Against the Machine

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No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society…On the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order. – Eric Vogelin

What a book! I loved reading this and continue to find myself thinking about it. Kingsnorth goes beyond the staid claim that technology is what ails us. He puts forward a coherent, albeit opinionated, philosophy of how to live.

It’s one of those thought-provoking books where I find myself genuinely unsure how much I agree with. Plenty of it, yes. But not everything. That’s why it’s my favorite from this genre of book.

What most resonates is the push toward local, human-scale communities and time away from glowing screens. I deeply feel that. It’s what draws me to the home we’re in the middle of buying and its associated retreat to a rural property outside a small town. City life, as Kingsnorth writes, is not what it’s claimed. In place of the city will enter 2 acres, homegrown vegetables, and care and attention put toward something tangible.

The antidote to this is to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair. We are going to have to learn to be adults again; to get our feet back on the ground, to rebuild families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment, of limits and longing.

His forays into the sacred and religious don’t click for me in the same way, yet it’s inarguable that religion is an oft-available source for the values he puts forward. I think that’s partly because religion is more willing to admit that, yes, there are tradeoffs to the decisions you make.

What do I want to hold and carry with me from this book? That we all have choice around the role technology plays in our lives. That none of this is “inevitable” nor unavoidable. That what brings meaning to life is how you connect to people, a place, and your past.

I have more notes than I’ve yet been able to make complete sense of. These are the bits that most float in my mind.

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines. — Wendell Berry

We—at least if we are among the lucky ones—have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us, but we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning, and roots.

At the end of a culture, the real work is not lamentation or desperate defence—both instinctive but futile reactions—but the creation of something new.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. — Edward Abbey

Squabbling over history is how we make sense of whatever present we think we are living in.

the elements of human life from which cultures of all kinds, however different, have traditionally sprung are negated by today’s way of life.