Many prophets of doom expertly diagnose society’s ills, but do they offer a coherent vision for the future that looks any different than the catastrophes of the 20th century?
PUBLISHED ON
November 12, 2025
Paul Kingsnorth, a recent convert from eco-activism and Wicca to Orthodox Christianity, has attracted a wide audience to his work. He has published Against the Machine as the culmination of his writings on his Substack, “The Abbey of Misrule.” His trenchant critiques of modern techno-capitalism and the searching spirit he brings to his stories resonate with many. Christians, in particular, have turned to him as a sort of “prophet,” as he has frequently been called, of this modern technocratic dystopia.
What is “the Machine”? Kingsnorth says that it is the working of technology united with omnipotent state power to control and bleed dry, both materially and spiritually, the people in whose name it ostensibly rules. It is also “a tendency within us,” a “story” that we tell ourselves, a “new type of civilisation,” a “cultural inversion,” and either is or contributed to many other aspects of modernity including AI, the quest for unlimited economic growth, climate change, religious decline, transgenderism, imperialism, leftism, conservatism, open borders, nationalism, cars, and more.
There’s much to agree with. But that’s also the problem. One of the weaknesses of Kingsnorth’s thesis about the Machine is that it is such a broad category that it seems to be almost indistinguishable from the word “modernity” itself.
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One of the most illuminating chapters in the book is “The Universal,” in which Kingsnorth shows where his real strength lies: uncovering the implications of Artificial Intelligence. This chapter explores the frightening development of AI, a veritable Frankenstein’s monster. For those who are not familiar with the words of some of the creators of AI, this chapter will open your eyes. Kingsnorth’s account only confirms my suspicions that AI is demonic. Indeed, Kingsnorth connects it with the Antichrist.
But AI is only one of a great many topics that Kingsnorth tackles in this book. He also tries to lay out the Machine’s history and development. Kingsnorth is very open about his disdain for modern technocracy, but the reader must pay careful attention to glean his beliefs about politics and human nature that undergird his social criticism.
There is much at work in Against the Machine, and to unpack all of Kingsnorth’s claims, many of which compete with one another, would require a book in itself. Thus, I have limited the scope of this review to the points that I take to be most salient. There are many different currents and crosscurrents in Against the Machine. It often reads like a series of blog posts stitched together, which is, as Kingsnorth admits, how the book came about. At times, it feels a little like an introductory reader to the Machine, a concept that many others besides Kingsnorth have named and described over the last century and a half.
What is more significant, in my opinion, than the blitz of names with which Kingsnorth hits the reader is Kingsnorth’s own account, and in particular, his underlying assumptions about man. For Kingsnorth is open about his Orthodox faith, and many of his readers assume that his perspective is a Christian one. Is this the case, though?
Kingsnorth gives a brief history of the rise of the Machine, which, it turns out, is as old as time. As soon as Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, the Machine began to come to life. Pharaonic Egypt was a Machine society. It is as if man is destined to create the Machine.
The Enlightenment turbocharged the Machine, and the French Revolution all but sealed the fate of the West in its grip. Kingsnorth rightly mentions the role of figures such as Descartes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in helping to destroy custom, religion, and ancient institutions—the very things that would resist the Machine.
Rootedness and tradition, Kingsnorth often says, are the antidote to Machine modernity. They are the forces that preserve our humanity and that resist the overweening control of technocratic globalists. But what does Kingsnorth mean by “roots” and “tradition”?
Kingsnorth draws heavily on the writing of Simone Weil (1909-1943) when he talks about “rootedness.” Weil is a paradoxical figure. While lamenting the rootlessness of the modern world, Weil nonetheless lived something of a rootless life herself, both physically and metaphysically.
She insisted that her parents call her by the masculine name “Simon,” and this is how she signed her letters. She traveled to Spain to fight on the side of the communists in the Spanish Civil War and actually arranged for Leon Trotsky to reside at her parents’ apartment in Paris in 1933. She rejected her Jewish identity but never converted to Christianity. To illustrate to his readers that Weil was no conservative, Kingsnorth quotes her words: “For centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad.”
It is curious that Kingsnorth should rely so heavily on a figure who is neither in the Christian nor conservative tradition. Yet this only struck me toward the end of the book when it became clear that Kingsnorth is largely unaware of the conservative intellectual tradition in the West—the tradition that defends rootedness most incisively.
Kingsnorth dismisses conservatism as one of the “foremost defenders” of “oligarchic capitalism” in the West! It has always, he says, had a “love affair with private property and the sovereign individual.” Is Kingsnorth confusing conservatism with Lockean liberalism? None of the major names that I associate with conservatism—Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Irving Babbitt, Robert Nisbet, G.K. Chesterton, the American southern agrarians, William F. Buckley Jr., Roger Scruton—ever hint at having such a love affair. They are the staunchest defenders of the social, cultural, and religious norms that restrain the dreams of avarice of which Kingsnorth often warns.
What, then, does “rootedness” mean to Kingsnorth? He connects it with tradition and with localism and nature. He says that we have neglected the “Four Ps”: past, people, place, and prayer. Throughout the book, he refers to this abandonment. Yet they remain largely abstractions. This seems to be, in part, because Kingsnorth does not wish to defend the West or to call for its cultural restoration.
The West is “dead,” he declares; and anyway, it was only an idea, “a way of seeing.” Thus, we must “create our own cultures of refusal.” The word create seems to be key. It would explain why Kingsnorth is reluctant to go beyond mere abstractions about “place” and “prayer.” He wants to leave those concepts open-ended because he is not calling for us to restore or renew the culture of the West. We are to imagine a new future, a new culture.
There is ample evidence that Kingsnorth, despite his criticism of progress and of utopian scheming, has given in to this romantic temptation to dream of a future untethered to the past, free from the burdens of our messy history. In one chapter, Kingsnorth says that we ought to imitate the hill peoples of Asia who have dmanaged to escape being governed by centralized power. Following James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed, Kingsnorth says that we would do well to take the example of these “raw” and “cooked” barbarians, whose mobility, nomadism, ability to flee into the mountains and caves, and “loose and shifting identities” allowed them historically to remain ungovernable.
There is ample evidence that Kingsnorth, despite his criticism of progress and of utopian scheming, has given in to this romantic temptation to dream of a future untethered to the past, free from the burdens of our messy history.Tweet This
“Any attempt at building utopia will fail,” Kingsnorth warns. Not utopia but “some form of free survival is the goal,” Kingsnorth says: “Survival in order to live a life unconformed to the dictates of the Machine, and to uphold the values of a true human life.”
Utopians never imagine that they are building utopia. To the utopian, the plan always sounds attainable, at least in some distant future. But the hallmark of a utopian scheme is that it is based on an abstraction, so there are no practical steps that can be taken to bring us any closer to the goal. The desire to live “unconformed to the dictates of the Machine” is such an abstraction. How can we ever hope to live unconformed to a thing that, as Kingsnorth has said, is “a tendency within us”?
It is worth asking: Where does Kingsnorth believe that the Machine comes from? He rightly points to the dangers of rationalism that were present in the Enlightenment and to the destructive tendencies within Rousseauistic romanticism. But at the same time, Kingsnorth lays heavy stress on the historical importance of economic relations between human beings, in a way that parallels Marx’s reading of history.
“I’m no Marxist” Kingsnorth says when he highlights what he takes to be the “brilliant insights” of The Communist Manifesto. But he then says, “we can usefully understand our time by seeing in it the final result of the centuries-long tension between the merchant class and everyone else.” Kingsnorth is not wrong to see some value in Marx’s criticism of modernity. Technological and industrial society is dehumanizing and alienating. But are Marx and Kingsnorth correct that an entire class of people—call it “merchant” or “bourgeois”—is guilty for modernity’s woes, or that the antagonism between a guilty class and a non-guilty underclass is one of the main drivers of history?
Kingsnorth asserts, quoting Marx, that this guilty class has “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism” and “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’” These are the words of a revolutionary. Indeed, they are from one of the most revolutionary documents in history, The Communist Manifesto. And they are not remembered for their insights into the nature of contemporary society but for setting the world aflame.
Russell Kirk, who shares many of Kingsnorth’s criticisms of technocracy and greed, writes in Beyond the Dreams of Avarice that the Marxist does “service to Mammon” no less than the capitalist. “Proletarian avarice,” Kirk says,
is no less corrupting than the avarice of an oligarchy: indeed, it may be more disastrous to a society than the passionate accumulation of possessions by a few, because the triumphant proletariat is less disposed to tolerate the dissenter, the eremite, the contemplative.
is no less corrupting than the avarice of an oligarchy: indeed, it may be more disastrous to a society than the passionate accumulation of possessions by a few, because the triumphant proletariat is less disposed to tolerate the dissenter, the eremite, the contemplative.
Kingsnorth seems not to consider this in his reading of history. Moreover, it is worth considering why Kingsnorth sees the rise of the merchant class as problematic. Is it because its rise ultimately has separated us from Christ? Or because it has given rise to this thing called the Machine?
We can perhaps infer that Kingsnorth believes the Machine separates us from Christ, but that is a theme that he does not develop. Rather, Kingsnorth devotes much energy lamenting the environmental degradation that results from our overabundance and wastefulness. After recalling when a little town in which he took a family vacation revealed to him the sordid, pleasure-seeking nature of modern man, Kingsnorth says,
We can enjoy our little towns here in the richer bits of the world because the waste we generate through our excited purchases of big-screen tellies, Lego sets, foreign holidays, cheap clothes, cheap food and all the rest of it always ends up somewhere else. The dioxins and PCBs go into the water and soil, the plastic goes into the oceans, the carbon dioxide goes into the air. Fifty million tonnes of ‘e-waste’ is dumped every year, much of it shipped to the poorest countries on Earth.
We can enjoy our little towns here in the richer bits of the world because the waste we generate through our excited purchases of big-screen tellies, Lego sets, foreign holidays, cheap clothes, cheap food and all the rest of it always ends up somewhere else. The dioxins and PCBs go into the water and soil, the plastic goes into the oceans, the carbon dioxide goes into the air. Fifty million tonnes of ‘e-waste’ is dumped every year, much of it shipped to the poorest countries on Earth.
And he goes on.
Kingsnorth connects small-town life in a tourist village with major environmental degradation, as if the moms and pops who own chocolatier shops and cafes are morally culpable. On his reading, the folks who buy and sell in these little towns (or even in major cities) are committing crimes for whatever waste may be generated or whatever pleasure may be had (from “cappuccinos” and “old castles,” he says). Modernity is rife with problems, but Kingsnorth seems to present all forms of civilized life as inherently degrading and morally suspect. This is to play the part of the secular environmentalist rather than the classical or Christian social critic who sees, with Aristotle, that “all associations aim at some good.”
Kingsnorth criticizes Rousseau, to be sure, but his sweeping condemnation of modernity nonetheless comes across as romantic. I say this not because Kingsnorth longs for a return to nature but because of a certain tone of resignation, which is typical of romanticism. He laments that he must use a computer even though he hates the thing. He laments that he must use the internet even though he needs it. He laments that there are cars even though he says, “the best thing I ever bought was my VW camper van.” He laments that when he looks up, he imagines that he sees the grid, yet he lives in beautiful, rural Ireland and homeschools his children. For the romantic, life is never as it should be, and there is not much that we, as individual persons, can do about it.
The belief that our world is wildly deficient and that if only things were different, we could be more humane, happier, closer to nature, etc. is dangerous insofar as it tends toward anger and hatred. One gets this sense of romantic melancholy turned to anger reading Against the Machine. We are guilty of creating the Machine, but we are also its “cogs.” We are experiencing “a historical cycle, and that cycle won’t be altered by any of us,” Kingsnorth says. And, “the very possibility of living cultures in ‘advanced’ countries (i.e., the countries most under [the Machine’s] sway) is impossible.”
If the Machine is the predetermined outcome for all of human society—recall, it was already present in Pharaonic Egypt—then what can we do about it other than grieve our own existence within it?
There are indeed passages in Against the Machine in which Kingsnorth seems to give in to the temptation to despair. “I don’t hate many things in this world” Kingsnorth says in one chapter, “hate is an emotion I can’t sustain for long—but I hate screens, and I hate the digital anticulture.” Later, he says, “I hate cars.” He goes so far as to say, “When I see people taking selfies on mountaintops, I want to push them off.”
One gets the sense that Kingsnorth hates many things about modernity. Even the monks on Mt. Athos do not escape Kingsnorth’s judgment. “I’m trying not to judge here,” Kingsnorth says, but “smartphones in a place so dedicated to prayer and to God” are unacceptable. “Even here, I thought, even them.”
Kingsnorth reveals not only a romantic desire to live in a society that is utterly different from the one that we have inherited, technology and all, but also a lack of imagination. Could it not be the case that human beings can have the self-control to use technology for good? If not, if it is an unqualified evil that will eventually destroy humanity, as Kingsnorth says, then perhaps he should lead the revolution by example. He does not have to use a computer for a living. He owns fertile land. Why not till it and reap a harvest? Unplug, toss the computer, get off the grid! It’ll be hard work, but then he could be at peace with himself knowing that he is not contributing to the Machine.
If Kingsnorth prefers the business of writing over the work of farming, and he sees good in the work that he produces, then perhaps there is something to be said for modern technology, for screens, and for the internet. Maybe it isn’t a necessary evil but a qualified good. I am reminded of the words of an Orthodox saint. On the icon of Matushka Olga, her scroll reads, “God can create great beauty from complete desolation.”
For the Christian, material reality, such as technology represents, does not drive history. Cultures and civilizations ebb and flow, but God is always present and always at work in human affairs. He does not sit back and watch as His creation runs rampant, be it in building the tower of Babel or the Machine. He is no watchmaker God. There is always space for the Christian to form community, however small and however harsh the conditions.
Christian life will look different according to circumstance. The question to ask is not how to create a world altogether different from the one that we have inherited or to resign ourselves to the dystopia. For the Christian, the question must always be: How can I follow Christ in the given circumstances? The beauty is that following Christ in those given circumstances will have a leavening effect. The world does not remain the same in the presence of Christianity lived to its fullest.
As for the question of technology in particular, the Aristotelian idea of the Gold Mean is instructive: it should be used in the right way, for the right reason, and toward the right end. This type of practical wisdom requires, above all, a moral imagination.
Had the book’s concluding emphases been on statements such as, we must battle our “own internal demons” or our “most effective weapon is sacrifice,” then it might have made good on the dust jacket’s promise of being “a spiritual manual.” But Kingsnorth does not elaborate on these ideas the way that he elaborates on the problem of carbon emissions and material waste or the belief that we must start anew in the West. After many chapters that state, in one way or another, that we are “sick with consumerism, eye-glazed with screen burn, confused, rudderless, Godless,” Kingsnorth says that the best that he can offer as far as practical advice is to “raindance on the astroturf.”
The book tries to conclude with a message of hope. Kingsnorth says that this “is the time we were born for. We can’t leave it, so we have to fully inhabit it. We have to understand it, challenge it, resist it, subvert it, walk through it on towards something better.” Yet we must ask what this actually means. The preceding pages of the book have painted a picture of modernity so bleak and desolate that one is left wondering, how do we inhabit this place or subvert it? The “practical” advice to emulate the Southeast Asian hill people is not particularly helpful to families rooted in particular places. Nor is the “spiritual” advice to “raindance” and “call down the powers” helpful.
Kingsnorth reminds us, “People, place, prayer, the past.” But again, we must ask what these mean concretely.
We could build communities. We could write books. We could plant trees. We could do anything, really. None of it will ‘solve’ all of the world’s problems, or all of ours. We are still going to die; and so, one day, is the Machine. But what will we do in the meantime?
What will we do?
“Raindance on the astroturf,” Kingsnorth answers.
Raindance to call down the Spirit upon them and us. Raindance to defy the Machine. Raindance to remember your ancestors. Raindance to offer up prayers to your home. Raindance to the forest and the prairie and the meadow. Raindance to reclaim your stories.
Raindance to call down the Spirit upon them and us. Raindance to defy the Machine. Raindance to remember your ancestors. Raindance to offer up prayers to your home. Raindance to the forest and the prairie and the meadow. Raindance to reclaim your stories.
At this cultural juncture in which romanticism reigns as the new religion, an effusive and emotive “spirituality” will not do. The day is far spent. What is needed is the refreshing beauty and order of traditional Christianity. Many a hippy and pseudo-mystic has tried to mine from Christianity its ancient mysticism and eternal truths while leaving behind its concrete liturgical practices and rigor. But it is these rituals that allow us to enter into its mysteries and its rich, life-changing possibilities. We cannot have the one without the other. Let us heed Kingsnorth’s warnings about the dangers of modern technocracy—the Machine. He is correct about its dehumanizing tendencies and its tentacle-like reach into our private lives. But we need not become overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible task of subverting it or creating a new culture. Our task is more modest: to follow Christ and, in so doing, revive our already-existing Christian culture. Far from being dead, this culture is being renewed every day.
Author
Emily Finley holds a PhD in Politics from The Catholic University of America. Find her on Substack at https://efinley.substack.com/.
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I appreciate this long review. I’m halfway through the book, and so far find it to be just as the author describes–ideosyncratic, romantic, and (often) wrong. Kingsnorth’s bizarre statement that the people who built the pyramids worked in lockstep with machine-like precision while being brutally oppressed (for centuries, I guess) is only one example of his taking the worst possible view of human life. Going by the chapter based on Mumford’s condemnation of the modern city, you’d think that the industrial revolution was a time of unmitigated misery. While it certainly was a time of misery for many, it was also an age of exploration, discovery, artistic achievement, and plenty of other human triumphs. Life is complicated. I’m not saying his overall thesis is wrong, but he says it took years to figure out what’s wrong (the thing he calls “the Machine”) and I think there’s a lot more to be figured out. Maybe what he sees as “the Machine” is life outside Eden.
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