Choosing God or the Machine
Deep Dives
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Jacques Ellul
18 min read
French philosopher and sociologist whose concept of 'technique' is directly referenced as foundational to understanding the Machine. His critique of technological society deeply informs Kingsnorth's thesis, and most readers won't know his extensive body of work on technology, propaganda, and Christian anarchism.
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Iain McGilchrist
9 min read
The psychiatrist and philosopher whose theory of left-hemispheric brain dominance is cited as describing what Kingsnorth calls the Machine. His work 'The Master and His Emissary' argues that Western civilization has become pathologically dominated by analytical, reductive thinking at the expense of holistic understanding.
Most of us are entirely unprepared for what has already happened. This may sound more paradoxical than it is. Understanding, after all, always arrives late to the party. All of us were born into a world already on the go, and it often takes us a while to catch up. Still, if there were ever a moment to self-locate and make some changes, this is it. We have to find ways to resist the monster that modernity has made—a monster Paul Kingsnorth calls the Machine.
The idea is not Kingsnorth’s alone, but he selects it because of how aptly the notion describes all that is cold and inhuman and spiritually bereft in this world we inhabit. It captures a widespread reliance on what Jacques Ellul calls technique and what Iain McGilchrist identifies as the dominion of left-hemispheric thinking. Kingsnorth tells us he feels as if he’s been writing this book all his life. All of his work, from his journalism to his poetry to his unpublished and published novels, has included distinct attempts to investigate and understand the Machine.
The Machine is the existential and spiritual equivalent of a cage or prison. In his poem “The Panther,” Rainer Maria Rilke imagines a majestic beast pacing to and fro in a cage, numbed and anaesthetised to its natural ability to sense the world beyond its immediate confines. Rilke writes, “it cannot hold anything else.” To the panther, “there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.” I thought of this poem often while pondering Kingsnorth’s words, partly because Against the Machine strikes me as a careful attempt to describe many of the bars of the prison we inhabit, but also because Kingsnorth believes, as Rilke does, that there really is a world beyond the cage. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that we have no say in any of this, that we have no agency. Don’t believe for a second that there is no way out.
For Kingsnorth, the Machine is not all there is, despite its pervasiveness. As I concluded reading, the impression I was left with was that we are not without power or ability to improve our situation. I mention this now because in so much of the book, on page after elegantly written page, the picture of the world Kingsnorth sketches is thoroughly depressing. The truth will undoubtedly set you free, but first
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