A major task of Christian witness in our time is repudiation of what Paul Kingsnorth calls “the Machine.” But we can only meaningfully repudiate what we recognize. Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity is an earnest attempt to show the inhabitants of technological modernity who are their masters and what is the shape and cost of their subjection to these masters.
The problem is a promise sourced in machine logic, fueled by machine ideals: a promise of frictionless activity and the conquest of our desires.
He is the first to acknowledge he did not coin the term “the Machine” himself, and it is stirring to read from whom he derives it. Kingsnorth draws together Lewis Mumford’s analysis and concerns from The Myth of the Machine with R.S. Thomas’s image of a nightmarish machine “hurrying new arts in” and “singing to itself / Of money.” Here, Mumford’s mode of cultural criticism is bonded with poetic insight to show us what is all around us but often invisible to us.
Kingsnorth is, at heart, a poet, but also a veteran of environmental activism. He documented his disenchantment with this movement in his earlier Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, criticizing its capitulation to the interests of finance capital and of individualistic autonomy.
His long interest in the history of ideas was revitalized by his conversion to Christianity a few years ago. As it ought to be—the gospel should illuminate and magnify the meaning of the world and its creatures. Kingsnorth’s interests did not change in his yielding to Jesus Christ: they deepened.
This informs the pathos of this book. There is vitriol, certainly, but its motive is not ego-flattering disgust with the kids these days. There is a woundedness that carries over from previous writings; it informs his perspective and his tone but is not the ground of his complaint. He writes with the heartache of a betrayed lover. As he argues against anti-human ideologies and policies he frequently notes how their consequences contradict the avowed purposes and interests of the ones implementing them and the people they claim to serve.
Kingsnorth notes his own awakening to this frequent contradiction and the sense of having been deceived, even exploited. He focuses primarily on the political left’s iterations of this phenomenon, but this is because he not only belonged to these movements but gave of himself in costly ways for most of a lifetime. However, Kingsnorth has not succumbed to bitterness. Rather, he recognizes that the betrayal that wounded him and other zealots like him is, in fact, a symptom of a larger problem.
That problem is not technology. To be human is, among other things, to utilize technology. The problem is a promise sourced in machine logic, fueled by machine ideals: a promise of frictionless activity and the conquest of our desires. It is a promise that justifies a way of being that is abrasive to humanity. This promise has compelled us ever since the Garden; it propelled the construction of the pyramids and the building of the empires that have shaped our imaginations and our ambitions.
What is the Machine, though?
Kingsnorth’s book isn’t a systematic treatise, so he does not present a single definition. Instead, it is a philippic, a prophetic outcry, and so he sketches a series of examples to paint his portrait of the phenomenon, its sources, and its effects. It is not just a complaint about technological fetishism and overreach, though it is that. The problem Kingsnorth identifies is one that is not simply exterior to us: the problem is also within us.
“The thread that links them”—science and magic—“is control.” Allow that to sink in. Magic never went away, nor did our hunger for mastery. It has only changed its guise when it became expedient to do so.
“The Machine,” Kingsnorth divines, is “a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control, and ambition” (37). Kingsnorth’s anthropology, though he is a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, is refreshingly Augustinian—or, perhaps, sufficiently biblical in root—to recognize that humanity’s chief problem is not sin in the abstract, but Sin reigning over our subjectivity from within. The Machine exercises its tyranny over us because the Machine is within us.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan styled this a phenomenon’s “extimacy”—its apparent exteriority to the subject while simultaneously originating as an intensely interior event. The object has the power it does because it is a piece of clothing placed over the lack that spurs us on in all that we do. That lack, like a Ringwraith, has a shape that is partly disclosed by the cloak it is garbed in.
Kingsnorth doesn’t employ this terminology; I am fleshing out an account of the subject that I think could help prosecute his case against the Machine and the subject (this is Lacan’s language, but it is apt, as persons are always subject to something) without whom the Machine has no real power. As with all idols, there is a reciprocal relationship that makes the idol like its worshiper and the worshiper like its idol. Both establish and require each other.
Kingsnorth sees the Machine as having disclosed itself and its true nature in our time. It has been operative throughout our history but any veil it conceals itself behind has since fallen. If that sounds spooky, it should: the disenchantment discourse plays a part here as Kingsnorth recognizes, with others, that we have not eradicated the sacred order but rather substituted a new one. “We have instead enthroned a new god, and disguised its worship as the disenchanted pursuit of purely material gain” (35).
“The history of magic,” as students of Lynn Thorndike’s History of Magic and Experimental Science and The Myth of Disenchantment know, teaches “that what we call ‘magic’ and what we call ‘science’ are intertwined” (75). To dismiss the reality and significance of magic in trying to understand our conditions is simply to favor one school of magic over another.
“The thread that links them”—science and magic—“is control” (75). Allow that to sink in. Magic never went away, nor did our hunger for mastery. It has only changed its guise when it became expedient to do so. The only people fooled are, precisely, the subjects of the Machine, formed to accept its hegemony.
The history of modernity should not, perhaps, be reduced to only one thing, but one of its predominant themes is, without question, control. Control is what we modern subjects seek for ourselves. It is what we try to protect ourselves from by rejecting commitments and duties that are costly. And yet, ironically, we end up yielding ourselves to the crisis-crossing systems of liberalism, capitalism, and mechanization that characterize our time. We seem to never give ourselves away as much as when we seek self-contained autonomy.
Machine ideology has forcefully moved to open all “closed” things, waging war “against limits and boundaries of any kind, cultural or ecological”—against traditions, cultures, religions…
The forces of globalization and “development” are not concerned simply with amassing riches but with the ideal of “openness.” The myth of progress is at work in the pursuit of this ideal, demonizing those who would prefer to be closed as “backward, bigoted, prejudiced, fearful, and largely obsolete” (107). And since Matthew Perry’s arrival in Edo, Japan in 1853, Machine ideology has forcefully moved to open all “closed” things, waging war “against limits and boundaries of any kind, cultural or ecological”—against traditions, cultures, religions, anything that “can’t be harvested, exploited, or transformed in the image of the new world which the Machine is building” (108).
This new iteration of our fallen death drive is really only new in its details. Our efforts to make ourselves something more have only ever made us less, in the Garden, at Babel, and all the way to our post- and transhumanist moment. Kingsnorth’s book is subtitled On the Unmaking of Humanity because the Machine and its ways energize discontent with our creatureliness as well as our specific vocation as God’s image bearers.
Is resistance the answer? Yes and no. “Against the Machine” could easily be a posture we adopt, one we display on Instagram: “Lawn care is self-care, king! #scythe #AgainsttheMachine.” And for many of us, we wouldn’t even recognize the stupidity of what we were doing. Once formed, we conduct ourselves according to our formation; it requires an intrusion of colossal magnitude to shake us off course and provoke consideration of the way we have been taking.
We, collectively, are on a road to Damascus. A rough beast has already been born but its Eras tour is concluding here. The beast is uniquely skilled in appropriating criticisms of itself and fashioning them into hash tags and merch and silly catch phrases. It is a beast we have midwifed with our undisciplined appetites, our prevarication about what is stealing and what is scraping the internet, and our uncritical adoration of all things new and “state of the art.”
But culture wars are not the answer, as the “cultures” represented in these battles are typically Machine caricatures of traditions once alive in tangible, analog networks of responsibility and care.
But culture wars are not the answer, as the “cultures” represented in these battles are typically Machine caricatures of traditions once alive in tangible, analog networks of responsibility and care. The cultivation of better norms must be the goal, not the changing of quotas or legislation. These come and go, but we must always fight to remain human. These are the misguided ambitions of the loudest and most visible—and most online—political factions of our time. And both are, by and large, beholden to the Machine.
The prime political action that should be taken in our context is diffidence. Withdrawal. A refusal to be ashamed for being peculiar, for standing out because you are out of touch. Because you are not familiar with the latest salvo of brain rot. Because you do not guzzle down AI slop. Because you do not offload the work of your life to chatbots. Because you recognize that friction is part of the cost of any valuable thing and you do not resent God for the existence of effort.
“The digital revolution represents a spiritual crisis,” Kingsnorth diagnoses (303). But we all know this, at some level. Honest acknowledgment is important, certainly, but askesis is the only viable solution. Askesis is “the foundation stone of all spiritual practice. Without an ascetic backbone, there is no spiritual body” (303). But how is this to be fleshed out? Kingsnorth identifies two categories of dissenters: “cooked” ascetics and “raw” ascetics.
Cooked ascetics “live within the city walls, but practice steady and sometimes silent dissent.” It “consists mainly in the drawing of lines” and accepting the consequences of holding them. But it also means recognizing or being open to the truth that “such refusal can enrich as well as impoverish you” (304). This is the truly radical change that no slogan or program can impart, that can only be won through opened eyes, revitalized hearts, and discipline, for “in exchange for your refusal, you get to keep your soul” (304).
Raw ascetics, on the other hand, recognize that moderation is an overused concept scarcely actually applied and more imagined. They see that they are “fighting a spiritual war, and never make the rookie mistake of treating technology as ‘neutral’” (306). They unplug and risk appearing stuck-up to those who cannot imagine denying themselves slop.
Raw ascetics… recognize that moderation is an overused concept scarcely actually applied and more imagined. They… “never make the rookie mistake of treating technology as ‘neutral.’”
Both of these paths, Kingsnorth asserts, “incorporates two simple principles,” of “drawing a line, and saying, ‘no further,’” and of “making sure that you pass any technologies you do use through a sieve of critical judgment” (306-307). This sort of routine scrutiny will yield “the kind of sensible and intelligent relationship with technology that our Machine culture seems intrinsically unable to offer us” (307).
These are the only substantive paths on offer, though not the only ones publicly available. The mode that most of us, caught up in late stage global capitalism, adopt is the aforementioned #resistance. #Resistance is our ready-to-hand posture, one that is so commonly assumed it’s prominently displayed in commercials, on billboards, and on shirts and bumper stickers.
There was a time when I found slogans such as, “Respect our existence or expect our resistance,” to carry gravity and urgency. I saw this warning spray painted in Minneapolis near the American Indian Center, not far from signs pleading with local Indians to seek help for drug addiction. And right around the corner were two twenty-something Indians setting up their mattresses to use intravenous drugs.
Lines like this, I think, tend to reflect our delusions about ourselves much more than any real integrity or capability of ours. We do not need much help in devising delusions, but capitalism and its technologies are, to borrow Calvin’s phrase, “a factory of idols.”
The trouble lies in the fact that we are creatures defined by desire and limitations but also by our being fallen. We imagine ways of making ourselves more attractive, more socially connected, more wealthy, but all of these are means we imagine of making ourselves more secure ontologically than we can ever become by ourselves.
“Want is the acid,” Kingsnorth writes, burning through structures and values, the acidic force that has propelled us through the bourgeois revolution Marx and Engels diagnosed and into the conditions that shape our subjectivity today (95). Again, I draw on Lacan’s terminology to name the texture and the activity of our being self-conscious entities, not only in terms of our conscious willing and self-understanding but also, crucially, the obscure and even contradictory desires that motivate our often self-sabotaging behavior. But this want is more than desire: it is a lack, one we try to hide from the world and from ourselves. Our desire stems not only from the attractiveness of this or that thing but also from the lack within us that we are always trying to overcome and fill.
How does the world benefit from the publication of Against the Machine? Principally from its fierce witness that the flood of advertisements and products that surround us is not only not good but not neutral. It is against our good, both common and individual, and against what orients us and our activity as human.
We shrink from these warnings, it seems to me, because they bring back to consciousness how little control we actually have over our lives.
No one can say, “I never heard otherwise. I’ve never heard that anything was wrong with our preoccupation with progress, our love of new technology, or our dependence upon gadgets and programs and technical solutions.” This book is the objective correlative to the suspicion many of us have that something is deeply wrong with our world, our society, our work, and our lives. And crucially it does this as it commends the faith of the gospel. More than that: it does this while showing that Christian faith diagnoses the ills we intuit and confirms them as real.
It seems to me that most criticisms of Kingsnorth’s book stem not from the opacity of his claims but from their translucence. We shrink from these warnings, it seems to me, because they bring back to consciousness how little control we actually have over our lives. We feel this frequently, but we suppress it because of how frightening it is. We try to carry on, doing what we must to get by, mistaking algorithmically-generated profiles of our search and purchase histories for who we genuinely are, but this dreadful truth gnaws at us. It gnaws at the illusion we try to sustain that everything is working to our advantage and that all of it has been approved by us.
Warnings such as Kingsnorth’s agitate our self-deception; we tend to respond explosively to them rather than to the conditions of our alienation and exploitation, like the Israelites reproving Moses as he seeks to liberate them. These conditions we accept, diminishing our agency further when we tell ourselves we must become accustomed to the future, to progress, to the promises of ease and supremacy our technological overlords sell us.
We are afraid not only of our present conditions but of what will be required of us if we truly want the world to be different. This is what terrifies us. And so most of us make our homes within the crater rather than seeking a better country.
Who can American Christians turn to for diagnosis of the cultural liturgies that deform them?
Against the Machine is not so much a call to action as it is a call to contemplation, to introspection and to observation of the world outside your head and the effects the Machine fosters in all these domains. On a similar wavelength, Byung-Chul Han writes in Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity that “we have no access to reality,” as “reality reveals itself only to contemplative attention” (11). This is in keeping with Kingsnorth’s demurral of revolt language, as the only revolt worth engaging in flows out of both a generous spiritual vision and a commitment to costly ascetic practices.
We will not have Wendell Berry or Oliver O’Donovan or Stanley Hauerwas or Charles Taylor much longer. And since James K. A. Smith has given apparent signs of walking away from his own substantive vision built up over years of helpful books, who can American Christians turn to for diagnosis of the cultural liturgies that deform them? Paul Kingsnorth would likely insist it isn’t him, and we can permit him that.
What is important is that we actually dare to contemplate our condition, dare to articulate our dread and wake up from the fantasy of frictionless ease and outsourced thought. We must be crucified to the flesh, to the world, to the Devil, and the Machine that lashes them all together.
