Introduction.Impressions about the book.
II.The Principe of the evolution according to AlvinToffler
IV.Secondwave
IV.Thirdwave
Energyof the new generation
Semi-directdemocracy. Minority power.
V.Watchingthe shift. Conclusion
Readingthe book “The Third Wave” by Alvin Toffler left a verydeep mark in my memory. There are only a few people in the entireworld that have the kind of mind that allows them to look at regularlife differently, analyze it and make assumptions that regular peoplewouldn’t even notice. I think that Alvin Toffler is one ofthese people.
Even though I don’t agree with the authoron some matters, I want to admit that “The Third Wave” isthe book that was written by a man who really cares about the issueshe is exploring and who is also a great expert in his field of study.Even if I did not know Alvin’s biography, after reading thebook I could assume that exploring human evolution, social issues andhistory has always been a goal of his life.
Basically,the book tells us about the author’sseeing the evolution of the human society.I can imagine how fresh and outstanding seemed his idea of dividingthe flow of human history and development into several phases that hecalled “waves” twenty years ago when his book was firstpublished in 1980. Since that time “The Third Wave” hasbeen translated into all major languages and became very popular allover the world.
Whilereading “The Third Wave” I kept asking myself thequestion: “What would Alvin change if he wrote this booknowadays”. I don’t want to judge him for some of hisforecasts that never came true especially because he urged thereaders not to filter out single items, but look at the system in itsentirety.
Lotsof changes have happened since the book first saw the world. WorldWide Web brought a piece of informational freedom into almost everyhouse, the big empire U.S.S.R collapsed (even Alvin did not believein this p. 314), finally, we met the new millenium. We are now muchdeeper in the third wave and this Alvin’s work is still popularand very actual. Moreover, it became a reference frame for the futureresearch and is being studied in colleges like DeVRY.
Another issue I want to point out here is theimportance of the Alvin Toffler’s work. Even if there werestill some people who do not want to look back and to explore ourhistory, they would probably want to know what is going to happen tothem tomorrow or after a certain period of time in future. At thevery beginning of the book, in the introductory part, Alvin warns thereaders about expecting any kind of prognosis or predictionsthroughout the entire book so it would not look like a Nostrodamusprophecy or an encyclopedia of the future. He is aware that he doesnot have enough information and/or knowledge to make some judgementsand purposely leaves this type of questions wide open for dispute.The author gives the reader or the future explorer directions, thebasic outlines that should be filled up by them. “Sometimes itis better to ask the right question rather than to give the rightanswer to the wrong one”(6).
II.ThePrincipe of the evolution according to Alvin Toffler
The book consists of two major parts where theauthor describes the first two waves that the human society camethrough and also the third wave. It is the wave that we are living inright now. But first, let’s take a look at the whole theorythat Alvin tries to explain in his work.
According to the author, the human evolution isnot stepless but it consists of several stages. So far, the societyhas experienced three of them. When there is a coincidence of severalfactors, we can witness the shift between the waves. The shifts arethe most painful moments in the human history. Most of the Civil warshappened at those times. “The Civil war was not foughtexclusively, as it seemed to many, over the moral issue of slavery orsuch narrow economic issues as tariffs. It was fought over a muchlarger question: would the rich new continent be ruled by farmers orby industialazers, by the forces of the First Wave or the Second?”(23)
AlvinToffler considers energy dependency to be a fundamental principle ofany civilization. The need for a new kind of energy is one of thecauses of shifting to a new wave. For example, during feudalismpeople used horse power or even human power in agriculture or inconstruction, which was also considered to be a source of energy.“The precondition of any civilization, old or new, is energy.First wave societies drew their energy from “living batteries”– human and animal muscle-power – or from sun, wind andwater”(25). “As late as the French Revolution, it hasbeen estimated, Europe drew energy from an estimated 14 millionhorses and 24 million oxen”(25).
Theincrease in human population evoked the need for bigger fields andmore buildings, which could no longer be achieved by using theexisting tools. In order to move forward, people needed new tools,such as tractors, trains, cars etc.
However, the need for a new kind of energy was not a sufficientcondition to make a shift. Many agricultural civilizations likeChina, Rome or Greece died and never moved to the next stage. Theneed should be backed by developments in science and technology whichmanifests the coincidence needed for the civilization shift. A goodexample of that was the invention of the steam engine in the 18thcentury when the agricultural civilization received a great push thatmoved it into the industrial age later.
All other issues, such as technical progress andeven political, economical and social sides of the society are onlythe consequences and they are being changed in order to fit the newreality. “Industrialism was more than smokestacks and assemblylines. It was a rich, many-sided social system that touched everyaspect of human life and attacked every feature of the First Wavepast” (22).
Firsttwo waves.
Firstwave.
Accordingto the author, the people of the First Wave were the firstcivilization that ever existed on the face of the Earth. He does notdeny that people did exist before that, but I did not find anyevidence that he considered those people to be a civilization. In hisbook he talks of “civilized” people, those who adoptedthe agricultural style of life, and the rest of the population,people called “primitive”, the ones who could not switchto the progressive way of living and were left behind in barbaricworld. “During the long millennia when First Wave civilizationreigned supreme, the planet’s population could have dividedinto two categories – the “primitive” and the“civilized”. The so-called primitive peoples, living insmall bands and tribes and subsisting by gathering, hunting, orfishing, were those had been passed over by the agriculturalrevolution”(21).
Thedistinctive feature of the agricultural society was thedecentralization of power. People still had to live together mostlyin small groups because it was the only way to feed themselves and tosurvive. But there was no centralized government over them that wouldlead them or try to organize people for bigger projects. Brutalphysical force was used as a method of solving either private orsocial conflicts. ”In most agricultural societies the greatmajority of people were peasants who huddled together in small,semi-isolated communities. They lived on a subsistence diet, growingjust barely enough to keep themselves alive and their masters happy”(37). The trading was developed very poorly and the market itself didnot exist at all. Even though that there was some simple division oflabor and several communities specialized in producing a particularkind of food or simple labor tools, mostly they just naturallyexchanged their products with the other groups. Money did not existin the agricultural era.
As I already mentioned in the basicprinciples of the Alvin Toffler’s theory, the social life ofthe people is a secondary issue and is subordinated to certaincivilization rules. The agricultural age was a nice example. Thefamily structure was also preconditioned by the human needs forsurvival. Lots of relatives lived at the same place mostly because itwas easier to cultivate land and grow their harvest this way.
The social life of the majority of peoplewas quite monotonous due to the lack of travelling. An average personliving in agricultural age probably met fewer people during his orher life than we do in one month or even a week.
The agricultural era was and, probably, will be thelongest in the history of the human society. It took more than a 1500years for several little currents of the first wave to come togetherand form the big stream that wold later grow into the Second Wave.
SecondWave
LikeI said before there should have been a coincidence of several factorsto come together in order for a civilization to come into the nextstage. After a series of unsuccessful attempts the human societyfinally made the move towards its future and started the big clock ofhistory again. According to Toffler, it happened in the 18thcentury (All Second Wave societies began to draw their energy fromcoal, gas, and oil – from irreplaceable fossil fuels. Thisrevolutionary shift, coming after Newcomen invented a workable steamengine in 1712, meant that for the first time a civilization waseating into nature’s capital rather than merely living off theinterest it provided”(25).
The future need for new kinds of energy laterconduced to the development in industry and technology. Finally, allthe sides of the human life in the new age were changed in order toget more efficiency out of new industrial formations such asmanufactories, factories, plants etc. At this stage the civilizationneeded entirely new methods of organizing people, totally neweconomical and political systems.
Unlike those of the Third Wave, the economicalissues of the Second Wave can be talked about with quite a great dealof persistency. For almost three hundred years, we have had enoughtime to witness and analyze the process that took place and, finally,formed the economy of the industrial society.
Nowwe can definitely say that the main concept that made the industrialproduction different from the agricultural one was the division oflabor. Establishment of the first manufactories is considered to beone of the first steps of transferring into the industrial age. Thefurther development of the Second Wave economy was preconditioned inmany aspects by this principle.
According to Toffler, there are six basicfundamentals the economy of any industrialized society stands on:Standardization, Specialization, Synchronization, Concentration,Maximization and Centralization. Not getting into details, all ofthem meant to optimize the economy of an industrial society byraising the efficiency of labor, decreasing the production costs,speeding up the process etc.
Themain point that proves the accuracy of Toffler’s theory is thatthese principles work in any kind of industrialized society whetherit is a capitalistic, socialistic or even the communistic one. Withsome margin of error, they could be found in the economics of eitherUSA, former USSR or China. Countries with absolutely differenthistory, human nature, traditions or, what is the most important,different kinds of governance, still had to come through the sameeconomical cycles as they entered the industrial stage.
Theeconomic rules were not the only ones that were developing in asimilar way in different industrialized countries. The political andthe social part of life also obeyed the strict laws of the SecondWave.
Eventhough the political systems were rather different, they all had oneattribute that differentiated the industrial societies from theagricultural ones. It was the strong centralization of power thatmade possible the establishment of big corporations and, as a result,the realization of big projects.
The author raises a very interesting issue aboutthe force that really makes the power decisions and integrates thewhole system in the industrial society. That force was the product ofthe narrow specification and expansion of production. Therepresentatives of that force became managers of all levels. Theywere the ones who got between the owners and the workers and made thething run when the owner could no longer control the technologicalprocess. ”In the larger firms no individual, including theowner or dominant shareholder, could even begin to understand thewhole operation. The owner’s decisions were shaped, andultimately controlled, by the specialists brought in to coordinatethe system. Thus a new executive elite arose whose power rested nolonger on ownership but rather on control of the integrationprocess”(63).
According to Toffler, the “executive elite”is the force that really has control over the industrial society.Even though the real tools of the industrial production like plantsor factories belong either to capitalists or to the state incommunistic societies, neither the owners, nor the state has the realpower in the Industrialism.
“Executive elite” is thepeople who are surfing on the edge of the Second Wave that came withthe Industrialism. Those are the people who really rule and have thepower. They make corrections to the laws through theirrepresentatives in parliament or through their people in theheadquarters of the communist party, they settle and stop wars, theyare in control of destiny of the whole peoples in the industrial age.
Anyway, weshould admit that industrial era made our lives much more exiting.People got an incredible number of opportunities they couldn’tdream of during the agricultural age. We can travel anywhere in theworld within reasonable amount of time; telephone also madecommunication between people much easier; the achievements inmedicine helped us to get rid to many of fatal diseases and havegreatly extended the human life, mass-media made the distribution ofinformation much easier too. Nevertheless, the industrial era kind ofhuman beings were still used only as a tool for achieving certainaims. It was still not considered to be a primary link in the chainof the human existence.
ThirdWave
The chapter where the author asks more questions that providesanswers. Alvin gives the reader the right to decide which answerswill most likely fit the system. Anyone who can answer them willprobably be able to obtain a clear picture of what is going to happento us in the near future.
In this chapter I found the most places where I want to argue withthe author. It was not surprising for me because this part of thebook was meant to describe the future structure of the society. LikeI mentioned before, I have been wondering, what would be different inthis book if it were written now, not twenty years ago. On the otherhand, even now we still do not have enough experience to decidewhether Toffler's theory is right.
The need for a new kind of energy and further discovering ofirreplaceable fossil fuels was the reason of shifting into the secondwave. But as we all know, the reserves of fossil fuels are notendless on the Earth and moreover, with the current consumption ratewe are going to have them for a hundred more years. All this plus theincreasing need for more powerful energy have created the potentialsituation for transferring into the next era or “The ThirdWave”. ”In 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out andthe Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries suddenly steppedout of the shadows. Choking off the world’s supply of crudeoil, it sent the entire Second Wave economy into a shudderingdownspin”(131).
I found the author’s opinion about the nuclear energy powersurprising. He considers both nuclear energy and the fossil fuels tobe obsolete, and he is looking for something else in terms of newera’s energy. “In short, though nuclear reactors or coalgasification or liquefaction plants and other such technologies mayseem to be advanced or futuristic and therefore progressive, theyare, in fact, artifacts of a Second Wave past caught in its owndeadly contradictions”(138).
In my opinion, deriving energy from nuclear fuel cannot be calledobsolete. On the contrary, this kind of energy is only at the veryfirst stage of being used by humans. There are still lots of problemslike the poor safety of nuclear reactors or technical impossibilityto create a compact nuclear engine at the current stage, but weshould not forget, that the efficiency of the steam engine was alsovery poor and comprised less than 5%!
Of course, new sources of energy will be discovered by human beingsin future, but today the use of nuclear energy is very advanced. Ithink that this the Third Wave civilization kind of energy. Moreover,I tend to think that the beginning of the new era should beconsidered in connection with the discovery of nuclear power ratherthan with the potential exhaustion of fossil fuels.
In terms of economic and political issues, the author’sconclusions seem to be pretty clear and logical. New discoveries intechnology contribute to free information flow. Such a greatpopularity of the Internet in many countries all over the world is avery nice proof for Alvin’s ideas about semi-direct democracyas the political structure of the new society.
There is no doubt that the existing political system will not workafter the shift into the new era. Terrorism became an every-day wordin our language. Big and powerful countries like former U.S.S.R andnow Russia are struggling trying to keep their territory together.Separatism became a very important problem in many other countries inall parts of the world. This all indicates that the existingpolitical system is already obsolete and the governments no longerkeep the situation under control. ”No government, no politicalsystem, no constitution, no charter or state is permanent, nor canthe decisions of the past bind the future forever. Nor can agovernment designed for one civilization cope adequately with thenext”(417).
Alvin sees the solution in an absolutely new political system where,unlike in an industrialized era, the minorities have the power andform the structure of the society. “The first, hereticalprinciple of Third Wave government is that of minority power. Itholds that majority rule, the key legitimating principle of theSecond Wave era, is increasingly obsolete. It is not majorities butminorities that count”419.
Implementing the minority power principle into our life is supposedto change the whole political system and end up as a new kind of ademocratic society – semi-direct democracy.
Watching the Shift. Conclusion.
If we look back at our history, we can easily noticethat the time during the transition into the Second Wave was the mostviolent and brutal. We are now observing another transition, now intothe Post-industrial civilization.
Ittook us less than three hundred years to jump from Second Wave intopost-industrial society which much faster than agriculturalcivilization could make it into Industrialism. This could mean notonly acceleration in social development or the technical progress;the «wave glitch» we are living in may turn out to be abigger drama than it used to be three hundred years ago.
Oneof the questions that Alvin did not raise in his book is that thepeople themselves could be in control of civilizational changes. Allthe achievements in technical, political and technical sciencesshould not only be used as a self-developing tool, but people can andshould use that knowledge in order to control the development oftheir history. We do not want to think that the civilization we areentering now is going to be the last one on the face of the Earth.Our children and the children of our children have the same right toleave and enjoy their lives as we do now. We are the ones who have tomake sure that the human history will not stop today and the shiftinto another era will be completed.