By Paul Kingsnorth (383.064 KIN)
Kingsnorth—novelist, poet, essayist—addresses what he calls the age of the Machine, where state power merges with tech power, potentially resulting in the unmaking of humanity. Though we “have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us, […] we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning and roots.” Kingsnorth argues that our culture—a story that a people tells itself—is not dying, but already dead, and the culprit is civilization—the growth of cities that have overwhelmed the culture of the countryside.
Kingsnorth opposes science and religion, saying that “science, right from the beginning of the modern enterprise, was allotted the role that the Church had previously claimed for itself: the primary guide to truth, and enlightener of humanity.” And it is science, he claims, that has built the Machine that is rebuilding the world and humanity. The modern Machine city is “global in scale and ambition, bland, homogenized, and empty at its heart.” We are now in the age of Artificial Intelligence [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.” Jaron Lanier says the big danger posed by AI is that humanity will “die by insanity” as a result of the blurring of the boundaries between the real and the computer-generated.
The driver behind all this is want, and the Machine destroys all the limits of want. What is needed to combat this want is not political revolution followed by a grand new social structure, but spiritual vigilance, and it is up to each of us to first “put our own inner house in order.”
As this Machine, which we have created, reaches maturity, two things are happening, according to Kingsnorth: “Firstly, an unprecedented technological network of power and control is being constructed worldwide, which is walking us into a tightly controlled future in which both humans and the wider natural world will be bent to this network’s needs. And secondly, in this bending, we are losing the essence of what it means to be human.”
The Machine has four values, which Kingsnorth calls the Four Ss: Science, the Self, Sex, the Screen. A consequence of the intersection of these four values, as Robert Bly says, is that “we forgot how to produce adults. […] People don’t bother to grow up.” Adults, rather than maturing towards wisdom, “regress toward adolescence […] [and adolescents] who have no desire to become adults.” Resistance to the four Ss is encapsulated by Kingsnorth in the Four Ps: people, place, prayer, and the past.
Where powerful nations colonize weaker ones, the Machine colonizes human beings by creating dependency and by abolishing the human idea of home; where those powerful nations seem “hollowed-out” and “prey for the Machine, surely it is because they have no soul.”
To put all this in perspective, Kingsnorth refers to Klaus Schwab and his summary of Four Revolutions: “The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution […] characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”
Progress is supposedly what the Machine gives us, but what, Kingsnorth asks, does Progress want? “The end of history, the end of transcendence, the death of God, permanent revolution, colonization, the uprooting of everything, liberation from everything, to move beyond nature, to replace us.”
Earlier, Kingsnorth referred to Science replacing Religion. Today, he says, it is the religion of the Machine that offers us salvation: “You will be like gods, knowing good and evil.” The religion of the future will be “the self-built theology of a people who worship the strongest thing in the world,” and it “will end where it all began: in an attempt to self-divinize.” The crisis of the modern world, then, is not one of “technology or politics or greenhouse gases. It is a spiritual war.”
So, what to do? Kingsnorth argues for 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 atomized individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a worldview has failed us.”
How to do this? “The Machine cannot be fought head-on, but it can, in certain circumstances, be circumvented. You can find your escape hatch. Like the hill tribes and barbarians, you can live outside civilization’s walls.” These cultures are what Malcolm Yapp calls jellyfish tribes, “localized, potentially dispersed cultures [that] can be almost impossible to conquer.” He calls the location of these cultures, shatter zones, and they can exist “within our homes and even within our hearts,” as well as in the hills.
Another form of resistance is askesis: self-discipline or self-denial, which is at the root of the Christian spiritual tradition. Restraining the appetites, fasting from food, sex and other worldly passions, limiting needs and restraining desires: this the foundation stone of all spiritual practice. And this, according to Kingsnorth, is our only way to preserve our humanity in the face of Machine progress.
Review by Matthew Manera