Against The Machine: On the Unmaking Of HumanityBy Paul KingsnorthParticular BooksISBN: 978-024178840-0368pp.

In the current year, the United States and China are set to significantly expand their lunar exploration programmes. While couched in the language of scientific discovery, these initiatives encompass efforts directed at exploring the conditions for human presence beyond Earth.

This interest in extra-terrestrial habitation signals an implicit acknowledgement that the planet’s resources may be insufficient to sustain the prevailing patterns of human life in the long term. These efforts also signify that, instead of reckoning with the restraints on growth, the contemporary lords of mankind are looking for a technological escape from crises generated by expansionary capitalism.

It is precisely this impulse towards expansion, control and ambition that Paul Kingsnorth takes aim at in his collection of essays, an impulse he terms “the culture of the machine.” This culture, which has become the dominant logic of the present age, is marked by the pursuit of limitless growth, a constant drive to master nature and an expanding ambition of technology to pervade everyday life. The machine, as Kingsnorth puts it, is “a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition.”

Kingsnorth traces the origins of this cultural logic to the scientific worldview, which took hold in the wake of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, he argues, brought about a decisive rupture in how the world was understood. Pre-enlightenment thought conceived of the universe as an ordered organism, in which human beings were embedded rather than distinct from nature. This cosmological order was oriented towards supra-terrestrial or transcendental ends that set moral limits on human actions towards the natural world.

A collection of essays takes aim at the pursuit of limitless growth, the constant drive to master nature and the expanding ambition of technology to........

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