“We may be in the process of creating something unique in human history: a global anticulture, unmoored from reality and increasingly at war with.”
― Paul Kingsnorth
I don’t read many contemporary books these days, but Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine, is quite remarkable. And timely. I’ve been writing on some of these societal themes for a decade now.
“We built the Machine to run the world for us. Now the Machine runs us.”
Kingsnorth argues quite compellingly that the Machine, which manifests today as “an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies,” is systematically dismantling the core of who we are as humans.
I think we all see it. We all feel deeply that something is off in today’s ‘rudderless’ world.
In our progress-obsessed, tech-fueled, screen-intoxicated culture, a culture entrenched in consumerism, self-worship, and superficiality, Kingsnorth lays out how we got here, where we’re going, and the apocalyptic “unveiling” if we persist.
“Our idols today are economic conquest, unending ‘growth’ built on turning all life into ‘resources’ for human consumption, scientism disguised as objective inquiry, manic forward motion, and the same old quest for perfectibility…
“The majority of humanity is now living in megacities, cut off from non-human nature, plugged into the Machine, controlled by it, reduced to it.”
Why does Kingsnorth, as well as many great writers and thinkers before him, use the notion of the “machine” as a symbolic metaphor for what is enveloping us? He tells us that:
“a machine is an emotionless, inorganic system; something which is pitiless and determined, and which has some task to fulfil. Above all, a machine is something unnatural: something constructed. Specifically, it is constructed of separate parts, all of which, when taken together, perform the wider function for which the machine is designed.
If today, then, we live under the reign of the Machine, what is this machine made of? What are its parts, and how do they operate?
This simple answer is: technologies, and especially digital technologies.”
When a plant is uprooted, Kingsnorth argues, “it withers and then dies.” Same goes for the soul of humans. Today, we have “turned away from a spiritual, rooted understanding of the world,” and find ourselves “rootless, rudderless, unmoored in a great sea of chaos; angry, confused, shouting at the world and each other.”
It’s this “unrooting” that “leads us into a mass society, controlled by and for technology, in which we have been on course to become, since at least the Industrial Revolution, mere cogs in a giant mechanism that we have no control over.”
As Wendell Berry once wrote: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
Iain McGilchrist, the great British psychiatrist, philosopher, and neuroscientist, stated that this was the “most powerful and important book” he has read in years. “This book should be required reading not only for politicians, technocrats, teachers and all who help shape our world, but for every still-living soul in this terrifying age of the Machine.”
I concur.
Against the Machine is a crucial book for our times. Kingsnorth's prose is fierce and elegant, shedding a much-needed light on the “bewildering, ominous” forces shaping our era. Today, I’d like to share a beautiful passage from the introduction. I hope you enjoy it.
A passage from the introduction of Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth.
Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in a metastasising machine, which is closing in around you, polluting your skies and your woods and your past and your imagination.
If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic.
Most of the things you like are fading away. The great forests and the stories made in and by them. The strange cultures spanning centuries of time. The little pubs and the curious uninhabited places. The thrumming temples and dark marshlands and crooked villages and folk tales and conviviality and spontaneous song and old houses which might have witches in them.
This world, you can see, is on the way out, if it is not already long gone. The one that is manifesting to replace it is a left-brain paradise, all straight lines and concrete car parks where the corn exchange used to be.
The future is STEM and chatbots and cashless parking meters and economic growth and asteroid mining forever and ever. There is no arguing with it. You can feel the great craters that it makes in the world, you can feel what is being tarmacked and neatened and rationalised into oblivion, and the depth of what is leaving, but you cannot explain or justify it in the terms which are now the terms we live by.
You just know that something is wrong, and it doesn’t matter how many lies, damned lies or statistics are produced to prove otherwise. You can feel this something enveloping you.
The Welsh poet R. S. Thomas described it chillingly in his poem, Other, in a verse I have never forgotten since I first read it:
. . . The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. Its song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.
God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough,
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.You can also check out Paul Kingsnorth's wonderful Substack page—The Abbey of Misrule.
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