Lessons from the Luddites
By KIRKPATRICK SALE
- Technologies are never neutral, and some are hurtful.
- Industrialism is always a cataclysmic process, destroying
the past, roiling the present, making the future uncertain.
- "Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can
be trusted with machines."
- The nation-state, synergistically intertwined with industrialism,
will always come to its aid and defense, making revolt futile
and reform ineffectual.
- But resistance to the industrial system, based on some grasp
of moral principles and rooted in some sense of moral revulsion,
is not only possible but necessary.
- Politically, resistance to industrialism must force the viability
of industrial society into public consciousness and debate.
- What purpose does this machine serve?
- What problem has become so great that it needs this solution?
- Is this invention nothing but, as Thoreau put it, an improved
means to an unimproved end?
- Who are the winners?
- Who are the losers?
- Will this invention concentrate or disperse power, encourage
or discourage self worth?
- Can society at large afford it?
- Can the biosphere?
- Philosophically, resistance to industrialism must be embedded
in an analysis--an ideology, perhaps--that is morally informed,
carefully articulated and widely shared.
- Anthropocentrism must be opposed by the principle of biocentrism
and the spiritual identification of the human with all living
species and systems.
- Globalism must be opposed by the empowerment of the coherent
bioregion and small community.
- Industrial capitalism must be opposed by an ecological and
sustainable economy built upon accommodation and commitment to
the earth.
Adapted from "Setting Limits on Technology", The
Nation, June 5, 1995, pages 785 - 788. Kirkpatrick Sale is
the the author most recently of Rebels against the Future:
The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons
for the Machine Age (Addison-Wesley). Adaptation and HTML
by Bret Pettichord, without permission.
What's a Luddite?