It may be that
even those who do remember the past are condemned to repeat it, such is
the regularity of the human condition, but at least those who learn from
it may fashion the weapons with which to triumph the second time around.
Armed with an understanding of the past, perhaps that can allow them to
be rebels against the future. Much there
is to be learned from the experience of the Luddites, as distant and as
different as their times are from ours. Just as the second Industrial
Revolution itself has its roots quite specifically in the first -
the machines change, but the machineness does not -
so those today who are inspired in some measure to resist or even reverse
the tide of industrialism might best find their analogs, if not their models,
in those original Luddites. As I see
it, these are the sorts of lessons one might, with the focused lenses of
history, take from the Luddite past.
I. Technologies
are never neutral, and some are hurtful.
It was not all machinery that
the Luddites opposed, but "all Machinery hurtful to Commonality," as that
March 1812 letter stated it, machinery to which their commonality did not
give approval, over which it had no control, and the use of which was detrimental
to its interests, considered either as a body of workers or a body of families
and neighbors and citizens. It was machinery, in other words,
that was produced with only economic consequences in mind, and those of
benefit to only a few, while the myriad social and environmental and cultural
ones were deemed irrelevant. For the
fact of the matter is that, contrary to the technophilic propa- ganda, technology is not neutral,
composed of tools that can be used for good or evil depending on the user.
As we have seen, it comes with an inevitable logic, bearing the purposes
and the values of the economic system that spawns it, and obeying an imperative
that works that logic to its end, quite heedlessly. What was true
of the technology of industrialism at the beginning, when the apologist
Andrew Ure praised a new machine that replaced high-paid workmen
- "This invention confirms the great doctrine already propounded,
that when capital enlists science in her service, the refractory hand of
labour will always be taught docility" - is as true today,
as when a reporter for Automation could praise a computer system
as "significant" because it assures that "decision-making" is "removed
from the operator [and] gives maximum control of the machine to management."
These are not accidental, ancillary attributes of the machines that are
chosen; they are intrinsic and ineluctable. Tools come
with a prior history built in, expressing the values of a par- ticular
culture. A conquering, violent culture - of which Western civilization
is a prime example, with the United States at its extreme - is bound to
produce conquering, violent tools. When U.S. industrialism turned
to agriculture after World War II, for example, it went at with all that
it had just learned on the battlefield, using tractors modeled on wartime
tanks to cut up vast fields, crop dusters modeled on wartime planes to
spray poisons, and pesticides and herbicides developed from wartime chemical
weapons and defoliants to destroy unwanted species. It was a war
on the land, sweeping and sophisticated as modern mechaniza- tion can be,
capable of depleting topsoil at the rate of 3 billion tons a year and water
at the rate of 10 billion gallons a year, as we have seen demon- strated
ever since. It could be no other way: if a nation like this beats
its swords into plowshares they will still be violent and deadly tools. The business
of cropping wool cloth with huge hand-held scissors was an arduous and
tiring one, which the shearing frame could have done almost as well with
much less effort and time, and the croppers might have welcomed such a
disburdening tool if it had had no history built in. But they knew,
and became Luddites because they knew, what they would have to give up
if they were to accept such a technology: the camaraderie of the cropping
shop, with its loose hours and ale breaks and regular conversation and
pride of workmanship, traded for the servility of the factory, with its
discipline and hierarchy and control and skillessness, and beyond that
the rule of laissez-faire, dog-eat-dog, buyer-beware, cash-on- the-line.
The shearing frame was so obviously not neutral - it was machinery hurtful. It does
not seem hard in a modern context similarly to determine when machinery
is hurtful or to define a commonality whose members might have something
to say about a technology's introduction or use. Wendell Berry, the
Kentucky essayist, has produced a list of criteria that would sere well
as a guide: a new tool, he says, should be cheaper, smaller, and better
than the one it replaces, use less energy (and that energy renewable),
be repairable, come from a small, local shop, and "should not replace or
disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and
community relationships." To which need be added only two other crucial
standards: that those "family and community relationships" embrace all
the other species, plants and animals alike, and the living ecosystems
on which they depend, and that they be considered, as the Irokwa have expressed
it, with the interests of the next seven generations in mind.
2. Industrialism
is always a cataclysmic process, destroying the past, roiling the present,
making the future uncertain.
It is in the nature of the industrial
ethos to value growth and production, speed and novelty, power and manipulation,
all of which are bound to cause continuing, rapid, and disruptive changes
at all levels of society, and with some regularity, whatever benefits they
may bring to a few. And because its criteria are essentially economic
rather than, say, social or civic, those changes come about without much
regard for any but purely materialist consequences and primarily for the
aggrandizement of those few. Only three
decades into the Industrial Revolution the Luddites already had a good
sense of the magnitude and severity of the changes it was bringing, though
they could not have imagined where it was ultimately heading. The
British scholar Adrian Randall has said:
Directly and indirectly the process of change affected and
impinged upon
whole communities.... Family economies were
disrupted. And over
all hung the threat of wholesale restructuring....
[The] opponents of
change might not have realized that it was an
"Industrial Revolution" they
were experiencing but they recognized
that the ways and the values
of the past were about to be overturned
[with] deep and profound
consequences.
We can
see something of the same process at work today in those societies where
industrialism has more recently been introduced, particu- larly in its
Western-capitalist form, from Eastern Europe to southern Africa, from Mexico
to China. The shock waves of change shoot through stable communities
and settled regions, disrupting families, clans, tribes, traditional relationships
and behaviors, often setting tribe against tribe, religion against religion,
race against race, in ways and with intensities never known before, often
dragging societies into successive dictatorships if not perpetual civil
war. Whatever
material benefits industrialism may introduce, the familiar evils - incoherent
metropolises, spreading slums, crime and prostitution, inflation, corruption,
pollution, cancer and heart disease, stress, anomie, alcoholism - almost
always follow. And the consequences may be quite profound indeed
as the industrial ethos supplants the customs and habitats of the past.
Helena Norberg-Godge tells a story of the effect of the transistor radio
- the apparently innocent little transistor radio - on the traditional
Ladkhi society of northwestern India, where only a short time after its
introduction people no longer sat around the fields or fires singing communal
songs because they could get the canned stuff from the professionals in
the capital. Nor is
it only in newly industrialized societies that the tumultuous effects of
an ethos of greed and growth are felt. What economists call "structural
change" occurs regularly in developed nations as well, often creating more
social disruption than individuals can absorb or families and neighborhoods
and towns and whole industries can defend against, and during times of
rapid technological growth the result is almost certain to be disastrous
for large sections of the population, no matter what public protections
may exist. And when those protections are meager or ineffective -
as with health insurance in the United States, say - structural change
will have widespread and onerous costs.
