Ludd On!

Written By Jonathan Krogh

Dear Luddite Siblings:

For the past few weeks, I’ve been musing about Ned Ludd, the hot-tempered weaver from Anstey, England. According to legend, Ludd was a Nottingham textile worker who, in 1779, became so enraged by the introduction of the automated knitting machine that he smashed several of them to defend his craft. The story was not recorded until 1811 in a Nottingham paper; this long delay and the identification of Ned’s home as Sherwood Forest (Robin Hood reference?) resulted in dismissing him as a fictitious character. But that did not result in his fading into obscurity.

As hand knitters were replaced by automated machinery, the factories rendered whole villages of artisanal workers useless. While this meant cheap, poorly made socks for the masses, it also meant near starvation for tens of thousands. As a result, the peasants revolted. Marauding tradesmen launched nighttime raids on factories, breaking in and smashing automated looms, often singing as they returned. (For a sample song, listen here.)

Factory owners were not happy, appealing to the constabulary for arrest and punishment of the vandals. Assuming there was a mastermind behind their violence, the police would interrogate the hooligans, who insisted their leader was General Ned Ludd—the term ‘Luddite’ was born.     

The word languished in obscurity for the next 150 years, appearing only in scholarly papers about labor movements and the Industrial Revolution; that was until the 1960s, when office automation created a new class of unnecessary workers. The word luddite no longer referred to unemployed craftspeople for whom mechanization meant starvation, but to an insult of people who feared technological innovation. Now the term has found new resurgence with the advance of AI.

What prevented massive violent protests in the middle of the last century was a series of social programs and safety nets designed to lessen the pain of mechanization. Unemployment insurance, job retraining programs, public health funding, food assistance and housing subsidies served to suppress the pain experienced by workers replaced by mechanization. But with AI, we are witnessing a convergence of reduced social welfare funding coupled with what may be a historic dislocation of labor. As with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, wealth stands to concentrate among the factory owners and away from their former employees. In the long arc of history, we can point to positive social transformation created by the introduction of cheap, mass-produced goods, but the generation that endured the shift experienced life-trashing poverty.

Yet my concern is not labor movements nor social history. It is who we must be as God’s people amid potentially cataclysmic change. Many of my religious colleagues are committed to protesting social inequity; and protest we must! But our calling runs deeper than campaigning for universal basic income or ending employment-based health insurance. We must renew our conviction that a person’s worth far exceeds the wealth to their name. Every effort to ease poverty must rest on the priceless identity of every individual as a child of God. The wounds of the Industrial Revolution inspired the Salvation Army, the Social Gospel, Catholic Social Teaching and Quaker temperance. Under religious pressure, industrialists poured fortunes into education, health care, cultural institutions and other philanthropy to demonstrate the worthiness of their souls. Shame, I suspect, proved more persuasive than violence, and perhaps even more consequential than policy. Fortunately, if religion has one dependable gift, it is making people feel ashamed.

Hoping to bring shame back to the ruling class, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor  

Jonathan Krogh
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