Author: Derek Beres / Source: Big Think
- Working with your hands affects brain chemistry in a positive way.
- Automation technologies can strip away a sense of agency and meaning in our lives.
- Using your hands connects you with your environment in a way that most technologies cannot.
Violence has become such a part of the fabric of American society that many stories pass without much commentary.
Mass shootings need to be bigger and grander than ever to stay in the headlines; solo homicides rarely receive a glance. We pass over news about increasing suicide rates as if it is to be expected. And then there’s Chandler, Arizona.A spate of recent attacks went virtually unnoticed. One man attacked with a knife; another waved a .22-caliber revolver. Others chuck rocks. Some swerve cars at their victims. One frustrated woman resorted to an ancient tactic: screaming.
Perhaps we haven’t been discussing these attacks because their victims are not humans, or even animals, but members of the Waymo fleet. Chandler residents are frustrated over the emergence of self-driving cars. At risk: human autonomy.
In his history of the Luddites, Rebels Against the Future, Kirkpatrick Sale pushes back against the notion that these bands of English workers were against technology. Their livelihood depended upon the skills that the new cotton and wool mills were replacing. As Sale puts it:
Beware the technological juggernaut, reckon the terrible costs, understand the worlds being lost in the world being gained, reflect on the price of the machine and its systems on your life, pay attention to the natural world and its increasing destruction, resist the seductive catastrophe of industrialism.
As Luddites were raging against machines, neuroscientist Kelly Lambert says doctors were prescribing knitting to anxious women. Medical professionals sensed that the act of working with their hands calmed housewives. It appears that using our biological inheritance, a wonderful adaptation of bipedalism—dexterous and flexible hands featuring opposable thumbs—is necessary for optimal mental health.
Sure, the Luddites were concerned about feeding their family, not weaving cotton per se, but losing such an integral part of your identity forces you to confront your value as a sentient being. The combination of repetitive movement (of say, knitting) and the production of a tangible product (a hat or scarf) can be therapeutic. Lambert coined the term “behaviorceuticals” to honor this valuable drug.
In her most recent book, Well Grounded, Lambert notes the devastating effects automation technologies wreak on our brains:
Our view of prosperity in contemporary Western societies with creature comforts such as lush surroundings and various personal services to avoid physical effort may suffocate our neural functions.
Photo: Randy Fath / Unsplash
Matthew Crawford agrees. He was “always sleepy” while employed at…
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