Particular Books, 2025
ISBN: 978-0241788400
Reviewed by Alan Dearing
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Around 10 years ago, despairing environmental activist Paul Kingsnorth left his urban home and moved to the west coast of Ireland. He wanted to escape the excesses of what he called ‘The Machine’, and also to understand it. His new book, Against The Machine’, explains what he means by that term. It is an understanding that goes deep into the malaise of modern humankind, which of course includes our ecological crisis.
The book starts with insightful observations of the change in the influences on humans which have been gradually increasing for at least a thousand years, and which have accelerated since the Enlightenment period. It has given us science, but also scientism and an overreliance on what is considered rational. Our best social order has eroded, and Paul says that when the pillars of that order have been knocked out, people are traumatised, whether they know the reason for it or not. It is, I think, plain to see that there is a simmering anger in modern job focussed people who are ready for glib opportunists to exploit their confusion. How have we become so dislodged?
The form of the Machine is gradually revealed in the first quarter of the book. It is an indistinct thing that dissolves the sacred and traditional and it is worshipped by a fixation on money and power. We are obliged to follow in the tracks of those who have been obscenely successful in acquiring both. Paul was influenced by the work of many critics of modernity, including that of historian Oswald Spengler, written in 1918, which said that culture is grown (literally) from the ground up, from its base in the peasantry. It is also the convention of the small town. Paul also finds inspiration in the recent, and awesome repudiation of techno orthodoxy by psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist.
There is not much left in modernity that escapes Paul’s scrutiny, and his devastating critique made my head spin. Paul believes that the way out is to lose our accumulated junk knowledge in spirituality, the authentic nature of people, in nature itself, and the home and work based culture that emerges. Paul chose Roman Catholicism as his spiritual support, and he cites an orthodox book that, I was sorry to read, dismisses any other form of spiritual life.
Paul points to the undemonstrative Amish of North America. My brief investigation of that group found that they believe in ascetic self sufficiency and live by the dictum ‘use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.’ Admirers could adopt the Amish restraint that chooses the ways and means which supports an ethical lifestyle.
This astonishing, alarming book is the result of years spent picking apart modernity. There is much to agree with, but we have all been raised in a technological, individualistic culture and we are surrounded by it, even at home. The genie is out of the bottle. It would, though, definitely be a vast improvement if modern people were more communitarian, aware of our rapidly emerging problems, and discriminating about technology.
So the message of the book is to recognise the decadence of western culture and to tune out, turn off and drop back. It advocates a parallel social structure and suggests making a start by entering the dreamtime and to go out and pray beneath the moon.