Creative Class

Tony Judt writes on “The Wrecking Ball of Innovation” identifying the fundamental contradiction of our time.

In which case who, today, will take responsibility for what Jan Patocka called the “Soul of the City”? There are two overriding reasons to worry about the soul of the
city, and to fear that it cannot be satisfactorily substituted with a
story of indefinite economic growth, or even the creative destruction
of the wrecking ball of capitalist innovation. The first reason is that
this story is not very appealing. It leaves a lot of people out, both
at home and abroad; it wreaks havoc with the natural environment; and
its consequences are unattractive and uninspiring. Abundance (as Daniel
Bell once observed) may be the American substitute for socialism; but
as shared social objectives go, shopping remains something of an
underachievement. …

The second source of anxiety is that the never-ending story may not
last. Even economies have histories. The last time the capitalist world
passed through a period of unprecedented expansion and great wealth
creation, during the “globalization” avant le mot of the world
economy in the imperial decades preceding World War I, there was a
widespread assumption in Brit-ain—much as there is in the US and
Western Europe today—that this was the threshold of an unprecedented
age of indefinite peace and prosperity. …

But we have good reason to believe that this may be
about to change. Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of
political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course;
but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable
speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground
to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of
losing control of the circumstances and routines of one’s daily life.
And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer
shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well,
to forces beyond their reach.

Half a century of security and prosperity has largely erased the
memory of the last time an “economic age” collapsed into an era of
fear. We have become stridently insistent—in our economic calculations,
our political practices, our international strategies, even our
educational priorities—that the past has little of relevance to teach
us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are
without precedent. Our parents and grandparents, however, who lived the
consequences of the unraveling of an earlier economic age, had a far
sharper sense of what can happen to a society when private and
sectional interests trump public goals and obscure the common good.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 5:54 am and is filed under Technology & Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.