Second thoughts

In many senses this early article is like Jim

Dators declaration of principles.
It declared
his research interest: the effects social changes
produce
in
individuals.
It designed
his
research mode: technological
innovation as
the catalyst of social evolution. It revealed his
particular point of interest: the shifts in the
value system. And with the perspective that
the past 30 years gives, we can say that all
these statements were not only at the theoretical or intellectual level; during all this time Jim
Dator has been trying to live up to his declaration.
The last point becomes obvious when
Dator describes valuelessness:
...the
principle-less
ability to adapt and adjust, chameleon-like,
to any and all situations;
the
ability to receive and assimilate contradictory
or even unrelated stimuli; the ability to accept
and appreciate any act, utterance, or thought
that is humanly possible. To me it is quite
clear that Jim Dator did more than just enunciate a principle; it was an announcement of
what was going to be his rule of behaviour in
approaching the future.

Plastic fantastic
Christopher

future?

Burr Jones

I found Jim Dators article to be both compelling and frightening. It appears that many of
his predictions and descriptions
of a cybernetic world are on target. Valuelessness
is
spreading like a cancer across the cultural and
political landscape of so-called Western civilization. The plastic personality seems to be
taking a good hold of younger generations and
many of their elders. As I have struggled with
Jims piece, I keep asking myself: is plastic
fantastic?. I dont think so. It seems to me that
valuelessness and plasticity are more problematic than Dator thought they would be. To be
sure, there are violent conflicts
exploding
between the resistors and the modifiers, but

The author, a former

student of Jim Dator, is Associate Profesor at Eastern Oregon State College, School
of Arts and Sciences,
1410 L Avenue, La Grande,
OR 97850,
USA (Tel: + 1 541 962 3385; fax: + 1
541 962 3898; email: cjonesdeou.edu).

672

Returning to the comparison with Citizen

I believe that the article, like the movie,
is current. For instance, the reference to situational ethics is very postmodern and many
would agree with it today. That is not to say
that time has left the piece untouched. The
paper transpires the naive ingenuity of the
196Os, and the choice of words reveals its true
age: cybernetic (now we would say digital),
LSD and sex as leisure activities (now we
would probably opt for virtual reality). But the
focus on the personal conflicts social evolution
causes is very relevant to the present, and
relates a lot with Jims more recent work. Of
course he would say that this is because he
has been revolving around the same idea for
the last 30 years.
To
conclude,
I would
say that the
value(lessness)
of this article is that it shows
that Jim has been following a coherent path all
these years. I am tempted to say that he would
still agree with much of what he wrote in
1967. I just hope that I am able to say the same
thing 30 years after my first article.
Kane,

the internal conflicts for modifiers are also

serious.
Valuelessness
indeed seems to be a pervading force in North American life and in
many countries with strong roots in European
culture. Valuelessness,
to my mind, is more
strongly rooted in consumer culture, secularism and materialism than Dator has suggested,
but for the most part I think he got it right.
There has been only feeble resistance to these
developments-at
least in the West.
Our
world has become smaller, and yet more harried and fragmented. Mobility
increases in
many ways, and in many aspects of lifeexotic species, investment capital, tropical diseases, consumer goods and popular music.
We are bombarded with MTV-sync,
nanosecond CPU materialism.
While
many Baby
Boomers may no longer indulge in weekend
warrior acid psychedelia, their lives are full of
mind-altering,
numbing commercial frenzy,
trips to the kids soccer matches, and Prozac
to even it all out.

Second thoughts

My experiences of teaching and working

with 18- to 25year-olds
suggest to me that the
changes in value-orientation
are both subtle
and dramatic-even
in the course of one generation. Research on intergenerational values
also seems to corroborate Dators claims. One
could argue that movements toward cultural
diversity (and a sometimes parallel cultural
relativism) and the creeping influences of poststructuralism
are further effects/causes of personal plasticity. Also contributing to plasticity
is apathy in the face of insurmountable global
problems:
the potential of catastrophic climatic change (taken seriously
to heart by
many young people); the rapidly changing
technological world (the World Wide Web,
mass media and computers generally); and,
external
socio-environmental
changes. The
plastic personality is a logical response to the
forces of change afoot in the world. Many of
my students seem to have a very cavalier attitude toward choosing a career or finding
direction in their lives. Faced with AIDS, the
Ebola
virus,
ozone
depletion,
economic

On provocation,

youth

uncertainty and the prospect of working at

McDonalds for the foreseeable future-or
not
working at all-no
wonder kids escape to
drugs, computer games and thrill kills.
Meaning has become fleeting and ever
more ephemeral. Therein lies the most blatant
internal contradiction of a plastic cybernetic
world. From the pages of the National Enquirer
to new evangelical mega churches, there are
indicators of a fundamental anthropological
quest for meaning and value. The high rate of
suicide among adolescents, drug use and teenage pregnancy rates are just a few examples
of the costs of spiritual (moral) aimlessness.
It
seems to me that the biggest challenges to a
postmodern, cybernetic future are not attacks
from religious
and cultural fundamentalism
(although there will be those), but internal
crises because of broken moral compasses.
While valuelessness
and plastic personalities
may make it easier to adjust to a chaotic
world, the psychological
and spiritual costs
threaten to further unravel our threadbare
social fabric.

and dystopia

Richard A. Slaughter
As a young expatriate teacher in Bermuda in
the late 1960s and early 1970s I would sometimes be invited to speak about environmental
and population issues. With no real stake in
the islands well-being and future I found it
easy to shock people with dire warnings of
social and economic breakdown if physical
and economic growth pressures
continued.
What I did not realise at the time was that my
provocations were partly a result of inexperience and my own lack of grounding.
In
essence, I was trying to find my feet, as it were,
in the exhilarating,
sometimes
frightening,
world of the near-term future. I could not separate wild speculation from sober forecasts; I
had not yet learned how to leaven the forward
view with critical judgement and express it

Richard
A. Slaughter
may be contacted
at the
Futures Study Centre, PO Box 2390, Kew, Victoria
3101, Australia (Tel: + 61 3 9853 4757; fax: + 61 3
9853 6380; e-mail: fsc@alexia.net.au).

more convincingly through, for example, the

use of suggestion and understatement. These
considerations affect my reading of the Dator
article three decades after it was written.
Some of what Jim wrote now merely looks
unconvincing. Situational ethics as the basis
for a cybernetic society? Machines in charge
of decision-making and administration? A totally planned society? They may have seemed
plausible then, but to me they are part of a
familiar fantasy: the high-tech future, in which
machines rule and humans fit in where they
may. I think that Jim also romanticised youth,
crediting them with adaptive qualities beyond
their capacity. He mistook lack of comm;
ment for adaptability and underestimated the
power of reflexivity.
The
cybernetic
world
that Jim was
attempting to describe sounds to me like a
reprise for the standard 20th century dystopia.
People are able to program their
own
needs-as
if program, their and needs
were all simple and unproblematic. In such a

673