ABSTRACT
The practical intelligence, the theoretical desire to pierce to ultimate fact, and ironic critical impulses have contributed the chief motives towards the repulsion from symbolism. Hardheaded men want facts and not symbols. In anthropology, A. L. Kroeber has introduced the distinction between “reality culture” and “value culture”. Weston LaBarre distinguished between ego-oriented “secular” culture and superego-oriented “sacred” culture. Countless others in the social sciences have employed distinction between the “instrumental” and “expressive” realms of culture. Technological symbolism and the theme of human mastery extend to the remote past of Western culture, if not to Biblical history itself. The Western intellectual history of the thoughtful criticism of science and technology is a rich one. Science and technology are neither intrinsically humanizing nor dehumanizing. The human longing for perfection that averts the Scylla of childhood dependency and the Charybdis of mortality takes the form in our time of what might be termed the “technomorphizing” of man.
