The Axemaker’s Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture
By James Burke and Robert Ornstein
After reading some dismissive reviews of The Axemaker’s Gift when it was first published I had no intention of reading the book. But then a couple years later I noticed that everywhere I turned people seemed to be reading it (in large measure because several professors here required them to do so). With my curiosity piqued, I thought I’d give the book a chance. What a waste of time.
The main problem with The Axemaker’s Gift is that James Burke and Robert Ornstein don’t even take their own advice. The message the duo try to get across is that technology has gotten “out of control,” and only a “participatory democracy” informed by a new “web of knowledge” will reign in technological excess. I am philosophically opposed to that argument, but Burke and Ornstein don’t even really give the argument the treatment it deserves.
For example, how are we going to have a new “web of knowledge” when in a 300+ page survey of thousands of years of technological history, Burke and Ornstein can’t be bothered to provide a single footnote in the entire book? Reading The Axemaker’s Gift there were several historical claims which I thought were inaccurate, distorted, or simply based on dated views. I suppose I could go through all of the books they list in their “selected bibliography” to evaluate their claims, but that would be extremely time consuming if not impossible altogether. By providing reader with no easy way to verify their claims, they commit the very sins they excoriate the high priests of technology for doing — not giving ordinary folks adequate information to evaluate technological progress.
Moreover, the historical flaws present in their book directly undermine their main argument — that laymen can adequately evaluate specialists. A major complaint of Burke and Ornstein’s is that technological progress has rendered important information accessible only to specialists, and that knowledge should be opened up to non-specialists. Maybe, but look at what Burke and Ornstein do when venturing into the areas of expertise of others. Their history of the medieval period is atrocious, and they relate speculative theories about prehistorical human artifacts as if they are the generally accepted interpretation, which in fact they are not.
Still, even with its problems, the book comes close to being worthwhile until the horrendous final two chapters when the authors abandon their disinterested, semi-objective sociological perspective in favor of a preaching, moralizing tone. Ancient Roman propaganda efforts on behalf of the empire are discussed in a neutral third person voice, but by the time they turn their attention to European imperialism, they’ve shifted to the ubiquitous “we” as if the colonization of North America, for example, were not conducted by specific individuals who could and have been delineated and written about extensively, but instead were carried out by some larger super-structural organism that survives to this day in the persons of Burke and Ornstein (and presumably in many of their readers).
The superficial nature of their analysis is most evident with their final recommendations to save the world. Only “participatory democracy” can save the world, they claim, urging their readers to go back to an Athenian-style democracy. Not once do they stop to note, much less address, that the extreme form of “participatory democracy” practiced in Athens tended toward reactionary conformism. A reasonable reader might hope that while extolling Athenian democracy they might note and even address the obvious problems such as the very democratic decision to sentence Socrates to death for corrupting the youth (which in large measure was responsible for Plato’s rejection of democracy as corrupt).
The authors probably avoid mentioning any of the problems associated with such extreme forms of democracy because they highlight where that system clearly leads — an insufferable government of nosey neighbors and conformist each trying to meddle in everyone’s lives and reinforcing the trends and problems the authors want to alleviate.
There is a rare birth defect called Dowling Meara disease. The skin cells of infants who suffer from this disease are unable to produce the specialized cells that hold skin together, the result being a horrific blistering of the skin at the slightest touch — the disease is often fatal. Recently a company introduced a treatment for the disease involving a synthetic skin genetically engineered from human cells and animal collagen.
Under Burke and Ornstein’s participatory democracy, such innovations would be put to a vote, and there are a substantial number of people who would vote no on such technologies on the grounds that — as Burke and Ornstein point out — often such technological innovations create new problems. I, on the other hand, would prefer not to have such important decisions left up to mob rule.
The only thing worse than out of control technology would be the sort of heavily controlled and restricted technology envisioned by Burke and Ornstein.