Christians have known that food and cloth dedicated to the altar can be sanctified, dedicated toward a good use: “nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving.” Even the Machine’s all-enframing and all-pervasive scope in our lives does not mean it cannot also be “sanctified by God’s word and by prayer.”

Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine has generated both admiration and frustration, often in equal measure. Some read it as a manifesto against modern technology; others as a hopeless lament for a world already lost. But the book is best understood neither as a how-to guide nor as a call to retreat simpliciter, but as a philosophy of history.

Kingsnorth is not asking how we might fix the Machine, or even whether we should change it. He seeks instead to understand the kind of age we inhabit in the flow of the historical process itself.

In other words, Against the Machine is a philosophy of history. Seeing it this way changes how the book should be read, softens many of its criticisms, and complicates how supporters may use it.

This is because Kingsnorth is not offering a technical analysis or a set of evidence-based prescriptions; he is working within a romantic and historicist account of history.

Within that frame, he finds us at the end of a cycle, in an age of decay. From that diagnosis follows a revolutionary and romantic response: unplug from the Machine. There is no solution to the problem. It just is. We cannot sanctify the machine; it has unfolded and enframed us all. It spells the end of humanity. It is the end of an age, one that will pass and lead to a rebirth in the next recurrence.

Kingsnorth’s Philosophy of History

Where Kingsnorth’s view of history becomes most clear is in Chapter 3, “The Faustian Fire,” in which Kingsnorth draws heavily upon Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Although Kingsnorth describes the work as “a comparative history of civilizations,” it is also one of the great works of the philosophy of history. As Kingsnorth explains: “its author claims to have discovered a pattern of birth, growth and decline which can be applied to all major human cultures, from that of Ancient Egypt to that of the modern West” (23). It is not a positivist or encyclopedic work; Spengler’s book can be likened to poetry, claims Kingsnorth. And it is obvious that Kingsnorth approves of some of the categories that Spengler uses for history, albeit not in all the particulars.

Importantly, Alasdair MacIntyre too plays a role in Kingsnorth’s mapping out of history. As MacIntyre demonstrated in After Virtue, the West has a collective amnesia when it comes to moral language like virtue and vice. We might use the language of virtue, but we have forgotten its substructure. Yet this use of MacIntyre mostly furthers his thesis that “Western civilization is already dead” (12). There is nothing to fight for. There is no culture war. It is all mere emptiness until something comes to fill it (12). Kingsnorth speaks of culture war as “the equivalent of two bald men fighting over a comb” (12). Well, he does have a way with words. But the point remains: Western culture has died.

We are, to use Spengler’s wording, in the Faustian age, the age of the machine (28). This age is marked by Christ’s unthroning and our uprootedness. Having moved through the Apollonian and Magian cultures, we are now in the unfolding of history at the end of this point in time: our Faustian age of the machine. This “decay,” as Kingsnorth calls it, alluding to the historicism common in Nietzsche’s day, which located us in an age of decadence, began to set in during the Reformation and came to atrophy civilization by the 1800s (26).

That Kingsnorth follows the line of Romantic (and idealistic) historicists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seems clear at this point. He even cites Arnold Toynbee, one of the modern principles of the philosophy of history alongside Spengler and Giambattista Vico, as those who saw history unfold in cycles or ages (28–29).

Further, he finds wisdom in the cyclical philosophy of René Guénon (164). This helps to explain why the West is broken. It has denied higher truth due to the “Reign of Quantity” (Guénon’s phrase). The West has deviated, even though traditions have a certain universal character, which means we all unfold toward truth. Not the West, however. It is off cycle. It is in decay.

This is nothing new. Whether in Stoic thought or ancient Vedic thought, humans have theorized that time moves toward decay. We started in a golden age, then a heroic age, then a silver age, and so on. Yet these are reborn after a time of conflagration or the like. This is the kind of thing that Kingsnorth posits.

Hence, he cites Toynbee positively, who sees a similar recurrence that ends in death, and then: “Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old things again, but of something new” (29). We live in death; there is no culture war to win. Only rebirth matters. The West is not worth saving.

And that philosophy of history undergirds Kingsnorth’s work. We do not resist the machine, we do not sanctify the machine, and we certainly do not talk about a good use of the machine. We are in the Faustian age, of decay and decadence. There is no war to win. We died. We live in the ashes. So the only real response is to unplug.

Critics of Against the Machine

Some reviewers have missed this aspect of Kingsnorth’s work. In missing it, they have accused him of cynicism or of mere Luddite nostalgia. But these critiques look for something Kingsnorth does not offer. They read the book as an analytic and prescriptive argument, when it belongs instead to the genre of philosophy of history.

Kingsnorth is a historicist and idealist, and he employs a romantic method rather than a calculative one (contra Comte and his heirs). As a result, his critics may ask for falsifiable analysis, for proposals that can be tested or measured; when they do so and find him wanting, they dismiss his conclusions as impractical or anti-technological. Yet this misunderstands both his method and his aim.

For example, in Joel Miller’s critical review, he points out that Kingsnorth “bungles the story” of the West. Miller then mounts counter assertions and points out flaws in particular aspects of Kingsnorth’s thesis. However, Kingsnorth is making a meticulous argument about cause and effect as such. Rather, he aims to show that modern capitalism is a qualitative break from the past, that we have truly entered into an age of decay. The historical trajectory, while important, does not falsify or prove Kingsnorth’s thesis; rather, it only adds context.

This is because Kingsnorth sees us on the final rung of a civilizational cycle, with the Machine at last revealing itself in its most profound form. This revelation brings about the end of a certain vision of humanity and calls for its rebirth. He is not giving tips. He is describing an apocalypse that follows from his philosophy of history.

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