Monsters and The Dialectic of Progress

Jocelyn Wildenstein is an over-wealthy New York woman who wanted to take advantage of her wealth and the incredible technology available to her to achieve some personal goals. She made changes here, then there, then, when the whole was less than she wanted from the sum of its parts, she did more. Much of this was small work, focused and controlled. It is important to understand that there was nothing casual here, nothing off handed and certainly nothing amateurish. She spent $4 million and it went to experts. Each step taken was to create her vision, to improve on what had been done before.

 

She had the audacity of hope.

 

This well intended meddling has a familiar ring to it. It is something of us all, our eagerness to improve things, make things better. It comes from a noble source: our confidence in our world, our belief in productive effort, but mostly our esteem for ideals. Beauty is not just beauty; it has virtue. So our efforts are never just self-centered. There is more on the line.

 

So we redo the garden, take New Year seriously, restructure a room done before by people of the same mind and generally try to achieve something a little bit more.

 

It is this way with government. It starts with a noble aim and writes a law. Then it rewrites its law, modifying and improving, a little addition here, a nip-and-tuck there, as it pursues the final perfection. And so a plastic improvement emerges from a hardened past.

Through our optimistic and destructive fine-tuning we build our monsters bit by bit. The average man calls this a disaster. The academic calls it "the dialectic."