I hate doing taxes. I like some of the things that taxes provide for us, like roads, but I hate having to fill out a plethora of forms during the most depressing time of year. A few days ago, I even thought to myself that I would prefer older, more lethal worries: keeping wolves from the cattle, foxes from the henhouse, and rot from the crops. It seemed to me a more honest kind of angst. Perhaps this was a shortsighted thought, and one that I might regret the moment I see a wolverine hurtling for my throat, but I suspect that if I were to relate this thought to Paul Kingsnorth, he might nod along in agreement.

Kingsnorth is an interesting fellow. A former green radical, he has steadily evolved into a green cynic, relatively hopeless about the environmental movement’s trajectory towards social acceptability, its radical solutions replaced by anodyne half-measures meant to support our current way of life rather than revert, or as critics would say, regress, to small-economy basics. This dichotomy, reversion and regression, lies at the heart of his writing: Kingsnorth is aware that critics will slap him with the “regressive” label, mistaking his longing for what good in the old days as longing for the good old days themselves.

However, Kingsnorth’s critique of our way of life lies not only in his environmentalism, but also in his conversion to Orthodox Christianity and his despair at witnessing the death of British culture. He distills the core tenets of his beliefs into what he calls the Four P’s - people, place, prayer, and past - which are diametrically opposed to the Four S’s of modernity - sex, science, self, and screen. He occupies a strange and lonely position, going to war against consumerism, scientism, globalism, cultural decay, and fascism all at once. These forces, gathered together, flatten the world to make way for the Machine: the churning, devouring force of the economy, which dictates that lines must go up ad infinitum.

You may have gathered that while Kingsnorth has some commonalities with the left, he isn’t really a leftist. Neither is Berry, his closest antecedent (indeed, Against the Machine opens with an epigraph by Berry). Neither am I, not really, not as the modern left often defines itself. I think the left likes to play the game more than it admits, prioritizing state-sponsored industry, public housing complexes, and other measures that bring us ever further from the way humanity lived up until the Industrial Revolution. For all Kingsnorth’s sympathies with the left, he identifies a problem that has long plagued it: the materialist dialectic that forms the basis of much popular leftist thought has largely ceded the war for the spirit to the right by refusing to engage at all; the right, on the other hand, has taken advantage of this to apply a spiritual paint job to the Machine, hence the rise of evangelistic megachurches.

Kingsnorth’s war against the Machine is in defense of an older way of life that goes beyond r/simpleliving and the Liver King both, striving to return but not retvrn. People need meaning, and meaning comes from the Four P’s. The roof over your head goes a long way, but I’m reminded of Frankl’s observations in Man’s Search for Meaning: a man with a purpose can survive anything, whereas a man without one will flounder and drown even in calm waters. (There may be something to this meme after all.) Is it idealistic to want to turn back the clock? Maybe. But idealistic isn’t the worst thing to be in this day and age, when idealism is in such short supply. We must have a greater purpose, even when that purpose comes with suffering.

I am largely in agreement with the ideas Against the Machine presents, but this book is not beyond reproach. While Kingsnorth is a good writer in the Substack sense, reading Berry is more like getting a letter from a very intelligent relative. Kingsnorth is an academic primarily and sometimes a practitioner; Berry is the opposite. Against the Machine, accordingly, reads more like a review of anti-progressive literature than an exhortation or guidebook; ironically, it is largely dominated the same left-brain mentality that Kingsnorth extensively critiques.

However, the academic mindset provides a valuable perspective that pure practicality wouldn’t. It reveals modern culture as anti-culture, historical trends towards inversion and revolution as the greatest tools of oppression, and our spiritual malaise as literal: an atrophying of the soul caused by the death of myth, and therefore meaning. The right seeks to return to a historical aesthetic without meaningful roots; the left seeks to replace one secular shibboleth with another. The best solution may be the one that has historically succeeded longer than any other, that prioritizes seasonal crops over global supply chains, responsible coppicing over solar panels and windmills, the intuitive knowledge of instinct and spirit over empiricism and rationality.

What do we have to lose in turning back? Plenty. Off the top of my head, I can think of refrigerators, convenience stores, asphalt, international travel, mass-produced tools, music streaming services, and entire artistic mediums, like film. What have we already lost by getting to this point? Much, much more.

Against the Machine

Loading Description

Bookshelves

Threads

Quotes

Reviews

Lists

Purchasable Editions

You May Also Like