Technology and Culture

438 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE information about how political and religious leaders and scholars ordered time, but little is revealed about how time and its order af­ fected the common person living in the Middle Ages. It is disappointing that Borst devoted only eight pages to the me­ chanical clock and does not relate the timekeeping systems to the push to develop and use a mechanical clock. Although in his first chapter he says that the 12th-century mechanical clock became the symbol of universal time and prototype of all machines, he later doubts its revolutionary influence and states it is overrated by modern scholars (p. 92). The Ordering of Time is convincing in its proof of Borst’s thesis that the Middle Ages saw time as more than a temporal order, simplified many of the complexities of time reckoning, and significantly affected future generations. But although the medievalists may have started the reckoning of time with their use of computus, augmented later with sandglasses, sundials, astrolabes, chronologia, and other calendar reforms, Borst concludes that the resulting computer has made it no less complicated. He seems pessimistic about the computer bringing any more order and less disruption to life than the mechanical clock did in the late Middle Ages as it exposed the “synchrony of non­ simultaneous things” (p. 95). In conclusion, he muses whether mod­ ern usage can keep up with the “rapid standardization of time­ reckoning and time-measurement.” The twenty-five illustrations are relevant, but the reproduction quality could have been better. Overwhelming detail occasionally causes difficulty in tracking historical figures and sorting out Borst’s conclusions. The translation from German may contribute to the rather stilted sentence construction. There are 217 notes (the major­ ity of the references are in German) for this relatively short book of 132 pages. With its comprehensive index and the bibliographic information in the notes, it is an excellent reference work for the subject of computus. V. Kay Youngflesh Ms. Youngflesh is with the Division of History of Technology at the National Mu­ seum of American History. Hand’s End: Technology and the Limits ofNature. By David Rothenberg. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Pp. xix + 256; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $30.00. This book is difficult to classify. It is neither a history of technology nor a philosophy of technology, although it draws from each of these disciplines. It is more of an interpretive essay whose purpose is to discover a new way to view technology so that it does not come to threaten either nature or human beings. The book attempts to find TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 439 a middle path between two opposing views of technology. On the one hand, there is the approach of the technophiles, who see technology as a self-correcting system capable of solving all human problems. In its extreme form, this view seeks to replace the unpredictable natural world with the rationality of a humanly designed technology. On the other hand, there is the philosophy of the deep ecologists, who see technology as an artificial construct responsible for the destruction of the natural world. In its extreme form this view seeks to eliminate technology, and in some cases the entire human species, in order to protect the integrity of the natural world. David Rothenberg, who previously worked on the philosophy of deep ecology but now sees its flaws, does not believe that technology must be eliminated in order to save nature, but he certainly does not believe that technology can go unchecked. Rather, he seeks some way in which technology can coexist with both humans and nature. The root of the problem is that both the technophiles and the deep ecologists have viewed nature as something given, fixed, and opposed to human civilization. Nature is seen as something that must be con­ quered or something that must be kept free of human influence. Rothenberg believes that this problem can begin to be solved through an investigation of the relationship between technology and nature. After a somewhat detailed study of the philosophies of Plato, Aris­ totle, Bacon, Spinoza, Marx, Heidegger, Mumford, and McLuhan, he is able to show that...