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I’m headed off to the Breakthrough Institute’s Dialogue 2022 conference, where tomorrow morning I’ll be on a panel discussing Ezra Klein’s idea of “supply side progressivism.” Ezra says he’s been reading The Future and Its Enemies and characterizes himself as what I call a technocrat, which is no doubt correct. But his critique of the problem of getting stuff done is basically correct, and I see some possibilities for a positive coalition with strong dynamist elements.
To see what we’re up against, read this NYT article on a Bay Area woman’s fight to block a 20-unit condo development on a vacant lot. (I live in a 14-unit condo development, built in 1975, so this is essentially an argument that people like the Postrels ruin the neighborhood.) She’s straight out of The Future and Its Enemies, complete with devotion to E.F. Schumacher.
Susan Kirsch is a 78-year-old retired teacher who lives in a small cottage home in Mill Valley, Calif., on a quiet suburban street that looks toward a grassy knoll. A Sierra Club member with a pesticide-free garden, she has an Amnesty International sticker on her front window and a photograph on her refrigerator of herself and hundreds of other people spelling “TAX THE 1%” on a beach.
The cause that takes up most of her time, however, is fighting new development and campaigning for the right of suburban cities to have near total control over what gets built in them….
After all, this is a person who once wrote an op-ed that said the removal of five trees in Mill Valley sent “existential messages to our fellow citizens of the world.” Who has fought for two decades to prevent a developer from putting 20 condominiums on a hill at the end of her street.
Ms. Kirsch’s nonprofit, Catalysts for Local Control, opposes just about every law the California legislature puts forward to address the state’s housing and homelessness problem. In Zoom meetings with her members, she describes lawmakers’ intentions in dark terms and drives the message home with graphics that say things like, “Our homes and cities are under attack.”
It might seem kitschy if it weren’t so effective. Susan Kirsch was 60 when she began her fight against the condos down the block. Eighteen years later, the hill remains dirt.
Enclaves and the Problem of “Stakeholder Capitalism”
Stakeholder capitalism implicitly assumes a cultural consensus identical to whatever its advocates believe. It harks back to the mid-20th century, when big US companies enjoyed little competition, mass media marginalized all but a narrow range of political, religious and social views, and hierarchy and security dominated worker expectations. It pretends social media, Slack channels and “bringing your whole self to work” don’t exist.
For a purer version of what stakeholder-oriented management can engender, forget profits and political disagreements. Look at the turmoil roiling all sorts of left-wing nonprofits. In a report in the Intercept, Ryan Grim details why Washington D.C.-based groups have spent the past few years engaged in “knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines.”
Read the whole thing here. Bloomberg allows a limited number of free reads. If you hit the paywall, you can read an ungated version here, thanks to my WaPo subscription, but it doesn’t have the all-important links. (I eventually put my columns on my site, but I have to wait at least 90 days.)
Speaking of Twitter, I highly encourage anyone on it to switch to the chronological feed. Suddenly people you forgot you were following will show up (at least if you follow a lot of people). From Home, click the sparkly icon in the upper right and choose “Switch to latest Tweets.”
This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on June 14. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.
In between other subjects and more pressing deadlines, I’ve been thinking about purity. Our public discussions have become obsessed with it.
The pandemic has forced us to contend with a new and invisible contaminant, resulting in conflicts about monitoring, safeguarding, and defining purity. Is wearing a mask a vital shield or a violation of individual integrity? Does a vaccine protect against contamination or constitute pollution?
The quest for purity informs cancel culture. It pushes partisans to ever-greater extremes, even when those positions are politically self-defeating. It turns historical heroes /into villains and closes nuclear power plants in the face of climate change. It makes the ideal the enemy of the improved, the perfect the exterminator of the better. If we want to understand our cultural moment, we need to think seriously about purity.
I like and admire Jon Haidt, but I don’t believe this claim. I have lived too long in the land of detox cleanses and Prop. 65 warnings to accept that liberals don’t care about purity, sometimes to an obsessive degree. And I have witnessed too many libertarian disputes about who qualifies as a “real libertarian” to equate laissez-faire attitudes toward sex, drugs, and bioengineering with indifference to purity.
In reminding us of the importance of purity in defining political identity, moral foundations theory points in a useful direction. But anthropology is more useful than psychology in understanding what’s going on. Purity concerns are a human universal. They just take different forms.
What Constitutes Contamination?
Purity is about identifying and eliminating contaminants—anomalies that are sources of danger. The danger may be physical, spiritual, cultural, or moral. To purify is to purge whatever is out of place. It establishes what belongs by banishing what does not. “The quest for purity is pursued by rejection,” writes anthropologist Mary Douglas in her landmark 1966 book Purity and Danger.
Every culture and every person beyond infancy maintains standards separating clean from unclean, safe from hazardous, permitted from forbidden. We police purity when we do laundry, copyedit manuscripts, or recite religious creeds. Vegans observe one system of dietary purity, paleo adherents another. Concepts of purity are among the essential classifications we use to navigate the world.
“Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience,” writes Douglas. Shared purity standards define communities. The rituals, customs, and mores that maintain purity embody communal values and beliefs.
The critical question, then, is not whether we care about purity but what we count as contamination. What characterizes an impurity? How small a trace constitutes pollution? Who decides? In many forms, these are the questions roiling our culture.While many discussions of purity focus on the first question, the second and third are just as important—and not just for environmental regulators measuring effluents in parts per million. The law of diffusion dictates that every vegan dinner contains microscopic traces of dead animals, yet the alternative to ingesting them is starvation. Absolute purity is intolerable. At some level, the pollutant must cease to count. But how do we determine what that level is?
Take the latest Twitter-fueled purity purge and the organizational “dumpster fire” that followed. Dave Weigel, a national political reporter for The Washington Post, retweeted a lame joke: “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.” Felicia Sonmez, another national political reporter, tweeted an objection. Weigel apologized and deleted the offending joke. Sonmez then went on a multi-day Twitter campaign complaining about Weigel’s tweet, the Post’s social media policies, and the sometimes-abusive pushback against her tweets. Memos were issued. Statements were made. Weigel was suspended for 30 days without pay. Finally, the Postfired Sonmez.1
You might consider the joke unacceptably sexist and thus an impurity. But you might also deem it minor and dumb, the equivalent of a spot of lint on your clothes, to be flicked away and forgotten. Alternatively, you might consider it an indicator of deeper crimes, a social version of Lady Macbeth’s damn’d spot. Different people would make different judgments about whether Weigel violated the Post’s community-defining purity conventions and, if so, how seriously. Who decides what should be done? Who makes the rules about how best to restore purity?
Who makes the rules?
Here, another aspect of Douglas’s work offers a valuable rubric. In several forms over the course of her career, Douglas developed what she called Grid-Group theory.2 It posits two key dimensions that define the characteristics of social groups. Group is how integrated the members are with each other—how tight the group’s identity is. Grid is how rigid and well defined the rules are for establishing status and power.
The result is a two-by-two matrix. Douglas classified groups with clear identities and rules as “hierarchies” and those with low integration and open status as “individualist.” The rare category of rigid status and low group affiliation she called “isolate.” And then there was the “enclave,” a well-defined community where power and status are always in flux. That’s where things get interesting, and sometimes frightening.
With no official authority, enclaves rely on emotional commitments and strongly held beliefs to maintain community cohesion. As a result, they tend to be subject to bouts of dangerous enthusiasm—literal and metaphorical witch hunts—in which belonging demands conformity to increasingly narrow patterns of thought and behavior. To stay cohesive, enclaves do a lot of banishing and boundary policing.
In an enclave, unleashing charges of impurity is a way to wield or obtain power. In traditional African cultures with enclave structures, Douglas observed, one result was the weaponization of sorcery allegations. “Any young man can plausibly accuse of sorcery a reactionary old incumbent of an office which he himself is qualified to occupy when the senior obstacle has been removed.” But, she warns, “If sorcery beliefs really serve as instruments for self-promotion they also ensure that the ladder of promotion is short and shaky.”
The 21st-century American version of sorcery allegations are charges of racism, sexism, harassment, and similar offenses. Many examples of “cancel culture” occur in enclaves—fan groups, for instance, or loose professional associations. In 2020, the online knitting community was torn apart by what British journalist Gavin Haynes dubbed a “purity spiral,” in which people who thought of themselves as kind-hearted liberals were suddenly ostracized and boycotted for alleged white supremacy.
The knitters in this purity spiral were a classic enclave. They were a tightly bound community (high “group”) without definite lines of authority (low “grid”). Although some knitters might be more influential than others at a given time, that influence was the outcome of choices among equals and could change at any time. Whether calculated or sincere, charges of white supremacy an opportunity to those seeking to enhance their own status—and posed a danger to the already prominent.
A newspaper is traditionally a hierarchy. Editors decide what gets published and who gets promoted. They decide what work is good and when good work justifies overlooking body odor, foul language, or other less-than-desirable personal qualities. They establish rules about what behaviors are off limits, whether accepting gifts from sources or, that favorite movie cliché, sleeping with them. They force writers to omit serial commas.
The internet, especially social media, has upended not just journalism’s business model but its organizational assumptions. Publication has become instantaneous, the line between professional journalism and personal expression blurry. Attention is precious, and journalists are rewarded for attracting traffic to themselves as well as their employers. The “brand called you” that Tom Peters prophesied in 1997 has become essential to surviving as a writer.
That model works for an individual operating independently, or as a gig worker going from job to job. But when infused into an organization, it threatens to turn a hierarchy into an enclave. When that happens, the sorcery charges start flying.
Last October, Anne Applebaum published an article in The Atlantic, appropriately titled “The New Puritans.” It did a good job of chronicling many recent purity spirals and establishing some consistent patterns.
The censoriousness, the shunning, the ritualized apologies, the public sacrifices—these are rather typical behaviors in illiberal societies with rigid cultural codes, enforced by heavy peer pressure. This is a story of moral panic, of cultural institutions policing or purifying themselves in the face of disapproving crowds. The crowds are no longer literal, as they once were in Salem, but rather online mobs, organized via Twitter, Facebook, or sometimes internal company Slack channels.
In response, Adam Gurri of Liberal Currents emphasized the selectiveness of Applebaum’s reporting. Of her roughly dozen sources, he wrote, “nearly all are professors or journalists at institutions like Yale or the New York Times, many quite prominent within those prestigious institutions.” The numbers are small, he maintained, and the people are privileged. Institutions always behave badly. All that has changed is that anyone can now be a publisher. “Between phone cameras, the stored and shareable nature of digital communication, and the Internet, everyone can now put a story out into the public view,” he wrote, and “that dramatically increases the overall odds that a media scandal will originate from within an institution.”
There’s a problem with this analysis. Simply because you possess documentary evidence of something negative about someone in your organization doesn’t mean you will be inclined to share it, even if you would like for the information to become public. Rules and bosses will stop you—if, that is, the organization is a hierarchy and you want to remain within it.
Applebaum’s New Puritans succeed because former hierarchies like The New York Times and Yale University are evolving into enclaves. The path to power and status is ill-defined, and anyone can police the group boundaries. Through allegations of impurity, students and employees who theoretically have little authority can quickly erode the legitimacy of veteran editors and even tenured faculty.
Terrifying for the relatively few individuals targeted, purity purges strike fear more broadly because they lack a stopping point. Zealous or ambitious people can keep shifting and tightening the definition of impurities. Even if the numbers are small, at least for the present, institutional structures have shifted in ways that portend amplifying conflict. And while the consequences for individuals may be severe, the social results could be devastating. Knitters may get along fine after a few purges and schisms, but how can knowledge-seeking organizations like universities and publications do their jobs if their members are afraid to be difficult or different? If they manage to function, will they remain credible?
The good news for those who fear the mob will come for them is that most workplaces are still definite hierarchies with no danger of becoming enclaves. They have clear profit-making missions and clear lines between company speech and personal expression. To keep employees from talking about internal matters, they have nondisclosure agreements and threats of termination.
It’s possible for ordinary people to become subject to enclave-driven social-media attacks, and small business owners, like some in the knitting story, are particularly vulnerable. But in most cases, there’s not enough to be gained. For those in the business of expression, however, the calls will come from inside the house until someone asserts the authority to stop them.
2 The best known version of Grid-Group was developed in her 1983 book with Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture. Reflecting Wildavsky’s concerns as a libertarian-leaning political scientist, that version places more emphasis on ideological or political commitments rather than social structure. Here I draw on Douglas’s more purely anthropological analysis.
I have more to say on purity, as well as many questions I haven’t yet thought hard about. It might make a good subject for a book. What do you think? Here’s some wisdom on the subject, from one of my favorite films.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 22, 2022 • Comments
This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on June 6. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.
Inflation in three signs, all on the Diddy Riese cookie shop in Westwood Village.
I’m on jury duty this week, which makes it difficult to plan my life. I don’t know until 7 p.m. the business day before whether I’ll have to show up. Not too bad for Monday, but it could get old fast. The good news is that L.A. has a “one day, one trial” system, so that when you do report you either get put on a trial or excused completely. The uncertainty reminds me of this article I wrote back in 2014 about the flexibility employers were demanding from part-time workers:
For many part-time workers in the post-crash economy, life has become like endless jury duty. Scheduling software now lets employers constantly optimize who’s working, better balancing labor costs and likely demand. The process demands enormous flexibility from part-time workers, sometimes requiring them to be on call all the time without knowing when they’ll work or how much they’ll earn….
Regardless of economic conditions, the deal between employers and workers has two components: money, including any benefits, and working conditions, including how well hours match worker preferences. The weak job market affects the total value of that package, not the mix between the two parts.
When an employer demands unpredictable work hours, it’s making the deal worse. It can get away with a worse deal because of the bad economy, but what about the mix? If unreliable schedules are so burdensome, why don’t workers switch to jobs with better schedules but lower pay? Why don’t competitors offer such options?
One reason, I argued, was the minimum wage, which limits the ability to offer less money in exchange for fixed schedules.
Now, of course, the economic environment is very different. We’ve gone from a labor surplus to a labor shortage. Everywhere you look, there are signs advertising for new employees. Stores and restaurants are limiting their hours because of staffing shortages. Hotels no longer offer daily maid service (a relief to those of us who sometimes want to work in the room). Service at the local sandwich shop is slower and more likely to screw up your order. Like smaller packages at the same price—aka “shrinkflation”—this diminished quality is a hidden form of inflation. You’re getting less for your money. It’s the flip side of the unmeasured quality improvements that, I’ve often argued, made inflation even lower than official statistics suggested (see this, this, and this).
So here’s the question I don’t know the answer to: Are employers giving part-time workers more predictable schedules? Are they offering more full-time jobs? At lower wages, what do job offers look like these days? I’ve seen countless reports on working from home versus coming to the office, but how is the current labor market affecting people who work in restaurants, bars, stores, and old folks’ homes?
FIRE Expands Beyond the Campus
I’ve been on the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, better known as FIRE, for more than 20 years—as long as it has had a board. It’s a great organization, principled, nonpartisan, and well-managed. Today it announced a major strategic shift and a name change, to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Although FIRE will continue its much-needed work on behalf of freedom of speech, expression, and inquiry on college campuses, it will also work to educate the public on the principles and importance of free speech. As Greg Lukianoff, FIRE’s president put it:
“Our defense of freedom of speech and inquiry on campus will remain core to what we do and will grow in the coming years,” said Lukianoff. “But we have come to realize that defending the First Amendment and a culture of free speech off-campus is essential to protecting those values on-campus, just as much as fighting for those values on-campus is essential for preserving them off-campus.”
“We need to remind older Americans that freedom of speech is still a value worth fighting for, and we need to teach younger Americans that everything from scientific progress, to artistic expression, to social justice, peace, and living authentic lives requires the staunch protection of freedom of speech for all.”
For more information and lots of links, check out FIRE’s press release. Politico covered the move here. (The article is too ACLU-obsessed for my taste.)
The move beyond campus is a challenging one, but it’s also a logical extension of the work FIRE has already been doing through its podcast, books, and other educational outreach. Greg’s open letter to Elon Musk about free expression on social media is a good example of the way FIRE can bring its deep knowledge and nuanced approach to bear on speech issues beyond the campus.
From my YouTube Channel
The story of how Muslims first came to Uyghur territory gets a brief mention in The Fabric of Civilization, without any of the current context. I expanded it into this video.
Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and if there are topics you’d like to see future videos on, let me know in the comments. (For now, I’m limiting myself to videos related to The Fabric of Civilization.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 26, 2022 • Comments
This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on May 29. To see other posts and subscribe, go here.
My author photo for The Future and Its Enemies, proving that Nick Gillespie did not originate the leather jacket.
Who am I and how do I work? To answer that question, please do not go to my terrible Wikipedia page. Read the following interview, first conducted by Charlie Euchner in 2018. Charlie is a New York-based writer and writing teacher, who offers online advice and courses at TheElementsofWriting.com and TheWritingPartner.com. He has some other good interviews on his site, including this recent one with shopping expert Paco Underhill, who learned the craft of careful observation from William “Holly” Whyte. Underhill is one of the many familiar names I ran into when reading Whyte’s biography.
Virginia Postrel on Big Ideas, Overlooked Issues, Style, and Hard Reporting
Virginia Postrel has forged one of the more intriguing careers in journalism and letters. Once the editor of Reason magazine, she gave the ideals of libertarianism an inventive, modern twist in her book The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (1998).
That book, an instant classic, argues that politics is not a battle between right and left, red and blue, or even corporate and government orientation. It is really a battle between dynamism and stasism. Dynamists are optimistic, open, inventive, eager to embrace the tumult that has become the way of the world. Stasists are more pessimistic, fearful of tumult, and willing to go to great lengths to bridle the forces of change.
How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning? Do we declare … that “we’re scared of the future” and [decry] technology as “a killing thing”? Or do we see technology as an expression of human creativity and the future as inviting? Do we think that progress requires a central blueprint, or do we see it as decentralized, evolutionary process? Do we consider mistakes permanent disasters, or the correctable by-products of experimentation? Do we crave predictability, or relish surprise? The dynamism-stasism battle cuts across all other divides in modern life. Democrats and Republicans each contain lots of stasists, from crony capitalists to public-sector unionists to evangelicals fearful of modern inquiry and freedoms. Almost by definition, stasists are declinists and can only prevail by thwarting progress. Dynamists, on the other hand, can be found (not always) in Silicon Valley, bustling cities, science, new media, the arts, and the battle for human rights.
Postrel could have spent her whole career elaborating on the dynamism/stasism theme … but that would not be very dynamist, would it? So she has, dynamically, explored other topics. In The Substance of Style: : How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness (2003), Postrel argues that style is about superficial surface appearances; it is integral to the social, cultural, and economic value of things. Likewise, in The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion (2013), Postrel argues that glamour reveals something essential about the ways people present themselves to the world. Talk about the weaving together of form and function: Her latest book is called The Fabric of the World: How Textiles Made Civilization.
Now a columnist for Bloomberg and a regular commenter on social media, Postrel lives in Los Angeles.
Charlie Euchner: I always appreciate a writer who offers a powerful new lens for exploring complex issues. So I admire writers like A.O. Hirschman (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty), James Carse (Finite and Infinite Games), Jane McGonigal (Reality is Broken), E.E. Schattschneider (The Semisovereign People), and Eric Berne (The Games People Play).
That’s what you did in The Future and Its Enemies, with your distinction between dynamists and stasists. You obviously strive for making things as simple as possible, while respecting the complexity of your subjects. Do you have a process for honing your subjects and ideas to their essence. How do you do it?
Virginia Postrel: What I call intellectual infrastructure often comes about unintentionally, as I collect examples that interest me without trying to fit them into a particular pattern. At some point, I start to see commonalities and dichotomies and a pattern emerges. I then test and refine it. Sometimes this is a gradual process and sometimes I have an epiphany and everything just clicks into place.
The stasis-dynamism dichotomy in The Future and Its Enemies evolved from earlier work I’d done on green ideology, where I was struck by the idealization of stasis. That led me to think about its alternative, as well as to see other manifestations of stasis as an ideal. When I was working on The Power of Glamour, on the other hand, I had an a-ha moment when I realized the parallels between glamour and humor. That epiphany made it possible to actually define what type of phenomenon glamour is.
CE: How did you come to write The Substance of Style and The Power of Glamour? Both deal with finding the value in topics that people often dismiss. Why did these topics (and for that matter, your current work on fabric) call out to you?
VP: I’m attracted to topics that are important but overlooked. I’m easily bored and put a high premium on new material and original thought. If everybody already knows something, why bother to repeat it?
In the case of The Substance of Style, I began to notice the rising importance of aesthetics as a source of economic value while I was researching The Future and Its Enemies. The idea for the book started with the trend, but then it forced me to think about why aesthetics is valuable to people, which led me to delve into aesthetics as a source both of pleasure and of meanings beyond the status competition that has always been the go-to explanation for economists and many other social scientists.
I never would have expected to write about glamour, since I tend to be interested in the kinds of details glamour hides. But Joe Rosa, who was a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, asked me to write the introductory essay for a catalog accompanying an exhibition on glamour in architecture, industrial design, and fashion. Once I took that on, I realized how pervasive, interesting, and poorly understood glamour is. Several years later I embarked on a book to understand it.
CE: Writing about abstract or complex subjects can be hard, even for the most skilled writers. Your work is strong on every level–sentence, paragraph, section, and whole piece. What secrets do you have for that? How do you “block” the issues at different levels of writing to stay clear and on track, saying the right thing at the right time?
When I was a young writer at Inc. magazine, my editor used to write “weak and vague” in the margins of our articles. It drove our small team crazy, because everything was clear to us and, of course, “weak and vague” is itself a vague critique that didn’t tell us what to do, only what the problem was. Responding to that criticism over and over again forced me to learn about how to be specific. My training there and earlier at The Wall Street Journal taught me that general statements need specific examples, not only as support but to give the audience something to picture.
Even people who like patterns and abstractions are still sensory, story-telling creatures who find arguments easier to follow if you give them specifics that hold their attention. Thinking of examples can also force you to clarify your thinking: Does your pattern really work? What are the exceptions and complexities? Are there examples that contradict it?
As editor of Reason in the 1990s and a New York Times economics columnist in the 2000s, I often had to explain—or help other people explain—complicated technical material. My rule of thumb was: the more complicated the material, the simpler the sentences. Subject-verb-object. If this, then that. Break it into small pieces. The harder it is to understand, the easier it should be to read. I create categories to organize my own thinking, as well as to give readers intellectual infrastructure they can apply elsewhere. I put a lot of thought into how I structure my books, which is tricky because I’m not a narrative writer. That can require some difficult tradeoffs. The Power of Glamour had to build a theory before it could apply it, which meant that some of the most interesting chapters—on history—come later in the book.
For The Fabric of Civilization, I quickly realized that the obvious structures—chronology and type of fiber—wouldn’t work. A chronological account would be a library, not a book, and separating cotton from silk from wool from synthetics wouldn’t highlight interesting parallel themes. So I’m using a combination of stages of production and themes. The first chapter, for instance, is about fiber and also about how humans alter nature. (There’s no such thing as a “natural fiber.”) The second is on spinning and work, the third on weaving and code, and so on. This structure allows me to span different textiles, different time periods, and different places, while also highlighting important themes in human history and culture.
CE: When you were developing as a writer, did you model yourself off another writer? And as a critical thinker/analyst, were there writers or thinkers who also modeled the way to break down problems and construct responses?
VP: I didn’t consciously model myself on another writer, although I was certainly influenced by The Wall Street Journal’s style. I read its features growing up and it was the first place I worked in journalism. But unlike the WSJ or most other journalistic writing, I’m prone to piling up series and using appositives. I like to multiple versions of the same thing, a tendency I credit to the influence of the Hebrew Bible via my mother reciting Psalms—and explaining the metaphors and structures—to me when I was very young.
Although my writing doesn’t resemble his, I got good advice from the legal scholar Richard Epstein when I embarked on my first book. He warned me against trying to research everything in advance. “Divide the book into three parts,” he said. “Then divide the first part into three parts. Then start on the first of those three parts.”
CE: In an age filled with so much propaganda and misinformation, arguing as blood sport, what do you think is the best approach for writers on current issues? It seems to me that you have taken a one-two punch. First, you concentrate on your own projects and refuse to get distracted. Second, while you speak out, you consciously refuse to get involved in the cycle of outrage and response. Is that right? How can you describe the writer’s role in society in such a crazy time?
VP: Know thyself. Know what you care about and what you bring to the public discussion. My strengths don’t lie in quick takes. And although I do reporting, I’m also not first and foremost a reporter. Other people are better at these things. I’m good at big-picture thinking, providing historical context, and noticing what’s being overlooked. In my short-term column writing I try to concentrate on those things.
Consciously and unconsciously, I’ve also arranged my life to accommodate what you could flatteringly call my integrity and unflatteringly call my diva qualities. I’m pretty stubborn about what I will and won’t do, and I won’t take a journalism job I can’t quit. Having no kids and a husband who’s much the same way makes that easier.
While I understand the market forces that push writers to feed outrage in order to get traffic, I also feel a civic responsibility to keep my cool, not to attribute motives to people that they wouldn’t themselves recognize, and to think about what might actually persuade people who disagree with me. I don’t always live up to those standards—we all get outraged sometimes—but the older I get and the more history I read, the easier it is to do.
It also helps that, unlike many, perhaps most, female writers, I have never felt either market pressure nor a personal desire to write about my personal experiences and emotions. What interests me is learning and writing about the world.
I appreciate Charlie’s interest in my work and his permission to reprint the interview.
Who exactly is that “historian”? And what on earth is a “Jew’s-box”?
A colleague who’s listening to the audio version of The Fabric of Civilization, recently asked me about the sources. It’s a common question. Listeners are sometimes downright irritated by the book’s description of sources in general terms, e.g., “a historian,” and I can’t blame them. The strategy of avoiding sea of names works fine for the written version, since you can flip back to the copious end notes. (The Substance of Style does something similar, while my other two books have names, names, names.) But if you’re using the audio version, you’re out of luck. Fortunately, there’s a solution. The references for The Fabric of Civilization are online here—a handy solution not just for audio book readers but for anyone who wants an easily searchable bibliography.
Several people have asked what Adam Smith meant by a “Jew’s-box” in the passage on “trinkets of dubious utility” quoted in my article on pocket globes and the related Substack discussion. It isn’t a religious artifact but a piece of capital equipment: the combination carrying and display case used by peddlers, many of whom were Jews. Here are some photos of a figure in the collection of the U.S. Holocaust Museum that illustrate what one would have looked like.
I’m currently listening to the fascinating, short book The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Mattersby Megan Walsh. The audio book is fine, but I would recommend the print version instead, so you can see the names. Here’s an interview she did with Paul French, a writer, business consultant, and all-round very smart guy based in Shanghai. I met him on a visit back in 2010, when I was researching the many versions of Shanghai glamour.
Again, please pose questions in the comments on Substack. I also appreciate feedback on what you’d like to see more of in this newsletter.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 26, 2022 • Comments
This post went out to my Substack newsletter subscribers on May 24. It's an excerpt from chapter six of The Fabric of Civilization. Like my recent column on Princeton Reunions, it looks at continuity amid change (and vice versa).
It’s early evening, and the woman in red looks like she’s heading home after a day in the market of San Juan La Laguna, a town on the shores of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. She is wearing a traditional ensemble, or traje—except for the smartphone tucked into her tightly cinched faja, a wide, handwoven sash. Drawn by the contrast between old and new, I ask a Guatemalan friend to ask if I can take her photo. Something gets lost in translation. Happy to cooperate, she removes the phone and hides it behind her back. No, please tell her I want the phone in the picture. She proudly poses with it in her left hand. Still not part of the outfit. Oh well.
Although it includes the essential components that mark her as a Maya, the woman’s traje isn’t as traditional as it initially appears. Her top is not a handwoven cotton huipil but a factory-made blouse, probably polyester, adorned with machine embroidery and rhinestones—less expensive and more practical for everyday wear than the heavy cotton rectangles woven on a backstrap loom and sewn together. Her skirt, or corte, is the critical component of the outfit; the Guatemalan idiom “Lleva corte,” or “she wears a [traditional] skirt,” means a woman is indigenous. Yardage wrapped around the body and secured by the faja, hers looks like it came off a traditional floor loom—a technology introduced by the Spanish—but the red and navy plaid reflects fashion rather than custom. Her outfit is as up-to-date as her nail polish and cell phone. Yet it is still indisputably Maya.
In the well-established romantic narrative, material progress represents a devil’s bargain: shoes, running water, and vaccines at the cost of beauty, identity, and meaning; uniqueness replaced by homogenized global culture. Maya trajes illustrate a different—and likely more common—pattern. Left to their own devices, consumers rarely treat tradition and modernity as all-or-nothing choices. They find ways to maintain their inherited identities, including the material manifestations that signify belonging, while satisfying the desire for novelty and self-expression.
Contrary to the nostalgic vision of timeless peasant customs, Guatemalan textiles have always been dynamic. Many huipiles incorporate colorful designs in supplementary weft brocade, some geometric, others featuring stylized animals, plants, and people. The bright threads to make the designs initially came from Chinese silk floss—“There are five generations of Chinese in Guatemala,” notes textile collector Raymond Senuk—and, when World War II interrupted the supply, weavers adopted shiny mercerized cotton.
Picked out row by row with fingers or a pointed stick similar to a knitting needle, the patterns range from ancient Maya imagery to contemporary innovations. At a shop in Antigua that sells secondhand huipiles, I bought one featuring rows of donkeys, rabbits, scorpions, roosters, quetzals (the national bird), baskets, spiders, humans, and, clinching the sale, helicopters! When magazines began printing cross-stitch patterns in the nineteenth century, Maya weavers adapted the designs, inventing a new form of brocade, known as de marcador, in which the supplementary threads wrap around the warp so that both sides of the fabric are identical.
Ceremonial huipil from the 1950s
Without giving up backstrap weaving, indigenous people also embraced European floor looms, using them to produce fabric for skirts, aprons, and trousers. Probably inspired by Asian fabrics, they developed a new tradition of dyeing called jaspe. Better known elsewhere as ikat, jaspe is a complicated tie-dye technique in which undyed threads are tied to block out a pattern that appears when the cloth is woven. (You can identify ikat by the slightly blurred appearance of the figures.) In addition, today’s floor-loom cloth frequently incorporates metallic threads made of coated polyester film.
Examples of jaspe
Far from a dying art, says Senuk, “weaving is fine in Guatemala. But it’s changing, really dramatically. In the last twenty years, dramatic things have happened.” Until a few decades ago, you could easily identify a Maya woman’s village simply by looking at her clothes. Although each weaver created her own patterns, they worked within well-defined rules of construction, background colors, and decorative designs. A huipil from San Juan La Laguna would feature twenty-four embroidered squares, arranged as four rows of six, below a yoke decorated with zigzags, all on a red striped background comprising two woven pieces. The accompanying corte would be black and white.
In the northern highlands village of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, by contrast, a huipil would be sewn from three panels, woven with alternating red and white stripes. The center section would have geometric patterns brocaded in supplementary weft, with a yoke adorned with store-bought rickrack. The stripes could be larger or smaller and the brocade designs could vary, sometimes spreading to the other panels. But to a knowledgeable observer the blouse would clearly declare that its wearer hailed from Todos Santos. Every village had its own distinctive combination of elements.
Women in this village traditionally wear blue.
By the 1990s, things began to change, as women started to buy and sell clothes in local markets rather than making everything themselves. “I would see a woman in the market that I would know was from San Antonio Aguas Calientes and she would be wearing a huipil from the Alta Verapaz, from Cobán, and I would say, ‘Porque?’” recalls Senuk. “And she would say, ‘Because I like it.’” Picking and choosing from other villages’ trajes evolved into new “pan-Maya” fashions that weren’t specific to any particular place.
Around the turn of the century, Maya women invented the novel style that captured my attention on the street in San Juan La Laguna: the monochrome outfit, with huipil, sash, and skirt—and sometimes apron, hair band, and shoes—all in coordinated colors. “What you did was you now got a base color—say, turquoise,” explains Senuk. “You now went and got a turquoise huipil that was machine embroidered with related colors. The skirt was an ikat skirt but with turquoise bands in it. And the belt was a Totonicapán-style woven belt but turquoise. Now you were either turquoise, pink, café, purple—and all these things were possible choices. And they had no village significance at all.” Monochrome fashion makes it easy to produce a striking outfit that is simultaneously Maya and Instagrammable: #chicasdecorte.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 26, 2022 • Comments
This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on May 23. To see all the entries and subscribe, visit it here.
Contrary to the promises in earlier newsletters, I can’t provide new pictures of the Postrels in our garish Princeton Reunions gear. The best I can do are a couple of shots from ten years ago.
Photo by David Bernstein ‘82, unearthed from Facebook
The Postrels in the 2012 P-rade
We didn’t make it to our 40th Reunion because my favorite classmate suffered a minor but extremely painful tear in his calf muscle while innocently throwing a blanket onto the bed. Flying cross-country for several days of intense standing and walking (not to mention dancing) wasn’t going to happen.
So instead of going to Reunions, I used the occasion to think about how their peculiar rituals connect past, present, and future, embodying both continuity and change. The result was my latest column for Bloomberg Opinion.
Princeton’s rituals enact the conviction that the Princeton of today descends from the Princeton of yesterday, that the many eras of Princeton belong to one another, and that, whatever their differences and flaws, they are all beloved and good. We are here because they were here first, and they take pride and pleasure in their successors. It’s the kind of myth easily discarded yet desperately needed in our divided culture.
Among the many problems posed by current purity crusades on campuses (including an appalling one that gets a brief mention toward the end of my column) is the threat they pose to the social convention that treats all alumni as part of the family. If you’re purging tenured faculty for getting on the wrong side of political controversies, what are you saying to alums who take the same positions?
There’s an ungated version of the article here, courtesy of my Washington Post subscription, but it doesn’t include links or the great photo that accompanies the original Bloomberg Opinion version.
Thanks to my classmate Joyce Robbins, however, I can share this photo of Joe Schein ’37, the oldest returning alum at 107. Schein, a retired psychiatrist, was one of 11 Jewish students in his class, and this February Daily Princetonian article about early Jewish life on campus—contrary to myth, it didn’t start with Einstein—quotes him extensively.
Something about Princeton gets me thinking about how institutions maintain their identities as they evolve over time. One fall, at least a decade ago, I was in Princeton on a research trip. Walking through campus, I was struck by the juxtaposition of the statue of John Witherspoon, which faces the university’s magnificent neo-Gothic chapel, and a sign advertising an upcoming Diwali service. Witherspoon, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, was an important early president of the College of New Jersey and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Although he was progressive for his day (he even encouraged students to read the infidel David Hume), he would likely have been shocked by the Medievalist Catholic style of the chapel, never mind celebrating a Hindu festival! None of these things belonged together—and yet they absolutely did.
Speaking of universities
Since August, I’ve been a Visiting Fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University in Orange, California. One of the institute’s signatures is the Humanomics program, which offers classes combining economics and the humanities. I taught one this year called “Consumerism and Its Discontents” and am working on a syllabus for a fall first-year seminar called “Ambition and the Meanings of Success,” in both cases teaching with an economist colleague. To explain the program to prospective students, I also produced this video.
“Consumerism and Its Discontents,” which had been previously taught in 2018, assigns my 2003 book The Substance of Style. “When I was in college,I once wrote a paper saying that my professor’s book was wrong. I told all the students, “He graded me fairly, and if you write a paper saying my book is wrong, I’ll do the same thing.” We aren’t in the business of indoctrination. We want our students to think.
I’m delighted to be part of this excellent program. Drawing students from all classes and a wide variety of majors, the courses offer a rare combination of intellectual engagement, respectful conversation, and mind-expanding works. Plus lots of feedback, from two professors.
What I’ve been “reading”
Driving between L.A. and Orange gives me plenty of time for listening to audio books, which I also enjoy while walking, cooking, and weaving. For some reason, I’m drawn to massive histories as audio experiences. I’m currently on the third volume of Simon Schama’s History of Britain. I’ve added the printed versions to my collection so I can check passages of interest (and perhaps eventually read the hard copies myself). I did the same with Ritchie Robertson’s The Enlightenment, which I first saw in a bookshop on a July visit to Princeton. I would have bought it then, but it was much too big to carry home.
If you’re looking for a non-massive history book, The Fabric of Civilization is also available as an audio book. (That’s the Amazon/Audible link, but it’s on all platforms.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 18, 2022 • Comments
This entry went out to my Substack newsletter list on May 16. To subscribe, click here.
Last Wednesday, Ross Douthat devoted his NYT column to applying the stasis/dynamism model I developed in The Future and Its Enemies to understanding Elon Musk:
A term like “conservative” doesn’t fit the Tesla tycoon; even “libertarian,” while closer to the mark, associates Musk with a lot of ideas that I don’t think he particularly cares about. A better label comes from Virginia Postrel, in her 1998 book “The Future and Its Enemies”: Musk is what she calls a “dynamist,” meaning someone whose primary commitments are to exploration and discovery, someone who believes that the best society is one that’s always inventing, transforming, doing something new.
I might quibble with some of his presentation—dynamism includes an important role for criticism and competition, since not every new idea is a good idea—but it’s a good analysis both of Musk and of why dynamists who considered themselves liberals (in the left-of-center American sense) might feel politically homeless these days. And I do say in the book that learning, as opposed to stability and control, is the central dynamist value, something that I am even more convinced of today than when I was writing in the late 1990s.
Ever since Trump bent history’s arc his way, however, that confidence has diminished or collapsed. Now liberals increasingly regard the internet as the zone of monsters and misinformation, awash in illiberalism, easily manipulated by demagogues, a breeding ground for insurrectionists. And if digital technology has become particularly suspect, via the transitive property so has the larger idea of innovating your way out of social or environmental problems — empowering the part of the environmental movement that wants to tame capitalism to save the planet, for instance, at the expense of the part that imagines taming climate change with fleets of Teslas and nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, the values underlying dynamism — above all, the special pedestal given to free thinking and free speech — are also more suspect within liberalism today. In their place is a new regulatory spirit around culture as well as economics, a how-much-is-too-much attitude toward the circulation of potentially dangerous ideas, a belief in institutions of scientific and intellectual authority but not necessarily institutions devoted to wide-open inquiry. [Emphasis added.] Just as a dynamist might, at the extreme of the orientation, prefer a monarchy that protects innovation over a democracy that discourages it, some of today’s progressives are making the same move in reverse: If democracy is endangered by technological change and unfettered free speech, then so much the worse for free speech. The important thing is to save democratic self-government, even if you have to temporarily take the “liberties” out of the American Civil Liberties Union or put away your John Stuart Mill.
For more background on my perspective, here’s a good Q&A from 2017. (I was less articulate in the updated conversation with Jim Pethokoukis earlier this month.)The good news is that the dynamist coalition that I imagined 25 years ago is starting to emerge, even if it’s far from a political force.
Writing in The Atlantic last week, Derek Thompson asked a provocative and not at all hypothetical question, “What if we invented a technology to save the planet—and the world refused to use it?” His column was a powerful follow-up to an earlier argument for what he calls an “abundance agenda.”
Altogether, America has too much venting and not enough inventing. We say that we want to save the planet from climate change—but in practice, many Americans are basically dead set against the clean-energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar-power projects. We say that housing is a human right—but our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new houses, infrastructure, or megaprojects. Politicians say that they want better health care—but they tolerate a catastrophically slow-footed FDA that withholds promising tools, and a federal policy that deliberately limits the supply of physicians. In the past few months, I’ve become obsessed with a policy agenda that is focused on solving our national problem of scarcity. This agenda would try to take the best from several ideologies. It would harness the left’s emphasis on human welfare, but it would encourage the progressive movement to “take innovation as seriously as it takes affordability,” as Ezra Klein wrote. It would tap into libertarians’ obsession with regulation to identify places where bad rules are getting in the way of the common good. It would channel the right’s fixation with national greatness to grow the things that actually make a nation great—such as clean and safe spaces, excellent government services, fantastic living conditions, and broadly shared wealth.
I’m looking forward to the Breakthrough Institute’s “Breakthrough Dialogue 2022: Progress Problems” conference next month, where I’ll be on a panel discussing Klein’s “supply-side progressivism” idea and, I hope, finding ways to counter the regulatory mindset that sees every new venture as something to be squashed or controlled.
One of the striking splits today, which I failed to anticipate in TFAIE, is between those concerned with climate change as a problem needing dynamist approaches to find solutions and those like Bill McKibben who use it as an excuse to promote stasis. BTI’s Alex Trembath, who is definitely in the dynamist camp, published an excellent article in March on “cost-disease environmentalism,” his term for what happens when subsidies to promote, say, green infrastructure confront regulations that hamper all infrastructure.
Subsidizing demand for low-carbon technology comes with serious risks if policymakers don’t attend to the supply side by dismantling the regulatory bottlenecks that make it hard to build anything in this country. For decades, clean-energy deployment has been undergirded by federal tax credits, state-level renewable-portfolio standards, and other subsidies. Democrats’ climate agenda broadly extends and expands this subsidy regime. Yet the projects these subsidies support encounter regulatory hurdles imposed by the same governments that provide the subsidies. Public enemy number one has to be the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Passed in 1970 as part of a wave of environmental regulatory reform, NEPA created regulatory standards and hurdles for infrastructure projects, industrial facilities, and more. NEPA’s practical effect has been the proliferation of environmental impact statements (EISs) for projects that could “significantly affect” the environment, including everything from denser housing supply in cities and high-speed electric rail to large-scale renewable-energy projects and, infamously, bike lanes. The constraints on breaking ground, let alone completing, projects like these are notorious. As Niskanen’s Hammond and Brink Lindsey have noted, the average EIS today runs over 600 pages in length and takes 4.5 years to complete.
A similar phenomenon explains why the liveliest, and most politically effective, cross-partisan dynamist coalitions today are centered on increasing the supply of housing (one of my favorite topics). You don’t have to be a libertarian to see the value in the literal meaning of laissez-faire: allow doing.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 18, 2022 • Comments
This post was originally sent out through my Substack newsletter on May 8. To read current entries and subscribe, go here.
When I revived my newsletter using Substack, I thought of it primarily as a way to sent out my recent work to people who don’t follow me on Facebook or Twitter. Then I started adding old articles relevant to current discussions. I'm now sending out two newsletters a week: one with updates and one with something from the archives.
I quickly learned that Substack offers a distinct advantage over both social media and ordinary publication: I can add new material that doesn’t fit easily into a normal article, often because it’s simply too long. If you read the newsletter, you get to see things like the 1799 poem about giving a young sailor a pocket globe or my great-grandfather writing in 1928 about the early days of mechanical cotton harvesting.
One happy result of the newsletter has been an invitation from Steven Heller and Debbie Millman to publish in their revitalized online version of Print Magazine, starting with this reprint of an article on summertime textiles that I wrote last summer for Zocálo:
Wedding dresses and bridal veils. Graduation caps and gowns. The Stars and Stripes and the rainbow Pride flag. Rally towels and baseball caps. The flags and fashions of the Olympic opening ceremonies. Checked picnic blankets and striped beach towels. The red, green, and black of Juneteenth celebrations.
Summer wouldn’t be summer without textiles.
Blessed with an abundance of cloth, we tend to take textiles for granted, all the more so when we aren’t bundled up against the cold. But textiles are among the oldest, most essential, and most pervasive of human inventions. Their summertime incarnations demonstrate just how central they are to defining who we are. Freed by higher temperatures from most of their protective functions, in the summer textiles reveal their social side, becoming signs of who we are and what we value.
This article also answers a question I’m often asked but don’t address in The Fabric of Civilization: When did wearing clothes start? Read the whole thing here.
Writing timely yet timeless columns
As a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, I have a strong incentive to tie my articles to the news. But as a writer (and reader) with little patience for boredom and repetition, I strive to offer unique material—writing on topics, or offering perspectives, that you won’t get from other people. It’s hard to say something new on a subject that everyone is writing about. To square the circle, I often address cultural, historical, or philosophical themes using recent news as a springboard.
One of my most popular recent articles was this one from a year ago, inspired by the news that the large jeweler Pandora would no longer use mined diamonds in its wares. Titled “‘Natural’ and ‘Ethical’ Are Getting a Divorce,” it allowed me to tap files about synthetic luxuries that I’ve been collecting for years, while drawing on themes about nature and artifice of perennial interest. Here’s the lead:
Vegan silk and leather, mine-free diamonds, bioengineered perfumes: Lab-grown products with ethical appeal could be the future of luxury. Exemplified by the announcement last week that giant jeweler Pandora A/S will no longer use mined diamonds in its products, the emergence of these high-tech luxury goods represents a significant cultural shift.
Since the first Earth Day a half-century ago, large industries have grown from the widespread conviction that “natural” foods, fibers, cosmetics and other products are better for people and the planet. It’s an attitude that dates back to the 18th- and 19th-century Romantics, who rejected industrialism in favor of sublime landscapes and rural nostalgia: What’s given is good; what’s made is suspicious, especially if it’s of recent origin.
That assumption is beginning to reverse, as entrepreneurs and consumers turn to cutting-edge artifice in search of more environmentally friendly, less ethically fraught materials. Substances grown in fermentation vats or built up atom by atom are replacing those wrenched from the earth, stripped from plants and animals or implicated in human suffering.
You can read the whole thing here. It inspired a panel at South by Southwest and I expect to do further reporting on the topic this summer.
This past week, the death of paparazzo Ron Galella, best known for his photos of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, inspired a column on celebrity photography, drawing on history I learned while researching The Power of Glamour:
Ron Galella, the New York paparazzo best known for his stealth photos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, died last Saturday. Born in 1931, Galella lived through three culturally and technologically distinct eras in celebrity photography. Despite their enormous differences in ethos and aesthetics, their common elements offer insights into our photo-saturated age.
The full version, including links and good examples of photos, is at Bloomberg Opinion here, but the Washington Post ran a link-free version that my subscription allows an ungated link to here. (Bloomberg allows a limited number of free reads a month.)
Misc. book news
The History in Story newsletter ran a nice review of The Fabric of Civilization, accompanied by an excellent teaser Twitter thread, featuring interesting examples from the book.
Apple is running a sale on the audio version of The Fabric of Civilization. It’s $4.99 through May 18. You’ll find it in Buzzy Nonfiction under History here.
This post was originally sent out through my Substack newsletter on May 3. To read current entries and subscribe, go here.
Since August, I’ve been enjoying a two-year appointment as a Visiting Fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University in Orange County. The institute is named for two people: our colleague Vernon Smith, who won the Nobel prize in economics for his pioneering work on experimental economics, and Adam Smith, the 18th-century economist and moral philosopher most famous for The Wealth of Nations. One of the institute’s missions is to reintegrate economics and the humanities, in the tradition of Adam Smith. Along those lines, this year I co-taught a course called “Consumerism and Its Discontents” with an economist. (This course, which had been previously taught in 2018, uses The Substance of Style, among other works, including The Great Gatsby, Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, and Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.) I’m now working to design a new first-year seminar for next year called “Ambition and the Meanings of Success.” It, too, will be co-taught in a discussion format—both Smith Institute practices.
On the syllabus for each course, I’ve incorporated a passage from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments called “Of the Effect of Utility upon the Sentiment of Approbation.” I’m a bit obsessed with this passage, which gets richer every time I read it. It’s about why we often go to great trouble and expense not merely to attain a goal but because we’re enamored with the means of attaining it. The puzzle, for Smith, is that “the exact adjustment of the means for attaining any conveniency or pleasure, should frequently be more regarded, than that very conveniency or pleasure.”
Smith spins out this paradox, applying it to everything from furniture arrangement to designs for public improvements. Those who’ve read The Power of Glamour may recall a passage I cite about “the poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition.” He’s enraptured with a glamorous vision of wealthy contentment and works hard all his life to achieve it: “Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power.”
I’ve been using some of my Smith Institute research time to investigate the material and cultural history behind another, quite contemporary paragraph. It’s about 18th-century pocket gadgets.
How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniencies. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew’s-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden.
Some things simply seem cool. And often we go to more trouble than these “trinkets of frivolous utility” are worth. Smith isn’t talking about watches, which get their own separate discussion. So what were these pocket gadgets? For the past several months, off and on between other work, I’ve been investigating this question.
Here’s one answer:
In Adam Smith’s day, and for roughly a century before and after him, pocket globes were popular consumer items. I tell their story and examine their appeal in my most recent article, published appropriately on Liberty Fund’s site, where you can find Adam Smith’s great work. (When I was in London doing research I met up with historian Anton Howes, who kindly played hand model above. If you’re interested in the history of invention and innovation, be sure to check out his Substack, “Age of Invention.”) Here’s a bit from the article:
A pocket globe was a different sort of object, “new and ingenious” but not primarily functional. “Its only Use was to keep in memory the situation of Countries, and order of the Constellations and particular Stars,” acknowledged Joseph Moxon, the London printer who popularized the pocket globe. Three inches in diameter, Moxon’s pocket globe came in a case lined with a map of the heavens, making it two globes in one.
Pocket globes exemplified what Adam Smith called “trinkets of frivolous utility,” otherwise known as consumer gadgets. Their appeal lay less in their function than in their cool factor. “What pleases these lovers of toys,” wrote Smith, “is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniencies.” Like nutmeg grinders, étuis (“tweezer cases” to Smith), and tiny microscopes for examining flowers, pocket globes offered ingenuity you could carry around.
Aside from their scientific aura, pocket globes took on patriotic and imperial meaning. Here’s a 1799 poem titled “Sent, with a Pocket Globe, to a Young Gentleman Going On-Board the Amethyst Man-of-War.” I’ve included the footnotes from the original. The references were apparently as obscure in 1799 as they are today.
To England ere you bid adieu, My friend and sailor, gallant Hugh, Proud to exchange, at Honour’s call, Your cricket for a cannon-ball. This globe accept—so like, we know, One whirl’d six thousand years ago.
By Him whose fiat rules the tide, And bids our fleets in triumph ride!
Who smote the French by valiant Howe,
And crown'd with laurel Duncan’s brow,
Bade Jervis Spain’s armada foil,
Bade Nelson thunder at the Nile
Bade England humble Gallic pride,
That scatters blood and ruin wide.
On this small Globe, exulting, see
Great Britain in epitome;
Whose sailors keep the world in check
They, who to shores of Iceland roam,
In either India are at home.
Learn, here, to study daring Drake,
There Raleigh voyaged, here fought Blake;
Contemplate Cooke’s eventful story
Or follow Anson’s path to glory
See Rodney, deck'd with flags, advance
From vanquish’d Holland, Spain, and France!
But vain the talk to number o’er
These heroes of the British shore.
And, O my Namesake, whilst your burn
To fight and triumph in your turn,
Let nicest Honour be your guide,
Your Pole-star, though the dangerous tide,
Then, when the trump of war shall blow,
And George commands to blast the foe,
Like Norman Hugo,* Ridware’s lord,
With stern defiance draw your sword;
Like cross-legged Henry* point your rage
Where Infidels the battle wage;
Like fam’d Sir Robert,* win renown
In cause of Country, King, and Crown,
With brave Sir Bertin* bravely vie:
They knew to conquer, or to die!
The battle gain’d—safe, amidst cannon’s roar,
In the proud Amethyst approach the shore,
There to receive the meed of valour won,
Whilst parents own, with pride, their gallant son.
—H.M.C.
* Hugo Malveysin, in the reign of Henry I, whose armed effigy remains at the Ridware church, Staffordshire
* Sir Henry Malveysin, in the region of Edward I, whose cross-legged effigy (showing he was a Crusader) still remains.
* Sir Robert Malveysin, who slew Sir William Handsacre, and was slain himself soon after (stans cum rege) at the battle of Shewsbury, in 1403.
* Sir Bertin Entwystell, who distinguished himself in the wars, and was slain at St. Albans, on the part of Henry VI, in 1455.
Upcoming Travel and Appearances:
Friday, May 13, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD: I’ll be giving a talk on The Fabric of Civilization, complete with as many show and tell items as I can fit in my luggage (definitely including examples of magnetic core memory and a Jacquard punchcards). Info on the JHAPL symposium series here.
Friday, May 20 to Sunday, May 22, Princeton University: No talks, no books, just a lot of orange and black, as Steve and I attend our 40th Reunion. Hope to see all our college friends there! Stay tuned for photos in ridiculous getups that encourage bonding.
Monday, May 23 to Wednesday, May 23 (leaving early afternoon): New York City, schedule TBD. If you have something in mind, please let me know.
Wednesday, June 22 to Friday, June 24: Breakthrough Dialogue 2022: Progress Problems, Sausalito, CA. I’ll be on a panel discussing Ezra Klein’s idea of “Supply Side Progressivism.”
This is the first installment of my new Substack newsletter, which was sent to subscribers on April 23.
I’ve moved my newsletter from MailChimp to Substack and resolved to keep it up. I’ll try to send out a new one each weekend. For now at least, this won’t be the kind of Substack where I write posts and try to get people to pay to subscribe. It will just be a way to let you know what I’ve been up to.
My latest article is a deep dive into recent textile history, answering the question posed by my editor Sam Bowman of Works in Progress: How did polyester go from the awful faux pas fiber of 40 years ago to the wearable, silky feeling fabric of today? The article involved a lot of interviews with polyester pioneers.
Two bits that didn’t make it into the article:
My former WSJ colleague Ron Alsop’s classic 1982 lead: “Pity poor polyester. People pick on it.” I quoted one of the interviews from his article, which he kindly dug up for me when I was researching The Fabric of Civilization. Remembering Ron’s research when we were young reporters in the long-defunct Philadelphia bureau helped me set the scene for my article.
John Updike’s ode to polyester, “IN PRAISE OF (C10 H8 O4),” originally published in 1958. Polyester as we know it today was called by terylene by its British inventors (read about them in my book). The poem begins:
My tie is made of terylene, Eternally I wear it. For time can never wither, stale, Shred, shrink, fray, fade, or tear it.
I do a lot of podcasts these days, mostly interviews about The Fabric of Civilization. But on this economics podcast, we talked about The Power of Glamour. (NPR listeners may remember Cardiff from Planet Money.)
Yet another interview about an old book, in this case The Future and Its Enemies, whose 25th anniversary is coming up next year. I’m a big fan of Jim’s (subscribe to his Substack!) and it was an honor to talk with him.
Meanwhile, at Bloomberg Opinion…
Prompted by Shein’s $100 million valuation, I talked fast-fashion, past, present, and future with my friend and colleague Adam Minter (buy his great books).
You can find my most recent Bloomberg columns here. Bloomberg has a paywall that comes down after, I believe, three articles. So choose judiciously. After 90 days, you can also read them in my website archives.
Upcoming Appearances
Thanks to Covid, most of my “book tour” was via Zoom, but I’m now starting to make some in-person appearances.
Sunday, May 1, Torrance Cultural Arts Center, Torrance, CA: I’ll be selling and signing The Fabric of Civilization (including the Spanish edition) at the Southern California Handweavers’ Guild’s Weaving & Fiber Festival, aka WeFF. Admission is $1, with free parking, and it’s a fun day with demos, workshops, and lots of great fiber-arts-related shopping. (I’m also in charge of the Silent Auction and the Workshops. This is what happens when your research gets too hands-on and you need an outlet for executive talents.) Full details here.
Friday, May 13, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD: I’ll be giving a talk on The Fabric of Civilization, complete with as many show and tell items as I can fit in my luggage (definitely including examples of magnetic core memory and a Jacquard punchcards). Info on the JHAPL symposium series here.
Friday, May 20 to Sunday, May 22, Princeton University: No talks, no books, just a lot of orange and black, as Steve and I attend our 40th Reunion. Hope to see all our college friends there! Stay tuned for photos in ridiculous getups that encourage bonding.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 20, 2022 • Comments
While many discussions of purity focus on the first question, the second and third are just as important—and not just for environmental regulators measuring effluents in parts per million. The law of diffusion dictates that every vegan dinner contains microscopic traces of dead animals, yet the alternative to ingesting them is starvation. Absolute purity is intolerable. At some level, the pollutant must cease to count. But how do we determine what that level is?
