Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [24]
In the kitchen of a tidy white farmhouse, we found the fellow in the midst of lunch with his daughter’s husband and children. Soon, seated at the table, we were nibbling grilled smoked chicken breasts, buttered noodles, coleslaw, pickled beets, mashed potatoes and gravy, and at the end of this banquet, the pièce de résistance, peach upside-down cake with real whipped cream heaped on top. Conversation ran the gamut of friendly inanities, touching on even a few (vague) remembrances about the brother we were supposed to be talking about.
At the end of the meal, mother and two grown daughters (one having the day before given birth to a baby whose arrival it turned out they were celebrating) sang us a farewell hymn in three-part harmony. The intonation was perfect.
As we pulled out the driveway in our car, the son-in-law leaned over the window and detained us another thirty minutes with more inquiries about life in our parts. I don’t believe I’ve ever met someone who gave out such sighs of contentment or radiated such beams of satisfaction. We were able to leave only by inching the car forward until we were out in the road.
When the quantity of machines shrinks, another area of human realization expands: skill. Strange that our mental picture of life with simpler technology is peopled by drudges and unskilled laborers. That is doubtless a projection of our own experience—the mindless repetition brought about by automation over the last two centuries. Mary and I were discovering now that it wasn’t the sheer physical burden of unmechanized labor that was daunting. It was the skill. To make matters harder, skill was not concentrated in a single specialty but scattered in dozens of little knacks and hundreds of bits of knowledge, all foreign to the button-pusher. On top of all this, the foremost skill was balancing and integrating all the little bits into a single livelihood. When I told one young farmer how impressed I was by how much he knew about so many things, he looked at me, grinning, and said, “But I never do one thing long enough to get good at it!” Another time, as I observed some Minimites with an Amish background tearing down an old house to reuse the lumber, one turned to me and asked, “Do you think you could disconnect the electric lights for us?” I suppressed a laugh. I no more knew how to dismantle electrical connections than how to tie a double half-hitch. He had assumed that, as a representative of technological society, I must know how everything in it worked. And why wouldn’t he? In a society where machinery has not displaced human skill, people still do. By minimizing technology, our neighbors maximized human know-how.
To get a sense of what went into the vast repertoire of skills they took for granted, consider what it was like for me to learn a single one: operating one of their chosen non-automatic gizmos. Shortly after Mr. Miller had arranged to have me grow sorghum with his son-in-law, I biked over to Sylvan’s to see what needed to be done. I found my sorghum collaborator in his barn. He had big bushy eyebrows and looked plump and thoughtful as a hen. When he saw me through the doorway, he arched his brow in mock alarm as if to say, “Here we go.”
But he only said, “Ohhh! Well, well. If it isn’t Eric Brende. I was just about to work your field over with the cultipacker. Actually, you only get sixteen rows of the field, at the upper end.” He was standing next to a pair of horses and proceeded to throw on their harnesses. Leading them into the barnyard, he hitched them to an odd device that consisted of a heavy-looking metal roller about eighteen inches in diameter and eight feet long, with a small platform above it for the driver to stand on.
“What is a cultipacker?”
“It pats down the ground so the seed don’t blow away.”
“Oh.” My voice fell. “So you’ve already planted the sorghum?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I