A couple hundred years ago in England, there was a short lived, very limited in range and effect, revolution against modern technology.
Yes, a couple hundred years ago, revolution, against modern technology.
It was the early years of what would become known as the industrial revolution, and the modern technology was the power loom. These new-fangled contraptions made it possible to replace skilled, somewhat well-compensated artisans with unskilled, underpaid manual laborers, and that didn't sit too well with the aforementioned skilled artisans.
As it pretty much put them out of work.
These masters of the handloom soon started attacking mechanised cotton mills and other such factories that churned out fabrics and lace cheaply and in huge quantity. They refused to adapt to the changing tide, choosing instead to fight, to resist.
They supposedly were named after a youth, Ned Ludd, who had smashed two machines that he saw as threats to his livelihood.
Of course, it didn't take long for the British government to make machine-breaking and any other form of industrial sabotage not only a criminal act, but a capital crime. That's right - take a sledge to a Jacquard loom, get strung up.
Governments controlled by owners of the means of production are touchy like that.
That 6 year period of civil disobedience some two hundred years ago is remembered today not only by those who are opposed to industrialisation, but also to new technologies. These people are known collectively as Neo-Luddites.
Neo-Luddites want a return to what they envision as simpler, less-stressful times.
But those people are not what this is about. This is about people who refuse to let go of the outdated, outmoded, rusted-relics of social structures that were developed hundreds and hundreds of years ago and have long since lost any relevance to life as we know it.
These are people who want a return to less-enlightened times, when people's lives were dictated by superstitous nonsense and fear.
Yeah, yeah, I can hear a few voices saying that is still how things are, but those voices are either being blatantly facetious or have blinded themselves to the obvious.
The people I am speaking of, the ones determined to live in pre-Columbian times, are people I refer to as Social Luddites. They are the people who are bound and determined to hold on to cultural, political, or religious social structures regardless of how irrelevant they have become.
These are the people who refuse to, or simply cannot, understand that the world has changed dramatically since the end of WWII.
I might be talking out of my NyQuil-addled ass here, but for any literate person on the surface of this planet to still hold the belief that there are people who have a right to rule because they were born into a "royal" family, that women should be treated as property, that individuals are "subjects" and not citizens, that one person should be subservient to another based on a supposed birthright...well, that's just crazy talk.
It is 2013. There are 7 billion people clinging to this freaking rock, and as far as I'm concerned all of us have the right to live the lives of our own choosing under the following proviso:
Do nothing that takes advantage of, or harms, another human being.
I know I have expressed that philosophy before, but in light of what happened in Boston this past week, and what is happening in Syria, Nigeria, Somalia, etc., I feel the need to reiterate.
If everyone walking around with the idea that their way is the only way - or more likely, the way that is being espoused by their "great leader" is the only way, could just somehow find the wherewithal to ask themselves if what they are thinking, what they are doing, may in any way, mean, or form take advantage of or harm another human being, and if it does, not do it, then this will be a much better planet to live on.
And that's what it's all all about, isn't it? Finding a way to improve living on this rock somehow, someway?
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