Against the Machine: The hidden Luddite tradition in literature, art and individual lives by Nicols Fox, Island Press, $25, ISBN 1559638605
SIX or seven years ago, a gentle woman from the state of Maine, with Quaker leanings and a hat to match, excitedly flagged down a gaggle of hippies with handcarts in a picturesque country lane in Cornwall. 鈥淎re you the Benders?鈥� she asked. 鈥淪ome call us that,鈥� one replied. And so, for her, they were.
She was Nicols Fox. They were a few of the self-declared Dongas Tribe, who from 1993 to 1995 protested against the building of a highway through the ancient landscape of Twyford Down, in south-central England. Some protesters had lived in the path of the road in 鈥渂enders鈥�, tarpaulin-covered hoops of willow or hazel, in the path of the road. 鈥淏ender鈥� is also British slang for a gay man, hence their joke on the nice American lady.
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Machines had been broken. Protesters had also run a radio station, websites and email alert lists amid the mud. Nevertheless, Fox was clearly ecstatic about having 鈥渇ound鈥� her modern Luddites. She was researching Against the Machine, an account of the Luddite movement that from 1811 to about 1813 broke the machines that were destroying weavers鈥� way of life in north-central England 鈥� and its echoes through the culture since.
The trouble with Luddites, for the historian, is that clandestine and countercultural currents leave no minutes of meetings. So in her charming Against the Machine Fox focuses on the literary tradition, starting with the intriguing observation that the visionary poet William Blake disappeared for the whole of the Luddite period. He was certainly a sympathiser, and like them an anti-capitalist.
Fox describes the clash between Luddites and the Machine in terms of the tension between the Romantic and Rationalist strains of Western thought. That is 鈥� to get classical on her 鈥� the divide between the followers of the gods Bacchus and Apollo, or the primacy (as she sees it) of felt experience over reductionist instrumentalism.
And the Romantics certainly have the best tunes. Fox quotes liberally from contemporary poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth 鈥� though not, oddly, from writer Mary Shelley鈥檚 Frankenstein. She convincingly traces a thread of sympathy for Luddism through the novelists Charlotte Bront毛 and Charles Dickens and the designer, poet and socialist William Morris.
She draws heavily on the historian E. P. Thompson and especially his The Making of the English Working Class. That sits decidedly uncomfortably alongside the rugged individualist founders of the American Wilderness movement and her interviews with back-to-the-land types emulating the writer Henry David Thoreau and his sojourn in a shack at Walden Pond.
What Fox leaves out are the more activist and collectivist 鈥渋ndividual lives鈥� of her subtitle. Simply put, Bacchanalians have more fun. There is a unique, fierce joy in disabling a machine that would destroy the life or the landscape you love 鈥� or so I am reliably informed. Another wave of raw Romanticism will, I am sure, be along soon. It may break the engines of global climate change, or those of nanotechnology (and as a reader of New 杏吧原创, you may find your own machines smashed). It will include people as beautifully bonkers as Blake, and others as subtle and sensible as Morris or Bront毛. You would do well to try to understand it: this book is a start, and at the very least it gives you a compendium of some excellent poetry and polemic.