But at Tulane, he wrote, inexplicably, a Ph.D. thesis, at the suggestion of a professor, on education in the Belgian Congo, a subject to which he never returned for the rest of his life. He taught American history and geography at West Georgia College in rural Carrolltown for eight years and, after entering Congress, gave lectures at Kennesaw State College, a commuter school north of Atlanta, that were broadcast by satellite to 25 other colleges across the United States. As Speaker, Gingrich picked as House historian a political scientist at Kennesaw State, Christina Jeffrey, who was quickly dropped when it was discovered that she had criticized ahigh-school curriculum on the Holocaust for failing to present the Nazi and Ku Klux Klan points of view. Gingrich himself shares, viscerally, this anti-elite feeling, yet he has also embraced a set of ideas that derive quintessentially from such places as Harvard and Yale. His mentor in this respect is Alvin Toffler, a journalist whose book, The Third Wave, is a vast simplification of sociological theories already more than 20 years old, but presented in a hopped-up prose that leaves one breathless.
Humanity faces a quantum leap forward.
If that were so, how would one explain the persistence of the great historic religions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam over millennia of time, while empires have crumbled, political orders have disintegrated, and economic systems have decayed. Social change is not and cannot be uniform, and the metaphor of waves is wet and misleading. The argument, if argument it be, is based, necessarily, on new technologies that permit customized production, electronic democracy and the like. These may be potentialities, but they are not irresistible forces that override social structures and values. Technology is primarily instrumental, but its adoption or rejection necessarily derives from the values that one wishes to defend or enhance.