“What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, one and the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine?… The postmodern left that has seized the heights of so much of Western culture is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment… The left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to ‘heteronormativity’ to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the fragments.”
This is Paul Kingsnorth in his invigorating new collection of essays articulating an uncomfortable truth. And here is another: contemporary environmentalist ideology is a hyperbolic variation on conventional wisdom. Melding “climate justice” with anti-colonialism, gender politics and every other fashionable orthodoxy, it articulates a mindset that has been embraced by academics, corporations and governments across much of the West. It holds out a reassuringly simple solution to what it represents as a catastrophic crisis: re-engineer society on a progressive model. Cover the planet with windfarms and solar panels, reorder the economy to secure social justice and get to net zero. All will be well.
Though there is now some dissent from this view on the political right, with Nigel Farage’s Reform flirting with climate-scepticism and some in Trump’s White House dismissing climate change as a hoax, in bien-pensant circles the above still prevails. Among neither camp is there the recognition that human demands on the planet may be inordinate. Only incidentally concerned with the environment, 21st-century environmentalism is another iteration of the anthropocentric boosterism that has brought the world to its present impasse. There is an urgent need for heterodox thinking, asserting the intrinsic worth of the biosphere while ruthlessly shredding the comforting pieties of respectable Greenery.
Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine offers to meet that need. No one can read this refreshingly subversive book and emerge with their world-view intact. He shows what some of us have long suspected: environmentalism is a symptom of the sickness of our time, peddling modish panaceas that only make our condition worse. He quotes Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), author of the monumental Myth of the Machine (1967-70): “With this new ‘megatechnics’, the dominant minority will create a uniform, all enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the Machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalised, collective organisations.”
A world like that posited by Mumford over half a century ago has indeed been coming into being. Instead of human-to-human relationships, our lives consist ever more of interactions with machines. The options we have in entertainment, the arts and consumer goods have expanded enormously – but what we watch, listen to and buy are algorithmically regulated commodities, increasingly generated by AI. Much of the food we eat is no longer produced by human-scale farms and reaches us processed and packaged from distant mega-corporations. What is still human in our lives lingers on in the interstices of a vast inhuman mechanism.
Kingsnorth looks forward, seemingly with hope, to a breakdown in this structure. A cursory glance at history, however, suggests that the age of the Machine will not be succeeded by “uncivilisation” – a term coined by him to denote a healthier post-technological society. Instead, there will be an epoch of barbarism, different from others in history only in the magnitude of the destruction human beings will wreak on the natural world and each other. How then can anyone look to a technological collapse for salvation?
An answer may be found in Kingsnorth’s spiritual journey. Born in 1972, he studied modern history at Oxford. Soon after he left, he threw himself into direct action and was arrested during demonstrations against road-building projects. While working with Greenpeace and other activist groups, he became disenchanted with the protest politics of secular utopianism. In 2009, he co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, a literary-philosophical movement that rejected the narrowly scientistic focus on reducing carbon emissions and called for a recognition of the soul in nature. Soon after, he left England for Ireland, establishing a farm in east Galway, living off the land and cutting hay with a scythe. He and his family continue to live and farm there today.
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Kingsnorth had come to believe that only by re-enchanting the natural world could it be saved. But what spiritual tradition could be a vehicle for this renewal? He moved from atheism to Zen Buddhism, through animism and Wicca, before settling into a Romanian branch of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In a fascinating 2021 essay, “The Cross and the Machine”, he recounts his conversion as an unexpected and involuntary experience. A key moment occurred when he suddenly felt ill and unable to join his fellow pagans in a Wiccan ritual. During subsequent months, he found himself surrendering to an inescapable truth.
His conversion may have seemed mysterious to him, but there was an inner logic in it. In Savage Gods (2019), he wrote of his spiritual quest as a struggle with language, questioning the power of words to capture the truth of a disjointed world and convey what may lie beyond it. More than other branches of the Christian religion, Orthodoxy emphasises the limits of language: it is notable for its apophatic theology, which defines God by what God is not. Truth is discerned through practice – liturgy, fasting and prayer – not scholastic reasoning. Unlike Western Christian traditions shaped by Greek philosophy, Orthodoxy does not shun the material world. Instead of Plato’s dark cave, Earth is an icon – a window to divine perfection. Careless or wilful disrespect for the environment is a grave and potentially catastrophic sin. There is therefore an intrinsic affinity between Orthodoxy and ecology.
Kingsnorth sees environmental crisis in explicitly apocalyptic terms: “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the times we are currently living in would be regarded by many of our ancestors as apocalyptic… the rising paranoia that extends now across the political spectrum throughout the Western world – the anger and confusion, the sense of promises broken and established systems gumming up – all this can be traced to the rise and consolidation of the Machine, this great matrix that strips from us our understanding of what a human life is, and makes us instead lonely cogs in its drive for self-creation.”
Against this background, a breakdown of technological civilisation would be apocalyptic in the biblical sense, an “unveiling” in which humankind suffers the consequences of its alienation from the divinely created natural order; but those who repented would be saved in the afterlife. If humans are made in the image of God, they can’t be unmade by the Machine. Technology may be powerfully malignant, even – Kingsnorth intimates – Satanic. Yet technology can’t prevail, and its downfall would be cleansing and redemptive.
Kingsnorth says little here of the society he anticipates coming into being when the Machine stops. But it would seem to resemble that described in the Victorian nature-mystic Richard Jefferies’s novel After London (1887), where a tilt in the planet’s axis turns London into a swamp. England reverts to a medieval way of life based on craftsmanship and aristocratic hierarchy. JG Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) reimagines this scenario, without the Romantic frippery and with the chief protagonist returning inwardly to a primordial pre-human past.
Against the Machine contains echoes of DH Lawrence’s dream of Rananim, a colony of kindred spirits finding refuge from mechanisation in a self-sufficient community, possibly located in Florida, Cornwall or New Mexico. In impassioned letters written in 1915-17, Lawrence tried to persuade fellow writers such as Katherine Mansfield to join him in the venture. His scheme came to nothing. But the dream survived in his fiction, particularly The Plumed Serpent (1926), and he returned to it in Apocalypse, a collection of his thoughts on the Book of Revelation that were written during the winter of 1929-30, shortly before his death.
Kingsnorth has himself produced eschatologically themed speculative fiction. In a trio of novels – The Wake (2014), Beast (2016) and Alexandria (2020) – he traces a single lineage from the Norman conquest to the far future, culminating in a small monastic community in the English fenland, which lives without machines under the guidance of a presence called The Lady. There are dangers – a demon-like AI that promises digital immortality in a cyber-domain called Alexandria. At the end of the book swans return, signalling the end of Alexandria and a renewal of sacred order.
A real-world techno-collapse would be rather different. Consider Russia in the civil war that broke out after the Bolshevik coup. The Romanov empire splintered into nearly 30 states, and more than a dozen foreign armies intervened in the war. During the three-to-five years in which it raged, around ten million people died of causes related to the conflict.
Eight million perished through famine and epidemics, more than a million in combat and hundreds of thousands in waves of terror and anti-Semitic pogroms. As transport links disintegrated, the emerging industrial society of late tsarism was replaced by localised economies, subject to relentless attack from Red and White forces. In the Tambov region, a large-scale rebellion was crushed by the Bolsheviks burning down villages and using poison gas on peasants.
This was surely an apocalypse of a kind, but it produced no redemptive release. The Bolsheviks triumphed owing to their superior organisation and more methodical cruelty and because they promised an end to anarchy. Securely in power, they launched a programme of forcible agricultural collectivisation. Millions died, unnumbered children were orphaned and livestock slaughtered amid outbreaks of cannibalism. The Nazis invaded in 1941, another 20 million or so died, and history moved on.
A global breakdown would be much more destructive. One reason – ignored by Kingsnorth and the environmentalists he criticises – is the size of the human population. Birth rates are falling in many countries, and there is talk of the species failing to reproduce itself and heading for extinction. But the fact remains that the eight billion people alive in 2025 (rising to nearly ten billion by 2050) depend for their existence on the Machine. The increase of the past few centuries was a by-product of hydrocarbons. Without shipping, railways, refrigerators and mechanised agriculture, most of those people would not have been born. Without our global techno-structure, most would likely perish. Environmentalists insist the current and prospective population can be supported by organic farming. Maybe, but such methods will not be adopted worldwide. Whatever Western countries do, China, India and other countries will continue to industrialise using fossil fuels, accelerating climate change.
What is to be done? The inventor of the Gaia theory, James Lovelock (1919-2022), proposed using high-tech – nuclear energy, genetically modified food and vertical farms – to allow a “sustainable retreat” from human domination of the Earth. Lovelock saw nothing demonic in technology: rather than marking a rupture with nature, it is nature evolving. (Cities are as much a part of planetary ecology as beehives – and though Kingsnorth seems blind to it, can be as beautiful as any rural idyll.) In his last book Novacene (2019), Lovelock interprets the emergence of AI as a Gaian adaptation, which could bring the planet to a new equilibrium.
For Kingsnorth this must be an abhorrent vision – the perpetuation if not the deification of the diabolical Machine. But there is no other way the biosphere can be preserved. Human expansion goes with destruction of habitat. Unless our environmental footprint is reduced, we are heading for an era of mass extinction. The price of renouncing technology is a denatured planet. Kingsnorth cannot admit this paradox. He praises the poet Gary Snyder, “the Thoreau of the Beats”, who when asked how people should respond to the combined environmental and cultural crises of the late-20th century replied: “The most radical thing you can do is to stay at home.” Leave aside the many who cannot afford to move to a remote Irish smallholding. When Amazon stops delivering and the smartphones no longer work, city dwellers will spill out, plundering and wrecking such low-tech retreats. The skills of the age will not be in ploughing and hoeing but killing. Militias commanded by local warlords will fight savagely for turf. Anarchy will be followed by tyranny and reindustrialisation. Isolation is no refuge from the Machine. The same is true of countries that opt to withdraw from the modern world. Kingsnorth devotes a chapter to the arrival of Commodore Perry’s “Black Ships” in Japan in 1853, aiming to open the country to Western trade. He omits that by the end of the century, Japan had industrialised to the point of being able to sink the Russian navy in the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 – the first occasion in modern times when an Asian state decisively defeated a Western power. Tibet, on the other hand, having chosen to stand apart, was invaded by China in 1950 and its civilisation all but destroyed.
Technology cannot deliver us from environmental crisis. The ongoing wave of global warming is undoubtedly anthropogenic in origin. That does not mean human action can halt it. By now hard-wired in the climate system, it will persist for centuries. If it means a time in which our species rules the planet, the Anthropocene looks like being remarkably brief.
However, Kingsnorth is mistaken in denying that technology can help us adapt. The alternative to progress need not be apocalypse. Intelligently deployed, nuclear energy could eliminate reliance on fossil fuels. Coastal settlements could be fortified against rising sea levels and cities made more resilient against extreme weather. The population could be fed, and much of the planet returned to wilderness. But this presupposes peace. In a more likely future, new technologies will be deployed in warfare. America used cloud-seeding in Vietnam to disrupt North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops by extending the monsoon cycle, and the chemical Agent Orange to defoliate jungle. Even if geoengineering the global climate is feasible – a big “if” – it will serve geopolitical conflicts which damage the biosphere.
Kingsnorth has been attacked by mainstream environmentalists for what they denounce as his “nihilism” – the curse cast by feeble minds on anyone who mocks their mawkish hopes. The extremity of his vision should rather be celebrated. By framing the environmental crisis in such stark terms, he speaks to the sense, so pervasive that it is incessantly denied, that ours is an end-time. Whether they know it or not, many are asking how to live in a world they believe to be dying. Kingsnorth’s answer is unreal, and not entirely coherent. Despite his conversion to Orthodoxy, he has not altogether shed his neo-paganism. His writings are peppered with references to cycles of world-destruction and creation in nature and history – an essentially un-Christian, anti-apocalyptic view. As he oscillates between the two, it is unclear whether his new world is coming in the hereafter or on Earth in a far-off future.
Oddly enough, the latter has some scientific support. Whether or not they accept the Gaia theory, few scientists now doubt that the planet is best understood as an evolving system. In the Permian-Triassic extinction around 250 million years ago, nearly 90 per cent of the world’s species were lost, only for the planet to recover and become the rich biosphere of recent times. The Earth will survive whatever our species does to it. The polar caps may melt, and densely populated parts of the globe become unhabitable. Jungles may become deserts, and deserts jungles. Civilisations may come and go. Humans may or may not be around for the long term. The sun will still shine, and life will go on.
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
Paul Kingsnorth
Particular Books, 368pp, £23
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[Further reading: Why László Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize in Literature]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor