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Released: July 28, 2008 The Boston Globe
Inside the crystal poll
By David Mehegan
Pollster John Zogby's new book, "The Way We'll Be," is one of the more reflective and abstract of books by his tribe. While it is full of data that his polls have dug up, what Zogby (at right) is really up to is an effort to dig deep and figure out who Americans are and what they want. His writing is bright and his survey findings are interesting, though few of them will come as a shock. For example, the young -- he calls them the "First Globals" -- are transforming America and are less likely to have the views their elders held in a range of subjects. Society is becoming more fragmented, individualized, and networked, especially through the rise of the Internet. Noted. About himself and his peers, Zogby writes, "We are prognosticators, of course; that's mostly what we get paid for. But as I conceive of this work, we are equally priests and philosophers trying to make sense out of the always confusing human condition.... As with priests and philosophers, there's a bit of the ancient soothsayer in us pollsters. Our livelihood involves peering through the veil of time. Unlike priests and philosophers, though, when pollsters make assertions about what's to come, we at least have the data to back us up." This is a pretty cocky and elevated view of survey research. Are pollsters really paid to predict the future? For that matter, is that what priests and philosophers do? The book ends with a fairly sunny view of the future. Though Zogby acknowledges that no forecast is set in stone, he goes on to write, "The America of 2020 will be a more tolerant nation. Our people by then will have lived for two decades in a new world of less. We will have gotten comfortable with the limitations on us and embraced the Zen of more minimal lifestyles and consumption patterns. We will expect our leaders to talk stright: Hype, hokum, and hooey -- in politics, in advertising, wherever it appears -- will be punished...." How could any poll, no matter how scientific, lead to the conclusion that 12 years from now, Americans will be "comfortable with the limitations on us"? This sounds a little like Charles Reich in his 1970 bestseller, "The Greening of America," which also imagined that the new generation, so different from the old, would surely change America for the better. Alas, young people get older. Look what happened to that peace-loving, tolerant generation that was going to create Reich's "Consciousness III," a more spiritual sensibility in tune with the earth and eternal values. They became the much-derided Boomers, whose Consciousness is mainly filled with worries about their 401 (k)s and whether Social Security and Medicare will last as long as they do. http://www.boston.com/ae/books/blog/2008/07/inside_the_crys.html
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