Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  A similar idea is filtering through the specialists who concern themselves with "squatter housing" in major cities in the technologically underdeveloped world. Outside Khartoum in the Sudan, thousands of former nomads have created a concentric ring of settlements. Those furthest from the city live in tents, much like the ones they occupied before migration. The next-closer group lives in mud-walled huts with tent roofs. Those still closer to the city occupy huts with mud walls and tin roofs.

  When police set out to tear down the tents, urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis recommended that they not only not destroy them, but that certain municipal services be provided to their inhabitants. Instead of seeing these concentric rings in wholly negative terms, he suggested, they might be viewed as a tremendous teaching machine through which individuals and families move, becoming urbanized step by step.

  The application of this principle, however, need not be limited to the poor, the insane or the criminal. The basic idea of providing change in controlled, graduated stages, rather than abrupt transitions, is crucial to any society that wishes to cope with rapid social or technological upheaval. The veteran, for example, could be released from service more gradually. The student from a rural community could spend a few weeks at a college in a medium-size city before entering the large urban university. The long-term hospital patient might be encouraged to go home on a trial basis, once or twice, before being discharged.

  We are already experimenting with these strategies, but others are possible. Retirement, for example, should not be the abrupt, all-or-nothing, ego-crushing change that it now is for most men. There is no reason why it cannot be gradualized. Military induction, which typically separates a young man from his family in a sudden and almost violent fashion, could be done by stages. Legal separation, which is supposed to serve as a kind of half-way house on the way to divorce, could be made less legally complicated and psychologically costly. Trial marriage could be encouraged, instead of denigrated. In short, wherever a change of status is contemplated, the possibility of gradualizing it should be considered.

  ENCLAVES OF THE PAST

  No society racing through the turbulence of the next several decades will be able to do without specialized centers in which the rate of change is artificially depressed. To phrase it differently, we shall need enclaves of the past – communities in which turnover, novelty and choice are deliberately limited.

  These may be communities in which history is partially frozen, like the Amish villages of Pennsylvania, or places in which the past is artfully simulated, like Williamsburg, Virginia or Mystic, Connecticut.

  Unlike Williamsburg or Mystic, however, through which visitors stream at a steady and rapid clip, tomorrow's enclaves of the past must be places where people faced with future shock can escape the pressures of overstimulation for weeks, months, even years, if they choose.

  In such slow-paced communities, individuals who need or want a more relaxed, less stimulating existence should be able to find it. The communities must be consciously encapsulated, selectively cut off from the surrounding society. Vehicular access should be limited to avoid traffic. Newspapers should be weeklies instead of dailies. If permitted at all, radio and television should be broadcast only for a few hours a day, instead of round the clock. Only special emergency services – health, for example – should be maintained at the maximum efficiency permitted by advanced technology.

  Such communities not only should not be derided, they should be subsidized by the larger society as a form of mental and social insurance. In times of extremely rapid change, it is possible for the larger society to make some irreversible, catastrophic error. Imagine, for instance, the widespread diffusion of a food additive that accidentally turns out to have thalidomide-like effects. One can conceive of accidents capable of sterilizing or even killing whole populations.

  By proliferating enclaves of the past, living museums as it were, we increase the chances that someone will be there to pick up the pieces in case of massive calamity. Such communities might also serve as experiential teaching machines. Thus children from the outside world might spend a few months in a simulated feudal village, living and actually working as children did centuries ago. Teenagers might be required to spend some time living in a typical early industrial community and to actually work in its mill or factory. Such living education would give them a historical perspective no book could ever provide. In these communities, the men and women who want a slower life might actually make a career out of "being" Shakespeare or Ben Franklin or Napoleon – not merely acting out their parts on stage, but living, eating, sleeping, as they did. The career of "historical simulant" would attract a great many naturally talented actors.

  In short, every society will need sub-societies whose members are committed to staying away from the latest fads. We may even want to pay people not to use the latest goods, not to enjoy the most automated and sophisticated conveniences.

  ENCLAVES OF THE FUTURE

  By the same token, just as we make it possible for some people to live at the slower pace of the past, we must also make it possible for individuals to experience aspects of their future in advance. Thus, we shall also have to create enclaves of the future.

  In a limited sense, we are already doing this. Astronauts, pilots and other specialists are often trained by placing them in carefully assembled simulations of the environments they will occupy at some date in the future when they actually participate in a mission. By duplicating the interior of a cockpit or a capsule, we allow them to become accustomed, by degrees, to their future environment. Police and espionage agents, as well as commandos and other military specialists, are pre-trained by watching movies of the people they will have to deal with, the factories they are supposed to infiltrate, the terrain they will have to cover. In this way they are prepared to cope with a variety of future contingencies.

  There is no reason why the same principle cannot be extended. Before dispatching a worker to a new location, he and his family ought to be shown detailed movies of the neighborhood they will live in, the school their children will attend, the stores in which they will shop, perhaps even of the teachers, shopkeepers, and neighbors they will meet. By preadapting them in this way, we can lower their anxieties about the unknown and prepare them, in advance, to cope with many of the problems they are likely to encounter.

  Tomorrow, as the technology of experiential simulation advances, we shall be able to go much further. The pre-adapting individual will be able not merely to see and hear, but to touch, taste and smell the environment he is about to enter. He will be able to interact vicariously with the people in his future, and to undergo carefully contrived experiences designed to improve his coping abilities.

  The "psych-corps" of the future will find a fertile market in the design and operation of such preadaptive facilities. Whole families may go to "work-learn-and-play" enclaves which will, in effect, constitute museums of the future, preparing them to cope with their own personal tomorrows.

  GLOBAL SPACE PAGEANTS

  "Mesmerized as we are by the very idea of change," writes John Gardner in Self-Renewal, "we must guard against the notion that continuity is a negligible – if not reprehensible – factor in human history. It is a vitally important ingredient in the life of individuals, organizations and societies."

  In the light of theory of the adaptive range, it becomes clear that an insistence on continuity in our experience is not necessarily "reactionary," just as the demand for abrupt or discontinuous change is not necessarily "progressive." In stagnant societies, there is a deep psychological need for novelty and stimulation. In an accelerative society, the need may well be for the preservation of certain continuities.

  In the past, ritual provided an important change-buffer. Anthropologists tell us that certain repeated ceremonial forms – rituals surrounding birth, death, puberty, marriage and so on – helped individuals in primitive societies to re-establish equilibrium after some major adaptive event had taken place
.

  "There is no evidence," writes S. T. Kimball, "that a secularized urban world has lessened the need for ritualized expression ..." Carleton Coon declares that "Whole societies, whatever their sizes and degrees of complexity, need controls to ensure the maintenance of equilibrium, and control comes in several forms. One is ritual." He points out that ritual survives today in the public appearances of heads of state, in religion, in business.

  These, however, represent the merest tip of the ritual iceberg. In Western societies, for example, the sending of Christmas cards is an annual ritual that not only represents continuity in its own right, but which helps individuals prolong their all-too-temporary friendships or acquaintanceships. The celebration of birthdays, holidays or anniversaries are additional examples. The fast-burgeoning greeting-card industry – 2,248,000,000 Christmas cards are sold annually in the United States alone – is an economic monument to the society's continuing need for some semblance of ritual.

  Repetitive behavior, whatever else its functions, helps give meaning to non-repetitive events, by providing the backdrop against which novelty is silhouetted. Sociologists James Bossard and Eleanor Boll, after examining one hundred published autobiographies, found seventy-three in which the writers described procedures which were "unequivocally classifiable as family rituals." These rituals, arising from "some simple or random bits of family interaction, started to set, because they were successful or satisfying to members, and through repetition they 'jelled' into very definite forms."

  As the pace of change accelerates, many of these rituals are broken down or denatured. Yet we struggle to maintain them. One non-religious family periodically offers a secular grace at the dinner table, to honor such benefactors of mankind as Johann Sebastian Bach or Martin Luther King. Husbands and wives speak of "our song" and periodically revisit "the place we first met." In the future, we can anticipate greater variety in the kinds of rituals adhered to in family life.

  As we accelerate and introduce arhythmic patterns into the pace of change, we need to mark off certain regularities for preservation, exactly the way we now mark off certain forests, historical monuments, or bird sanctuaries for protection. We may even need to manufacture ritual.

  No longer at the mercy of the elements as we once were, no longer condemned to darkness at night or frost in the morning, no longer positioned in an unchanging physical environment, we are helped to orient ourselves in space and time by social, as distinct from natural, regularities.

  In the United States, the arrival of spring is marked for most urban dwellers not by a sudden greenness – there is little green in Manhattan – but by the opening of the baseball season. The first ball is thrown by the President or some other dignitary, and thereafter millions of citizens follow, day by day, the unfolding of a mass ritual. Similarly, the end of summer is marked as much by the World Series as by any natural symbol.

  Even those who ignore sports cannot help but be aware of these large and pleasantly predictable events. Radio and television carry baseball into every home. Newspapers are filled with sports news. Images of baseball form a backdrop, a kind of musical obbligato that enters our awareness. Whatever happens to the stock market, or to world politics, or to family life, the American League and the National League run through their expected motions. Outcomes of individual games vary. The standings of the teams go up and down. But the drama plays itself out within a set of reassuringly rigid and durable rules.

  The opening of Congress every January; the appearance of new car models in the fall; seasonal variations in fashion; the April 15 deadline for filing income tax; the arrival of Christmas; the New Year's Eve party; the fixed national holidays. All these punctuate our time predictably, supplying a background of temporal regularity that is necessary (though hardly sufficient) for mental health.

  The pressure of change, however, is to "unhitch" these from the calendar, to loosen and irregularize them. Often there are economic benefits for doing so. But there may also be hidden costs through the loss of stable temporal points of reference that today still lend some pattern and continuity to everyday life. Instead of eliminating these wholesale, we may wish to retain some, and, indeed, to introduce certain regularities where they do not exist. (Boxing championship matches are held at irregular, unpredictable times. Perhaps these highly ritualistic events should be held at fixed intervals as the Olympic games are.)

  As leisure increases, we have the opportunity to introduce additional stability points and rituals into the society, such as new holidays, pageants and games. Such mechanisms could not only provide a backdrop of continuity in everyday life, but serve to integrate societies, and cushion them somewhat against the fragmenting impact of super-industrialism. We might, for example, create holidays to honor Galileo or Mozart, Einstein or Cezanne. We might create a global pageantry based on man's conquest of outer space.

  Even now the succession of space launchings and capsule retrievals is beginning to take on a kind of ritual dramatic pattern. Millions stand transfixed as the countdown begins and the mission works itself out. For at least a fleeting instant, they share a realization of the oneness of humanity and its potential competence in the face of the universe.

  By regularizing such events and by greatly adding to the pageantry that surrounds them, we can weave them into the ritual framework of the new society and use them as sanitypreserving points of temporal reference. Certainly, July 20, the day Astronaut Armstrong took "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," ought to be made into an annual global celebration of the unity of man.

  In this way, by making use of new materials, as well as already existing rituals, by introducing change, wherever possible, in the form of predictable, rather than erratic chains of events, we can help provide elements of continuity even in the midst of social upheaval.

  The cultural transformation of the Manus Islanders was simple compared with the one we face. We shall survive it only if we move beyond personal tactics to social strategies – providing new support services for the change-harassed individual, building continuity and change-buffers into the emergent civilization of tomorrow.

  All this is aimed at minimizing the human damage wrought by rapid change. But there is another way of attacking the problem, too. This is to expand man's adaptive capacities – the central task of education during the Super-industrial Revolution.

  Chapter 18

  EDUCATION IN THE FUTURE TENSE

  In the quickening race to put men and machines on the planets, tremendous resources are devoted to making possible a "soft landing." Every sub-system of the landing craft is exquisitely designed to withstand the shock of arrival. Armies of engineers, geologists, physicists, metallurgists and other specialists concentrate years of work on the problem of landing impact. Failure of any sub-system to function after touch-down could destroy human lives, not to mention billions of dollars worth of apparatus and tens of thousands of manyears of labor.

  Today one billion human beings, the total population of the technology-rich nations, are speeding toward a rendezvous with super-industrialism. Must we experience mass future shock? Or can we, too, achieve a "soft landing?" We are rapidly accelerating our approach. The craggy outlines of the new society are emerging from the mists of tomorrow. Yet even as we speed closer, evidence mounts that one of our most critical sub-systems – education – is dangerously malfunctioning.

  What passes for education today, even in our "best" schools and colleges, is a hopeless anachronism. Parents look to education to fit their children for life in the future. Teachers warn that lack of an education will cripple a child's chances in the world of tomorrow. Government ministries, churches, the mass media – all exhort young people to stay in school, insisting that now, as never before, one's future is almost wholly dependent upon education.

  Yet for all this rhetoric about the future, our schools face backward toward a dying system, rather than forward to the emerging new society. Their vast energies are applied to cranking out
Industrial Men – people tooled for survival in a systern that will be dead before they are.

  To help avert future shock, we must create a super-industrial education system. And to do this, we must search for our objectives and methods in the future, rather than the past.

  THE INDUSTRIAL ERA SCHOOL

  Every society has its own characteristic attitude toward past, present and future. This timebias, formed in response to the rate of change, is one of the least noticed, yet most powerful determinants of social behavior, and it is clearly reflected in the way the society prepares its young for adulthood.

  In stagnant societies, the past crept forward into the present and repeated itself in the future. In such a society, the most sensible way to prepare a child was to arm him with the skills of the past – for these were precisely the same skills he would need in the future. "With the ancient is wisdom," the Bible admonished.

  Thus father handed down to son all sorts of practical techniques along with a clearly defined, highly traditional set of values. Knowledge was transmitted not by specialists concentrated in schools, but through the family, religious institutions, and apprenticeships. Learner and teacher were dispersed throughout the entire community. The key to the system, however, was its absolute devotion to yesterday. The curriculum of the past was the past.

  The mechanical age smashed all this, for industrialism required a new kind of man. It demanded skills that neither family nor church could, by themselves, provide. It forced an upheaval in the value system. Above all, it required that man develop a new sense of time.

  Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world – a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock.