Word: brzezinsky
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Contemporary America is often described-especially by the young-as a reactionary country. But in the opinion of Zbigniew Brzezinski, professor of government at Columbia University, the only revolution worth talking about these days is an American one-and it has not been run by the New Left. Brzezinski calls it the technetronic revolution. In Between Two Ages he discusses the repercussions of rapid change from an industrial era-with its emphasis on sheer productivity-to a period that stresses services, automation and cybernetics. Being that rarity among futurists, a cautious man, Brzezinski is not sure if utopia or bedlam...
BETWEEN TWO AGES by Zbigniew Brzezinski. 334 pages. Viking...
...Such progress-if that is what it is-largely results from the fact that the U.S. spends more on scientific education and research than any other nation; it has indeed drained the world of the brains needed for its technical endeavors. "What makes America unique in our time," Brzezinski writes, "is that confrontation with the new is part of the daily American experience. For better or for worse, the rest of the world learns what is in store for it by observing what happens in the United States: whether it be the latest scientific discoveries in space and medicine...
Polish-born Brzezinski has something of the pride of an adopted son in such achievements, though he recognizes that in some ways the U.S. is its own worst enemy. For the technetronic revolution it exports causes profound disturbances in the less developed nations. Suddenly aware of material progress, they conspicuously and maddeningly lack the means to achieve it. Their acute frustration causes not a revolution in rising expectations, says Brzezinski, but a "specter of insatiable aspirations...
...threat suggested by last week's piracies remained. Small groups can tyrannize simply by finding a pressure point. The older metaphors for societies -the ship of state, the political machine -should perhaps be replaced. More apt would be a neurological or organic comparison, what Columbia's Zbigniew Brzezinski calls "the global nervous system," in which revolutionaries can cause not massive onslaughts but small and devastating aneurysms...