BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Have We Made a Faustian Pact for Modern Technology? : THE AXEMAKER’S GIFT: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture <i> by James Burke and Robert Ornstein</i> ; G.P. Putnam’s Sons; $26.95, 368 pages

Those of us who lived through the ‘60s seem destined (some might say doomed) to fight those fights all of our lives.

One of the overarching themes of that seminal decade was protest against the straight jacket of conformity that society imposes. Play by the rules or you don’t play. Those who get ahead are the cautious and unimaginative. Free spirits are left behind.

In the years since, little has changed, but the rebellious strand of the ‘60s has not given up. It has contemporary manifestations in politics and in thought.

Is knowledge a good thing? Is science? Is technology? Is medicine? Is reason itself? Are we better off knowing things than not knowing them?

On one level, the answer to these questions seems obviously yes. As a society and as individuals, we are much better off than our ancestors, materially and physically, if not always spiritually.

But James Burke and Robert Ornstein argue in “The Axemaker’s Gift” that the answer is much less clear. They have written a history of civilization that portrays the history of knowledge as a Faustian bargain: We have made a pact with the devil in exchange for the knowledge we have and the comforts we enjoy.

Since prehistoric times, they say, when agriculture was invented and people learned to make simple tools, every new discovery and invention--every new gift--has meant increased regimentation, increased conformity, increased social control and increased power in the hands of a few at the expense of the many.

To be sure, the benefits of this arrangement are real. But, they argue, so are the costs. Throughout history, they say, society has elevated “science over the arts, reason over emotion, logic over intuition, the technologically advanced community over the ‘primitive.’ ” Burke, a leading science producer and host for PBS and the British Broadcasting Corp., and Ornstein, the author of the best-selling “The Psychology of Consciousness” (Viking/Penguin), give a detailed, original and persuasive reading of cultural and intellectual history, arguing that each advance was a two-edged sword.

For example, writing--first the alphabet and subsequently the printing press--was a great achievement. But it also gave leaders the ability to organize and to control. It structured the way people could think, validating some kinds of thinking and dismissing others.

Even universal education, the authors say, was a way to consolidate control.

The Mesopotamians defined social structure, the Greeks shaped thought, the Middle Ages concentrated power in a religious elite, the Renaissance and the Age of Science substituted a different elite and widened the gulf between the experts and the uninitiated.

“From the time of the first axe,” the authors write, “knowledge had conferred power on those who were in a position to be able to make use of it. With each of the axemaker’s gifts, from the first ‘sequentializing’ mental effects of language and toolmaking to predictive shaman batons and the bureaucratic potential of Mesopotamian cuneiform script, as well as the analytical force unleashed by the alphabetic world-cutting edge of logic and the mind constraint made possible by the confessional, those institutions and individuals in power were armed with ever-more effective knowledge that they could use to cut and control the natural world and human society.”

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Can you see where this is leading? What starts out as an interesting and provocative reading of the history of knowledge becomes by the end of the book a political screed on behalf of environmentalism and against reason.

In pursuit of short-term gains, we are destroying the planet, don’t you know? The desire for unlimited growth has polluted the planet. “Our leaders and institutions always accepted the gifts for their short-term value and ignored their long-term cost,” the authors write. “This process has brought us close to catastrophe.”

Not that this catastrophe is ever proved. It is merely asserted, accompanied by the familiar hand-wringing that substitutes for argument among the gloom-and-doom crowd.

Elsewhere the authors write, “We go on doing it, even though we don’t know whether what is happening is catastrophic or just Armageddon.”

Yes, the benefits of knowledge, science and technology have not come without cost. But most people would rather live in heat and light than in the cold and dark. Presumably, so would Burke and Ornstein.

And people prefer this not because they have been brainwashed and co-opted by the oppressors. They think this because the comforts that technology has brought are better than the harsh existence that people lived before.

Yes, we prefer the technologically advanced to the primitive. That’s because the technologically advanced is preferable to the primitive. If we put that proposition to a vote, only Burke and Ornstein and a few of their pals would vote against.

It’s all well and good to chant, “Small is beautiful,” but how are we to feed more than 5 billion people on Earth?

Burke and Ornstein say that computer technology, the Internet and cyberspace hold the key to a new kind of people-oriented democracy that will wrest power back from the evil leaders.

They can’t have been reading too much of what’s on the Internet, which is like talk radio on a computer screen--a cacophony of good ideas, bad ideas, no ideas and nonsense.

Come to think of it, it’s not unlike “The Axemaker’s Gift” itself.