Article: The Future as a Way of Life
Had I read this article without knowing that it was written in 1965, I would have bet it was written by a futurist blogger on Substack as early as yesterday.
While pointing at the rate of change underway across society, culture, and technology, Alvin Toffler frames a form of malaise taking over, "Future Shock" which he describes as a "dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future." It's a state wherein societies are unable to adapt and anchor their sense of identity and belonging to the change around them. Unlike culture shock, from which a traveler rest in the comfort of return to their usual state, future shock offers no such respite.
Because our sense of identity depends on having a place in the structure of society, constant and accelerating change, Toffler argues, forces redefinitions that imposes "unendurable stress on a great many people."
One of Toffler's sharpest claims that speaks to a generation of professionals and recent graduates entering the job market today is the ever shrinking lifespan of an occupation, and with it the loss of what Toffler calls man's "anchor and organizing principle."
While we may not know the limits of our capacity to adapt, Toffler argues that if we are to "cope with the equivalent of millenniums of change within the compressed span of a single lifetime", we must throw away our conception of time as relatively static and train ourselves to speculate about the future with reasonable sense of accuracy.
Quotes from the article
In the past it was possible to know in advance what occupation would exist when a boy became a man. Today the life span of occupation has also been compressed. The computer programmer, who was first heard of in the 1950's, will be as extinct as the blacksmith within a matter of years, perhaps by 1970. Individuals now train for a profession and look forward to remaining in that profession for the entire period of their working life. Yet within a generation the notion of serving in a single occupation for one's entire life may seem quaintly antique. Individuals may need to be trained to serve successively in three, four, or half a dozen different professions in the course of a career. The job will no longer serve as man's anchor and organizing principle.
"We all need," says psychiatrist John R. Rees, Honorary President of the World Federation of Mental Health, "a sense of our own identity, that we have a certain place in the structure of our society, and that we fit into that. We have constantly to change our identity when we move into a different sort of world, and we often get considerable confusion of identity, something that is disturbing to many people. They cannot take it..."
If the degree of change and the speed of that change is even remotely close to what I have suggested, it must be obvious that the shift to Professor Boulding's "postcivilization" may place unendurable stress on a great many people. For the current upbringing of most people, and the subtly inculcated sense of time that comes with it, are both inimical to adaptability.
...the most educated people today operate on the assumption that society is relatively static. At best they attempt to plan by making simple straight-line projections of present-day trends. The result is unreadiness to meet the future when it arrives. In short, future shock.
If the contemporary individual is going to have to cope with the equivalent of millenniums of change within the compressed span of a single lifetime, he must carry within his skull a reasonably accurate (even if gross) image of the future.
Notable statistics, figures, and comparisons
Energy consumption (Homi Bhabha's "Q" unit)
- One "Q" equals the energy from burning roughly 33 billion tons of coal.
- For the first 18.5 centuries after Christ, consumption averaged under half a Q per century. By 1850 it had risen to one Q per century. By the time of writing, about ten Q per century.
- The upshot: roughly half of all the energy humans consumed in the past 2,000 years was used in the last 100.
Mining and materials (Kenneth Boulding)
- The dividing line for metal and materials extraction sits around 1910. Humans took about as much out of mines before 1910 as after it.
Knowledge and information
- Around 15,000 significant journals worldwide, carrying perhaps a million significant papers a year (per Charles P. Bourne, Stanford Research Institute).
- The total quantity of information was said to be doubling every ten years.
Population growth
- About 25% of all human beings who ever lived were alive at the time of writing, heading toward 50%.
- Julian Huxley's figures: it took Homo sapiens at least 100,000 years to reach two-thirds of a billion people (by 1650). The next doubling took about 200 years, the one after that only 100 years, then it more than doubled again in the 64 years of that century.
Civilization stages (Boulding)
- Fewer than 5% of the world's population could still be classed as living in genuinely precivilized society.
Agriculture, past vs. present
- In ancient societies the food surplus rarely topped 20–25% of total product, forcing three-quarters to four-fifths of people into food production. Most classical cities sat within a few weeks of starvation.
- In the modern US, only 10% of the population worked in agriculture yet produced a surplus. Boulding projected that figure dropping to 5% or less.
US labor shift
- By 1900 the non-farm labor force already outnumbered farm labor, and 57% of non-farm workers were blue-collar.
- By 1960, more Americans wore white collars than blue for the first time.
Urbanization (Kingsley Davis)
- Projection that by 2000, a quarter of the world would live in cities of 100,000 or more, and by 2050, half the world's population.
Pace of change and obsolescence
- Long-lived brands like Ivory Soap, Calumet Baking Soda, and Smith Brothers' Cough Drops became institutions through decades on the shelf. Future products, he argued, would last only weeks or months.
- The work week had already been cut by 50% since 1900, with a prediction it would halve again by 2000.
- The computer programmer, first heard of in the 1950s, was predicted to go the way of the blacksmith, "perhaps by 1970."
Speed of scientific advance
- Less than 35 years separated Los Alamos and Hiroshima from Rutherford's basic discoveries about the atomic nucleus.
- Margaret Mead's example: the Manus of New Guinea moved from Stone Age life into a 20th-century way of living within a single 25-year span.