Paul Kingsnorth is in his Tyler Durden era

His new book is out today

If you can’t see the resemblance, then I don’t know what to tell you.

In 1999, Brad Pitt starred as Tyler Durden in Fight Club, offering a Gen X response to the ennui of The End of History. Durden lamented a generation wasted — “slaves with white collars” — working jobs they hate so they can buy things they don’t need. He concluded, “We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.”

In response, Durden launched “Project Mayhem,” an anarchic revolt against materialism, consumer capitalism, and the domestication of man. And while the English writer Paul Kingsnorth isn’t looking to start Fight Club chapters all over the country, his new book Against the Machine picks up these same themes as he, a fellow Gen Xer, comes to terms with his spiritual and cultural inheritance.

Kingsnorth, like Durden, has created a coalition through rhetoric and an almost legendary history. Kingsnorth started as a lefty environmental activist, became a “Zen Wicca Buddhist Witch,” and then about five years ago, he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. He’s moved from the London suburbs to rural Ireland where he tends the land, heats his home with a wood stove, and avails himself of a composting toilet he built on the premises.

As I said, legendary.

Consequently, his readers come in from a surprisingly broad range. There are the anarchic populists who found Kingsnorth during Covid lockdowns to be an articulate defender of vaccine skepticism. His most popular essay on his Substack is entitled, “The Vaccine Moment, Part One,” where he lays out his concerns about Austria leading the way with authoritarian state crackdowns.

Then there are the woo-woo Christians. His 2021 essay “The Cross and the Machine” described how God miraculously intervened to save him from his wiccan coven and blessed him with a spiritual vision of the love that binds all beings. His 2020 short story “The Basilisk” imagined an epistolary correspondence between an uncle and niece about whether the internet is, in some real sense, a magical portal for demons.

Nowadays with chatbots, this idea is increasingly mainstream, but Kingsnorth wrote his story before the rise of ChatGPT. I say “story,” but Kingsnorth says he “prefers to see it less as a work of fiction and more of a piece of current affairs journalism. Or perhaps a working hypothesis.”

Finally, there’s the Against Christian Civilization crowd. At his First Things Erasmus Lecture, Paul Kingsnorth essentially said that Christian civilization is a contradiction in terms. Christians can build a culture, but the globalized, urbanized, mechanized world that we’ve built is in some sense definitionally anti-Christian. He pilloried Jordan Peterson and other proponents of civilizational Christianity and pointed instead to Ohiyesa, a native American Christian convert who “believed that the new America needed an indigenous soul, and that his people could help provide it.”

Obviously, Kingsnorth’s audiences overlap, but because he is not willing to submit himself to an algorithmic straitjacket, he veers more than many modern writers. One moment he’s arguing that the internet has been a disaster for humanity, then he’s telling the story of an eccentric Orthodox monk, then he’s offering a travelogue through Alaska. I know many people interested in at least one of these topics, but fewer who would happily read all three.

And this is the great strength and weakness of his new book Against the Machine. Depending on how the reader came to Kingsnorth, they may feel he dawdles on either economics or history or technology or spirituality more than they would prefer. Since the book began as a series of Substack essays, they may find the chapters feel more like thematic groupings rather than a single thesis developed at length. But that’s not just a product of Kingsnorth’s breadth or the origin of the book, it’s a consequence of the subject as well. Because his topic of inquiry, “The Machine,” is a slippery one.

What is “The Machine”

You may have heard “The Machine” as a term used by Paul Kingsnorth and others as a description of our modern age, but it can be tricky to put a name to it. At different points in the book, Kingsnorth describes it as a massive cultural, ecological, and spiritual uprooting. At another point, he writes that it is “an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits...Its endgame is the replacement of nature with technology, in order to facilitate total human control over a totally human world.”

But lest you think it merely an economic or political phenomenon, Kingsnorth writes that the Machine is also a “tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control, and ambition.” The Machine is “a story,” a founding myth of modernity that we must stop believing before we can go about dismantling it.

The danger is that the Machine becomes a floating signifier. Pollution is the Machine and so are Covid lockdowns, globalization, Avengers, McDonald’s, smartphones, highways, Amazon, OnlyFans, strawberries out of season, AI, and insurance bureaucracies. In other words, every part of modernity that we don’t like.

Kingsnorth’s critics like Sebastian Morello have argued that Kingsnorth smuggles in personal preference under the guise of moral absolutes. As Kingsnorth writes in the book:

The fact is that the culture which is crumbling, or being demolished, around me is also a culture I never felt comfortable with. Though it is the world that made me, I’ve long felt that the modern West is broken in some deep way. Something always felt bent out of shape, as if there was some hidden wound beneath it all...While I loved the landscapes of my country — the downs, the hills, the moors, the copses — and was fascinated by the history of my people, what we had become simply left me cold.

Thus, when Kingsnorth says “The West Must Die,” does that say more about the West or about himself?

Likewise, some of the tragicomic moments when he is forced to go buy a push mower instead of mowing grass with a scythe, shop in a grocery store instead of gathering food by hand, or consigned to a holiday in a quaint English town full of “food, drink, fun, entertainment, games, probably some sex somewhere in the mix” — well, one can imagine plenty of readers not seeing what the fuss is all about.

One essay starts with, “I always hated cars,” but another starts with, “The best thing I ever bought was my VW camper van.” If Kingsnorth really believed all of this, wouldn’t he go live in the woods instead of posting online about how bad the internet is and flying to New York City to say how awful flying and New York City are?

Who Is Paul Kingsnorth?

A few years ago, Alan Jacobs offered a taxonomy of writers and how they affect him as a reader:

The Explainer knows stuff I don’t know and can present it clearly and vividly. This does not require great creativity or originality, though Explainers of the highest order will possess those traits too. The Illuminator is definitionally original: someone who shines a clear strong light on some element of history or human experience that I never knew existed. (Though sometimes after reading something by an Illuminator I will think, Why didn’t I realize that before?) The Provoker is original perhaps to a fault: Ambitious, wide-ranging, risk-taking, Provokers claim to know a lot more than they actually do but can be exceptionally useful in forcing readers to think about new things or think in new ways.

Jacobs warns that even great thinkers, if read in the wrong way, can be disastrous: Rousseau is “marvelous and wonderful as a Provoker, but God help the reader who takes his purported illuminations seriously.”

Now the question is, when Paul Kingsnorth says that AI is demonic, that the West must die, and Christian Civilization is a misnomer, is he explaining, illuminating, or provoking?

Take a sentence like, “I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net.

I think: These are things designed to trap prey.”

Are we to conclude that surfing the web is tantamount to fooling around with a Ouija board? Or should we merely exercise prudence, just as we would when engaging with alcohol, literature, or any number of things, and the internet is just a particularly tricky tool?

If you read the comments and reactions to Kingsnorth’s Erasmus lecture, most of them don’t dispute his rhetorical gifts, his diagnosis of Western decay, or his prescription of asceticism and personal repentance.

The split is over what mode Kingsnorth is speaking in. And the tricky part is that Kingsnorth is gifted enough that he moves between explanation, illumination, and provocation all throughout Against the Machine. He explains how we’ve gone from a society built around people, place, prayer, and the past to one built around sex, screens, science, and the self. He illuminates how everything from Ned Ludd to “jellyfish tribes” to imperial colonization reveals the playbook of the Machine that’s now being run in the digital realm and crumbling West of the 21^st century.

But in the end his prescriptions are, by design, more of a provocation.

What do we do?

When a woman asked at the Erasmus Lecture what he’d recommend to someone going into the Trump administration, he laughed, made a joke, and then simply said that we all need to draw our line and Christians are called to die to the world. No 5-step plan or blueprint for utopia.

Instead, he writes at the end of the book, “Yes, I know what you’re asking. ‘But how?’ I can’t answer the question. I don’t know you. But I have worked through this for long enough to understand that if we start from where we are, things will ripple out.”

Some complain that Kingsnorth is yet another in a long line of Romantic screeds against modernity and technological culture. He is circling the drain, just like we’ve been doing for hundreds of years. It did nothing then and will do nothing now.

But while Rousseau and Kingsnorth may share some temperamental traits, Kingsnorth is an Orthodox Christian. And throughout the book, he comes back to the idea that you must first set your own house in order before you begin setting the world right. And more than that, it is through acquiring inner peace that the world will in fact be saved. The inner purification is not a prerequisite to the “real work” but the real work itself. The lack of pragmatism isn’t a dodge or a concession. It’s a belief that prayer and theosis are what changes the world rather than politics and technology.

Kingsnorth channels that Tyler Durden charismatic condemnation of modernity, but whereas Durden opts for anarchy and brutality to reconnect with his body and soul, Kingsnorth seeks asceticism and local acts of resistance. Rather than political terrorism, Kingsnorth advises personal repentance. Rather than a bullet in your enemy’s throat, Kingsnorth offers a prayer.

You can buy Against the Machine here. Whether you’re a long time fan of Kingsnorth or only vaguely aware of him, it’s worth the read.