Old ways often better …

… The beauty of doing things by hand: A review of Alexander Langlands and Ole Thorstensen. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Langlands is not standing athwart innovation; rather, he wants us to rediscover the lost beauty and utility in manual tasks. He wants us to remember the power of our hands. That spirit of rediscovery explains his preference for the Old English word cræft over our modern equivalent. He fears we’ve lost something natural and pure related to cræft, and he finds the origin of our discontent in the Industrial Revolution: “mechanization has changed the way we think, the way we build knowledge; so familiar has postindustrial power become that we genuinely find it hard to relate to the world before it.”