"Contemporary reality is like an overlapping set of dire science-fictional scenarios"

When I was younger, I was a flat-out science-fiction nerd. I think I have this in common with a lot of other policy wonks: there's something about memorizing numerous details about imaginary worlds that translates well into memorizing details about the slightly less imaginary but no less bizarre worlds of Washington (and in my case, Tokyo).

Accordingly, with the news cycle in its August nadir, I couldn't resist a post on some recent sci-fi odds and ends.

First, William Gibson, the famed coiner of the term "cyberspace," has just published a new book — Spook Country — that like his novel Pattern Recognition is set in the post-9/11 present (early 2006 to be precise). There is some overlap between the novels, with the enigmmatic Belgian adman Hubertus Bigend serving as a facilitator for at least one plot line. I can't say that I enjoyed SC more than PR — I thought it dragged in some places, in fact — but I have nothing but praise for Gibson's writing style and for his sense of the present. His fictional world is populated with people, objects, and concepts stripped from our own, and it is hard not to look at our world differently after reading both of the aforementioned novels. As Gibson noted in an interview in this weekend's NYT Magazine, "Contemporary reality is like an overlapping set of dire science-fictional scenarios." (In SC, he tries, successfully I think, to bring the Le Carrean cold-war spy thriller into the twenty-first century, a shift that is appropriate because, as Jay Kinney observes in an essay posted at Boing Boing, we're in the midst of a "conspiracy boom.")

Second, I want to direct you to a review by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker of the Library of America's new volume of four Philip K. Dick novels from the 1960s (HT: Boing Boing). Philip K. Dick was one of my first great favorites as a reader of science-fiction. I was certainly a committed fan years before the explosion of interest in his writing that has followed in the wake of the latest round of films adapted from his novels and stories (most of which aren't particularly good, I should add). Gopnik's review is serviceable but I regret that he passed over what I think is Dick's best novel, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said on the way to discussing either his grand epiphany or his descent into madness, depending on your point of view.

The gist of Gopnik's review is that in Dick's novels the focus is not on wondrous new technologies but rather on how frail, immutable, mean humanity will suffer the same faults regardless of our technology: "Although 'Blade Runner,' with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life." (One of my problems of Blade Runner is that for all the grime, it left out a more interesting concept from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: kipple, "unwanted or useless junk that tends to reproduce itself.")

(Incidentally, for more background on Philip K. Dick, as a high school student I did a phone interview with Frank Bertrand, a sort of guardian of Dick's legacy, who posted the interview online.)

What does it say about our age that science-fiction writers, long dismissed as mere genre hacks by the mainstream literary establishment, often have more to say about the way we live now than that establishment? (Look at how Second Life has leaped straight out of the pages of Neil Stephenson, another favorite of mine.)

Anyway, apologies for the nerd moment. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Future-shocked Japan

I first want to wish a happy and healthy New Year to all of my readers.

After a bit of break, I'm back to posting, although my posts will most likely be on a more abstract level, like, say, this post, because Japan is on holiday for the week.

The title of this post refers to the 1970 book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (with uncredited work by Heidi Toffler). I read Toffler's book not too long ago, and it's high on my list of books that have remained relevant long after their initial publication. I guess that's why it's still published as a mass market paperback.

In any case, I was prompted to think about Future Shock today after reading this op-ed in The Japan Times by Kimihiro Masamura, professor emeritus at Senshu University.

Masamura's thesis is that Japan's political leadership has to date failed to respond effectively to the panoply of problems plaguing Japanese society. He writes:

In order to build up again the basic strength of society, the quality of life must be improved. It is necessary to change the people's orientation toward work, restore the function of the family and change the landscape of cities and agricultural villages. It is also necessary to restore the family's power to raise and educate children, and the power of schools to educate children and reconstruct the whole environment surrounding children -- or the totality of nature, society and culture in which children are born and grow.

Masamura's diagnosis of Japan's problems sounds familiar -- namely, like Toffler's idea of future shock.

Toffler considered the impact upon individuals and societies of the rapidly accelerating pace of social change in developed countries. He wrote:

Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one's own society. But its impact is far worse...Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own, with a different set of cues to react to -- different conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else -- then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the dislocation he suffers is doubly severe. Moreover, if this new culture is itself in constant turmoil, and if -- worse yet -- its values are incessantly changing, the sense of disorientation will be still further intensified...Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation -- including its weakest, least intelligent, and most irrational members -- suddenly transported into this new world. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale.

Arguably future shock is the disease that not only Japan, but every developed society (and increasingly, developing societies) has suffered from, to greater or lesser extents, since Toffler first coined the term in the 1960s. Japan has already suffered from future shock in a substantial way -- the breakdown of its political and economic institutions during the 1990s -- but until recently it was relatively immune to social stresses. No longer. The bullying problem, the general failure of schools to prepare students for the future, the new relationships between grown-up children and their parents, the aging problem: these are the symptoms of a society undergoing a much more substantial social shift.

While better leadership is essential to help Japan through the convulsions of future shock, it is a necessary but insufficient condition; there will be no top-down solutions to Japan's social problems. In his op-ed Masamura points out what has to change:

We must think what the government has to do to ensure the people's safety and stabilize their lives, and to protect the environment. Japan is suffering from a vicious cycle: The government's policies are poor and cause anxiety to the people. As a result, the people do not have intellectual and spiritual latitude to think about the future of the nation and society, and become indifferent to politics. This leads to the government's policies becoming even poorer. We need to create a positive cycle: The government's activities concerning the people's safety and lives would be strengthened, enabling the people to have intellectual and spiritual latitude, and to start thinking about the future of the nation and society, and becoming interested in politics. As a result, the government's activities will be improved.

For Japan to change Japanese society will have to become more dynamic. The Japanese people must break the habit of looking to Tokyo for guidance when something goes wrong.

I will leave you to mull the implications of Japan's future shock. And if you haven't read Toffler's book, now would be a good time to do so, because when looking the problems plaguing Japanese, American, and European societies today, his diagnosis is remarkably accurate.