Number 72, April 1996

The Third Wave:
*What the Tofflers Never Told You

by Thomas J. Czerwinski

Conclusions
- Although much of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) debate centers on the notion that theInformation Age represents a Third Wave paradigm shift, the Information Age is only one of thecomponents of the Third Wave. 

- The Third Wave is marked  not  by a paradigm shift, but the  utter lack  of a paradigm.

- Discussions about the RMA (or, as it is increasingly being called, Revolution in Security Affairs,as some call it) should reflect the specific conditions existing in the Third Wave, in this regard,the Tofflers' analysis is incomplete. 
The Composition of Waves
	It is inevitable that the future will not be determined by the singular, unimpeded triumph of information technology.  It is naive to presume that something so epochal as a struggle for aparadigm shift should lack for pretenders and contenders. Indeed there is no shortage of formidablecombinations of contending ideas for the Third Wave crown.  But what is the arrangement of awave?

- The  first  level of any wave is inhabited by technology, artifacts and processes.  The economy iscentral and politics inherent, as are social forms.  This is the plane at which Alvin and HeidiToffler and Peter Drucker ply their craft.  Here we subscribe, as they do, to the continuum froman Agrarian Age to an Industrial one to the emergent Information Age. 

- The  intermediate  plane of a wave can be described in essentially cultural terms. The culturalterms Premodernism, Modernism, and Postmodernism apply here, and we subscribe to theircontext. It is in this region that art, literature, poetry, and philosophy flourish. It is also the denof ideology.

- The  third  and deepest level of a wave is the foundational. Paradigms originate in this region. Aparadigm is  the dominant and fundamental way of thinking within a  period--how phenomena areperceived and assigned meaning .  It is here that the genesis of ideas culminates in outcomes in theother layers.  Paradoxically, science, religion, and superstition share this region.  Here wesubscribe to the Age of Faith, the Age of Reason, and what is provisionally called the Age ofIntuition, as a working title.

	Waves are parallel, but not coterminous.  Nor is a paradigm continuously present within a wave.The following table shows the general arrangement as it applies to the Western world. (This impliesthere are other stories to be told, but the framework holds as a universal.)
**There is no Paradigm Shift
	The levels normally interact vertically  through a "Principle-Metaphor-Tool bridge." The effectof Newton's discoveries, for example, are portrayed by  Gene Edward Veith, Jr., in "bridge-terms"as follows:  "With the rise of modern science, which accompanied the industrial revolution *(Tool)*,nature itself began to be seen as a machine *(Metaphor)*. Nature was interpreted as a closed system ofcause and effect, which can be totally explained by mathematical and experimental analysis*(Principle).*Whereas preindustrial human beings confronted nature as a mysterious living organism,the scientists of the Enlightenment reduced nature to a complex but inert mechanism that could betaken apart, rationally understood, and used like any other mechanical device."
	James Gleick provided another example: "The Second Law of Thermodynamics has establisheditself firmly in the non-scientific culture....Any process that converts energy from one form to anothermust lose some energy as heat *(Principle)*.** Perfect efficiency is impossible. The universe is a one-waystreet" *(Metaphor).*This principle, known as *entropy*, has taken on its own intellectual value farremoved from science, taking the blame for disintegration of societies, economic decay, thebreakdown of manners, and many other variations on the decadence theme" *(Tool).*
	 These "secondary, metaphysical incarnations" of scientific thought are metaphors formingbridges or clover leafs linking the levels, transferring ideas formulated as principles at thefoundational level to the application layer to become tools, principally through the creative powersof writers, philosophers, and artists. A successful cycle forms a paradigm.
	 There is a striking difference between the nature of the First and Second Waves, and that of the3rd. The first two achieved paradigms that were  effectively three layers deep. The First and SecondWaves had periods of integrity. This is not necessarily a claim for their morality, or their outcomes.Rather, integrity simply means that both developed to the point where their paradigms held--thattheir plumbing worked for significant periods of  time. The Third Wave so far does no such thing.It leaks like a sieve and remains a "work-in-process," despite the superficial projection of theInformation Age as a  paradigm in contemporary fashion. There is no paradigm shift, but a shift fromparadigm to non-paradigm.
**A Paradigm Lost
	Of utmost importance is whether a paradigm is any longer achievable. The Second Waveparadigm is irretrievably lost. Can the layers of the Third Wave be consistently, supportively alignedto render an effective consensus as to how phenomena shall be perceived in order to give it meaning?Is the basic, acculturated pattern of thought which constitutes a paradigm, giving cohesion and forceto an age and to its inhabitants, a thing of the past? Upon this condition, all higher order divisionsand cooperation have depended. Until re-cently the United States, during its entire history, has neverbeen without a paradigm. This accounts for much of its success, and also for much of the currentconfusion in its affairs. The possibility that life will have to  proceed, without the foundational--thatbeing unable to achieve a paradigm we must go on without any broad agreement as to the meaningof meaning--is individually frightening, and collectively debilitating.
	This crisis in the Third Wave is caused by proponents at each layer attempting to  triumphindependently as a paradigm contender *horizontally,* rather than  following the convention of *vertical*synthesis through "bridging." The abdication of the cultural layer in fulfilling its middlemanparadigm-building role, is traced back to the 1930's in C. P. Snow's *The Two Cultures*, published in1959.  John Brockman in his *The Third Culture* (1995), provides this update and concurrence: "Literaryintellectuals are not communicating with scientists. Scientists are communicating directly with thegeneral public....Today, thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavor to express their deepestthoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public." 
	 What each layer is independently promoting as a paradigm pretender is inadequate. None ofthem can provide a paradigm shift alone. A paradigm needs the full force of the total energy, spirit,and creativity of a society, represented by all three levels. In order to do this, the levels must talk toeach other. As we shall find, in the Third Wave they have ceased to do so.
**The Disconnected Third Wave**The Information Age
	George Stein of Air University has succinctly summarized the heart of the Tofflers' universalthesis in their *War and Anti-War*. It involves "the transformation of the chief forms of Americansociety's mode of wealth generation from land, through natural resources and industrialinfrastructure, to knowledge/data/ information as the new creators of wealth. First-Wave wars werefought over land, second-wave wars over physical productive capacity; the emerging third-wavewars will be for the access and control of knowledge. As the 'combat form' in any society follows the'wealth creation form' of that society, the wars of the future will be predominantly, but not solely,'Information Wars.'"
	This thesis prompts an examination of the wealth creating powers of the Information Age, whichforms the underlying basis for the assertion. The Tofflers describe 10 features of the "new economy."However, these lack the profound surface effects which would indicate the presence of a powerfulunderlying paradigm representing a new wealth-creating form worthy of supporting a new age formankind to embrace enthusiastically, or resign oneself to as inevitable. The Information Age is, ifanything, unrelenting in its surrender to the deterministic forces of history through the triumph of technologically driven futures, immune to human intervention.  There is, therefore, no need toengage in dialogue with the other levels of the Third Wave.
	The fact is that  the Information Age has an economy as does every period.  But what theInformation Age does not have are wealth-creating concepts  incorporated in a coherent andpersuasive economic theory.  It depends on Second Wave economics.   In fact, we find in the *WallStreet Journal* that Bill Gates "believes in 'capitalism' the same way Adam Smith did more than 200years ago."  Therefore, some economists view the Information Age as merely an extension of theSecond Wave (often referred to as the "3rd Industrial Revolution.") In November 1994, Peter Druckeradmits in the*Atlantic Monthly* to the "need to develop an economic theory appropriate to a worldeconomy in which knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant, if not theonly, source of comparative advantage."

Postmodernism
	Essentially, Postmodernism represents an agenda, while its neighbors, the Information Age andthe Age of Intuition (provisional), are the product of technology and science, respectively. Thisagenda represents a reaction to Modernism , so intense and successful as to do it under, as theEnlightenment once undid  Premodernism. Indeed the Postmodernists, with their introduction ofcritical theory, incorporating textual deconstruction, may be the most successful pure informationwarriors in history because they went for the jugular--language itself.
	NDU's David Johnson cites a key argument from*Telling the Truth About History* (Joyce Appleby,Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacobs):  "The primary goal of the Postmodernists has been to challengeconvictions about the objectivity of knowledge, and the stability of language. They challenge theneutrality of science and the modern state and assert that their cognitive methods are biased by theiragendas that are gendered, ideological and politicized....They also argue against the possibility of anycertain knowledge. 'Truth' derives from the construct...that human beings do not discover a *truth inaccordance with nature*; they invent it, so the truth is always changing." 
	Paradigm-building, however, has been largely dependent upon metaphoric "bridging," the resultbeing deemed to incorporate the essence of the *truth in accordance with nature*. This chasm alone canaccount for the intransigence, even hostility, of Post-modernists to engage in vertical paradigm-building. 
	Recently, however, such events as the publication of *Telling the Truth About History*, and theexchange between Stanley Fish and John Richard Neuhaus in the journal *First Things*, may indicatea disposition to dialogue, after 70 years of noncooperation. There is in these events, perhaps a smallharbinger of hope that the deadlock within the Third Wave will be eventually relaxed. It also maybe that the resurgence of Premodernism, in the media's guise of the "religious Right," and thespirited debate over values in society are also factors.
	Finally, Postmodernism as a paradigm contender shares with the Information Age the Achilles'heel of lacking a convincing wealth-creating economic theory.  This discrepancy was first observed16 years ago, and has persisted since. In 1980, Ogilvy and Schwartz "searched very hard, in a varietyof disciplines, for indications of the emergent paradigm. They found their evidence everywhere, insuch diverse fields as physics, chemistry, brain theory, mathematics, biology, philosophy, politicaltheory, linguistics, consciousness research, psychology, religion, and the arts, but they did not findit in the field of economics." 
	In 1994, W. Kirk McNulty attempted an explanation for the missing new economics. He suggeststhat economics is so central to the Industrial Age and Modernism because it "lies on the axis ofpolarization," and therefore is "locked in place, so to speak, during the process of the paradigmshift....That is why new ideas billed as 'new age economics' have the flavor of rehashed schemes....We will probably not see a really new economic theory developed until the paradigm shift iscomplete." 
**"The  Age of  Intuition"
	 Aristotelian and Thomist concepts formed the archetypes for the Age of Faith, and Cartesian/Newtonian concepts for the Age of Reason. Post-Newtonian nonlinear sciences, exemplified byChaos and Complexity theories, are now emerging to support another prescription. The hallmarkof nonlinear science is the startling idea that apparent chaos such as international relations, whitewater rapids, and battlefields, are *unpredictable, but are within bounds, self-organizing.* A few things areeffectively linear, and at the other extreme, another few are effectively random. The remainder arethe vast unexplored, newly-conscious universe of phenomena which are "in between," and whichwe know little about, and would not know at all without the computer. Uncovered in the last quartercentury,  the potential of the idea of self-organization has hardly been scratched. In this vast domainmay lie new literatures, engineering, philosophies, arts and social dynamics to self-organize a bettersociety. 
	Nonlinear science rejects the primacy of deterministic tendencies found in the Information Age,as well as the nihilistic performance and legalism of  Postmodernism. It calls for the elevation ofintuitive processes to deal with the variable of  *bounds*, in an equation in which both *prediction* and*solution* are not amenable to current conventions of planning and control. It seeks a Third Way, at theseam between the polarities of Faith and Reason. It moves from physics toward biology.
	Nonlinear economics suggests that information technology as a wealth creator, a key elementof the Information Age argument, is prone to monopolistic behavior, and promotes market forceswhich do not necessarily optimize product capabilities. Further, it rests on problematic nationalsecurity and military strategies to deal with the integrity of intellectual property. Wealth creationrequires synergy among all three Waves--Agricultural, Industrial and Informational, withoutprivileging the last. 
	The noted physicist Heinz Pagel had it right: "I am convinced that the nations and people whomaster the new sciences of complexity [*and chaos theory*] will become the economic, cultural, andpolitical superpowers of the next century."  Presidents complain that there is a "malaise" among thepeople, and that the nation is in a "funk." If the nation and people are without a paradigm to givespirit, cohesion, and force, is it any wonder they feel malaise and act as if in a funk? 

Thomas J. Czerwinski is a professor at the Institute for National Strategic Studies' School ofInformation Warfare and Strategy.  For additional information Professor Czerwinski can be reachedat (202) 685-3629, ext. 364 or FAX (202) 685-3664. 

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