Maine writer fights the machines New book analyzes Luddite tradition

AGAINST THE MACHINE: THE HIDDEN LUDDITE TRADITION IN LITERATURE, ART, AND INDIVIDUAL LIVES, by Nicols Fox, Island Press/Shearwater Books, Washington D.C., 2002. $25.

It seems only natural that Nicols Fox should have chosen a small village in Maine as her home more than a decade ago. For as she tells us right at the start, she is a “technology resister,” and ever since the late fifties, Maine has built a reputation as a post-industrial state, a place where back-to-the-landers live off the grid, a place where organic farmers and gardeners have a large and influential organization, a place where a couple like Arthur and Nan Kellam could move their lives and their way of life to Placentia, a small island off Mount Desert, and live there quite alone for 40 years. And quite without the accessories of what we call civilization: no television, no microwave, no automobile, no electricity – not much of anything, really, except each other and a very basic dwelling they built for shelter.

Fox took a boat ride out to Placentia to see for herself where the couple that defied technology’s pervasive influence had made their stand.

For in a way, the Kellams had become symbols of the anti-technology struggle, a battle, the author tells us, most of us have already lost. As she writes in her prologue: “For the past two-hundred years, technology has been creeping up on us slowly, seductively, incrementally, until now it dominates our thinking, our expectations and our actions in ways that could not have been anticipated and of which we are scarcely aware. … Over the two centuries the relationship between human and tool has shifted dramatically. The extent to which we now attempt to adjust our lives to the requirements of the machine is unacknowledged. We adjust automatically, willingly, bravely: remembering our identification numbers, fitting our hands to the keyboards. … But the struggle to adjust is not without consequences. It manifests itself in our stress, our discomfort, our rage.”

Using this as her springboard, the energetic author jumps off for another 400 pages of analysis, anecdote and articulate essays on how 200 years of technology’s advance has affected our culture; and, more importantly, how individuals have fought the good fight against it over the two centuries since Ned Ludd and his followers battled to destroy the first machines of the Industrial Age. Like Maine’s organic farmers and gardeners, many are still fighting.

Readers are taken on a more or less chronological tour of philosophers, poets, artists, composers, naturalists, authors, architects and others who have questioned and criticized technology, who are, like the author, technology resisters. These include Henry David Thoreau, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, William Blake, and Maine’s own Scott and Helen Nearing and their disciple, Eliot Coleman, who is still setting the standard as an organic gardener and farmer.

In 400 relatively dense pages (dense not in prose style, but in their capacity for provoking thought), Fox must have marshaled just about every cultural argument against technology’s hurtling advance that exists as an intellectual premise. Surely, she has done her homework and then some. As much as this is an argument, it is also a cultural treatise, a valuable reference for historians and sociologists.

But how effective is it when it comes to changing current technological trends? Can it slow, even for a moment, our ever-increasing surrender to machines? We shall, obviously, have to wait a while for the answer, if any there be, to such questions. Surely Fox has given her effort the old college try, and then some. But this reader wishes she had acknowledged some of technology’s redeeming features. Many of us, including this writer, would be dead if it were not for some of the amazing advances in surgical medicine.

And would the world be more or less violent without the technology that has created weapons so sophisticated they are the most effective deterrents known to history. There is much to be argued against technology, as this articulate book certifies in no uncertain terms. But are there arguments on the other side? Whatever else it will do, this fine effort frames the arguments as they have never been framed before.