Against the Machine is a penetrating critique of the tech-heavy culture of illusions

I’ll cut right to the chase: Paul Kingsnorth is among the three or four best writers I have encountered in the last decade. And his latest book, Against the Machine, published late last month, is worthy proof. More on that in a moment. Meanwhile, anyone wanting a quick taste of Kingsnorth’s thought can find it in the brief video (15 minutes) here. His more extensive talks and interviews are—justly—all over the internet, including a long and compelling conversation with another superb writer, the philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist.

My own interview with Kingsnorth, conducted two years ago, can be found here. The man’s range is impressive. His 2015 novel Awake, written in a “shadow tongue” of hybrid Old and Modern English, is a terrific story of doomed, pagan, Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Norman invasion of England in the 11^th century. His Abbey of Misrule Substack is a treasure house of good material, from tranquil reflections on nature and saints to urgent cultural criticism. As a writer, Kingsnorth has the uncommon gift of delivering deep content in an elegant style, with simple clarity.

And his personal story compounds the appeal of his work. A former environmental activist with no religious convictions, he migrated through Wicca and Buddhism as an adult, finally converting to Christianity in 2020. He was baptized in the Orthodox Church in 2021. His faith now informs nearly everything he writes.

And that brings us back to his latest book.

Against the Machine is rooted in, and expanded from, two years of preliminary essays perfecting the author’s ideas. Briefly put, it’s a penetrating critique of the Faustian, machine-addicted, tech-heavy culture of illusions we have woven around ourselves over the past 300 years, a cocoon of shiny artifice that now threatens to smother and supplant the humanity of its creators.

As Kingsnorth notes in his opening pages, “There has never been any unitary organization of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church”—a religious framework which gave everyday life a purpose and grounding for social cohesion. “Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture,” he writes, “there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual continuity, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.”

That day has now passed. And he adds that

when a culture built around such a sacred order dies, then there will be upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics right down to the level of the soul. The very notion of an individual life will shift dramatically. The family structure, the meaning of work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to work to nature to kin to responsibility to duty: everything will be up for grabs.

Today, predictably, as Christianity recedes in the West, “We [moderns]—at least if we are among the lucky ones—have every gadget and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us,” but we’re lacking the two things that we most desperately need: meaning and roots. As a result, we’re adrift in a time that the author presents as “The Great Unsettling.” It’s the fruit of our own short-sighted appetites and vanities, personified most vividly in our elites.

Kingsnorth is far from the first writer to describe our current conditions. Nor is he the first to use The Machine as a metaphor for today’s spiritual unrest and growing technological threats to our humanity. E.M. Forster wrote his prophetic short story, “The Machine Stops,” nearly 120 years ago. But Kingsnorth brings a unique blend of passion, past experience, a wealth of sources, and persuasive logic to his telling of the tale.

The author borrows a line from the American social theorist, Craig Calhoun, to suggest his own guiding spirit: a kind of “reactionary radicalism.” In Kingsnorth’s approach, this is not a political ideology. It operates outside the familiar left-right conflicts. It is “radical” in the original sense of the word: getting to the roots; in this case, the roots of what it means, and what we need, to be human.

It consists of “an active attempt at creating, defending or restoring a moral economy built around the four Ps.” These include, first, the past, where a culture comes from, its history, and ancestry. The second is people, who a culture is: a communitarian sense of being a distinct “people.” The third is place, where a culture is, its sense of home and belonging, nature in its local beauty and particular manifestation. Fourth and finally is prayer, where a culture is going, its religious tradition and destiny, its understanding of God or the gods.

Machine culture bulldozes all these elements of a healthy, human-scaled reality into a globalized, consumption-driven homogeneity. In the process, it provides material abundance while sucking the soul from Creation. Kingsnorth does not argue that technology is inherently bad. On the contrary, its many positives are obvious, starting with the computer he uses to write. But when we allow it to become a form of idolatry—as it now is in the “developed,” postmodern world—the idol eats its worshippers.

I find it impossible to pick a favorite chapter in the text. Too many are too good: A Thousand Mozarts, Want Is the Acid, Come the Black Ships, You Are Harvest, Kill All the Heroes, The Abolition of Man (and Woman), What Progress Wants, and others. But the final chapter—The Raindance – is perhaps the most important because it offers a path forward; not an easy one, but one that, in seemingly dark times, invariably works:

I have come to the end now, and here is what I think: that the age of the Machine is not after all a hopeless one. Actually, it is the time we were born for. We can’t leave it, so we have to fully inhabit it. We have to understand it, challenge it, resist it, subvert it, walk through it on towards something better. If we can see what it is, we have a duty to speak the words to those who do not yet see, all the while struggling to remain human. People, place, prayer, the past. Human community, roots in nature, connection to God, memories passed down and on. These are the eternal things.

In the end, we’re not powerless. No Christian is ever powerless. The only revolution that matters is the one we conduct in our own hearts; the choice to actually know and live and act on the faith we claim to believe, whatever the cost.

When that happens, the world begins to change. God, in his own time, handles the rest.

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
By Paul Kingsnorth
Penguin Random House, 2025
Hardcover, 368 pages