The Axemaker’s Gift

Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture

James Burke and Robert Ornstein
Paperback edition 1997

Each time the axemakers offered a new way to “cut and control” the world to make us rich or safe or invincible or knowledgeable, we accepted the gift and used it. And when we changed the world, we changed our minds, for each gift redefined the way we thought, the values by which we lived, and the truths for which we died.

This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds.

They are the axemakers, whose discoveries and innovations, over thousands of years, have gifted power in innumerable ways. To emperors they gave the power of death, to surgeons the power of life. Each time the axemakers offered a new way to make us rich or safe or invincible or knowledgeable, we accepted the gift and used it to change the world. And when we changed the world, we changed our minds, for each gift redefined the way we thought, the values by which we lived, and the truths for which we died.

And because each axemaker’s gift was so attractive, not evil or ugly, we always came back for more, unmindful of the cost. Each time there was no choice but to adapt to the effects of the change that followed. This has been true for every generation of our ancestors since the process began, well over a million years ago. When we used 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 grew, so did the power of those who could wield the axe most effectively. They became leaders. Most of the rest of the group followed the axe.

In a fundamental schism that would last until modern times, the gift of an axe favored those in a community who were good at handling the new tool and the change it could bring.

For tens of thousands of years, it has been our practice to use the axemaker’s gifts to take what we wanted from the world without recompense. All that mattered was a rising standard of living. Only rarely, if ever, did we look back to examine the effect of our passage on the world, because progress always led us forward toward the horizon we never expected to reach. Unless we can appreciate that axemaker gifts have always unleashed the kind of power that changes minds, we will not recognize that our survival now depends on harnessing the same power to save ourselves.

The axemakers are those who had the talent to take the pieces of the world and reshape them to make the tools to chop up the world. The precise sequential process that shaped axes would eventually generate language and logic and rules which would formalize and discipline thinking itself. Thanks to their talents and gifts, things have never been the same again.

Axe
Homo erectus mass-produced axes 700,000 years ago. This required more communication and stimulated advances in mouth noises.

With ecological and other disasters staring at us, we must appreciate that the gifts have always unleashed the kind of power that changes minds. What we need is a new mind, and we have the means to make a new one. All we need to do is find out how it has always been done and do it to ourselves. That is the purpose of this book.

The story begins with the axemakers of ancient Africa.


About the Book’s Authors: 

James Burke is an author, educator, and award-winning television host best known for this successful PBS series Connections. The companion books to this and several of his other series, including The Day the Universe Changed, have been best-sellers in the United States and abroad.

Robert Ornstein was the author of more than twenty books, among them New World, New MindThe Right MindThe Evolution of Consciousness, and the best-selling The Psychology of Consciousness, now in its 4th edition. His final book, which he considered his most important, was the groundbreaking God 4.0: On the Nature of Higher Consciousness and the Experience Called “God.” He was the founder of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, which is responsible for this Human Journey website. (See also: www.robertornstein.com.)