Review: Paul Kingsnorth, “Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity”

It’s the internet. Get thicker skin.

Every book that’s been published carries with it an array of ghosts: the books that this work might have been had its author zeroed in on a slightly different concept, done research in a different archive, or explored a different character or plotline. Presumably, Paul Kingsnorth understands this well. His loose trilogy that began with The Wake and continued in Beast and Alexandria revisits some of the same themes in radically different settings, from the Norman Conquest to the distant future. There’s a sense of recurrence there, as though Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion was a radical environmentalist gradually losing his grip on reality.

Kingsnorth’s new book is a work of nonfiction, titled Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. This isn’t his first foray into nonfiction; Against the Machine follows Small Gods and Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays, and the portrait of Kingsnorth that emerges from all of them is of a principled man whose politics refuse to line up with any conventional ideology. In many ways, the Kingsnorth of these books is not far removed from the protagonists of The Wake and Beast: an isolato bound and determined to forge his own path, no matter who he might alienate along the way.

Cards on the table: Against the Machine is an occasionally fascinating read, even if it often isn’t remotely convincing. Some of that has to do with Kingsnorth’s own stated beliefs: for one thing, he seems bewildered by the existence of trans people; he also seems willing to entertain the ideas of some fascist-adjacent thinkers. And some of that has to do with the roads not taken within these covers; for all of the heady and visceral discussions of philosophy, technology, and politics found here, it’s what goes unsaid that makes for the most interesting aspect of this book.

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Kingsnorth makes his intentions clear early in Against the Machine via a discussion of Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 work of nonfiction After Virtue. It’s in heading down this path that leads Kingsnorth to write about the importance of “how to interrogate power and identify illegitimate authority.” So far, so good. It’s where he goes from there that complicates matters.

This has been the terrible irony of the age of reason, and of the liberal and leftist theories and revolutions which resulted from it. From 1789 to 1968, every one of them ultimately failed, but in destroying the old world and its sacred order they cleared a space for money culture to move in and commodify the ruins. The vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism.

This eventually leads him to the concept of “reactionary radicalism,” and if that seems inherently contradictory, well, it won’t be the only place in Against the Machine where Kingsnorth spends a lot of time erecting a philosophical structure too contrary to last. The section quoted above reads like an amalgamation of different ideological strains; can one be simultaneously anti-capitalist and yearn for a return to the days of monarchy — or, at least, some version of monarchial societies?

What this translates to in practical terms comes up over the course of the book, as Kingsnorth invokes different groups of activists and thinkers. He holds both the Luddites and the Fen Tigers — the latter being a 17th-century group of ecological saboteurs — in high regard. There’s also a significant strain of anarchist thought running throughout the book, with the French thinker Jacques Ellul invoked several times. (This is one of two ambitious works about culture and politics published this year that invokes Ellul; the other is Phil Christman’s far more focused — and, for my money, much more rhetorically effective — Why Christians Should Be Leftists.) Simone Weil is another thinker lauded in the book, with Kingsnorth emphasizing the way that she embraced neither fascism nor Stalinism at a time when many of her peers were doing so.

Against the Machine is at its best when Kingsnorth makes unexpected connections between different writers and philosophers. While discussing the legacy of the Fen Tigers, Kingsnorth brings up G.K. Chesterton’s The Outline of Sanity, a book in which the author of The Man Who Was Thursday critiqued both capitalism and socialism. Kingsnorth describes Chesterton as advocating for “a society in which land, resources and power were all reasonably evenly distributed — as they were in the best pre-modern cultures.”

This yearning for a much earlier model of civilization is another recurring motif. Kingsnorth makes a passing reference to his interest in seeing society being reorganized into “smaller, more anarchic, less centralized units.” This is one of several places where he hints at a much more idiosyncratic version of Against the Machine, one where the contrarian and — sigh — anti-woke elements were scaled back and Kingsnorth offered a sense of just what his ideal society might look like.

One of the more surprising elements of Against the Machine comes via Kingsnorth’s praise for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. “[D]espite their many flaws, [they] have never been bettered in their description of the new world which grew from the ruin of the old, and which is now coming to ruin itself,” Kingsnorth writes. It’s especially jarring when you consider that Marx and Engels are cited approvingly in a book where national conservative thinker Yoram Hazony is also praised, as is The Decline of the West author Oswald Spengler.

Kingsnorth argues that, with respect to this particular work of Spengler’s, “it is hard to argue that the broad trajectory which its author offered was wrong.” That this follows a paragraph in which Kingsnorth criticizes the racism found in Spengler’s work and mentions that Adolf Hitler was a reader of Spengler’s writings makes for a particularly large caveat. There’s a challenging ideological balancing act that Kingsnorth undertakes here in alluding to a disparate group of thinkers, and it doesn’t always hold. Or, as he puts it when weighing in on Spengler himself:

[Spengler] had discovered that we don’t get to choose the shape of our Caesars, or their designs. Perhaps all we can do is try to make sure we do not prepare the ground for them to spring from.

Has Kingsnorth mused about what his own worst readers might do after reading this book? If so, he doesn’t spend much time discussing it here.

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Against the Machine is a work of nonfiction, but it doesn’t take much digging to find the story Kingsnorth is using this book to tell. The Machine of the title is, essentially, the modern world, and Kingsnorth doesn’t have much use for it. He writes about his dislike of cars and describes feeling a surge of anger when he sees a smartphone in a sacred place. But increasingly, “the Machine” comes to mean virtually anything Kingsnorth dislikes. It also assimilates different causes, including one dear to Kingsnorth’s heart: “The once-radical green movement, in which I cut my teeth, has been transformed into a Machine accelerant.”

Readers of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture are likely aware that there is a rigorous and comprehensive critique one can make of how corporations can co-opt ostensibly left-wing doctrines for their own purposes. Kingsnorth’s argument here is not inherently reactionary; unfortunately, he also invokes “the Machine” the same way that Republican politicians invoke “the Swamp” as a catch-all for the ideological adversaries.

There’s also a reading of Against the Machine that follows the ideological arc Daniel Oppenheimer set out in his book Exit Right: that he’s a disillusioned leftist who’s now moved significantly rightward. That doesn’t feel exactly right, either. Kingsnorth’s Savage Gods was praised in a review in The American Conservative; we’re not quite in Whittaker Chambers territory here. Still, it isn’t always clear who the ideal audience for this book is. Readers on the left are likely to cringe at the mention of Spengler and the way that Kingsnorth addresses any sort of gender non-conformity. Readers on the right, by comparison, may well stop short when they encounter approving mentions of Jacques Ellul or Karl Marx. There are plenty of very talented writers whose work eludes easy ideological categorization, but in reading Against the Machine, I’m not sure if Kingsnorth fits into this category or if this book represents an attempt at carving out a space all to himself, a syncretic ideology he can call his own.

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Unfortunately, that ideology has very little room for transgender people. At one point, Kingsnorth trains his lens on how he believes that his nemesis — the titular Machine — has ruined society. Some of his arguments are familiar to almost anyone concerned about the excesses of technology right now. One critique, though, echoes the words of many a “gender critical” thinker.

The Machine-fueled culture of inversion changes all of our parameters. This is a time in which the pertinent questions are not ‘Who should own the means of production?’ or ‘Should we privatise the health service?’ They are ‘What is a woman?’, ‘Where should we implant the microchips?’, ‘How quickly can we get this digital ID system up and running?’, and ‘What do you think of my new killer robot?’

Kingsnorth begins a chapter called “The Abolition of Man (and Woman)” with an anecdote from a book tour he undertook eight years ago. While on tour, Kingsnorth meets a father whose child has come out as transgender. The father doesn’t react well to this, refusing to accept his daughter’s gender and, from what he tells Kingsnorth, going on a bender. Kingsnorth writes that he told this father “that a man couldn’t become a woman, or vice versa.” The father then gives him a fateful warning, asking Kingsnorth, “Has this come to your country yet?”

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Kingsnorth was among the worst conversation partners this man could have possibly had at that particular moment. The fact that this man opted to go on a days-long bender upon learning this news suggests that something is very wrong here; instead of advising this man to find a decent therapist, Kingsnorth seems to have confirmed his course of action.

That Kingsnorth opens this chapter with this story also gets at another part of why this aspect of the book feels so egregious: certain parts of Against the Machine left me wondering whether or not Kingsnorth has ever had a conversation with a transgender or nonbinary person. Kingsnorth does briefly mention the writings of Judith Butler — but through the lens of a critique written by Mary Harrington, creator of the term “reactionary feminism.” And sometimes you get passages like this:

The deflating West is becoming a place of almost pure negation. After decades of cultural inversion, we have forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct, there is nothing left to overturn, and we have come to define ourselves by what we are not. Black is Not-White. Female is Not-Male. Gay is Not-Straight, and Trans is Not-Gay. Muslim is Not-Christian. Weak is Not-Strong. Welcome to the Not-West.

To call this a strawman argument does a disservice to straw men. It is — with apologies to Jeff Tweedy — a unified theory of everything, except for the massive holes through it. Does Kingsnorth know that trans and gay are not mutually exclusive categories? Has he actually conversed with any trans people? (Given that several of his books have been published by indie presses in the U.S. that have also released books by trans and non-binary authors, one presumes he has had the opportunity to do so.) Is he aware that people in the West have more religious options than Islam and Christianity? (Presumably, given what he writes about his own religious history, he does.) This rhetorical device turns up elsewhere in Against the Machine. What begins as a lament for a bygone world turns into a presentation so all-encompassing it approaches incoherence.

Kingsnorth takes another leap from here, wrapping his transgender critique in a transhumanist critique. Part of Kingsnorth’s attempted smoking gun here is a self-published book by Martine Rothblatt, From Transgender to Transhuman: a Manifesto on the Freedom of Form. Rothblatt is trans, as well as being a CEO and a founder of a transhumanist ideology, the Terasem Movement. Rothblatt’s very unique biography does not ipso facto mean that all transgender people are into cybernetic body modification.

There’s a feint in the direction of acknowledging that this is a bit of an intellectual leap, until Kingsnorth gets incredibly vague. “Rothblatt is far from the only person who believes that the path to a disembodied, posthuman and post-natural future leads directly through the shattered gender binary,” he writes. Well, there are over eight billion people on the planet. I could write, “Kingsnorth is far from the only writer who created his own version of Old English to write a novel,” and it would be an accurate invocation of his novel The Wake. That doesn’t mean that there are entire bookstore sections dedicated to this particular approach.

Kingsnorth’s argument here is to oppose the idea that “biology is a problem to be overcome.” But that’s a very wide net, and it raises the question of what the author does condone. Are glasses verboten? Is heart surgery fueling the Machine? At moments like these, Kingsnorth’s reactionary radicalism reads like a much more straightforward reactionary ideology. That continues as he inches into culture-war territory:

Patriotism, Christianity, cultural conservatism, sexual modesty, even a mild nostalgia for the English countryside or a love of once-canonical novels: all are more or less verboten, and the attitude towards them is rapidly hardening. Until recently simply giggled at or patronised, these kinds of views in the 2020s may see you labelled a ‘white supremacist’, or the more general but still-lethal ‘hater’.

If Kingsnorth cited multiple examples of each, that would be one thing. He doesn’t, which suggests that he’s writing for an audience that will nod appreciatively as they read this, their prior beliefs confirmed, and move on. One example here, the reference to “once-canonical novels,” loses plenty of power from being overwhelmingly general. Is Kingsnorth implying that anyone who cites admiration for mid-century British literature is going to wind up a pariah? I doubt that, but it isn’t hard to see where a reader of Against the Machine might get that idea. There’s also the matter of how some of those books have, indeed, not aged well. I enjoy the works of Evelyn Waugh overall, but found Scoop to be crushingly racist, for instance. There are plenty of ongoing discussions of the role that race and gender play in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction.

And there’s another element present here that’s also frustrating to read, summed up in three words: labelled by whom? If Kingsnorth means that some random person on social media will take a digital swing at you for saying that you enjoy P.G. Wodehouse, I’m not sure what to say. It’s the internet. Get thicker skin.

As someone who has read and enjoyed several of Kingsnorth’s previous books, Against the Machine comes as a disappointment in ways both ideological and rhetorical. But there’s also the hint of a very different book found just below the surface here that would be much more interesting, much more personal, and much more idiosyncratic. Here’s Kingsnorth discussing his own religious evolution:

A few years back, before I became an Orthodox Christian, I was a practitioner of Wicca, a nature religion founded by the eccentric Englishman Gerald Gardner back in the 1950s. Wicca is a form of modern ‘witchcraft,’ though everyone involved will have a different explanation of what that word means. Being a modern path, Wicca is mostly undefined and eclectic.

He doesn’t bring the subject up again, but the story of how he came to move from one very distinctive belief system to another represents a fascinating narrative road not taken.

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And now we come to the image at the heart of Kingsnorth’s book. What, precisely, does he mean when he alludes to “the Machine,” that nemesis that’d led him to espouse an ideology of radical reaction?

... I believe that the heart of the crisis that is enveloping so much of the world today — cultural, ecological, and spiritual — is this ongoing process of mass uprooting. It is also, as this book will explain further, the root of the West’s current turmoil. We could simply call this process modernity, which is not a time period so much as a story we tell ourselves. But I prefer to call it the Machine, because a machine — as the poets showed me — is what it feels like.

In so many words, then, one might say that this book “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Perhaps Kingsnorth is correct about modernity being “a story we tell ourselves,” given that the aforementioned quote about “yelling Stop” comes from the pen of William F. Buckley circa 1955 as part of National Review’s mission statement. Can something truly be radical if the work it echoes is a seventy-year-old conservative manifesto? Perhaps this is simply a rare example of reactionary carcinization.

But at the end of Against the Machine, I think back to Kingsnorth’s line about “[getting] to choose the shape of our Caesars.” In terms of publishing platforms, this is likely to be Kingsnorth’s work with the largest possible audience to date. And as someone who’s written positively about his work in the past, I’m left with a sense of disappointment that the capacity for empathy and ambiguity found in many of his previous works has sloughed away. His stories of isolated men in pitched battle with the world around them tapped into something primal, but it’s also left Kingsnorth as the sort of antihero he’d previously presented as a cautionary tale, a voice in the wilderness bearing destruction in his wake.