Review by Blanton Alspaugh: ““Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?”
Bumper-sticker theology poses the question. Paul Kingsnorth offers an answer in his prophetically pitched new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. Kingsnorth, a British philosopher and author living in the west of Ireland, joins a line of trenchant predecessors ranging from Paul the Apostle and G.K. Chesterton to René Guénon and Jacques Ellul. With an unflinching look at what we have made of the world, he sees “a machine made of human parts,” as Lewis Mumford characterized it. The Machine is the implacable, disembodied culmination of humanity’s fatal craving for knowledge and power. It respects no boundaries and obeys no law but its own. It advances more rapidly than our ability to manage it. Its origin is spiritual, and its consequences are eschatological. And Kingsnorth believes we must find a way to resist it.
As Kingsnorth has it, the West and Christendom are synonymous, and we are living through their death. But these terms are contested. “The West” for liberals is the Enlightenment and all that proceeded from it—“parliamentary democracy, human rights, individualism, freedom of speech.” For conservatives, it is a blend of cultural values—the traditions of “family life, religion and national identity, and…capitalist economics.” And for postmodern leftists, the West is little more than “a front for colonization, empire, racism.” As for Christendom, we may stipulate that it has often been very un-Christian, but it has still, as Christopher Dawson explained, been “the Christian Church, which provided an effective principle of social unity.” Unmoored from the sacred order, we live now among what Kingsnorth calls the “beautiful ruins” of Christendom.
Kingsnorth places the origin of the Machine in the biblical Fall, when we first saw something to be desired but were forbidden to take it. We took it anyway, and Kingsnorth makes a strong case that the Machine is in fact our ongoing project to become like gods. It is the accumulation of our efforts to transcend all boundaries, push past all limits, and overturn all traditions. The logic of the Machine is growth for its own sake; control and efficiency are its primal impulses; and the only value it recognizes is money, the market, Mammon. Money is how we obtain what we want, and the ceaseless stream of things to want is what the Machine uses to ensnare us. But, cosmically speaking, this money is play money—we are born with none, and we take none with us when we die. The true cost of obtaining what we want—going right back to that forbidden fruit in the Garden—is alienation, disenchantment, and dehumanization…(More)”.
