Rage Against the Machine. Or Don’t. – Religion & Liberty Online

It’s unusual to be in the situation of reviewing a book no one will like. I don’t mean that literally; a handful of people will appreciate Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine, probably the same people who have followed his work for the past decade. I mean that “no one” in the corporate sense: No one camp or party or religious group or ideology will embrace it heartily and make it part of their identity. Kingsnorth has written something that will be difficult to bring into the service of any particular group, and in our black-and-white, if-you’re-not-for-me-you’re-against-me kind of world, that makes him everyone’s enemy.

I think that’s exactly what he wants.

The critique Kingsnorth offers of contemporary society—one that reaches back hundreds of years, for Kingsnorth is trying to take a long view of history here—is not of one side or another in the modern struggle for dominance, but of that struggle itself. The modern project, as he conceives of it, is the enemy. Progressives, conservatives, Marxists, capitalists, globalists, nationalists, corporate executives, environmentalists: No one comes out unscathed. But that’s the point. Kingsnorth’s intention is to disabuse his readers of the idea that they are in an “existential fight for the future of ‘Western civilisation,’” because, he says, “Western civilisation is already dead.” This is a bleak view, perhaps, but also exhilarating. Kingsnorth is saying that there is a way out, out of the zero-sum ideological struggle, out of the relentless hustle-or-die grind, out of the restless rootless agitation that defines so much of modern life.

Against the Machine has a lot of ground to cover. It is an attempt to describe our modern situation, to explain that situation, to critique it, and finally to offer a corrective. The book makes a major misstep right at the beginning, however, which runs the risk of driving some potential readers away. The introduction (written in a voice different from that found in the rest of the book) uses the irritating and twee trends of second-person address and arbitrary capitalization. For example, it includes these sentences:

You just know that something is wrong. Everybody tells you that you feel things because you are infected with something called “nostalgia.” … Basically, there is something wrong with you. You don’t understand Progress, which is always and everywhere a Good Thing.

If the entire book had been written like this, I would not have finished it. Mercifully, the rest of Against the Machine eschews this style in favor of a more traditional blend of first-person anecdotes and scholarly research, but this ill-advised introduction may send more serious-minded readers running.

Kingsnorth’s first challenge is to convince his readers (many of whom are likely highly educated, employed, intelligent, somewhat sophisticated—in other words, the people who are “winning” in the games of modern society) that there is a problem with modern society. My sense is that he will not have much trouble convincing younger readers (Millennials and Gen Z), but he may run into difficulties with older ones. His thesis is nuanced; some might call it amorphous. It is anti-institution, a little vibey. He argues that the systems and structures that have governed society for the past 400 years are fundamentally inhumane. It is a radical claim, and it will be more appealing to the young. But that doesn’t mean older readers can afford to ignore him. Kingsnorth offers warnings that apply as much to the end of life as to its middle: The Machine has no use for the aging or infirm, for those who have lived out their economic or social “usefulness.” “Without uprooting older communities and ways of life … the Machine cannot operate,” Kingsnorth warns. Today that means uprooting Silent Generation life in Rust Belt towns. Tomorrow it could mean uprooting Boomer suburbs and Social Security.

Against the Machine might start with vibes, but it doesn’t stop there. Kingsnorth has done his homework. He presents a well-researched, reasonable interpretation of history, one with enough heft to invite debate. For example, he argues that colonialism is an instrument of the Machine, offering criticisms of imperialism that will satisfy left-leaning hearts, but he extends this criticism to include contemporary foreign aid projects that use financial and material help to compel nations to adopt progressive values like LGBTQ rights.

Kingsnorth invokes a dizzying array of strange, uncategorizable (and ire-raising) writers, any one of whom could demand an entire life’s attention to comprehend: Simone Weil, Robert Bly, Wendell Berry, Oswald Spengler, Christopher Dawson, Eugene McCarraher, René Guénon. For the titular “Machine,” Kingsnorth leans heavily on Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine for a definition, saying,

The Machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power, and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits.

There’s plenty here to irritate: A libertarian will be frustrated by the use of the phrase “money power,” while a progressive will not appreciate the pejorative connotation of the phrase “state power.” A traditionalist will have plenty of questions about what constitutes “roots,” and a liberal might scent the possibility of oppression in the idea of honoring “limits.” But a human being, despite any ideological hairs that are raised, will feel the tug of these words, will—if he stops to think—sense that he is in fact surrounded and bound up with “coercive and manipulative technologies.”

But Kingsnorth is not writing to libertarians, progressives, traditionalists, liberals; he is writing to human beings, all of us who feel a vague, elusive, but disturbing sense of being trapped, even as we’re assured that we have more freedom than ever before. He is addressing anyone who feels powerless in the grip of faceless, nameless forces that control more and more of our world—and that is probably a lot of us.

Kingsnorth acknowledges the difficulty of his project. “The great genius of the Machine,” he says, “and one reason for its flourishing, is that it can absorb its own critics, co-opt their criticism, and then, very often, commercialise it.” He shares a personal experience: Kingsnorth’s background is as an environmental activist, but he witnessed the green movement “transformed into a Machine accelerant.” He writes,

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.

The Machine can absorb any movement, even an organized resistance, so thoroughly that the resistance begins to serve it.

So what are we supposed to do?

Kingsnorth begins with what we should not do: “The culture war is not, in my view, about politics at all. It’s not even about culture.” In reality, the culture war that sucks up so much of our time and attention is a distraction manufactured by the Machine—a natural byproduct, if you will, of a Machined society—to keep us from noticing the artificiality of everything around us: our mass-produced food, our cheaply built homes, our regurgitated entertainment.

The real problem, according to Kingsnorth, is that “the sign [no longer] points to the signified.” The boundaries between “real” and “fake” have dissolved, and we can no longer differentiate between them. This has happened not only with our material surroundings but also with more foundational things: “real” love and “fake” love, “real” men and women and “fake” men and women, “real” passion and “fake” passion. When we can accept, straight-faced, the claims of a company that it is “passionate” about frozen carrots (which Kingsnorth mentions in chapter 15), something vital has been drained out of us.

Kingsnorth eventually found that the green movement he respected had disappeared, its every impulse absorbed and manipulated by the Machine. Seeking a new home, in 2020 he became a Christian. He does not deny that religion can become an instrument of the Machine, but throughout the book he asserts that faith, carefully disentangled from social and political ideologies, can bring us back into a world where the sign indicates the signified, where we can indeed encounter something real.

Kingsnorth’s proposal is not one that will make him powerful friends. We should not, he says, “exhaust our souls in a daily war for or against a “West” that is already gone, but [we should] prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture.” We should not argue endlessly about what a woman’s “role” is at work or at home. Instead, “we all should [return to the kitchen], and into the other rooms of the home too.” We should not spend our attention on whatever the elites are doing; rather, we should seek to “chang[e] our quality of attention … , to see the world as an organism rather than a mechanism.” He borrows a phrase from the writer Craig Calhoun to describe this: “Reactionary radicalism,” a realignment of things that have been artificially separated by modernity. Home and work, for example, used to be one and the same. Consumption and production were not separate acts. One did not “work” so one could “consume” or leave home so one could go to work so one could come home again. Instead, one simply lived in a place where there was family and labor and making and using, all bound together.

This will, no doubt, strike some as pie-in-the-sky historical revisionism. But Kingsnorth is not calling for a return to feudalism, or to anything else. He is explicitly not a conservative any more than he is a progressive, because both of those, according to his lights, have irreconcilable issues at their core. Conservatism has failed because “it was always only, in Roger Scruton’s words, ‘a hesitation within liberalism’. … By now, across most of the modern world, there is less and less left to conserve.” Progressivism is fatally flawed as well, because it invokes endless progress and growth without a clear sense of what it is progressing toward. Kingsnorth wants us to escape the dichotomy between these two ideologies and instead seek to build something worthwhile, something with inherent value here and now that might also be the field for future flourishing.

Kingsnorth will not win over all readers. In fact, he will probably not win over most, or even many. But what he has accomplished in Against the Machine is noteworthy: He has introduced a new set of terms into the discussion and called into question the incontrovertibility of existing terms. He has offered a critique of modern society that will not easily serve any of the existing parties, and because of that, he offers something highly attractive to people who feel intellectually and spiritually homeless.

The real test of Kingsnorth’s project begins now, as more and more people begin paying attention to his ideas. Will his suggestion of “reactionary radicalism,” grounded in attention to rootedness and limitations, survive its brush with the Machine, which is able to bring even resistance into its service? Only time will tell.