Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

What the subjects did not know is that they had previously been divided into two groups. In the case of one group, the opening paragraph was set in the past. The characters "heard," "saw" or "ran." The students were asked to "Tell what Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman did and what was said by the children." For the second group, the paragraph was set entirely in the future tense. They were asked to "Tell what Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman will do and what will be said by the children." Apart from this shift of tense, both paragraphs and instructions were identical.

The results of the experiment were sharply etched. One group wrote comparatively rich and interesting story-endings, peopling their accounts with many characters, creatively introducing new situations and dialogue. The other produced extremely sketchy endings, thin, unreal and forced. The past was richly conceived; the future empty. "It is," Professor Condry commented, "as if we find it easier to talk about the past than the future."

If our children are to adapt more successfully to rapid change, this distortion of time must be ended. We must sensitize them to the possibilities and probabilities of tomorrow. We must enhance their sense of the future.

Society has many built-in time spanners that help to link the present generation with the past. Our sense of the past is developed by contact with the older generation, by our knowledge of history, by the accumulated heritage of art, music, literature, and science passed down to us through the years. It is enhanced by immediate contact with the objects that surround us, each of which has a point of origin in the past, each of which provides us with a trace of identification with the past.

No such time spanners enhance our sense of the future. We have no objects, no friends, no relatives, no works of art, no music or literature, that originate in the future. We have, as it were, no heritage of the future.

Despite this, there are ways to send the human mind arching forward as well as backward. We need to begin by creating a stronger future-consciousness on the part of the public, and not just by means of Buck Rogers comic strips, films like Barbarella, or articles about the marvels of space travel or medical research. These make a contribution, but what is needed is a concentrated focus on the social and personal implications of the future, not merely on its technological characteristics.

If the contemporary individual is going to have to cope with the equivalent of millennia of change within the compressed span of a single lifetime, he must carry within his skull reasonably accurate (even if gross) images of the future.

Medieval men possessed an image of the afterlife, complete with vivid mental pictures of heaven and hell. We need now to propagate dynamic, non-supernatural images of what temporal life will be like, what it will sound and smell and taste and feel like in the fastonrushing future.

To create such images and thereby soften the impact of future shock, we must begin by making speculation about the future respectable. Instead of deriding the "crystal-ball gazer," we need to encourage people, from childhood on, to speculate freely, even fancifully, not merely about what next week holds in store for them but about what the next generation holds in store for the entire human race. We offer our children courses in history; why not also courses in "Future," courses in which the possibilities and probabilities of the future are systematically explored, exactly as we now explore the social system of the Romans or the rise of the feudal manor?

Robert Jungk, one of Europe's leading futurist-philosophers, has said: "Nowadays almost exclusive stress is laid on learning what has happened and has been done. Tomorrow ... at least one third of all lectures and exercises ought to be concerned with scientific, technical, artistic and philosophical work in progress, anticipated crises and possible future answers to these challenges."

We do not have a literature of the future for use in these courses, but we do have literature about the future, consisting not only of the great utopias but also of contemporary science fiction. Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation. Our children should be studying Arthur C. Clarke, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Robert Sheckley, not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they can lead young minds through an imaginative exploration of the jungle of political, social, psychological, and ethical issues that will confront these children as adults. Science fiction should be required reading for Future I.

But students should not only read. Various games have been designed to educate young people and adults about future possibilities and probabilities. Future, a game distributed by Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, introduces players to various technological and social alternatives of the future, and forces them to choose among them. It reveals how technological and social events are linked to one another, encourages the player to think in probabilistic terms, and, with various modifications, can help clarify the role of values in decision-making. At Cornell, Professor Jose Villegas of the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis, has, with the aid of a group of students, created a number of games having to do with housing and community action in the future. Another game developed under his direction is devoted to elucidating the ways in which technology and values will interact in the world of tomorrow.

With younger children, other exercises are possible. To sharpen the individual's futurefocused role image, students can be asked to write their own "future autobiographies" in which they picture themselves five, ten or twenty years in the future. By submitting these to class discussion, by comparing different assumptions in them, contradictions in the child's own projections can be identified and examined. At a time when the self is being broken into successive selves, this technique can be used to provide continuity for the individual. If children at fifteen, for example, are given the future autobiographies they themselves wrote at age twelve, they can see how maturation has altered their own images of the future. They can be helped to understand how their values, talents, skills, and knowledge have shaped their own possibilities.

Students, asked to imagine themselves several years hence, might be reminded that their brothers, parents, and friends will also be older, and asked to imagine the "important others" in their lives as they will be.

Such exercises, linked with the study of probability and simple methods of prediction that can be used in one's personal life, can delineate and modify each individual's conception of the future, both personal and social. They can create a new individual time-bias, a new sensitivity to tomorrow that will prove helpful in coping with the exigencies of the present.

Among highly adaptive individuals, men and women who are truly alive in, and responsive to, their times, there is a virtual nostalgia for the future. Not an uncritical acceptance of all the potential horrors of tomorrow, not a blind belief in change for its own sake, but an overpowering curiosity, a drive to know what will happen next.

This drive does strange and wonderful things. One winter night I witnessed a poignant quiver run through a seminar room when a white-haired man explained to a group of strangers what had brought him there to attend my class on the Sociology of the Future. The group included corporate long-range planners, staff from major foundations, publishers and research centers. Each participant spieled off his reason for attending. Finally, it was the turn of the little man in the corner. He spoke in cracked, but eloquent English: "My name is Charles Stein. I am a needle worker all my life. I am seventy-seven years old, and I want to get what I didn't get in my youth. I want to know about the future. I want to die an educated man!"