Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 06:1 (Winter 1997)
Article: A Review Article
Author: Greg Beaupied

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RAR 6:1 (Winter 1997) p. 137

A Review Article

Greg Beaupied

Creating a New Civilization, Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Atlanta: Turner Publishing Inc., 1995. 112 pages, cloth, $14.95.

The Tofflers’ book, Creating a New Civilization, is a return to the aspirations of the cities of Enoch and Babel and all they represent—what is known as the City of Man. The book’s purpose is to alert us to the cresting Third Wave that will soon engulf the older systems and technologies of the industrial Second Wave. All of this is more than conflicting technologies and philosophies; it is an exaltation of human worshipping the digital god of the microchip. In the Tofflers’ view all of our hopes for the future depend upon our ability to make everything we believe and all we practice subservient to the Third Wave. We are entering the technological eschaton; Man will be divided into Third Wave sheep and Second Wave goats. Those who warn of “the end of history” (p. 27) are merely experiencing the anguish of outmoded thinking, and they must change, or be swept aside. Religion, psychology, sociology, politics, marketing, banking, families, economics—all of what is human—will bow before this techno-baal.

The City of Man Revisited

Cain was the patriarch of the ungodly. He was sent into exile, a sentence of wandering for the killing of his brother, Abel. God banished him into the wilderness, but Cain desired to create a city for himself, a new Eden based upon the cleverness of the unregenerate mind. Cain founded a city named Enoch, after his son, but the metropolitan dream was exposed as a sinful nightmare under the reign of Lamech. The city of Enoch was the forge of technology,

RAR 6:1 (Winter 1997) p. 138

instruments of music, tools, and weapons of cruelty—all to be used by a civilization at enmity with God.

The evil of humanity reached its awful epitome before the Great Flood, but soon the spirit of Cain returned as Babel reached for the heavens. Babel was an attempt to recreate the mountain of paradise on the plain of Shinar. Again, technology was essential. No stone or mortar was suitable for their tower, but bricks served as substitutes for stone and pitch for mortar. Babel was enhanced by man’s ability to communicate and work cooperatively, but their plans were so presumptuous that God had to “come down” to see this minuscule bump on the plain, which the inhabitants of Babel thought could reach to heaven. God was not in danger of actually having a competitor, but men were in danger of believing such a thing possible. It was not the technology, but their willful independence that threatened a return to the pre-Noahic terrors.

The history of the Bible is the recycling of...

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