Book Review: Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
by Paul Kingsnorth
To defeat the machine, the West must be superseded.
This is not a book for the faint of heart, as Paul Kingsnorth presents in well researched detail how the Technocracy casts disruptive innovation in a sort of secular faith, which promises freedom while ultimately leaving people in mental and functional slavery—all as it robs humanity of our anchors to place and other real persons. I see this book as reaching the logical destination foreshadowed in previous books such as The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich, and How the World Made the West, by Josephine Quinn; and it’s advancement is chronicled in exacting detail in America América, by Greg Grandin. All of this is taking place while the world’s natural environment—which supports your life and mine—is being destroyed by extractive greed, and the parts on AI can be fully terrifying.
Kingsnorth points out that capitalism and oligarchy are of the same substance. The author demonstrates that want is the acid that has eaten away previous cultures and values, and replaced them with its only approved value: making money. Capitalism is the battery using the acid. Growth is the engine. And greed is the force that moves society to where it is inevitably headed. The brake on this headlong rush to death is limits (an anathema to libertarians). And the antidote to it all is: You shall not covet—that especially means not letting advertisers manipulate your desires (a taller order than some might expect, but necessary nonetheless). Kingsnorth describes this totalizing system of techno-capitalism and modernity, the “machine,” as advancing itself via Sex, Science, the Self, and the Screen. As a test of this hypothesis, ask yourself how much of your waking hours are dedicated to screen time? Likely much more than you should or is healthy for you. These four S’s represent the core components of modern technological culture that supplant more grounded traditional values—and this same economic carpetbagging is now eating the “machine’s” own house.
To counter this ruthless advance of the “machine,” Kingsnorth advises advancing the four P’s: People, Place, Prayer, and the Past—these are foundational cultural elements that the modern “machine,” or technological society, has displaced. The causes and remedies that Kingsnorth presents do not follow clean left-right ideological lines, as the author asserts that the economics of capitalism and the politics of progressivism spring from the same roots. The fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself belongs to no one—in this context, development is the new colonialism and progress is actually colonization disguised as charity. We need to see the world as an organism rather than a mechanism—it’s a person not a thing. Technology is not creation—it’s only rearranging what’s already there, even that (falsely) considered spiritual.
Kingsnorth’s solution to this problem of the “machine,” which he describes with unsettling clarity, is that the West must be superseded—it’s the world of mammon, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. We need to learn again to distinguish intelligence from wisdom. This moral economy is the exact opposite of the free market (better described in practical terms that oligarchs are free to manipulate desires and consumption and extract from everyone else who is not free). Having established that the West must go, the book is unclear on exactly what is best to replace it with for the purpose of recovering the four P’s. Kingsnorth suggests individual actions of self expression in what he calls a rain dance—perhaps the solution to the problems caused by the West’s Enlightenment are spiritual after all.