Among the InteUectualoids / Alvin's Song
Ross, Mitchell S.
ALVIN'S SONG An January 1950, just as the second half of the twentieth century opened, a gangling twenty-two-year-old with a newly minted university diploma took a long bus ride through the night...
...I soon learned that my 'answers' were partial, one-sided and obsolete...
...We have, as it were, no heritage of the future...
...I want to believe in Alvin...
...We know that our prophet could not merely be pandering to his audience, and so this is puzzling...
...This was change...
...He called it social 'wavefront' analysis," which "looks at history as a succession of rolling waves and asks where the leading edge of each wave is carrying us...
...Toffler's prophetic gift has been extolled all over the-world...
...I refuse to believe it...
...Serial marriage-a pattern of successive temporary marriages...
...I am ashamed of its cultural arrogance and its depredations against the rest of the world...
...This statement is corroborated by Professor Jessie Bernard, "a world-prominent family sociologist," according to Alvin...
...He continued his search for the truth...
...He contributed "countless" (according to one of his book jackets) articles to newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals...
...He was, for example, impressed by "the recent upsurge of rental activity in fields in which it was all but unknown in the past.'' To Toffler, the traveling salesman stepping up to the Hertz . counter was not merely a man of commerce interested in efficient transportation...
...We need to construct, Utopia factories.' " "For, by making imaginative use of change to channel change, we cannot only spare ourselves the trauma of future shock, we can reach out and humanize distant tomorrows," With this final vision of humanized tomorrows the first of Alvin's two great books of prophecy comes to a close...
...The fact that Soviet and Eastern European elections routinely produced magical majorities of 99 to 100 percent suggested that the need for reassurance remained at 'east as strong in the centrally planned societies as in the "free world...
...Its architecture is different...
...The boys in the factory agreed that the ex-millwright had gone far...
...Technology has introduced both novelty and transience into the culture to a degree hitherto unknown...
...Snow as the author of the notion that despair is a sin...
...But why does Alvin hate supporters of nuclear energy, too...
...Here is a sample: "While offering the obligatory lip service to democracy and social justice, the Nixons, Carters, Thatchers, Brezhnevs, Giscards, and Ohiras of the industrial world rode into office by promising little more than efficient management.'' Recalling the great public debates of 1964 and other Soviet election years, one might wonder how Comrade Brezhnev found his way onto that list...
...Yet Alvin says it isn't so...
...Education must shift into the future tense...
...In the meantime we must be prepared to endure revolutionary tensions...
...Before my wife and I arrived in Tokyo, NHK had lined up a series of lectures...
...Toffler perceived a European distaste for Time magazine...
...By the middle of the nineteenth century," he writes, "every industrializing nation had its sharply defined left wing and its right, its advocates of individualism and free enterprise, and its advocates of collectivism and socialism...
...ALVIN'S SONG An January 1950, just as the second half of the twentieth century opened, a gangling twenty-two-year-old with a newly minted university diploma took a long bus ride through the night into what he regarded as the central reality of our time...
...One can only regret that this intriguing analysis was not extended to explain the success of Time's French counterpart, L 'Express...
...And so, all ye of little futuristic faith, good night . . . and have a humanized tomorrow...
...My ears were split by the hiss of steam, the clank of chains, the roar of pug mills...
...But it is his books that have made him famous...
...Alvin can be awfully frustrating...
...We must remember that we are discussing a man who had the moral grandeur to write, I detest the way industrialism crushed First Wave and primitive peoples...
...I cannot forget the way it massified war and invented Auschwitz and unleashed the atom to incinerate Hiroshima...
...Acetylene sparks left burn marks on my legs...
...Among his most enthusiastic customers are the Japanese, who, I suspect, have secretly craved a replacement for Douglas MacArthur ever since the old soldier faded away...
...I swallowed the dust, the smoke and steam of the foundry...
...I learned firsthand how factory workers struggled to earn a living in the industrial age...
...It is more prescriptive...
...His girlfriend, Heidi, was destined to become his wife and associate prophet...
...Future" should be studied as history used to be and "science fiction should be required reading for Future I." Something of the medieval spirit should be revived, but, where folks used to envision heaven and hell, "We need now to propagate dynamic, nonsupernatural images of what temporal life will be like, what it will sound and smell and taste and feel like in the fast-onrushing future...
...Four million copies of Future Shock were printed and, understandably, Alvin's faith in the future intensified...
...I felt the heat as the white-hot steel poured...
...In brief, young Toffler had seen the present and had decided it didn't work...
...ilow did he do it...
...Citizens of the world's largest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time...
...The third-person voice initially disguises the autobiographical nature of the passage but one paragraph later the veil is dropped and the memories pour forth: I spent five years in those factories, not as a clerk or personnel assistant but,as an assembly hand, a millwright, a welder, a forklift driver, a punch press djperatorstamping out fans, fixing machines in a foundry, building .giant dust control machines for African mines, finishing the metal on light trticks as they sped clat tering and screeching past on the as sembly line...
...Gazing out at the American landscape the Prophet Alvin saw many strange things come to pass...
...Would happy days be here again...
...This is as if I were to say, "My Uncle Norman once told me, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.''' My way would be to quote the Lord God directly...
...is the natural, the inevitable outgrowth of a social order in which automobiles are rented, dolls traded in, and dresses discarded after one-time use...
...When I was a Marxist during my late teens and early twenties-now more than a quarter of a century ago-I, like many young people, thought I had all the answers...
...It embodies and exports the American Pace of Life...
...As a result the asses are tumbling over the applecarts and average folks are wondering what the hell it all means...
...It took a Toffler to see the similarity between running through airports and filing for divorce...
...An Albanian James Reston couldn't have put it any better...
...Corporate and bureaucratic reorganizations portended nothing less than the death of bureaucracy and the coming of "Ad-hocracy...
...If only great men had the time for small matters of detail...
...And one day, perhaps while disrobing and hearing Heidi lament the lost beauty of his legs, he determined to consecrate his life to the future...
...Moreover, the theoretical sentiments that had sustained him othroughout those years in the factory weakened...
...For them, the future will have arrived too soon...
...Perhaps he feels it doesn't sit well with his image as a man of the future...
...Mindful of the hazards inherent in the task, Alvin argued that we must leap joyfully into the future...
...Indeed, it may well be that the widespread European dislike for Time, itself, is not entirely political, but stems unconsciously from the connotation of its title...
...Make that Change...
...He suspected that not only culture shock, but future shock, was behind it...
...I need to believe in him...
...To forgive, or at least ignore, Hitler, and blame industrialism: this is spiritual generosity...
...That twenty-two-year-old, Alvin Toffler, was destined to become a prophet...
...He signed on as an associate editor of Fortune magazine...
...After lengthy communion with Heidi and a digital processor he began to manufacture thunder...
...Toffler saw that the world, having endured the agricultural (First Wave) and industrial (Second Wave) revolutions, was now in the midst of a post-industrial (Third Wave) revolution...
...The perceptive reader will find that its structure mirrors its central metaphor-the clash of waves...
...With his girlfriend at his side and a pasteboard suitcase filled with books under the seat, he watched a gunmetal dawn come up as the factories of the American Midwest slid endlessly past the rain-swept window...
...Where folks once simply assumed that nothing lasts forever Alvin confidently intoned "the Death of Permanence...
...I spoke for about an hour and a half and a few nights later NHK telecast the entire lecture during prime time as "Alvin Toffler Speaks to the Japanese Nation...
...Like the Oberammergau Passion play, they have appeared at the start of decades: Future Shock in 1970 and The Third Wave in 1980...
...The man of the future would be more interested in collecting experiences than in collecting things...
...It is the mainstream marriage pattern of tomorrow...
...He has published four, though I have not read two of them: The Culture Consumers is hard to find and The Eco-Spasm Report has an unpleasant title...
...A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.'' He means all those Thatchers and Brezhnevs and other Second Wave types...
...One of the great advantages of social wavefront analysis, it soon becomes evident, is that it enables Alvin to lump things together when lesser prophets might feel inclined to make trivial distinctions...
...By the middle of the nineteenth century the Webbs -not to mention Eugene V. Debs- had not yet begun their enlightenment of Second Wave civilization, so to whom is Alvin referring...
...So Future Shock opens in an alarming manner: In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future...
...But he saw no reason why this should deter us: Proper social planning and education would steady the course of Spaceship Earth...
...Alvin would have little patience with such small-minded quibbling...
...In far off France "an angry outcry . . . has greeted the recent introduction of American-style drugstores in Paris . . . at Le Drugstore the thirsty Frenchman gulps a hasty milkshake instead of lingering for an hour or two over an aperitif at an outdoor bistro...
...He pondered an immediate problem...
...The important thing to remember is that the Soviet Union, like the United States and its chief allies, was a Second Wave nation, characterized by industrialism...
...Recently he traveled to Japan under the sponsorship of NHK, the television network which also has a book publishing division...
...How did the second masterpiece differ from the first...
...The social planning should preferably be done by committee, and include such innovations as groups of cul-turati meeting in New York and Paris to organize long-range artistic goals...
...he was being swept along by " a spectacular new force [that] has emerged to challenge many of the most deeply engrained patterns of the automotive industry...
...Today as never before we need a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies- images of potential tomorrows...
...Great Britain...
...The above passage is an autobiographical pearl buried inside Toffler's most recent book of prophecy, The Third Wave...
...I watched the managers who kept the workers in their place, white-shirted men themselves endlessly pursued and harried by higher-ups...
...Never mind whether you are for nuclear energy or against it: In the context of social wavefront analysis the thing would seem to be unassailably Third Wave...
...Well, to start, he found himself a Great Theme...
...As so often he grows reticent just when we need him most...
...Well, we must not be impudent...
...This is the auto rental business...
...Millions have read these books and the publishers assure us that lives have been changed by them...
...To equate Auschwitz and Hiroshima: this is social wavefront analysis at its most heroic...
...Does it not after all represent one of the newer technologies...
...The Prophet Alvin subsequently briefed the New York Times on the experience...
...Our social wavefront analyst-prophet's sense of history is as brilliantly original as his sense of the upheaval caused by the appearance of Time magazine in Europe...
...In the cities and in the countryside, on the seas and in the air, our prophet saw Change upsetting people's lives...
...He became a Washington correspondent...
...Time, with its brevity and breathless style, exports more than the American Way of Life...
...Why, for example, does he cite C.P...
...No matter: Whoever has read Toffler's two most celebrated tomes has captured the essence and fragrance of the man...
...Yes, I have heard it said that Alvin Toffler is nothing but a claptrap dialectician, a ninth-rate thinker, devoid of moral intelligence and common sense, who managed to retool the Marxism of his youth into highly profitable prophecy in middle age...
...The demand for novelty had become insatiable...
...These are, of course, Future Shock and The Third Wave...
...I helped lift a sixty-five-year-old woman out of the bloody machine that had just torn four fipgers off her hand, and I still hear her cries-"Jesus and Mary, I won't be able to work again...
...I am a child of the late twentieth century and I crave answers...
...We have no objects, no friends, no relatives, no works of art, no music or literature, that originate in the future...
...In the Introduction to The Thira Wave he denounced the prophets of doom and proclaimed, "The Thira Wave is for those who think the human story, far from ending, has only just begun...
...For the first one they invited 200 of the top industrialists plus an additional 200 people whose names were drawn at random from a pile of postcards by people who wrote in asking to attend...
...To begin with, it covers a much wider sweep of time-past as well as future...
...So he set his muscle relaxant and his copy of Das Kapital aside and ventured into journalism...
...The United States of America...
...Unfortunately, many other prophets saw the same thing, which meant Alvin would have to do something different in order to have his voice heard above the roar...
...I crave hope...
...Alvin, apparently, is too bashful to quote ancient sources...
...As Alvin put it in one of his most arresting formulations, "What happens to an economy when, as is likely, the entire concept of property is reduced to meaninglessness...
...While distinguishing himself as a Computer Age Ezekiel, Toffler taught at Cornell University and the New School for Social Research...
...He conducted a Playboy interview with Vladimir Nabokov...
...I am sickened by the waste of human energy, imagination and spirit in our ghettos and barrios...
...Seen in this perspective the real purpose of the electoral process can be detected: that they were still in command-that they "could, in theory at least, dis-elect as well as elect leaders...
...I crave meanings...
...Alvin added a new wrinkle to his prophetic technique...
...I turned Out thousands of pieces of shift on a press, repeating identical movements until my mind and muscles shrieked...
...In both capitalist and socialist countries, these ritual reassurances often proved more important than the actual outcome of many elections...
Vol. 14 • June 1981 • No. 6
