There’s a sucker punch at the end that Glenn Beck fans won’t enjoy, and it’s worth noting that however pessimistic Alvin Toffler was about the future at the start of the 1970s, he had made quite an about-face a decade later in the surprisingly hopeful sequel to Future Shock, The Third Wave. But otherwise, this is a fun video look from Matt Novak of the PaleoFuture blog at the doomsday Malthusians of the early seventies:
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Novak’s video echoes a point I made last March: today’s global warming fear mongering is tomorrow’s late-night camp TV:
A 1930s scare film such as Reefer Madness was seen as high camp by liberals by the time the 1970s rolled around, as were Jack Webb’s anti-communist efforts of the late 1950s. But seventies liberals, perhaps spurred on by the title of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock, if not the actual contents, had plenty of fears of their own, and wanted you to share the cold sweat of their own brand of paranoia.
Recall the horrific slate of politically-oriented science fiction films that Hollywood churned out in-between 1968′s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 1977′s Star Wars. Films such as Soylent Green, Silent Running and ZPG were obsessed with the Malthusian nightmares of overpopulation and deforestation that dominated the overculture of the time. Rollerball depicted a world controlled by giant corporations, at precisely the same time that Steve and Woz were cobbling together the first Apples in their Bay Area garage. They were followed by Leonard Nimoy’s cheesy synthesizer-scored In Search Of TV series a few years later, which explored Global Cooling, Killer Bees, Deadly Ants, and other ’70s obsessions.
Today, these ’70s efforts are seen as equally campy as Refer Madness became three or four decades after its release. The eco-doomsday films of the naughts, such as The Day After Tomorrow, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, and Al Gore’s own An Inconvenient Truth are well on the way to becoming late night camp TV themselves, and at much faster rate as their equally schlocky predecessors.
Perhaps someone can recut Al’s film and dub it “Climate Madness.” Maybe hire William Shatner to cut an exaggerated Jack Webb-style parody opening.
Who knows: “Climate Madness” could eventually even have the same impact on its genre as his wife Tipper’s efforts to curb raunchy lyrics in pop music.
Perhaps that’s why, as Stacy McCain notes today, Malthusian predictions are increasingly of the “if we don’t act now, the world will come to an end in 200 years” variety, as opposed to the “if we don’t act now, the world will come to an end in 20 years” style that were a staple of the schlock documentaries that Novak pokes fun at in his video:
“Population Bomb” hoaxer Paul Ehrlich made a laughingstock of himself by predicting what he expected to happen in five, 10 or 15 years — and all his disaster scenarios proved false. As Reason magazine’s Ronald Bailey says, Ehrlich has never been right about anything.
Other doomsayers have learned the lesson of Ehrlich’s example. Nowadays, the purveyors of climate-change “consensus” talk about what will happen in 50, 100 or 200 years. The beauty of putting Doomsday in the fairly distant future is that your prediction cannot be falsified any time soon. By the time anyone can determine whether your forecasts were accurate, you’ll be mouldering in the grave.
And while I don’t watch Glenn Beck very often, it’s worth noting that his message is the exact opposite of Malthusianism, which seeks an ever-growing number of regulations to fight the imagined horror of the day. As a libertarian, his goal is to expand freedom, not strangle it. I suspect he wouldn’t complain much if we look back in 20 years and find his predictions about a future diminished by over-regulation and top-down government planning (QED) are wrong — it would indicate that his notion of renewing America was a success on some level.
Finally, speaking of bad doomsday documentaries, after 20 years of being trapped in a thousand cable TV shows telling us that global warming would lead to their demise, a hearty group of unpaid and exploited extras finally decided to strike back:
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(H/T: Virginia Postrel)
Lots of 1960s-early 70s lifestyle choices praised back then by the left already have been a source of lampooning for the better part of two decades — the whole premise of “Forest Gump” is based on how off-base the ‘forward-looking’ liberals of the era were, while Eric Cartman’s invective against “dirty hippies” on “South Park” has gotten out into the mainstream, let alone the ManBearPig base camp in Afghanistan.
The difference is that films like “Reefer Madness” came at a time when Hollywood still had some more pro-American bosses (some of whom were even Republicans) who may have produced some future high-camp movies to make various groups happy. The disdain for those types of films, including the less-hysterical but still pro-U.S. society films, came as the people who control popular culture moved to the left in the 1960s and early 70s. But they and their successors are the ones who still truly believe in global warming, and as long as that continues to be the case, stuff like “South Park” trashing Al Gore is going to remain on the comedy fringes, while being looked on with disdain in the other standard locations.
Hollywood celebrated trashing the overblown fears of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, because the folks in control over the past 40 years held U.S. seociety in those earlier times in general contempt. But as long as the left holds power there, Hollywood’s reaction to lampooing of global warming is going to come across like some crotchety, humorless “Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!” type of reaction, where they and like-minded pols threaten to call the climate change police on the people laughing at their beliefs.
Left wing, Islamophile, PC, MC Green NAZI moonbats are never happy unless they are living under some cataclysmic threat. The fact that they are gullible, ignorant, fools that do not have a clue what they are talking about simply escapes them. No matter how many times they are proved wrong its hey ho on to the next disaster. Funny how they can completely ignore the reality and evil of what Islam is and what Islam wants and the blatant bare faced liar that Obambi is yet find so much disaster in the nothing that is Climate Change. Its as though they just dont want to see the elephant in the room.
When I was a kid in high school in the early 1970s, there were articles in Newsweek Magazine saying that we were all going to freeze to death in a new Ice Age. Today we’re all going to burn up because of Global Warming. I wish somebody would make up their minds!
As for me, I’m going to drive to the grocery store (using horrible fossil fuels in my car) and buy some hot dogs (which will kill you) and cook them on my grill (which will kill us because of the carbon emissions) and wash it all down with some diet soda (which will kill me faster because of the artificial sweetners) and maybe have a cupcake for desert (which will clog my arteries and make me die tomorrow). Then I will leave my estate, which will be taxed by almost 50%, to my kids who will then all die because of global warming. I guess there’s nothing left for me to do but eat up!
This isn’t politically influenced, it is strictly a money making phenomenon.
People will not purchase a Book that presents a rainbow puppy dog version of the world.
But if a Writer presents a scenario that the world will end in cataclysm, nuclear disaster, environmental disaster, ice age, global warming, genetic mutations, zombies overrunning Washington DC, anything that depicts a world worse off than the present, they will buy the book, see the film, join the club.
It is Human nature to react to fear, something politicians know well and take full advantage of.
We should learn from history but, it seems we never do.
I the movie “Future Shocked” was screened to my class in high school. The only thing I remember from it was Orson Welles being driving around in a Rolls Royce.
Environmentalism is the new religion. Whereas Christianity preached “be fruitful and multiply” because the world needed an expanding population in order to advance, Environmentalism preaches “turn gay or abort your filthy babies” because the little brats will use up too much of what rightly belongs to Ted Turner, Mayor Bloomberg and Warren Buffet. Meanwhile the New York Times will assure that in the future, Al Gore will be worshiped as the Son of God (Gaia).
Nice article, but you got one thing majorly wrong. Glenn Beck is not a libertarian.
He is right about Beck, though…Beck reminds me of those stupid over-reacting alarmist Jews who fled Germany in the ’30′s.
With any “olde tyme” predictions about the future, people are often amused, but rarely enlightened as to how wrong these predictions can be.
The 1960, 1970′s and even the 1980s are now looking awfully funny after a few decades of discovery. There was all sorts of shlock nonsense such as Erich Von Dankien’s notions of archeology, Nuclear Winter, and the Erhard Seminars Training (EST).
The common theme behind all this is that the sky is falling and that we must redistribute wealth and empower certain “experts” to tell us how to live our lives.
Those who have been living on the planet long enough are usually skeptical of such idiotic claims. However, that skepticism is not easily taught to the next generation. It has to be learned. This is why leftist liberals continue to exist, either as wide-eyed mouth-breathing adherents, or as amoral ass-hat leadership who see nothing wrong with their behavior.
Speaking of doomsday scenarios, wasn’t it about 5 years ago that Al Gore was saying we face a “tipping point” in 10 years after which global warming would be impossible to stop? We are now just 5 years away. Does that mean in 5 years we don’t have to listen to the sky-is-falling cries of the global warming alarmists because we can’t do anything about their hypothetical problem anyway? Or is the tipping point always 10 years away? Close enough to scare the daylights out of some people but far enough away that they will forget about it when it doesn’t happen. We haven’t heard much about the “tipping point” lately. Have the warmists forgotten about it??
I wonder how many of the people who believe in global warming are Republicans/Conservatives/Libertarians?
Seems to me that a lot of the “true believers” are of the opinion that only the Democrats can save us from global warming which mean that their beliefs reinforce their politics.
Don’t forget “Quintet,” a silly 1979 Robert Altman movie about the imminent ice age where Paul Newman and other survivors kill time before their extinction by playing an ominous board game.
I was thinking the same thing. I actually saw “Quintet” in one of the base theaters while stationed in Germany (78-80). When I entered the theater, there were perhaps a dozen of us in there. That should’ve been a clue. All during the movie, I kept thinking that it had to get better. It never did. Only about 6 of us actually stuck it through to the end. Quintet was quite possibly the worst movie I ever saw and I include Army sex-ed training films in the list.
Hey! The Late Great Planet Earth isn’t some leftist agitprop piece; it’s about the Second Coming of Christ.
Hey! The Late Great Planet Earth isn’t some leftist agitprop piece; it’s about the Second Coming of Christ.
What difference does that make?
An apocalyptic religious fantasy is an apocalyptic religious fantasy. The details differ, the essence is the same.
Because Malthus has been proven wrong time and again, while history has been vindicating Hal Lindsey.
I don’t see how Star Wars is politically driven; I thought it was just a goofy sword-and-sorcery story set in outer space.
To offset the pernicious effects of reading Future Shock, I highly reccomend The Shockwave Rider
By all respect, Mr. Driscoll, it’s pretty weird to see your “Nimoy vs. Shatner” on this subject. Shatner believes in and PROMOTES the same BS: “GLOBAL WARMING will KILL THE OCEANS in 10 years!” (“Mind Meld”, 2001 – even Nimoy refused to chime in on that one). Promoting his book “Up Till Now” on Glenn Beck radio show, Shatner stated that all our problems are caused by OVERPOPULATION (the point made in the book too). When Glenn asked him about his solution, Shatner answered and, mg, he wasn’t kidding, that THE EARTH WILL TAKE CARE OF IT: earthquakes, tsunamies etc. And he has a lot of twisted ideas like that. SHATNER IS ONE OF THE MODERN SCAREMONGERERS. And, unlike quiet Nimoy, Shatner stinks all over the place with all that today.