Copyright The Atlantic
During the five years I worked as an environmental-studies professor at a progressive private college, I undertook a small, semesterly rebellion: I had students read “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” a 2011 essay by the British writer and former green radical Paul Kingsnorth. In it, Kingsnorth chronicles his disenchantment with the activism that had once been his life’s work—the very kind of advocacy that had driven many of my students, that had driven me, into that classroom in the first place. The essay makes the case that mainstream environmentalism has abandoned the commitments and ideas that originally defined it. Classic texts of the 1960s and ’70s, including Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, took a sort of acetic posture as they warned about the ecological risks posed by technology, industry, and development. They asked societies and individuals to live more simply, consume less, and go—grow—more slowly. As Kingsnorth sees it, the ideological landscape began to change in the ’80s and ’90s, when ecologically minded people embraced the idea that global industrialization could continue at its breakneck pace and simply be made “green” through “sustainable development.” To Kingsnorth, “sustainability” is not a laudable goal to strive for but rather the emergent rot in the green apple. This account of mainstream environmentalism is more than a little reductive, at times even a caricature. Kingsnorth unfairly downplays the many individuals and organizations who do still have views mostly in keeping with his own degrowth perspectives. But his polemic does capture a change that I have been, and that I think more than a few of my students were, quietly unsettled by: that the dominant strains of environmentalism—the sort that are generally embraced on college campuses and by major nonprofits and the media—have lost their enthusiasm for limits. Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, expands his critique to include nearly all of present-day culture. A tendency to see nature as raw material that can be engineered to meet our perceived needs or whims, he argues, suffuses most every aspect of social and political life. “Modernity is a machine for destroying limits,” he insists. In his telling, this attack on limits is legible in a host of current phenomena, including mass immigration, free-market orthodoxy, the rise of AI, overseas labor exploitation, the clear-cutting of rainforests, and new ideas about gender. If Against the Machine is one of the most insightful works on culture, technology, and the environment published in some time—and I believe it is—it is not so much because Kingsnorth is persuasive, or likely to win acolytes to his cause. It is not even because I think the limits he chooses to draw are necessarily the right ones. It is valuable because he sees with uncommon clarity that not only nature, but human nature, is being redefined by an anti-limit culture, economic system, and technology sector that treat minds, bodies, and environments as ripe for plundering and optimization in the name of progress. “What progress wants is to replace us,” Kingsnorth writes. “Perhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.” Kingsnorth is not the first person to think of industrial modernity as a kind of machine, or to assail the idea of “progress.” He joins a long list of anti-progress critics, including his British contemporary Mary Harrington and the 20th-century historian Christopher Lasch. Likewise, Kingsnorth’s analysis of civilization’s embrace of what he calls the “Four Ss”—a substitution of religion for science, an obsession with personal fulfillment and improving the self, a faith in identity-crafting and personal liberation through sex, and a fixation on the screen—draws on ideas from Catholic intellectuals including Charles Taylor, conservatives such as Carl Trueman and Philip Rieff, and tech critics including Jonathan Haidt. On these issues, Against the Machine is not groundbreaking, though it is still valuable as a synthesis of these earlier strains of thought, and as an articulation of the kind of “reactionary radical” tradition Kingsnorth sees himself as belonging to. This tradition blurs the lines between right and left, progressive and conservative. It is skeptical of technology, opposed to market fundamentalism, and deeply concerned about climate change and ecological collapse—and is also troubled by how these forces can erode traditional and indigenous cultures, dismantle local economies, undermine the nation state, wear away at religious life, and make having a family more difficult. What is novel about Against the Machine is Kingsnorth’s account of what is at stake in the 21st century: what he calls the “unmaking of humanity.” Human biology, as he sees it, is rooted in a few basic facts: We are born to sexed bodies on a planet with finite resources, endowed with minds capable of exercising creativity and seeking wisdom, and then we die. His book attempts to demonstrate that much of today’s scientific, economic, technological, and cultural activity is predicated on an effort, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, to overcome these realities. He offers several examples of ideas and innovations that he believes are part of this effort: biotech for billionaires seeking immortality; state-assisted suicide for the suffering; IVF and other results of “the technologisation of sex”; hormone therapy that allows children to change their gender; plans to geoengineer the planet and to abandon it and colonize Mars; robot “priests” that can preside over funerals. In isolation, the importance of any one of these examples may be easy to downplay. But Kingsnorth argues that, in the aggregate, they point toward a future in which the realities of human life—sex, death, environment—are negotiable. The English writer G. K. Chesterton, a favorite of Kingsnorth’s, once argued that “the thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect.” It is these sorts of “great plain limitations” that Against the Machine frames as being undermined today. Kingsnorth encourages his readers to ask: If civilization is accelerating down a freeway that’s taking us away from our shared humanity—not to mention destroying the ecosystems we depend on—at what exit do we get off? Artificial intelligence, new medical interventions, and other modern marvels allow us some choice about which natural limits we accept, and which we decide to blow past. According to Kingsnorth, each person must make individual decisions about where to begin “drawing a line, and saying ‘no further.’” Will you watch television shows written by large language models? Will you let the machines craft your emails, your college essays, obituaries for your loved ones? Will you get an AI-enabled virtual girlfriend? Will you let AI into your life knowing that data centers are metastasizing, while already-parched deserts are drained dry to cool them, while content moderators in Africa labor in quasi-slave conditions, sorting through images of beheadings and child abuse? Will you draw the line at letting algorithms design your baby? When the time comes, will you get your chip? Your brain-computer interface? Will you upload your consciousness to the cloud? Kingsnorth’s most contentious claims concern his insistence that technoculture and its products—large language models, genetic engineering, and so on—share a great deal in common with progressive ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender. They all, in his telling, attempt to use technology to overcome what were once hard natural limits. Unlike some other critics of the transgender movement, however, Kingsnorth shows compassion for those struggling with their identity and does not scapegoat them for larger problems in society. “People with gender dysphoria, girls with short hair, boys who play with dolls, people whose sexualities differ from the norm: they are not, in fact, the real issue,” he writes. But he rejects assertions that “biology is a problem to be overcome” and that the “body is a form of oppression.” These ideas, first aired on his Substack, have, not surprisingly, alienated some fans of his earlier environmental writing. The writer, green activist, and former Kingsnorth enthusiast John Halstead said that Kingsnorth has become a “transphobic proto-fascist.” Specifically, Halstead argues that Kingsnorth confuses sex with gender, and is mistaken to call binary sex “natural,” given that other species have more sexual variation. For my part, I don’t find Halstead’s objections especially persuasive. Rather, the principal problem with Kingsnorth’s gender analysis is that it mostly ignores the ways that those of us who live in the aftermaths of the industrial, scientific, sexual, and digital revolutions are all already “cyborgs,” as the science and technology theorist Donna Haraway would put it. Microplastics permeate our bodies, birth control courses through our veins, smartphones rewire our neural pathways, medical devices keep our hearts pumping. If, as Kingsnorth claims, gender-affirming medicine is an assault on human nature and the human body, then so, too, are pacemakers and prosthetic limbs, or Botox and condoms, for that matter. But even though some of Kingsnorth’s claims may be too simplistic, and vulnerable to these kinds of rebuttals, and even though some readers may understandably be turned off by some of his stances, I do think he is getting at something important. William F. Buckley famously said that the purpose of his conservative magazine, National Review, was to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.” It is a quip that Kingsnorth himself invokes, yet he is no true conservative. His philosophy has less in common with Buckley than with the refusenik scrivener of Herman Melville’s short story, a man who does not shriek or resort to violence or cruelty or name-calling, but who looks at what is being asked and offered by modernity and says, simply, “I would prefer not to.” For Kingsnorth, this ethic has led him to go off the grid, moving to Ireland, converting to Orthodox Christianity, and toiling on a subsistence farm with his wife and homeschooled children. Kingsnorth knows full well that this hermit’s path is closed to most of his readers, just as he knows that he himself is no purist. He acknowledges that he makes his living off The Machine as a Substacker: “Even we romantic Luddites are doing much of our lamenting on the internet.” What is most provocative about Against the Machine is not Kingsnorth’s diagnosis of modernity but his insistence that, if you are troubled by a culture of no limits, you can still take some stands, even if they’re only small ones: Shun the chatbots and don’t engage with AI unless you have no choice. Lose the smartphone and “bring your children up to understand that the blue light is as dangerous as cocaine.” Seek out wild places and remember that your body is not made to be hacked or optimized but to connect you to the earth beneath your feet. Touch grass, quite literally, and do your best to connect with other people who want to do the same. “Nothing is easy; everything is compromised,” Kingsnorth concludes. “But building anew, building in parallel, retreating to create, being awkward and hard to grasp, finding your allies and building your zone of cultural refusal, whether in a mountain community or in your urban home: what else is there?” Against the Machine is more than a warning about the dangers of technology. The book is a much-needed reminder that it is still possible for humans, at least as individuals, to say, “Enough.”
