An Annotated Reading of Between Two Ages, by zbigniew brzezinski, 1970, pages 10-14
Previous Entries: Chapter One, and the Introduction to Brzezinski.
The impact of science and technology on people and societies, especially in the more advanced countries of the world, was becoming the major source of contemporary change in Brzezinski’s time (1960s, for this book).
The postindustrial society is becoming a “technetronic” society: a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics—particularly in the area of computers and communications.
In today’s world, social change is no longer primarily driven by industrial processes focused on improving production techniques. Brzezinski argues that unlike the industrial era, where technical knowledge was mainly applied for the sake of ever-faster rates of production, we now live in a Technetronic society. Here, scientific and technical knowledge doesn’t just improve production; it swiftly influences almost every aspect of life directly. The impact goes beyond simple production and shapes mores, social structures, and societal values more comprehensively.
As the ability to instantly calculate complex interactions grows and biochemical means of human control become more accessible, the potential for consciously chosen direction expands. This, in turn, increases the pressures to direct, decide, and change. The reliance on these advanced calculation and communication techniques elevates the social importance of human intelligence and underscores the immediate relevance of learning.
The increased ability to decipher patterns of change amplifies the need to integrate social change. This hastily emphasizes the importance of fundamental assumptions about the nature of man and the desirability of different forms of social organization. Science doesn’t diminish the relevance of values; instead, it intensifies it. However, it demands that these values be articulated in terms that surpass the more simplistic ideologies of the industrial age.
New Social Patterns
For Norbert Wiener, “the locus of an earlier industrial revolution before the main industrial revolution” is to be found in the fifteenth century research pertaining to navigation (the nautical compass), as well as in the development of gunpowder and printing. Today the functional equivalent of navigation is the thrust into space, which requires a rapid computing capacity beyond the means of the human brain; the equivalent of gunpowder is modern nuclear physics, and that of printing is television and longrange instant communications.
A given society’s social concerns and institutions evolved as they entered their Industrial Age. Brzezinski highlights how they will evolve again as a society grows out of its Industrial Age and into a Technetronic era.
Production
In an industrial society, the mode of production shifts from agriculture to industry, replacing human and animal muscle with machine operation.
In the Technetronic society, industrial employment gives way to services, as automation and cybernetics take over the operation of machines previously managed by individuals.
Labor
In the industrial society, issues of employment, unemployment, and the urbanization of the post-rural labor force take center stage in the dynamics between employers, labor, and the market. Ensuring basic welfare for the expanding industrial workforce becomes a significant concern.
In the evolving society, the focus shifts to questions about skill obsolescence, job security, vacations, leisure, and profit sharing. The relationship dynamics are marked by concerns about the psychological well-being of millions of relatively secure but potentially aimless lower-middle-class blue-collar workers.
Education
In the industrial society, breaking down traditional barriers to education is a primary goal of social reformers, serving as a fundamental starting point for social advancement. Education, limited and time-bound, initially focuses on overcoming illiteracy and later transitions to technical training, primarily based on written, sequential reasoning.
In the Technetronic society, education takes a transformative turn. It becomes universal, with advanced training accessible to nearly all individuals possessing basic talents. There is a heightened emphasis on quality selection. The central challenge is to identify the most effective techniques for the rational exploitation of social talent, employing the latest communication and calculating techniques. The educational process extends, incorporating more audiovisual aids, and the continuous flow of new knowledge necessitates frequent refresher studies.
Politics
In the industrial society, social leadership undergoes a shift from the traditional rural-aristocratic to an urban-plutocratic elite. The foundation of this new leadership is freshly acquired wealth, with intense competition serving as both its outlet and stimulus.
In the Technetronic society, plutocratic pre-eminence faces a challenge from political leadership. The political sphere is increasingly influenced by individuals with special skills and intellectual talents. Knowledge transforms into a powerful tool, and the effective mobilization of talent becomes a crucial avenue for acquiring power.
Academia
In an industrial society, the university, unlike its role in medieval times, stands as an aloof ivory tower—a repository of respected yet often irrelevant wisdom. It briefly serves as the fountainhead for aspiring members of the established social elite.
In the Technetronic society, the university transforms into an intensely involved “think tank.” It becomes a crucial source for sustained political planning and social innovation.
Social Fabric
The shift from a rigidly traditional rural society to an urban one inherently brings about turmoil, leading to a tendency to seek comprehensive answers to social dilemmas. This inclination fosters the thriving of ideologies in industrializing societies. An exception to this trend was observed in America, which Brzezinski credits to the absence of a feudal tradition.
In the industrial age, literacy promotes static, interrelated conceptual thinking that is favorable to ideological systems. However, in the Technetronic society, audiovisual communications encourage more changeable, disparate views of reality that resist compression into formal systems. Simultaneously, the demands of science and new computational techniques emphasize mathematical logic and systematic reasoning. Additionally, the increasing ability to quantify and measure social conflicts reinforces a trend toward a more pragmatic approach to social problems. It also stimulates new concerns about preserving “humane” values.
Franchise, Sex, and girl power
In the industrial society, the transition from passive masses to active participants sparks intense political conflicts, particularly concerning disenfranchisement and the right to vote. The issue of political participation becomes crucial.
In the Technetronic age, the focus shifts towards ensuring real participation in decisions that appear too complex and distant for the average citizen. Political alienation becomes a growing concern. Similarly, the question of political equality between the sexes transforms into a struggle for the sexual equality of women.
In the industrial society, women, as machine operators, cease to be physically inferior to men—once a limiting factor of rural life. They begin demanding their political rights. In the emerging Technetronic society, automation poses threats to both genders, intellectual talent becomes computable, the “pill” encourages sexual equality, and women start advocating for complete equality.
Mass Movements
In the industrial society, the newly enfranchised masses are organized by trade unions and political parties, rallying around relatively simple and somewhat ideological programs. Political attitudes are further shaped by appeals to nationalist sentiments, often conveyed through the proliferation of newspapers in the readers’ national language.
In the Technetronic society, the trend leans toward aggregating individual support from millions of unorganized citizens. Magnetic and attractive personalities find it easy to connect with this audience, leveraging the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason effectively. The reliance on television, (and eventually the internet, though Brzezinski hadn’t conceptualized this in his time) leads to a shift from language to imagery, which is international rather than national. This includes coverage of global events like war or scenes of hunger in distant places, creating a more cosmopolitan but highly impressionistic engagement with global affairs.
Economics
In the early phase of industrialization, economic power typically takes on a personalized form, embodied by great entrepreneurs like Henry Ford.
However, in the subsequent stage, there is a tendency toward depersonalization of economic power. This trend is spurred by the emergence of highly complex interdependence between governmental institutions (including the military), scientific establishments, and industrial organizations. As economic power becomes intricately intertwined with political power, it becomes less visible, and the sense of individual futility grows.
Morality and Reality
In an industrial society, acquiring goods and accumulating personal wealth become markers of social attainment for an unusually large number of people. In the Technetronic society, the application of science to humane ends and a growing concern for the quality of life become both possible and increasingly a moral imperative, particularly for a significant portion of citizens, especially the young.
Over time, these changes, along with others that directly impact personality and the quality of human beings, will render the Technetronic society as distinct from the industrial as the industrial was from the agrarian. The transition from an agrarian economy and feudal politics to an industrial society and political systems based on individual identification with the nation-state brought about the international politics of Brzezinski’s era (post-WWII, the Cold War, etc.). The emergence of the Technetronic society will signal the onset of a new relationship between people and their expanded global reality.
Social Explosion/Implosion
This shiny new relationship is a tense one: we still struggle to define it conceptually and render it comprehensible to ourselves. The expanding global reality is simultaneously fragmenting and thrusting itself in upon our local daily reality. The result of the coincident explosion and implosion is not only insecurity and tension, but also an entirely new perception of what many in Brzezinski’s time called “international affairs”. Life seems to lack cohesion as environment rapidly alters and human beings become increasingly manipulable and malleable. Everything seems more transitory and temporary: external reality more fluid than solid, the human being more synthetic than authentic. Even our senses perceive an entirely novel “reality”—one of our own making but nevertheless, in terms of our sensations, quite “real”.
More important, there was already widespread concern about the possibility of biological and chemical tampering with what had until the mid-20th century been considered the immutable essence of man. Human conduct, some argue, can be predetermined and subjected to deliberate control. Man is increasingly acquiring the capacity to determine the sex of his children, to effect through drugs the extent of their intelligence, and to modify and control their personalities.
“I foresee the time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.”
So it becomes an open question whether technology and science can in fact increase the options open to the individual. Brzezinski cites an article in The New York Times titled “Study Terms Technology a Boon to Individualism,” which reported the preliminary conclusions of a Harvard project on the social significance of science. Its participants were quoted as concluding that “most Americans have a greater range of personal choice, wider experience and a more highly developed sense of self-worth than ever before.” Which may have been true, but a judgment of this sort rests essentially on an intuitive and comparative insight into the present and past states of mind of Americans.
“It behooves us to examine carefully the degree of validity, as measured by actual behaviour, of the statement that a benefit of technology will be to increase the number of options and alternatives the individual can choose from. In principle, it could; in fact, the individual may use any number of psychological devices to avoid the discomfort of information overload, and thereby keep the range of alternatives to which he responds much narrower than that which technology in principle makes available to him.”
In other words, the real questions are how the individual will exploit the options, to what extent he will be intellectually and psychologically prepared to exploit them, and in what way society as a whole will create a favorable setting for taking advantage of these options. Their availability is not of itself proof of a greater sense of freedom or self-worth. Instead of accepting himself as a spontaneous given, someone in the most advanced societies may become more concerned with conscious self-analysis according to external, explicit criteria: What is my IQ? What are my aptitudes, personality traits, capabilities, attractions, and negative features?
It will also give rise to difficult problems in determining the legitimate scope of social control. The possibility of extensive chemical mind control and the danger of losing the individuality inherent in extensive transplantation, the feasibility of manipulating the genetic structure will call for the social definition of common criteria of use and restraint.
“. . . while the chemical affects the individual, the person is significant to himself and to society in his social context —at work, at home, at play. The consequences are social consequences. In deciding how to deal with such alterers of the ego and of experience (and consequently alterers of the personality after the experience), and in deciding how to deal with the ‘changed’ human beings, we will have to face new questions such as ‘Who am I?’ ‘When am I who?” ‘Who are they in relation to me?’”
Moreover, people will increasingly be living in manmade and rapidly man altered environments. Brzezinski predicts that by the end of the 20th century, approximately two-thirds of the people in the advanced countries will live in cities. Urban growth has so far been primarily the byproduct of accidental economic convenience, of the magnetic attraction of population centers, and of the flight of many from rural poverty and exploitation. It has not been deliberately designed to improve the quality of life. At the time of the book’s writing, the impact of “accidental” cities was already contributing to the depersonalization of individual life, as the kinship structure contracts and enduring relations of friendship become more difficult to maintain.
Writing from the late 1960s, Brzezinski believed that the problem of identity was likely to be complicated by generation gaps, and intensified by the dissolution of traditional ties and values derived from extended family and community relationships.
“The dialogue between the generations is becoming a dialogue of the deaf. It no longer operates within the conservativeliberal or nationalistinternationalist framework. The breakdown in communication between the generations—so vividly evident during the student revolts of 1968—was rooted in the irrelevance of the old symbols’ to many younger people. Debate implies the acceptance of a common frame of reference and language; since these were lacking, debate became increasingly impossible!”
In his time, the generational clash was over values—with many of the young rejecting those of their elders, who in turn contend that the young have evaded the responsibility of articulating theirs— Brzezinski’s prediction for the future was that the generational clash would also be over expertise. Coming generations would stake their claim to power in government and business. He predicted a generation trained to reason logically; that will be as accustomed to exploiting electronic aids to human reasoning the same way as people had been using machines to increase their own mobility; often expressing themselves in a language that functionally relates to these aids; accepting as routine what were in the late 1960s major innovations in managerial processes involving programming, planning, and budgeting and the appearance in high business echelons of “top computer executives”.
“As the older elite defends what it considers not only its own vested interests but more basically its own way of life, the resulting clash could generate even more intense conceptual issues.”
Global Absorption
“But while our immediate reality is being fragmented, global reality increasingly absorbs the individual, involves him, and even occasionally overwhelms him.”
Brzezinski believed advances in communications technology were the obvious and immediate cause for globalized anomie. The changes wrought by communications and computers make for an extraordinarily interwoven society whose members are in continuous and close audiovisual contact—constantly interacting, instantly sharing the most intense social experiences, and prompted to increased personal involvement in even the most distant problems. The new generation of the late 1960s no longer defined the world exclusively on the basis of reading, either of ideologically structured analyses or of extensive descriptions; it also experiences and senses it vicariously through audiovisual communications. This form of communicating reality was growing more rapidly, especially in the advanced countries, than the traditional written medium, and it was already providing the principal source of news for the masses.
Another of Brzezinski’s predictions was that global telephone contact in the more advanced states will include instant visual contact and a global television satellite system that will enable some states to “invade” private homes in other countries and create unprecedented global intimacy. The accuracy of this prediction is now in the 2020s, self-evident. This new reality, however, was not going to be that of a “global village.” It would have none of the personal stability, interpersonal intimacy, implicitly shared values, and traditions that were important ingredients of the primitive village. It would be something more like a “global city”—a nervous, agitated, tense, and fragmented web of interdependent relations. That interdependence, however, is better characterized by interaction than by intimacy. Occasional electronic and digital malfunctions, like blackouts or breakdowns, were assumed to become all the more unsettling, precisely because the mutual confidence and reciprocally reinforcing stability that are characteristic of village intimacy will be absent from the process of that “nervous” interaction.
“Man’s intensified involvement in global affairs is reflected in, and doubtless shaped by, the changing character of what has until now been considered local news.”
Television joined newspapers in expanding the immediate horizons of the viewer or reader to the point where “local” increasingly meant “national,” and global affairs competed for attention on an unprecedented scale. Physical and moral immunity to “foreign” events cannot be very effectively maintained under circumstances in which there are both a growing intellectual awareness of global interdependence and the electronic intrusion of global events into the home. This condition also made for a novel perception of foreign affairs. Before the advent of mass electronic communications, one learned about international politics through the study of history and geography, as well as by reading newspapers. This contributed to a highly structured, even rigid, approach, in which it was convenient to categorize events and nations in somewhat ideological terms.
Today, however, foreign affairs intrude upon people in the advanced countries in the form of disparate, sporadic, isolated—but involving—events. Catastrophes and acts of violence both abroad and at home become interweaved, and though they may elicit either positive or negative reactions, these are no longer in the neatly compartmentalized categories of “We” and “they.” Television in particular contributed to a “blurred,” and impressionistic attitude toward world affairs. The internet and social media even more so, with large amounts of people not only being unable to discern fact from fiction, but living with entirely different definitions of the meaning of a “fact” and that of “misinformation”. Such direct global intrusion and interaction, however, does not make for better understanding of our contemporary affairs. It can be argued that in some respects, “understanding”—in the sense of possessing the subjective confidence that one can evaluate events on the basis of some organized principle —has become much more difficult for most people to attain. Instant but vicarious participation in events evokes uncertainty, especially as it becomes more and more apparent that established analytical categories no longer adequately encompass the new circumstances. Every new advance in computer technology—the most rapidly expanding aspect of our entire reality, growing more rapidly than population, industry, and cities—intensifies, rather than reduces, these feelings of insecurity. It is simply impossible for the average citizen, even for those of high intellect, to assimilate and meaningfully organize the flow of knowledge for themselves. The sharing of new common perspectives thus becomes more difficult as knowledge expands; in addition, traditional perspectives such as those provided by primitive myths or, more recently, by certain historically conditioned ideologies can no longer be sustained.
“In every scientific field complaints are mounting that the torrential outpouring of published reports, scientific papers, and scholarly articles and the proliferation of professional journals make it impossible for individuals to avoid becoming either narrowgauged specialists or superficial generalists.”
The threat of intellectual fragmentation, posed by the gap between the pace of the expansion of knowledge and the rate of its assimilation; raises a perplexing question concerning the prospects for mankind’s intellectual unity. In Brzezinski’s time It had generally been assumed that the modern world, shaped increasingly by the industrial and urban revolutions, would become more homogeneous in its outlook as everyone caught up. But to Brzezinski, it was more likely to be the homogeneity of insecurity, of uncertainty, and of intellectual anarchy. The result, therefore, would not necessarily be a more stable environment.
The Normal Times 
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