ABSTRACT
While it is part of human nature to exercise control over natural objects, in modern times exercising control has gained distinctive features (Leiss 1972): its extent, its pre-eminence and its centrality in our lives, the high and virtually unsubordinated value granted to it, the dissociation of considerations of control from those of the meaning and value of our activities and social arrangements, the intense efforts to expand and implement our capabilities of control, and the conviction that these efforts will be at the heart of projects to meet human needs and wants even as their embodiments continually generate new needs and wants. Consequently, certain values connected with the control of nature rank especially highly in modern value complexes. I will argue, as anticipated in the previous chapter, that the nearly unanimous adoption of materialist strategies in modern scientific practices becomes intelligible largely in virtue of its mutually reinforcing interaction with these values.
