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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I started reading this book a few months ago (read 82 pages) and gave up. The beginning of it was interesting, but the more I read it, the more repetitious and boring it became. He made it clear that he is against industrialization and urbanization, but his desire to go back to the more primitive time is unrealistic. On the other hand, I just finished the book by Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence, and now I want to read everything by him. It’s like finding the well of clear drinking water in a desert. I finally found the definition of what true traditional conservatism is: “conservatism is the negation of ideology”. His writing style may come across as antiquated to some, but I like it. This book is far superior to Kingsnorth’s. Kirk died in 1994 so some of his texts are a bit dated, but they are no less valuable. I bought his “Enemies of the Permanent Things” and I’m looking forward to reading it. There is another book I found recently that may be of interest to you and your readers: Francis A. Schaeffer’s “How Should We Then Live? (The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture)”.
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I love Russell Kirk.
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The pre-modern society of small villages and artisanal guilds living happily in communion with nature…that’s still the West! If Kingsnorth wants to destroy the West he needs to go back further, back when Europeans were Pagan and engaged in human sacrifice. Some aspects of the pre-modern era appeal to me, even though like you I don’t want to go back, but I’m sure even Kingsnorth does not want to return to that. He is simply taking for granted many of the fruits Western civilization has given him.
Of course, we cannot go back to either. Even if society as we know it collapses, something else lies ahead, just like the collapse of literacy is not bringing the centuries dead oral culture of illiterate medieval peasants back.
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He wants all of the technology to go away. Cars, phones, electricity, everything. He wants the modern state to go away completely. Everybody should be growing their own food and foraging in the woods. He used to be a radical green, and it never really went away.
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That’s why I think his ideas are Utopian, even if it’s a backwards Utopia. I wonder if he wants medicine to be pre-industrial as well, when people were lucky to live to 40 years old. Besides, the current population, being much bigger in numbers than the pre-industrial one, simply would not be able to survive with the resources available. I wish the book had the contemporary ideas of conservatism on how to live and be conservative in the current society, but Kingsnorth squandered that opportunity. He kept saying he’s conservative and a Christian now, but those radical green ears were sticking out of his ideas despite his claims to the contrary.
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I’m glad nobody is saying I’m imagining this. People say that I see leftism where there isn’t any but what can I do if it quacks like a commie duck?
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That’s all very well and good but that’s just the West without phones, unless he also wants these woods to be filled with the corpses of infants left to die, and Christianity even deader.
Though don’t get me wrong, I don’t even want the most benign version of his vision. He and I could be providing for ourselves through farming and foraging right now. We don’t, because it’s really hard
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I am reading Against the Machine just now, though I discovered Kingsnorth during Covid, a topic on which he wrote poignantly and perceptively. However, I agree with you, he has never really left his leftie/ecowarrior origins behind: it’s simply that the progressives he used to associate with have moved beyond the tenets he was familiar with and he thinks he has now found a new home among “conservatives”.
Conservatism is not against change per se, it is against the idea that change is always good in and of itself. Conservatism has a predilection for organic change, the type of change also known as developmental growth, keeping permanent things quite distinct from contingent ones.
Some of Kingsnorth’s idea are downright crazy or dangerous and, in many ways, just as totalitarian as the ideology he says he is fighting: “the dissolution of the modern nation-state into smaller, more anarchic, less centralised units would be welcome” (p. 205). This is irresponsible: it took over a millennium to get to the modern nation-state in Europe, from the chaos and anarchy of the post-barbarian Roman Empire, the Romano-Germanic states, through feudalism, and the nation-state was for long and still is in a precarious equilibrium between authoritarianism and the free-for-all world of dog eats dog.
I’m surprised that Iain McGilchrist – who really should have known better – gave his book such a strong endorsement. I am very disappointed: Kingsnorth may be good on the diagnosis, but he is quite weak on the etiology of the symptoms, which is why he is no good at all with regard to the therapy suggested.
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Yes. Also, why aren’t people noticing how extremely similar this spiel is not only to the leftism of the 1960s and 1970s but also to what Tucker Carlson says? Forget similar. It’s downright identical. This is what happened to the nature-loving left when the mainstream left went heavily corporate.
Still an excellent book. And Tucker is still extremely talented. Let nobody say that I’m searching for an echo chamber.
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This guy is doing what we use to call “talking out his @ss.” He knows not of what he speaks. He was what they use to call in Europe a watermelon, green on the outside and red on the inside. Those old yearnings of moral superiority die hard. Some of it comes from reading to much Tolkien and not enough Robert Heinlein. Spend a summer in St. Louis without air conditioning and then come back and talk to me. I did it for most of my life.
As regards the West might I suggest, God forgive me, Solzhenitsyn’s speech at Harvard in 78 “A World Split Apart.”
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Yes, exactly, air conditioning. And washers and dryers. I have washed and ironed by hand for a significant part of my life. It’s not enjoyable. I’ll be damned if I do that again.
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That was me Walnut
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I’m very glad you embraced the nickname. It’s very endearing and meant lovingly
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I think it just moved down my to-read list a couple of points.
Read Crossing to Safety on the recommendation of this blog, and am most through Hannah Coulter for the same reason. It is striking how complementary these two books are. Same time period in US history, same age range of characters, radically different sides of American life.
-ethyl
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