The Nation. - Department of Government at Cornell University

June 5, 1995 The Nation. 785ARTICLES.LESSONS FROM THE LUDDITESSetting LimitsOn TechnologyKIRKPATRICK SALEAs Newt Gingrich has assured us, and as our owndaily experience has convinced us, we in the industrialworld are In the middle of a social and politicalrevolutlon that 1s almost wlthout parallel.Call it “third wave” capltalism, or “postmodern,” or “multi-national,” or whatever; this transformat~on is, without anyonebeing prepared for it, overwhelmlng the communities andinstitutions and customs that once were the familiar stanchionsof our lives. As Newsweek recently said, in a special issue thatactually seemed to be celebrating it, this revolution 1s “outstrippingour capacity to cope, antiquating our laws, transformingour mores, reshuffling our economy, reordering our priorities,redeflning our workplaces, putting our Constitution to thefire, shifting our concept of reality.’’No wonder there are some people who are Just Saying No.They have a great variety of stances and tactics, but thetechnophobes and techno-resisters out there are increasinglycoming together under the banner that dates to those attackersof technology of two centuries ago, the Luddites. In thepast decade or so they have dared to speak up, to criticize thisface of high technology or that, to organize and march andsue and write and propound, and to challenge the consequencesas well as the assumptions of thls second IndustrialRevolution, just as the Luddites challenged the fmt. Someare even using similar strategies of sabotage and violence tomake their pomt.These neo-Luddltes are more numerous today than onemight assume, techno-pessimists without the power and accessof the techno-optimists but still with a not-lnslgnificant voice,shelves of books and documents and reports, and increasingnumbers of followers-maybe a quarter of the adult population,according to a Newsweek survey. They are to be foundon the radical and dlrect-action side of envlronmentalism,particularly in the American West; they are on the dlssentingedges of academlc economics and ecology departments, generallyof the no-growth school; they are everywhere In IndianCountry throughout the Americas, representlng a traditionalbiocentrlsm against the anthropocentric norm; they are activistsfightmg against nuclear power, lrradlated food, clearcutting,animal expenrnents, toxic waste and the killing ofwhales, among the many aspects of the high-tech onslaught.They may also number-certainly they speak for-some ofKrrkpatrrck Sale, a Natlon contrrbutrng edrtor, is the authormost recentIy ofRebels Against the Future: The Luddites and’ Their War on the Industrlal Revolution: Lessons for the MachineAge (Addkon- Waley), from whlch thls arttcle IS udapted.those whose experience with modern technology has in oneway or another awakened them from what Lewis Mumfordcalled “the myth of the machine.” These would include thoseseveral million people in all the industrial nations whose jobshave simply been automated out from under them or havebeen sent overseas as part of the multinationals’ global network,itself built on high-tech communications. They wouldinclude the many millions who have suffered from some exposure,officially sanctioned, to pollutants and poisons, medlcinesand chemicals, and live with the terrible results. Theyinclude some whose faith in the technological dream has beenshattered by the recent evidence of industrial fragility anderror-Bhopal, Chernobyl, Love Canal, PCBs, Exxon Valdez,ozone holes-that is the stuff of daily headlines. Andthey may include, too, quite a number of those whose experiencewith high technology in the home or office has leftthem confused or demeaned, or frustrated by machines toocomplex to understand, much less to repair, or assaulted andangered by systems that deftly invade their privacy or denythem credit or turn them into ciphers.Techno-resisters couldfind theirmost useful analogues, if not theirmodels, in the Luddites.Wherever the neo-Luddites may be found, they are attemptingto bear witness to the secret little truth that lies at the heartof the modern experience: Whatever its presumed benefits,of speed or ease or power or wealth, industrial technologycomes at a price, and in the contemporary world that priceis ever rising and ever threatening. Indeed, inasmuch as industrialismis inevitably and inherently disregardful of the collectivehuman fate and of the earth from which it extracts allits wealth-these are, after all, in capltalist theory “externalities”-itseems ever more certain to end in paroxysms of economicinequity and social upheaval, if not in the degradationand exhaustion of the biosphere itself.From a long study of the original Luddites, I have concludedthat there is much in their experience that can be importantfor the neo-Luddites today to understand, as distant andas different as their times were from ours. Because just as thesecond Industrial Revolution has its roots quite specificallyin the first-the machines may change, but their rnachinenessdoes not-so those today who are moved in some measure toreslst {or who even hope to reverse) the tide of industrialismmight find their most useful analogues, if not their modelsexactly, in those Luddites of the nineteenth century.And as I see it, there are seven lessons that one might, withthe focused lens of hutory, take from the Luddite past.1. Technologies are never neutral, and some are hurtful. Itwas not all machmery that the Luddites opposed, but “all Machineryhurtful to Commonality,” as a March 1812 letter to