Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on January 13, 2026 | 20 Comments
Happy new(ish) year. As hinted by the second part of my title, this post isn’t a two-part retrospective on the Beatles, with a follow-up on John and Ringo. Instead, it’s mostly a sort-of review of Paul Kingsnorth’s recent book Against the Machine (henceforth ATM). But while thinking about Paul Kingsnorth, I find it hard not to think also about George Monbiot – sometime friends and fellow travellers in the broadly left-wing environmentalist movement whose intellectual, political and spiritual journeys have now diverged sharply. Also, arguably the two most prominent contemporary English writers on the conjunction of politics, nature and society.
I’ve written plenty about George recently, and in this post I want to give most of my attention to Paul. But their diverging journeys interest me, perhaps partly because they mirror my own. Also because they’re relevant to delineating what Paul calls ‘the Machine’, and to figuring out how to respond to it, as discussed below.
What is the Machine? It escapes easy definition, which is one of the criticisms I’ve seen of Paul’s concept, and he chews away at it throughout his book. But maybe this passage gives a sense:
…‘growth’ is the overriding purpose of the ‘global economy’ which the Machine has built … The growth has no specific aim and no end in sight, and can always be justified by pointing to problems – poverty, environmental degradation – which were in many cases caused by the growth, but which can now only be solved by more of it …. [the Machine] is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies …. The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us … [manifesting] 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 … and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world. To do that, it must raze or transmute many older or less measurable things (pp.37-8)
Yes, exactly this. It is quite nebulous, but I believe that’s the nature of the thing. Other noted critics of modern times like Michel Foucault and Antonio Negri likewise opt for the ineffable with ideas like ‘biopower’ or ‘empire’. No doubt it’s important to identify specific people, policies and actions for wrongdoing and redress, but identifying this systemic autonomy of the Machine seems to me no less relevant.
It’s a strength of Paul’s thinking that he sees the Machine as “a tendency within us” operating within all people and all societies at some level. It’s not a new thing – he identifies Pharaonic Egypt as an archetype. I’d suggest we can go further back than that, and we can also identify it in more egalitarian and less monumental or goal-exalting societies than Egypt. Nevertheless, it does seem to have reached its apogee and a potential point of crisis in modern times. Maybe a difference of quantity, or maybe a difference of quality. Anyway, a difference.
Another strength of Paul’s thinking is that he sees how the essence of the Machine isn’t really about accumulation. The materialist drive for more growth, wealth, wellbeing, efficiency or whatever is its clothing, not its purpose. Instead, “It is, in some deadly fashion, a sacral object in itself. It is its own enchantment” (p.39).
I think that’s right, and I’ll come back to this issue of sacredness shortly.
In some of his chapters, Paul starts with a moment of epiphany in some aspect of his day-to-day life where the veil is torn and he suddenly realises how odd and lopsided are our modern commitments. He draws on various thinkers to help diagnose the problem, for example Iain McGilcrhist’s influential ‘master and emissary’ or left-brain/right-brain analysis, which sees in modern society the loss of an ability to comprehend the world holistically in favour of an ability only to apprehend the functioning of its parts. A world where “there is no territory … only map”. This leads Paul to ask “Are we in ‘the West’ literally a culture with brain damage? It would explain a lot” (pp.267-8).
If our modern commitments are odd and lopsided, if we have no territory, if our culture has brain damage, that implies there must be other normal, symmetrical, territorial and brain-intact cultures. Yet, Paul writes, “Those who can see this, and try to point it out, are dismissed as ‘romantics’, ‘nostalgics’, ‘reactionaries’ or ‘dreamers’” (p.267).
All this resonates strongly with my view and experience of the world – including the epiphanies, and the dismissals. A brain damaged person or culture isn’t necessarily aware of their state, and interprets such challenges as a deviation from their own sense of the normal. Hence, perhaps there’s no point in trying to point it out. Yet some people born and raised within the brain damaged culture do come to see it. And given that this culture is committing great harm to itself and to other people and other species, continuing to point it out and trying to redress it seems important.
Paul emphasises four values that non-brain damaged cultures have where we might look for redress, which he calls ‘the Four Ps’: Past, People, Place and Prayer (p.131). I’ll restrict my comments mostly to the first and last of these.
Orientations to the past are easily ridiculed by Machine-thinking along the lines of the pejoratives Paul mentions: nostalgia, reaction and so on. But, as Paul argues brilliantly throughout ATM, the point is not to seek a return to some fantasy of the good old days so much as to understand that there are some good old ways (the four Ps) that need constant refreshing. Indeed, we don’t even really need to emphasise their oldness so much as their difference from the Machine’s infatuation with the new and ‘disruptive’. Modernism is a cultural vehicle of the Machine, but ‘modern’ is not the same as ‘contemporary’. There are contemporary societies that are not modern and that hold to the four Ps. But not many, because of the destructiveness of the Machine, its levelling of distinctive culture.
So it’s not a matter of vaunting or returning to the past or to tradition, so much as finding a living orientation to it. Nevertheless, it’s easy to slip into mystified or over-valued approaches to it (how much easier to embrace the Machine and associated ideologies like ecomodernism, where perfection lies in the future and therefore can’t be confronted with its real-world shortcomings!)
Despite his general brilliance, I think Iain McGilchrist errs in this respect when he talks about the importance of an education in the classics of English literature, “one of the richest if not the richest in the world”. I see this as a kind of high culture pretentiousness, over-obsessed with comparing itself to others and effacing its complex roots. This somewhat tweedy elitism opens itself up to ironic putdowns and satire, the kind of modernism that ultimately paves the way for the empty knowingness of the Machine. If not high culture, then, I’d suggest the need for low culture or folk culture, which doesn’t care too much about how it compares with others, but is still culture in critical conversation with itself. Ideally, I’d have liked to see Paul say more about this. To have a living folk culture, I think you need to have local livelihood communities enjoying a degree of autonomy. I’ll say a bit more about that shortly.
The other key requirement to avoid cultural brain damage is an embrace of the sacred, which Paul lays out beautifully in his book. This, essentially, is the fourth ‘P’ – prayer. No doubt Paul’s relatively recent conversion to Christianity is relevant, but his discussion of the sacred is capacious and generous, not narrowly sectarian. I touched on this here on this blog a couple of years ago in a discussion with Andrew among others. Andrew wrote:
I used to enjoy Kingsnorth’s writing, but I often find it objectionable these days, largely because I think it’s often dishonest … [He] explicitly disavows any ideology of his own, instead invoking a ‘stance’ or a ‘politics’, although he also claims that his own stance ‘does not fit easily into any Left-Right paradigm’. In my view it is not possible to escape ideology
This would probably have been my own reaction some years ago, and I agree with Andrew that it’s not possible to escape ideology. However, while a society’s orientation to the sacred will inevitably be used ideologically by people within that society to advance some interest or other, I don’t think the sacred is reducible to ideology. Indeed, maybe one definition of the sacred is precisely that which is widely seen as not ideological but simply existent and whole.
I won’t dwell much further on the sacred here. It’s something that Paul addresses in considerable detail in his book, in my opinion actually with a lot of honesty and intellectual courage. However, there are different kinds of sacredness, with different implications. They potentially do clash in the field of politics (or ‘ideology’), although not necessarily in ways that standard political designations well capture. Whatever my other differences with them might be, I think the likes of Paul and Patrick Deneen are correct to suggest that the left-right paradigm represents two sides of the same coin of a problematic Machine liberalism.
While always implicit, I think we’re now seeing this conformity manifest increasingly in contemporary politics as ‘left’ and ‘right’ political economies converge around state-corporate technocracy. The ideology is human betterment (or sometimes transhuman betterment), the driving force is the Machine, and the recipe is ecomodernism.
Paul discusses, and in my opinion rightly dismisses, this assemblage in ATM in relation to two main areas – food and artificial intelligence. His main target on the food front is George Monbiot, and specifically George’s book, entertainingly described by Paul as “the humbly titled Regenesis” (p.209).
Regular readers of this blog will scarcely need me to repeat my own criticisms of Regenesis, but what I would say is that I think Paul cedes far too much ground to George and the ecomodernists before planting his flag. He writes as if the factory-made bacterial protein powder George advocates in Regenesis is carrying all before it as the mass food of the future, whereas the truth is that among its other flaws it’s a monumentally energy-hungry process that’s now demonstrably flopping, and is vanishingly unlikely to ever become a mass food (unless humanity can access cheap, low-carbon energy in unprecedented quantities, another improbable but much-vaunted ecomodernist dream).
Paul also quotes George’s claim that “It’s time we became obsessed by numbers. We need to compare yields, compare land uses, compare the diversity and abundance of wildlife, compare emissions, erosion, pollution, costs, inputs, nutrition, across every aspect of food production” (ATM, p.210; Regenesis, p.224-5). He treats this largely just with weary resignation as an example of the Machine’s spreadsheet-brain. But while ATM isn’t the place to probe the details, he could usefully have pointed to the intellectual shoddiness of George’s numbers games, which are so often wrong or tendentiously misleading. George mostly mobilises the idea of numbers and comparisons as a logic of technocratic enclosure against agrarian localism when actual numbers – and, more importantly, considered analysis – inevitably tell a more complex and context-specific story.
So here I think Paul allows the Machine too much leeway. When it comes to ecomodernism versus human-scaled conviviality and localism we’re not in the presence of some great clash between science and feeling, logos and mythos. Instead, we’re in the presence of two kinds of myth, two kinds of feeling or two kinds of sacredness, one of them resting on ‘science’ as a kind of sacred ideal rather than a particular and limited mode of enquiry.
It’s funny how commitment to these different forms of sacredness provokes similar apocalyptic language in their opposition to each other. Paul writes of elite responses to climate change that “bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen” (p.215) while George has objected to my scepticism about the future of mass urbanism thus:
To me, Chris’s long-standing plan – to move the people to the food, rather than the food to the people – is a further instance of the Great Cruelty of the past two centuries. The Great Cruelty is common to colonialism, capitalism, communism, Nazism, neoliberalism and all the other conquering and interconnected forces that have dominated thought and action during this period. It can be summarised as follows:
People are counters, to be moved in their millions, as interests or ideology dictate, across the board game called Planet Earth.
It’s consistent with the kind of thinking that characterises cities as “human feedlots”.
I won’t dwell too much on the cruelty that I think is coming by failing to understand the parallels between human cities and animal feedlots in terms of the entropy-defying flows of food, energy, water and waste they involve that simply aren’t sustainable in the long term. People aren’t counters to be moved – they will move of their own accord if they can, but for my part I sense the whiff of the coming enclosures, the cattle herders’ prod, in George’s ill-justified enthusiasms for high-energy manufactured food and material technologies, and for clearance rewilding. The larger point is the highly charged language involved in the clash between ecomodernist and localist visions. It speaks of the sacral commitments underlying them.
In an ideal world, it would be good if we could discuss our differences less epically. I loved Paul’s critique of artificial intelligence as a form of the Antichrist (honestly, read it – it’s a nuanced and delightful piece of writing, and not nearly as mad as it might sound). Yet, though I may be (apocalyptically) wrong about this, as with overhyped corporate greenwash concerning bacterial food, I’m not convinced AI is quite this beast. Nuclear weapons might be a closer fit, and a more likely source of apocalypse. Paul is probably right that AI and other aspects of contemporary tech and technocracy will at minimum “be responsible for mass unemployment, fakery on an unprecedented scale and the breakdown of shared notions of reality” (p.302), but perhaps by this token the overinflated claims of ecomodernism and technocracy to be able to deliver greater human benefit give more leverage against the Machine than Paul is willing to concede in the bleaker moments of his book.
Nevertheless, it does seem that we Four-P types are currently losing the battle of hearts and minds against the Machine, if only because the latter has better command of media platforms. And, sadly, a direct airing of differences across the divide rarely seems to generate anything positive. Perhaps our respective sacral commitments are just too different.
In the face of this impasse, Paul lands in ATM on many similar positions to ones I’ve tried to articulate in my own writing. For example, he emphasises the virtues of finding ways to circumvent the Machine rather than confronting it head-on, a kind of weapons-of-the-weak approach involving a long-term, multigenerational project to build a Four-P world in the interstices of Machine power as best we can. And small or large practices of asceticism or spiritual discipline – something emphasized in every Four-P culture, but largely abandoned in Machine modernity. He draws nicely on a medieval Chinese distinction between ‘cooked barbarians’ living ambiguously and semi-uncooperatively within the walls of the state Machine, and ‘raw’ ones living oppositionally outside it, advocating for these respectively less and more compromised ways of opposing the Machine through asceticism.
While discussing this, he mentions in passing that people following the more hardcore, ‘raw’ form of asceticism make real things with their hands. Here is where I want to push this somewhat buried aspect of his argument harder, connecting it to my advocacy for agrarian localism, for a small farm future, for local crafts and livelihood communities. I don’t think we can build the kind of folk cultures I mentioned earlier that we need if they’re not deeply dedicated to local material livelihoods. But it’s not going to happen overnight. And it involves major elements of cooperative community work as well as individual or household work.
Paul writes:
the age of the Machine is not after all a hopeless time. Actually, it is the time we were born for. We can’t leave it, so we have to fully inhabit it …. If we can see what it is, we have a duty to speak the words to those who do not yet see, all the while struggling to remain human (p.317)
This is just the pep talk I need as I contemplate another year of pushing the boulder of agrarian localism up the hill of the Machine in my writing and my land-work. It bears on a discussion under my last post about having skin in the game. As I see it, I have skin in this game which isn’t negated by the fact that in numerous ways my efforts are compromised by living a life that’s thoroughly cooked in the Machine. This isn’t an Olympics of individual virtue. It’s long-haul work by ordinary, flawed people to help get us out of the Machine’s deathly grip. For my part, I don’t relish putting my head above the parapet and being likened to the Nazis by people with vastly greater media power than me. But I guess that’s just a silliness which is best shrugged off, and to be fair I get a lot of positive feedback about my writing too. Anyway, I take comfort from Paul’s injunction that we have a duty to speak the words. I’d add we also have a duty to grow the food and fibre and make things with our hands when we can.
Talking of Nazism, there’s quite a funny passage in Paul’s book where he skewers the tendency in mainstream writing to warn of the growing threat of eco-fascism via a series of lazy associations (‘populism’, Ted Kaczynski, the Christchurch shooter, the organic movement, blood and soil etc.) “I was in and around the green movement for a long time, but I never met an eco-fascist” he writes, “though I did have the pleasure of being called one” (p.207).
There are many ways of defining fascism – state-corporate alliances in service of techno-futurism is one, and it’s tempting to apply it to some of our purportedly radical public intellectuals. But the term is bandied about far too often. I’ve bandied it about too much myself in the past. I think it’s best to find calmer terms when we can.
Post-liberalism is one such term. I came across this review of Paul’s book by Emma Collins – a bad review, in more than one sense of the term – which counterposes her own recipe for writing books like Paul’s:
At this point the formula for a postliberal book is very familiar. A writer will take a provocative stance, trot out a little Deneen, a little Solzhenitsyn. Maybe sprinkle in a little Chesterton for good measure. Cook for 300 pages, and you’ve got a potential bestseller. Some of these people embrace the label reactionary and some don’t — but they are all, as the writer George Packer describes former Marxists in his book Last Best Hope, “hectoring pessimists” who “carried their apocalyptic baggage with them when they moved from left to right.
I think this is nonsense at several levels, but it did give me pause since Deneen and Chesterton also feature in my own recent ‘postliberal’ book (for the record, I don’t embrace the label ‘reactionary’ and I’m not entirely convinced by Paul’s take on ‘reactionary radicalism’, though I appreciate what he’s trying to do). In fact, the parallels between Paul’s book and mine don’t end with Deneen and Chesterton. We both also discuss James Scott, woodburning stoves, Edo Japan, dark ages, Alasdair MacIntyre, asceticism, Christopher Lasch and God. I find it interesting and quite comforting that we’ve converged in this way despite our somewhat different concerns and starting points. To me it’s suggestive not of some tired formula we’re trotting out but of a set of ideas and associated thinkers whose time is coming around again in the face of the manifest failings of liberal modernism and the Machine. While an often-empty novelty and originality are the guiding stars of modernism, perhaps the basic principles of grounding local livelihood societies admit to fewer basic permutations.
Yet originality doesn’t seem to be Emma Collins’s fundamental aim. She’s scornful that Paul “devotes himself to activities like using a composting toilet and cutting grass with a scythe” (another couple of things I have in common with him, though I wouldn’t say I’m ‘devoted’ to using a compost toilet and mowing with a scythe so much as I’ve chosen the easiest and most efficient options to get the job done, so to speak, in my circumstances). But Emma is having none of it:
Real country people aren’t spending all their time churning artisanal butter while reading books made of vellum. They eat hamburger soup from the crockpot while watching the local news. They drive Frito-Lay trucks. They use lawnmowers, not scythes, for God’s sake. I know because I’m from there. My people would catapult Kingsnorth’s pretentious tome into the nearest puddle.
As with the Marxists, here we have an ultimate appeal to the supposedly ideology-free collective authenticity of ‘real’ working people. Well, I’m sure it’s true that a lot of regular people in the countryside nowadays would spurn a scythe or a compost toilet on the grounds that they seem kind of weird. That’s people for you, and that’s why the Machine has us in its grip. We’re just such dopes for fads and fashions, for what the ‘real’ people – whoever we deem them to be – are thinking and doing . As I said earlier, the Machine is very old, as old as humanity. Although the taste for ‘progress’ as a value in itself and for new gimmicks that trap us in precarious high-energy global supply chains is a new twist.
Most people throughout human history have had to generate most of their livelihood locally with limited land and energy availabilities. I daresay they’ve always been prey to fashion, but not to the extent it compromises these basic non-negotiables of ecological existence. It seems likely that most people in the future will have to do the same. In the longer run, technologies like scythes and waterless toilets that have been stress-tested through ecological reality seem likely to prevail over lawnmowers and WCs. Likewise with social technologies like tradition (the past) and prayer (the sacred) despite the danger these can trap people in their own versions of the Machine. Nobody has much of a clue as to how we – or hopefully at least some of us – will get there out of the Machine-levelled present, but in my opinion ATM at least helps steel us to the task.
Paul is in no sense ‘eco-fascist’, but I must admit I wrote critically about him in the past when I felt some of his positions veered too close to an embrace of unconflicted nationalism and the ‘revolt against the elites’. ATM doesn’t fall into this trap. I daresay some of his positions around culture war issues will scare hares among some on the left, but I find his instincts invariably humane and oriented against the Machine rather than any particular kind of person: “because we no longer have a culture, we have a culture war instead. But I don’t believe in this conflict … If any real ‘war’ is in evidence today it is a spiritual war. It is the Machine versus human-scale culture” (p.310). Amen to that.
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The ‘real people’ as described by Emma Collins seem to take a pride in any activity that inverts thermodynamic advantage at the expense of ecology. I scythe in full public view to the bewilderment and occasional heckling of ‘real people.’ They glaze over when I try to explain the emergy framework of Howard Odum. I’ve not read ATM yet, but is Paul including the thermodynamic limits of the machine in his critique? It feels like he’s not questioning the machine’s resilience and is maybe taking the whole thing too seriously.
Imagine, if you will, a single ant in an ant colony, mindlessly doing its part in the work of the colony, unable to alter the behavior or goals of the colony. If it were to suddenly become sentient, it would still be unable to alter the group behavior, and in fact, why would it want to change anything? The group behavior has been honed over millennia to be successful , so is inherently resistant to change.
Our success as a species is unbreakably linked to the similar eusocial group cooperation we evolved to exhibit. The emergent phenomenon of the Hagen’s super organism, or the Orlov technosphere or now The Machine, are simply names for this heady mix of the maximum power principle and our clever ability to create artifacts and technology that vastly increase our ability to access energy sources. It’s how we are wired, it’s out of our control.
I’d argue that it’s not a Western thing, it simply happened where it did by a Jared Diamond lucky convergence. Once things clicked, the super organism was birthed, and is now exhibiting its own agency.
Call it our dark side, or just a latent but always there disruptive new species specialization ( remember the great oxygenation event?) that’s only been in the environment for a few millennia. It will likely take millennia more before a new stable balance with the rest of the ecosystem occurs. Will it be egalitarian and cooperative? Who knows. Nature only favors reproductive success in the conditions it exists in. Hopefully it will not reach a new equilibrium that also means survival in a landscape of radioactive slag.
Happy New Year!
On a lighter note, the superorganism persists only in the current sea of fossil energy. As that recedes, we will revert back to the less planet disrupting cycle of the rise and fall of regional empires . That’s not so bad, is it? Still plenty of room for variations on the theme, maybe even small farm regions based on distributism?
PS, have started reading the new book, and finding myself in need of a pencil as I note questions and comments I am teeing up for future conversations.
#Steve C
Your post summed up my thoughts much more coherently than I can.
“The Machine” is a very human construct. (Obviously 🙂 )
Is life on earth and evolution a “machine”? It has no purpose. Evolution just rolls merrily along. With no purpose or direction. Organisms evolve or become extinct. Life goes on. It would seem odd to me to describe it as a “machine”?
Same goes for the structures of human society. Lots interconnectedness and limits on what is possible.
Our present human disconnect from “nature” is only possible due to a once in a planetary bonanza of fossil fuels. We are all constrained by limits, though we do have some “agency” within those limits. We do make conscious choices. (Sometimes 🙂 )
Once we’ve “p***ed fossil fuels up the wall”, we’ll be back within the ecological limits/constraints. (We’ve never really been outside of them)
Empires will grow and then collapse. No different to the ebb and flow of population sizes everywhere else in nature. (Rabbits and foxes)
On a slight tangent……..
Prayer is an interesting topic.
Do any other organisms on the planet have a need or practice “prayer”?
I’m guessing not.
I think that the problem with us humans is we think too much! 🙂
(I’m half way through reading Ramp Hollow (about 3 years behind other people on this blog!!! 🙂 )
Really interesting read. Highlights some of the pressures that are experienced by by folks trying to live a SFF)
The “duty to grow the food and fibre and make things with our hands when we can” might be seen as asceticism, when compared to the Machine’s ways, but what looks like asceticism could actually be the means for a deep, luscious and often joyful (co)existence, despite the pains of life. It’s obvious to some, but incomprehensible (at the moment) to many others.
“the empty knowingness of the Machine” Exactly.
It’s interesting to me that you are beginning to talk about faith. It seems to me that the Machine is the ultimate expression of lack of faith. Because the current culture of the Machine was built so that we would be ‘secure’ and not need to rely on any kind of Providence. But since a complete lack of faith is incompatible with remaining alive, we are stuck with faith in the Machine instead, ironically.
Or at least that’s how it was sold to we hoi polloi.. Although I understand the urge to put greater trust in the things we humans have built rather than the unpredictable forces of nature. But more likely, the major force promoting the Machine’s dominance has been the greed of those who scramble to the top of the pyramid. I’m pretty sure that all those old, balanced human societies had their ways for keeping a lid on this kind of hubris.
So this ideology of human betterment with its “‘science’ as a kind of sacred ideal” is, in my view, a hedge against the uncertainty of relying on faith that the world will provide for our needs. Which Providence, as you say is “not ideological but simply existent and whole.”
I have mixed feelings too about Paul’s conversion to Christianity, though it’s none of my business. And I understand the human proclivity to see Providence as a human-like personality. But in this context, I have to say that the current regime of the Machine got its start long before anybody was a monotheist, and taken as a whole, organized religion has done much more to further the expansion of the Machine than it has to hinder it.
As for George and his “colonialism, capitalism, communism, Nazism, neoliberalism and all the other conquering and interconnected forces” I think it’s best to let them roll off your duck’s back. George and most of the rest of we westerners are heir to those ‘isms’ and more or less fully dependent on their legacy for our daily sustenance. The difference is that George wants to take the Machine one step for the worse.
You say “…To have a living folk culture, I think you need to have local livelihood communities enjoying a degree of autonomy…” and “make real things with their hands”
Yes, but. Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers and Joseph Whitworth & his friends also made real things with their hands, and they were masters at it. The important part is the purpose of the work. All those practical industrial geniuses were working to get wealthy and insulate themselves from the vagaries of the natural world. More lack of faith in Providence, in other words.
And especially now, more than 100 years after those geniuses, and deeper into overshoot, that lack of faith is certainly logical. Only a very few of us are able to have plenty by foraging at the margins of our diminished world.
So then, how to “get us out of the Machine’s deathly grip?” Doubtless it will be a long hard slog, but personally I think the “breakdown of shared notions of reality” might actually help. That breakdown might make it easier to lose our faith in the Machine. It will certainly become easier to see how hollow the Machine’s promises are.
But as you and Paul say, we don’t need to fight the Machine, we only need to outlive it. Keeping some human culture alive until the Machine destroys itself.
Unfortunately, we will probably not be able to prevent the Machine from destroying a large portion of the world with it as it goes.
Hi Chris and commenters. Happy new year.
I finished ‘ How not to be Governed ‘ by James C Scott today, and read Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘Against the Machine’ a week ago. Both relavatory books to me. Add in Luke Kemp’s ‘Goliaths Curse’ which looks at state formation and persistence, which I read before Christmas and I’m seeing connections. Your post this week Chris has added more detail. I had read bits of the later chapters of ATM in Waterstones when it initially came out, but thought it did not add much to Dmitry Orlovs ‘ Shrinking the Technosphere’. Instead I ordered it on library lone, but had to wait some months for my turn. Boy was I wrong, it is a very religious book i.e. about the west’s loss of religion and what has replaced it (Paul’s Machine) and possible paths to regain holistic sacredness and a sane society. I have been coming to Christianity over the last two years following a number of crisis in my life. I needed a value system very different from modernism, plus community, and to my surprise singing. Back to ATM, I read it in three days flat. Half way through a small picture fell out, it was of Christ. It’s not just me thinking this is a book about religion. I put the picture back in for the next reader to find. I going to reply later with some longer thinking, but for now will discuss the source of the west’s left brain thinking. Luke Kemp discusses the prevalence of psychopaths in society, using an estimate of one percent. Psychopaths lack empathy, does this means that they cannot see holistically? That they can’t see the consequences of there actions? They can see the physical consequences but not the emotional? They can’t think holistically? Are dominated by the left brain? Do they see the world as a jumble of parts? Do some have a psychological need to try to make order out of the chaos of parts that they see? This drive is not modern, it goes back to the first states, and Luke Kemp thinks psychopath’s are a key part of state formation. Going on to James C Scott’s work, he highlights the differences between the precolonial valley padi states and the stateless swidden hill cultures. The valley padi states are very flat, literally and figureatively, that is there is only one king, one formal religion, one culture, one language, one monoculture grain (rice), and fixed abodes, all hierarchachly organised. While the hill tribes have multipule languages, religions, cultures, subsistence strategies, will move abode frequently, have no fixed hierarchy and will change identities as suits them. These are people you can’t pin down. You can only see them as a whole fluid humanity. The hill cultures are very hilly. The Machine originated in our left brain, it sees a jumble of parts, and needs order to rationalise the world, to understand the world. Everything must be named, everything must fixed, everything must be in order. This has been a drive since the earliest states. Technology enhanced this drive to control nature, to acceed nature, to be greater than nature. And yes, lots of straight lines! That’s enough of my ramblings for now, good night all.
Like Eliot I also seized on the choice of words ‘the real people’. Put me immediately in mind of that famous song ‘Drover’, the lyrics of which don’t shirk from the demands of a country lifeway, perhaps one on the periphery of Machine (coincidentally the name of the town in Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man). Like Philip, I sometimes enjoy (actually draw strength from) singing, though you could even sprechgesang this one, Mark E. Smith style. Here’s some lines to mull:
The real people went away
I’ll find a better word someday
Leaving only me and my dreams
My cattle
And a resonator…
… I drove them by the crops
and thought the crops were lost
I consoled myself with rudimentary thoughts
And I set my watch against the city clock
It was way off!
… One thing about this wild, wild country
It takes a strong, strong,
It breaks a strong, strong mind
And anything less makes me feel like I’m wasting my time
Good testosterone-fuelled version here, IMO – lovely shots of America, put me in mind of that old Channel 4 series Road Dreams, made by Bristolian (I think) Eliot Bristow some decades ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_IEQSqpF9Y&list=RDG_IEQSqpF9Y&start_radio=1
Thanks for comments. Briefly, in reply –
Eliot, while I have a certain sympathy with your onlookers’ eye glaze when confronted with Odum’s emergy framework, it’s perhaps symptomatic of the sacral nature of progress I discussed above: people want to laugh at the antiquated, they don’t want to face its logical advantages. I’d be interested in discussing how best to break down this resistance. Regarding Paul’s neglect of Machine thermodynamics, yes he doesn’t really address this. I suspect this might be less that he’s unaware of it and more that he doesn’t want to engage the Machine in its own terms – efficiency, progress etc. But he does miss a few tricks with this choice. Sadly, I fear there are plenty of ways the Machine can cause destruction even as it collapses under the weight of its own impossibility.
Steve C, much to agree with in your comment. Though maybe I’m a bit of a renegade in questioning the applicability of the maximum power principle and the way people often talk about overshoot – not that I dispute the overall trajectory. I hope to write a post about this soon and I’ll be interested in your thoughts. Agreed, it’s not specifically a Western thing (though I’d prefer to keep Jared Diamond out of it!) but arguably there’s a certain left-brained scientism that Europeans in particular unleashed on the world. I look forward to discussing FLIDA with you soon!
John, I wouldn’t describe life on earth or evolution as a machine, but I think it fits certain aspects of human designs – a vehicle built by human creators that grinds mindlessly on. But I don’t want to get too hung up on the exact metaphor. Agreed about the post-fossil return to ecological limits, though (again re MPP) I don’t think it’s a simple case of rabbits and foxes, due to your point about conscious choices. More on that anon. Regarding prayer, well I don’t know if other organisms pray – if they do, doubtless not like we do. Maybe they meditate? (Over)thinking is our human superpower, and also our curse. As I see it, prayer isn’t a case of overthinking but a way of trying to redress the damage of overthinking by a creature that can’t otherwise help overthinking. Overthinking without prayer leads to the Machine.
Steve L – yes, good point. I think I’m often too wary of making it in the face of the incomprehension and therefore ridicule of others. But, as per Eliot’s point, I’d like to find ways of doing it better. One way into it might be that ideas like asceticism or ‘sacrifice’ aren’t to be thought of as bad things involving suffering, but are joyful and generative.
Eric – yes, I think there are old ways of keeping the lid on that Machine culture has prompted us to forget. Agree with your ambivalence about organized religion and its association with the Machine. Something I’m wrestling with. Good point about the Edisons, Wrights etc and making real things. I agree that what matters is purpose … which, in large part, is the local livelihood communities. If we keep the two together the handwork looks different and is under another lid.
Philip – thanks for that, very interesting – especially your psychopathy point. Kemp’s book is in my in tray. I read an interview with him where he made the point that Trump, Putin & Xi demonstrate the three characteristics of political psychopathy: a narcissist, a ‘cold psychopath’ and a master manipulator. Made me laugh, and cry – way to get to the top! Look forward to your further thoughts.
Simon – thanks for the lyrics!
#Chris.
Further thoughts on “prayer”………
Yes. Perhaps prayer is a soothing tonic against the overthinking of our brains. Like a mantra, mindfulness, playing a guitar, long distance running, crochet, or (in my case), whittling. There seems to be a need to switch off the internal chatter.
As you say, superpower and curse.
Maybe we have become aware of the complexity of the cosmos but without the understanding of how it all works? Quite an exhausting combination.
Of all the “tonics” above, prayer is different. It emphasizes an entity/power outside of our individual brains (in a way that knitting doesn’t)
Finding solace in a fantastical “super being” or “force”.
Or maybe my understanding of the word “prayer” is too narrow?
From ancient times everyone has noticed the regularity of natural processes, cause and effect, and mysterious things that happen for unknown reasons. These observations make it easy to think that “something” is in control of everything. But this was before we knew about the space-time continuum and the operations of nature at extremely small and extremely large scales. It was easy to assume that some being outside of nature was manipulating it all. We now know that this is not the case.
But I think it’s possible for an atheist, like me, to pray. Doing so is an expression of one’s most fervent desire for a particular outcome in circumstances where there is a large range of outcomes and in which one has virtually no control over what happens.
Even though the universe is deterministic (albeit stochastically), we don’t know enough to predict the future with any granularity. So even though we know that something must happen, we often don’t know what it will be. Prayer is an expression of what we hope will happen even when we know that our prayer has no hope of changing the course of events.
@Joe Clarkson
Yes, I agree with all of that.
I think there is another side to “prayer” though, which is interesting.
The sense of the collective. Prayer can be a deeply personal affair or it can be a group activity. A bringing together of people. A sense of a collective/shared consciousness. Binding of a community.
This collectiveness can be a positive or negative. A club that can exclude as much as include. Create division as much as harmony.
But, it seems to me that the need for prayer always starts at the individual/personal level. A response to stress/trauma. Sometimes the stress/trauma is experienced collectively leading to the fanatical.
Joe & John;
Yes, I think I agree with both of you mostly. I might quibble about whether we really understand the workings of the physical universe as much as we think we do, but that’s an aside.
It’s a long story, but I grew up with a devout fundamentalist Christian mother and a similarly devout Darwinist atheist father. Both of them fully devoted to understanding the world rationally a la the Machine. There was plenty of prayer on my mother’s side, and it was also a rationalist sort of exercise, and I saw no evidence that it did anything, except as you say perhaps to bind a community together.
Consequently, I don’t understand prayer generally. Though having an incantation handy to focus one’s attention onto a future goal is a very effective and powerful tool.
Having said all that, for myself, I think the closest I come to the more ‘spiritual’ aspect of prayer is with the non-verbal human communion of dancing, or the deep immersion in the vast non-human natural world that is bodysurfing (the kind that requires an ocean).
Written by an atheist attending Harvard Divinity School:
“The prayer that I pray is an articulation of our connection, a deep investment in the lives and beliefs of fellow human beings. Prayer cannot bring water to parched land, nor mend a broken bridge, nor rebuild a ruined city, but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.”
https://news-archive.hds.harvard.edu/news/2017/07/17/sally-fritche-atheists-prayer
Steve L,
That was a good quote, prayer as a form of self-administered therapy, and Eric F’s point about prayer binding a community together was also very apt.
I’ve also always enjoyed prayer as an expression of group thankfulness, as in grace before meals. I’m not thanking a divinity when participating in grace, but I think it’s always good to take a moment to appreciate good fortune and, indirectly, all those, human and otherwise, who participated in making that good fortune.
@Eric F
I’m with you on the bodysurfing.
Something quite gratifying about betting roughed up in a big wave. Creates a good perspective on ones position in the cosmos and feeling the elemental forces of nature.
Brings me down to earth, so to speak.
John, and others, Rupert Sheldrake has interesting things to say about prayer (typically focussing out) and meditation (focussing in), perhaps chief of which is that regular practitioners tend to report an enhanced sense of wellbeing. Prayer’s a curious one, as it seems it’s often an address, an endless hope, to some power beyond ourselves who we might also concede has it all in the bag, so to speak.
Interesting talk on the mechanistic, memory, consciousness and faith here:
https://rupertsheldrake.substack.com/p/memory-consciousness-and-faith-with
#Simon H
Thanks for the link.
I’ll check it out.
I can see a rabbit hole appearing before me 🙂
Interesting discussion of prayer – thanks. As I see it, indeed it’s not about asking God to intervene in our personal wishlists, but to de-centre ourselves and orient to others – other people, other organisms, other realities.
Not that I’m a great practitioner of prayer. I will try harder.
I can see how some people who’ve grown up within religious traditions they find problematic might be more sceptical of prayer than some of us who haven’t. I don’t see prayer and religion as a magic bullet for solving current problems. I just have a nagging feeling they’re important. One aspect might be their cultural meta-languages of connection.
As discussed in my recent book, via among other things a quote from David Foster Wallace (p.184), I don’t think there’s really such a thing as not being religious or not worshipping, even among atheistic folk. But what people worship does vary. Ecomodernist and Machine types tend to worship humanity, and their writings are a long prayer for salvation from a human techno-god. Yet another prayer that’s likely to go unanswered.
Eric, I’m interested in how you reconcile ocean bodysurfing with living in Kansas. Asking for a friend who likes to commune with nature in the medium of snow, but lives in Somerset.
Yesterday elsewhere I wrote:
There is a point, I think, where one is so dependent on the master’s tools that pulling down the master’s house becomes more symbolic than practical.
I think it’s still worth doing. Maybe we won’t learn to use other tools if we don’t do it? I don’t know.
Can we disassemble the “machine” while also relying on it for our livelihoods? I don’t know. Can we re-make and re-purpose the machine so that it becomes a force for wisdom, joy and healing rather than extractive harm? I don’t know. I hope so.
But I think the issue is not only the machine but the people who drive it in order to profit from its action in the world: the 0.1% or the rentier class or whatever we want to call them: those who not only benefit from the machine (as many of us in the West do: I like vaccines as much as the next person who has never had to deal with smallpox or measles), but whose vast wealth is sustained not by their labour but by those from whom they extract labour and by the reckless exploitation of resources (land, oil, whatever). The machine harms them too, on some level: one needs only observe Musk or Trump briefly to understand that there is some serious spiritual twistedness to them, that their worship of Mammon has marred them. I am willing to grant that these men (…most of them are men) are more a symptom of a profoundly damaged culture than a cause, but the fact remains that they have a far greater capability, and therefore a far greater responsibility, to change or deconstruct the machine than you do or I do.
Nevertheless, it isn’t enough to write off Western culture as brain-damaged. We cannot make the Trumps and Musks of this world repent, but we are nevertheless responsible for creating a culture that calls them — and us — to repentance. And also to interconnectedness, sufficiency, and joy.
I’m currently in Canada helping my mother after a hip replacement operation, and I’ve been thinking a bit about territory Vs terroir. There is a weekly farmer’s market here, even in winter, so I have been getting as much there as I can, and then supplementing with visits to the supermarket where I try to find produce that is relatively locally grown. On balance I have better access to very local meat, dairy and eggs, but the fruit and veg are more limited. With snow on the ground my foraging has been limited to pine needles for tea; my mother doesn’t have garden space but we have been sprouting some garlic and spring onions for greens, at least, and I’m getting some mustard micro-leaves going. Back in the UK some of my seed potato varieties have turned out to be unavailable, so I need to decide on substitutes at some point.
Mum is worried about what will happen to Canada if Trump invades Greenland, and I am trying to direct her to local community mutual aid efforts rather than the mindless anxiety of endless doomscrolling.
Meant to post this sooner, got distracted and came back to it. Will respond to discussion on prayer in due course, I hope — need to make supper soon…
-14°C today and we had around 30cm of snow overnight and I half expected Mr Tumnus to turn up on the dog walk this morning! I have missed the snow.