Is It Fair?

A fascinating look at world's fairs from my friend Virginia Postrel. She was just in Shanghai to see Expo 2010. Like most Americans, I didn't even know they had a world's fair out there.

That's because, Virginia believes (and I agree), that world's fairs used to represent an exciting look at a bigger world--even a glimpse of the future--to most Westerners. Now the whole concept seems like a nostalgic afterthought.

Thanks to computers, television, cars, cheap air flight, more imports and quite a few other things, the planet has become a lot smaller--at least to countries that have money. In Peggy Sue Got Married, Kathleen Turner returns to her 1960 high school days, where one character feels he has to explain what a "burrito" is. In a Mad Men episode, Betty Draper hosts a dinner party with a "trip around the world" theme, including such exotic fare as Heineken, a "beer from Holland." That's an age that would still be impressed by a world's fair. But as the post-WWII boom continued, the whole concept lost its glamor. By Postrel's account, the last one that really clicked was Montreal's Expo '67.

Which is why the 2010 Exposition has been a big hit with the Chinese. They're coming by the millions. They've only recently liberalized their economy, and still have a closed culture, so the opportunity to see the rest of the world still holds excitement, and hope, for them.

Postrel notes another reason why world's fairs seem like the past. Not because we're cynical about the future, but that we see it differently from how we used to. These fairs used to present a vision of an orderly, top-down, well-planned society:

They came to stand for a controlled and predictable version of progress: the dream of a civilization built from scratch, designed — or at least rearranged — according to an expert ideal of order. Or as the Century of Progress motto put it, “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms."

[....] That vision did give America interstate highways and a trip to the moon. But it also sparked a backlash. In the 1960s, the New Left and the Goldwater Right, hippies and hackers, personal liberation movements and historic preservationists all rebelled against the tyranny of expertise.

[....] Twentieth-century world’s fairs had encouraged visitors to equate progress and technological optimism with the Galbraithian vision of stable, heavily bureaucratic, industrial quasi-monopolies — the corporate version of nation states — working with government to determine the future. All the rage in the first half of the 20th century, this technocratic theory of progress became not only less popular but much less believable in the second half.

So progress can't always be planned. I don't deny, however, that I'd still like to travel by jet pack.