FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

THE THIRD WAVE

 

Once I began thinking in terms of waves of change, colliding and overlapping, causing conflict and tension around us, it changed my perception of change itself. In every field, from education and health to technology, from personal life to politics, it became possible to distinguish those innovations that are merely cosmetic, or just extensions of the industrial past, from those that are truly revolutionary.

Even the most powerful metaphor, however, is capable of yielding only partial truth. No metaphor tells the whole story from all sides, and hence no vision of the present, let alone the future, can be complete or final. When I was a Marxist during my late teens and early twenties— now more than a quarter of a century ago—I, like many young people, thought I had all the answers. I soon learned that my “answers” were partial, one-sided, and obsolete. More to the point, I came to appreciate that the right question is usually more important than the right answer to the wrong question.

My hope is that The Third Wave, at the same time that it provides answers, asks many fresh questions.

The recognition that no knowledge can be complete, no metaphor entire, is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanati-cism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial I mill, and to oneself the possibility of error. This possibility is especially present in large-scale synthesis. Yet, as the critic George Steiner has written, “To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding.”

In a time of exploding change—with personal lives being torn apart, the existing social order crumbling, and a fantastic new way of life emerging on the horizon—asking the very largest of questions about our future is not merely a matter of intellectual curiosity. It is a matter of survival.

Whether we know it or not, most of us are already engaged in either resisting—or creating—the new civilization. The Third Wave will, I hope, help each of us to choose.

 

 

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