I find that I’m often misinterpreted for failure to speak directly. Something like this happened at the conference I attended this weekend, where someone (actually a respected scholar on the topic) stood up to say that my paper on Vergil’s Georgics had really been about “creative destruction:” you have to destroy something if you want to make something new. Far from it! In fact, the Georgics are about (among other things) how this is basically impossible. It’s not that you can’t create – which people do all the time, especially in the last book of the poem – but that destruction is impossible. What you kill (i.e. Orpheus, Eurydice) always remains somewhere, even if only in memory. Sometimes the preservation is more literal. Say, if you kill tens of thousands of your countrymen to make an empire out of a republic, tempus veniet when all those weapons and giant bones will come out of the ground again, much to the confusion of future farmers. It’s as Timothy Morton says: there’s no away for things to go.
Creative destruction is a modern trope with a modern trick. It’s an advertising slogan, designed to get you to notice one thing and distract you from something else. What’s eye-catching is the “creative” part, which everyone can get behind. It’s an adjective applied to a noun; the noun’s what you take for granted. You’re supposed to think, “hmm. I love it when people create! Definitely worth a little destruction, if that’s what it costs!” You’re not supposed to think about whether destruction is possible, but you should. After all, if it’s not, do you really want to tether your creative process to it?
Actually, I think the Georgics are a lot more on the ball about this than Friedrich Hayek is. Or maybe Hayek’s contemporary and countryman, Freud, is the right citation: the mind is like Rome, except that the ruins are all still intact. It’s a layering where the layers intersect with one another. If you think you’ve actually destroyed something, you’re in trouble: it’ll get back after you like a ghost jedi, forcing you to recognize that the past isn’t past. Hayek dreamed of the unleashed forces of capitalism, destroying old structures and industries to replace them with the latest, greatest thing. That’s what we thought we were doing, 1996-2016. As it turned out, though, we hadn’t actually destroyed the old structures (manufacturing, racism, whatever), we’d just given them an identity, as old. Trump, the archetypical cranky, sponge-brained geriatric, gave them something to organize around. It’s the shock of the old.
The other problem with creative destruction is one that I hinted at before, which is that it makes actual creativity impossible. The big “disruptive” innovations of the past decade or so have been things like Uber (Uber for laundry, Uber for euthanizing your pet, whatever). Uber isn’t actually anything new; it’s just a different, worse way of ordering a cab, where the driver isn’t a professional and doesn’t get any money. Amazon isn’t anything new; it’s just a mail-order catalog with the cash on hand of a small nation-state. Facebook isn’t anything new; it’s just socializing, but with extra psychopaths. The logic of creative destruction means we’re stuck “disrupting” stuff by making worse, more profitable versions of it. That’s good for someone, but odds are it’s not you.
I don’t mean to say that mantras like “creative destruction” actually have a causal force when it comes to making the world shitty. But they do set up a permission structure. They’re excuses for bad, boring, dumb behavior. What’s worse, they’re excuses you make on behalf of other people. Destruction sounds good in theory, but it isn’t happening in practice. Maybe next time, we can build on top of something rather than blowing it up.