Remembering Ned Ludd

[Dave Monroe]

>From Geoffrey Nunberg, "Remembering Ned Ludd," The Way
We Talk Now (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), pp. 76-8
...

"Boethius wrote that every man dies two deaths: the
first of his body, the second of his fame....  But
occasionally fate makes a special deal with some
people, which lets their names live on even after
their fame has subsided.  They don't have to give up
their souls, just their capital lettrs, so they can
continue as common nouns.

[...]

   "Sometimes a name comes down to us through a whole
series of forgettings.  Take Ned Ludd.  The first
bearer of the name was ... a feeble-minded workman who
lived in a small town in Leicestershire near the end
of the eighteenth century.  It happend that one day he
cahsed some boys who were tormanting him into a house
where some frames used in stocking manufacture were
kept.  Unable to catch the boys, he vented his anger
on the frames.  Afterward, whenevr machinery was
broken it became the local joke to say that Ned Ludd
had done it.  The joke might have died out soon
enough, but about thirty years later, when a band of
Nottingham craftsmen took to breaking up machinery ina
systematic way, their leader called himself General
Ludd, and his followers became known as Luddites, a
name that spread along with the movement to other
parts of the English Midlands.
   "The modern myth holds that the Luddites were
simply rioters who smashed machinery in the vain
belief taht they could somehow hold back the tide of
industrialization, and since then people invoke the
word whenever they want to suggest an irrational
resistance to technological change....  'I'm no
Luddite, but ...'--it's the loyalty oath of the
republic of progress.
   "The thing of it is taht the Luddites were no
Luddites either.  It's true that they destroyed
machinery that enabled mill owners to replace them
with women and children who worked sixteen-hour days
for subsistence wages ....  But what drove the
Luddites to open rebellion was a series of legal
measures that had stripped away tehir right to
organize and eliminated the minimum wage, all in the
name of free markets and the need to improve Britain's
international competitiveness.  And even then tehy
were selective in their destruction: they spared the
machines of mill owners who hadn't lowered their wages
or who had compensated men put out of work.
   "The Luddites won some temprary local victories
....  But in the end, with the full power of the state
arrayed against it, the movement was doomed. 
Parliament made the destruction of machinery a capital
crime, over the eloquent objections of Lord Byron.... 
Some of the Luddites finsihed on the gallows, the rest
went underground.  Their story was rewritten as a
lesson about the futility of trying to stand in the
way of technological change.  The victors have always
written the history books, but in this case they wrote
the dictionaries, too." (76-8)

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=toc&titleNumber=H01841

Lord Byron, Song of the Luddites (1816) 

As the Liberty lads over the sea 
Brought their freedom, and cheaply with blood, 
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free, 
And down with all kings by King Ludd!

When the web that we weave is complete, 
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword, 
We will fling the winding sheet 
Over the despot at our feet, 
And dye it deep in the gore he has poured. 

Though black as his heart its hue, 
Since his veins are corrupted to mud, 
Yet this is the dew
Which the tree shall renew 
Of Liberty, planted by Ludd! 

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRbyron.htm

And see as well ...

http://engphil.astate.edu/gallery/byron7.html

Pynchon, Thomas.  "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?"
   New York Times, October 28th, 1984.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html


	
		
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