GANDHI WITH SATELLITES

resemble those found in First Wave societies. We are seeingsomething that looks remarkably like a dialectical return.
This is why so many of today’s most startling innovations arrive with a comet’s tail of trace memories. It is this eerie sense of deja vu which accounts for the fascination with the rural past that we find in the most rapidly emergent Third Wave societies. What is so striking today is that First and Third Wave civilizations seem likely to have more in common with each other than with Second Wave civilization. They are, in short, congruous.

Will this strange congruity make it possible for many of today’s First Wave countries to take on some of the features of Third Wave civilization—without swallowing the whole pill, without totally surrendering their culture or first passing through the “stage” of Second Wave development? Will it, in fact, be easier for some countries to introduce Third Wave structures than to industrialize in the classical manner?

Is it now possible, moreover, as it was not in the past, for a society to attain a high material standard of living without obsessively focusing all its energies on production for exchange? Given the wider range of options brought by the Third Wave, cannot a people reduce infant mortality and improve life span, literacy, nutrition, and the general quality of life without surrendering its religion or values and necessarily embracing the Western materialism that accompanies the spread of Second Wave civilization?

Tomorrow’s “development” strategies will come not from Washington or Moscow or Paris or Geneva but from Africa, Asia, and LatinAmerica. They will be indigenous, matched to actual local needs. They will not overemphasize economics txt the expense of ecology, culture, religion, or family structure and the psychological dimensions of existence. They will not imitate any outside model. First Wave, Second Wave or, lor that matter, Third.

But the ascent of the Third Wave places all our efforts in a new perspective. For it provides the world’s poorest nations, as well as the richest, with wholly new opportunities.

SUN, SHRIMP, AND CHIPS

The surprising congruence between many of the structural features of First Wave and Third Wave civilizations suggests that it may be possible in the decades ahead to combine elements of past and future into a new and better present.

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