On Being a Pseudo-Luddite

More about Principles, Permaculture, Scythes, and Composting

Here is where I tackle my self-proclaimed identity as a Pseudo-Luddite.  This comes heavily from my reading of Wendell Berry, and I have, like, 100 posts I want to write about that man’s work because it’s shaped my life so powerfully in the last 15 years.  Mr. Berry somewhat famously wrote an article called Why I Won’t Buy a Computer back in the 80’s.  What I just wrote in that last sentence is perfect proof that I am a Pseudo-Luddite.  I am currently writing on a laptop computer and provided a link to Mr. Berry’s book on Amazon, about why he won’t buy a computer.  Computers and Amazon are, in my pseudo-Luddite view, a big part of the problem of the modern world, or at least provide a platform for our problems to fester.  Yet I use them, and I use them a lot.  What’s the deal?

Well, I’m first going to sidestep any accusations you may have of my hypocrisy.  Guilty as charged.  In fact, casting aspersions of impurity is a favorite pastime of warring factions in politics, lifestyle wars, and just about everywhere else, that bores me to tears.  I’ll invoke in my defense that I never meant to have rigid principles that I strictly adhere to anyhow.  At least not since my 20’s.  Back then I read a Frederick Beuchner book called Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC in which he defines a number of common terms in Christian parlance.  In the entry about “Principles”, Mr Beuchner says, “Principles are what people have instead of God.”  When I read that, it was a big revelation to me, a step toward greater freedom (I'd probably also say now that "God is something people sometimes have instead of their own God-given senses and brilliance”).  Or, I could invoke Charles Eisenstein who said something like (paraphrasing because I can’t remember where I read it; it might be in his book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.  Highly recommend it!), “A person can choose to live by principles or convictions, but I don’t recommend it.”  I see rigidly held principles as another kind of fundamentalism. Like if I stopped using all computers because I find Mr. Berry’s arguments are so persuasive and I want to demonstrate my purity to you all by shunning them.  Look at me, I’m so much better than you!  I think they call that virtue signaling these days.  If you want to hang out with all the pure people, good luck finding them, and don’t bother inviting me.

    I grew up using computers as computers were coming of age.  So, I use them.   I try to use them well, and use them only for what I want to use them for, not for what they want to use me for!   I’ve struggled with their addictive qualities ever since I bought a Nintendo as a teenager and found myself on it 8 hours a day. (This is especially true now that they are really just terminals linked to the huge internet, which pulls you in with its siren call of wasting your life away voyeuristically watching other people, whether they be actors or real folks).   I’ve really struggled with email, which I find to be such a millstone around my neck if I don’t practice strict boundaries with it.   But, I use YouTube all the time when, for instance, I need to fix my sink and I’ve never done that repair before.  Or, when I want to find out if someone has done an authentic reenactment of Michael Faraday’s Chemical History of a Candle (someone has, and it’s awesome).  But wait, more hypocrisy, I’m trying to get your attention right now on this Substack post on the internet!  Fair point.  I guess what I like about Substack is that I can just give you my words, unmagnified, unboosted and un-prettified, and leave it as much as possible up to you if you want to spend your time interacting with them.  Because, ultimately, the internet is a powerful way to connect people.  It is neither angel nor demon.  But one needs sufficient culture and internal fortitude to ride that lightning without getting burned.

    Even Ned Lud himself, that Benedict Arnold of industrial technological progress, was probably a fundamentalist, even as he was simultaneously absolutely correct that the sweeping industrial changes taking over his world were deeply anti-human and anti-creative.  So, being a Pseudo-Luddite to me means doing my best to introduce some healthy distance between myself and those technologies that seem to be seducing me or lulling me into unconsciousness.  By contrast, the three examples I mentioned in my recent post on Etheric Technology (permaculture, scything, and composting) work in the opposite way: they bring me into greater connectedness with my surroundings, and greater awakeness through using them.

A little bit more about these three is called for here.  First, permaculture.  There are a ton of great websites you can check out for a deeper dive into this way of working with land.  Here is one, but you could just use that scary seductive tool called Google search and you’d come up with many great explanatory websites. Permaculture at its core is an approach to holistic landscape design.  Jenny and I took an online course last spring, and I had a first opportunity to put the principles into action on our land where we are developing a natural landscape to raise honeybees (The instructor of that course, Andrew Millison, has many awesome YouTube videos to learn more about Permaculture that way). In Permaculture as I understand it, you spend a lot of time looking and studying your land, in all the available ways, before you make a first attempt at design.  What you are looking for are patterns: patterns of water, air, wildlife, flora, soil, topography.  Doing permaculture reminds me of the famous Georgia O’Keefe quotation, “No one sees a flower really.  To see a flower takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”  Basically, permaculture is a system to help you make friends with whatever piece of land you have been entrusted with taking care of.  I’m just at the beginning phases of working in this way, but I find it has great promise.  We hope to document some of our successes and failures with attempting permaculture design on our own land as we try things.

Second, scything.  Well, this one I’m still very much at the ground floor on.  But, I have a scythe and I’ve done a little work with it the last couple summers, and I love it.  Here’s a website that a friend sent to me that inspired me to go deeper.  Scything is to riding lawn mowers as rakes are to leaf blowers.  So elegant, so beautiful, so fun to use.  One uses one’s whole body in a smooth motion that is simultaneously a good workout but also, once you get better at it, you could keep up for a long time.  And, no oil to change, no parts to break, no noise, no smell, no gasoline.  You have to sharpen the blade every so often, but this means you get to take breaks and not work too fast, stand there and enjoy the beauty while birds sing to you and you feel limber and calm and connected.

Finally, composting.  Well, honestly, don’t get me started on this one.  Friends and neighbors know I’m a compost nutcase, a zealot really.  I gave a presentation here in Racine to our local urban gardener group (Racine Urban Garden Network).  Here’s a slideshow I made, check it out.  In it, I started by borrowing a pop culture reference from The Mandalorian TV show with the phrase, “Composting is the Way.”  It’s that awesome and that important. It has the potential to wake up so many people’s etheric slumber, divert waste from landfills, address and embrace our society’s fear of death and creepy crawly things, and generally cause a revolution that will fix most of the major problems we are currently suffering from. . . Maybe I’d better make a separate post about this one!

That’s all for now, but writing this has caused a few other ideas to pop out, and I definitely want to tell you more about Wendell Berry sometime.  As always, please engage as you wish to with comments. I love to hear from you how what I’m writing impacts you.

Photo taken from Wikipedia article about “The Monkey Wrench Gang” by Edward Abbey