The Axemaker's Gift A Double Edged History of Human Culture

The host of the popular science series on public television, "Connections," and a psychologist trace the advantages and dangers of human inventions and argue that the time has come to turn away from specialized, technological knowledge. 35,000 first printing.

Prolific psychologist Ornstein and historian Burke, best known for his PBS-TV series Connections, have written an ambitious, entertaining, not always convincing survey of the interaction of technology, culture, history and the human mind. Early hominids' use of tools, they maintain, altered the brain's structure over millennia, favoring reason over emotion and fostering sequential thinking, which generated language, logic and rules. With the advent of agriculture and writing in Mesopotamia came social hierarchy. The authors strain mightily to prove that successive advances in technic?the Greek alphabet, the weight-driven clock, Gutenberg's printing press, scientific method, London's stock exchange, modern clinical medicine, computers, etc.?radically altered the structure of society, increasingly concentrating power and knowledge in the hands of a specialized ruling elite that imposed ever greater degrees of conformity on the masses. A "cut-and-control" outlook that divides the world into manipulable units is held responsible for our present ecological crisis. The authors' proposed solution is a world of small communities with participatory democracy and "webbed education" whereby information-technology users can access all knowledge as a dynamic whole.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Who better to trace over millennia the political, economic, psychological, and moral consequences of our species' technological breakthroughs than these two lively thinkers: Burke, host of the award-winning PBS and BBC series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed, and Ornstein, a Stanford and University of California medical center professor who has written more than 20 books, including The Evolution of Consciousness (1991) and The Roots of the Self (1993). Their argument is that the technological geniuses among us, "axemakers," improved our lives but also "redefined the way we thought, the values by which we lived, and the truths for which we died." We were given the world "in exchange for our minds." How? By valuing over all other human capacities the precise, sequential thought processes required to "cut-and-control" nature, each axemaker gift--from prehistoric times to the postmodern global economy--has, at least on some levels, reinforced caste distinctions between people permitted by nature and/or nurture to be "axemakers" and all other human beings. After sketching generation upon generation of the axemakers' short-term technological solutions and their unintended consequences, the authors paradoxically see hope in a new axemaker gift: information available in a "webbed" (rather than sequential) format on decentralized computer networks could empower non-axemakers to find more holistic, long-term approaches to our species'--and the planet's--problems. An eclectic, demanding analysis that will appeal to thoughtful readers. Mary Carroll

Burke, host of the PBS series Connections, and Ornstein, a psychologist and author of the classic text The Psychology of Consciousness (1973), collaborate in this ambitious criticism of progressive societies.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.