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http://www.ludditeluddite1812.blogspot.com/

a blog mired in irony by Chellis Glendinning
in honor of the 200th anniversary of the Luddite Rebellion 1811-1813 to 
2011-2013

I: “I am a Luddite”

Native peoples in earlier centuries were stymied when they tried to talk 
about the European conquest; their pre-Columbian vocabularies had no words to 
describe such a battering.  And it’s like that again.  You and I can only peg 
together language to describe the invasion overwhelming our bodies, psyches, 
and cultures by technology.  And that assault, taken together with the 
economic/political institutions that fuel it, is swiftly diminishing life’s 
future on this Earth.

Back in the 1980’s and ‘90’s, I thought I had a few words.  I was part of a 
society of activists and thinkers collaborating to refurbish the analysis of 
technology that the original resisters against industrialism, the Luddites, 
had initiated.  We were a lively collection of folks from countries all over 
the world.  Theodore Roszak.  Kirkpatrick Sale.  Vandana Shiva.  John Mohawk. 
 Gustavo Esteva.  Stephanie Mills.  Helena Norberg-Hodge.  Langdon Winner.  
Godfrey Reggio.  David Suzuki.  Jerry Mander.  Chet Bowers.  Beth Burrows.  
Satish Kumar.  Charlene Spretnak.  Sigmund Kvaloy.  Susan Griffin.  Teddy 
Goldsmith.  Now, we knew how to talk.  Sitting together around conference 
tables at five-day meetings that boasted such titles as “Mega-technology and 
Development” and “Mega-technology and Economic Globalization,” we proclaimed 
that the “new technologies that were coming” would wreak a havoc grander in 
scale than even the industrial revolution had wrought.

But what were we expecting?  It wouldn’t affect us?  Did we think we would go 
on meeting in luscious locations to spin our theories?  Write a white paper 
or two?  Give a rally speech?  Hang on to our land lines?

I’ll be frank: we didn’t think anything.  We couldn’t.  We had no way to 
imagine.  No vision.  No words other than “supercomputer,” “satellite 
communications,” “genetic engineering,” “transnational corporation.”

And so that cadre of stellar minds fell through the unforeseen cracks that 
gashed open when tectonic plates of political/economic/technological 
proportion clanked apart like iron.  Most got a computer and a cell phone.  
Some landed the grant monies they were seeking and clicked into the focus of 
a more manageable pursuit.  And more than one insisted that, for strategic 
purposes, we not speak of technology any more.  And then that 
ever-so-brightly rising star of resistance -- paralleling one that had begun 
two centuries before during a comparable siege -- shot into a glorious sky, 
only to burn away.

Plutonium pit.  Packbot.  Prostate cancer.  Broken back.  Brain tumor.  
Beached whales.  Wasting elk.  Whiplash.  WiMAX.  iPod.  Oil tanker.  Iraq.  
The biggest shopping mall on the planet.  The tallest skyscraper.  Scrape.  
Save.  Spend.  Crave.  Credit card.  Debit card.  Macromind.  Multiple 
sclerosis.  Melting ice.

The concerned will rave about war, poverty, oil depletion, and climate 
upheaval – as well they should.  Some venture to name racism, capitalism, 
empire; cruelty and greed can be high on the list.  But technology’s role in 
shaping these same tragedies handily slips from the perceptual gaze.  Despite 
all and still, the notion of technological development is linked in the 
popular mind to “progress,” “advancement,” “evolution.”
And fear.

“I WANT MY MAMMOGRAM!” shrieks a radio listener like a child.  The tantrum 
occurs on a talk show during my 1990 book tour for When Technology Wounds.  
Also like a child, the woman carries zero awareness of likely precedents to 
her susceptibility to breast cancer: like synthetic hormones and pesticides.  
Or the radiation from last year’s mammogram.

The inherent disjuncture of mass society does not propagate the kind of 
thinking that would unify the parts of the whole.  It severs instead.  It 
fragments.  It scatters – and lays ground for engaging and defending only one 
fragment at a time.

Wendell Berry

“I am a Luddite!”  Such was the scandalous proclamation Wendell Berry 
bellowed at the first official gathering of our new generation of technology 
critics.  San Francisco was the place, 1993 the year.

For the time, the statement was 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: the term “Luddite” had been 
made into a dirty word, a put-down, a brazen denigration.

          Everyone burst with laughter –- Wendell was, as always, 
preposterously right-on -– and everyone breathed in relief.  A deep-seated 
taboo had irretrievably been broken: without further excuse we were going to 
be who we were.  To boot, our work -- which up until that moment had been 
conducted solo -- could move forward enriched by interaction among a worthy 
collection of hearts and minds.

        A small flurry of activity followed.

Well, OK: our actions got swept up in the onrush of media attention the 
Unabomber was getting.  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 this event like a wrangler on a small bull and, in 
the process, gave readers a glimpse into the long-repressed details of 
Luddite history.  The Jacques Ellul Society was born, named for the French 
sociologist who had so brilliantly critiqued technological society.  One of 
our group, biologist Martha Crouch, quit the university in protest against 
its collaboration with biotech corporations.  Others took on the fight 
against bio-specting in Yellowstone National Park.  A few stalwart 
researchers tried to reveal the negative impacts threatened by the entry of 
computers into education.  Stephanie, Kirk, and I regaled a 
standing-room-only audience in New York City with our theatrical performance 
Interview with a Luddite, and we all spoke copiously on the radio.

At the same time other thinkers and activists –- alternative-technology 
inventors, Native and land-based peoples favoring traditional livelihoods, 
monkey-wrenchers, anarchists, and modern rebels against the future –- were 
challenging technology with their own words and acts.  Some dedicated 
anarchists tore down high-voltage power lines in the American West and 
liberated lab animals from science experiments; environmentalists draped tall 
buildings with pro-Earth banners; and a group of simple-living advocates in 
Ohio put out a hand-set magazine called Plain and threw gatherings for 
contemporary Luddites, to which they exhorted everyone to travel on foot, 
buggy, or train.
The upshot: the proclamation “I am a Luddite” re-entered the vernacular.  And 
none too soon, we suspected.

What we were referring to as the “new technologies” in the early ‘90s have by 
now facilitated not only the emergence of a global economic order whose means 
and goals are corporate dominion, ecological ransacking, and mass 
consumption; they have infused our very rhythms, thought patterns, and 
identities.  Indeed, the upheavals we are enduring are equal in scope and 
magnitude to those that swept through the early-19th century.

Then: the destruction of the commons.  The break-up of village life, wild 
spaces, the family.  The separation of work from meaning, city from country, 
luxury from misery.  The creation of slums.  Child labor.  Environmental 
illness.  Theories of progress, inevitability, utilitarianism, laissez faire. 
 The budding of rebellious but deeply conservative thoughts in the work of 
Keats, Shelley, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens.  The melding of machine with 
discontent, radical politics with rusticity, hope with passion.
Today: global warming, climate upheaval, economic collapse.  The microwaving 
of the planet.  The demise of the last wild places left.  The exhaustion of 
oil reserves.  The rise of the richest class of individuals in history -– 
with a parallel fall in quality of life for everyone else.  Environmental 
refugees.  Species extinctions.  Build-up of nuclear, biological, and 
electromagnetic weaponry.  The continuation of rebellious but deeply 
conservative thoughts.  The melding of cyberspace with violence, radical 
politics with marginalism, passion with desperation.

And is not today’s world that teeters so precariously on its cliff of demise 
the extension of economic and social patterns that were made painfully 
evident some two centuries ago?   Is not the resistance mounted by courageous 
bands of weavers, foresters, and villagers in Europe and the United States -– 
and the systemic analysis they offered -- as relevant now as they once were?

My presence at the 1993 gathering of contemporary Luddites began three 
decades before in a lecture hall at U.C. Berkeley.  It was in Professor Allen 
Temko’s class on the history of the city that I first encountered the ideas 
of Lewis Mumford.

Lewis Mumford

My God!  When I read his words, I had to stop every three or four paragraphs 
and breathe just to contain my excitement.  His aim was to merge the 
intellectual with the passionate, the lofty with the earthy –- and this he 
did.  To the hilt.  Born in 1895 and growing up at a time when Americans were 
swelling with pride over the streamlined possibilities of mass mechanistic 
society, when “science” and “democracy” appeared to be ushering in a 
permanent era of peace and prosperity, he pierced through the veneer to 
reveal the deepest patterns of a civilization in trouble.

What stunned –- and inspired -- me was his sweep of vision.

Mumford asserted against all prevailing belief that the centerpiece of the 
cult of “progress” -- technology -- did not lie at the dividing line between 
our animal ancestry and the first sparks of human consciousness; art, music, 
ritual, and language did.[i]  “I have taken life itself to be the primary 
phenomenon, and creativity, rather than ‘the conquest of nature,’” he wrote, 
“as the ultimate criterion of man’s biological and cultural success.”[ii]

In his two-part ‘Myth of the Machine’ series, Mumford described progress as 
“a scientifically dressed up justification” for practices the ruling classes 
had used since the time of the pharaohs to congeal and perpetrate power.[iii] 
 He identified the Megamachine as the central theme of Western society:  a 
social construction built upon absolutism, centralization, mechanization, 
regimentation, militarism, genocide, biocide, spectacle, and alienation – 
with attendant loss of the very qualities the species had developed through 
evolution: autonomy,  human scale, spontaneity, diversity, communalism, and 
participation.

Displaying a moral indignation that bucked the overarching assumptions of the 
times, he spoke of the potency of the Megamachine’s grasp upon the popular 
mind: “The wonder is … that the hopeful dream has remained alive for so long, 
for some of its original luminosity still dazzles and blinds the eyes of many 
of our contemporaries who continue to pursue the same archaic fantasies.”[iv]

And he fortuitously foretold that a “dominant minority” -– the masters of 
technology and accumulated wealth –- would create “a uniform, all-enveloping, 
super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation,” just as he 
described every-day citizens as “cut off from their own resources for living, 
feel(ing) no tie with the outer world unless they are constantly receiving 
information, direction, stimulation, and sedation from a central, external 
source.”[v]

My own grasp of the dynamics of such a Megamachine was thrust forward by 
industrial medicine’s perpetration of birth control.  After two years of 
suffering chronic yeast infections from the imbalances generated by synthetic 
hormones, a physician at Congressional hearings in 1970 rattled the myelin 
off my nerves with his proclamation that The Pill was “the largest 
experiment” foisted upon unsuspecting human beings in the history of medicine.

Being a victim of medical technology came with some poignancy:  I was the 
great-granddaughter of the founder of the Cleveland Clinic and haled from a 
family whose members had given their lives to the healing profession.  But my 
suspicion of allopathic medicine was not yet as deeply rooted as it would 
become; still seeking the quick fix, I replaced my packet of chemicals with 
the latest pharmaceutical do-dad: the Dalkon Shield Intrauterine Device.  And 
sure enough, with an already depressed immune system from The Pill, I 
contracted pelvic inflammatory disease.

By the time, in the late 1970’s, I met Jerry Mander in the cafés of San 
Francisco’s North Beach and launched into his Four Arguments for the 
Elimination of Television, I was fertile for the all-encompassing analysis he 
had focused upon a single technology.

Too, there had been the vision.  It had come as a flash when I was taking 
time off from the intensity of anti-war protest in Berkeley to work on a 
maple sugar farm in Vermont.  The year was 1970; Earth Day was on the 
horizon.  But more crucial to me, Paul Ehrlich’s article in the September 
1969 issue of Ramparts magazine -- “Eco-Catastrophe: The End of the 
Ocean”[vi] -- had jolted my notion of the future.

“THE OCEANS,” the cover art proclaimed on a marble headstone inscribed for 
the Earth’s seas:

Born: Circa 3,500,000,000 B.C.
Died: 1979 A.D.[vii]

On the farm marvelous insights pushed through the icy drudgery of digging 
winter ditches, a by-product of physical work I surmise, as if to bring color 
to black-and-white thoughts.  Most often it was a feeling of awe that grew up 
in me like a crocus through snow.  This time though, the insight was a moving 
picture that took over my inner world: citizens storming factories.  I didn’t 
yet harbor consciousness of the dysfunction of the whole of mass society -- 
and yet the kind of mass protest we had engaged in to stop the Vietnam War 
had morphed to a prophecy of what might be required to stop destruction by 
technology.  Just as my reproductive organs were wracked with disturbances 
from technical interventions, I was catching glimpses of what would unfold as 
the historical textures of my lifetime.  The template that would become mine 
had been delivered: the personal is political.
-----------------------

[i] Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1934.
[ii] Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power. NY: 
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, preface.
[iii] Lewis Mumford, “Prologue to our Time,” The New Yorker, March 10, 1975, 
p.45.
[iv] Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, p. 7.
[v] Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, p. 352, 
Ill. 14-15 (between pp. 180-181).
[vi] Paul Ehrlich, “Eco-Catastrophe: The End of the Ocean,” Ramparts, Vol. 8 
No. 3, September 1969, pp. 24-28.
[vii]Jeffrey Gholson, cover photograph, Ramparts, September 1969.