The two had sparred before. In 2009, they exchanged public letters in Guardiancircling the question that worries many eco-minded Westerners: what can be done in practice? Kingsnorth accused Monbiot of offering a false choice: either “Liberal Capitalist Democracy 2.0”, a status quo with more solar panels, or a “McCarthy World” in which “The Road” becomes our reality. He also claimed that he had not taken into account the magnitude of what was coming; we needed to return to our cultural roots, learn to live again, and accept that fire and flood were beyond our control. Monbiot called this a “millennial fantasy” and argued that faith in political action was a duty: life must go on.
The split was metaphysical. Kingsnorth may be right that Monbiot is a man-machine intent on using leverage to save the world, but by these standards, so is anyone who makes any green choices at all. This is the temptation and danger of Kingsnorth's position: it gravitates towards the absolute. In his new book, the Machine is also a “technium,” a term he borrows from techno-optimist Kevin Kelly to refer to the impersonal, irresistible force that technology has become. It changes all values and cannot be reversed. Without a complete rejection of society there is no salvation – and even this dream, says Kingsnorth, is illusory, because the Machine is “a tendency within us”, assembled by our own blood and sweat.
Lamenting this trend, Kingsnorth joins a chorus as old as civilization. Cities, cars, modernity are growing; countryside, old customs, decline of traditions. Socrates warned that writing, a mechanical activity, can weaken creative memory. Virgil linked the destruction of pastures to moral decay: “right and wrong are intertwined; the world is drowning in war; evil takes all kinds of forms; and the plow is no longer a matter of honor” – this line could be heard without tension in “Against the Machine”. Jefferson, Hogg, Blake, Thoreau: with the advent of the Enlightenment, the number of opponents multiplied. For Kingsnorth, the Industrial Revolution was the point of no return. What once was animaspirit or soul, became methodsresource. Playing gods, we turned our backs on the Earth. In his opinion, this is the Fall – or, in secular terms, human history as a tragedy, a swan's plunge into darkness.
Kingsnorth's break with the Green movement, after many years as one of its most visible foot soldiers, cost him dearly. Since the twenties, he has shunned and shunned its liberal mainstream. The previous Archbishop of Canterbury once cited his work; Now Rod Dreher supports this. Kingsnorth's commitment to the patriotic concept of “England”, often claimed by the political right, is suspect, but he argues that the left has conceded it for no reason. I owe my idea of “roots” to Simone Weilsignifies community bonds rather than genetic heritage. He imagines the modern nation-state breaking down into smaller, more anarchic units, disdains the “womb of expanding cities,” and tells us through Lewis Mumford that Plato believed that a city should be small enough for one voice to address it. He wants to reclaim the “parish” – what’s wrong with parishes? Icons in “Against the Machine” from Aldous Huxley Jacques Ellul, gravitate towards communitarian, class conservatism, albeit with a touch of the transcendental. With some modifications the book could pass for an anarchist treatise; and a few more – for the feat of a Christian ascetic.
However, before this becomes possible, a lot of nonsense will have to be crossed out. Kingsnorth claims to reject culture wars—”I don't believe in this conflict, and I won't send my children to fight it”—while framing his own culture war forays as battles with the Machine. Feminism, he writes, has laid siege to the “non-machine family unit.” (“Why shouldn’t a child have three fathers?” he argues is a serious question at the moment.) Mass migration, he warns, puts “natives… on the path to minority status,” even as migrants are excluded from “national history”—a history that, thanks to ruling elites, is now “dissolving” anyway. (This is both a confusion and not how stories work, but never mind.) “Population” appears in his prose, shadowed by “growing,” “massive,” and “huge,” as if it were an epidemic. I wonder what he thinks should happen to these people? Perhaps they can no longer be helped. Perhaps the rest of us do too. He writes as if modern Britain were ruled by the Khmer Rouge:
