Helen Keller

Alabama has recently selected the design for their state quarter; I was luckily enough to pick one up this last week. It looks like this.



I thought it unusually progressive of Alabama to select such a radical leftist to celebrate. Helen Keller was a well known socialist and a very insightful thinker. She initially praised the Russian revolution, although I believe she later became disenchanted with it. Note this writing, in 1932.

I am convinced that the machine has taken something out of life. We have paid, and are still paying a great price for the benefits it has given us. But the fault lies with us. We have not used it properly. If the progress of the mechanical age should suddenly cease now, I should say that its disadvantages had outweighed its benefits. But further developments are certain to come. We cannot now throw the machine overboard. It is with us to stay, and our task is to turn it to our proper need. In the machine, rightly controlled, lies the hope of reducing human drudgery to the minimum - not merely that we may be free of drudgery, but that every individual may have the opportunity for a happy life, for a leisure which, under wise guidance, may lead to mental and spiritual growth.

I do not set myself up as an expert economist, but from my detached position I have tried to examine the whole problem from a humanitarian and common-sense point of view. It is evident to me, as it must be to all thinking people, that the manufacturer and exchange of goods constitute the preponderant influences in modern life. That is a false emphasis. Now, at last, we have an opportunity gradually to shift that emphasis by using labor-saving machinery for its ostensible purpose of saving labor. This will mean a reduction in the hours of toil for the great masses of people. The trend is already in that direction, as an emergency measure, and I am convinced that the pressure toward this end will outlast the emergency, for it is a logical result of the flowering of the mechanical age. This new orientation is by no means impossible. If I thought it were, I should lose my faith in humanity.

I'd have to say that her vision has not exactly come true. Instead of allowing workers to accomplish more in less time, most modern machinery is used to eliminate jobs, by allowing one person to do the work of two or three. Information technology, such as the PDA or the Cell Phone or the Laptop Computer, lets an individual be "at work" twenty four hours a day. So, perhaps our modern captains of industry could still benefit a bit from Hellen Keller's insight.