Ever wonder if the majority are the radicals?

Today’s read was Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology by Eric Brende, an autobiographical account of a year and a half spent living in and working with the Old Amish in the quest for better understanding how to live life with minimal technology. Eric Brende is an M.I.T. student who decided to get married and experiment with life in a pre-industrial, pre-mechanized lifestyle. “In a world of organic beings and relationships, machines can act as a wrench,” he writes in conclusion, “ It often makes no sense to save labor and time when labor provides needed exercise and time is spent with family or neighbors.” P. 231

In several ways, he makes the argument that people who work to create their food (and preserve it) eat better, excercize in a more healthy way, and create an environment where their social needs are as well met, if not better met, than their physical. “The Southeast Asian peasantry got together in the name of self-interest to better their common lot,” he writes at one point,  “[but] our neighbors had worsened their lot so they could get together.” P. 40 He makes it amply clear that not having the work power of several people embedded into a machine that one person can run, forces those several people to work together and that it is in working together that people form the sorts of bonds they need to be healthy social human beings. “Physical work, then, served one more function,” Brende explains, 

“besides putting bread on the table and vigor into the physique, it’s also provided a special social elixir.  And this, at the same time, explains why you couldn’t appear too eager to see your neighbor.  He had to keep up the pretext of labor or the whole arrangement would collapse.  Friendship is something you could only sidle up to obliquely.  Or maybe it would be better to say that you let in sidle up to you.” P. 33

In other words, social needs are best met when they are met as a side effect of necessary collaboration.  Perhaps because, as Brende puts it, “since the purpose of getting together was not social, there was no pressure to like or be liked.” P. 32 He speaks of his neighbors who came over to help his family clean up the wreckage of a minor flooding in illustration:

“It was as though some sort of reverse hurricane had struck: four smiling cyclones, bending and gyrating about the property, airing out rugs and casting off debris while spewing out a bit of cheerful chatter.” P. 40

In one of the conversations the author records, he finds himself discussing with a neighbor whether or not it would be beneficial to eliminate horses altogether sinse they seemed to demand so much of the resources. Brende suggests that one could replace the work that it took to maintain the animals with study time.

“For me,” [I said] the kind of life I’d like to have, I’d work hard half the day and read and studied the other half.

Wilbur sighed with recognition; it was the sort of thing you would have expected a college educated person like me to say. 

“Just think how much of the Bible you could learn,” I cajoled him.  “Think how many good books you could read.” 

“But here’s a place where we might disagree – “on this word Wilbur’s eyes popped out in gentle remonstrations – “with your way of thinking we don’t go for book learning.” The sequence of logic that followed, nonetheless fell out with textbook precision.  He knew his destination.  He had several planks on hand.  He built his way, plank by plank, until he had arrived.  He called into question “intensive study”.  He repeated the phrase several times like a physician reminding a patient of the dangers of high cholesterol.  He painted a verbal picture of a bifurcated personality – one whose head swam with ideas that were out of sync with his daily reality.  “By contrast, to live the way we do, you have just what you need to know.  And you learn that – in action.”  After all his careful preparation, he landed on the last word with zest. P. 166

And this of course raises a question I have asked myself my whole life: “Is access to knowledge and time to think about it an asset or a detriment to life? Are we well served in our world of information access? A world where we have infinite access to information that we “do not need”? Is this a detrimental access or a cherishable liberty?

After running the course of his eighteen months in an Old Amish community, Brende concludes, “It is surely not I who [have become] radical or extreme in my practices.  It is the Americans around me.”

Question for Comment: Brende writes:

“If there was one moment when the scales tipped irrevocably in favor of machinery in the English speaking world, however, it was probably back in 1817, when the legendary Ned Ludd and his followers were hanged for vandalizing the power looms that were ruining their livelihoods.  At that moment came the fulfillment of Locke’s novel definition of rights: destroying a machine became legally tantamount to murder.  The plea of self-defense counted for nothing, and opposition to technological advances has ever since been informally stigmatized as “Luddism” p. 9

 Can you think of any ways that your life would improve with a little Luddism?