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.
