Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (Particular Books, 2025) is an important book, and not only because it is being widely read. It takes a serious, clear and uncompromising stand on vital issues. I’m going to concentrate on those issues, some of them present in the book and others arising. 

AtM is a mixture of diagnosis and prescription. It centres on the narrative of the Machine of modernity – ecocidal and anti-human – whose engines include global capitalism, the modern nation-state, and technoscience.¹ AI is the latest instalment of modernity’s quest for mastery over life and death, and its attempt to replace ‘the crooked timber of humanity’ (Immanuel Kant) with something straighter and easier to calculate, quantify, commodify, manipulate and dominate.²

To call AtM a narrative is not to denigrate it; any extended account or analysis must tell a story. There are indeed some significant questions that could be asked here, but on the whole Kingsnorth delivers a timely and insightful critique of ‘the entwined myths of progress, growth and materialism’, which, as he says, is rarely allowed to be heard in the public sphere (p. 40). So for anyone concerned about where the Machine of modernity is taking us, and what might be done to slow or even stop it, Kingsnorth has performed a real service. And that includes ecocentrics, even though his case is not itself ecocentric.

He has read widely and well. His principal sources – including Alasdair MacIntyre, Lewis Mumford, Oswald Spengler, James C. Scott, Jacques Ellul, Christopher Lasch and Iain McGilchrist – are impeccable. Curious omissions include one of the prophets of modernity, Max Weber; one of the earliest and most bracing attacks on modernity, The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno; and perhaps Theodore Roszak, whose Where the Wasteland Ends (1972) in its own day resembles the cultural role and impact of AtM now. In criticizing scientism he could have borrowed more from Mary Midgley’s imperturbable sanity, while the strong echoes of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (1943) in Kingsnorth’s own reflections on ‘the Unmaking of Humanity’ goes unmentioned. Above all, there is the affinity of his worldview with Ruskin’s influential Tory radicalism. But these are not serious failings, since Kingsnorth stitches together so much and does it so well. And yes, much of the time he is re-inventing the wheel; but that’s alright too, because from time to time the wheel needs to be re-invented and brought up to date.

Here are a few of the things Kingsnorth also does well along the way. One is to show the extent to which the liberal and/or progressive Left is itself implicated in the ideology of progress, etc., and thus its secret alliance with the neoliberal Right in tearing up communities, the natural world and non-material values. (It is also cripplingly anthropocentric, although Kingsnorth doesn’t mention this.)

Second, there is his clear-eyed and courageous analysis of transgender activism as an ideology and programme which rejects the sexuality of the animal biological body, and consequently an essential part of what it means to be human. (Judith Butler has much to answer for.) Anthropocentric as well as misogynistic, it involves a Promethean assault on the reality, not to mention the necessity, of boundaries and limits. One billionaire transgender advocate is quoted as trumpeting that ‘Transgenderism is the onramp to transhumanism.’ (A caveat which shouldn’t be necessary but probably is: what is being addressed by Kingsnorth, and here by me, is a value and view, and not any particular individuals.)

Third is Kingsnorth’s longstanding perceptive critique of the ‘corporate takeover of most of the environmental movement’ (p. 209), especially by hyper-anthropocentric, high-tech and ‘efficient’ eco-modernists and so-called neo-greens. These aren’t confined to well-funded think-tanks and university departments; they include the influential journalist George Monbiot, whose work should carry an ecocentric health warning. (He is quoted as opining that ‘One of the greatest threats to life on Earth is poetry.’ This is deranged, of course, but of a piece with Monbiot’s other views.) And all this makes it perfectly comprehensible why, as Kingsnorth says, climate change, rather than the biodiversity crisis, mass extinctions, pollution, overshoot and so on, ‘has so utterly dominated the green debate’: because it is most ‘amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers, which go with the grain of a Machine culture’ (215).

Finally, Kingsnorth rightly eschews big top-down solutions which inevitably end up practising the kind of power-driven instrumentalism that is central to the dynamics that have brought to where we are today. Instead, he favours what he calls ‘reactionary radicalism’,³ which consists of ‘an active attempt at creating defending or restoring a moral economy built around the fours p’s’ (284). These are: the past, a people, place, and prayer, or a culture’s ‘religious tradition’ (131). And maybe here, where prescription starts to come forward, is where the problems can be said to begin; because which culture are we talking about, and what does it, or its religion, entail?

Kingsnorth makes it clear that the only one that really concerns him is ‘Christendom’, which he equates with ‘the West’. That is fair enough, but it begs some very big questions. For example, what about the many other cultures which are not based on Christianity? Presumably Kingsnorth would say they should return to some equivalent set of spiritual values. The trouble there is that God, at the pinnacle of ‘our’ values, comes with some very specific and extremely heavy baggage with consequences not only for ‘us’, but globally. Developing this point more would take us well beyond the parameters of this essay, but anyone who is interested should – and I almost mean has a duty – to read Jan Assmann’s The Price of Monotheism.⁴

Again, is it of no concern that the relative inclusivity of, say, medieval Christendom  integrally depended on the relative exclusion of others, as inclusion always does? Externally, of course, that usually meant Muslims. (This doesn’t make Muslim societies the good guys; they do it too.) Internally, it meant Jews and women. The stain of violent anti-Semitism on the history of Christianity is ineradicable. (Blame the Christ-killers!) Equally impossible to miss – notwithstanding the carefully delimited place allotted to Mary within Catholicism – is its bitter misogyny, inherited from Plato and transmitted by St Paul, St Augustine and the Church Fathers. (Blame Eve, and her wilful female descendants!)

Kingsnorth has earlier opined that the premodern woman enjoyed ‘more agency and power than her contemporary counterpart’.⁵ It is only possible to say such a daft thing without serious qualification if you are happy to assert that women had it better when they were essentially men’s property; had no legal redress for sexual abuse and rape, even within the family; couldn’t vote or formally study or hold many high positions or inherit property, and so on.

Maybe there is a parallel here with Kingsnorth’s unqualified condemnations of modernity. I sympathise and have said similar things myself, but would that anathema include modern hygiene, antibiotics, antiseptics, anaesthesia? If so, when do you plan to renounce them? To say nothing of what it takes to write, edit, transmit, produce, market and distribute a book – even a book against the Machine. Surely the basic point is rather one expressed by the late lamented Teresa Brennan (2003: 165): ‘To say that we need to “go back, slow down” will be portrayed as anti-progress. But progress lies in straining the human imagination to its limits in cleaning up the mess – while retaining the information that mess has yielded’.

So far as I can tell, verbal attacks on women are increasing, especially among the new Christian Right, and mostly (but not entirely) by men. In addition to the sheer one-sidedness just mentioned, they proceed on a caricature of feminism. The essence of the latter was stated succinctly by Marilyn French: ‘It’s believing women are as important as men. It’s really that simple’.⁶ That has never stopped being true, even if some strands of feminism have lost sight of it themselves. And it apparently hasn’t struck Kingsnorth that the transgender activism he rightly decries entails a fundamental onslaught on the reality of women (and men) as such, never mind their rights. By the same token, it also abandons women’s identity to the whims of gender, including gender stereotypes. Transgenderism, which he condemns, thus dovetails nicely with the calls he seems to approve to thrust women back, down, and in. If one of these two positions must go, if only for consistency, let it be the second!

The problem is not a result of being Christian. There are many ways to be Christian that do not entail damning women, or Jews, or other non-Christians, or indulging in apocalyptic eschatological fantasies with something like glee. The rhetoric of the new Christian Right is unimaginable in the mouths of several of Kingsnorth’s Christian exemplars, such as Wendell Berry and Alasdair MacIntyre. But here Kingsnorth’s own conversion might make unfortunate sense. (I don’t shrink from mentioning it, since he has made it very public.) He describes visiting Mt Athos, the big Orthodox monastery in Northern Greece, but doesn’t mention the inflexible rule there: not only are no women allowed, but no female animals of any kind. This is fanaticism, pure and simple.

It’s also a concern that Kingsnorth confuses, or conflates, the self-restraint of humility – one of the principal ecocentric virtues – with the hatred of the body, women, and the Earth, and therefore self-hatred, that so disfigures asceticism, as the instances of the Desert Fathers, Pascal, and Simone Weil clearly show.

Nor, by the way, does it help matters to think of AI (or AGI) as the anti-Christ or Moloch, which Kingsnorth as good as says (p. 222). It’s very difficult to say anything about AI that isn’t either either banal or melodramatic, but of that unhelpfulness, at least, I’m sure.

To speak plainly, then, I think with respect to this particular brand of theism, Kingsnorth has taken a wrong turn. Indeed, I would say that something is structurally wrong,  not merely contingently, with any public discourse which includes attacks on women and/or on feminism as their proxy. That includes all calls for women to be controlled, reined in, and/or domesticated – by men, if they won’t do it to themselves, and forcibly ‘if necessary’. And in a context where, as the statistics show  beyond any possible doubt, women are overwhelmingly the victims of violence perpetrated almost entirely by men – intimidation, sexual abuse, rape, murder – such calls are especially shameful.

By now I may seem to have strayed far from ecocentrism, but not so. The calls just mentioned are the same which have for so long been made, with lethal destructiveness, regarding nature. Ecofeminists have pointed out that the logic of controlling and instrumentalising nature is the same as the logic of doing the same thing to women. The lyrics differ, so to speak, but the tune is the same. As the work of Ariel Salleh shows clearly, the oppression of nature by men cannot be addressed without also addressing the oppression of women by men.⁷ By the same token, that logic proceeds from a ‘master mentality’ which is both androcentric and anthropocentric.⁸ So although ecofeminism is not ecocentric as such (as adherents of both have sometimes reminded me), finally neither of those two dynamics can be tackled alone.⁹

This point brings me to something else missing from Kingsnorth’s account: ecocentrism itself. By that I mean a set of values and ideas which accord pride of place to the more-than-human natural world, including, but greatly exceeding, humans. AtM’s focus is instead firmly on the subject of the sub-title: the unmaking of humanity. For reasons of space I cannot argue the case, and I am writing here in a personal capacity, but the work of The Ecological Citizen (which provides plenty to read) is predicated on the understanding that trying to understand and remedy the human crisis in solely human terms has no hope of succeeding. Rather it must be addressed ecocentrically, considering humans, both individually and as a species, as thoroughly embodied, embedded, and ecological beings.

There is a metaphysical context for what in my view has gone wrong here, although it has serious real-world consequences. That context is a world split into two, consisting of spirit (later mind), subject, ‘inner’ and so forth vs. physical matter, object, ‘outer’ and so on. This split was introduced by Plato, then further developed by St Paul, before being redefined and sharpened for modern times by Descartes. As the rogue anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1987: 51, 64) argues, the resulting dualism consists of ‘two species of superstition…rival epistemologies, the supernatural and the mechanical’, and he describes them elsewhere as ‘two nightmares of nonsense’: ‘established materialism’ as against ‘romantic supernaturalism’.

More recently, David Abram (2010: 300) points out the same truth. Scientific naturalism privileges abstract objectivity, whereas spiritual idealism privileges subjectivity. Butthey‘actually fortify one another in their detachment from the Earth, one of them reducing sensible nature to an object with scant room for sentience and creativity, the other projecting all creativity into a supernatural dimension beyond all bodily ken’.

Adherents of both extremes pretend that their realities need no context or relations – indeed, that they just are the final context and ground for all relations, although remaining unaffected themselves. Thus they not only sweep aside all realities and values which acknowledge their own interdependence, impermanence and limits; they are perpetually engaged in the attempt to absorb and thus eliminate the other. The result is not so much dualism any longer as two warring monisms, neither of which – given the nature of the whole – can ever quite succeed.

This commitment to a final, universal and (what is the same thing) sole Truth results in what Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1988: 179) calls ‘the effort to identify the presumptively universally compelling Truth and Way, and to compel it universally’. The warning about the potential for coercion (echoed by Assmann) is apt, especially when you consider some of the company which Kingsnorth seems to have joined, such as Rod Dreher, current doyen of Right-wing white evangelical Christianity. Can J.D. Vance be far away? Or even (god forbid) Pete Hegseth?

The mistake is to enlist in either the cause of spirit or that of matter, because life is fundamentally both. To divide that wholeness is to destroy it together with its wonder, which is why Max Weber (1991: 155)¹⁰ famously identifies the result as ‘the disenchantment of the world’. Furthermore, as both Bateson and Abram point out, each side secretly supports the other. Together they maintain the lie that life is fundamentally spiritual, or fundamentally material; so to identify with one is to tacitly support the other.

It follows that opposing mindless materialism – which Kingsnorth rightly wants to do – by espousing disembodied spirituality is never going to work. It merely inverts the dualism, where what is needed is to problematize the split itself. His references to God as the ultimate value are kept to a cautious minimum, but he is explicit that ‘A culture is above all a spiritual creation’, even ‘a spiritual byproduct’ (164, 12). Kingsnorth thus runs the risk of turning his back on life and endorsing its disenchantment, and then dismemberment, by the schism bequeathed to, and extended by, modernity. Which is strange, because I thought lived life was what we were supposed to be defending.

The understanding I have outlined here points to what I find ultimately missing from AtM’s otherwise comprehensive account: what Abram calls ‘the animate earth…the sense of a wild and multiplicitous otherness’ (10). The Earth in this understanding is to be honoured, and indeed revered, as the source and sustainer of all life, figured by Daoism as the ‘dark female’ who gives birth to both men and women, and all the ten thousand things.¹¹

It’s as if Kingsnorth, in pursuit of a ‘spiritual’ solution, had decided to set aside any attempt to recognize and honour the reality of the world in which we and all forms of life actually live and consist of: liminal and ambiguous, messy and mysterious, completely relational and therefore ecological, limited but endless, enchanting but scary, serious but sometimes very funny, sensuous but deeply spiritual, anarchic but not random, profoundly female but not ‘anti-men’, and full of unpredictable encounters. There is materiality here, but to quote Val Plumwood (2002: 226) it ‘is already full of form, spirit, story, agency, and glory’. By the same token, there is spirituality, but it is immanent in and as embodied, embedded and ecological life – not hovering somehow above, beyond, behind or beneath it as a transcendent super-natural.

In short, ‘The world,’ in the words of a modern Zen master, ‘is its own magic’.¹² It doesn’t need God to enchant it. And life is the world – not somewhere else, some heaven, but this world. That is what needs valuing, defending, and mending.

---

Footnotes

1. See chapters 9 and 10 of my Enchantment: Wonder in Modern Life (Floris, 2019) for a slightly less ambitious account. ↩︎
2. For two accounts which haven’t been bettered since they appeared, see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) and James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). ↩︎
3. I once suggested ‘radical nostalgia’. Defending Middle-Earth (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). ↩︎
4. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, transl. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). ↩︎
5. https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/keep-the-home-fires-burning; for a spirited rejoinder, as we say in Shepherds Bush, see Sharon Blackie: https://sharonblackie.substack.com/p/the-new-christian-rights-war-against ↩︎
6. Quoted in The Guardian 22.10.1998. ↩︎
7. See https://www.arielsalleh.info/ ↩︎
8. See Val Plumwood, Ecofeminism and the Mastery of Nature (Routledge, 1992). ↩︎
9. For a brief and partial account, including references to follow up, see chapter nine of my Ecological Ethics: An Introduction (Polity Press, 2017). ↩︎
10. In his late essay ‘Science as a Vocation’. ↩︎
11. Daodejing: “Making This Life Significant”: A Philosophical Translation, transl. & ed. Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003) 85. ↩︎
12. Shunryi Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York: Weatherhill, 1970) 61. ↩︎

Sources

Abram D (2010) Becoming Animal. An Earthly Cosmology. Pantheon Books, New York, NY, USA.

Bateson G and Bateson MC (1987) Angels Fear. An Investigation into the Nature and Meaning of the Sacred. Rider, London.

Brennan T (2003) Globalization and its Terrors. Daily Life in the West. Routledge, New York, NY, USA.

Plumwood V (2002)  Environmental Culture: The ecological crisis of reason. Routledge, London.

Salleh A (2010) Green New Deal – or Globalisation Lite?’ Arena 2:105 [?].

Smith BH (1988) Contingencies of Value. Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, USA.

Weber M (1991) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills.  Routledge, London.