AGAINST THE MACHINE

Perhaps the best way of positioning this remarkable book is to say that I agree with Iain McGilchrist’s endorsement when he says that ‘this is the most powerful and important book I have read in years. Simply brilliant… Kingsnorth is unflinching in his keen-eyed gaze, and the message is chilling: but he is also inspiring in his determination that we must survive, and he points the way to what ultimately matters.’ As readers will see below, I think that Fabian Scheidler’s book on the Megamachine is historically even more important, but from a spiritual point of view, Paul hits the mark, following in the tradition of many of the writers he cites: Simone Weil, Alasdair MacIntyre, Oswald Spengler, Lewis Mumford, Christopher Dawson, Edward Goldsmith, Philip Sherrard (a fellow Greek Orthodox Christian), Jacques Ellul, René Guénon, Wendell Berry, Nicolas Berdyaev, Jeremy Naydler, Jean Baudrillard, Augusto del Noce and – refreshingly - John Moriarty, whose books I reviewing these pages many years ago. Arguably missing from this impressive list is Arnold Toynbee, Thomas Berry, C.G. Jung and Peter Kingsley, who makes many of the same diagnoses about the terminal moral and spiritual state of Western culture in his book Catafalque, reviewed here in the summer of 2018.

Many leading thinkers are now articulating how our humanity has been hollowed out by the collapse of sacred order and the dehumanisation inherent in purely secular technological progress that seeks to re-create us in its own mechanistic image. As Gregg Braden and Iain – among others – note, there is in a very real sense a battle for the human soul anticipated by Rudolf Steiner over 100 years ago. In this context, what Paul calls the Machine represents ‘the triumph of the mechanical over the natural, the planned over the organic, the centralised over the local, the system over the individual and the community.’ (p. xiv) It is driven by the values of money, wealth, greed, growth, individualism, competition, and short-term profit maximisation. These are in stark contrast to traditional spiritual values of love, compassion, care, cooperation and wisdom.

Paul sums this up with what he calls the four Ps and the four Ss (pp. 133-5): on the one hand, we have Past (history, tradition, ancestry), People, Place (rootedness), Prayer. The anticulture of the Machine is characterised by Science (claiming absolute epistemic and ontological authority as scientism), Self, Sex, Screen, where Paul comments that ‘the screen is both our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming posthuman reality of the Machine.’ We are in a dis-integrated state where we have chosen ‘knowledge over communion, power over humility’, forgetting that the spiritual path ‘is not the way of power, but of humility, not of conquest but of love and sacrifice.’ This means losing self in order to find the Self, to serve rather than be served, as Saint Francis put it. The result, according to Paul, is that we are ‘cut loose in a postmodern present, with no centre, no truth and no direction, we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in the human republic. We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers of the self’ (p. 11) – this is stark and penetrating in its diagnosis. We have to remind ourselves, as Toynbee maintained, that culture is above all a spiritual creation, hence fundamental cultural renewal can only be spiritual in its essence, arising from our inner depths.

Since the 18th century, enlightenment rationalism has proceeded under the banner of Progress – but what does this really mean, and what are its ultimate outcomes? The process of enclosures in England destroyed rural self-reliance and independence, while the industrial revolution uprooted and displaced massive numbers of people, destroying the independent artisan in the process and making workers cogs in a giant mechanism. Paul observes that there are two opposing viewpoints of the overall notion of Progress: the dominant group regards this as a move towards reason and away from superstition, while opponents claim that it is a slide into decadence and moral dissolution – all this is analysed in detail by Lewis Mumford in his seminal The Myth of the Machine. I am intending to review some of his books in a future issue. In the late 1960s, Mumford was already presciently forecasting that ‘the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-developing, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions… will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalised, collective organisations. (p. 36) This is the looming homogenised, centralised, technocratic totalitarianism, representing a huge agglomeration of digital power and control that we have directly experienced since 2020, and which remains the direction of travel towards Agenda 2030.

There is much more I could write in support of Paul’s overall cultural thesis, but how can we stand up to this war against roots and our very humanity? It is just these immeasurable things that are being expunged and that we must recover: ‘rooted human communities, wild nature, human nature, human freedom, beauty, faith, and the many deeper values.’ (p. 38) There has been historical pushback against these seemingly inexorable trends, broadly in the Romantic movement, and in many individual cultural thinkers since that time. Essentially, as our mission states, this means a recovery and upholding of the spiritual essence of the human, of the heart, of intuition, of imagination - as Iain eloquently maintains.

Paul takes up the phrase ‘reactionary radicals’ from the writer Craig Calhoun, where the word radical also means going back to roots (hence my title Radical Prince). Utopian projects have always resorted to violence and coercion, from the 1790s on, contradicting their own Enlightenment ideals of liberty and free speech. Paul himself recommends that we plant our feet on the ground, live modestly, refuse technology that will enslave us in the name of freedom, build a life in which we can see the stars and taste the air; live on the margins, in your home or in your heart (with a real fire in your hearth) – speak truth and try to live it. (p. 297). Having begun with Simone Weil’s book The Need for Roots (L’Enracinement) originally commissioned by the Free French in London, Paul returns to this essential theme, adducing further insights from John Moriarty, whom I was lucky enough to know personally – an academic turned gardener who sought to become indigenous again in the age of the Machine. He lived people, place, prayer, the past: ‘human community, roots in nature, connection to God, memories passed down and on. These are the eternal things.’ We too can strive to enact this in our own corner of the world, and this book – essential reading for our time - will undoubtedly inspire you to do so and persuade you of the urgency of such a task.