Increasingly, those with concern for the future of science â in the final resort, all of us â have to watch helplessly as its course is plotted ever further away from our control. The results of âmanâs mastery of natureâ are effectively concealed from us. Although official and surreptitious propaganda make claims to the contrary we are quite unable to confirm these claims and often end by resignedly accepting them.
However, some of the most concerned people have begun to look behind the curtain shrouding technology and, in the horror at the travesties it conceals, search desperately for some means to tear it down. A brick hurled through the window of some nuclear research establishment? ⦠or, more effective perhaps, a home-made bomb? It is all too plain that these are totally unavailing protests, for the march of science will go on unabated, celebrated in trade agreements worth millions of pounds â for example, the Federal German trade agreement of 1975 to supply Brazil with 40 billion marksâ worth of atomic stations by 1990.
By now, science and technology have gained such an ascendency over the common manâs understanding that his mere uncomprehending anger can in no way hold them in check. And yet it is supposedly to reproduce him and his labour that this technology has been developed. This is now nothing but a blatant fiction. We know the real motive power behind it is the maximisation of power and profit. It has become clear beyond question that the heads which plot the path of technology and the hands which operate it and which should benefit from it have undergone the most total schism.
When did this schism first occur? Without any clue to its origin the opponent of rampant technology can only rant and rave; he is ill equipped to envisage any remedy. But how can he set out to trace this alienation, this division of head and hand back to its real point of historical departure? How can he begin to unravel the tangled web of relations between man and machine, between society and science, which now threatens to strangle him?
This book attempts to do just that. But in doing so it has of necessity to deal with matters of exasperating abstractness; it has of necessity to delve into areas of such unaccustomed complexity that it might seem all too easy to lose sight of the crucial issues which give rise to the book in the first place. I say âof necessityâ because it is precisely the abstractness and complexity with which the core of the schism is lodged in its historical roots that make us so blind to the overall pattern of perversion traced by technology today. The whole transaction, as it were, has been completed behind our own and our ancestorsâ backs.
Thus the difficulties of the book are no mere adjuncts but are inherently essential to achieve a truly cogent analysis, in historical materialist terms, of the split between head and hand and of the emergence of abstract thought. The development of modern science and technology has everything to do with these phenomena and until their historical secrets are unravelled before our very eyes technology will continue to ride roughshod over us.
We ask the reader to be clear what is at stake. If he or she is, the unavoidable difficulties of the analysis will surely fall into perspective and instead of presenting insurmountable barriers to the bookâs conclusions will give the key to their proper understanding. But it takes an infinitely deeper theoretical effort to dispel the fetishism of the intellect than it does to continue its worship. This is the use of theory we know from Marx: its use in the service of practice.