It’s about forty years since “Future Shock” was published, and it seems to have withstood the test of time. More to the point, the Tofflers’ predictions for how the symptoms would be manifest appear to be roughly on target. They predicted a growth of cults and religious fundamentalism; rejection of modernism: irrational authoritarianism: and widespread insecurity. They didn’t nail the other great source of insecurity today, the hollowing-out of state infrastructure and externally imposed asset-stripping in the name of economic orthodoxy that Naomi Klein highlighted in The Shock Doctrine, but to the extent that Friedmanite disaster capitalism can be seen as a predatory corporate response to massive political and economic change, I’m inclined to put disaster capitalism down as being another facet of the same problem. (And it looks as if the UK and USA are finally on the receiving end of disaster capitalism at home, in the post-2008 banking crisis era.) […]
I’m going to give it a qualified thumbs-up, for now. Thumbs-up, because religious intolerance is clearly not the answer — but a qualified thumbs-up because I don’t believe we should give a free pass to all religious doctrines in the name of tolerance. Some beliefs can kill, when they are translated into action. They can kill directly, as when the Taliban stones women to death for adultery, or they can kill indirectly, as in the Catholic Church’s opposition to the use of condoms (which makes it harder to prevent the spread of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease holocaust is killing two million people a year). We should, in my view, not seek to accommodate those religious doctrines that would impose restrictions on people — especially non-co-religionists — through the force of law. (If you’re a Hassidic Jew and don’t want to eat pork products, that’s fine; campaigning to ban pork products from sale to anyone at all: not so fine. And so on.)
But ultimately, religious doctrines aren’t the source of today’s social problems. The taproots run deeper, and religious extremism is only one manifestation of the underlying problem: widespread future shock. And I’ve got no easy answer to how to deal with it, unless it is to apply a little humanity to our fellow sufferers when we meet them.
Charlie Stross: A working hypothesis
(via Grinding)
Is future shock to blame for the rise of radical strains of Islam over the past couple-few decades? Putting it to the Popper test: what would disprove this hypothesis?
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