The two have sparred before. In 2009, they exchanged public letters in the Guardian, circling a question that nags at many eco-minded Westerners: What, in practice, can one do? Kingsnorth accused Monbiot of offering a false choice: either \u201cLiberal Capitalist Democracy 2.0,\u201d the status quo with more solar panels, or \u201cMcCarthy world,\u201d in which \u201cThe Road\u201d becomes our reality. Neither, he argued, reckoned with the scale of what was coming; we needed to return to our cultural roots, relearn how to live, and accept that fire and flood lay beyond our control. Monbiot called this \u201ca millenarian fantasy\u201d and maintained that faith in political action was a duty\u2014life must go on.<\/p>\n
The rift was metaphysical. Kingsnorth may be right that Monbiot is a Machine man, intent on twiddling levers to save the world, but, by that standard, so is anyone who makes any green choice at all. That is the lure, and the hazard, of Kingsnorth\u2019s position: it tends toward the absolute. In his new book, the Machine is also \u201cthe technium,\u201d a term he borrows from the techno-optimist Kevin Kelly for the impersonal, unstoppable force technology has become. It reshapes all values and cannot be reversed. Without abandoning society altogether, there is no escape\u2014and even that dream, Kingsnorth says, is illusory, because the Machine is \u201ca tendency within us,\u201d assembled with our own blood and sweat.<\/p>\n
In lamenting that tendency, Kingsnorth joins a chorus as old as civilization. Cities, machines, modernity rise; the countryside, the old ways, tradition decline. Socrates warned that writing, a mechanical act, might weaken memory, a creative one. Virgil linked the destruction of pastures to moral decay\u2014\u201cright and wrong are tangled up; the world is drowning in war; evil takes all kinds of forms; and the plough is no longer a thing of honour\u201d\u2014which is a line that could sit without strain in \u201cAgainst the Machine.\u201d Jefferson, Hogg, Blake, Thoreau: with the Enlightenment, the objectors multiplied. For Kingsnorth, the Industrial Revolution marked the point of no return. What was once anima, a spirit or soul, became techne, a resource. Playing gods, we turned our backs on the Earth. It is, in his account, the Fall\u2014or, in secular terms, human history as tragedy, a swan dive into the dark.<\/p>\n
Kingsnorth\u2019s break with the green movement, after years of being one of its most visible foot soldiers, cost him. Since the twenty-tens, he has shunned, and been shunned by, the liberal mainstream. A previous Archbishop of Canterbury once quoted his work; now Rod Dreher<\/a> backs it. Kingsnorth\u2019s attachment to the patriotic concept of \u201cEngland,\u201d one often claimed by the political right, draws suspicion, but he argues that the left ceded it without cause. His idea of \u201croots,\u201d indebted to Simone Weil<\/a>, means the bonds of community, not genetic heritage. He imagines the modern nation-state disassembling into smaller, more anarchic units, despises the \u201cmaw of the expanding cities,\u201d and tells us, via Lewis Mumford, that Plato thought a city should be small enough for one voice to address it. He wants to reclaim \u201cparochial\u201d\u2014what\u2019s wrong with parishes? The icons in \u201cAgainst the Machine,\u201d from Aldous Huxley<\/a> to Jacques Ellul, tend toward communitarian, class-conscious, small-\u201cC\u201d conservatism, albeit illuminated with a touch of the transcendent. With a few edits, the book could pass for an anarchist tract; with a few more, for the work of a Christian ascetic.<\/p>\n Before it can be either, though, there are swaths of nonsense to scythe. Kingsnorth claims to abjure the culture wars\u2014\u201cI don\u2019t believe in this conflict, and I won\u2019t send my children to fight in it\u201d\u2014while framing his own culture-war sorties as battles with the Machine. Feminism, he writes, has besieged the \u201cun-Machine-like family unit.\u201d (\u201cWhy should a child not have three fathers?\u201d is, he claims, a serious question of the moment.) Mass migration, he warns, puts \u201cthe natives\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. on the path to minority status,\u201d even as the migrants are excluded from the \u201cnational story\u201d\u2014a story that, thanks to the ruling \u00e9lites, is now being \u201cdissolved\u201d anyway. (This is both confused and not how stories work, but never mind.) \u201cPopulation\u201d appears in his prose shadowed by \u201cgrowing,\u201d \u201cmass,\u201d and \u201cvast,\u201d as if it were a pestilence. One wonders what he thinks should happen to these human beings. Perhaps they are beyond help. Perhaps\u00a0the rest of us are, too. He writes as if modern Britain were run by the Khmer Rouge:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The two have sparred before. In 2009, they exchanged public letters in the Guardian, circling a question that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,93,61,60,709,58586],"class_list":{"0":"post-92395","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-magazine","13":"tag-textbelowcenterfullbleednocontributor"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}