Against Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘Against the Machine’
A Charitable (I Hope) Critique
Toward the end of
’s Against the Machine, he paints an attractive picture of people free to pursue value and meaning in small pockets of community and industry. He highlights “a politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion.”My inner anarchist cartwheeled at his description of “a system built around community bonds, local economics, and human-scale systems,” where the reach of the totalitarian state gains little purchase, populated by—in James C. Scott’s descriptor—“barbarians by design.”
But! And you can’t even imagine all the contrariness I’m cramming into that humble coordinating conjunction. But! The barbarian stands outside civilization, and I reject Kingsnorth’s description of the civilization he urges us to exit.
Let me start with a caveat and show some cards; the rest of my hand will be revealed as I go. I don’t read books to dismantle them and don’t review books as takedowns; that can be useful, but I find it distasteful and get no joy from it. When I read disagreeable books, I do so with self-imposed criteria you can find here.
More important than that, however, books are written by authors, by people. I have no relationship with Kingsnorth; he lives an ocean away, and I don’t believe I’ve ever had one exchange with him online. But he’s an Orthodox Christian, as am I. He’s a brother, and however we differ, we have more in common than not. I’ve read some of his work—I’ve been, for instance, fascinated by his posts about sacred wells. I suspect I’d enjoy his company for hours on end. If opportunity ever presents, and I hope it does, I’d jump on it.
I say that to underscore the spirit in which I offer this critique. Take it as you will, but there is no malice in what follows. There is, however, considerable disagreement. I scribbled my way through the entire thing.
From where I sit, the whole project gets off on the wrong foot.
The Wrong Story
Kingsnorth begins by describing what he sees as a complete break in the West’s self-understanding as it shifted from a Christian culture to a secular society. He describes this shift as a death, “leaving only ruins.” But this bungles the story.
Secularism is the product of Christianity, as were both earlier and subsequent developments Kingsnorth derides: capitalism, individualism, liberalism, and so on. They are all part of how the West interpreted and applied its Christian heritage to meet various societal needs.
Secularism was, as Kingsnorth acknowledges, an answer to warring Christian groups after the Reformation. Agreeing to disagree—that is, allowing for some sort of common ground if only as a practical concession—beat endless bloodshed over who had the “correct” set of beliefs. I, for one, am grateful to sip coffee with my Catholic neighbor instead of lancing him on a muddy field somewhere. But contra Kingsnorth, the intent wasn’t to replace religion with Christless secularism; that may have been an effect—it’s at least worth debating—but it was not by design as he claims.
This sort of mischaracterization runs all through the book. Kingsnorth approvingly quotes G.K. Chesterton damning capitalism as “a monster that grows in deserts.” Chesterton was clearsighted about many things, but he overlooks his own tradition’s role in capitalism’s emergence and what that origin might tell us about the thing itself. Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason shows how, for instance, capitalism arose from European monastic communities where agricultural produce was cultivated, traded, and managed with the development of cash, credit, interest, and investment. Widespread technological innovation folds into this story as well, as detailed by scholars such as Lynn White Jr.1 The industrial revolution? Read French medievalist Jean Gimpel and it’s clear its trajectory began in the Middle Ages.2
Pointing to medieval origins doesn’t cancel Kingsnorth’s criticisms. Monks trading grain and wool and building windmills operated at a different scale than Amazon’s global logistics empire, and size can transform the nature of a thing. The question is whether modern capitalism represents a continuous development or a qualitative break. I lean toward the former.
What about the negatives that populate Kingsnorth’s narrative? The fact that various players have historically coopted political power and used it to direct ill-gotten riches to themselves says less about capitalism and industry than it does about human failings: arrogance, greed, and the like. Perhaps other systems offer different checks on those sins; it’s harder to play monopoly in, say, Communist Cuba—unless, of course, you rule the island. Even then, I suspect the Cubans aren’t noticeably more virtuous than their North American neighbors.
Along with capitalism, monasteries also helped foster individualism and liberalism. Through both theological and social innovation, Christianity challenged the Greco-Roman dominance of the family and carved out a pocket for personal autonomy and conscience to flourish. In Inventing the Individual, Larry Siedentop follows this trajectory from St. Paul through medieval monasticism and into the modern era. “Christian moral beliefs emerge as the ultimate source of the social revolution that has made the West what it is,” says Siedentop.
We can add to this recital, but I think it’s sufficient to say that where Kingsnorth beholds rupture and ruin there’s actually surprising continuity and fruit with deep, if underappreciated, roots. The problem? In missing these and other continuities, he misconstrues the cultural developments he criticizes.
By presenting the Western project—which we might define by several of its features, such as personal autonomy, equality, individual rights, liberal governance, open trade, democracy, and so on—as something alien or, more accurately, cancerous, he can attribute a form of malignancy to the entire enterprise. He then portrays this malignancy as a consuming force that relentlessly grinds against human flourishing: the machine of his title.3
But there’s nothing fundamentally malign about any of these features and their development. They are simply how our culture evolved, given the materials to work with and the situations at hand. To press that point, these features are responsible for much of the human flourishing documented in the last several hundred years: lengthened life expectancy, heightened living standards, economic growth, widespread reductions in poverty, drastically expanded literacy, greater freedom and civil liberties, significant declines in overall violence, and more.4
These gains are real and shouldn’t be dismissed—I won’t trade them in. But Kingsnorth hardly nods in their direction. Instead, we get an unremitting prosecution of the modern West’s many faults: fractured communities, meaningless work, nature treated as mere pantry for our ravenous appetites, the dominance of market logic, technological triumphalism, and an unshakable sense we’ve been reduced to cogs in, well, a machine. (There’s a reason the title resonates.) To the extent these complaints are real and not caricature, Kingsnorth does us a service. But by presenting them as if they are absolute facts of Western life with no benefits in the balance, he actually obscures the picture.
How could, after all, such a malign machine produce the gains outlined above? It didn’t. Because there is no malign machine. Kingsnorth might be describing something real: emergent structures that, whatever their origins, now constrain human freedom and flourishing in ways that feel systematic and mechanical. But that’s not the whole story—nowhere near it.
What does all this reveal? Kingsnorth presents us with a flawed understanding of how cultures actually work and, therefore, what our response to our current predicament should be.
How Culture Works
Kingsnorth treats modern culture like a top-down phenomenon, practically imposed on us. Following Lewis Mumford, he describes the machine as “an entire society ordered from the top down, justified by a mythos employed by its leaders and driven by a desire for order, power, predictability, and above all control.”
Corporations represent an example of this in action, according to Kingsnorth. “Companies like Amazon and Google do not just have phenomenal economic heft, granted to them every time we use their services: they also design the parameters of the culture in which we live” (my emphasis).
Kingsnorth captures something real here about the experience of modern life; it often feels as though we’re subject to forces beyond our control, shaped by institutions whose scale dwarfs our individual agency. Hello, administrative state! But as a description of how culture actually works, Kingsnorth has it backwards. Corporations like Amazon and Google—not to mention governments—don’t set the parameters of our culture. Culture is a bottom-up phenomenon, an emergent system like language and markets.
What is a culture? Kingsnorth says it’s “a story that a people tells itself.” But a culture is not a story; it is a constellation of assumptions and practices. Story is something we layer on those practices after the fact, as a way to make the past intelligible. But that narrative imposition is necessarily reductive, flattening the messy reality of how cultures actually function.
Cultures don’t operate under singular narratives anyway. They contain currents and crosscurrents, internal tensions that affect how people within the culture express themselves at any given moment. There is no monolithic story to which a culture subscribes. There are multiple stories, many of which compete with each other.
By ignoring this dynamic reality, Kingsnorth presents a monolithic, antagonistic vision of the modern Western project. His capitalism, for instance, means one thing, but many of its most ardent proponents wouldn’t recognize the capitalism he describes. He isolates certain features—say, corporatism or technocracy—and treats them as if they constitute the whole, as if they define the system rather than represent particular expressions within it. He also fails to recognize that these strands are opposed by proponents within the same system. (Consider the fight within the Republican Party right now over tariffs.)
Kingsnorth seems to assume that cultures are static, not dynamic. This rules out the ability to see the continuities mentioned above; instead, they represent fractures. But excluding extreme cases, cultures don’t die so much as transform. They have to. They must evolve and change because the people who practice that culture face different circumstances, and cultures arise precisely in response to circumstances. The Reformation created religious and political turmoil; secularism emerged as a practical solution. Economic changes demanded new forms of organization; capitalism developed. Technological possibilities opened; people explored them. None of this was designed or superintended from above, let alone for malign purposes. These were adaptive responses, bottom-up solutions to real problems and opportunities.
This is how cultures work: through constant feedback and adjustment, changing as individuals act upon the exigencies of their day. Every participant plays a role in signaling and responding to countless factors, both internal and external. Changes themselves drive further changes in an open-ended process without a predetermined destination. There are tradeoffs, but the reality of winners and losers doesn’t mean the game is fundamentally rigged. It’s too gargantuan and complicated to rig beyond local effects anyway.
Recognizing the continuities also helps point us to answers for the intolerable aspects of these developments, such as alienation, dislocation, meaninglessness, ecological destruction, and concentrated political and commercial power. “Europe has given birth to monsters,” says French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, “but at the same time it has given birth to theories that make it possible to understand and destroy these monsters . . . like a jailer who throws you into prison and slips you the keys to your cell.” Potential answers come from within a living tradition, not by exiting a supposedly dead culture.
This is what Kingsnorth misses in his call to become “barbarians by design.” As products of Christianity as lived within Christian Europe, secularism, liberalism, individualism, capitalism, and the rest, are not foisted upon us from without or by a cabal of malicious elites. These developments are us; we created them in response to real needs and genuine problems. And their best, most fruitful expressions will come not from rejecting them and wandering off, but from better participating in them.
Kingsnorth emphasizes the importance of roots, rightly so. But these are our roots—every bit as much as those he laments having lost as Western culture has adapted and evolved. Even to the extent we reject certain expressions of the culture, we are its children nonetheless. We are not barbarians outside the gate. We are inhabitants of this city we’ve created with responsibilities to love our neighbors and live our lives within it. That means working to bend it toward human flourishing, using the very resources—moral, intellectual, spiritual, practical, institutional—that the tradition itself provides.
The dynamism that created these problems can also address them, if we participate intentionally rather than passively. So: If there is no malign machine, if culture is an emergent phenomenon that we help shape through our participation, then Kingsnorth’s prescription to exit offers one response—but not the only one, and perhaps not the wisest.
The Irony of Exit
I could say more. I believe, for instance, that Kingsnorth pulls his punch at the end of the book by accepting that people who go for his argument will still need to live and work within the machine, to become “cooked barbarians” as opposed to “raw.” That’s only honest if we downplay the severity of everything that’s come before. I also think he fundamentally misconstrues the role of the city—Christianity is a cosmopolitan religion whose culminating icon is an enormous city, gloriously descending from heaven. But there’s a final and more fundamental irony in Kingsnorth’s call to become barbarians.
The attractive picture he paints at the end of his book—people free to pursue value and meaning in small pockets of community and industry, a politics embracing family, home, and place—is best practiced, perhaps only practiced, within a liberal order that leaves people free to experiment and try new ways of living.
What Kingsnorth describes is possible right now, under the current terms of our culture, thanks to the very liberal, secular order he decries. Want to raise your children outside the industrial education system? Opt out of consumer culture? Slow your pace? Homestead? Start a local farm coop? Build intentional communities organized around shared values? Practice artisanal crafts? The current order permits all of this. It even protects your right to do so.
If this sounds like the right path for you, thank the liberal tradition’s commitment to pluralism and individual conscience—back to those Christian continuities I mentioned.
By all means, push back against what you find dehumanizing. Build alternatives. Create communities that embody superior values. Retrieve and revive ways of life that modernity has marginalized. Follow a monastic rule! But recognize that there’s nothing gained in burning down the platform on which we stand—a platform those same monks helped build.
The very ground that makes such experiments possible is the liberal, pluralistic culture that emerged from our Christian past and still promises hope for the future.
Side note: Several months ago, Dylan Pahman of the Acton Institute allowed me to read an advance copy of his book, The Kingdom of God and the Common Good (Ancient Faith, 2025). It’s now out, and it’s the single best book I know for explaining the long, rich history of Christian social thought—across all traditions. If you’re looking to supplement Kingsnorth’s book, or want an corrective to it, I cannot recommend Pahman’s book highly enough.
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And tour my new book, The Idea Machine, out this week!
See, for instance, White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford University Press, 1964); Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered (MIT, 1968); and Medieval Religion and Technology (University of California Press, 1978).
See, for instance, Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine (Penguin, 1977).
It’s worth saying that my continuity argument cuts both ways. If modernity’s problems flow from Christianity’s development in the West—and I acknowledge Kingsnorth identifies genuine problems—then perhaps something in that developmental path itself warrants scrutiny. He teases this when pointing to John Duns Scotus’s theological innovations in the thirteenth century. As Orthodox Christians, both Kingsnorth and I recognize divergences in Eastern and Western expressions of the faith that foreclosed certain options as Western Christianity pursued its subsequent trajectories. That’s a conversation worth having, even if I don’t share his conclusions.
See, for instance, the work of Joel Mokyr, Deidre McCloskey, and Johan Norberg. It’s also worth looking at the data tracked by Human Progress.