- Email: [email protected]
Plastic fantastic future?
Second thoughts
In many senses this early article is like Jim Dator’s declaration of principles. It declared his research interest: the effects social changes produce in individuals. It designed his research mode: technological innovation as the catalyst of social evolution. It revealed his particular point of interest: the shifts in the value system. And with the perspective that the past 30 years gives, we can say that all these statements were not only at the theoretical or intellectual level; during all this time Jim Dator has been trying to live up to his declaration. The last point becomes obvious when Dator describes valuelessness: ‘...the principle-less ability to adapt and adjust, chameleon-like, to any and all situations; the ability to receive and assimilate contradictory or even unrelated stimuli; the ability to accept and appreciate any act, utterance, or thought that is humanly possible’. To me it is quite clear that Jim Dator did more than just enunciate a principle; it was an announcement of what was going to be his rule of behaviour in approaching the future.
Plastic fantastic Christopher
future?
Burr Jones
I found Jim Dator’s article to be both compelling and frightening. It appears that many of his predictions and descriptions of a cybernetic world are on target. Valuelessness is spreading like a cancer across the cultural and political landscape of so-called Western civilization. The plastic personality seems to be taking a good hold of younger generations and many of their elders. As I have struggled with Jim’s piece, I keep asking myself: ‘is plastic fantastic?‘. I don’t think so. It seems to me that valuelessness and plasticity are more problematic than Dator thought they would be. To be sure, there are violent conflicts exploding between the ‘resistors’ and the ‘modifiers’, but
The author, a former
student of Jim Dator, is Associate Profesor at Eastern Oregon State College, School of Arts and Sciences, 1410 L Avenue, La Grande, OR 97850, USA (Tel: + 1 541 962 3385; fax: + 1 541 962 3898; email: cjonesdeou.edu).
672
Returning to the comparison with Citizen I believe that the article, like the movie, is current. For instance, the reference to situational ethics is very postmodern and many would agree with it today. That is not to say that time has left the piece untouched. The paper transpires the naive ingenuity of the 196Os, and the choice of words reveals its true age: cybernetic (now we would say digital), LSD and sex as leisure activities (now we would probably opt for virtual reality). But the focus on the personal conflicts social evolution causes is very relevant to the present, and relates a lot with Jim’s more recent work. Of course he would say that this is because he has been revolving around the same idea for the last 30 years. To conclude, I would say that the value(lessness) of this article is that it shows that Jim has been following a coherent path all these years. I am tempted to say that he would still agree with much of what he wrote in 1967. I just hope that I am able to say the same thing 30 years after my first article. Kane,
the internal conflicts for ‘modifiers’ are also serious. Valuelessness indeed seems to be a pervading force in North American life and in many countries with strong roots in European culture. Valuelessness, to my mind, is more strongly rooted in consumer culture, secularism and materialism than Dator has suggested, but for the most part I think he got it right. There has been only feeble resistance to these developments-at least in the West. Our world has become smaller, and yet more harried and fragmented. Mobility increases in many ways, and in many aspects of lifeexotic species, investment capital, tropical diseases, consumer goods and popular music. We are bombarded with MTV-sync, nanosecond CPU materialism. While many Baby Boomers may no longer indulge in weekend warrior acid psychedelia, their lives are full of mind-altering, numbing commercial frenzy, trips to the kids’ soccer matches, and Prozac to even it all out.
Second thoughts
My experiences of teaching and working with 18- to 25year-olds suggest to me that the changes in value-orientation are both subtle and dramatic-even in the course of one generation. Research on intergenerational values also seems to corroborate Dator’s claims. One could argue that movements toward ‘cultural diversity’ (and a sometimes parallel cultural relativism) and the creeping influences of poststructuralism are further effects/causes of personal plasticity. Also contributing to plasticity is apathy in the face of insurmountable global problems: the potential of catastrophic climatic change (taken seriously to heart by many young people); the rapidly changing technological world (the World Wide Web, mass media and computers generally); and, external socio-environmental changes. The plastic personality is a logical response to the forces of change afoot in the world. Many of my students seem to have a very cavalier attitude toward choosing a career or finding direction in their lives. Faced with AIDS, the Ebola virus, ozone depletion, economic
On provocation,
youth
uncertainty and the prospect of working at McDonalds for the foreseeable future-or not working at all-no wonder kids escape to drugs, computer games and thrill kills. Meaning has become fleeting and ever more ephemeral. Therein lies the most blatant internal contradiction of a plastic cybernetic world. From the pages of the National Enquirer to new evangelical ‘mega churches’, there are indicators of a fundamental anthropological quest for meaning and value. The high rate of suicide among adolescents, drug use and teenage pregnancy rates are just a few examples of the costs of spiritual (moral) aimlessness. It seems to me that the biggest challenges to a postmodern, cybernetic future are not attacks from religious and cultural fundamentalism (although there will be those), but internal crises because of broken moral compasses. While valuelessness and plastic personalities may make it easier to adjust to a chaotic world, the psychological and spiritual costs threaten to further unravel our threadbare social fabric.
and dystopia
Richard A. Slaughter As a young expatriate teacher in Bermuda in the late 1960s and early 1970s I would sometimes be invited to speak about environmental and population issues. With no real stake in the islands’ well-being and future I found it easy to shock people with dire warnings of social and economic breakdown if physical and economic growth pressures continued. What I did not realise at the time was that my provocations were partly a result of inexperience and my own lack of grounding. In essence, I was trying to find my feet, as it were, in the exhilarating, sometimes frightening, world of the near-term future. I could not separate wild speculation from sober forecasts; I had not yet learned how to leaven the forward view with critical judgement and express it
Richard A. Slaughter may be contacted at the Futures Study Centre, PO Box 2390, Kew, Victoria 3101, Australia (Tel: + 61 3 9853 4757; fax: + 61 3 9853 6380; e-mail: [email protected]).
more convincingly through, for example, the use of suggestion and understatement. These considerations affect my reading of the Dator article three decades after it was written. Some of what Jim wrote now merely looks unconvincing. ‘Situational ethics’ as the basis for a ‘cybernetic society’? Machines in charge of decision-making and administration? A ‘totally planned’ society? They may have seemed plausible then, but to me they are part of a familiar fantasy: the high-tech future, in which machines rule and humans fit in where they may. I think that Jim also romanticised youth, crediting them with adaptive qualities beyond their capacity. He mistook lack of comm; ment for adaptability and underestimated the power of reflexivity. The ‘cybernetic world’ that Jim was attempting to describe sounds to me like a reprise for the standard 20th century dystopia. People are able to ‘program their own needs’-as if ‘program’, ‘their’ and ‘needs’ were all simple and unproblematic. In such a
673
In many senses this early article is like Jim Dator’s declaration of principles. It declared his research interest: the effects social changes produce in individuals. It designed his research mode: technological innovation as the catalyst of social evolution. It revealed his particular point of interest: the shifts in the value system. And with the perspective that the past 30 years gives, we can say that all these statements were not only at the theoretical or intellectual level; during all this time Jim Dator has been trying to live up to his declaration. The last point becomes obvious when Dator describes valuelessness: ‘...the principle-less ability to adapt and adjust, chameleon-like, to any and all situations; the ability to receive and assimilate contradictory or even unrelated stimuli; the ability to accept and appreciate any act, utterance, or thought that is humanly possible’. To me it is quite clear that Jim Dator did more than just enunciate a principle; it was an announcement of what was going to be his rule of behaviour in approaching the future.
Plastic fantastic Christopher
future?
Burr Jones
I found Jim Dator’s article to be both compelling and frightening. It appears that many of his predictions and descriptions of a cybernetic world are on target. Valuelessness is spreading like a cancer across the cultural and political landscape of so-called Western civilization. The plastic personality seems to be taking a good hold of younger generations and many of their elders. As I have struggled with Jim’s piece, I keep asking myself: ‘is plastic fantastic?‘. I don’t think so. It seems to me that valuelessness and plasticity are more problematic than Dator thought they would be. To be sure, there are violent conflicts exploding between the ‘resistors’ and the ‘modifiers’, but
The author, a former
student of Jim Dator, is Associate Profesor at Eastern Oregon State College, School of Arts and Sciences, 1410 L Avenue, La Grande, OR 97850, USA (Tel: + 1 541 962 3385; fax: + 1 541 962 3898; email: cjonesdeou.edu).
672
Returning to the comparison with Citizen I believe that the article, like the movie, is current. For instance, the reference to situational ethics is very postmodern and many would agree with it today. That is not to say that time has left the piece untouched. The paper transpires the naive ingenuity of the 196Os, and the choice of words reveals its true age: cybernetic (now we would say digital), LSD and sex as leisure activities (now we would probably opt for virtual reality). But the focus on the personal conflicts social evolution causes is very relevant to the present, and relates a lot with Jim’s more recent work. Of course he would say that this is because he has been revolving around the same idea for the last 30 years. To conclude, I would say that the value(lessness) of this article is that it shows that Jim has been following a coherent path all these years. I am tempted to say that he would still agree with much of what he wrote in 1967. I just hope that I am able to say the same thing 30 years after my first article. Kane,
the internal conflicts for ‘modifiers’ are also serious. Valuelessness indeed seems to be a pervading force in North American life and in many countries with strong roots in European culture. Valuelessness, to my mind, is more strongly rooted in consumer culture, secularism and materialism than Dator has suggested, but for the most part I think he got it right. There has been only feeble resistance to these developments-at least in the West. Our world has become smaller, and yet more harried and fragmented. Mobility increases in many ways, and in many aspects of lifeexotic species, investment capital, tropical diseases, consumer goods and popular music. We are bombarded with MTV-sync, nanosecond CPU materialism. While many Baby Boomers may no longer indulge in weekend warrior acid psychedelia, their lives are full of mind-altering, numbing commercial frenzy, trips to the kids’ soccer matches, and Prozac to even it all out.
Second thoughts
My experiences of teaching and working with 18- to 25year-olds suggest to me that the changes in value-orientation are both subtle and dramatic-even in the course of one generation. Research on intergenerational values also seems to corroborate Dator’s claims. One could argue that movements toward ‘cultural diversity’ (and a sometimes parallel cultural relativism) and the creeping influences of poststructuralism are further effects/causes of personal plasticity. Also contributing to plasticity is apathy in the face of insurmountable global problems: the potential of catastrophic climatic change (taken seriously to heart by many young people); the rapidly changing technological world (the World Wide Web, mass media and computers generally); and, external socio-environmental changes. The plastic personality is a logical response to the forces of change afoot in the world. Many of my students seem to have a very cavalier attitude toward choosing a career or finding direction in their lives. Faced with AIDS, the Ebola virus, ozone depletion, economic
On provocation,
youth
uncertainty and the prospect of working at McDonalds for the foreseeable future-or not working at all-no wonder kids escape to drugs, computer games and thrill kills. Meaning has become fleeting and ever more ephemeral. Therein lies the most blatant internal contradiction of a plastic cybernetic world. From the pages of the National Enquirer to new evangelical ‘mega churches’, there are indicators of a fundamental anthropological quest for meaning and value. The high rate of suicide among adolescents, drug use and teenage pregnancy rates are just a few examples of the costs of spiritual (moral) aimlessness. It seems to me that the biggest challenges to a postmodern, cybernetic future are not attacks from religious and cultural fundamentalism (although there will be those), but internal crises because of broken moral compasses. While valuelessness and plastic personalities may make it easier to adjust to a chaotic world, the psychological and spiritual costs threaten to further unravel our threadbare social fabric.
and dystopia
Richard A. Slaughter As a young expatriate teacher in Bermuda in the late 1960s and early 1970s I would sometimes be invited to speak about environmental and population issues. With no real stake in the islands’ well-being and future I found it easy to shock people with dire warnings of social and economic breakdown if physical and economic growth pressures continued. What I did not realise at the time was that my provocations were partly a result of inexperience and my own lack of grounding. In essence, I was trying to find my feet, as it were, in the exhilarating, sometimes frightening, world of the near-term future. I could not separate wild speculation from sober forecasts; I had not yet learned how to leaven the forward view with critical judgement and express it
Richard A. Slaughter may be contacted at the Futures Study Centre, PO Box 2390, Kew, Victoria 3101, Australia (Tel: + 61 3 9853 4757; fax: + 61 3 9853 6380; e-mail: [email protected]).
more convincingly through, for example, the use of suggestion and understatement. These considerations affect my reading of the Dator article three decades after it was written. Some of what Jim wrote now merely looks unconvincing. ‘Situational ethics’ as the basis for a ‘cybernetic society’? Machines in charge of decision-making and administration? A ‘totally planned’ society? They may have seemed plausible then, but to me they are part of a familiar fantasy: the high-tech future, in which machines rule and humans fit in where they may. I think that Jim also romanticised youth, crediting them with adaptive qualities beyond their capacity. He mistook lack of comm; ment for adaptability and underestimated the power of reflexivity. The ‘cybernetic world’ that Jim was attempting to describe sounds to me like a reprise for the standard 20th century dystopia. People are able to ‘program their own needs’-as if ‘program’, ‘their’ and ‘needs’ were all simple and unproblematic. In such a
673