Remembering Alvin Toffler and “Future Shock”

When I happened to see that Alvin Toffler was born in October 1928, I thought that today, the 95th anniversary of his October 4 birthday, would be a good time to write about him and his book Future Shock. 

Alvin Toffler, who died in 2016, was an author, futurist, and businessman who, with his wife Heidi, wrote Future Shock, which became a worldwide best-seller. It is considered to be one of the most important and influential books about the future ever written.

Toffler was raised in Brooklyn and graduated from New York University in 1950, the same year he and Heidi Farrell married. During the last half of the 1960s, the Tofflers did research for Future Shock, first published in 1970.

According to the Tofflers' website, over 15 million copies of Future Shock have been sold worldwide. It has been translated into more than 30 languages and has never been out of print.

The second book authored by the Tofflers and issued in 1980, was titled The Third Wave. Following the agrarian revolution, and the industrial revolution, the “third wave” is the information revolution.

Powershift (1990), their third major book, deals with the increasing power of twenty-first-century military hardware and the proliferation of new technologies.

The later books continue the Tofflers’ exploration/development of ideas first introduced in Future Shock.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler coined the term future shock to describe the emotional distress that individuals and societies experience when facing rapid technological and social change.

Early in the first chapter of their book, the Tofflers referred to “culture shock,” explaining that it refers to “the effect that immersion in a strange culture has on the unprepared visitor.” They then go on to say that

culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with the much more serious malady, future shock. Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow.

In 2020, a massive book titled After Shock was published with the subtitle, “The world’s foremost futurists reflect on 50 years of Future Shock and look ahead to the next 50.” (I wish I had been able to read much more of it.)

Rather than writing more specifically about the books just mentioned, though, I will now share only some of my personal reflections about Future Shock and how I was influenced by it.

Reading Future Shock in my early 30s was instructive and formative for me. Early in 1970, I somehow heard about “future shock” and that Toffler had written about that concept in an essay published in the March issue of Playboy magazine, of all places.

As I was living in Japan at that time and there was no other way to read Toffler’s essay, I bought a copy of that Playboy magazine at the excellent English bookstore in Fukuoka, the city where I lived, and read his article with great interest.

(Memories from 50+ years ago are rather unreliable, but as far as I can remember, that was the first and probably the last time I ever bought a Playboy magazine.)

After several months I was able to get a library copy of the book, and it took a few weeks to read it as I was stretched by the challenge of teaching university classes in Japanese. I also remember taking rather extensive notes, but alas, they weren’t included in what I brought back to the U.S.

Partly because of reading Future Shock, sometime in the 1970s I joined the World Future Society (WFS), founded in 1966, and read The Futurist, their bimonthly magazine. I never was a futurist as such, but through the decades I was deeply interested in thinking about the future.

In July 1989, I flew from Japan to Washington, D.C., to attend the WFS’s annual assembly, and at one of the study group sessions I presented a paper titled “Religious Faith and World Peace in the 1990s and Beyond.”

Perhaps it is not a direct quote, but Toffler is widely credited for this aphorism: “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Much has changed since 1970, and the likely future of world civilization is more shocking now than ever.

The challenge for us now is to unlearn much of what we think we know, to learn what the world actually is at present, and to see and act upon the new knowledge of what it is likely to become in the near future.

_____

** The underlying notion of future shock existed many years before the Tofflers’ book was published. In 1949, an issue of the Saturday Evening Post included the poem (not by Toffler) titled “Time of the Mad Atom,” which I remember reading, and quoting, in the mid-1950s. Here it is in its entirety:

This is the age
Of the half-read page.
And the quick hash
And the mad dash.

The bright night
With the nerves tight.
The plane hop
With the brief stop.

The lamp tan
In a short span.
The Big Shot
In a good spot.

And the brain strain
The heart pain.
And the cat naps
Till the spring snaps

—And the fun’s done!