Steam Drills and Smart Phones

“…the fallacy of technology, which is the conclusion that because a thing can be done, it must be done.”

-Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, page 60

In the music to which I normally listen (your standard “pretentious about being unpretentious” Americana fare), John Henry’s name comes up quite often. There are the ubiquitous ballads and revisionist homages which take him as their primary subject, but mostly he is mentioned in passing, either referenced as a member of the American mythic pantheon or alluded to through the various folk-poetic phrases associated with him –– “Let me die with a hammer in my hand”, “Ring like silver, ring like gold,” etc.

What is to me fascinating about the character is that it signifies a crucial American duality: his fabled fate at once urges us toward progress and warns us against it. Regarding the former, it puts us in contact with a specific historical group, i.e. those African Americans in the period following the Civil War who were imprisoned and released into the custody of railroads who put them forcibly to work laying new line in the mountains of West Virginia.

There is, then, an issue of civil rights inherent in the name of John Henry, who represents a minority who were in some cases literally worked to death, being deprived due to race of the means of subsistence. Even more universal and exigent than this exhortation to progress, however, is the warning against another type of progress, technology.

I do not intend to condemn technology (in fact, I recently acquired my first “smart phone”, a fact with which I continue to grapple ethically), but it is a powerful thing; as with all power, it is not to be used without a serious consideration of its consequences.

The railroads had to be built. They were built, and we were better for it (Russell Kirk was, incidentally, the son of a railroad engineer), but the manner in which they were built led to a great amount of human suffering. The railroad companies used the technology at hand (human labor), and used it up until it dropped dead with a hammer in its hand. When this technology was superseded by another (steam drills), it was replaced without care for the human damage. As the exponential growth of technology continues in our time, it behoves us to give serious though to the real human problems which accompany its creation and implementation.