An unabashedly dynamist work, The Future and Its Enemies devotes most of its pages to limning the dynamic vision, which has rarely been articulated in full. It does not pretend to invent that vision from scratch or claim to discover new truths for a new age. It unites the work of scholars from many different fields and relates them to the textures of life in an evolving world, past, present, and future. It would make the book so much easier to sell. The question, of course, answers itself.
Static visions depend on hiding the connections between disparate aspects of life.
My purpose is to expose them. Stasists gain credibility by treating dynamism as a shallow fad. My aim is to reveal its rich heritage. Stasists thrive by issuing prescriptions that ignore the details of life, believing that details are unimportant, the stuff of anonymous specialists, and can safely be ignored. My goal is to encourage respect for those details, even when they can only be evoked in passing.