It’s hard to know where to start with this. For one, it probably would have been better left unsaid that Kingsnorth reminded you of several exes. It leaves you vulnerable to the accusation that you’re not really responding to his actual ideas, which would already not be a hard case to make.
Kingsnorth acknowledges the machine is great at producing material comfort and convenience. What he’s trying to wake many of us up to is that these things are not cost-free.
He quotes E.F. Schumacher in the chapter “Want is the Acid” to make the point and provide the antidote:
“The dangerous results of untrammeled want have been known since the dawn of time, which is why every sane culture has discouraged it rather than making it the basis of its value system. But an ancient problem…will have ancient solutions - if we choose to go looking for them. To those who ask ‘What can I actually do?’ he said the answer was as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.”
Needless to say, the wisdom of humanity has so far been silent on the virtues of big trucks and big butts.
Honestly, this book wasn’t even on my radar. But reading this mildly amusing but decidedly over-the-top critique, has only fueled my desire to read the book. If the author of this post can’t recognize where we are as an American society, and the church’s full throated embrace of empire (and the resulting destruction this has caused humanity, and really the world, then God help her). Somehow, I think this was the opposite reaction that she intended, but I am grateful nevertheless.
Pretty emotional response there. (And emotional is ok.) Good book, a bit bombastic at times, but that’s how good authors get attention. If you can’t see our post enlightenment, feminist, technologically obsessed world is leading us to oblivion and crushing our souls, there’s not much I can say. Do you happen to have a therapist or struggle with mental health? Did you know about 50% of Gen Z and Gen A girls do have these issues? This is all the evidence we need that modernity is very very broken.
Heavens, such a mean-spirited, self-indulgent and altogether dreadful post. And seemingly interminable, clocking in at 3,600 words, including many expended in ginning up a series of inessential straw men.
Case in point: an entity the author dubs “the Controlling Hippie,” an “aficionado of hypocrisy” who, inter alia, “would love to take away the American tradition of autonomous travel altogether and have everyone mashed together miserable on public transportation.” Uh, maybe don’t toss that grenade in the city that yesterday installed as mayor the candidate who celebrated and actually uses mass transit and kicked to the curb the candidate with a penchant for driving a muscle car all over midtown?
Not having read Kingsnorth’s book, I can’t assess how seriously he actually recommends blowing up data centers or pushing to their doom people taking selfies on mountaintops. What I can say is that anyone who’s never felt such an urge is no one I want to spend time with.
And does no one edit this stuff? A middling high schooler would have cut the first four grafs and revealed the lede: “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.” A post that honestly built upon that feeling might actually have been worth reading.
Yeah he doesn’t recommend blowing up data centers he is just drawing a conceptual distinction between those who merely try to draw lines limiting their use of technology (like him) and those who reject the technological system altogether, and perhaps wage war on it.
I agree with you. The review is absurd and somewhat nasty. It bascially amounts to “this made me upset therefore it’s wrong”.
"This made me upset therefore it's wrong" is exactly what this is. The "Against Doom" title of this review says it all. Sometimes a feeling of doom or despair is an appropriate response to something and should be faced head on rather than avoided and suppressed. But doom and despair shouldn't be the only responses and they won't be if we allow ourselves time to sit in the discomfort of these feelings rather than running away from them and writing off the entire book as "poison." As I read this book, first breathlessly and now on my second time much more slowly, I've moved from despair and darkness to a feeling of lightness and hope (though still definitely have moments of despair!).
I continue to be astounded by the Against the Machine reviewers who don't see how hopeful this book actually is with its simple message of embracing the organic messiness of human life, valuing the four P's, and putting our own "inner house" in order first and foremost.
I completely agree and you said it so well. For me, it used to be a great source of despair to be thinking about “ok how do we save this way of life and sustain it”. Kingsnorth and some other “fellow travelers” of his have persuaded me that we probably can’t “save” it, and we probably shouldn’t want to anyway. Thinking in those terms has given me a lot of hope and peace.
I will say though, I still imagined from Kingnorth’s way of writing that he was probably this really severe and dour person. But I’ve met him a couple times in person and found him to be very happy, easygoing, relaxed, honestly a wonderful guy, not the type of person you would expect after learning "this is a man who writes sweeping and dire civilizational critiques".
We happened to lose power for about 5 days recently, and I spent two of them - appropriately - reading this book. I (a liberal Democrat who is constantly bemoaning the impact of phones and social media who also happened to spend 3 years collaborating on a book about bitcoin) have an admittedly complex relationship with tech with which I am ongoingly grappling. I found much I agreed with in this book, and also much I either disagreed with or wanted to examine further (much like your excellent and thought-provoking review!). I’ve come to the conclusion that this is an excellent “whetstone” for sharpening and giving nuance to our own ideas and beliefs, and is therefore a work of tremendous value no matter what you think of it. I do think it’s sometimes really helpful to have the whole table laid out before you so you can see it for what it is, rather than piecing together bits and pieces as is so often the case. I didn’t necessarily ENjOY it, and I certainly don’t plan to live by it, but I do think this book was something of a masterpiece.
This is the correct approach, I think. I also disagree with Kingsnorth on some things (perhaps fewer than you do) but I think his overall project is a great one. I don’t like this approach of “I find it depressing and mean, ergo the things he said must be wrong.”
Also I’ve met him in person and he is a very warm and honestly jovial human being. I’m not sure where this review finds the sort of nihilism and misanthropy that he is accused of.
PS: Allison, you ran for state rep in my district! I was too young to vote then but would have loved to have voted for you.
OMG! No way! Which town? That means the world! What an insanely unexpected (and very happy!) PS! :)
And that's awesome about meeting PK in person—I have only seen him on videos (have been reading Abbey of Misrule for years) and have never felt "depressed," more like "called to task" in the best possible way. And inspired to interrogate my assumptions. I also have him to thank for my intro to Iain McGilchrist, whose work I deeply admire and think about often.
Yeah McGilchrist is such a fascinating thinker and I’ve been meaning to dive into his book for a while but it’s long and quite a commitment so I’ve been procrastinating.
I can't say I've finished it, either; just one of many books in the works. But I've heard enough interviews to at least get the contours, and it's extremely compelling.
"I do not see how anyone can consider this a legitimately Christian book."
It is a Christian book. It's a *very* Christian book. I think it's *the most Christian book* written in the past half century.
Kingsnorth reviles Western Civilization because it has made the Christianity of the Gospel - whose message is one of extreme forgiveness and extreme charity - utterly impracticable unless one retreats to the far reaches as he hinself has done, or chooses to martyr himself.
This should be plainly obvious from reading the book and Paul's other writings from the past several years, but somehow the reviewer has missed it.
The author herself says, "Genuine contemplative devotion still cultivates love and good will, and seeks to be of service to others." She criticizes Kingsnorth for being on Substack, but is helping his fellow man not what he is doing?
Ha, definitely not! The best criticisms of a community or technology come from people who love that community or technology, use it, and want it to be better. Or who believe it could be better. Or who don't think it can ever improve, but believe there is a reason to be there in spite of the flaws.
If you look at my comment, you will see there is no value judgement in it. I'm just pointing out that people who critique civilization are themselves participating in civilization. Critisicm, in itself, is an act of love and participation.
Kingsnorth may be an odious figure. But can we please dispense with the evocations of simple people who are supposedly really truly faithful and hopeful and fluffy in contrast to people like Kingsnorth?
Christianity is hostile to many, many facets of the modern world. Christian witness and testimony through the millennia - to say nothing of Scripture - are filled with figures who mock the world and heap scorn upon it. The idea that the truly faithful - I don't know - never say anything bad about progress or modernity because they're "comfortable with their faith" or whatever is just nonsense and cope.
This could’ve been a perfect review — no need for all the senseless paragraphs attacking others. If you had kept things objective instead of diverting down so many paths of ad hominems, your piece would go much further.
My husband Peco and I presented the keynote address at the Doomer Optimism Gathering in November, affirming that being "against" technology should not form our guiding principle:
"And while we need a good radar, the guiding principle should not be that we are against things. We do not need to be reactionaries or activists. That doesn’t mean don’t have strong feelings. There are certain forms of technology and techno-centered values that we utterly reject—viscerally and daily. But being against things, as a guiding principle, is not how to build a life. It’s a way of staying frustrated. It puts your mind in a negative frame of expectancy, which not only makes you more prone to seeing negatives, but narrows your attentional focus, making it harder to see positives and opportunities that might be right in front of you."
...
"Napoleon has this huge fighting machine, but the machine has no relationship to the place it is in. It is made up of men. Men who go hungry and who freeze and who lose morale and who die.
His war machine can’t survive. This is true of the kind of machine we are facing today. When technology separates us so profoundly from each other and the real world, it has created within it the seeds for its own downfall. The Machine lacks agency, it has no generativity, it does not produce life, and so it’s ideas are bound to die. We don’t need to fight it directly.
What we need to focus on is how to live a fully human life. The individuals and families who commit themselves fully to remaining grounded in reality, and on being fully human, have already won the war."
While I agree that Kingsnorth’s approach is extreme, I’d argue he’s not nihilistic. There are things of great value in his view and those things are being lost, in his opinion, due to the relentless march of technology. He views the screen as a portal to a digital nihilism, which he abhors. I did find myself put off at times by his overwrought and dramatic attempts playing at being a sage, but I found his general premise to be correct. Modern technology is diminishing our world and making it grayer, less creative and coldly inhuman. I don’t think Kingsnorth is off the mark there. He’s often too reactionary in terms of solutions for me but I find his description of the crisis accurate. I teach and I am witness everyday to the destructive impact of technology on society, learning and human connection. Kingsnorth may be too radical for some but he’s absolutely right to sound the alarm about the crisis society faces. An imperfect messenger who still carries an important message.
I was literally just talking with a friend about the few bearded whackadoodle men we know, and how their ego and penchant for secret knowledge draws them to Orthodoxy like moths to a flame . . . and it's really not fair for Orthodoxy at all, which is all about feasting and kissing the face of God.
So……..that’s it? No argument as to why his critique might be ‘wrong’. Just ‘meeehhh I didn’t like it. Mehhhh it reminds me of my ex. Mehhhh Christianity is about ‘hope’ or something lmao. Ohhh orthodox converts are icky. Mehhhhhh’
This piece articulates something I’ve felt but rarely seen said this well—how spiritual despair can masquerade as insight when it’s really just refined nihilism. There’s an elegance to Kingsnorth’s critique, but it collapses into the same emptiness it condemns.
The reminder that Christianity is not a funeral march but a feast is essential. Dignity doesn’t require doom. In fact, hope—real hope—is the most subversive position one can take in a culture addicted to collapse.
"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."
I feel like I read a different book and couldn't disagree with this review more. One quote I keep coming back to is this:
“The choice is not between ‘going forward’ or ‘going back’, but between working with the complexity of human and natural realities, in all their organic messiness, or attempting to supersede them with abstractions which can never hope to contain them.”
I read this book as an ode to embracing the "organic messiness" of reality. That's where the light and joy can be found. It is curious that so many Kingsnorth critics are ignoring this core message of the book.
And...no humor? I laughed out loud multiple times reading Against the Machine. In fact just last night was rereading the chapter that starts with an anecdote about his son's fish tank and I was giggling to myself: "Oh, and you have to ensure that you don't put a small fish in the same tank as one big enough to eat it. We learned this one the hard way. RIP Martin the Loach."
I didn't read the book, but you sound like someone on Titanic annoyed that someone dared to suggest that they better interrupt their ballroom dances and consider other types of actions, because they're in the middle of a catastrophe. How could they be so dreary, apocalyptically disturbing.
Well we're in the middle of the 6th mass extinction, hundreds of species disappear everyday from the face of the world, we're in a very fast (at historical scale) collapsing world. Collapse for which your big American way of life, big trucks, big imperialism, big wars, are the main engine.
It’s because they probably follow a particularly bastardized form of Christianity that essentially says forget the world, you are not of the world, you belong to another world yada yada yada.
Therefore, you shouldn’t give a shit about the state of the environment and also poor people need to exist, so Capitalism is also good and natural.
Kingsnorth annoys me in loads of ways, so I did enjoy this.
First - that he, a man who valorises a mythical Anglo-Saxon past and connection to the land, now lives in Western Ireland - the land my great grandparents fled due to poverty, not owning enough land to be self-sufficient.
(Especially without an international book deal and a really good publicist to get your work in the major Western broadsheet papers, plus Substack income).
So, on that point alone he can bugger off. However modestly he lives, he’s used his London accrued wealth to buy enough land to go play Thoreau.
Second - come the collapse of civilisation he longs for, that homestead will be gone. No one will have time for a guy who insists on using a scythe.
Third - I live in a city, where my life involves regularly meeting up with people in my community, where we might do something like watch some live music (only occasionally looking at our phones), chatting or dancing. Some of us raise funds and donations for the local food bank - other people in the community use it. I could carry on listing the events and clubs that people run. It’s a rootedness based on community, which isn’t very mystical, but I feel is the real answer to atomisation and digitalisation. You don’t need to wait for the collapse of civilisation to start living a more communal life.
It’s also telling that of all the branches of Christendom he could embrace, it wouldn’t be extant ecological Christianity (one of my good friends is the author of Wild Worship / Wild Lent) but the Eastern Orthodox Church.
It’s fascinating how much of a free pass he is given on a lot of his views - he gets to be a critic of Western liberalism and individuality - but does so with handwaving vagueness rather than saying outright the specific things he would wind back.
Unlike J K Rowling, he seems careful to pick the right fights, yet his church of choice strongly opposes homosexuality. Does he see it as part of spiritual malaise or not? Merely ungodly or right that states should criminalise this dangerous Western idea?
It’s hard to know where to start with this. For one, it probably would have been better left unsaid that Kingsnorth reminded you of several exes. It leaves you vulnerable to the accusation that you’re not really responding to his actual ideas, which would already not be a hard case to make.
Kingsnorth acknowledges the machine is great at producing material comfort and convenience. What he’s trying to wake many of us up to is that these things are not cost-free.
He quotes E.F. Schumacher in the chapter “Want is the Acid” to make the point and provide the antidote:
“The dangerous results of untrammeled want have been known since the dawn of time, which is why every sane culture has discouraged it rather than making it the basis of its value system. But an ancient problem…will have ancient solutions - if we choose to go looking for them. To those who ask ‘What can I actually do?’ he said the answer was as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.”
Needless to say, the wisdom of humanity has so far been silent on the virtues of big trucks and big butts.
Honestly, this book wasn’t even on my radar. But reading this mildly amusing but decidedly over-the-top critique, has only fueled my desire to read the book. If the author of this post can’t recognize where we are as an American society, and the church’s full throated embrace of empire (and the resulting destruction this has caused humanity, and really the world, then God help her). Somehow, I think this was the opposite reaction that she intended, but I am grateful nevertheless.
Pretty emotional response there. (And emotional is ok.) Good book, a bit bombastic at times, but that’s how good authors get attention. If you can’t see our post enlightenment, feminist, technologically obsessed world is leading us to oblivion and crushing our souls, there’s not much I can say. Do you happen to have a therapist or struggle with mental health? Did you know about 50% of Gen Z and Gen A girls do have these issues? This is all the evidence we need that modernity is very very broken.
Heavens, such a mean-spirited, self-indulgent and altogether dreadful post. And seemingly interminable, clocking in at 3,600 words, including many expended in ginning up a series of inessential straw men.
Case in point: an entity the author dubs “the Controlling Hippie,” an “aficionado of hypocrisy” who, inter alia, “would love to take away the American tradition of autonomous travel altogether and have everyone mashed together miserable on public transportation.” Uh, maybe don’t toss that grenade in the city that yesterday installed as mayor the candidate who celebrated and actually uses mass transit and kicked to the curb the candidate with a penchant for driving a muscle car all over midtown?
Not having read Kingsnorth’s book, I can’t assess how seriously he actually recommends blowing up data centers or pushing to their doom people taking selfies on mountaintops. What I can say is that anyone who’s never felt such an urge is no one I want to spend time with.
And does no one edit this stuff? A middling high schooler would have cut the first four grafs and revealed the lede: “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.” A post that honestly built upon that feeling might actually have been worth reading.
Yeah he doesn’t recommend blowing up data centers he is just drawing a conceptual distinction between those who merely try to draw lines limiting their use of technology (like him) and those who reject the technological system altogether, and perhaps wage war on it.
I agree with you. The review is absurd and somewhat nasty. It bascially amounts to “this made me upset therefore it’s wrong”.
"This made me upset therefore it's wrong" is exactly what this is. The "Against Doom" title of this review says it all. Sometimes a feeling of doom or despair is an appropriate response to something and should be faced head on rather than avoided and suppressed. But doom and despair shouldn't be the only responses and they won't be if we allow ourselves time to sit in the discomfort of these feelings rather than running away from them and writing off the entire book as "poison." As I read this book, first breathlessly and now on my second time much more slowly, I've moved from despair and darkness to a feeling of lightness and hope (though still definitely have moments of despair!).
I continue to be astounded by the Against the Machine reviewers who don't see how hopeful this book actually is with its simple message of embracing the organic messiness of human life, valuing the four P's, and putting our own "inner house" in order first and foremost.
I completely agree and you said it so well. For me, it used to be a great source of despair to be thinking about “ok how do we save this way of life and sustain it”. Kingsnorth and some other “fellow travelers” of his have persuaded me that we probably can’t “save” it, and we probably shouldn’t want to anyway. Thinking in those terms has given me a lot of hope and peace.
I will say though, I still imagined from Kingnorth’s way of writing that he was probably this really severe and dour person. But I’ve met him a couple times in person and found him to be very happy, easygoing, relaxed, honestly a wonderful guy, not the type of person you would expect after learning "this is a man who writes sweeping and dire civilizational critiques".
As I pointed out elsewhere, “bombing the data centres” is classic British - South London even - humour. It went way over the OP’s head.
We happened to lose power for about 5 days recently, and I spent two of them - appropriately - reading this book. I (a liberal Democrat who is constantly bemoaning the impact of phones and social media who also happened to spend 3 years collaborating on a book about bitcoin) have an admittedly complex relationship with tech with which I am ongoingly grappling. I found much I agreed with in this book, and also much I either disagreed with or wanted to examine further (much like your excellent and thought-provoking review!). I’ve come to the conclusion that this is an excellent “whetstone” for sharpening and giving nuance to our own ideas and beliefs, and is therefore a work of tremendous value no matter what you think of it. I do think it’s sometimes really helpful to have the whole table laid out before you so you can see it for what it is, rather than piecing together bits and pieces as is so often the case. I didn’t necessarily ENjOY it, and I certainly don’t plan to live by it, but I do think this book was something of a masterpiece.
This is the correct approach, I think. I also disagree with Kingsnorth on some things (perhaps fewer than you do) but I think his overall project is a great one. I don’t like this approach of “I find it depressing and mean, ergo the things he said must be wrong.”
Also I’ve met him in person and he is a very warm and honestly jovial human being. I’m not sure where this review finds the sort of nihilism and misanthropy that he is accused of.
PS: Allison, you ran for state rep in my district! I was too young to vote then but would have loved to have voted for you.
I think she's projecting some of her ex-boyfriends onto him.
OMG! No way! Which town? That means the world! What an insanely unexpected (and very happy!) PS! :)
And that's awesome about meeting PK in person—I have only seen him on videos (have been reading Abbey of Misrule for years) and have never felt "depressed," more like "called to task" in the best possible way. And inspired to interrogate my assumptions. I also have him to thank for my intro to Iain McGilchrist, whose work I deeply admire and think about often.
Yeah McGilchrist is such a fascinating thinker and I’ve been meaning to dive into his book for a while but it’s long and quite a commitment so I’ve been procrastinating.
I can't say I've finished it, either; just one of many books in the works. But I've heard enough interviews to at least get the contours, and it's extremely compelling.
Agreed!
"I do not see how anyone can consider this a legitimately Christian book."
It is a Christian book. It's a *very* Christian book. I think it's *the most Christian book* written in the past half century.
Kingsnorth reviles Western Civilization because it has made the Christianity of the Gospel - whose message is one of extreme forgiveness and extreme charity - utterly impracticable unless one retreats to the far reaches as he hinself has done, or chooses to martyr himself.
This should be plainly obvious from reading the book and Paul's other writings from the past several years, but somehow the reviewer has missed it.
The reviewer missed it because they refuse to see at all.
Was not expecting to find Mr. Sobanii in the comments of this essay, of all places. A breath of fresh air after a stale review.
If someone really believed in getting off the internet and disengaging from the project of civilization, then we wouldn't hear from them at all.
The author herself says, "Genuine contemplative devotion still cultivates love and good will, and seeks to be of service to others." She criticizes Kingsnorth for being on Substack, but is helping his fellow man not what he is doing?
Is this not just a complicated and self-satisfied way of saying "if you criticize the internet -- shut up"?
Ha, definitely not! The best criticisms of a community or technology come from people who love that community or technology, use it, and want it to be better. Or who believe it could be better. Or who don't think it can ever improve, but believe there is a reason to be there in spite of the flaws.
If you look at my comment, you will see there is no value judgement in it. I'm just pointing out that people who critique civilization are themselves participating in civilization. Critisicm, in itself, is an act of love and participation.
Kingsnorth may be an odious figure. But can we please dispense with the evocations of simple people who are supposedly really truly faithful and hopeful and fluffy in contrast to people like Kingsnorth?
Christianity is hostile to many, many facets of the modern world. Christian witness and testimony through the millennia - to say nothing of Scripture - are filled with figures who mock the world and heap scorn upon it. The idea that the truly faithful - I don't know - never say anything bad about progress or modernity because they're "comfortable with their faith" or whatever is just nonsense and cope.
This could’ve been a perfect review — no need for all the senseless paragraphs attacking others. If you had kept things objective instead of diverting down so many paths of ad hominems, your piece would go much further.
My husband Peco and I presented the keynote address at the Doomer Optimism Gathering in November, affirming that being "against" technology should not form our guiding principle:
"And while we need a good radar, the guiding principle should not be that we are against things. We do not need to be reactionaries or activists. That doesn’t mean don’t have strong feelings. There are certain forms of technology and techno-centered values that we utterly reject—viscerally and daily. But being against things, as a guiding principle, is not how to build a life. It’s a way of staying frustrated. It puts your mind in a negative frame of expectancy, which not only makes you more prone to seeing negatives, but narrows your attentional focus, making it harder to see positives and opportunities that might be right in front of you."
...
"Napoleon has this huge fighting machine, but the machine has no relationship to the place it is in. It is made up of men. Men who go hungry and who freeze and who lose morale and who die.
His war machine can’t survive. This is true of the kind of machine we are facing today. When technology separates us so profoundly from each other and the real world, it has created within it the seeds for its own downfall. The Machine lacks agency, it has no generativity, it does not produce life, and so it’s ideas are bound to die. We don’t need to fight it directly.
What we need to focus on is how to live a fully human life. The individuals and families who commit themselves fully to remaining grounded in reality, and on being fully human, have already won the war."
You can read more in "A (Visual) Human Creed" https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/a-visual-human-creed-how-to-unmachine
This review has to be satire.
While I agree that Kingsnorth’s approach is extreme, I’d argue he’s not nihilistic. There are things of great value in his view and those things are being lost, in his opinion, due to the relentless march of technology. He views the screen as a portal to a digital nihilism, which he abhors. I did find myself put off at times by his overwrought and dramatic attempts playing at being a sage, but I found his general premise to be correct. Modern technology is diminishing our world and making it grayer, less creative and coldly inhuman. I don’t think Kingsnorth is off the mark there. He’s often too reactionary in terms of solutions for me but I find his description of the crisis accurate. I teach and I am witness everyday to the destructive impact of technology on society, learning and human connection. Kingsnorth may be too radical for some but he’s absolutely right to sound the alarm about the crisis society faces. An imperfect messenger who still carries an important message.
He’s definitely not a nihilist
I was literally just talking with a friend about the few bearded whackadoodle men we know, and how their ego and penchant for secret knowledge draws them to Orthodoxy like moths to a flame . . . and it's really not fair for Orthodoxy at all, which is all about feasting and kissing the face of God.
So……..that’s it? No argument as to why his critique might be ‘wrong’. Just ‘meeehhh I didn’t like it. Mehhhh it reminds me of my ex. Mehhhh Christianity is about ‘hope’ or something lmao. Ohhh orthodox converts are icky. Mehhhhhh’
That’s all you got?
Substantive. You’ve got a future as a writer.
“PK is a poop head. Let’s all call him a poop head!
Didn’t need 3600 words.
This piece articulates something I’ve felt but rarely seen said this well—how spiritual despair can masquerade as insight when it’s really just refined nihilism. There’s an elegance to Kingsnorth’s critique, but it collapses into the same emptiness it condemns.
The reminder that Christianity is not a funeral march but a feast is essential. Dignity doesn’t require doom. In fact, hope—real hope—is the most subversive position one can take in a culture addicted to collapse.
"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."
I feel like I read a different book and couldn't disagree with this review more. One quote I keep coming back to is this:
“The choice is not between ‘going forward’ or ‘going back’, but between working with the complexity of human and natural realities, in all their organic messiness, or attempting to supersede them with abstractions which can never hope to contain them.”
I read this book as an ode to embracing the "organic messiness" of reality. That's where the light and joy can be found. It is curious that so many Kingsnorth critics are ignoring this core message of the book.
And...no humor? I laughed out loud multiple times reading Against the Machine. In fact just last night was rereading the chapter that starts with an anecdote about his son's fish tank and I was giggling to myself: "Oh, and you have to ensure that you don't put a small fish in the same tank as one big enough to eat it. We learned this one the hard way. RIP Martin the Loach."
I didn't read the book, but you sound like someone on Titanic annoyed that someone dared to suggest that they better interrupt their ballroom dances and consider other types of actions, because they're in the middle of a catastrophe. How could they be so dreary, apocalyptically disturbing.
Well we're in the middle of the 6th mass extinction, hundreds of species disappear everyday from the face of the world, we're in a very fast (at historical scale) collapsing world. Collapse for which your big American way of life, big trucks, big imperialism, big wars, are the main engine.
It’s because they probably follow a particularly bastardized form of Christianity that essentially says forget the world, you are not of the world, you belong to another world yada yada yada.
Therefore, you shouldn’t give a shit about the state of the environment and also poor people need to exist, so Capitalism is also good and natural.
Kingsnorth annoys me in loads of ways, so I did enjoy this.
First - that he, a man who valorises a mythical Anglo-Saxon past and connection to the land, now lives in Western Ireland - the land my great grandparents fled due to poverty, not owning enough land to be self-sufficient.
(Especially without an international book deal and a really good publicist to get your work in the major Western broadsheet papers, plus Substack income).
So, on that point alone he can bugger off. However modestly he lives, he’s used his London accrued wealth to buy enough land to go play Thoreau.
Second - come the collapse of civilisation he longs for, that homestead will be gone. No one will have time for a guy who insists on using a scythe.
Third - I live in a city, where my life involves regularly meeting up with people in my community, where we might do something like watch some live music (only occasionally looking at our phones), chatting or dancing. Some of us raise funds and donations for the local food bank - other people in the community use it. I could carry on listing the events and clubs that people run. It’s a rootedness based on community, which isn’t very mystical, but I feel is the real answer to atomisation and digitalisation. You don’t need to wait for the collapse of civilisation to start living a more communal life.
It’s also telling that of all the branches of Christendom he could embrace, it wouldn’t be extant ecological Christianity (one of my good friends is the author of Wild Worship / Wild Lent) but the Eastern Orthodox Church.
It’s fascinating how much of a free pass he is given on a lot of his views - he gets to be a critic of Western liberalism and individuality - but does so with handwaving vagueness rather than saying outright the specific things he would wind back.
Unlike J K Rowling, he seems careful to pick the right fights, yet his church of choice strongly opposes homosexuality. Does he see it as part of spiritual malaise or not? Merely ungodly or right that states should criminalise this dangerous Western idea?