Raging Against The Machine, Longing For Eden

There are many ways to describe modernity and the feelings it inspires: malaise (Walker Percy), disenchantment (Max Weber), deathworks (Philip Rieff), liquid modernity (Zygmunt Bauman), after virtue (Alasdair MacIntyre), technopoly (Neil Postman), a secular age (Charles Taylor), dis-ease (David Wells), dry and choking places (C. S. Lewis). The common theme among these terms is the sense that our culture feels fundamentally unsettled in ways that are hard to explain because we’re immersed in it, like fish in water.

In Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth—a poet, novelist, and recovering environmentalist—illuminates the spiritual alienation of modernity. “You are living in a metastasising machine which is closing in around you,” he asserts, “polluting your skies and your woods and your past and your imagination” (xiv). Kingsnorth prescribes rage against the machine but also “a counter-revolution: a restoration” (270).

Writing from rural Ireland, Kingsnorth weaves together themes from many popular antimodern thinkers like J. R. R. Tolkien, Jacques Ellul, Simone Weil, Wendell Berry, and Lewis Mumford as he portrays the bankruptcy of Western civilization. He argues that technology and the resultant technocracy have created a fundamentally inhumane world. His solution, however, is a mysticism that has pagan overtones.

Modernity as a Spiritual Crisis

According to Kingsnorth, an Orthodox Christian, modernity is primarily a spiritual crisis. Our chief problems aren’t economic inequality, colonization, or environmental degradation. Those are all symptoms of the deeper issue: spiritual exhaustion.

The West’s spiritual exhaustion is the result of our rejection of God’s plan for creation and our abandonment of the biblical storyline as the dominant cultural narrative. Kingsnorth’s retelling of the metanarrative of Scripture begins in the garden of Eden and continues through the disobedience of the primal couple, which results in their expulsion from paradise. Eventually, he argues, God, taking pity on his creation, “comes to Earth in human form to show us the way back home. . . . He gives us a way out, a way back home. But we have to work at it” through self-denial. Thus, “to get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross” (5).

The West’s spiritual exhaustion is the result of our rejection of God’s plan for creation and our abandonment of the biblical storyline as the dominant cultural narrative.

In the modern West, Kingsnorth argues, we’ve replaced God’s story with a mechanical view of creation. The universe isn’t an organism; it’s a Machine. We’ve abandoned “Four Ps”: past, people, place, and prayer. They’ve been replaced with “Four Ss”: science, the self, sex, and the screen. “The Four Ss,” he argues, “offer a kind of catechism for the Machine age” (134). Our goal should be to recatechize ourselves and our culture with the Four Ps.

When Christendom died in the West, he argues, culture lost its sacred order. This loss leads to rootlessness in every sense of the word. Kingsnorth is no idealist, but he longs for a return to a supernaturalism that reignites wonder at the world, which he hopes will inspire a more humane culture.

Distorted Worldview

It’s initially reassuring that Kingsnorth begins his book with the familiar narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. There’s a lot of wisdom in Kingsnorth’s critiques of the ills of our age. Yet his distortion of biblical theology misdirects both his analysis of and his prescriptions for the sickness of modernity.

The misdirection of Kingsnorth’s narrative begins with his misrepresentation of the fall’s nature and consequences. In his retelling, it’s primarily immaturity that leads to exile from Eden. The primal couple would have been “ready to eat [the] fruit one day. . . . But they [were] not ready yet” (3). He has in mind an alternative vision of human history, absent from Scripture, where humanity’s primary problem is developmental rather than volitional.

Furthermore, Kingsnorth depicts expulsion from Eden as exile to an alien universe. Rather than Eden being a location on earth, it was a distinct reality. In an interview, he explains, “The way to understand Eden as well is that it’s outside time. . . . The fall of humanity is a fall into time as well.”

As a result, there’s no place for God’s original command to “fill the earth and subdue it” within Kingsnorth’s worldview (Gen. 1:28). Instead, he argues, in the fall humans lost “the state of questless ease that was our birthright” (4). Thus, contrary to Genesis, work didn’t exist before the fall (2:5, 15).

These distortions of Scripture matter because they set the direction for Kingsnorth’s analysis. It’s not just that human sin causes the misdirection of technology; human creativity is itself the problem. As he makes clear, “The consequence of rejecting communion with nature and God . . . is basically civilization.”

Despising Technology

There’s more Rousseau than Scripture in Kingsnorth’s anthropology. Lament over exile from Eden is the primary intersection of Christianity with this manifesto. Absent a theology of common grace and eschatological hope for creation’s renewal, his outlook on our technological age is dark.

It’s not hard to understand why a negative view of technology can evolve. Technologies aren’t neutral. They’re developed by sinful humans with imperfect motives who insufficiently consider the negative consequences of their innovation. Technology promises freedom but leaves us everywhere in chains. Our smartphones offer an untethered life, but we’re scrolling ourselves to death.

Furthermore, as a “recovering environmentalist,” Kingsnorth has witnessed former allies lured into a utopian vision by technology’s false promises. George Monbiot, a journalist and environmental activist whose name is emblazoned on the cover of Kingsnorth’s 2004 book, no longer calls for a return to nature. Monbiot now uses dubious math to argue for a technocentric future that has human populations corralled in dense cities, fed by bacterial sludge. That’s an extreme version of the Machine that Kingsnorth is fighting against.

Yet because Kingsnorth misreads humanity’s origin story, at times he appears to oppose all technology. So severe are his declamations against technology that it wouldn’t have been shocking had he written, “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. . . . The continued development of technology will worsen the situation.” Those words actually came from Ted Kaczynski, whose violence Kingsnorth explicitly rejects. However, even for readers nodding along with Kingsnorth’s account of modernity’s dissolution of culture, the echoes of the Unabomber’s foundational complaint explain why his jeremiad sometimes seems too severe.

Powerful Lament

As we wrestle with the anger and sorrow his critique is meant to inspire, it’s helpful to remember that Kingsnorth is a novelist and a poet. Against the Machine is more a lament than a precise enumeration of complaints. Taking him seriously but not literally makes it easier to affirm his antimodern mood and evaluate his recommendations more objectively.

When we consider the way technology entraps us, forcing us into the hypocrisy of using it in our resistance against the Machine, it’s easy to understand the deep discontent behind his hyperbolic statement that he’d like to “collect every screen in the world and bulldoze the lot down into a deep mineshaft” (302). For, as Kingsnorth acknowledges, he’s waging his war against the Machine behind a laptop screen, one of “The Four Ss” at the heart of modernity’s distortion. Despite his rage, he’s still just a rat in a cage.

Thus, restoration can’t be found by shopping at a suburban Whole Foods store. Instead, anti-Machine warriors must ask a simple question: “What kind of barbarian do I want to be?” (294). Those resisting modernity will live on the fringes of our technological society, resisting it with minds and emotions first. But resisting the Machine also changes our lifestyles. We must voluntarily deny ourselves certain technologies. Self-denial is the key to resisting the Machine. Following the Orthodox tradition, Kingsnorth asserts, “Without an ascetic backbone, there is no spiritual body” (303).

Misleading Mysticism

Kingsnorth begins the book by extolling a version of the biblical storyline, but his ultimate plea is to adopt a mystical panentheism. “My connection to God comes through nature, fundamentally,” he told Rod Dreher. This promise of God’s continual, immanent presence within creation drew Kingsnorth out of Wicca into Orthodox Christianity.

Technology promises freedom but leaves us everywhere in chains.

Yet Kingsnorth’s mysticism clearly goes beyond Christianity as he advocates for pursuing our “own version of what Australian aboriginals called Altjeringa: Dreamtime” (312). What does that spiritual approach lead modernity’s rebellious citizens to do? “Raindance to defy the Machine. Raindance to remember your ancestors. . . . Raindance to the forest and the prairie and the meadow” (317). Modernity leaves us in a state of spiritual exhaustion, but Kingsnorth describes an unholy syncretism.

Moreover, the spiritual restoration Kingsnorth prescribes neglects the good news of the gospel. The little hope he offers is through human effort. “We have to work at it. . . . The path back to the garden . . . is the path of renunciation, of love and of sacrifice,” he argues. But it’s our work, our love, our sacrifice. Christ essentially disappears after the book’s first chapter.

In contrast, according to Scripture, our path isn’t back to the garden; it’s forward toward the heavenly garden-city (Rev. 21:9–27). And entry into that city relies on Christ’s efforts, not ours. It’s little wonder that since Kingsnorth’s Christ is primarily an example of self-denial, his garden path is as likely to run through the rigors of pagan mysticism as through God’s mercy and grace.

Kingsnorth is a relatively recent convert writing to a broad audience, so some liberties in explaining Christianity are to be expected. But what he describes is a form of godliness that denies its power (2 Tim. 3:5). He’s promoting a version of the Bible’s story that points away from its Author.

Nevertheless, Kingsnorth’s cultural analysis draws our attention to the way modernity envelops us, obscuring our ability to see the way it silently controls us. The modern Machine’s epistemological obfuscation explains why the nature of humanity seems to be up for grabs, why transhumanism and eugenic embryo selection are more often greeted with curiosity than the horror they deserve. Though its spiritual prescriptions are unhelpful, Against the Machine is a wake-up call for citizens of modernity.