Few writers in the liberty movement are as dynamic and inspiring as Virginia Postrel, former editor of Reason magazine and author of The Future and Its Enemies (1998), The Substance of Style (2003), The Power of Glamour (2013), and The Fabric of Civilization (2020). Winner of the 2011 Bastiat prize, Postrel started her writing career reporting for the Wall Street Journal and has been a columnist for the New York Times and The Atlantic. Postrel stands out for showing not only that some views, which she calls “stasist,” impede human progress, but also for outlining a “dynamist” view that promotes prosperity.

We spoke recently about this stasist/dynamist divide, how it impacts people’s views on such things as style and glamour, and about the incredible (though oft-overlooked) achievements that made possible the modern textile industry.

Jon Hersey: Hi, Virginia. Thanks so much for speaking with me today. In your latest book, The Fabric of Civilization, you lay out the history of textiles. Why examine this history?

Virginia Postrel: I think there are two reasons. One has to do with textiles in particular, which is that they are ubiquitous and really important in our lives, but we take them for granted. I write in the book that we suffer “textile amnesia,” because we enjoy textile abundance. This is atypical in human history, as textiles typically have been highly valued and difficult to obtain. Making and trading them consumed a great amount of time and energy.

The other thing has to do with the history of innovation, science, technology, trade, and human history in general, because textiles are something that we all use. They’re found in almost every culture. They were the objects of some of the earliest long-distance commerce. So a lot of business practices came out of the textile trade. In looking at history through the lens of textiles, you have the experience—which I think is one of the great things about studying history—of seeing people who are extremely different from us, yet very similar in some respects. I think appreciation for the uniqueness of moments in time and of different cultures is a fascinating part of studying history, as is appreciation for the commonalities.

Hersey: Early in the book you say that the story of textiles is the story of human ingenuity. How is that?

Postrel: Even the textiles that we call natural—you know, natural fabrics, natural fibers, like cotton and denim—are highly artificial. Bringing them into being required lots of invention over many centuries. The earliest invention that I talk about in the book is that of string, which is something we, of course, take for granted. And given that it’s at least fifty thousand years old and was used by Neanderthals, I think it’s excusable that we take it for granted. It seems completely natural that there would be string in our environment. But it is a hugely transformative technology, because once you figure out that you can strip plant fibers and roll them into longer strings, then a lot of things become possible. It’s possible to tie a spearhead to a stick; it’s possible to make fishing nets; it’s possible to set traps; it’s possible to tie your food up above the ground so that vermin don’t get it; it’s possible to make baby carriers so that when you’re carrying your infant, your hands are free. Lots and lots of things become possible. So, string is what today is called a general-purpose technology, like the steam engine or the semiconductor—it’s just a whole lot older.

Every step in the development of textiles required more innovation. Learning how to go from making string to making thread that can be fashioned into cloth required the invention of spinning. Then that invention of spinning, used for thousands of years, eventually led, in the late-18th century, to figuring out how to mechanize the process—and that set off the Industrial Revolution.

Knitting and weaving were also important inventions. People figured out how to weave and knit, and then, over time, they figured out how to do them better or differently. These processes embedded a lot of pattern recognition, pattern memorization, pattern repetition, pattern variation, and these all required a kind of mathematical ingenuity. That eventually led to the Jacquard loom attachment and to driving looms with punch cards, which helped inspire early computing.

That’s just the production side. There was also a tremendous amount of innovation in trade. How do you finance this long process between growing the fiber and selling the cloth? There were a lot of stages, and there was a big need for working capital and for communicating over long distances. So you see all kinds of human ingenuity in the history of textiles.

Hersey: It’s not every day that you hear of things like string or cloth referred to as technology, but you’re absolutely right to call them that, and you show in your book just how much went into creating these technologies.

Postrel: Yes. It’s no accident that “technology” and “textile” have the same root. They both derive from a word that means “to weave.”

Hersey: One of the most intriguing connections you discuss is that between silkworms and modern medicine. What’s the story?

Postrel: This was an interesting authorial story, too. One thing I knew beforehand was that Louis Pasteur, known today as the father of the germ theory of disease, had worked with silkworms. A disease called pébrine was devastating the French silkworm industry, and the French government brought in Pasteur, who previously had solved problems relating to yeast and fermentation. What I found when I started doing research was that, actually, the connection between silkworms and the germ theory of disease started earlier with Agostino Bassi in early 19th-century Italy. Bassi was a lawyer by trade, but he was deeply interested in science. So, on the side, he did a lot of scientific experiments, which included trying to figure out what was causing silkworms to stiffen, die, and turn white.

Everybody, including Bassi, thought it was some sort of toxin—that something in the air or environment was causing it. He spent years trying to figure out what was going on. He spent all his money, he lost much of his eyesight—and he still couldn’t figure it out. But eventually, he had an epiphany. He realized that silkworms raised in different rooms under the same conditions yielded different results. He determined that it must be some contagion. He eventually identified that it was caused by fungus spores and that once the animal died, the spores spread.

This was the origin of the germ theory of disease and the first understanding of contagion as a way that diseases spread. Bassi developed disinfecting processes and even had the idea of applying these to other diseases. By the time Pasteur—who was much more famous and had much better PR—came along, he had access to Bassi’s work, and that helped him better understand pébrine. Pasteur’s work on silkworms was the first he did with animals. Before that, he had dealt only with yeast. His work on pébrine led to his work on germ theory, rabies, and all his world-changing research on disease and disease prevention.

Hersey: And all of this so that people could harvest more silk and make clothing out of it—fascinating!

How did the bandana change the world?

Postrel: (laughs) Well, strictly speaking, the bandana didn’t change the world, but its roots did. “Bandana” comes from the Indian word bandhani, which is a sort of tie-dye textile, except that it’s made with tiny stitches that create small dots of white. This was one of a number of Indian printing and dyeing technologies that set off a revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries. Cotton was known in Europe, but bandhani was the first widely available cotton—available, as they say, “at any price point.” Indian dyers had created excellent, colorfast dyes that didn’t fade in the wash—and cotton is actually quite difficult to dye.

Europeans went crazy for these prints, and that led to a number of different things. It led European scientists to become much more interested in the chemistry of dyes and how to improve them. It led to the development of printing technologies for fabric. And it led to spinning technologies, because British textile manufacturers were not able to spin really tough warp threads (the threads that are held in tension during weaving). British and Irish spinners couldn’t make good enough cotton thread except by using what’s called a drop spindle, which is very slow. So, the incentive was to try to find a way to mechanize the production of cotton thread, and that ultimately is where the spinning mills of the Industrial Revolution came from.

It also led to all kinds of geopolitical developments—particularly regarding the relationship between Britain and India—many of which involved protectionism. Britain actually banned the importation of Indian cotton prints, although they could be sold in the Americas. In France, you had the most amazing, jaw-dropping example of prohibition in history. France treated these Indian cotton prints, known as calicoes, the way we treat cocaine. It was a crime to possess them; it was a crime to traffic in them. And that didn’t apply only to cotton prints from India; it applied to all prints, even those made in France by French manufacturers. And it applied to all cotton. You couldn’t import plain cotton and print it yourself because the French government, beginning under Louis XIV, wanted to protect the silk industry. This was because, at the high end, these cotton prints were not just handkerchiefs like a bandana. They were really elaborate materials for ladies’ court dresses that competed directly with silk. They were less expensive than silk but equally fashionable. So the French government saw cotton as a real threat.

Hersey: What was the motive for protecting the silk trade?

Postrel: Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister, had formulated France’s dirigismes, which were government policies for directing the French economy, a practice that continues to this day. The policies are different now, but government planning is very much a part of French culture and French political economy. The idea was that such government directives would enrich the kingdom. It’s a mercantilist theory that’s supposed to bring more currency into the kingdom and protect jobs. Louis and his ministers were concerned about keeping money inside France, not paying for imports, and not disrupting employment.

Hersey: Hey, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Wasn’t it a recent American president who thought much the same?

There’s a thread, pardon the pun, between such protectionist policies and the conflict you discuss in your first book, The Future and Its Enemies, between the dynamist outlook and the stasist outlook. Could you describe those views?

Postrel: The dynamist viewpoint is that progress comes from decentralized experimentation and feedback. And what I mean by progress is essentially learning—learning more about the world, what people want, better ways to do things, whether those things have to do with technology, business practices, cultural practices. Progress occurs when people are able to use their knowledge of their specific circumstances and their expertise to try to innovate.

There’s a quote that I use in The Future and Its Enemies, which is “form follows failure.” The idea is that whatever you have—even if it works exactly the way it was supposed to work—you immediately see what’s wrong with it. And so there’s always this drive to find improvements, and that is best done in a competitive, decentralized way so you don’t get locked into a single approach.

Going back to Louis XIV, there was a great deal of emphasis on progress in the dye industry under Colbert. The government sponsored science and encouraged scientists to investigate dyes. But this involved a contradiction. For instance, they tried to spread what today we would call “best practices.” They would say you have to dye this way, but they also wanted people to come up with better ways. Well, if you have to dye this way, how are you going to experiment to come up with better ways?

In The Future and Its Enemies, I contrast this dynamist approach of trial-and-error learning with the drive to keep things the same, which is what I call stasism, which can take different forms. Often, it’s not about locking in today’s actual status quo but, rather, about some imagined past that is supposedly better—if only we could go back to that. But even more often, it arises in the form of a technocratic desire to say, “Oh, well, we’re for progress. But it must look exactly like this.” And that’s sort of the Colbert view.

Hersey: Yes, there are two camps, the reactionaries and the technocrats. And although they may seem in conflict at some level, both have very similar goals of stopping change, stopping the dynamic, uncontrolled process that leads to progress, right?

Postrel: Yes, right.

Hersey: Turning now to your other books—The Substance of Style and The Power of Glamour—how do you characterize style and glamour, and what role have they played in stoking advancements in textiles?

Postrel: Let’s keep in mind the distinction between style and glamour, because I think each has had an impact on textiles, but each in different ways. The Substance of Style investigates the value to people—and therefore the source of economic value—of the nonfunctional aspects of design. Why are people willing to pay more for something as superficial as how a product looks? Why do we value a restaurant’s environment, not just the taste of its food? Where does that value come from? I identify pleasure and meaning as the sources of those values.

This is relevant to textiles. For example, we have 6,200-year-old cloth, found in Peru, that was dyed with indigo. Of course, 6,200 years ago, people were poor, by anyone’s standards—and indigo dyeing is really complicated. It’s actually amazing that people all around the world figured it out because, chemically, it’s a very complex process. So, the question is, why would these very poor people 6,200 years ago go to the trouble of making cloth that not only was blue but was made with blue stripes? This is a lot of extra trouble when cloth is very difficult to make.

The reasons are pleasure and meaning. It is more aesthetically appealing, and it gives us this aesthetic pleasure. We don’t know for sure, but most likely, the color had some kind of meaning. That could have just been, you know, “I’m Virginia, and I like to wear this color blue,” or it could have been, “My tribe wears this pattern of stripes,” or it could have been related to religion or something else. This ties in to the history of textiles in the sense that, although textiles have important functional qualities, they’re much more than just functional. They are bearers of meaning, and they are everyday sources of pleasure. They have aesthetic value. The pursuits of pleasure and meaning drive a lot of innovations, including innovations in dyes, weaving, and so on.

Now glamour is different, and The Power of Glamour is a book about what I call visual persuasion—that is, it’s about an imaginative process. It’s about a process of communication, a process that, like humor, works or doesn’t work, depending on the audience, and takes many different forms in different contexts. So, when you see something that strikes you as glamorous, you have this feeling of, “If only I could be in that place, be with that person, drive that car, live in that house, have that job, my life would be perfect.”

Glamour can relate to textiles in this very sort of tactile, visual way. But it can also relate to ingenuity or invention, in the sense that innovation itself can be glamorous. And so people can think, “Oh, I would like to be an inventor.” Today, people may think about it in terms of entrepreneurship or having a start-up. They have this picture in mind of what that would be like, and that picture omits the tedium. So, the relationship between textiles and glamour sometimes is a matter of the textiles themselves being glamorous. But other times, depending on the context, someone could see the process of figuring out new ways of doing things as glamorous as well.

Hersey: You mentioned people’s willingness to pay more for something as superficial as how a product looks, but I suspect that you became interested in this topic in part because you questioned the notion that style is some bourgeois superficiality, as many cultural critics believe. Could you say more about the significance of style and what motivated you to look at it in depth?

Postrel: That book was inspired by things happening in the world around the turn of the century. Lots of things that had always been purely functional were becoming stylish. This was when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and was making Macs in candy-colored plastic cases. Business hotels were going from ugly, multicolored bedspreads that wouldn’t show the dirt to having all white bedspreads to show that they were clean. All of a sudden, Starbucks was everywhere. And very quickly, Starbucks went from something that was kind of cutting edge to something that was commonplace. Restaurants improved not only their food, but also their environments. There was more attention to the decor.

So all of that was going on. But, yes, one of the reasons I wanted to write about this was because this idea—which I think is very much an Anglo-American idea—that all of this is trivial; it’s all superficial. And, therefore, if it’s a source of economic value, if people will pay more for it, then that’s somehow an indicator of capitalism tricking and manipulating people.

This is not a normal view in human history. This is not how people have thought in China, Africa, and continental Europe. This is not a normal view of the role of aesthetics in human life—that aesthetics matter only for high art, but that everything else should just be plain. And so, I wanted to investigate what it is that people get out of what we think of as nonfunctional elements: the function or substance of style.

Style can be a problematic status marker. One explanation of why people are willing to pay more for aesthetics, which is widely accepted by economists and social critics, is that style is about status—it singles you out from your “inferiors.” Now, it is true that status is something that human beings care about. And it is something they use style and textiles to indicate. But it is not the only thing that human beings care about. In my book, I talk about the two senses that express the substance of style. One is, “I like that,” which relates to pleasure. And the other is “I’m like that,” which relates to personal identity and how you see yourself as an individual. So it is a complex, deeply human thing, and it is definitely a valid source of economic value.

Hersey: Yes, sure, many people may want the BMW as a status symbol, but many people have far more legitimate motives. For instance, my wife loves interior decorating, and every weekend there’s something I’m needed to help with so that we can make our place look better. And it’s really because we get personal joy (or, mostly, she gets personal joy) from the space we live in. Using an example you talk about in the book, we don’t go out and buy a flyswatter that we can display for friends when they come over or something like that. We do take pride in how our home looks, but primarily it’s about the “I like that”: We get pleasure from it. It’s really odd that so many people think that style just reduces to status, and I’m glad that you’ve pointed out these more legitimate reasons for caring about it.

Postrel: In the book, I have this long paragraph about different styles of toilet brushes. People had figured out that you could put the brush in a case. And then you could make the case look like something for people with different tastes and at different price points. I pointed out that nobody is getting status from their toilet brush. Your friends might see it if they come over and use your bathroom. But this is not like a car. It’s not something that you’re going to show off. Even if it’s a really expensive toilet brush, basically, it’s just for you.

Hersey: Yes. We have a teapot called R2-Tea2. It looks like R2D2. And yes, some people who come over ask about it, but we got it for our own pleasure, because it makes us smirk every time we see it.

Looking at your work, you often focus on some positive value that you’d like to help people better understand and appreciate. I think a lot of writers, especially writers in the liberty movement, are very focused on how this or that law or regulation is evil. Of course, these are valid points. But I tend to find your sort of approach much more attractive and inspiring. Do you have any thoughts on this difference in approach?

Postrel: Over the course of my career, and certainly when I was editing Reason magazine, I’ve written plenty of articles that equate to “this law makes me mad” or “this proposed policy is a bad idea.” I fully appreciate the importance of doing that. We talked about The Future and Its Enemies, and that’s a good example of how I’ve developed. If you trace that back to before it was a book, it originated with a deep dive for an article for Reason in April 1990, for the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day [“The Green Road to Serfdom”]. I read a whole lot of what I would call “green theory.” This is not people figuring out how to make the water cleaner. These were people who were laying out ideological visions.

Looking back at the article, now I would say that certain aspects of that are overwrought. But I saw this very powerful theme of stasis put forward by many of these thinkers, and I was engaging with ideas that I don’t agree with. But when I set out to do the book, it wasn’t enough to just think, “Oh, bad, bad, bad.” I had to think about what I was for, not just what I was against. And most of that book is actually about the dynamist vision. What is it? What is it about? What elements make it work? I hadn’t really thought about it before you asked the question, but that’s probably where I started more and more to go down the road of looking for a positive analysis of what I’m for.

The other thing is, I’m very attracted to writing about things that are overlooked but important. I was famous when I was at Reason for writing about nail salons. That came out of my interest in finding the sources of new jobs. What types of jobs can you have in a nonmanufacturing economy? What type of jobs can you have that don’t require large amounts of education? But it was also just, “Wow, there are all these nail salons, and I’m getting my nails done.” I never thought I would be the kind of person who got her nails done. And I would say that my subsequent books, after The Future and Its Enemies, have all been focused on positive phenomena that are important but tend to be overlooked.

Hersey: Yes, you’re sort of pointing out complacency where you see it and saying, “Look, this is great!” It reminds me of the now-growing progress studies movement.

You started your writing career as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. How did your early experience in journalism inform how you approach conveying ideas?

Postrel: After I was at the Wall Street Journal, I was at Inc. magazine. I had a good editor there who was also very aggravating because he used to comment in the margins of our articles, “weak and vague.” He wouldn’t tell us what was weak or vague; we just had to figure it out. But I think that journalistic drive to tie things to specifics—to give the reader something he can picture—is very much a part of my training. People who are interested in ideas often think, “Well, all you need is the idea.” But the most abstract thinker still is a human being who exists in the world, who is a sensory creature, who works in images, who likes stories. So, using those sorts of journalistic techniques of storytelling—of illustrating abstract points with specific examples—became a big part of my writing because of that early training. When I was at Reason, I tried to pass this down to the people who worked for me, and I would often say, “Give the reader something he can picture. Make it specific.” It doesn’t weaken the abstract point; it strengthens it.

Hersey: Amen. What sorts of things do you think lure people toward stasis positions and away from dynamist ones, or vice versa?

Postrel: People have a reasonable and understandable discomfort with a lot of change in their lives, especially if that change is negative—for instance, losing your job. Nowadays, we use the word “Luddites” to refer to people who are ideologically opposed to technology. But the original use referred to people who were being displaced by technology and who didn’t want to lose their jobs as hand weavers. That’s an understandable motive, and people often feel if somebody were in charge, and they made a rule, things would be more predictable. The problem is that when you have a lot of rules, it becomes difficult to make your own plans if they don’t fit perfectly into that. And that is something that people often don’t consider.

Just as we all have a certain drive toward stasis in our personal life, we all have a certain drive toward dynamism. We’re always inventing and improving, whether that’s with recipes, how to get your kid to go to bed, or your interior decorating. We all want that kind of dynamism at some level. But I think what drives people to embrace it at a broader level is a general desire for learning. In the book, I say that the central value for dynamists is learning, and the central values of stasists are stability and control.

Both have good aspects to them. But when you think about it at a more global level, I think what drives people toward dynamism is an appreciation of all the cool things that can come out of it—and, often, a real concern for human life and belief that it can get better. Life has gotten better for virtually everyone. And that only happens when you let things change, because, historically speaking, the normal state of human beings is misery, or at least extreme poverty. Allowing people to innovate, to explore new ways of doing things, is what moves society forward.

Hersey: Absolutely. You mentioned Luddites. There’s a really interesting and ironic story about Luddites in your latest book, and I was wondering if you could tell it.

Postrel: Luddites were, as I said, hand weavers. They made cloth using big looms that were just powered by muscles. In the early 19th century, people invented power looms. They were steam powered, didn’t require so much muscle, and could produce a lot more cloth much more quickly. They could even be tended by teenage girls. And they started displacing the Luddites. So the Luddites were not happy, and they rioted and smashed power looms.

They had had good jobs, where they had enjoyed what one economic historian called a “golden heyday” of about a generation. And that golden heyday was made possible by the earlier round of innovation that produced spinning machines, which also had sparked riots and opposition. So the Luddites were not against technology; they were perfectly happy to use the technology, or the yarn that was produced by the technology of spinning machines. That made weaving a much more profitable business, because you didn’t have shortages of yarn, which used to be a big problem. And the technology also drove down the price of their raw materials. So they were OK with technology that helped them; they just didn’t like the technology to hurt them. And I think this is much more typical of how real human beings are. Like the Luddites, they don’t oppose technology on some grand ideological grounds. It is true that, nowadays, there are such people, but they’re a minority, and most of the people who oppose technological innovations are not against them in general. They just think they’ll be personally hurt by them. Part of what I’m trying to do is remind people that even when you are personally hurt in the short term by technological innovations, they may be lifting the world and making a better world for your children, your grandchildren, and so forth.

Hersey: Well said. Do you have any parting words of wisdom for those interested in a career like yours as a public intellectual, perhaps promoting liberty?

Postrel: The besetting flaw of people who are interested in writing about liberty is thinking that you already have all the answers, that you understand the whole world and how it should be—that you’ve simplified the world down to a formula. And that is not how the world really is. Instead, you really need to be learning constantly, whether that’s from books, experience, reporting, or the like.

You don’t know it all; no one knows it all; no one has ever known it all. The world is complex, and that’s a strong argument for protecting liberty: There isn’t somebody on top who has universal knowledge and can direct everything.

So, you need to have curiosity and humility, which are often discouraged. Not officially: I mean, if you say, “You need to have humility and curiosity,” everybody would say, “Oh, yes, of course, you do.” But the truth is that a lot of people like what I call libertarianism as algebra; they like to have a formula where you put in the variable and out pops the answer. I think that’s a really unfortunate way of looking at the world. It makes the world much less interesting. And it makes you much less persuasive, because people can spot where you’re using stereotypes and assumptions.

Hersey: So true. Thank you so much for your time!

Postrel: Thank you!

Award-winning writer @vpostrel discusses the stasist/dynamist divide, how it impacts people’s views on such things as style and glamour, and the incredible though oft-overlooked achievements that made possible the modern textile industry.
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