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This article is part of a year-long series where we try out one classic theory of happiness every two months. Find all the articles in this series on this page. This week, we’re still talking about Epicurus and the argument that rejecting technology might make us happier, that we began last week with a post about Stephanie Mills and her book “Epicurean Simplicity”.
Historical Luddism
Luddism as a social and political movement begins with the introduction of mechanised looms and other machinery during the British industrial revolution.
With the use of machines, factories could produce clothes cheaper than artisan workers could do by hand. So when these workers saw that they were losing their jobs, they protested, and some of these protests turned violent, with the now unemployed workers attacking and destroying the machines.
The movement was named after a man who probably had been a real person, Ned Ludd, but who was transformed into a half-mythical figure by the “Luddites,” who claimed to be his followers.
Today’s Luddism is a different fight, of course. We are, nowadays, not only used to the industrial society, we have also hugely profited from it – at least in the affluent West. Still, there have also always existed critics of technology. As today artificial intelligence is disrupting the world of work, with millions of people already certain to lose their jobs to a new generation of machines, Luddism is once again a proposition that we need to take seriously.
Luddism, at its core, is the thesis that technology must serve human life, rather than the other way round. If we look at all the technologies that we use in our societies, clearly some fulfil this criterion better than others. Rather than trying to re-frame those harmful technologies, or wait for them to prove beneficial, Luddites would rather get rid of them in the name of human flourishing.
Unfortunately, it can be quite difficult to see clearly which technologies benefit human life and which don’t. Cheap energy is a good thing, it would seem, until one realises that the availability of cheap oil over the 20th century has brought about the collapse of the Earth’s climate systems, global heating, floods, deadly pollution, the destruction of forests and other natural environments through the construction of roads, the extinction of countless species, traffic injuries and deaths, sprawling urbanisation, the …
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