Paul Kingsnorth’s star has risen. Since his latest book, Against the Machine, was published last September, he has recorded countless podcast interviews and delivered high-profile public lectures. His apocalyptic view of the modern world, along with his yearning for pre-modern Christendom, has found resonance especially on the political right. Rod Dreher, the Trump-supporting Christian reactionary who moved to Hungary in 2022 to enjoy the blessings of illiberal democracy, has called Kingsnorth a “prophet.”
But his ideas have also found traction among a wider readership. Last fall, Kingsnorth was favorably reviewed in the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times, which praised him as an iconoclast and a spiritual seeker. These reviewers are captivated partly by his biography. Kingsnorth began his career as an environmental writer and anti-globalization activist before declaring his disillusionment with the progressive left. He is a poet and novelist whose work was long-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize. In 2014, he renounced urban civilization, moved to rural Ireland to live off the land, and began homeschooling his children. He was Wiccan and a Buddhist before converting, in 2020, to the Romanian Orthodox Church. He positions himself as a freethinker who, in a world swimming in artifice, has both feet firmly planted on the ground.
Against the Machine, which is full of reflections on Kingsnorth’s own personal travails, is not entirely bereft of wisdom. In its strongest moments, it explores the truly radical ways in which consumer capitalism in the digital age is remaking human relationships, changing the way we see and think, capturing and monetizing our attention. Kingsnorth sees our rush to embrace new technologies, heedless of their human and ecological costs, as a kind of collective derangement animated by our complacent faith in technological progress. His urgent call to scrutinize the ideological underpinnings of this faith is timely and important. Buried in this 300-page screed against modernity lie the makings of a good book, a useful book.
Kingsnorth surrenders completely to his melodramatic impulses, presenting modern history as an apocalyptic contest between Good and Evil.
But that is not the book Kingsnorth chose to write. The volume he produced instead is useful mainly in illuminating the pitfalls of reactionary thinking. Kingsnorth surrenders completely to his melodramatic impulses, presenting modern history as an apocalyptic contest between Good and Evil. He refuses to strive for conceptual or analytical precision, leaving his analysis a mess of contradictions and conceptual muddles. He eschews complexity and intellectual humility in favor of caricature and oracular self-importance. Worst of all, he rehashes right-wing talking points and lends tacit support to reactionary authoritarianism at a time when its destructive power is growing across the world.
Demonic Modernity
Against the Machine unfolds in a series of short chapters that weave together personal anecdotes and high theory. They transport us across time and space, from the supermarket aisles where Kingsnorth realizes that “everything is fake” to imperial Japan in 1853 to the English Civil War. Through these travels, we learn that the entire sweep of modern history has been driven by a single dominant logic: the logic of the Machine. Since the Protestant Reformation, this Machine has been colonizing human civilization and ruthlessly squeezing out anything that opposes it. It is a “totalising, utopian” project, writes Kingsnorth (153). And he describes its goal variously as the enslavement of humankind, techno-totalitarianism, or the transformation of human beings into machines (147, 183, 227).
If this story brings to mind the plotline of a 90s action thriller, this seems to be what Kingsnorth intends. The book is peppered with references to The Matrix and the Terminator movies—with the Machine cast in the role of Skynet, the AI superintelligence that wipes out most of humanity in a nuclear holocaust and then sends Arnold Schwarzenegger back through time to wreak havoc. Kingsnorth’s main storyline evinces only slightly more subtlety: it features a titanic struggle between Good and Evil, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance. Evil is embodied, of course, in the immensely powerful Machine that he describes, by the end of the book, as a “demonic” force and as the “Antichrist.” The good, meanwhile, resides among a ragtag band of misfits and rebels who have stared evil in the face and found the courage to resist it. These include the nineteenth-century Luddites who famously burned mechanized looms to preserve their artisanal craft; the seventeenth-century Fen Tigers who carved their meager subsistence out of the swamps of Eastern England and fought the Crown’s plans to drain them for farmland; and latter-day back-to-the-landers—like Kingsnorth himself—who have renounced urban civilization to cultivate their garden.
Evil is embodied, of course, in the immensely powerful Machine that Kingsnorth describes, by the end of the book, as a “demonic” force and as the “Antichrist.”
What is the Machine, exactly? Try too hard to answer this question and the book’s main argument starts to crumble.
What is the Machine, exactly? Try too hard to answer this question and the book’s main argument starts to crumble. The truth is that Kingsnorth offers no careful definition of his own master concept. Instead, readers are treated to a parade of sprawling generalizations and loose juxtapositions that encompass everything he dislikes in the modern world, from AI to Covid vaccines to public schools. He declares, for example, that “[t]he contemporary Western gaze is the gaze of the Machine; of Enlightenment Man, of cosmopolis, of reason, of money” (265). In an earlier chapter, he sums up the Machine with a different list: “Progress; ‘openness’; an objection to limits and borders; therapeutic individualism; universalism; the rejection of roots, place and history; pure materialism; the triumph of ‘reason’ over ‘superstition’; scientism; commercialism and the primacy of market values” (42). Later he presents “sex” and “the screen” as essential Machine values (133). What does Kingsnorth think he’s conveying with this jumble of mismatched abstractions? If there’s any single sentiment being expressed here, it’s the conspiratorial feeling that everything is connected: Kingsnorth may not be able to explain it to us clearly, but he knows intuitively that it’s true.
To be fair, Kingsnorth does make some attempt to locate the common thread that unifies these disparate facets of modern life. The main culprit, apparently, is the “deep desire for control” that animates the modern thirst for scientific knowledge and the quest for new technologies. He discerns this impulse in the left’s attempts at social reform and their faith in moral progress (69). He sees it in the relentless pursuit of efficiency that drives modern capitalism, overpowers “human-scale ways of living,” and enmeshes everything in its widening web (118). All of this, he suggests, springs from the same psychological source: our compulsion “to know the world, and to bend it to our will”—and to transgress any limits we encounter along the way (75). By “the world” here, he means not just the natural environment but societies and cultures, other people, and human nature itself. If you squint hard enough, you can see the outlines of a coherent story.
Kingsnorth’s main culprit, apparently, is the “deep desire for control” that animates the modern thirst for scientific knowledge and the quest for new technologies.
But open your eyes and it falls apart. This “desire for control” is so broad that it can be found lurking everywhere: in the search for better cancer treatments, in the effort to deconstruct caste hierarchies, in the mass murder of European Jews. All are examples of human beings striving to impose their will on “the world.” This desire also seems to encompass some of the ascetic and spiritual practices that Kingsnorth himself recommends. “The purpose of askesis,” he writes late in the book, “is self-control. Learning this will allow us to avoid the various pits and snares of life which knock us off the path that leads to holiness—wholeness—and onto the path which leads to pride and self-love” (303). The intentional living that Kingsnorth celebrates, which requires a certain quality of attention and a capacity to know and subdue our own desires, is clearly an attempt to regain a measure of control over our minds and lives in a world full of commercialized distraction and dissipation. Likewise, the local, sustainable economies he lauds reflect a deliberate plan for communal living. Kingsnorth is not, it turns out, suggesting that we relinquish control and set ourselves adrift in the currents of time and history.
Nor does Kingsnorth acknowledge the ways in which modern societies, under the influence of liberal ideas, have surrendered control by imposing limits. Before Protestant thinkers began calling for the separation of church and state and theorizing the rights of individual conscience, medieval governments claimed vast powers over the inner lives of their subjects. The Inquisition and the Albigensian crusade—during which a quarter million Christians in southern France were massacred for their heterodox beliefs—illustrate this tendency clearly enough. Likewise, modern feminism was born out of the impulse to limit men’s discretionary control over their wives and daughters. In fact, just about every struggle for social or political reform can be described simultaneously as an effort to assert and to disrupt control. What usually matters, in all of this, is not the desire for control as such, but who gets to exercise it, and to what end, and within what constraints. My point here is that Kingsnorth’s story is too simplistic to be illuminating.
Some small part of Kingsnorth understands that the intellectual’s role is to explore and illuminate complexity. Some part of him understands that it’s absurd to assimilate all of modern history to the narrative genre of an action flick. At various points in the book, we find the briefest acknowledgments that modern life—Machine life—might not be all bad. He interrupts his discussion of the evils of urbanization, for example, to note that “it would be daft” to deny all of the supposed richness of urban living. In a few short sentences, he grudgingly acknowledges the value of “art galleries” as well as some other “anonymous, seedy fun” (81). But Kingsnorth can’t help himself: his heart isn’t in it, and he reverts quickly to his melodramatic screed. Soon, he’s describing cities as “black holes” that destroy human agency, eviscerate human culture, consume the natural environment, and ruthlessly privilege profit over any other human value (83-85).
Kingsnorth describes cities as “black holes” that destroy human agency, eviscerate human culture, and ruthlessly privilege profit over any other human value.
Readers familiar with the social and political thinking of the new, reactionary right know that this apocalyptic vein is all too common. It is an understandable temptation: the worse you can make modern life look, the more plausible your yearnings for some pre-modern halcyon become. But there is a more specific rhetorical strategy at work here, too. These writers begin by identifying some genuinely sinister aspects of 21st-century life—such as the dangers posed by unregulated AI, our epidemic of screen addiction, or the moral catastrophe of unchecked climate change. They argue that these dangers are connected by some iron logic to other aspects of modernity that offend them, from feminism and LGBTQ rights to vaccines or the separation of church and state. Having thus revealed the inner spring that makes liberal modernity tick, they then admonish us against half measures: to save everything good and true from this looming apocalypse, they claim, we have to take down the entire “system.” This is how you talk yourself into sympathizing with the reactionary political movements that are cresting across the world, with liberal democracy in their sights.
The Dictatorship of Reason
Like many other reactionary treatises, Against the Machine displays a recognizable intellectual method—you might call it oracular essentialism. Like an oracle or prophet, Kingsnorth has seen the shape of things to come. He has peered into the annals of human history and understood the logic that unites it all. Having grasped this timeless essence, he can then ignore the innumerable complexities and countercurrents that hint at alternative conclusions. One hallmark of this method is the impulse to reduce complex empirical or historical phenomena to two-dimensional caricatures. Another is a loose and highly selective treatment of historical evidence. To insist that an oracle marshal his facts carefully would, after all, seem pedantic, if not insolent.
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Like many other reactionary treatises, Against the Machine displays a recognizable intellectual method—you might call it oracular essentialism.
We find this method at work throughout the book. Thus, we learn that the Reformation unleashed radical individualism and set the modern West on a course, inexorably, to pure materialism and irreligion (72-3). We learn that scientific inquiry tends, invariably, toward the tyranny of technology and the banishment of the sacred (76). We learn that the Enlightenment, and the French and American revolutions inspired by its ideas, gave rise to the “dictatorship of reason in the West,” whose “inevitable result” was wanton violence, from “religious bloodbaths to the Napoleonic wars.” Its natural endpoint, of course, was the holocaust, which Kingsnorth describes (quoting Canadian historian John Ralston Saul) as a “perfectly rational act” (62).
Reason comes in for especially harsh treatment in Against the Machine. Kingsnorth sees its displacement of faith and spirituality, and its denigration of intuitive wisdom, as the key to our modern discontents. Of course, he never explains exactly what he means by “reason.” The closest he gets is in an extended discussion of French sociologist Jacques Ellul’s idea of “technique,” which stands for “the translation into action of man’s concern to master things by means of reason” (116). Ellul was concerned, mainly, with the quest for efficiency. He argued that modernity is increasingly structured by a compulsion to optimize every aspect of human life, which snuffs out spontaneity, variety, and meaning. Here again is Kingsnorth’s “desire for control,” projected onto an impersonal system—comprised of modern states, growth-dependent capitalist economies, and invasive technologies—which demands ever greater regularity, legibility, and productivity. Ellul was an insightful thinker, and there is power in this analysis.
Reason comes in for especially harsh treatment in Against the Machine. Kingsnorth sees its displacement of faith and spirituality, and its denigration of intuitive wisdom, as the key to our modern discontents.
The kind of reason Ellul described is what philosophers call “means-ends” rationality: the quest to find the most efficient means to achieve some given objective. It has delivered cheap solar panels and indoor plumbing as surely as gulags and nuclear bombs. But there are other expressions of reason, too. In fact, philosophers from the Enlightenment onward have used the term in a broader sense, to describe the effort to justify ourselves to one another—among equals—by giving reasons and evidence. They have insisted, especially, that power needs justifying. A society is more rational, in this sense, to the extent that its power relations can be justified to all members in a way that respects their dignity and autonomy. The opposite of rationality is arbitrariness—as in the arbitrary power of the despot who justifies himself to no one. Democratic ideals are an expression of this second conception of reason.
These two contrasting ideas of reason suggest different ideas of progress: efficiency maximization on the one hand, mutual justification on the other. And although these ideas sometimes go hand in hand, they have often diverged dramatically. Consider just one example: the industrial revolution was launched, in part, through the cotton plantations of the American South, which were organized around a brutally efficient form of slave labor. A new generation of scholars has painstakingly documented the ruthless quest for efficiency that dominated these plantations, as slaveholders found ever more ingenious ways of terrorizing enslaved people into frantic productivity. Here is a horrific example of Ellul’s technique, unbound by any moral constraints. On the other hand, the abolitionist movement that arose in the 1830s in the United States mobilized a different idea of reason, inflected with Protestant universalism and the moral principles of the Scottish Enlightenment. The most radical of these abolitionists aimed to reconstruct American society along egalitarian lines, as a racially inclusive democracy. They believed that racial hierarchy was a manifestation of prejudice and arbitrary power and wholly unjustifiable among rational human beings.
Kingsnorth’s entire position about modernity depends on the claim that these two forms of reason (and progress) are either identical or inseparable. In fact, he acknowledges no distinction at all. To his eyes, both look like hubristic assaults on customary ways of life, perpetrated by innovators and reformers who were, at best, breathtakingly naïve. Unlike them, Kingsnorth has divined that the essence of human reason is the tyranny of “technique” and declared it to be profane.
There are, of course, deep and interesting questions to consider about the many tangled legacies of the Enlightenment, and how its diverse ideas of reason relate to one another, both historically and philosophically. Many smart historians and philosophers, from Max Weber to Hannah Arendt to Sven Beckert, have done their part to help untangle this complicated web. Paul Kingsnorth is not one of them. Instead, he often resorts to oracular pronouncements that would make these thinkers blush. “Liberal modernity, in short, is doomed,” he announces at the conclusion of a chapter that rails at the simplistic utopianism of Tech Bros (63). Or even better (cue the Matrix soundtrack): “What fuel does this [Machine] run on? … very soon, you are going to understand the answer before you have even asked it: The fuel is nature. The fuel is life. The fuel is you” (italics in original; 69-70).
It may seem odd to read such sentences in a book that warns so pointedly against intellectual hubris. Kingsnorth abhors the hubris of the rationalist who believes that everything can be known to the “deductive, logical, reasoning mind” (235). What he fails to acknowledge is that Enlightenment reason, at its best, is an intellectual discipline designed to hold other forms of hubris at bay. These include the hubris of the obscurantist or mystic who, dispensing with the need for sound evidence and analytical clarity, mistakes his own feelings and intuitions for the essence of things—and then compounds his errors by proselytizing. Kingsnorth does himself no favors when he places the terms “fact checked,” “peer reviewed,” and “the scientific method” in scare quotes, thus heaping scorn on the aspiration to intellectual rigor itself (285, 215).
Authoritarian Nostalgia
It is difficult to understand the significance of any book without considering its intellectual and political context. Against the Machine was published in the United States at a time when right-wing politicians are stoking virulent xenophobia, brutalizing immigrants, shattering Constitutional limits, eviscerating humanitarian aid, assailing medical and scientific expertise, vilifying gay and trans people, and unleashing masked paramilitaries to clean up urban “cesspools”—all in service of a hazy vision of the golden past. Anyone who launches a reactionary treatise into this conflagration runs the obvious risk of adding fuel to it. In fact, it is easy to imagine Donald Trump’s acolytes persuading themselves that they’re striking virtuous blows against the Machine. The fact that Kingsnorth praises pro-Trump intellectuals and appears on podcasts hosted by right-wing propagandists only throws this danger into sharper relief. What then does he have to say about all of this?
It is easy to imagine Donald Trump’s acolytes persuading themselves that they’re striking virtuous blows against the Machine.
There are a few passages scattered across the book in which Kingsnorth distances himself from the illiberal politics of the authoritarian right. In a chapter that praises the ethnostate and draws inspiration from the right-wing nationalist Yoram Hazony, for example, Kingsnorth includes a very brief warning against the vilification of immigrants: “Blame the immigrants if you like,” he writes, “—it’s always the easy option—but they didn’t strip the soul out of the nations of the West” (203). Such admonitions raise more questions than they answer. First, why are they so tepid and fleeting? Considering the strident tone that Kingsnorth employs throughout most of the book, his lack of conviction here is unmistakable. In the same chapter, he insists that the dangers of excessive nationalism are overshadowed by the left’s desire to uproot nations altogether “in some pseudo-egalitarian frenzy” (204).
Kingsnorth’s moral scruples raise deeper questions, too. Let us assume that he rejects xenophobia and ethnic chauvinism. Let us assume that his nostalgia for the pre-Enlightenment world does not include a penchant for religious persecution, feudal exploitation, patriarchal domination, or divine-right authoritarianism. Let us assume that the few cryptic lines in this book about “justice for communities” and “a fair and balanced moral, social, and economic order” are sincere (281). (In his podcast appearances, he sounds sincere about these things.) Where do such ideas come from? On what moral principles do they rest?
One of the strangest conceits in the entire book is Kingsnorth’s notion that he can just insert these beliefs—like so many light copyedits to a completed manuscript—into the ethos of the medieval peasantry (or, for that matter, the Fen Tigers, the Cossacks, the Marsh Arabs, or the other renegade peoples he admires). In one of the few paragraphs that outline his recommendations for the future, Kingsnorth calls for radical decentralization, localism, and de-urbanization. He wants a “moral economy” premised on neighborly love, not competition. Like the agrarian essayist and poet Wendell Berry, he yearns for a politics of place which “aims to limit rather than multiply our needs.” And he wants all of this to be realized “without excluding the outsider” (284). Reading between the lines, it seems that he also wants democratic local governance, with voting power distributed to everyone, not just white Christian men.
Does he really fail to see that this egalitarian vision—in the Western mind at least—is among the hard-earned fruits of the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the great modern revolutions that he spends the book condemning? Does he not recognize it as an expression of the universalism he scorns? As a Christian convert, Kingsnorth would presumably rest this vision of localist harmony on the ethical teachings of Christ. But Christ’s moral outlook was itself radically universalist. And until Protestant reformers began to secularize it into a doctrine of individual rights, of government by consent, and of rightful resistance to tyrannical rule, it had precious little bearing on the way Western societies were governed. The Enlightenment—in both its secular French versions and its devout Scottish variants—finally brought this intellectual project to fruition.
It is easy to imagine right-wing readers dismissing Kingsnorth’s perfunctory appeals to justice and inclusion as evidence that he has not completed his own break with the Machine.
Here is another way of posing the same question. It is easy to imagine right-wing readers dismissing Kingsnorth’s perfunctory appeals to justice and inclusion as evidence that he has not completed his own break with the Machine. After all, the book teaches us that reason and universalism are features of the Machine-mind, which does violence to everything customary by trying to remap human society along “straight lines,” producing a soulless conformity (292). The original modern reactionaries—including the French Catholic Joseph de Maistre—saw moral equality and individual rights as emblems of this very conformity. What are these ideals if not “straight lines” imposed on the delightfully crooked stuff of medieval custom? The same arguments can be found, only a few years later, among Christian defenders of American slavery who denounced the airy, geometric abstractions of the Declaration of Independence as unsuitable for organic human cultures. As far as I can tell, Against the Machine offers no explanation of why Kingsnorth’s own analysis should not compel him to follow a similar trajectory.
Whose Freedom?
Another, related perplexity centers on the ideal of freedom, which stands out as the single most important moral standard in the book. The Machine is evil because it threatens us all with slavery or totalitarian control. The goal of the resistance, writes Kingsnorth, must be “some form of free survival” (294). Like virtually all the other key concepts in the book, freedom is never carefully defined or explained. Sometimes—in his paean to the Fen Tigers, for instance—Kingsnorth seems to be describing what philosophers call autarky. A people or nation is free, in this sense, so long as they are not ruled by outsiders. This is hardly an attractive ideal: it is compatible with slavery and other forms of profound subjugation—as long as they’re practiced by insiders.
At other points in the text, however, Kingsnorth seems to be holding up an idea of individual freedom as his lodestone. He writes, for example, about his own personal struggles to resist the colonizing incursions of technology, consumerism, and intolerant groupthink. These passages show him trying to live life on his own terms, governed by his own reflective ideals. And Kingsnorth seems to want this not just for himself but for others too; not just for white men but for everyone. These are the passages in which Kingsnorth makes common cause—despite himself—with some of the classic texts of Western liberalism, from Mill’s On Liberty to Thoreau’s Walden. How they’re supposed to fit with his nostalgia for the medieval past is anyone’s guess.
Kingsnorth sometimes makes common cause—despite himself—with some of the classic texts of Western liberalism.
The ugliest passages in the book, by contrast, are those in which Kingsnorth refuses to acknowledge this very yearning for freedom in others. He mocks progressives for their desire to “topple statues of long-dead slave traders” without acknowledging what these statues mean to Black people living in their shadow (140). He derides contemporary feminism as “a device for filling workplaces with females” but offers no serious discussion of the condition of women in any pre-modern society (41, 187). He assures us that the psychological anguish of transgender youth is not “the real issue”—the real issue, it turns out, is the billionaire transhumanists who are using these kids to pursue an agenda that points toward “nanotechnology, ‘cyberconsciousness software’ and perhaps, ultimately, the end of their physical embodiment altogether” (178). These passages stand out for their lack of empathy—and their lack, even, of any real intellectual curiosity. Kingsnorth simply isn’t interested in the struggles for liberation, or the many forms of oppression and marginalization, that do not fit neatly into his Machine narrative.
Kingsnorth simply isn’t interested in the struggles for liberation, or the many forms of oppression and marginalization, that do not fit neatly into his Machine narrative.
This lack of empathy underwrites another, final failure. In the brief sections of the book devoted to constructive solutions, Kingsnorth counsels us either to abandon modern life and model ourselves on the Amish, or to practice a more moderate agrarian localism with an internet connection—like him. If this were a how-to guide written for affluent but disaffected urbanites, these might be adequate (if bracing) suggestions. But this is a book with much bigger ambitions: it proclaims that “the West must die” and that we should do what we can to hasten its demise (265). What would this demise portend for the billions of people who can’t relocate their families to rural Ireland and buy a plot of land to cultivate? What would it hold in store for city dwellers, for religious and ethnic minorities, for people who need advanced medical treatment? Kingsnorth has nothing to say about any of this. In this sense, his positive vision is an abdication, a refusal to give serious consideration to the questions his own book poses.
This abdication, too, is a familiar feature of reactionary thinking, which tends to exhaust itself in the gleeful work of cataloging the supposed horrors of modern civilization. In the fleeting moment, near the end of the book, where he seems to acknowledge the inadequacy of his own solutions, Kingsnorth reverts to his preferred genre. “Sometimes the ridiculous ideas are the only ones worth having,” he writes—like sending “two halflings to throw a ring into a volcano under the nose of the dark lord. It was madness. But it worked” (317). Readers interested in charting a morally serious path forward will have to look elsewhere.
Alex Zakaras is Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont. He is the author of several books, including Freedom for All: What a Liberal Society Could Be (2025) and The Roots of American Individualism: Political Myth in the Age of Jackson (2022).
Image made using “Paul Kingsnorth,” by Navjoat Kingsnorth licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. All other images used are in the public domain.
