Technopoly by Neil Postman Page A

told by his father to fix a weaving machine, proceeded instead to destroy it. In any case, between 1811 and 1816, there arose widespread support for workers who bitterly resented the new wage cuts, child labor, and elimination of laws and customs that had once protected skilled workers. Their discontent was expressed through the destruction of machines, mostly in the garment and fabric industry; since then the term “Luddite” has come to mean an almost childish and certainly naïve opposition to technology. But the historical Luddites were neither childish nor naïve. They were people trying desperately to preserve whatever rights, privileges, laws, and customs had given them justice in the older world-view. 3
    They lost. So did all the other nineteenth-century nay-sayers. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton might well have been on their side. Perhaps Bacon as well, for it was not his intention that technology should be a blight or a destroyer. But then, Bacon’s greatest deficiency had always been that he was unfamiliarwith the legend of Thamus; he understood nothing of the dialectic of technological change, and said little about the negative consequences of technology. Even so, taken as a whole, the rise of technocracy would probably have pleased Bacon, for there can be no disputing that technocracy transformed the face of material civilization, and went far toward relieving what Tocqueville called “the disease of work.” And though it is true that technocratic capitalism created slums and alienation, it is also true that such conditions were perceived as an evil that could and should be eradicated; that is to say, technocracies brought into being an increased respect for the average person, whose potential and even convenience became a matter of compelling political interest and urgent social policy. The nineteenth century saw the extension of public education, laid the foundation of the modern labor union, and led to the rapid diffusion of literacy, especially in America, through the development of public libraries and the increased importance of the general-interest magazine. To take only one example of the last point, the list of nineteenth-century contributors to
The Saturday Evening Post
, founded in 1821, included William Cullen Bryant, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe—in other words, most of the writers presently included in American Lit. 101. The technocratic culture eroded the line that had made the intellectual interests of educated people inaccessible to the working class, and we may take it as a fact, as George Steiner has remarked, that the period from the French Revolution to World War I marked an oasis of quality in which great literature reached a mass audience.
    Something else reached a mass audience as well: political and religious freedom. It would be an inadmissible simplification to claim that the Age of Enlightenment originated solely because of the emerging importance of technology in the eighteenth century, but it is quite clear that the great stress placed onindividuality in the economic sphere had an irresistible resonance in the political sphere. In a technocracy, inherited royalty is both irrelevant and absurd. The new royalty was reserved for men like Richard Arkwright, whose origins were low but whose intelligence and daring soared. Those possessed of such gifts could not be denied political power and were prepared to take it if it were not granted. In any case, the revolutionary nature of the new means of production and communication would have naturally generated radical ideas in every realm of human enterprise. Technocracy gave us the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition—whether political or spiritual. Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social organization. Technocracy also speeded up the world. We could get places faster, do