ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question of the meaning of science in our lives, both personal and social. Human life in technical civilization cannot be called straightforwardly "a better life," because it is a different way of life. These differences also can be seen by critics of our culture as drawbacks. A further change connected with technical civilization consists in the externalization of constraints. Technical civilization is therefore linked to the development of a huge imaginary world, which is steadily produced by the mass-media, and whose main function is to emotional needs. Technical civilization is in some respects the reverse of what Elias described as the civilizing process. The obsolescence of ethics, the instrumentalization of the body, the detachment of emotional life, the extemalization of constraints, and the compartmentalization of personal life are all changes which concern the structure of the personality in technical civilization. In technical civilization, the individual partakes of society as a terminal or a connection.
