John Leary
Wayne State University
I am associate professor of English at Wayne State University. I am author of A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the U.S. Imagination (Virginia 2016) and Keywords for the Age of Austerity: The New Lexicon of Inequality, under contract with Haymarket Books. My non-academic writing on inequality and the culture of neoliberalism can be found in Guernica, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, and The Awl.
“Innovation” is a ubiquitous word with a long history and a slippery meaning. Until the early 20th century, it was used to denounce false prophets and political dissidents. Shakespeare used the word in this way in Henry IV, when the King speaks of “poor discontents” gaping at the news of “hurly-burly innovation.” By the turn of the last century, though, “innovator” had lost its old associations with heresy. A milestone was achieved around 1914, when Vernon Castle, America’s foremost dance instructor, invented a “decent,” simplified American version of the Argentine tango and named it “the Innovation.” No longer a deviant sin, innovation—and “The Innovation”—had become positively decent.
The innovator, no longer a false prophet, is now the closest thing to a ideal personality our fractious society possesses. Everything New Under the Sun tells the surprising story of a term that has become for the twenty-first century what “progress” was for the nineteenth: the virtue to which both societies and individuals aspire. It’s a story that begins with the Book of Ecclesiastes, which counseled believers that there was nothing new under the sun—innovation was the work of God alone. It continues with those who have ignored this advice ever since, from the court of King James I to the White House, from the false prophets once denounced as “innovators” to the Silicon Valley “digital prophets” and self-help gurus now celebrated as the same. A word that began its life in the seventeenth century as a synonym for “heretic” is now our finest modern virtue. Who could possibly be against it?
The story of innovation in America today is most often told as a history of “disruptors,” C.E.O.s, and computer scientists. But there is another innovation story, a romance of capitalist heroes and the power of the free market in a new Gilded Age. This is the story told in this book. It explores how a term for religious deviance became the twenty-first century’s ideal of success, but it also shows how much remains of the “innovator’s” older, prophetic identity. This story of innovation takes us to to the tech campuses of Palo Alto and the lecture halls of the Ivy League, but it also passes through Wilmington, DE, where DuPont, an early adopter of innovation as a brand identity, promised better living through chemistry. And it detours on divergent technological paths, like the dream of socialist cybernetics in Allende’s Chile and the practice of innovación in Cuba, the name for Cubans’ famous ability to keep old technologies running amindst privation.
It explores how a term for religious deviance became the twenty-first century’s ideal of success, but it also shows how much remains of the “innovator’s” older, prophetic identity. When national politics and our post-apocalyptic obsessions seem to promise fear and disaster, the “innovation” myth offers the fantasy that every social problem can be solved with a new technology or an unheard idea. It’s a myth of that creativity, but always in competition; it aims for the mysteries of spiritual life, but mostly summons its reverence for authority; and it lionizes collaboration, but only for profit.
