Virginia Postrel is the editor of Reason Magazine.
Why Those With Vision Embrace Imperfection
By Virginia Postrel
Washington Post
Sunday, November 22, 1998; Page C01
Just about every morning around 6, I wake up and glance
at a clock perched four feet away. Its glowing red
digits tell me that it is not yet time to get up, and I
happily roll over for another hour or so of sleep.
Whenever I think about it, I am amazed that I can open
my eyes in the dim light of morning and see.
Every couple of weeks, when I take the required break
from my wear-to-bed contact lenses, I get a sharp
reminder of why my amazement is justified. On those
mornings, the clock is nothing but a dark blur, its
digits smeared into a bright discoloration with no hint
of meaning. That is the way the world--all the world
more than a foot or so away--looks to my naked eyes. No
one who sees the world this way can simply scoff at the
notion of progress.
The development of the contact lens shows how
dissatisfaction and demand breed innovation and
improvement. Back in the late 19th century, an obsessed
Swiss physician named A. Eugen Fick had glass lenses
ground to his specifications, tested them on rabbits and
then tried them on himself--for two whole hours. He
recorded problems that the lenses posed and explored
possible causes. Over the next century, eye specialists,
later joined by polymer chemists, experimented with lens
materials and sizes, with ways of making impressions of
the eyeball and with wetting solutions--all in pursuit
of a lens that would provide the right vision correction
and could be worn for long stretches of time without
harm or irritation.
It was a long and difficult process, with inherent risks
for both innovators (whose ideas might not work) and
users (whose eyes might be injured). Yet this is how
progress arises: through trial and error, experiment and
feedback. Both components are crucial. As economic
historian Joel Mokyr notes, "If every harebrained
technological idea were tried and implemented, the costs
would have been tremendous. Like [biological] mutations,
most technological innovations are duds and deserve to
be eliminated. Yet overcoming the built-in resistance is
the key to technological progress: If no harebrained
idea was ever tried, we would still be living in the
Stone Age."
This principle applies to all innovation. How we feel
about this process tells us who we are as individuals
and as a civilization: Do we think progress requires a
central blueprint, or do we see it as a decentralized,
evolutionary process? Do we see mistakes as permanent
disasters, or as correctable byproducts of
experimentation? Do we search for "stasis"--a regulated,
engineered world? Or do we embrace "dynamism"--a world
of constant creation, discovery and competition? These
poles increasingly define our political, intellectual
and cultural landscape.
Because they believe we learn from choice, competition
and criticism--not from picking winners in
advance--dynamists are willing to put up with
experiments that may not work, or that they think are
lousy. And they embrace plenitude. Their world has room
for a range of enterprises: for both Promise Keepers and
Ms. magazine; for the macho culture of Intel and the
zaniness of Southwest Airlines; for punks and
debutantes; Mozart and Madonna; "The Little Mermaid" and
"Pulp Fiction." Dynamists do not demand that we
collectively choose "one best way."
This way of thinking is foreign to most public debates,
which are often governed by static, technocratic
assumptions. In early 1996, about a year into the
Republican takeover of Congress, I met with a Capitol
Hill insider who tried to explain what had gone wrong
with Newt Gingrich's "revolution." The problem, he said,
was that most members of Congress--including
"revolutionary" Republicans--couldn't imagine life
without central, governmental direction. "They're good
conservatives, so they want to reduce government," he
said. "But they think of that as getting as close to the
abyss as possible without falling off."
Life as the abyss. All too often, that attitude shapes
our political discussion. We have become so accustomed
to technocratic governance that we take for granted that
new ideas, products or problems require government
scrutiny and centralized "solutions." Most political
arguments thus take place between competing technocratic
schemes: Should the tax code favor families with
children or people attending college? Should a national
health insurance program enroll everyone in managed
care, or should we regulate HMOs so they act more like
fee-for-service doctors? Should we regulate, subsidize
or ban biotechnology? The question often isn't whether
the future should be molded to fit a static ideal. It's
whose blueprint should rule.
Instead of rushing to address every new development with
a grand plan or an ad hoc solution, dynamists have the
patience to let trial and error work. "Premature
choice," physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in 1992, "means
betting all your money on one horse before you have
found out whether she is lame."
The search for the perfect corrective lens provides a
microcosm of dynamism at work. Eyeglasses to correct
nearsightedness were invented around the year 1500, two
centuries after reading glasses. For me in the late
1960s, they were miracle enough. The trees once again
had leaves and the chalkboards had words. Contact lenses
came a decade later, along with more wonders: peripheral
vision, sharper and more consistent focus, no annoying
smudges, no slipping down my nose. And I did look
better.
Another decade passed. My hard lenses had been replaced
by gas-permeable ones, safer because they let in more
oxygen. But when I moved to Los Angeles, my eyes
couldn't take the dry air: The lenses would cause me
pain within a few hours, driving me back to glasses and
all the shortcomings I thought I'd escaped. Finally, a
new optometrist hit on a solution: disposables, which
had been on the market only a couple of years. Unlike
rigid lenses, they came in off-the-shelf sizes--easier
to fit than shoes--and could be quickly and cheaply
replaced. They were super-wet and got thrown away before
they could get grungy. As an added bonus, I could keep
them in for two weeks at a time.
The inventors are still at work, and the perfect contact
lens remains always out of reach. This process is hardly
unique to contacts. Authors revise books, cooks fiddle
with recipes, teachers try new techniques and parents
hope to do better with their second child than their
first. Rarely do we discover perfection. The
imperfections of the world generate the demand for
progress. "Form follows failure," explains civil
engineering professor Henry Petroski, whose popular
books explore the histories of such mundane objects as
zippers and forks.
Fix one problem and others arise. Or having solved the
more serious problems, we turn to others we never
worried about before. Car makers refine the placement of
cup holders; dishwasher manufacturers design fold-down
racks; Procter & Gamble produces Tide Free for the
allergy-prone. Post-it Notes sprang from one man's
discontent with the bookmarks that kept falling out of
his choir hymnal.
Contrary to the traditional technocratic vision, the
very nature of progress dictates an inherently open,
unpredictable and imperfect future. This diverse,
decentralized process makes those who crave control
uncomfortable. No one is in charge, and the results are
risky.
Consider the advice dispensed by Vogue medical columnist
and physician Isadore Rosenfeld on disposable,
extended-wear contact lenses. Three of the four experts
he surveyed, Rosenfeld wrote in June 1994, say sleeping
in the lenses "is not safe" and is unjustified "unless
you're having near-sighted dreams." Don't do it, he
warned, but added, "There's good news on the horizon:
I'm told there are lenses in development that will
permit adequate passage of oxygen to the eye and will
likely be safer for overnight wear."
As consumer information on the inherent hazards of
sticking pieces of plastic in your eyes and then going
to sleep, Rosenfeld's column was entirely reasonable. He
questioned cornea authorities and presented up-to-date
research. And I can testify from excruciatingly painful
personal experience that extended-wear lenses do entail
the risk of corneal ulcers.
But would we have contact lenses at all, much less safer
lenses in development, if everyone shared Rosenfeld's
attitude toward risk taking? We can only imagine what
he--or any other sensible person--would have advised the
obsessed Dr. Fick when he was placing ground-glass
lenses over his eyeballs and observing the results.
Confined to a fashion magazine, Rosenfeld's preference
for progress without risk is a benign fantasy, no more
dangerous than the lingerie ad it followed. But it is,
in fact, a fantasy. Risk and courage are essential to
innovation. The early adopters who take chances with
unproven innovations provide critical feedback both to
innovators and later users. The information they supply
helps determine whether a new idea will flop altogether
or get to prove itself to a larger public.
Just about every new idea goes through a debugging
process. When the use of bank credit cards spread in the
1960s, the losses bordered on the catastrophic. Issuing
banks lost millions of dollars in theft, fraud and bad
debts. Consumers screamed about receiving unordered
cards in the mail--a technique banks used to establish a
large enough network of cardholders to interest
retailers. Pundits warned of a nation of "credit
drunks." Congress held hearings, led by Wright Patman,
then the powerful chairman of the House Banking and
Currency Committee. He threatened to regulate bank cards
out of business. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed,
and only minor restrictions became law.
As for the risks (and losses) the banks took, they were
as necessary as they were painful. "Most credit card
veterans now view the late 1960s as a time of madness,
culminating in staggering losses to the banks, public
embarrassment and federal legislation," Joseph Nocera
wrote in "A Piece of the Action," a history of the
"money revolution." From that chaos emerged our current
credit card system.
Trial and error is a very humble process. It invests no
one with decisive power, assumes no one is omniscient or
even particularly wise. It cherishes the unheralded
inventor willing to test a new idea. It recognizes that
most ideas will fail--but converts that weakness into a
powerful lever for progress. "There is no way to find
the best design except to try out as many designs as
possible and discard the failures," writes physicist
Dyson.
Progress does not mean that everyone will be better off
in every respect. But under ordinary circumstances, for
the random individual, life in a dynamic society will be
better tomorrow, on the whole, than life today. It will
offer more variety, more opportunity, more options, more
knowledge, more control over time and place, more life.
It will address more sources of dissatisfaction (though
it may also call attention to new ones) and create more
sources of delight.
And while dynamism will not perfect moral character or
avert foolish ideas, its continuous processes of
criticism and correction will, over time, curb excesses
and limit damage. We have not discovered the one best
way to live, nor is it likely that we ever will. But we
can improve our lot by building on the discoveries,
insights and experiments of the past.
Virginia Postrel is the editor of Reason magazine. This
article is adapted from her new book, "The Future and
Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity,
Enterprise and Progress" (Free Press).
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company