How to fight the machine
When the publisher for Paul Kingsnorth’s new book Against the Machine asked if I would like an advance copy, I was pleased. I’ve always appreciated his work and read his substack regularly where, for a year, he wandered out to Holy Wells in Ireland and wrote pilgrim entries about the experiences. Fifty holy wells. It was a glimpse into folk religion and the heart of a people.
That heart, as Kingsnorth argues in Against the Machine, is being slowly but surely lost as what he calls “the Machine” does its work, by which all the traditional human ways of living are being enclosed, made efficient, subjected to market-forces. The result is the loss of human happiness and flourishing as we become ever more captive to technology and artificial constructs. Typically, I’m skeptical of long, drawn out counter-factual arguments, which is what the majority of this book is. However, he’s not wrong, but in my opinion the sections where the writing really shines is when positive solutions are proposed. I love the Kingsnorth who sleeps in hermit caves and wanders strange byways and searches out all that is ancient and beautiful. Become like a jellyfish tribe, he writes. Jump up and down on your smartphone until it cracks. Love the place you inhabit. Pray more. Those sorts of things. I suppose what I’m saying is that Kingsnorth does a fine job of explaining what he calls the “unmaking,” but I don’t think we should dwell there for too long. Diagnose the problem, understand the stakes, and move on. I’m far more interested in “making.”
Assuming I’m reading him correctly, Kingsnorth is half-convinced that the machine is developing into some sort of digital, emergent false god. I think this is true but we must be very careful how we understand that proposition. If the machine is become god, it’s the sort of idol that St. Paul insists is dumb and pointless. Made of wood and stone, it has no spiritual power, nothing with which to rival the One, True God. The god of the machine is mindless scrolling, anti-creativity, un-making. This is the god of “the research shows,” and “believe in science.” Impersonal, surface-level-only. Boring. But, of course, still incredibly damaging.
Rilke warns of it;
The machine would threaten all we have done,
If it dared to exist in spirit, not simply serve us.
Lest the controlling hand show a sweet hesitation,
It cuts the stone more exactly, to build more firmly.
It never lingers long enough for us to escape it,
To leave it, oiled, to itself, in the silent factory.
Certainly a hellish destiny, and one we ought to be fighting against with all our might. The question, though, what is the weapon with which we offer battle? The drift of my writing over the past years has actually been, the more I think about it, entirely a response to this question. My book The Forgotten Language is a plea for a recovery of the poetics of Holy Mass so the liturgy might do its transfiguring work. I’m writing a book currently for Angelico Press on the Poetics of Our Lady, the point of it being that motherhood is a fundamentally creative, poetic act and, as such, Our Lady mediates reality, a poetic image, into her children of such magnificence that it does not in any shape or manner actually fit into us. It’s the impossibility and poetry of motherhood, her dreams, hope, and her humility by which the small is raised up, and so does the Logos enter his creation.
This is how Rilke completes his poem. In that uncanny way of his, he puts it just right;
But for us existence is still enchanted, our origin
In a hundred places, a play of pure forces, no one
Encounters without kneeling in admiration.
Words are still sensitive to the unsayable,
And music, ever-renewed, from quivering stone
Still builds its heavenly house in unusable space.
This is how we fight. By welcoming Beauty. Making beauty.
It simply won’t do to sit around complaining about everything that has gone wrong with modernity, or indulging in large-scale abstract arguments about the drift of sin through history, or obsess over some coalescing new antichrist in the distant future. Sin is always with us. Idolatry is ever-present, much closer to each of our hearts than we would like to admit. Theoria is contemplation, meaning it’s not actually an abstract concept but, rather, an individual commitment to sitting and waiting, looking for God, searching out and welcoming grace. The answer to fighting the machine is not to construct a bigger, shinier machine. It’s to withdraw entirely. Love your wife and children. Go to Mass. Write a poem. Look at the sunset. As Kingsnorth says, do a raindance. Or as Rilke says, build your heavenly house in unusable space. Be impractical. Inefficient. Salvation is impossible. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t risk everything to obtain it because, right there at the end of our resources stands Christ through whom even the impossible is possible.
In his book Transfiguration, Michael Martin argues that the strident rationalism of the modern era is actually a disfigurement of nature because it only apprehends the mechanistic, surface-level. The perspective is entirely technological, resulting not in the creation of an AI demon (I don’t think) but, rather, a lack. A deprivation. Something vital and alive is missing. Indeed, Martin says, science itself becomes a lifeless object in a machine-world. The recovery of a truly scientific worldview, he writes, “that does not reject the entirety of the cosmos is to welcome poetic perception back…” If science wants to explore reality, well, it should actually explore the whole of reality and not some small, self-delineated corner. Anything less is submitting to servitude in the machine.
Truth is wrapped up in the splendor of Beauty such that, if we would know the truth, we absolutely require poetry, which is the avenue of exploration humble enough to receive Truth’s disclosure and contemplate it, perhaps even join in the disclosure through creative manifestation. There’s no abstract theory to be propounded, no system, no quick fix. There is only looking at God and not flinching when he looks back. There is the human person confronting the reality of what it means to be created in the image of God.
It’s a disclosure of love and creativity and rebirth. Martin comments, “There is an almost obvious Marian dimension to such disclosure,” which is why, I think, I’ve found the last two years of working on my Poetics of Our Lady so spiritually rewarding. Our Lady tabernacles God within her womb and from her humility arises her great poem the Magnificat. She is compelled to speak of this truth, this dangerous incarnated Truth that joins humanity to himself and drags us up the holy mountain to lay down our lives and die. The house of this world is too small, but he builds it anyway.
Caught in the machine, we think we need to be perfect. We’re fooled by surface appearances. Ego and mimetic desire destroy us. Break free. Build your house. Choose people. Faith. A genuinely human life. It’s a constant challenge because, with real people, the outcome is unknown. People might not respond. Or respond in the way you want. Or betray you. Or belittle you. The machine will never do that. The machine will plug you in and make you comfortable. But the machine cannot give birth. It cannot love.
You don’t need to be perfect. You can just be you. If you welcome Beauty into your heart, he will remake you, transfigure your entire existence. You will become poem, fully alive.
This essay is cross-posted from my substack. After re-reading it, I think it represents a gesture towards the beginnings of my response to the recent, dehumanizing trend we’ve been enduring in public discourse and culture.
