In our society, driven as it is by capital and technology with its constant emphasis on growth, where bigger and more are equated with better; some of us are beginning to question the purpose and direction of it all. As we question, we begin to realize that as individuals and communities our freedom to exercise responsible judgment over our lives is fast disappearing. With this realization comes a feeling of helplessness. Have we run too far too fast without looking where we are going? Can we somehow get back that ephemeral “something” we have lost?
Sometimes it seems that all of the changes we are constantly adapting to are parts of a natural evolution: They are not. The direction in which we are headed represents a change in course, a change we made in the early years of the nineteenth century.
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The year is 1812. England is somewhere between a rock and a hard place. Across the Channel, Napoleon rules most of Europe. Beyond the Atlantic, English sailors and troops are engaged in a confused war against the newly independent Americans. At home, in English towns and villages, action of a different sort is worrying traditional economic and social relationships.
Surrounding the oaks of Sherwood Forest, some of England’s finest craftsmen live and work in communities they have called home for over three hundred years. The weavers of Nottinghamshire, working in their homes, produce high quality lace and stockings much in demand by exporters. With a market stabilized by tradition and protected by a royal charter, these independent contractors and their apprentices can afford the luxury of care in their craft and can expect a reasonably secure life in return.
This is about to change.
Bowing to pressure from a new group consisting of wealthy garment-factory owners, the Tory government yanks the stools out from under the weavers when it adopts an economic policy guaranteeing the factory owners freedom to do what they wish, especially with labor.
No longer protected by either royal charter or tradition, the weavers see their security evaporate almost overnight. Their income shrinking while their cost of living climbs, many find themselves forced out of their homes and villages and into the dark confines of factories where the new mechanized looms produce great quantities of inferior products at a substantially reduced price. The poet Wordsworth, looking out at the mills, which are spreading like a blight over the natural landscape, and their imprisoned and impoverished workers, is moved to pen: “…such outrage done to nature as compels the indignant power … to avenge her violated rights.”
Wheat prices skyrocket and the workers, unable to feed their families, become truly desperate. Just a few years earlier William Blake, catching the scent of a rot in English society, prophetically writes:
They compel the poor,
To live upon a crust of bread
By soft mild arts,
They reduce a man to want,
Then give with pomp and ceremony:
The praise of Jehovah is chanted
From lips of hunger and thirst.
Suffering under the oppression of the factory owners, who treat their labor as little more than slaves, the craftsmen-turned-laborers soon identify the new mechanized technology as the primary weapon of their oppressors.
Enter, stage left, a "feeble minded lad” named Ned Ludd. One day at the mill Ned smashes two of the new, expensive weaving forms. No one sees this act as one of frustration or anger—the lad is clumsy is all. Nevertheless, hereafter, whenever an expensive piece of machinery is broken the incident is attributed to Ned Ludd. Any person who accidentally or otherwise breaks machinery is termed a “Luddite.”
On April 15, 1812, without old Ned (for his very existence is questionable) a thousand oppressed and frustrated people gather in Stockport, Cheshire and homogenize into a guerilla army. Knowing the countryside well, the guerilla bands strike at night, appearing at factories with demands for better wages and working conditions in the name of “General Ludd.” Many factory owners, shaken by the anger and sheer number of petitioners standing at their doorstep in the dark, temporarily oblige.
The soldiers of “General Ludd” do not oppose all machinery, but rather "machinery hurtful to commonality.” The property of any factory owners who pay a fair wage and machinery that does not displace workers they leave untouched. All others find their expensive technology broken and shattered by the Luddite hordes. When pursued, the guerillas simply disappear into the byways and forest.
The Luddite’s night raids incite a Tory poet to write of "that most dreadful of all conceivable states -- an insurrection of the poor against the rich". Indeed, the Tory government, seeing elements of the French Revolution in the smashed machines and the armed, rampaging weavers, becomes increasingly concerned.
Not everyone is stricken with terror, however. The Luddites find words of support flowing from the quill of yet another poet, Shelley, who writes: "Down with all Kings but King Ludd.”
The bands of Luddites, like the famous Robin Hood’s merry-men centuries before, enjoy the support of nearly the entire local population. They are seen as "the thousands acting out the resentment of the millions” and although they do not hesitate to destroy property, they carefully avoid violence upon any person. As the destruction increases, such avoidance cannot last.
On April 20, 1812 over a thousand guerillas armed with sticks and stones attack Burton’s power-loom mill in Lancaster. Finding the mill stiffly defended by a small, but well armed private army; the guerillas center their attack upon the mill owner’s residence, which they burn. In their energetic wrath the guerillas wait too long to flee the scene and are surrounded by the military force from the mill. During the ensuing battle, several persons are killed.
In response, the government orders a stiff crackdown on the guerillas. Fourteen thousand English troops are dispatched throughout the countryside. In the next few months 40 Luddites are killed in action, 24 are executed, 37 are transported to Australia and 24 are sentenced to prison. This effectively stops the Luddite movement in its tracks. For the next two centuries the name of the poor, feeble-minded lad, Ned Ludd, the original Luddite, is to be associated with any that disdain machinery and/or the unrelenting march of technological progress.
It is now fifty-eight years later, 1870, and an ocean away from Nottinghamshire, in West Virginia, the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad is building the Big Bend tunnel through the Allegheny Mountains. Men, many of whom have tasted the bitterness of slavery and, until very recently, stared into the eyes of abject poverty and starvation, sweat and sing as they swing twelve-pound hammers, blast through rock and carry away a mountain on their backs. Unlike slaves, these men find meaning in their labor and hope in their paychecks.
This too is about to end.
Up from the south comes a new thing, a thing, not of muscle and sweat, but of steam and steel, levers and wheels; a steam drill that can tirelessly drive steel into rock, making holes into which the dynamite can be placed.
Whether legend or fact, a man steps forward to challenge technology. This time the man is not a mere feeble-minded lad, but a large, strong man with a glistening ebony complexion. His name is John Henry. The rest is ballad and legend.
John Henry told his captain
"A man ain't nothin' but a man
But before I let your steam drill beat me down
I'll die with a hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord!
I'll die with a hammer in my hand."
They say that the race between John Henry and the steam drill was a thing to see. But in the end a man of flesh was buried and a thing of steel remained.
Like the men who careened through the woods of Nottinghamshire, doing so not simply out of a hatred or fear of technology, but because much more was at stake, the same held true that day on the West Virginia mountain when John Henry met the steam drill. The way of life they had known for hundreds of years was being obliterated by what many now refer to as the inexorable march of technology. Their backs were against a wall. Finding themselves full of adrenaline and faced squarely with “fight or flight,” they chose to fight…and lost. Some lost their lives, but also lost was the power of the community, the singular consciousness of place, a pride in craftsmanship and the meaningfulness of work.
What was it that caused the peace loving weavers of Nottinghamshire to rise in revolt and John Henry to die with a hammer in his hands?
In the midst of what we now call the Industrial Revolution, the Luddites dared to question progress. They were not about to let themselves be trampled under by a blind technology moving helter-skelter over the countryside. They believed technological progress, if it was to be considered progress, must serve the welfare of the community, not vice-versa. The innovations confronting the weavers in 1811-1813 were innovations engineered only to increase profits for the factory owners and were forced upon the workers. Their violent response to this degradation of their life, work and community, far from being an over-reaction, must be seen as a moderate response to a very grim development.
One hundred and seventy-four years after Luddites first gathered at Stockport, Cheshire, Luddites gathered themselves for a “Second Congress” at Barnesville, Ohio. Citizen delegates numbering more than 250, representing “many faiths and none” met in April of 1996 for three days of discussions concerning where they have been and where they are going.
What similarities, if any, exist between the concerns of the 19th century Luddite and the worker of today? The answer lies in the insidious economic theory, born in the industrial revolution and inexorably held to this day: Constant technological improvement brought about by capital interests increases economic productivity thus resulting in an improved society.
According to Kirkpatrick Sale—a New York author and contributing editor to The Nation magazine and perhaps the most erudite voice among neo-Luddites, not only is this theory false, it is responsible for a host of ills ranging from the destruction of tradition and community and the end of meaningful work to massive harm to the environment. Faster growth, after all, requires faster consumption of our planet’s resources. In a Wired magazine interview with Kevin Kelly, Sales stated, “The Luddites raised what was called at the time "the machinery question," and they raised it in such a forceful way that it could not ever go away: Whether machinery was simply to be for greater production by the industrialists, regardless of its consequences, or whether the people who were affected by these machines had some say in the matter of how they were to be used. The Luddites also established themselves as the symbol of those who resist the new technologies and demand a voice in how they are to be used.”
On the other end of this philosophic spectrum are those who accept the imposition of all technology as a given of the natural order. It is their belief that capital-driven progress is not only inevitable, it is quite natural; after all, has not society always managed to adapt to it?
For true neo-Luddites, there is no alternative but to question and resist such an imposition. That resistance must focus on the point where technology specifically threatens family, place, common morality, faith and the earth’s abundance. Loyalty to these principles produces the confidence necessary to resist.
According to Lionel Basney writing in Christianity Today, many of us non-Luddites find some comfort in the defensive walls our things have erected for us. Some, primarily the neo-Luddites, are peering over the walls: “What they see are thousands of human social and cultural groups struggling to choose a prudent course in the face of runaway change and the power it confers on others. The neo-Luddite query, at its simplest, is this: Who will choose our vital technology, and on what basis?”
In the Ballad of John Henry, the hero, just before engaging in mortal contest with a machine, states: "A man ain't nothin' but a man….” This statement was rephrased and reverberated in the Quaker meeting hall at the Second Luddite Congress where the predominant question asked was not “What are machines for?” but “What are people for?”
This leads to the definition of a term that appears frequently in this discussion—“community.” To Luddites and neo Luddites, community is never to be taken as an abstract, but as real people living in real places.
Public—as opposed to community— is where persons are apart from neighborly attachments, it is where communities go to work out their differences. (Read public as in public sector, as in government). Wendell Berry, a prolific writer and self-proclaimed Luddite, warns against public being allowed to become dynamic. When public begins to dictate a form of economy and technology, public becomes dangerous. A very exaggerated and therefore easily understood example of this phenomenon is to witness the affect the public Chinese decision to build a massive dam at Three Gorges has had on millions of individuals from numerous communities.
According to An International Rivers Network and Human Rights in China Joint Report, China’s Three Gorges dam project resulted in the movement of between one and two million people to make way for world's largest hydroelectric dam. “This displacement could also turn out to be one of the world's worst reservoir resettlement disasters. Unlike some of their counterparts around the world who are now successfully mobilizing to challenge massive dams and to defend their right to their land and livelihoods, Three Gorges resettlers awaited their fate mostly in silence, their concerns censored out of media reports and concealed even from the eyes of central government officials”. As one displaced, community member, who was brave enough to speak, put it: whenever the needs of public politics and money come up against the needs of communities, communities always lose.
In this behavior, China is but one of many states that disavow the individual and community. Indeed, in this behavior, China joins what Luddites pejoratively describe as the “ Industrialized Western World” in disavowing the entire human community. It does not matter what form of state harbors the public industrial regime, what matters—in the words of Sale—is that “its values penetrate, and its interests be defended, with 14,000 troops if necessary, or even an entire Desert Storm.”
Writing in Engines of our Ingenuity, John Lienhard of the University of Houston’s College of Engineering stated: “Today, we use the word Luddite to label someone who tries to live in yesterday's world. But when technology changes our lives too rapidly, it tears the fabric of society. It's then that we need enough Luddite in us to slow the pace of change to a bearable rate.”
Must we accept all technology, regardless of its consequences? Do we have any say in that which affects us? Perhaps, the time has come for us—the human community—to pause, reflect deeply and ask: “Where are we headed? Do we really want to go?”
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