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distinguish a tool-using culture from a technocracy. In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to
become
the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.
    The modern technocracies of the West have their roots in the medieval European world, from which there emerged three great inventions: the mechanical clock, which provided a new conceptionof time; the printing press with movable type, which attacked the epistemology of the oral tradition; and the telescope, which attacked the fundamental propositions of Judeo-Christian theology. Each of these was significant in creating a new relationship between tools and culture. But since it is permissible to say that among faith, hope, and charity the last is most important, I shall venture to say that among the clock, the press, and the telescope the last is also the most important. To be more exact (since Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and to some extent Kepler did their work without benefit of the telescope), somewhat cruder instruments of observation than the telescope allowed men to see, measure, and speculate about the heavens in ways that had not been possible before. But the refinements of the telescope made their knowledge so precise that there followed a collapse, if one may say it this way, of the moral center of gravity in the West. That moral center had allowed people to believe that the earth was the stable center of the universe and therefore that humankind was of special interest to God. After Copernicus, Kepler, and especially Galileo, the Earth became a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in some hidden corner of the universe, and this left the Western world to wonder if God had any interest in us at all. Although John Milton was only an infant when Galileo’s
Messenger from the Stars
was printed in 1610, he was able, years later, to describe the psychic desolation of an unfathomable universe that Galileo’s telescopic vision thrust upon an unprepared theology. In
Paradise Lost
, Milton wrote:
    Before [his] eyes in sudden view appear

The secrets of the hoary Deep
—
a dark

Illimitable ocean, without bound
,
Without dimension
.…
    Truly, a paradise lost. But it was not Galileo’s intention—neither was it Copernicus’ or Kepler’s—to so disarm their culture.These were medieval men who, like Gutenberg before them, had no wish to damage the spiritual foundations of their world. Copernicus, for example, was a doctor of canon law, having been elected a canon of Frauenburg Cathedral. Although he never took a medical degree, he studied medicine, was private physician to his uncle, and among many people was better known as a physician than as an astronomer. He published only one scientific work,
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
, the first completed copy arriving from the printer only a few hours before his death, at the age of seventy, on May 24, 1543. He had delayed publishing his heliocentric theory for thirty years, largely because he believed it to be unsound, not because he feared retribution from the church. In fact, his book was not placed on the Index until seventy-three years after it was published, and then only for a short time. (Galileo’s trial did not take place until ninety years after Copernicus’ death.) In 1543, scholars and philosophers had no reason to fear persecution for their ideas so long as they did not directly challenge the authority of the church, which Copernicus had no wish to do. Though the authorship of the preface to his work is in dispute, the preface clearly indicates that his ideas are to be taken as hypotheses, and that his “hypotheses need not be true or even