As I keep saying, I am deeply in love with Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine even though I disagree with much of it. In this post, I want to talk about one of the things with which I disagree. And it’s his foundational idea and not a minor quibble.
Kingsnorth says that the West deserves to die. It shouldn’t be saved. To the contrary, it should perish altogether. This is not my interpretation. He says this verbatim. The reason why Kingsnorth has given up on the West is that his understanding of it is very different from my own that I described here.
Kingsnorth believes that the driving force of the Western civilization is the idea of revolutionary change. Everything must be destroyed to create something new. Then this new thing must be destroyed to create an even newer thing. And so on. The West will end up destroying humanity unless the West falls apart completely. When that happens, Kingsnorth hopes, we will be able to go back to the pre-modern society of small villages and artisanal guilds living happily in communion with nature.
This prospect does not appeal to me. I know the numbers on infant mortality and women’s mortality in childbirth before the twentieth century. No amount of small villages and artisanal guilds can make the prospect of going back there attractive to me. I like modernity. I really like capitalism, which is another thing Kingsnorth despises.
Kingsnorth says that the West is colonialist by nature, and that this is bad. He would happily have continued being a leftie if the Left hadn’t gone corporate and statist. I don’t want this to put you off from reading the book. It’s a wonderful book. Kingsnorth has an amazing sense of humor. The book is beautifully written and very easy to follow. Just read it already. It’s totally good.
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