Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Today I heard you discuss Luddites. Pretty much everything you said was incorrect, albeit common knowledge. There was really no one in the XIX century who was against machines in the way that modern Luddites are. The original Luddites, followers of the fictional Ned Ludd, were stocking frame weavers. They had been among the most mechanized and automated workers in the world since the invention of the stocking frame in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. They were not protesting the use of stocking frames. They were attacking unskilled workers who were charging lower prices for inferior goods. Their "masters", far from being the object of their actions, often went with them on their expeditions. Their actions were entirely about prices not about machines. They smashed the machines of competitors to supress competition. They did not smash their own machines.

The closest you can get to the myth of machine haters in the XIX century is Captain Swing. That was a movement against the use of mechanical threshers to replace farm workers. They did, for a short period, smash mechanical threshers but their complaint was not that the machines were evil, but that their employers were stupid. The farmers in question needed farm hands in the spring, summer and fall, but replaced the hands traditional winter work by using the machines. That put the farm hands on the dole, which the farmers had to pay. There was no actual economy for the farmers, only loss of dignity for the hands.

Modern Luddites, who rage against machines, live in the world that William Morris imagined in News from Nowhere, where machines run everything, allowing people to live with less effort and spend time thus freed from sustenance enjoying themselves, thinking and debating, but the machines are invisible, forgotten, and discredited. It is hip to proclaim that you are a Luddite and cannot use a computer, but few indeed are the people in this world who could exist without them, especially those with enough leisure to complain about them. Such posers cite such figures as Morris, John Ruskin, and the Luddites as precursors, but none of those took a stand against machines.

It is interesting to remember, in such discussions, that from the fifteenth century until well into the twentieth, printing was among the most technologically sophisticated enterprises in the world. Even if you go back before movable type, language, the alphabet and writing are advanced technology, not pastoral simplicity.

How the myth of Luddites managed to prevail against the simple truth of the matter is interesting in itself, but rather long.

I just wrote a fairly long post in reply. It seems the machine had logged me out and therefore ate it.

Just now I do not have time to redo it. The short answer is that I spent several years studying the period and much of what I wrote is the result of searching for anyone who actually took a principled stance against machinery. I found no one. I looked carefully at such cited critics as Ruskin and Morris, rare figures in an age that realized how much their lives depended on machinery for the degree that those lives were lifted out of misery and squalor. Ruskin and Morris did not like machinery, but they both recognized that their dreams of arts and crafts depended on the wealth created by machinery. They both recognized the level of artistic design, both in the works and in the decoration, that machinery embodied. They simply preferred to promote arts and hand crafts.

I have seen the patent issued by Queen Elizabeth for the stocking frame.

While it has been too long for me to be sure, I would start by checking Eric Hobsbawm for a discussion of the Luddites themselves that recognizes just who they were. There were several groups of agitators in the first part of the century of which the Luddites were only one. The only one I found who wrecked the machines that replaced them, or that they worked on themselves, was Captain Swing and their is a book by that name that describes in detail what the movement was about. It was a local economic dispute, not a principled stance against machinery.

If this is insufficient, I could try a little more.

Not at all, just to bad design. That is human.

re: Malagee Buck..
I let my mind float a little to childhood back in Va.
We used a variation of Ms Malagee.
Albeit a bit on the crude side.
I have no idea where we learned it.
It was something of a game and it was usually played when me and my 3 siblings were confined to the back seat of our '50 Ford.
When one of us made a very audible "toot" the game was on..
You had to yell loudly "safety". If one forgot the phrase "buck 7" was announced by any one of the offended. It was then that 7 blows..rather punches..to the shoulder were administered to the offendee.
After a couple of those one would remember the courtesy word "safety" (to the gritted teeth again of the offended) or one would generally stop because their shoulder was pretty sore by the middle of the trip.