Recently, I made a swap for something I’ve wanted for years: a hand-cranked butter churn.
When you milk cows, the one thing you end up with is a lot of cream. One of the best things to make from this abundance is butter. In the past, I’ve used a blender to make butter, but my cardinal rule in life is to always opt for the low-tech hand-powered version of any tool, if one is available. That’s why I’ve always coveted a hand-cranked butter churn, and why I was so thrilled to make the trade.
“You’re such a Luddite,” my husband teased in response to my giddy delight.
Luddites, for those unfamiliar with the term, were (to quote Wikipedia) “members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers which opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, often by destroying the machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines in ‘a fraudulent and deceitful manner’ to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods.”
In modern parlance, today’s Luddites are viewed as technophobes who look with suspicion on new technology. While most don’t choose to live like the Amish, as a group they are reluctant to rush out and embrace the latest whiz-bang electronic marvel. As a result of Luddites’ refusal to get a smartphone (guilty) or acquire any other smart item (again, guilty!), they are frequently the recipient of sneers and derision. The term “Luddites” is often lobbed as an insult, but those of us who pick and choose which technology to incorporate in our lives accept it as a compliment.
“To be a Luddite is seen as synonymous with being primitive – backwards in your outlook, ignorant of innovation’s wonders, and fearful of modern society,” observes Joel Abrams in a piece called “I’m a Luddite. You should be one too.” “This all-or-nothing approach to debates about technology and society is based on severe misconceptions of the real history and politics of the original Luddites. … Luddism was a working-class movement opposed to the political consequences of industrial capitalism. The Luddites wanted technology to be deployed in ways that made work more humane and gave workers more autonomy. The bosses, on the other hand, wanted to drive down costs and increase productivity.”
In fact, if you avoid shopping on Amazon due to its inhumane exploitation of workers in massive warehouses driven by automation – and, not incidentally, which line the pockets of incredibly rich men – then you, too, could be considered a modern Luddite.
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But, warns, Paul Roehrig in a piece called “Modern Luddites and the Growing Techlash,” “The house money never bets against new technology in the long run. In no case have we collectively decided to simply turn the machines off. In every case we have collectively chosen to move ahead with the new gadgets. That’s what humans do.”
That’s why critics will censure me for my interest in using a hand-cracked butter churn rather than using a blender – or buying butter from the store.
Naturally, as a child of the modern age, I have the luxury to pick and choose which conveniences to embrace and which to avoid. On our farm, we like having low-tech versions of modern conveniences for times when those conveniences go down. It’s why we have a wood cookstove, a hand pump for our well, an outhouse and other alternatives for life’s necessities. We don’t always use them (notably the outhouse) unless we need to, but having them available makes for great peace of mind. It’s why I’ve coveted that butter churn for so long.
But this logic eludes those who mock Luddites. “Tantruming technophobes who were attacking the very notion of progress,” sneers this article. “The rebels embraced the label.”
Yes. Yes we do. But here’s the thing: When the power goes out, we can still stay warm, see, cook, entertain ourselves, use the toilet and (incidentally) make butter. I fail to understand the problem.
A few years ago, a man named Tim Wu wrote a brilliant piece in the New York Times entitled “Tyranny of Convenience.” In this essay, Wu outlined why “convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today.”
“Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable,” writes Wu. “Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper.”
Wu continues: “[W]e err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us. It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much. … As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. … Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.”
This, dear readers, encapsulates in a nutshell why I wanted a hand-cranked butter churn for so long. Laziness apparently is at the heart of things. “Smart” features are the lazy man’s way to go about his daily business. Clearly, a low-tech lifestyle isn’t sought by many, however. That’s why fighting against it is viewed as stupid at best and suspicious at worst.
Look, I’m not suggesting everyone needs to give up technology and live in the 19th century. We’d all be dead from lack of modern medicine anyway. What I am suggesting is that just because something can be “smart-ified” doesn’t mean it should.
As I write this, our power has been out for 16 hours after a heavy snowfall, and temperatures are slated to dip to -10 F tonight. Inhabitants of “smart” homes around here are freezing right now, yet we’re warm and comfortable. Luddites unite.
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