The unmaking of humanity

Paul Kingsnorth is a British journalist and novelist with a colorful record of environmental activism and spiritual pilgrimage, converting to Orthodoxy in 2020. From his rural outpost in western Ireland he surveys the cultural landscape with an apprehension laid out in Against the Machine (Thesis, 368 pp.).

Kingsnorth’s argument begins with a definition of “culture” as “the story a people tells itself.” Once, the civilization we know as “the West” drew life and meaning from a story of God becoming man. Our roots sank deep in the Old Order alliterized as Past, People, Place, and Prayer. After the Protestant Reformation swept away the authority of the Church and made religion a matter of individual preference, the West became increasingly unmoored.

Against the Machine Paul Kingsnorth

Subsequent revolutions re-created the earth as an object to be used rather than a living organism to be wondered at. Age-old allegiances to home, king, country, and God shattered, clearing the way for a New Order of Science, Self, Sex/Sexuality, and Screens. The raging current of so-called Progress will one day absorb humanity. The Machine dissolves transcendence, obliterates the person, and values only money and power. “When you have made a machine of the world you are going to have a question on your hands: What fuel does this thing run on? The fuel is nature. The fuel is life. The fuel is you.”

As he lays waste to every innovation in sight, Kingsnorth sounds like a cranky Old Testament prophet. But his wholesale condemnation of modernity overlooks progress in literacy, medicine, and labor savers like lawn mowers (which he regretted having to purchase when scythes weren’t up to the job). In one chapter, he even appears to give a nod to income redistribution, disregarding capitalism’s ability to take much of the world out of grinding poverty.

But he’s correct that surrendering our foundational story has led to rootlessness. The deification of Self ultimately destroys individual selves, as indicated by our growing unease over AI. In one chilling passage Kingsnorth quotes AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky on the possibility of an immaterial superintelligence shaping itself from strands of DNA into an organic superbeing. If that happens, wrote Yudkowsky, “we are all going to die.”

But wait. That happened already, when an Immaterial Superintelligence became an organic being. God is present but passive in Kingsnorth’s doom scenario. Yet we know God is at work, now as much as ever. We can resist the Machine in any way practical, whether putting down our phones or moving off the grid. But we do not fight alone.