Luddites

To type in Luddites on a computer screen is to instantly receive the red underline of 'typo'. The screen writer has broken a semantic taboo of the American way of life. If he or she types in talmud and bible the lowercase 't' springs like elastic into uppercase 'T'. But the poor old bible stays glumly in lower case 'b'.

If you want to argue who won the American and cultural race wars, that is as good an instant argument as any. After all America is the land of the instant solution like instant coffee. The English language teacher, if from the Commonwealth, now throws in the towel. Big Brother and Brave New World turned out to be Microsoft.

There may never have been Luddites in the American/English lexicon. They are now inferior even to fiction. There is no software memory that they ever existed at all. Software operators must call them 'terrorists' to escape the red underline of Microsoft.

Terrorists have no syntax problems. A few nights ago on television I saw one in Israel summarily taken out. The American and Israeli public, for at least one day, repeatedly feasted their eyes- but not their brains or their noses-on his execution.

How does the Oxford dictionary, in its archaic book form, define Luddite?
I read,

‘Member of band of mechanics (1811-1816) who used riots for destruction of machinery.’

As befits Oxford, the Luddites here are associated with semantic connotations of group or mass criminality. Thieves make up bands. In proper English, regimes always have uprisings, Governments always have riots.

This is the semantic verdict of Luddites. When a citizen protests any technical innovation, the inevitable pejorative charge will be luddism. That is a mindless fear of modernity, a public confession to technical and intellectual inferiority. History will always run them over as they were run over in the early nineteenth century. They will be history as the recent American lexicon now dismisses every aspect of the past even when it is reflective and instructive.

So in the English historical lexicon, Luddites are mindless gangs of machinery wreckers. They are idiotic blocks in the path of technological progress. No reason, or inducement can unblock them.

However a good or real historian must question the motivation of legions of English working men, in the early nineteenth-century, to engage in these mass attacks of destruction of industrial property. The characteristic happening was after their vandalism, they vanished into the law- abiding English countryside. As is typical in English history, we must look for the lone dissenting voice of reason in the British Parliament.

Lord Byron was a young aspiring great poet, and a member of the House of Lords. He addressed the House.

‘The well-being of the poor ought to matter more than the enrichment of a few monopolists!’ he exclaimed.
‘Never, in European and Asian travels, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my travels in the very heart of a Christian country.’

The authorities received letters from men signed off as Captain or General or Ned Ludd. They boasted of their invincibility in destroying the new cotton spinning factories. A good guess is that Ludd was a sarcastic verbal play on the deferential address My Lud. The British Government eventually passed a law that made Luddite attacks a capital offence.

Sometimes in history technology races ahead of culture. In the ancient Roman Empire the villa was originally created by the enslavement of their neighbouring peasants and tribes- people. Then through its history, the villa became rooted in the country side. At the end of its history, its slaves became free and transformed into their villages.

Until the legalisation and rise of unionism in the later nineteenth century, even the humblest member in every society lived as a person with his own business. The journeymen and landless peasants below them lived lives outside society, barely more bare and ignorant than the beasts. Except in times of war and disorder, life of the lower classes appeared to be fixed for ever. Now, like a giant juggernaut - that reduced the weavers to unskilled, pauperised wage-earners- factories crept inexorably over the English countryside.

Yet despite the terror and legends the Luddites stirred up, by the end of the Napoleonic wars they had evaporated forever into the countryside. The soldier's gun and the hangman's noose had ended their terror. A new semi-legal dissent movement of the poor replaced it: the Chartist movement.

Chartism did not sink roots into the English and American English lexicon. Only among historians is it know today. Paradoxically, everyone of its demands except for annually elected Parliaments is the government system that even George Bush and the neo cons profess every country on earth should have. But from the Chartists' original petition to Parliament and its implementation in Great Britain almost a century passed by.

Meanwhile in the Luddite-infested countryside, the factories became themselves rooted into the environment. After them came railways and all the other gradual urban and industrial encroachments into the countryside. The typical British country person had after all no desire to live like their weaver forbears had lived.

So today in the British countryside, its inhabitants fight to preserve as national and local treasures the very objects and symbols their ancestors fought so bitterly and manfully to destroy. The Luddites fought so their descendants could be free people and inherit a sense of ownership over their own environment.

In 1851 old ex-Luddites and their children and grandchildren took the new trains into London to stare and marvel at the temple to modernism and technology, the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park.

update: 2011

I now see Luddites in the computer spell-check. Either I was mistaken or the "one percenters" are beginning now to educate their once and future masters.