Essay 1 Comments

Time's Harvest, Fall 1997

Grading, and Something on Changes as Well

Last updated: 10/18/97
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I apologize for having taken so long in getting Essay 1 graded and returned. I have graded them and will be e-mailing them back to the people who e-mailed them to me this Monday, 10/20. If you sent in your essay on hard copy, I will be e-mailing your grade to you; see below for getting your essay back.

Contents:

General comments on essay content and grades
Submitting work electronically
If you submitted your essay in hard copy form (including floppy disk, FAX, U.S. Mail, and hand delivery)
Change and stages

General comments:

The essays were generally good. They were not as completely thought-out and well-organized as I expect, but there was much careful reading of Toffler, and a lot of good analysis. A large group did not fully follow the essay form that I am asking for - descriptive title, introduction (roadmap for essay), body, and conclusion (wrap-up for essay). Many did not say which of the essay questions they were responding to.

A sizable group felt that there is a contradiction between many smaller changes that accumulate and a shift in the fundamental basis of society, as in Toffler's waves. That is, they seemed to feel that if there are many small changes going on continuously, we cannot be going from one stage to another. There is no such contradiction, certainly not in Toffler's view, and not in mine either. It is fine to disagree with that, but, in all such cases of disagreement I wnat:

A statement of what you believe
A statement of what Toffler writes
Some reason or basis for why you think Toffler is wrong

Just a statement of disagreement all by itself will not get full credit. Of course, it will get more credit than having a disagreement and not realizing it!

Several used a comparison with evolution to say that there were not different stages. But evolution is in fact an excellent example of how small changes can accumulate to produce a fundamental change. While there are similarities, there are important differences along the way. The development of animals from plants, the development of multiple senses, the development of an internal skeletion, the development of language and culture in humans; these produce different kinds of beings.

Some in this group even acknowledged the validity of Toffler's six keys to industrial society, and that these keys were no longer valid, while denying that there was a fundamental change. At some level, yes, we are all humans, just as with evolution, at some level plants and animals are all living beings. But that does not mean that there are not important and even fundamental differences.

The six keys were presented as the basic structure of industrial society. Those are six prinicples that people more or less had to live by, but that didn't matter too much, because for the most part people also wanted to live by them. Now, if those are the fundamental keys, and they are no longer in force, then there must have been a fundamental change in society.

I will write some more about this at the end of this document.

Here are the changes I think you could make easily to improve your Time's Harvest Essays:

Read the essay (and quiz) questions before you start the reading, to organize your reading and watch for points to include.
Be careful about the form, particularly a descriptive title.
Think through your essay before writing it. (Outlines, anyone?)
If you change your mind while writing your essay, rewrite it and in particular reorganize it. This is a lot easier with a word processor.
Make sure your introduction introduces all you are going to say, and that your conclusion wraps up all you have said.
Spell-check.
Include your name, the assignment, and the essay question you are answering up front, ahead of your title.
To make sure that your introduction and conclusion reflect your whole essay, consider writing them last.

Submitting your work electronically

For the most part, this worked smoothly. There are some potential problems that I want to prevent. So: rules for the future, to present potential problems:

If you are submitting by file attachment, instead of cutting and pasting your essay into the body of your e-mail message, please name your file as follows:

First letter of assignment type (e for Essay, Q for Quiz, T for Team Report
Number of assignment
Your three initials (use your last initial twice if you are one of those with no iddle name)
Any extension will do.

Example: David R. Bowen's Essay 3 would be named e3drb.doc

I will return your graded file with a g appended, e.g. e3drbg.doc

For grading the electronic files, I have put my grades and comments in square brackets [] throughout the essay.

Hard-copy people:

If you gave me a hard copy of Essay 1, I will be mailing it back to you, but e-mail me your address or leave it on my voice mail at 313-577-1498. I need addresses from:

Chris Klein
Jason Teper
Barbara Trotter

In the future, I would like to see electronic submissions. If you can send me e-mail, you can submit your essay electronically as follows:

Pull up essay in word processor
Select the whole essay
Copy it to the clipboard (Edit / Copy menu item in most Windows word processors)
Start your e-mail program and write a preliminary message, for example identifying yourself and the assignment
Use Edit / Paste to insert your work at the end of your e-mail message.
Send the message.

Changes and stages

Futurists in general, and Toffler in particular, believe that the future comes into being by the cumulative action of individuals. We create the future by our own actions. If we do not adopt changes, they don't happen. In order for a change to come into being, a certain minimum number of people must adopt it, probably something like a majority. After the change has established itself, then it is possible for the people left behind to feel that they were forced. But the first people chose it. A change cannot get established unless, at a minimum, a large number of people like it. Some people feel that employers can make people do things. But if you read about the earliest factory owners, the weaving mill owners in England, they had a hard time. Craft weavers and farmers simply enjoyed their life and didn't want to submit themselves to factory discipline. Some did, but far from everyone. It grew by fits and starts. And now, in the Third Wave, more and more people are giving up working for someone else and going out on their own.

If you are one that believes there are many changes, but no fundamental change, then it almost necessarily follows that you feel society is being buffeted from all directions, and it is impossible to tell what is going to happen next. If you believe there are fundamental changes, and that The Third Wave or your own variation on that will be the next stage, then you have some idea; a compass, a pattern.

Now, below I give a table of some of the characteristics of the three stages of society. there is a point to this, and I make it at the end.

In the column labelled "Justification", I list the basis for the power of government. I do not mean to say that everybody really believed this basis, but it was the publicly-given basis for the power of the government. For example, in Communist (centrally-planned economies) countries, there were elections, and the justification for government power was the same as that in the democracies, the consent of the governed. The elections were shams. There was only one candidate, and voting against the government could put you in danger. But that makes it all the more remarkable that they bothered with elections; these were presumably the most efficient societies in existence, so why should they bother with sham elections. Because publicly, they had to be able to say they were elected and held power with the consent of the governed.

Also, in the table, I do not mean to claim that all examples of a given form of society held each aspect equally. As the discussion above should make clear, there were important differences in how each of the aspects worked. Also, some societies were in transition, and not all aspects changed at the same time.

Aspect of Society	Hunter-gatherers	Agricultural society	Industrial society
Type of government	Self-government	Monarchy	Elected government
Laws documented how?	No formal laws	The king decreed and knew the rules; if you didn't that was your problem	Constitution and public laws
Size of governmental unit	About 20	Cities of thousands	Countries of millions
Justification for holding power	?	Divine right (power came from God)	Consent of the governed
Basis of wealth or value	Wealth or value typically shared relatively equally. there were some precious objects.	Ownership of land, gold and other precious objects and materials	Ownership of the means of production (factories, corporations)
Form of religion	Religion and government the same	State religion, heretics punished	Free choice of religion
Education	No formal education; informal apprenticeships, maybe	Education for the elite, apprenticeships for some	Universal education is the goal
Principle form of communication	Oral	Oral, some written for the elite	Written, delivered by Post Office
Amount of travel	Minimal	Most people lived and died within 15-20 miles of birthpalce	Country-wide travel common (e.g. trains, boats,canals, later autos)
Role of marketplace	Communal production	Most production for personal or family consumption. Market important for a few.	Most production for the marketplace
Basis for marriage	?	Marriage primarily for economic and political reasons. Arranged marriages common. Love important for a very few.	Romantic love.
Type of family	Tribe	Extended family	Nuclear family
Type of employment	Informal	Most worked for themselves on their farms, taxed arbitrarily by government	Job; working for a company for money

I am sure that there could be more aspects listed here. I invite your suggestions. When I first started doing this in Time's Harvest, I started with just a few rows. Together with the students, we added more rows.

Now, so what? First, these are important aspects of a society, that determine much of what an individual's life would be like, for example. Second, notice that the general trend is moving from behavior controlled by social norms to behavior controlled by individual desires.

Third, why aren't these aspects "mix and match, at least to a much greater extent?" This third point is the reason for my presenting the table. This demonstrates to me, and I hope to you, that there really are stages. There is some internal coherence that I don't understand, and that I haven't seen researched very much, that means that if some aspects of a society change, the changes affect most or perhaps all aspects of society.

If Industrial society is waning, we should expect that what replaces it will be something fundamentally different. Yes, there will be lots of little changes, but they won't be random and arbitrary changes; they will all tend in the same direction, and have some inner logic to them.

"It's just crazy," is a popular opinion. Society is chaotic, out of control. Things don't make sense any more. There is no morality or sense of values. There is no set of expectations on which we relate to each other. The next day's changes will undo today's changes. Again, a popular opinion.

Toffler tries to make sense out of society. There is a general direction, a coherence to what is going on. Is this happening in lock step? No, that is going too far. But Toffler does not feel we are in a state of chaos.