Reason Magazine - Contributors

Creating Culture

Mon, 01 Dec 1997 00:00:00 EST

In recent years, the production of "culture"--art, music, literature, video, and other forms of creative expression--has exploded. There are any number of reasons for this, including technology that has dramatically lowered production and distribution costs, higher discretionary income, greater communication among peoples of the world, and the erosion of traditional "gatekeeper" authorities. REASON asked a number of writers, scholars, and new media specialists to recommend up to three books that explore, discuss, or exemplify the ways and means by which culture is, was, or could be created, circulated, and evaluated.

Nick Gillespie

Despite an assumed antagonism, the marketplace for culture shares a lot with the marketplace for less rarified goods and services. Both embody an unpredictable mix of creative vision, technological innovation, sweat equity, and luck (good and bad); both are characterized chiefly by failure and manage to support all sorts of losing ventures; and both tap into a basic, often unrealistic, human urge for risk taking.

At rock bottom, the artist and the entrepreneur face the same dilemma: In a world of prolific choice, how do I cultivate, hold, and grow an audience for what I'm offering? Relatively free and unregulated markets in culture and commerce alike have helped create so much stuff that we sometimes take our aesthetic bounty for granted, much in the same way we take a supermarket whose shelves are overpacked with food for granted. But of course food doesn't just grow itself, much less make its way to the corner store.

I suggest those interested in how culture is created, circulated, and evaluated in an open society take a look at the Beat movement, particularly its three best-known figures: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs (the latter two of whom died just this year). Whether or not you care for their product, they provide a case study in the cultural marketplace: Like some ridiculously undercapitalized startup in an industry dominated by a few big firms, the Beats throughout the 1950s slowly built a market for themselves, eventually winning over an indifferent public, sidestepping a bellicose critical establishment, and even overcoming official state repression (Ginsberg's great poem Howl was the subject of a now unthinkable obscenity trial). True cultural entrepreneurs, they created the modern, wine-soaked poetry reading, utilized alternative publishing outlets (including the Pocket Poets Series started by poet and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti), and tapped into a real yet inchoate demand for something different in American letters. In relentlessly hustling after a public, in drawing connections to the past while breaking with it, and in moving from the periphery toward the center of the literary world, the Beats exemplified the process by which culture flourishes when left to its own imaginative devices.

The Beat Scene (1960), edited by Elias Wilentz, is a contemporaneous (and often comically hyperbolic) assemblage of writing, photos, and commentary that captures the energy and appeal of the movement, along with its sense of community and propensity toward myth making. As their subtitles indicate, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America (1979, 1990), by Dennis McNally, and Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (1983), by Gerald Nicosia, focus on Kerouac, but both are excellent at tracing and explaining the various, dense, and often disturbing personal and professional relationships that helped create and promote what might be called the Beat franchise. For a taste of what people responded to in Beat writing, check out this alternative trio of books: Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, the 1958 follow-up to On the Road that illustrates how the Beats cross-fertilized and cross-promoted one another; Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956), which features a shrewdly legitimating introduction by William Carlos Williams; and Burroughs's Junkie (first published in 1953 under the pseudonym William Lee), a coolly compelling tour of the dropout demimonde that proved irresistible in Eisenhower's America.

Nick Gillespie is a REASON senior editor.

Charles Paul Freund

"Culture is a process, not a fixed condition," writes Lawrence W. Levine in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988). Exactly. Control of that process is what America's "culture wars" have always been about. Levine's anti-canonical book describes the 19th-century cultural struggle, in which a moneyed and educated class took control of such once-popular forms as Shakespeare and opera, embalming them and arrogating to itself the arbitration of Taste.

Marxist critics regard this process as a form of class domination, but America's cultural gatekeepers usually use the arts as they do fashion and food: as levers of separation and status. Most people have by now been persuaded that culture really is a condition, one displayed in museums. The consequences of such cultural power are enormous. On the one hand, it underlies the pretensions (and budgets) of PBS and the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities; on the other, it obscures the actual workings of a vital and creative culture that, because it is an essential force in everyday life, shapes history.

Culture begins in pleasure. A useful account of the foundations of vital 20th-century culture is David Nasaw's Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (1993). Nasaw's book is about the revolution in leisure made possible by rising wealth and technological innovation: dance halls, vaudeville, midways, movies, night clubs, etc. A paean to old urban downtowns, this academic work suffers from its belief that the last Golden Age is past, among other problems. But it has real value as a portrait of the birth and development of cultural forms.

An audience seeking enjoyment, and the new cultural industries anxious to provide it, nourished an array of novel musical, visual, architectural, and other styles. Some of these were eventually noticed by the arbiter crowd, who adjusted Good Taste to accommodate them. Jazz and film are standout examples of forms that were originally considered contemptible by tastemakers but which later emerged as capital-A art, to their frequent detriment. Architecture too has been transformed by the midway. While elite culture was withdrawing into an increasingly cerebral and opaque discourse, vital forms laid the foundation for a culture that was liberationist and filled with individual possibility.

Nowhere is the power of these forms more apparent than in their challenge to the century's tyrannies. A thoughtful examination of this reality is Thomas Cushman's Notes From Underground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia (1995). It is worth remembering that while such high-end Western forms as classical music and art-house films were the stuff of "cultural exchange," rock music and Hollywood kitsch (to say nothing of jeans style) presented the Soviets with insuperable cultural problems and were significant factors in the withering of Soviet domestic credibility.

Cushman understands very well what was wrong with managed socialist culture, and he also understands the benefits--social, economic, psychological--of a vital and creative culture under capitalism. Yet he persists in regarding the market as another instrument of domination, because, among other reasons, it fails to reward truth telling for its own sake. But artists only became free (of the church, state, and bourgeois patron) when they assumed risk. Anyway, isn't it at the point where the teller's truth meets the listener's pleasure, in all their respective complexities, that the secret history of culture is told?

Charles Paul Freundis a REASON senior editor.

Omar Wasow

Andrea Rich, publisher of Laissez-Faire Books, once recalled the covert joy of reading early libertarian book galleys before they hit the press and pitied my generation's lack of any equivalent insider experience. Stumbling on George Gilder's Web archive of recent writing, however, evoked precisely that same private exhilaration. Published originally in Forbes ASAP as a serialized version of his forthcoming book Telecosm, the Web archive gave me the sense of having discovered a secret gold mine. Though Telecosm is primarily about technology--and thankfully steers clear of Gilder's more peculiar notions of race and gender--Gilder fully understands the symbiotic relationship between high-tech and the creation of culture. Gilder hammers home the point that plummeting chip prices increase access to the toys of cultural production.

I first found Gilder's site a few days before a conference in Martinique. Curious about his work, I printed out the entire series of articles and lugged several hundred pages to the French West Indies. Between excursions to the gorgeous beaches, I devoured articles with titles only a nerd could love: pieces such as "Into The Fibersphere" and "The New Rule of Wireless." Unlike most technology writers, Gilder has a clear passion for the underlying scientific forces driving innovation. With arrogance and poetry, he brilliantly articulates a vision of the future of computing and communications.

Gilder leans heavily on the phenomenon of Moore's Law (which posits that chip prices will halve every 18 months). But his true insights revolve around dramatic
improvements in communications technology (and the less dramatic, though nevertheless beneficial, changes in regulatory policy). Gilder argues that bandwidth costs are now falling even faster than chip prices, which in turn are leading to a "bandwidth tidal wave." As communication costs approach zero, the costs of distributing text, music, movies, and newer media will also drop precipitously. In the section "Life After Television, Updated" Gilder notes, "Today some 70 percent of the costs of a film go to distribution and advertising. In every industry--from retailing to insurance--the key impact of the computer networking revolution is to collapse the costs of distribution and remove the middlemen."

Will film studios, record labels, and book publishers disappear? I doubt it, but certainly ownership of shelf space, trucks, and burly men to move product will decline in importance, allowing for a far greater variety of creative content to reach mass audiences. In fact, I think we are about to witness an inversion of the meaning of "mass media." Where once mass media meant made for the masses, increasingly it will mean made by the masses. Whether you're looking at the impact of desktop publishing in nurturing underground 'zine culture or weighing how cheap synthesizers and DSP chips allowed multi-platinum rap acts to emerge from basement parties, it is clear that as the cost of creation and distribution gets cheaper, everyone becomes a media maker.

Gilder does a superb job of weaving into each tale of tech breakthrough a case for the moral and intellectual basis of free markets. Though he's too exuberant at times (one critic hilariously complains that "Gilder never met a technology he didn't like"), I found his energy intoxicating. Check out the site. Then do what I did. Go buy and read the rest of his books the old-fashioned way.

Omar Wasow is the founder and president of the Web site developer New York Online and a regular contributor on the cable TV channel MSNBC.

Jesse Walker

The standard map of cultural production is vaguely Marxist. There is high culture, which is upper-class, individual, and arty. There is the people's culture: working-class, communal, and folky. And there is pop culture: middle-class, commercial, and crappy. In this model, pop culture is a parasite; it steals from both of its rivals, waters the booty down, and sells it all back to the compliant masses.

Let's start by admitting that there's some truth to that picture. But as relentlessly mediocre as the culture industry's products can be, some very good, very individualistic art does get made in those allegedly unlikely pop-culture settings. Spike Jones, Alfred Hitchcock, Philip K. Dick--there's a lot of great stuff out there in the so-called trash.

So the first "book" I'm recommending isn't a book at all. It's a CD, albeit with lengthy liner notes. The Carl Stalling Project (1990) collects scores composed for the great Warner Brothers cartoons of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Performed in a symphony hall, this music would be considered wildly experimental--and some of today's most interesting avant-garde composers, such as John Zorn, have cited Stalling as an influence. Yet it is remarkably accessible listening.

The model breaks down in other places, too. It isn't just popular culture that raids its rivals for inspiration; highbrow and folk arts happily steal from commercial culture (and each other) as well. Actually existing communities (as opposed to the static entities of media myth) often appropriate the pop icons that they supposedly just docilely consume. In Invisible Governance: The Art of African Micropolitics (1994), David Hecht and Maliqalim Simone explore how Western pop detritus has fluidly mixed with African folk cultures, to the point where images from The Little Mermaid turn up at shrines to the mer-goddess Mami Wata.

But the greatest problem with the semi-Marxist schema is that it ignores art that is both autonomous and individual. Folk art must be communal and anonymous, the thinking goes; creative individuals require commercial sponsorship or aristocratic patronage. (The National Endowment for the Arts has presumably taken over the latter role.) So I'm tempted to suggest, instead of a third book, that you find a store that sells 'zines and there browse the wares of America's self-directed self-publishers. A lot of their stuff is crap, of course, but then, so are a lot of Random House titles.

But I do have a third book for you--a guide, of sorts, to the 'zine world. Bob Black's Beneath the Underground (1994) subjects the "marginals" scene to the kind of critical scrutiny it has thus far mostly escaped, and while I disagree with some of his conclusions, I nonetheless enjoy watching him reach them. Whatever you may think of Black's ideology or personal behavior, he approaches the critic's tasks with the well-honed, witty knife of a Twain, Bierce, or Mencken.

None of whom really fit into the standard cultural map either--but that's a topic for another time.

Jesse Walker is writing a history of the micro-radio movement and its historical predecessors.

Frederick Turner

Good art and bad art really exist; and there really is a faculty by which human beings can recognize the difference. Moreover, a life surrounded by good music, books, visual art, performance, and architecture is a better life than one that is not.

Taste is the word we use to refer to the faculty by which we recognize good cultural productions. True taste has nothing to do with snobbery, as true goodness has nothing to do with hypocritical moralism. Taste is no more mysterious than the subtle ability of a good sports scout to recognize baseball talent in the rough; but like a sports eye, it takes cultivation.

The conventional wisdom on culture is that, while the free associations of a market society can generate wealth, they cannot generate taste. Left to itself, the market creates only schlock and kitsch. Even good artists can be ruined by "selling out" to "commercialism." Thus the government must assure that the populace is culturally educated and that good artists are commissioned even if their works would not make it on the free market.

There is enough truth in this argument to make it a serious challenge. The burden of proof is on those who believe as I do, that a reasonably prosperous and stable free society, experiencing the economic progress and accumulation of wealth that the free market provides, will eventually create by itself the civil institutions of education and patronage that it needs for the production of culture.

Some might argue that institutions for the cultivation of taste, even nongovernmental ones, are unnecessary. But the problematic assumptions of this position are revealed by the new academic fashions of "cultural studies" and "popular culture" that celebrate the collapse of traditional canons of taste, reducing all works of human expression to the same level, and that offer only political correctness and gender/ethnic/class identity as ways to choose one artwork over another. Throw out the devil of the bureaucratic state and seven worse devils rush in, it seems.

The key recognition, it seems to me, is that cultural value and economic value ought to be connected--wealth over time creates taste, good taste can make someone wealthy, good art should be expensive, and the rich should become patrons of the arts.

The great cultural savants of the 19th century have given us some fine books--Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, the cultural theory of Goethe, Hegel, Pater, Ruskin. They tell us much that is valuable about the amazing powers of art, the genuine reality of taste, the wonderful combination of the moral, the intellectual, and the aesthetic that characterizes high culture. But all their work presupposes the state, the politically centralized cultural nation. None of them realized that true political democracy would degrade the power of its elites and spend the grease of its cultural taxes on the squeakiest wheels of ethnic/gender/disadvantaged grievance. Nor did they see that government-sponsored elites could themselves stunt and limit the culture they serve, like the Académie Française and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Thus, the best I can do is recommend cautiously some books that at least outline the minimum requirements for the development of taste.

The first is Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929). Its value in this context is to show what Shakespeare's brilliant sister would have needed in the way of social encouragement, patronage, and education in order to contribute her genius to the culture at large.

The second is Victor W. Turner's classic work of comparative social anthropology, The Ritual Process (1966), which shows how the fundamental spiritual and aesthetic roots of culture are necessarily outside the realm of the official power structure.

The third is the complete works of Shakespeare, who is for me, with such figures as Verdi, Rembrandt, Dickens, Robert Frost, and J.S. Bach, and certain contemporary filmmakers, a touchstone for how great art that is popular and lucrative can emerge by demand from relatively free-market societies.

Contributing Editor Frederick Turner is an internationally known poet and Founders professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. His ninth book of poetry, Hadean Eclogues, will be published by Story Line Press next year.

Nathan Shedroff

I have always been interested in how technology and culture affect each other and, in particular, what the word interactivity really means. The more I read and experience, the more I've come to believe that culture is affected much less by technology than it affects technology. These five books--I never could follow directions very well--have helped me explore that relationship and isolate some central ideas:

Art and Physics (1993), by Leonard Shlain, is one of the most interesting books on how we've developed an understanding of our world. It is the best book on physics you will ever read--and the best one on art history. By digging into our past, Shlain gives you a sense of how the politics, emotion, theory, and inspiration of art, science, culture, and technology mix. Also look for his forthcoming book, The Alphabet vs. the Goddess.

The Meaning of Things (1981), by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, presents a taxonometric study of the relationships people have with things on many levels. They explore what--and why--objects have mere utility for some people yet are cherished by others; they examine how objects define us and are defined by us. While parts of the book get a bit off-track, the core research is important and fascinating.

There are many different cultures in what we call our society. The novel Generation X (1992), by Douglas Coupland, gives insight into the motivations, dreams, frustrations, and reactions of an important and growing segment of our society that is trying desperately to build culture. Most of us are too old, jaded, distracted, or ignorant to build culture from scratch. Instead, we tweak it from time to time as it flows by us, usually only choosing from the alternatives created for us. Don't read the story itself, but the stories within it. We build culture by telling stories to each other, and the characters in this novel successfully build their own culture in reaction to the one around them in a particularly interesting, inspiring, and emotional way.

Identity is an important part of culture, and ours is a culture that is increasingly allowing many different identities to coexist and thrive--even within the same individual. Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), by MIT's Sherry Turkle, explores how and why we build identities and how we use those identities to affect and integrate our cultures.

The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (1996), by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, is a rare and disturbing look into the dynamics of power in culture and society--from intimate, personal interactions to those that affect our society as a whole. It will engage you, enrage you, scare you, and give you a sense of control over the invisible pressures you feel every day.

Nathan Shedroff is creative director of San Francisco's Vivid Studios. He maintains a Web site with resources and thoughts about interactivity at www.nathan.com.

Dana Gioia

Contemporary poetry mostly exists outside the marketplace. Thousands of new poetry collections appear each year, but most sell only a few hundred copies. Even critical successes achieve circulation mainly through compulsory sales to students. And yet a few poets still prosper by attracting a voluntary audience of readers willing to spend their hard-earned cash for the pleasure, enlightenment, and conciliation genuine poetry provides. I want to recommend three poets who in different ways have built considerable readerships without academic support.

My first recommendation is the late Philip Larkin (1922-1985), who is in danger of becoming academically respectable despite his unreconstructed Tory politics. Look for his Collected Poems (1989), but any of his books will serve as an irresistible introduction. Larkin published only four proverbially slim collections in his lifetime, but on the basis of that tiny output, he is universally recognized as the best British poet of the past half-century. Larkin's poetry, which is mostly in rhyme and meter, is often simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious. "Deprivation to me is what daffodils were to Wordsworth," he once remarked. Near the end of his life, the queen offered him the coveted post of poet laureate, but he declined. "I dream of being poet laureate," he told reporters, "and wake up screaming." Larkin had the essential poetic gift for memorable language. He is one of the few contemporary poets whose work people know by heart.

My next recommendation is a starker poet: Weldon Kees (1914-1955). Although Kees has never been a big seller, his work has steadily stayed in print--without any scholarly support--for the 40 years since his mysterious disappearance and presumed suicide. (His first editions, in fact, command huge prices in the rare-book market.) If Larkin is alternately wistful and stoic, Kees is wryly apocalyptic. You may have trouble finding a copy of his Collected Poems, even though the book was reissued both here and in England in 1993, so let me explain why searching it out will be worth the effort. There has never been an American poet with fewer illusions about life than Kees. He makes his tragic worldview, however, not merely compelling but darkly attractive. "It's good to be deaf," he observed, "in a deafening time." He is the laureate of gallows humor and fatalistic ingenuity. Academic critics have little use for Kees. He rarely appears in the official anthologies, but writers and artists adore him. For many readers, discovering Kees becomes a conversion experience; they are drawn completely into his imaginative world. (This is similar to what science fiction fans undergo reading Philip K. Dick--an experience that changes their notions of the medium.) BBC television even did a film, Looking for Robinson, depicting an obsessed British poet traveling America to search out clues about Kees's disappearance. Kees is a poet who requires a psychic warning label.

Finally, let me recommend Wendy Cope, a poet who offers pure pleasure. Cope is currently Britain's best-selling poet, but she remains almost unknown in America. She is probably the best living comic poet in English. She is also a superb love poet. Her first book, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), would be my top recommendation. Among its many delights are "Waste Land Limericks," which summarizes Eliot's Modernist classic in five bouncy light-verse stanzas, and "From June to December," possibly the best sequence of love poems written in the past 20 years--by turns comic, erotic, romantic, and vengeful. Cope is so ingenious and funny that you won't be able to read her alone. You will soon be in the next room or on the phone reciting her to someone else.

Dana Gioia is a poet and critic. He is the author of numerous books, including Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture. He lives in Sonoma County, California.

Paul Shepheard

I know a man who does not like Shakespeare's plays. The unusual Elizabethan syntax throws him, and he will not learn how to listen to it. What's more, he insists that no one else understands it either. He says that anyone who says they enjoy Shakespeare is faking it. Why should they do that? Because they're snobs.

The last time we were trawling Walt Disney World's Epcot Center together, I tried telling him that everyone needs education. Education is the prime technology, the prime politics, and the prime defense against exploitation. "I agree," he said. "Everyone needs it. Conservatives need it to tell people what to think, socialists to tell people how to think. Fundamentalists need it to fill up people's heads until they can't think at all, and the market needs it to trick people into choosing one thing instead of another."

"And liberals need it, too," I said, because that's what I am. In England, a liberal is someone who wants a bill of rights to protect individuals against the majority. "Liberals need education because people need it. Without liberal education our beautiful, heterogeneous society, which has taken so much to construct, will dissolve back into tribal strife." He reached for his gun; he always does when I talk like that.

This is about the idea of education as cultivation, the bringing of wild minds to utility. It's an agrarian analogy, which reminds me of the culture dishes in the biology labs--which is agriculture of a different sort--and of Voltaire's gardens. If cultivation is what culture is, I think that means that culture is not something we all share. It means many things and has many modes. So what's my mode? Freethinking, by which I mean trusting my own insights to found my reasoning. Here are three collections of essays, from three sublimely cultivated minds, all of them profound freethinkers.

The first is William Hazlitt (1778-1830), the Enlightenment Age journalist who writes more buoyantly and transparently than any other writer in English I can think of. He describes the enormous 18th-century revolution in thinking as though it were a personal matter. His collected essays are published by Penguin.

The second is Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), the great modernist, whose writing is harder to get used to than Shakespeare's, but whose analysis of what modern thinking was about is astonishingly accurate. Her essays "What Is English Literature" and "What Is a Masterpiece" transformed my understanding of what art is. They can be found in the British collection Look At Me Now and Here I Am (1967), also published by Penguin.

The third is Robin Evans (1944-1992). He writes about material form; the difficulty of which is that the complex relationships embedded in it have to be teased out in sequence. He does this with a measured grace that is a joy to experience. His great quality is that even while he sports an erudition that would blow your head off, there is not a trace of false claims. His collection Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (1997) is published by MIT Press in conjunction with the Architectural Association, London.

Paul Shepheard is an architect in London. He is the author of What is Architecture? (1994) and The Cultivated Wilderness (1997), both available from MIT Press.

Martha Bayles

How do we talk about popular culture? Too often, our praise is sheer self-indulgence and our blame a compendium of intellectual clichés half a century old. Let me illustrate not with examples but with counter-examples: three authors who treat popular culture with originality, intelligence, and taste.

Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience was published in 1954, at the peak of the so-called mass culture debate. Unlike most parties to that debate, Warshow understood that while popular culture is a part of everyday life in a way that elite culture almost never is, our understanding of it cannot be reduced to sociology. For good and ill, popular culture claims our attention in ways that are more or less related to the claims of art. "I have not brought Henry James to the movies or the movies to Henry James," he wrote, "but I hope I have shown that the man who goes to the movies is the same as the man who reads Henry James."

Warshow also understood why so many intellectuals of the World War II generation refused (and still refuse) to acknowledge the artistic dimension of popular culture. Having witnessed the persecution of artists deemed too difficult for "the masses" and the forced imposition of a didactic "people's art," these intellectuals distrust all but the most rigorous aesthetic standards. The great irony, of course, is that "the masses" have never cottoned to the official culture fashioned for them by their totalitarian masters. Given half a chance, they have always gravitated toward the American alternative: a genuinely popular culture shaped not by ideological decree but by market forces.

On this subject I recommend S. Frederick Starr's delicious Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union (1985). With a light touch comparable to that of Josef Skvorecky writing about the forbidden jazz bands of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, Starr's history of the Soviet regime's efforts to suppress jazz is a case study of how impossible it is for any state, even the most repressive, to engineer the arts in its own image. A genuine art like jazz is no more susceptible to such treatment than is the ebullience of human nature it expresses.

As for the nature of that expression, it has never been described as superbly as by Henry Pleasants. In four impudent and elegant books--The Agony of Modern Music (1955), Serious Music--And All That Jazz! (1959), Death of a Music? (1961), and The Great American Popular Singers (1974)--Pleasants combines a blistering critique of post-Webern serialism with a sophisticated appreciation of jazz as one of the most viable musical languages of the 20th century. Pleasants's argument, written in the peppery style he developed during many decades as the music critic of the International Herald Tribune, partakes neither of the jazz buff's hyperbole nor of the academic's dissection. Instead, it carves out the precise position that jazz occupies in the musical canon of our century.

One cause of today's "culture war," I am convinced, is our abiding misunderstanding of what is good and bad about popular culture. We respect what we do not love and love what we do not respect. We argue bitterly in language fraught with myths and shibboleths. And we forget what these three writers are at pains to remind us: That it is we, the audience, who make or break the arts. Not in the short run, where too often we grasp at fool's gold. But in the long run, where gradually, with the help of our finest critics, we learn to recognize the 24-carat real thing.

Martha Bayles is the author of Hole In Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (1994) which has been re-released in paperback by University of Chicago Press.

Charles Oliver

There's no doubt much American popular culture traffics in sex or violence. And for as long as there has been popular culture, there have been moralists who decry its effects on society. Fortunately, some researchers have bothered to actually examine such books, music, and movies--and the way audiences use these things. The two books discussed below provide a way of talking about sex and violence in slasher films and porno movies that is very different from the usual screeds against such seemingly unredeemable and undifferentiated "filth."

In Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992), literature professor Carol J. Clover looks at some of the most disreputable movies there are, the slasher films so enjoyed by teenaged boys. She finds that, far from critics' assertions, these films don't invite the audience to identify with the sadism of the villain. Rather, the audience puts itself psychologically in the position of the suffering victims.

Clover came to that conclusion by literally watching teenagers as they view these films. What she found were not mindless zombies passively absorbing bloody images, but viewers who were aware of the conventions of the genre and who made watching such films ritualistic group activities: They talked to the screen and commented to each other on the action. Clover theorizes that such films offer moviegoers a way to deal with primal fears, especially their fear about the weakness of their own flesh. By identifying with the victims, viewers are engaging in empathy, not objectification. And, she points out, the appeal of these films reaches far beyond adolescent boys. While slasher films have typically been low-budget, independent efforts, Hollywood has tapped into the genre to revitalize its own efforts. Films as different as Thelma and Louise and The Silence of the Lambs have used narrative structures, camera angles, and themes common to the low-budget horror film.

In Hardcore (1989), film theorist Linda Williams tackles pornographic movies and shows that not all sexually explicit films are the same. Over the 80-plus years of the genre's existence, it has undergone a number of changes, responding to new developments in technology, to social and legal acceptance of sexuality, and to the evolving nature of its audience.

The earliest stag films were one- or two-reel affairs, usually nothing more than visual dirty jokes. They were designed to be shown in male gatherings such as lodge meetings or bachelor parties. There's no mistaking them for the feature-length films that came of age in the 1970s and that are still staples of adult pay-
per-view TV channels. These were to be shown in theaters, often to mixed audiences, and they mimicked standard film structures.

Neither stags nor features can compare to the loops shown in peep-show booths or the all-sex videos produced today. Each serves a different audience and each serves a different need. It's this focus on the role of the audience that is the most interesting aspect of Williams's work: She shows that the viewer is far from passive but is in fact an active interpreter of the images, using them not just for sexual arousal but also to deal with his or her own questions about gender politics and sexual identity.

Contributing Editor Charles Oliver writes for Investor's Business Daily.

Brian Doherty

Cultural conservatives and NEA supporters may lament the fact for different reasons, but culture today is defined by a range of options that allows unprecedented room for more and more of anyone's version of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The contemporary scene supports an enormous range of cultural creators and consumers, and even carves roomy niches for commercially marginal products. Here are three books that give historical perspective, insider insight, and forward-looking examples of how our culture machine operates.

Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (1984), by Kenneth C. Davis, tells the tale of a technological and marketing innovation--the paperback book--that changed the reading world by bringing both ancient classics and modern trash (and vice versa?) to more people more cheaply than ever before. Davis begins with the original innovator, Pocket Books, which started in 1939 with 10 titles that included Shakespeare's tragedies, an Agatha Christie mystery, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, and Bambi. "This undertaking," Davis writes, "was another amalgam of that peculiar American genius for combining culture, commerce, and a little technology....[T]he world of books ...would never be the same." Davis shows how cheap production techniques and wide audiences make room for more of everything, and he ought to soothe many a cultural crank's fervid agonies over the coarsening and limitations of modern culture: It's all out there for the choosing. Of course, to some folks, that's exactly the problem.

Virgil Thomson: An Autobiography (1966), is an elegant and witty insider account of how to thrive while purveying arts that don't set the commercial world on fire--in Thomson's case, modern American art music. Thomson relied largely on the time-honored artist's perquisite of patronage from wealthy people; he also received some government funds through the New Deal Works Projects Administration, which fired the free-spirited Thomson when he took an unapproved trip to Paris in search of various artist friends and muses. He later became a well-known music critic for the New York Herald Tribune and even helped create a performance-rights society for composers. Thus this book serves as a thorough, if idiosyncratic, account of how the machine of uncommercial music operates. In the modern cultural cornucopia--even in the midst of the 1930s Depression--"uncommercial" music can survive, when people have the wherewithal to follow their eccentric tastes.

The Factsheet Five Zine Reader (1997), edited by R. Seth Friedman, is an anthology of writings from modern 'zines, that latest example of the irrepressible outpourings of ground-level culture in a society where the means of (re)production are cheap and widespread. Not everything in the book is great writing, by any means. But it's a zesty smorgasbord of what's out there among unedited, un-gatekeepered one-man "publishing companies." And the collection's very existence, published by a Random House subsidiary, vividly illustrates that the dominant culture barons are indeed open to invasions from those who start as outsider barbarians.

REASON Assistant Editor Brian Doherty runs Cherry Smash Records, a small independent record company.

The Merchant of Avon

info@reason.com (Frederick Turner) — Sat, 01 Mar 1997 00:00:00 EST

The core questions of economics are what value is and how it is created. These are mysterious questions, not accessible to the mathematical methods used by the academic discipline of economics, which deals admirably with how "utility"--the technical term for value--is exchanged, stored, communicated, regulated, and gauged, but which remains prudently silent on the nature and origin of utility itself. One of the functions of poets is to go forward, living off the land as it were, when the expeditions of professional scholars and scientists must turn back, having exhausted their supplies of fact and tested theory. In the realm of value the insights of poets can be exceptionally useful, for poets spend their lives making value out of combinations of words that have no economic worth in themselves, being common property, infinitely reproducible, and devoid of rarity value. William Shakespeare, for instance, became one of the richest commoners in England--a media tycoon of his day--essentially by combining words in such a way as to persuade people to pay good money for them. Poets must be always exploring the subtle chemistry of the meaning of words, and the old and new ways in which human beings come to desire and cherish that meaning.

Where poets blaze the trail, economists and business people can follow, usually without knowing who made the path in the first place. In this essay I want to make a large claim, and one that may appear fantastic to those who make a sober living: that Shakespeare can be a wise guide to 21st-century economics.

Shakespeare was a key figure, perhaps the key figure, in creating that Renaissance system of meanings, values, and implicit rules which eventually gave rise to the modern world market, and which still underpins it. Using Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic definitions of such words as bond, trust, good, commerce, market, save, value, means, redeem, dear, interest, honor, company, worth, thrift, use, will, partner, deed, fair, owe, ought, treasure, risk, royalty, fortune, venture, grace, and so on, English-speaking merchants transformed the planet and made the language of a small, cold, wet island the lingua franca of the world.

Shakespeare made us see the business company as like a theater company, a troupe of actors, whose interactions generate the plot of the play and the interest that draws the paying audience; he taught us practically how life with others is not necessarily a zero-sum game but an arena where all may profit and competition increases the payoffs for everyone. By now many other cultures and languages have absorbed those rich and peculiar notions of trade, reciprocity, the deal, and so on, and the practices of democratic politics that arise out of them. Shakespeare's economic language has survived the huge challenges of socialism, communism, fascism, and the other statisms that arose in reaction against its new vision of things.

But its positive contributions have not yet ceased, I believe. Until now they have been largely unconscious and unacknowledged, a habit of thought and feeling absorbed with the 200 or 300 Shakespearean phrases that most English speakers know but do not know they know. For Shakespeare to make his full contribution to the next century, his wisdom must be analyzed more explicitly. This has not happened so far in the area of economics because his critics and interpreters, excellent though they often were, had a notable blind spot as far as money was concerned. Until the 20th century Shakespeare critics were gentlemen scholars who aspired to the old values and lifestyle of the aristocracy, with its contempt for trade and its superiority to money matters; and in the 20th century their successors were university intellectuals whose political loyalties were usually to the left of the general population, and who, as liberals, socialists, or Marxists, likewise despised the market and its values. Thus much of Shakespeare's business wisdom has been passed over in embarrassed silence, and some major misinterpretations have crept into our understanding.

For instance, the gentlemanly and leftist dislike of usury--best defined as interest at a rate higher than one would like to pay--led to a deep and unnecessary discomfort with The Merchant of Venice. The Jewish moneylending capitalist, Shylock, was particularly difficult. The critics' values told them to despise him, as do some of the bigoted Christians of Venice in the play. Yet as good liberals, they also hated ethnic stereotypes and prejudice. They were thus forced to deny the fact that Jews of Shakespeare's time did tend to be strongly represented--and for good reason--in banking, jewelry, commodities, currency exchange, and related money industries, and to excuse what they took to be Shakespeare's anti-Semitism on the grounds that it was not as bad as that of his contemporaries.

What they ignored is that Shakespeare did not disapprove, as his critics did, of the taking of interest. In fact, he evidently regarded it as the foundation of Venetian prosperity, and he has Antonio, one of his most positive characters, invest money at interest to support the newlyweds Lorenzo and Jessica, one of whom is Jewish. Most striking of all, Shylock is punished at the end for not taking the exorbitant interest he has been offered on his bond, but insisting on the worthless pledge of the pound of flesh. In other words, Shakespeare's anti-business critics are completely blind to the implication that Shakespeare is the very opposite of the economic anti-Semite, that he regards the spread of "use" or interest as a creative and valuable, if not very exalted, form of real progress. Shakespeare himself was a large investor in bonds and other interest-bearing securities. His famous words "neither a borrower nor a lender be" are put in the mouth of the "wretched, rash, intruding fool" Polonius, the time-pleasing state bureaucrat in Hamlet who so richly deserves his rather nasty fate, stabbed while spying on a private conversation.

Shakespeare's core insight is that human-created value is not essentially different from natural value. The value that is added by manufacture, and the reflection of that value in profit, are but a continuation of nature's own process of growth and development. Consider the following exchange between the shepherdess Perdita in The Winter's Tale and the disguised king, Polixenes.

Announces Perdita: "...the fairest flowers o' th' season/Are our carnations and streaked gillyvors/Which some call Nature's bastards; of that kind/Our rustic garden's barren; and I care not/To get slips of them." She refuses to grow the gaudier summer flowers, hinting that there is something improper in their ancestry. A "slip" is a cutting, from which a new plant can be propagated or cloned.

Polixenes pursues the matter: "Wherefore, gentle maiden,/Do you neglect them?" Perdita responds, "For I have heard it said,/There is an art, which in their piedness shares/With great creating Nature."

But now she has opened up one of the perennial questions of philosophy. What she has just said is that she objects to the art of selective breeding and hybridization by which Renaissance horticulturalists transformed simple wildflowers into elaborate multicolored blooms. Those blooms could, as the great Dutch tulip breeders found, make huge profits (as well as losses). But like an ardent advocate of environmental purity in our own time, Perdita is suspicious of artificial interventions into nature. Great Creating Nature is for her a goddess like the Gaia of our own New Age philosophers: "I'll not put/The dibble in earth, to set one slip of them;/No more than were I painted, I would wish/This youth to say 'twere well, and only therefore/Desire to breed by me."

Perdita dislikes the hybrid flowers because they use their attractive looks to gain the advantage of being reproduced instead of their more modest sisters. But if Perdita is right, art itself is a profoundly questionable enterprise. The very art of drama in which she is portrayed is a fiction. And what is art? For Shakespeare the word had an enormous range of related meanings, which had not disentangled themselves from each other. It could mean "art" in the contemporary sense of what we find in an art gallery, a book of poetry, a symphony hall, or a theater. But it was also a normal term for skill or technique, and by extension for technology, machinery, and mechanical devices of all kinds. It also meant magic, alchemy, and the mystical sciences of astrology and prognostication. Or it could mean deceptive practice or cunning imposture.

The ambivalence and complexity implicit in Perdita's use of the term are surely quite familiar in our own times. At present we are struggling with the ethical and health implications of the science of genetic engineering by means of recombinant DNA. Should we buy the new genetically altered tomatoes on the grocery shelves, or drink the milk produced with the aid of bovine hormones? What about the strawberries with their chimeric pesticide genes, the experimental fruitflies with eyes growing out of their legs and antennae, or the patented strains of cancerous mice? We must balance the benefits of insulin, thyroid hormones, oil spill�eating bacteria, interferon, and gene-grown taxol against the specter of laboratory killer viruses; gene therapy for inherited diseases against sinister eugenic schemes to improve the human gene pool; in vitro fertilization and implantation against the legal and kinship dilemmas that result when the birth mother is not the same as the genetic mother.

Reading Shakespeare, we become aware that our problems are not new--Perdita's unease prefigures ours. Indeed, since the neolithic agricultural revolution, when we first began selecting plants and animals to breed future stock, we have been in the business of genetic engineering and recombinant DNA. Our humblest domestic and culinary techniques are just as "unnatural" as the activities of the biochemists. Brewer's yeast, sourdough, ginger ale plants, and cheese mites are all out-and-out examples of human tinkering with natural genetic processes. When we divide a clump of irises in the garden we are literally practicing clone technology; when we enter a pedigree dog or cat or pigeon in a show we are practicing eugenics on an entire species. Worse still, when we choose what we believe to be an exceptionally kind, intelligent, attractive, healthy, and honest person to be our mate and bear or sire our children, we are engaged in human eugenics on our own local scale. There is no escape.

Thus Perdita cannot evade the fact that as a tool-using animal--the "dibble" she uses for gardening is a cunning little technological device--she must alter nature in order to survive. She needs "art" in its technological sense. How may this contradiction between nature and art be resolved? Polixenes's reply to Perdita reveals a wisdom that we would do well to take to heart. Recall that she has just disparaged the gillyvors on the grounds that there is an art that went into their ancestry. Says Polixenes:

	Say there be;
	Yet Nature is made better by no mean
	But Nature makes that mean; so over that art
	Which you say adds to Nature, is an art
	That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
	A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
	And make conceive a bark of baser kind
	By bud of nobler race. This is an art
	Which does mend Nature, change it rather; but
	The art itself is Nature.

In several of Shakespeare's sonnets, the idea of sexual reproduction is imaged in frankly economic terms, as an investment that earns compound interest. The sum that we invest was itself loaned to us by nature; we do wrong if we spend it on ourselves, or even invest it in ourselves at high rates of interest, for if we do, it will perish with us:

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
	Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy?
	Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
	And being frank she lends to those are free.
	Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
	The bounteous largess given thee to give?
	Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
	So great a sum of sums yet cannot live?
	For having traffic with thyself alone,
	Thou of thyself thy sweet self doth deceive.
	Then how when Nature calls thee to be gone,
	What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
	Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
	Which, used, lives th' executor to be.

Thus living DNA is like invested money, and its self-replication is like the return on an investment. The young man to whom the poem is addressed invests his genetic beauty only in himself, and pays himself the interest on the loan, which he then spends on himself. The audit on this questionable investment--death--reveals its unsoundness. The best policy is to be a rentier, so to speak, and invest in another--that is, the young man should marry a woman and have children with her. When the original business loan of life must be repaid, the profits made by using the money--one's children--remain. This is an extraordinary idea, rather breathtaking in its tough-minded equation of personal and financial values. But it also has a strange ring of truth.

In another sonnet it is quite clear that Shakespeare, who has observed the methods of livestock breeders just as Charles Darwin did over 200 years later, has already grasped the principle of evolution through natural selection:

Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,
	Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish.
	Look whom she best endowed, she gave the more;
	Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish.
	She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby
	Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.

Living organisms preserve their inner genetic structures, and thus conquer death and decay, by reproducing themselves into another generation. But such an answer to the problems of death and decay is as unsatisfactory to Shakespeare as it is to us. Certainly the general type is preserved by reproduction. Asexually reproducing organisms can make exact copies of themselves. But it is precisely the individuality of a loved human being that we miss when he or she is gone, and that individuality is the product of sexual reproduction, which creates a unique recombination of genes for each new birth. In other words, the process of natural reproduction that Shakespeare recommends to preserve his friend's beauty is the guarantee that his individuality, the essence of his beauty, is irreproducible.

Shakespeare's second answer to the problem of time is to eternalize his friend's beauty in poetry, in the very art by which Shakespeare mourns its passing: "But thy eternal summer shall not fade,/Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,/Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade/When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st./So long as men can breathe and eyes can see,/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

We today are reading those lines, so the solution has worked for 400 years at least. What is especially significant is that poetry is being described as a higher form of natural reproduction. Both are what Shakespeare, in another sonnet, calls "the lines of life, that life repair." These lines of life are the lineage of a family, which replaces the dying with the newborn. But they are also, in context, the lines that a portraitist uses to eternalize the features of a sitter, and they are, most fundamentally, the lines of poetry. It is as if he has guessed that the genetic code that specifies the shape of our bodies is a line or thread, like the long thread of letters that make up a poem.

DNA is indeed a thread of nucleotides, which spell out the "words" and "sentences" of the genes, which in turn determine the proteins that make up the human body. The words in which this beautiful relationship is being conducted find for themselves a form of repeated rhymes and metrical rhythms that are able to reprint themselves in memory and books, as DNA does by peeling its double helix apart and printing the sequence of nucleotides anew upon the raw material within the cell. But poetry is a higher form of reproduction, for it can capture and preserve the mind and individuality of an organism, not just its bodily composition. Living reproduction can outwear the enduring metals and stone with which we build monuments to defy the effects of time. But poetry, which is even more spiritual, intangible, and apparently fragile, is more enduring still: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,/But you shall shine more bright in these contents/Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time."

What Shakespeare now does is graft the new, cultural form of reproduction upon the old, biological form: "And, all in war with Time for love of you,/As he takes from you, I engraft you new." Thus, poetry is to living reproduction what living reproduction is to the enduring hardness of the stone and metal out of which we build monuments to defy time's decay. Poetry is grafted onto natural inheritance, so that both the generic and unconscious elements of what we wish to preserve, and also the individual and self-aware elements, are protected. And poetry is in a sense the purest form of manufacture--it makes out of the most valueless raw material of all, breath, a valuable good.

Shakespeare is proposing a kind of gardening economics, a technique of growing value rather than extracting existing stores of it embodied in raw materials or the metabolic capital of the laborer. The brilliant achievements of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution gave us our most precious resources: the 5 billion people now living and the library of technical knowledge upon which all future progress must be based. But the Industrial Revolution achieved these feats in rather the fashion of a fetal bird in the egg, by drawing down the world's yolk-sac of fossil fuels, high grade ores, topsoil, and perhaps even its peoples' accumulated cultural discipline and moral/aesthetic traditions.

Its methods came from the science of thermodynamics, and its major power source, steam, involved the burning of complex molecules to release their energy. If we see the world in thermodynamic terms, as containing a limited stockpile of free energy which is exhausted by its use to do work, and dissipated into the irretrievable form of waste heat--if the increase of entropy with time is the last word on the subject--then the 19th-century strategy of seizing natural resources and exploiting them makes perfect sense. But if complex intercommunicating feedback systems at the edge of chaos can generate emergent new forms of organization, as such distinguished new scientists and philosophers as Ilya Prigogine are now saying, and as Shakespeare suggests, then a different economics suggests itself, one which can increase the net amount of value in the world.

Shakespeare's concept of value creation is, I believe, remarkably prophetic. Industry today need no longer "burn" increasing amounts of natural order to force its will upon matter and turn out its mass-produced product. Contrary to the prophecies of the doomsayers, the world's requirements for energy seem to be leveling off, and even dropping in the more advanced economies, as market-driven efficiencies emerge. Of course, we will always need energy, just as do the other processes of nature. But we may become able, like a full-fledged bird, to live off the land rather than the fat of our thermodynamic egg.

The power requirements of the Internet are minuscule compared with those of an equivalent exchange of material parcels of information. Industry is discovering the far- from-equilibrium situations that crop up throughout nature, finding ways to "tweak" existing natural processes so as to bring about economically desirable results. Tinkering with a few genes in a test tube, we create immunities that save thousands of bushels of crops from pests and diseases. Industry is making extensive use of catalytic chemistry, chaotic mixing processes, and the like--those processes in the inorganic world that anticipate the ingenious economy of life. Just as microscopic chips of silicon can now efficiently control the roar of a mighty tractor engine, so we can use the efficient leverages offered to us by nature itself to harness the grand natural forces of our living universe.

Industrial chemistry loves to exploit those states of matter at the boundaries between the solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasma states or between different crystalline or chemical configurations, where, far from equilibrium, only a small change of temperature, light, chemistry, or pressure can produce large results. Those results include metals with useful properties, self-adjusting sunglasses, liquid crystal displays, efficient fuel injection, or highly sensitive measuring devices such as the home pregnancy test. The raw materials of the new technology are plentiful and easy to extract: carbon, sand to make silicon chips, air, water. Biotechnology may one day develop perennial cereal crops that will not need tractors to plough them or even, perhaps, petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. It took a huge expense of coal and oil and iron ore to develop the cybernetic control systems that now require only a few ounces of silicon and a tiny flow of current to maintain, and which are in turn radically diminishing our need for fossil fuels and ores.

Shakespeare's reasoning endorses the tweaking and readaptation of natural processes for human purposes. Those natural processes, however, are but precursors and simpler versions of the much more deeply self-referential and multi-leveled processes we find in the human world. The market is just such a complex system. The market is the drama of concrete human interaction, the theater of the world. Only highly nonlinear, turbulent, and far-from equilibrium processes, as the market is, could produce such complex and individuated entities as human personalities and cultures.

Anthropologists and ethologists are now revealing the elaborate web of short-term and long-term economic exchanges that happen within human and animal families; babies are made human by the exchanges they enter into with their parents and close kin. For Shakespeare economic exchange is the embodiment of human moral relations. Unlike our own cruder ethical systems, resulting from the combined assaults of Puritan iconoclastic highmindedness, Enlightenment reductionism, Romantic moral sentiment, and Marxist paranoia, Shakespeare does not make a strict distinction between personal rights and property rights. For him personal love cannot be divided from the bonds of property and service that embody it. When King Lear demands the unconditional love of his daughters-- that is, a love that is not mediated by reciprocal material relations--his two corrupt daughters Regan and Goneril are quick to offer it, swearing they love him "more than eyesight, space, and liberty;/Beyond what can be valued, rich and rare."

But Cordelia, the good daughter, refuses to offer such love: "I love your majesty/According to my bond, no more nor less.../...Good my lord,/You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I/Return those duties back as are right fit,/Obey you, love you, and most honor you." She goes on to point out that when she marries, half of her love and duty will then be owed to her husband.

Though tactless, Cordelia is expressing a wisdom we should pay attention to. If the world is as 19th-century science suggested it was, a deterministic machine that is running down, then the only ethical kind of love would be one that was purely disinterested, a Kantian dispassionate self-sacrifice that gave the advantage over to the other in the struggle to seize and exploit the diminishing stockpile of order. Only thus could one escape the deterministic motivations embedded in our own nature, which would render every interested decision void of freedom and ethical responsibility. But Shakespeare's world, as we have glanced at it in The Winter's Tale and the sonnets, is one in which human freedom is not the avoidance of natural motivation but the capacity of creative action; the net amount of value naturally increases, and human creativity accelerates that increase. Both the lover and the beloved can prosper.

The "bond" that Cordelia offers is a combination of reproductive, material, and emotional/spiritual exchanges. In As You Like It, Shakespeare defines marriage as a "blessed bond of board and bed," in which three "b" words, blessed (the emotional and spiritual element), board (the material element), and bed (the sexual and reproductive element) are likewise combined in a fourth, the bond of the nuptial contract. Most important for us is the way in which the intangible elements of the contract can be cashed, or in Shakespeare's suggestive word, "redeemed," in material terms.

For Shakespeare, value must be embodied to exist, just as the inscription denoting the sovereignty of the mint and the denomination of the coin must be embodied in the intrinsic value of the specie of which it is made. We do not need to embrace the gold standard to understand that paper or electronic money must likewise be based, though at more removes, upon such backing as a gross national product and the consent of the community to the legitimacy of the minting authority.

In The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare correctly implies that the word market is cognate with the word mercy. But how can the market be merciful? Isn't it counterintuitive that mercy--and merci, the French word for thanks--should come from the same linguistic root as mercenary, merchant, mercantile, commerce, and market itself? What does the legendary ruthlessness of the marketplace have to do with the free gifts of compassion? If, using the excellent etymological supplement to the American Heritage Dictionary, we follow the etymology of this root back to its Etruscan origins, we find the same ambiguity all the way down. The Old French merci meant forbearance to someone in one's power; the Late Latin merces meant reward, but also God's gratuitous compassion. The Latin merx meant merchandise, in the sense that merchandise was something under the purview of the god Mercury, patron of commerce. All these words derive from the name of the god Mercury.

Mercury is an extremely interesting god in this context: As well as being associated with markets, he was the divine messenger, the god of travel and of thieves, and the psychopomp, that is, the god who conducted the souls of the dead to their final destination, whether Hades or the Elysian Fields. Perhaps we can make sense of him thus: As the spirit of communication and exchange, he is that which allows whole systems of connected feedback to come into being. He is thus the patron of change, since systems can change only to the extent to which they can communicate within themselves and with other systems.

Merchants, the "middlemen" of human exchange and often the carriers of news, information, new science, and socially disruptive ideas and diseases, take Mercury to be their leader. The marketplace is the place where both goods and ideas are exchanged, and thus it bears the god's name. Naturally all the illegitimate and cheating forms of communication and exchange--lying and stealing--are also under his aegis. Mercy is kin to thievery; both are unjust. Naturally, too, Mercury conducts human consciousness--itself the product of the internal communication of self-awareness and the external communication of exchange with other human beings in the marketplace of life--across the greatest threshold of change, from life to death.

When we look at some of Mercury's other attributes and associations, he becomes more interesting still. He gives his name to the metal that is liquid, quicksilver, that cannot be held in one place but runs away. Mercy--the things of Mercury--is essentially liquid, as we have already seen. In alchemy, mercury was one of the two primary opposites, sulphur--a solid--being the other, whose true union through the evolutionary process of alchemical metamorphosis might produce perfect gold. Mercury's planet was the harbinger of the two great diurnal changes, day into night and night into day, and thus the link between the day world and the night world: Again, Mercury is the reconciler of opposites.

Most interesting of all, he is the possessor of the caduceus, the snake-entwined rod, that ancient and modern symbol of life and its transformative powers. This talisman represents the reconciliation of order and stasis (the rod) with chaos and change (the snakes). The rod is solid, and is often the symbol of justice; the snake is associated with liquid, and is the great symbol of transgression. The snake itself symbolizes the polar opposites of death and healing (its venom can kill or cure), and change and immortality (it changes its skin and thus rejuvenates itself). Like the serpent of Eden, it is the breaker of the status quo, the opener of new perspectives, the originator of new levels of being and consciousness. The caduceus as a whole represents the pairing or twinning by which reproduction takes place, and the transfer of information by which the shape of the parent is communicated, replicated, and immortalized. It so happens that the double helix of the two snakes is an exact model of the shape of the DNA molecule. This is not just a coincidence, for the double helix is perhaps the best intuitive diagram of any feedback process, and DNA is the feedback process of feedback processes. Uncannily, in the symbol of the caduceus the ancient icon makers anticipated the modern discovery of the structure of DNA. Kindness, in both the moral sense and the biological sense, emerges from the kinship bonds that DNA creates.

So the mercy of the market is real. Those who in the Marxist tradition persist in seeing the market as impersonal and merciless are comparing it by implication with the intimate world of uncounted cost and unquestioned trust that they believe exists in the family, in a friendship, in a traditional tribal village, or in a nonprofit organization dedicated to some higher voluntary purpose or liberal art. Perhaps the market is less forgiving than such communities, though anthropologists, sociologists, and novelists have charted the often ruthless politics and unyielding cruelty of families, villages, and universities. But communities of this kind are not the alternative to the market, nor has the market shown any sign of putting an end to them--they flourish still as they always did, and their sphere in society is proportionately no smaller in relation to the market than it ever was.

There are only two real alternatives to the market. One is the way that communities actually treat strangers and outsiders, and the way communities traditionally treat each other, when they are not trading with each other or governed by a higher authority: that is, by enslavement, murder, and war. The other is the utopian rule of an abstract justice in which there could be no room for mercy, since any communication or gift or exchange other than the application of the law would amount to corruption and favoritism. As F.A. Hayek argues, the market is the place where one can begin to communicate with strangers, where one can negotiate, where there is time to haggle and latitude for error, where a loan can be prolonged because the lender wants his money back, where defeat does not mean extinction but the opportunity to pull off a better deal another day. It encourages a basic level of civility, and requires of those who would profit by it a preparedness to take risks in trusting others, even if the risk taking is the margin for error in the quantification of risk when one is estimating the interest one should charge on a loan.

The Shakespearean theater was a kind of marketplace; and that market was one of the preconditions for the emergence of democratic politics. In fact we could even say that true democracy is the political expression of the Shakespearean market.

Worlds Without Ends

info@reason.com (Frederick Turner) — Sat, 01 Jun 1996 00:00:00 EDT

The disappointing progress of the U.S. space program was not primarily the result of the technical difficulties it faced, nor the dangers to which we were alerted by the Challenger disaster, nor its great expense, nor the sense that there were pressing social and ecological problems to be solved at home, nor the fact that the leaders of the program were World War II-era people with World War II attitudes and style who had not replaced themselves with fresh blood. All these were factors, certainly, but they are symptoms of a larger problem: We will only begin to develop a truly spacefaring civilization when we feel it is in our interest to do so.

What does one do with space once one has got there? What interests of ours are met and served by going there? Space turned out to be just what the word originally meant, that is, distance and interval. There is no point in going to distance or interval. There's no

there there. One goes through it to get someplace where one has business or pleasure. Space is a whole bunch of nothing. Of course there are things and places on the other side of space, but they turned out to be just exactly the kind of things and places one would try hard to avoid if they were down here on Earth--baking hot or freezing cold or poisonous or totally barren--just plain miserable.

Movies, of course, imagined these places inhabited by sweaty miners or oppressed factory workers or heroic warriors or ascetic scientists, who are about the only people who for practical reasons go willingly to such places on Earth. But it is hard to imagine anything worth the transportation costs into and out of the Earth's gravity well; one mines and manufactures to be able to afford the luxury of going into space, one does not go into space to afford the luxury of mining and manufacturing. There is valuable information to be gained out there, but it can be obtained efficiently by robots, which is not the same as actually being there.

But certainly if we wanted we could, by the '90s, have gone to all the places in the solar system and done all the things that we expected to in the '50s. If we had as a planet committed to a consistent space effort the kind of resources we committed to World War II, we could have colonies on the Jovian moons by now and be working on interstellar flight. If we had just had enemies out there, we would have a splendid space program. Now we don't even have the Russians.

Maybe, however, we don't need Russians, or their equivalent (an Eldorado, an opulent Indies, a mine of information). Postwar generations of space thinkers have proposed a different goal for space exploration from the old ones of mining, industrial profit, war, or science. What is suggested is that livable worlds can be built, created, out of those extraterrestrial wildernesses. Ecopoiesis (the introduction of freestanding and proliferating life into a lifeless environment) and terraforming (the further project of creating an environment hospitable to human beings and other earthly animals) offer a much wider field of possible interests than do traditional visions of space exploration.

Yet the prospects here, too, are not promising on the surface. We had better face it. No Antarctic waste, no arid desert or barren mountaintop or volcanic inferno or abyssal ocean trench on Earth is more hostile to life than the most benign microclimate anywhere else in the solar system. So far so bad, as far as the case for space exploration is concerned. But this is not the end of the story. With terraforming and ecopoiesis we are beginning to enter mental territory where the glimmer of possible human interests might begin to show.

One key issue is what constitutes a human "interest" and, even more important, how human interests will change during the coming era in which planetary engineering will become feasible. The first European explorers of the Americas in fact misunderstood their own interests: They were looking for precious metals (which, though abundant, were never as plentiful as their seekers wished) when the real riches of the New World were the great pre-Columbian food and stimulant crops, and the fertile land and rich base metal resources of the western continents.

The gold and silver brought back by the Spanish monarchy had the complex economic effect of impoverishing and depopulating Spain and enriching its enemies, England and Holland. In Iberia profitable farming, with the dense population it supports, was priced out of the social market, to be replaced by flocks of voracious goats that ate the vegetation, damaged the soil, and dried out the climate. Bankers along the Rhine, the Danube, the Po, and the coasts of the North Sea and Baltic grew rich on high-interest loans taken out by Hapsburg monarchs to finance the defenses of their far-flung empires; the accumulation of capital fueled the Northern European industrial revolution, whose raw materials were the mundane bulk commodities the Hidalgos had scorned. The true beneficiaries of the Columbian discovery were not the aristocrats, sailors, and warriors but the farmers and planters who followed them, and the businessmen and industrial entrepreneurs who followed them.

The basic wealth of feudal aristocrats, what they correctly perceive it in their interest to possess, is land with an established peasant population. The way to obtain this wealth is by conquest or marriage, and the pool of such wealth is limited. One warlord's gain is another's loss: There is an unchanging pie to be divided according to the courage, intelligence, charisma, and luck of the individual. The secondary wealth of such leaders consists of portable works of precious metals and other rare durable materials, embodying fine craftsmanship--objects that can alleviate the drabness of a subsistence economy, that can symbolize the magical powers of command and education at the disposal of the elite, that can be given as rewards for service to a faithful thane or samurai, and that can honor the God of Christendom (or the mandate of Heaven, or the pyramid of Tlaloc). It is such goods that the conquistadors were seeking; but at the moment they found them, the game changed, the pie started to get bigger, wealth changed its colors, other currencies began to harden. Free farmers could get more out of the soil than could serfs; traders could multiply the local value of things by the alchemy of the market; craftsmen could leverage production upward by new technologies; city republics could bankrupt counts and dukes. The very meaning of America, as a resource and as a set of interests, changed as the European conquest proceeded.

Thus, if we are to get an accurate picture of the potential wealth to be gained from the solar system, we must recognize the successive waves of economic energy through which our present civilization is passing, the paradigm shifts that change the nature of wealth and the interests that drive human effort. A modern economy is not like the old notion of a balanced ecology, in which every species occupies its own fixed niche and a mysterious set of feedbacks preserves a homeostatic harmony among them. Instead, it is much more like the present model of ecological succession, where clusters of species rise, replace their predecessors at the top of the food chain, and are demoted, giving way to others. The very shape and identity of the ecological niches undergo continuous, irreversible metamorphosis. We live in a world of economic transvaluation, in which each wave reaches and passes its point of maximum capital flow, employment, and cultural influence, to be succeeded by a further wave. Obsolescence disrupts people's lives, and at the same time society as a whole becomes--erratically but inevitably--richer and more full of opportunities for those willing to use them. As each new wave comes along, the disparities in wealth between the rich and the poor first increase, and then decrease, leaving the average person with much more disposable income than before.

Two hundred years ago America was an agrarian nation in which 90 percent of the people worked on farms and 90 percent of the capital commitment and cultural energy went into agriculture. Prices were relatively high enough, and the production system labor-intensive enough, to support a large rural population. Wealth was widely distributed, reinforcing the American political ethic of equality that de Tocqueville celebrated. Then, with the introduction of such devices as the cotton gin and the combine harvester, the cost of production dropped rapidly, prices collapsed, production sharply increased, the number of workers needed fell sharply, and, after an initial increase in investment for mechanization, the capital requirements for farming relative to the rest of the economy went into steady decline.

Rural unemployment sent thousands of jobless farmers out on the roads. Farming simply bulked less large in the nation's economy, society, and culture. It took up a smaller share of its interests. Today perhaps 2 percent of our national treasure and work goes into farming. One odd little counter-trend, however, may be significant: There is an increasing number of gentleman and lady farmers, freed from more pressing economic necessities, who have taken up ranching or planted gardens or bought vineyards for the sheer joy of doing so. Like aristocrats of an earlier agricultural era, who hunted, rode, bred animals, sailed, or fished, preserving in their leisure the ancient work patterns of the hunter-gatherer past, the new leisure classes have rediscovered as a pleasure and spiritual recreation what was once the drudgery of survival.

It is already clear that what happened to farming is now happening to the extractive and manufacturing sectors. In the developed countries manufacturing employment and capital investment rose until it tied up about 90 percent of the available labor, capital, and cultural energy. At first, huge fortunes were made. Then wealth became widely shared; the essential and collectively powerful assembly line workers could ask a decent fraction of the earnings of their masters. Then automation, robotics, computer-assisted design and manufacturing, materials science, miniaturization, just-in-time inventory techniques, discount retailing, and global competition created successive leaps in efficiency--cutting costs, prices, and labor requirements, increasing volume, and maximizing the utility and durability of the product.

Manufacturing, like farming, became more capital intensive and less labor intensive. Marx's 19th-century proletariat withered away. Unemployed industrial workers crowded the decaying inner cities. The rust belt succeeded the dust bowl, and we are now reaching the point where the capital requirements for manufacturing are likewise dropping--until, perhaps, they will be no more than the 2 percent or so we need for farming. The amounts of money to be made out of manufacturing are also shrinking, and thus the amount of the world's interests tied up in it. Finally, perhaps, a few dozen biotech/nanotech factories, with some bored troubleshooters and elite staffs of artsy, temperamental designers and marketers, will make all the world's necessary stuff. We may even, in what will appear to be a decadent and deplorable cultural development, create gentleman factories, like our present dude ranches, to provide the old thrills of heroic industrialism. The present vogues for furniture making and home improvement may already be examples of this trend.

So far this is a familiar story. According to its script the third wave, the information age, is upon us, the golden dawn upon the economic horizon. However, it takes a little more imagination to see that the same thing will happen to the information industries, currently ascendant, that happened to the farms and factories. There is no reason why the technologies of data storage, management, and retrieval should not perfect and miniaturize and cheapen and streamline themselves almost out of existence like their predecessors. If the historical analogy holds, employment, investment, and cultural commitment in the information industries will rise to about 90 percent of the given resources. At first huge fortunes will be made; then, as the labor demand rises, economic equality will increase; there will follow the predictable collapse of the labor market as the information industries become more and more cost efficient, smaller and smaller on the world's horizon, less and less labor intensive, and finally less capital hungry and less profitable, leaving a few cash cows providing all the world's needs.

Eventually their operation will take up 2 percent of our money and our people. Hordes of information workers will be turned out on the streets, asking the employed if they can spare a dime. Moreover all this will happen much faster than the rise and decline of manufacturing, just as the manufacturing age happened faster than the agricultural age. Everything is getting faster and faster. Information resources will be virtually invisible, at our mental fingertips, perhaps even wired into us by neural/cybernetic interfaces, activated by an unconscious movement of the will as are our own brains--as natural, cheap, and convenient as a hammer. Will we then create clunky antique data devices, requiring programming and the memorization of command codes, for the leisured and the nostalgic?

But for those who believe we should become a spacefaring civilization, the great question that arises from this review of economic succession must surely be: Which of these economic paradigms will best support space travel? The agricultural model, despite such appealing visions as Robert Heinlein's hardy wagon-train pioneers, is clearly by itself insufficient. Oddly enough, the human race does not need more cultivatable land; in countries where farm production is rising the most, the proportion of land given over to it is decreasing.

The industrial paradigm is not much more promising. A space program based on an industrial manufacturing model will be a bigger and bigger fish, and a hungrier and hungrier one, in a pond that is shrinking and drying up. We may never build the gigantic space hangars, with their banks of tiny windows and huge, half-obliterated identification numbers, the enormous space-cruisers with their turrets and flying bridges, that we see in our science fiction movies--the iconography of the foundry and the drill rig and the aircraft carrier transferred to space.

Two hundred years from now such images may seem as quaint as Edward Bellamy's science fiction cities of the 19th century, with their skies packed with airships sporting baroque gondolas full of men in top hats and ladies in crinolines. Our spaceships may actually look like inside-out trees or jellyfish. Or we may not even use spaceships as such to get from one place in the universe to another, but something more like a photographic studio or an X-ray machine. There is no reason why we will need huge edifices made out of riveted plates of metal. If we are essentially growing our machines and appliances ad hoc as we need them, and re-dissolving them when we want them out of the way, and if their shapes are customized perfectly to the task at hand and to human aesthetics, our devices will probably look like plants or animals or exquisite little works of art. If, as is already happening, much of the technology comes to be in the hands of individuals rather than vast state organizations or centralized corporations, our collective works may be more like hives or coral reefs or village markets than like the totalitarian one-vision, one-use monuments of the Bauhaus and the Capitol. And all of this is not in the remote future, but just around the corner.

For a while a space program based on the information industries--one in which we go into space to hunt out valuable data or in pursuit of the raw materials of hardware and software--will flourish, but its possibilities are strictly limited. The largest pool of important information in the known universe is right here on our planet; it is thus no coincidence that by far the largest commitment in our space program is to devices designed to look at, or direct messages to and from, the Earth. If we, and our living companions, were to go to other parts of the universe, then they would become valuable as information. But we have to get there first, and we can't afford to; the cash flow and amortization problems would be insoluble.

Of course, if we discover alien civilizations, then everything changes. We would then need centuries of highly lucrative scholarship and cybernetics to process the gigantic wealth of knowledge that would flow from such a discovery, and the information industries would be in the delightful situation of having simultaneously a glut of raw materials and an endless consumer demand. Space travel might flourish, on a pay-as-you-go basis. But the last few years of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have presented us with a single massively important and dispiriting piece of negative information: Against all our expectations, the galaxy seems to be silent of technological civilization, at least of anything that might use electromagnetic waves for communication. Closer to home, within our own solar system, we are almost certainly alone. There is more going on in a single earthly forest or village than on the whole of Mercury or Venus--more surprises, more unprecedented and unpredictable events, more emerging structures of information. The information-industry model of wealth creation will not take us into space, any more than the manufacturing model will.

But perhaps there is another model, one that will succeed the knowledge industries. An economic wave or paradigm loses its hold on a civilization not because of inefficiency but because of efficiency. Earlier waves of economic activity are not suppressed by succeeding waves. The reason there are so few farmers in the United States and so little money tied up in farming, when once 90 percent of the nation was agrarian, is not the failure of farming but its astonishing success: Farming now needs only a tiny fraction of the country's human and economic resources to supply more than enough foodstuffs and raw materials.

Finally, we will be left with the irreducibly labor- and capital-intensive human industries of what we might call "charm": tourism, education, entertainment, adventure, religion, sport, fashion, art, history, movies, ritual, personal development, politics, the eternal soap opera of relationships. Once the world's wages have leveled up to those of the developed countries, a process already well in train, the service industries will begin to starve for labor, and be forced to raise their pay scales. At the same time the job descriptions, and the actual content, of service employment will begin to approximate those of artists, entertainers, educators, and sports professionals. One can already see this process at work in the restaurant industry in such wealthy cities as Dallas, New York, Phoenix, or Los Angeles: Good waiters, sommeliers, and cooks are wooed and tempted by rival establishments, and each evening is conceived as a little work of art.

Given a cheap and effortless supply of materials, manufactures, and information, which will be on hand in a few decades if this scenario of economic evolution is plausible, the chief natural resources required for these new charm industries will be empty space and empty time. The rich, who since the Renaissance have lived as the rest of the world will try to live a few decades later, and are thus the harbingers of the future, have always valued empty space and empty time. That is why they buy land and build mansions in the country, and why they hire managers and secretaries to handle their deadlines. Often they are quite frugal in their consumption habits, not out of affectation but in the pursuit of a more refined joy in the experience of life.

The arts and pleasures of the charm industries take up time and space; they also paradoxically increase both time and space by their magical powers of illusion, delay, inner articulation, and concentrated attention. But time and space, with the present buildup of physical, temporal, and cultural waste product on our planet, are becoming increasingly scarce and increasingly at a premium. We are swamped by mountains of junk information, junk production, junk cultural overflow. We will be prepared to pay top dollar for silence, horizons, the threat and presence of death, the strange and mystical experience of uneventful time. Japanese Heian princes, with all the resources of a rich civilization open to them, sought the exquisite boredom of glacially slow Noh drama and court music. American and European millionaires outfit one-man ocean-going yachts and, on the fine edge of loneliness, terror, and tedium, sail round the world. Our civilization as a whole will seek out the ultraviolet-ravaged red wastes of Mars, the voiceless empty grandeur of the Jovian moons.

New planetary habitats obviously offer enormous amounts of empty space. Less obviously, they also offer huge quantities of empty time. Outer space has an inexhaustible resource, which is temporal separation from the home planet. Nobody on Mars can have a phone conversation with anyone on Earth, because the light that carries the message takes time to get from place to place, and even a one-minute time lag puts a gap between two people almost as great as the grave: Mars is at least three minutes away, and sometimes as much as 20. The times of Mars and Ganymede are empty of Earthly chatter and Earthly information overload. The relativistic time-separation from Earth of even the closest planets imposes an impenetrable barrier of privacy, and creates huge unexploited temporal niches for the coming charm industries. The tragic existential choices that faced emigrants to the New World, and that made possible their creation of new societies and new alternatives for the human race, will once again be possible.

The other worlds of space offer empty time in another sense. When you are sailing, or horseback riding, or gardening, or training an animal (as my friend Steven Bodio points out), you must adapt to the rhythms of the rest of nature. Survival tasks take a lot of time, but most of that time is spent attentively waiting. If you try to hurry a boat, a horse, or a plant, you will come to grief. Human beings, however, especially when armed with timesaving devices like fax machines, telephones, e-mail, copiers, and computers, can, it seems, hurry each other up without limit, to the point of catastrophic stress. The planets offer us places to slow down, precisely because the processes we will require to stay alive--and to transform those hostile environments into Arcadia--take so much empty time.

But emptiness is not enough. What the dream of ecopoiesis and terraforming also offers is a project whose grandeur equals or surpasses every previous aspiration of the human species. The combination will eventually be irresistible. It will be the last reliable source of economic wealth.

Tourism is already the world's largest industry, but tourism is only a pale shadow of what its seekers desire: the chance to make history, to be true explorers, naturalists in a new world, anthropologists of a never-before-encountered civilization. More epoch-making than the first winged flight would be the first created planetary atmosphere where human beings might fly under their own power. More splendid than any ocean voyage is the colossal task of filling a new ocean. More scientifically bold than any naturalist's exploration is the creation of a new ecosystem. More daring than any big game hunt is the introduction of genetically adapted wildlife where once no life existed.

When we are all able to dispose of resources equivalent to those of a present-day aristocrat, we will all want to do the equivalent of hunting, sailing, fishing, gardening. We will all want to relive the wild adventure of the Amerindians working their way down a brand-new continent, the Polynesians feeling their way across the Pacific, the Bantu conquering southern Africa, the Europeans carving out colonial empires. We will never again need theme parks; new planets will satisfy every need that the theme park unsuccessfully tries to meet, and Old Earth will take on instantly a pathos and preciousness it never had for us before by contrast with the terrors of our grand adventure.

Thus we will rediscover the wild again in the almost insuperably hostile plains and mountains of Mars. No longer alienated from reality, we will feel its gritty pressure as we struggle against the hostile terrain. We will be making history there, for there is all the history in a world to make. The mother planet, already beginning to be a boxed-in little place for the more spiritually enterprising, and a prison for our useless young men, will gain a new kind of magic as our home and alma mater.

Who will make all this happen? Not, perhaps, the nation state; it is doubtful that the state as an institution will ever again command the kind of loyalties and commitments and moral prestige that gave us World War I, the Grand Coulee Dam, the defense of Stalingrad, the Holocaust, and the Apollo program. It will be corporations that will go into space, but not, surely, corporations like industrial General Motors or information-based Microsoft. Charm industry corporations will be more like exclusive safari adventure outfits, theater companies, churches, movie studios, art workshops, literary publishers, sports clubs, resort hotels, restaurants.

Eventually it may even be families and individuals who go up there. The technology they will use will be a combination of the almost unimaginable with the familiar: biotech and nanotech to supply the manufacturing base, traditional aeronautics to get us out of Earth's gravity well, human bioengineering to alter our bodies to suit other planets, architecture and theater design to create bearable living conditions, materials science (especially intelligent materials), artificial intelligence, horticulture, self-replicating robots, genetically tailored and trained domestic animals. The keys will be financial cheapness (mainly keeping down labor costs through the recruitment of wealthy volunteers and hobbyists), the use of local materials, improvisation in a technologically fail-safe context, the adaptation of humans to the environment, and the identification of existing far-from-equilibrium energy systems in the solar system that can be tweaked with little effort to create big changes.

More important than the technology, though, will be the artistic insight and economy that will tie it all together and sell it to the public. I have spelled out how all this might work in my epic poem Genesis, and more scholarly treatments may be found in the work of such scientists as Robert Haynes, Christopher McKay, Robert Zubrin, Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan, and Martyn Fogg.

Apologists for space exploration have often added to their list of practical reasons to go to space a half-apologetic reference to the adventure and aspiration of it. It is as if they were ashamed of their true motivations and had to relegate them to the position of an afterthought. But a cold analysis of the direction of the world's economic future leaves such motivations as the only reliable source of good old-fashioned profit, once every automatable and replicable industry has, by improvements in efficiency and competitive reduction of costs, priced itself into economic insignificance. The nations and corporations that get in on the ground floor of the emerging charm economy will control the pipelines of economic value. Terraforming is art, adventure, history, travel: Invest in these and watch your money grow.