“Well, shit,” I said as I closed the book. “He’s right. And I can’t do a damn thing about it.” I had just finished reading Paul Kingsnorth’s well-regarded book Against the Machine, which synthesizes a mix of ideas from many of my favorite tech and society writers across the years. Stuff about smartphone tech, the acceleration of daily life, the false promises of progress, the inhumanity that drives Silicon Valley … if that’s your bag, you won’t find anyone writing a better summary of where we are and how we’re going.
A sample of Kingsnorth’s arguments for the unfamiliar: he argues that the Pyramids of Giza are grotesque. They represent the economic slavery of the masses in the service of an ideology and should be regarded as the tragedy of “the machine” that destroys human lives, instead of a monument to human achievement. Stop praising these gargantuan structures, argues Kingsnorth, and stop dreaming of modern-day versions of pyramids from Silicon Valley. Guard instead the four p’s of being human: people, place, prayer, and past, while avoiding the four s’s of The Machine: self, secularism, screens, and sex.
At the end of the book, he addresses how to push back against the machine. I’ll let you read it for yourself, but the spectrum was something between ditching the smartphone on one hand and homesteading while forming a guerilla reactionary force to blow up data centers on the other. (He doesn’t call for violence explicitly, but he probably wouldn’t say no …). My own meager attempts to keep the machine out of my life have been, as the kids say, mid, especially compared to how much I think Kingsnorth gets right. The kids have limited screen time, and we’re paying extra to send them to private school where they limit tech use. We live in a small walkable rural town, we have dinner with our geographical neighbors, and we take them to church. Alas, the smartphone remains, the Netflix subscription continues, my wife’s job is integrating ChatGPT into her workflow, and the short videos continue to be swiped. Most people recognize that same feeling of slavery that modern tech instills in us.
It’s not difficult to imagine that if Kingsnorth were to review my life, he would probably say I’m not doing enough. Work harder. Do more. Ditch streaming, toss your phone, get off social media, stop shopping at Walmart. Job forcing you to use AI? Find another job. Start a garden at the very least, or run for office and fight the machine through political action. Can’t bomb a data center? Go cut down some Flock cameras. If we agree that The Machine is killing us, spirit and body, why not fight it as if our lives depended on it?
Maybe he would say this, but also, maybe not. Maybe he would see my meager acquiescence to his thinking as a practical, if minimal, part of the resistance. Or maybe this inner guilt is just my own inner monologue, a reflection of my own scrupulosity and not the feelings of the author. After all, if there is a value that is good and right and true, shouldn’t it be followed with total devotion? If Kingsnorth is right that the machine is coming for me and my family, isn’t that a DEFCON 1 Klaxon alarm worth responding to?
If you’re not familiar with Kingsnorth, you are certainly familiar with similar calls to radical and reactionary living against the antihuman apocalypse of our time. The late Wendell Berry represented this vision for many people, as Ethan Richardson discussed last week on the site. As Berry’s legions of fans posted tributes to their social pages (looking at you, Substack!), others were quick to point out the irony of a digital tribute to the contrarian agrarian. There is an undeniable tension between the pastoral lifestyle Berry embodied and the pulls of modern life on his readers. Many live in that tension of agreeing with Berry about the nature of the good life while feeling stuck and unable to apply it.
We might agree with the scientific predictions of future climate change but can’t afford solar panels or an electric vehicle. We might agree with Dave Ramsey’s debt reduction principles, but also, we don’t have enough stocked away to pay cash for an urgent home repair. The best we can muster is to buy a metal straw, start a porch garden, and make a budget — hardly the kind of radical intensity required to stave off a financial or environmental apocalypse. A convinced mind is one thing, but to replicate the success of the radical reactionary in life is something else altogether.
But is it beyond our ability to replicate? This is the nagging voice that pulls at the thread of my conscience. Surely, I could hustle and think my way into a more integrated and authentic way of living. I just need to try harder. Ditch the smartphone, start a garden, cancel the credit cards … My opposition to the logical conclusions of these apocalyptic and reactionary ideals is just fear or weakness or laziness. If a cause is of primary importance, any reason not to go in whole hog has to be a defect of character.
For many, Christianity represents that same ideological vision, a “no excuses” call to radical living. The monastics embrace it, of course, with vows of celibacy and poverty. So do the missionaries, or at least that’s the romantic take, leaving family and culture behind to live in the third world with only Jesus as a companion. Their examples are inspirational but not normative. Despite vague exhortations to “do more,” most Christians in history have lived out their faith in the context of family and vocation, in service to a ruling body, and in the geographic context they were born. Be good kids, raise good kids, do good work, honor the king, pay taxes, help the needy, and contribute to the community good. Is that enough given modern Christianity’s veneration of saints, Bible smugglers, martyrs, intellectual powerhouses, and servants of the poor? Are these everyday Christians just not radical enough in light of Jesus’ admonition to “take up your cross and follow me?”
When the first Christians were working to identify themselves in the context of their Jewish heritage, the question arose as to whether newly baptized Christians from outside Jewish ancestry should be required to be circumcised. Christianity, of course, is of primary apocalyptic importance. If the salvation of one’s soul was on the line, then of course circumcision would be worth undergoing. That’s a half joke, of course. If the modification of one’s adult and developed genitalia is required to join a religion, it may be a radical and rigorous religion, but we can doubt that it would be very popular.
After much discussion of the matter, the apostle Peter offers his take on the situation: “Why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus.” Plenty of circumcised people, reflects Peter, have lost the plot when it came to Jewish spirituality in the past. They jumped through the hoops of living a religious life, but that didn’t mean they had any sort of lively and active faith in God himself. Not only would this circumcision place upon the new Christian a burden beyond what even God himself intends, but it would be counterintuitive in inspiring the saving faith God wants. Now that Jesus has died and risen, there’s a freedom from the Law’s rigid prescriptions. A life lived in faith is enough.
This moment offers two criticisms of the apocalyptic scrupulosity that Kingsnorth and others represent.
First, Peter says that the “radical” answer here was not the right one. Other ideologies offer the choice between radical living or apocalyptic doom, but the Christian exhortation “take up your cross” is not viewed in opposition to “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.” Jesus’ teaching here is that “everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required,” but what about those who have been given little? A person can only be responsible for what is under their oversight and control. If we take the Serenity Prayer at face value, we have a decent heuristic that helps us divide what is our responsibility from what is beyond our control.
In this instance, the call to cut down my town’s Flock cameras is in direct opposition to the call to care for my family. Honestly, I’m sympathetic to the idea, but I can’t afford bail and the legal penalties, and my wife and kids need me at home and not in jail. The call to ditch the smartphone conflicts with the call to be connected to my church. Texting parishioners to see if they got their power back on after a storm, sending a silly meme to a discouraged friend, sending out the church news via email … as much as I hate it, the call to love my neighbor means keeping one foot in The Machine. The truest apocalyptic ideology, Christianity, has in place a system of values that conflicts with lesser apocalyptic ideologies. The call to take up one’s cross may actually mean suffering within The Machine instead of struggling to be free from it.
Second, not only is the idea of radical devotion reimagined in light of Jesus’ death and resurrection, but the level of choice and independence assumed by radicals may be a mirage. Human beings are limited, and many of those limits are expressions of our dependence on the divine. Peter’s decision recognizes that people suffer under burdens they themselves may not be able to carry. The slaves building the Egyptian pyramids didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter as to whether they could escape the machine. It’s worth asking how we are hemmed in by a similar lack of agency.
The New Testament has a descriptor for these misanthropic realities that are beyond our individual ability to control. It calls them “powers and principalities,” and its recommendation is not to put on the armor of worldly power and resistance but to put on a spiritual armor of faith, truth, resolution, readiness, and prayer. It doubles down on the spiritual solution to these worldly matters instead of practical solutions, which is radical in its own way but not reactionary in the slightest. These thoughts come from St. Paul, who writes about principalities and armor while he himself is a prisoner of the Roman Empire’s political machine. His deepest desire is not for revolution but for rescue, achieved by God and encouraged by the steadfast prayers of his companions. Christianity offers its own way of raging against the machine, it’s just not nearly as romantic or dramatic as the calls for apocalyptic radicalism today.
A Christian, then, takes comfort that God’s love and good providence is not only for those who can escape The Machine but also for those who are trapped in it too. He happens to know a thing or two about what it looks like to rescue slaves from the shadows of The Machine’s pyramids, bringing plagues and parting Red Seas along the way. He also knows what it’s like to comfort and sustain and support his people when the chains haven’t yet been unlocked. It wasn’t Israel’s radical commitment to an ideal that saved them, nor was it Paul’s writing or public speaking, but the grace of an outside force that brought about their help.
Am I doing enough? I don’t know. The world around me is out of my control, and it drives me nuts. I do know I would like to do more to stem the tide of The Machine in my life but find myself limited in frustrating and embarrassing ways. As much as we hold our own lack of movement against ourselves, there’s something freeing about the fact that God isn’t the one holding it against me. As long as the heavens are in the business of helping slaves, then my own fears about The Machine can be replaced by serenity, Flock cameras and ChatGPT be damned.
