After hearing some online buzz about Paul Kingsnorth’s new book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, I got it from the library and sat down with it this week. And boy, do I have some thoughts.

Kingsnorth is an English writer in his early 50s who has variously been a journalist, ecological activist, Buddhist, Wiccan, and anti-globalist. He converted to the Romanian Orthodox Church in 2020. Against the Machine is categorized by its publisher as social science, but after reading it the first word that comes to mind is “jeremiad”.

Through the first two sections of the book I found myself frequently nodding my head in agreement with Kingsnorth’s description and critique of what he calls the Machine: the amalgamation of technology, capitalism, globalism, and the embrace of “progress” that have the tendency to dehumanize, to unmoor us from place, to tempt us to forget the realities that make us human. Think Wendell Berry (who is quoted in the epigraph) if Berry was a Gen X English Wiccan.

But then…

Then starting with part 3, Kingsnorth turns the corner toward offering critiques of modern systems and events, and here’s where he starts to go off the rails. It’s not that there isn’t some merit to most of his critiques. It’s that he cherry picks examples and quotes, doesn’t engage with the substance of arguments when he can just use an out-of-context quote to illustrate his point, and when facts are scarce he makes unfounded assertions and hopes you’ll accept them without challenge.

He spends a couple chapters arguing that Artificial Intelligence is, more or less, the Antichrist. He criticizes the advance of technology largely by treating the wild futurist predictions of Kevin Kelly and Ray Kurzweil as if they would be implemented in every home tomorrow. Rather than honestly engaging with the transhumanist evolutionary thought of Pierre Teillhard, he quotes a throw-away one-line quote from Teillhard scholar Ilia Delio from a 2019 Vox article as if it sums up the whole position.

He inveighs equally against the political right and left, saying that they all promote The Machine, that it’s just a matter of scale and intensity. He decries fascism but in the next breath rails against progressive thought; he dismisses anyone who would utter the phrase “dead white men”, saying that “we know what happens” when a culture stops honoring its elders.

In one chapter he addresses gender and clearly positions himself as anti-trans. But rather than trying to engage the topic with any seriousness, his entire basis for his argument is a first-person anecdote about talking to a new acquaintance who relates discomfort at having a transgender son. And that’s it. Case closed.

Can we talk about reality?

Kingsnorth seems to idealize a pre-modern, pre-technical age, but doesn’t ever deal with the thought that the same scientific techniques that could be abused have also created great good and great improvement to human life. At one point he seems dismayed about the West “forcing” vaccines onto Africa. Might one think instead that vaccines have brought a significant improvement of life to Africans who otherwise might die from preventable diseases?

Take any of Kingsnorth’s arguments to their logical conclusions and it would seem we should be living in small hunter-gatherer clans with 30-year life expectancies and no more technology than maybe a wheel to help us along. He concedes that maybe living in towns would be OK if they’re no larger than the 150 or so people Plato describes being within the sound of a human voice, and he idealizes a sort of Dark Ages jack-of-all-trades substistent household. (Did such a thing actually exist?) The Machine he critiques isn’t an invention of the Enlightenment or even the Romans or Greeks; it’s been a part of human civilization for as far back as we have historical record. One might assume that, had he lived in a different time, Kingsnorth would be the cave dweller telling his next-cave neighbor that the folks living in the newfangled stand-alone shelter were hopelessly on the path toward inhumanity because they would never appreciate the earthy experience of breathing the smoke from a cooking fire while the fire’s shadows danced on the cave walls.

There are a few thin chapters at the end of the book where Kingsnorth tries to answer the inevitable question: “so what should we do”? He admits that he himself “cautiously accept[s] that using the technology of the Machine to resist the Machine can be of benefit.” And so his practical advice sounds familiar to what you will hear others saying, others in whom he might find allies if he hadn’t just spent chapters excoriating them. “Live on the margins.” “Speak truth and try to live it.” “Set your boundaries and refuse to step over them.” “Find our liminal spaces.” “Retreat to create.” “Be awkward and hard to grasp.” “Build your zone of cultural refusal.” It puts me in mind of what the kids say these days when someone is too wound up online: “touch grass”.

If Paul Kingsnorth is happy living his Luddite life in Ireland, God bless him. But after reading Against the Machine I can firmly say his vision for the world sure isn’t mine. Even if we could go back on millennia of scientific advances, the world would not be a better place for it. The challenge of humanity is not fantasizing about going back but in learning how to go forward.