Reason Magazine - Staff

Consumer Vertigo

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EDT

High In the Sunlit Silence

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST

The new movie about Howard Hughes could have had any number of titles, from the simple Hughes to the inflation-ignoring America's First Billionaire. But no alternative would have the magical attraction of The Aviator.

From the days of biplanes and silk scarves, the aviator has been the archetype of masculine glamour. Aviators have personified national ideals, from French elan to Soviet party discipline. They've inspired lust and admiration. They've turned sunglasses and short, utilitarian leather jackets into fashion statements. "Glamour boys," the press called Royal Air Force fliers between the wars, and the nickname stuck through their finest hour.

Charles Lindbergh's glamour was once as potent as any movie star's, powerful enough, imagines Philip Roth in his latest novel, to topple Franklin Roosevelt. When George W. Bush stepped on to an aircraft carrier in a flight suit, he wrapped himself in the aviator's aura. So did Sen. John McCain when his 2000 presidential campaign used a portrait of the candidate as a handsome young flier.

If glamour is, to quote from a fashion blurb, "all about transcending the everyday," what could be more transcendent than flight itself? Even today, when commercial air travel has become a dull yet stressful routine, a photo of a jet in the sky still has a glamorous power. It promises to transport us out of the everyday, to take us away to some better place.

Director Martin Scorsese, in an interview with The Boston Globe, recalls reading the Aviator script and "imagining Hughes up there in the clouds, flying over the world, that is transcending the mortal self." His movie is all about transcendence, aspiration, and illusion. It portrays glamour for a cynical, media-savvy age.

For centuries, glamour was literal magic, a malicious deception created by witches. In the 20th century mass media turned the magic into a metaphor. Glamour became the imaginative process an audience undergoes in the presence of a special combination of mystery and grace: "Men want to be him, and women want to be with him" (or vice versa). Glamour in this sense may have always existed, but only in the age of mass communication did it, like charisma, become so commonly experienced that it required a special name.

From the beginning, publicists depicted aviators as glamorous—larger yet simpler than life and aloof from earthbound mortals. Discussing a 1908 French profile, the first of a living rather than fictional aviator, historian Robert Wohl writes that "it ascribes to Wilbur Wright many of the characteristics and qualities that would later become identified with countless other famous fliers," among them: "the unusual eyes; self-reliance; determination; attention to detail; extraordinary patience; an artisan-like dedication to work; loneliness; genius; indifference to the superficial emotions of the masses."

A decade later, the daring exploits of World War I aces provided an inspiring contrast to the bloody, muddy tedium of trench fighting. "Aces exemplified more purely than any other figure of their time what it meant to be a man," writes Professor Wohl in A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908-1918 (Yale University Press, 1994). That most aces died young only added to their allure, preserving them as ageless icons.

Taking national identification to an extreme, Soviet propaganda posters turned aviators into literal icons, appropriating the conventions of Russia's traditional religious art. Instead of Christ ringed by a mandorla, or almond-shaped halo, posters would show a flight-suited pilot against a similarly angled Soviet star. These iconic aviators were neither reckless aces nor technocratic Lindberghs, however. They did not embody the individualism, whether risk-taking or precise, of Western heroes. Neither Russian religious tradition nor the Soviet state sanctioned unmediated flight.

"What Soviet authorities offer up is a vision of the glamorous aviator in which the aviator is disciplined," says Scott W. Palmer, a historian of modern Russian culture and technology at Western Illinois University, "and his work is undertaken in service of a larger, collective mission, which is to construct socialism."

Like aviation itself, glamour is a versatile and amoral tool that can serve any ideal, whether monstrous or humane. Leni Riefenstahl opened Triumph of the Will not just with Hitler's flight to Nuremberg but with aerial shots from the pilot's point of view, conferring on Hitler some of the aviator's aura. Whether manufactured for pulp entertainment (a form reprised this year by Jude Law in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), biographical drama, or political propaganda, the aviator's glamour, like the movie star's, requires selection as surely as an airplane requires fuel. Too much familiarity destroys glamour, which is why commercial pilots have lost their aura while military aviators still retain it.

Even at its most benign, glamour tells only partial truths. The laconic ease of Sam Shepard's Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (which, like its source book, celebrates both the mystique and the process by which the mystique is manufactured) and the cocky bravado of Tom Cruise's Maverick in Top Gun share the same essential grace. These unflappable men are masters of their fates, of their machines, of the air itself. They make their jobs look deceptively easy. In the popular imagination, military aviators are always competent and never afraid.

Maintaining glamour's beautiful illusion means holding viewers at a discreet distance, close enough to invite identification without providing the detailed knowledge that would destroy the mystique. For this purpose, the aviator's costume is ideal. The flight suit, helmet, goggles, and, that touchstone of glamour, sunglasses simultaneously reveal and enclose.

Our wised-up culture supposedly wants nothing to do with such falsehoods. We're for candor in all things—for transparency, not translucence. We want to rip the protective masks off our heroes and expose the photo ops for the phony setups they are. Or so we say.

The dramatically divided reviews of The Aviator suggest more ambivalence. For every rave, there is a complaint that the movie isn't grim enough. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis blasts Scorsese for having "compromised his dark gifts" by not showing the "depths" to which Hughes fell. She charges that he's sold out to "commercial palatability." This critique misses the point of the film.

The Aviator portrays the glamour of aviation and Hollywood in the 1930s and '40s, but it also plays to our modern skepticism. It lets the movie audience in on the public relations manipulations, while hiding them from the audience within the film. The movie shows us Hughes as the world saw him in his golden years but also Hughes as only his intimates knew him. "No one sees him like this," his business partner orders when Hughes suffers a breakdown.

The Aviator thus allows us to simultaneously revel in glamour's power and know that there's more behind the scenes. Reviewing it for The Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern inadvertently complimented the movie. It is, he wrote, "a production more concerned with theatricality than with realism or biographical truth." It is indeed. The Aviator is all about theatricality, all about glamour.

We don't need to see the hideous end of the story, because we already know it. That tragedy informs all of The Aviator's glamorous moments. From the early scenes of Hughes filming Hell's Angels, the movie is about the cost—and the insanity—of imagining perfection.

In The Aviator, Hughes strives for greatness in aviation and movie-making, both crafts that depend on a million tiny details. He creates technical marvels by demanding absurd perfection: cloud-filled skies to show the speed of his air force in Hell's Angels, aircraft with bodies so smooth he cannot feel a single rivet. He ignores the constraints of money and time. He obsessively tries to make the idealized, glamorous world real.

And the perfectionism that makes Hughes great proves his fatal flaw. He can be content only in a pristine, frictionless world, a world that can exist only in the imagination. Perhaps, the film hints, movie stars understand the limits of glamour's illusions better than engineering geniuses. "Nothing's clean, Howard," Ava Gardner tells him, "but we do our best."

Light Unto the Wealth of Nations

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 00:00:00 EST

As Christmas lights go up on homes around the country, you've probably noticed that the displays seem to get more elaborate every year. No longer does decorating a single evergreen in the front yard suffice. Every tree demands its own ropes of light, wrapping trunks as well as branches. Ubiquitous icicle lights drape even the most generic tract home in sparkling abundance.

Arbiters of taste may clash over the merits of white versus colored bulbs, and energy Puritans may denounce the inessential use of electricity. But even stylistic snobs can't entirely deny the appeal of a thousand points of holiday light.

Today's lavish displays do more than brighten the night. They tell a story of economic progress. Like the electronic gadgets aimed at gift buyers, the tiny lights outlining rooflines and tree limbs illustrate new sources of growth, productivity, and prosperity. Aesthetic pleasure, they tell us, is an increasingly important source of economic value and hence of new jobs and business opportunities. And the same trends that boost living standards in other areas also make Christmas lights more abundant.

A holiday-lighting dollar simply goes further than it used to. Homeowners buying Christmas lights benefit from the same intense retail and manufacturing competition that have driven down prices and improved reliability in so many other industries, raising the American standard of living.

As a teenager in the mid-1980s, David VanderMolen's job was to buy and install holiday lights for his family's Charlotte, Michigan home. Each year his parents would give him $10, enough for two 35-light strings, each 20 feet long, from Kmart. If the weather wasn't too bad, a string of lights would last about three years. VanderMolen eventually built up a collection of 350 miniature lights, enough to make his house the most elaborately decorated in the neighborhood.

Today, that display would be nothing special. You can buy a 100-light string, nearly 50 feet long, for $2.44 at Wal-Mart. Even without adjusting for inflation, VanderMolen's old $10 annual budget would cover more lights in a single year than he could accumulate over seven years in the 1980s. Today's cheaper lights, mostly made in China, also last longer.

"The stuff now is so well made that you can put it up in November before it gets too cold or wet, and leave it up until a January thaw, and it doesn't all fall apart," says VanderMolen.

As a result, today's homeowners can put on light shows that would have made theme park news a generation ago. Says VanderMolen, "It is easy and inexpensive to put up a tasteful display, and not much more cost or effort to try and humiliate your weak-willed neighbors."

Not everyone wants to climb around on the roof, however, and not everyone has the skills to put together an attractive display. More and more homeowners are contracting out the lighting work, creating satisfying jobs that never existed before. It's part of the long-term trend toward greater and greater specialization. The business also illustrates just how experience improves productivity even in service industries.

Christmas D�cor, based in Lubbock, Texas, has more than 350 franchise locations throughout the U.S. and Canada. The company estimates that its franchisees do more than $32 million in holiday light business a year. (At least four other national companies offer similar franchises.) Most franchisees are landscaping companies looking for ways to keep working through the slow winter months. Like the inventory controls that have improved efficiency in manufacturing, adding a holiday lighting service allows landscapers to avoid the boom and bust of hiring and laying off employees.

Franchisers like Christmas D�cor give local contractors the benefits of scale-not only buying lights by the container load but learning from experience. Christmas D�cor franchisees serve about 300,000 customers each year. "The information you receive from that kind of volume is scientific," says Brandon Stephens, the company's director of marketing. "If there's a problem, it's going to repeat."

If one local contractor figures out a way to save labor, the company incorporates the technique nationwide, changing its vendor specifications if necessary. To make wrapping tree branches more efficient, for instance, Christmas D�cor has suppliers deliver lights in balls rather than lined up on cards, the way homeowners shopping at Wal-Mart find them.

Hiring a lighting contractor saves homeowners trouble and raises quality expectations, creating a ratchet effect that in turn generates more demand for specialists.

People who do the same job over and over again get better and better at it. They hang lights in more consistently attractive patterns. The more people see professional displays, the more they expect to be wowed. Although lighting contractors do some direct marketing, their most effective advertising is the impressively decorated house down the block. Exposure creates demand.

"The more lights that go up, the more lights that go up," says Tom Tolkacz, president of Swingle Tree Co., a Christmas D�cor franchisee in Denver. His business has about 70 employees during the holiday season, 20 to 30 more than before Swingle added the lighting franchise. (At its seasonal peak, the landscaping company employs about 200 people.) Its lighting business continued to grow right through the recession, posting some of its greatest gains ever in 2001 and 2002.

Most customers are two-income couples with homes valued at $400,000 or more, says Tolkacz, a "middle market" of people who would not have hired professionals in the past. Some less-affluent single parents also hire the company because they "don't want to get on the roof." The service appeals more to baby boomers than to the over-60 crowd, who tend to believe that hiring someone to install holiday lights is frivolous.

That disparaging attitude toward aesthetics affects us not only as consumers deciding where to spend our money but as citizens trying to understand the sources of future economic growth. We mourn the loss of manufacturing jobs—"real jobs"—and ignore growing aesthetic professions, from installing holiday lights and landscaping lawns to giving manicures and facials, from designing brochures to crafting granite countertops.

Yet in an advanced economy, in which competition is pushing the prices of goods ever lower and their quality ever higher, enhancing the look and feel of people, places, and things will become more and more important over time. Just as surely as the horsepower of a car engine or the warmth of a blanket, the pleasure of twinkling Christmas lights offers real value.

Designing Rules

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:00:00 EDT

Irvine, California, is the epitome of tightly controlled urban design, a squeaky-clean edge city of office parks and master-planned neighborhoods. The Orange County town is so tidy that when my husband started teaching at the University of California campus there he couldn't find a gas station.

I've come here to talk with SteveKellenberg, who creates master plans for large-scale developments that sell more than 1,000 homes a year. These "high-production, high-velocity" businesses represent the present and future of American home construction, supplying the booming suburbs of the Sunbelt. I'd heard Kellenberg tell an audience of developers about survey data showing that 63 percent of buyers in master-planned communities want more diversity, while only 32 percent want their neighborhood to look consistent.

That was what I wanted to hear. Like many variety-loving city dwellers, I'm leery of master-planned communities, even though I know they're extremely popular. It's bad enough that even my little 18-unit townhouse complex has ridiculously conformist rules -- no plants by the front door, no non-neutral window coverings, no door decorations except around Christmas -- but at least our homes are literally connected to each other, making the cost of spillovers high. I can't imagine wanting to live in a whole neighborhood of similar uniformity.

But people really are different.

During the last two decades, master-planned communities with standardized styles and prescriptive "pattern books" have become the norm for large-scale home developments. These communities sell predictability. While old-line suburbs started out fairly uniform to keep down construction costs, owners could (and did) dramatically transform their properties over time. Master-planned developments, by contrast, seek to control changes. Buyers are bound by contract to abide by rules designed to preserve a certain look and feel.

The Highlands Ranch community in Colorado, for instance, limits house numbers to no more than six inches tall and kids' backyard clubhouses to no more than 24 square feet. No white picket fences are allowed in most neighborhoods. An enforcement team cruises the streets looking for such offenses as deviant home colors. (A light purple house got neighbors particularly riled up.) A competing community, Prospect New Town, takes a contrasting tack, going so far as to require striking colors on its houses -- no Highlands Ranch neutrals allowed. Prospect, too, tightly regulates its environment. The developers require changes on 95 percent of the new house plans submitted for their approval. "It sounds harsh," says one developer. "But somebody's taste has to prevail, or else it would be anarchy."

In this case, the taste enforcement occurs within a voluntary, profit-sensitive development that has to compete with nearby alternatives offering radically different design philosophies. Homebuyers select the design regime that fits their personalities and lifestyles, and business success depends on design rules that please potential residents. But such restrictions aren't limited to competing contractual communities. The public sector has jumped into the act, bringing similarly uniform standards to property owners who don't necessarily want them.

Building appearance is getting the sort of government scrutiny once reserved for public health and safety. A 1993 survey found that 83 percent of American cities and towns had some form of design review to control building looks, usually on purely aesthetic (as opposed to historic preservation) grounds. Three-quarters of these regulations, covering 60 percent of cities and towns, were passed after 1980, an adoption rate survey author Brenda Case Scheer compares to that of "zoning in the 1930s." The trend appears to have accelerated in the late '90s.

Some communities prescribe design rules in detailed dos and don'ts. Others use general terms like appropriate and compatible, illustrated with drawings showing acceptable and unacceptable examples. Scheer, now the dean of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Utah, recalls a suburb that had no specific rules at all, allowing the design review board to outlaw whatever members happened to dislike. The result was an ad hoc checklist of idiosyncratic no-nos. "The strangest things," she says, "like they didn't want to have any windows with round tops on them. The decking on a deck couldn't run diagonally. If you had shutters, your shutters had to be able to close."

That town isn't an isolated example. Architectural review boards, planning commissions, and city councils often have broad discretion to determine and enforce taste standards, from mandating roof lines and window styles to specifying what kinds of trees can be planted. Minutes of routine meetings record officials opining that the red leaves of ornamental bushes will clash with the brick of a shopping center sign and instructing a housing developer to build more single-story homes on certain streets. In one town, a city council member praised the beauty of Bradford pear trees, while in another an official condemned them as an "epidemic."

People are different.

During our visit, Steve Kellenberg comes back to that message again and again, expressing a tolerance that arises as much from relentless pragmatism as from liberal idealism. If you're in the business of designing environments people will pay money to live in, you can't kid yourself about what they value. You can't design your idea of utopia and force everyone to conform to it; if you try, everyone who isn't just like you will go elsewhere to find a home.

Unlike me, some people really do prefer uniformity to variety, regardless of cost. Not everybody thinks it's bad if every house on the street looks pretty much like every other one, or if people can't change their houses much over time. Some people like that sort of predictability. It makes them feel secure, at home in their neighborhood. Even if cost were no object, not everybody would want the same thing I'd pick.

"We have this incredible tendency to overgeneralize about the population and to say, 'Everybody wants this -- everybody wants to live in a community where you can't paint your house unless it's the right color and you have to close your garage door,'" says Kellenberg. "Well, the fact is that there really are a lot of people who want that kind of controlled, predictable environment," often because they've had bad experiences in deteriorating neighborhoods. "And there are others that find that an incredibly repressive regime and wouldn't live there if you gave them a house, because they believe there should be an organic, fluid, self-expressive environment."

People are different.

"You have people in Irvine that love living in Irvine," he says. "And you have people that moved to Irvine and leave after five years because they hate it, and they move to Seal Beach or Santa Ana," nearby towns with few design restrictions. In a diverse society, some people will indeed want a lot of rules, "but it clearly isn't something that is the right way of doing it for everybody." Neither is the alternative.

People are different.

Even those survey statistics are misleading aggregates. Some people care a lot about diversity; others really, really want consistency. A lot are in the middle. Some people want to be sure to run into their neighbors. Others just want to stay in with their big-screen TVs or to socialize with the friends they already have. Some people want to be able to walk to the store without seeing a car. Others want to be able to drive in and out easily. The difference isn't one of demographics -- age, income, education, and so on -- but of identity and attitude. You can find people shopping for houses in the same price range, for the same size families, who want all sorts of different neighborhood designs.

What the survey numbers actually say is that part of the housing market has been underserved. For years, large-scale developers have focused so much on those homebuyers who want a predictable environment and the most house for the money that they've ignored people with other preferences. Offer the long-ignored groups a different sort of design, and they'll reward you handsomely. This pragmatic, trial-and-error process of discovering new sources of aesthetic value is less grandiose, and perhaps less inspiring, than the ideological search for the one best way to live. But it is also less divisive and venomous.

You can see its latest products in the spanking new streets of Ladera Ranch, a huge new development about a half-hour drive southeast of Irvine. A blue-gray Cape Cod home, with the deeply sloping roof of its saltbox ancestors, sits next to an updated beige and brown Craftsman with a low-pitched roof. Down the street is a Spanish colonial with a red-tile roof, and around the corner a stuccoed house whose turret recalls the fantasy homes of 1920s Los Angeles. Although many garages face the street, most are recessed so they don't dominate the landscape. You see porches and yards and sidewalks -- social space. And between the sidewalk and street is something no new Southern California community has gotten in a generation: a small parkway planted with trees, spindly today but promising charm and shade as the neighborhood ages.

These are mass-produced homes, with metal windows and Hardiboard concrete siding rather than wood. They'd never pass purists' tests of authenticity. But they offer something genuine and rare -- variation in more than façade, rooflines and massing that match their styles, a street of different colors and different forms. Built on the empty hillsides of what once really was a ranch, Ladera Ranch is turning the previously unfulfilled desire for varied and sociable neighborhoods into extraordinary profits. The development sells 1,200 houses a year for prices 10 percent to 14 percent higher per square foot than in the more conventional community right next door. The landscaping and construction quality cost more, acknowledges Kellenberg, but even accounting for those costs, "it still appears that there's a 7 to 10 percent lift in the base values that can only be explained by people being willing to pay more to live there."

People are different.

Specialization pays. "There really is a lot of the market that doesn't want everything to look the same, that does want to have individuality in their home, that does want a diversity of neighborhoods, that wants [the design] to feel like it grew out of the heritage of the place, that are interested in meeting their neighbors, that would enjoy having the street designed as a social space, that would like to have other social spaces and social opportunities that they could participate in," he says.

Ladera Ranch's design owes much to the New Urbanism, a planning philosophy that favors high densities, limited setbacks, and old-fashioned Main Streets. Both put an emphasis on community, and both understand streets as social spaces. But Kellenberg dismisses the New Urbanism's one-size-fits-all doctrines, its "singular mission" that "rejects everything other than New Urbanism." Lots of beloved neighborhoods, he notes, don't conform to New Urbanist prescriptions.

The design for Ladera Ranch isn't New Urbanism. It's specialization -- specialization within specialization, in fact. The development includes four different neighborhood styles, each crafted to suit a different personality and lifestyle. And if you want something different, you don't have to buy a place in Ladera Ranch. You can go next door. There's something for everyone and, if there isn't, a smart developer will figure out how to fill in the gaps.

The seeming homogeneity of master-planned communities -- the planning that gives them a bad name among intellectuals -- turns out to be real-world pluralism once you realize that everyone doesn't have to live within the same design boundaries. Community designs and governance structures are continuously evolving, offering new models to compete with the old. This pluralist approach may overturn technocratic notions of how city planning should work, but it's the way towns are in fact developing in the United States, suggesting that these institutions offer real benefits to residents. From 1970 to 2002, the number of American housing units in homeowner associations, including condominiums and cooperatives, rose from 1 percent to 17 percent, with more than half of all new units in some areas in these associations.

As an alternative or supplement to large-scale local government, some economists (notably Robert Nelson of the University of Maryland) and legal scholars (such as Robert Ellickson of Yale) have begun debating ways to let homeowners who aren't in private associations form them, whether for whole neighborhoods or just a few blocks. Some proposals envision the privatization of former city services such as garbage collection and zoning-style regulations. Others involve only a specialized complement to city governance, with special fees to cover services that people in that small area particularly value. For instance, Ellickson suggests, "if artists were to concentrate their studios on a particular city block, their [Block Improvement District] could make unusually heavy expenditures on street sculptures. Indeed, the prospect of forming a Block Improvement District might encourage artists to cluster together in the first place."

Some of these plans would require unanimous agreement, others a supermajority. The question of whether new boundaries can be drawn around residents without their individual consent is a difficult one. If unanimous agreement is necessary, a single holdout can make everyone worse off. But retroactively limiting what property owners can do with their homes raises the same problems that allowing small districts is supposed to avoid.

This problem is especially great when the new district isn't truly self-governing. Many cities, for instance, allow a supermajority of homeowners to petition to make their neighborhood a historic district subject to special aesthetic controls -- potentially a good model of specialized design boundaries. Unfortunately, historic districts usually have to conform to procedures established by a higher level of government. They can't create processes and rules tailored to the wishes of those they govern. In Los Angeles, for instance, a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone is regulated by a five-member board. Unlike a homeowner association board, members are appointed by city officials and other board members, and only three of the five must be residents of the area they govern. Since residents don't have a direct vote, they can't easily predict, or check, the board's actions.

Even some preservation activists admit to concerns. Adriene Biondo, a San Fernando Valley resident who's campaigning to make her neighborhood a historic zone, says she isn't looking to crush individual homeowners' self-expression, only to raise awareness of the history and value of the neighborhood's mid-century Eichler homes. But some local preservationists are sticklers for architectural authenticity, narrowly defined. If the board is captured by purists, admits Biondo, it might even outlaw the pistachio-green siding she and her husband chose to match their vintage car. "I don't think we'd like that too much ourselves," she says.

Even in the best of circumstances, small, self-governing districts wouldn't eliminate aesthetic conflict. Neither do master-planned communities. As anyone who's lived in a small condo complex knows, even small groups of people disagree. Governance rules simply provide processes for resolving disputes. And they help people know what to expect, avoiding the nasty surprises and bitter conflicts that result when aesthetic rules are imposed after the fact. The best we can hope for isn't perfection but fairness, predictability, and a reasonable chance of finding rules that suit our individual preferences. The advantage of narrow boundaries is that if all else fails, we can vote with our feet, not only improving our own situation but sending a signal that the competition is offering a better design package.

The more difficult it is for people to enter and exit -- to find design rules to their liking -- the more general the rules need to be. A four-block special district can have very prescriptive rules that would be inappropriate for an entire city. A metropolitan area like Orange County that is made up of many smaller cities can offer a range of city-level design regimes.

In larger areas, one way to accommodate different tastes within an overall sense of structure is to make the rules fairly generic. Consider the difference between a work uniform, a requirement to wear black, and a general prescription for "business casual." All three establish an organizational identity, but each allows more individual choice and flexibility than the previous one, accommodating a wider range of appearance and personality. To attract a diverse group of employees, to avoid turning off independent or creative individuals, or simply to stay up to date as fashions change, it may be better to keep the dress code as general as possible.

Along similar lines, Brenda Scheer suggests that urban design regulations should pay more attention to the urban forms that are hard to change and concentrate less on the stylistic details that are easily altered. It's easy enough to ignore a single building you don't like, especially once it's been around a while. But street widths, setbacks, and lot sizes affect the whole experience of being in a particular neighborhood. They establish the underlying structure that creates the sense of place. "If you get the lots right and the blocks right and the street right and the setbacks right, somebody can build a crummy house and it will sit there for 30 years, and somebody will tear it down and build a nice one," she says. "There's a kind of self-healing process that's available if the structure is fine."

This model allows for flexibility, personal expression, and change while still preserving a coherent underlying design. It echoes the pattern identified by Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn, which examines how buildings are adapted to new uses over time. Brand explores what makes architecture resilient and capable of "learning" as its purposes change. A building, he notes, contains six nested systems: Site, Structure (the foundation and load-bearing elements), Skin (the exterior), Services (wiring, plumbing, heating, etc.), Space plan (the interior layout), and Stuff. The further out the nested system, the more permanent. Moving around furniture (Stuff) is easy; altering a foundation (Structure) is difficult.

In a building, Brand writes, "the lethargic slow parts are in charge, not the dazzling rapid ones. Site dominates Structure, which dominates the Skin, which dominates the Services, which dominate the Space plan, which dominates the Stuff. How a room is heated depends on how it relates to the heating and cooling Services, which depend on the energy efficiency of the Skin, which depends on the constraints of the Structure....The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide continuity and constraint."

A well-designed, adaptable building, Brand argues, respects the different speeds and different functions of these nested layers. It keeps them separate, allowing "slippage" so that the quick inner layers can change without disrupting the more permanent systems. (You don't have to tear up the foundation to fix the plumbing.)

Scheer's proposal applies a similar model to the surrounding environment. She essentially adds a seventh layer we can call the Street. By limiting design restrictions to the Street, Site, and possibly Structure, rather than the usual obsession with Skin, she makes room for evolution and learning. Like Brand, she emphasizes the effects of time. Given enough slippage between outer and inner layers, we can correct flaws and adapt to changing circumstances while preserving some underlying sense of order. A city, she says, is "a living thing, it's a changing thing, and it has to adapt or it dies. A city that is not having a continuous renewal is a dying place."

A dynamic model of city life recognizes that not just purposes or technologies change over time. So do tastes. Like Capri pants and stiletto heels, aesthetic styles go in and out of fashion, flipping from positive to negative and back again. Hard as it is to believe today, from the end of World War II until the 1980s the Art Deco hotels of Miami Beach were considered "tacky, in bad taste, and old fashioned." When the Miami Design Preservation League was formed in 1976, recalls one of its founders, South Beach "was considered a disgrace to the city, because of its cheap neon lights, 'funny-shaped' buildings, and the signs along Ocean Drive blaring 'rooms $5 a week.'"

Similarly, American tastemakers have for decades condemned neon signs as the epitome of commercial tackiness, and many cities continue to ban neon. Others, however, have rediscovered the lively pleasures of the lights. While some neighboring cities such as Santa Monica have been forcing businesses to take down their neon signs, Los Angeles has spent about a half million dollars helping building owners restore and relight historic neon signs. The city's Museum of Neon Art not only preserves vintage signs but lends them to the popular Universal CityWalk outdoor shopping area. Commercial neon has slowly regained its 1920s status as a source of public pleasure.

The built environment is filled with once-scorned designs that have become architectural touchstones or popular icons. When it was new, a critic called the Golden Gate Bridge an "eye-sore to those living and a betrayal of future generations." Writing in Architectural Record, critic Suzanne Stephens provides a wide-ranging tour of similar examples: "In 1889 artists, architects, and writers, including Charles Garnier and Guy de Maupassant, called the Eiffel Tower 'useless and monstrous.' Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building in Buffalo was deemed 'ugly' by eminent critic Russell Sturgis in [Architectural] RECORD in 1908, and in 1959 his Guggenheim Museum was dismissed by visionary architect Frederick Kiesler. In 1931 Lewis Mumford charged that New York's Chrysler Building by William Van Alen was full of 'inane romanticism' and 'void symbolism.'" Some of the world's most beloved buildings and architects have been dismissed by their contemporaries. Tolerating strange styles can create significant value over time, as the unfamiliar becomes familiar, leading to aesthetic appreciation.

Aesthetics may be a form of expression, but it doesn't enjoy the laissez-faire treatment accorded speech or writing. To the contrary, the more significant look and feel become, the more they tend to be restricted by law. The very power of beauty encourages people to become absolutists -- to insist that other people's stylistic choices, or their tradeoffs between aesthetics and other values, constitute environmental crimes. Individuals may expect more expressive freedom for themselves, but they often feel affronted and victimized by the aesthetic choices of others. This is particularly true for places, the touchstone category of our aesthetic era.

Yet now that people increasingly care about look and feel in their private choices, aesthetic regulation is less necessary to control blatant public ugliness. The same taste shift that has made the spread of design review politically viable is slowly but surely changing the definition of what's commercially necessary. Our greatest fears of the aesthetic future are not of too little design, but of too much.

Why Buffy Kicked Ass

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:00:00 EDT

Artifact: Free Hand

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Fri, 01 Mar 2002 00:00:00 EST

A week after the Taliban lost control of Kabul, Reuters photographer Yannis Behrakis took this picture of an Afghan widow begging. Anonymous behind her burqa, she flashes a once-forbidden sign of personality: chipped red polish on her carefully maintained nails. She applied the polish the day after the liberation of Kabul. The chips came from work and the passage of time.

The Taliban outlawed wearing polish in the late 1990s, punishing some offenders by amputating a fingertip. Importing polish was banned only in July 2001, which suggests that women were still wearing painted nails within the safety of their homes. But a woman who had to beg on the street could not have afforded the risk of violating the ban in public.

The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out. "Making special," art theorist Ellen Dissanyake's term to describe what all art and ritual have in common, is a deep human drive -- all the more so when the object is one's own body. By reshaping or decorating our outer selves, we express our inner sense of self: I like that becomes I'm like that. The right to wear nail polish, seemingly the most trivial of matters, is in fact a vital freedom, part of the very freedom to create oneself.

Don't Impede Medical Progress

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Wed, 05 Dec 2001 00:00:00 EST

To many biologists, the recently announced creation of a cloned human embryo was no big deal. True, researchers at Advanced Cell Technology replaced the nucleus of a human egg with the genetic material of another person. And they got that cloned cell to start replicating. But their results were modest. It took 71 eggs to produce a single success, and in the best case, the embryo grew to only six cells before dying. That's not a revolution. It's an incremental step in understanding how early-stage cells develop.

And it's far from the 100 or so cells in a blastocyst, the hollow ball from which stem cells can be isolated. Scientists hope to coax embryonic stem cells into becoming specialized tissues such as nerve, muscle, or pancreatic islet cells. Therapeutic cloning, or nucleus transplantation, could make such treatments more effective.

In theory, it would work like this: Suppose I need new heart tissue or some insulin-secreting islet cells to counteract diabetes. You could take the nucleus from one of my cells, stick it in an egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed, let that develop into stem cells, and then trigger the stem cells to form the specific tissue needed. The new "cloned" tissue would be genetically mine and would not face rejection problems. It would function in my body as if it had grown there naturally, so I wouldn't face a lifetime of immunosuppressant drugs.

But all of that is a long way off. ACT and others in the field are still doing very basic research, not developing clinical therapies. Indeed, because of the difficulty of obtaining eggs, therapeutic cloning may ultimately prove impractical for clinical treatments. It could be more important as a technique for understanding cell development or studying the mutations that lead to cancer. We simply don't know right now. Science is about exploring the unknown and cannot offer guarantees.

Politics, however, feeds on fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and the word "cloning" arouses those emotions. While its scientific importance remains to be seen, ACT's announcement has rekindled the campaign to criminalize nucleus transplantation and any therapies derived from that process. Under a bill passed by the House and endorsed by the president, scientists who transfers a human nucleus into an egg cell would be subject to 10-year federal prison sentences and $1 million fines. So would anyone who imports therapies developed through such research in countries where it is legal, such as Britain. The bill represents an unprecedented attempt to criminalize basic biomedical research.

The legislation's backers consider the fear of cloning their best hope for stopping medical research that might lead to gene-level therapies. Opponents make three basic arguments for banning therapeutic cloning.

The first is that a fertilized egg is a person, entitled to full human rights. Taking stem cells out of a blastocyst is, in this view, no different from cutting the heart out of a baby. Hence, we hear fears of "embryo farming" for "spare parts."

This view treats microscopic cells with no past or present consciousness, no organs or tissues, as people. A vocal minority of Americans, of course, do find compelling the argument that a fertilized egg is someone who deserves protection from harm. That view animates the anti-abortion movement and exercises considerable influence in Republican politics.

But most Americans don't believe we should sacrifice the lives and well being of actual people to save cells. Human identity must rest on something more compelling than the right string of proteins in a petri dish, detectable only with high-tech equipment. We will never get a moral consensus that a single cell, or a clump of 100 cells, is a human being. That definition defies moral sense, rational argument, and several major religious traditions.

So cloning opponents add a second argument. If we allow therapeutic cloning, they say, some unscrupulous person will pretend to be doing cellular research but instead implant a cloned embryo in a woman's womb and produce a baby. At the current stage of knowledge, using cloning to conceive a child would indeed be dangerous and unethical, with a high risk of serious birth defects. Anyone who cloned a baby today would rightly face, at the very least, the potential of an enormous malpractice judgment. There are good arguments for establishing a temporary moratorium on reproductive cloning.

But the small possibility of reproductive cloning does not justify making nucleus transfer a crime. Almost any science might conceivably be turned to evil purposes. This particular misuse is neither especially likely -- cell biology labs are not set up to deliver fertility treatments -- nor, in the long run, especially threatening.

Contrary to a lot of scary rhetoric, a healthy cloned infant would not be a moral nightmare, merely the not-quite-identical twin of an older person. (The fetal environment and egg cytoplasm create some genetic variations.) Certainly, some parents might have such a baby for bad reasons, to gratify their egos or to "replace" a child who died. But parents have been having children for bad reasons since time immemorial.

Just as likely, cloned babies would be the cherished children of couples who could not have biological offspring any other way. These children might bear an uncanny resemblance to their biological parents, but that, too, is not unprecedented. Like the "test tube babies" born of in vitro fertilization, cloned children need not be identifiable, much less freaks or outcasts.

Why worry so much about a few babies? Because, say opponents, even a single cloned infant puts us on the road to genetic dystopia, a combination of Brave New World and Nazi Germany. A cloned child's genetic makeup is too well known, goes the argument, and therefore transforms random reproduction into "manufacturing" that robs the child of his autonomy. This is where the attack broadens from nucleus transfer to human genetic engineering more generally. An anti-therapeutic cloning petition, circulated by the unlikely duo of conservative publisher William Kristol and arch-technophobe Jeremy Rifkin, concludes, "We are mindful of the tragic history of social eugenics movements in the first half of the 20th century, and are united in our opposition to any use of biotechnology for a commercial eugenics movement in the 21st century."

But the "eugenics" they attack has nothing to do with state-sponsored mass murder or forced sterilization. To the contrary, they are the ones who want the state to dictate the most private aspects of family life. They are the ones who want central authorities, rather than the choices of families and individuals, to determine our genetic future. They are the ones who demand that the government control the means of reproduction. They are the ones who measure the worth of human beings by the circumstances of their conception and the purity of their genetic makeup. They are the ones who say "natural" genes are the mark of true humanity.

Winners in the genetic lottery themselves, blessed with good health and unusual intelligence, they seek to deny future parents the chance to give their children an equally promising genetic start. In a despicable moral equivalency, they equate loving parents with Nazis.

Biomedicine does have the potential to alter the human experience. Indeed, it already has. Life expectancy has doubled worldwide in the past century. Childbirth is no longer a peril to mother and infant. Childhood is no longer a time for early death. The pervasive sense of mortality that down through the ages shaped art, religion, and culture has waned.

Our lives are different from our ancestors' in fundamental ways. We rarely remark on the change, however, because it occurred incrementally. That's how culture evolves and how science works. We should let the process continue.

Making Medical Progress a Crime

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Thu, 21 Jun 2001 00:00:00 EDT

If you get all your news from The New York Times, you'd think that the Bush administration is wrestling with its most important and controversial biomedical policy issue: whether to allow federal funding of research using stem cells from frozen embryos left over from in vitro fertilization. (The latest Times story, on Senate Republicans who support the research, is here.) Unfortunately, through a great trick of policy misdirection, the administration has already taken a much more extreme and dangerous position on a more important biomedical issue: whether to criminalize "therapeutic cloning."

The science goes something like this: Suppose I need a new heart or insulin-secreting islet cells to counteract diabetes. You could take the nucleus from one of my cells, stick it in an egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed, let that develop into stem cells, and then trigger the stem cells to form the specific sorts of cells needed -- heart tissue, say, or islet cells. The new tissue would be genetically mine and, therefore, would not face rejection problems; it would function in my body as if it had grown there naturally. Obviously there are a lot of scientific advances needed before we can do this sort of tissue creation, but you can see the enormous promise it holds for the cure of all sorts of diseases. You can also see that there are no babies involved.

A bipartisan bill in the House (and a similar bill in the Senate) would make this research a federal crime. Transferring my cell nucleus to an egg (human or animal) would be punishable by up to 10 years in prison and, if you got paid to do it, by civil fines of not less than $1 million. With a few technical quibbles, the Bush administration has endorsed this sweeping bill, which is sponsored by Reps. David Joseph Weldon (R-Fla.) and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.).

At a hearing yesterday, Deputy HHS Secretary Claude Allen declared that the administration supports criminalizing all applications of "somatic cell nuclear transfer with human somatic cells, such as cloning to produce cell- and tissue-based therapies," which is the technical way of describing this sort of cell manipulation. The Washington Post, with better news judgment than the Times, which ran nothing on the hearings, put the story on page one.

I would gladly cut off funding of embryo-stem cell research tomorrow if that would permanently placate the forces who want to treat privately funded biomedical research like methamphetamine labs. But the other side is not willing to live and let live. They want criminal laws and they want them now, before the science goes so far that it becomes politically unstoppable.

Bill Kristol, who plays a moderate Republican on TV, is on a crusade to stop this and other biotech research on human beings. Moral panic over biotech has long been a Weekly Standard theme. Now Kristol has a new organization called the Bioethics Project, and he was out making the talk show rounds yesterday -- attacking embryo stem cell research on Nightline and pushing the Weldon-Stupak bill on The Fox News Channel. In a Fox interview with Brit Hume, he said the bill is important because nuclear transfer technology would be "opening the door to a 'brave new world' in which we design our descendants, our children. You know, we'll clone our embryos. Then we'll select certain stem cells and -- and do eugenic manipulation on which children we choose to have. And it really is a step over the line from medical therapy and from the advancement of science to a 'brave new world' scenario of the manipulation of human nature."

This is a common misuse of Brave New World. In a world of individual choice and biomedical freedom, Brave New World can't happen. Huxley's dystopia depends on government control of the means of reproduction. In the book, that central control has replaced the private bonds between parents and children. The scary part of Brave New World is the uniformity and coercion of its society, not the mere existence of genetic engineering. More than two decades after the birth of Louise Brown, and all the hysteria that surrounded her "test tube" conception, we should know that institutions, not technologies, create dystopias. Artificially conceived children are everywhere, beloved by their parents, and they haven't radically altered our world.

Brave New World's uniform vision of the good is exactly where Kristol and his congressional allies are heading, criminalizing science, medicine, and reproduction. Their agenda, like the novel, replaces diverse, decentralized, intimate decision making by parents and families. Kristol and his allies are in effect trying to socialize reproduction and child rearing. They are asking the police, rather than parents, to act on behalf of children -- not just in extreme cases of abuse, which could occur via genetic technology just as it can occur with more primitive means, but in every case.

It's important to ban this entire line of research, Kristol said on Fox, because transferring a nucleus to an egg to produce tissue "would clone the embryo for the sake of producing stem cells that could then be used either for the sake of the person from whom the clone was developed or for others." That's my heart and islet cell story above. He continued, "I would argue, and many of the witnesses today argued -- Leon Kass, the very distinguished social philosopher from the University of Chicago, for example -- that opening this door is just to begin to go down really a terrible and scary path of eugenic manipulation of human nature."

There's an entire philosophy of the relation between humans, nature, and technology buried in that inflammatory language. This is not a wonky policy argument. It's about fundamental issues of conscience -- about how you value human life and what you see as its essentials. It's not an argument between liberals and conservatives, in the normal Washington sense, but between moderns and ancients.

The Weldon-Stupak bill offends my conscience, and the consciences of millions of other Americans (including some traditional religious authorities) who believe that saving people from suffering and death is more important than preserving a pre-Enlightenment (specifically, pre-Vesalius) view of the proper limits of medical science. Kass, whose ideas are embodied in the bill, excoriates contemporary culture for all its manifestations of irreverence toward bodies in pursuit of longer, healthier, happier lives.

"Even the perfectly voluntary use of powers to prolong life, to initiate it in the laboratory, or to make it more colorful and less troublesome through chemistry carries dangers of degradation, depersonalization, and general enfeeblement of soul," he writes in his 1985 book, Toward a More Natural Science. Another striking passage criticizes moderns for failing to emulate the ancient Greeks: "We, on the other hand, with our dissection of cadavers, organ transplantation, cosmetic surgery, body shops, laboratory fertilization, surrogate wombs, gender-change surgery, 'wanted' children, 'rights over our bodies,' sexual liberation, and other practices and beliefs that insist on our independence and autonomy, live more and more wholly for the here and now, subjugating everything we can to the exercise of our wills, with little respect for the nature and meaning of bodily life."

Congress is basing legislation on the reasoning of a man who finds the dissection of cadavers morally troubling. This isn't about the 21st century. It's about the 16th.

At yesterday's hearings, Kass omitted any mention of the evils of autopsies and organ transplants and stuck to a more politically appealing argument: that the only way to ban what the Brits call "baby cloning" is to imprison scientists who transfer human nuclei for any purpose at all. He may be right about that. The question is, How many people are you willing to let suffer and die -- and how extreme a police state are you willing to impose on science -- in order to stop the birth of a few cloned humans? In Kass's view, and perhaps in the administration's, there is no limit. Any amount of suffering is justified to prevent baby clones and preserve a uniform idea of the "nature and meaning of bodily life."

This is high stakes politics. With barely a hint of serious public discussion, Congress and the White House are moving to erode parental rights, destroy freedom of inquiry, and condemn millions of Americans to suffer and die. Such inhumane policy making should exact a political price. Its advocates should face a few informed and pointed questions. The public should have some idea what's going on. The future of medical progress deserves at least as much attention as campaign finance reform. But so far, the subject barely makes the papers.

Dropping the SATs Is an Excuse to Drop Standards

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Sun, 25 Feb 2001 00:00:00 EST

University of California president Richard C. Atkinson's call to drop the SAT as an admissions standard is just another way to retain racial preferences--even if it means losing objective measures of academic achievement for all applicants.

Atkinson's epiphany came, he said, when he saw 12-year-olds in an elite private school "studying long lists of verbal analogies such as 'untruthful is to mendaciousness' as 'circumspect is to caution.' " What exactly is wrong with learning the meanings of these words and how they relate to each other? It would be nice if everyone liked to read, but learning analogies by rote is better than not learning them at all. The problem isn't that 12 year olds in private schools are practicing analogies. It's that most public schools would never even consider teaching such difficult material to 12-year-olds.

Atkinson also worries about an "arms race" of test-preparation classes. That arms race is indeed a bit creepy. But the alternative is to drop all standardized tests. After all, subject-based "achievement tests" will produce the same pathologies. Ambitious parents will send their kids to special coaching, just as kids in Japan go to cram schools.

Atkinson declares that "the strength of American society has been its belief that actual achievement should be what matters most," so "students should be judged on what they have accomplished during four years of high school, taking into account their opportunities." This sounds good, but it's an excuse to drop standards of achievement--what people actually know--in favor of standards of character. We don't apply Atkinson's definition of "achievement" to athletes or artists.

The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless. SAT scores do measure both specific knowledge and valuable thinking skills. For a social scientist like Atkinson to advocate throwing away relevant data is extraordinary.

Atkinson says he wants to tie admissions tests more closely to the high school curriculum, so that anyone in any high school, no matter how crummy, can score well. Instead of raising high school quality, this will bind the UCs to the quality of the state's worst secondary school.

And some kids are still bound to do better than others, even if they all meet a minimum standard. The top eighth of California high school graduates are already guaranteed admission to a UC. The only question is whether you can favor the high scorers with admission to Berkeley and UCLA. Changing the test doesn't remove that problem.

Atkinson's agenda isn't just to drop a single, flawed test. It's to greatly reduce the importance of all objective measures. He wants the UC campuses to "move away from admissions processes that use quantitative formulas"--i.e. that consistently factor SAT scores and grades into admissions decisions--and "instead look at applicants in a comprehensive, holistic way" where qualitative factors matter much more.

The result would be a process more like Harvard's, in which admissions officers have broad discretion to decide who has the right stuff. As the Harvard Web site says, "high marks do not guarantee admission . . . we look at more than just grades: energy, initiative, the support of teachers and counselors, evidence that a student will take advantage of what Harvard offers . . . high test scores are no guarantee of admission and low scores do not necessarily mean exclusion. Some students with 'perfect' scores are not admitted while other students who may have more modest scores are." In other words, a Harvard applicant has no idea of his or her chances.

There are two problems with applying this sort of process to giant state universities. The first is scale. How holistic can you be when you're accepting more students than Harvard has applicants? The second is the difference between public and private institutions. Public institutions have a greater duty to avoid arbitrarily indulging the tastes of their admissions officers. De-emphasizing tests that put everyone on the same rating scale makes arbitrariness more likely.

Atkinson all but admits that his proposal is an attempt to circumvent Proposition 209, citing the need to be mindful that the UC system "serves the most racially and ethnically diverse college-going population in the nation." He says that "because California's college-age population will grow by 50% over the next decade and become even more diverse than it is today, additional steps must be taken now to ensure that tests scores are kept in proper perspective."

Having more applicants means it's better to make decisions with less information? That doesn't add up, regardless of your math scores.

Electoral Beauty Myths

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Mon, 11 Dec 2000 00:00:00 EST

Shortly after the election, I left on a book tour of Australia and New Zealand. So when Katherine Harris became a famous face, I didn't see her on television. My husband told me about her on the phone.

The Republicans, he said, had gotten a lucky break. The Florida secretary of state was attractive, too good-looking to be demonized like Linda Tripp.

Oops.

Harris did of course get vilified, for her appearance as well as her politics. Instead of focusing on bad features or unattractive clothes - Tripp's faults - critics condemned her for wearing too much makeup. Wags compared her to a drag queen, Vampira, and Cruella de Vil. They drew on a centuries-old tradition that equates cosmetics with deception, decadence, and even witchcraft. A woman who wears a lot of makeup, they suggested, is not to be trusted. Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan famously pulled out all the metaphorical stops, writing that Harris' skin "had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat." The secretary was clearly wearing false eyelashes, Givhan declared, so that "caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid."

The response to such blistering commentary was outrage and condemnation. Conservatives blasted feminists for double standards that attack conservative women while protecting liberals. Feminists decried double standards that zap women while exempting men. The Post's own ombudsman wrote that "mocking someone's appearance is not something that newspapers should do."

Righteously upholding the idea that looks don't matter, these watchdogs all studiously ignored the embarrassing truth: Not only do human beings make judgments about how other people look, we enjoy doing so. We're not going to stop just because ombudsmen of various sorts tell us it's bad manners. And in an age where we see more and more good-looking people, either directly or through the media, we're getting more and more judgmental. When it comes to looks, double standards - of whatever variety - are disappearing.

Even as they bemoaned the emphasis on appearance, in fact, commentators gleefully used the opportunity to air their own pent-up judgments. "Warren Christopher wears handsome suits but otherwise looks like a deflated mix of Shar-Pei and beagle," wrote Andrea Billups of The Washington Times. Maryln Schwartz of the Dallas Morning News compared Christopher to a prune and Joe Lieberman to an elf; she mocked Strom Thurmond's orange hair plugs and told Dennis Hastert to go to Weight Watchers. Having released these attacks, Schwartz declared such slurs "too nasty, too vicious, too totally uncalled for." She claimed that people only say such mean things about women.

Al Gore might beg to differ. In his first debate with George W. Bush, Gore appeared in orange makeup applied thickly to cover a sunburn. He looked awful. Commentators compared him to Lurch from The Addams Family, "Herman Munster doing a bad Ronald Reagan impression," and "a big, orange, waxy, wickless candle." One columnist wrote that "it looked like he melted down orange circus peanuts and then asked Tammy Faye for a 'light' dusting." San Francisco Examiner television critic Tim Goodman landed one of the most quoted blows: "If you'd stuck him in a push-up bra and a sequin dress and had him sing show tunes, he'd have carried San Francisco in a landslide."

The vice president became The Man Who Wears Too Much Makeup. The label has endured as a trope of late-night comedians - "If Al Gore took off half his makeup and gave it to Warren Christopher, they'd both look a lot better," said Jay Leno recently - and as color for political journalists. This isn't just fun at the vice president's expense. Commentators treat Gore's pancake problem as if it has deeper significance. It makes him seem bumbling, unmanly, and, most of all, phony. "While Gore yammered about [the voters'] 'will,' it was clear to my houseplants that the man who looks like he raids Katherine Harris' pancake makeup supply was really gloating about the Florida Supreme Court decision in his favor," opined a disillusioned Gore voter in late November.

Harris' critics similarly seized on flaws in her appearance to indicate flaws in her character. The Post's Givhan interpreted Harris' fashionable blue eyeshadow as evidence that "she failed to think for herself" and declared that "one wonders how this Republican woman, who can't even use restraint when she's wielding a mascara wand, will manage to use it and make sound decisions in this game of partisan one-upmanship." By focusing on makeup as metaphor, Givhan could make political judgments without supporting them.

This is the trouble we get into when we declare mere appearance off-limits to serious commentary. Instead of admitting that how people look is interesting in and of itself - that writers and readers enjoy making aesthetic judgments about people - we strain for broader significance. We treat beauty as a sign of virtue and ugliness as a sign of vice. If Al Gore and Katherine Harris wear the wrong makeup, they cannot be trusted. If Paula Jones has a crooked nose and Monica Lewinsky is fat, they cannot be telling the truth. Conversely, if Hillary Clinton has a bad health care plan, she cannot have a lovely face.

It would be better for our public discussions, and our mental health, if we simply admitted that we care about how other people look - if we acknowledged that beauty has its own significance and does not need to be saddled with symbolism. Commentators could then opine on distracting makeup, crooked noses, and broad hips without forcing their aesthetic judgments to take on inappropriate moral weight. They could be honestly catty without pretending to be deep. If they wanted to add substance, they could stick to relevant considerations, such as how Harris' heavy, '80s-style makeup typifies women of her age, region, and social class. But respectable commentators could not get away with pretending that analyzing how people look can substitute for analyzing how they think or act.

Treating beauty as though it has moral significance is an anachronism. The idea of beauty as a value in and of itself - looks as just looks, as compelling surface without deeper meaning - is what the historian Arthur Marwick calls the "modern" idea of beauty. Traditional cultures assumed that good looks indicated good character. Think of the ugly step-sisters compared to beautiful, virtuous Cinderella.

Nowadays we see a fuller range of human looks - and of the human character that accompanies them - than people who lived before modern trade, travel, and communications media. We can thus judge both looks and character more stringently and more carefully, and we can separate the two. "Only when people have the opportunity to make choices and comparisions can they make a genuine evaluation of personal appearance," writes Marwick in his 1988 book, Beauty in History.

The emancipation of women, he argues, contributes to this process. More women become visible to a broad public, giving everyone a broader basis of comparison. And attractive women can make a living from their looks - whether directly as models or indirectly as saleswomen or newscasters - without trading sexual favors. "Women active in society offer enhanced opportunities for comparison and choice," Marwick concludes, "while at the same time women themselves begin to judge men as men had, prevailing orthodoxies notwithstanding, tended to judge women - by appearance."

Talking honestly about how public figures look certainly has its negative side. We already have high standards, pushed ever higher by the beautiful faces we see in the media. It's surely no accident that both presidential candidates, and the incumbent president, are unusually good looking. "Presidentially, the United States is now in a place called Hunksville," wrote Hank Stuever of The Washington Post's style section in a long disquisition on the politics of cuteness. Our demand for good looks, expressed in the biting comments that ensue when public figures fall short of perfection, puts enormous pressures on these individuals and may screen out the otherwise qualified. If video killed the radio star, it may also be doing away with the homely politician.

But denial won't work. Pretending we don't care how people look doesn't make us stop caring. It simply encourages us to equate good looks with other qualifications. Instead of treating beauty as one value among many, we come to treat it as the greatest value of all. It may not seem fair to treat looks as important. But it's far more fair than treating appearance as something more.

Ironic Processing

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Wed, 01 Nov 2000 00:00:00 EST

When I give a speech about the big-picture political and cultural ideas in my book The Future and Its Enemies, the question and answer period almost always starts with a down-to-earth query: "What do you think of George W. Bush and Al Gore?"

"Well," I say, "Bush is a mixed bag. But I think Al Gore is the devil."

This line always gets a laugh, but it’s not really a joke. Don’t get me wrong: Unlike some Clinton haters, who have the same opinion of his boss, I don’t mean Gore is literally the Prince of Darkness. I simply mean that he operates according to core principles that work to erode the freedoms of individuals and the progress of the open society.

This is true whether you examine the "real Gore"–the intellectual wannabe who seems like he’d rather have my job than Bill Clinton’s–or the political Gore, who speaks in poll-tested phrases. Both versions share the patronizing world view perfectly expressed in the vice president’s tendency to address his audiences as though they were dim second-graders. Both want to tell everyone else how to live, to subordinate our diverse, individualized purposes to their own goals.

Back before his populist peroration at the Democratic National Convention, the intellectual Gore gave a remarkable interview to Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker. Lemann was smart enough not to ask routine, soundbite-inducing questions. Instead, he asked Gore about his favorite ideas, and he ran long quotations from their conversations.

Gore’s responses elicited scorn, derision, and dismay in Washington’s political-intellectual circles. He was way, way, way too interested in obscure notions about complexity and fractals. He drew strange diagrams. He talked a lot about metaphor. He dropped names of philosophers and physicists. Gore sounded like a New Age version of Newt Gingrich.

The pundits were so flabbergasted by his strangeness that they paid little attention to the content of what he said. But Lemann’s article revealed more than Gore’s interest in odd ideas; it gave readers a peek at his political philosophy. And the substance of Gore’s world view is troubling.

Gore believes society needs to take ideas from science and apply them to politics and economics, and he’s frustrated that scientific ideas are too unfamiliar to the general public–and his political colleagues–to be used that way. He wants to replace the old metaphors of a clockwork universe and machine-age government with something more up-to-date. His favorite metaphor is "distributed intelligence."

That sounds promising. The insight that knowledge is scattered through society, and that it’s impossible to collect all relevant information (including the knowledge of individuals’ purposes and preferences) in a single place, is fundamental to understanding why central planning does not work, and why it is incompatible with individual freedom. But Gore’s idea of distributed intelligence does not in any way endorse the significance of dispersed, local knowledge.

To the contrary, Gore imagines society as a giant computer system, using massively parallel processing to attack a single problem. In such a system, he explained in a 1996 speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, "When a problem was presented, all the processors would begin working simultaneously, each performing its small part of the task, and sending its portion of the answer to be collated with the rest of the work that was going on. It turns out that for most problems, this approach is more effective." (Actually, massively parallel processing isn’t good for most problems, but that’s a messy real-world detail.)

As a metaphor for society, this analogy suggests that someone in charge decides what the problem is and parcels out tasks to individuals. Individuals do not choose their own problems and purposes or respond to the needs and desires of other dispersed individuals. Asked by Lemann to apply this idea to government, Gore imagined members of Congress bringing information from their districts to "assemble it at the center, in the Capitol building."

So "distributed intelligence," a phrase that appears to honor decentralized knowledge, turns out to enshrine centralized decision making. This vision is in keeping with Gore’s desire, in Earth in the Balance, for a "central organizing principle for civilization," a goal to which all other goals are subordinated.

Gore also rebels against the dispersed knowledge that makes an advanced civilization possible–the specialization that lets people do what they’re good at and enables us to benefit from the knowledge of others, the specialization that acknowledges that each of us is inevitably ignorant about most things. To the AAAS, he bemoaned "the increasing segmentation of society," blaming it for the failure of his favorite metaphor to capture the public imagination.

The problem of specialization, he told Lemann, was what Earth in the Balance was all about. The book was an attempt, he said, "to understand the origins of our modern world view, and its curious reliance on specialization and ever-narrower slices of the world around us into categories that are then themselves dissected, in an ongoing process of separation, into parts and subparts–a process that sometimes obliterates the connection to the whole and the appreciation for context and the deeper meanings that can’t really be found in the atomized parts of the whole."

No wonder the pundits scoffed. That Gore doesn’t sound like much of a politician.

His views can nonetheless be translated into a campaign document. You just have to push the metaphor: The "atomized parts" are citizens, or voters, or taxpayers, or just plain individuals. They’re the little pieces that don’t count for much until they’re brought into the grand scheme, connected to the whole. You connect them to those deeper meanings by deciding what goals they should pursue–programming them to solve the right problems.

Follow this analogy, and you wind up with a platform that reads something like Gore’s campaign document, Prosperity for America’s Families. Filled with grandiose promises and constant repetition, this 191-page "plan" consists largely of prescriptions to add more headache-inducing complexity to the tax code, all in the name of rewarding good behavior.

Take retirement savings. Gore wants people to save, but he wants the savings to cost people the same regardless of how much money they make. Today’s IRAs don’t do that. A family making $25,000 pays no income taxes, so putting away $2,000 in retirement savings costs the full two grand. A family that makes $75,000 is in the 28 percent bracket, so sticking $2,000 in a tax-deductible IRA costs just $1,440. That’s not fair, suggests the Gore document.

You could, of course, solve the unfairness problem by flattening tax rates, so that everyone faced the same tax hit. You could even eliminate special treatment of retirement savings and let taxpayers decide, in an unbiased way, how to spend their money. But that even-handed approach would let the atomized parts decide on their own purposes. It would offer no deeper meanings.

Instead, the current progressivity of the tax code becomes an argument for even greater progressivity. Gore proposes a new Retirement Savings Plus program in which people who save but don’t pay taxes will receive matching funds and people who save and do pay taxes will get credits that go down as their tax rate goes up. Having centrally decided that the nation’s little processors should all attack the problem of retirement savings, he has to rig the pieces of the problem assigned to each household.

Saving for retirement is important to Gore, but the true central organizing principle of his plan is that everyone should be raising children and sending them to college. His plan thus offers a tax deduction for college tuition, establishes tax-sheltered accounts to save for educational expenses, and gives a tax credit for after-school programs. It hikes the child-care tax credit (including a credit for parents who stay home with very young kids) and promises full-time moms who haven’t paid Social Security taxes the same benefits as employed women who have. Parents whose kids aren’t either in college or young enough for day care are pretty much out of luck when it comes to tax cuts as, of course, are people who make too much money.

Prosperity for America’s Families goes on and on in this vein. To keep the nation’s "atomized parts" from pursuing their own, unapproved goals, Gore creates so many new specialized categories that he winds up contradicting his own goals. His plan "corrects" the marriage penalty by doubling the standard deduction, for instance, but that penalizes any couple who itemizes to take advantage of any of its other credits–or of the old mortgage deduction.

The overall effect is an irony worthy of any machine-age, old-paradigm manager: In pursuit of deeper meanings and centralized purposes, Gore winds up slicing Americans into ever-narrower interest groups, favoring some and punishing others.

Mine Eyes Deceive Me

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Mon, 02 Oct 2000 00:00:00 EDT

We live, writes a critic, in the "Age of Falsification," filled with surfaces we cannot trust. Some are digital creations. Others, from ad slogans to plastic surgery, are not. But the problem is pervasive: Our civilization's artifacts are deceptive, fake, inauthentic, a pack of lies. Today, the whole world is a theater.

No wonder Shakespeare is experiencing a revival. His plays--and his times--were so obsessed with appearance and reality that one of my professors used to refer to the theme as "your basic A&R." Boys pretending to be girls pretending to be boys. In Shakespeare's world, characters cannot trust their senses.

Is the ghost in Hamlet true and truthful, or is it a demon, tempting young Hamlet into murderous sin? Is Juliet dead or merely sleeping? Does Lear really stand at the edge of a great cliff? Or has the Fool deceived him to save his life?

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments. You cannot believe everything you see or hear. Othello is the tragedy of a man who trusts the wrong source and thus misunderstands what he sees.

Nature alone, to some, seems true. But is it? Nature, too, must be interpreted. Imagination, declared Shakespeare's contemporary, Sir Philip Sidney, is a triumph, a creative act in emulation of man's Creator. The poet "goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit." This was, in Sidney's day, a controversial stance.

It is in ours as well. All that is different is the technological context. Today's cultural critics, heirs to Plato and the Puritans, don't attack poetry. They attack new media. But the attack and its targets are not new. Some eras are acutely aware that the truth is hard to discern. Others are complacent.

We got so used to the old technologies that we forgot their capacity for deception. We believed photography was "real," as though World War II literally happened in black and white. We forgot that selection creates its own biases. Despite evidence ranging from Soviet propaganda to the evening news, we believed that pictures--especially moving ones--never lied.

You can hear nostalgia for those good old days on almost any C-SPAN media panel, in which journalists from broadcast news and monopoly daily newspapers lament new media for degrading ethics. Ethics, in this context, means maintaining a uniform stance toward the audience and the issues--making judgments so the readers or viewers don't have to.

Like Galileo, born the same year as Shakespeare, we have new tools, and we see things we didn't see before. "In our time," wrote Galileo, "it has pleased God to concede to human ingenuity an invention so wonderful as to have the power of increasing vision four, six, 10, 20, 30, and 40 times, and an infinite number of objects which were invisible, either because of distance or extreme minuteness, have become visible by means of the telescope."

Appearance now suggests a more complex reality. The Internet exposes a diversity of opinion, experience, and taste we'd been led to believe didn't exist. If you were unusual in 1950 or 1980--and everyone is unusual in one way or another--you were an isolated anomaly. Now you're a Web ring, a Yahoo category. But that still doesn't mean we can trust what you say.

Like Shakespeare's art and Galileo's telescope, the Internet reminds us that the world is not only complicated and diverse but also requires more discernment. We cannot believe everything we see, hear, or read because what we see, hear, and read is contradictory and potentially false. Even our senses can deceive us.

We live, says author Kurt Andersen, in an era of "magic realism." Dinosaurs march through movie landscapes, and dead actors are morphed into TV commercials. These deceptions don't bother us anymore. We know they are part of an act, and we enjoy it.

But we are nonetheless anxious, fearful of manipulation, and the worry shows up in our art. Politicians saw only the movie's violence, but The Matrix was an artistically powerful meditation on your basic A&R. That's why it was so popular.

The movie's relevance to the Columbine shootings wasn't in the gun battles and the long black coats. It was in what the movie said about the difficulty of figuring out the truth when reality is mediated and manipulated. Were the Columbine killers members of a "Trench Coat Mafia"? Are every school's weird kids killers in the making?

The mass media told one simple story, in which all the answers were yes. The Net, with its telescopelike ability to see the minute and distant, to discern what was once invisible, found contradictions. The stories on Slashdot and Salon were more complex and ultimately more trustworthy than the nightly news. The newspapers eventually followed, mostly too late to change the first impressions. Journalists, too, must make judgments about which leads to chase, whom to trust, what makes a story. Their senses, and their prejudices, can mislead them.

"Free your mind," preached The Matrix. A start, but just a slogan, and not much of a guide. Look through your telescope yourself, but what do you see? The challenge is in interpretation, in judgment. Are sunspots "an illusion of the telescope," or perhaps undiscovered planets hovering around a pristine and perfect star? Nature, unadorned by reason and imagination, may be "true," but it is also incomprehensible. Galileo was a master not only of observation but also of imagination and argumentation. The truths he uncovered were not easy to discern.

Appearance and reality do not come with labels. Confronted with new tools, new cultures, new ways of telling stories, we are shaken from the complacent assumption that truth is simple and obvious. We grow anxious. We ask questions. The pursuit can make us as crazy as Hamlet or as creative as Galileo. Either way, the search starts with a truth we forget at our own peril. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than we once dreamed--and we must inspect every one of them through the lens of our imagination.

This article appeared in the October 2, 2000 issue of Forbes ASAP.

Politicizing Parenthood

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Sun, 01 Oct 2000 00:00:00 EDT

I used to think it was nobody else’s business whether my husband and I planned to have children. I used to think it was rude to make such personal inquiries.

But politeness is a social construct, and my view is a minority opinion. So after nearly 15 years of answering such questions from friends, acquaintances, people I’ve just met at conferences or cocktail parties, store clerks, cab drivers, manicurists, and, most recently, the customer-service operator who changed my Sprint PCS phone number from Los Angeles to Dallas, I have given up. I guess my procreational plans, or lack thereof, are the world’s business.

I like kids, but I don’t expect to have any of my own. I’m 40 years old and spend most of my time working. I’d be a terrible mother. Now you know.

I’m telling you this not because it’s any of your business–it isn’t–but because, like many formerly private matters, parenthood has become a political issue and nonparents an aggrieved interest group. Despite their incessant talk of "inclusion," "tolerance," and "diversity," both Democrats and Republicans are working assiduously to divide America into two classes: parents (or, more accurately, parents with children at home), who are important and valuable, and everyone else.

The Republicans may be the party of "family values," but we can thank the Clinton administration for turning the New Discrimination into a major public policy. The first bill President Clinton signed was the Family and Medical Leave Act, whose main point is to give new parents the right to quit their jobs for three months, leaving the work to be picked up by unmentioned co-workers. Earlier this year, Clinton ordered new Labor Department regulations to encourage states to make that leave paid, by letting new parents collect unemployment insurance during their voluntary absence. (So far, no state has taken up the idea.) He has also proposed that federal law add parents to the list of groups protected against workplace discrimination–a formula that would inevitably punish companies that give childless workaholics greater pay and more promotions than they give soccer moms and dads.

When candidate Al Gore talks about "tax cuts for working families," he’s engaging in not one but two forms of class warfare: against the higher-income people who pay most of the country’s income taxes (and presumably vote Republican) and against workers of all incomes who don’t have dependent children (and who often vote Democratic). The Clinton administration’s tax policy has been almost entirely geared to reward parenthood with various tax credits.

The Republicans have mostly gone along with, and often sought to top, the administration’s bias. Gone is the goal of neutral tax-rate cuts, in favor of the new gospel of behavior modification and interest group payoffs. In her often caustic book, The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless, Elinor Burkett calls the 1997 tax cut, which included a $500 tax credit for children, "the most massive redistribution of wealth since the War on Poverty–this time not from rich to poor, but from nonparents, no matter how modest their means, to parents, no matter how affluent."

The trend shows no signs of abating. Analyzing George W. Bush’s Republican convention, David Brooks of The Weekly Standard suggests that it marked a turning point, transforming the GOP "from a work party to a home party." Instead of the traditional Republican celebration of entrepreneurs and workers, he writes, "this convention worshipped the child-rearer." It was a perilous strategy for a candidate best known as his parents’ son, but perhaps an understandable one.

Conservative intellectuals, meanwhile, incessantly declare that "the" purpose of family life is to raise children. Follow this rhetoric and pretty soon the childless are not merely second-class citizens, but fake families and quite possibly less than fully human. Women’s lives, in particular, are meaningless if they have not, in author Danielle Crittenden’s words, "brought into this world life that will outlast us." Without kids, she suggests, a life’s work amounts to a mere "pile of pay stubs." So often does this attitude emanate from the Independent Women’s Forum, a group of high-profile conservatives including Crittenden, that some of its own disgruntled members have taken to throwing around the phrase "mommy nazis" to describe the ideologists of mandatory motherhood.

Nonetheless, it’s hard even for me to sympathize with some of the organized childless–or "child free," as they prefer to be called. Burkett and her followers can be just as intolerant as their foes. Too often, they seem to hate both children and their parents. They have the blinkered anger of self-styled victim groups. And, like their opponents, they show little understanding of the relation between employment and compensation.

In Burkett’s view, providing "family-friendly" benefits, such as on-site day care or health insurance for family members, violates the sacred principle of equal pay for equal work. So does expecting workers without children to be more flexible or to work longer hours than people with kids. Accommodating employees who need time off for family responsibilities is, in Burkett’s assessment, a form of discrimination, because people with kids will almost always ask for more flexibility than those without them.

The problem with this view–and with the contrary Clintonian vision of legally obligated privileges for parents–is that it ignores the explicit and implicit bargaining through which employers and employees come to terms. A day care center may not matter to most employees, but it may be essential to attract certain workers. A lawyer who bills more hours than most of the firm may demand, and get, the opportunity to bring her baby to work, even if some of her colleagues think it’s weird. To hire and hold talented people, employers have to give them what they want, and that won’t mean a one-size-fits-all package.

"From where I sit, the increasing insistence by employees that employers accommodate their lives has been a welcome revolution," writes Lisa Belkin in a recent New York Times Magazine cover story on the "backlash against children." She has two young sons and likes working at home on a flexible schedule. What she doesn’t say is that the Times gives her that privilege not because of laws or regulations, or because the paper is a humane, understanding place (it notoriously isn’t), but because she’s unusually good at what she does. Even the Times can be accommodating to keep its most talented writers.

But Belkin is never going to be managing editor of the Times. In fact, as long as she needs those flexible hours, she isn’t going to be a manager of any kind. Other people, with work schedules that often stretch late into the night, bear the burdens that make lives like hers possible. Many of those people have no children.

But these people aren’t victims. They are striking their own bargains, bargains that differ from those that conscientious parents insist on. After all, people without children do have the freedom to do things that caring parents with dependent kids can’t–to work long hours, to travel frequently, to relocate, and to do all these things on short notice if necessary. In return, they can achieve positions that devoted parents can’t. Barring laws to the contrary, the people who put more time and energy into their work, and who are good at it, will reap greater rewards.

Politicizing parenthood reduces our ability both to accommodate differences and to benefit from them. By announcing that society has decided on one best way to live, it creates winners and losers, citizens who matter and those who don’t.

The great insight of classical liberalism was that government neutrality in matters of faith and conscience would foster social peace. The same is true of parenthood, which is equally personal and thus equally explosive. Allowing people the freedom to make varied arrangements–from family-friendly workplaces to (currently illegal) child-free apartment buildings–won’t eliminate all conflicts. But it gives people fewer causes for grievance and more ways to alleviate life’s stresses.

Society needs both parents and nonparents, both the work party and the home party. While raising children is the most important work most people will do, not everyone is cut out for parenthood. And, as many a childless teacher has proved, raising kids is not the only important contribution a person can make to their future. The children who are "our future" will inherit a world created not just by parental devotion but by the sort of zealous, focused endeavors that can preclude good parenting.

As Francis Bacon observed four centuries ago, "The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works are proper to men. And surely a man shall see the noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men, which have sought to express the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed. So the care of posterity is most in them that have no posterity."

Bacon, writing under the rule of the Virgin Queen, leaned too far toward the party of work. The republican Constitution that seeks to "secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity" does not play such favorites. Neither should those who govern under it.

Impure Thoughts

vpostrel@dynamist.com (Virginia Postrel) — Tue, 01 Aug 2000 00:00:00 EDT

Poor Joe Stiglitz. Here he is, an eminent economist, on everyone's short list for a Nobel Prize. He writes a perfectly respectable New Republic cover story about the failings of the International Monetary Fund. He's particularly concerned that IMF policies make poor countries experiencing recessions poorer and more depressed. The article makes a big splash. Yet when all the publicity is over, Stiglitz has become the intellectual poster child for anti-trade, anti-growth fanatics. What happened?

Stiglitz got involved in a dirty issue, one entangled in many agendas, and he didn't separate his goals from those of larger, louder, sexier coalitions. He wanted to criticize the IMF and, for maximum effect, he did so as the IMF and World Bank were holding big meetings in Washington. But at the same time, protesters hit the streets to condemn not just specific practices of international lending organizations but globalization, trade, and economic growth. Coming off the much larger anti-trade protests in Seattle, these activists dominated journalists' imagination and, hence, set the terms of the discussion.

So, for instance, when PBS' Charlie Rose Show discussed the topic, Stiglitz was paired with Juliette Beck, a young anti-globalization activist and the recent subject of a glowing profile in The New Yorker.

When Charlie Rose asked whether she sees any evidence that the World Bank and IMF get the protesters' message, Beck responded, "Quite frankly no. I think that they are still entrenched in their ideology of `growth is the solution.' Economic growth, frankly, is leading to a decline in almost every ecosystem on Earth. We cannot sustain this level of growth and yet they're promoting more and more economic growth as a solution. We need to rethink the whole economic system that we're living in."

"Rethinking the whole economic system" is a long way from Stiglitz's argument. From Beck's point of view, what Stiglitz dislikes about the IMF would be a wonderful attribute. What's a depression if not the opposite of Earth-destroying "growth"? Further wrecking the economies of Thailand and Indonesia just moves us closer to a "new paradigm" that will save the environment.

Faced with a supposed ally whose explicit agenda is to end economic growth, Stiglitz had a professional, and moral, responsibility to disagree. He needed to explain why trade and growth are essential if the world's peasants are ever to climb out of poverty and how, in his view, the IMF is hampering that process. That was, after all, the thrust of his original criticism.

But he had apparently defined his goal as enlisting as many anti-IMF allies as possible, regardless of their agendas. So instead of disagreeing, he kissed up. He said nothing in defense of economic growth, let alone trade. He tried to keep Beck and her followers from supporting Ralph Nader for president; he gushed about how much his man Al Gore defends the environment and worries about population growth. It was disgusting.

It was also understandable. Dirty issues are tricky; they don't break down along neat and clean political or cultural lines. Dealing with them effectively requires more than an ideology or a set of policy goals. It requires a strong sense of the particular political and intellectual moment--of which issues are strategically important and which are less so, of how results are likely to be framed in law and public opinion, of which victories or defeats really matter.

To address dirty issues, you can't just have principles. You have to have priorities. Let's say that you think tax-and-spend redistribution is bad and that the government shouldn't tell people how to live their lives or spend their money. In a perfect world, you wouldn't want any taxes at all, or would want them only to support government activities that benefit everyone, such as the courts or national defense. Either way, you think taxes should be low, low, low. You also want tax policy to be neutral. How, then, should you react to a proposal to give some taxpayers a special break if, say, they buy a new home for the first time or pay college tuition?

It all depends on the political Zeitgeist. In the 1970s, the ideology of egalitarian redistribution--"Soak the rich!"--dominated tax discussions. Taxes weren't seen as a necessary evil to fund government spending. They were a righteous cause, a way to right the injustices of a system that made some people richer than others. And the government deserved as much money as it wanted, because it was using it to help people. Marginal income tax rates were extremely high. Under these circumstances, it made sense to adopt Milton Friedman's adage that any tax cut is a good tax cut. At least a few people got to keep a little more of their money.

Today, however, egalitarianism, while by no means dead, is not the biggest threat to individual freedom, personal or economic. Bossiness is. The most potent challenge to markets, and to liberal ideals more generally, is no longer about fairness. It is about stability and control. It is the argument that free social and economic processes are disruptive and chaotic, that they make the future unpredictable, and that they serve too many diverse values rather than "one best way." The most important challenge to individual freedom today is not the ideology of egalitarianism but the ideology of stasis: the notion that the good society is one of stability, predictability, and control. The role of the state, in this view, is not so much to reallocate wealth as it is to curb, direct, or end unpredictable economic and social evolution. (See "After Socialism," November 1999.)

In this context, targeted tax credits look bad indeed. They are, as they have always been, a way of favoring some citizens over others, a ready tool for interest-group pandering. Now, however, targeted tax credits also fit into a larger ideological pattern. They bolster the idea that government authority should determine the shape of people's choices. As Bill Clinton famously remarked, a general cut in tax rates, rather than targeted credits, might encourage people to spend their money the wrong way.

Under these circumstances, it may be better to keep the tax code as it is rather than add more loopholes. If tax cutting has been your political lodestar for decades, that's an unpleasant thought. But it's the sort of analysis that dirty issues require.

It's tempting, then, to avoid dirty issues altogether, to "pick clean fights with the other side that aren't muddied by problematic circumstances," as an analyst at a libertarian think tank recently e-mailed me. But rarely do we have the luxury of public policy debates conducted entirely on our own terms. "Problematic circumstances" are everywhere.

Waiting for clean issues is a fine strategy if what you want to do is demonstrate the philosophical consistency of your beliefs, with little concern for what actually happens in the world. Many libertarians are attracted to that sort of utopian purity. But dodging dirty issues is a prescription for symbolic politics that let you feel superior while the world is shaped by the ideas and policies of others. And many of those ideas and policies will be dangerous.

Take the issue we were discussing when my correspondent weighed in on the value of picking only clean fights. In January, the Sierra Club filed suit in Hawaii to block a three-year promotional campaign funded by the state tourism board. The suit argues that Hawaiian law requires an environmental impact study before the state can spend money to attract more tourists. Although the state law has previously been applied only to land use and building projects, its scope isn't specifically limited. The Sierra Club thus argues that since more visitors could damage Hawaii's environment, the promotional campaign shouldn't be allowed to proceed without considering the effects of more tourists.

No big deal, right? It's just a dispute over some pork-barrel spending, "corporate welfare" at the local level. "If the Sierra Club wins their suit," said the analyst, "the only precedent set is that programs we as libertarians otherwise don't like--tourism promotion funded by states--are going to get the same level of environmental scrutiny that other government undertakings get. I certainly am not going to lose sleep over that."

Unfortunately, the Sierra Club's agenda has absolutely nothing to do with corporate welfare. Suggesting that the issue is subsidies is like pretending that Juliette Beck is fighting for better IMF fiscal policies. The Sierra Club is trying to get travel declared a form of pollution. "Nearly 7 million tourists descend on Hawaii's beaches and roads and natural areas each year," says Jeffrey Mikulina, director of the group's Hawaii chapter. "Whether an extra million would be the straw that breaks the camel's back needs to be examined."

The Sierra Club chapter in Hawaii isn't just against state spending to promote tourism. It's against more visitors in general. Like Beck, Mikulina is concerned about "the notion of boundless growth." His chapter opposes not just the marketing program but, for instance, any revision in the state's 39-year-old land-use law that might make it easier to build hotels and resorts instead of farms. When land-use reform came up last year, Mikulina had a simple message: "The environmentalists' reaction is, `Don't touch it.'"

The Sierra Club's suit is certainly incremental, reinterpreting a particular law to curb a particular government activity. A victory would not declare travel illegal. But the Sierra Club is a savvy organization that understands how to build a policy base gradually, step by step. It is working to move law and public opinion toward the assumption that autarky is the natural, proper state of society, and that mobility is suspect, something that must be justified and defended. The Sierra Club may also be smart enough to realize that by attacking subsidies it can get some potential opponents to sit out the debate, just as anti-immigration activists in California made it hard to attack Proposition 187 by framing it as an anti-welfare measure.

But the principle at stake in Hawaii is not business subsidies. It is freedom of movement--a cause worth losing sleep over. And, once again, it is also economic growth. The two issues are inextricably linked with each other and with individual freedom in general.

Business subsidies are wasteful and unfair. But they do not, in our era, represent a systemic threat to liberty. No pro-subsidy ideology is on the march. But those like Mikulina and Beck, who see human mobility, human ingenuity, human pleasure, human life itself as a form of pollution--those who seek to hold the world in stasis lest human action change it--do pose a fundamental challenge to individual freedom and social progress.

Letting these ideas go unchallenged because we might sully ourselves with dirty issues is irresponsible. By waiting for perfectly clean opportunities to apply our principles, we risk losing them altogether.