A DISCUSSION has emerged on the Right of our political spectrum about the future and its prospects. It arises from the concern that our future be one of progress rather than regress, of innovation, both technologically and socially, rather than stagnation, stale habit, and reaction. Central to this debate is Virginia Postrel, perhaps the most vigorous defender of what she calls the "dynamist" future In her recent book The Future and Its Enemies [Simon & Schuster, 265 pp. $25.00], Postrel celebrates human beings as the playful creators of their own destiny; and she believes that, in the aftermath of the Cold War, such a dynamic playful future is finally possible, if only its enemies, whom she calls "stasists," can be defeated.

Postrel also believes that the old distinctions of Left and Right ought to be replaced by a new political distinction between dynamism and stasism, between the future and its enemies. Her book is, or at least claims to be, the first pohtica theory of the new dynamist world. It is also a work of moral theory or ethics, since the dynamist society depends not only on limited government but on the encouragement of certain virtues, like courage and self-reliance.

The enemies of the future lack such virtues, according to Postrel and are thus partisans of government regulation. These enemies come in two varieties: Technocrats and Reactionaries, and both have left-wing and right-wing versions. The technocrats are not opposed to progress as such; indeed they welcome it, especially technological progress But they want to determine the character of that future before it arrives, and wrongly believe that they can. Reactionaries oppose the future and want to maintain the status quo or return to what they consider a simpler, more virtuous past.

But the question arises: Why are there such people? If the the present, not to mention the future, is as glorious as Postrel takes it to be, why should there be people who fail to appreciate it? Why are there more stasists than dynamists, as Postrel claims? Are today's stasists merely an historical anomaly, products of the past who are destined to disappear as contemporary progress continues? Or do the positions they take, however accidental or even unreasonable, arise from abiding human characteristics and concerns that can be expected to persist in the future?

ONE of the virtues of Postrel's book is that she is aware of such questions and their importance. One of its shortcomings is that her treatment of them is harshly polemical. This is in keeping with the political character of the book and perhaps reflects an intentional rhetorical strategy--to appeal over the heads of the enemies of the future to a public that is still free to reject their advice. Still, the prospects of success for such a strategy rest on how deeply it has understood the sources of resistance to the dynamist future--and specifically, whether the stasist impulse is rooted in human weakness and error or human nature, the very thing that Postrel denies.

Postrel says that the first source of stasism is fear. Many people are made anxious by change, since they fear change may be for the worse. They are cowards. In response to this, Postrel calls upon us to be courageous, to face such fears in a manly fashion and conquer them. Courage then is one of the virtues Postrel means to inspire. In the closing lines of the book, as elsewhere, Postrel asserts that there is nothing to fear, there is no abyss opening beneath us, no inevitable limits or tragedy in human life. The courage Postrel calls for is not some grim duty imposed by the necessity of facing the harsh facts of life, as it might have been in an earlier age. Rather, it is the key to a new world of human fulfillment and happiness. It asks us not so much to put up with risk as to invite it as the condition of human happiness.

Another source of stasist enmity is aesthetic. Stasists cannot stand the messiness of dynamism. The creative processes that define the current and future scene produce a kind of chaos, mixing together all sorts of things in unusual and unprecedented ways. Moreover, many formerly distinct and independent things have their identity submerged and transformed, if not totally obliterated, in this process. This mixing does not respect older distinctions of high and low or good and bad but takes whatever it finds useful for producing something new. Stasists are repelled by this chaos, preferring orderliness and hierarchy. They are snobs or neat-freaks.

IN short, Postrel believes that certainty is an illusion and a hindrance, and that the condition of human happiness is an uncertain, playfully self-created future. (How, one wonders, does she know that the uncertain future will be good rather than horrible?) In part, such happiness consists of a whole array of subsidiary goods: greater liberty in the form of an ever increasing range of choices, greater prosperity, and greater comfort. But Postrel does not limit herself to these. She believes that the cultivation of our distinctly human qualities and powers--above all, our intellectual capacities, our curiosity and love of knowledge, and our capacity to transform and control our world--is the key to human excellence. Such a life provides immense satisfaction, both through its concrete instances, such as the acquisition of some new piece of knowledge or the discovery of some new form of human power, and through the general sense and appreciation of the growth of our powers. And though in part such satisfaction appeals to human pride, it is joined to a sense of humility before the many things we do not yet know and the things we cannot yet do.

Postrel's espousal of intellectual cultivation bears some similarity to Socrates' claim that the highest and happiest life is the pursuit of wisdom. Her book is suffused with the notion that we live at a time foretold by Socrates in the Republic, when through the triumph of human reason, the "evils of the city" and the problems of human life have been overcome. But there is at least one important difference. Unlike the ancient Greeks and most subsequent Western philosophers, including the modern philosophers of liberty, Postrel rejects nature as a standard for defining the best human life. Instead, she holds a completely open-ended view of human possibility: Human beings are what they make of themselves, and there is no telling what that may be.

Our power over nature, including our own natures, shows that nature cannot be our standard. Postrel believes that at some future time the natural sciences might fulfill their objective with a complete account of nature, including all aspects of the natural cosmos. But even this would not limit human progress. The human capacity to transform nature is limitless. Also limitless is our capacity to derive pleasure from our own creativity.

TO establish the happiness of such a life, Postrel must address the question of work. The life of creative progress is very busy and active and thus entails a great deal of what we ordinarily describe as work. But work, as most people understand it, is inseparable from the notion of pain, if not exclusively then partially. It is to Postrel's credit that she does not flinch from this subject. Rather, she claims that what we are accustomed to understanding as work is better understood as play, since the distinction between work and play is a false one.

Playfulness is, Postrel says, a good in itself. Citing the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, she reports that "people say they are happiest when they are completely absorbed by some activity that challenges their skills, provides feedback, has rules and gives them a sense of control-when, in short, they are at play." This understanding of human happiness converges with Postrel's earlier account, which stressed intellectual satisfactions, through the assertion that "philosophy and science were invented and flourished because thinking is pleasurable."

Postrel opens her discussion of this theme with the example of beach volleyball, which is unfortunate because it does not amply represent the dawn of dynamism that she is describing. For what is really significant is the transformation of our economy from industry to information, from an economy based on the manipulation of large pieces of steel to an economy based on the manipulation of information. Postrel cites a number of cases in which technological progress and increased wealth resulted from people playing on computers--most notably the development of the Internet.

In this, as in other respects, Postrel's moral and political theory seems to depend upon the very new and unique circumstances of contemporary America, perhaps even contemporary California. It requires the view that we, or at least we Americans, have over the past 10 to 15 years arrived at a special condition in which many age-old problems have been in principle, solved. It also requires the view that this special condition can continue indefinitely, so long as we appreciate it and defend it from its enemies. If we do so, we will be beneficiaries of a "delightful paradox," where work is play.

There are, however, a number of difficulties with Postrel's account of the role of play in our society, the most important of which Postrel raises herself, at least implicitly. Despite the rise of the information age, it turns out that not everyone has the ability or opportunity to do playful work. For the majority of people, work is drudgery, and this includes people who work in information industries. When playful experimentation results in a great new software idea, it also results in thousands and even millions of lines of code that must be written and entered by small armies of programmers who may not find this playful or pleasant.

Postrel struggles with this difficulty. Some measure of the playful side of life can be found in almost any activity, she says. But she admits that the dynamic society will be characterized by considerable inequality in the happiness of its members. The happiest people will be those who can make play out of work, a capacity that appears to require a mixture of great daring and high intelligence. Moreover, there will be significant inequality of status. Those who "make play out of work" become the rulers. True, such rule lacks official status or sanction, which is, Postrel suggests, the great blessing and beauty of it. Such benign rule reconciles the tensions between public good and private interest, the age-old problem of politics. Since the chief interest of the rulers is play, their rule comes as close to being disinterested as is humanly possible. At the same time, they produce an immense public good in which we all share one way or another.

However, even such benign inequality inspires envy and, in a democratic society, such envy will express itself in the political process. Postrel attempts to persuade us to resist the politics of envy by arguing that we all share in the benefits of dynamism. That is to say, we all benefit from the growth of prosperity and the expansion of choice. But more significantly, Postrel appeals to the possibility that we might derive satisfaction from our sense of belonging to the grand enterprise of progress. She presents dynamism as a heroic adventure in which everyone can take pride, even if the greatest honor belongs to our captains, those special people who lead us through their playful activity.

THE quasi-heroic side of Postrel's argument has charm and might even have force in our public life if properly considered. The problem is that Postrel has not done so adequately. For Postrel, the polity is held together by its shared commitment to the processes of creative progress and playful work. To be sure, people may respect our greatest entrepreneurs even when their playful activity results in vast, incomprehensible fortunes. But are Americans willing to die for Bill Gates' right to play? Postrel needs to explore a different and much less delightful paradox-that men will risk their own lives, not out of any enmity for the future, but for the future of someone or something else.

Postrel's appeal to heroism is flawed, because it is not grounded in things that men still respect and long for. If it is not to be the family, which has taken a beating in the last 30 years, it must be something else natural and familiar to Americans, such as liberty and faith. This, at bottom, is the problem that all would-be political reformers face; To honor the things that Americans already hold dear is to accept, however temporarily, the limits they might impose.

Postrel's view of the contemporary political landscape is also flawed. She finds enemies on the Right and the Left and seems to think there is not much to choose between them. Surely, she vastly overestimates the defects of the Right. For what most clearly defines the Right, in all its various parts, is adherence to the principle of limited government. And in the end, it is conservatives, not liberals, who will defend limited government, which is central to Postrel's vision of the dynamist society.

FINALLY, Postrel does not give enough consideration to the immediate founder of the progress she celebrates, Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a great friend of the future and persuaded his fellow Americans to believe again in the future of the American enterprise. He succeeded in large measure because of his understanding of American politics and its role in American dynamism, and because of his understanding of the dignity of political activity and his taste and skill for it. For the purpose of finding a politics that would protect American dynamism from unhealthy regulation, I believe Postrel would profit from devoting more time to studying and celebrating his career and less to the inventors of the microprocessor and beach volleyball.

Reagan's devotion to the American future had much to do with his respect for the American past--specifically, the past represented by men like John Locke, who first imagined our future, and the framers of the Constitution, who made it a living reality. If we cannot summon up any gratitude for their efforts, gratitude not being one of our strong suits these days, we should at least consider their proven record as people who really knew how to make a future, one that has now lasted more than 200 years.