Toffler, Alvin and Heidi. War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the
21st Century. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993. 302 pages.
Alvin and Heidi Toffler are billed as the world's most influential
futurists. Their credits include titles such as Future Shock, The Third
Wave, and Powershift, published in more than fifty countries and thirty
languages. This book is a hymn of praise to the forward-looking elites in
the U.S. military establishment, who bounced back from the demoralization
of Vietnam to join the 21st-century with their Gulf War "smart bombs." The
Tofflers don't try to moralize; they only observe. This is the information
age, but in Vietnam our methods of waging war were dependent on the mass
production and mass destruction of the industrial age. The shift from
industrial to information age is as profound as the shift from agrarian age
to industrial age; it's high time for warmakers to get with the program.
The Tofflers provide interesting reading, and they interview some
information-age strategists from places like Rand Corporation and the
Pentagon. As unreliable as futurism is, at least it makes us think. One
thought we had is that it seems just as likely that nationalist, religious,
and population pressures, along with the cultural trend toward dumbed-down
infotainment, will fragment everything into another agrarian age within a
hundred years. The information age may be dandy for elites, but bytes of
data do not a meal make.
ISBN 0-316-85024-1
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