Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, by Paul Kingsnorth (Thesis, 368 pp., $29.48)
Paul Kingsnorth has First World problems. He has food and shelter. He has a laptop and an Internet connection. He takes his family on intercontinental vacations. Yet he finds the present day cold and empty. He senses a spiritual vacuum at the heart of Western life. “We modern creatures,” he laments, “are people with everything and nothing all at once.”
In his engrossing but often vexing new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Kingsnorth surveys the ailments of the affluent, secular, capitalist, materialist postmodern mind. He denounces “the triumph of the mechanical over the natural, the planned over the organic, the centralized over the local.” The “Machine” of his title—electronic, digital, networked, supply-chained industrial society—has been centuries in the making. Yet now, he says, it is hurtling toward a precipice beyond which our souls will be lost.
Techno-optimists may await liberation and riches. But Kingsnorth foresees in the Machine’s final victory a disaster for the human race.
Kingsnorth is a fascinating man. In his youth, he was a flinty environmentalist—the sort who chains himself to bulldozers. Disillusioned by a green movement that he deems “co-opted” by “technocrats,” he is now an Orthodox Christian and self-styled reactionary radical. Think of him as a conservative degrowther. A few years ago, he left his native England for rural Ireland, where he and his wife grow their own food, use a compost toilet, and homeschool their kids. His poetic outlook echoes William Blake’s: the divine is everywhere, angels are real, and the “watch fiends” of the world see only a fragment of reality.
His starting point is the death of Christianity—more precisely, of the Christian order. Culture is a spiritual creation. When a culture’s sacred center collapses, chaos follows. “It has been a long time since the West was in any way Christian,” Kingsnorth writes, and thus “Western civilization is already dead.” What has filled the void? So far: technology, consumerism, and ideology. These forces cannot, in Kingsnorth’s view, be fought head-on. Instead, he invites like-minded spirits to retreat to the margins and the wilderness, where they can slowly form new customs, myths, and rituals.
Kingsnorth is a gifted stylist and a syncretic thinker. At their best, his insights are sharp and layered. He is an astute critic of the fashionable nonsense that passes for contemporary politics. Though he indicts both sides of the culture war—each an outgrowth of the Machine—he is especially sharp in skewering the follies of wokeness. We are being undone, he understands, by the elite Left. These “cynical and exhausted” leaders sneer at “our ancestors and our history.” They define themselves overwhelmingly by what they reject, which “is everything we used to be.” Theirs is a hollow “culture of inversion.” These “small people standing on the shoulders of giants and giggling,” though they have “dominated the culture for some time now,” still pose as insurgents. In their wake, society is divided, rudderless, and angry.
All true. Still, some readers might find that this portrait drifts toward caricature. Drawn from essays originally published over several years on Kingsnorth’s Substack, “The Abbey of Misrule,” the book retains the feel of an author thinking aloud. The tone can swing from subtle to overwrought and back again.
When he turns to capitalism and liberal democracy, Kingsnorth’s passion gets the better of him. Is the Machine really so “exploitative”? Is scientific progress truly so “dehumani[zing]”? Is “liberal modernity” really “doomed”? For all his eloquence, Kingsnorth rests his boldest claims on little more than vibes. His treatment of history is mystical—civilizations’ vital forces rise and fall in grand cycles. He blurs the lines between liberalism and fascism, science and magic, while carefully extracting for praise the most appealing features of superstition. He blames the Enlightenment for the violence of the French Revolution but gives it no credit for free speech or civil rights. He admits (with some resentment) that capitalism has lifted living standards but ridicules its every imperfection.
Kingsnorth has no interest in data, which he considers mere tricks of the Machine. This leaves his treatise fatally incomplete. That he is personally unmoved by the fruits of modernity—more leisure, more family time, cheap travel, clean water, cancer treatments, dentistry, refrigeration, avocados year-round—is no argument. He predicts that the “brief age” of prosperity is nearly over. He makes no empirical case here, either.
At bottom, Kingsnorth is offering nostalgie de la boue—nostalgia for the mud. He paints a rosy picture of what his fellow English writer Geoff Dyer more accurately calls “centuries of rural life in which obligations and hardships greatly outweighed all possibilities of treats or abundance.” He romanticizes the peasant and the gypsy. He rhapsodizes about going without engines or supermarkets. He flirts with endorsing “indigenous ways of knowing.” His implicit economic program would leave everyone at the mercy of guilds of local craftsmen. He is making an aesthetic pitch for poverty.
In declaring the West dead—and suggesting that this might even be for the best—Kingsnorth loses perspective. The West may be confused and adrift, but it remains a force for good. “Most of today’s ‘defenders of the West,’” he scoffs, “will defend empire, science, rationality, progress and nuclear fission until the cows come home.” Well—yes. Those are, by and large, splendid things. Even the jab at “empire” doesn’t quite land. If Western science and reason persuade rural India that earthquakes are not caused by the declining morals of village women, so much the better for Western science and reason.
“The Machine is popular,” Kingsnorth concedes, and “there will be no popular revolution against it.” This is true: most people hate being poor and like being comfortable. His cynicism spares Kingsnorth the task of setting out a political program of his own. Which “luxuries” should be abolished? Which goods rationed? Which medical advances renounced? Lacking constructive proposals, Kingsnorth settles on telling only half a story.
And he overlooks a central part of human nature. He appeals to a longing for communion but neglects the drive to compete and achieve. Maybe one proper response to the Machine is not the self-denial of the medieval monk but the virtus—courage, excellence, civic duty—of the Roman citizen. If the Machine is here to stay, what form should it take? Can it be made to serve faith and tradition? Might it even be wielded to oppose darker forces, at home or abroad? Kingsnorth is free to tend his garden. But the world belongs to the man in the arena.
Some of this disagreement might just be Anglo-American miscommunication. Kingsnorth dwells on the U.K., where the crisis of national confidence runs particularly deep. Britain’s “cultural, intellectual, and even spiritual elites can’t,” he writes, “see a national tradition of any kind without wanting to jump up and down on it in public.” Conversely, he distrusts American pragmatism and individualism—the values that sustain this country’s dynamism and self-belief.
Whatever one makes of his prescriptions, Kingsnorth asks fundamentally important questions. What is to be done about our self-loathing elites? How do we reverse the spiritual malaise lowering birth rates and corroding mental health? Are we stuck in a “simulacrum of real culture”? Is it dangerous to let science reengineer human beings? Does technology saw away at the cultural branch on which it sits? Could the engine of progress grind to a halt? Kingsnorth does not have the answers, but neither does anyone else.
Even if the Machine’s benefits outweigh its costs, its excesses must be spotted and resisted. Here Kingsnorth is persuasive. We all need roots, he says, even (or especially) in restless America. In the face of Machine modernity, cultivating rootedness is a countercultural task. It means reconnecting with the eternal things—what Kingsnorth sums up as people, place, prayer, and the past. “Human community, roots in nature, connection to God, memories passed down and on.” In this vision, home is “the centre of the universe.” So put your house in order. Throw away your television. Raise your children well. Walk in the woods. Love your neighbors. Use technology only insofar as it serves your family. “Live through the technium with your eyes open.”
Kingsnorth has not shown that the Machine should be dismantled. But prophets are often dismissed in their own time. When he takes up the advance of artificial intelligence, you can’t help but wonder if he’s on to something. Who knows what will come of this “inhuman or beyond human intelligence” that is “struggling to be born”? “Everything has changed,” Kingsnorth warns, “and yet the real changes are only just beginning.” Maybe, he says, quoting the agrarian sage Wendell Berry, “the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” In that world, today’s political fights might look trivial.
We have spent years obsessed with identity and social justice. These debates are stale and boring. The real question on the horizon is technology’s place in our lives—how to balance it with community, with virtue, and with what it means to be human. That is the argument worth having. It is to Paul Kingsnorth’s credit that he sees this so clearly.
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