Future Tense

Why Washington can't stand Newt's futurism

Virginia Postrel from the March 1995 issue

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When Gingrich pushes social responsibility, he describes individuals helping individuals, not government seizing and redistributing work and property. To fight unemployment in the knowledge economy, he promotes two hours of homework a night, private programs to pay poor kids to read, and, yes, incentives to get computers to the poor--individual by individual. (Not, as Al Gore proposes, by wiring public institutions to a nationalized superhighway.)

The tax-credits-for-laptops plan reveals what's actually wrong with Gingrich's futurism. He himself can't really let go of central control. He loves technology and wants to make sure everyone else does, too. That's why in the early '80s, he was advocating huge public works in space and a Minitel-style national information infrastructure. Gingrich is always in danger of falling into the technocratic traps that built the regulatory state--the notion that government planners, like engineers designing widgets, can build a good society from the top down. His futurism is out of date.

Engineering-as-metaphor is out. Biology and complexity are in. The world is messy, organic, out of control. It evolves by trial and error. If we want progress, nobody can be in charge. Progress is the unintended result of dynamic processes, not a predetermined outcome of someone's official static plan.

So, a new reading list for Newt: Start with a great book dedicated to "the unknown civilization that is growing in America," The Constitution of Liberty by F.A. Hayek. It has much to say about progress and freedom, and its postscript "Why I Am Not a Conservative" explains a lot about the people attacking your love of the future. Read Hayek's essay, "The Uses of Knowledge in Society," which is essential to understanding the knowledge economy, and Thomas Sowell's masterful elaboration, Knowledge and Decisions. To understand how the growth and diffusion of technology depend on local circumstances, not simple extrapolation, delve into economic historian Nathan Rosenberg's work.

There are lots of pop books out on complexity and evolution. Possible starting places include Out of Control by Kevin Kelly; Bionomics by Michael Rothschild; and Complexity by Michael Waldrop. (Take them all with a grain of salt, however, especially when they generalize about economics.)

To expand your mind in more poetical directions, read Frederick Turner's Tempest, Flute, & Oz and the forthcoming Culture of Hope. Add Richard Rodriguez's Days of Obligation, an organic consideration of cultural paradoxes.

Above all, don't be embarrassed to say you care enough about the future to speculate on it. And don't be hubristic enough to think you can determine, or even predict, it.