Raging Against the Machine

This new book reminds us of the dangers of the ‘Machine’ and how we can resist it:

In the early 1990s an American rock group was formed called Rage Against the Machine. Because I do not follow very much of current rock music, I cannot tell you anything more about this group. Even my opening sentence was gleaned from a Wiki article.

But the idea of there being a ‘Machine’ out there that deserves to be raged against, resisted, and repudiated is something I can go along with. Of course I suspect that many folks using a phrase like this see the enemy as America, or conservatism, or capitalism, or Christianity, and so on. I do not see it that way.

Indeed, in my view – and that of millions of others – the Machine really became manifest in the West during the great Covid Wars, where Big Brother statism, mandatory medicine, obscene lockdowns, and mass violations of basic civil rights became the norm. It was then that I started a new category on my website called “Resistance Theory”.

With all this in mind, let me mention a brand-new book that contains much good material on the Machines we face. I refer to Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by the English writer and poet Paul Kingsnorth (Particular Books, 2025). It is clear that he does not like what he sees.

I had not known of him before, and I again needed Wiki to do a quick assessment of who he is. It seems he had earlier been quite active in various leftist and Green causes. In January 2020, Kingsnorth converted to Christianity and was baptised into the Romanian Orthodox Church. He tells that story here: https://firstthings.com/the-cross-and-the-machine/

And see this hour-long interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfWNMktE3xc

While still showing signs of his leftist convictions, his newest book offers much that conservatives can latch onto, especially in terms of waking up to where so much of the West is headed. So a few quotes – mainly from the book’s opening chapter – will give you an indication of the case he is seeking to make.

In it he speaks of how the earth is a “broken version of the garden, of our original integration with creator and creation.” (p. 4) But as the Christian well knows, all this was lost early on, so the creator returned to earth in the form of a humble human being who rejected power, conquest and greed: “To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.” (p. 5)

So those now living in the West are living in the ruins. He speaks about these ruins and the way things now are:

Many of them are beautiful – intact cathedrals, Bach concertos – but they are ruins nonetheless. They are the remains of something called ‘Christendom’, a 1,500-year civilisation into which this particular sacred story seeped, informing every aspect of life, bending and changing and transforming everything in its image. No aspect of daily life was unaffected by this story: the organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast days and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the very notion of individuals, with ‘God-given’ rights and duties; the attitude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe—its structure and meaning, and our human place within it. (pp. 5-6)

He goes on to write:

The point to focus on is this: that when a culture built around such a sacred order dies then there will be upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics right down to the level of the soul. The very notion of an individual life will shift dramatically. The family structure, the meaning of work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to kin to responsibility to duty: everything will be up for grabs.

 

The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. What does that make us, its descendants, living amongst its beautiful ruins? It makes ours a culture with no sacred order. And this is a dangerous place to be. (p. 7)

And when the old order is broken, and a moral vacuum arises, something must replace it. Says Kingsnorth:

In this case, a certain colour of Christianity had stepped into the breach created by the death of an earlier sacred story. The end of the taboos had not brought about some abstract `freedom’; rather, it had stripped the culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but now that the formal architecture was gone too, there was an empty space waiting to be filled—and nature abhors a vacuum.

 

It seems to me that we are now at this point in the West. Since at least the 1960s our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years the last remaining monuments have been—often literally—torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead, we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all. (pp. 9-10)

And one final quote from this chapter:

The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions—’the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress’. I’m all for liberty, and it would be nice to give democracy a try one day too; but the dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

 

This has been the terrible irony of the age of reason, and of the liberal and leftist theories and revolutions which resulted from it. From 1789 to 1968, every one of them ultimately failed, but in destroying the old world and its sacred order they cleared a space for money culture to move in and commodify the ruins…. (p. 11)

Future articles will further explore the case Kingsnorth is making here. But one concluding quote from Chapter 4 gives a look at the matter of resistance to the Machine. He speaks of how communism and fascism were false forces of resistance, and just other forms of the naked Machine in action. He then says this:

But today’s milder forms of resistance are quickly co-opted too. The once-radical green movement, in which I cut my teeth, has been transformed into a Machine accelerant. A movement which began by calling for more simplicity and slowness, closeness to nature and simple living, has mutated into a crusade to coat wild landscapes with glass and metal, abolish farming, further industrialise the global food supply, track and trace our consumption patterns and promote a vision of ‘sustainability’ that would make any Fortune 500 company smile. Feminism, which began as a movement calling for the equal treatment of women, has become a device for filling the workforce with females while eroding the inconveniently un-Machine-like family unit. As for that ‘social justice’ movement that keeps conservatives awake at night: its ‘radicalism’ just happens to be Machine-shaped.

 

Here is where we find ourselves: in a world in which all of our desires, needs, projects and even attempts at resistance end up furthering the progress of the Machine. The values of that Machine are now so ubiquitous that we treat them as if they were as natural as rain or wind. Progress; ‘openness’; an objection to limits and borders; therapeutic individualism; universalism; the rejection of roots, place and history; pure materialism; the triumph of ‘reason’ over `superstition’; scientism; commercialism and the primacy of market values: all of these go to make up the unseen and unquestioned value system within which we live, and to which we feel there is simply no alternative. The Machine, in Mumford’s words, feels ‘absolutely irresistible … and ultimately beneficent’. Opposition to it is presented as naive idealism at best, and a dangerous denial of its benefits to the needy at worst. (pp. 41-42)

All Christians today of necessity need to be in the resistance. They all need to rage against the Machine. And it is not just Christians, but anyone who cares about the death of the West and the onward march of the deadly Machine.

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