AGAINST THE MACHINE

 I’ve been reading Paul Kingsnorth‘s latest book Against the Machine – on the unmaking of humanity (2025). Kingsnorth is an investigative journalist and green activist, known for his Dark Mountain project and The Abbey of Misrule site. One of the reasons I’m attracted to the book is the way Kingsnorth integrates into the text quite naturally references to long forgotten figures such as Lewis Mumford and Stephen Toulmin

We have arrived at the point which the writers I have explored so far—Oswald Spengler, Christopher Lasch, Robert Bly, Patrick Deneen, Simone Weil, Ian McGilchrist and others—warned us we would come to. It is the point at which our underlying cultural and spiritual brokenness is manifesting on the surface as politics, with explosive results. This is the result of the Great Unsettling: a time and place where nothing seems to be solid, comforting or even real.

This process has been accelerated a thousandfold by the arrival of the internet, and particularly social media, which, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, has had the same impact as the collapse of the tower of Babel: ‘people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate,condemned to mutual incomprehension.’p152 

Paul Kingsnorth goes on to argue that

The ‘decline of the West’ which is so hotly debated right now is, in my view, not a matter of the wrong people being in charge, or the wrong economic policies being pursued. It is not due to the rise of China or Russia, or racism, or ‘misinformation’, or nasty populists, or the institutionalisation of ‘woke’ ideology. As such, it will not be solved by tougher border controls, or radical rightist governments, or revolutions, or ‘decolonisation’, or controls on freedom of speech in the name of ‘protecting our democracy’. Any number of these things might or might not be real or true or desirable, but they are symptoms, not causes, of our malaise. The malaise is deeper, older, more interesting and far more consequential than any of this, and it affects the very basis of our humanity. What happens next will determine what it means to be human in the twenty-first century and beyond.

This book seeks to tell the tale of this Machine: what it is, where it came from, and where it is taking us next. Drawing from history, from religion, from current events and from the work of many other writers and thinkers, it aims to pin down the shape and genesis of this thing. My inquiry is divided into four parts. Part one explores the roots of the current Western cultural malaise. Part two explains where the Machine came from, and how it contributed to that problem. Part three examines how its values manifest around us today, and what they are destroying. Part four offers a guide to practical and spiritual survival and resistance.

But while I learned this early, it was much later that I learned something else, dimly and slowly, through my study of history, mythology and, well, people: that every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.

The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions—‘the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress’. I’m all for liberty, and it would be nice to give democracy a try one day too; but the dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

Sometimes, his writing can seem a bit excessive -

You can judge a culture, I think, by its tallest buildings; what it chooses to reach towards is a reflection of its soul and purpose. The tallest buildings in a modern city are not cathedrals, temples, or even palaces: they are skyscrapers, which are homes to banks, finance houses and global corporations. (p85) And so we find ourselves in the age of AI and apps for everything, with CCTV cameras on every street corner, our opinions manufactured by interest groups, our communications tracked and monitored, wondering what is true or who we can believe, and feeling, day by day, like we have less agency, less control, less humanity than ever before. In the future that is offered to us we are not even cogs in the Machine, for the Machine can increasingly operate without human input. Mumford, as ever, is bracingly frank about where this leads:

Never before has the ‘citadel’ exercised such atrocious power over the rest of the human race. Over the greater part of history, the village and the countryside remained a constant reservoir of fresh life, constrained indeed by the ancestral patterns of behaviour that had helped make man human, but with a sense of both human limitations and human possibilities. No matter what the errors and aberrations of the rulers of the city, they were still correctible. Even if whole urban populations were destroyed, more than nine tenths of the human race still remained outside the circle of destruction. Today this factor of safety has gone: the metropolitan explosion has carried both the ideological and the chemical poisons of the metropolis to every part of the earth; and the final damage may be irretrievable.

Back to Kingsnorth -

One man who tried back in the 1960s, when an unquestioning faith in science and its offspring, technology, was roaring across the Western world, was the French thinker Jacques Ellul. Ellul’s 1964 book “The Technological Society” attempted to understand and explain what the Machine was made of. Its thesis is that the society we live in today—which he predicted with accuracy—represents a fundamental, qualitative change in what it means to be human (p113). Around the same time that Robert Bly was writing “The Sibling Society”, another American thinker, Christopher Lasch, was also predicting a future of elite colonisation. In “The Revolt of the Elites”, Lasch forecast the future accurately. ‘The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties’, he wrote, ‘are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or “alternative” institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.’ p135

What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the ‘progressive’ left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine? (p142) It’s not hard to see that progressive leftism and the machine, far from being antagonistic, are a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, ‘superstition’ and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.

Kingsnorth continues -

We have arrived at the point which the writers I have explored so far—Oswald Spengler, Christopher Lasch, Robert Bly, Patrick Deneen, Simone Weil and others—warned us we would come to. It is the point at which our underlying cultural and spiritual brokenness is manifesting on the surface as politics, with explosive results. This is the result of the Great Unsettling: a time and place where nothing seems to be solid, comforting or even real.

This process has been accelerated a thousandfold by the arrival of the internet, and particularly social media, which, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, has had the same impact as the collapse of the tower of Babel: ‘people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate,  condemned to mutual incomprehension.’(p152)

The West’ is, above all, a way of seeing—a way of looking out at the world. Once, that gaze was Christian, but it has not been that way for a long time now. The contemporary Western gaze is the gaze of the Machine; of Enlightenment Man, of cosmopolis, of reason, of money. And it is because this gaze has been unable for centuries to appreciate that the world in its fullness that we have come so unstuck. If we are going to get stuck again, as it were, we will need to learn to see the world very differently. (p236)

McGilchrist’s thesis boils down, in simple terms, to brain hemispheres. All animal brains are divided into two hemispheres, joined by a thin band of connecting tissue, and nobody quite knows why. What they do know, according to McGilchrist, is that each hemisphere has its own particular way of seeing—or, as he puts it, ways of ‘attending to the world’. This does not break down according to the popular stereotype, in which the ‘left brain’ is masculine, scientific, rational and cold and the ‘right brain’ is feminine, intuitive, artistic and warm. Rather, according to McGilchrist, ‘the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend—and thus manipulate—the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it’. The left and right hemispheres seem to have very specific ways of relating to their world. The left’s way is the way of certainty, manipulation, detail, the local and familiar, the isolated, discrete and fragmentary. Its world is fixed, decontextualised, inanimate, general and optimistic. The right, on the other hand, sees the whole picture, notices the peripheries and is comfortable with the new, ambiguous, circumspect and complex. It attends to change, flow, context, the animate, narratives, the pragmatic, empathy and emotional expressivity, and it tends towards pessimism.

But something happened, posits McGilchrist, over the course of Western history. In this little part of the world, there was a revolution. At some point, or perhaps at many points, the left hemisphere—the emissary—overthrew the right—the master—and began to run the show itself. Instead of the parts being in service to the whole, the whole became diminished or dismissed by a perspective that could only see the world as a collection of parts. The result is the Machine mind, and the irony is ‘that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it.’

The upshot, says McGilchrist, is that ‘we no longer live in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it’.[2] There is no territory in this new world, only map. Those who can see this, and try to point it out, are dismissed as ‘romantics’, ‘nostalgics’, ‘reactionaries’ or ‘dreamers’. The left hemisphere’s world is taken to be reality, whereas it is, in fact, only an inadequate representation of it. The result, says McGilchrist, is an age that is literally unprecedented in human history. ‘We exist in the world, of course’, he writes, ‘but we no longer belong in this world—or any world worthy of the name. We have unmade the world. This is entirely new in the history of humanity and it is impossible to exaggerate its significance’.

The age of AI, the metaverse and the deepening technosphere both results from and turbocharges this way of seeing, to the point that we are now losing contact with reality altogether, all the time imagining that we are ‘progressing’ towards it. ‘Machines and tools’, notes McGilchrist matter-of- factly at one point, ‘are alone coded in the left hemisphere.’ It is the left hemisphere which built Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley which built us. He believes that ‘we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, and chosen to ignore, or silence, the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case’. Now, as a result, ‘we have reached the point where there is an urgent need to transform both how we think about the world and what we make of ourselves’.

In short, ‘the West’ as we know it today is an overwhelmingly left hemisphere culture, and this descent into a narrow way of seeing has been accelerating as modernity has progressed. At one point, McGilchrist even makes the startling claim that Western art from the modernist period onward often looks like the kind of representation of the world that is produced by people who have suffered brain damage to the right hemisphere, and he is neither being insulting nor speaking metaphorically. Are we in ‘the West’ literally a culture with brain damage? It would explain a lot. P238

I have written already about the Four Ps—people, place, prayer, the past —which could be said to underpin traditional culture, and the Four Ss—sex, science, the self and the screen—with which Machine modernity has replaced them. A reactionary radicalism could be usefully defined as an active attempt at creating, defending or restoring a moral economy built around the four Ps (p252)

This, then, is my idea of an anti-Machine politics. A reactionary radicalism, its face set against Progress Theology, which aims to defend or build a moral economy at the human scale, which rejects the atomised individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a worldview has failed us. A politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion. The rejection of abstract ideologies in favour of real-world responses, and an understanding that material progress always comes with a hidden price tag. A politics which aims to limit rather than multiply our needs, which strategically opposes any technology which threatens the moral economy and which, finally, seeks a moral order to society which is based on love of neighbour rather than competition with everyone.