The 'Vital Lie' of World's Fairs

Virginia Postrel went to the Shanghai World's Fair, and came home to write about it for BQO. Excerpt:

Taking place in a society that is both authoritarian and rapidly developing, the Shanghai Expo highlights the double-edged allure of world’s fairs, which are both deceptive and inspiring. The Expo’s cheery boosterism and sanitized reality match Lawrence R. Samuel’s description of the 1964 New York World’s Fair in The End of the Innocence:  a “protective cocoon” where “foreign nations sang in harmony, corporations existed to produce things that made life better, and, most important, the future looked brighter than ever.” Like all glamorous objects, the ’64 fair was an illusion. Yet its optimistic spirit, and those of other fondly remembered world’s fairs, fostered attitudes that often did produce real progress. “For the tens of millions of kids who went,” writes Samuel, who was one of them, the fair “planted a seed of the possibility to achieve great things.”

Conventional wisdom holds that Americans lost their fondness for world’s fairs because we became pessimistic and disillusioned about progress. If so, the naïve enthusiasms on display in Shanghai suggest that the future belongs to the Chinese. But the real story is more complicated. In part, world’s fairs were simply victims of the prosperity they prophesied. The more affluent, well-traveled, and media-saturated the audience, the harder it is to impress. World’s fairs are designed for people from homogeneous cultures who are still impressed by electricity and foreigners. In 2010, that means the Chinese. 

Is it the case that in order to make material progress, a nation and its culture have to believe that progress will make them happier? Or is that even the right question to ask? Virginia points out that we Americans laugh at the hokey-smokes futurism of world's fairs in the past, but because people who went to them believed in what those events promised, they went on to fulfill the prophecies.  Ray Bradbury's story "The Toynbee Convector" alludes to the importance of illusion in keeping a culture's sense of innovation vital. The idea of Progress, in the world's fair sense, may be said to be a "vital lie" -- which is what some call religion and all mythological systems: a story we tell ourselves for our own good. But a lie is a lie, and we know too well that a project built on an untruth is not going to last. Right? Help me out here.