THE AXEMAKER'S GIFT
A Double-Edged History of Human Culture

Robert Ornstein and James Burke

Grosset/Putnam, 1995

From the first stone used by prehistoric man to today's electronic wonderland, each new technology has had a double-edged effect, say the authors. Psychologist Robert Ornstein and historian James Burke, known for his PBS-TV series Connections, present a 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 say that successive advances in technicnology - 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, 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 responsible for our present ecological crisis. The authors' proposed solutions include a world of small communities with participatory democracy and 'webbed education.'