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!

Apologies to the Grandchildren

As many of you know, I have seven grandchildren. The oldest celebrated her 38^th birthday in January, so I have been a grandfather for 38 years now. In 2022, two of my granddaughters became mothers, so now I also have two precious great-grandchildren, the first born a year ago last month.

I have been thinking about my grandchildren in a new way because of reading two books written to or for grandchildren. Those books are closely related to my January 28 blog post.

Larry R. Rasmussen’s book The Planet You Inherit was published last year. Its subtitle is Letters to My Grandchildren When Uncertainty’s a Sure Thing. I had the privilege of writing a review of that book for The Englewood Review of Books, and you can read that review here.

Rasmussen (b. 1939) is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, emeritus, at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Among his published books are Earth Community, Earth Ethics (1996) and Earth Honoring Faith (2013).

It is no surprise that the letters written to Eduardo and Martin Rasmussen Villegas (b. 2015 and 2018), his two grandchildren, are primarily related to his many years of ecotheological teaching and writing.

While the letters clearly express the writer’s love for his two young grandsons, it will likely be 2035 and beyond before they will be able to comprehend the meaning and significance of those letters.

Maybe, though, the writer’s intention was to say important things to us adults who read those letters now, as well as to Eduardo and Martin, who will be reading them much later.

One of Rasmussen’s most important letters is titled “Responsible by Degrees,” written in August 2020. There he broached the possibility of “widespread civilizational collapse”—and asserts that “we know we must put an end to a growing, extractive economy running on ecological deficits.”

Rasmussen, though, has hopeful views about humanity’s ability to confront the current and coming ecological crisis effectively, and those views need to be pondered thoughtfully.

Still, this challenging book written for the author’s young grandsons needs to be balanced with careful consideration of more realistic views about what is most likely to occur in Eduardo’s and Martin’s lifetime.

William Ophuls’s Apologies to the Grandchildren is a 2018 book of essays, the first one bearing the same title as the book, which does give a more realistic and less hopeful view of the current ecological crisis.

(I first learned of Ophuls, born in 1934 and with a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1973, from the video by Michael Dowd that I introduced in my January 28^th blog post linked to above).

Ophuls begins his essay with stark words: ”Civilization is, by its very nature, a long-running Ponzi scheme. It lives by robbing nature and borrowing from the future, exploiting its hinterland until there is nothing left to exploit, after which it implodes.”

He continues by saying that civilization “generates a temporary and fictitious surplus that it uses to enrich and empower the few and to dispossess and dominate the many. Industrial civilization is the apotheosis and quintessence of this fatal course.”

He goes on to write these blunt words to the grandchildren, “A fortunate minority gains luxuries and freedoms galore, but only by slaughtering, poisoning, and exhausting creation. So we bequeath you a ruined planet that dooms you to a hardscrabble existence, or perhaps none at all” (p. 1)

What Can We Say/Do? While I would like to embrace Rasmussen’s hopeful view, I have become convinced by Ophuls and by Dowd—as well as by William Catton, whom I plan to introduce in later blog posts—that my grandchildren and their children will experience a world of increasing gloom.

Perhaps there is still time for necessary changes to be made, but that is doubtful—and there is little evidence to indicate that such changes will likely be made. Perhaps, sadly, little can realistically be done other than to offer deep apologies to the grandchildren.

Yet, surely, we can work toward pushing the impending collapse farther into the future and encourage the grandchildren to find ways to flourish now in the present, regardless of what looms in a future that, unfortunately, may not be as uncertain as Rasmussen thinks. 

Singing the Praises of “A Christmas Carol”

For 175 years now, Charles Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol has delighted, and inspired, people throughout the English-speaking world. Six years ago, which was 200 years after Dickens’s birth in 1812, I posted a blog article titled “A Dickens of a Good Story” (see here) and I encourage you to read it (again) as well as this new article.  

“The Man Who Invented Christmas”

Les Standiford, an American author/novelist, has written a book titled The Man Who Invented Christmas (2008). It is about how A Christmas Carol rescued Dickens’s career and led to a reinvigorated celebration of Christmas in England and the U.S.

Last month I read Standiford’s delightful book, and then June and I enjoyed watching the 2017 movie by the same name, even though the movie is quite different from the book.

Dickens started writing his short Christmas novel on October 13, 1843, and it was published on December 19. Earlier that year, Dickens had gone up from London and spent some time in Manchester, observing the plight of the poor in that industrial city.

It was at that very time that Friedrich Engels was studying the lives of the factory employees in Manchester. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), Engels described the heart of that city as a place of “filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness.”

First edition cover

Because of his own boyhood days as a child laborer with his father in a debtor’s prison, as well as from his visits to Manchester and the seedy sections of London, Dickens knew well about the problem of poverty—and the gap between the well-heeled (such as Scrooge) and the struggling poor (such as Bob Cratchit and his family).  

As is widely known, A Christmas Carol is about the redemption of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge as the three ghosts he encounters on Christmas Eve help transform him into a man of generosity and goodwill.

Dickens’s delightful story is credited with removing the lingering stigma of Christmas celebrations from 17^th century Puritanism and making Christmas a time for family enjoyment and communal generosity.

Altering the Future

In Dickens’s story, Scrooge asks the third ghost, “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”

And then, understandingly, Scrooge declares, “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”

When he awakens after the departure of the third ghost, the regenerated Scrooge proclaims that “the shadows of the things that would have been, may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will!” (p. 80).

And so it was in the story.

And so it can be for us, if we are as willing as Scrooge to change our ways—and here I am thinking more about society in general and not only individuals.

As is widely known, but also downplayed by certain political leaders, climate scientists have issued dire warnings about the “shadows of things that Will be” unless significant changes are made.

An October headline in The Guardian cries out, “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN.”

These are shadows of things to come—but as Scrooge recognized, “if courses be departed from,” things will change.

Just as Tiny Tim didn’t have to die because Scrooge became a benefactor of the Cratchit family, the looming global warming catastrophe can be averted by the human family changing its current course.

As Tiny Tim exclaims, “God Bless Us, Every One!”—and may God help us, every one, to alter the environmental future by making necessary changes in the new year.

The United Nations and the Future We Want

The Charter of the United Nations is the foundational treaty of the international organization usually referred to as the U.N. That Charter was signed in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, sixty-seven years ago this week.

It took only about four months for the five permanent members of the Security Council and the majority of the other signatories to ratify the Charter. Thus, on October 24, 1945, the U.N. was formally established for the purpose of maintaining peace in the world. 

There are now many critics of the United Nations, as there have been through the years. There are, to be sure, many weaknesses in it—as there are in all human institutions. But, at least and surely partly due to the work of the U.N., there has not been another world war since it was founded in the year the Second World War ended. (It is interesting to note that the Charter was approved even before WWII ended in the Pacific.)

In this country, part of the opposition to the U.N. comes from those who affirm the concept of “manifest destiny” and “American exceptionalism.” If the USA is unique and qualitatively different from all the other countries in the world, belonging to an organization that basically recognizes the equality of nations is not seen as something positive.

For many years the U.N. has been working on issues such as the deterioration of the natural environment and the problem of climate change (global warming). Just last week (June 20-22), the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (That meeting was also called Rio+20, as the Earth Summit was held in Rio in 1992.)

Some people think that concern for the environment is bad for business and say that human-caused global warming is nonsense. Such persons are less than enthusiastic about the work of the U.N. and the UNCSD, which emphasized, among other things, “a green economy.”

On the other hand, before and during the Rio+20 meetings, there was criticism of the UNCSD from the other side of the spectrum. The People’s Summit, which also convened in Rio, charged that the U.N. conference was making too many concessions to the world’s biggest corporations and to global capitalism.

Similarly, according to Ecumenical News International, “The Geneva-based Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance (EAA) said that while the conference’s final document . . . . acknowledged that access to food is a human right, it did not pay adequate attention to needed changes in agriculture that favor the small farmer over big corporations.”

Ban Ki-moon (b. 1944)

The theme of the Rio+20 conference was “The Future We Want.” In a YouTube video, U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki-moon spoke about the kind of future he wants: a future where everyone can breathe clean air, drink safe water, and have enough to eat.

Ban’s hopes for the future of humanity are good ones. If the United Nations doesn’t take the lead in seeking to reach those goals for the peoples of the world, who will?

The World in 2100

June and I are delighted to announce the birth of Natalie June Seat on February 16. Natalie is the daughter of Ken and Mina Takazaki Seat and our seventh, and probably last, grandchild. We are very happy to welcome this new member into the Seat family and into the world.

There is a strong possibility that little Natalie will live to see the year 2100—and that is also possible for her big sister, Naomi, who was born in 2004. After all, Natalie had three great-grandparents to live past 90, and her only living great-grandparent will likely live that long. And what with medical advances and all, we should be able to expect children born in 2010 to live longer than people born in the 1910s. Or should we?

I have no doubt that the earth will still be here in 2100, but what about the human race? Will there be a U.S. presidential election that year? Will the Summer Olympics be held? Will there be as much resemblance between 2100 and 2000 as there was between 2000 and 1900?

While there is not, at present, a strong threat of a nuclear war, such as was the underlying fear of so many people a half-century ago, there are other ominous signs that make me uneasy about human society in 2100. I guess my three main concerns are the possibility of massive changes on earth due to global warming, the likelihood of enormous problems due to the depletion of water resources in much of the world, and the constant increase in the population of the world.

When I was born in 1938, the world population was under 2.3 billion. This year there will likely be exactly three times that number of persons on earth. Even though the growth rate has slowed greatly, the population of the world may reach nine billion several years before 2050, and who knows what it will be by 2100.

Population growth is one of several reasons why the world’s supply of clean, fresh water is steadily decreasing. Water demand already exceeds supply in many parts of the world. In my lifetime, let alone in Natalie’s, we may see major warfare over water. And who can say what dire effects of global warming may be seen in the coming thirty, sixty, or ninety years.

All I know is that there are great problems that all people of goodwill need to be concerned about and working diligently to solve. I want to keep doing what I can to work for a just and sustainable society, for the sake of Natalie and my other grandchildren and as well as for the sake of all the children of the world.