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.
I appreciate your comment but would respectfully point out that Kingsnorth explicitly rejects the concept of building a New Jerusalem. He says, “Any attempt at building utopia will fail—but utopia should never be the goal. Some form of free survival is the goal: survival in order to live a life unconformed to the dictates of the Machine and to uphold the values of a true human life.” (294)
The only program he suggests is for individuals to establish some personal technological boundaries and then endeavor to stay within them.
He may explicitly reject it, but he's trying to build it anyway. I think you can see this at work particularly in the four S's. Anyone who can give you a four point plan for redressing the ills of society is mainlining the Machine. It may not feel that way. The four points he picks may have enough folksy and organic resonance to drown out the groan of gears, but they're derivative of the same motivation. Eschatology in four easy steps, am I right?!
The four S's are a very specific kind of modern yearning. I really wish Kingsnorth had stuck to the yearning itself instead of trying to box it into a four cornered room. And if you'll pardon me, I'd like to step off the rails for a bit myself. There are two back to back cards in the tarot deck - The Tower and the Star - which could have appeared on the cover of Kingsnorth's book. The Tower he definitely seems to get. That's the card of systems. It's the engineered society; the New Jerusalem we all pine for. When we are ruled by the Tower, we try to construct that City, brick by brick. Towers are built either out in the world or within our own consciousness. They are utopias, systems of social engineering, heady philosophies, or rigorous moral codes. And all of them are doomed to fail. Anyone who would build a Tower always neglects to recognize that there are outside forces that will threaten it, unforeseen flaws in our design, and new complexities that will have to be addressed. Eventually, the whole thing can no longer stand. Either it is cast down by the denizens of other Towers or it just collapses under its own complexity. ATM is an excellent study of this process.
The Tower of Western society has fallen. There are bits and pieces of the system that are still running, but the whole has lost its coherence. The remaining machinations will eventually cease. Right now, we are living in the liminal time after the Tower has fallen but before most of us have caught sight of the Star. So what's the Star? There's that beautiful scene in the Neverending Story, after the Nothing has come, where Sebastian and the Empress are alone in the Ivory Tower. In her hand is Fantasia's last remaining grain of sand and it shines in her palm, like a star. That grain of sand, that star, is hope itself. It's the yearning that so many of us are feeling right now as Western civ crumbles around us. Like a star, that yearning, that hope, is something we can navigate by. It provides us orientation in the dark. And it hints at something much, much brighter to come.
I think Kingsnorth has seen the Tower fall and I think he's caught a glimpse of the Star, but rather than trust in it and follow, I feel like he's trying to rebuild his own Tower under the Star's scant illumination. I can't necessarily fault him for that. Following the Star is a treacherous journey and one that asks us to supply complete faith even though we don't actually know where the Star will ultimately lead us. Few people can supply that amount of trust. Even more daunting, following the Star requires us to abandon all expectation about what will be while likewise loosening our attachment to all that has come before. Kingsnorth seems to be filling his pockets with bricks from the Tower and I'm fairly certain he has some pretty refined expectations of what might come next. All that's going to do is weigh him down.
So no four S's, no ten commandments, no eight-fold path, or 99 theses. Maybe these will have a part to play, maybe not. All we've got right now is that one shining star in the dark beckoning us with its familiar light.
That's an excellent koan! I think if you look closely, you will often see it peeping from behind the clouds - even on days where it seems so overcast that no light could possibly get through. But mainly we see it on ordinary days, in mundane thoughts, and the loves that animate us despite the darkness. Everyone sees the star to some degree. It appears to us in parallax. My vantage point causes it to appear one way, your perspective may provide a completely different vision. We know the star as the star when following it both pacifies our minds and enlivens our spirit. We feel oriented. The darkness ceases to be so dark. We also feel like we are moving toward something. Something we feel might have once possessed, but lost over time. When we see the star, we recognize that it is within our capacity to find that again. I promise you, your star is beckoning. And you likely know from where.
The OP article and this nuanced comment are both excellent.
I found myself wondering what damaged Kingsworth, and while i agree with OP on most all of her impassioned fire, I would want from both combatants further focus on the path outward & upward (not just 'away' from Kingsworth, i.e.) .
Much as the elves (treading on super tiptoes here mentioning Tolkien) seemed to have elevated & removed their lives by eschewing some local 'modernity', wouldn't it be nice to have a positive path out, something short of Butlerian Jihad?
Something(s) gone/are going wrong -- and in any time and place this will be true to a greater or lesser extent -- and so having more light & path and somewhat less fire would be helpful for us normies.
Great conversation all around.
(and thanks to Emma for saving me the time to read "Against")
"Kingsnorth ventures that Marx's critique of capitalism was spot on even if his solution was entirely unworkable."
I have come to a similar conclusion as Paul in this regard, but from the opposite direction. He came from left-wing environmentalism;, I from right-wing libertarianism.
"I would apply the same criticism to his book."
This is what Paul misses. He's built an anti-Machine ideology whose solutions (like, let's end modernity and fossil fertilizers and kill half the planet) are just as bad as Marx's.
Unlike Marx, he views the collapse to be inevitable (or at least fears even more if the Machine doesn't fail) so he sees no reason not to hasten it. Marx rejected this, believing his utopia would arise in the "full development of capitalism" not its collapse.
Paul may be correct in the long run. But as Keynes said (I teach econ): "in the long run we're all dead." So one might as well plan for the slightly-less-than-long run and hope for the best. To use another analogy, the fact that we'll almost certainly eventually start a nuclear war shouldn't preclude us from trying to live good and meaningful lives in the interim.
I'm fairly certain you won't like this, but I think Kingsnorth should have aligned himself more with structured decline instead of utopian abandonment. I'm more in the John Micheal Greer camp on this. Barring some black swan energy discovery - and those do happen. Fossil oil replaced whale oil after all! - the goose of Western Civ is drowning. I'm not saying we all need to move to the wilderness and subsist on locusts and wild honey, but we can't keep glutting ourselves on oil and natural gas the way we are and expect our American version of the machine to keep puttering along the way it has. Call me crazy, but I would like to maintain as much of our current lifestyle as far into the future as possible. I mean, modern Western medicine and not wearing a parka in my house is friggin amazing. What do the Cherokee say? Make all of your consumption decisions with the next seven generations in mind? There's real wisdom there. And all that really looks like is eating one less meal of animal protein a day, setting your thermostat to 65 in just the rooms you're using, and driving a K truck instead of a F-350. I promise that none of those things will shrivel our testicles and compel us to mainline the Halmark Channel at Christmas.
I have chronic kidney stones. Absent modern medicine, I die painfully within a few years. So I respect Paul greatly, but I take his "let's all go live in the stone age" mantra a little personally.
Though a word from the stone age - if you haven’t already consider strong teas and decoctions of plants like gravelroot, dandelion, goldenrod, or really most members of the aster family. They do help move fluid through the uniary system. Contraindictations include if you’re already on diuritcs, but there is clinical evidence that some of the phytochemistry in those plants can also help break up crystals as well. This is especially true of gravelroot (I mean, look at the name) and dandelion. And I’m sure you’ve already heard this, but the usual advice: watch out for foods high in oxalates.
(One quick addition - gravel root should never be used long term. There's some nasty alkaloids in there you don't want building up. It's more for acute cases.)
And a further word of caution - never, ever tell a herbalist about any chronic health conditions unless you’re willing to sit through a botany lecture!
Yeah, I'm a philosophy and civics teacher, so believe me, I do my share of soapboxing too. :-) I've used that same line several times: "that will teach you not to ask a phil teacher about..."
I have several hundred stones. Every time I go in for a CAT scan, I tell the tech, "hey, my kidneys look pretty weird, so be prepared." And it's always the same, "oh, I've seen it all, Mr. Villanueva. It's no problem." After the scan they come back white as a sheet and look at me like "why are you alive?" On x-ray, my kidneys look like they're made of bone.
Thanks for the advice, seriously. Gravelroot wasn't one I was aware of, so I'll look it up. I will be careful with it though. There's a good natural foods store close to me, so I have folks to bounce ideas off of.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’
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.
I appreciate your comment but would respectfully point out that Kingsnorth explicitly rejects the concept of building a New Jerusalem. He says, “Any attempt at building utopia will fail—but utopia should never be the goal. Some form of free survival is the goal: survival in order to live a life unconformed to the dictates of the Machine and to uphold the values of a true human life.” (294)
The only program he suggests is for individuals to establish some personal technological boundaries and then endeavor to stay within them.
He may explicitly reject it, but he's trying to build it anyway. I think you can see this at work particularly in the four S's. Anyone who can give you a four point plan for redressing the ills of society is mainlining the Machine. It may not feel that way. The four points he picks may have enough folksy and organic resonance to drown out the groan of gears, but they're derivative of the same motivation. Eschatology in four easy steps, am I right?!
The four S's are a very specific kind of modern yearning. I really wish Kingsnorth had stuck to the yearning itself instead of trying to box it into a four cornered room. And if you'll pardon me, I'd like to step off the rails for a bit myself. There are two back to back cards in the tarot deck - The Tower and the Star - which could have appeared on the cover of Kingsnorth's book. The Tower he definitely seems to get. That's the card of systems. It's the engineered society; the New Jerusalem we all pine for. When we are ruled by the Tower, we try to construct that City, brick by brick. Towers are built either out in the world or within our own consciousness. They are utopias, systems of social engineering, heady philosophies, or rigorous moral codes. And all of them are doomed to fail. Anyone who would build a Tower always neglects to recognize that there are outside forces that will threaten it, unforeseen flaws in our design, and new complexities that will have to be addressed. Eventually, the whole thing can no longer stand. Either it is cast down by the denizens of other Towers or it just collapses under its own complexity. ATM is an excellent study of this process.
The Tower of Western society has fallen. There are bits and pieces of the system that are still running, but the whole has lost its coherence. The remaining machinations will eventually cease. Right now, we are living in the liminal time after the Tower has fallen but before most of us have caught sight of the Star. So what's the Star? There's that beautiful scene in the Neverending Story, after the Nothing has come, where Sebastian and the Empress are alone in the Ivory Tower. In her hand is Fantasia's last remaining grain of sand and it shines in her palm, like a star. That grain of sand, that star, is hope itself. It's the yearning that so many of us are feeling right now as Western civ crumbles around us. Like a star, that yearning, that hope, is something we can navigate by. It provides us orientation in the dark. And it hints at something much, much brighter to come.
I think Kingsnorth has seen the Tower fall and I think he's caught a glimpse of the Star, but rather than trust in it and follow, I feel like he's trying to rebuild his own Tower under the Star's scant illumination. I can't necessarily fault him for that. Following the Star is a treacherous journey and one that asks us to supply complete faith even though we don't actually know where the Star will ultimately lead us. Few people can supply that amount of trust. Even more daunting, following the Star requires us to abandon all expectation about what will be while likewise loosening our attachment to all that has come before. Kingsnorth seems to be filling his pockets with bricks from the Tower and I'm fairly certain he has some pretty refined expectations of what might come next. All that's going to do is weigh him down.
So no four S's, no ten commandments, no eight-fold path, or 99 theses. Maybe these will have a part to play, maybe not. All we've got right now is that one shining star in the dark beckoning us with its familiar light.
but where is the star?
That's an excellent koan! I think if you look closely, you will often see it peeping from behind the clouds - even on days where it seems so overcast that no light could possibly get through. But mainly we see it on ordinary days, in mundane thoughts, and the loves that animate us despite the darkness. Everyone sees the star to some degree. It appears to us in parallax. My vantage point causes it to appear one way, your perspective may provide a completely different vision. We know the star as the star when following it both pacifies our minds and enlivens our spirit. We feel oriented. The darkness ceases to be so dark. We also feel like we are moving toward something. Something we feel might have once possessed, but lost over time. When we see the star, we recognize that it is within our capacity to find that again. I promise you, your star is beckoning. And you likely know from where.
The OP article and this nuanced comment are both excellent.
I found myself wondering what damaged Kingsworth, and while i agree with OP on most all of her impassioned fire, I would want from both combatants further focus on the path outward & upward (not just 'away' from Kingsworth, i.e.) .
Much as the elves (treading on super tiptoes here mentioning Tolkien) seemed to have elevated & removed their lives by eschewing some local 'modernity', wouldn't it be nice to have a positive path out, something short of Butlerian Jihad?
Something(s) gone/are going wrong -- and in any time and place this will be true to a greater or lesser extent -- and so having more light & path and somewhat less fire would be helpful for us normies.
Great conversation all around.
(and thanks to Emma for saving me the time to read "Against")
I still think it's a book worth reading. Kingsnorth's treatment of the forces that got us here are definitely worth your time.
Maybe the path outward and upward is a Butlerian Jihad, though.
"Kingsnorth ventures that Marx's critique of capitalism was spot on even if his solution was entirely unworkable."
I have come to a similar conclusion as Paul in this regard, but from the opposite direction. He came from left-wing environmentalism;, I from right-wing libertarianism.
"I would apply the same criticism to his book."
This is what Paul misses. He's built an anti-Machine ideology whose solutions (like, let's end modernity and fossil fertilizers and kill half the planet) are just as bad as Marx's.
Unlike Marx, he views the collapse to be inevitable (or at least fears even more if the Machine doesn't fail) so he sees no reason not to hasten it. Marx rejected this, believing his utopia would arise in the "full development of capitalism" not its collapse.
Paul may be correct in the long run. But as Keynes said (I teach econ): "in the long run we're all dead." So one might as well plan for the slightly-less-than-long run and hope for the best. To use another analogy, the fact that we'll almost certainly eventually start a nuclear war shouldn't preclude us from trying to live good and meaningful lives in the interim.
I'm fairly certain you won't like this, but I think Kingsnorth should have aligned himself more with structured decline instead of utopian abandonment. I'm more in the John Micheal Greer camp on this. Barring some black swan energy discovery - and those do happen. Fossil oil replaced whale oil after all! - the goose of Western Civ is drowning. I'm not saying we all need to move to the wilderness and subsist on locusts and wild honey, but we can't keep glutting ourselves on oil and natural gas the way we are and expect our American version of the machine to keep puttering along the way it has. Call me crazy, but I would like to maintain as much of our current lifestyle as far into the future as possible. I mean, modern Western medicine and not wearing a parka in my house is friggin amazing. What do the Cherokee say? Make all of your consumption decisions with the next seven generations in mind? There's real wisdom there. And all that really looks like is eating one less meal of animal protein a day, setting your thermostat to 65 in just the rooms you're using, and driving a K truck instead of a F-350. I promise that none of those things will shrivel our testicles and compel us to mainline the Halmark Channel at Christmas.
You're wrong -- I love it!
I have chronic kidney stones. Absent modern medicine, I die painfully within a few years. So I respect Paul greatly, but I take his "let's all go live in the stone age" mantra a little personally.
Though a word from the stone age - if you haven’t already consider strong teas and decoctions of plants like gravelroot, dandelion, goldenrod, or really most members of the aster family. They do help move fluid through the uniary system. Contraindictations include if you’re already on diuritcs, but there is clinical evidence that some of the phytochemistry in those plants can also help break up crystals as well. This is especially true of gravelroot (I mean, look at the name) and dandelion. And I’m sure you’ve already heard this, but the usual advice: watch out for foods high in oxalates.
(One quick addition - gravel root should never be used long term. There's some nasty alkaloids in there you don't want building up. It's more for acute cases.)
And a further word of caution - never, ever tell a herbalist about any chronic health conditions unless you’re willing to sit through a botany lecture!
Yeah, I'm a philosophy and civics teacher, so believe me, I do my share of soapboxing too. :-) I've used that same line several times: "that will teach you not to ask a phil teacher about..."
I have several hundred stones. Every time I go in for a CAT scan, I tell the tech, "hey, my kidneys look pretty weird, so be prepared." And it's always the same, "oh, I've seen it all, Mr. Villanueva. It's no problem." After the scan they come back white as a sheet and look at me like "why are you alive?" On x-ray, my kidneys look like they're made of bone.
Thanks for the advice, seriously. Gravelroot wasn't one I was aware of, so I'll look it up. I will be careful with it though. There's a good natural foods store close to me, so I have folks to bounce ideas off of.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.