A Dark Ecologist Warns Against Hope

The two have sparred before. In 2009, they exchanged public letters in the Guardian, circling a question that nags at many eco-minded Westerners: What, in practice, can one do? Kingsnorth accused Monbiot of offering a false choice: either “Liberal Capitalist Democracy 2.0,” the status quo with more solar panels, or “McCarthy world,” in which “The Road” becomes our reality. Neither, he argued, reckoned with the scale of what was coming; we needed to return to our cultural roots, relearn how to live, and accept that fire and flood lay beyond our control. Monbiot called this “a millenarian fantasy” and maintained that faith in political action was a duty—life must go on.

The rift was metaphysical. Kingsnorth may be right that Monbiot is a Machine man, intent on twiddling levers to save the world, but, by that standard, so is anyone who makes any green choice at all. That is the lure, and the hazard, of Kingsnorth’s position: it tends toward the absolute. In his new book, the Machine is also “the technium,” a term he borrows from the techno-optimist Kevin Kelly for the impersonal, unstoppable force technology has become. It reshapes all values and cannot be reversed. Without abandoning society altogether, there is no escape—and even that dream, Kingsnorth says, is illusory, because the Machine is “a tendency within us,” assembled with our own blood and sweat.

In lamenting that tendency, Kingsnorth joins a chorus as old as civilization. Cities, machines, modernity rise; the countryside, the old ways, tradition decline. Socrates warned that writing, a mechanical act, might weaken memory, a creative one. Virgil linked the destruction of pastures to moral decay—“right and wrong are tangled up; the world is drowning in war; evil takes all kinds of forms; and the plough is no longer a thing of honour”—which is a line that could sit without strain in “Against the Machine.” Jefferson, Hogg, Blake, Thoreau: with the Enlightenment, the objectors multiplied. For Kingsnorth, the Industrial Revolution marked the point of no return. What was once anima, a spirit or soul, became techne, a resource. Playing gods, we turned our backs on the Earth. It is, in his account, the Fall—or, in secular terms, human history as tragedy, a swan dive into the dark.

Kingsnorth’s break with the green movement, after years of being one of its most visible foot soldiers, cost him. Since the twenty-tens, he has shunned, and been shunned by, the liberal mainstream. A previous Archbishop of Canterbury once quoted his work; now Rod Dreher backs it. Kingsnorth’s attachment to the patriotic concept of “England,” one often claimed by the political right, draws suspicion, but he argues that the left ceded it without cause. His idea of “roots,” indebted to Simone Weil, means the bonds of community, not genetic heritage. He imagines the modern nation-state disassembling into smaller, more anarchic units, despises the “maw of the expanding cities,” and tells us, via Lewis Mumford, that Plato thought a city should be small enough for one voice to address it. He wants to reclaim “parochial”—what’s wrong with parishes? The icons in “Against the Machine,” from Aldous Huxley to Jacques Ellul, tend toward communitarian, class-conscious, small-“C” conservatism, albeit illuminated with a touch of the transcendent. With a few edits, the book could pass for an anarchist tract; with a few more, for the work of a Christian ascetic.

Before it can be either, though, there are swaths of nonsense to scythe. Kingsnorth claims to abjure the culture wars—“I don’t believe in this conflict, and I won’t send my children to fight in it”—while framing his own culture-war sorties as battles with the Machine. Feminism, he writes, has besieged the “un-Machine-like family unit.” (“Why should a child not have three fathers?” is, he claims, a serious question of the moment.) Mass migration, he warns, puts “the natives . . . on the path to minority status,” even as the migrants are excluded from the “national story”—a story that, thanks to the ruling élites, is now being “dissolved” anyway. (This is both confused and not how stories work, but never mind.) “Population” appears in his prose shadowed by “growing,” “mass,” and “vast,” as if it were a pestilence. One wonders what he thinks should happen to these human beings. Perhaps they are beyond help. Perhaps the rest of us are, too. He writes as if modern Britain were run by the Khmer Rouge: