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.
IV. 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.
V. 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.
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