Paul Kingsnorth. Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. Thesis, 2025. $32.00. 368 pp.
"I won't die from it, but I will die with it." This is how an older saint—a clergyman, in fact—I once knew described the kind of cancer with which he'd been diagnosed. Five or six years since, the remark has stayed with me. This cheerful resignation at the prospect of an aging body, of life continuing in the midst of death, was new to me as a younger man. I had heard terminally ill Christians speak movingly of suffering, death, and the life to come before, but this was different. It spoke of a slower affliction, a perennial weeping wound like the Fisher King. Plus, it's a great line.
I thought of this line often whilst reading Paul Kingsnorth's Against the Machine. The Machine, as Kingsnorth describes it, is like that cancer: We might not die from it, but we will all die with it. It is inescapable now. We've all ingested the microplastics, and even the monks of Mount Athos have smartphones. The real question is how we "stagger onward rejoicing," as W. H. Auden had it.
Another way of putting this question is: To what extent is reconciling oneself to The Machine the same as simply reconciling oneself to the fallenness of the world in general?
As I pondered this question, I returned to Kingsnorth's sadly overlooked 2019 book Savage Gods. A highly lyrical work of non-fiction, its chief concerns are words and belonging. Both these eluded Kingsnorth when he relocated to a smallholding in the rural west of Ireland—a nightmare scenario for a nature-loving localist writer. He faces up to the question of whether language (and writing in particular) may be unavoidably a poisoned chalice, and whether the eternal difference between the map and the territory, particularly when it comes to the natural world, is the source of man's woes:
Is language the trap? The field is full of language. Everything is speaking to everything else, and some of it I can hear and some of it, because of my biology and my cultural inheritance, I am not equipped to. All nature is a language — but none of it is written down. Writing: converting a living, dancing speech, a pattern of sounds from a pulsing animal body, to dead, unmoving symbols on a page. Writing: fossiling life, replacing life with representations of life, representations which can be more attractive than life itself if you're not careful.
This inability to get one's words to match reality contributes to—or is perhaps a manifestation of—an inability to feel at home anywhere:
I am lost, and is that what life is, what modernity or post-modernity is, a rolling sense of being out of place, of being tangled up in the gauze, of being alienated by language, perception, of having eaten the apple and fallen, and is fall another word for life?
I once heard of a Frenchman married to a non-French speaker say that speaking to his wife in English was like "always only touching her with gloves on." This is what Kingsnorth articulates in Savage Gods. Do we only ever touch the world with gloves on?
It is curious, in retrospect, to read Savage Gods knowing now that Kingsnorth was not far off his sudden conversion to Christianity. To my mind, there are some well-established Christian answers to his questions in that book. Language by itself is no trap, since man is made in the image of a God who speaks and names. Accordingly, the first thing man does is name things. Remarkably (and I never tire of pointing this out), Adam is never commanded to name things—he just does it, as if he can't help himself. And his Creator delights in it: "Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name" (Genesis 2:19). But now, it is true that for man "fall" is another word for "life", since there is no unfallen life for man on this side of glory. This affects everything, including our language and sense of belonging and the relationship between the two. Words will always fail us, and homes will always leave us marooned at the hearth like Tennyson's restless Ulysses, to whom "all experience is an arch wherthro'/ Gleams that untravelled world." And yet none think that, even after the Fall, man should try to live without words and homes.
This is a roundabout way of asking: Is the Machine the same principle applied to technology? And if so, should we relate to it in much the same way as we relate to the rest of our fallenness, accepting that the Machine we will always have with us? Should we be ever watchful but rest easy lest we delude ourselves into visions of a Machine-less utopia? Is the Machine another word for life?
Kingsnorth has been discussing and defining the Machine for years, but consider his most pithy summary in this newest book:
This, then, is the Machine. It is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies we have cleverly managed to rustle up--cars, laptops, robot mowers and the rest. In fact, such 'technics', as [Lewis] Mumford calls them, are the product of the Machine, not its essence. The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition.
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.
The Machine, then, is "a tendency", and clearly a sinful one. Is it one like any other? Perhaps on the abstract moral weighing scales, yes. But the Machine is set apart from its fallen cousins like language and belonging by its particular ability to manifest itself in the conditions of the twenty-first century.
I wondered as I read Against the Machine whether technology, language, and belonging might not be a kind of unholy trinity, coequal in malice in their fallen states. They are the chief themes of the tower of Babel: “a people with one language and a common speech" deploy advanced technology to "reach[] to the heavens, so that [they] may make a name for [them]selves" (Genesis 11:1, 4). Yet I find it convincing that "the Machine" is a more overarching reality, subsuming fallen language and belonging via technology. Such technology is what Kingsnorth calls "the Grid", "a physical manifestation of the values of the Machine on the landscape itself," those technologies by which the Machine wages its war on roots and limits. Babel seems a kind of pre-Grid abortive first attempt at a Machine-world. Unsuccessful, the Machine continued "slouch[ing] toward Bethlehem to be born" as Yeats put it in a poem of which Kingsnorth is fond. Now, in Kingsnorth's view, the paths have been made straight and lo, the Machine comes.
Kingsnorth's idea of the Machine is not merely synonymous with a fallen attitude toward technology. This specific tendency relates to different kinds of power in certain ways and has come into its own in the material conditions of modernity. Now that artificial intelligence has been added to the Machine’s armoury, it may be a project as genuinely demonic as any pagan religion, since Kingsnorth suggests (as convincingly as anyone I've yet read) that the AI revolution is "ushering in" an age of "spiritual machines".
If the Machine is not merely “technology + sin,” then another question presents itself: Is there a non-Machine way for a society to live wisely and humanely with digital technology, even knowing that it will never be perfect?
Kingsnorth gives the arresting image of “raw” and “cooked” barbarians as a model for the lifestyles of individuals and smaller elective communities learning to live within and without the Machine respectively. But is another life possible for society as a whole in the digital age, for the political community? Could we ever manage a humane, post-Machine digital existence at the national level? Long before the Machine reached its current state, the Christian West managed to develop societies that reined in words, sex, money, violence, and plenty of other volatile forces—or at least aspired to (or at least said they aspired to). Excesses came and went, crimes were punished, taboos embedded restraint, and functioning—even prosperous—societies grew up. Could we tame digital technology in the same way?
One possibility is that this is doable, but only after another fall of Babel. The fall of the first Babel was a judgement, but also a mercy. Part of Babel’s sin was its resistance to mankind’s vocation to fill the earth. Although man’s confused tongues and dispersal were a judgement, they also served to advance him in his natural creation mandate. What’s more, the new creation of the church does not reverse the sounds of Babel. Rather, it redeems them at Pentecost as a community of every tribe and tongue and nation.
The Machine is not going anywhere anytime soon. I am convinced enough of this to write sporadic reflections on parenting in the age of the Machine in my Substack, The New Albion. I in no way wish to minimize the manmade horrors we will see under its rule. But if its Babelic downfall comes, perhaps on the other side there will be some kind of realignment with our humanity which involves a maturation in our collective relationship to the forces of technology. My friend Joseph Minich has suggested that C. S. Lewis saw modernity as a kind of testing ground, a rite of passage, for mankind. In his contribution to my recently edited volume Life on the Silent Planet, Minich considers the “conversion” that Mark and Jane Studdock (the thoroughly modern protagonists of Lewis’ 1945 novel That Hideous Strength) undergo as they reconcile themselves to their respective genders:
Elsewhere, I have characterized the defining feature of modernity as this: the simultaneous global renegotiation of all human custom. Although the basic principles of natural law don’t change, the “living dance” that particularizes these principles does. The independent conversions of Mark and Jane as perhaps a commentary on what Lewis expects will become increasingly normative in contemporary civilization. Putting these two points together, then, whatever it means for modern people to inflect the old patterns is liable to be more rooted in individual internalization of God’s way than “peer pressure” to behave in certain ways that modernity often renders practically impossible.
He continues:
Even if individuality and choice take on a greater degree of prominence in the modern experience of our gendered selves, this can result in either curse or blessing. It will be a curse to the extent that our own radically peculiar (by historical standards) freedoms come to seem more basic in our vision than the self-giving patterns of interdependence that are stamped into our very bodies and natures. It will be a blessing to the extent that the individualism of modern civilization catalyzes a greater depth of engagement with the basic principles themselves.
Could the same happen in our relationship to digital technology? And could it happen at scale, with enough individuals taking ownership of the “basic principles” of their humanity to affect a genuine societal shift? In principle, I cannot say no. In practice, it remains to be seen. But the Christian faith of which Kingsnorth is now a member has turned the world upside down before. It could do so again. That Hideous Strength was the fictional counterpart to Lewis’ lectures in The Abolition of Man, a non-fictional work whose title is synonymous with the subtitle of Kingsnorth’s book, On the Unmaking of Humanity. Lewis seemed to think that, between now and glory, there was some hope in the face of the Machine.
Yet this is likely a way off, quite possibly on the other side of some Babelic cataclysm. For now, though, Kingsnorth’s account of the Machine demands attention. Taking heed of it could well be the difference between dying from the Machine and merely dying with it.
Rhys Laverty is an editor and writer based in Chessington in the UK, where he lives with his wife and three children. He has written for outlets including First Things, The Spectator, The Critic, and Plough Quarterly.
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