The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler

Author:Alvin Toffler
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Topics Modern History, Society, Psychology, Politics, Mystery Babylon
Published: 1980-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-one

The Mental Maelstrom

I^Iever before have so many people in so many countries— even educated and supposedly sophisticated people—been so intellectually helpless, drowning, as it were, in a maelstrom of conflicting, confusing, and cacophonous ideas. Colliding visions rock our mental universe.

Every day brings some new fad, scientific finding, religion, movement, or manifesto. Nature worship, ESP, holistic medicine, sociobiology, anarchism, structuralism, neo-Marxism, the new physics, Eastern mysticism, technophilia, technophobia, and a thousand other currents and crosscurrents sweep across the screen of consciousness, each with its scientific priesthood or ten-minute guru.

We see a mounting attack on establishment science. We see a wildfire revival of fundamentalist religion and a desperate search for something—almost anything—to believe in.

Much of this confusion is actually the result of an intensifying cultural war—the collision of an emerging Third Wave culture with the entrenched ideas and assumptions of industrial society. For just as the Second Wave engulfed traditional views and spread the belief system I call indust-reality, so today we see the beginnings of a philosophical revolt aimed at overthrowing the reigning assumptions of the past -100 years. The key ideas of the industrial period are being discredited, discounted, superseded, or subsumed into much larger and more powerful theories.

The core beliefs of Second Wave civilization did not win acceptance during the past three centuries without a bitter struggle.

THE MENTAL MAELSTROM

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In science, in education, in religion, in a thousand fields, the “progressive” thinkers of industrialism fought against the “reactionary” thinkers who reflected and rationalized agricultural societies. Today it is the defenders of industrialism who have their backs against the wall as a new, Third Wave culture begins to take form.

THE NEW IMAGE OF NATURE

Nothing illustrates this clash of ideas more clearly than our changing image of nature.

In the past decade a worldwide environmental movement has sprung up in response to fundamental, potentially dangerous changes in the earth's biosphere. And this movement has done more than attack pollution, food additives, nuclear reactors, highways, and hair-spray aerosols. It lias also forced 11s to rethink our dependency on nature. As a consequence, instead of conceiving ourselves as engaged in a bloody war with nature, we are moving toward a fresh view that emphasizes symbiosis or harmony with the earth. We are shifting from an adversary to a nonadversary posture.

At the scientific level, this has led to thousands of studies aimed at understanding ecological relationships so that we can soften our impacts on nature or channel them in constructive ways. We have just begun to appreciate the complexity and dynamism of these relationships and to reconceptualize society itself in terms of recycling, renewability, and the earning capacity of natural systems.

All this is mirrored in a corresponding shift of popular attitudes toward nature. Whether we examine opinion surveys or the lyrics of pop songs, the visual imagery in advertising or the content of sermons, we find evidence of a heightened, though often romantic, regard for nature.

City dwellers by the millions yearn for the countryside, and the Urban Land Institute reports a significant population shift toward rural areas.

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