Getting Plain: the Second Luddite Congress

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In my mind, however, the real business of the congress had already happened the day before. There we’d been: Mennonite farmers, professional agitators, pagan grandmothers, journalists, and lots of ordinary folks, squeezed together onto narrow wooden benches without the mediation of technology, practicing self-moderation and pacifism and building some kind of funky, diverse--if temporary--community in the process. Later, as I rushed back to the airport in Pittsburgh, struggling most of the way with my car’s power windows, and reflected on what had transpired, it struck me that when we followed the example of the Quakers, whose meetings are about joy and trust as opposed to politics, we had, in a small way, already succeeded in our purpose. We had shown that doing less, which seems so un-American, was an essential “means” to overcoming the most out-of-control, damaging technology of all: the complicated circuitry of the self.

Joshua Glen is the associate editor of Utne Reader.

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