Against the Machine is an attempt to give voice to a feeling: a feeling that something is shifting—or has already shifted—in humanity’s relationship to, well… pretty much everything.
Paul Kingsnorth used to be an environmentalist: the chain-yourself-to-bulldozer-to-stop-a-new-motorway kind. He grew up an atheist, but nevertheless harboured a deep sense of the sacredness of the wild earth. In time, his activism led him to a sustained critique of any human culture which systematically destroys natural places in the name of Profit and Progress, and he’s the author of multiple books chronicling resistance to these forces in his native England and across the globe.
For most of his life, as far as he could tell, Christianity—if it was relevant at all—was part of the problem: it was the religion of dominion after all. Yet he was a spiritual seeker, clearly recognising our desperate need to be grounded in something greater than ourselves. For ten years Kingsnorth practised Zen Buddhism and even spent time in a neo-pagan nature religion. Then, out of the blue, he suddenly found himself pursued by Jesus: friends came out of the woodwork, he had dreams, received strange and cryptic messages… what was going on? He did not want to become a Christian, but it was happening all the same, and he felt unable to resist. In January 2020 he was baptised into the Romanian Orthodox Church. Since then, he has continued to try and articulate the predicament of the world, but now from the perspective of Christian faith. This book, Against the Machine, is the culmination of these efforts.
Against the Machine is an attempt to give voice to a feeling: a feeling that something is shifting—or has already shifted—in humanity’s relationship to, well… pretty much everything: to nature, to place, to history, to culture, to technology, to imagination, to each other, to ourselves, and to the Divine. Whether we trace the first stirrings of these changes from 10 000 BC or 1500 AD, it long pre-dates any of us, but it has been building conspicuous momentum recently, at least since the modern period. What is this force which is reshaping all of life, portending either our final liberation from all limits or the unmaking of our humanity (depending on your perspective)? Following earlier thinkers and writers, Kingsnorth calls this thing The Machine: the ever-tightening net of money, technology, power, and ideology drawing us all in like a catch of fish.
For Kingsnorth, this is no conspiracy: there is no dark cabal secretly pulling the levers of power. In its broadest sense, The Machine is the restless quest of humanity since our exile from Eden. The Machine is the logic of Babel and the logic of Babylon. The Machine is what we try and build any time we seek to oust God from his world so we can rule it by ourselves. The Machine is what we enthrone in God’s place when a culture loses its sacred centre. The Machine is what we get when we throw off all spiritual restraints.
The book’s chief subject is the rise of this Machine in modern times, for Kingsnorth observes that, in post-Christian and post-Christendom societies, we are possessed of both unprecedented technical power and perhaps a unique spirit of rebellion against the sacred story which anchored the diverse cultures of Europe for so long. While sympathetic to certain strands on each side of the West’s resulting culture war, Kingsnorth ultimately rejects it as hopeless squabbling amid the ruins. For him, the contemporary West (and its colonial progeny like the US and Australia) is not a true culture so much as a spiritual vacuum into which the monsters of consumer capitalism, materialist scientism, and self-worship have eagerly rushed. Worse still, the West has by now well and truly exported its new Machine ‘culture’ across the globe and it is nearly impossible to find a people or a place untouched by its corrosive influence. All societies and all nations have been woven into its global economy and either convinced or compelled to accept its terms—to become nodes in the Grid and bend the knee to Growth at the cost of their people’s welfare and the devastation of their local ecologies and cultures.
In Kingsnorth’s telling, this Machine inherently rejects all traditions, boundaries, and limits, it accepts only forward movement and acknowledges only what can be measured and quantified. ‘Its endgame is the replacement of nature with technology, in order to facilitate total human control over a totally human world.’ However, he warns the result will not in fact be liberation but enslavement, as any totally human world turns out to be totally anti-human in the end.
Paul Kingsnorth is not known for his optimism.
What do we do? Can we roll back the damage already done? Can we turn aside from this bleak trajectory? Without despairing, Kingsnorth holds limited near-term hope. However, in place of the Machine anti-culture’s values of Science, Self, Sex, and Screen he counsels a rediscovery of an older way of being: a return to an emphasis instead on the Past (where we come from), People (who we are as a culture), Place (our specific local region), and Prayer (our direction and relation to God). He would have us start with who we are and where we are ‘without giving in to the nihil of the age’. Instead we must do our best to retain a sense of wonder at the world, remaining alert to opportunities to practise love and to the necessity of self-sacrifice, all the while avoiding getting drafted as a solider in the culture wars.
Outside of a miraculous worldwide change in direction, Kingsnorth believes the best we can hope for is to try to live as sanely as possible through this mad time in history. He would have us do what we can to preserve and build something real in a society essentially at war with reality.
Kingsnorth believes the best we can hope for is to try to live as sanely as possible through this mad time in history. He would have us do what we can to preserve and build something real in a society essentially at war with reality.
Thus far I basically agree. After all, I am the ideal audience for Against the Machine: a lover of wild creatures and places, an admirer of much in pre-modern cultures, techno-cautious and suspicious of Progress, uninspired to culture war but certainly not a-political, and rather romantic and pessimistic (or is that realistic?) in mood. If this isn’t you, you’ll likely find the book at least as frustrating as you will helpful: Kingsnorth is largely writing for people who are already (generally) predisposed to see things as he does.
Also fair warning: Kingsnorth’s specific views on this or that issue make him impossible to categorise as either on ‘the Right’ or ‘the Left’ of package-deal politics. While I found this wonderfully refreshing, all the same I could not help feeling his tone was often a little too dismissive or harsh when it came to certain topics. It’s also worth saying that some elements of his perspective don’t directly translate Down Under, while some suggestions for what to do remain slightly nebulous.
All the same, the book is eminently readable, especially given the sombre subject matter. Kingsnorth is a writer first and foremost, and he seems to know it, for he draws on a wide range of other thinkers throughout the book to help him with the conceptual heavy lifting. For those unlikely ever to read Lewis Mumford, René Guénon, Jacques Ellul, or a host of others, this is a real service.
For me, the main achievement of Against the Machine is the way it draws together a vast array of ideas, observations, and intuitions into a coherent, accessible, and lucid analysis of our situation. I am indebted to Paul Kingsnorth for giving me words and a frame for something I always dimly felt, and for offering a wide-ranging cultural-spiritual diagnosis and prognosis which continues to stimulate valuable discussion among my friends and family. Though easier said than done, one thing he helps make clear is our essential need to find others of like mind and to act together if want to chart a substantially different course (see Bernadette’s reflection on p. 11 and the letters from Jim and Andy on p. 13 for more).
All in all, despite easy criticisms of romanticism, when read sympathetically, I find the book’s gaps or insufficiencies as provocative as its insights. If I wish Kingsnorth’s advice for how to live through these times was more specific, or actionable, or felt more likely to succeed, what would I add to it? If I sense there are blindspots, where are they and how do they change the overall vision? If there is greater hope for the human and planetary predicament than that offered here, what grounds this hope?
We would all do well to ask such questions, so we need more books like this one.