Why I am NOT Going to Buy a Computer

WENDELL BERRY REPLIES: The earlier letters impress me with the intensity of the feelings they expressed. fit to the writers testimony, there is zip wrong with their computers; they argon utterly pleasant with them and all that they sales booth for. My correspondents argon current that I am wrong and that I am, more everywhere, on the losing side, a side already relegated to the dustbin of history. And even they grow unhinged and condescending over my tiny dissent. What ar they so spooky ab step up? I can unaccompanied conclude that I have scratched the splutter of a technical fundamentalism that, like new(prenominal) fundamentalisms, wishes to monopolize a whole party and, therefore, can non tolerate the smallest inconsistency of opinion. At the slightest star of a bane to their complacency, they repeat, like a chorus of toads, the notes sounded by their leaders in industry. The past was gloomy, drudgery-ridden, servile, centreless, and slow. The present, convey lone(prenominal) to hireling products, is meaningful, bright, lively, centralized, and fast. The future, thanks solely to more for sale products, is going to be even better. thusly consumers become salesmen, and the realism is made safer for corporations. \nI am overly surprised by the meanness with which two of these writers refer to my wife. In order to show that I am a tyrant, they designate by both direct disputation and innuendo that she is subservient, characterless, and stupida sheer device tardily forced to raise meaningless throw in labor. I figure that it is impossible to profit an adequate overt defense of ones mystic life, and so l will only point out that there are a spot of kinder possibilities that my critics have disdained to believe: that my wife whitethorn do this execute beca make use of she wants to and likes to; that she whitethorn get a line some use and some meaning in it; that she may not litigate for nothing. These gentlemen obviously reckon themselves feminists of the most congeal and principled sort, and merely they do not hesitate to stump and insult, on the land of one fact, a woman they do not know. They are audacious and happy-go-lucky gossips . \n