3. "Only a people serving
an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines."
This wise
maxim of Herbert Read's is what Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets
of the Luddite era expressed in their own way as they saw the Satanic mills
and Stygian forges both imprisoning and impoverish- ing textile families
and usurping and befouling natural landscapes ---"such outrage done to
nature as compels the indignant power . . . to avenge her violated rights."
Mercantile capitalism showed scant regard for nature and perceived the
earth's treasures as resource and bounty, but until the 19th century it
had not developed many technologies capable of wholesale destruction or
an unreflective ethic committed to development and progress at all costs.
With the Industrial Revolution there was not even a pretense that British
society was paying attention, much less serving an apprenticeship to nature,
nor was there any concern at all that its products and processes should
somehow enhance biological needs or preserve organic communities. What happens
when an economy is not embedded in a due regard for the natural world,
understanding and coping with the full range of its consequences to species
and their ecosystems, is not only that it wrecks its harm throughout the
biosphere in indiscriminate and ultimately unsustain- able ways, though
that is bad enough. It also loses its sense of the human as a species
and the individual as an animal, needing certain basic physical elements
for successful survival, including land and air, decent food and shelter,
intact communities and nurturing families, without which it will perish
as miserably as a fish out of water, a wolf in a trap. An economy
without any kind of ecological grounding will be as disregardful of the
human members as of the nonhuman, and its social as well as economic forms
--- factories, tenements, cities, hierarchies --- will reflect that. Since technology
is, by its very essence, artificial --- that is to say, not natural, a
human construct not otherwise found in nature, where there is no technology
--- it tends to distance humans from their environment and set them in
opposition to it, and the larger and more powerful it becomes the greater
is that distance and more effective that opposition: "The artificial world,"
says Jaques Ellul, the French philosopher, is "radically different from
the natural world," with "different imperatives, different directives,
and different laws" such that "it destroys, eliminates, or subordinates
the natural world." At a certain point, one that we have reached
in the 20th century, technology can completely overwhelm so many other
elements of that world as to threaten its continued existence, and unless
the technosphere re-establishes some connectedness to the biosphere it
seems likely to carry out that threat.
4. The nation-state,
synergistically intertwined with industrialism, will always come to its
aid and defense, making revolt futile and reform ineffectual.
There
is no sign of hurt or astonishment in any of the Luddite letters written
in reaction to the government's decision to defend the new industrialism
with some 14,000 troops --- the tome is repeatedly one of defiance, of
the "Above 40,000 Heroes are ready to break out" sort --- but in fact it
must have come as a surprising and frightening blow. Never before
had the British government resorted to such a measure --- so stark and
clumsy and brutal, and accompanied by systems of spies & informers,
zealous magistrates, illegal arrests, and rigged trials --- to control
its own populace. That response was a statement, all the more emphatic
for being apparently unexpected, of the real meaning of laissez-faire:
force would be used by the state to ensure that manufacturers would be
free to do what they wished, especially with labor.By the time the Luddites were
hanging "comfortably" on their two bars at Yorkshire castle, the power
of the new industrialism was patent. Since then,
of course, the industrial regime has only gotten stronger, probing itself
the most efficient and potent system for material aggrandize- ment the
world has ever known, and all the while it has had the power of the dominant
nation-states behind it, extending it to every corner of the earth and
defending it once there. It doesn't matter that the states have quarreled
and contended for these corners, or that in recent decades native states
have wrested nominal political control from colonizing ones, for the industrial
regime hardly cares which cadres run the state as long as they understand
the kind of duties expected of them. It is remarkably protean in
that way, for it can accommodate itself to almost any national system ---
Marxist Russia, capitalist Japan, China under a vicious dictator, Singapore
under a benevolent one, messy and riven India, tidy and cohesive Norway,
Jewish Israel, Moslem Egypt --- and in return asks only that its priorities
dominate, its markets rule, its values penetrate, and its interests be
defended, with 14,000 troops if necessary, or even an entire Desert Storm. Some among
the Luddites might have entertained a dream that the British government
could be overthrown ---"shake off the hateful Yoke of a Silly Old Man,
and his Son more silly and their Roguish Ministers"--- but it didn't take
long to show the hollowness of that. Since then not one fully industrialized
nation in the world has had a successful rebellion against it, which says
something telling about the union of industrialism and the nation-state.
In fact, the only places where rebellion has succeeded in the last two
centuries have been where a version of a modern nation-state has emerged
to pave the way for the introduction of industrialism, whether in the authoritarian
(Russia, Cuba, etc.) or the nationalistic (India, Kenya, etc.) mold. Some among
the Luddites also entertained a dream that the British government could
be reformed, either through new laws that would empower workers against
their masters or by a broadening of Parliamentary representation.
Immense effort was spent on this throughout the whole Luddite period and
for decades afterward, absorbing the energy of tens of thousands of workers
and siphoning off tens of thousands of pounds they could ill afford, but
never once were the power alignments of British society significantly altered,
never did the British government accede to any but the most meager demands.
There is perhaps no figure of the Luddite era more pathetic than that of
Gravener Henson after his long and arduous and quite costly work in organizing
Nottingham stockingers, getting Parliament to consider a bill preventing
"Frauds and Abuses" in the knitting trades, only to see his bill become
so distorted in the Commons, as he said, that it ended up allowing manufac-
turers to "Cheat, Rob, Pilfer" as never before --- and then finding that
even that bill was rejected by the Lords.
5. But resistance
to the industrial system, based on some grasp of moral principles and rooted
in some sense of moral revulsion, is not only possible but necessary.
Probably
no images emerge more clearly from the story of the Luddites than those
that capture their boldness and bravery --- the cropper at Cartwright's
mill leaping up to shoot through the window in anger because a bullet had
just been fired through his cap, the two sisters setting fire to the sofa
and curtains in Emmanual Burton's mansion --- and their willingness at
considerable personal cost to express their opposition by hatchet, pike,
gun, letter, march, or any other handy means. Yes, it is true that
in a general sense the Luddites were not successful either in the short-run
aim of halting the detestable machinery or the long-run task of stopping
the Industrial Revolution and its multiple miseries; but that hardly matters
in the retrospect of history, for what they are remember- ed for is that
they resisted, not that they won. Some nowadays, honored with
the haughtiness of hindsight, may call it foolish resistance ("blind" and
"senseless" are the usual adjectives), but it was dramatic, forceful, honorable,
and authentic enough to have put the Luddites' issues forever on the record
and made the Luddites' name as indelibly a part of the language as the
Puritans'.
What remains,
then, after so many of the details fade, is the sense of Luddism as a moral
challenge, "a sort of moral earthquake," as Charlotte Bronte saw it ---
the acting out of a genuinely felt perception of right and wrong that went
down deep in the English soul. Such a challenge is mounted against
large enemies and powerful forces not because there is any certainty of
triumph but because somewhere in the blood, in the place inside where pain
and fear and anger intersect, one is finally moved to refusal and defiance:
"No more." "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes
so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part," is the
way that Mario Savio put it before another movement in 1964. "And
you've got to put your bodies upon the levers, upon all the apparatus,
and you've got to make it stop."
But although
violence as a tactic --- bodies on the levers --- can be an extremely effective
tactic for a while, as the Luddites discovered, it can also be extremely
limited and no longer of much use at the point when it calls down the potent
wrath of authority and turns away the allegiance of neighbors. Moreover,
it is difficult to maintain such a tactic in a high-moral context, to argue
for very long that the low means of destruction are justified by the high
ends of principle, and when that context is shattered, when the disjunction
between ends and means becomes too great within the ranks and without,
then violence loses its utility except for the crudest purposes.
Besides, the
ways of resisting the industrial monoculture can be as myriad as the machines
against which they are aimed and as varied as the individuals carrying
them out, as the many neo-Luddite manifestations around the world make
clear. The "Great Refusal," in the words of Michel Foucault, is made
up of "a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances
that are possible, necessary, improbable, others that are spontaneous,
savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent." Lewis Mumford,
at the end of his lengthy analysis of "the myth of the machine" a generation
ago, argued that indeed anyone could "play a part in extricating himself
from the power system" by "quiet acts of mental and physical withdrawal,"
and he thought he saw such resistance "in a hundred different places":
Though no immediate and complete escape from the ongoing power system
is possible, least of all through mass violence, the changes that will
restore
autonomy and initiative to the human person all lie within the province
of
each individual soul, once it is roused. Nothing could be more damaging
to
the myth of the machine, and to the dehumanized social order it has brought
into existence, than a steady withdrawal of interest, a slowing down of
tempo,
a stoppage of senseless routines and mindless acts.
In the decades
since, the power system has of course gone on to increase its grip on the
society as a whole, but in fact some degree of withdrawal and detachment
has also taken place, not alone among neo-Luddites, and there is a substantial
"counterculture" of those who have taken to living simply, working in community,
going back to the land, developing alternative technologies, dropping out,
or in general trying to create a life that does not do violence to their
ethical principles.
The most successful
and evident models for withdrawal today, however, are not individual but
collective, most notably, at least in the United States, the Old Order
Amish communities from Pennsylvania to Iowa and the traditional Indian
communities found on many reservations right across the country.
The Amish
long ago worked out a way to exist within the industrial monoculture, deciding
that no technologies that tied them to the outside world --- combustion
engines, radio and television, electric power, and telephones --- would
intrude into their lives and make their communities beholden to institutions
that had no regard for the principle on which they ordered existence: "the
harmony of God, nature, family, and community." For more than three
centuries now they have withdrawn to islands mostly impervious to the industrial
culture, and very successfully, too, as their lush fields, busy villages,
neat farmsteads, fertile groves and gardens, and general lack of crime,
poverty, anomie, and alienation attest.
In Indian
country, too, where (despite the casino lure) the traditional c ustoms and
lifeways have remained more less intact for centuries, a majority have
always chosen to turn their backs on the industrial world and most of its
attendant technologies, and they have been joined by a younger generation
reasserting and in some cases revivifying those ancient tribal cultures.
There could hardly be two more antithetical systems --- the Indian is,
among other things, stable, communal, spiritual, participatory, oral, slow,
cooperative, decentralized, animistic, and biocentric --- but the fact
that such tribal societies have survived for so many eons, not just in
North America but on every other continent as well, suggests that there
is a cohesion and strength to them that is certain ly more durable and likely
more harmonious than anything industrial- ism has so far achieved.
It is not
incidental that both Amish and Indian communities are morally based, guided
by spiritual values that place primary emphasis on living in harmony with
the earth and sustaining small-scale communities. That both should
then be so careful and restrictive in their use of technology, explicitly
refusing to adopt certain machines whose qualities they can ably judge,
says not only that there is an ethical decision to be made about technologies
but that some of them can be seen to fail this test. As the Irokwa
Confederacy put it in their statement to the United Nations in 1977, "We
must all consciously and continually challenge every model, every program,
and every process that the West tries to force upon us." Rejecting
always the "machinery hurtful to commonality."
