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Future Shockby Alvin Toffler(Random House; 430 pp.; $8.95.Bantam
Book; 565 pp.; $1.95)
Richard LueckeAlvin Tofflers Future Shock is note-worthy not
only for its argumentbearing on technology and culturebut as a
cultural event. Portions ofthis work by an editor of Fortunepassed
through Horizon, Redbook,and Playboy on the way to a Ran-dom House
hardcover edition, whichwent through fifteen printings in lessthan
a year before becoming a Ban-tam Book available on every book-stand
and drug counter. Early editionswere advertised as being
talkedabout by Betty Friedan, MarshallMcLuhan, Richard Nixon,
andBuckminster Fuller; the paperbackis still being mentioned by
bothguests and hosts on the talk shows.Projections and proposals
from manysources were here packaged for awaiting, apprehensive, and
apprecia-tive public. That readership meritsieflection no less
than-and along-side-the substance of the book.A roaring vortex of
technologicalchange is, as Toffler puts it, racing,hurtling,
arrowing, and, above all,accelerating through the society,
pro-ducing the second, or at most thethird, great era in
civilization: super-(not post-) industrialism. If wecount out
history in eight hundredlifetimes, print has been known onlyin the
last six, electricity in the lasttwo, most material goods only in
thelast one. Half the energy consumedby men in the past two
thousarldyears was actually consumed in thelast hundred. A t a
growth rate of5-10 per cent annually, productiondoubles in fifty
years. Facts of anaddable, storable, usable sort (the-fuel of
technology) will increasefourfold before the child born
todaygraduates from college, thirty-two-fold by the time he is
fifty; at hisdeath, 97 per cent of all accumulatedknowledge will
have been the prod-uct of his own lifetime. The result-ing
technology makes increasingly
disposable many items of social re-lationships, things, places,
organiza-. tions, and ideas. S y h change knowsno geographical
boundaries and pro-duces universal history.
NeedlBss to say, people are feelingshock-not least the reader.
But,while his language does not lenditself to making evaluations,
To5eris able to describe those who taketo technological change and
crestits waves joyfully. They are trainedpeople (the brain drain
came fromEurope not merely to acquire dollarsbut to live faster)
and executiveswho move freely-advance agents ofman, the earliest
citizens of theworldwide super-industrial societynow in the throes
of birth. Thosewho dont take to it, seek flight fromit, never do
adjust adequately, arelikely to be older people (and someconfused
young), untrained (ortraditionalists with Rousseauite ro-manticism
or Luddite paroxysms),mournful rurals who cling to theland
(remaining victims of the tyr-anny of geography) or preserve
at-tachments to cottages like those de-picted in cloying English
poetry.Toffler does not mean to be overtlyevaluative. His argument
is thattechnological advance is here to stayand that, for the most
part, thosewho can adapt will. His is not thecynical argument that,
since we cantbent it, we would do well to join it.Most people like
what technology isable to produce, and only partly be-cause they
have been induced to do
New technological output resultsin a multiplication of choices
which,Toffler asserts, extends the rangeof freedom and entails
greater op-portunities for self-realization: thanever before. He
refers not only tolarge-scale possibilities (sea cities,cyborgs,
fabricated men) but also topsychic pleasures which can beadded to
products or which can bedirectly induced. What, then, doesToffler
recommend for the malaise offuture shock? He has made a re-markable
survey of social science. laboratories for present or antici-pated
techniques of measuring stressand adaptability, which not onlyhelp
discover limits of tolerable
so .
change but might also help enlatgethem. In addition to
supportivetherapies and withdrawal communi-ties, he points to
education which,once freed from older static concep-tions, might
serve to increase peo-ples copability through formationof
anticipatory images and tech-niques of information handling.
Simi-larly, public programs can be sub-jected to devices which
monitor en-vironmental and social equilibrium.Societal decisions
can be facilitatedthrough the invention of diversifiedscientific
futures. (Hippies, the-ologians, and interdisciplinary
groupsimagine futures which technologiststest for feasibility.)
Toffler joinsthose who believe the media willmake it possible to go
to the peo-ple as never before with alternativeproposals.
Media-held social futureassemblies will ventilate proposalswhich
might otherwise have stayedbehind closed doors.
What Toffler has done is to raisethe question of technological
de-velopment in language characteristicof highly schooled, highly
employedAmericans. His syntax is itself em -piricist and
technological in its treat-ment of knowledge as hard data,freedom
as choices, and evaluationas votes. There is a welcome absenceof
any talk about noncumulativesorts of knowledge or
intractableaccumulations of power. But, pre-cisely for that reason,
a questionarises whether this book is not partand parcel of trends
which havebrought the society to certain im-passes, and whether its
chief effect(especially in view of its large andgratified
readership) is not to en-force those trends.
Tofflers language remains remark-ably impervious to
considerationsraised by other commentators ontechnology, freedom,
and publicdecision. Though he treats techno-logical advance as a
virtual givenand defines knowledge as the fuelof technology,
Toffler is not led toask whether human intervention andinvention
are not thereby proscribed.Jacques Ellul is chided as a
techno-phobe, but the well-known argu-ment of The Technological
Societyis not considered: i.e., the extent to
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which technology tends to augmentitself (as side effects and
fallout setnew problems), interlock (for ex -ample, as production
requires mar-keting and planning techniques),and roll on in a quite
amoral way(there was no way to nuclear energyexcept through the
bomb).Facts are not simply given; theyare, as the word itself
implies,made. A culture is characterizedby the facts which it
values and byits valuations which are facts. Isthere no connection
between the de-fense budgets for research and de-velopment during
the past genera-tion and the circumstance that thereare more
scientists today than pre-viously since Adam? Toffler is with-out
any explanation for the fact thatthe steam engine of Hero of
Alex-andria remained a toy, that the conicsections of Apollonius
were not ap -plied for hvo thousand years, thatArchimedes smashed
his machineand Leonard0 refused to allow pro-duction of his
inventions. (Todaysuch delays are almost unthink-able.) ToHers
assumptions tend toleave us with a tyranny of facts:with a past
from which we cannotlearn, a present in which we cannotintervene
through the formation offa& aQd judgments, and a futurefull of
terror-admittedly, more ter-ror for some than for others.
Multiplication of products andmodules (forty-four varieties of
Mus-tang) no doubt give more freedomof a sort, but the new choices
liebetween parallel lines set by tech-nological feasibility and
marketabil-ity-as Marcuse described in One-Dimensional Man. Are we
free to d e -cline Mustangs, even in the face ofaccumulated
evidence that every in-crease in automotive speed lengthensthe time
we spend in getting fromplace to place where we want to be,and
diminishes the number of placesthere are to go on the whole? It
maybe asked whether our very tastes arenot adapting to the
necessities ofmass production (Wonder Bread).In any case,7he e
seems some slip-page behveen the grand passion de-manded by Madame
Bovary and thatelicited by abstracted knees, el-bows, and rumps on
the cover of
Playboy or achieved with a vibrator.If, as Toffler admits,
psychicallyloaded merchandise blurs the linebetween fad and
product, and psy-chically induced pleasures blur theline behveen
illusion and reality,who then is being escapist-theman who resists
such masturbatoryawareness or the man who crestsit? The point is
that Tofflers lan-guage affords no firm criteria or pri-orities for
making such choices-though such rationalities are includedby
Marcuse and others in the veryconception of freedom.
Many of ToHers practical pro-posals seem a straight-faced
linkageof material and human technologieslike that against which
Ellul warned:It is precisely the need to diagnoseand cure this
disease [FutureShock!] that is offered as both jus-tification and
demand for the crea-tion of new human techniques.In contemplating
the cooptability ofeducational functions, it gives pauseto note how
specific suggestionsdropped along the way by EverettReimer and Ivan
Illich (an end offactory-model schools, a call for pa-rental and
neighborhood instruction)reappear in ToHers proposals-though the
parents and neighbor-hoods he names are near Santa.Monica,
Califomia, where thk RANDCorporation has its headquarters, inthe
research belt around Cambridge,Massachusetts, or in such
sciencecities as Oak Ridge, Los Alamos orHuntsville. Let the
reformer be-ware! In the end, Toffler allows theburden of decision
to rest with pri-vate imagination and social future
assemblies without any tradition tofocus their discussion or any
lan-guage with which to pursue it.Victor Ferkiss, . in
TechnobgicalMan: The Myth and the Reality,remains unsnowed by
generalizationsabout mass man and insists onthe power of human
intervention intechnological development. But heis never so bold as
to venture that,merely by extension of previous atti-tudes, people
will pose appropriatefutures or choose well among them.What began
for Ferkiss as a study oftechnology and politics issued in acall
for philosophic changes which
will focus new norms with respectto nature and mans function
withinit and will issue restrictions on alter-ing the human
organism before welearn what it can accomplish in itspresent form
once liberated fromhunger, fear, and ignorance.Toffler is more
shocking, less de-manding. He draws no lines against
increasing material desires as such,which leads invariably to
increasingdivisions in the society. His projec-tions do not include
mass starvationfor lack of resources shortly after theturn of the
century. Perhaps he istalking about a more distant future;but he
pretends to be talking aboutthe next years, and those are theyears
of his readers. Occasionally aparagraph names present povertyand
scarcity as presenting projectswhich might slow the present
tech-nological onrush, but it seems thoseparagraphs were inserted
as an after-thought. You cant say I haventthought about that-then
the argu-ment resumes, as though it had notbeen touched-or
invalidated.
A richer language seems neededto find our way into the future
inspite of present shock. Otherwisetechnological development may
wellfall before the childs question: Whyhave the technocrats gone
to all thetrouble? Answer: Of course, to makepeople happy! But w hy
, seeing theycould make all men deliriously happy,amid the worst
privations, with elec-tric charges to the brain?
CONTRIBUTORSDENNISHALE,a freelance writer,co-edited The Ne w
Student Left andCalifornia Dream.
MIGUELA. BRETOSs Acting As-sistant Professor of History at
Ober-lin.
JAMES LOESELeaches political sci-ence at Washington and Lee
U.WILLIAM. STEVENSONs a mem-ber of the political science faculty a
tthe U. of Wisconsin, Whitewater.
PETERHENNER,n undergraduatestudent at Livingston College,
Rut-gers, writes frequently on contem-porary radicalism.RICHARD
LUECKEs Director ofStudies at the Urban Training Cen-ter in
Chicago.
