Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

by Paul Kingsnorth

I’ve never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, but I have often been addicted to dreams. This is the lot of the writer. You become a writer because the world you encountered in the stories you read as a child is more exciting than the world you are actually living in. More exciting and, in a strange way, more real.

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. The possibility of dragons. The empty beaches and wild hilltops, the chance of getting lost in the rain forever or discovering something that was never on any map. A world without maps, a world without engines. 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, a...

The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. What does that make us, its descendants, living amongst its beautiful ruins? It makes ours a culture with no sacred order. And this is a dangerous place to be.

Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead, we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed

I’m all for liberty, and it would be nice to give democracy a try one day too; but the dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

Cut loose in a post-modern present, with no centre, no truth and no direction, we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers of the self.

We—at least if we are among the lucky ones—have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us, but we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning, and roots.

There is no such thing as a perfect society, and anyone who tries to build one will either go mad or become a tyrant. Humans are fallen, or just natural, and both of those words are synonyms for ‘imperfect’.

Weil was writing from exile in England, as her homeland was still under Nazi occupation. She saw National Socialism’s perversion and capture of the notion of rootedness, and the evil that was being done with it. But unlike many intellectuals of the left, the Nazis’ racial tyranny did not lead her to reject the notion of rootedness in favour of some universalist flavour of ‘global justice’. She saw that for the perfectionism it was: the same flavour of perfectionism that, to the east, was leading the USSR to roll out the same kind of tyranny as the Nazis were building, right down to the barbed wire that surrounded the camps designated for those who did not fit into the model.

We in the West invented this thing called ‘modernity’, and then we took it out into the world, whether the world wanted it or not. Once, we called this process ‘the white man’s burden’ and exported it with dreadnoughts. Now we call it ‘development’ and export it via the World Bank. But—and here is the point so often missed, especially by critics on the left—before we could eat the world, we first had to eat ourselves. Or rather: our states, our elites, our ideologues and power-mongers had to dispossess their own people before they could venture out to dispossess others. We were the prototype, the guinea pigs in a giant global experiment. Now we find ourselves rootless, rudderless, unmoored in a great sea of chaos; angry, confused, shouting at the world and each other. We have made of our world a nihil. We are both perpetrators and victims of a Great Unsettling.

Wherever we come from, wherever we are, we are almost all uprooted now. The power of the ‘global economy’ demolishes borders and boundaries, traditions and cultures, languages and ways of seeing wherever it goes. Record numbers of people are on the move as a result, and as the population increases and climate change bites, those numbers will rise everywhere, churning cultures and nations into entirely new shapes or no shapes at all. Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer could. 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.

The novelists and filmmakers I mentioned in this book’s introduction, issuing their now-quaint warnings about the eclipse of humanity by its own technology, had two curiously related characteristics: they were right, and their being right made no difference at all. We nodded sagely at ‘The Machine Stops’, as we did at The Matrix ninety years later, and then we went home and nothing changed. The great genius of the Machine, and one reason for its flourishing, is that it can absorb its own critics, co-opt their criticism, and then, very often, commercialise it. So pervasive are the Machine’s values that often those who promote what they imagine is an alternative find themselves doing its work.

But today’s milder forms of resistance are quickly co-opted too. The once-radical green movement, in which I cut my teeth, has been transformed into a Machine accelerant. A movement which began by calling for more simplicity and slowness, closeness to nature and simple living, has mutated into a crusade to coat wild landscapes with glass and metal, abolish farming, further industrialise the global food supply, track and trace our consumption patterns and promote a vision of ‘sustainability’ that would make any Fortune 500 company smile. Feminism, which began as a movement calling for the equal treatment of women, has become a device for filling the workforce with females while eroding the inconveniently un-Machine-like family unit. As for that ‘social justice’ movement that keeps conservatives awake at night: its ‘radicalism’ just happens to be Machine-shaped.

Even now, where I live in rural Ireland, people are considerably more practical and multi-skilled than the average Dubliner. They—we—have to be, when a tree comes down across a road in a winter storm, or the power goes out, or a cow escapes from a field or the well stops working. When I lived in the city, my main skill was tapping keyboards. This is still my main skill—here I am—but since coming here I have supplemented it with a dozen others, from coppicing to composting, construction to chainsaw use. In the country, you have no choice but to remember what your body is for. In the city, even if you want to be self-sufficient, everything will militate against it.

Keynes knew it too: it’s why he so apologetically explained that we would need to live under a self-made spell for a hundred years, like some fairytale princess. We must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair. What he didn’t foresee was that we would forget that we were pretending. Today we are led by want, we are drenched in it, and we are increasingly sick from its infection.

Take, for example, the famous list of the seven deadly sins in the Western Christian tradition: gluttony, lust, pride, wrath, greed, sloth and envy. With the possible exception of sloth, we currently live in a culture which not only sees nothing wrong with these values but actively encourages them.

Many people have simply forgotten what it feels like not to be pulled and pushed and tugged and directed every hour of the day by the demands of the glowing screen. Many people are not paying attention.

Twenty years ago’, said Mark, toying with his knight, ‘we were fighting to save wilderness from destruction. Now it seems like we’re just fighting to keep ourselves off screens twenty-four hours a day.’

The right kind of warrior takes on his own internal demons before he sails out to take on those of others. He takes his stand, and stands his ground, without giving in to to the nihil of the age. He cleaves to what he believes in without falling into the traps laid by partisanship, anger and self-righteousness. Most of all, he works to clear out his own inner junkyard so that he can go searching for truth—and recognise it when he finds it. His war is against the worst of himself and for the best of the world, and what he is fighting for is the love he so often fails at. His most effective weapon is sacrifice. This is easier written than practiced, of course. But I think it might be the way through.