The word “gestalt” is a German word that means “the way a thing has been ‘placed,’ or ‘put together’” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. In psychology, the word refers to a theory of perception that has to do with “attributes of the whole [that] are not deducible from analysis of the parts in isolation.” This theory of perception is essential background for understanding Paul Kingsnorth’s outsized essay, Against the Machine, a manifesto which has received a broad reception in both Europe and North America.
Kingsnorth is a former atheist and environmentalist who has started a new life in western Ireland on a farm with his family, having embraced the Eastern Orthodox faith. The book is a political call to arms as well as a moral and spiritual field guide. He seeks to rescue the sacred from the clutches of the machines that blot the landscape, that strangle our souls and our politics. In place of the machine, Kingsnorth wants to re-signify the world, to restore what he calls the “sacred order.” The book exudes the older habit of viewing the natural world as a mirror of God’s glory. To return to this habit, argues Kingsnorth, capitalism must fall and, with it, modernity and the entire edifice of “Western civilization.”
The “machine” in the book is a reference to the peculiar dangers of an amalgam of threats that prey on the innocent, the organic, the spontaneous, and the beautiful. The machine is the West’s beating technological heart, its cold, dead mechanical Gestalt. Humans are now mere nodes within a mechanical universe and Kingsnorth’s goal is to call attention to the omnipresence of this order, its inhumanity and its spiritual consequences. It is the book that everyone under 25 should read and discuss in required first-year liberal arts courses alongside Leviathan, Pride and Prejudice and the Confessions. It maps the alternative to the educational behemoths that ruin Generation Z’s desiccated mindscape.
What is genuine enchantment? Doesn’t it entail embedding ourselves in the prayers, rituals, pilgrimages, and seasons of the liturgy by which our formerly enchanted forbears were guided?
The book turns on the need for cultural roots that nurture transcendence. The prognosis for recovery hinges on four “P’s”: people, place, prayer, and the past. These things stand opposed to the four “S’s”: sex, science, self, and the screen. The ubiquity of the latter at the expense of the former is how the machine manipulates societies in thrall to mammon and so-called progress. Kingsnorth is stark, stern, sagacious, and sincere. He draws on works by Lewis Mumford and Oswald Spengler, as well as exemplary figures like Ned Ludd from his native England. Kingsnorth builds his case for both identifying and expunging mechanistic structures in the western socio-economic orbit. He maps the problem conceptually by mapping a history marked by the various ideological enclosures in his native Britain: the falsehood of the Enlightenment’s image of pure reason, scientism as faith, urbanization, the rise of money and avarice, global trade, the rejection of tradition, the role of hearth and home, as well as the spiritual emptiness of “all the lonely people,” as the Beatles once said.
Kingsnorth is a romantic conservative, whose consistent impulses align with an agrarian, “small is beautiful” outlook. He consistently aligns with a Burkean red Toryism, as espoused, for example, by Canadian philosopher George Grant. The reader is given a sprinkle of Italian political theorist Augusto Del Noce and the American social critic Christopher Lasch, although the citations and references span numerous disciplines. Kingsnorth’s intellectual debts are incisive, from the philosopher and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist and his work on brain organization, to the views of Oswald Spengler and the deterministic path of the West’s decline. Yet, despite the insight of its perceptive gaze—and my enormous sympathy with its appeal as a Gestalt interpretation of our predicament—the book lacks depth. None of these figures is interpreted critically or comparatively. It’s a cook’s tour, not a tour de force.
The book has received a great deal of attention from Christians and various secular critics. Most of these engagements appraise it in political and social terms, whether positively and negatively. But Kingsnorth’s book deserves a Christian response. His cri de coeur appears to be a Christian form of resistance, but his message is backstopped by the sociology of religion, rather than a political, moral, or natural theology. The choice to hold theology at bay defangs the book’s bite. Kingsnorth advocates a “sacred order” and interprets Weber’s disenchantment theory as an example of the Western flight from nature. But what is genuine enchantment? Doesn’t it entail embedding ourselves in the prayers, rituals, pilgrimages, and seasons of the liturgy by which our formerly enchanted forbears were guided? What hope does a Christian life with nature mean? Against the Machine does not say. It speaks of order and spiritual enchantment, which isn’t wrong, but is not the same thing as divine presence or the authority of that presence in the church and the world. The book could have drawn upon the landscape of Christian geography: the parish. Or it could have drawn upon the ingredients of Christian forgiveness that seeped into civil law from the realm of canon law. And this is to say nothing of all those other Christian inheritances upon which the West draws, and which Tom Holland highlights in his great book Dominion. But Kingsnorth’s certainty around pervasive cultural decline, and the conceptual impregnability of faith apart from the world of natural knowledge, shield these sources of recovery from the reader.
To be sure, the desire for an enchanted universe is wholesome. Yet, without theological specifics or the implications of virtue, it reads like nostalgia. The misplaced characterization of science as ideology is gross exaggeration. Equally false is the confusion between finance capitalism and “the West.” The reactionary radicalism that he endorses in his final chapter is too thin to buttress the desire for limits laid out earlier. An ascetic worldview needs more than concepts; it needs fasting and abstinence across a large range of human activity. Almost no one needs a clothes dryer. They need an ordered love of virtuous behavior. But that would necessitate an exchange between philosophy, political theory, natural law, and theology. Let me be candid: Kingsnorth’s embrace of an isolated polis of the family and small churches, similar to Rod Dreher’s proposal in The Benedict Option, is an elusive (if not illusory) ideal.
Christian faith and the good life are parallel tracks that don’t meaningfully converge in an Eastern Orthodox approach. The Christian virtues of simplicity, meekness, and patience are radical, yes, but they shouldn’t be reactionary. They are necessary, but insufficient, since the deliberation of common goods takes place in the polis. The good is always mediated by differing public goals and authorities. The disingenuous character of reason in the West—due to the waves of scientific naturalism and relativism that have grown up here—does not unseat reason, properly understood, from its proper role in guiding cultural critique, social norms, governance, and lawful rule.
The environmental movement, from which Kingsnorth is estranged because of its left-wing evolution, began as an impulse of reason. Rachel Carson’s scientific research into the toxic effects of DDT is great science. The response to the Three Mile Island disaster was a confluence of journalism and independent politics. Kingsnorth, like the Orthodox Dreher before him, cannot see the virtuous potential of liberal individualism that grew in the West from Augustine through Aquinas to figures like Maritain and Pope John Paul II. Fideism is a poor substitute for such a theological reckoning with the saeculum as these. Against the Machine needs a differentiated, Augustinian defiance of imperial rule, a way of granting secular freedom, mindful of the possibility of the consequences that flow from its disordered expression. Christian virtue doesn’t suit a politics of reclusion, much less revanchism.
Kingsnorth repeatedly asserts that the mechanical worldview that dominates global culture is “Western.” The rise of AI seems to substantiate this view. But Kingsnorth’s favorite critics of the machine are only nominally Eastern. The monk Seraphim Rose was American. Kingsnorth likes the Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy, a Russian who was thoroughly inspired by liberal Westerners. Tolstoy read Montesquieu and was so enamored by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that he wore a medallion of Rousseau around his neck instead of Christ. Kingsnorth’s desire for the “West to die” is a revenge too far because he bites the hand that feeds him intellectually. And this desire lacks the theological virtue of hope. Biblical sources of all kinds point toward a hope in God, whose fire and brimstone does not obscure our expectation of seeing God’s face (Psalm 11). The invocation of the demonic to explain the sinister control of the machine is based on a category mistake. While the evil that arises from AI is genuine, it is more like the Tower of Babel than the worship of Satan. It’s simply idolatrous. The West’s many mistakes are the surds of folly, the loving of our temporal lives more than God—as Augustine would say. The benefit of Kingsnorth’s book however is that he gives us a true picture (Gestalt) of where misplaced love has landed us. His diagnosis of the Machine’s control is absolutely correct even if his remedy is lacking.
Dr. Paul Allen is Dean of Undergraduate Studies, Corpus Christi College and Professor of Theology at St. Mark’s College, Vancouver, Canada. His books include Theological Method: A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark), as well as the edited volumes: Augustine and Contemporary Social Issues (Routledge, 2023), Divined Explanations: The Theological and Philosophical Context for the Development of the Sciences (1600–2000) (Brill, 2024) and Catholic Thought and Gender Theory (CUA Press, 2026).
