Yesterday's Tomorrows: 1968-1998

Books that got the future right--and wrong

From the December 1998 issue

(Page 9 of 9)

Gabler could have been writing about Matt Drudge or the latest Web site designer. And he may have written a clear look at the future of popular media.

Adam Clayton Powell III is vice president of technology and programs at the Freedom Forum.

John Shelton Reed

A book that got it wrong, huh? But there are so many, and they're wrong in so many different ways....How about something by the Chicken Little of population studies, Paul Ehrlich? One of his more fevered imaginings is The End of Affluence: A Blueprint for Your Future (Ballantine Books, 1974), but any of a half-dozen others would do as well. Ehrlich started his doomsaying career in 1968 (a big year for doomsaying) with The Population Bomb, (Ballantine Books) and he's been at it so long that he has become a sort of endearing figure, the Harold Stassen of environmentalism.

Speaking of Republicans, my candidate for a book that got it mostly right is The Emerging Republican Majority (Arlington House, 1969), by Kevin Phillips. How we laughed at Phillips's title when the Republicans got creamed in 1974! But he had the underlying demographic and cultural trends spot on, as Reagan demonstrated and the 1994 elections confirmed. The only way the Democrats can elect a president now is to nominate a Southerner who talks like a Republican (at least long enough to get elected), and even so it takes a real doofus like Ford, Bush, or Dole to screw it up for the Republicans. Of course, the Republicans seem to seek these guys out.

Finally, for a book that may tell us something about the next 30 years, I'm going to play a wild card: Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Published in 1971, this gets a few things wrong (Spiro Agnew is mentioned as a revered elder statesman), but what resident won't recognize Dr. Tom More's Louisiana hometown, which "has become a refuge for all manner of conservative folk, graduates of Bob Jones University, retired Air Force colonels, passed-over Navy commanders, ex-Washington, D.C., policemen, patriotic chiropractors, two officials of the National Rifle Association, and six conservative proctologists"? The center isn't holding: "Americans have turned against each other; race against race, right against left, believer against heathen, San Francisco against Los Angeles, Chicago against Cicero. Vines sprout in sections of New York where not even Negroes will live. Wolves have been seen in downtown Cleveland, like Rome during the Black Plague." The Republicans and Democrats have reorganized as the Knothead and Left parties, but it hardly matters: "Don't tell me the U.S.A. went down the drain because of Leftism, Knotheadism, apostasy, pornography, polarization, etcetera, etcetera," Dr. Tom says. "All these things may have happened, but what finally tore it was that things stopped working and nobody wanted to be a repairman." Bracing stuff.

John Shelton Reed is William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent book is Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Vanderbilt University Press).

Lynn Scarlett

Two ideas dominated political philosophy in the 20th century. The first was that mankind could collectively define the "good order." The second was that mankind could bring about this order through collective planning. These ideas were not new. But in the 20th century, they took root and sprouted as grand movements, like the Soviet communist experiment, and in more modest endeavors, like city renewal projects.

By the 1960s, almost no city planner challenged the idea of "the plan." Then came Jane Jacobs. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Vintage, 1961), she announced, "this book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding." Jacobs described cities as "fundamentally dynamic." She celebrated diversity. Jacobs argued that cities were problems of "organized complexity," by which she meant that cities represented the "intricate minglings of different users." Cities were, she wrote, created through the "vastly differing ideas and purposes" of different people, all "planning and contriving outside the formal framework of public action." She saw attempts to impose order, by moving people around "like billiard balls" to new locations, as destructive of the organized complexity that kept cities vibrant.

Jacobs was right. Her prescience anticipated public housing project debacles and sterile redevelopment programs of the 1970s and '80s. But her vision extended beyond city problems. She recognized and celebrated unplanned order, the importance of feedback, competition, and innovation--ideas re-entering late 20th-century political debates about environmentalism, global economies, communications systems, and technological evolution.

Rewind half a century to the writings of French philosopher Jacques Ellul, in whom we find a mental map of another sort. Where Jacobs celebrated uncertainty, complexity, and spontaneous order, Ellul, in The Technological Society (Alfred A. Knopf, 1954) and subsequent books, offered a near-incoherent mix of contempt for uncertainty and yearning for self-will and choice. Jacobs launched her views using the city as her subject; Ellul targeted technology. His thesis: Technology dominates all else. It destroys traditional social structures, imagination, and values--all that makes us human.

Ellul is, above all, what REASON Editor Virginia Postrel calls a stasist. He does not oppose technology but wants to control it. By the 1990s, Ellul was lamenting that "no one has taken charge of the system." In uncertainty, he sees a kind of disorder and amorality.

But Ellul has it wrong. The very uncertainty and change in human structures that he describes is not generating a society of mere consumers and game players. Technology is allowing new social forms, new relationships, new possibilities for human imagination, interaction, and cooperation.

Cooperation is not always--or even often--wrought by some great "we" taking charge and dictating outcomes, an insight explored by Yale law and economics scholar Robert Ellickson in his 1991 book Order Without Law (Harvard University Press). Ellickson remarks that in everyday speech we refer to "`law and order,' which implies that governments monopolize the control of misconduct. This notion is false." Ellickson, like Jacobs 30 years earlier, is an idea buster. He proposes that among human settlements, cooperation is the norm; conflict the exception. And cooperation is often achieved without recourse to law. Instead, it is achieved through ever-evolving informal rules that generate mutual gain.

Ellickson's work is empirical. He shows how real people in real communities achieve cooperation. But his thesis is playing out in a broader political and philosophical tableau in which states, regions, and cities increasingly struggle with the clumsiness of statutes and the inability of laws to deal with the complexities of human interaction and physical reality. Not all circumstances are alike, but statutes require uniformity. Informal social and economic interactions offer a more resilient, adaptive, and evolutionary response to circumstance. Widening the realms in which informal bargaining, negotiation, and trade can supplant order generated through statute is the challenge for the next century. The former builds on human cooperation; the latter reinforces propensities for conflict. Ellickson's Order Without Law anticipates the potentially deepening tensions between formal and informal orders.

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