Oh, you're a Luddite.

An acquaintance said to me once after listening to one of my rants.  "Oh, you're a Luddite."

What is a Luddite?  Well, it isn't too difficult to find out but the history of the word has some discrepancies and there is an element of the apocryphal too.
The OED reports the following:

(Said, but without confirmation, to be f. Ned Lud, a lunatic living about 1779 who in a fit of rage smashed up two frames belonging to a Leicestershire stockinger.)  A member of an organized band of mechanics and their friends, who (1811-16) went about destroying machinery in the midlands and north of England. 

Webster's New World Dictionary (college edition 1957) says:

(said to be after Ned Lud, feeble-minded man who smashed two frames belonging to a Leicestershire employer (c. 1779), any of a group of workers in England between 1811 and 1816 who smashed new labor-saving textile machinery in protest against reduced wages and unemployment attributed to its introduction.

The American Heritage Dictionary (New College Edition, 1980):

Any of a group of British workmen who, between 1811 and 1816, rioted and destroyed textile machinery in the belief that it would diminish employment.  (Probably after Ned Lud(d), a late 18th-century worker who destroyed stocking frames in England.)

Then there is this from a history of economic thinkers  titled "The Worldly Philosophers" written by Robert L. Heilbroner:

 "..the horrors of working conditions were not the only cause for unrest.  Machinery was now the rage, and machinery meant the  displacement of laboring hands by uncomplaining steel.  As early as 1779 a mob of eight thousand workers had attacked a mill and burned it to the ground in unreasoning defiance of its cold implacable mechanical efficiency, and by 1811 such protests against technology were sweeping England.  Wrecked mills dotted the countryside, and in their wake the word went about that "Ned Ludd had passed."  The rumor was that a King Ludd or a General Ludd  was directing the activities of the mob.  It was not true, of course.  The Luddites, as they were called, were fired by a purely spontaneous hatred of the factories that they saw as prisons and the wage-work that they still despised."

Americans have been taught that a Luddite is a perjorative word, such people being backward and against progress.  Differing opinions are not acceptable, I guess.  Such as Wendell Berry's observation that "labor saving means people replacement."

Today we live in a technological and mechanical world.  We have bet our future on cyberspace, robots, machinery, and artificial intelligence.

I leave it to a better mind than mine to complain:

We see that great masses of people, left to themselves and allowed to pursue their private pleasures and interests as the spirit of the day moves them, will spoil themselves if the requisite facilities for doing so are available to them.  And the commercial interests - the advertisers and the others - will eagerly provide those facilities, because this involves consumer spending and they make money out of it.  

He continues:
The politicians, left to themselves, and anxious to say only what they think people and the special interests that support them want to hear, will be the last to try to halt this process.  Their main concern will be not to oppose it but to exploit it.
...One can contemplate only with sadness and apprehension the prospect of the American federal government intervening in problems of the habits of daily life among the citizenry.  Certainly, it would be better if this could be avoided.  Yet whenever public authority, here as elsewhere, has stood passively by and permitted technological innovations to be thus recklessly and uncritically appropriated into people's lives with out concern for their social effects, it has assumed, whether or not it meant to, a measure of responsibility (and who else to do it?), it will draw a cloud - is already drawing such a cloud - over its own adequacy as a form of government for a great people in the modern age."

from:  Around The Cragged Hill  by George F Kennan, 1993.

Philosophically I am a Luddite.  I would not destroy another person's machines but I would be willing to prevent their use in my workplace, and my life.
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Wisdom from George F Kennan

"This brings us to the questions of "human rights."  Let us first glance at the extent of our involvement in this cause.  The Department of State , as I understand it, in addition to harboring the Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs headed by an assistant secretary of state, now has a "human rights officer" attached to the normally already redundant staff of every American diplomatic mission anywhere.  One part of the duties of these particular officials is said to be  the preparation of an annual report on the human rights record, so called, of the host country.  The department, for its part, maintains in Washington a "human rights reports team", to read and ponder such reports and to prepare a consolidated report for congress.  It does all this, to be sure, not solely of its own volition;  these procedures are now, at  least in part, required by law.  But what is under consideration here is not the involvement of the Department of State alone but of our government as a whole in the question at issue.  And thus extravagantly do we, like a stern schoolmaster clothed in the mantle of perfect virtue, sit in judgments over all other governments, looking sharply down the nose of each of them to see whether its handling of its domestic affairs meets with our approval.

That these commitments constitute one more limitation on our freedom of action in foreign affairs - one more instance in which we have committed ourselves in advance to behave in a given way in a wide category of instances, none of which can be specifically foreseen - is beyond doubt.  And is this justified?
Let us recall that the manner in which regimes customarily treat their subjects, worldwide, is largely a matter of tradition, habit, and popular concepts of what is right and what is wrong.  All these are subject to change, to be sure, over long periods of time, but seldom, if the results are to be lasting, can the change be abrupt.

It is the habit of a great many regimes, across the surface of the globe, to deal harshly with those of their nationals who have opposed their positions of power, or who are suspected of doing so.  In most instances, their opponents, if the shoe were on  the other foot, would behave in much the same way.  The incentives to such behavior are never-ending, and unless the national traditions and political habits sternly rule them out, they will normally be yielded to.  The pressures of outside opinion may occasionally cause the respective regime to  go a bit easier for a time in this respect; but unless these pressures are supported by the inherited political culture of the place, and particularly by the existence and tradition  of democratic self-government, such gestures of moderation  are not apt to be lasting.
The pressure of outside opinion about human rights sustained oer long periods of time, can indeed produce beneficial changes in both attitudes and institutions.  The role of private opinion in this direction, when applied in support of gradual change, is important and should be welcomed.  Whether governments, and the U.S. government in particular, should be involved in exerting such pressures is more dubious.  In this respect, governments have to take the world pretty much as they find it.  Their task - at least, the task of the U. S. government, as I perceive it - is to conduct its own relations with other governments in a manner conducive to a minimum of bilateral friction and to the maximum of usefulness to world peace and stability.  This will be most effective if the sound old principle on noninterference in the other's domestic affairs is respected - if the lines of responsibility, in other words, are clearly recognized.  This includes the responsibility of each regime for the governing of its own people.  Each of them has, alone, the power to shape the situation in this respect.  It must be, from the standpoint of morality, the judge of its own behavior.  Outside pressure, particularly from another government, is seldom helpful, and may be counterproductive.

For a foreign government to exert such pressure, in circumstances impossible to foresee, for an indefinite time into the future, strikes me as in all respects a questionable procedure;  and I cannot but regret the lengths to which we have shown ourselves prepared to go, and the leadership we have even taken internationally in promoting, on the governmental level, the cause of "human rights."

The die is now cast.  Formal obligations have been entered into.  The practice has found sanction in American public opinion.  So be it.  But I would ask it to be noted that this is one more instance where indulgence of the desire to appear virtuous in our own eyes has placed limitations on the area in which we should have the flexibility to act usefully in more significant areas of international life."

George F. Kennan (Around the Cragged Hill, 1993, W W Norton & Co.)
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