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.
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.
Very well said. Kingsnorth criticizing other people for things he himself has done (moving somewhere other than he grew up; using cars) was something that irked me when reading this as well. (For what it's worth, my review is here... https://zonamotel.substack.com/p/review-paul-kingsnorth-against-the)
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.
Multiple times in Against the Machine, Kingsnorth ventures that Marx's critique of capitalism was spot on even if his solution was entirely unworkable. I would apply the same criticism to his book. We are sliding toward techno feudalism; I don't think anyone can argue that. Whether we're talking about Flock networks, loops of Ring doorbell cams, Peter Thiel's massive government contracts, or Bezo's key chain full of monopolies, the Machine is enclosing everything from our digital likeness to our attention and personal economy. This is a dire situation and Kingsnorth is right to address this with the language of catastrophe. I would also agree with him that this situation is spiritual damaging. Fractured concentration cannot access spiritual realities. I'm sorry if you disagree, but we've got two millennia of religious writings from as far West as Spain and as far east as Japan saying as much.
Where I think Kingsnorth goes off the rails is when he begins to conflate the symbols he operates under with the archetypes they point to. That man desperately wants to be a hobbit. I'm not being cute here. I actually don't think you can fully appreciate where Kingsnorth is coming from unless you understand the impact that Tolkien's writings are having on a certain class of men. The LoTR was Tolkien's attempt to craft a new mythological history for Europe - one that embodied the broader Christian, pagan, and folk roots of England. What most people miss is that mythologies don't just look backwards. They tell us how to look forward as well. LoTR is prescriptive and it's images of quiet rural life, heroism, skepticism of technology, and tendency toward hierarchy form the mythological basis for many people who did not have a solid formation in Christianity or other traditions. It fills a void, shapes their thinking, and guides behavior. It's the water they swim in and they breath it, often unconsciously.
The mythology Tolkien composed was True, but the symbols themselves are just the vehicle for delivery. It's important to recognize where inspiring image and practical reality diverge. I think writers like Kingsnorth come off as Romantic, idealistic, and bougie because they are trying to birth an impractical, idealized vision into a universe that simply won't allow such a perfected visions to condense. At best, they attempt to ram that vision into a preexisting structure - like homesteading or trad Christianity - that either can't contain it or ends up being a warped simulacrum of the real thing. The truth is, we can't build the New Jerusalem. We can only look toward it with hope.
After reading his interview with the NYT, I decided that he was a nihilist of some sort: all doom, no joy. I appreciate his analysis that we’ve lost touch with what Charles Williams would call co-inherence, especially as between ourselves and nature, but he has none of Williams’s hope that we can reclaim it.
I'm just reading The Third Inkling, the biography of Charles Williams, so you mentioning co-inherence brought a smile of familiarity. what a fascinating man he was!
Fire. Writers like this also elide that Christianity is arguably what made the west. Enlightenment and individualism are unthinkable without hundreds of years of Christian thought; Enlightenment as historical rupture is an uninformed view. Brian Tierney opened my eyes on this subject.
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.
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.
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.
Very well said. Kingsnorth criticizing other people for things he himself has done (moving somewhere other than he grew up; using cars) was something that irked me when reading this as well. (For what it's worth, my review is here... https://zonamotel.substack.com/p/review-paul-kingsnorth-against-the)
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.
Multiple times in Against the Machine, Kingsnorth ventures that Marx's critique of capitalism was spot on even if his solution was entirely unworkable. I would apply the same criticism to his book. We are sliding toward techno feudalism; I don't think anyone can argue that. Whether we're talking about Flock networks, loops of Ring doorbell cams, Peter Thiel's massive government contracts, or Bezo's key chain full of monopolies, the Machine is enclosing everything from our digital likeness to our attention and personal economy. This is a dire situation and Kingsnorth is right to address this with the language of catastrophe. I would also agree with him that this situation is spiritual damaging. Fractured concentration cannot access spiritual realities. I'm sorry if you disagree, but we've got two millennia of religious writings from as far West as Spain and as far east as Japan saying as much.
Where I think Kingsnorth goes off the rails is when he begins to conflate the symbols he operates under with the archetypes they point to. That man desperately wants to be a hobbit. I'm not being cute here. I actually don't think you can fully appreciate where Kingsnorth is coming from unless you understand the impact that Tolkien's writings are having on a certain class of men. The LoTR was Tolkien's attempt to craft a new mythological history for Europe - one that embodied the broader Christian, pagan, and folk roots of England. What most people miss is that mythologies don't just look backwards. They tell us how to look forward as well. LoTR is prescriptive and it's images of quiet rural life, heroism, skepticism of technology, and tendency toward hierarchy form the mythological basis for many people who did not have a solid formation in Christianity or other traditions. It fills a void, shapes their thinking, and guides behavior. It's the water they swim in and they breath it, often unconsciously.
The mythology Tolkien composed was True, but the symbols themselves are just the vehicle for delivery. It's important to recognize where inspiring image and practical reality diverge. I think writers like Kingsnorth come off as Romantic, idealistic, and bougie because they are trying to birth an impractical, idealized vision into a universe that simply won't allow such a perfected visions to condense. At best, they attempt to ram that vision into a preexisting structure - like homesteading or trad Christianity - that either can't contain it or ends up being a warped simulacrum of the real thing. The truth is, we can't build the New Jerusalem. We can only look toward it with hope.
After reading his interview with the NYT, I decided that he was a nihilist of some sort: all doom, no joy. I appreciate his analysis that we’ve lost touch with what Charles Williams would call co-inherence, especially as between ourselves and nature, but he has none of Williams’s hope that we can reclaim it.
I'm just reading The Third Inkling, the biography of Charles Williams, so you mentioning co-inherence brought a smile of familiarity. what a fascinating man he was!
This is discouraging because I really wanted to like this book.
Fire. Writers like this also elide that Christianity is arguably what made the west. Enlightenment and individualism are unthinkable without hundreds of years of Christian thought; Enlightenment as historical rupture is an uninformed view. Brian Tierney opened my eyes on this subject.