Tonya Matheson’s Reviews > Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity > Status Update

Take, for example, the famous list of the seven deadly sins in 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.

The city provides opportunities for wealth that the village never could, but treats its poor and marginal ised with contempt that the village would reward with incomprehension.

Today, Britian-84% of whose people live in towns or cities-is one of the most urbanized, most centralized and least agrarian nations on Earth. That it is also one of the most deculturised, rootless and whims of the global market is not a coincidence.

With tradition and authority demolished, reason would become the only basis for argument about God and morality. It was a short leap from that of Science and Enlightenment..when no God could be found with a telescope then reason could be used to argue God out of the picture altogether.

But when Luther and the Reformers launched their missiles at the Catholic Church they unwittingly paved the way for the modern dissolution that was to follow. By basing their new version of faith on the notion of Sola Scriptura that there should be no authority but the Bible they unleashed the radical individualism on which the modern world would be built.

This state corporate growth and incessant urge to contribute to it by clicking, scrolling, buying and competing.... shows no sign of stopping. It cannot stop, in fact, for to do so would mean collapse. Growth has become an end to itself, long divorced from any means. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.

This 'growth' is the overriding purpose of the 'global economy' which the Machine has built: everything else is of secondary concern. The growth has no specific aim and no end in sight, and can always be justified by pointing to problems--poverty, environmental degradation--which were in many cases caused by growth, but which can now only be solved by more if it. It is facilitated by the production and consumption.

"Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will uncoordinated 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."