Топик: Three Waves of Alvin Toffler. The Basic Points

Like I said before there should have been a coincidence of several factors to come together in order for a civilization to come into the next stage. After a series of unsuccessful attempts the human society finally made the move towards its future and started the big clock of history again. According to Toffler, it happened in the 18^th century (All Second Wave societies began to draw their energy from coal, gas, and oil – from irreplaceable fossil fuels. This revolutionary shift, coming after Newcomen invented a workable steam engine in 1712, meant that for the first time a civilization was eating into nature’s capital rather than merely living off the interest it provided”(25).

The future need for new kinds of energy later conduced to the development in industry and technology. Finally, all the sides of the human life in the new age were changed in order to get more efficiency out of new industrial formations such as manufactories, factories, plants etc. At this stage the civilization needed entirely new methods of organizing people, totally new economical and political systems.

Unlike those of the Third Wave, the economical issues of the Second Wave can be talked about with quite a great deal of persistency. For almost three hundred years, we have had enough time to witness and analyze the process that took place and, finally, formed the economy of the industrial society.

Now we can definitely say that the main concept that made the industrial production different from the agricultural one was the division of labor. Establishment of the first manufactories is considered to be one of the first steps of transferring into the industrial age. The further development of the Second Wave economy was preconditioned in many aspects by this principle.

According to Toffler, there are six basic fundamentals the economy of any industrialized society stands on: Standardization, Specialization, Synchronization, Concentration, Maximization and Centralization. Not getting into details, all of them meant to optimize the economy of an industrial society by raising the efficiency of labor, decreasing the production costs, speeding up the process etc.

The main point that proves the accuracy of Toffler’s theory is that these principles work in any kind of industrialized society whether it is a capitalistic, socialistic or even the communistic one. With some margin of error, they could be found in the economics of either USA, former USSR or China. Countries with absolutely different history, human nature, traditions or, what is the most important, different kinds of governance, still had to come through the same economical cycles as they entered the industrial stage.

The economic rules were not the only ones that were developing in a similar way in different industrialized countries. The political and the social part of life also obeyed the strict laws of the Second Wave.

Even though the political systems were rather different, they all had one attribute that differentiated the industrial societies from the agricultural ones. It was the strong centralization of power that made possible the establishment of big corporations and, as a result, the realization of big projects.

The author raises a very interesting issue about the force that really makes the power decisions and integrates the whole system in the industrial society. That force was the product of the narrow specification and expansion of production. The representatives of that force became managers of all levels. They were the ones who got between the owners and the workers and made the thing run when the owner could no longer control the technological process. ”In the larger firms no individual, including the owner or dominant shareholder, could even begin to understand the whole operation. The owner’s decisions were shaped, and ultimately controlled, by the specialists brought in to coordinate the system. Thus a new executive elite arose whose power rested no longer on ownership but rather on control of the integration process”(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 plants or factories belong either to capitalists or to the state in communistic societies, neither the owners, nor the state has the real power in the Industrialism.

“Executive elite” is the people who are surfing on the edge of the Second Wave that came with the Industrialism. Those are the people who really rule and have the power. They make corrections to the laws through their representatives in parliament or through their people in the headquarters of the communist party, they settle and stop wars, they are in control of destiny of the whole peoples in the industrial age.

Anyway, we should admit that industrial era made our lives much more exiting. People got an incredible number of opportunities they couldn’t dream of during the agricultural age. We can travel anywhere in the world within reasonable amount of time; telephone also made communication between people much easier; the achievements in medicine helped us to get rid to many of fatal diseases and have greatly extended the human life, mass-media made the distribution of information much easier too. Nevertheless, the industrial era kind of human beings were still used only as a tool for achieving certain aims. It was still not considered to be a primary link in the chain of the human existence.

3. Third Wave

The chapter where the author asks more questions that provides answers. Alvin gives the reader the right to decide which answers will most likely fit the system. Anyone who can answer them will probably be able to obtain a clear picture of what is going to happen to us in the near future.

In this chapter I found the most places where I want to argue with the author. It was not surprising for me because this part of the book was meant to describe the future structure of the society. Like I mentioned before, I have been wondering, what would be different in this book if it were written now, not twenty years ago. On the other hand, even now we still do not have enough experience to decide whether Toffler's theory is right.

The need for a new kind of energy and further discovering of irreplaceable fossil fuels was the reason of shifting into the second wave. But as we all know, the reserves of fossil fuels are not endless on the Earth and moreover, with the current consumption rate we are going to have them for a hundred more years. All this plus the increasing need for more powerful energy have created the potential situation for transferring into the next era or “The Third Wave”. ”In 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries suddenly stepped out of the shadows. Choking off the world’s supply of crude oil, it sent the entire Second Wave economy into a shuddering downspin”(131).

I found the author’s opinion about the nuclear energy power surprising. He considers both nuclear energy and the fossil fuels to be obsolete, and he is looking for something else in terms of new era’s energy. “In short, though nuclear reactors or coal gasification or liquefaction plants and other such technologies may seem to be advanced or futuristic and therefore progressive, they are, in fact, artifacts of a Second Wave past caught in its own deadly contradictions”(138).

In my opinion, deriving energy from nuclear fuel cannot be called obsolete. On the contrary, this kind of energy is only at the very first stage of being used by humans. There are still lots of problems like the poor safety of nuclear reactors or technical impossibility to create a compact nuclear engine at the current stage, but we should not forget, that the efficiency of the steam engine was also very poor and comprised less than 5%!

Of course, new sources of energy will be discovered by human beings in future, but today the use of nuclear energy is very advanced. I think that this the Third Wave civilization kind of energy. Moreover, I tend to think that the beginning of the new era should be considered in connection with the discovery of nuclear power rather than with the potential exhaustion of fossil fuels.

In terms of economic and political issues, the author’s conclusions seem to be pretty clear and logical. New discoveries in technology contribute to free information flow. Such a great popularity of the Internet in many countries all over the world is a very nice proof for Alvin’s ideas about semi-direct democracy as the political structure of the new society.

There is no doubt that the existing political system will not work after the shift into the new era. Terrorism became an every-day word in our language. Big and powerful countries like former U.S.S.R and now Russia are struggling trying to keep their territory together. Separatism became a very important problem in many other countries in all parts of the world. This all indicates that the existing political system is already obsolete and the governments no longer keep the situation under control. ”No government, no political system, no constitution, no charter or state is permanent, nor can the decisions of the past bind the future forever. Nor can a government designed for one civilization cope adequately with the next”(417).

Alvin sees the solution in an absolutely new political system where, unlike in an industrialized era, the minorities have the power and form the structure of the society. “The first, heretical principle of Third Wave government is that of minority power. It holds that majority rule, the key legitimating principle of the Second Wave era, is increasingly obsolete. It is not majorities but minorities that count”419.

Implementing the minority power principle into our life is supposed to change the whole political system and end up as a new kind of a democratic society – semi-direct democracy.

3. Watching the Shift. Conclusion.

If we look back at our history, we can easily notice that the time during the transition into the Second Wave was the most violent and brutal. We are now observing another transition, now into the Post-industrial civilization.

It took us less than three hundred years to jump from Second Wave into post-industrial society which much faster than agricultural civilization could make it into Industrialism. This could mean not only acceleration in social development or the technical progress; the «wave glitch» we are living in may turn out to be a bigger drama than it used to be three hundred years ago.

One of the questions that Alvin did not raise in his book is that the people themselves could be in control of civilizational changes. All the achievements in technical, political and technical sciences should not only be used as a self-developing tool, but people can and should use that knowledge in order to control the development of their history. We do not want to think that the civilization we are entering 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 to leave and enjoy their lives as we do now. We are the ones who have to make sure that the human history will not stop today and the shift into another era will be completed.