Happy new(ish) year. As hinted by the second part of my title, this post isn’t a two-part retrospective on the Beatles, with a follow-up on John and Ringo. Instead, it’s mostly a sort-of review of Paul Kingsnorth’s recent book Against the Machine (henceforth ATM). But while thinking about Paul Kingsnorth, I find it hard not to think also about George Monbiot – sometime friends and fellow travellers in the broadly left-wing environmentalist movement whose intellectual, political and spiritual journeys have now diverged sharply. Also, arguably the two most prominent contemporary English writers on the conjunction of politics, nature and society.
I’ve written plenty about George recently, and in this post I want to give most of my attention to Paul. But their diverging journeys interest me, perhaps partly because they mirror my own. Also because they’re relevant to delineating what Paul calls ‘the Machine’, and to figuring out how to respond to it, as discussed below.
The Machine
What is the Machine? It escapes easy definition, which is one of the criticisms I’ve seen of Paul’s concept, and he chews away at it throughout his book. But maybe this passage gives a sense:
…‘growth’ is the overriding purpose of the ‘global economy’ which the Machine has built … The growth has no specific aim and no end in sight, and can always be justified by pointing to problems – poverty, environmental degradation – which were in many cases caused by the growth, but which can now only be solved by more of it …. [the Machine] is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies …. The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us … [manifesting] today as an intersection of money, power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits … and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world. To do that, it must raze or transmute many older or less measurable things (pp.37-8)
Yes, exactly this. It is quite nebulous, but I believe that’s the nature of the thing. Other noted critics of modern times like Michel Foucault and Antonio Negri likewise opt for the ineffable with ideas like ‘biopower’ or ‘empire’. No doubt it’s important to identify specific people, policies and actions for wrongdoing and redress, but identifying this systemic autonomy of the Machine seems to me no less relevant.
It’s a strength of Paul’s thinking that he sees the Machine as “a tendency within us” operating within all people and all societies at some level. It’s not a new thing – he identifies Pharaonic Egypt as an archetype. I’d suggest we can go further back than that, and we can also identify it in more egalitarian and less monumental or goal-exalting societies than Egypt. Nevertheless, it does seem to have reached its apogee and a potential point of crisis in modern times. Maybe a difference of quantity, or maybe a difference of quality. Anyway, a difference.
Another strength of Paul’s thinking is that he sees how the essence of the Machine isn’t really about accumulation. The materialist drive for more growth, wealth, wellbeing, efficiency or whatever is its clothing, not its purpose. Instead, “It is, in some deadly fashion, a sacral object in itself. It is its own enchantment” (p.39).
I think that’s right, and I’ll come back to this issue of sacredness shortly.
Epiphanies in a brain-damaged culture
In some of his chapters, Paul starts with a moment of epiphany in some aspect of his day-to-day life where the veil is torn and he suddenly realises how odd and lopsided are our modern commitments. He draws on various thinkers to help diagnose the problem, for example Iain McGilcrhist’s influential ‘master and emissary’ or left-brain/right-brain analysis, which sees in modern society the loss of an ability to comprehend the world holistically in favour of an ability only to apprehend the functioning of its parts. A world where “there is no territory … only map”. This leads Paul to ask “Are we in ‘the West’ literally a culture with brain damage? It would explain a lot” (pp.267-8).
If our modern commitments are odd and lopsided, if we have no territory, if our culture has brain damage, that implies there must be other normal, symmetrical, territorial and brain-intact cultures. Yet, Paul writes, “Those who can see this, and try to point it out, are dismissed as ‘romantics’, ‘nostalgics’, ‘reactionaries’ or ‘dreamers’” (p.267).
All this resonates strongly with my view and experience of the world – including the epiphanies, and the dismissals. A brain damaged person or culture isn’t necessarily aware of their state, and interprets such challenges as a deviation from their own sense of the normal. Hence, perhaps there’s no point in trying to point it out. Yet some people born and raised within the brain damaged culture do come to see it. And given that this culture is committing great harm to itself and to other people and other species, continuing to point it out and trying to redress it seems important.
Paul emphasises four values that non-brain damaged cultures have where we might look for redress, which he calls ‘the Four Ps’: Past, People, Place and Prayer (p.131). I’ll restrict my comments mostly to the first and last of these.
Orientations to the past are easily ridiculed by Machine-thinking along the lines of the pejoratives Paul mentions: nostalgia, reaction and so on. But, as Paul argues brilliantly throughout ATM, the point is not to seek a return to some fantasy of the good old days so much as to understand that there are some good old ways (the four Ps) that need constant refreshing. Indeed, we don’t even really need to emphasise their oldness so much as their difference from the Machine’s infatuation with the new and ‘disruptive’. Modernism is a cultural vehicle of the Machine, but ‘modern’ is not the same as ‘contemporary’. There are contemporary societies that are not modern and that hold to the four Ps. But not many, because of the destructiveness of the Machine, its levelling of distinctive culture.
So it’s not a matter of vaunting or returning to the past or to tradition, so much as finding a living orientation to it. Nevertheless, it’s easy to slip into mystified or over-valued approaches to it (how much easier to embrace the Machine and associated ideologies like ecomodernism, where perfection lies in the future and therefore can’t be confronted with its real-world shortcomings!)
Despite his general brilliance, I think Iain McGilchrist errs in this respect when he talks about the importance of an education in the classics of English literature, “one of the richest if not the richest in the world”. I see this as a kind of high culture pretentiousness, over-obsessed with comparing itself to others and effacing its complex roots. This somewhat tweedy elitism opens itself up to ironic putdowns and satire, the kind of modernism that ultimately paves the way for the empty knowingness of the Machine. If not high culture, then, I’d suggest the need for low culture or folk culture, which doesn’t care too much about how it compares with others, but is still culture in critical conversation with itself. Ideally, I’d have liked to see Paul say more about this. To have a living folk culture, I think you need to have local livelihood communities enjoying a degree of autonomy. I’ll say a bit more about that shortly.
The sacred
The other key requirement to avoid cultural brain damage is an embrace of the sacred, which Paul lays out beautifully in his book. This, essentially, is the fourth ‘P’ – prayer. No doubt Paul’s relatively recent conversion to Christianity is relevant, but his discussion of the sacred is capacious and generous, not narrowly sectarian. I touched on this here on this blog a couple of years ago in a discussion with Andrew among others. Andrew wrote:
I used to enjoy Kingsnorth’s writing, but I often find it objectionable these days, largely because I think it’s often dishonest … [He] explicitly disavows any ideology of his own, instead invoking a ‘stance’ or a ‘politics’, although he also claims that his own stance ‘does not fit easily into any Left-Right paradigm’. In my view it is not possible to escape ideology
This would probably have been my own reaction some years ago, and I agree with Andrew that it’s not possible to escape ideology. However, while a society’s orientation to the sacred will inevitably be used ideologically by people within that society to advance some interest or other, I don’t think the sacred is reducible to ideology. Indeed, maybe one definition of the sacred is precisely that which is widely seen as not ideological but simply existent and whole.
I won’t dwell much further on the sacred here. It’s something that Paul addresses in considerable detail in his book, in my opinion actually with a lot of honesty and intellectual courage. However, there are different kinds of sacredness, with different implications. They potentially do clash in the field of politics (or ‘ideology’), although not necessarily in ways that standard political designations well capture. Whatever my other differences with them might be, I think the likes of Paul and Patrick Deneen are correct to suggest that the left-right paradigm represents two sides of the same coin of a problematic Machine liberalism.
The ecomodernist moment
While always implicit, I think we’re now seeing this conformity manifest increasingly in contemporary politics as ‘left’ and ‘right’ political economies converge around state-corporate technocracy. The ideology is human betterment (or sometimes transhuman betterment), the driving force is the Machine, and the recipe is ecomodernism.
Paul discusses, and in my opinion rightly dismisses, this assemblage in ATM in relation to two main areas – food and artificial intelligence. His main target on the food front is George Monbiot, and specifically George’s book, entertainingly described by Paul as “the humbly titled Regenesis” (p.209).
Regular readers of this blog will scarcely need me to repeat my own criticisms of Regenesis, but what I would say is that I think Paul cedes far too much ground to George and the ecomodernists before planting his flag. He writes as if the factory-made bacterial protein powder George advocates in Regenesis is carrying all before it as the mass food of the future, whereas the truth is that among its other flaws it’s a monumentally energy-hungry process that’s now demonstrably flopping, and is vanishingly unlikely to ever become a mass food (unless humanity can access cheap, low-carbon energy in unprecedented quantities, another improbable but much-vaunted ecomodernist dream).
Paul also quotes George’s claim that “It’s time we became obsessed by numbers. We need to compare yields, compare land uses, compare the diversity and abundance of wildlife, compare emissions, erosion, pollution, costs, inputs, nutrition, across every aspect of food production” (ATM, p.210; Regenesis, p.224-5). He treats this largely just with weary resignation as an example of the Machine’s spreadsheet-brain. But he could usefully have pointed to how George mostly mobilises the idea of numbers and comparisons as a logic of technocratic enclosure against agrarian localism when actual numbers – and, more importantly, considered analysis – inevitably tell a more complex and context-specific story.
So here I think Paul allows the Machine too much leeway. When it comes to ecomodernism versus human-scaled conviviality and localism we’re not in the presence of some great clash between science and feeling, logos and mythos. Instead, we’re in the presence of two kinds of myth, two kinds of feeling or two kinds of sacredness, one of them resting on ‘science’ as a kind of sacred ideal rather than a particular and limited mode of enquiry.
It’s funny how commitment to these different forms of sacredness provokes similar apocalyptic language in their opposition to each other. Paul writes of elite responses to climate change that “bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen” (p.215) while George has objected to my scepticism about the future of mass urbanism thus:
People are counters, to be moved in their millions, as interests or ideology dictate, across the board game called Planet Earth.
It’s consistent with the kind of thinking that characterises cities as “human feedlots”.
I won’t dwell too much on the cruelty that I think is coming by failing to understand the parallels between human cities and animal feedlots in terms of the entropy-defying flows of food, energy, water and waste they involve that simply aren’t sustainable in the long term. People aren’t counters to be moved – they will move of their own accord if they can, but for my part I sense the whiff of the coming enclosures, the cattle herders’ prod, in George’s ill-justified enthusiasms for high-energy manufactured food and material technologies, and for clearance rewilding. The larger point is the highly charged language involved in the clash between ecomodernist and localist visions. It speaks of the sacral commitments underlying them.
In an ideal world, it would be good if we could discuss our differences less epically. I loved Paul’s critique of artificial intelligence as a form of the Antichrist (honestly, read it – it’s a nuanced and delightful piece of writing, and not nearly as mad as it might sound). Yet, though I may be (apocalyptically) wrong about this, as with overhyped corporate greenwash concerning bacterial food, I’m not convinced AI is quite this beast. Nuclear weapons might be a closer fit, and a more likely source of apocalypse. Paul is probably right that AI and other aspects of contemporary tech and technocracy will at minimum “be responsible for mass unemployment, fakery on an unprecedented scale and the breakdown of shared notions of reality” (p.302), but perhaps by this token the overinflated claims of ecomodernism and technocracy to be able to deliver greater human benefit give more leverage against the Machine than Paul is willing to concede in the bleaker moments of his book.
Spiritual discipline
Nevertheless, it does seem that we Four-P types are currently losing the battle of hearts and minds against the Machine, if only because the latter has better command of media platforms. And, sadly, a direct airing of differences across the divide rarely seems to generate anything positive. Perhaps our respective sacral commitments are just too different.
In the face of this impasse, Paul lands in ATM on many similar positions to ones I’ve tried to articulate in my own writing. For example, he emphasises the virtues of finding ways to circumvent the Machine rather than confronting it head-on, a kind of weapons-of-the-weak approach involving a long-term, multigenerational project to build a Four-P world in the interstices of Machine power as best we can. And small or large practices of asceticism or spiritual discipline – something emphasized in every Four-P culture, but largely abandoned in Machine modernity. He draws nicely on a medieval Chinese distinction between ‘cooked barbarians’ living ambiguously and semi-uncooperatively within the walls of the state Machine, and ‘raw’ ones living oppositionally outside it, advocating for these respectively less and more compromised ways of opposing the Machine through asceticism.
While discussing this, he mentions in passing that people following the more hardcore, ‘raw’ form of asceticism make real things with their hands. Here is where I want to push this somewhat buried aspect of his argument harder, connecting it to my advocacy for agrarian localism, for a small farm future, for local crafts and livelihood communities. I don’t think we can build the kind of folk cultures I mentioned earlier that we need if they’re not deeply dedicated to local material livelihoods. But it’s not going to happen overnight. And it involves major elements of cooperative community work as well as individual or household work.
Paul writes:
the age of the Machine is not after all a hopeless time. Actually, it is the time we were born for. We can’t leave it, so we have to fully inhabit it …. 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 (p.317)
This is just the pep talk I need as I contemplate another year of pushing the boulder of agrarian localism up the hill of the Machine in my writing and my land-work. It bears on a discussion under my last post about having skin in the game. As I see it, I have skin in this game which isn’t negated by the fact that in numerous ways my efforts are compromised by living a life that’s thoroughly cooked in the Machine. This isn’t an Olympics of individual virtue. It’s long-haul work by ordinary, flawed people to help get us out of the Machine’s deathly grip. Anyway, I take comfort from Paul’s injunction that we have a duty to speak the words. I’d add we also have a duty to grow the food and fibre and make things with our hands when we can.
The F Word
There’s quite a funny passage in Paul’s book where he skewers the tendency in mainstream writing to warn of the growing threat of eco-fascism via a series of lazy associations (‘populism’, Ted Kaczynski, the Christchurch shooter, the organic movement, blood and soil etc.) “I was in and around the green movement for a long time, but I never met an eco-fascist” he writes, “though I did have the pleasure of being called one” (p.207).
There are many ways of defining fascism – state-corporate alliances in service of techno-futurism is one, and it’s tempting to apply it to some of our purportedly radical public intellectuals. But the term is bandied about far too often. I’ve bandied it about too much myself in the past. I think it’s best to find calmer terms when we can.
Post-liberalism is one such term. I came across this review of Paul’s book by Emma Collins – a bad review, in more than one sense of the term – which counterposes her own recipe for writing books like Paul’s:
At this point the formula for a postliberal book is very familiar. A writer will take a provocative stance, trot out a little Deneen, a little Solzhenitsyn. Maybe sprinkle in a little Chesterton for good measure. Cook for 300 pages, and you’ve got a potential bestseller. Some of these people embrace the label reactionary and some don’t — but they are all, as the writer George Packer describes former Marxists in his book Last Best Hope, “hectoring pessimists” who “carried their apocalyptic baggage with them when they moved from left to right.
I think this is nonsense at several levels, but it did give me pause since Deneen and Chesterton also feature in my own recent ‘postliberal’ book (for the record, I don’t embrace the label ‘reactionary’ and I’m not entirely convinced by Paul’s take on ‘reactionary radicalism’, though I appreciate what he’s trying to do). In fact, the parallels between Paul’s book and mine don’t end with Deneen and Chesterton. We both also discuss James Scott, woodburning stoves, Edo Japan, dark ages, Alasdair MacIntyre, asceticism, Christopher Lasch and God. I find it interesting and quite comforting that we’ve converged in this way despite our somewhat different concerns and starting points. To me it’s suggestive not of some tired formula we’re trotting out but of a set of ideas and associated thinkers whose time is coming around again in the face of the manifest failings of liberal modernism and the Machine. While an often-empty novelty and originality are the guiding stars of modernism, perhaps the basic principles of grounding local livelihood societies admit to fewer basic permutations.
Yet originality doesn’t seem to be Emma Collins’s fundamental aim. She’s scornful that Paul “devotes himself to activities like using a composting toilet and cutting grass with a scythe” (another couple of things I have in common with him, though I wouldn’t say I’m ‘devoted’ to using a compost toilet and mowing with a scythe so much as I’ve chosen the easiest and most efficient options to get the job done, so to speak, in my circumstances). But Emma is having none of it:
Real country people aren’t spending all their time churning artisanal butter while reading books made of vellum. They eat hamburger soup from the crockpot while watching the local news. They drive Frito-Lay trucks. They use lawnmowers, not scythes, for God’s sake. I know because I’m from there. My people would catapult Kingsnorth’s pretentious tome into the nearest puddle.
As with the Marxists, here we have an ultimate appeal to the supposedly ideology-free collective authenticity of ‘real’ working people. Well, I’m sure it’s true that a lot of regular people in the countryside nowadays would spurn a scythe or a compost toilet on the grounds that they seem kind of weird. That’s people for you, and that’s why the Machine has us in its grip. We’re just such dopes for fads and fashions, for what the ‘real’ people – whoever we deem them to be – are thinking and doing. As I said earlier, the Machine is very old, as old as humanity. Although the taste for ‘progress’ as a value in itself and for new gimmicks that trap us in precarious high-energy global supply chains is a new twist.
Most people throughout human history have had to generate most of their livelihood locally with limited land and energy availabilities. I daresay they’ve always been prey to fashion, but not to the extent it compromises these basic non-negotiables of ecological existence. It seems likely that most people in the future will have to do the same. In the longer run, technologies like scythes and waterless toilets that have been stress-tested through ecological reality seem likely to prevail over lawnmowers and WCs. Likewise with social technologies like tradition (the past) and prayer (the sacred) despite the danger these can trap people in their own versions of the Machine. Nobody has much of a clue as to how we – or hopefully at least some of us – will get there out of the Machine-levelled present, but in my opinion ATM at least helps steel us to the task.
Paul is in no sense ‘eco-fascist’, but I must admit I wrote critically about him in the past when I felt some of his positions veered too close to an embrace of unconflicted nationalism and the ‘revolt against the elites’. ATM doesn’t fall into this trap. I daresay some of his positions around culture war issues will scare hares among some on the left, but I find his instincts invariably humane and oriented against the Machine rather than any particular kind of person: “because we no longer have a culture, we have a culture war instead. But I don’t believe in this conflict … If any real ‘war’ is in evidence today it is a spiritual war. It is the Machine versus human-scale culture” (p.310). Amen to that.
