Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction
Suspended in Language and Culture
Attempts at Escaping Our Suspension in Language and Culture
Foundationalism and the Architecture of Non-Life
The Technical Division of Labour and the Architecture of Non-Life
Technique and the Architecture of Non-Life
Technique, the State, and the Law
Growing Up and Living with Technique

1. Our Physical Embodiment within the Relativity of Life and the World
Can We Escape Our Embodiment?
The Great Cultural Divide in the Relativity of Human Life
The Relativity of Our Lives before Screen-Based Devices
The General Relativity of Human Life and the World before Screen-based Devices

2. Our Social and Cultural Embodiment in the Relativity of Human Life in the World
A Hidden Discontinuity
The Artificiality of a Culture
Screens as Magic Portals
Growing Up with Symbolization and Desymbolization
Two Streams of Experiences
Language Acquisition in Anti-Societies with Three Frames of Reference

3. Living with a Dual Relativity beyond Cultural Embodiment
A General Interpretation of Our Dual Relativity
Living and Constructed Entities
The Emergence of Cultural Mediation in a General Relativity
From Cultural to Technical Mediation
The Economy, Art, and the Order of Non-Sense
Making Sense of Non-Sense

4. Mathematics as the Non-Language of Science and Technique
Mathematical Foundations and Truths
The Emergence of a Secular Religious Daily-Life World
Science and Mathematics
Disciplines, Games, and the General Relativity of Human Life
Mathematics as a Discipline
Mathematics, Languages, and Games
Mathematics and Time
Mathematics and Daily Life
Mathematics and Education
Is Mathematics the Secular Religion of Technique?

5. Human Knowing and Discipline-Based Science
Is Our Science Unlike All Others?
Disciplines and Daily-Life Knowing
The Known and the Unknown
Culture and Discipline-Based Science
Science, Reality, and Our Life-Milieu
Physics as a Mathematical Game?
Our Metaphors for Space, Time, Matter, and Numbers
Science, Religion, and Christianity

6. Human Doing, Technique, and the Living of Our Lives
Naming What We Have Lost
Recognizing the Symptoms of What We Have Lost
Absolute and Relative Efficiency
Economics as Technique
Our Daily Lives and the Professions of Technique
Technique and Non-Life
Technique as Response to Relativism, Nihilism, and Anomie

Epilogue: Possessed by Secular Myths
Endangered by Secular Religious Attitudes
Is Humanity Truly against Enslavement?

Notes
Index

About the Author

Willem H. Vanderburg has taught preventive engineering, sociology, and environmental studies at the Centre for Technology and Social Development at the University of Toronto.

Reviews

" Rescuing Humanity is a timely and important work. Any scholar or student interested in the perils and promises of contemporary technology will find this book a thought-provoking resource. Vanderburg shows that our reliance on a 'secular myth' of contemporary technology, along with its narrow and mathematical interpretation of economics, hobbles us from rising to the occasion of the environmental disasters that are upon our doorstep." --Stuart Dreyfus, Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of California, Berkeley
"We must change the way we do things, particularly how and what we teach the technologists in our society. Human beings must not be a side-effect of what contemporary engineers call 'progress.' If we treat each other like objects, we will kill life on the planet. Vanderburg's incisive, passionate book shows us how to avoid this abyss, how to reset our minds, take back our agency about what we wish to do next. This is a guide about how to stop being a piece of data, and start being a human: it's a guide to surviving and flourishing in this new century."--Tim Blackmore, Professor of Information and Media Studies, Western University