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!
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