Getting Plain: the Second Luddite Congress

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That evening, Savage and McKibben both told inspiring stories and then counseled everyone to stop looking for institutional or technological fixes and to use the imagination as a subversive weapon. At the end of the day, the delegates gathered in the kitchen to put together a rough draft of the Statement of Means. I stuck around, hoping—as I imagined journalists were supposed to—that I’d catch a glimpse of the real neo-Luddites, unmasked at last: Stephanie Mills and Charles Siegel and Kirkpatrick Sale grimly battling for control of the document. Oddly enough, the delegates turned out to be a uniformly decent and deeply conscientious bunch who put together the draft without any problems. No story here, I thought.

That night at the hotel, still under the neo-Luddites’ spell, I hung my jacket over the television and started reading a Jules Verne novel I’d picked up in Barnesville. Over the next couple of hours, no matter how often my hand involuntarily snatched the TV remote control and my thumb stabbed at the power button, it was to no avail.

The book, Five Weeks in a Balloon, which Verne wrote in 1862, 50 years after the original Luddite uprising, included a character who prophesied that “if men go on inventing machinery, they’ll end by being swallowed up in their own machine. I’ve always thought that the last day would be brought about by some colossal boiler, heated to three thousand atmospheres, blowing up the world.”

The next morning I eluded the TV without much difficulty, and made it to the meeting house before anyone else. Strolling around the campus of the nearby Quaker school, I bumped into Savage, and we finally had our face-to-face conversation. I told him that many of the ideas I’d heard reminded me of Abbie Hoffman’s irreverent, counterintuitive brand of revolution, and Scott proved to have a thorough understanding of Yippie tactics. “Part of the reason those guys used so much obscenity,” he said, “was that they were deeply concerned about the power of big business and the media to co-opt the trappings of any anti-establishment movement. They figured that curse words, at least, couldn’t be sold back to them. That’s part of what’s so subversive about simplicity. You can’t sell it!” I didn’t have the heart to tell him what was really happening in the world of commerce. All of a sudden, thanks in part to the neo-Luddites, plain is hot. (But he probably knew that.)

As it turned out, the Big Event was anticlimactic. Despite some disagreement over the language—loaded terms such as guilty, nonviolence, and even family raised hackles, for instance—the assembly seemed to agree more than it disagreed. Cheers went up when the clerk of the meetinghouse read the final Statement of Means--which included entries such as “We believe that the needs of people exceed the needs of the machines” and “We affirm the importance of . . . times of rest, times of fasting from production and consumption; time spent in solitude, listening and waiting.”

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