Against Against the Machine

Paul Kingsnorth’s Latest Book is a Mixed Bag

Before I launch into a true review of Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, I want to recount one of the most intense personal experiences of my life. One day in January of 2016, my wife was with our then-youngest child when she noticed something off about him. Our six-month old son suddenly stopped what he was doing, got very quiet, stretched out his arms and then shook in regular intervals for a few seconds. She picked him up, and handing him to me, told me what happened. “Sounds like hiccups?” I unhelpfully suggested as she pulled out her phone. She went into the other room and started searching online to find out if what she had just witnessed was a symptom of something dangerous. Within minutes she found a YouTube video of a child exhibiting the same phenomenon as our son—and yes, these kind of shakes in infants was an indicator of West Syndrome, aka Infantile Spasms (IS), a often fatal malady. Somewhat panicked, she called our pediatrician’s personal cell phone. Our son had had some health complications when he was born, so even though our pediatrician was out of town and on vacation, he took our call. My wife described what had happened and our pediatrician agreed that it sounded concerning, advising us to go to the ER at Lurie Children’s Hospital in downtown Chicago. So off we went. In the months that followed, our son was diagnosed with IS. He underwent a treatment plan that involved over $120,000 worth of medication, paid by a federal program that parents of children with IS had agitated for in previous years. Even with the treatment, the chances of our son making a full recovery were only 5%. He turned out to be one of the lucky ones. This was due in no small part to the speed of my wife’s action on that day when he first had the spasms.

M son’s life today depends so much on the benefits of the modern material culture of the rich world, benefits that, thank God, we had access to. My wife could, within minutes, find a video on the internet explaining our son’s weird fit. Cell phones connected her to a pediatrician who drew from his expertise to rightly judge the urgency of the situation. By virtue of living in the city of Chicago, a trip to the Midwest’s premier children’s hospital was no big deal. And decades of painstaking scientific research and parent activism had produced, by 2016, a drug that could treat IS that we didn’t have to go into bankruptcy to obtain. Telecommunication, science, urbanity and democracy all came together to give our son a 5% of living a normal life, a chance that worked out for him. I thank God that we lived in Chicago in 2016 when our son got sick, I really do.

So you see, modernity, for lack of a better word, can save lives—I’ve seen it happen, up close. I don’t think our family is alone is this regard. Many of you reading, I bet, have stories like ours: there was a scary situation involving a loved one in danger that would not have worked out well in a different era. It’s a good time to be alive, right?

Paul Kingsnorth doesn’t think so. In Against the Machine, Kingsnorth lays out his argument that Liberalism (the capital-L kind, meaning the political ideology that privileges the rights of the individual) and capitalism are but two sides of a singular historical trend called The Machine. Since the Reformation, Westerners have been building The Machine by reordering their societies around the accumulation of wealth at the expense of all other pursuits. Purveyors of goods and services marshal science, ravage the planet’s resources, and exploit the labor of many in order to make money off of purchasers who have been conditioned for economic consumption by Liberalism which teaches them to believe in the sacredness of personal choice, autonomy, and expression. The Machine, according to Kingsnorth, has ruined an earlier, Christian-centered Western culture that, despite all its failings, at least valued local folkways, charity for charity’s sake, and the holy wonder of being a creature of the Living God. What we in the West have lost, according to Kingsnorth, is not compensated at all by what we have gained. It would be better if modernity had not happened.

Does that last sentence sound extreme to you? That was just my summary. Consider these direct quotations from Kingsnorth’s book:

“The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” (p. 244)

“If there was a big red button that turned off the internet, I would press it without hesitation. Then I would collect every screen and bulldoze the lot down into a deep mineshaft, which I would seal with concrete, and then I would skip away smiling into the sunshine.” (p. 302)

The most charitable reading of that second quotation is that he’s joking, right? If so, I don’t find it funny. Fantasizing about single-handedly upending the way a good chunk of humanity goes about its daily life does not bring a smile to my face but rather stirs up my wariness. Why is Kingsnorth so bitter?

Now don’t get me wrong. There are many catastrophic trends in the world of today, and Kingsnorth poetically draws attention to such problems in his book. I agree with him that corporate capitalism is environmentally ruinous and exploitative, and from everything I’ve read about AI…well, AI seems pretty scary to me, as it does to Kingsnorth. In fact, I’d recommend to every one his chapter on AI (chapter 22, “The Universal”). The most frightening sentences in that chapter are not the ones Kingsnorth himself writes, but simply his quotations from AI developers themselves. It’s not as if his book makes no meaningful contribution.

But all in all, I disagree with Kingsnorth in two major ways. First, I can’t agree with him that progress is a myth. Second, I don’t think Kingsnorth is actually providing us with a Christian point of view on urbanity.

Let’s first talk about progress. Kingsnorth is against it. He literally has a chapter in the book entitled “Against Progress.” Progress, to Kingsnorth is an ideology that trains us “to see the living world and its people as a matrix of interchangeable parts, all of them potentially for sale”. And so “progress,” as Kingsnorth defines it, “will not stop until everything is measured, commercialized, [and] commodified” (275). In other words, progress is nothing more than the march of consumerism, and as such it is morally empty and ecologically ruinous.

But Kingsnorth ignores a very real and truly valuable knock-on effect of modern consumerism: the alleviation of human suffering. When was the last time you enjoyed reading a book on stormy night? Or slept in a comfortable bed? Or used a toilet? So much of what any reasonably housed person can expect in the rich world represents, in the context of human history, astounding luxury. Consumerism, even with all its moral compromises, has provided this, along with government intervention in the form of building codes and the like. Human beings stand a better chance of being warm and dry at night, clean during the day, and literate than ever before. I’m not trying to defend capitalism here, I’m simply pointing out the truth of the matter: the material culture of a good chunk of humanity is currently one that provides for our bodily needs like never before. That is real progress, my friends.

Aside from this issue of progress, though, there is a deeper disagreement I have with Kingsnorth’s book. I actually don’t think he’s offering us a Christian point view on urban living. I’m not saying this lightly or belligerently; I have heard Kingsnorth on a Christian podcast and I gather he’s truly searching for a faith-based view on the human experience. That said, I think he’s missing the mark in how he treats cities.

Kingsnorth has a dim view of cities. To him, the modern city is “a kind of micro-empire” that “removes our agency, deskills us, and toys with us” because once inside a giant city, its inhabitants can no longer “fend for themselves” (84). His stance is, to me, rather nonsensical. Of course no one person can fend for themselves in a city. We pool our collective effort and our collective lives in them. That’s the point. To fetch clean water for oneself, to acquire one’s food, to educate and medicate oneself and one’s children when needed—in the city, all these services are at hand. And yes, one has to pay for all of them, and there are considerations of justice and political economy to be attended to. But cities enlarge, not diminish, the human experience because we all share in the work of life in them.

But aside from what I think, Kingsnorth’s antagonism toward cities puts him at odds with the New Testament. According to John’s Revelation, we will begin our lives in the Next Age in the New Jerusalem—in a city. Into that city are gathered all sorts of people who “will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations” (Rev. 21:26). Sounds rather cosmopolitan, no? And it’s not just Revelation that speaks well of this perfect city to come, see also the letter to the Hebrew Christians chapter 11, verses 10 and 16. God, it seems, is a city-planner. Now, this isn’t to say there cannot be a Christian critique of the cities in the world as it is now—but to present an anti-urban point of view as Christian is to argue agains the grain of scripture, and I don’t find such an argument in Kingsnorth’s book.

So in the end, I was left disappointed by Against the Machine. The world indeed has its crippling injustices and hell-bent tendencies. At the same time, it is not irredeemable—far from it. I for one believe that God loved the world enough to send his Son to save it. The real question is not how to combat “modernity” but how each one us can participate, in our own small way, in the work of Christ, Savior of the World.

Until next time—