Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [73]
“They make good fertilizer,” said Wilbur. Everyone stopped talking and looked up. He chose his next words carefully: “One time I didn’t get a chance to stop them in an open field and disked them under. They turned it green just like it is after commercial fertilizer.”
The comment brought a hush. A proposal to increase yields by reducing work? The thought seemed somehow illicit. “But if the seed gets mixed up in the feed,” countered Gideon, “it goes through the livestock and comes out in manure, and then you’re just taking it up the length of a football field”—he gestured toward the bare wheat field before us—“and sowing it back in. Those redroots, you miss one, it gets about twelve foot tall and, come fall, goes to seed. Seeds thousands or millions of new plants. Even if you plant in the fall and miss them, they’ll grow four inches high and go to seed. They’ll outsmart you.”
The rebuttal seemed cogent, and the others waited to see what Wilbur would say.
“Sounds like they have a high I.Q.”
There were several ways to take this comment. But from the wry purse of his lips, I gathered he was siding with me after the debate about pigs. I say this because there was also the slightest hint, in his wryness, that after all, next to a crafty redroot, a man whose mind is held bound by customs of the past is no intellectual match. Despite the sultry weather, despite the weeds, despite what may have been a bad internal disposition, intelligence had poked through and made it all worthwhile. What if we hadn’t gotten that ice cream?
Even Wilbur seemed a tad cheerier.
That, by the way, was how I became acquainted with the community’s other choice for the ministry, the contender certain thoughtful members would pit against Edward.
Wilbur’s witticism, I will say, and his curiosity about moods got me back on track. Reclaiming happiness from the jaws of technology took more than a physical abandonment. It also entailed a certain pliability of mind, what Minister James had called willingness—a disposition to bend with needs and opportunities one could not have predicted. From this perspective human mastery is truly a mystery, a puzzle whose first clues may be honestly unpleasant or weigh us down merely because we do not understand or expect them.
In his own mysterious way, Wilbur revealed a certain capacity to understand this. His abashment was a bit deceptive. I think he was more in possession of himself than he let on.
But there was surely an objective side to the human experience with technology (or its lack), and technologists would gladly tell us so. One of the most exacting of them was the early twentieth-century efficiency expert Frederick Taylor, father of “scientific management.” Wielding a stopwatch, he would measure the time it took a worker to perform a given task, such as shoveling dirt. Then he would analyze the task, breaking it down into segments, eliminating any unnecessary motions and replacing them with more efficient ones. The task was now standardized. Using Taylor’s findings, a manager could instruct an employee how to shovel dirt in one perfect, unvarying pattern, as if he were a robot, and reprimand him if he deviated to the slightest degree. Taylorism thence became one of the most slavish forms of technological servility, parodied by Charlie Chaplin in the movie Modern Times.
After threshing with the Minimites a few times, I thought of a way to turn Taylorism on its head and call into question mechanically inspired ideals of human efficiency. It was never my aim to debunk efficiency itself, the effective