Abstract

Although Toffler has not written an in-depth philosophical analysis of social problems, he certainly has written a highly readable popular diagnosis of the phenomenon of cultural change which social philosophers should be considering, and has given a synoptic view of contemporary culture similar to Pitirim Sorokin's popular Crisis of Our Age in the forties. Toffler's thesis is "that there are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb, and that by endlessly accelerating change without first determining these limits, we may submit masses of men to demands they simply cannot tolerate." Future shock is, therefore, both the physical and psychological impairment caused by reluctance and inability to absorb the rapid changes that an age of discontinuity produces. Psychic distress is identified in Leon Festinger's arresting phrase, "cognitive dissonance," the rejection or denial of information that challenges preconceptions. Physical distress is analyzed by such interesting research tools as the Rahe Life-Change Units Scale which attempts to correlate change factors with physical health. The philosophic base of modern life is seen in a Heraclitean or Bergsonian flux which ontologizes change itself and sees social and political conflict inevitably provoked by rapid change confronting an older society whose substantialist structures reflect more the stable and enduring values of an older culture. It is from the vantage point of change theory that Toffler explains the contemporary turmoil in domestic, social, political, and religious realms; and although he does not employ the more formal idiom of a Vico or Spengler in the discussion of Zeitgeist, he recognizes thought and life style as even more significant than ever in a culture in which communication is so widespread and immediate. He uses the imagery of eight hundred 62-year lifetimes to illustrate man's history of the last 50,000 years, noting the comparative stability of the previous segments and the bewildering rapidity of change cycle of idea, application, and diffusion in the last sixty-year period. He analyzes progressively the accelerative thrust that creates conflict between cultures and generations; describes the typical attitudes of citizens in an Age of Transience towards time, things, places, people, organization, and ideas; and sees "modular" man as a being for whom permanence of marriage, career, educational values, and convictions yields to "temporariness." Organizations in such a climate are characterized by lateral rather than hierarchical power relationships in which "super-industrial man," committed more to his craft than to his company, assumes more decision-making responsibility in an "adhocracy" of transient values and relationships. Toffler interestingly sees bureaucracy on the decline, technology as contributing to plurality of choice rather than to standardization, and to a kinetic imagery of impermanence in aesthetics. For the most part, Toffler, the diagnostician, resists the temptation to be the pleader. His happily infrequent divagations produce less than satisfactory critiques of family life, education, and genetic engineering. It is inevitable that this book will be criticized by specialists as bewilderingly diffuse, and verging at times on science fiction; it is possible too that the strategy of "social futurism" suggested by the author will elicit less than undiluted enthusiasm, and that inexact references to Toynbee and Maritain may be questioned. But the essential purpose of this volume to give a unified vision of contemporary culture in terms of the adaptive reaction to change--all this has been admirably realized. And one feels that the author indeed possesses the vision and research tools for particularized study in the areas treated here quite generally.--R. P. M.