Inside The Minds of Gingrich's Gurus

By Paul Gray

WHAT HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH THINKS ABOUT the brave new world of technological change can largely be traced back to the works of two best- selling authors: Alvin Toffler, 66, and George Gilder, 55. When Gingrich tosses out such concepts as "the Third Wave" or the "overthrow of matter," when he talks about the "demassification" of U.S. society and the "bottom- up" freedoms created by the personal computer, he is quoting chapter and verse from the ideas of Toffler and Gilder.

Despite political dissimilarities -- Toffler says he is more liberal on some issues than the Speaker, while Gilder may be even more conservative -- the two writers have much in common. Both are former journalists who hit it big with big-think books. In Toffler's case it was Future Shock (1970), which contributed its title phrase to the language and turned its author into a much sought-after consultant-prophet; Gilder's Wealth and Poverty (1981), a ringing endorsement of capitalism and supply-side economics, became a sacred text for members of the first Reagan Administration. Both have eagerly tackled subjects in which they possess no formal training. And both are relentlessly, almost wearyingly optimistic about what the future holds for those willing to embrace it.

Gingrich's personal association with Toffler dates from the early 1970s, when he, then an assistant history professor at West Georgia College, went to Chicago to attend a seminar the author was giving. The young academic introduced himself to the best-selling Toffler; this acquaintance blossomed into a friendship after Gingrich was elected to Congress. Through the years the Gingriches began spending considerable time with Toffler and his wife of 44 years, Heidi, who has collaborated on her husband's books without, until recently, accepting byline credit. Over the recent New Year's holidays, the Congressman and his wife Marianne stayed a week at the Tofflers' Los Angeles home -- their own spirited, though modest version of a Renaissance weekend.

Gilder and Gingrich met in the early '80s, at the time when Wealth and Poverty was making waves. "I've had a friendly relationship with him for years," Gilder says, "particularly with the people around him." Gilder admits he does not have the close friendship with the new Speaker that the Tofflers enjoy. "But," he adds, "my ideology is more akin to Gingrich's." He also claims he knows more than the Tofflers do about such new technologies as fiber optics and semiconductors. "That's my business. Gingrich is interested in it. He's consulted me from time to time."

What is it about Toffler's and Gilder's futuristic work that has so attracted a conservative Republican Congressman from the South? The surprising -- and, to some, unsettling -- answer seems to be the cataclysmic social revolutions that both authors blithely, indeed joyfully, say have already begun.

The quintessential Tofflers can be found in The Third Wave (1980), which Gingrich has called "one of the great seminal works of our time." The book's argument can easily be summarized. There have been three major changes, or waves, as the Tofflers like to call them, in human history. The first took place some 10,000 years ago, when certain hunter-gathering tribes discovered agriculture and settled down. The second occurred with the Industrial Revolution 300 years ago. People flocked to the cities, where the new manufacturing jobs sprang up; they were mass-educated for mass-production. Power shifted from the owners of property to the creators of capital.

The preliminary swell of the third wave is crashing in now: the computer- driven Information Age, when people no longer trudge off to factories or offices but sit at home in "electronic cottages," using their modems and faxes and keyboards to cruise cyberspace. These voluntary shut-ins are not merely customers anymore but "prosumers" using and adding to the daily flow of data. Synergies run rampant. The world is becoming the oyster of computer literates.

Unfortunately, as the Tofflers have gone on pointing out during the past 15 years, the third-wave pioneers are still stuck with all those vestiges of a second-wave society: big corporations, big government bureaucracies, smarty pants in mass communications who stubbornly think that information remains theirs to spoon-feed to the unwashed. In Microcosm (1989), Gilder reaches, by a somewhat different route, the same dismissal of old-line thinking and technology that the Tofflers do. In a chapter titled "The Death of Television," he writes, "In an age when computers will be responsive to voice, touch, joysticks, keyboards, mice and other devices, television is inherently passive, a couch potato medium." Why watch what some TV programmer decrees you should watch, when a computer can let you see or create whatever your heart desires?

The vision that the Tofflers and Gilder have constructed foresees the withering away -- thanks to the private access to technology -- of nation- states as they now artificially exist, of centralized authority, of outmoded political alliances and of all old-fashioned restraints on entrepreneurial imaginations. It is not hard to grasp why Gingrich the conservative outsider found this prospective shake-up attractive. But now that he has become the ultimate insider, the Speaker's reaction to the rich potential for cyberspace anarchy -- which apparently worries neither the Tofflers nor Gilder -- will be interesting to watch. Putting congressional proceedings online, which Gingrich has already facilitated, is one thing. Pornography and all sorts of seditious twaddle are online too, where sophisticated children can track them. What can or should be done about that? How do school prayers and family values mesh with the gloriously unfettered freedom of every crank in the world with a keyboard?

For all their embrace of cyberliberation, the Tofflers and Gilder have grown rich and famous through that outmoded second-wave artifact, the book. Public pressure forced Gingrich to back away from his $4.5 million advance on a two- book deal, but he has not refused the royalties those books may earn. The third wave will really arrive when the Tofflers, Gilder and Gingrich renounce all remunerations from outmoded publishers and, in the spirit of free and easy information, simply upload their thoughts on the Internet.

With reporting by Karen Tumulty/Washington