This is basically where I landed in my piece in Mere Orthodoxy talking about Paul's book and other similar phenomena. We run the risk of hypocrisy when we stamp our feet and denounce what the Machine has produced, as if we arent all benefiting. Instead we need to learn to view the machine world as a tool, and nothing more.
I use the metaphor of a tent - a very helpful tool to shelter from the elements, but the mistake would be to think the four walls of the tent represent the whole world. We need to know when to erect the tent and hunker down inside it, and when to walk outside, pack it up, and bring it with us.
I’m a brand new reader and a fellow Louisiana native (born and raised New Orleans -now I’m rural). I enjoyed reading this even though I haven’t gotten to read Kingsnorth’s book yet. I can say I like the machine in some ways. I like that I have technology that serves me as a mother of almost 8. I like that the men in my life don’t have to do backbreaking work just for us to survive. I feel grateful I’m able to buy groceries to feed my children with the click of a button. My full fridge and pantry is something I thank God for daily. However, I do disagree that most people can just put down the phone. There are too many people without the ability to make reasonable decisions. In Washington Parish we have a very high rate of opioid addiction, poor schools, and lower than average literacy rates for Louisiana. I struggle to see how many of the people around me can change their behavior on their own without significant cultural change.
Heard you prepping for this essay to go out this week via the haunting melody of the theremin playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” echoing through our old house. Loved it.
The Machine as total enemy feels like another abstraction. Holding it against aliveness without pretending purity is possible feels closer to sanity. Normal might actually be the radical option here.
I think this is an excellent critique. It's helping me to formulate my own thoughts on the book. On my first reading I really just noticed that I loved the first half and found the second half tedious.
Ah that's interesting! I felt the exact opposite. When he said, "But the solution isn’t in total war with the Machine, which is impossible anyway, but in finding small ways to make the Machine principle the slave of the Aliveness principle once again." I thought he sounded defeated, but towards the end, I appreciated him landing on the point of living in balance and dealing with the paradox is human.
I think that part of the resolution was strong, but my eyes really started glazing over with the cooked and raw barbarian talk. In general I found his diagnosis more powerful than his resolutions, but I do agree that small acts of kindness and stewardship are excellent ideals.
I was ready to hate this article, but I find it compelling. I dislike hypocrisy accusations (otherwise we could never decry sin, or even hypocrisy for that matter), but the McGilchrist observation is helpful. Our issue isn't with some form of black magic that needs to be destroyed, it's with an imbalanced approach to the world that's ultimately dehumanizing. That involves less alluring solutions, but it also brings more peace.
As a rule , I don't listen to or read books on the faith or applications of the faith from new converts. Paul, for all his fame, is just that. I will leave time for maturity to come and in the meantime fill my spirit with prayer and reading those in the faith, past and present, that have endured. Otherwisr, we risk the celebrity culture that has put Evangelical churches shipwrecked on the coral reefs.
I liked ATM (and that acronym) even though I was wary of Paul’s position and his eloquence. And I liked this article, and it makes the book better by making these observations.
A couple of observations. JT, you read much faster than I, for one. Also, I am one of the 25% who is both a reader of PK and JT. The machine helped me there for sure, most likely due to my penchant for following writers just prior to their conversion/reversion, but a few years after my own. On my short subscription list, three of you share that brotherhood with me.
I’m only half way through ATM, but I’ve read several reviews and there seems to be a correlation between age of the reviewer and level of enthusiasm. More equals more
I also note that a decade of reading PKs essays gave me a much different sense of his body of work and thought than does the book thus far at least. Pauls essays taken as a whole for me have an overall amiability, while individually managing to find a level of urgency that is thought (and action) provoking without beating the poor horse that is not only dead but was so each of the prior three times it was dug up.
But this is not a book review of course
Perhaps because I read the 4-Ps and Cross and the Machine essays early in the sequence, I always found Paul’s work and good humor inspiring rather than paralyzing. Throw in some wild saint stories and I’m ready to roll. I have been enriched by what his work seems to ask of us, and have not gone away sad because I have many screens. I also have a job that involves trying to fix things the machine had a hand in breaking.
And like PK, I live on the edge, rather hobbit-like in a hole in the side of a north slope Oakenshire, and have done so for thirty-two years. I credit PK’s work- especially in conversation with martin shaw and Jonathon Pageau- with energizing and revealing significant vocational shifts for me. There is also the band of bros convert thing we (including you).
Now I need to hurry back to ATM in order to get to the very best part- people past place prayer poesis and play. The last two Ps are added to the PK’s as a nod to martin shaw (and another reviewer of ATM whose name I can’t recall). Martin and paul are friends in the same wonderful, enchanting and mostly hopeful 100-acre wood that I visit often. I love me some Eeyore but he needs the aliveness of Tigger now and again.
I just discovered Kingsnorth and started reading his 'Savage Gods' this week, so this is great timing for me, James.
You're dead-on about it being ineffective and shortsighted to vilify one side of a duality (two interdependent things that could exist in harmony), mistaking it as a dichotomy: two opposite things irreparably in a state of conflict. The Machine, the masculine, has been of great benefit to our species, *and* for maybe a thousand years or more, it has been imbalanced with feminine, Nature.
I agree that the only way to resolve our state of discord is to give life to the side of things that's repressed, drowned out, and harmonize the two: the Machine & Nature.
Here's a passage I read today in 'Savage Gods' that struck me as odd, as an example of warring against from the Machine, rather than embracing its useful parts:
"I listened to the birds sing a lot—our land is ripe with birdsong—and I watched them. I tried to watch them without naming them, though it went against my intellectual, analytical instincts. I didn't always succeed, because I can't resist the impulse to catalog."
In response, I wrote in the margins, "Not all of these impulses need to be resisted."
Duality as opposite to dichotomy precisely expresses the category-error I came here to try and roast. Very deflating, tbh. Is there anything in nature that is genuinely a dichotomy? Yin contains yang, and all that
This is a good review of Against the Machine. I tend to land more in agreement with Paul than you but I appreciate your perspective and takeaways. I think it’s helpful to define things the way he did and cause a bit of “how should I respond to this?”
I agree that we can’t totally escape the Machine and we need to set limits. I think a big problem is that the excessive use of technology inevitably blurs those lines and limits we set. Of course the Machine (modernity, progress, etc.) has produced much good, but at what cost to us and our future? Maybe much of it has more benefit than cost. Or the benefits allow for an offset of the costs in the future.
Unfortunately Orthodoxy is so small that there are a lot among us who just get excited because someone is Orthodox and well known! A little pathetic, to be sure. But there are others among the Orthodox who wish he would just shut up for a little while. To be fair to the Orthodox, he wrote the vast majority of the book before his conversion. A testament to how fresh that conversion is, is the fact that he did not think he should not publish his book.
James, sitting in that sweet middle space where something true emerges. Love it. And this, wow!
"...the implication that it can’t be done seems to me like convenient moralizing from people who actually don’t want to stop scrolling Instagram and would rather live in a fantasy world that suggests the only way for them to personally stop doomscrolling is to burn down the West."
Haven’t read it, but the irony of going on a media press tour to promote the book basically kept me from picking it up. I do believe the spirit of the machine is real and worthy of respect due to its power, but if there isn’t really a possibility to completely escape there must be a better posture we are mean to have toward it than reject it wholesale. Techne and Advertising are related to the market and there is something real there. I think the better question is how does religion relate to the machine and how does the machine/market relate to the church.
Isn’t Paul advocating ‘riding the tiger’ until it tires itself out? Not total war like you’ve labelled him here.
Socrates disliked the advent of the written word - well maybe he was onto something? Maybe he saw the trajectory of what this direction was hurling us towards?
As for me I am typing this on a typewriter, faxing it to a fedex store, and having a clerk enter it this comment into a computer. Any typos are the clerks issue.
Does that make me superior to you? Well, if we turn the machine into a moral issue, it might.
“I know the buttons are colorful like a ripe strawberry - you can still just put it down. “- this strikes me as another deeply myopic comment. I fully give you the benefit of the doubt making it. You’re an extremely conscious and resourced individual that has incredible amounts of insight. I whole heartedly congratulate you - we need more of you.
But to extrapolate your extraordinary ability to be aware of subtle forces behind modern day products onto the masses is in fact naive. In the realm of the traumatized, unconscious and programmed peoples that constitute the majority that demographically struggle to get by and don’t have margin to reflect on their dopamine addiction, your projection is unrealistic and almost as long as this sentence. And to fuss over the many that seem to be informed and become more informed is to kiss the shadow of the machine. The vast majority can’t see beyond next week’s grocery bill - how do we expect them to reflect on the implicit attention agreement they’ve made with the Media and billionaires?
Are we able to nurture consciousness and awareness at the scale the world needs before we drive it into oblivion (to support the American lifestyle for every person on earth would require 4.5 more earths, and that seems to be the direction many people strive for)? I want to believe we can. I also realize how hard it is to talk to the depth about personal emotions with parents in the social settings with 10 year old children - they simply won’t go there. At least in the urban Knoxville tn area I live in. More interested in sports, weather, products and dogmatic religion. That’s my experience at least.
What I see Paul doing is confirming the suspicions of many who feel the game is up. That the elite and everyone who believes they should be an elite in some way won’t stop until the earth is chewed up and spit out. So let’s make another path that might utilize some of the technology but isn’t addicted to the myth of progress and keeps aliveness the goal. Not simply survival and domination.
This is basically where I landed in my piece in Mere Orthodoxy talking about Paul's book and other similar phenomena. We run the risk of hypocrisy when we stamp our feet and denounce what the Machine has produced, as if we arent all benefiting. Instead we need to learn to view the machine world as a tool, and nothing more.
I use the metaphor of a tent - a very helpful tool to shelter from the elements, but the mistake would be to think the four walls of the tent represent the whole world. We need to know when to erect the tent and hunker down inside it, and when to walk outside, pack it up, and bring it with us.
I’m a brand new reader and a fellow Louisiana native (born and raised New Orleans -now I’m rural). I enjoyed reading this even though I haven’t gotten to read Kingsnorth’s book yet. I can say I like the machine in some ways. I like that I have technology that serves me as a mother of almost 8. I like that the men in my life don’t have to do backbreaking work just for us to survive. I feel grateful I’m able to buy groceries to feed my children with the click of a button. My full fridge and pantry is something I thank God for daily. However, I do disagree that most people can just put down the phone. There are too many people without the ability to make reasonable decisions. In Washington Parish we have a very high rate of opioid addiction, poor schools, and lower than average literacy rates for Louisiana. I struggle to see how many of the people around me can change their behavior on their own without significant cultural change.
Heard you prepping for this essay to go out this week via the haunting melody of the theremin playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” echoing through our old house. Loved it.
It needs a vocal, Riley!
I was going to comment in depth but instead have to put down the Substack and call my mom.
The Machine as total enemy feels like another abstraction. Holding it against aliveness without pretending purity is possible feels closer to sanity. Normal might actually be the radical option here.
Go virgin monk boy go!!
I think this is an excellent critique. It's helping me to formulate my own thoughts on the book. On my first reading I really just noticed that I loved the first half and found the second half tedious.
Ah that's interesting! I felt the exact opposite. When he said, "But the solution isn’t in total war with the Machine, which is impossible anyway, but in finding small ways to make the Machine principle the slave of the Aliveness principle once again." I thought he sounded defeated, but towards the end, I appreciated him landing on the point of living in balance and dealing with the paradox is human.
I think that part of the resolution was strong, but my eyes really started glazing over with the cooked and raw barbarian talk. In general I found his diagnosis more powerful than his resolutions, but I do agree that small acts of kindness and stewardship are excellent ideals.
I was ready to hate this article, but I find it compelling. I dislike hypocrisy accusations (otherwise we could never decry sin, or even hypocrisy for that matter), but the McGilchrist observation is helpful. Our issue isn't with some form of black magic that needs to be destroyed, it's with an imbalanced approach to the world that's ultimately dehumanizing. That involves less alluring solutions, but it also brings more peace.
As a rule , I don't listen to or read books on the faith or applications of the faith from new converts. Paul, for all his fame, is just that. I will leave time for maturity to come and in the meantime fill my spirit with prayer and reading those in the faith, past and present, that have endured. Otherwisr, we risk the celebrity culture that has put Evangelical churches shipwrecked on the coral reefs.
I liked ATM (and that acronym) even though I was wary of Paul’s position and his eloquence. And I liked this article, and it makes the book better by making these observations.
Too late to call mom as it turns out.
A couple of observations. JT, you read much faster than I, for one. Also, I am one of the 25% who is both a reader of PK and JT. The machine helped me there for sure, most likely due to my penchant for following writers just prior to their conversion/reversion, but a few years after my own. On my short subscription list, three of you share that brotherhood with me.
I’m only half way through ATM, but I’ve read several reviews and there seems to be a correlation between age of the reviewer and level of enthusiasm. More equals more
I also note that a decade of reading PKs essays gave me a much different sense of his body of work and thought than does the book thus far at least. Pauls essays taken as a whole for me have an overall amiability, while individually managing to find a level of urgency that is thought (and action) provoking without beating the poor horse that is not only dead but was so each of the prior three times it was dug up.
But this is not a book review of course
Perhaps because I read the 4-Ps and Cross and the Machine essays early in the sequence, I always found Paul’s work and good humor inspiring rather than paralyzing. Throw in some wild saint stories and I’m ready to roll. I have been enriched by what his work seems to ask of us, and have not gone away sad because I have many screens. I also have a job that involves trying to fix things the machine had a hand in breaking.
And like PK, I live on the edge, rather hobbit-like in a hole in the side of a north slope Oakenshire, and have done so for thirty-two years. I credit PK’s work- especially in conversation with martin shaw and Jonathon Pageau- with energizing and revealing significant vocational shifts for me. There is also the band of bros convert thing we (including you).
Now I need to hurry back to ATM in order to get to the very best part- people past place prayer poesis and play. The last two Ps are added to the PK’s as a nod to martin shaw (and another reviewer of ATM whose name I can’t recall). Martin and paul are friends in the same wonderful, enchanting and mostly hopeful 100-acre wood that I visit often. I love me some Eeyore but he needs the aliveness of Tigger now and again.
I just discovered Kingsnorth and started reading his 'Savage Gods' this week, so this is great timing for me, James.
You're dead-on about it being ineffective and shortsighted to vilify one side of a duality (two interdependent things that could exist in harmony), mistaking it as a dichotomy: two opposite things irreparably in a state of conflict. The Machine, the masculine, has been of great benefit to our species, *and* for maybe a thousand years or more, it has been imbalanced with feminine, Nature.
I agree that the only way to resolve our state of discord is to give life to the side of things that's repressed, drowned out, and harmonize the two: the Machine & Nature.
Here's a passage I read today in 'Savage Gods' that struck me as odd, as an example of warring against from the Machine, rather than embracing its useful parts:
"I listened to the birds sing a lot—our land is ripe with birdsong—and I watched them. I tried to watch them without naming them, though it went against my intellectual, analytical instincts. I didn't always succeed, because I can't resist the impulse to catalog."
In response, I wrote in the margins, "Not all of these impulses need to be resisted."
Duality as opposite to dichotomy precisely expresses the category-error I came here to try and roast. Very deflating, tbh. Is there anything in nature that is genuinely a dichotomy? Yin contains yang, and all that
This is a good review of Against the Machine. I tend to land more in agreement with Paul than you but I appreciate your perspective and takeaways. I think it’s helpful to define things the way he did and cause a bit of “how should I respond to this?”
I agree that we can’t totally escape the Machine and we need to set limits. I think a big problem is that the excessive use of technology inevitably blurs those lines and limits we set. Of course the Machine (modernity, progress, etc.) has produced much good, but at what cost to us and our future? Maybe much of it has more benefit than cost. Or the benefits allow for an offset of the costs in the future.
Just a few musings in response to your article!
Unfortunately Orthodoxy is so small that there are a lot among us who just get excited because someone is Orthodox and well known! A little pathetic, to be sure. But there are others among the Orthodox who wish he would just shut up for a little while. To be fair to the Orthodox, he wrote the vast majority of the book before his conversion. A testament to how fresh that conversion is, is the fact that he did not think he should not publish his book.
James, sitting in that sweet middle space where something true emerges. Love it. And this, wow!
"...the implication that it can’t be done seems to me like convenient moralizing from people who actually don’t want to stop scrolling Instagram and would rather live in a fantasy world that suggests the only way for them to personally stop doomscrolling is to burn down the West."
Haven’t read it, but the irony of going on a media press tour to promote the book basically kept me from picking it up. I do believe the spirit of the machine is real and worthy of respect due to its power, but if there isn’t really a possibility to completely escape there must be a better posture we are mean to have toward it than reject it wholesale. Techne and Advertising are related to the market and there is something real there. I think the better question is how does religion relate to the machine and how does the machine/market relate to the church.
Isn’t Paul advocating ‘riding the tiger’ until it tires itself out? Not total war like you’ve labelled him here.
Socrates disliked the advent of the written word - well maybe he was onto something? Maybe he saw the trajectory of what this direction was hurling us towards?
As for me I am typing this on a typewriter, faxing it to a fedex store, and having a clerk enter it this comment into a computer. Any typos are the clerks issue.
Does that make me superior to you? Well, if we turn the machine into a moral issue, it might.
“I know the buttons are colorful like a ripe strawberry - you can still just put it down. “- this strikes me as another deeply myopic comment. I fully give you the benefit of the doubt making it. You’re an extremely conscious and resourced individual that has incredible amounts of insight. I whole heartedly congratulate you - we need more of you.
But to extrapolate your extraordinary ability to be aware of subtle forces behind modern day products onto the masses is in fact naive. In the realm of the traumatized, unconscious and programmed peoples that constitute the majority that demographically struggle to get by and don’t have margin to reflect on their dopamine addiction, your projection is unrealistic and almost as long as this sentence. And to fuss over the many that seem to be informed and become more informed is to kiss the shadow of the machine. The vast majority can’t see beyond next week’s grocery bill - how do we expect them to reflect on the implicit attention agreement they’ve made with the Media and billionaires?
Are we able to nurture consciousness and awareness at the scale the world needs before we drive it into oblivion (to support the American lifestyle for every person on earth would require 4.5 more earths, and that seems to be the direction many people strive for)? I want to believe we can. I also realize how hard it is to talk to the depth about personal emotions with parents in the social settings with 10 year old children - they simply won’t go there. At least in the urban Knoxville tn area I live in. More interested in sports, weather, products and dogmatic religion. That’s my experience at least.
What I see Paul doing is confirming the suspicions of many who feel the game is up. That the elite and everyone who believes they should be an elite in some way won’t stop until the earth is chewed up and spit out. So let’s make another path that might utilize some of the technology but isn’t addicted to the myth of progress and keeps aliveness the goal. Not simply survival and domination.