Anticipatory Democracy

...This he calls "future shock...

...Mugs like Gandhi, Robert Kennedy and Charlie Brown are skeptical, prudent, iconoclastic...

...Toffler further demonstrates that people of the future who live in the present "consume life styles the way people of an earlier, less choice-choked time consumed ordinary products...

...Zealots like Lenin, Dayan and Superman are bold, authoritative...

...they are advocates of economic conservatism, revolution, patriotism, even war...

...Zbigniew Brzezinski sees the present as a period of transition between the industrial age and a time when technologies, especially electronics--hence the neologism "technetronic"--will be "the principal determinants of social change, altering the mores, the social structure, the values, and the global outlook of society...

...with new social services, a future-facing education system, new ways to regulate technology, and a strategy for capturing control of change...

...Yet I despair that those whom Brzezinski terms "irrational humanists" will learn what is needed for the fulfillment of that goal...

...the future Calder, Brzezinski and Toffler foresee demands the fusion of those two cultures...

...or the boy who committed suicide because "without a license, I don't have my car, job, or social life...

...He wants the Mugs to win out over the Zealots, and believes they will because "it is scarcely credible that the well-informed, research-trained interconnected communities of the foreseeable future should tolerate men in power who want power for its own sake, who have simple-minded theories of society, or who seek to profit from the differences among men...

...The "irrational humanists" display an ignorance of science that is truly shocking...

...Let it be sufficient to say that the intricacies of "America's role in the technetronic era," to borrow his subtitle, are richly illuminated by his work...

...Reviewed by E. Nelson Hayes Ours has been variously called the age of protest, the postindustrial society, the electric age, the technetronic society, technopolis, the global village, the superindustrial society, postcivilization...

...Three of the above terms are from the books at hand...

...Toffler hopes for a "massive, global exercise in anticipatory democracy...

...Toffler sets out to diagnose the disease resulting from change, "the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time...

...Calder suggests the employment of electronic techniques that will decentralize political power and permit democratic participation not only in governing but also in defining "exploratory" and "normative" futures...

...The technetronic rate of change Brzezinski discusses is the most important characteristic of Alvin Toffler's superindustrial world, a "complex, fast-paced society dependent upon extremely advanced technology and a postmaterialist value system...

...505 pp...

...The major problem with technopolis, as he sees it, is a lack of control over its novelty--primarily a result of the belief that "the uses of science are politically boring" and the nationalistic misuse of science...

...They continue to attack technology as the chief source of their woes and the world's--while pounding out the manuscript on an electric typewriter, having the kids inoculated against polio, picking up the wife's birth-control pills at the local pharmacy, and otherwise indulging in the many benefits technology has brought them...

...there are too many other forces at work in society for us to focus so exclusively on the nature and effects of change...

...they believe in internationalism, liberalism and democracy, and are "concerned and wooly minded...

...Yet his proposals are admittedly rather vague because the purpose of his book is to diagnose rather than cure...

...If society is to control the application of technology, as indeed it should, then first it will be necessary to drag the academicians screaming into the 20th century...

...He is not only thoroughly familiar with his subject but presents his ideas in an often memorable if sometimes oversimplified fashion...

...Brzezinski is less naive, and therefore possibly more hopeful...

...For in scores of books now appearing that attempt to define, describe and interpret our times, there is a terrifying sense that we are undergoing a profound revolution whose nature we do not understand and whose future we fear...

...for example, Wylie Sypher seriously proposes in Literature and Technology that if the humanist should know something about the second law of thermodynamics, the scientist ought to be familiar with Verner's law of philology...

...That having been said, however, it must be added that his is a brilliant book, offering more understanding of present and anticipated psychosocial phenomena than any I have read in recent years...

...Once stated, the thesis becomes self-evident, and Toffler indulges himself in an orgy of examples: the couple who moved 28 times in 26 years--inspiring the not wholly humorous proposal of some executive that only the husband be moved to a new post in another area, where a modular family would be provided to meet his needs and desires...

...8.95...

...and a heightened awareness that as long as man conceives himself as a distinctive being, idealism will be the central mode of expressing his spirit...

...Future Shock By Alvin To filer Random House...

...Only then will there be a sufficiently broad intellectual base for anticipatory democracy...

...Toffler's analysis is extremely one-dimensional...

...and so on...

...For example, he offers a chart outlining the differences between "Mugs" (the tender-minded and the scientific conservationists) and "Zealots" (the tough-minded and the technological opportunists...

...It is impossible to summarize here the richness and complexity of Brzezinski's study, for it ranges from the failure of Communism to fuse humanism and internationalism to the expectations of the Third World to the intellectual and political sins of the New Left...

...Brzezinski goes on to explore the implications of this "rational humanism" both for the future of America and for the development of cultural and economic diversity on a world-wide scale...

...These and other such terms suggest that we should perhaps prefer Auden's phrase, the age of anxiety...

...What is crucial is their different attitudes toward various technologies: Mugs think any use of the H-bomb indefensible, while Zealots can conceive of circumstances in which it might be justifiable...

...the first group believes that computers will enslave us, the second that computers make us smarter...

...Most of Calder's book is concerned with how governments establish--or fail to establish--science policy, and with the effect on mankind of current and foreseeable technological developments...

...It is exemplary of Toffler's thesis that C. P. Snow's phrase "the two cultures" is already a cliche, though his book on the subject was published only a decade ago...

...He proposes a synthesis of the "irrational personalism of the 'humanists' and the impersonal rationality of the 'modernizers'" (one can, with reservations, substitute Mugs and Zealots...

...Nevertheless, the concept remains meaningful...

...British science-writer Nigel Calder believes technopolis is already upon us: "a society not only shaped but continuously modified in drastic ways by scientific and technical novelty...

...He observes that the traditional distinction between national and international affairs is becoming blurred, quoting John F. Kennedy's description of himself as "the first American President for whom the whole world was, in a sense, domestic politics...

...Clearly, all three authors are fundamentally optimistic about the future, since each offers ways in which society can learn to control and direct the uses of technology...

...that humans are good, or that they should be better...

...he points to the establishment of temporary marriages, communes and homosexual families with children as proof that the rate of social change is making the shared growth of love hopeless...

...Calder admits this is "primitive binary logic," but declares it necessary in order to establish a new basis for controversy and democratic process in place of the worn concepts of liberalism and conservatism...

...He calls for a new perspective on this current dichotomy, one involving a growing recognition that "man's propensity for scientific innovation cannot be restrained...

...that wild-life conservation is desperately important, or that it is reasonable within limits...