Tout Newt - Newt Gingrich's suggested reading list for Republican legislators

National Review, March 20, 1995 by Richard Brookhiser

Alvin and Heidi Toffler, though they are the most abstract of Newt's authors, are very grounded indeed. Before advising a don or a saint, they would want to know what wave of history he or she belonged to. In the Foreword to Creating a New Civilization, Gingrich says the Tofflers have been "writing about the future for a quarter century." Does the futurism of 1970 hold up better than the lava lamp?

The Tofflers make a number of specific predictions and analyses. They see the leaner, meaner organizations discussed by Miss Boone and Mr. Drucker as prototypes for all social units, which can be decentralized, "de-massified," and "deliberately hollowed out." They apply this model to government and to the family, which has gotten them some bad ink during the Republican takeover. Gingrich was echoing the Tofflers when he speculated that majority rule might be passe, and social conservatives have noticed that the Tofflers take shots at "the values and morality of the 1950s, a time before universal television, before the birth-control pill." This book qualifies these pugnacious opinions somewhat: demassified government could lead to devolution along the lines of the Tenth Amendment as well as to balkanization along the lines of Lani Guinier, and the Tofflers call for a revival of extended families, and family autonomy: "forget peripheral issues, accept the diversity, and return important tasks to the household. Oh yes, and make sure the parent keeps control of the remote." Such backing and filling also explains the Tofflers' success as seers: big bull's-eyes make good marksmen.

Everything the Tofflers say is trivialized by their theory of history. Humanity has gone through three waves: agriculture, industrialism, and the wave that's happening now, the information age. I first heard the big theory in my interview with Gingrich ten years ago and that was the best way to be exposed to it. It's the kind of thought you come up with at a dinner party when you've had a few drinks and you're on a roll. It's sweeping, plausible, partly true; in that context, the holes don't matter. But the Tofflers have built an entire world view on it.

It looks like history, but it is really trendology, or the game of threes: posit two eras, and predict a third. If you win, you not only foresee the future, you own it. This is why the witches played the game on Macbeth, hailing him as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and "King hereafter." In the hands of the Tofflers, the game of threes will probably have less drastic results, issuing only in verbiage and confusion.

Trendology ignores the persistence of previous eras into their successors. The Tofflers acknowledge that the clash of one wave and the next causes turbulence, but they don't see that the turbulence lasts for millennia. The era before the first wave, the era of hunting and gathering, still shapes our notions of warfare and masculinity, so that nearly half the men elected President in second-wave America had fought in battle. Dying and reviving gods, the myths of agriculture, haunt Christmas trees and The Waste Land. This is a criticism of trendology on its own terms. The more serious criticism is that trendology's terms ignore the question of truth, whether framed by philosophers, prophets, or poets. Plato, St. Paul, and Shakespeare would all be baffled by the Tofflers. So would the authors on Gingrich's first team, who cared passionately that the United States be not just the coming thing, but the right thing. "We hold these truths to be self-evident. . ."