People, Place, Prayer, the Past: A Review of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine
If the most perplexing question of our day is, “What does it mean to be human?” the most serious source of confusion on that topic has to be the all-pervasive role of technology in the way we now live our lives. Where once technology provided tools that allowed us to do specific tasks—a hammer drove in nails, a landline telephone allowed us to communicate with others at a distance, a calculator allowed for doing numerical calculations at speed—now it increasingly mediates the whole of life. Indeed, the smartphone that lies on my desk as I write is rarely used for what its name suggests—telephoning somebody. More often it is the medium by which I communicate with others by text, order books and more from websites, receive my news, and reserve tables at restaurants. Further, given the role of algorithms in searches, it profoundly influences where I choose to reserve such a table because it quietly structures the available choices into a hierarchy on the basis of occult criteria. More than that, it has even refashioned the way I read, influenced my choice of seat in an airport departure lounge, and truncated my attention span.
Yes, technology has brought me great benefits—medical treatment involves less physical pain than it did for my ancestors and, as an immigrant far from family, I can stay in touch with distant loved ones—but it comes with a cost, a cost only evident when I stop to reflect on it. And such reflective pauses are not encouraged in the distracted and accelerating world that advanced technology fosters.
In recent years, Paul Kingsnorth has emerged as one of the leading voices sounding the alarm on all this. What is typically called modernity and was dubbed the technological society by Jacques Ellul, Kingsnorth calls the Machine, echoing the terminology of Lewis Mumford, on whose work Kingsnorth draws constructively at points. This term, he says, captures what it feels like to be living today: we experience a world where we have over the last centuries been steadily uprooted from stable space, community, rituals, and religion, and cast into one where, to adapt a phrase from Marx, all that is solid melts continually into air. Culture, in other words, has been destabilized and is not a source of solid identity but is characterized rather by a permanent, dehumanizing identity crisis. And in Against the Machine Kingsnorth has gathered together many of his most pungent essays on the topic. I say “essays” rather than “articles” because Kingsnorth stands in the tradition of cultural critics such as Hazlitt and Orwell, combining both analysis and argument with personal commitment and literary sparkle. His work is not only challenging in its content but pleasurable in its presentation. Thankfully, he also possesses an honesty lacking in some of the most well-known critics of modernity, those who trumpet their refusal to own a computer while neglecting to mention that they can only do so because their agents, their publishers, and the many stores and online retailers that have made them famous and wealthy own such things on their behalf.
Indeed, when I opened Kingsnorth’s book, I feared that I would encounter just another such anti-modern poseur. But Kingsnorth is not one. Nor is he an unhinged Unabomber figure. He sees the problems of technology; but he also realizes (and acknowledges) that he is embedded in the Machine. What he proposes toward the end is not a naïve and impossible utopian withdrawal but selective resistance to the Machine, resistance that can take various forms but that will always involve some level of complicity.
Kingsnorth’s critique ranges widely but key themes stand out. Behind many of the phenomena he describes is the way technological developments have transformed how nature is understood. This is central to his phenomenological analysis of how modern culture is experienced. Like many previous thinkers such as C. S. Lewis, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Martin Heidegger, he has an acute sense of how technology is constitutive of our reality. It does not simply allow for the manipulation of nature but actually changes the way nature is understood. For modern man it is no longer an authoritative, stable given but, at best, raw material and at worst a set of problems or limitations that must be overcome.
To take an obvious contemporary example, the human body is now problematic, with even its biologically sexed nature being something to be rendered negotiable by the application of technology. And alongside this, instrumental reason has emerged as triumphant, demanding that everything’s value be determined by its usefulness, though exactly how “usefulness” is understood is itself not stable. Kingsnorth looks askance at capitalism at several points, but profit margins are not the only criteria of value for the Machine. Novelty seems to be just as important in a world committed to constant cultural iconoclasm as a means of affirming its authenticity, as so much of the modern and postmodern art establishment demonstrate. And this extends to the institutions and rituals that once gave life a deeper meaning and a sense of continuity. In a passage that resonated deeply with me as a fellow Englishman of similar vintage, Kingsnorth reflects on his sense of loss when hearing of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, a constant presence in his (and my) life, and then on how modern technocracy has no place for an anachronism such as monarchy and its associated symbols and rites.
Technology has also enabled a type of indignant moral incoherence. I was impressed in the early 2020s by the smug stridency of those who used social media to attack America for its historic and long-abolished institution of slavery. The medium was interesting, being dependent on cell phones made by modern-day slaves in China. For Kingsnorth this is a great example of the incoherence at the heart of a technological culture that validates itself, to borrow that phrase from Facebook, by moving fast and breaking things. It knows what to break—anything that is, anything from past or present that has a claim on us—but it has no idea what to put in its place. It is that Mephistophelean spirit of negation that today haunts not just Europe but the entire developed world and manifests itself most obviously in phenomena such as the gender theory of Judith Butler and the transhumanism of Martine (formerly Martin) Rothblatt. Citing the work of Mary Harrington, Kingsnorth sees such figures as supplanting the last, great constant authority—the human body itself—with a vision that turns the body into raw material to be transformed—or even discarded—through the use of technology.
A more tragic example Kingsnorth highlights is the figure of Richard Dawkins, whom he compares most provocatively to the occultist Aleister Crowley. The difference between the two, says Kingsnorth, is that Crowley knew where his mantic behavior was leading, whereas Dawkins is clueless about where his religious commitment to “science” is heading. Though he does not cite this, Kingsnorth could have drawn on Dawkins’s criticism of transgenderism to highlight this problem. Apparently, the sexed nature of the body is, for him, obvious, natural, and authoritative. But one could argue that cancer or shortsightedness falls into the same category, and nobody objects to the deployment of science to cure, correct, or change those things. Dawkins’s lack of metaphysical competence and of any sense of teleology leaves him floundering incoherently when he encounters something that he considers obviously wrong but that demands going beyond the framework of science to address.
Of course, Dawkins has recently gestured in a desultory fashion toward the usefulness of what he calls “cultural Christianity,” something that he believes is apparently strong enough to give him the cultural benefits he favors though not to require that he actually believe any of Christianity’s dogmatic claims. It’s true only to the extent that it confirms his tastes and makes his life easier. Kingsnorth is much sharper and more consistent than the befuddled New Atheist, for he sees the issue of science (and thus of technology) as, at root, a theological one. The goal of technology—and of the idea of progress that it fosters and that is used to justify its untrammeled ambition—is the death of God and the permanent revolution, or chaos, that such deicide brings in its wake.
Technology has thus not merely disenchanted the world; it has desecrated it. This explains why the Tech Bros are happy to talk about rendering human beings an anachronism. And that is a theological move, given that it demands an answer to the question “What is man?” Either he is made in God’s image or he is not. And technology, at least as the Machine, is committed to proving the latter. The struggle is not simply metaphysical. It is moral and theological, too.
Theologically, Kingsnorth is himself a convert to Orthodoxy. This flavors his negative judgment on western theological traditions. Augustine and Aquinas are villains, helping to separate humanity from the rest of nature and thus opening the way for later Baconian and Cartesian disenchantment of the world, turning it into mere material to be plundered and manipulated. This is made worse by the Reformation where, openly depending on the work of historian Brad Gregory, he sees the voluntarism of Duns Scotus and then the Reformers’ alleged biblicism as responsible for a rampant scientific rationalism.
This is the one part of the book where I significantly dissent from the author. First, all Christian theologians must distinguish man from God (as creature from creator) but also from all other created things. Only man is made in God’s image, and only man, according to Genesis, has a unique role as God’s vicegerent over the created realm. Augustine and Aquinas were both aware of those doctrinal points and articulated them well. They cannot be blamed even remotely for later exploitation of the natural world.
And second, the Scotus/Reformation thesis is flawed. Scotus’s thought becomes plausible in part because of wider challenges to the stable theological structures that preceded it. Urbanization, the Black Death, and the rise of a literate culture in the wake of the advent of the printing press, replacing that of orality, all serve to make the world (and therefore the God who created it) more mysterious and unpredictable. As to the Reformers and their heirs, their metaphysics was far more eclectic than a simple recasting of Scotism, and their views of authority and tradition were scarcely reducible to a naïve biblicism connected to a radical individualism. Still, Kingsnorth’s dependence on debatable and speculative sources at this point does not damage his wider claim: the problems of our technological world are moral and theological, challenging the very notion of man as having a stable essence and given end: of man as made in the image of God.
Much of Kingsnorth’s book is devoted to analyzing aspects of the Machine, and it is by turns characterized by polemic and lamentation. But at the end he offers some positive proposals. Drawing on the distinction between the raw and the cooked, he observes that the pathway of “raw” opposition to technology—a kind of anchoritic complete withdrawal from it—is not possible for most, perhaps even all, people living in the technologically shaped world today. But by a “cooked” approach, one where people are aware of how technology shapes them and make self-conscious and intentional decisions about limiting what they will own and how they will use it, some small resistance can be offered. I myself have had cause to email the author and was impressed to receive an out-of-office notification, informing me of the days and hours each week when he would use his computer and thus have access to such correspondence. A small thing, but significant. Readers who doubt that might try it themselves—maybe even just put their phones down for an hour—and find out that even this requires a level of willpower for those who live and move and breathe within the Machine.
Finally, Kingsnorth points to prayer as a key part of this. Indeed, he summarizes the focal points of any resistance as follows: people, place, prayer, the past. He has done excellent work in showing how the Machine has undermined each. I, for one, hope that he continues his work and produces a subsequent volume that outlines in greater detail how we mitigate the power of the Machine by recapturing our real humanity.
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