Future Shock
Page 35
This sickness is increasingly mirrored in our culture, our philosophy, our attitude toward reality. It is no accident that so many ordinary people refer to the world as a "madhouse" or that the theme of insanity has recently become a staple in literature, art, drama and film. Peter Weiss in his play Marat/Sade portrays a turbulent world as seen through the eyes of the inmates of the Charenton asylum. In movies like Morgan, life within a mental institution is depicted as superior to that in the outside world. In Blow-Up, the climax comes when the hero joins in a tennis game in which players hit a non-existent ball back and forth over the net. It is his symbolic acceptance of the unreal and irrational – recognition that he can no longer distinguish between illusion and reality. Millions of viewers identified with the hero in that moment.
The assertion that the world has "gone crazy," the graffiti slogan that "reality is a crutch," the interest in hallucinogenic drugs, the enthusiasm for astrology and the occult, the search for truth in sensation, ecstasy and "peak experience," the swing toward extreme subjectivism, the attacks on science, the snowballing belief that reason has failed man, reflect the everyday experience of masses of ordinary people who find they can no longer cope rationally with change.
Millions sense the pathology that pervades the air, but fail to understand its roots. These roots lie not in this or that political doctrine, still less in some mystical core of despair or isolation presumed to inhere in the "human condition." Nor do they lie in science, technology, or legitimate demands for social change. They are traceable, instead, to the uncontrolled, non-selective nature of our lunge into the future. They lie in our failure to direct, consciously and imaginatively, the advance toward super-industrialism.
Thus, despite its extraordinary achievements in art, science, intellectual, moral and political life, the United States is a nation in which tens of thousands of young people flee reality by opting for drug-induced lassitude; a nation in which millions of their parents retreat into video-induced stupor or alcoholic haze; a nation in which legions of elderly folk vegetate and die in loneliness; in which the flight from family and occupational responsibility has become an exodus; in which masses tame their raging anxieties with Miltown, or Librium, or Equanil, or a score of other tranquilizers and psychic pacifiers. Such a nation, whether it knows it or not, is suffering from future shock.
"I'm not going back to America," says Ronald Bierl, a young expatriate in Turkey. "If you can establish your own sanity, you don't have to worry about other people's sanity. And so many Americans are going stone insane." Multitudes share this unflattering view of American reality. Lest Europeans or Japanese or Russians rest smugly on their presumed sanity, however, it is well to ask whether similar symptoms are not already present in their midst as well. Are Americans unique in this respect, or are they simply suffering the initial brunt of an assault on the psyche that soon will stagger other nations as well?
Social rationality presupposes individual rationality, and this, in turn, depends not only on certain biological equipment, but on continuity, order and regularity in the environment. It is premised on some correlation between the pace and complexity of change and man's decisional capacities. By blindly stepping up the rate of change, the level of novelty, and the extent of choice, we are thoughtlessly tampering with these environmental preconditions of rationality. We are condemning countless millions to future shock.
Part Six: STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL
Chapter 17
COPING WITH TOMORROW
In the blue vastness of the South Pacific just north of New Guinea lies the island of Manus, where, as every first-year anthropology student knows, a stone age population emerged into the twentieth century within a single generation. Margaret Mead, in New Lives for Old, tells the story of this seeming miracle of cultural adaptation and argues that it is far more difficult for a primitive people to accept a few fragmentary crumbs of Western technological culture than it is for them to adopt a whole new way of life at once.
"Each human culture, like each language, is a whole," she writes, and if "individuals or groups of people have to change ... it is most important that they should change from one whole pattern to another."
There is sense in this, for it is clear that tensions arise from incongruities between cultural elements. To introduce cities without sewage, anti-malarial medicines without birth control, is to tear a culture apart, and to subject its members to excruciating, often insoluble problems.
Yet this is only part of the story, for there are definite limits to the amount of newness that any individual or group can absorb in a short span of time, regardless of how well integrated the whole may be. Nobody, Manus or Muscovite, can be pushed above his adaptive range without suffering disturbance and disorientation. Moreover, it is dangerous to generalize from the experience of this small South Sea population.
The success story of the Manus, told and retold like a modern folk tale, is often cited as evidence that we, in the high-technology countries, will also be able to leap to a new stage of development without undue hardship. Yet our situation, as we speed into the super-industrial era, is radically different from that of the islanders.
We are not in a position, as they were, to import wholesale an integrated, well-formed culture, matured and tested in another part of the world. We must invent super-industrialism, not import it. During the next thirty or forty years we must anticipate not a single wave of change, but a series of terrible heaves and shudders. The parts of the new society, rather than being carefully fitted, one to the other, will be strikingly incongruous filled with missing linkages and glaring contradictions. There is no "whole pattern" for us to adopt.
More important, the transience level has risen so high, the pace is now so forced, that a historically unprecedented situation has been thrust upon us. We are not asked, as the Manus were, to adapt to a new culture, but to a blinding succession of new temporary cultures. This is why we may be approaching the upper limits of the adaptive range. No previous generation has ever faced this test.
It is only now, therefore, in our lifetime, and only in the techno-societies as yet, that the potential for mass future shock has crystallized.
To say this, however, is to court grave misunderstanding. First, any author who calls attention to a social problem runs the risk of deepening the already profound pessimism that envelops the techno-societies. Self-indulgent despair is a highly salable literary commodity today. Yet despair is not merely a refuge for irresponsibility; it is unjustified. Most of the problems besieging us, including future shock, stem not from implacable natural forces but from man-made processes that are at least potentially subject to our control.
Second, there is danger that those who treasure the status quo may seize upon the concept of future shock as an excuse to argue for a moratorium on change. Not only would any such attempt to suppress change fail, triggering even bigger, bloodier and more unmanageable changes than any we have seen, it would be moral lunacy as well. By any set of human standards, certain radical social changes are already desperately overdue. The answer to future shock is not non-change, but a different kind of change.
The only way to maintain any semblance of equilibrium during the super-industrial revolution will be to meet invention with invention – to design new personal and social change-regulators. Thus we need neither blind acceptance nor blind resistance, but an array of creative strategies for shaping, deflecting, accelerating or decelerating change selectively. The individual needs new principles for pacing and planning his life along with a dramatically new kind of education. He may also need specific new technological aids to increase his adaptivity. The society, meanwhile, needs new institutions and organizational forms, new buffers and balance wheels.
All this implies still further change, to be sure – but of a type designed from the beginning to harness the accelerative thrust, to steer it and pace it. This will not be easy to do. Moving swiftly into uncharted social territory, we have no time-tried techniques, no
blueprints. We must, therefore, experiment with a wide range of change-regulating measures, inventing and discarding them as we go along. It is in this tentative spirit that the following tactics and strategies are suggested – not as sure-fire panaceas, but as examples of new approaches that need to be tested and evaluated. Some are personal, others technological and social. For the struggle to channel change must take place at all these levels simultaneously.
Given a clearer grasp of the problems and more intelligent control of certain key processes, we can turn crisis into opportunity, helping people not merely to survive, but to crest the waves of change, to grow, and to gain a new sense of mastery over their own destinies.
DIRECT COPING
We can begin our battle to prevent future shock at the most personal level. It is clear, whether we know it or not, that much of our daily behavior is, in fact, an attempt to ward off future shock. We employ a variety of tactics to lower the levels of stimulation when they threaten to drive us above our adaptive range. For the most part, however, these techniques are employed unconsciously. We can increase their effectiveness by raising them to consciousness.
We can, for example, introvert periodically to examine our own bodily and psychological reactions to change, briefly tuning out the external environment to evaluate our inner environment. This is not a matter of wallowing in subjectivity, but of coolly appraising our own performance. In the words of Hans Selye, whose work on stress opened new frontiers in biology and psychiatry, the individual can "consciously look for signs of being keyed up too much."
Heart palpitations, tremors, insomnia or unexplained fatigue may well signal overstimulation, just as confusion, unusual irritability, profound lassitude and a panicky sense that things are slipping out of control are psychological indications. By observing ourselves, looking back over the changes in our recent past, we can determine whether we are operating comfortably within our adaptive range or pressing its outer limits. We can, in short, consciously assess our own life pace.
Having done this, we can also begin consciously to influence it – speeding it up or slowing it down – first with respect to small things, the micro-environment, and then in terms of the larger, structural patterns of experience. We can learn how by scrutinizing our own unpremeditated responses to overstimulation.
We employ a de-stimulating tactic, for example, when we storm into the teen-ager's bedroom and turn off a stereo unit that has been battering our eardrums with unwanted and interruptive sounds. We virtually sigh with relief when the noise level drops. We act to reduce sensory bombardment in other ways, too – when we pull down the blinds to darken a room, or search for silence on a deserted strip of beach. We may flip on an air conditioner not so much to lower the temperature as to mask novel and unpredictable street sounds with a steady, predictable drone.
We close doors, wear sunglasses, avoid smelly places and shy away from touching strange surfaces when we want to decrease novel sensory input. Similarly, when we choose a familiar route home from the office, instead of turning a fresh corner, we opt for sensory nonnovelty. In short, we employ "sensory shielding" – a thousand subtle behavioral tricks to "turn off" sensory stimuli when they approach our upper adaptive limit.
We use similar tactics to control the level of cognitive stimulation. Even the best of students periodically gazes out the window, blocking out the teacher, shutting off the flow of new data from that source. Even voracious readers sometimes go through periods when they cannot bear to pick up a book or magazine.
Why, during a gregarious evening at a friend's house, does one person in the group refuse to learn a new card game while others urge her on? Many factors play a part: the selfesteem of the individual, the fear of seeming foolish, and so on. But one overlooked factor affecting willingness to learn may well be the general level of cognitive stimulation in the individual's life at the time. "Don't bother me with new facts!" is a phrase usually uttered in jest. But the joke often disguises a real wish to avoid being pressed too hard by new data.
This accounts in part for our specific choices of entertainment – of leisure-time reading, movies or television programs. Sometimes we seek a high novelty ratio, a rich flow of information. At other moments we actively resist cognitive stimulation and reach for "light" entertainment. The typical detective yarn, for example, provides a trace of unpredictability – who-dunnit? – within a carefully structured ritual framework, a set of non-novel, hence easily predictable relationships. In this way, we employ entertainment as a device to raise or lower stimulation, adjusting our intake rates so as not to overload our capacities.
By making more conscious use of such tactics, we can "fine-tune" our microenvironment. We can also cut down on unwanted stimulation by acting to lighten our cognitive burdens. "Trying to remember too many things is certainly one of the major sources of psychologic stress," writes Selye. "I make a conscious effort to forget immediately all that is unimportant and to jot down data of possible value ... This technique can help anyone to accomplish the greatest simplicity compatible with the degree of complexity of his intellectual life."
We also act to regulate the flow of decisioning. We postpone decisions or delegate them to others when we are suffering from decision overload. Sometimes we "freeze up" decisionally. I have seen a woman sociologist, just returned from a crowded, highly stimulating professional conference, sit down in a restaurant and absolutely refuse to make any decisions whatever about her meal. "What would you like?" her husband asked. "You decide for me," she replied. When pressed to choose between specific alternatives, she still explicitly refused, insisting angrily that she lacked the "energy" to make the decision.
Through such methods we attempt, as best we can, to regulate the flow of sensory, cognitive and decisional stimulation, perhaps also attempting in some complicated and as yet unknown way to balance them with one another. But we have stronger ways of coping with the threat of overstimulation. These involve attempts to control the rates of transience, novelty and diversity in our milieu.
PERSONAL STABILITY ZONES
The rate of turnover in our lives, for example, can be influenced by conscious decisions. We can, for example, cut down on change and stimulation by consciously maintaining longerterm relationships with the various elements of our physical environment. Thus, we can refuse to purchase throw-away products. We can hang onto the old jacket for another season; we can stoutly refuse to follow the latest fashion trend; we can resist when the salesman tells us it's time to trade in our automobile. In this way, we reduce the need to make and break ties with the physical objects around us.
We can use the same tactic with respect to people and the other dimensions of experience. There are times when even the most gregarious person feels anti-social and refuses invitations to parties or other events that call for social interaction. We consciously disconnect. In the same way, we can minimize travel. We can resist pointless reorganizations in our company, church, fraternal or community groups. In making important decisions, we can consciously weigh the hidden costs of change against the benefits.
None of this is to suggest that change can or should be stopped. Nothing is less sensible than the advice of the Duke of Cambridge who is said to have harumphed: "Any change, at any time, for any reason is to be deplored." The theory of the adaptive range suggests that, despite its physical costs, some level of change is as vital to health as too much change is damaging.
Some people, for reasons still not clear, are pitched at a much higher level of stimulus hunger than others. They seem to crave change even when others are reeling from it. A new house, a new car, another trip, another crisis on the job, more house guests, visits, financial adventures and misadventures – they seem to accept all these and more without apparent ill effect.
Yet close analysis of such people often reveals the existence of what might be called "stability zones" in their lives – certain enduring relationships that are carefully maintained despite all kinds of other changes.
Another case involves a man who has changed jobs at a mind-staggering rate, has moved his family thirteen times in eighteen years, travels extensively, rents cars, uses throwaway products, prides himself on leading the neighborhood in trying out new gadgets, and generally lives in a restless whirl of transience, newness and diversity. Once more, however, a second look reveals significant stability zones in his life: a good, tightly woven relationship with his wife of nineteen years; continuing ties with his parents; old college friends interspersed with the new acquaintances.
A different form of stability zone is the habit pattern that goes with the person wherever he travels, no matter what other changes alter his life. A professor who has moved seven times in ten years, who travels constantly in the United States, South America, Europe and Africa, who has changed jobs repeatedly, pursues the same daily regimen wherever he is. He reads between eight and nine in the morning, takes forty-five minutes for exercise at lunch time, and then catches a half-hour cat-nap before plunging into work that keeps him busy until 10:00 P.M.
The problem is not, therefore, to suppress change, which cannot be done, but to manage it. If we opt for rapid change in certain sectors of life, we can consciously attempt to build stability zones elsewhere. A divorce, perhaps, should not be too closely followed by a job transfer. Since the birth of a child alters all the human ties within a family, it ought not, perhaps, be followed too closely by a relocation which causes tremendous turnover in human ties outside the family. The recent widow should not, perhaps, rush to sell her house.