#modernity

“But while the Luddites lost their war, their case was always correct. That war was not fought against technology per se—what Lewis Mumford called ‘technics’. Most Luddites operated weaving looms themselves, and were quite comfortable with machinery. What mattered was who controlled it. They were fighting what they called ‘the factory system’—the destruction of lived freedom, and the regimentation of both body and soul. Like the Fen Tigers and the many unnamed people who have stood up against the onward march of dehumanising ‘progress’, General Ludd and his legions were fighting the monster from the desert, and their struggle was existential. If they could see us today, transfixed by our glowing screens, deskilled and dependent on oligarchs for permission to earn, eat and speak, with the factory system gone global and the Earth heating up from its exhaust, they might be permitted a grim smile.”

This is the devil’s bargain of the technological society, and we have been falling for it forever: embrace the new, lose the old, and find yourself more deeply entwined in a technological web from which you cannot extricate yourself even if you want to . . . It’s often suggested that when we moved from Christendom via the Enlightenment into our current age, whatever we might call it, we desacralised or ‘disenchanted’ our culture: that we became pure materialists. For its proponents, this process was a move towards ‘reason’ and away from ‘superstition’. For opponents, it represented a slide into decadence and moral dissolution . . . ‘The fate of our times’, wrote pioneering sociologist Max Weber, ‘is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world'.