Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology (review)

Graduate students are the lowest of the low in academe, dependent on advisors and lacking status, security, and income. Should we be more impressed that so many of them survive to earn their doctorates or that so few have existential crises? In the case of Eric Brende, a graduate student in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (some familiar names appear), his doubts about modern American society and its technologies became a quest "to ascertain more carefully how much—or how little—technology was needed . . . for human convenience, comfort, and sociability—a line below which physical effort was too demanding and above which machines begin to create their own demands" (p. 10). And so, aided by a bicycle accident that enforced immobility and a friend who became his helpmate, Brende leaves the Route 128 rat race to spend a year farming in a small, unnamed (but picturesquely mapped) Mennonite community.

Historically, the Mennonites, like the Amish, have exercised a particular fascination because they represent a deliberate "low-tech" alternative to "normal" American life, and yet they live within the continental United States (see, for example, David Weaver-Zercher's The Amish in the American Imagination). To a less secure or more rigid culture, these groups could appear as a threat by the simple fact of their existence, proof that alternative paths of living succeed. Instead, according to Sasha Issenberg's "The Simplest Life," in the October 2004 Washington Monthly, we have four million tourists visiting Amish regions annually. We have UPN's reality show Amish in the City, movies like Witness with Harrison Ford, and, of course, Amish-theme calendars. The lure is the mirage of or belief in a simpler, more wholesome, nonurban, premodern life.

Brende is Everyman and this is his journey to that lure through the world of farming, a world very different from academic experience. He discovers that manuals and books do not tell everything, that thinking is a useful complement if not guide to human muscle, and that one should focus on the basics. A later lesson is that drinking water helps prevent dehydration and physical collapse.

As a graduate student in the history of technology, Brende learned that artifacts have politics. Amid the Mennonite community, he discovered that people have politics too. Brende touches, sadly too lightly, on many interesting themes: the trade-off between developing a skill and being a jack-of-all-trades, the learning and self-learning involved in adapting to a new environment, the ongoing Mennonite debates about what technologies and machines are acceptable, and how much knowledge is local, especially knowledge pertaining to agriculture. In one cute section, Mennonite farmers ridicule the ignorant city-based customers on whom their livelihoods depend, a commonplace exercise in bonding and information sharing.

Aided by a very supportive local community, Brende and his wife not only survive but seriously contemplate staying. (As his tale reveals, Brende is clearly going through a crisis of faith too, and one decision he and his wife face is whether to join the community's church.) Partly as a result of his wife's allergic reaction to horse dander, however, they reluctantly decide to leave, though not to return to the rat race.

Seeking to draw larger lessons from his experience, Brende offers the principle of "minimation"—a preference for nontechnological solutions over technological ones and lower-tech over higher-tech—and this is a useful corrective to those who seek technological silver bullets to solve complex problems. Brende's epilogue indicates that he is happy with his new life (as is often the case after leaving grad school), living in Saint Louis, raising a family, working, and remaining outside the mainstream. More power to him and his! Yet, if he is so convinced of the merit (righteousness seems too strong or faith-based a word) of his way of living for everyone, one wonders why is he not more politically active in creating a social and cultural...