It was easy to mock Alvin Toffler when he was riding high in the saddle, back in the 1970s. A self-described “futurist” (precise job description still TBD), he was part Jeremiah and part Arthur C. Clarke, warning us all about the dizzy pace of technological change even as he got giddy describing its supposed blessings.
In his day he was a darling of TV talk show bookers and sold millions of copies of books, Future Shock most famously but also other two-word titles like Third Wave and Power Shift. His literary and intellectual pretensions made him an easy target for smart guys who, in a strange coincidence, weren’t selling millions of books or getting asked to appear on TV themselves. (How pretentious was Future Shock? For the answer, treat yourself to the first two minutes of this Orson Welles-narrated documentary from the early seventies.)
Yet reading the obituaries since Toffler’s death last Wednesday, even an old scoffer might have second thoughts.
By the early 1990s Toffler’s flame had dimmed—or he had been toppled from the saddle, if you want to stick with the equestrian metaphor. It was left to Newt Gingrich, newly installed Speaker of the House and aspiring intellectual, to revive Toffler’s reputation and reintroduce him to the general public. Toffler, a former mainstream journalist and hence a conventionally liberal Democrat, always seemed ambivalent about the Newt-generated attention, but what bound them together was greater than politics.
Both men wanted to be a certain kind of intellectual: a generalist and a humanist. They were big picture guys. At last count, Gingrich is the author of 21 books, and the earliest and most interesting of them bear the Toffler stamp. They skim happily over cultural history and then move breathlessly on to the latest developments in medicine, transportation, education, and every other field within sight, alighting here and there to make a prediction or sound a warning before taking flight again like one of those space-trip honeymoons Gingrich once predicted all American newlyweds would be enjoying by 2020.
See? Easy to mock. It’s only in contrast to our most recent big-picture intellectuals that the admirable richness and imagination of “futurists” like Toffler (and Gingrich) become plain. These days any writer or thinker wishing to hold a mirror up to human nature—and who wants to sell books in Toffler-like quantities—inevitably ties himself to the sterile guesswork of neuroscience or the crabbed and desiccated “findings” of social psychology. The vast carnival of life gets reduced to the colored patterns of a brain scan or the statistical manipulations from a psych lab.
For all their pretentions, Toffler and generalist-humanists like him were quite happy gazing on the carnival itself, taking people for what they appear to be and, more or less, actually are. They got a lot wrong, they said many silly things, but they never fell for the fatuous materialism and reductionism of their 21st century successors, from Dan Ariely to Malcolm Gladwell to Jonah Lehrer. RIP.
