Book Review The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised by James Pethokoukis, Center Street, 2023 (336 pages)
Flying cars, autonomous robot maids, and personal jetpacks: all featured as humdrum aspects of life in The Jetsons, the popular 1960s TV series that imagined the future. Yet all remain in the realm of science fiction in 2024. Scientists, policymakers, and investors alike have tried to determine why, pointing to everything from burdensome regulations to a tech sector consumed with shallow social apps. But in The Conservative Futurist, James Pethoukoukis points to a different source: the fact that our popular culture discarded the easy-going futurism of The Jetsons for a mélange of techno-pessimist dystopias.
Pethokoukis, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, traces the history of our views on technological progress from the mid-20th century to today. During the 1960s – the heyday of the space race, the birth of the semiconductor industry, and the mass adoption of color television – Americans felt a sense of technological limitlessness. The Jetsons and Star Trek defined what to expect from the future, Pethokoukis writes, while science fiction writers and policy experts such as Isaac Asimov and Herman Kahn gained reverence as futurist prophets and were featured everywhere from Capitol Hill to The Tonight Show.1 The United States of this era was “Up Wing,” Pethokoukis’s term for “solution-oriented future optimism” that embraces “risk-taking” and believes that technology can “solve big problems” to drive human flourishing.
Yet within a few short years, Pethokoukis writes, Americans became “Down Wingers” – and, but for brief breaks such as the late 90s’ dot-com bubble, have remained so ever since. We grew fearful of risk, growth, and technological progress. As we did so, the Space Age petered out, the atomic age powered down, and productivity growth shuddered to a halt.
One of Pethokoukis’s aims in The Conservative Futurist is to identify the source of this down-wing descent. He considers many possible explanations, including the flowering of the environmental movement and the attendant wave of regulations, the oil shocks, Vietnam-laden malaise, and global geopolitical chaos. Yet Pethokoukis’s central argument is that root of our long-standing down-wingism is not money or politics, but culture.
By the late 1960s, Pethokoukis writes, we began producing and devouring the down-wing ur-texts, such as Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which unearthed hoary fears of overpopulation and famine, and Planet of the Apes, which portrayed a tech-induced nuclear holocaust. The following generations featured a litany of doomer franchises, from Terminator and Blade Runner to Ex Machina and Black Mirror. By forsaking futurists for Cassandras, Pethokoukis argues, we embraced a “self-reinforcing doom loop” of down-wing stories leading to down-wing policy and tech development, further entrenching down-wing narratives. It’s no wonder most Americans think we’re on the wrong track.2
That very unease, Pethokoukis contends, speaks to “the most crucial divide” about America’s future: not “left wing versus right wing” but “Up Wing versus Down Wing.” Unfortunately, the book’s title – The Conservative Futurist – obscures this insight, slipping back into a more conventional left-versus-right framework. Pethokoukis himself seems to realize this, touching on the “conservative” aspect of his futurism briefly, and only then to endorse market capitalism and reject centralized state planning. Up Wingers and Down Wingers exist in both parties, and the struggle between them runs deeper than politics, into the stories we tell ourselves.
If culture is the source of our tech stagnation, it can also be the source for its renewal. The good news is that this renewal is already underway in certain sectors, such as software, in which 70 percent of the top companies are American and U.S. companies dominate in artifical intelligence. Yet if we want that revolution to proliferate to other sectors, such as manufacturing and defense, it must penetrate popular culture. To do that, techno-optimsts must retake the cultural field. Writers and directors must emerge to tell the tale of a tech-powered American century – not necessarily with a new-age, Jetsons-like pollyannish gloss but with a realistic vision of innovation and abundance. The Conservative Futurist offers a promising start.
References
1 Elon Musk has noted that Asimov’s Foundation novels inspired Space X and his ambition to make “life/consciousness multiplanetary.” Elon Musk, X (formerly Twitter), July 11, 2024.
2 Gallup, “Satisfaction with the United States,” Gallup Inc., Washington, D.C., 2024.
