Against Doom

On Paul Kingsnorth's 'Against The Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity'

Albrecht Dürer, View of the Arco Valley in the Tyrol, 1495, Pen, ink, and watercolor on paper

A few years ago, I attended a Christmastime service at an Orthodox church in Washington, D.C. The liturgy was beautiful and the clergy welcoming and gracious. The icons decorating the church’s interior were indeed evocative, and the long, slender candles parishioners placed in sand added to the atmosphere. As I was walking back home I encountered a young man who had been there too, and explained that he was a convert. “In Orthodox Christianity,” he gushed, his eyes widening, “it’s like the Enlightenment never existed.”

Cool story, bro. While I know there are sincere Orthodox converts who are gentle, believing people (a girlfriend who cuts my hair is one of them), there does seem to be a contingent of dudes who find their way into this denomination in order to justify reactionary politics. What’s ironic about these types, especially in America, is that it never occurs to them to pay homage to the First Amendment with its guarantee of religious freedom (a product of the Enlightenment) — the very condition on which their license to worship rests.

The manosphere beard should have been a dead giveaway. I parted ways with the young pilgrim and his unkempt facial hair and happily returned the next day to my own Catholic church. I told a woman there about my conversation and she smiled knowingly.

Most of us are familiar with people who use belief in God as a tool of dominion over others, or try to. Or maybe domination isn’t their jam and they want to retreat from the world, not participating at all. Religion can be used as a cloak for this too — a great justifier. Maybe they have an utterly negative, dystopian view of the world, and in a backwards way, they tell a conversion story to make it all “make sense.” They then write from a spiritual perspective, purporting to carry God’s message, while in fact doing the opposite. Only God can know the contours of someone’s heart, but when a book claims to promote faith and instead exhales darkness, its nature should be questioned.

Paul Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity is without a doubt the most depressing, discouraging, negative, and nihilistic book I have ever read. Save for a few chapters at the end which offer some vaguely sketched suggestions about what he depicts as our modern dilemma, amounting after hundreds of pages of gloom to a small ribbon atop a mass of brown sludge, the effect of reading this book is akin to falling down a very deep abyss and plunging closer and closer to utter hopelessness.

I do not see how anyone can consider this a legitimately Christian book.

Somewhere amidst the provocative podcasts and ominous doom-mongers of our current discourse, a very important message is being lost: that Christianity is a religion of hope and freedom from despair.

Bizarrely, Kingsnorth is regarded as a prophet by many, a kind of “seer” of our times. But perhaps he has forgotten, or never considered, that the meaning of prophecy in the Bible is to speak to others “for their strengthening, encouraging, and comfort” (1 Corinthians 14:3). Against the Machine, with it hundreds of pages of invective against civilizational progress, does anything but.

Kingsnorth famously converted to Orthodox Christianity in 2021 after dabbling in Buddhism and Wicca. He was a strident environmental activist in his youth. Now 50-something, he lives on a homestead in Ireland and devotes himself to activities like using a composting toilet and cutting grass with a scythe. He has written 10 books and runs a popular Substack called The Abbey of Misrule. His latest work is billed as “a spiritual manual for dissidents in a technological age.”

Against the Machine is a screed not only against technology, but against the forces of human ambition, empire, infrastructure, modern capitalism, and accumulated power that have characterized Western culture. All this he views as “Progress,” and he hates it. One might think that the Enlightenment is his ultimate enemy (1789 is indeed one of his years of discontent), but he also takes aim at the Protestant Reformation and even the pyramids. There is no bottom to the profundity of his disdain for the culture that birthed him, and just when one thinks one has plummeted to the limit of his glass half-empty worldview, the abyss opens further.

So great was the despair that I felt while reading this book that I had to take breaks from it for days at a time. I am not naturally a sad person, but I am sensitive to the energies that books communicate, and this book filled me with poison — with a psychological substance I can only compare to black tar filling my lungs and heart chambers. I cannot dis-recommend it enough.

Kingsnorth is an extremist posing as an edgy radical. That his particular brand of edgy radicalism has been embraced by the kind of bien-pensant upper-class liberals who read Jonathan Haidt may appear mystifying, but I will address that in later paragraphs. At times in his onslaught against what he calls “the Machine” he sounds like nothing less than a jihadist. What is the Machine, exactly? It is “the system of power and technology which now entwines us all.” He explains that “sometimes we call it ‘the economy.’ Sometimes we talk of ‘growth’ or ‘progress.’” And the internet, the central core of his target practice, is “the neurological network of the Machine.”

Kingsnorth writes:

“I hate screens, and I hate the digital anticulture that has made them so ubiquitous. I hate what that anticulture has done to my world and to me personally. When I see a small child placed in front of a tablet by a parent on a smartphone, I want to cry; either that or smash the things and then deliver a lecture. When I see people taking selfies on mountaintops, I want to push them off.”

It gets worse.

“If the digital revolution represents a spiritual crisis,” he advises, “then a spiritual response is needed.” Sounds reasonable enough. “What would this look like?” he asks, before presenting two modes of alternative life: one for people who still need to use technology, but distance themselves from it, and one for people who go on a rampage to divorce themselves from it entirely. He calls these people “raw ascetics,” from the Greek askesis, or self-discipline. And what would they do?

“Bombing the data centers: this is the mindset of the raw tech-ascetic.”

How does he justify this?

“The raw ascetic understands that he or she is fighting a spiritual war.”

After such invocations of violence it is impossible to take anything Kingsnorth says about God seriously. These are the pathetic (as in genuinely pathos-inducing) fantasies of a disturbed and fundamentalist mind, and it baffles me that the reading public does not seem to see this message for what it is.

The writer Steven Pressfield characterizes a fundamentalist thinker as one who “cannot stand freedom. He cannot find his way into the future, so he retreats to the past . . . he gets back to basics. To fundamentals.” The projects and initiatives of a fundamentalist, he continues, “are dedicated to annihilation, of his enemies and of himself. But the fundamentalist reserves his greatest creativity for the fashioning of Satan, the image of his foe, in opposition to which he defines and gives meaning to his own life . . . the fundamentalist is consumed with Satan, whom he loves as he loves death.”

It is indeed true of Against the Machine that Kingsnorth spends the bulk of his writing on his Satanic vision of the internet and depicting today’s digital culture as the contemporary manifestation of man’s inner evil. His book is so consumed with describing this darkness that it leaves almost no trace of light, or evidence of the joy found in salvation. There is no humor in this book. It is self-serious and broadly condemnatory not only of modern people, but of the very instincts our ancestors had to build civilization and construct dynamic societies.

Kingsnorth describes a lifetime of futile and absurd gestures — chaining himself to bulldozers, trying to stop people from driving cars, and refusing to ride in one himself. “The values of money and numbers and profit and growth” — he boasts — “I was against them.” He views modernity, or what he calls the Machine, as a process which is continually “uprooting us from nature, culture, and God, lead[ing] us into a mass society, controlled by and for technology,” in which we become nothing more than “mere cogs in a giant mechanism that we have no control over.” He relishes in forecasting demise. “Liberal modernity,” he intones, “is doomed.” We are being encircled by a “digital noose.” He’s big on we statements. “We all find ourselves trapped,” he laments.

Some of his most preposterously nihilistic sentences might be best spoken in a darkened closet, with a flashlight under one’s chin.

“We built the Machine to run the world for us. Now the Machine runs us.”

“The Machine has, by now, colonized us all.”

“The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.”

“Soon the farmers will be gone and and the food will be made, not grown, and it will be boundless and formless, like your culture, like your very being.”

The “dark spiritual undercurrent” Kingsnorth describes seems to be his real obsession, the real source of arousal that inspires his sentences. He invokes the Old Testament false deity, Moloch. One can almost picture him, Nostradamus-like, running his hands over a purple orb and bestowing knowledge on his salivating subscribers. Nothing engorges him more than issuing ominous warnings:

“What Moloch wants — Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks — is sacrifice.”

“Something is coming. Be ready.”

This one is best said in a movie trailer voice promising maximum destruction:

“Buckle up.”

What’s hilarious about this is that Kingsnorth posits himself as some kind of rural sage, even though he’s from the suburbs of London, and paints these pronouncements as somehow in line with populist leanings. I can assure him that my family members who have lived in the boondocks their whole lives would never dip their big toe, let alone their whole being, in the pools of pessimism Kingsnorth promotes. They are too practical, and too full of actual faith. They would be rolling on the floor if they ever heard such fulminations.

Real country people aren’t spending all their time churning artisanal butter while reading books made of vellum. They eat hamburger soup from the crockpot while watching the local news. They drive Frito-Lay trucks. They use lawnmowers, not scythes, for God’s sake. I know because I’m from there. My people would catapult Kingsnorth’s pretentious tome into the nearest puddle.

I think what bothers me about Against the Machine, besides its self-parodical levels of gloom, is its voice. Its voice reminds me of several of my exes and is broadly representative of the Controlling Hippie archetype. The Controlling Hippie is also an aficionado of hypocrisy. The Controlling Hippie only uses Tom’s of Maine toothpaste, but is perfectly willing to ride a transatlantic airplane. The Controlling Hippie will insist, oblivious to his classism, that McDonald’s Happy Meals are a form of child abuse. The Controlling Hippie will look askance at you if you eat something sugary for breakfast, but sucks down American Spirits with no problem. The Controlling Hippie will get mad at you for idling the car on a winter’s night so you can listen to your favorite song on the radio. The Controlling Hippie would love to take away the American tradition of autonomous travel altogether and have everyone mashed together miserable on public transportation. The Controlling Hippie makes his living on the internet while telling everyone else to get off it.

These people need to be left to play Dungeons and Dragons in peace, not lead movements of edgelords. Leave them at the Ren Faire where they belong. Kingsnorth insists that “the sacred and the digital not only don’t mix, but are fatal to each other,” yet has a Christian Substack. And although he spends huge swathes of his book railing against individualism — one of the hackneyed favorite pastimes of the postliberal set — his solution to the quandary of digital saturation is surprisingly individualistic. Realizing that he cannot force his prescriptions on the whole of society (perhaps the first sober assessment of the entire book) he quotes the author E. F. Schumacher: “We can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order.” How we engage with our particular era is “largely our choice.” When imagining a reader asking him how to establish a genuine resistance to prevailing trends, he shrugs: “I can’t answer the question. I don’t know you.” This is the late stage of the Controlling Hippie: he ends by not changing the world, but shopping at the co-op and growing out his armpit hair.

At this point the formula for a postliberal book is very familiar. A writer will take a provocative stance, trot out a little Deneen, a little Solzhenitsyn. Maybe sprinkle in a little Chesterton for good measure. Cook for 300 pages, and you’ve got a potential bestseller. Some of these people embrace the label reactionary and some don’t — but they are all, as the writer George Packer describes former Marxists in his book Last Best Hope, “hectoring pessimists” who “carried their apocalyptic baggage with them when they moved from left to right.”

In describing the highest level of aspirational ascesis, Kingsnorth envisions building a collective in which you “take a hammer to your smartphone, sell your laptop, turn off the internet forever and find others who think like you . . . . You band together with them, you build an analog, real-world community and you never swipe another screen. You bring your children up to understand that the blue light is as dangerous as cocaine.” This sounds like the kind of environment in which a person caught watching a funny YouTube video would be forced to wear a scarlet lower-case i for the rest of her life.

As a faith ‘n’ flag girlie, the most egregious element for me of Kingsnorth’s book is its rank anti-Americanism. One can find hints of this on his Substack, too, as in a comment from a reader on a Summer 2023 post that Kingsnorth “liked”:

You’re one of a handful of people who “get it” . . . I look forward with great hope and gratitude to the end of the demonic “american” empire, which I truly believe I’ll have the great grace of witnessing in our life time.

In a chapter called “The West Must Die,” Kingsnorth talks about wanting to “uproot” the “seed” in human nature that he deems responsible for establishing Western civilization. Sounding like a New Age guru who speaks in unsettlingly calm tones, he offers that no one should try to preserve the West or its cultural heritage. “Sometimes, you have to know when to let go,” he moans, sagely. “We need to let ‘the West’ die.” Then, he urges again, like a two-bit energy healer at a Goop summit for wellness junkies: “You have to let go.”

No thanks! I am half-Adirondack hillbilly and half-Washingtonian swamp creature, and I love the American flag and all that it stands for. If Kingsnorth is coming for even a thread of it, he’ll have to pry it from my cold dead claws. There is a supreme irony in the amount of time Kingsnorth spends inveighing against colonization, or “uprooting a people from its traditions,” yet it’s clear he’d love nothing more than to relieve us American patriots of many of the hallmarks of our collective culture. He seethes against “the ambitious, expansive United States of America,” calling us in our first century nothing more than a “newly incorporated business,” and raging against us “spreading [our] core values of individualism.” Not surprising for an anti-Enlightenment bro. As for that era which established the values of classical liberalism, we are “still swimming in its backwash,” he bellyaches.

He quotes the Anglican poet R. S. Thomas in the introduction to the last part of his book. “What to do?” The poem goes. “Dream small.” Again, no thanks. We like things big here in America. Trucks and butts included.

Some of the worst impulses of the meme-o-sphere are given a palatable presentation in Against the Machine, anti-urban sentiment chief among them. Echoing many a Roman statue profile pic, you can almost see the capillaries bursting in Kingsnorth’s eyeballs when he condemns “rootlessness.” To move from the place you are from and pursue your ambitions in another region is one of the cardinal sins of the reactionary canon. Heading to the big city is portrayed as an action motivated by the “global economy” and nothing more. “All of us are daily uprooted by this thing that we are ourselves making,” he frowns. “The Great Unsettling is our common inheritance.”

This trope is indeed one of his most irksome. Staying in the place one grew up in can of course be a meaningful choice, but is no one really ever supposed to move? If great artists hadn’t moved to cities throughout history, we wouldn’t have many of their masterpieces. Should Mozart never have left Salzburg and moved to Vienna? Then we wouldn’t have Don Giovanni or his 41st Symphony. Should Michelangelo never have left the province of Arezzo and painted the Sistine Chapel? Should Jesus himself have just stayed in Nazareth? Christ says his followers will be his witnesses “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). That means going where we’re called. Sometimes it’s not just the “economy” or the “market” that leads us somewhere — it’s God. Why does Kingsnorth’s critique of liberal mobility never include the notion that it might be disobeying divine will to remain tethered? He quotes Simone Weil, who says being grounded is necessary for a person’s “moral, intellectual, and spiritual life.” This may be true, but what if the development of that very life necessitates going somewhere new?

Kingsnorth’s vision of homemaking is similarly insular. He describes the ideal homestead as encompassing every possible human activity — child-rearing, education, food production, work, and socialization. To me, this sounds unbearably suffocating. It is good to be out in the world. “Almost the main work of life,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “is to come out of ourselves.” The vision of permanent pessimistic retreat Kingsnorth promotes is nothing like the true monastic vocation he compares it to. He seems to be in love with “the ascetic attitude of seeking liberation from the world,” but what he delineates sounds closer to what is called quietism, an erroneous religious passivity. Genuine contemplative devotion still cultivates love and good will, and seeks to be of service to others.

I have listed the book’s lunacies and inconsistencies. Why, then, has it received a fawning interview in The Free Press? A favorable profile in the New York Times? A generally approving review in The Atlantic? Why is upper-crust liberal America embracing Against the Machine?

Because the book is, in a word, woke. It doesn’t explore racial or gender-based injustice, and so may appeal to those who are tired of such subjects. But it is indeed an exercise in victimology. It is an oppressor vs. oppressed narrative, with technology as the oppressor, and it shows virtually no way out. Kingsnorth seems to view his vocation as opening brains to this dark worldview. “Everyone can sense what’s going on, and they’re looking around for someone to help explain it to them,” he told the New York Times.

The book also absolves the TDS (Tech Derangement Syndrome) of the laptop set. Weary liberals who engaged in the culture wars throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, thinking they were doing something valiant, are exhausted. They want an excuse, or even permission, to log off. This comes after years of hearing from activists that to give up the fight or focus on your own personal world is a sign of “privilege,” and that if you withdraw, you are “part of the problem.”

Despite its negativity, Against the Machine serves as a soft and soothing exemption from the vicissitudes of staying in the world. Seen through this lens — as something spiritual — going offline is a noble, not irresponsible, act. It is brave and nonconformist. This is the license people are looking for.

Consider the contrast between Kingsnorth’s condemnations and recent statements from the Pope. Speaking at various conferences in November, including one for young people, Leo reassured audience members that “technology can help us do many things and even really help us live our Christian faith.” While emphasizing prudence and responsibility, he assured people that “all human invention springs from the creative capacity that God has entrusted to us. This means that technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation.” As for ambition? “One can be both an entrepreneur and a saint,” he shared. “Economic efficiency and fidelity to the Gospel are not mutually exclusive.”

This is the right message. I remember, during a crisis, a passage from the Bible that helped me move forward. “For I know the plans I have for you,” it says. “Plans to give you hope and a future.” What manifestos like Against the Machine are missing is an acknowledgment that modernity and embracing the eternal aren’t incompatible. Optimism is not complacency, and endorsing moderation doesn’t mean I’m some kind of cuck. I’m tired of doom, and of doom being passed off as Christianity. Remember this: faith is about life. It’s about joy. It’s about salvation. Don’t get it twisted.

Emma Collins is the author of A New Heaven on Substack. She has written for the Washington Examiner and RealClear Books & Culture. Originally from upstate New York, she now lives in Washington, D.C.