“The feast of life” is how Lewis Mumford
described this lively sentiment in his 1962 “Prologue to Our Time.”[i] By 1989 I was aware that the important public
intellectual, who had in so many ways laid the ground for my own life’s work,
would soon pass from this world. I wrote
a letter to his home in Amenia ,
New York
A year
later Ping and I drove through the upstate New York
The
floor was made of planks. There was no
rug, and the room was almost empty. At
the far wall, under a dappling of light from a small window, stood a writing
table, a wooden chair, an old black typewriter, plus some clipboards, pencils,
and erasers. Everything was exactly as
it had been the last day he had worked there.
His corduroy jacket was still hanging from a nail on the inside of the
door.
 |
| Mumford's Home |
The feast of
life.
Emboldened
by colleagues like Langdon Winner and John Mohawk; inspired by the courage of
forerunners like Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, and the Luddites; propelled by
the force of a globally-charged anti-nuclear movement -- we were riding high,
feeling our oats, speaking our truth.
But it
was a different time from now.
Slower. The speed of computers did not form the
backbone of social relations, and people had time to nurse deep thoughts. Conversations were not cut off by intrusive
clicks and ditty-refrains. Everyone was
not running to get somewhere else. You
wrote a letter, time passed, you received a response. Speciousness reigned. Your every move was not captured on security
film, your conversations not tracked, your whereabouts not documented by
skyward camera. You didn’t have instant
access to every iota of information and every product on the planet. “Be Here Now” was a distinct possibility --
along with a sense of alighting upon life rather than plying it with management
skills. Before. There was a vibrancy sizzling through your
bones. The inclination to help a friend,
lend a hand, start a movement was alive.
Oddly to those who defend a preference for digital “connectivity” via
telecommunications, the internet, and satellite-delivered data -- indeed, cannot fathom life without it -- the cracks one might fall through seemed less
gaping, less craggy than they do now. We
were well aware that life was up a creek.
But we felt more rooted in the face of it, more at home, more embodied,
engaged, supported -- and far more given to bold language in articulating
visions of the possible.
Such was
the sentiment that guided me to write “Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto,”
penned for the Utne Reader in 1990.
Most
students of European history dismiss the Luddites of 19th century
England as “reckless machine-smashers” and “vandals.” Probing beyond this interpretation, though,
we find a complex, and thoughtful social movement whose roots lay in a clash
between two worldviews.
The worldview the
Luddites challenged was that of laissez-faire capitalism with is increasing
amalgamation of power, resources, and wealth, rationalized by an emphasis on
“progress.”
The worldview they
supported was an older, decentralized one espousing the interconnectedness of
work, community, family, and nature through craft guilds, village networks, and
local sustainability. They saw the new machines that owners introduced into
their workplaces – the gig mills and shearing frames – as threats not only to
their jobs, but to the quality of their lives. In the end, destroying the
machines was a last-ditch effort by a desperate people whose world lay on the
verge of destruction.
The current
controversy over technology is reminiscent of that of the Luddite period. We
too are being barraged by a new generation of technologies -– biotechnology,
superconductivity, fusion energy, wireless electricity, space weapons, super-computers.
We too are witnessing protest against the onslaught.
A group of Berkeley
students gathered in Sproul Plaza to smash television sets as an act of “therapy
for victims of technology.” A Los Angeles businesswoman hiked onto Vandenberg
Air Force Base and beat a weapons-related computer with a crowbar, bolt cutters,
and cordless drill. Villagers in India resist the bulldozers cutting down their
forests by wrapping their bodies around tree trunks. Japanese living near the
Narita airport sit on the tarmac to prevent airplanes from taking off and
landing. West Germans climb up the smokestacks of factories to protest
emissions that are causing acid rain and killing the Back Forest.
Such acts echo the
commitment of the 19th-century Luddites. Neo-Luddites are 20th-century
citizens – activists, workers, neighbors, social critics, scholars – who
question the predominant modern worldview preaching that unbridled technology represents
progress. Neo-Luddites have the courage to gaze at the full catastrophe of our
century: the technologies created by modern Western societies are out-of-control
and desecrating the fragile fabric on Earth. Like the early Luddites, we too
are a desperate people seeking to protect the livelihoods, communities,
families, and wild spaces we love.
Just
as recent social movements have challenged the idea that current models of
gender roles, economic organization, and family structures are not necessarily
“normal” or “natural,” so the Neo-Luddite movement has come to acknowledge that
technological progress and the kinds of technologies produced in modern society
are not simply “the way things are.”
Technology consists
of more than machines. It includes the techniques of operation and the social
organizations that make a particular machine workable. In essence, a technology
reflects a worldview. Which particular
forms of technology – machines, techniques, and social organization – are
spawned by a particular worldview depends on its perception of life, death,
human potential, and the relationship of humans to nature.
In contrast to the
worldviews of a majority of cultures through history and around the world, the
view that lies at the foundation of modern technological society encourages a
mechanistic approach: to rational thinking, efficiency, utilitarianism,
scientific detachment, and the insistence that the human place on Earth is one
of ownership and supremacy.
Stopping
the destruction brought by such technologies requires not just regulating or
eliminating individual items like pesticides or nuclear weapons. It requires
new ways of thinking about life and humanity. It requires the creation of a new
worldview.
1) Neo-Luddites are not anti-technology. Technology
is intrinsic to human creativity and culture. What we oppose are the kinds of
technologies that are destructive and that emanate from a worldview that sees
rationality as the key to human potential, material acquisition as the key to
human fulfillment, technological development as the key to social progress.
2) All technologies are political. As social
critic Jerry Mander writes, technologies are not neutral tools that can be used
for good or evil depending on who uses them. They are entities that have been
consciously structured to serve specific interests in specific historical
situations. The technologies created in mass technological society are those
that serve the perpetuation of mass technological society. They tend to be
structured for short-term efficiency, profit-taking, war-making, and ease of
production, distribution, and marketing.
Television, for
example, does not just bring entertainment and information to households across
the globe. It offers corporations a surefire method of expanding their markets
and controlling social/political thought. It also breaks down family
communications and narrows people’s experience of life by mediating reality and
lowering their span of attention, thus making them more fertile consumers.
3) The personal view of technology is
dangerously limited. The oft-heard message “but I couldn’t live without my word
processor” overlooks the consequences of widespread use of computers like toxic
contamination of electronics workers or the solidifying of corporate power
through instantaneous access to information.
Producers and
disseminators of technologies tend to introduce their creations in utopian
terms. Pesticides will increase yields to feed a hungry planet! Nuclear energy
will be too cheap to meter! The Pill will liberate women! Learning to critique
technology demands fully examining its sociological context, economic
ramifications, and political meanings. It involves asking not just what is
gained and by whom -- but what is lost and by whom. It involves looking at the
introduction of technologies from the perspective not only of human use, but of
their impact on other living beings, natural systems, and the environment.
As
a move toward dealing with the consequences of modern technologies and
preventing further destruction of life, we favor the dismantling of:
1) Nuclear technologies -- which cause disease
and death at every stage of the fuel cycle;
2) Chemical technologies -- which create poisonous
substances and leave behind toxic wastes;
3) Genetic engineering technologies -- which
foster dangerous mutagens;
4) Television – which functions as a centralized
mind-controlling force, disrupts community life, and poisons the environment;
5) Electromagnetic technologies – whose
non-ionizing radiation alters the natural electrical rhythms of living beings
and causes disease; and
6) Computer technologies – which cause disease
and death in their manufacture, enhance centralized political power, and remove
people from direct experience of life.
We favor a search for
new technological forms. We favor the creation of technologies by the people
directly involved in their use – not by scientists, engineers, and
entrepreneurs who gain financially from mass production of their inventions and
who know little about the context in which their technologies are used.
We favor technologies
that are of a scale and structure that make them understandable to the people
who use them. We favor technologies built with a high degree of flexibility so
that they do not impose a rigid and irreversible imprint on their users, and we
favor technologies that promise political freedom, economic justice, and
ecological balance.
We favor technologies
in which politics, morality, ecology, and technics are merged for the benefit
of life on Earth:
1) Community-based energy sources utilizing
solar, wind, and water technologies – which are renewable and enhance community
integrity and respect for nature;
2) Organic, biological technologies in
agriculture, engineering, architecture, art, medicine, transportation, and
defense – which derive directly from natural models; and
3) Decentralized social technologies – which
encourage participation, responsibility, and empowerment.
We favor the
development of a life-enhancing worldview in Western technological societies. We
seek to instill a perception of life, death, and human potential that will
integrate the human need for creative expression, spiritual experience, and
community with the capacity for rational thought and functionality. We perceive
the human role not as the dominator of other species and planetary biology, but
as integrated into the natural world with appreciation for the sacredness of
life.
We foresee a
sustainable future for humanity if and when Western technological societies
restructure their mechanistic projections and foster the creation of machines,
techniques, and social organizations that respect both human dignity and nature’s
wholeness. In progressing toward such a transition, we are aware: We have
nothing to lose except a way of living that leads to the destruction of all
life. We have a world to gain. (1990)[iii]
This blog is a book. Please feel free to read the next chapter now. Go to the Table of Contents under the introduction on the right side of the page and click on the next chapter.
[i] Lewis
Mumford, “Prologue to Our Time.”
[ii] Letter
from Sophia Mumford, September 6, 1989.
[iii] Adapted
from Chellis Glendinning, “Notes Toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto,” Utne Reader, No. 38, March/April 1990,
pp. 50-53.
