PART 1: THINGS THAT SHAPE OUR FUTURE
The
lives of most men and women are blighted by problems they cannot solve.
And people usually blame themselves, or they blame "fate;" whatever
that is. However, when two cars collide at an intersection, should we,
as students of society, concentrate our attention on the individual
blame of the drivers, on "fate," or on the way transportation is
engineered so that it permits collisions?
If you believe that cars and roads should be designed so that it is
almost impossible for people to lose their lives through collisions,
this book is for you. If you believe that the mind is capable of
gradually applying the method of patient, scientific investigation to
find out how to rearrange the structure of our society to give each
individual a greater opportunity for self-realization and happiness
while he is on earth, we welcome and need your help.
If you believe it's about time for the human race to stop spinning its
wheels, then let's get going! But this book on the future of our
civilization is not for everyone. Few will be able to read it without
forming an opinion before they see the picture as a whole. To enjoy this
book you will have to blend openmindedness with critical skepticism. It
is hard enough to face the problems of our own time. And it is many
times more difficult to understand a projection of fantastic and
shocking changes that may occur over the next hundred years!
Suppose an intelligent man in New York City around 1860 had sat down one evening with a book predicting life a century later.
He would have refused to believe that almost everyone in 1960 would be
able to own a horseless carriage that could whisk about at 60 or more
miles per hour. With his Victorian attitudes he would have been deeply
shocked by the brief bikinis. In 1860, not even a "woman of ill repute"
would have appeared so undressed in public. He would have smiled smugly
at the ridiculous prediction that man-made flying machines would travel
faster than the speed of sound. The thought of sending pictures and
sounds through miles of air would have seemed impossible to a sensible
person in 1860. It would have been incredible to him that the art of war
would progress to the point where one small bomb would destroy a city.
Our Victorian would have been alarmed that a part of his wages could be
withheld to provide for retirement. At this point, let us leave this
gentleman of the last century muttering to himself about loss of freedom
and the world's moving too fast.
Are we more flexible—more farsighted—today? We will need to become
experts at changing our minds. The differences between the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries will probably be small when compared with the
accelerating pace of the next century.
You will understand this book best if you see today as only a stepping
stone between yesterday and tomorrow. You will need a sensitivity to the
injustices, lost opportunities for happiness, and searing conflicts
that characterize our twentieth-century civilization. If your mind can
weigh new ideas and evaluate them with insight, this book is for you.
We have no crystal ball that gives an accurate picture of the
twenty-first century. We want you to feed our ideas into your own
computer. Perhaps you may find even better ideas that may play a part in
molding the future of our civilization. In the next six chapters we'll
explore the "why" and "wherefore" of the unfamiliar, alarming,
unbelievable, wonderful, and exciting picture we will paint of the
twenty-first century. Then we'll join Scott and Hella, who live in the
next century. We'll experience with them the new dimensions of life in
the changed world of the future.
To understand the
probable courses of man's future development, let's spend a few minutes
looking into his past. The world came into existence around four and
one-half billion years ago, and all sorts of weird fishes and monstrous
dinosaurs got into the act before we did. Millions of years ago our
ancestors were little apelike fellows that spent most of their time in
trees. Then some of these little beasts began to do things that were to
make a lot of difference to you and me. They quit jumping from branch to
branch like the squirrels and, instead, began swinging from limb to
limb somewhat like the man on the flying trapeze. This led to some
important changes from head to toe. The arms, which previously moved in a
restricted arc, developed free rotation.
This makes it possible for a baseball pitcher to whirl his arms around
and zing one over home plate. The intestinal organs, which had been
slung from the backbone, as in a dog, were now supported by the pelvis,
which became somewhat bowl-shaped.
The front feet didn't have to support the weight of the body anymore,
and they developed into a bunch of skyhooks that we call fingers. Since
animals that misjudged distances when swinging from branch to branch
left fewer offspring, we are blessed today with excellent stereoscopic
vision and neuro muscular co-ordination. We owe a large part of what we
are today to our swinging primate ancestors. Man has made three big
steps away from his animal cousins. The first cultural jump occurred
when he began to use fire, tools, and language. Although men of our own
species, Homo sapiens, have been here about 50,000 years, radioactive
carbon datings show that our ancestors were using tools and fire as much
as 600,000 years ago.
The beginnings of language probably occurred several hundred thousand
years ago. This was a tremendous leap forward. The development of
language may have played a part in helping us be as intelligent as we
are today. Suppose someone had yelled, "Watch out for the tiger in the
tree behind you!" The more intelligent ones would have got the message
fast. They probably charmed the greater number of females that evening
and, thus, left more offspring.
The second big cultural jump taken by our ancestors occurred about 7,500
years ago. This was the discovery of how to raise food. The development
of agriculture and animal-raising made it possible for us to live in
crowded nests known as cities. When man had to gather his food in the
form of fleeing animals and random plants, it took a lot of land to
support a small group.
For example, there were probably not over 100,000 people on the entire continent of Europe before they learned to raise food.
A good year might have increased the birth rate. But they would soon
have been killed off by famine and disease if there were even one rough
year when the game and plants were less available.
When man began to raise food, he could stay in one place instead of
roaming all over the countryside. Socially and technologically, lots of
things began to happen for the first time. He began to accumulate
bric-a-brac. The wheel was developed. He learned how to heat metals to
make them soft so that they could be poured or beaten into useful
shapes. He developed the plow for working the land and the loom for
weaving cloth. Social patterns that were needed in city life were
developed. He amplified political structures and created armies equipped
with death-dealing instruments. Within a thousand years after our
ancestors acquired the know-how for raising food, the cultural patterns
of city life, politics, business, and technology were invented. Since
then they have continued with very little change until recently.
Many anthropologists consider the city as our most fundamental social
invention. The first cities evolved in southwestern Asia, and the
pattern of the city was well worked out in Mesopotamia by 4,500 to 4,000
B.C. Cities did not appear in China until around 2,000 B.C. Europe had
to wait until the Greeks put together a few cities around 900 to 800
B.C. The city did not appear in Scandinavia until after 1,000 A.D.
Writing developed almost simultaneously, about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago,
in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. The Chinese invented their
cumbersome symbols 2,000 years later. When a man's thoughts were
written, they could speak out after his death. The human race began to
accumulate information that permitted the building of a modern
civilization with a complex value system.
Whereas learning was previously a monopoly of a privileged class, the
development of the alphabet eventually made it possible for everyone to
acquire an education. All alphabets now in use seem to stem from a
single point of origin in the Sinai Peninsula where the Egyptians were
busy mining. Most of the time the Egyptians used criminals and prisoners
of war for this type of work. Occasionally, some wandering Semites who
needed food came to work for them. Since they were pretty smart fellows,
the sheiks of the Semites were appointed foremen of the mines.
As part of their job they drew up reports on how much metal was mined and how much money was earned by the various men.
From the complicated Egyptian system of writing, these foremen
abstracted the simple symbols representing single sounds in the Egyptian
system. We are indebted to them for giving us the first alphabet.
We were doing business as usual by at least 3,000 B.C. Standard weights
and measures were in use in Sumeria. Barley was one of the earliest
mediums of exchange. A measure for barley was available for public use
in the market place. If a farmer had felt he was being gypped, he could
have walked over and measured it out. By 3,000 B.C. convenient metal
coins began to be used in place of the more awkward sacks of barley, and
a shortage of money became a continual problem for the government. The
Code of Hammurabi set the value ratio of barley and metal. This code
provided serious penalties for anyone caught cheating. To make sure this
money system would work, a merchant could have been put to death if he
had refused to accept either barley or coins in payment for his
merchandise.
There are cuneiform records of loans with interest that ran as high as 300 per cent when an individual could not offer security.
Even the lowest rate was 25 per cent per year. The Sumerians worked out
business methods such as stock companies and corporations. Many tablets
recording their business deals and their private correspondence have
survived. One tablet dated before 2000 B.C. describes the complaint of
an old man about the degeneracy of the younger generation. Another
tablet is from a boy at school telling his parents about the "lousy
food."
The late Ralph Linton , a noted American anthropologist, wrote:
Many of the economic and social patterns which still operate in modern Western society can be traced to this region. It has been said that if George Washington had been transported back to the court of Hammurabi of Babylon, about 2067-2025 B.C., he would have felt vastly more at home there than he would in the modern capital city which bears his name. Apart from language difficulties, he would have encountered very few things in Hammurabi's empire which were not familiar and understandable, while in Washington he would have been baffled and confused by the tremendous technological changes . . . and the fumbling efforts which our society is making to bring the other aspects of its culture into adjustment with these.1
The third enormous step in the development of human culture took place
when we began to supplement the puny muscles of human beings and animals
with other sources of power. The use of sails on boats eventually
replaced galley slaves. Water power was used to carry things downstream.
The water wheel furnished power to run mills. Later, steam power
replaced even more human muscles. During the last hundred years we
learned to manufacture large amounts of electrical energy. Then things
began to hum because this made energy or power available at any point to
which we could run a wire or lug a generator.
From a modern point of view one of the most useful measures of the
development of a civilization is the amount of available energy per
person. To a large extent the degree of physical comfort that you enjoy
today is correlated with the energy that is at your disposal.
The application of the scientific method of thinking has made it
possible to develop almost unlimited amounts of energy. This energy may
be in the form of electricity which will run a constellation of
laborsaving and life-enriching appliances and instruments. It may be in
the form of coal, gasoline, oil, or nuclear power. It may be in chemical
form, such as in an automobile battery or a flashlight cell. Imagine
the almost complete paralysis that would occur if your electricity and
gasoline supply were cut off, and you had to use your own muscles in
place of the complex of machines upon which you now rely.
We are today but a few steps from the jungle. While we've been trying to get away from the animal
patterns of the jungle for a little over a half-million years, we really got moving only a few thousand years ago
with the development of cities and the invention of writing. It has
just been in the last century that we have started the large scale use
of non-muscular sources of energy and power. Most factory workers today
are laboring in industries that were not even in existence in 1900.
Although our world may in some ways appear stable to us, we are in a
furious transitional phase in which changes are occurring at the fastest
rate in history.
Today we are at the beginning of this third phase of the development of our civilization. Fantastic developments lie ahead.
If life at times seems bewildering, if you feel pulled in many
directions, if you find that no matter what you do, you still have
sticky problems, if you find that our economic, political, and social
ways of doing things sometimes create more difficulties than they solve,
then you are simply playing your part in suffering through the present
transitional phase of our civilization.
Much of your life is patterned along the lines used in western Asia
several thousand years ago. Yet, some of the conditions to which you are
trying to adjust have come out of the laboratory in the last few
decades. If the day-by-day pattern of your personal, business, and
social life is something less than serene, you've been caught in the
wringer of change, and you've got lots of company.
RETURN TO TOP
The habit patterns of men and women that may have been appropriate several thousand years ago
cannot be made to yield maximum happiness in the changed world of
today—to say nothing of the future civilization toward which we are
rapidly evolving. This chapter will briefly catalogue some of the things
that keep us frustrated, insecure, and jumpy. As might be expected in a
time of rapid transition, few of the basic needs of men and women are
now met in a satisfying way. We hope you will bear with us as we haul
out some of the dirt that usually stays lumpily under the rug.
Among the hangovers from the past, we might list the grisly pattern of
war. Back in Mesopotamia a war might have chewed up a few thousand
people. The First World War killed approximately ten million people of
whom 5 per cent were civilians. But that's only the beginning. The
Second World War rolled up a death toll five times as
large—approximately fifty million. About 50 per cent were civilians.
Suppose there were no police and no laws in your city. Who would be
safe? Criminals might like it. But not you and your family. Similarly,
the lack of a respected and enforced international law between nations
endangers everyone on earth today. It's like living in a jungle.
General Eisenhower has summed up the tragic effects of the custom of war as a method of settling disputes between nations:
... a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth . . . Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: A modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half a million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
When Bertrand Russell,
world famous philosopher, participated at the age of ninety in a big
peace demonstration in London in 1962, he was arrested and sent to jail
for a week! It seemed that he wanted to change some of our habit
patterns. He wished to end nuclear bomb testing, get rid of all nuclear
weapons, and abolish the institution of organized murder that we call
"war."
In spite of our program
of so-called "social security," both personal and economic insecurity
are usual in our time. Few people can be sure of continued employment.
In many cases one can not be sure that the business that employs him
will be in existence a year from now. Often, one can not be sure that
the type of work for which he has been trained will be in demand next
year. Automation is eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs each year
in the United States.
We are quite ingenious in building factories that can turn out enormous
quantities of television sets, automobiles, refrigerators, toothbrushes,
packaged foods, etc. But we wouldn't dare let these factories run full
time because they would produce more goods than we could sell. So we
have idle factories some of the time with large numbers of people in
need all of the time. Paradoxically, it seems that only when we're
fighting a war are we able to keep our industrial machines operating at
full capacity. Although much of our population can use better clothing,
better housing, and better food, our techniques in distributing the
bounty of mass production are bogged down by economic diseases that go
under the names of "overpopulation," "unemployment," and "lack of
purchasing power."
Dr. Ralph Linton has observed:
As the disharmonies within the culture become increasingly pronounced, more and more of the society's energy and resources have to be expended on makeshift adjustments until the period of rapid change gradually grinds to a halt. Our own society would seem to be in such a period at the present time. Its tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns . . . We are now . . . only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political, and economic fields. It is safe to predict that even two or three centuries from now, such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed toward the adjustment of modern society to modern technology.1
Although
this is the only world we have, we're certainly not taking good care of
it. We've already exploded enough atomic bombs to contaminate the
atmosphere with strontium 90 and other radioactive elements. According
to Hathaway and Leverton of the U.S. Department of Agriculture:
Strontium 90 . . . may become a health problem. Its radioactivity is slow to disappear, and its accumulation in the body could be dangerous. . . . Strontium 90 was first detected in animal bones, dairy products, and soil in 1953. It now occurs in all human beings regardless of their age or where they live.2
Those who are not overly worried about human beings might well ponder
other costs of air pollution. Sulphur dioxide has been shown to
disintegrate nylon stockings. It reacts chemically with moisture to form
sulphuric acid, which eats away roofs, eaves, downspouts, and other
exposed metals. It even affects stone buildings and the proud statutes
of military heroes in the parks.
Air and water are the most immediate physical necessities of life. Lest
we neglect the latter, it may be pointed out that our largest river is
well polluted with oils, phenols, ammonia and toxic metals, blood,
refuse from hospitals and undertakers, and acids from mines. For
example, in the St. Louis area there have been times when the chicken
feathers, viscera, and offal collect in patches too thick to drive a
motorboat through. The 300,000,000 gallons of sewage a day coming from
St. Louis and East St. Louis contain 460 tons of solid garbage and 165
tons of ground garbage. In the part of the Mississippi from St. Louis to
New Orleans, a mouthful of water contains half a million coliform
bacilli, which come largely from untreated sewage. Nor does the United
States have a monopoly on polluted water. Throughout the world about
five million children die each year before their first birthday from
diarrhea or dysentery through drinking unclean water.
The pleasure of living in the twentieth century is
somewhat tarnished by the constant deterioration of the machines and
gadg ets we use. They are, unfortunately, designed for a short life—
both style-wise and function-wise. It is possible to build a washing
machine or television set that would probably not need service during a
ten-year period. It is possible to design an automobile that may remain
trouble-free for a ten-year period and to give it an attractive design
that would be appreciated even longer. Instead of designing for
longevity and service, automobile designers rack their brains for ways
to make next year's car so appealing that we'll trade in this year's
car. Gerald Piel informs us:
According to the standard practice of our durable goods industries—always with the aim of perpetuating scarcity in the face of abundance—the automobile is designed for 1,000 hours of service, to be traded in at 40,000 miles or less.
Can
you think of any electrical or mechanical device in your home that will
remain trouble-free for a long period? There is only one device in your
home that is designed to last about twenty years. It is likely that it
won't require service during this time. And you don't even own it!
Although it is a complicated electronic instrument, you can drop it on
the floor, and it probably won't break. Whether you use it once a day or
continuously throughout the day, it does not seem to wear out. The
reason it was designed to give at least two decades of trouble-free
service is that it was not made to be sold. The company that rents it to
you would have to repair it at their own expense if something were to
go wrong. So they make sure that this complex device is engineered to
high standards. They can't make money if it breaks down every few
months. In case you haven't guessed the name of this one thing in your
home that has been engineered to give you maximum utility and minimum
maintenance, it is the telephone! It is designed for trouble-free use,
not for cheap production at a profit. How wonderful it is to realize
that there are ways to get off the treadmill of buy it, use it, junk it,
and buy it again!
Overpopulation of the world is a twentieth-century
problem. It took until about Ï800 for us to spawn a world population of
one billion. Current predictions indicate that the present population of
three and one-third billion will explode to seven billion by the end of
this century and to sixteen billion by the year 2040 if the growth rate
is not changed.
This enormous growth in population in many areas of the world is greatly
exceeding the ability of most countries to provide food and decent
living standards. The FAO World Food Survey of 1963 found that at least
60 per cent of the people in the under-developed areas were
undernourished and that half of the world suffers from hunger, or
malnutrition, or both. In Africa, Latin America, and the Far East, food
production is growing only two-thirds as fast as the population. In the
latter two areas the per capita food production is still below the
levels attained twenty-five years ago ! Eugene R. Black, former
president of the World Bank, has summed it up in this way:
I must be blunt. Population growth threatens to nullify all our effort to raise living standards in many of the poorer countries. We are coming to a situation in which the optimist will be the man who thinks present living standards can be maintained.
Most of the built-in dilemmas that face human beings in
our fast-changing world pose problems for which the wisdom of the past
offers no effective solutions. In so many ways we're like a man chased
to the edge of a cliff by a roaring lion. If he jumps, he'll be hurt.
And if he stays there, the lion's going to get him. For example, we have
built-in sexual drives that become strong in the teen years. Marriage
may seem to offer a solution. Yet, the marriage counselors advise us
that early marriages have a greater rate of divorce— that a person needs
to experience life and achieve a degree of maturity before choosing a
life partner. The individual suffers no matter how he tries to solve the
problem. If a person has an active sex life before marriage, the mores
of our tribe may load him with feelings of guilt. If an unmarried person
denies his need for sexual expression, he may enjoy a culturally-clean
conscience, but he will be fighting a constantly stimulated, deep need
that has been structured into his body. Guilt feelings may still arise
from vivid sexual fantasies, erotic dreams, or masturbation. No matter
what choice a person makes in this situation, it is usually accompanied
by conflict and doubt. Not only in matters of sex, but in most business,
personal, and social matters we are confronted with countless dilemmas.
Our present folkways make it difficult to achieve effective solutions
that deeply contribute to human dignity and happiness.
"The mass of men," said Thoreau, "lead lives of quiet
desperation." The lives of most people in our present civilization fall
far short of fulfilling levels of serenity and happiness. Ann Landers, a
newspaper columnist, who deals with personal problems received this
poignant letter:
Dear Ann Landers :
How do you feel after reading a couple of hundred letters? Disenchanted, I'll bet. When I look back at my own life, its problems and its failures, I wonder what is it all about? Then I look at my children and what has happened to their lives. Dear God, I tried. He knows I tried. But where did I fail? I must have failed. I am their mother. The children went to church and Sunday School. They earned Bibles for perfect attendance and they had love. But here is the record : One married while in the Air Force. Five years later—debt, drinking, divorce. Two children, two unhappy pawns. Remarriage out of the church. More debts. Our daughter, desperately in love in high school, married to a fine but sick man. Willing but unable to work. Debts, then death. A new love? She thought so, but her second marriage was a poor one. Where will it end? Heaven only knows. . . .
The lives of not-so-quiet desperation of many people are reflected in another letter received by Ann Landers.
Dear Ann:
Our five children are in bed and I am looking at a huge basket of clothes that I should be ironing, but I'm writing this letter to you instead. I'm so exhausted if I walked past the bed and looked at it I'd fall asleep standing up. My husband is a wonderful person and a terrific father. He doesn't drink or gamble and wouldn't think of spending a dime on himself. He always puts me and the children first. He works hard at his job, but every week they take something out of his paycheck. I don't think we'll ever be a dollar ahead.In 18 years this house will be paid for, and then it will probably fall apart. The kids, God love them, are wonderful. They help me by doing for themselves and by just being good. Never do I hear a complaint because they have to wear their cousin's hand-me-downs or because there is no money for treats or Scout uniforms. If I could get my hair done in a beauty shop and eat dinner out once in a while I'd think I was in heaven. Is this what life was meant to be?
Tired
Ann Landers began her reply, "Only if you're lucky. . . ."3
It is quite possible that most women in our rapidly
changing civilization have a rougher time of it than men. A woman who
lived on a farm two centuries ago was deeply needed and felt secure. She
and her home were the center of vocation, recreation, and education.
Although she worked hard, she was psychlogically secure in her own
feeling of worth. She was confident of the great need which she supplied
in the lives of her husband and children. Today, household gadgets have
relieved woman of some of the work, but the secure emotional
foundations of her life have been largely swept away. The home is no
longer the place where the family makes its living. Factories and
offices beckon the father to a world of business not shared by the rest
of his family. Schools grab up the children and take over the
responsibility for educating them—frequently, in a way that is quite
different from the training of the parents. Although television has
added to the recreational aspect of modern homes, most of the really
exciting things happen away from home. Automobiles scatter the family in
all directions, and the home is often used primarily as a hotel in
which to eat and sleep.
The modern housewife is expected to be a fascinating and energetic
companion to her husband. She must meet the endless needs of her
children. And at the same time she must operate the household, including
food-gathering at the grocery store. In addition to these three
full-time occupations which stretch her out pretty thin, she should find
time to develop her own mind and body, including frequent trips to the
beauty salon. After a number of years of this tearing in every
direction, most wives begin to feel that, "Life is passing me by." They
begin to question their self-worth. They realize that they are needed
less and less by their husbands and children. Unhappiness, divorce,
suicide bitterness, and blighted personalities are often the
consequences of our rapidly changing culture.
In the United States there are currently around four million divorces a
year that affect about a third of a million children mostly under ten
years of age. Divorce statistics themselves are not important, but the
painful bickering, searing accusations, and damaged egos that lead to a
divorce greatly affect the total sum of human happiness.
When a woman tries to live a fuller life in the world outside her home,
the path is not smooth. Dr. Ruth B. Kundsin, a prominent Harvard
bacteriologist, said:
It is my contention that women in the United States have been victims of both prejudice and discrimination. . . If she has a sprinkling of Harlowian traits, her male colleagues are flirtatious. If she looks like a benevolent moose, they are merciless and their appraisal of her appearance takes precedence over what she has to say.
Dr. Kundsin would have us consider the enjoyment of living with a happy, independent woman who is utilizing her talents completely and arrives home with sparkling, challenging expertenees of her own to tell and share. . . . Couldn't it be that the love of such a woman is a wondrous, exciting experience? Or does the American male ego really need a female slave in residence?
Just in case it's beginning to look as though only the women have a
rough time of it, there's a tragedy in the monotonous, routine-filled
hours by which most men earn their living. Spending most of the prime
years of one's life fighting to earn an existence severely limits the
self-realization and happiness of most men. The world is so full of
exciting things to learn, of interesting places to travel, of countless
creative hobbies, of body-building sports, and of lovely sunsets and
natural beauty that one must wistfully sigh at our limited opportunity
to experience the best things in life.
In this chapter we have briefly touched on some of the problems of our confused civilization that scream the loudest for solutions. It would be possible to write several books just describing the "hangovers" of our transitional civilization. Take a deep breath because we haven't covered even a hundredth of the problems of the present. Help us fill out the long, long list:
The failure to apply
scientific methods to solve social problems; the thousands of insidious
types of prejudice and prejudice-inspired violence and killing; the
hollowness of so much of family and social life; a competitive life
pattern that makes it difficult for us to give fellow humans the deep
acceptance that their egos need so much; the failure of men to cooperate
in joining hands over national boundaries to build a civilization in
which all men may be happier, the failure to seek and utilize the
abilities of geniuses, the shortage of good teachers; schools that
indoctrinate in what to think instead of teaching how to think; the
unfortunate attitude that education stops when "schooling" is over; the
failure of 40 per cent of our young people to finish high school; the
restlessness of our adolescent population; drug addiction; the problem
of abortion; mental illness; the failure of prisons to rehabilitate; the
growing crime rate; slums that mar our beauty and disgrace our
humanity; a countryside made ugly with shoddy stores, screaming signs,
and junkyards; the primitive automotive systems which kill over 40,000
people each year; the high rate of all kinds of accidents that kill one
person in the United States every six minutes and injure someone every
three seconds; the difficulty of consumers in getting reliable
information on products because of advertising that exaggerates little
differences; the competitive system in which one man's success in
business may throw three into the tragedy of bankruptcy; unemployment;
the insecurity of men and women in the forty to sixty-five age range who
have difficulty in finding wellpaying, dignified employment;
price-fixing; industrial strikes; the squeeze on the small businessman;
monopoly; the graft of politicians and the hypocrisy of lawmakers; high
taxes; senior citizens, restless in retirement; unscientific tampering
with our land, resulting in floods, dust storms, and the loss of
valuable forests; the fertile acres wasted in the growth of tobacco that
is detrimental to the health of mankind; water shortage that hampers
agriculture and industry: the use of pesticides in ways that injure
people and kill wildlife; agricultural practices and processing
techniques that result in low quality foods; choosing foods by taste and
habit instead of by vitamin-mineral-protein-unsaturated fat content;
immature personalities reinforced by the deficiencies of television,
radio, and motion pictures; the prevalence of inadequate values based on
wealth and social prestige, which seldom bring happiness when achieved;
and the list may go on and on and on.
The purpose of this book is to show how the mind and heart of man can solve these apparently "unsolvable" problems. The readers of this book may be "pioneers" in a deeply significant way when the long-range story of civilization is written.
RETURN TO TOP
At every point in history [warns Dr. George Gallup] man has assumed that civilization has reached its zenith. He has smugly refused to place himself on a scale of time that reaches thousands and millions of years into the future as well as into the past. Looked at from the vantage point of 8,000 years hence—approximately the period of recorded history—man's progress up to the present time may appear far less impressive than it does today.1
We have been here such a short time that we could almost be called
"newborn." If you were to use a twenty-four hour clock to represent the
time since life began on earth, it would show that man has only been in
existence since the last minute of the twenty-fourth hour; only during
the last few seconds of the last minute has modern man begun to use
scientific methods to lead him to the most effective ways to get things
done. We are just now beginning to hit our stride. More new knowledge
has been created during the twentieth century than in the previous
billion years. Change is everywhere.
How does one go about predicting the most probable changes in man's
future? One might at first think that scientists could give us
worthwhile information on the future. They're busy hammering out the
next step. They're running experiments to find out what works and what
doesn't. They're patiently sifting facts and theories that form the
stepping stones to the future. But a glance at the record shows that few
scientists have been able to anticipate future developments correctly.
They have often been woefully wrong in giving opinions on the
probability of events even a decade in the future.
About eighty years ago Thomas Edison, after his brilliant success with
the phonograph and carbon microphone, became interested in using
electricity to make light. When the news of this got around, the
securities of the gas companies began to drop. The British Parliament
appointed a committee to investigate the possibility of developing an
electric light. The concensus of the experts was that Edison's ideas
were, "good enough for our transatlantic friends . . . but unworthy of
the attention of practical or scientific men."
C. D. Darlington the brilliant English geneticist said:
It is no accident that bacteria were first seen under the microscope by a draper, . . . that oxygen was first isolated by a Unitarian minister, that the theory of infection was first established by a chemist, the theory of heredity by a man who was unfitted to be a university instructor in either Botany or Zoology.
At the beginning of this century, most scientists unanimously agreed
that an airplane was probably impossible, and, even if it worked, it was
impractical. The eminent American astronomer Simon Newcomb declared
with finality:
The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.
Fortunately, the Wright brothers did not have time to worry about
Newcomb's conclusions. They were too busy bolting a gasoline engine onto
some wings in their bicycle shop in Dayton. Here's what William H.
Pickering, a well-known scientist, had to say after the Wright brothers
had flown their airplane at Kitty Hawk:
The popular mind often pictures gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic and carrying innumerable passengers in a way analogous to our modern steamships. ... It seems safe to say that such ideas must be wholly visionary, and even if a machine could get across with one or two passengers the expense would be prohibitive to any but the capitalist who could own his own yacht.
Another popular fallacy is to expect enormous speed to be obtained. It must be remembered that the resistance of the air increases as the square of the speed and the work as the cube.... If with 30 h.p. we can now attain a speed of 40 m.p.h., then in order to reach a speed of 100 m.p.h. we must use a motor capable of 470 h.p. ... it is clear that with our present devices there is no hope of competing for racing speed with either our locomotives or our automobiles.
Scientists may have struck out when it came to airplanes, but they had
another chance to improve their batting average on predictions as the
rocket age approached. In spite of the pioneering researches of American
Robert Goddard and the Romanian Hermann Oberth, who outlined in detail
the basic technology of rockets and spaceships, Professor A. W.
Bickerton in 1926 wrote:
This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialization will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments. Let us critically examine the proposal. For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of the earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15,180 calories. . . . The energy of our most violent explosive—nitroglycerine—is less than 1,500 calories per gramme. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one-tenth of the energy necessary to escape the earth. . . . Hence the proposition appears to be basically impossible. . . .
During the last few months of World War II, the Germans surprised the
world with a V-2 rocket, which they fired from the Continent to England.
This naturally raised the possibility that an intercontinental missile
might be built which could he fired in Europe to destroy American
cities. Dr. Vannevar Bush, who was head of the United States scientific
war effort, testified before a Senate Committee on December 3, 1945:
There has been a great deal said about a 3,000 miles high-angle rocket. In my opinion such a thing is impossible for many years. The people who have been writing these things that annoy me, have been talking about a 3,00U mile high-angle rocket shot from one continent to another, carrying an atomic bomb and so directed as to be a precise weapon which would land exactly on a certain target, such as a city. I say, technically, I don't think anyone in the world knows how to do such a thing, and I feel confident that it will not be done for a very long period of time to come. ... I think we can leave that out of our thinking. I wish the American public would leave that out of their thinking.
Slightly over a decade after this expert delivered his words of wisdom,
there were intercontinental missiles in actual production, and the
Russians had Sputnik I orbiting the earth! Arthur C. Clarke in his
excellent book Profiles of the Future (and to whom we are indebted for
the examples of predictions given in this chapter) wrote:
Too great a burden of knowledge can clog the wheels of imagination; I have tried to embody this fact of observation in Clarke's Law, which may be formulated as follows: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Perhaps the adjective "elderly" requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!2
There have been many men who have been successful in
making remarkably accurate predictions of the future. Leonardo da Vinci
possessed the necessary combination of imagination and nerve. Jules
Verne, in the last century, gave us fantastic predictions, almost all of
which have become present-day realities. Thorsten Veblen was able to
foresee economic and social trends far in advance of their occurrence.
H. G. Wells encompassed, at least in outline, the inevitability of a
world society essentially based upon scientific, rather than political,
orientation.
Anyone who doubts the possibility of long-range prediction might well
consider the statements of Friar Roger Bacon, who lived between 1214 and
1294. These words were written at a time when science and technology as
we know them were non-existent :
Instruments may be made by which the largest ships, with only one man guiding them, will be carried with greater velocity than if they were full of sailors. Chariots may be constructed that will move with incredible rapidity without the help of animals. Instruments of flying may be formed in which a man,sitting at his ease and meditating in any subject, may beat the air with his artificial wings after the manner of birds ... as also machines which will enable men to walk at the bottom of the seas. . . .
Perhaps the only thing we can be sure about when predicting the future
is that it will sound utterly fantastic. It will be enormously different
from anything that we regard as "natural" or "right." If our
predictions in this book seem plausible to you, we have probably failed
to see far enough ahead. If our projection of the future seems
completely impossible and utterly fantastic, there is a possibility that
we may be on the right track.
As we pointed out in the first chapter, we have not been
able to find a crystal ball we consider reliable for predicting the
future. We have, instead, developed a method of analysis which we wish
to set forth clearly. If you agree with the method by which we will
attempt to predict some of the features of our twenty-first century
civilization, perhaps you will then find some of the revolutionary
conclusions more acceptable.
It is our hypothesis that there are three important factors that will
greatly influence the evolution of our civilization. They are:
-
The values, purposes, and ideals toward which man is striving.
-
The method of thinking that we use to select our courses of action.
-
The state of technology, or, what sort of tools are available to help us do what we want to do.
In the next three chapters we are going to discuss each of these three factors that we believe will generate the future shape of our civilization. We believe that if we are
able to determine what people really want here on earth, we will be
able to anticipate the general directions in which men will go in
building the civilization of the future. We will inquire into the "mind"
and "heart" of man to see what he really seems to want most. We will
see if there have been values that have been on a steady upswing for
centuries. If we are successful in correctly pinpointing the values and
ideals that human beings will most desire in the future, we will be on
our way toward accurately predicting the type of civilization that lies
ahead of us.
Values are only a first step. To know what man really wants is most
helpful, but it is equally important that we accurately pick the method
of thinking that he will use to try to get what he wants. For example,
man has always placed a high value on good health. But simply having
this value is not enough. The methods of thinking that accompany a value
have a lot to do with whether it will be achieved. Thinking methodology
that was in vogue during past centuries resulted in seriously ill
people being bled by barbers. Bloodsucking leeches were considered a
necessary item in the doctor's bag. In contrast, the methods of thinking
in use today in the field of medicine often call for a blood
transfusion.
In the past if an idea sounded plausible, people believed it. If an
authority said something was true, it was generally accepted. It was
very rare for a person to say, "I don't care how reasonable it sounds or
who says it's so, I want to make some careful tests to see for myself."
Thus, the methods of thinking that people employ play a big part in determining what kind of civilization they have.
A third factor that interacts with the value structure and the methods
of thinking is the technology of a given age. For example, as a
consequence of our value structure, we want to travel to the moon. We
use scientific methods of thinking to arrive at the basic theories that
show us how to get there. But if the state of technology does not yield a
metal strong enough and light enough to build spacecraft, we're not
likely to set foot on the moon.
Our technology has been slowly evolving for the last 600,000 years. It
was a great day when prehistoric man first picked up a stick and used it
as an instrument to achieve greater control over his environment. The
invention of the wheel was a big step forward. But there has been more
technological development in the last half-century than in the preceding
600,000 years. Computers, automation, and the development of atomic
power enormously enhance man's potential to achieve whatever values and
ideals he chooses.
Now you know how we are going about this. If anyone wishes to spell out
in useful detail some of the forms of our future, we believe he must
pick the right horse in three different races:
-
He must correctly assess what man will want to do—what he really values most.
-
He must accurately find out how he's going to try to do it— what methods of thinking he will rely upon most.
-
He must analyze the tools that man will have for accomplishing what
he sets out to do—he must pinpoint the significant technological
developments that will play major roles in the future.
All three factors interact with each other. The value structure not only
influences the method of thinking and the technology, but it is, in
turn, influenced by them. The method of thinking that man employs is
affected by his value structure and the technology of the age, but it
also plays a part in modifying both of these. Similarly, the technology
of any given civilization interacts in a mutual way with the value
structure and the method of thinking. These pregnant factors might be
viewed as three gears that mesh with each other. 
Now you have a way to judge how well we accomplish what we set out to
do. If you don't feel that we have picked the trends that will play the
largest part in shaping the future, then you probably won't accept the
type of civilization that we describe in Part II of this book. If,
however, you feel that we have correctly assessed the dominant trends in
mankind's value system, if you feel that the method of thinking has
been accurately pinpointed, and if you view technology in the same vein,
then you may be intrigued by our projection of the experiences of a man
and woman in the twenty-first century.
RETURN TO TOP
Many people have pessimistic feelings about the future. Perhaps the
enormous growth of technology that enables man to build bombs that can
destroy a city, automobiles that kill more people than wars, and planes
that exceed the speed of sound give them a "What's next?" feeling.
Perhaps some of the pessimism is due to the failure of economic, social,
and political inventions to keep pace with the developments of physical
science.
Many people identify the future with the value system projected by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and George Orwell in 1984.
These authors had an important message for us. They pointed out that if
we choose values that ignore the inner needs of man, we can create a
horror here on earth. Orwell wrote of a society in which technology was
used to the ultimate to curtail freedom of thought and action. A
television camera in every apartment enabled secret police to see what
was going on. The only way for an individual to have any privacy was to
turn his back to the camera and speak softly. This was modern technology
implementing a value system of the past. Most science fiction uses an
inadequate system of crude values that conflict with man's need to be a
free spirit enjoying the potentialities of life.
We are rapidly approaching a stage in human development that will permit
man to do almost anything he wants. We feel confident man will choose a
set of values that will yield happiness. The warnings of Orwell and
Huxley have not been in vain. We'd be glad to trade two hours in the
present world of conflict for one hour in the advanced civilization of
one hundred years from now. We feel that the next century will open the
door to new horizons of human experience and happiness.
;)
Perhaps the most significant thing a person can know
about himself is to understand his own system of values. Almost every
thing we do is a reflection of our own personal value system. What do we
mean by values? Our values are what we want out of life. No one is born
with a set of values. Except for our basic physiological needs, such as
air, water, and food, most of our values are acquired after birth.
As an example of how values are picked up, individuals who grow up in
the twentieth-century America are conditioned to the acquisition of
money as a part of their value structure. It isn't "natural" for a
person to Want money. It's a value most people in our culture acquire.
When we were perhaps two years old, we learned that a penny would buy a
piece of candy. We heard adults say with obvious approval, "He has a lot
of money." As we grew up, we observed the correlation between money and
larger cars, more beautiful homes, finer clothes, etc. Feelings of
self-worth became associated with money. Over the years we gradually
acquired a value structure that led us to place such a high value on
money that in our present economy of scarcity we spend a large part of
our lives scratching for dollars.
If we had grown up in a society where people do not stress material
wealth, money would not have played an important part in our value
structure. In Samoa food is there for the taking. Coconuts and fruit
grow without cultivation, fish are available in the nearby sea, little
or no clothing is needed, and it doesn't take long to put up a
thatched-roof hut from materials that grow on all sides. In such a
society people may be less likely to work hard for money. People
conditioned in this manner do not act in ways men consider acquisitive,
competitive, and thrifty.
When a culture is in a rapid state of transition, we have conflicting
values which often yield hostility and unhappiness. Most people in
twentieth-century America have a value system that includes both
sincerity and the desire for money. Suppose a merchant advertising a
sale were to include a "loss-leader" item such as a dacron shirt for
$1.49. But if people flocked to purchase this advertised shirt, they
would find that he had only six for sale at this price. The conflict in
values might be felt by both the merchant and his customers. Our
transitional culture of today keeps us in perpetual conflict.
Values are not immutable and eternal. They are created largely by the
feelings of human beings. "The values both of individuals and of groups
both large and small have been changed," Ralph Borsodi advises us:
They are being changed today more rapidly than ever before. The acquisition and the inculcation of values begins at birth in the acceptance or rejection of the child by its parents;the values inculcated and acquired during the first few years of life affect the unconscious mind so deeply that their alteration is not easy, but they can be changed and it is easier to change them in the modern . . . world than ever before.1
We can test a value by asking, "Does it yield happiness for us?" There
is nothing absolute about any value—it's not a question of "right" or
"wrong," "true" or "false," "good" or "bad." We should ask ourselves,
"How do our values affect our happiness, both present and future?"
The happenstance of when and where we are born determines what set of
values we acquire. A few years or a few miles can make a whale of a
difference. Although we know that no one is born with a set of values,
the particular set of values we acquire seems both "inborn" and
"natural" to us. We always feel strange when we meet people with a
different set of values. They don't act "right."
Jacques Fresco, one of the authors, visited Bora-Bora in the Society
Islands thirty years ago. He carried with him fifty pocket mirrors and
hundreds of beads and other novelties that he hoped to use in place of
money. Fresco showed these gifts to several natives and then put them
into a suitcase. When he returned to his living quarters several hours
later, he was surprised to see a number of men and women freely handing
out the beads, mirrors, and other trinkets to their Polynesian friends.
He interrupted them and asked what was going on. One of the older men
replied that Fresco had more than he needed and that it was a shame to
see so many wonderful things not being put to use.
After establishing a favorable relationship with the Polynesians, he
made a casual comment that he would appreciate their help in building an
outrigger canoe. They gathered in a huddle and left without saying
anything. Several days later, they appeared carrying an outrigger canoe
and presented him with this extravagant gift. During the next two weeks
he was unable to find time to enjoy their gift. They appeared disturbed
and picked up the canoe and carried it away.
"Why are you taking my canoe away?" he asked.
An older Polynesian stepped forth and commented resentfully, "We give you boat. You no use. We take back."
It took Fresco a while to grasp fully the significance of such a system of values based on need and use, instead of ownership.
Many of the values that you and I have today were devised thousands of
years ago in a world of great scarcity. For example, during past
centuries it took about twenty farmers to produce enough surplus food to
maintain one townsman. To have a deep feeling of worth in such a world,
it was usual to have a value structure that generated hardworking and
thrifty behavior.
The scarcity conditions of the past have led men to place a high value
on owning as many things as possible. The ownership of a set of tools
enabled a man to make his living. If someone had stolen these from him,
his ability to earn a living would have been threatened. The ownership
of material goods became associated with a feeling of self-esteem. In
some of our past cultures, the concept of private ownership even
extended to include women. Women could be bought and sold in the
marketplace. Even in the twentieth century we have conflicts in our
value system as the status of women is evolving from being the property
of men to the role of free human beings.
If we are to make a reasonable anticipation of the type
of world our descendants will have, we must adequately choose the
dominant trends in values. So here we go! Although there are many ways
to phrase it, we feel that the value wave of the future was expressed
well by Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence in that historic phrase, "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."
Although we in mid-twentieth-century America have a degree of liberty
and freedom, we have only reached the first rung in climbing the ladder
toward achieving the highest degree of life and liberty. When men of the
future look back and try to understand the relatively primitive
conditions of mid-twentieth century America, they will be most
perplexed. They may comment that while Fourth of July speeches in which
the blessings of liberty, freedom, and the right of everyone to be an
individual were spoken of quite highly, yet every year more and more
laws were passed telling people that they couldn't do this, and they
would pay a fine if they did that, and they would go to jail for doing
something else. Perhaps further research by future historians might
reveal that many of our laws were passed because we felt they were
needed to keep men from hurting other men. In other words, the liberty
of one person had to be limited so that he could not destroy the freedom and happiness of others. And this
will be a curious thing for people in the future to understand about our
present civilization. For they will find it unthinkable that conditions
existed that permitted conflict between human beings.
The civilization of the future will outgrow the need for laws as we know them. For example, we have a law against murder.
In the future there will be no laws dealing with murder. No baby is born
a murderer. Immersed in a conflict-culture such as ours, he interacts
with the conditions of his environment to develop a pattern of reaction
that can, under certain circumstances, lead him to kill another human
being. As he grows up, he often sees headlines and pictures in
newspapers telling of murder. In literature, movies, and television he
witnesses thousands of murders.
Our sick society dotes over such legendary murderers as Jesse James, Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde. A young child lives under conditions where he is trained to be
jealous and acquisitive. His king sized ego learns to respond with
feelings of deep hurt and rejection. If one day the grown man were to
find his wife in bed with another man, he would respond in a way that is
dictated by the years of conditioning. It would seem natural for him to
seize a gun and murder the man.
Today we are beginning to identify various things which condition us to
act as we do. In the future the factors that condition human beings to
kill or do other things that harm fellow human beings will be understood
and eliminated. The value structure will not permit children to be
conditioned in sick, twisted, and insane ways. If it is found that
someone might do something that could hurt another human being, the
reaction will not be to pass a law against it. People will not use an
archaic structure of courts, judges, and laws. They will simply ask
themselves, "What is it that permits a person to act in a way that could
hurt someone else?" When they find the root of the difficulty, they
will modify conditions so that people will not —or can not—act in this
way.
When little was known about cultural anthropology,
sociology, and psychology, it seemed quite valid to resist proposed
reforms by saying, "It won't work. It's against human nature." It is
difficult for many people to appreciate the fact that what they call
"human nature" just doesn't exist. Scientific research has discovered
that it is probably not even "human nature" for a man to be attracted
sexually to a woman! The particular object to which one is attracted
sexually seems to be determined by experiences that happen early in
life. This even applies to some animals. Eckhard Hess kept a young male
jungle fowl with him for the first month of its life. It was not
permitted to be with any of its own species during this time. Hess
noticed :
This animal, even after five years—much of that time in association with his own species—courts human beings with typical behavior, but not females of his own species. This certainly is a far-reaching effect and is similar to the finding of Räber (1948), who reported on a male turkey whose behavior toward human beings was similar.2
Man is like a mirror—he largely reflects his surroundings. If man were
to come into the world with a fixed "nature" consisting of automatic
responses, civilization would be impossible. Like the ants, we would
live out our lives in patterns that are modified but little with the
passing of time. The wonderful thing about us is that we come into this
world with maximum flexibility.
We believe that man's pursuit of happiness under the
conditions of the twenty-first century will permit him to achieve the
fullest expression of the following values:
Life and Liberty
A matured society will permit man a maximum degree of life, liberty, and
freedom. Individuals will understand themselves. They will choose
patterns of living that will deeply express their own inner selves.
Never before has society been able to permit all individuals to express
their intellectual, emotional, and physical needs. At long last,
individuals will no longer be subordinated and pressured to conform to a
set pattern.
Economic Abundance.
There will be economic abundance so that the material needs of men are
amply met. Competitiveness, acquisitiveness, thriftiness, and the
hardworking syndrome will be as extinct as the dinosaur.
Health and Longevity.
The ideal of radiant health will continue to be valued as it has in the
past. But for the first time it can be realized. Scientific nutrition
along the lines suggested by one of the authors in How to Live Longer—
Stronger—Slimmer will be built into everyday life-patterns.3
Improved genetic designs and living conditions which promote maximal
health will give a freedom from disease and a maximum of energy that was
seldom achieved in older civilizations. The average life-span may well
exceed 150 years in thetwenty-first century. Eventually, it will stretch
toward immortality.
Love and Friendship.
Man's feelings of friendship, warmth, and love for all other men will
deepen to an extent that can not be understood by those who live in the
twentieth-century world of scarcity. Friendship and love in the
twentieth century are so clouded with conscious and unconscious
hostilities, competitiveness, envy, greed, and insecurity that the
deepest levels of human warmth can not be approached. Only in a mature
society is it possible for man to savor fully his relationships with
fellow human beings.
Physical Pleasures.
The potential that men and women have for enjoying the pleasures of sex
will reach their greatest fruition in a mature society. Sexual behavior
in mid-twentieth-century America will be regarded as incredibly
primitive, for it is overladen with guilt feelings inculcated by early
raining. In the twenty-first century sexual emotions will be treasured
because of their historical association with the creation of life. Deep
feelings of pleasure, oneness, and relaxation will flow from the mature
expressions of human sexual feelings.
Appreciation of Beauty.
Man's appreciation of beauty will expand from the narrow ranges of the
present into the greatly enlarged horizons he will achieve in the
future. The physical beauty of human beings will not be confined to the
narrow standards of the "beauty queen" mentality of today. The beauty of
human beings of all ages from birth to the lovely mellowness of old age
will be appreciated. Esthetic experience will become a pervasive
reality in the lives of all men. Almost everything in the
twenty-first-century world will be beautiful. Man's esthetic sense will
not be dulled by exposure to sham and artificiality, slums, jukeboxes,
and advertising art. As we will discuss in a later chapter, music will
acquire new dimensions that completely transcend the limited orchestral
ranges of today. Beauty will become an integral part of life, not just
something we appreciate at detached moments. People will be more
interested in producing art than in acquiring and
displaying it.
Deep Levels of Self-Knowledge and Communication of Feelings.
People in the twenty-first-century world will achieve penetrating levels of rapport, both with themselves and with the feelings of others. Many of the inner feelings of people in the twentieth century are repressed and do not come fully into awareness. It is extremely rare that one's innermost feelings can be continually, fully, and freely expressed, even between friends or lovers. In the future all feelings will be eagerly sought, verbalized, and thoroughly accepted by others. This will produce a new dimension of relaxed living that is almost unknown today.
Vicarious Sharing of the Delights of Others
The relaxed egos of individuals in the twenty-first century will permit them to achieve a deep pleasure in sharing the happiness and the experiences of others. The achievement of happiness will not be on a narrow self-centered basis in which one ego fights another for a feeling of worth. People in the future will feel that the happiness levels of all individuals are to a large degree interlocked and rise and fall together. For example, if one person is sick, the disease might spread to others. If he is unhappy, the interaction with others might make them unhappy. If an individual is given an inferior status, his resentment might lead to hostile acts that hurt others. Hence, individuals in the twenty-first century will value the feelings of other people as their own and derive a deep satisfaction from knowing that all men in their society live relaxed, deeply-fulfilled and fascinating lives. No one will stand alone.
The Challenge of Life.
The challenge of life that men and women will experience in the future will, perhaps, be a supreme value. For the first time all men and women will live a multidimensional life, limited only by their imagination. In the twentieth century we could classify people by saying, "He is good in sports. She is an intellectual. He is an artist." In the future all people will have the time and the facilities to accept the fantastic variety of challenges that life offers them. Men and women will feel perfectly at home in all parts of their world. The satisfaction of a continuing self-development will be a normal part of life, not a rare thing as it is in the mid-twentieth century.
As we sketch a picture of the twenty-first-century world, we will seek values that will help individual men, women, and children to achieve feelings of fulfillment. Most of the functional value systems of the past will seem inappropriate in the world of the future that we project in Part II.
We must be prepared to see the dissolution of human institutions that have been with us for thousands of years if they no longer contribute maximally to human happiness in the changed world of the twenty-first century. As we study the future value structures of mankind, we must not be like travelers who go to a foreign land and immediately compare everything with their own home town. To understand another place, we must lay aside the value patterns that we are used to. We must relax our mental sets so that we may feel a new pattern of human experience. The biggest problem that we face is to get the twentieth century dust out of our eyes so that we may feel and think as freshly as possible about the almost limitless permutations and combinations of life patterns that mankind may explore for ever higher levels of fulfillment in the future.
If you think that today's vices and virtues are absolute and ultimate and reflect the final value system for all times and all civilizations, you will find our projection of the future to be shocking and incredible. If you have an absolute attitude toward values, all you can do is to project your particular conditioning onto mankind's dynamically evolving future. You will tend to see the future in terms of the present with, of course, some of the burrs removed. If you want even the slightest chance of understanding where we are course, some of the burrs removed. If you want even the slightest chance of understanding where we are going—and possibly helping us get there—shake out the absolutes and put in the relatives. A culture must be seen relative to time, relative to place, and relative to a particular framework of values, thinking methodology, and technology.
Civilization has just recently given up crawling and has begun to toddle. With the development of scientific methods of thinking several centuries ago, mankind began to blossom into what might be called the childhood of civilization. We are today fast-growing adolescents. We have clashing values. We are torn between our inside feelings and needs and outside structures and pressures. The adulthood of human civilization lies before us. There is only one thing we can know for certain—the world of the future will be enormously different from anything in the past or present.
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Our method of thinking helps us choose between formulations, ideas, thoughts, notions, hypotheses, theories, and other cerebral itches. It enables us to decide what is "true" and what is "false." Our method of thinking should help us pick the most reliable thing to do that offers maximum predictability. It should enable us to reject ideas that do not correspond with observable facts.
What are the various methods of thinking that man has used? There is the method of appealing to authority, or, asking what the wise men, present or past, have to say about the problem. There is the method of intuition, which means pumping your feelings for something that may bear on the problem. There is the method of rational, philosophical, logical thinking, which means using your brain to test out various verbal structures.
We're in favor of using all the above methods of thinking, and any others you can find, for the purpose of coming up with creative ideas that may be useful. It is vital that we should not misuse these methods of thinking by relying on them to make a final selection. To choose the most useful ideas we must finally quit talking and check whether a verbal formulation corresponds with observable facts.
The history of human thought shows that we don't get very far as long as we spin words around in our heads and fail to take the scientific step of checking them against observable facts. Non-scientific methods of thinking do not produce agreement between individuals of different backgrounds. They can argue "until the cows come home," and problems still don't get settled. Even worse, non-scientific methods have never been successful in building an effective structure of knowledge on which men of all nations can rely. Reliable knowledge accumulates only when men slow the flow of words and start scientifically checking their ideas against something outside their skulls. The enormous progress of science and the technological marvels of our age were possible because men tested their ideas against observable facts.
Although the Greeks dabbled in and seemed to have anticipated almost everything, it was not until Francis Bacon (1561-1626) appeared on the scene that men began to use systemically the method of science. As Dr. George Gallup pointed out :
Bacon argued strenuously for an entirely new approach to the physical world. ... He advocated the experimental approach, its virtue being that every finding and conclusion could be tested. Since every new bit of knowledge was demonstrably true, there would be no room for quarreling schools of thought, and knowledge about the physical world could be rapidly expanded. Bacon's foresight has proved correct. The world of knowledge, as a result, has been literally transformed by this special way of channeling man's intelligence. Almost all of the physical and material benefits mankind enjoys today are a product of this method of science.1
In a way this scientific method of thinking is really nothing new and not so unusual. We use it often in our everyday personal, business, and social problems. The thing that makes the big difference is the thorough insistence that all knowledge pass the test of being checked by observation. Most of our everyday thinking is a mixture of all methods of thinking.
The scientific method is almost as "old as the hills." Imagine a group of cave men perched on a river bank, arguing whether Onk or Donk can run faster. They'll probably use all of the methods of thinking that we have described above. They may get the opinion of the wise men of the tribe (reference to authority). They'll probably argue and argue (the use of logic). Onk has bigger muscles, but Donk has longer legs, etc. The words will whirl around endlessly. Perhaps one of the women will use her intuition and try to pick the man that can run faster. Or they may use a method to settle the argument that, unfortunately, is still with us—they may fight about it. The one who beats up the other one is assumed to be right. This is the way of the jungle, and it is universally relied upon by lions, tigers, wolves, etc. Unfortunately, in our mid twentieth-century world almost all really big disputes between nations are settled in this age-old fashion.
None of the above methods of settling the dispute may be called scientific. The words go 'round and 'round, the tempers go up and up, but all this has very little to do with who can run faster. Finally, some little genius perched on a branch interrupts the sweating people below, "Why don't we let them run to the big oak tree over there and see who is faster?" This genius has proposed a method of settling the dispute that would probably enable most reasonable men to reach agreement. It is the method of science. It is a method that does not involve the use of words to decide the problem.
The two men get ready to run. The signal is given. They start running. Everybody stops arguing and starts observing. They are anxious to know the facts. They use their senses to report information that will help them decide. They will carefully note whether Onk arrives first, Donk arrives first, or whether they both get there at the same time. The argument as to which could run faster is settled at that time by using the scientific method.
If these cave men had generalized the lesson and had decided to use observation to test all their arguments, problems, ideas, and theories, the human race could have developed today's civilization about fifty thousand years ago! They could have fought out all of the atomic wars and gone through the uncomfortable transition periods a long time before we came on the scene to sweat it out. But instead we find that man became too intrigued with verbal intricacies and developed the habit of using verbal means to decide between "true" and "false."
The Greek philosopher Aristotle had one of the most brilliant minds the world has ever produced. According to some ancient authors, he wrote 1,000 volumes that covered practically every field of learning. When Aristotle was writing on physics, he explained that a heavy object would fall faster than a light object of the same shape and material. This verbal conclusion seemed so natural and obvious to him! How silly to bother with testing. He just reasoned it out in a way that seemed logical. Weight makes things fall. Therefore, the more weight, the faster the fall. Seems reasonable, doesn't it? Aristotle had many assistants, and it would have been very easy for him to check this by actually dropping a light rock and a heavy rock from the top of the Parthenon. But he did not depend on the scientific method for checking his thinking. He liked to prove things rationally, logically, intellectually. He didn't know it was necessary to test the results of his brilliant mind by observation.
You and I lost two thousand years of progress because of this non-scientific attitude of Aristotle's age. In the sixteenth century Galileo began to wonder about the predictability of Aristotle's theory of falling objects. But he didn't refute Aristotle with intellectual argument. He used the scientific method for checking it out. He let the facts speak for themselves. Instead of "settling" the problem by words, he dropped a heavy weight and a light weight at the same time. They both hit the ground simultaneously. "Nature" had spoken. Sane people stopped arguing about the problem. Regardless of how illogical it might seem to us, the facts are that the weight of an object, under standard conditions, does not determine the rate at which it falls.
When we test our ideas by our senses, we can go forward. We can build useful structures of reliable knowledge. We can predict. The unscientific tendency to believe without testing is not, alas, confined to the Ancient Greeks. "Men are apt to be much more influenced by words," said the famous scientist Pavlov, "then by the actual facts of the surrounding reality."
Scientific thinking may be boiled down to three steps:
Coming Up with New Ideas
We use our imagination, intuition, memory, etc. to suggest ways of explaining or solving a problem.
Processing Ideas Mentally
We analyze our thoughts to determine a way to test them by observation. By logic we can determine how well our brain child fits in with known facts. We can try to figure out intellectually how well it will work. What will be its consequences?
Testing by Observation
After we have found a possible new solution to our problem, explored it, and figured out a way to check it, we are then ready to take the third step which will make our thinking scientific. This is testing by observation. This is where we shut up and let observable facts do the talking.
Suppose you were to get into an argument with someone about whether a chameleon will change its color to match its surroundings. Perhaps you have heard the tale of a chameleon that went crazy trying to match a Scotch plaid. Now, if you would want to pursue this matter in an argumentative or philosophical fashion, you could just stand around whirling the words all day and night. But if you felt like getting useful information on the matter, then it would be time to stop talking and start doing. You would bide your time until you could round up one or more chameleons. Then you would let them demonstrate their alleged powers of matching their background. People who have the scientific habit of letting the facts speak for themselves have observed that a chameleon can no more pick its color than a zebra can pick its stripes. When these people check things out, they find that a chameleon turns green when it is excited, frightened, angered, asleep, or dead. It turns brown in response to low temperatures, hunger, and strong sunlight. If you take a green chameleon and throw it into the icebox, it will take about three minutes for it to change from green to brown.
If an argumentative person were to use his logical ability and debate the subject of how chameleons should act, it would be hard to convince him that chameleons don't give a hoot about matching their backgrounds. If you could persuade him to check his thoughts by observation, he would find that a green lizard is perfectly comfortable on a brown background and a brown lizard is perfectly at home on a green background. He'll even let you photograph him that way.
Anyone who tests his thoughts by using his eyes, ears, touch, smell, or taste is using the method of science. "The scientific method," says Stuart Chase:
is concerned with how things do happen, not how they ought to happen. Knowledge of the way things do happen, with no ifs, ands, or buts, allows us to deal more effectively with our
environment. The method is no more an exclusive matter for professionals than it is a matter of white coats and goggles. Most of us are amateur scientists today, though we are seldom aware of it. . . . The scientific method is not primarily a matter of
laboratories and atom-smashers or even meter sticks; it is a way of
looking at things, a way of gathering from the world outside knowledge which will stay put, and not go wandering off like the wickets in Alice's croquet game.2
Many people have confused the scientific method with laboratories and test tubes. But a laboratory is only a room where there are special devices for turning up facts. Charles Darwin, who is regarded as one of the world's greatest scientists, did not use a laboratory. The world was his laboratory. He needed no special apparatus to uncover the facts that suggested and confirmed his theory of evolution. The scientific method is an attitude—a dogged insistence that no matter how right something sounds, we're going to check it out by observation. Sometimes this means tests, and sometimes it only means opening our eyes to observe facts that have been around us for years. So, if you want to boil down the method of science to one word, it's simply testing.
As man reaches out toward the twenty-first century, he will learn to be suspicious of all ideas that are not formulated so that they can be tested by observation. He will realize that the history of human thought shows that the ideas of which we are surest are the ones we most need to test. He will realize that his common sense only mirrors his training and experience. What seems natural and right to him is usually a reflection of the conditions under which he spent his first decade of life.
New generations, who will live and breathe the scientific spirit, will supplant us. Prejudice, grasshopper-like guessing, and emotional thinking will be rare. People of the future will, as suggested by John Dewey, achieve, ". . . the habit of suspended judgment, of skepticism, of desire for evidence, of appeal to observation rather than sentiment, discussion rather than bias, inquiry rather than conventional idealizations." They will know when further logical manipulation is fruitless. They will know when to stop discussing and check the facts. They will be like the proverbial "Man from Missouri"—show me. If they want to know whether a pudding's good, they won't just read the recipe;
they know that "the proof of the pudding is in the eating." They will feel, as Karl Pearson does, that, "There is no short cut to truth, no way to gain a knowledge of the universe except through the gateway of scientific method."
In his book How to Develop Your Thinking Ability one of the authors has described in detail how the scientific method of thought can be used in meeting everyday life problems.3
Men, women, and children in the twenty-first-century world will probably use these or similar techniques to make the scientific spirit a way of life, not just something they use every now and then. They will hold ideas tentatively, not as bastions to be defended, but as tools to be improved. They will keep their eyes and minds open to find facts that do not support their points of view, for contrary facts may lead them to formulations that have greater predictability.
Because of limitations in our sensory and cortical equipment, no one can know all about anything in this world. All of our senses are limited in range. Dogs can hear higher-pitched sounds than we can. Our eyes can see only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Edison said, "We don't know one-millionth of one per cent about anything." Since we can't know all there is to know about anything we must always keep an open mind for important factors that have been left out of our thinking. Wendell Johnson pointed out, "An attitude of this kind—'You can't tell me anything about that'—has an effect quite similar to that of a pus sac in the brain."
The world in which we live is constantly changing. No object in this world is without change. "The world rolls," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, "the circumstances vary every hour." On the atomic level all we have is motion and dynamism—perpetual split-second change. If we would act in ways that are effective and bring us the most happiness, we must train our senses to scan the world around us constantly to detect things that may have changed in a significant way. Alfred North Whitehead said, "Knowledge keeps no better than fish."
Another thing that helps us achieve the scientific spirit is to remember that no two things in this world are absolutely identical. Two things may be similar for our purpose, but the closer we look, the more differences we find. We become prejudiced when we lump a group of people under a single label and then respond to individuals as though they have the same characteristics as the label. Only open eyes and open minds are prepared to cope with a world in which no two things are alike. The words we use imply similarity. We must use our eyes and ears to remind us of differences that are important for our purpose.
Men, women, and children in the twenty-first century will learn to think in terms of degrees. The language we use often implies polar opposites—good or bad, true or false, beautiful or ugly, fast or slow, black or white. But the world in which we live usually shows a large number of degrees between extremes.
If we are to be as relaxed and happy as possible, our thoughts must adequately reflect the reality around us. And we can't do that by making black and white statements if the area to which we are referring contains shades of grey.
Individuals in the twenty-first century will learn to think in terms of probability. They will realize that man must regard all his knowledge as more or less probable. "Absolute certainty," said C. J. Keyser, "is a privilege of uneducated minds—and fanatics. It is, for scientific folks, an unattainable ideal." The people of the future will think of their ideas in terms of an ascending scale of probability, ranging from, "This seems most unlikely," through, "This may be or may not be confirmed by further observation," to, "This has a very high degree of probability."
When people adapt their thinking to the degree nature of our world, they will be more relaxed. They will be more effective at locating and adopting, but always tentatively, the points-of-view that best represent the world about them. "A truly scientific attitude," said Dr. Roger Williams, "is one of humility. . .
A know-it-all attitude is incompatible with the scientific method." individuals in the twenty-first century will be acutely aware of the way their own nervous system influences their observations and reactions. We see life through the filter of our own individual personality and mode of thinking. Even the language structure that we absorb plays an important part in how we think and the way we observe things. Our ego-needs play a big part in selecting what we notice, fail to notice, remember, or forget. "We see things not' as they are," said the wise man, "but as we are."
Individuals in the twenty-first-century world will have a pro found feeling of the way all people and all things interact with their environment. People or things are not cut-and-dried entities. The way they act varies depending on the time and place. We must notice differences. Wendell Johnson said, "To a mouse, cheese is cheese. That is why mouse traps are effective."
The success of the method of science in solving almost every problem put to it will give individuals in the twenty-first century a deep confidence in its effectiveness. They will not be afraid to experiment with new ways of feeling, thinking, and acting, for they will have observed the self-corrective aspect of science. Science gives us the latest word, not the last word. They will know that if they try something new in personal or social life, the happiness it yields can be determined after sufficient experience has accumulated. They will adapt to changes in a relaxed way as they zigzag toward the achievement of their values. They will know that there are better ways of doing things than have been used in the past, and they will be determined to experiment until they have found them. They will know that most of the unhappiness of human beings in the mid-twentieth century was not due to the lack of shiny new gadgets; it was due, in part, to not using the scientific method to check out new political and social structures that could have yielded greater happiness for them.
About a century ago Abraham Lincoln brilliantly expressed the attitudes that will most effectively help us work toward a happier future: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew."
Future generations of mankind will realize that it is only through the scientific method of thinking that their value systems can be fully realized. They will welcome experimentation of all kinds in all phases of life. They will have a habitual open-mindedness coupled with a rigid insistence that all problems be formulated in a way that permits factual checking. They will have the attitude described by Wendell Johnson, "To a scientist a theory is something to be tested. He seeks not to defend his beliefs, but to improve them. He is, above everything else, an expert at 'changing his mind.'"4
The paramount role that the method of science will play in helping us achieve "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" was eloquently expressed by Herman J. Müller:
Above all, the spirit of science is the spirit of progress. . . .
It can afford men ever newer horizons and higher peaks to climb, materially, mentally, and
spiritually. It can afford ever greater and more inspiring opportunities for cooperative as well as individual achievement. Its pathway leads not only outwards into space and to other worlds than ours, but also inwards into the recesses of life, of the mind, and of the heart. By its means we will ourselves assume the role of creators of ever lovelier worlds and more sublime beings.5
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How would you like to have a guaranteed life income of $100,000 per year—with no taxes? And how would you like to earn this income by working a three-hour day, one day per week, for a five-year period of your life, providing you have a six-months vacation each year? Sound fantastic? Not at all with modern technology. This is not twenty-first-century pie-in-the-sky. It could probably be achieved in ten years in the United States if we applied everything we now know about automation and computers to produce a cybernated society. It probably won't be done this rapidly, for it would take some modern thinking applied in an intelligent crash program. Such a crash program was launched to develop the atomic bomb in a little over four years.
It might otherwise have taken thirty years. We get moving if we're threatened, but we chew the fat a long time when it comes to constructive improvements in human affairs.
You will recall that there are three factors that will play a vital role in the evolution of our civilization. One is our value system. Another factor is our method of thinking. The third is the state of our technology—the methods and machines for producing goods and services. The technological wave of the future will involve automated machines guided by computers.
When Queen Julianna of the Netherlands saw a demonstration of an electronic computer at an
Amsterdam exhibition, she said, "I can't understand it. I can't even understand the people who can understand it." But the situation isn't really as bad as the queen implies. It isn't necessary to understand how a computer works any more than it is necessary to understand how the internal combustion engine in your car works for you to enjoy the benefits of the automotive age. The important thing is that we understand the effects of automation and computers. And that's what this chapter is about.
"The electronic computer," says Dr. Louis T. Rader, a vice-president of General Electric, "may have a more beneficial potential for the human race than any other invention in history, Sir Leon Bagrit, who is the head of Britain's Elliot-Automation, has said that the computer and automation will bring, "the greatest change in the whole history of mankind." Let's find out what they're talking about.
Automation simply means replacing human hands and feet by machines that do the same job—only better. Computers today replace human brains with electronic equipment that manipulates figures, makes programmed decisions, and gives instructions far more efficiently than any human. Cybernation means the control of the entire factory by a computer that acts in place of the boss.
The purpose of machines is to lighten the burden of work. Suppose there were no machines. In such a society a person might have to work from 100 to 200 days per year just to get enough food for himself. To produce even a shirt to cover his back could require over 100 hours of labor! Suppose you would have to produce a shirt under primitive conditions. How many hours would you spend preparing soil and growing the cotton? After the cotton bloomed you'd have to pick it, tease out the seed, and spin the fiber into thread. Once you have enough thread, you could weave it into cloth. Then you would need to cut the cloth into the form of a shirt and sew it together. Imagine the amount of time it would take if your only tools were a hoe, a knife, and a needle.
The time needed to produce a shirt took a nose dive back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when much of the work became mechanized and concentrated in factories. The development of the cotton gin, which separated the seed from the white cotton fiber, the invention of machinery that made thread, and the design of looms that wove the thread into cloth enabled a better shirt to be manufactured with only several hours of human labor. Today a shirt may represent only a little over one hour of human time from seed to salesman!
In the twentieth century mass production with assembly lines and improved machinery greatly reduced the cost of producing goods. Automation is based on all of the principles of mechanization and mass production, but it goes one step further. Previously factories needed humans to operate each machine. Automated machines operate themselves. Through "feedback" mechanisms they observe what they are doing. They give themselves instructions, and they check on the quality of their output. They work faster and at speeds that would kill a human. They don't get tired and they don't forget. They never go out on strike or ask for pay increases. Factory design is simplified. Automatic machines don't need parking lots, air conditioning, bright lighting, wash rooms, lunchrooms, or coffee breaks. They don't even need buildings for many types of work.
Automatic machines have been, or soon will be, designed to perform almost any conceivable task done by human beings. Since we have only two hands, it is possible to design automatic machines that will far exceed the manipulative ability of a human. In 1961 U.S. Industries announced that they had developed the first general-purpose automation machine at a price of around $2,500. It is called the TransfeRobot. Its swinging arm and hand is infinitely superior to any human arm or hand. It never gets tired, and the electronic brain guiding it seldom goofs off. It picks things up and puts them down with an accuracy of two thousandths of an inch! The Westclox Corporation of LaSalle, Illinois, uses the TransfeRobot to oil clock assemblies as they speed by on a conveyor belt. It oils eight precision bearings in a second. At the Underwood Corporation typewriter plant in Hartford, the robot picks up and inserts a small typewriter
component into a close-fitting nest. The hand of the TransfeRobot can be adjusted to something more tender than a lover's caress, or it can grab things with the force of a vice. It can use mechanical fingers or electromagnets. For oozy stuff such as chocolate creams, it uses a gentle vacuum.
John Snyder, the maker of the TransfeRobot, says:
So far we have not been able to find any material or any shape or any size it can't handle. . . We built an automated stamping line for Nissan Motors in Japan. It has six presses with TransfeRobottype machines to take the stuff out of one press and feed it to the next. One man watches raw sheet metal go in and one more watches finished fenders come out. It replaces, oh, maybe 20 men altogether. But that's not all. You could extend the process right up to bolting the fender to a car. Even considering how cheap labor is in Japan, the thing saves money.
Just as automated machinery replaces the tired muscles of man, computers are being developed that can replace the bored minds of men who are engaged in the repetitive production of goods and services in our industrial society. And just as automated machinery does a better job on repetitive tasks than the human hand, a computer outperforms a human mind. The circuits in an electronic computer can respond in less than a millionth of a second. This is over a thousand times faster than it takes the neurons in our brains to respond to incoming stimuli. Robert Theobald has pointed out, ". . . in the near future we will see that the computer can take over any structured task . . ."
Man worked toward the development of a computer for a long time. The simple abacus of ancient times was a first step. In 1671 Gottfried Leibnitz tried unsuccessfully to invent a mechanical calculating machine. "It is unworthy of excellent men," he wrote, "to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation." An Englishman named Charles Babbage worked out many of the principles of modern mechanical calculating machines in 1834, but he was unable to produce a successful model because the technology of his time could not turn out accurate gears. It was not until 1944 that the first true computer was produced by Howard Aiken, a professor at Harvard University. It is a sad reflection of our times that this pioneering computer was used to compute weapon trajectories for the U.S. Navy.
Aiken's first computer was soon overshadowed by the famous ENIAC, developed at the University of Pennsylvania. Though a great improvement, EN I AC had 18,000 vacuum tubes, was unreliable, and took too much space. Computers began to trim their waistlines and speed up their operations about 1958 when small reliable transistors and other solid-state components replaced the vacuum tubes. Computers today can multiply a half-million ten-digit numbers in a second. Many computers can make more calculations in an hour than an auditorium full of mathematicians could accomplish in their lifetime. In 1951 there were under 100 computers in operation in the United States. By 1965 the number had jumped to 22,500 and is constantly accelerating. Some companies use up to 200 of them.
As long ago as 1959 the Sperry-Rand Corporation produced a computer that was able to handle 250,000 additions and subtractions of twelve-digit numbers per second. This enables it to make up a monthly payroll for 15,000 employees in only fifteen hours. Previously, it took 450 to 900 hours to do this job. Since only a part of the circuits of the computer are used while calculating a payroll, it can simultaneously solve scientific problems on the side!
By 1965 computers had been used in more than 700 specific tasks. At the time you read this page this number will have increased enormously. Major airlines use computers to give instant information on seats available on all flights. Stock Exchanges use computers to give instant stock quotations. Computers are now busy setting newspaper type, pawing over our income tax returns, controlling the flow of electricity of most power companies, helping you make long distance phone calls by ferreting out available circuits, navigating planes and ships, and providing railroads with instant information on where their freight cars are hiding out. Computers can land a plane in foggy weather without any human help. Our space ships that orbit the earth, spy on the moon, and whiz by the planets are highly dependent on computers from
the design board to the final inch of their spectacular flights. Much of today's business, government, and science would be paralyzed if the computers were ever to demand a vacation.
It has been estimated that if there were no computers, the phone company would now have to hire all the working women in the country just to handle the flood of calls. Computers today control the production machinery in the petrochemical, petroleum, paper, and steel industries. At Western Electric's "Plant of Tomorrow" computers handle the billing, shipping, and warehousing; they order materials, write checks, and decide what to manufacture and how many. Time magazine has pointed out:
Computers have helped scientists to discover more than 100 new subatomic particles, and are busy analyzing strange radio signals from outer space. Biochemists have used the computer to delve into the hitherto unassailable secrets of the human cell, and hospitals have begun to use it to monitor the condition of patients. Computers now read electrocardiograms faster and more accurately than a jury of physicians. The Los Angeles police department plans to use computers to keep a collection of useful details about crimes and an electronic rogue's gallery of known criminals. And in a growing number of schools, computers have taken jobs as instructors in languages, history and mathematics.1
Although recently invented, computers are rapidly transforming our civilization. "In a Chicago radio plant," according to Walter Buckingham:
1000 radios a day now are assembled by two men where two hundred had been required before automation. The duPont Company, using a computer at M.I.T., solved in thirty hours a chemical problem that would have required one man, working forty hours a week for twenty years to do the arithmetic alone.At the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton an electronic computer works out weather predictions in three hours that would take one man with an adding machine three centuries.In these last two cases, the job would not have been practical or economical to tackle without automation.2
A bakery is being automated so that grain delivered to the silo is not touched by human hands until the loaves of bread are ready for delivery. One bakery run by one man could supply the needs of an entire state. A local union with 1,300 members in 1959 had only 350 in 1963. Soon their plant will be automated further, and there will be only twenty-five workers, producing twice as much as before. Union leaders today are desperately worried about the livelihood of their members. Nevertheless, one union is automating its headquarters and reducing the staff from sixty to only six girls. When quizzed about this apparent contradiction, the union official explained that, "Business is business."
Cybernation has been described as the wedding of automated machines with computers. When you equip a factory with automated machinery that is controlled by a computer, you have taken the work out of production. There is little for people to do but turn the machinery on, step aside, and let it do the work.
For example, an automated cleaning fluid plant will have machines that mix and bottle the stuff. When cybernated, this plant will use a computer that is electrically connected to every machine, every storage bin, and every operating mechanism in the entire plant. The computer will have at all times full data on what is happening throughout the plant. It will digest this information and give instructions continuously to keep all parts of the plant operating at maximum efficiency. It will have a better grasp of what is happening second by second throughout the entire factory than any boss could possibly have. It never takes a coffee break or goes to the bathroom. The computer that controls this cybernated cleaning fluid plant will, among other things, send out orders for chemicals, bottles, labels, and other materials before they are needed. It will automatically shut down the plant or speed up the production depending on the need for the product. The computer will quickly spot any breakdown and order repairs instantly. It will maintain a continuous inventory.
Cybernation means that automated machines do all the work with a computer as the boss. The computer "boss" coordinates all activities in the plant so that no executives, secretaries, foremen, or other supervisory personnel are needed. A self-repairing, cybernated factory may operate 24 hours a day, 365 days per year without a single human. If a human were present, he would probably spend his time looking at dials and fighting boredom. The small crew that even today operates a modern cybernated oil refinery could do their work in dinner jackets and white gloves without soiling them!
"Ultimate automation based on atomic power," said Albert Einstein, "will make our modern industry as primitive and outdated as the stone age man looks to us today." It is possible to build an automobile plant in which the raw materials are automatically put in one end and shiny automobiles run out another end, untouched by human hands. Cybernated systems that use almost no human labor can be developed to produce everything we use from the food we eat to the homes we live in.
Now, what does cybernation do to the shirt that we previously discussed which might take one hundred hours to produce without machines? If all raw materials are mined, raised, or gathered by cybernated machinery, and if shirts are produced in a cybernated factory without human beings, just how much labor is involved in the production of a shirt? It is conceivable that only five seconds of human time per shirt might be enough.
Further improvements might get this below one second per shirt. How much would a shirt be worth under these circumstances? Five cents? One cent? One-tenth of a cent? Would it be worthwhile even to worry about charging for a shirt if there were practically no human labor involved in its production or distribution?
Since any task done by human minds and human hands can theoretically be cybernated on a repetitive basis, the advance of modern technology will almost eliminate the human labor cost of services. Services such as dry cleaning are now being automated. In the future haircuts, manicures, beauty parlor services, laundry, and the servicing of automobiles will be performed on a cybernated basis. The ability of cybernated machines has been described by Donald N. Michael:
Cybernated systems perform with a precision and a rapidity unmatched in humans. They also perform in ways that would be impractical or impossible for humans to duplicate. They can be built to detect and correct errors in their own performance and to indicate to men which of their components are producing the error. They can make judgments on the basis of instructions programmed into them. They can remember and search their memories for appropriate data, which either has been programmed into them along with their instructions or has been acquired in the process of manipulating new data.Thus, they can learn on the basis of past experience with their environment. They can receive information in more codes and sensory modes than men can. They are beginning to perceive and to recognize.3
Humans will not even be required to maintain the factories of the future. Cybernated factories will be designed to operate for many decades without repair by men. Routine maintenance and repairs will be performed by machines. Improved metals and designs of the future will make machines almost impervious to wear and tear. Even today Western Electric makes complex switches that work so flawlessly that a single failure in five million operations is considered below par. Some relays now in use will perform a billion switching operations in their lifetime.
Dr. Norbert Wiener, the "Father of Cybernetics," wrote:
It is a degradation to a human being to chain him to an oar and use him as a source of power; but it is almost an equal degradation to assign him purely repetitive tasks in a factory, which demand less than a millionth of his brainpower.
The advent of cybernation may be regarded as an emancipation proclamation for mankind. Its thorough application will at least enable man to have the highest conceivable standards of living with practically no labor. It will free him for the first time from a highly structured and outwardly imposed routine of repetitive day-by-day activity. It will permit him to return to the Greek concept of leisure where all work was done by slaves and men had time to cultivate their minds. In the future each of us will command a million slaves. These will be mechanical and electrical slaves, not the degrading use of a human being to do the work so that another may live an abundant life.
Computers are today in a very early stage comparable to the Model T Ford. At the present time the largest electronic computers have only about 1/10,000 of the associative powers of human beings.
Computers today are generally programmed to operate in specific ways. We are only beginning to design them to observe a large range of outside data and creatively handle this information.
Although computers are just out of their teen years, some of them are already beginning to show a potential for originality.
"The present level of these learning machines," said Dr. Norbert Wiener :
is that they play a fair amateur game at chess but that in checkers they can show a marked
superiority to the player who he programmed them after from 10 to 20 playing hours of working and indoctrination. They thus most definitely escape from the completely effective control of the man who has made them. Rigid as the repertory of factors may be which they are in a position to take into consideration, they do unquestionably --and so say those who have played with them-- snow originality, not merely in their tactics, which may be quite unforeseen, but even in the detailed weighting of their strategy.4
The micro-miniaturization of computer components may enable man to build computers in the future that will have a thousand times more associative power than any human brain. Computers will be designed that will have sensory receptors in all parts of the world which will give them immediate information on anything significant that occurs. A master computer in the future will be able to gather, digest, and analyze all recorded facts and information-a fantastic task that is impossible for any human being. The range of facts and formulas .s so extensive today that it is often impossible for a scientist to keep up with new developments even in his specialty.
Only a computer will be able to handle the integration of all knowledge and come up with decisions that will be based on the full range of relevant data. In the future computers will not only be able to think as well as men, they will be able to exceed man enormously in the capacity to digest facts and information. They will analyze the data and come up with solutions to problems that will enable man to obtain what he wants on earth. It would be impossible to achieve the value system discussed in Chapter 4 without the thorough use of automated machinery and computers integrated into a world-wide cybernated complex.
Cybernation can transform our entire world into a Garden of Eden The goods and services that we desire will be available without repetitive human toil. And the Tree of Knowledge will bloom for the fulfillment of everyone. The biggest portion of the prime years of one's life will no longer be structured by the need for a weekly pay check. With cybernation household jobs will no longer saddle women with boring day-to-day routines.
Men and women will for the first time in their lives be free to inquire into their own needs, to face themselves, and to work out satisfying patterns of life based on their own feelings and thoughts. "The liberation of people from tasks unworthy of human capacity," said Gerald Piel, "should free that capacity for a host of activities now neglected in our civilization. . . ."5
The rat-race will be over. Society will require relatively little from any of its members. John F. Kennedy's famous dictum, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," will be reversed. People may for the first time enjoy an abundant life made possible by the creative intelligence of man. With a cybernated technology it will be possible for all humans to live better than if each person were to have a million slaves at his command. Even a millionaire today has a crude, harried life compared with the smooth, fulfilling pattern that all people may achieve in a cybernated society.
We have asked how you would like a guaranteed income of $100,000 per year. In the 1960's in the United States, the average family has had income of around $6,000 per year. However, when there is almost no human labor cost to producing cybernated goods and services, it will be possible for everyone to have almost anything in any quantity! One hundred thousand dollars per year or $1,000,000 per year— it won't matter. Of course, with practically no labor cost and limitless nuclear energy, things won't have price tags. Prices are only a way of distributing the loot when there is not enough for everyone.
Man's future will be a thousand times more exciting than his past. For the first time man will be free to work out any system of values that he desires—and to achieve these values. For the first time man will be in a position to make a thorough application of the scientific method of thinking so that his knowledge has predictability—so that he can solve his problems and not just patch them up crazy-quilt fashion. For the first time it will be possible to have a cornucopia of goods and services that will not be obtained by the sweat of someone's brow.
"This is a time of transition. . . ," said Adlai Stevenson, "from the ancient problem of sharing scarcity to the modern problem of distributing abundance." Cybernated technology will for the first time permit us to realize our human potential. We may achieve the deepest measure of life; we may enjoy the highest level of liberty; and we may have maximum scope in our pursuit of happiness.
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In the next section we will leap into the twenty-first century. In previous chapters we have found that man escaped from the jungle a relatively short time ago. As might he expected he brought with him many primitive habits of thinking and feeling that still plague us today. We have discussed in detail the triple foundation on which we are making a projection of our twenty-first-century civilization. If you can accept our value system, if you feel that the scientific method of thinking will play a dominant role in the future, and if you understand the impact of a cybernated technology that will produce goods and services with practically no human labor, then we feel that you will find our projection thought provoking.
We do not believe it should necessarily take one hundred years to accomplish the technological and sociological changes that will provide mankind with this cybernated Garden of Eden. Some of the things we are anticipating may be well under way by the time this book is published. If the improvement of our society were given the same priority that the development of the atomic bomb was given during the last war, it would be possible to achieve most of the features we project for the twenty-first century in time for us to enjoy them during our lifetime. U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations, said:
The truth, the central stupendous truth, about developed countries today is that they can have—in anything but the shortest run—the kind and scale of resources they decide to have. ... It is no longer resources that limit decisions. It is the decision that makes the resources. This is the fundamental revolutionary change—perhaps the most revolutionary man- kind has ever known.
Books and articles describing the future usually deal with space ships and other technological marvels and gadgets. They wisely stay away from upsetting the reader's values or challenging the age-old patterns by which he lives. People are not usu-ally threatened by technological change but they get emotional when someone proposes a social change. A twenty-year-old farm boy will join the Air Force and fly jet planes faster than the speed of sound. His grandparents below will hop into their 350 horsepower chrome-plated monster and speed over the expressways. But it took over a century for a good part of the people in the United States to recognize that we should respond to human beings as individuals, instead of on a basis of race, creed, or color. And that battle, unfortunately, is still going on.
As we leap into the future, we must make every attempt to avoid being bogged down by tradition and the "wisdom" of the past. It is useless to try to fight change. It is much more fruitful for human beings to control and channel intelligently the accelerating flow of events. Over a half-century ago the United States Electric Light Company gave its dynamic inventor Hiram Maxim a $20,000 annual life pension and exiled him to England. They felt they needed to get rid of him because his brilliant mind kept inventing improvements. His creative ability made their equipment obsolete before they had time to pay for it. Maxim produced some of his greatest inventions in England. At the time that he was being knighted for his outstanding accomplishments, the United States Electric Light Company was going out of business.
Probably the only thing we can know for sure about the future is that it will be very different from what we have today. But whatever difficulty we may have in trying to understand life in times to come, it is little compared with the trouble people in the twenty-first century will have understanding the way we do things today. In the future people will find it almost impossible to believe that human beings could have organized themselves into nations and then could have used scientifically designed weapons to slaughter each other. As they watch movies of the past, they will be astounded by the tobacco smoke emanating from the nostrils and by the ostentatious clothing and dangling jewelry. They will find animal emotions of hostility and jealousy most incredible. Individuals in the twenty-first century will not look back with nostalgia to a world threatened by atomic oblivion, with economic and political activities vitiated by greed and hypocrisy, and with mental disorders growing at a phenomenal rate. How crude and pathetic we will appear in the eyes of our descendants !
One measure of the degree of civilization at any given time is the extent to which it requires individuals to sacrifice themselves. In the past millions of men were required to sacrifice their lives during the recurrent wars. These individuals usually sacrificed themselves willingly, for they had been conditioned this way.
An Englishman once described America as, "A place where everybody furiously works overtime making labor-saving machinery." To operate the economy of industrial nations today, many individuals are required to sacrifice the prime portion of their lives in an eight-hour-per-day pattern of labor. They are conditioned so that they do not usually consider it a sacrifice. The work week is getting shorter. Some people in the preceding century had to work twice as many hours to make a poorer living.
Furthermore, working conditions are improving, fringe benefits increasing, time-and-a-half more common—if not double time —vacations longer, and every now and then someone manages to convince himself that some part of his job is interesting. Men and women are working to get money to buy things they want, or they are working for recognition in terms of titles and achievements. But the fact remains that the prime portion of the lives of most twentieth-century men and many women is consumed by more or less compulsory, more or less monotonous, more or less repetitive, more or less boring tasks which are associated with a pay check.
The mature society of the future will burden man with a minimum of obligations. Most societies of the past and present could not operate unless its citizens were heavily committed and obligated to certain set patterns. But as we shall see, the automated world of the future will for the first time free mankind from these heavy obligations to the group. He will be able to face himself deeply and fundamentally. No longer will his parents, his boss, and his country tell him how he should act. Our future society will require minimal work, criticism will not be considered disloyalty, and diversity in sexual and family patterns will be possible.
In the future individuals will do most for their social group by developing themselves into dynamic, happy human beings. Men and women will ask themselves: "What fills me as a human being? What things add to my feeling of worth? What do I enjoy? What do I really need? What things make me feel intellectually vital, emotionally warm, and physically strong? What makes me feel ten feet tall, that life is glorious, and that today is wonderful?"
The rate at which we progress toward the better world of the future will depend upon how rapidly we use the scientific method to test out various solutions to our problems. In the past we have fired professors who advocated doing things that were different from the present mores of our tribe. In the future we must take these creative men and give them the facilities they need to test their ideas scientifically.
We must plan to increase the available power and energy in all parts of the world to enormously higher levels. Intelligence guided by scientific methodology must be applied to the technological and sociological reconstruction of our entire planet. A cybernated food production system must be designed to meet the needs of a stable world population. Areas must be set aside for industry that will be coordinated with a vast international transportation system. A product that is cybernetically manufactured anywhere on earth should be cybernetically delivered to almost any building on earth in less than twenty-four hours. We must open our eyes and minds to use to the fullest man's enormous ability to create. Knowledge is exploding. It is reported in Schools for the Sixties, a volume sponsored by the National Education Association that over the last 2,000 years, knowledge doubled for the first time by 1750, for the second time by 1900—(150 years later) for the third time by 1950—(50 years later), and for the fourth time by 1960— (10 years later).
The world's supply of technical knowledge is now doubling every seven years. Most of the scientists who have ever lived are alive today. "By now," said Dr. A. C. Hall, the Defense Department's Deputy Director of Research and Engineering for Space, "we seldom doubt the technical feasibility of anything."
Dr. George Gallup in his book The Miracle Ahead has shown us the type of thinking that will enable man to achieve a maximum of "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." Dr. Gallup asks:
Can man perform the miracle of lifting himself to a higher level of civilization?
The answer is Yes—unequivocally. Man is clearly in charge of his own evolution; he can proceed at a pace that he himself sets. He can solve any problem that comes within his purview—even the problem of war. The great advances made in physical science can be paralleled in social
science. Man now has the procedures for dealing with the problems
arising out of his social existence— problems that the methods of physical science can not adequately explore or illuminate. Man has scarcely begun to make use of his almost limitless brain power, either individually or collectively. Lack of progress in dealing with the affairs of mankind can be traced to a simple truth: man has never made a concerted and persistent effort to solve his social and political problems. His inventive genius has been confined almost exclusively to the production of better tools and instruments. The next great move forward can now be taken. All that is required is a firm belief in man's great potentialities and a readiness to accept change. Man is still young on the face of the earth; civilization is still in its infancy. Homo sapiens has not yet realized his strength and his greatness; nor does he see, except dimly, the heights to which civilization can reach.1
Mankind today is in a period of challenge and opportunity. Fascinating, unexplored territory lies before us. The explorations of Columbus will seem like child's play in comparison. By joining the forces of science and technology throughout the world in a common endeavor, we can eliminate man's inhumanity to man. We can reconstruct the whole of the world environment to give every person on earth what he needs to live a fulfilled, abundant life. We can build a new society with sufficient flexibility to correct its own errors and to meet any challenge that lies ahead. In the future no individual will ever stand alone. The unlimited horizons of the humanistic-scientific-cybernated future will be the most exciting adventure in the history of mankind.
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Notes
Chapter 1
1 Linton, Ralph. The Tree of Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959. p. 298.
Chapter 2
1 Linton, Ralph. The Tree of Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959. p. 47-48
2
Hathaway, Milicent L. and Leverton, Ruth M. "Calcium and Phosphorous," Food, The Yearbook of
Agriculture. United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C., 1959, p. 117.
3
Reprinted by permission of Ann Landers and Hall Publisher's Syndicate.
Chapter 3
1 Gallup, George. The Miracle Ahead. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper & Row, 1964. p. ix.
2
Clarke, Arthur C. Profiles of the Future. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. p. 14.
Chapter 4
1 Borsodi, Ralph. "Eight Propositions About Values," The Humanist. 1964, No. 5. p. 152. Copyright 1964 by the American Humanist Association, Humanist House, Yellow Springs, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
2
Hess, Eckhard H. "Imprinting," Science. 1959. p. 140.
3
Keyes, Jr., Kenneth S. How to Live Longer—Stronger—Slimmer. New York: Frederick Fell, 1966.
Chapter 5
1 Gallup, George. The Miracle Ahead. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964,
p. 153.
2
Chase, Stuart. Tyranny of Words. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1938. p. 123-24. Reprinted
by permission of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.
3
Keyes, Jr.,Kenneth S. How to Develop Your Thinking Ability. New York: McGraw Hill Publishing Co.,
1950.
4
Johnson, Wendell. People in Quandaries. New York: Harper & Brother, 1946. p. 39.
5
Müller, Herman J. Therefore Choose Life. Santa Barbara, California: Center for the Study of Democratic
Institutions, 1965. p. 37.
Chapter 6
1 "Technology," Time. 02 April 1965, p. 86. Courtesy TIME; Copyright Time Inc., 1965.
2
Buckingham, Walter. Automation. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. pp.27-8.
3
Michael, Donald W. Cybernation: The Silent Conquest. Santa Barbara, California: Center for the Study of
Democratic Institutions, 1962. p. 6.
4
Wiener, Norbert. "Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation" Science. Vol. 131, No. 3410.
06 May 1960. p. 1306. Copyright 1960 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
5
Piel, Gerald. Consumers of Abundance. Santa Barbara, California: Center for the Study of Democratic
Institutions, 1961. p. 9.
Chapter 7
1 Gallup, George. The Miracle Ahead. New York, Evanston and London: Harper & Row, 1964. p. 203.
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