Quilting & Disenchantment
We attended the Walworth County Fair. I look forward to the drive to Elkhorn Wisconsin. The fair is one of the few remaining old fashioned agriculturally-based county fairs.
While inside the homemaking arts exhibit building I noticed a 
individual standing at a computerized sewing machine. She was guiding the sewing head lazer dot, tracing the lines of a quilting pattern printed on the instruction sheet. The reciprocating needle was exactly following the pattern as it sewed the quilting fabric. I was amazed. The crafts-person holding the handles of the machine, was “driving”. By following the pattern she was creating a quilt quite similar to what my grandmother would have made, sewing by hand. My grandmothers quilt, literally hand made, would have required many many hours of work in the evening. Watching the machine work, I was curious. I asked the operator if the machine was capable of following the pattern without operator assistance? Her answer was yes, that it did not really need the guidance of a human hand at all. The machine could produce a quilt without human assistance.
I walked away with a strange feeling. My grand mother had she been alive, would no longer be needed to create what in her day was a most intimate, and care-imbued object. To a farm family a good hand made quilt was a precious and comforting source of warmth on a cold winter evening. I slept under such a quilt as a child, likely made by my mother and grandmother.
Grandmother has disappeared, replaced by a machine costing many thousands of dollars. A quilt untouched by a human hand…
I was reading a sociologist called Max Weber the other day. Back in the 1920s, he was predicting that we would all be taken in by a bureaucratic age. It could be left wing of right wing, but we would enter what he called an iron cage of rationality. It would be a wonderful world where everything was managed, everything was rationally done. But what you would lose was enchantment. It would become a disenchanted age. You would miss the sense that things are mysterious and wonderful in their mysteriousness. He said, “the price you pay for going into the iron cage is you become disenchanted.”
Capitalism has become an iron cage. It’s trapped us. Some new form of enchantment is going to have to come back in.
–Adam Curtis
