preparing the field of technological absolutism

I am grazing my way through Lewis Mumford's "The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power." In it, Mumford makes a bold line of thinking from Descartes to his present day technocratic America. What he says started out as a clever, self-imposed pigeonholing of thinking about man by Descartes to avoid the wrath of the Church became a mistaken model of humans as machines. In effect, bleeding any soul and subjectivity from definitions of man founded the science of understanding life, in the abstract, in a mechanistic model. It gave Descartes the needed distance from Church authorities and unwittingly gave license to a mode of thinking more pernicious to life than otherwise recognized. Here, Mumford summarizes his effort to understand the roots of technocracy in Descartes' thinking:

Now the underlying implications of Descartes' baroque absolutism must not be forgotten. By accepting the machine as his model, and a single unifying mind as the source of absolute order, Descartes in effect brought every manifestation of life, ultimately, under rational, centrally directed control--rational, that is, provided one did not look too closely at the nature and intentions of the controller. In doing so, he set a fashion in thought that was to prevail with increasing success for the next three centuries. (p. 98)