The Toffler Commandments

It makes sense to place Toffler's technolatry in the religious realm, for what Toffler has handed down to us is a fully worked-out religion. It comes complete with Churches (Institutes), myths (advancement, progress, empiricism, the divine right of the slide rule). Commandments (transience, novelty, diversity), a single greatest commandment superceding all others (the Technological Imperative — 'we need not less but more technology'), Saved and Damned (Future and Past people), exalted priesthood (white-coated experts and ulcerous managers), a few Saints (Nobel prizewinners in Science), and, now, gospel (Future Shock). In return for being worshipped properly. Technology will 'give' us affluence, democracy, you-name-it, and as a bonus to those nations in a state of whiter-than-Persil grace, under 20 different brand names.

I suggest an alternative set of proposals for taming technolatry: to cease forthwith the veneration of 'overseas experts' until such time as 'overseas' or 'experts' have demonstrated they are more wise than clever; to subvert any structure that assumes the efficiency of its lubricants is more important than the people it is supposed to be serving; to laugh at humourless behavioural scientists; to carry about with us an independent spirit, a poison for which technology has yet to invent an antidote; to demythologise technological pomp and circumstance with the gelignite of crap-detection; to defy the dictatorships of consumerism, fashion and statistics; to pour vials of magic into the phials of biochemists; and finally to cherish and esteem all those aspects in each of us that can't be fed into a computer but nevertheless provide much more reliable 'data' on our talents and personalities — our instincts, emotions and imaginations.

*

Throw-away Sociology