Laudator Temporis Acti

It is to us ever a painful sight to see the rustic virtues rudely thrown aside by the intrusion of what are termed improvements. A railroad is certainly a capital invention for the traveller, but it may be questioned if it is of any other benefit than that of pecuniary convenience to the places through which it passes. How many delightful hamlets, pleasant villages, and even tranquil county towns, are losing their primitive characters for simplicity and contentment, by the passage of these fiery trains, that drag after them a sort of bastard elegance, a pretension that is destructive of peace of mind, and an uneasy desire in all who dwell by the way-side, to pry into the mysteries of the whole length and breadth of the region it traverses!

Labels: Luddism

The ravages, of course, began long before the war. The invention of the internal-combustion engine may be regarded with justice as the greatest single disaster in the history of mankind. Not only has it destroyed the security of England and made wholesale death and mutilation familiar things; it has also destroyed the beauty of England, killed quiet, and, with quiet, dignity. Take, for example, the case of Sussex. Who would have thought, as we wandered years ago through the Weald in spring and saw that incredible profusion of primroses and wild daffodils, or in summer through the empty spaces of the high downs, that these things upon which we had been nourished in childhood and had grown to rely upon in manhood, turning to them again and again for rest and refreshment of the spirit, would in our time be destroyed, dying before we ourselves should die? Yet so it is. First, the railways scattered their scurf of 'resorts' along the coast and accumulated little ganglions of vulgarity around their stations, as an alien body thrust into the flesh accumulates a zone of inflamed tissue around its place of entry; but the county as a whole remained inviolate. Then came the cars. The south and south-east of England were brought within the range of daily accessibility from the centre, with the result that London burst like a bomb and scattered its debris far and wide over the faces of Surrey and Kent, and presently over that of Sussex. With the coming of the car the peace of the county was broken, its traditions destroyed, its power to refresh and reinvigorate the spirit, a power which depended in part upon its emptiness and its peace, impaired. Its inhabitants bought gramophones and grew basely rich; its roads became maelstroms of traffic along which cars hurled their inert occupants to the coast, its valleys came out in a rash of angry pink; every hilltop had its villa, every village its multiple store, while the sacred peace of the downs was broken by the snorts of motor-bicycles and the hoots of straining cars. If the horde of invaders had derived benefit from their defilements, the case though bad would have been bearable. In fact, however, the majority of those who rifled beauty were unaware of what they did. Walking, just before the war, on Amberley Down, I came upon a small Austin perched upon its highest point, outraging the sight of all beholders. I approached, intending to draw the attention of the occupants to the beneficent but unobserved law which forbids a car to park itself more than fifteen yards from the highway (see the Road Traffic Act 1930). Within it sat a young man and his girl. Their backs were to the view, their windows shut. Were they engaged in the fulfilment of a function intelligible, if there misplaced? They were not. They were sitting stolidly, side by side, listening to the fat-stock prices over the wireless.

• Born Too Late
• A Gloomy Milestone
• What is the Advantage of Locomotion?
• Jouyl
• A Bionic Roach
• No Respect for Mechanical Genius
• American Culture
• Going for the Sake of Going

Labels: Luddism

The motor-car, in bringing us all closer together, by making it easy to have luncheon two counties away, has driven us all further apart, by making it unnecessary for us to know the people in the next bungalow. And so, once again, we have to thank civilisation for nothing.

• Motor Cars and Roads
• The End of Civilization
• Jouyl
• A Bionic Roach
• American Culture

Labels: Luddism

The three enemies of man are: the devil, the state, and technology.

Los tres enemigos del hombre son: el demonio, el estado y la técnica.

Labels: Luddism

I find it most inconvenient to be born into the age of the internal-combustion engine and the electric dynamo and to have no sympathy with them: a push bicycle, a primus stove, and an army rifle mark the bounds of my mechanical capacity.

Labels: Luddism

I think that if I could un-invent one feature of modern life, it would be the car. How wonderful Kyoto would be if there were no cars! Anyone who has spent time in Venice knows what spiritual succor comes from the quiet of a city without cars, where the only sounds are of people's footsteps. At the risk of being called a reactionary, I will shout, "Down with the car!"

• Motor Cars and Roads
• The End of Civilization
• A Gloomy Milestone
• Jouyl
• A Bionic Roach
• American Culture

Labels: Luddism

To me the bicycle is in many ways a more satisfactory invention than the automobile. It is consonant with the independence of man because it works under his own power entirely. There is no combustion of some petroleum product from Venezuela to set the pedals going. Purely mechanical instruments like watches and bicycles are to be preferred to engines that depend on the purchase of power from foreign sources. You can be more independent, and therefore more of a man, in a sailing vessel than in a power-driven boat. In the former you can still keep going if the national or international economy breaks down. You need not trouble yourself about legislative enactments for the exchange of goods and services, about international treaty arrangements for which your life is hostage. The price of power, on the other hand, is enslavement.

Labels: Luddism

I have always considered that the substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind.

It is arguable whether the human race have been gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine. Electricity opens a field of infinite conveniences to ever greater numbers, but they may well have to pay dearly for them. But anyhow in my thought I stop short of the internal combustion engine which has made the world so much smaller. Still more must we fear the consequences of entrusting a human race so little different from their predecessors of the so-called barbarous ages such awful agencies as the atomic bomb. Give me the horse.

• What is the Advantage of Locomotion?
• Jouyl
• A Bionic Roach
• American Culture

Labels: Luddism

Come, my friend, and discourse with me. Let us know what are thy ideas of the inestimable benefits which science has conferred on us in these, our latter days. How dost thou, among others, appreciate railways and the power of steam, telegraphs, telegrams, and our new expresses? But indifferently, you say.

"Time was I've zeed vifteen pair o' 'osses go out of this 'ere yard in vour-and-twenty hour; and now there be'ant vifteen, no, not ten, in vour-and-twenty days! There was the duik,—not this 'un; he be'ant no gude; but this 'un's vather,—why, when he'd come down the road, the cattle did be a-going, vour days an eend. Here'd be the tooter and the young gen'lemen, and the governess and the young leddies, and then the servants,—they'd be al'ays the grandest volk of all,—and then the duik and the doochess, Lord love 'ee, zur; the money did fly in them days! But now,—" and the feeling of scorn and contempt which the lame ostler was enabled by his native talent to throw into that word "now" was quite as eloquent against the power of steam as anything in their favour that has been spoken at dinners, or written in pamphlets by the keenest admirers of latter-day lights.

Labels: Luddism

But no higher wage, no income, will buy for men that satisfaction which of old — until machinery made drudges of them — streamed into their muscles all day long from close contact with iron, timber, clay, wind and wave, horse-strength. It tingled up in the niceties of touch, sight, scent. The very ears unawares received it, as when the plane went singing over the wood, or the exact chisel went tapping in (under the mallet) to the hard ash with gentle sound. But these intimacies are over. Although they have so much more leisure men can now taste little solace in life, of the sort that skilled hand-work used to yield to them. Just as the seaman to-day has to face the stoke-hole rather than the gale, and knows more of heat-waves than of sea-waves, so throughout. In what was once the wheelwright's shop, where Englishmen grew friendly with the grain of timber and with sharp tool, nowadays untrained youths wait upon machines, hardly knowing oak from ash or caring for the qualities of either.

I'm daft. They say I'm daft, and they're richt!
Listen afore I speak.
I like to turn out a bit of wark that is perfect,
or raither wad be perfect
if only the customer had perfect patience.

I like to mak, say, a table out of a tree.
That table maun be perfectly flat and smooth.
I maun see my face in it.
Ken whit I mean? — see my face perfect,
no blurred, nor twisty-weys, not wan iota.

When I say a tree, of course, I mean some boards —
I'm no Robinson Crusoe.

Wuid is sweirt. It's no willin.
Its naitur is to haud up a lot of leaves
and swee about in the wind.

Wuid doesnae want to be flat.
It wants to rax itsel and twist about.
I choose timmer, that auld and seasont,
that muckle droukit and dried and blaffert about,
it has lost aa ambition to dae as it likes.

Wuid doesnae want to be smooth.
I plane it and sand it and try it
on a deid-flat surface.
I sand it and try it and sand it finer.
And when I'm finished I dae it again.

Wuid wants to bide the colour it started.
I stain it wi dragon's bluid or turmeric,
burnt sienna, Pernambuco wuid, burnt umber,
indigo, even, if I'm in the mood.

Wuid wants to be reuch and grainy.
I rub in f1lling, and sand it finer and finer.

Thair again, raw linseed yle and shellac in spirits
are sweirt to mix. I mix them.
And thair's yer polish. Or anither wey,
byled linseed yle and pouthert tripoli
and twa days' wark, thon's better still.
Polish-daft I am, polish without end:
pottie pouther, pomas, crocus, jewellers' rouge,
and every job sent out afore it's duin,
naethin-like perfect yet.

I ken I'm daft. I wark wi naitur agen naitur.
But aa that is in fact a thing of the past.
I hae been Moved On wi the times.
I'm in chairge of a machine as big as our hous.
I set the haunnles on the dials, press a button.
Out comes, say, Honduras mahogany, shade nine.
I dinnae ken hou it got thair.
I dinnae ken whit it's made of.
But it's perfect,
perfect every time.
And I dinnae like it.

It's daft I am,
no donnart.

That wood-polishing poem ["Perfect," Complete Poetical Works, p. 40] turned out better than I expected, at least it pleases people a good deal at poetry-readings, which is something to go by, though there is a lot more to it, of course. It is easy to follow and repetitive, so easy to take in at one reading. I went to a Nelson Hall concert and admired the gloss that some Corporation painter had got on the panelling, and that started the thing off. I don't really know about polishing and staining wood, but my father knew a lot about it, and there is plenty of information about it in one of his books that is still in the house. He made two violins and varnished them beautifully. One of them is considered to have a pretty good tone, very good, in fact, by people who know....

Labels: Luddism

Suppose further that, first from choice and then from necessity (our new, frightening friend), we had to stay put in one spot, vagrants no longer since the gas that whisked us over the face of the earth had run out and the highways had buckled and half vanished as grass returned to cover the scars of that self-inflicted wound. Suppose that our lives were spent in homes where the mysteries of birth and death had occurred, instead of being handed over to sterilized non-places called hospitals, and that our work was done near the hallowed ground where our dead lay. Suppose that we had to live according to the rhythms of day and night, the magic juice that disrupted those rhythms having long since been priced off the market by the utilities companies. Might not the symbolisms of the sacred which have withered in the regnum hominis start to take hold again? None of these changes is impossible to conceive, unless we are so mesmerized by the size and noise of the man-locked set all around us that we think it indestructible. Is it impossible or illicit to imagine the change of heart and mind which might in time go with these material changes?

Labels: Luddism

His cottage had no central heating or television and only recently a telephone. The advantages of these amenities he thought exaggerated, perhaps not altogether good for us. To the last, he corresponded in a tiny, rather elegant script, disdaining the typewriter, much less the word-processor.

He did not travel abroad, read novels, smoke, attend the theatre or the cinema. He had watched television only twice in his life and then only for ten minutes.

• Computers and Pencils
• Anachronists

Labels: Luddism

So as long as trades and industries remain I should recommend you to support yourself sparingly by them and to trust to your little plot of ground to provide you with luxuries. For there is no grape sweeter than that which you pluck from your own vine nor, unless you have been raised in Putney or the Bronx, is there any sweeter occupation.

It is the strong conviction of that fact that makes France in general and Provence in particular the only stable and prosperous states in the world. But the inhabitants of Putney and the Oranges immensely outnumber all the thinking men of the world and it is the occupations of their spare times that is the real difficulty in front of us....You will suggest to one of them that the ideal—as well as the only practicable—state is one of very small communities belonging to hundreds of little nations each not much larger than, say, Monte Carlo; without rigid boundaries, violently settled codes of manners, without lethally supported senses of property....And imagine his guffaws!...

So he will yell: "Me live in a backwoods town!...Me never eat canned goods again!...Me go native!...Me live with Dagoes!....Me wear home-made pants! I don't think...What a hope!...Oh...hell!"

It will however come to that after the world has passed through the preparatory stages of Fascism or Communism of the Russian variety or the mutually exterminating contests of those two opposed world tendencies....We must go back to the Dark Ages....For if we do not go back to the Provençal Dark Ages we shall go back to those of the Teutoburger Wald with the poison-gas clouds for ever above the appalled tree-tops....

I do not suppose we shall get rid of—or even that it would be desirable entirely to get rid of—the Machine. I do not suppose that we shall ever not have War with us, or rid ourselves entirely of the sense of property, or of Churches, or of Science or even of Law which, ever since the Evil side of the Dual First principle put a tabu on the pamplemousse and Eve ate the first brussels sprout, has been the primary curse of humanity. And it would be hopeless to think of ever being relieved of the final curse, national patriotism.

But all these things must—they will inevitably—be made little. They will be reduced to their proper status either because the armament firms and scientists will blot out almost the entire populations of the world, leaving here and there mere pockets of men. Or else by a change of heart in humanity!

One way or another the number of machines and of machine hours worked must be reduced to a minimum. The wars of the nations must be little wars of little nations brought about by local jeers; the religions must be little religions; the churches without temporal powers; the leisure enjoyments be individual enjoyments. The glorification of Mass must disappear. You will talk of the largest pumpkin in the village as a glory, not of the largest armament-factory in the world. There must be the change of heart—the progression.

No, I want to belong to a nation of Small Producers, with some local, but no national feeling at all. Without boundaries, or armed forces, or customs, or government. That would never want me to kill anyone out of a group feeling. Something like being a Provençal. I might want to insult someone from the Gard if he said he could grow better marrows than we in the Var. But that would be as far as even local feeling would go...and of course I would not pretend that we could grow wine as good as the Côte du Rhône.

Labels: Luddism

The Taoists objected to machinery. There are of course many grounds upon which labour-saving devices may be condemned. The common modern objection is that they cause unemployment; but religious leaders (Gandhi, for example) reject them on the ground that they have a degrading effect on those who use them. The Taoist objection was of the latter kind:

Tzu-kung, the disciple of Confucius, after travelling to Ch'u in the south, came back by way of Chin. When he was passing through Han-yin he saw an old man who was engaged in irrigating his vegetable plots. The way this old man did it was to let himself down into the well-pit by footholes cut in the side and emerge clasping a pitcher which he carefully emptied into a channel, thus expending a great deal of energy with very small results.

'There exists,' Tzu-kung said to him, 'a contrivance with which one can irrigate a hundred vegetable plots in a single day. Unlike what you are doing, it demands a very small expenditure of energy but produces very great results. Would you not like me to tell you about it?' The gardener raised his head and gazed at Tzu-kung. 'What is it like?' he asked. 'It is an instrument carved out of wood,' said Tzu-kung, 'heavy behind and light in front. It scoops up the water like a bale, as quickly as one drains a bath-tub. Its name is the well-sweep.' A look of indignation came into the gardener's face. He laughed scornfully, saying, 'I used to be told by my teacher that where there are cunning contrivances there will be cunning performances, and where there are cunning performances there will be cunning hearts. He in whose breast a cunning heart lies has blurred the pristine purity of his nature; he who has blurred the pristine purity of his nature has troubled the quiet of his soul, and with one who has troubled the quiet of his soul Tao will not dwell. It is not that I do not know about this invention, but that I should be ashamed to use it.'

Labels: Luddism

We mourned for a lost Eden. Farming was becoming a noisy, mechanised, stinking business. Wagons, ploughs, and the horses that drew them were all disappearing. Wood and stone were giving place to asbestos and corrugated iron. Care and grace, and the old slow pace and the old thoroughness and craft were all abandoned. The farm tractor was now king, and speed was all-important. Thatched ricks, cut-and-laid hedges, shocks of corn and cocks of hay, handmade wooden gates and stiles, were rare sights now. The stone-breaker was no longer needed since the white limestone lanes were tarred. Flowers that were once common had become rare, and only a few of the old mixed pastures escaped the zeal of farmers keen to sow 'leys' without a 'weed'. Those who never saw Edwardian England can have no idea of its beauty. Old photographs show this with great poignancy. True, the children in them often looked cowed and ill-clad, and the men and women are bowed with labour, but that need not have been the heavy price paid for beauty and naturalness: the brash angularity of today, its harsh shapes and unsympathetic textures, its litter of poles and wires, its makeshift, temporary appearance lie like an ugly palimpsest upon the old countryside.

In the sleepy England of my childhood it was an event to see a motor car, or watch a biplane for the first time until it became a speck in the distance and vanished. Nothing ever changed. Sugar was twopence a pound, and a letter required a penny stamp. Yet the ugly and stupid technological revolution was imminent. Over the years I have watched the change from age-old agriculture to a mechanised 'agro-business'. Horses and men have gone, and traditional farming craftsmanship such as rick-building and thatching, coppicing and hedge-laying has been extinguished in the process. A hedge has become an obstacle to be removed, and wild flowers troublesome weeds to be exterminated.

Year by year we lose more and more of the things we have loved: ancient woodlands, flowery meadows, handsome old farm buildings, stiles and gates of oak and ash; things made of wool, linen or silk; cloth-bound books of lissom paper, their sections properly stitched so they open easily; and a multitude of domestic things that were good to handle – all made before the fatal invasion of synthetic substances and shoddy methods.

Labels: Luddism

Where once the haycocks lay
Soft-mounded and sweet,
Compounded was that hay
Of sorrel and cow-wheat,
Trefoil and tormentil,
Potentilla, meadowsweet,
Melilot and storksbill
Pungent in June heat;
Lady's bedstraw, woodruff,
Lady's mantle, marguerite,
With marjoram flowers enough
To make the air sweet;
Wagwants and nameless grasses,
Goosegrass, cocksfeet,
Feverfew and creeping Jenny,
Eyebright neat.

Where once the wagon rolled
Hoop-raved and proud
Across the shorn wold
Under the June cloud,
With slow sound of horse and wheel
Through aisles of grass and vetch,
Meadow vetchling, selfheal,
The scented load to fetch —
Knapweed, silverweed,
Hawkweed and clover,
Meadow sage, meadow rue
The pasture over:
Meadow fescue, millet grass,
Timothy and rye,
Salad burnet, creeping cinquefoil
Under the June sky —

Now the stinking engine roars
Down streamlined fields.
Oblong hayblocks
Its vomit yields.
Of sterile and purest ley,
Parcelled and hard,
Compounded is that hay,
By no flower marred;
Tested and scentless,
Weedless and clean,
Clinical bales
Litter the June scene.

Yet when the summer moon
Rises over the wood,
They are like standing stones
That have always stood;
Primeval and high,
Ageless, stark,
Their long shadows lie
In the June dark.
Older than haycocks
These cromlechs stand:
Immemorial
They rise from the land.
Man's strange ways,
Newfangled and odd,
Are all one
To the June god.

Labels: Luddism

With modernity in architecture there came, tied to it, the paradox of a technological retrogression. If a medieval candle went out, one person was in darkness; the failure of a power station plunges a whole city into darkness, halts elevators in their shafts, trains on their tracks. That's the principle. The actuality is far more subtle. The brunt of modernity is in a pervasive convenience and in technological "advances." I put that word in quotation marks because I have come to feel that modernity has marched into a great trap, that the once-balanced paradox has come to weigh more on the side of retrogression.

Labels: Luddism

I often find it comforting to think of Uncle Dockery Fitzsimmons, a serene old bright-leaf tobacco farmer who lives in Black Ankle County, about six miles from Stonewall. He is the only man I have ever known who has absolutely no respect for the mechanical genius of Western civilization. One day, when I was about fifteen, we we were fishing Little Rump River for blue bream and a motorboat chugged by, scaring all the fish to the bed of the river, and Uncle Dockery said, "Son, the only inventions that make sense to me are the shotgun, the two-horse wagon, the butter churn, and the frying pan. Sooner or later such contraptions as the motorboat will drive the whole human race into Dix Hill." Dix Hill is a suburb of Raleigh, where the North Carolina State Asylum for the Insane is located.

Uncle Dockery is still opposed to the automobile. "I don't want to go nowhere," he used to say, "that a mule can't take me." His hatred of automobiles embraces people who ride in them. One summer afternoon we were sitting on his veranda, eating a watermelon, when a neighbor ran up the road and said, "There's been a terrible auto accident up on the highway, Mr. Fitzsimmons." The news pleased Uncle Dockery. He placed his rasher of watermelon on the rail of the veranda, smiled broadly, and asked, "How many killed?" "Four," said the neighbor. "Well, that's just fine," said Uncle Dockery. "Where were they going in such a rush?" "They were going to the beach for a swim," said the neighbor. Uncle Dockery nodded with satisfaction and said, "I guess they figured the Atlantic Ocean wouldn't wait."

Labels: Luddism

We are slow to learn. In spite of warnings, we are once again cashing-in on our trees. In the ordinary course of things, trees are remorselessly cut down by the industrial Frankenstein to feed his monster's voracious appetite for pit-props, boxes, sheds, bungalows, matchsticks and what-not, and it now seems necessary to fell them as a means to more lucrative farming. When I look mentally around England, my heart fails me at the sight of so much senseless devastation. Oh! for a Cobbett to ride through the land and lift up his voice in anger.

Even in my village has the rot set in. Gone are the proud elms that once topped the rise leading up to Amberley Hills. The glorious limes are now chip baskets. The oaks, beeches and pines, the nobility of the forest, are no more. Many a tree has been felled in Ridding Woods whose annular rings proved that it was a lusty harp of God when Ben Jonson was a boy. But not only have the peers of the forest fallen in sacrifice to Mars, the humbler populace has also been decimated to clear a path for the tractor and the combine harvester. The hedges, the hawthorns, sloes, crabs and rowans, have been ruthlessly torn up in the name of economy, and to make way for my lord man who rides forward on his mechanical juggernaughts to who knows what strange destiny. Only this morning I met Tom Mellows in the Hazel Patch. When I was a boy, Tom drove his team afield with loud cries of encouragement and abuse; and in the intervals he spat lustily. He was a true son of the soil; and though to the casual observer he seemed a mere clod, at least he had the same blessings as a clod—the same sun, wind and rain to modify his elemental roughness and to plant in his mind a vague humility. But now Tom rides out in the morning on a quivering, pulsating monster and rattles over the stones on his way to the fields. He has more time to spit now that he sits in splendid isolation as custodian of his gaudy orange machine; and no doubt he is happy to know that he is moving with the times. But he fails to see, I am afraid, that such movements are not without their backwash; and in a similar way turns a blind eye to the rise in the cost of living, but acclaims with much spitting and slapping of thighs the obvious increase in wages. But since wages move forward in direct proprtion to the cost of living—like ancient chain-shot made of two cannon-balls chained together hurling along side by side—nobody is any better or worse off.

The soil seems in no happier case than its cultivator. Deprive the soil of its natural humus and it will so deteriorate as to cause an economic landslide. Of course, the catastrophe may be averted for a time by fetching all sorts of artificial foods and medicines for the soil, to keep it, as it were, on its feet. Even this will have to be done in lorries and railway trucks made of wood; and the trees, had they been left to grow, could have provided the leaf-mould for the soil. De-forestation and mass production precede famine; and dust-bowls are the direct consequences of interference with the delicate balance of Nature.

Ah, you should see Cynddylan on a tractor.
Gone the old look that yoked him to the soil;
He is a new man now, part of the machine,
His nerves of metal, and his blood oil.
The clutch curses, but the gears obey
His least bidding, and lo, he's away
Out of the farmyard, scattering hens.
Riding to work now as a great man should,
He is the knight at arms breaking the fields'
Mirror of silence, emptying the wood
Of foxes and squirrels and bright jays.
The sun comes over the tall trees
Kindling all the hedges, but not for him
Who runs his engine on a different fuel.
And all the birds are singing, bills wide in vain,
As Cynddylan passes proudly up the lane.

Labels: arboricide, Luddism

Job Davies, eighty-five
Winters old, and still alive
After the slow poison
And treachery of the seasons.

Miserable? Kick my arse!
It needs more than the rain’s hearse,
Wind-drawn, to pull me off
The great perch of my laugh.

What’s living but courage?
Paunch full of hot porridge,
Nerves strengthened with tea,
Peat-black, dawn found me

Mowing where the grass grew,
Bearded with golden dew.
Rhythm of the long scythe
Kept this tall frame lithe.

What to do? Stay green.
Never mind the machine,
Whose fuel is human souls.
Live large, man, and dream small.

Labels: Luddism