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To Stop The Emerging Anticulture, We Must Escape The Digital ‘Machine’

Paul Kingsnorth’s latest book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, has the makings of a classic that may help us all rediscover faith and virtue.

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It would be an understatement to say that the modern world has not been conducive to human flourishing. There is a sense that every humanizing influence is replaced with artificial interventions, causing life to become scripted, mechanized, quantified, and commoditized.

Worse still, the resulting malaise is so ubiquitous that even perceiving it, let alone defining it, is incredibly difficult — like asking a fish to perceive and define the water in which it swims. And even if one could wrap his mind around this pervasive force informing the current world, it would take a whole book to properly articulate what it is and what to do about it.

Fortunately, such a book has finally arrived, appropriately titled Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by writer and former hippie Paul Kingsnorth. His book does not just take aim against today’s addictive digital technology, corrupt and incompetent political leaders, and exploitative and unscrupulous titans of industry, but against the whole damn system, which he calls “the Machine.” In Kingsnorth’s view, a vast web of bad ideas and cruel processes has come together to destroy human nature by making it mediocre, melancholic, and more easily manageable.

Although his claims sound extreme, Kingsnorth makes a compelling case that nearly everything in modern life really has been rendered unnatural and antihuman to the point of demanding a forceful response from anyone who doesn’t want to lose their body and soul to the Machine. In the introduction, he compares this ambitious endeavor to that of Captain Ahab hunting the murderous white whale Moby Dick: “I find myself still circling the [Machine], like Ahab pursuing the whale.” If he can even “circumscribe this thing with words,” the book represents a major victory in the war for the world recovering its humanity.

The Emergence of Anticulture

Before discussing what the Machine actually is, Kingsnorth........

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