Postrel says she got the notion of "verges" from the historian Daniel Boorstin. Postrel says Boorstin describes verges "as a place where something comes together with something else. Which is a very general notion. But what he's arguing is that America's sort of creativity and strength grew from the fact that it was a nation of verges. That it was a place where there were different ethnic groups, races, coming together." The frontier was a form of a verge between sort of the settled world and the less settled world and the different challenges that brought in to play."
Postrel finds verges in general fascinating because of their mixture of two sometimes diametrically opposite elements. "What takes place when you start to mix those two, and what sort of discoveries might take place? So, it's a kind of a way of getting at this notion of third places, of either literal or metaphorical places and mixing and the creativity that comes from that."
To the extent that the concept of "home" is as old as the cave, while some of our homes are filled with the newest most advanced technologies available, we are all living "on the verge."
Postrel's book provides us with two very different worlds, colliding with each other. Who will win? While dynamic growth seems exciting and expansive, the stasist's cry that the past was much better than the present is hard for many to resist. Of course, that cry may be blunted dramatically by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. The Taliban were, if not the ultimate example of a static regime run amok, certainly the newest and most recently dramatic, and make a sharp contrast to the dynamism of the United States. Postrel should consider updating "The Future and Its Enemies" to include them--they help to make her point manifold. In the meantime, it's no coincidence that she was in overdrive updating her Weblog on September 11th, keeping people informed of events of that tragic day, even as larger Web sites were often inaccessible.
(This article originally appeared in Flak magazine.)
Article comments
1 - Artie Turner
I never paid much attention to Postrel until I came across her piece in WIRED. The gratuitous slap at Pat Buchanan set off my neocon radar, but I read the rest of the article, amazed at the flimsy logic from someone who had "credentials" as contributor to Reason, Wall St. Journal, etc.
Postrel has observed that the liberal/conservative dichotomy has outgrown its usefullness, and I can accept that, but in its place she posits her own dichotomy, the "dynamist/stasist" that seems equally unfit at describing anything observable. Her entire thesis is based on one casual observation of Pat Buchanan and Rifkin of Crossfire.
Her observations seem to amount to little more than the complete triumph of style over substance. Emoting and freely expressing style is good, working at a traditional job like welder is bad.
She seems like the Ann Coulter of economics to me.