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benefits are patiently explained by some loyal member of the new so–
ciety. The feeling of being a passive observer, a dreamer and an
in–
truder into utopia is often overpowering, and sometimes the unex–
pected effect is the reader's relief to be back in the age of industrial
violence and sexual warfare.
"Futurology," which is generally some institute's funded study of
the United States a few years hence, shares with utopian literature one
point: it scarcely leaves the present, or so exaggerates it that it is just
a caricature. In the ledger of this literature, what matters most is the
increase of television sets, cars, cultural devices, money and the de–
crease of political strife, violence, crime and poverty. Zbigniew Brze–
zinski's
Between Two Ages
is neither utopian literature nor futurology
- principally because it is less contrived - but it is similar to both in
tone. It
is
a projection of the idea that modern technology will prevail
over ideology and provincialism, and that world society will witness
the withering away of the political crisis of our day. Optimistically, it
makes the forces of social integration so powerful nothing can stop them.
Brzezinski begins his work with what is surely an epilogue, the
proclamation of a new technetronic age, and ends with some benign
advice on foreign policy, such as the streamlining of the diplomatic
service, global economic development through lending institutions and
a defense posture directed to a few selected spots. He does not dem–
onstrate how the new age will grow out of the present one, and his
long lists of opinion polls scarcely point to a revolution in feeling or
in social awareness. Brzezinski really needs a new period in world his–
tory, for only a new period can bypass the immediate social dilemmas
which he will not and cannot face in this book.
The technetonic age, proclaimed somewhat earlier by Bzrezinski in
Encounter,
is another name for the triumph of American technology
over the world community. And this is what he means when he argues
that the United States
is
the most revolutionary world society, contain–
ing all of the blueprints for a new world order. What happens else–
where is ancillary; in fact, he defines the underdeveloped nations of the
world as ghettos. This remarkable ethnocentrism - which sees most
of human society living on primitive reservations - isolates five changes
in American society and calls them universal. The technetronic age
is marked by a new form of social and business managerialism and
expertise; by mass education; by the quantification of social problems
- that is the end of controversy over ends and the beginning of solu–
tions; by the communications revolution; and by the creation of a
global unity.
