Paul Kingsnorth. Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. Thesis, 2025. $32.00. 368 pp.
I have been reading Paul Kingsnorth since his days at the Dark Mountain Project, and I found his Buckmaster Trilogy absolutely brilliant. So I greeted the news of his conversion to Christianity with joy but not surprise; the trajectory of his thinking had been apparent. He has long seen the West’s environmental, technological, and political crises as symptoms of a spiritual crisis, and his essay “The Cross and the Machine,” which describes his conversion (after years of paganism, Zen Buddhism, Wicca, and more) and begins connecting these threads, remains one of the best essays I’ve ever read. Kingsnorth doesn’t exhibit the arrogance that marks some recent converts; he doesn’t think he’s figured everything out. He is, instead, a “come and see” disciple, one who has had his life upended by the incarnate Christ and humbly invites others to encounter this radical good news for themselves—and then rearrange their entire lives accordingly (John 1:46).
His new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, synthesizes arguments he’s been making in his essays and talks since his conversion in the early days of COVID. For those who haven’t read Kingsnorth, this is the place to begin (but not to end). For those who have been following along on his Substack, there’s still much to be learned from reading through his revised arguments in book form.
Kingsnorth is an ambitious and deep thinker—his aim here is nothing less than defining “the West,” understanding how it went wrong, and imagining some path toward renewal—so the book defies summary. Instead of making that doomed attempt, I want to set it alongside another landmark work of cultural criticism that kept coming to mind as I reflected on Kingsnorth’s project: Christopher Lasch’s True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics.
Kingsnorth doesn’t refer to Lasch’s 1991 magnum opus, though he does appreciatively cite Lasch’s posthumous The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, but these two incisive works have much in common. Both are written by disaffected leftists who probe beneath the superficial conflicts between left and right, and both unearth an often unconscious, fragmented tradition that offers a genuine alternative to the Progressive or Machine consensus to which both sides of this ostensible divide adhere. Where Kingsnorth parts course from Lasch is in his more explicit search for a poetic and spiritual core: Against the Machine is a work of cultural analysis written by a mythic imagination.
For Lasch and Kingsnorth, the camps we term left and right, conservative and liberal, free-market and socialist are bickering siblings within the broader Progressive family, one animated by the conviction that we can make a better world and overcome natural and human limits through the right technology and organization and systems. And what both argue—rightly, I think—is that such utopian aspirations inevitably cause real harm. Kingsnorth cites C. S. Lewis to this effect: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” Kingsnorth follows poets R. S. Thomas and Robinson Jeffers in naming this utopian-minded system the Machine. The Machine, then, is the target of his critique, as he exposes how its reductive and destructive logic crops up in scientism, globalism, colonialism, technocracy, COVID politics, transgenderism, transhumanism, AI, industrial agriculture, and more.
Like Lasch, then, Kingsnorth consistently refuses to be taken in by the simplistic framing that the culture wars impose on the political and cultural issues of our day. While Lasch exhibited sympathy with and admiration for Christianity in his later years, Kingsnorth is more explicit in arguing that the culture wars are a distraction from an underlying spiritual malaise: “When the cult departs from the heart of the culture, the thing starts to fall apart.” So what we’re left with now “is the equivalent of two bald men fighting over a comb.” It is “because we no longer have a culture,” Kingsnorth writes, that “we have a culture war instead.” Yet “the surface churning of these battles can distract us from the deeper currents,” which show these disputes to be part of “modernity’s long rebellion against nature,” limits, and God.
Take, for instance, Kingsnorth’s approach to nationalism. He is no fan of what he calls “the Grid” by which transnational capital hollows out particular places and nations, transforming them into profitable nodes of a global Machine. But he’s also wary of the ways in which nationalism makes immigrants into scapegoats and distracts from the Grid’s ongoing destruction of cultures and communities. Intractable contradictions are inherent to both sides of the typical conflict: “The left wants a world without borders that somehow also contains welfare states, while the right wants to defend the ethnic makeup of nations without acknowledging that traditional notions of ethnicity are increasingly impossible in the high-tech globalised world that has resulted from the capitalist economy they have always defended.”
In other words, neither party seems perturbed that “the Machine is birthing its own ethnicity. It is a globalised, screen-enabled, placeless identity” that sucks the life out of regional or national cultures. As he concludes, “the point, as ever, is spiritual. . . Blame the immigrants if you like—it’s always the easy option—but they didn’t strip the soul out of the nations of the West. We did. Do you think you can build your country around nothing but money and then complain when people want to come in and earn some of it themselves?”
If left and right are a distraction, where does the real conflict lie? The book’s epigraph signals Kingsnorth’s basic conviction. It records Wendell Berry’s resonant sentence, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” Like Lasch, Kingsnorth’s extensive reading enables him to bring to the surface a tradition that’s too often gone unnoticed and unarticulated.
He brings to consciousness a creaturely alternative, enabling those who are dissatisfied with the machine to recognize allies and fellow travelers from other times and places and glean from their wisdom. And there’s a great deal of overlap between the traditions that Lash and Kingsnorth uphold. Lasch praises a producer-populism that, he writes, “would find much of its moral inspiration in the popular radicalism of the past and more generally in the wide-ranging critique of progress, enlightenment, and unlimited ambition that was drawn up by moralists whose perceptions were shaped by the producers’ view of the world.” Kingsnorth borrows the term “reactionary radicals” from Craig Calhoun’s The Question of Class Struggle, and he defines this group in ways that rhyme with Lasch’s populist tradition: “reactionary radicalism . . . is a defense of [a] moral economy—a system built around community bonds, local economics and human-scale systems—in the face of colonisation by the Machine.”
Kingsnorth develops this contrast between machine life and creaturely life in different ways over the course of his analysis, but he offers a thumbnail version under the rubric of the Four Ss of the Machine’s anticulture versus the Four Ps that mark creaturely cultures across their genuine diversity. The Four Ss are Science (which tells us “where we come from”), the Self (which tells us “who we are”), Sex (which tells us “what we do”), and the Screen (which tells us “where we are going). Kingsnorth articulates how these work together to create a false religion: “If the self is our object of worship and science our new priesthood, then we could say that sex is our liturgy and prayer rule.” And this project is enabled by digital technologies that “can increasingly give us exactly what we want at any given moment.” Screens make tactile and plausible a sense of the world as manipulable, answerable to my every desire. Hence, as Kingsnorth points out, the Machine is but the latest iteration of the temptation that has bedeviled humans since Eden: “Do what thou wilt is the motto of our world: the motto of the Machine. Thy will be done is its older brother, and its challenger.”
Those who live by this petition that lies at the core of the Lord’s Prayer will find their lives marked by the Four Ps: the Past, People, Place, and Prayer. Interestingly, when Kingsnorth spoke on this framework at the 2023 Front Porch Republic conference, he cited just three Ps, omitting the Past. But his revised, four-part model echoes the rich definition of place that Berry develops in his writings. As I’ve argued, Berry understands the proper human place as found at the intersection of four dimensions: tradition, community, geography, and hierarchy. The fact that Berry and Kingsnorth both land on complementary definitions of what it means to be rooted, healthy people indicates that they are drawing from a perennial well of wisdom.
His similarities to Berry (a collection of whose essays Kingsnorth edited for British readers) also highlight a key difference between Lasch’s approach and Kingsnorth’s. Like Berry, Kingsnorth writes not only non-fiction essays but also poetry and novels. His imagination searches for images and stories to lead us out of the ideological prison imposed by the Machine. So if his philosophical or historical analysis at times suffers from imprecision or oversimplification, this is because he’s searching for something deeper. Asking how an anticulture heals itself, Kingsnorth cites Robert Bly’s answer: “through story and ritual.” This is no quick fix. Rather, it’s “long, hard work: intergenerational work. It is myth work.” In the same vein, Kingsnorth praises the approach that Ian McGilchrist takes in seeking to recover a right-hemisphere, whole-oriented way of seeing the world that could then guide the tinkering and manipulating of the left hemisphere.
Kingsnorth has, of course, done this work in his own poetry and fiction. And even though this book emphasizes rational analysis and argument, it too includes plenty of stories. At one point, Kingsnorth recites a litany of ills unleashed by the Internet and admits: “if I had the energy, I suppose I could fill a hundred pages trying to prove” what a disaster the Internet has been for humans. Yet many pixels have already flickered on and off in this endeavor, “and by now you either agree or you don’t. . . . So I won’t try to prove anything. Instead, I’ll tell you a story.” This seems to be the choice he’s made in his Substack as well, where he pens fewer polemics and more often recounts pilgrimages to various holy sites and narrates the lives of “wild saints.” This shift makes me hopeful that we may yet enjoy more novels from him as well. Whatever Kingsnorth writes in the future will be well worth reading and pondering, but it is in this mythic vein that, I think, his greatest gifts lie.
Near the end of Against the Machine, he returns to the Four Ps: “Human community, roots in nature, connection to God, memories passed down and on. These are the eternal things.” And while they are threatened today by the ever-encroaching Machine, they also offer paths toward re-rooting for those of us who have grown dissatisfied with the Machine and its promises of material abundance and instead long for a more abundant life. Simone Weil concluded that the only path forward for those in the rootless West was “the growing of roots.” Kingsnorth agrees:
This, in practical terms, is the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a ‘West’ that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particularly little fires—fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths—and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true.
Rather than offer a grand, utopian political vision, Kingsnorth urges us to look around our homes and see what good work we might do here and now. “After all,” he reminds us, “we are still people, we still inhabit places, we have our inheritance, and God is still all around us, and within us, if we want to go looking for Him.”
Neither nostalgic nor utopian, neither pessimistic nor optimistic, Kingsnorth embodies the “hope without optimism” that Lasch believed was the “spiritual discipline against resentment.” May this book and its hard-won hope prepare the seedbed for genuine renewal.