The Flintstone Fallacy and the Jetsons Fallacy

By Daniel Rigney

Years ago I taught a course called “Future Societies” in which we considered various approaches to studying a subject, the future, that literally does not exist. It will exist, but then it won’t be the future any more.

I often say that we’re now living in the future we tried to imagine decades ago; but the future we’re living in now hardly resembles the future anyone then imagined.

Two fallacies that futurists may commit in their attempts to see beyond the past are what I’ll call the Flintstone Fallacy and the Jetson Fallacy. I refer, of course, to two popular 1960s animated cartoon comedies set respectively in the stone-age past and the century-distant future.

I realize that both shows present cartoonish caricatures of past and future societies. But then don’t most of us think about society almost entirely in cartoonish caricatures? I know I do.

In each of these fictional worlds, the premise is that technological change and cultural change are independent of each other. One can change while the other remains the same.

In the Flintstones, a society's technology remains stagnant (in the stone-age town of Bedrock) while its culture and institutions have somehow fast-forwarded to reflect the Hanna-Barbera studio’s version of American culture in the 1960s.

A mutant form of the Flintstone Fallacy is the Tea Party Fallacy, which maintains that we can inhabit a fantasy version of our 18th-century political and social past while living in the real world of 21st- century global technology.

The Jetson fallacy is the same fanciful premise in reverse. This time technological evolution, and not culture, has zoomed ahead. We’re riding to work in air cars, and robots are our domestic servants, but the social institutions still reflect, once again, Hanna-Barbera’s version of American culture in the 1960s.

Either fallacy reflects a failure to understand that technology and culture evolve together, though technology tends to change more rapidly and to drag culture along behind it. More exactly, we often find what early 20^th-century sociologist William Ogburn called a “cultural lag” between new technologies and the social and cultural institutions from which they emerge, and which they in turn transform, as we struggle to keep up with and adjust to changing tools of our own making.*

The invention of the internal combustion engine, for instance, continues to challenge the capacities  of our social institutions to manage and restrain urban sprawl, traffic congestion, and the overreliance on non-renewable and unsustainable energy. Birth control technology, meanwhile, continues to test and alter traditional beliefs about sexuality and reproduction. Information technology? Provide your own personal examples here of the many ways in which computers and communication devices have virtually required us to  change the way we now live.

We create our tools, and then we try to adjust and adapt to them. Marshall McLuhan said it better: We make our tools, and thereafter our tools make us.

While there is a lag between technology and cultural change, the two still evolve together. Neither the Flintstones nor the Jetsons, which both assume static social institutions, give us a way to think intelligently about the relation between technology and culture and their co-evolution in our own world.

Ogburn’s theory of cultural lag, on the other hand, remains relevant to an understanding of our rapidly changing technocultural times as we hurtle further into the future, going where no one has gone before.

*William F. Ogburn. 1922. Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature. New York: B.W. Huebsch.