AGAINST THE MACHINE:
The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives
by Nicols Fox.
Reviewed by Chellis Glendinning
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Subversive Material:
"I am a Luddite!" Such was the scandalous proclamation Wendell Berry bellowed in 1993 at the first official gathering of the new technology critics in the United States. For the time the statement was bold and heretical. Since the rebellion (and demise) of the original Luddites at the launch of the industrial revolution some 180 years earlier, this new wave had been constrained by an intellectual context forged by the winners of the earlier conflict and their reformist historians: the term "Luddite" had been made into a dirty word, a put-down, a brazen denigration.
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Everyone laughed - Wendell was, as always, preposterously right-on - and everyone breathed in relief. Langdon Winner. Stephanie Mills. Godfrey Reggio. Helena Norberg-Hodge. John Mohawk. Kirkpatrick Sale. Jerry Mander. Martha Crouch. Sigmund Kvaloy. Vandana Shiva. For us a deep-seated taboo had been broken: without further excuse we were going to be who we were. To boot, our work - which up until that meeting had been conducted by isolated individuals - could move forward enriched by a hearty collection of hearts and minds.
A small flurry of activity followed in the US. Well, OK: it was pushed along by the media attention the Unabomber was generating. In 1995, in an attempt to bargain with mail-bombing Ted Kaczynski, the New York Times and Washington Post published his manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future." Fortuitously, Kirk's Rebels against the Future rode the tails of this public event and, in the process, gave many readers a first glimpse into the long-hidden details of Luddite history. Stephanie, Kirk, and I regaled a select audience in New York City with our theatrical performance, "Interview with a Luddite." The Jacques Ellul Society was founded. A group of serious simple-living advocates in Ohio put out a hand letter-set magazine called Plain and threw two gatherings for contemporary Luddites, to which they exhorted everyone to travel on foot, buggy, or train. Then Jerry Mander pushed the analysis forward by linking the newest technologies - supercomputers, biotechnology, microwave communications - with the expansive insistence of corporate globalization.
At the same time, other activists and thinkers - alternative-technology inventors, Native and land-based peoples favoring traditional livelihoods, monkey-wrenchers, anarchists, and modern rebels against the future - were boldly challenging technology with their own words and actions.
The upshot: the proclamation "I am a Luddite" re-entered the vernacular.
This is the intellectual context into which Nicols Fox's Against the Machine arrives. Fox comes to her ideas about machine-based society through a labyrinthean tour. She is a journalist and essayist, having previously written on such diverse topics as granite quarrying, censorship, and food. An ever-so brief reference to a body of literature paralleling the Luddite rebellion in Kirk's Rebels against the Future set Fox on this current exploration, and indeed her eclectic/elastic mind has offered up a treasure: Against the Machine is a truly scandalous book.
It is scandalous for the brilliance of the fabric it crafts. To begin, Fox weaves together the development of capitalism in 18th and 19th century England, its facilitating technologies and its devastating social upheavals - with popular responses through political action and literature, and the arising need to make sense of it all in social theory.
The destruction of the commons. The break-up of village life, wild spaces, the family. Urbanization. The separation of work and meaning, city and country, misery and luxury. The creation of slums. Child labor. Environmental illness. The new middle class and its complacency. Theories of progress, inevitability, utilitarianism, laissez faire. The budding of fresh thoughts in Keats, Shelley, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens. The intertwining of machine with discontent, radical politics with rusticity, passion with hope. The necessity of revolt. Food riots. Frame-breaking. Class consciousness. Fox makes these seemingly disparate developments into whole cloth.
Next, she threads in what becomes a constant theme in Western philosophy and social thought: the clash between human and machine - taking us on a meander through the works of such writers as E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, C.S. Lewis, Jacques Ellul, and Siegfried Giedion, all the while displaying the archetypal nature of the conflicts machine-based society poses.
Against the Machine is perhaps most scandalous for the historical basis it lays to the issues you and I face in a world shaped by techno-economic forces every bit as consequential as those of industrialism. The dissent of the Luddites, it turns out, is not so very different from our own passions, longings, and interpretations.
John Ruskin's exortion, original to the 19th century, - "Let us examine by what laws of labour, purchase, and sale, the greatest accumulative results in wealth is obtainable" - is repeated in the questions we ask of sweatshops. Thomas Carlyle's "Shall your Science proceed in the small chink-lighted, or oil-lighted, underground workshop of Logic alone; and man's mind become an Arithmetic Mill ...?" is an earlier version of Fritjof Capra. William Blake writes:
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"I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow
And mark in each face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe,",
and his insights are reiterated by ecopsychologists 150 years later.
Indeed, Fox's method is to lift the veil between contemporary critics, rebels, and prophets and the many comrades who preceded us. She goes looking for modern-day Luddites, and she finds them - hauling hazel sticks in Cornwall; teaching values at Schumacher College; weaving in Barnsville, Ohio; making art on the Maine seacoast - bringing us right back to ourselves. And so we are left with a historically-informed and presently-embodied appreciation for Wendell Berry's boldness.
Look out: Against the Machine is subversive material, reminiscent in scope and intelligence of the work of yet another technology critic, Lewis Mumford. Luminous, lyrical, impassioned, profound - I had to put the book down every few paragraphs and breathe in relief.
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– Chellis Glendinning
To her delight, New York magazine has described Chellis Glendinning’s home in New Mexico as a “mud hut.” Her latest book, Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy, won the National Federation of Press Women 2000 Book Award.
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