6. Politically,
resistance to industrialism must force not only
"the machine question"
but the viability of industrial society into
public consciousness
and debate.
If
in the long run the primary success of the Luddite revolt was that it put
what was called "the machine question" before the British public through
the first half of the 19th century --- and then by reputation kept it alive
right into the 20th --- it could also be said that its failure was that
it did not spark a true debate on that issue or even put forth the terms
in which such a debate might be waged. That was a failure for which
the Luddites of course cannot be blamed, since it was never a part of their
perceived mission to make their grievance a matter of debate and indeed
they chose machine breaking exactly to push the issue beyond debate.
But because of that failure, and the inability of subsequent critics of
technology to penetrate the complacency of its beneficiaries and their
chosen theorists or successfully call its values into question, the principles
and goals of industrialism, to say nothing of the machines that embody
them, have pretty much gone unchallenged in the public arena. Industrial
civilization is today the water we swim in, and we seem almost as incapable
of imagining what an alternative might look like, or even realizing that
an alternative could exist, as fish in the ocean.
The political
task of resistance today, then --- beyond the "quiet acts" of personal
withdrawal Mumford urges --- is to try to make the culture of industrialism
and its assumptions less invisible and to put the issue of its technology
on the political agenda, in industrial societies as well as their imitators.
In the words of Neil Postmen, a professor of communications at New York
University and author of Technopoly, "it is necessary for
a great debate" to take place in industrial society between "technology
and everybody else" around all the issues of the "uncontrolled growth of
technology" in recent decades. This means laying out as clearly as
possible the costs and consequences of our technologies, in the near term
and long, so that even those overwhelmed by the ease/comfort/speed/power
of high-tech gadgetry (what Mumford called technical "bribery") are forced
to understand at what price it all comes and who is paying for it.
What purpose does this machine serve? What problem has become so
great that it needs this solution? Is this invention nothing but,
as Thoreau put it, and improved means to an unimproved end? It also
means forcing some awareness of who the principle beneficiaries of the
new technology are --- they tend to be the large, bureaucratic, complex,
and secretive organizations of the industrial world --- and trying to make
public all the undemocratic ways they make the technological choices that
so affect all the rest of us. Who are the winners, who the losers?
Will this invention con-
centrate or disperse power, encourage
or discourage self-worth? Can society at large afford it? Can
the biosphere?
Ultimately
this "great debate" of course has to open out into wider questions about
industrial society itself, its values and purposes, its sustainability.
It is no surprise that the Luddites were unable to accomplish this in the
face of an immensely self-satisfied laissez-faire plutocracy whose access
to means of forcing debates and framing issues was considerably greater
than theirs. Today, though, that task ought not to be so difficult
--- in spite of the continued opposition of a plutocracy grown only more
powerful and complacent --- par-
ticularly because after two centuries
it is now possible to see the nature of industrial civilization and its
imperiling direction so much more clearly.
Certain home-truths
are beginning to be understood, at least in most industrial societies,
by increasing numbers of people: some of the fish at least not only seem
to be seeing the water but realizing it is polluted. Industrialism,
built upon machines designed to exploit and produce for human betterment
alone, is on a collision course with the biosphere. Industrial societies,
which have shown themselves capable of creating material abundance for
a few and material improvement for many, are nonetheless shot through with
inequality, injustice, instability, and incivility, deficiencies that seem
to increase rather than decrease with technical advancement. Industrialism
does not stand superior, on any level other than physical comfort and power
and a problematic longevity of life, to many other societies in the long
range of the human experiment, particularly those, morally based and earth-regarding,
that did serve the kind of "apprenticeship to nature" that Herbert Read
saw as the proper precondition to technology.
Say what you
will about such tribal societies, the record shows that they were (and
in some places still are) units of great cohesion and sodality, of harmony
and regularity, devoid for the most part of crime or addiction or anomie
or poverty or suicide, with comparatively few needs and those satisfied
with a minimum of drudgery, putting in on average maybe four hours a day
per person on tasks of hunting and gathering and cultivating, the rest
of the time devoted to song and dance and ritual and sex and eating and
stories an games. No, individuals did not necessarily live as long
--- one estimate has paleolithic longevity at 32.5, exactly the same as
in the United States in 1900 --- nor did they produce so many progeny,
but that is because, apprenticed to nature, they consciously restricted
human numbers and accepted limited human duration so that other species
around them could thrive, for the benefit of all. No they did not
have the power of five hundred servants at the flick of a switch or turn
of a key, but then they did not have atomic bombs and death camps, toxic
wastes, traffic jams, strip mining, organized crime, psychosurgery, advertising,
unemployment, or genocide.
To propose,
in the midst of the "great debate," that such societies are exemplary,
instructive if not imitable, is not to make a romanticized "search for
the primitive." It is rather to acknowledge that the tribal mode
of existence, precisely because it is nature-based, is consonant with the
true, underlying needs of the human creature, and that we denigrate that
mode and deny those needs to our loss and disfigurement. It is to
suggest that certain valuable things have been left behind as we have sped
headlong down the tracks of industrial progress and that it behooves us,
in a public and spirited way, to wonder about what we have gained from
it all and reflect upon what we have lost. And it is, finally, to
assert that some sort of ecological society, rooted in that ancient animistic,
autochthonous tradition, must be put forth as the necessary, achievable
goal for human survival and harmony on earth.
7. Philosophically,
resistance to industrialism must be embedded in an analysis --- and ideology,
perhaps --- that is morally informed, carefully articulated, and widely
shared.
One of the failures
of Luddism (if at first perhaps one of its strengths) was its formlessness,
its unintentionality, its indistinctness about goals, desires, possi-
bilities. Movements acting
out of rage and outrage are often that way, of course, and for a while
there is power and momentum in those alone. For durability, however,
they are not enough, they do not sustain a commitment that lasts through
the adversities of repression and trials, they do not forge a solidarity
that prevents the infiltration of spies and stooges, they do not engender
strategies and tactics that adapt to shifting conditions and adversaries,
and they do not develop analyses that make clear the nature of the enemy
and the alternatives to put in its place.
Now it would
be difficult to think that neo-Luddite resistance, whatever form it takes,
would be able to overcome all those difficulties, particularly on a national
or international scale: commitment and solidarity are mostly products of
face-to-face, day-to-day interactions, unities of purpose that come from
unities of place. But if it is to e anything more than sporadic and
martyristic, resistance could learn from the Luddite experience at least
how important it is to work out some common analysis that is morally clear
about the problematic present and the desirable future, and the common
strategies that stem from it.
All the elements
of such an analysis, it seems to me, are in existence, scattered and still
needing refinement, perhaps, but there: in Mumford and Schumacher and Wendell
Berry and Jerry Mander and the Chellis Glendinning manifesto; in the writing
of the Earth-First!ers and the bioregionalists and deep ecologists; in
the lessons and models of the Amish and the Irokwa; in the wisdom of tribal
elders and the legacy of tribal experience everywhere; in the work of the
long line of dissenters-from-progress and naysayers-to-technology.
I think we might even be able to identify some essentials of that analysis,
such as:
Industrialism,
the ethos encapsulating the values and technologies of Western civilization,
is seriously endangering stable social and environmental existence on this
planet, to which must be opposed the values and techniques of an organic
ethos that seeks to preserve the integrity, stability, and harmony of the
biotic community, and the human community within it.
Anthropocentrism,
and its expression in both humanism and monotheism, is the ruling principle
of that civilization, to which must be opposed the principle of biocentrism
and the spiritual identification of the human with all living species and
systems.
Globalism,
and its economic and military expression, is the guiding strategy of that
civilization, to which must be opposed the strategy of localism, based
upon the empowerment of the coherent bioregion and the small community.
Industrial
capitalism, as an economy built upon the exploitation and degradation
of the earth, is the productive and distributive enterprise of that civilization,
to which must be opposed the practices of an ecological and sustainable
economy built upon the accommodation and commitment to the earth and following
principles of conservation, stability, self-sufficiency, and cooperation.
A movement
of resistance starting with just those principles as the sinews of its
analysis would at least have a firm and uncompromising ground on which
to stand and a clear and inspirational vision of where to go. If
nothing else, it would be able to live up to the task that George Grant,
the Canadian philoso- pher, has set this way: "The darkness which envelops
the Western world because of its long dedication to the overcoming of chance"
--- by which he means the triumph of the scientific mind and its industrial
constructs --- "is just a fact.... The job of thought in our time is to
bring into the light that darkness
is darkness." And at its
best, it might bring into the light the dawn that is the alternative.
One last lesson of a slightly
different kind stems not from the experiences of the Luddites, though they
might have had such inklings in their more religious moments, but from
the subsequent course of the industrialism of which they were the first
victims.
8. If the
edifice of industrial civilization does not eventually crumble
as a result of a determined
resistance within its very walls, it seems
certain to crumble
of its own accumulated excesses and instabilities
within not more than
a few decades, perhaps sooner, after which t
here may be space for
alternative societies to arise.
The two chief strains pulling this
edifice apart, environmental overload and social dislocation, are both
the necessary and inescapable results of an industrial civilization.
In some sense, to be sure, they are the results of any civilization: the record of the
last five thousand years of history clearly suggests that every single
preceding civilization has perished, no matter where or how long it has
been able to flourish, as a result of its sustained assault on its environment,
usually ending in soil loss, flooding, and starvation, and a successive
distension of all social strata, usually ending in rebellion, warfare,
and dissolution. Civilizations, and the empires that give them shape,
may achieve much of use and merit --- or so the subsequent civilizations'
historians would have us believe --- but they seem unable to appreciate
scale or limits,
and in their growth and turgidity
cannot maintain balance and continuity within or without. Industrial
civilization is different only in that it is now much larger and more powerful
than any known before, by geometric differen-
ces in all dimensions, and its
collapse will be far more extensive and thorough-
going, far more calamitous.
It is possible
that such a collapse will be attended by environmental and social dislocations
so severe that they will threaten the continuation of life, at least human
life, on the surface of the planet, and the question then would be whether
sufficient numbers survive and the planet is sufficiently hospitable for
scattered human communities to emerge from among the ashes. But it
is also possible that it will come about more by decay and distension,
the gradual erosion of nation-state arrangements made obsolete and unworkable,
the disintegration of corporate behemoths unable to comprehend and respond,
and thus with the slow resurrection and re-empowerment of small bioregions
and coherent communities having control over their own political and economic
destinies. In either case, it will be necessary for the survivors
to have some body of lore, land some vision of human regeneration, that
instructs them in how thereafter to live in harmony with nature and how
and why to fashion their technologies with the restraints and obligations
of nature intertwined, seeking not to conquer and dominate and control
the species and systems of the natural world --- for the failure of industrialism
will have taught the folly of that --- but rather to understand and obey
and love and incorporate nature into their souls as well as their tools.
It is now
the task of the neo-Luddites, armed with the past, to prepare, to preserve,
and to provide that body of lore, that inspiration, for such future generations
as may be.
