Are We Prometheans? "The Permanent Problem," Reviewed

Something has gone wrong in America. By historical standards, we live in a time of unimaginable abundance. Yet there is a malaise, and we all feel it. The normal rules of normal politics no longer seem sufficient to answer our questions. The straitjacket of the Long 90's is breaking: what will replace it?

Enter Brink Lindsey's The Permanent Problem. A vice president at the Niskanen Center, Lindsey diagnoses America's malaise as a breakdown of two opposed forces: the dynamism of capitalism and the inclusiveness of communities. Many of Lindsey's proposals will be familiar to readers of Abundance—opposition to a stifling vetocracy, the need to build more housing, and generally to recover the idea that we need to build more future. But compared to the policy-wonk obsessions of Abundance, specifics are pretty thin on the ground. The red meat of The Permanent Problem is cultural-spiritual diagnosis—an attempt to see past policy and into the deeper currents of American culture that have gone awry.

According to Lindsey, we must recover the Promethean spirit—the willingness to go out and change the world, and use this to solve Keynes' "permanent problem" of "living wisely and agreeably and and well" (3). We must reshape society into a form more amenable to human flourishing, one not subject to the "acid bath" of late neoliberalism (39). In this I am in full agreement. MAGA is hawking a vision of the future, tying their plans for mass deportation to a retro-future vision of American greatness. Overseas, China is racing to achieve geopolitical dominance by engineering the future. If we liberals want to compete in the 21st century, we need to rediscover our Prometheanism.

Unfortunately Lindsey's diagnosis is something of a mess—more a collection of culture-war gripes than a compelling diagnosis. On a fundamental level, the scale of ambition is deeply unclear. At times Lindsey speaks of the need to recover a deeply Promethean outlook on the world—a mindset to grasp nature and reshape it to meet humanity's needs. Vertical farms (133), fusion power (138), undersea colonies (193), asteroid mining (139)—in places the vision shades into the aspirations of golden age science fiction. In other places Lindsey rants about the "self-delusions" of body positivity and trans activists who are denying "biological reality" (10, 52). We are meant to reach for the stars to feed the fires of industry, but crossing the boundaries of gender is off-limits.

Okay.

This unclarity is not limited to a couple of culture-war bugbears. It pervades The Permanent Problem. Lindsey wants us to found new cities in "remote, exotic, and spectacularly beautiful settings" via a new Homestead Act (173), providing subsidies for those who move there and engage in "collaborative R&D" projects, exempt from intellectual property law—an echo of Balaji Srinivasan's "network state" concept. But he also thinks that reforming the Supreme Court or the Electoral College is outside the bounds of political possibility (104).

Okay.

Lindsey's diagnosis is likewise constantly shifting. He inveighs against exclusionary zoning and the NIMBYism that has strangled American cities and American growth, and then somehow this is meant to be caused by "safetyism," a neologism coined by Jonathan Haidt to describe college students protesting about safe spaces and trigger warnings (66). The actual history of zoning—and its roots in good old fashioned American racism—goes unmentioned.

He waves his hand at Spengler and Toynbee's (pseudoscientific) theories of civilizational collapse, before citing the relatively unknown Joseph Tainter's concept of "cephalization" to explain our civilizational decline (113). All societies, apparently, adopt increasingly complex forms of social organization to resolve social problems, until they hit diminishing and eventually negative returns to increased complexity, and become "cephalized." Then they collapse, return to simplicity and decentralization, and the cycle begins again. What are Lindsey's examples of "cephalization" today? DEI, the HR lady, Covid lockdowns (120).

Okay.

In the philosophy of science, a good scientific theory is fruitful: it does not merely provide answers you already know, but points you towards new problems you never expected. Consider Abundance's core thesis: "to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need" (4). This points us in a clear direction across a wide variety of domains, from housing to clean energy to clean water to pharmaceutical research. What new problems does "cephalization" point us towards? Nothing, just our own pre-existing list of gripes. Lindsey aspires to new frontiers but cannot escape his own collection of petty resentments.

Witness Lindsey bemoaning endlessly the breakdown of traditional sources of community. But Lindsey's "community" is a particularly nostalgic vision of tight-knit "ethnic enclaves" (37) united by the nobility of manual labor and "the solidarity of the foxhole" (29). He speaks of the importance of church attendance—though of course he himself is a nonbeliever (12). He himself did not serve in the military or break his back on the assembly line. He proudly lives 9,000 miles from his place of work (163). One cannot but see the anxieties of a middle-aged man uncertain of his manliness, a professional-managerial type anxious that he is no longer one of the True Volk.

Okay.

In the last chapter some of the fog clears. Lindsey lays out his vision of a positive human future, one that reunites the dynamism of capitalism and the chthonic ties of community. "We need to make it so that capitalism’s vast impersonal order rests on a secure, sustainable foundation of strong personal ties and face-to-face relationships" (158). This is to be achieved, Lindsey argues, by reducing dependence on both the state and the market in general (159). Reducing this dependency of the community on external forces will be achieved via "significant expansion of home- and community-based production for internal use" (160).

The first steps are to mainstream co-housing and work from home, but soon care for babies and the elderly as well as education might return to domestic production (165). This, Lindsey hopes, will increase the bargaining power of workers vis-a-vis their employers, by giving them options outside of market labor. 

This must be sustained by a counterculture that embraces a DIY ethos, hacker ethos, makerspace ethos (the buzzwords come fast and thick here) (170). 3d printers, home solar panels, small modular nuclear reactors, community gardens—all are part of the vision. As noted above, this will culminate in a new Homestead Act, which will enable pioneer charter cities exempt from standard rules concerning intellectual property, combining radical technological progress with "strong intergenerational communities in support of strong families" (172).

That is why beneath all the buzzwords the most important concept at play is "threshold earners," who per Tyler Cowen "seek[] to earn a certain amount of money and no more" (168, quoting Cowen 2011). These are the actual people who will forgo the rat race of competing for wages on the market, and do the hard work of all that community-building. This, at the end of the day, is Lindsey's offer: a world of market relations, full of competitive individuals looking to make the most money and out-compete each other, married—quite literally—to another group of less-competitive individuals who stay at home and take care of kids and elders and generally build community.

"Just say women, Brink, this is taking forever."

Here again we see the crack in his Prometheanism. The vision Lindsey is selling is what one might call "gender neutral tradhumanism," with this bizarre term "threshold earners" substituting for "women" who manage child care, elder care, homeschooling, bearing children, and generally Building Community^TM while their menfolk go off and invent fusion reactors and asteroid mining.

The vision that emerges at the close of Lindsey's book is a kind of libertarian fantasia (including that staple of libertarian prepper fic, TEOTWAWKI, in Lindsey's case the irrevocable collapse of the electrical grid—p. 187), in which self-sufficient communities out in the wilderness of the Rockies somehow produce a technological explosion and a population explosion without the people there ever really wanting to work that hard or make that much money. Ayn Rand, at least, understood that John Galt wants to get paid.

I say this like a joke but it is in fact fundamental. Like Lindsey's vision or find it repugnant, whatever: the problem is that it is macroeconomically incoherent. Ask one question: in Lindsey's utopia, what is the market demand for labor?

Let us say it is high. Workers are highly productive, and there aren't enough of them. This is what rapid technological progress and economic growth implies. This increases each individual's options on the market, and their leverage relative to their employer: they have other options that are well-paid. The economy is dynamic: people leave one job and take another; they up sticks and take a better job somewhere else. After all, they have a strong incentive to do so. They're going to earn a lot more money. And of course what they produce is highly valuable—at the end of the day, some consumers are getting more stuff from whatever work they're doing.

Alternatively, demand is low. Workers are not very productive, or there are too many of them. There aren't opportunities for better jobs. Your employer has a lot of leverage over you. Wages aren't great, and unemployment is high. The economy is stagnant.

Both of these visions have their downsides. In a high-demand economy, your labor is well-remunerated. But so is everyone else's: thus, services become expensive. In a low-demand economy, services might be cheap, but you're broke. 

This is why tourists and expats from high-labor-demand countries always have such a great time in low-labor-demand countries. Their labor is highly remunerated, and also they have access to a large pool of labor willing to do menial service tasks for peanuts.

Which of these visions is Lindsey offering? Both, at once, he hopes. A bifurcated labor force—one half that is formally excluded, or which (on Lindsey's supposition) excludes itself for countercultural reasons, plus one half whose labor is in high demand—is one way of resolving what I call the illiberal's dilemma. Lindsey imagines that there is some don't-say-paterfamilias selling his labor on the market for a high return, then creaming off the psychic wages earned by the don't-say-housewife performing the domestic labor of building community.

Lindsey imagines this as freedom from dependence on the state and the market; in practice he has simply moved those relationships of dependence into the family—and by now I hope I should not have to explain to you how such dependence has traditionally been a site of abuse.

What makes this vision incoherent is precisely this class of stay-at-home worker. Such a class entails huge slack capacity in the economy—all those "threshold earners" staying at home, ignoring the highly remunerative opportunities available to them in the public world. As Maia Mindel has argued, the "two income trap" that so bedevils populists is fake. The rise of the two income household isn't driven by low wages but by high wages. Women have an incentive to leave the home. Why spend your days slaving over the 3d printer when you can just buy the same result for half the price with the high wages you earn outside the home?

In the end, is Lindsey offering us Prometheanism? Or just repackaged patriarchy? One starts to hear echoes of Charles Haywood's "Foundationalist Manifesto," which doesn't bother to hide the potato here, but bills itself as a "politics of future past" that combines radical technological visions with retrograde gender and political norms. Nathan Goldwag writes of the "fatal lure of yesterday's tomorrows;" Jeffrey Herf called this "reactionary modernism," though in connection with the Third Reich rather than American libertarians.

But here's the thing. Lindsey is right: there is a simultaneous crisis of capitalist dynamism and human community. Capitalist dynamism sputters under the weight of vetocracy. NIMBYs want to smother America in amber and make our cities into temples to their own nostalgia. They chase an ephemeral "community" and in so doing destroy it. What Lindsey offers as an alternative is no different: just another iteration of "nostalgia with futurist aesthetics." 

Lindsey called it the "acid bath;" he might equally have said that all that is solid melts into air. Economic growth and technological change are coming. They have reshaped human society, and they will continue to do so. To ride that wave what is needed is a new Prometheanism. We need a vision of human identity and human connection that is compatible with breakneck technological change. Lindsey dreams of asteroid mining, but artificial wombs will arrive first. These great questions of technology and economics are always, inevitably, tied to our most intimate forms of family relations—and our most personal conceptions of gender.

The future requires a vision of gender that is not some reskinned picket-fence-fantasy, but a true human ideal. The new woman, who might be a man—to be a woman is a gender-neutral aspiration—the new woman who straddles the stars and the earth, the new woman who comprehends both bare-knuckle competition and warm-hearted conection—yes, this ideal is necessary. But if you are searching for such dreams you will not find them in The Permanent Problem.

Featured image is "Sun in X-Ray," NASA Goddard Laboratory for Atmospheres and Yohkoh Legacy Data Archive 1992.