TECHNOLOGY’S CAPTURE OF OUR CULTURE

Burke, J. and R. Orenstein (1997) The axemaker’s gift New York: Putnam

The premise of this book is that our ancestors have carved out of the environment a culture that presents each new generation a gift and a hazard of coping with survival.

Axemaker is a metaphor for those who shape the culture of which they and all of us then change due to the circumstances that we are presented. The book is a history of western culture in a very readable form.

Early homosapiens came from Africa and survived among other animal forms. The Adam and Eve are the creatures who had the ability to understand numbers and then words. From hunting and gathering societies, the middle range of the earth could store and preserve food. Those further from the equator were stranded or blessed with the earliest social organization. Those more near the equator first develop hoe culture, followed by plow culture, then agriculture, could store food, and specialize. With the ability to have full time warriors they could cover the world and exploit other humans and enslave them.

Cities emerged. The centralized Roman Catholic Church could compete with other world religions in the domination of the earth. Language meant power and Egypt followed by Greece built a system of thought incorporated into the major Christian church that ruled the western world. Catholicism was confronted with the printing press and then schisms.

The industrial world emerged after a long stay with agriculture. Although Science was born by early pioneers such as Aristotle and Descartes, the Renaissance was followed by the Enlightenment era and cooled off by the Romantic era. Reason and faith became enemies.

Capitalism now unfettered by the church spread throughout the western world. The Hegelian antithesis was Socialism. Today, Socialism is a form of capitalism and numerous other ideologies use a market system.

All of this introduces us to shortages. The world is finite. Can we find resources in time to feed and keep warm the world?

Since the time of the writing of this book, it appears that the earth will stabilize with a population of about 11 billion. It is possible that renewable energy may be forth coming and that new oil reserves may be utilized. However, the book uses a cautious response to science and progress in terms of how much energy is needed to continually use cropland and farm large corporate entities.

At any rate, this is not the first book to deal with perceived dwindling of resources, but it is one of the first to introduce linguistic and cultural analysis to the application of the environment.

This is the crux of the book and it is a fine contribution to the history of culture.