Lent Like a Luddite

 

My son was in middle school when he started telling his friends that his family was Amish. Yes, we grew our own vegetables in a garden nourished by our own compost piles. Mom baked bread without a bread machine and hand knitted sweaters. And, yes, Dad didn't own a snowblower and cleared the driveway with a shovel. The chief evidence, however, of my son's claim, according to his observations, was that we lived in a four bedroom house with a living room and a family room and had only one television set. Just one. He repeated this unimaginable fact to his friends, said it in German in his high school language class, and even briefly convinced his college roommate freshman year that his upbringing might as well have been without electricity.

Of course, we weren't Amish, not by a long shot. Had my son known as much about history and low technology philosophies as he does today, he probably would have come up with another, more accurate word to describe our family life style. He might have declared us Luddites.

This year I decided to do some random Lenten writings exploring what it might look like to do Lent like a Luddite. If you are familiar with the term “Luddite” and you have read this far, you might have a picture in your head of me taking a sledgehammer to my laptop and writing this with pencil and paper. Or perhaps imagining my husband and I finally getting the household television count down to zero. Neither is true. Since the term “Luddite” is often used incorrectly,I thought I'd spend the rest of this post explaining who the Luddites really were and why I think they have something to say about how we can spend Lent.

The Luddites were highly skilled weavers and textile craftsmen living during the early days of the industrial revolution in England. Named after the semi-fictitious Ned Ludd*, the Luddites were neither anti-technology nor ignorant of the operation and working of the textile machines of the day. They were “educated” craftsmen in that they spent years in apprenticeships learning their craft. The quality of their work reflected their effort and they took pride in the excellence of their product. In the early 1800s in England the hard economic times brought on by the ongoing Napoleonic wars coincided with the beginnings of mass produced fabrics. Many of the operators of the new textile machinery were untrained, poorly paid and produced low quality goods. The Luddites attempted to get the attention of textile mill owners, hoping to maintain the high standard of the textile craftsmen and earn a wage appropriate for their training and quality of work, even if they now would produce it on powered machines. The mill owners preferred to pay untrained operators and settle for inferior textiles, pocketing the savings for themselves. Angered at what they saw as a insult to both their livelihood and the quality of their craft, the Luddites began their destructive attempt to get the mill owners to reconsider. Using large sledgehammers, they smashed and destroyed weaving frames all over England. Machine breaking became a capital offense and eventually the retribution by the authorities against the Luddites became more violent than the Luddites' assaults on the mills.

In 1829, Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle noted that the people of the time were aware of both the positive and the negative aspects of the Industrial Revolution and the amazing “mighty change” it would cause in their “modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.”

Today, the Luddites are mainly remembered for their violence against the technological machines of their day. But the Luddites also asked important questions that we can learn to ask in our day, and I think Lent is a good time to ponder these questions. For each new technology - “machine” - we let into our lives, are we losing something valuable, something of quality that the “old way” of doing it provided? How can this loss be avoided? When we can't live without the new technology, how do we decide to adapt, to use it in a way that does not diminish our lives and relationships? To what extent are we in danger of growing “mechanical in head and in heart, as well as hand”? I'll be asking myself these questions in the weeks before Easter. I suspect the answers will not come easily.

*Ned Ludd might have existed, but he was only a symbolic image of the movement, giving his name to it. He was by no means a recognizable leader. He may have been a young apprentice that damaged some weaving equipment in a fit of rage years before the Luddites did their own spectacular damage.