The "Cut & Control" Ax Maker Philosophy of Western Civilization

The Cut & Control Ax Maker Philosophy of Western Civilization

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

All our lauded technological progress, our very civilization, is like the ax in the hand of the pathological criminal.

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and dread of you shall be upon the earth. Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it.

Genesis (The Holy Bible)
Author’s note: This was preliminary work to the writing of Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man? This work is yet to be published.




The ax maker gave us the world in exchange for our minds. To emperors they gave the power of death; to surgeons the power of life. Each time the axemakers made us rich, knowledgeable, safe or invincible, we accepted the gift and used it to change the world. When we changed the world we changed our minds because each gift defined the way we thought and the values by which we lived and the truth for which we died. Because each gift was irresistible not evil or ugly, we came back for more unmindful of the cost. Each time there was no choice but to adapt to the change that followed. This has been the process for our ancestors since the beginning of human history. When we developed the first tool to cut more food from nature than nature was ready to offer, we changed our future. As a result there were soon many more of us. And as our numbers increased so did the power of those who could wield the acts most effectively. They became leaders. At first the effect of the new tools on the world was insignificant. The bounty was so great that the damage caused by the axe was not worth consideration.

But about 12,000 years ago, this had already changed. The number of people and tools had reached a critical mass. Our presence began to make itself more widely felt. The rate of change accelerated. The result of that process can be seen in any crowded third world city street today. 12,000 years ago there were 5 million of us. Today 5 million are born every two weeks. Why has this happened? Because the axemakers were too good to be true. Their tools offered our leaders and institutions opportunities for self-fulfillment, self-aggrandizement, self-indulgence, self-satisfaction and self-enrichment was so seductive to those who sought power that they ignored the potential effects. Today, that disregard expresses itself in distressing terms. While millions starve, the developed nations have used their immense scientific and technological capabilities to pave almost half their culpable land. One-third of the world’s forest disappeared. The world population is exploding. The oceans are becoming depleted. And the atmosphere is severely polluted. Technology and destruction of the environment are inextricably linked.

In the ancient past, when we came out of Africa, and we hacked our way across the planet, led by tribal chieftains whose axemaker gave them the power to cut and control the world we did not know then how close we were to journey’s end. All that mattered was a rising standard of living. Today, as a result, we in the industrialized nations are healthier, wealthier, better fed, more informed, and more mobile than anybody ever. That progress has also brought a measure of devastation in its wake should not surprise us since as we progressed we destroyed. Progress always led us forward toward the horizon we never expected to reach, thanks to the axe the past was dead and the future was ours to make.

It is only now in the remains of journeys end that we have begun to question why we have the difficulties that we now have. We may have learned the cause and effect lesson too late. Unless we appreciate that axemaker gifts have always unleashed the kind of power that changes mind we will not recognize that our survival depends on harnessing the same power to save ourselves. If what we need is a new mind, we have the means to make one. All we need to do is find out how it was always done and do it to ourselves.

Different minds attain prominence in different worlds. The talent for performing tasks in the precise sequential pattern would give rise to the right sequential thought that would generate language, logic, rules, which would formalize and discipline thinking itself. The newly dominated sequential talent of the mind was able to use the cut and control capability to extract more knowledge from the world and use that knowledge of the world to cause further change.

The majority of the people do not understand what experts and technologists and scientists know. Historically, they have operated in the backroom making their gifts available to institutions. A few of their many roles played through history have been shaman, astronomer, printer, cardinal, engineer, philosopher, and quantum physicist.

For millions of years the earth changed due to climatic disturbances adjusting and assimilating them, then came something that was no longer cyclic but sequential and cumulative, the appearance of man. The asymmetry of limbs accompanied by asymmetry of the brain, the left side of the brain handling the making of tools, and the right side of the brain able to process and assimilate information, made it possible to manipulate the environment to our purposes. To construct shelters and primitive settlements, with these tools they were able to hunt in groups, which first changed the menu from fruits and berries to meat, which from a single hunt could support several families for days. This sharing encouraged the forming of communities. Hunting required the ability to plan, communicate and cooperate as well as speed and execution. This helped them to become better organized, but more important it laid down the mental matrix for thought and reason, language and culture.

Modern Western perception is different from others. In modern Western culture builders uses a lot of straight lines, primarily vertical and horizontal with straight streets that extend for long distances, rectangular buildings and hallways, square windows, televisions and computer screens. Growing up in this straight up and down, left and right world, has affected our ability to see lines. City dwellers in a study were shown to have less ability to distinguish oblique and diagonal lines than Cree Indians in which lines go in all directions. The Cree were not so good at handling the rectilinear.

Since the beginning of human history, the people good at handling new tools would acquire the power. So, in a fundamental schism that would last until modern times, the gift of the axe favored those in the community who could at handling the new tool and the change that it would bring. Winners would be those who found it easy to use their minds as an axe in a sequential manner. Power would flow to this analytic type who could turn the axemaker’s gift to cut and control to advantage. It was as if the axe had generated a kind of artifactual environment. Those who were best to use technology to shape the world and those around them became leaders.

This change from natural to unnatural selection hastened the sequentially thinking mind and the non-cyclic nature of change. These two aspects of human development joined to become a potent force in innovation. Because the sequential, serial, step-by-step of tool making could be developed into thought processes by which other artifacts could be created. This ability will become a prized asset in the human community.

As a result of this preference society would elevate science over the arts, reason over the emotions, logic over intuition, the technologically advanced community over the primitive. It may be that those non-sequential aspects of human talent expressed say in music or art were not facilitated in those stringently survival oriented circumstances and remained dormant awaiting better days. For the moment, the flavor of the month would be strictly linear thinking.

Inside each of us there are different talents that develop in relation to the world we live in. The talents crowd the different centers of the brain and they include the capacity for sensing the world, and the knowledge of one’s own and others emotions, the ability to move gracefully, ability to locate and identify objects in the moving world, calculation, talk, writing, music, organization of self and others. However, we can lose many of our talents as we develop. Developing one kind of talent means rejecting or downgrading others.

Shaman used myth making for social control explaining natural phenomenon in terms of these myths. They used this mysterious knowledge to predict natural phenomena, and thus heighten their prestige and power.

Written language about 10,000 years ago did not start with words but with counting and accounting with coins designating various sums when bartering grains, meats and supplies. This all started in what is now Iraq. These coins or tokens a certain kind of order or syntax and created the first written alphabet.

Quantitative thinking was established by being able to inventory grain, livestock, and supplies. Rivers could be rerouted to irrigate arid land so that it would bloom. This happened in Mesopotamia. The chaos of nature could be transmuted into a human divine order. Society and its environment were now similarly controllable. The change to a sedentary agricultural society also changed the role of women. Women previously had skills superior to men in cooking, weaving, making utensils, making clothes, but now with agriculture, men came into prominence as they could distribute the surplus of what they could produce, and buy and sell land. The power of land ownership and weapons in defense of land took the gift giving power from women and gave it to men.

About this time semi-mystical shaman gave way to kings. The new leaders presented themselves as mediators between the people and the mystical forces of nature, claiming direct contact with these divine supernatural forces metamorphosing to gods and goddesses.

The concept of a new kind of a human in the form of a high controlling authority separate from and elevated above the populace, a concept still very much alive in the modern world, was matched as it is today on the amount spent to house these people and their staff. Ceremonial structures and the houses of rulers became larger and more prominent cited on hilltops and closed by massive walls. From now on the trappings of leadership were to be public symbols reflecting the permanence of the community and the new values imposed upon it by authority.

Scribes now came into prominence as a very small group who could manipulate the more than 2,000 signs, which were quite esoteric and required many years of training. The art of writing became highly specialized skills known only to a few. The scribal bureaucracies maintain control of taxation and the allocation of resources, of workers remuneration, and of domestic and foreign trade. Because of their importance scribes held a respected and privileged position. So, they had no interest in simplifying their arcane art. That would make it more accessible to potential competitors. The scribal school was the driving force behind society and generated a small literate elite. In their literary, linguistic, mathematical, astronomical achievements the scribal schools far exceeded practical and bureaucratic needs. And in doing so widen the divisions between the leaders and the led. And then by a process repeated again and again throughout history, the qualified few were obliged by changing circumstances to diffuse some of their specialized skills. As technology began to generate increasing social change the unavoidable alternative to social collapse was to allow a wider segment of the community to read and write. Even though the population able to use the pictograms was less than one percent, it was not possible to organize a much more complex social structure and to organize the beginnings of a properly bureaucratic cutting up social activity. Writing unified the Mesopotamian command and control system through the bureaucracy, and by the third millennium this authority began to extend beyond work oriented organization into the behavior of individuals in their private lives.

What happened next singles out Mesopotamia from other ancient societies. The extension of control through the use of literacy radically altered the relationship between individuals and between them and the city authority thanks to the invention of law. It had to do with the rights and duties of individual ownership, a new concept. The lives of individuals were no longer to be lived entirely at the whim of priest or king. On the other hand, their lives were no longer entirely their own, thanks to the development of law. Nearly, 3000 years ago the Babylonian king Hammurabi came to power and the government became highly centralized who represented the king’s interests in all aspects of public life. He issued the Legal Code of Hammurabi in it he claims to have been elected by the gods to reign over Babylon to preserve justice among its people ending with blessings who respected its laws, and curses for those who did not.

Law radically altered our individual liberties and behavior to an extent that still colors our attitudes thousands of years later. We in the modern world refer to freedom under law, which is negative freedom. Our ancient ancestors would have regarded such laws as major constrains on all their freedoms.

But the modification of thinking brought about by writing and commerce pales into insignificance beside what happened because of the interaction between them. Trade was facilitated by the esoteric ability to write. Writing developed widely in Egypt because of the availability of the plant papyrus upon which to write. The Egyptian elite soon built an empire unrivaled in the Mediterranean.

This represented a new stage in centralization of authority and power with the institutionalization of control through technology and writing enshrined preferential treatment of the literate. A gulf between the aristocratic elite and the passive powerless commoners was sanctioned by practice and ritual.

About 3,600 years ago the alphabet was developed which changed the course of history and the use of the brain immensely. As wonderful as the alphabet is, and the early Greeks picked it up, it constrains us to alphabetic thinking. After 2,500 years it seems perfectly normal that the individual letters you read merge into words. And then naturally arrange themselves into a straight line with your eyes moving from left to right.

This was an oral period with poetry’s chief function to keep records not imaginative or emotional thought. Memorizing facts were easier if there were a trick to it.

With the alphabet literate people now had a tool that could now chop up thought to ask complex questions without getting lost in the process. This allowed to look at the world analytically step-by-step with new procedures for acquiring and analyzing knowledge, which the Greeks called “love of wisdom” or philosphia.

Because they had this ability to cut and control thought they were largely free of the religious awe that had permeating thinking until then. Questions were being asked about the nature of knowledge itself, about the practical aspect of the rule of law, and about the establishment of social convention.

The sophists came into prominence because they could argue and debate. Protagoras was the first to see the way sequential thought could argue the two sides of any issue. He argued all beliefs are true which Plato rejected. It was Plato’s theory that knowledge was mainly recollection; he preached the immortality of the soul. It was the Sophists idea that there is no absolute truth or morals. That they may vary from community to community. It is this relativism that attracts us so much today to the Sophists. At the heart of their approach was that concept and ideas were changeable elements, therefore moral values were relative. What was thought to be good and valued in one society might be scorned in another. Even more sophisticated was their idea that all knowledge was equally relative and that what counted as knowledge was not an absolute but a view of the world strongly influence by a society of the time and place. That man and his values were at the center of his interpretation of the universe. The emphasis the Sophists placed on rhetoric, the art of presenting an argument most to convince the listener, came from the realization that the relationship between speech and truth is far from simple. Speech is not simply a matter of presenting the facts, since considerable reorganization of the facts is involved, in the way they are selected and sequence. It was this difference between rhetoric and reality that led Plato came to contrast rhetoric with philosophy, and to condemn it. The Sophists point was that the elements of thinking remain much the same whether they are being used to support or attack a rationalist’s position. This was an arguable view, but the extraordinary thing is that somebody that somebody should be playing with ideas in this cut and combine manner as early as 450 B.C.

Plato stands however tallest in Greek thought. He developed a unified theory involving most branches of learning, such as politics, law and the arts, as well as the nature of the world. Largely influencing him was the disaster of the Peloponnesian Wars. The Athenians had been defeated by Sparta. So Plato swung between rejecting democracy because it could lead to the kind of demagoguery that had driven Athens into that war, and being horrified by excesses of the subsequent dictatorship. He developed a proposal for how a people should ideally be governed. In this system in return for absolute power enforced by warriors, philosopher guardians would act selflessly in the interest of the state because they themselves own no possessions.

He also felt that any philosophical system had to also explain the natural world. He was the archetypal theoretician that believed the structure of matter could be worked out from logical principles, and so there was no need for observation.

Aristotle studied at the Athenian Academy for twenty years. After the death of Plato he began to consider the problem Plato had left unresolved: how the mind, which is superior and separate from the world, acquires an understanding of matter.

When he moved away from Athens, he also moved away from Plato especially his views on the observation of nature. He concentrated especially on biology. Aristotle’s techniques shaped the way you marshal your thoughts and weigh the evidence today when you come to a decision about anything. He formulated the approved rules for how to think and how not to make mistakes. His formula submitted problems to a sequential rational process. The means by which to arrive at understanding was to process contradictory, incomplete, or inaccurate definitions until a consistent definition emerged. Deductive reasoning standardized thinking as never before.

The new method consisted of propositions taking the form of two premises, each containing a common middle term with a third new premise resulting form the other two. The power of this system was that it allowed the thinker to establish the truth about nature even if these truths could not be tested personally or directly. For example, all that shines in the dark is fire, stars shine in the dark, so stars are fires. This method allowed people to see if their mode of thought was consistent. Aristotle’s method was called “logic.” And Islamic thinker would refer to it as the tool for sharpening thought.

With it Aristotle offered the tremendous gift of world altering power, because it taught a standardized method for chopping up the world, observing it in a more orderly way, and analyzing how it worked.

Aristotle created a matrix of a great change of being. This definition of nature would rule investigation for the next 1500 years.

He also constructed a system to explain what happened in the heavens. The earth was in the center of the universe. This construct, too, would rule all thought until Newton.

He opened the door for increased specialization. The gulf between those with knowledge and those without widened again.

Our thinking is a product of the Aristotelian system of logic, which itself was designed to prevent the anarchy made so frighteningly possible by the alphabet and made so seductive by the Sophists.

Logic cut at the root of freethinking before it could become anarchic and would go on doing so over the following 2000 years.

It would take that long to offer the human mind a second chance.

Another dramatic shift was in the middle ages when monks barricaded in monasteries recorded the written records preserved for posterity during the Dark Ages. Out of this came the influential figure of St. Augustine of Hippo and his book “The City of God. These were transition points when knowledge of the ancient world would nourish and give birth to medieval thought. The model for their world to come was Augustine’s “City of God.” It defined the attitude of Western society through the centuries of confusion, which lay ahead.

Augustine expressed the “end of the world” escapist feeling of the time. Beyond the realm of the senses was spiritual and eternal world of truth that was the goal of all man’s strivings. The way to enter this divine world was not by examining the external world of the senses but by turning inward. Truth came not from the external world or from the mind, but from the illuminating presence of God.

Augustine divided people into those favored and those outcast. Those who dwelt in the “city of God” who would live eternally with the deity and those in the earthly city who would be condemned to permanent torment with Satan.

The church was earthly kingdom of God, and would one day rein supreme power in a theocratic society. Augustine ideology was a tool whose potential the church would use increasingly over the following thousand years in an attempt to manipulate and control the secular rulers of Western Europe, and through them, their subjects.

The ability to read and write raised the Christian hierarchs to an extremely powerful position over illiterate kings and princes, who relied totally upon the clergy to administer their territory. This is when new phrases came into the language, such as “auditing accounts,” and “holding hearings,” where all evidence was presented because most of those involved including those in high society were illiterate, and could only understand the spoken word.

It was easy for the church through its monastic commissions and bishops to control this illiterate world. By the early Middle Ages Roman state schooling had vanished, and nothing replaced it that might compete with the educational system controlled by the church.

Knowledge was now in the hands by a tiny fraction of the population. It was exclusively religious in purpose and it gave the church a monopoly of control over those aspects of social life that required literacy and learning.

Meanwhile, the church consolidated its authority by taking draconian action against any and all challenges.

When the second century Gnostic thinkers proposed a way to salvation through scholarship and self-knowledge their books were burned and they themselves were banned. The church consolidated power with a tightly controlled canon of official knowledge, the source in a single text, the bible, which was accessible only to the literate ecclesiastical hierarchs. To increase revenues the church authority introduced a religious tax, the tithe or tenth. It decreed that everyone should pay a tenth of their income to the local church where they received the Sacraments. This was the first universal tax in European history and greatly aided the papacy in sorely need of financial aid.

The power of the church lay where all social power had always been in a centralized command structure. The pope in Rome was, in theory, the single central authority to whom total obedience was due. The royal power of kings and princes was recognized, but the church teachings imposed restrictions on its extent. Not only did the papacy attempt to remove the church from subservience to lay authority but also proclaimed itself to be superior to the secular hierarchy. In response European kings and emperors began to invest themselves with a religious character, one at least sacred if not priestly. They started by having themselves anointed at coronations, which took the form of religious ceremonies that declared them to hold power as the Lord’s anointed. The anointing was done as often as possible of course by the pope. In this way Rome attempted to underpin Roman power by endowing kings and emperors with a sacred character making it obligatory for all subjects to submit faithfully with blind obedience to them. Ecclesiastical control based upon their literate abilities inserted the clergy into every aspect of secular life. Bishops and abbots received grants of land from kings and nobleman but royal appointment often placed them in inferior position to the monarch. But it did enhance their economic and political power as landlord over thousands of peasants.

By the 11th century the church’s grip on Western society was firm although not uncontested. Churches had been established in all known settlements in northern Europe and this made possible the growth of a parish system. Every town or village in Western Europe had a local church.
The church took another turn based on the Christian belief that it had a God given right to subjugate the world. According to both the old and new testaments of the bible, man had been given dominion over nature. Genesis said, “Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it. ”

In many other religions nature was divine, or it was a shared divinity. But Christian doctrine gave humankind a position separate in nature from the rest of creative things. The dominate Christian view was since animals and plants did not have souls this precluded their eligibility for humane treatment. The manipulation of nature, which could enhance its value and beauty, was mankind’s right and duty because improvement of the world involved the exercise of power derived from God for that very purpose.

Eleventh century Benedictine monks were among the first to systematically apply these views of nature to their daily life and to begin a process of the improvement of nature, which would be, reflect in social behavior for centuries to come.

The order of the Benedictines were to seek out monastic sites far from the haunts of men in wild and isolated places and then to apply their knowledge of the land for enough ford to support them. One of family of Benedictines was the Cistercians whose motto was “Work is prayer,” succeeded best of all in this task.

Most of the technology that survived the Fall of Rome in the Middle Ages emerged from Cisternan monasteries. They were more like small factories filled with water driven looms, mills, saws, grinding stones and trip hammers.

One system of social control, which sprang from the monasteries rose out of need of the monks to know what time it, was so that they could perform their eight daily periods of collective prayer at the appointed hours. Their search for a better form of time keeping speared the development of the mechanical weight driven clock in the 13th century. The gift of the clock made immediately possible wider more effective marshalling of social forces and behavior regulation.

In 1355 in Amiens France the city government issued an ordinance that will sound all too familiar. It concerned the time when workers started their workday, began and ended their lunch break, and quit work for the day. They used a special bell for this purpose.

As a result of the reconquest of Spain, centers of Arabic culture and their libraries fell into Christian hands. Toledo, the most important, fell in 1085. The works in these libraries translated from the Arabic to Latin made practical knowledge more available to Western ecclesiastical authorities. Medicine and astronomy came first in the 10th and 11th centuries. In the 12th century, the emphasis seems to have shifted to astrological works along with mathematical treatises needed for the successful practice of astronomy and astrology. Medicine and astrology rested on philosophical foundations. It was at least partly to recover these that from 1150 on attention shifted to the physical and metaphysical work of Aristotle. But once the first scope of Aristotle’s works became known it became clear that his philosophical system was applicable to an enormous range of issues to be dealt with in schools and in the new universities.

To Western policy makers mastery of the rediscovery of Aristotelian logic gave almost the magical ability to increase knowledge almost without end. Above all, it provided a damage control system to limit the destabilizing effects of the new Arabic data.

As in ancient Greece, the gift of reason might initially offer heady intellectual prospects but in the end it would act as an effective brake on the freedom of thought.

The excitement of Arabic knowledge is clear from the first contact with it. In the early 12th century the Englishman Adelard of Bath returned from Arab Sicily and wrote two books that made a big impact on his fellow Europeans. In them he said all authority should be subject to reasoned questioning. Perhaps his most powerful statement was, “The visible universe is subject to quantification, and if so, by necessity if you wish to hear more from me give and take reason because I am not the kind of man to satisfy his hunger on the picture of a stake.” The new learning became the center of intellectual life in the 13th century.

The task of Christian authority was to task it, organize it, assess its significance, but above all to make it socially safe. Most of the translated texts were considered harmless enough. They were superior to anything known before and contained no unpleasant theological or philosophical surprises.

But problems arose in subject areas that threatened to clash with theology in cosmology, physics, metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology. One of the first to be influenced by the new knowledge was Albertus Magnus. A 13th century Dominican friar who taught at the University of Paris. He put forth a new methodological principle; there can be no philosophy about concrete things. In such things, only experience can provide such certainty. He responded to Aristotelian rationalism by proposing to distinguish theology and philosophy on methodological grounds, and to find out what philosophy alone without any help from theology might demonstrate about reality. This was to prove to be a breakthrough.

A French contemporary of Albertus, William of Occam, took things further and called for the objective investigation of faith and philosophy. He severely restricted the province of philosophy in order to safeguard theology, and denied the competence of reason in matters of faith, declaring that divine action was beyond any standards of human rationality. Although in philosophy he was basically an empiricist, his teachings led many of his followers, known as nominalists, to a radical skepticism. His battles with Pope John XXII found him imprisoned at Avignon.

The French scholar Tyre of the same period analyzed Genesis from the point of view of the natural processes explained in the text and questioned the extent to which the descriptions should be taken literally.

The key issue, however, and one that would threaten the very foundation of the church was if logic and reason were to be applied to faith what would become of miracles such as the virgin birth, what would become of faith itself? Scholars had to be careful to maintain the delicate balance between belief and unbelief called for by this kind of thinking.

In the second half of the 13th century, the controversy over the new views began to involve the recently established universities of northern Europe. At the time dominated by or owing certain allegiance to the papacy. Ironically, in the early 13th century, Rome had reacted to the new heterodoxy much as Greece had reacted to the Sophists 1500 years before with a total ban on the teachings of Aristotle.

Then in 1277 anything remotely related to rationalism was forbidden, while Rome looked for a means out of the apparent impasse. The way was found in the person of a Dominican intellectual who had studied under Albertus Magnus in Paris and whose name Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas papered over the cracks between faith and reason in his “Summa Theologica.” In it he argued that philosophy examined the supernatural order in the light of reason, and theology examined it in the light of revelation. Although reason was used in theology, revelation did not fall into the province of philosophy. And philosophy could not contradict theology because truth could not contradict truth. For Aquinas, then, faith and knowledge were not mutually exclusive. He said belief took over at the point where knowledge ended. Aquinas summed up his theory, “To believe is to think with ascent.” With his “Summa Theologica” Aquinas released the full power of the gift of rationalism into secular hands. He bowed to the power of geometry admitting God could not make the sum internal angles of a triangle add up to more than two right angles.

In the future there would be two kinds of knowledge, that which related to revelation, which would be the province of theology, and that which dealt with the natural world, which reason and philosophy could handle. The result of this would one day become known as “science.”

No science would however be free of ecclesiastical control for centuries. Indeed, up to the time of the modern world, most scientists would be churchmen. And as late as Darwin, science would work in support of established religion.

One of the earliest more secular views came at the end of the 13th century from an English cleric called Roger Bacon in his “Opus Majus” (Major Work). He said that “What others strive to see dimly and blindly like bats in twilight I gaze at in the full light of day because I am master of experiments.” He said through experiments he gained knowledge of natural things, medical, chemical and indeed everything in the heavens or on earth. Bacons scientific pieces of writing were not pieces of natural philosophy but passionate attempts to warn the church hierarchy against suppressing the new learning expressed in Aristotelian philosophy, and all the new literature relating to natural philosophy, mathematical science, and medicine. Bacon argued that the new philosophy was a divine gift capable of proving articles of faith, and persuading the unconverted; that scientific knowledge contributed vitally to the interpretation of scripture; that astronomy was essential for establishing the religious calendar; that astrology enabled man to predict the future; that experimental science taught how to prolong life; and that optics enabled the creation of devices that would terrorize unbelievers and lead to their conversion. There was one perfect wisdom, Bacon argued in his “Opus Majus” and this is contained in Holy Scripture in which all truth is rooted. So, theology did not suppress these sciences, but put them to work directing them to their proper end.

Bacon’s experimental technique gave a new technique for manufacturing knowledge became known as “resolution and composition.” It was a direct descendant of the mode of thought made possible by the alphabet because it applied the cut and control analytical method to the solution of problems. Resolution defined the complex phenomenon and its causal conditions by breaking it down into the elements or principles involved in its appearances. Composition then used these data to show how these causes brought the phenomenon about. Thus revealing the conditions to a necessary and sufficient to produce the phenomenon.

The aim of Bacon and others experiments was to find mechanisms to make the phenomenon by experimentally creating the conditions for the phenomenon to exist. Starting in the 13th century experimenters started to refer to nature as if it were a machine that functioned according discoverable, measurable mechanisms. They were laying the groundwork for an entirely new body of knowledge that would enormously expand the power and influence of institutions and individuals with access to the knowledge.

In the 14th century these institutions for the manufacturing of knowledge were still limited to tiny isolated groups of clerics. But their isolation would end with explosive results 100 years later when a German goldsmith got the date wrong. The consequences of that mistake would shake Rome to its foundation and create an entirely new technology.

The next technology would radically change the way knowledge was recorded and disseminated. It would also change the nature of knowledge itself, how it could be used, and how many people could have access to it. In 1439 in the German town of Mainz a goldsmith named Johann Gutenberg found out that he had misinformed as to the date of a Pilgrim’s Fair in nearby Aachen. Gutenberg had agreed to sell small mirrors to these pilgrims. When he found out the fair was to be held a year later than he had thought, he revealed to his co-investors an alternative opportunity that he had been thinking about for some time, that is, to make individual letters of metal so as to combine and recombine them to print words on paper. The new typeface would radically change the world of documentation in the West, replacing as it did handwritten manuscripts. A limited amount of printing with engraved wooden blocks had taken place but carved wooden blocks could only be used to print one image and they wore out with use. The secret of Gutenberg’s metal type faces was that lasted well, reproduced single letters and were interchangeable.

The effect of Gutenberg’s letter would be to change the map of Europe, considerably reduce the power of the Catholic Church, and alter the very nature of the knowledge on which political and religious control was based.

Printing spread across continent at extraordinary speed. In 1455 there were no printed text in Europe. By 1500 there were 20 million books in 35,000 editions, one book for every five members of the population. In 1455 the only printing press in Europe had been Gutenberg’s. By 1500 there were presses in 245 cities from Stockholm to Palermo. No innovation in history had spread so far so fast.

The first to take advantage of this new technology was the Catholic Church. Rome realized that printing could strengthen its social authority through the production and dissemination of thousands of copies of identical devotional books, which would make possible liturgical conformity and obedience on an unprecedented scale.

Then in 1466 Rome made a move to entrench its power among the growing number of literate non-Latin speakers in the rising artisan class sanctioning the first printing of the vernacular bible in German. The idea caught on.

In 1471 an Italian bible was on sale in Venice. In 1477 the Delph Press had printed a Dutch bible. By 1500 there were 30 editions in six languages. This decision was a major mistake. To start with the bible was to have unexpected political effect. They gave permanence to the language in which they were printed. In doing so they strengthened the unity and power of the rulers in the language community. Between 1478 – 1571, in spite of the fact that Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Wales, Ireland, the Bath country, Catalonia and Finland, were in the economic influence of another more powerful group, these countries retained and strengthened their national identities because they had their own version of the bible.

Languages in which bibles were not printed either disappeared or became provincial dialects subordinate to the political and economic dominant language of the area. The political result of these new print languages imposed by kings in their control of the presses would lead to a new kind of society, a nation. Thanks to printing the Christian now saw himself as a member of a group that before printing had not existed to any great extent, a nation.

With the development of a national language, monarchs and their governments began to enforce their local tongues with laws, taxes, armies, and bureaucracies that went with them all. One the state boundaries had been consolidated in these bureaucratic ways, it gradually became more convenient for political, economic and social reasons to use a single language.

No European used the press more effectively to promote and manipulate its new print generated national identity than the German Protestant reformer Martin Luther. The presses took his fight with the pope to the street with astonishing speed. A printed version of his protest of the Roman church appeared everywhere in Germany within two weeks of their publication, and all over Europe within a month.

Given the publisher’s desire of profitable return on investment, within each new European language, efforts were made to standardize grammar and vocabulary. Punctuation marks were introduced. Thanks to print, language itself had become a vehicle of conformity and codification paving the way for linguistic purity.

The result was perhaps most obvious in the English Elizabethan culture and language where through the circulation of printed books the English language rapidly standardized all across the realm. The clearest example of way this contributed to the stability of the vernacular language dates from the first years of the King James Bible. Introduced in all English Protestant churches in 1611, and still there until 1970.

With the help of the printed word, England was a united cultural and linguistic entity by about 1600.

The new print languages created unprecedented ease in domestic communication among speakers of a wide variety of accents that existed between French, English or Spanish. By reading their formal common tongue on the page they became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions of people in their own particular language field. In consequence, they began to take pride in this new nationalists perception of themselves. There was now an English or French or Spanish way of thinking.

In England the crown had been quick to realize the potential of print to induce ideological conformity and so issued a vernacular Book of Common Prayer in 1549. Among the main justifications for its introduction were the economy of production and the uniformity of worship. Henry VIII of England also ordered the standardization of grammar, spelling and punctuations into one absolute and uniform sort of learning. Education and religion were cast into the same conformist and vernacular mode.

As a result of this kind of coordination, it was possible within months of the publication of a liturgical text for royal parties of visitation to roam the countryside checking up on parish compliance with direction for its use. Rules for social behavior were now set down everywhere in black and white.

In the century and a half after Gutenberg the press had rationalized laws and regulations to an unprecedented extent.

Printing defused power outward from the old papal center to the new nation state periphery. It then isolated people within their new state boundaries because it boasted a new sense of national identity and separatism. Commercial activity became easier to regulate and manage with the aid of printed passports, safe conducts, mandates, invitations, legal notices, and national paperwork of all kind. As printed encouraged standardized regulation of trade the economies of the new nations began to grow, and to develop their own distinctive character.

The chief popular books flooding from the presses also quickly created a large network of the reading public, not least among them merchants who typically new little or no Latin. Political and religious printed propaganda could also be used to mobilize this growing more literate middle class. The circulation of broadsides and the engravings carrying pictures of kings and princes heightened royal visibility. The effect of duplicated images and portraits of rulers framed and hung in both great houses and peasant hovels throughout Europe raised the mass media creation of a public image, which had been used by the old Roman emperors to hitherto unforeseeable heights.

In the Protestant community the drive for literacy to bring the word of God to every reader introduce other more intimate forms of control. By the early 1660s the rules of Puritan church conduct were specified in printed official injunctions distributed even widely enough for lay people able to use in order to identify and report ecclesiastically deviant behavior among congregations or clergy.

Writers from various nations began delving into their past and began writing patriotic histories, which often claimed superiority for their nations over others. More practically from the point of view of kings and princes the new histories strengthen the sense of separateness from the new nation-states. In the Protestant countries aided the monarchs in their attempts to move their nations away from papal control. This was to be made easier by a change of events set in motion, thanks to Rome’s original introduction of the vernacular printed bibles, which would finally lead to the diminishing of Catholic Christendom with unexpected and shocking effect.

In this case it would attack the core of religious belief itself and confer on secular authorities a new gift with which to cut and control the world. The sequence was contributed in 1545. When Rome convened an ecumenical counsel in the northern Italian city of Trent to discuss matters to combat Martin Luther. As general measures to standardize worship the counsel authorized the publication of approved versions of liturgical versions of Catholic text. In Antwerp, which was at the time under the Catholic control of the king of Spain, Philip II, there was a printer called Christophe Plantin who ran the biggest publishing house in Europe. His print house would change history because it would enable printing to generate the greatest force for change so far modifying the nature of knowledge itself, and suddenly widening the gulf between those with specialists knowledge and those without. This happened because in 1566 Plantin wrote for King Philip II of Spain and entirely new kind of bible. It would, he argued, consolidate the power of Rome and better control the laity. More important, it would add luster to Philip himself. To be printed in all the biblical languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac and Aramaic, the new bible would be based on the print generated analytical approach to textual criticism. In 1568 Plantin received permission to begin the work. Five French and Flemish scholars gathered under the personal supervision of King Philip’s personal theologian. In 1572 finally printed 1,212 copies of the eight-volume work. By this time known as the royal bible, the first five volume carried out the biblical text set out in the five languages; the last three volumes contained a new type of knowledge, only made possible thanks to printing. These were volumes of additional material containing commentaries, information relative to the biblical text, and based on compendium of the most recent scholarly discoveries. The appendices held vast amounts of data from biblical genealogies to maps of the Holy Land, notes on the Hebrew idiom, and on the origin of the language, plans on the temple in Jerusalem, Jewish antiques, history of the tribes of Israel, and essays on biblical coins, weights and measures. There were also Syria, Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek dictionaries in grammars, variant readings in text, indices, and no fewer than eighteen treatises on archeological and philosophical matters. This Polyglot Bible caught on and other appendices of the bible began to appear all over Europe.

When biblical scholars finished their work on these appendices they turned to other things, and as they did so, triggered an extraordinary knowledge fall out. It was to affect almost every aspect of 16th century European life, and it would help to shape the modern world.

The new knowledge specialists set up intellectual book networks across Europe, exchanging information on anything from maps to data on instruments, to flower balls, plant seeds, and rare stones. The only other books of comparable size were those of the almanacs. These also attracted the skills of the new experts. Almanacs had existed in limited form before printing. But from the 16th century on they appeared all over Europe in massive numbers and radically increased the amount of data in circulation. In the 16th century these were selling 400,000 copies a year.

As time past, the data contained in almanacs in turn encouraged more specialist disciplines, each of which needed its own almanac. The seaman’s calendar, the weaver’s almanac, the constable’s almanac, the farmer’s almanac, and so on. Each publication standardized the special data, and helped to institutionalize agreed practices within each specialist’s craft. And with each publication, knowledge became ever more fragmented, and esoteric.

After the early editions had summed up the work of authorities, specialists now knew enough to judge from their own experience. Anatomists, for example, opened bodies and saw errors of the ancients regarding the position of the organs and circuitry. Everywhere the gift of print gave a new way of thinking about the world. Education took on new significance in ensuring the proper management of knowledge.

Obsessed with the need to create a totally ordered hierarchical society of literate and docile believers Luther structured education into classified and graded process that submitted learners to standardized examinations, which would identify the level of ability, and reveal deviance or ignorance.

The Catholic Church responded to this threat by setting up Ignatius Loyola’s Jesuit colleges, the first of which was opened in Portugal in 1542. The college stressed uniformity and high standards of achievement. The course material was extremely formalized, and taught under strict theological supervision, while students were monitored at all times by priests, prefix, and rectors to make sure they conformed.
By the time of the establishment of the 17th century royal societies of knowledge, another key figure would emerge in education, the Czech educational reformer John Amos Komensky. His apparent democratic aim was to teach all things to all men. Merchants in England, France and Germany were eager to follow the vocational lead of Komensky because they wanted the young prepared for the new capitalistic economy in establishments free of direct church control. The new commercial schools taught reading, writing and arithmetic, the essential for success in the expanding economy.

Meanwhile, in 1518, the English King Henry VIII seen the wisdom of bringing these new knowledge makers under government control, founded the Royal College of Medicine in London. In 1540 English surgeons set up the new company to regulate the new profession of surgery. In the same year the Royal College of Physicians was established. And in 1617 the Society of Apothecary was founded.

As professional societies established themselves in print, their members increasingly used printed books to communicate with each other. Their language became more and more incomprehensible to all but members of their profession. However, this esoteric community of reading and writing specialists would be shaken by a number of events that appeared to threaten the very credibility of the printed knowledge upon which their new power rested.

The effect would be to generate a radically different view of knowledge where it could be found and what could be done with it. The event that brought this change was so extraordinary that when news of it became generally known about thirty years after it happened that the majority of people didn’t believe it. It was the discovery of America.

On July 22, 1502, the Italian manager of a Spanish branch of a Florentine shipping agency landed in Lisbon at the end of a voyage to the new world. It was his third transatlantic crossing and it made him famous. Because in 1507 the word “America,” a version of his first name was printed in a small insert on a small map drawn by a German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller, showing where the sailor and Amerigo Vespucci had gone. The map took Europe by storm because it showed the world as Vespucci had seen it with an extra continent in the middle of the Atlantic and another ocean beyond separating it from Asia. Columbus had never expressed this view, and in any case, little or nothing had been heard from him since 1497.

Vespucci’s account of the new world destabilized European society because it began a process that would call into question the validity of the premises upon which all social power had rested up to then. European core ideological belief was that the earth was the center of the universe, that everything in the heavens and on earth had its proper God ordained place, that there were only three continents, and above all, according to the bible, all these matters were fixed by God at creation and therefore were incapable of being changed. It looked as if the discovery of America, which the bible had not predicted would sweep all this away and with it the entire social structure built on 2,000 years of theological and philosophical authority.

The medieval way of arguing the way to the truth had failed because it had not prepared people for the possibility of an extra continent. And even greater problem came from the awkward fact that primitive people inhabited America in a state of natural existence apparently without knowledge of politics, history, or Christianity. And yet, there they were without all this knowledge surviving quite happily in voluntary, organized and functioning societies.

This realization triggered the rapid spread in Europe of radical concept of free association. A social principle that might prove to be better than the old European social forms whose existence depended on submission to authority. Free association proposed that communities of people should come together of their own free will and voluntarily agree on their laws just as American primitive tribes appeared to do. This concept was pretty shocking in the 16th century. But one hundred years later it would influence the thought of John Locke, and through him the founders of the French and American republics.

As more and more families returned from the new continent, brought with them questions that undermined authority of all kinds. How could these naked, wild savages be descendants of Adam and Eve? If Ptolomey, the unquestioned authority on geographical matters and on whose maps all contemporary cartographer was based, had not known of America, how accurate was the rest of his data? If the supreme Aristotle had been wrong about the number of continents, he said there were three, was his entire method of classifying nature, the bedrock of Western intellectual life, to be trusted?

But worse was to come. The same time doubts were being raised about the nature of the world similar questions were being posed about the nature of the cosmos. In 1543 Copernicus came up with the solar system arrangement that put the sun at the center of solar system in which the earth was just one of several planets. The implication of this new system was philosophically mind boggling because it denied the centuries old claim that humankind held a central position, central in the universe, as fitted a creature made in God’s image. This undermined the supreme authority of the church, which rested on just such an assertion.

The revelation of a flaw in the Aristotelian scheme gradually brought about the realization that phenomena had to be described in a more reliable way with the aid of measurement. The attempt to do this would bring about an entirely new technique deriving data from and exchanging data with the natural world because it was introducing non-religious explanations for the world.

The first exponent of this world changing technique was the Italian astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei. In 1603 in Padua, Galileo tried an entirely different approach to the study of natural phenomena in which he first worked out the answer to a problem mathematically, and then looked for proof through experimentation. He used the new method first of all on the acceleration of falling bodies. Aristotle had said that each object fell because it sought its natural position on the ground, and did so faster as it did so at its happiness at reaching its goal. Galileo proposed that all bodies fell in the same way and at the same rate because they were all obeying a common law of nature, which could be mathematically, derived and experimentally proved.

At the same time, an aristocratic English lawyer named Francis Bacon was approaching the certainty of knowledge from a different but complementary direction. In 1620 he proposed nothing less than an entirely new approach to the problem of generating information. New principles were needed as well as new forms of argument, new aims for knowledge, new ethics, and new means to manage and channel the flood of discovery, which seemed about to overwhelm the social and intellectual order. This new tool grounded knowledge in observation and experience because Bacon saw the old scholastic method of judging a theory by how well it could be argued failed when faced with the unprecedented data coming from newly discovered parts of the world. Only the exhaustive gathering and classification of information would bring the kind of certainty that would maintain social stability because it would reveal in a new way with new kinds of evidence the orderliness of God’s creation and the regularity of workings of nature and society.

Bacon’s new data management process had four official components, and would bring into being our modern view of knowledge, finding, judging, recording and communicating, so as to bring to light things never done.

If such things turned out to be truly new, for Bacon it was all the more important for them to be viewed in the cool light of objectivity, a new term which would come to dominate the mind of society.

Regulation of thought by approved methods like this would make control and mastery of nature easier, and most important; it would make easier the enforcement of conformity.

With Galileo experimentation and Bacon’s system for managing data the emerged the beginnings of a new definition of knowledge, of the role that theory should play, and of the objectifying capacity of mathematics to quantify phenomena. This left only a question of a technique for evaluating raw data without fear of error.

In 1637 the engineer Rene Descartes published his new concept he said would solve the problem of evaluation in a book called “Discourse on Method.” In it he set out the rules for seeking certainty in an uncertain world. The secret lay in what he called “methodical doubt” by which everything except self-evident truths were to be questioned until they proved themselves to be true. Descartes method provided a supreme cut and control approach to the world in a form of a technique known as “reductionism.” In an echo of the medieval “resolution and composition” technique, the method called for a problem to be divided up into smallest parts so that it could more easily be understood and solved.

All reductionism thinking should proceed from the simple to the complex, and all statements of the world should be expressed in only non-metaphysical terms: size, shape and movement.

Galileo’s mathematical proofs, Bacon’s empiricism, and Descartes’ methodical doubt produced a new investigative technique so powerful that it would enable specialists to reach unprecedented levels of esoteric specialization and control.

The first wide spread social effect of the new reductionist thinking was to generate hierarchies that would regulate how to apply the method and how to manage the further data from all over the world, which the application of scientific method would trigger. These hierarchies were known as academies for the propagation of knowledge. The first open in Rome in 1657 with the motto “test and test again!”

Britain’s Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge was founded in 1662.
Loosely translated, it motto was, “take nobody’s word for it.” It enthusiastically embraced Descartes’ “methodical doubt.” Much of the first hand information the society received from reporters, what they were then known as, came from sailors, merchants and military personnel, as well as English travelers and foreign observers of every kind. The key purpose of the new society, and others like it throughout Europe was to defend the institutional status quo by marshalling new techniques and knowledge in defense against what was declared to be atheism, the catch phrase for anti-establishment behavior. The avalanche of new information coming in from around the world made these new experimenters keen to find a way to manage knowledge, which would, above all, be politically correct.

In order for evidence to be objectively tested, new procedures were instituted by the society’s leading member the Irish aristocrat Robert Boyle. Boyle’s view was that science ought to reveal God’s grand design and strengthen orthodoxy. He reasoned the best way to arrive at an objective assessment of evidence was to have every experiment repeated before a number of society members in an act called “multiple witnessing.” Only when something was collectively observed in this way by the consensus could it be safely accepted as a matter of fact. This activity would demand a new kind of regulated official place where innovation could be carried out according to approved processes and with approved equipment. Boyle called the workplace a “laboratory,” and the investigators “priests of nature,” whose experiments would best be performed on Sundays.

In the new laboratory a new style of the objective management of data would be conducted for the first time with the aid of standard uniform instruments that would generate new worlds accessible only to those with the instruments. The first was made possible by the discovery of the vacuum.

In spite of its apparently wide range and free investigation and serendipitous manufacturer of new knowledge the society was in fact keeping a firm grip on what could and could not be said and done, and was not the democracy of science it pretended publicly to be. The case of the vacuum makes the point. Before its discovery, and then its confirmation with by observation and experiment and multiple witnessing, the vacuum had not existed. Indeed, to have suggested that it did would have been heretical since the church accepted Aristotle’s view that the vacuum was impossible.
Aristotle had said that space was created by God as a receptacle to be occupied by solid bodies. And if any part of space happened to be unoccupied, as might have appeared to be the case with a vacuum, the omnipresent God would fill this space with light. Space was never empty. So, the vacuum did not exist. It seems not only nature but also the church abhorred a vacuum.

The vacuum led experimenters into many areas of research: the development of the barometer, respiration, and the composition of air, even the eventual discovery of electricity. But especially the experiments with air pressure which laid the groundwork for the development of the steam engine.

After the vacuum, the second of the new worlds generated by the scientific method was made possible by optical instruments, the telescope, and to a much greater extent, the microscope.

When Galileo turned the new Dutch telescope to the heavens, he saw a cosmos that had not been known before. When he observed a transit of Venus, proving in this way that the planet was, as Copernicus had claimed, orbiting the sun, the telescope unambiguously challenged Catholic orthodoxy, and accelerated the rate at which science would take power out of the hands of religious authorities.

Science would create a new generation of dogmatic authority, whose instruments, alone, could see the new truth because they generated conditions under which it could be seen. From now on, political power would be sustained by science.

A more unsuspected world was to be discovered by the microscope. In 1628 the English anatomist William Harvey published on the movement of the heart and the blood after he was able to examine crustacean, mollusks, and insects. In 1660 Marcello Malpighi used microscopic data to explain the operation of the lungs to show how the capillaries linked arteries and veins, and to discover the taste buds on the tongue, as well as the cerebral cortex and the existence of red blood cells.

So, in a few decades, the microscope had driven knowledge to differentiate in to a large number of new sciences in which only specialists would be qualified to operate. Biology was no longer a single subject, but had split into embryology, developmental studies in general, comparative anatomy, cytology, histology, microbiology, and entomology.

Above all perhaps, the microscope confirmed Descartes’ new scientific method because the disciplines it generated were based on the reductionist study of structure, which could be taken apart and put together as Descartes had said.

Between them the twin gifts of the vacuum and microscope for the first time also linked the crafts of engineering and metallurgy with scientific theory. This in turn generated the new occupation of scientific instrument maker and the new concept of precision. Demand now surged for systems of measurement and quantification.

Precision changed life at sea, too, as increasing transatlantic trade made more accurate calculation of longitude a matter of urgency. In 1735, John Harrison produced a spring driven marine chronometer that was tested during an experimental voyage to Barbados. It showed the time accurate to within 15 seconds over a five-month period. This meant that over five months voyage navigation could be accomplish accurate to within one mile. More and more precision instruments came into being to deal with the massive increased cargos of tea, sugar and tobacco entering Britain. The slide rule was developed to help customs officers calculate tax. There were anemometers, pyrometers, and navigation instruments. Machine tools, principally lathes for cutting fine screw threads in brass and iron, which could then be used to turn scale markings devices with great accuracies, helped to make all forms of measurement in navigation, surveying and cartography even more precise. These would be used to plan and build the roads, canals, railways and bridges of the industrial revolution, powered by the steam engine, itself generated by the vacuum experiment and build with the aid of precision instruments.

Quantification directly effected the populous at large when its techniques took social management to new levels of defining and controlling. In 1671 a Dutchman developed a statistical life table in which fate annuities could be standardized and offered to investors who were loan money to pay for the war against the French. In the same year England centralized customs tax collection with the office of Inspector of Imports and Exports, the first national statistics department in Europe. From then on, the figures collected in that department figures in political and economic negotiations with other states. Statistics thus would become yet another tool by which to maintain social order.

Perhaps the most far reaching of the new reductionist philosophy came in 1776 with Adam Smith and his theory on the division of labor. In “Wealth of Nations” Smith expounded a new scientific law in economics in which market forces regulated the economic activity of a country. By showing the interaction of price with profit, economic growth with wages and employment, and supply and demand, as well as linking consumption and property with the circulation of capital, Smith demonstrated the various parts of a mechanism unaffected by bias or party and under the control of an invisible hand. This was, he thought, a force that would always seek equilibrium and could be used for predictable social effects like the other new laws of nature.

Finally, using the language of Boyle’s laboratory in his writings on social processes, John Locke said that there was a natural law at work governing the affairs of man just as it governed the trajectory of a cannon ball or the pressure of a gas. This social law manifested itself in the force of self-interest, which ruled the behavior of every individual. The soul aim of government should be to make sure that nothing constrained this natural force of self-interest.

Since the most common expression of this self-interest was the ownership of possessions, then the prime responsibility of the state should be to protect individual property, leaving citizens to concentrate on increasing their wealth.

Locke’s ideas, born of the scientific method triggered by print and discovery of America would find their most powerful expression in America, itself at the birth of the United States, a modern nation whose constitution would be framed in the language of the laboratory, as a rational free society instituted on the basis of natural law, consensus and self-evident truth. America would become the most powerful nation in history once the industrial revolution had provided the richest society on earth with new tools for defining and controlling on a planetary scale.

In a single generation since the scientific revolution culminating with Newton, science and technology were already giving us a radically new view of nature by suggesting that it could be improved. The new gifts developed in royal societies laboratories were spreading into society giving government and institutions the power to change the world with unexpected speed and unprecedented detail.

By the 18th century technology was able to move from creating artificial phenomena with royal society instruments to generating artificial forms of nature in field and garden. It would then move on to harness nature itself so as to provide an entirely new kind of power that would bring radical change to the community. This would occur first and most influentially in England, which at the time was more open to change than the rest of Europe thanks to the constitutional nature of the monarchy and the existence of a strong middle class.

At this time, society everywhere was primarily agricultural, and life on the land had altered little since the first Levantine settlements 11,000 years earlier. Nature set the calendar of social activities, plowing, sowing and harvesting. But this ancient cycle, and the lifestyle of a large majority of the population that lived on the land were both to be totally changed by new technology.

When Sir Richard Weston, a landowner from Surrey, returned from a visit to Holland in the 1640s, he wrote a book about the new crop rotations that he had seen there. They were just what English landowners wanted. The most popular was the Northfork system, after the county in which it was first implemented. Four crops would be sown on the same land in annual succession: wheat, turnips, barley and clover. It reduced the land under fallow and it increased animal fodder supply, which meant that more livestock could be raised and in turn provide extra manure. In consequence, yields increased, as did profits. The system spread rapidly from 1650 to be in general use 100 years later. It would eventually trigger massive population growth and then feed the increased population.

The new techniques allowed to cultivate infertile and uneconomic land, which could now be made profitable enough to be cut up and cleared and then fenced or enclosed for use. These techniques were to have profound social effects because enclosure cut off the small cottage man from his acres, and the sharecropper from his common grazing rights. To some land owners enclosure also offered valuable control of mineral rights, quarries or the soon to be valuable building land on the edge of town.

Land holdings changed as small land owners sold out to the upwardly mobile mercantile class whose fortunes were based on increased trade because of the advancements in shipping and commercial technology.

Above all, enclosed land was more efficient land because it lay fallow for shorter periods. The stock that grazed there was healthier because it was isolated from potentially diseased animals.

So, in the early 18th century, the scientific experimental techniques for improvements started by the royal society and other organizations began to make differences in animal husbandry. Selective breeding began to change the shape of animals for the first time perhaps since domestication 12,000 years earlier. The new large-scale specialist agri-business was fatal to small holders, most of whom became laborers or joined the ranks of the unemployed poor. Welfare legislation concerning the poor and destitute, which had always been harsh, now even became more so, as the separation of landed and land less became greater. Justices of the Peace, who were in most cases the local landowner, had summary powers of arrest, whipping, imprisonment and transportation to the colonies.

In this new structured landscape of great houses and formal gardens the right of movement of the laborer was rigidly controlled. People were only allowed to live in one parish. Certificates of movement were need for anybody who wanted to move elsewhere and these were rarely granted. Paupers in receipt of welfare were obliged to wear the letter “P.” Meanwhile, for the new owners, agriculture was becoming more and more profitable. Wheat output increased by 75 percent, barley by 68 percent, oats by65 percent, and livestock size rose by a quarter, and since the year 1500, the average crop yield doubled.

In a continual attempt to perfect and beautify nature, new landscaping techniques came into practice, which sometimes required the removal of peasants’ hovels if they happened to spoil the view. Rationalism and order had triumphed and undisciplined nature was to be reshaped in a better way. The new 18th century catchword was “progress.” The idea was that deliberate innovation should now be pursued so that everything could be improved by the application of rational thought and mechanical principles.

In increasing number of tools becoming available to agriculture made possible much more effective implementation of the concept of improvement. It was a powerful reinvigoration of the medieval view of the Benedictine monks that humankind was placed on earth to carve out a new paradise because God had sanctioned human domination and control of nature.

Puritans took things a little further. Their view was just as the wild part of nature could be tamed humans could also be improved, especially in personal desires and tendencies could be controlled. Work improves the character, and unremitting toil was humanity’s lot and the key to salvation. So, persistent application to the new practical arts was conveniently enough regarded as proof of an obedient spirit.

The puritan ethic had been so successful in generating wealth that there was enough spare money in the system to trigger the financial revolution of the 18th century, and with it came another new gift to organize and control society, capital.

Capital was a new kind of exciting tool because its capacity for self-increase was apparently unlimited, a fact that accorded perfectly with a new scientific concept of an infinite universe, a fact that brought science and capitalism together in a new dynamic.

The financial institutions set up at the time were primarily inspired by the work of John Locke, who conveniently reconciled in a new and profitable way concepts of universal laws, dominion over nature, and profit. Locke saw the growth of plants, and the movement of the sky as a designed universe working according to laws. Locke believed the world was evidently constructed according to reason and order. Therefore, God’s design for nature was matched by His design for man. God intends man to do something.

So, by discovering natural law, and choosing to act according to it, man would be following the divine plan as a result of reasoned thought rather than from blind faith. Self-interest, above all, would ensure that people would obey laws that aimed to preserve private property. Locke said, the great and chief end of men’s united into commonwealth and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property.

The gift in which to turn these new gifts into world altering reality appeared first in Amsterdam where the Dutch East India Company had been set up at the beginning of the 17th century to look for commercial opportunities in the Far East. The Dutch political authorities also set up a new exchange bank to raise and administrate the flow of capital to fund the venture. The bank did so well that it was soon doing the same work for the state, and for this was granted the highly profitable monopoly of the exchange. With the backing of the government, the new bank offered unprecedented financial security. So, funds poured into Holland from abroad. Thanks to this the bank was able to provide merchants with the foreign currency they needed for expenses and settlement of bills. The bank paid all depositors bills by transferring written notes for the amount to be debited from their deposit without actually moving the precious metal. The deposits gave Dutch currency the kind of stability that rapidly made Amsterdam the financial center of the Europe.

Capital by now was generating major changing in social behavior as wages altered the nature of work and altered the relationship between worker and employer. As the system matured, it took the usual technology and control path. Manipulation of resources and capital fragmented the production process, subdividing each job, deskilling the workers, reducing them to units of production that could be more efficiently used, more easily organized, and less likely to object to or demand changes as long as each man’s knowledge was limited to task at hand. A new kind of life was thus created. Mindless repetition of meaningless tasks set to the speed of a machine.

This new way of doing things was canonized in 1776 in Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” the factory owner’s handbook in which Smith used the idea of natural laws to develop a systematic analysis of economics and the creation of wealth. Essential, he thought, was the cutting up of labor since this represented the true wealth of the nation, essential to the improvement of national productivity. The economy was now ready for takeoff. All that was needed was a new means of production that would particularly make use of unskilled labor as there was no longer time or inclination for the old style apprenticeships and guide training of earlier, slower days. The gift was found. It was steam power.

The Industrial Revolution that steam made possible would be the greatest of all technological changes so far in history, and it would change the entire world. The revolution began, not across a broad front, but from small craft disciplines within the textile industry. A series of inventions changed textile production because they brought the whole process under one roof in a manufactory, later shorten to “factory.”

The Industrial Revolution was also bringing developments in manufacturing, industry, and production related scientific field such as chemistry, and setting the pattern for the kind of scientific innovation as would from then on increasingly widen the gap between technologists and the ignorant public, changing that public’s life in unexpected ways.

For instance, at the beginning of the 19th century the new gaslight used coal gas which was given off after coal coking, which in turn created huge amounts of coal tar. It was during experiments with this material that in 1856 an English chemist named William Henry Perkin made the discovery of a mauve substance with dyeing properties, which led to the foundation of the aniline dye industry.

As innovation triggered innovation, it must have seemed to leaders of the 19th century west that there was no end to want they could do. All over Europe the land was cut up and fertile. The money supply was growing. The market, like the population, was in constant expansion. The steam engines thundered, and once gaslight made night shift work possible the factory furnace fires lit up the sky in a never-ending fury of production. The machines worked, unceasingly, unerringly, and untiringly. The only gift missing from this enterprise was the technology that would turn people into machines.

In the early 19th century people started to notice how fast things were changing and questioned what this rate of change might mean to their lives. In 1828 a magazine published for English factory workers summed up the growing realization on the part of the masses how powerless technology had made them, as they understood so little of the scientific and technological magic which seemed to change their world every day. One major article in the magazine said, “We are born ignorant, brought up ignorant, we live ignorant and die ignorant. We are like men groping in thick darkness.”

The Industrial Revolution had sucked millions of country folk into newly industrialized towns at a rate too fast for the urban authorities to control effectively. The effect of a rapidly rising number of factory workers and the new unemployed, as well as the unspeakable conditions in which people were obliged to work and live, and above all the unyielding factory regime that gave them no freedom, no education, and no political power began to express itself toward the end of the 18th century in civil disturbance and riots. The government began cracking down with legislation and propaganda.

From the beginning of the 19th century the middle class led Evangelical Movement Moral Crusade preached discipline and self-control to the lower classes. But the English social commentator William Cobbett, a journalist turned reformer, wrote fierce pieces against the movement under the byline “Peter Porcupine,” suggesting that the real aim was, “To teach the people to starve without making a noise, and to keep the poor from cutting the throats of the rich.”

Members of the movement infiltrated banking institutions as well as government, and many of them served in the armed forces, seeing themselves in the front ranks for social stability. Evangelicalism, with its language of war, conflict against evil, and its stress on order and discipline helped to channel dangerous social dissatisfaction into more acceptable patriotic directions. But to many of the growing number of political radicals on the left, the Evangelical moral reforms were nothing more than propaganda for the authoritarian and repressive industrial system, a means designs by the forces of law, order and manufacturer as a way to create a sober, discipline and obedient working class.

The left wing reaction to the way workers found themselves was to organize. By 1818 the cities and towns in the English midlands in the north the radicals had penetrated the manufacturing areas with a network of clubs devoted to political discussion and agitation.

The establishment struck back at grass roots level with the earliest and most effective of the government’s reforms aimed at counteracting socialists’ tendencies and implemented in the educational system where they would face the least well-organized opposition.

Technology had created a problem. Industrialization and cheap food had brought overcrowding and unemployment. For the authorities, the growing delinquencies of out of work young people showed a clear need for increased supervision and discipline. So, new monitorial schools were set up ostensibly to education, but in fact to train children in the factory disciplines of their parents. The teaching of spelling and arithmetic by dictation reduced literacy and numbers to rote, providing a child with a bear minimum needed to perform factory work. In arithmetic class, a cipher read allowed sums and the class repeated them in a reiterate process much like factory work.

The most successful of all in educational innovations, the Sunday school, was introduced with the aim of neutralizing potentially disruptive behavior. Sunday schools were started in 1785 to clear the Sunday streets of young people with nothing to do at a time when dangerous libertarian ideas were spreading in the wake of the French Revolution. The schools were only opened on Sundays so that they would not interfere with the pupils weekday factory work.

Victorian authorities began using church ceremony for indoctrination purposes with hymns that now carried powerful propaganda messages. This would have a long-term effect on the general public even to the late 20th century. Hymns exhorted the singer to run straight races, endure suffering nobly, play the game, and be decent and fair. Hymns were even aimed at specific sectors of the population. Each group was encouraged to accept its social station meekly, while hard work and social quiescence were repeatedly emphasized. Many hymns took an admonitory attitude warning the believer against involvement in behavior that might disqualify them from entry into heaven. Rudyard Kipling’s hymn “Father in Heaven,” included all of the major control slogans: patriotism, racism, and the urge to charity, the value of work, obedience, and a call to arms in defense of the establishment:

“Land of our birth, we pledge to thee our love and toil in years to be; when we are grown and take our place as men and women with our race; land of our birth, our faith our pride, for whose dear sake our fathers died; oh mother land we pledge to thee, head, heart and hand through the years to be.”

The Victorian authorities also created a myth, which was meant to further, entrench the desire for conformity and obedience by instilling in the middle classes fear of the residuum, a vast, formless, unidentifiable underclass of paupers that was sickly and dangerous.

In 1884 the Cambridge economist Alfred Marshall, known for his concept of “time analysis, and whose “Principles of Economics” (1890) is still referred to today, suggested that labor camps be set up for the residuum outside London. Crowded into slums where decency and a healthful existence were impossible, this vast population of degenerates was said to threaten civilization.

By the late 19th century every Western nation had also accepted the requirement of technical training and had set up the necessary institutions. In most case this had also greatly increased the influence of the state in the life of the individual. But the educational system was rapidly becoming inadequate for the demands of technological advance that ran ahead of the authorities ability to keep up with the rate of innovation. The railroads, for instance, were creating a huge and unsatisfiable demand for engineers. Technology demands would outstrip educators from then to modern times.

Meanwhile, the general technology and control methods of the Industrial Revolution were changing the shape of society on a wider scale. The new industries had disrupted and eventually destroyed traditional rural social structures. In previous times individuals had lived with a close knit extended family, in country communities where social mobility was limited and where work had primarily involved little more than the provision of subsistence.

The new industrial towns cut off the new village immigrants from nature and from any regard for it. Also, removing from the new city dwellers any sense of nature’s origin, as well as increasing the isolation of the individual and separating and fragmenting family skills. The factory system also introduced cash wages. These placed a premium on youth and vigor, and in doing so impaired or destroyed the authority of the old.

The nature of urban communities changed as the middle classes left the city centers and not to return there until late in the 20th century. These industrialists also changed the individual’s concept of time. Previously, work had been defined by the nature of the task and seasons stated the production that set the rhythm alternating between times of intense labor and idleness. But now, in the new factories, work was now only a matter of how many hours were spent on it and how many units of production resulted. Time sheets were introduced at work, and so were timekeepers, informers, and fines for lateness. The factory clock was sometimes locked up so that it could not be altered.

By the end of the 19th century the effects of technology and control philosophy had shaped the modern world. Working life was now chopped up and set in orderly sequence dominated by the need to conform to the machine. At the same time, the proliferation of specialists’ disciplines had generated an increasing number of exoteric forms of industrial and technical knowledge from which the vast majority of the public was excluded. Education by both church and state served principally to ensure social control through the indoctrination of the virtues of obedience and uniformity.

Against this ranged the emerging and equally conformist alternate systems of socialism and communism. In 1884 the Social Democratic Foundation stood for social ownership of the means of production and exchange, and saw retention of political power of the working class as the essential means of achieving this end. In the late 1880s the formation of major unions of the unskilled took place under socialist leadership, strengthening the connection between political activity and industrial organization that had been lacking in the early days. At the same time the new socialists embarked on a program of propaganda and education of their own.

For the social commentator William Morris work was the primary source of human activity, enjoyment and self-development. So, in a socialist society the factory should be a primary educational center. Marx had considered this combination of learning and labor as key to education of the future. Morris took up the idea in the context of his concept of a communal free society of artists and scientists where factories would be surrounded by gardens, the buildings would be beautiful and the workers engaged in honorable and honored labor. In this way the socialist factory would provide, “work, light in duration and not oppressive in kind, education in childhood and youth, serious occupation, amusing relaxation, and more rest for leisure of the workers, and that beautify of surroundings and the power of producing beauty which are sure to be claimed by those who have leisure, education and a serious occupation.”

So, in the second half of the 19th century, industrialization had produced two parallel truths: socialism and capitalism. These ideological gifts would cut and control the entire world divided it between them for nearly one hundred years. Meanwhile, by the end of the 19th century, the insatiable demand of the new industrial economy for raw materials would lead to the establishment of another new Western world in the colonies.

With all the industrial might of the West, the Christian belief that control of nature was a gift from God could now be applied to the entire planet and its less technically advanced inhabitants. Many saw it as the West’s manifest destiny to bring its superior Christian way of life to the world, and in that way ensure the supply and continued functioning of an industrialized, consumer led social structure.

Of all the colonialists power elites to answer this call the group most certain of the good they were doing were the Christian missionaries. As early as the 15th century, they had spear headed the drive to convert natives in the newly acquired Americas. Europeans deliberately belittled the abilities of the native societies they subdued, and colonies were placed under the control of Western managers who directed but did not train unskilled and unschooled native labor.

The colonized country was always organized along Western administrative lines, and according to the location of its strategic reserves and materials, ignoring the social and tribal systems that had existed before. In this way Western governments effectively neutralized any native managerial and mercantile talent that might have been.

By the late 19th century Westerns had gone through a basic shift from their perception of non-Westerners, who were now all lumped together as “savages,” or by anthropologists as “primitives.” Western science was seen as an effective tool for weakening native adherence to their own beliefs. Missionaries used the railroad and telegraph to exhort the Christian God as the only true divine power.

Material backwardness was increasingly equated with hedonism so mission stations begin to teach Western agricultural techniques, and Western hospitals spread what was called superior concepts of cleanliness and hygiene. Behind the rhetoric lay the real agenda. As Cecil Rhodes expressed it, “I would annex the planet if I could.”

Europeans needed space in which to settle their separatist labor force generated by the increasing population triggered by the Industrial Revolution. Cecil Rhodes wrote further, “In order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population, to provide new markets for goods produced in the factories and mines. If you want to avoid a civil war, you must become imperialists.”

Technology was giving technologists the means to change the shape of the planet. The cut and control approach to industrial production had removed and separated most members of European society from previous direct relationship with the land. In an example to be followed by the rest of the developed world, most of the European population now lived in large cities dependent for survival on cash from a factory, which in turn was dependent on raw materials from the colonies. Daily life was now scheduled according to the demands of the factory system and shaped whether in socialist or capitalist communities by the decomposition of community into units of productive labor. The political, financial, and industrial institutions were now capable of shaping every minute of the working individual’s life. It only remained to shape the individual’s body.

Technology has always been quite seductive to the human spirit. Perhaps the most seductive proposition came from 19th century medicine, when for the first time in return for conformity and obedience the change makers offered life. In response to the epidemics which were decimating the burgeoning population, which they themselves had helped to generate, technology developed medical techniques would enable doctors to use the reductionist knife on the human body.

The ability to reduce people to numbers and graphs would eventually permit specialists to predict the fate of individuals and communities as accurately as their predecessors foretold the output of factories or the motions of planets.

Before technology had separated them, body and mind were supposed to be one. So, the personality and the emotional state of the sufferer was prime concern. Under these circumstances, the patient’s view of his or her condition was virtually the only tool of diagnosis. About all the 18th century medical profession could offer was a good bedside manner. The first move to a cut and control move in medicine came at the end of the 18th century in France with a concept of the statistically meaning sample. The possibility that the behavior of large numbers of people could be reduced to mathematical formulae excited the Marquis de Condorcet, a member of the Academy of Sciences, who had a profound influence on the development of a new science of society.

To Condorcet, history was above all a science to foresee the progress of the human race, which would make it possible to tame the future. The agents of progress would be scientists. The more the state provided education to train more scientists the more likely the certainty of progress would be. This idea has driven Western planning ever since.

Condorcet thought the manipulation of masses of people by numbers needed two kinds of data collection: general observation of the whole population through the application of mathematics; and an intense examination of a limited number of specimens through the application of medicine. These studies would make possible what he called the limitless perfection of human faculties and the social order.

The reduction of the individual to manipulatable numerical unit was given further impetus by the discovery in 1802 of basic physical units, called “monads,” as the irreducible smallest unit in the body. The Romantic Movement saw them as the common substrate of all life, or the ultimate link between man and nature.

It was felt that these units might be observed and measured as a means of establishing mathematical laws for life forms. Human organs were described as “little machines in the great machine” with tissue forming the basic structure of these machines. This marked the invention of pathological anatomy.

With the aid of statistics and pathology, medicine now begin to do to disease what classification had done to botany, what logic had done to argument, and what printing had done to languages.

The study of disease, rather than people, involved distancing the doctor from the patient. Medicine found ways to reduce data on the human body to many more subcategories. The microscope became the most effective tool to cut and control the patient. In 1841, using the microscope, blood was analyzed for its properties microscopic features and chemical composition, averaged out the proportions of globules, fibrous materials, solids and water in the sick and healthy, and in this way produced a numerical description of blood that could be used in diagnosis.

Medicine was becoming a science like chemistry or physics, as medical technology made disease tangible, visible and audible, while reducing data on thousands of individuals to uniform charts and pictures.

This new medical science only had an affect on the life of the public at large after the first cholera epidemic in 1831. Thirty-two thousand people were then killed in Great Britain, and this disease had killed 50 million on its way from India in the previous 14 years. To discover the source of that epidemic, and subsequent outbreak of other diseases, a statistically inclined public servant, Edwin Chadwick, launched an investigation in 1838 into the possible relationship of sanitary conditions and disease in five under privileged areas of London. The report published later that year documented the appallingly filthy conditions under which the poor lived, surrounded by open cesspools, stagnant drains, mounds of sewage and garbage, and limited or no access to clean water. A more ambitious nation-wide report followed on the conditions of the laboring classes. When this report was published in 1842, it shocked Victorian society to the core and led to measures, which would set the style for a radically new relationship between the state and the citizen.

When the next cholera epidemic struck in 1948, killing 70,000 people, it galvanized the authorities into passing the Public Health Act and the Nuisance & Removal Diseases Prevention Act. These new laws gave the government new compulsory power in an emergency to effect street cleansing, house disinfections, or removal of an infected person to an isolation hospital with or without consent. Public health considerations were to bring direct state intervention into the private life of the individual.

That health propaganda machine went into high gear and hygiene now became a separate discipline within medicine. The use of soap and washing was encouraged, as were open-air activities. In the 1860s athletics became fashionable, notably in private schools.

Meanwhile, the epidemic of 1853 had triggered further investigation into the root cause of cholera. John Snow’s meticulous statistical study a year later showed water from the fecal contaminated London reaches of the river Tames was nine times more likely to cause cholera than water drawn from an uncontaminated source upstream from the city. Snow also proved conclusively that when water supplies were filtered death rates dropped dramatically.

In 1866 the final major cholera epidemic killed 14,000. In support of Snow’s theory it was found that more than a third of the deaths were in those London areas that still lacked filtered water supplies. Although all along nobody knew what the disease was, attempts to control through quantification statistics seemed to have worked. The success set the pattern for future state intervention in cases, which were now to be defined as “matters of public concern.” The epidemics and the social conditions that had made their effects so devastating had both served to strengthen the grip of the state on the community at large. Now, the institutionalizing of public health, aided by developments in medical technology would strengthen that grip further.

The drive to find the origin of disease itself would also further reduce the status of the individual. The tool that would make this possible was the improved microscope that used a series of lenses designed by J. J. Lister in 1825. A wine merchant and amateur microscopist, he developed a method of building lens systems to greatly reduce chromatic and spherical aberrations. In 1827 the first use of the Lister triple lens compound microscope by James Smith revealed that blood corpuscles were not globular as previously thought but bi-concave. This was used a year later to produce the first competent article on histology. Discoveries followed thick and fast. The key advance, the discovery of cellular pathology, which led to the expression, “physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor. Social problems should be solved by them.” Medicine was deemed a social science and politics is nothing but medicine on a larger scale.

A paper was delivered in 1845 with the title “The Need for and Correctness of Medicine based on a Mechanistic Approach.” It held that life was nothing more than cellular activity. Cells were held to be the basic unit of existence. Life was no more than the sum of cellular phenomenon that could now be submitted to chemical and physical laws. If all life were cells, then disease being alterations in the cells was nothing more than life under altered conditions. So, if these conditions could be avoided public health would be dramatically improved. The microscope was now a new tool for social control.

The final move to reduce the patient to a statistics was taken by Robert Koch, a general practitioner working in a small town in East Prussia. In 1876 Koch isolated anthrax bacillus, cultured it and watched the bacillus produce spores in the tissues of animals and saw the spores in turn produce the bacillus again. Koch’s experiments provided the first clear evidence that a specific microbe organism caused a specific disease. When Koch also developed new techniques for growing bacteria in the laboratory he gave medicine the ability to manipulate nature at the microscopic level. This did away for the need of the patient’s presence because cultural the disease and controlling its development required no more than a single drop of blood. By the end of the century Koch new science of bacteriology had identified among others microbes responsible for tuberculosis, typhoid fever, tetanus, diphtheria, gonorrhea, cholera, leprosy, and malaria.

It was discovered that some bacteria staining chemicals would also selectively kill certain bacteria. Thus was developed the first “magic bullet” drug, “Salvarsan,” an arsphenamine, to treat syphilis. Chemotherapy was also introduced, and triggered the modern view that the center of attention for medicine should be the disease and not the person. Patients became little more than a source of material for study in the laboratory.

One key social effect of the laboratories was to divert the attention of authorities from the larger public problems of water supply, street cleansing, housing reform, and living conditions. Bacteriology was more modern, and it was cheaper and easier to administer in the more traditional approach to public health. To control tuberculosis, for example, it was not necessary to improve the living conditions of 100 million Americans, but merely supervise and control the 200,000 active cases and limit their potential to infect others.

In 1915 in the first handbook for public health almost half the book was devoted to contagious diseases with much smaller sections on industrial hygiene, housing, water supply, and public education. This narrow bacteriological view of disease would remain dominant for decades. Today, society has been medicalized as the language and ethics of the hospital have entered daily life. The doctor is the new shaman, closely associated with materialistic values are constantly rising standard of living, better individual health, and the growth of community care. Above all, the doctor represents a scientific objective way to judge social behavior as healthy, or diseased, or abnormal.

Thanks to the bacteriological revolution, and a reductionist concentration on microscopic phenomena, the human dimension of health has practically disappeared from medicine. With Western medicine we have cut apart the human body the same way we have separated the technologist from the non-technologist, subject from god-king, communicant from priest, nation from nation, and people from land. We have dissected and divided up the world and its inhabitants so that they can be manipulated economic and political units interchangeable with one another. In doing all this we have cut out the individual in the same way we have chopped up the planet, cutting and controlling the single parts without regard for the whole. And this process has brought us close to catastrophe.

Over the last 120,000 years, thinking man has helped us to make the great journey to colonize the world. Today, we have come close to that journey’s end. Along the way, on many occasions when the community faced a challenge, thinking man came up with gifts, which might solve whatever problem had arisen. Our leaders and institutions always accepted the gifts for their short-term value, and ignored their long-term costs.

The brief catalogue of calamity that follows here reveals the extent to which the gifts of technology have given us the rope with which to hang ourselves. The gifts themselves did nothing to create any immediate alarm or harm. But the acceptance of each gift caused a changed in the way humans saw their relationship with each other and with nature. Each time in accepting and using the gifts society deliberately or heedlessly shucked off old values and adopted new ones. Each time the extra constraint on our behavior required by the use of the new gift seemed relatively minor. In any case well worth it for the immediate benefits involved. But cumulatively, the effects would be severe.

Twelve thousand years ago agriculture was a quick fix on a short-term problem. Today, global agriculture may be in a precarious state because thanks to spectacular successes in scientific agriculture 90 percent of the world’s food is now produced from only eight species of livestock, and fifteen species of plant. Consequently, the genetic base from which alternate food sources might come has been drastically reduced, as has the traditional knowledge base that might have provided alternate techniques one rainy day.

Five thousand years ago a life-saving gift that changed our attitude was the technique of irrigation. Since then, engineers have ensured ever-increasing water supplies. Today’s wells go deeper than ever before. Enormous volumes of reservoir waters are available for hydroelectricity production or irrigation. Rivers have even been diverted to supply entire countries. Every time the techniques have materially improved life for a growing number of people. But in the 20th century the demand for water has increased to such an extent that the perennial sources are now being used up faster than nature can replenish them. The forecast is not good. Global industrial and domestic use has quadrupled since 1950. Scarcity is now common in 26 countries, including Russia, the Middle East, and parts of India, Africa, and the southwestern United States.

Today fish farmers are failing and the oceans are dying. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, four of the world’s seventeen fishing zones are already over exploited. Between 1950 and 1990, the catch increased four fold, and many believe the current world catch has reached the limits of sustainability. Contamination is also causing salt and fresh water problems.

After the construction of the Aswan Damn in Egypt in 1965, natural discharge from the Nile River virtually ceased with catastrophe effects on the southeastern Mediterranean fisheries.

Human activities involving deforestation, mining, dredging and erosion also caused sedimentation that fills reservoirs, lakes and rivers. Sediments containing nutrients such as fertilizers caused massive algae bloom, and in turn high levels of fish death. Sedimentation also triggers a fatal condition in coral reefs called “bleaching,” which now appears worldwide. Although coral reefs cover only 0.17 percent of the ocean floor, they support wide biological diversity, and the food they supply may sustain a quarter of all fish-types in the developing world. At current raters of destruction, it is estimated that another two-thirds of the world’s reefs will be lost in the next forty years.

One of the great gifts of technology has been “fire.” Today, the effect of uncontrolled energy use has been globally devastating, as consumption has grown with virtual disregard for the consequences. The United States uses a quarter of the world’s energy supplies although it has only one-twentieth of the world’s population. If the present rates of global consumption continue, oil reserves are expected only to last fifty years, and gas will last only two centuries. With rising populations and limited indigenous resources, third world countries are stripping the forests for fuel wood because they cannot afford to import oil, coal or gas.

A vicious circle develops. With insufficient gains in agricultural productivity, due to inequitable land distribution or the introduction to high cost Western farming methods, increased land clearance is necessary in order to feed the population. This reduces forest and agricultural productivity. That in turn triggers the need for more forest clearance with devastating long term effects.

The major danger associated with the loss of tropical forests is that they have been historically the source of genetic replenishment after natural extinctions, which tended to happen at an average rate of a few species every million years. At present logging rates, additionally tropical forest lost in the next thirty years could be as much as 15 percent. If that happens, then South American forest loss, alone, could account for the disappearance of 15 percent of all plant species, and up to 70 percent of birds. Rachel Carsons’s “Silent Spring” will become a reality.

Additionally, with the massive surge in fossil fuel use for fuel and electricity generation that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, the earth’s atmosphere also began imperceptivity to change as fossil fuel burning generated more and more carbon dioxide. This, and other gases, acts to trap solar energy in the atmosphere and prevent it from radiating back into space, the so-called “Green House Effect.”

The Green House Effect could have a number of effects that should concern everybody. Melting of the polar ice caps would cause a rise in sea levels. Major forests would die due to the inability of plant species to adapt to high rates of temperature increase. The same would be true of crop yields. A small increase in sea temperature would cause more powerful and more frequent major storms in South East Asia, Australia, the Caribbean, and the east coast of the United States.

Global warming could also cause dieback of the oceanic fighter plankton that absorbs three billion tons of carbon a year from the atmosphere, leaving the carbon in the air to further enhance the warming effect.

A sea level rise would cause major population displacement and death among the two-thirds of the world’s population that lives on low coastal land.

We don’t know how bad things will be if we go on doing what we are doing, but we still go on doing it.

Making things even worse is the factor of population growth. Today, 100 million people on the planet are homeless, 500 million people suffer from severe malnutrition, 800 million are illiterate, and 400 million have no jobs. The 1992 standard of absolute poverty as an annual income of under $500 per year fits 750 million people, most of them living in Africa. Meanwhile, the United States spends more than $5 billion a year on sliming diets. The average citizen in industrialized countries consumes twenty times the resources used by a member of the Third World.

Population forecasts are catastrophic and that population will be very different from what it is today. According to the World Resources Institute, by 2050 eighty four percent of humanity will be living in what is now the Third World, and half of them in only five countries. These shifts in population density and distribution will have serious implications for food, resource distribution, and the political make-up of the planet. By 2025, all the present industrialized democracies will be small number nations. The United States population will be less than that of Nigeria, Iran will be twice the size of Japan, and the population of Canada will be smaller than Madagascar or Syria.

For most of history high birth rates were maintained through religious practices, moral codes, laws, educational practices, marriage habits or family structures. These were traditionally countered by equally high mortality rates due to disease, famine, war and epidemics. Then industrialization tipped the balance in favor of population growth. Improved public health facilities, and increasingly reliable food and water supplies caused the mortality rate to fall and life expectancy to increase. Under these conditions, population growth accelerated.

What can be done to help the 21st century Third Word avoid succumbing to mass starvation? The old answer a massive push to industrialize the entire world is manifestly out of the question. But in this, and all the other gifts that technology has created, it is not going to be easy for voters in any country to decide how to escape from this situation because they know too little. Over the centuries the majority has been excluded from specialists information its leaders and institutions have drawn on in making policy decisions.

In these modern times when information is called the commodity of the future it is perhaps useful in recalling the way in which those who had it have always used information as an artificial possession. At the time primitive man was fashioning the first stone implement, and with it the means to make things that had not existed before, his relationship with the environment was so interdependent that it might have been said that he was an integral part of it. What followed was an unnatural element in life that would separate man from this sense of interdependence and that entity would become “knowledge.”

Knowledge would come to serve the world and control people. “Future Perfect?” and the problems the world currently faces are the serendipitous results of this knowledge. Each one of which brought immediate benefits, all of which acted over time to generate complex effects that could never have been expected.

If society is to find long-term answers to the critical problems as a result that it faces today we need to find a way to escape from the short-term view natural to our most primitive instincts and reinforced by millennia of quick fixed gifts we could never refuse. We also urgently need to find a way to control the process of change itself. Is there any simple solution? Probably not. There is no single solution to the multiple problems we face. The gifts of technology have made it too complicated for that.

So, how do we change the way we think in time to stop short of catastrophe? Well, we actually have two tools that may help. One is a new tool, information technology; the other is an old one, the brain.

Research on how experience affects the brain is just beginning. In the past most psychologists and neurophysiologists assumed that our brains were fixed, and that we learned to function as well as we could within the limits established by genetics. Each new study shows that the basic by which we operate are changed by experience. We are flexible.

This underscores how important it is to evaluate from time to time the ways in which we are changing and reshaping the world in order to better understand the effect the changed world might have on us. The computer maxim, “Garbage in, garbage out!” applies here. You may well be what you eat, but you are also what you see, hear, smell, taste, feel, and do. What being flexible implies is that if we do not like the biases so far put into our brain by the technological world we don’t have to be stuck with them. These biases themselves can be changed by the same means by which they were created because modifications to brains happen frequently and naturally. As we have shown, the acts of reading and writing are major alterations to the so-called natural process to mental development. Some permanent features do get laid down during the critical period between one and three years of age. For example, it you do not develop binocular vision during those years, perhaps because of having crossed eyes or one-eye covered, you will not develop it later. Less extreme limitations, such as language or mathematical deficiencies or music deprivation are more likely to be amenable to improvement with practice.

But in order to overcome the problems made for us by our technological environment we need to discover when, how and in what way we can make use of this flexibility to teach old brains new tricks. Key to this may be the way brain function seems to involve the same kind of serendipitous juxtaposition of data, as does the process of innovation itself. Thinking, like innovation, seems to consist of putting things together in new ways. But unlike sequential technological generated logic imaginative thinking seems to work in a nonlinear way. We do not seem naturally to follow these step-by-step syllogisms of Aristotle, or to reduce problems to their smallest parts as a matter of Descartes, or to make a list of every possibility like a computer, but instead flip haphazard back and forward across the cortex.

There seems to be an irrational element to the way imaginative, non-logical kind of thinking allows the brain to use less than complete or exact data when it comes to its more intuitive conclusions, or to think in terms of inexact fuzzy concepts, such as “almost two.” Some call this kind of thinking arational and see it not as a faculty of mind inferior to logic but one of that is complementary to sequential and rational thought. It is the kind of thinking, on the whole, that began to be devalued after the first breakthrough in technology.

Today, many individuals from religious thinkers to heads of state or large corporations are beginning to realize that this capacity to see the world whole, to perceive events as they combine simultaneously, working together with the ability to analyze problems sequentially may have a vital part to play in securing our future.

Nobody knows in detail what thinking is, but it seems to involve a process that makes the biggest, fastest computers on earth look simple. In this regard it may be worth remembering the saying that the most powerful data processors can only achieve cognitive levels approximately equal to a flat worm. Whether the brain operates with a gigantic number of physically interconnected neurons clustered in tiny networks containing core concepts or else is structured in a hierarchies each dealing with a world processing it through levels of feature recognition, or with some other system, the number of ways in which the brains 100 billion neurons can interact may be more than the number of atoms in the universe. Everybody has one of these gigantic systems between their ears.

The reason the new data processing systems might bring radical change in our relationship with burgeoning technology and to the way it has always indirectly organized society and our thoughts relates to the way the brain works.

It would seem there is a match between the non-technological intuitive arational thinking processes just described and some of the more complex and interactive capabilities of the next generation of information technology now being developed. The new systems can present data to the user in the form of a web on which all the information contained in a database is interlinked.

There are two main attractions to this way of accessing information. First, it is easy to operate because the user can join the web at an entry point matching the level of their knowledge, and which might therefore be something as complex as quantum physic equation or as simple as an address. Second, the interconnected nature of the web then makes it possible to move from the entry point to anywhere else on the web by a large choice of roots and search engines, one of which will suite the users idiosyncratic interests and level of ability. At each stage of the journey, any link prepares the user for the next link because of the way all links relate. Also, at any link there are a number of alternate roots to take, and it is here where the user can make choices based upon interests or personal experience. Since there will be no “right way” to arrive at target data, designated say by curriculum needs, in the kind of educational process that the web might make possible the web would offer the user the means to learn the target information by arriving at it in their own way. Knowledge would then be the experience of having traveled on the web, like the knowledge of city streets, the journey therefore would be more valuable than the destination, and relationship between data more valuable than the data. It might be that we would eventually come to value intelligence no longer by information retrieval but by imaginative way the student constructed such a journey. The attraction of the web is that the user needs no qualifications to enter, and the process of exploring the web is as easy or as complex as the user chooses. The web contains the sum of knowledge so the experience of the journey links the user in some way to every other user. The number of ways a web may be access or structured could be as many as its users decide. Use of the web, above all, would accustom people to become gradually more familiar with the way in which knowledge is not made up of unrelated unconnected facts but is part of a dynamic whole. Experience on the web might also bring greater awareness of social effects of any innovation thanks to the way the result of interrelated data on the web neared that of the way innovation effected the community-at-large. So, each time a user journeyed on the web and made new links between data the new connections would restructure the web in much the same way they might have rearranged society if they had been applied in real terms. In this sense the web could become a microcosm for society itself. It could serve as a means to play out scenarios of knowledge manufacturer and its potential social effects. Eventually, of course, the web might become the general motivation involvement in all-social processes either in person or through person electronic agents. Since the associated nature of a web also reflects in a limited way the basic processes of non-technological nonlinear, arational thought the new initiation would be required to use it. It would offer access to the body of knowledge, which at present is available only to those that happen to possess the right qualifications. Given the link structure of the web it would be unnecessary for users to know exactly what questions to ask. A system of key words allied to fuzzy logic software, the almost two approach as in a thinker’s “I think it has something to do with…” Such key words and software, together with prompts, can make it relatively easy to identify the area of potential interest even from the least precise statements or questions. This might be useful say when the user was looking for information to make a political or career decision.

Because of the sheer scale and speed with which information processing of all kinds is growing massive data bases and processing power like those needed to support the web should be available by 2010. Compact discs each carrying 2,000 texts at a cost of less than ten cents per book are already on the market, and the technology is expected to expand to at least a tenfold increase in storage in the next decade. This means a major library could be stored in about one hundred discs and made available to students anywhere. Books, supplementary to the basic two million library, could easily be downloaded from a central source by the technology, which today makes video available to people in the developed world. Because of this the representation of knowledge first achieved by the original technologists with Mesopotamian cuneiform, the alphabet, Gutenberg, Descartes method, and television is about to take another quantum leap. The storage capacity of 2030’s nano technology will make even the marvelous systems described here look like papyrus. But the use of the web also raises the disturbing issue of what information will be made available to the databases by whom and to whom. Much can still be withheld. But Noam Chomsky who has studied the control of public information is optimistic. He says, “There are ample opportunities to help create a more humane and decent world if we choose to act upon them. A democratic communications policy would seek to develop means of expression and interaction that reflect the interests of and concerns of the general population, and to encourage their self-education and their individual and collective action.”

A number of reasons offer hope that a democratic communications system such as Chomsky proposes will come about. Although specialization has now reached unprecedented levels of complexity, ordinary people are, in general, more knowledgeable in larger numbers than before, given the amount of access they have to data through newspapers, on-line services, radio and television. More information for rent is coming including digitized versions of data collection like the Library of Congress, which will give any individual or school access to amounts of information greater than that available to many members of society today.

So, with this increase access to information, it should become more difficult than before to propagandize and exclude general members of the public from decision-making processes.

One other element might accelerate this process. In order to travel the web users would not need to know anything in the present sense of expertise. If the web were able to provide users with the means to find and understand any data in their own terms then the problem of lay competence regard to social decision-making might be solved. Another important aspect of the issue, besides public involvement in the decision making process, is the sheer scale of the problems we face. In providing short-term fixes to the problems facing humanity since its dawn of man perhaps the major distinguishing characteristic in this problem solving journey is the way it has involved social control. However, the end result of such growth oriented centralizing policies in earlier times has been the environmental and social catastrophe in which the world finds itself today.

One possible solution may lie in the political potential of the web, a way to diffuse that control, participatory democracy. As technology related social and political issues become ever more complex, if access to relevant information is as suggested made universal, and if electronic agents are made available to act on behalf of the individual, then informed local participatory democracy becomes possible. When the technological means are ready, and educated franchise will demand it. Information technology is already making this small scale community more feasible without forcing its members to sacrifice benefits of modern living: for example, the worker owned plywood companies of the Pacific northwest, the power community of Davis California, the consensual democracy of Quaker meetings, the non-hierarchical societies of East Africa, the Amana Colonies in Iowa, and others.

The web could facilitate this kind of development by giving communities all the knowledge tools they need to function autonomously. But the key political virtue of smaller scale web supported communities run by direct democracy is that they provide forums for debate lost to us since Greece. The open social system made possible by small community participatory democracy is also hard to subvert and control. The structure encourages participation and consensus. And the closer contact between these communities and their environment makes for greater awareness of the need for self-sustaining non-polluting economies.

All the changes suggested so far are complex and far ranging. But they do not necessarily require a long time to happen. In general once any relevant information is available and is understood people change their lives extraordinarily quickly. Social scientists in the 1960s wrote papers saying it would take decades of constant government pressure to persuade Americans to alter their reproductive habits. But in the early 1970s in the United States and Western Europe the shift to small families took only three years, and happened without any need for government pressure. People were made aware that economic problems were caused by their reproductive habits so they changed them. In terms of the population problem in non-western cultures what succeeds may be access to information and the social changes that will follow access, giving women their fair share of power, the likely demand for social security, employment, and the promise of financial independence late in life, which means people would need fewer children to look after them in old age. This is not pie in the sky theory. It has already happened in the small, low tech southwestern Indian state of Karauli, and partly because the government was communist influenced it has been the subject of intense debate for the last two decades.

In the 1970s development planners dealing with global population problems found in Karauli an exceptional example of a tropical region where both the birth rate and the infant mortality rate were falling, where average life expectancy was approaching 70 years, with the large majority of the adults could read and write, and where women out numbered men. All this had been achieved without violent political change.

Karauli had not industrialized, but remained largely dependent on agriculture. Its per capita income was well below the all-Indian average. The Karauli model suggested that carefully implemented policies stressing equal access to basic needs had improved the inhabitants lives in the absence of revolutions.

In 1975 the United Nations in New York published a report emphasizing the positive achievements of Karauli in matters of “equity and balance social and economic development.” It pointed to the fact that a relative poor state with a low per capita ability of food made fairly impressive advancements in health and education, which had resulted in a perceptible difference to the quality of life.

The study made its greatest impact to the rest of the world in its evaluation of Karauli’s population control success. The report stressed “evidence of a sharp decline in birthrates in Karauli,” and suggested that this had resulted from “societal changes in attitude to family size resulting from longer life expectation, reduction in infant and child mortality, and female education.”

All of this in turn stemmed from substantial government investment in health and education.

How did all of this happen? Decades of widespread public participation in politics stimulated intense political competition after independence in 1947, involving a larger proportion of people than in anywhere else in India. One observer wrote, “A kind demanding electorate and frequent elections has driven Karauli politicians to pursue programs in education, land reform, and health that foster perceptible improvements in people’s lives.” Access to information and schooling has been crucial in Karauli. Thousands of women teachers have earned salaries for nearly a century. The education of girls has raised the age of marriage. Literate women care for their babies more successfully than illiterate mothers. Karauli’s schools are its biggest industry. By 1984 commanding 38 percent of state government’s annual expenditure. Schools and collages are the focus for intense competition between government and non-government structures. These vast educational interests give communal organizations an enduring substance, and the competition among them has helped to make politics routine and respected.

Writing in 1982, about the Karauli phenomenon, the economist and ex-ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, suggested, “it is literacy that comes first. We economists have are sequential priorities wrong. We thought we could start with capital investment. We should have started with investment in education.”

Karauli’s experience suggests that attitude changes toward population control can be achieved in the Third World. And if humanity’s future depends on the way people live and the qualities they value, Karauli offers striking evidence that societies can undergo rapid and dramatic transformations, and much chance of any success will likely lie in the hands of emancipated women.

In sum, as we move into the 21st century, we face a significant choice. We can continue to rely on the short-term, quick fix gifts of technology, or we can begin to think of ourselves as capable individuals who are also part of a global community. It is on a global scale that humanity is doing damage to the planet. No other species has multiplied and put the environment under stress, as has the human animal.

The political fragmentation of the post-Cold War era may be an indication in the direction we might proceed. Technology has made the nation-state ineffective, unable to protect its citizens militarily from the threat of urban terrorists, armed with nuclear knowledge; its economy no longer isolated from the outside world; its laws no longer sovereign; its currency no longer stable.

It could well be mastering information in the 21st century will for most people be easier. There is now a new less exclusive way to express ourselves. The ability to see relationships and to move things around in space may be intellectually as valuable with iconic computers as learning quadratic equations or remembering the table of elements used to be with print. When much of the routine drudge work of the mind is automated, the spatial, intuitive, navigational skills may be much better adapted to accessing knowledge that is structured more like the natural world than being reduced to alpha numeric codes.

If the new systems give individuals more direct access to Rembrandt’s painting techniques, or to the differing ways symphonies are constructed than the skills required will be primarily visual, aural and tactile. With this in mind, it is easier to see the post-Cold War with ethnic pluralism as an opportunity rather than a problem, for with the advent of iconic computers the literacy that used to be the hallmark of learned person may for the first time since Greece no longer be so essential.

Anthropologists have identified a number of characteristics, which seem common to most non-technological societies past and present. These societies tend to value practical rather than abstract knowledge. Their so-called primitive rituals are part of the regular day-to-day realities of life. The groups tend not to support specialists other than the shaman. Every member of the group can, to some extent, do every task. And all share the responsibility for all others. Principally, the so-called primitive takes a holist view of life that examines all social decisions for their effect on the community and on the environment. These social values may fit well in the web communities of the mid-21st century because they are more appropriate to small relatively simple social structures that up to now had seemed to be disappearing. The web might make small communities viable once more functioning in a way that ought to become commonplace all over the planet where the maxim would be “act local, think global.”

It would take only the kind of currently available renewable energy systems such as solar, or geothermal, or wind power to make such communities energy independent and ensure the survival of many cultures that otherwise will disappear in the next few decades. As long as the information super highways and the webs to which they would link us are not hijacked by the most powerful ever elite in history, and that is a big “if,” they might help return us in some ways to where we were before technology took the first slice of the world and began applying the process of cut and control to both human nature and the nature from which we sprang. For such communities, the most valuable skills would be generalists rather than specialists. They would prize the ability to connect, to think imaginatively, to understand how data are related, to see patterns in machine-generated innovation, and to assess its social effect before releasing it on society. With the new information technologies, it may be possible easily and swiftly for the community to visualize the pattern of change, to play out the effect of one or the other option, and to decide which to choose on the basis of more foreknowledge than our ancestors ever had.

It might be argued that these scenarios could be as flawed as the suppositions built into them. Nonetheless, they are better than nothing with which we have had up to now. This is only one way of looking at the problem. In concentrating on small-scale communities, indigenous knowledge, web education, and participatory democracy, obviously, other possibilities have not been considered.

There are those who feel the problems of resources, food and pollution might be completely solved by genetic engineering, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. Others place their faith in a central world government, population control, and ecological awareness. Whatever the approach, the decision about which problem and solution is most relevant will still have to be made on the basis of the kind of informed and enfranchised community described here.

The question, however, is whether or not we can escape the prison of technological thought. This depends on whether or not we are already too conditioned to be able to think arationally, as well as rationally. The first step may be to recognize that we can use our technology as it has been used time and again through history. We can use it to change minds, but this time for our own reasons, in our own terms, and at our own pace, if we use the coming technologies for what they could be, instruments of freedom.

The culture we live in has wielded tremendous power. It has given us the wonders of the modern world on a plate. It has also fostered beliefs that tied us to centralized institutions and powerful individuals for centuries, which we must shuck off if we are to survive. These beliefs are that unabated extraction from planetary resources is possible, that the most valuable members of society are specialists, that people cannot survive without leaders, that the body is mechanistic and can only be healed with knives and drugs, that there is only one superior truth, that the only important human abilities lie in a sequential and analytic mode of thought, and that the mind words like the technologists’ gifts. Above all, most recently we have also been persuaded to think that it is unacceptable to be different, or even to acknowledge that difference in talent exists between us. But our survival may depend upon the realization and expression of humanity’s immense diversity. Only if we use what may be the ultimate of many technological gifts, the coming information systems, to nurture this individual and cultural diversity, only if we celebrate our differences, rather than suppressing them will we stand a chance of harnessing the wealth of human talent that has been ignored for millennia, and is now eager all around the world for release