Future Shock

I've been wanting to read Future Shock by Alvin Toffler for several years.  It's an older book (it was first published in 1970), so I wasn't sure it would be as relevant today as it was when it was first released.  After I kept reading or hearing references to the book, I finally decided a few months ago to check it out at the library and read it.  The book was an interesting read, even if at times a bit of a struggle.  Many of Toffler's predictions were off (not too surprisingly),  but some were spot on.  The book itself hasn't aged particularly well.  For example, Toffler focuses on men in the workforce, and he even talks at one point about how wives make friends with their husbands' co-workers' wives and how this could pose a problem when the man gets promoted and his colleagues are now his direct reports.  However, some of Toffler's main points still resonate and are useful to some of the problems confronting society today.

Toffler first coined the term "future shock" in an article "The future as a way of life" in Horizon magazine in 1965.  The term is used in this context "to describe the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time."  That change can be technological, cultural, or social in nature.  At the time he wrote the book, the world was changing rapidly, at least in Toffler's opinion.  Whereas previous generations had experienced gradual transformation over time, the newer generations growing up in modern society were facing constant, rapid shifts in everything from family life to work to values.

For example, Toffler describes a concept that he calls the 800th lifetime.  All of human history can be divided into lifetimes, each lasting approximately 62 years (the average lifespan at the time he wrote the book).  If you start "human history" from the very beginning of Homo sapiens, we humans have been around for nearly 50,000 years, which equates to about 800 lifetimes.  Of these 800 lifetimes, about 650 lifetimes were spent in caves.  We have, in fact, only been communicating with future lifetimes during the last 70 lifetimes, following the invention of writing.  We've had the benefit of mass communication following the invention of the printing press for the last six lifetimes.  Toffler goes on to write, "Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision.  Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor.  And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime."

Toffler suggests then that one of the main drivers of "future shock" is the rapid pace of societal change that has occurred in just the last few lifetimes.  Other scientists have expressed a similar sentiment.  Carl Sagan once dedicated part of an episode in his popular television series of 1980, Cosmos to a concept he called the cosmic calendar.  Sagan maps the entire 13.7 billion year life of our universe (give or take a few million years!) on to a single calendar year.  The so-called "Big Bang" takes place just around midnight on January 1st.  Earth is formed around September 14, while prokaryotes first appear around September 21.  Dinosaurs roamed the Earth around December 25, while our own modern times coincides with just before midnight on December 31!  In other words, when viewed on the timescale of the entire universe, our society has made remarkable progress in a very, very short period of time!

It's hard to keep up with change when it occurs at such a rapid pace.  However, Toffler would also suggest that the pace of change is accelerating, and that makes sense if you consider his 800th lifetimes concept of Sagan's cosmic calendar.  Toffler writes, ""How do we know that change is accelerating?  There is, after all, no absolute way to measure change."  Instead, he asks us to consider another analogy.  He writes, "When a fifty-year-old father tells his fifteen-year-old son that he will have to wait two years before he can have a car of his own, that interval of 730 days represents a mere 4 percent of the father's lifetime to date.  It represents over 13 percent of the boy's lifetime."

Toffler cautions that the pace of change will force all of us to adapt, but not everyone will be successful in doing so.  He quotes Lawrence Suhm, a sociologist who was at the University of Wisconsin: "We are going through a period as traumatic as the evolution of man's predecessors from sea creatures to land creatures...Those who can adapt will; those who can't will either go on surviving somehow at a lower level of development or will perish - washed up on the shores."

Overall, I was glad that I read the book.  I plan to return to Toffler's themes discussed in Future Shock in a future post.