The Amish are not a people known for their love of the newfangled. They are deeply wed to their traditions, keeping to themselves, keeping the old ways alive, and shunning any sort of Engliſche imposition on their material culture. But there is one technological innovation which even the most stringently conservative have accepted:
The washing machine may be the most revolutionary invention in human history. (At the very least, it is the most revolutionary in women’s history, and 50% ain’t bad.) We do not often think particularly much of it today; when we do, it is usually because it is making too much noise, broken, or otherwise inconveniencing us. And yet! Think of all the hours saved — the gruelling days of hauling heaving buckets of water, scrubbing down with fat, keeping watch over boiling tubs… To quote the statistician Hans Rosling, on his mother’s first time using the machine:
My mother explained the magic with this washing machine the very, very first day. She said, ‘Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.’
This is the fundamental beauty of a technology applied correctly. It is deskilling as liberation. The liberation of one’s time, the liberation of one’s energy, the liberation of one’s mind to think about things other than merely staying alive.
Over the years, so many of these improvements, big and small, have shaved the drudgery, toil, and pain from our lives. As i write this paragraph, i am taking a sip of water that i can be reasonably sure is pathogen-free, with ice cubes which came from my electric freezer rather than the Arctic. A recording of Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” is playing through my headphones, on demand.
Rarely do we truly appreciate these facts. Once a technology has embedded itself thoroughly enough into society, it becomes just another part of the scenery. “Hasn’t that always been there?” But sometimes, i’ll be out on a walk, and i’ll see a power pylon, and i’ll think — god! What a beautiful world we live in! What a great, bounteous planetary network of which we are all a part! For a moment, the spirit of Boris Yeltsin at a Texan grocery store possesses me, and my head begins to spin.
There is no name for this hyper-specific emotion. In the spirit of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, i thought i might coin one.
This is eutechnia: the dizzying awe at all the technological progress of all of human civilisation that has brought you here, an appreciation for just how much better the average life is today than the past, and a deep reverence of all the interconnected systems that keep it afloat. In an age of pessimism and malaise, we could all do with a little eutechnia in our lives.
