Last week I was on my usual morning stroll through The Agenda with Steve Paikin when piqued by Virginia Postrel's blabbing on about How We View Progress.
Postrel speaks passionately about the individual's role in collective societal progress and our human desire (/need) to improve things. Her basic (read: basic) argument is that whenever we have an object, we have dissatisfactions with it, and we think of how it could be improved.
Her examples are pretty darn bad.
She tries to convince us that progress ("properly understood") is not progress toward a specific goal, rather it is open-ended and infinite. Each type of progress leads to new dissatisfcations which lead to new improvements. "Whatever is today leads to whatever is tomorrow." Riiiight.
Most interestingly, Postrel argues that understanding progress in this way lends a new way to conceptualize our long-entrenched right vs. left political spectrum. She posits that binary poles would be "valuing progress" (supporting a "dynamist" [she makes a mockery of this word] element with relatively simple rules that allow for competition) versus "stasis" (supporting the idea of a singular best way to do something).
Unapologetically, I think Postrel is scary-nuts. Her new "political spectrum" is full of contradictions, shoving her main points into irony as she claims to be developing a spectrum that is less dissonant than standing left-right conceptualizations. The scary-nutsiest part is her toss in that folks like Bill Clinton and Al Gore are people who are afraid of the future. Well, frack. We should be afraid of the future. Have you *seen* the global condition out there? And then she straight up disses Obama: apparently the recent lightbulb mandates (to reduce emissions) by his administration put Obama in the stasis category in a "deeply emotional way." And since in Dreams From My Father he writes about economic progress as devastating and disruptive to communities, Obama is "quite negative," she says.
I'm hard on Postrel because I'm afraid of a future with leaders and influencers of her ilk. Yes, this is "quite negative" of me. After all, she's brainstorming for the best version of a healthy future like the rest of us. Admittedly, though, I am afraid to be living in a time when opinions such as hers are represented as critical and innovative, and are seized by a culture that is thirsty for this kind of talk. I fall for buzzy sounding rhetoric too, so I suppose this is my reflection on for what we are thirsty and how sincere messages might quench.
This is interesting! I am not familiar with what you are speaking about here, but I am currently writing about innocent/feel-good/liberal/ "justice for all" claims. This is a difficult task. In fact, one author I am reading suggests that "one might as well be against puppies." This does not mean that feel good justice claims (of which we are thirty for) should be immune to critique.
ReplyDeleteSo typical of those who profit from the status quo to detract skeptics as having character flaws. Gore suggests that current economic models are harmful to the earth. Clearly he must be irrational.
ReplyDeletep.s. Corinne: innocent/feel-good/liberal/"justice for all" claims? This topic is HOT! Please elaborate, or hook me up to the topic somehow.
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