"In our time, must we not face the possibility that the human mind as a social fact might be deteriorating in quality and cultural level, and yet not many would notice it because of the overwhelming accumulation of technological gadgets?  Is not that one meaning of rationality without reason?  Of human alienation?  Of the absence of any free role for reason in human affairs?  The accumulation of gadgets hides these meanings:  Those who use these devices do not understand them; those who invent them do not understand much else.  That is why we may not, without great ambiguity, use technological abundance as the index of human quality and cultural progress"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 175).