Strange Conclusions

Whenever he strays from the purely figurative and technological, Toffler is led to strange conclusions. Because we're playing Mozart faster now, we're getting Mozart on the run, (who are? How much faster?). Because only 250,000 of the usable words in the language Shakespeare knew still form part of the 450,000 usable words, if Shakespeare were alive today he would be semi-literate. (What are 'usable words'? Usable by whom, for what?) Because 40% of a survey of Seventeen readers had taken major trips during the previous summer young people travel more nowadays. (What of the other 60%? Which young people? Why choose Seventeen to represent 'young people'?). Because there are Greeks, Jewish and Chinese names now in the specialised mutual fund field on Wall Street, professions are 'dividing cellularly' (Meaning perhaps that Wall Street is not now so much of a WASP reservation as a more purely mercantile enclave).

Ninety percent of Toffler's references are to people like Herman Kahn, a career technocrat, or professors in Eastern United States Universities who grow fatter on federal research grants, or behavioural scientists like B.F. Skinner, one of the more grotesque examples of the stupidity of a detached brain. These people, and the institutions like Rand. MIT, Udson and Stand ford that they (and Toffler himself) derive their livings from are not far removed from the kind of moral and social version that has recently given us Santa Claus incarnate in B-52's dropping incendiaries on hospitals.

It is a curious idea of intelligence, for example, that Toffler works from: in his remarkable 'critique' of technology he isolates a 'revulsion against intelligence' as a response to the loss of control over technocracy that sufferers from future shock are prone to feel. There is a 'garish revival of mysticism' (i.e., mysticism is unintelligent), and a 'disillusionment with science' (i.e., science is intelligent). Such judgements proceed from a notion of intelligence that includes objectivity, empiricism, rational manipulation, and tool invention but excludes spirituality, imagination, art. 'common sense', evaluation, creativity. If this nolion of intelligence is not itself unintelligent, assuming that it is the same thing as is wisdom is and this assumption is implicit in Toffler's teehnolatry.