In a series of memorable essays soon to be republished as a book, Paul Kingsnorth narrated what he calls “The Tale of the Machine,” of which AI is only the most recent incarnation. Kingsnorth defines the Machine as “the nexus of power, wealth, ideology and technology” that has emerged to “replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfill the most ancient human dream: to become gods.” We are, as Kingsnorth puts it, “unable to escape our total absorption by this thing, as we are reaching the point where its control over nature, both wild and human, is becoming unstoppable.” We are being taken at warp speed into a new way of being human. Yet, incredibly, few are conscious of the phenomenon of possession by this formidable thing. Why? Because our societies have become hyper-rational, and reason, particularly instrumental reason, unmoored from its proper metaphysical place, is blind to the Machine. We can feel the Machine and the depth of what is being lost as possession by the Machine is growing fast, but it is very difficult to explain. Because the Machine operates as a force that forbids empirical knowledge by numbing our senses and transferring our consciousness to some kind of master situated outside of ourselves, the only form of meaningful resistance to it requires a repossession of our senses, which itself requires a complete change of paradigm about how, through our work, we engage with the world.
The question then becomes, paraphrasing Kingsnorth: how far do we have to walk away from the human world in order to recover our senses, and to connect to the Creator beyond and beneath it? The following lines are my modest attempt at answering this question.
My first conscious encounter with the Machine came in 2007. Although I had been a practicing maritime attorney in France, upon moving to the United States, I worked essentially as a legal prole for several DC law firms. By that, I mean the work known as “document review,” involved in the phase of legal work called “discovery,” wherein thousands of proletarized attorneys comb through tens, nay, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of documents involved in trials, regulatory investigations, etc. All this work required was a law degree, a bar license, a functioning finger, and the ability to sit still staring at a screen for 10 hours or more per day. In other words, it demanded strictly nothing from me. But spiritually, it extracted a lot.
I found that the only way to keep my sanity while working on these monotonous jobs was to listen to podcasts on my iPod. One of them, which changed my life, was a series of radio documentaries produced by French public radio on the work of Simone Weil, including her reflections on factory work informed by her experiment of working on the Renault assembly lines in Boulogne-Billancourt. It spoke to me directly considering the servile work I was doing, though with one crucial difference. Work on an assembly line requires some form of attention to not be crushed by the machines the workers operate. There was no such risk in document review. I managed to comb through hundreds of documents per hour without having to pay strict attention to what I was doing. What Simone Weil made me understand was that this was my first conscious encounter with the Machine, although at the time, I would not have called it “the Machine.” But my senses knew it intuitively. What I was encountering was something big, and diabolical—something I had only acquired a vague consciousness of from authors who expressed in a visceral way that they were not of the world of the Machine: Poe, Lovecraft, Baudelaire, Philip K. Dick, Houellebecq.
In a way, I am grateful for this experience of brutal social downgrading because it radically altered my perception of pretty much everything and made me feel a communal bond with all the people who have experienced in their flesh and soul an encounter with the Machine: peasants displaced from the commons by enclosures to become industrial drudges; craftsmen rendered obsolete by factories and the advent of a class of managers, clocks in hand; all categories of workers whose skills have been rendered obsolete in their lifetime or have been emptied of anything that would give a sense of self-worth and, as a result, were or are about to join the ranks of populations declared historically superfluous.
Though important, close attention to the liturgy, to the education of children, to the treasures of classical culture and to the dangers of electronic stimulation are no substitute for an economic life shaped by Jesus Christ’s Second Commandment.
However, even though I had acquired the certainty that the experience of servile work was soul crushing, I was still far from seeing the value of manual work. That realization came through my encounter with the work of Matthew Crawford, who shares with Simone Weil the privilege of being the only other philosopher whose central object of enquiry is attention, which Weil characterized as the “only faculty of the soul that grants access to God.” When I first started to read Crawford, my circumstances had improved, and I was engaged in much more status-rewarding work in international development, flying all around the world to spread the gospel of the US government and international organizations according to which salvation in a globalized world requires immersion in the globalized economy. Like a global program of enclosures, it means coercing people engaged in traditional (essentially manual) activities, such as subsistence farming, to move to large metropolitan areas connected to the global economy to become, for the luckiest ones, proud holders of what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs,” and for most of them, to remain chronically unemployed or underemployed.[1] By a strange turn of events, my skills were no longer obsolete in the segment of the “knowledge economy” I operated, but most of my work now consisted in finding new ways to classify more and more people and lines of work as obsolete, identifying an endless supply of soon-to-be obsolete concepts, goods, and practices. In their oxymoronic way of expressing themselves, economists call this process “creative destruction,” which is a concept only conceivable by people who manipulate heavy doses of abstract materials, making them numb to the consequences of their actions on the lives of innumerable people. Crawford aptly calls this “trafficking in abstraction,” which implies the idea of a fully self-referential line of work completely oblivious to its consequences on human communities and the natural world.
But Crawford not only brings to light what is empty and servile in most “intellectual” and status-rewarding work in society, he also draws attention to a different way to engage the world through your work and to the importance of mastering “real things.” Comparing the kind of work people do in the knowledge economy to the traditional trades, Crawford found that manual work is often more “engaging intellectually,” because manual work forces you to actively engage with “the world beyond your head” and to what exists even before you encounter it. In Crawford’s narrative, the quintessential hero is the repairman, the very opposite of the technological demiurge. While the latter seeks constant self-affirmation that he can rationally control everything, the repairman must get “outside of his head” to ensure the functioning of the man-made world. This resonated with me at the time, and though I kept trafficking in abstractions for a few years, I had some kind of fundamental break-up with the gigantic, obsolescence-producing Machine that is the knowledge economy.
A few years later, I got into the quintessentially primordial activity of farming through another intellectual encounter, this time with the farmer, poet, novelist and moralist Wendell Berry. Berry is an indefatigable advocate of an agrarian economy as the only way of social organization for a decent and godly life on this earth. One of his texts in particular had a very profound effect on me in which he offers, prophetically, directly applicable advice to do one of the simplest acts of life: eat responsibly. To do so, Berry proposes such things as learning—by way of self-defense—what is involved in industrial food production and, by contrast, what is involved in the best types of farming and gardening, which will be enriched by direct observation and experience of the life histories of the food we eat. Equipped with this knowledge, he suggests producing (where possible) and preparing our own food, learning the origin of the food we buy and buying food closest to our home from a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. Only when you attempt to follow this deceptively simple advice do you realize that it would require a quasi-heroic determination to extricate oneself from a seemingly liberating idea that has become a trap.
But contrary to exhortations by “Machine greens,” as Paul Kingsnorth calls the organized environmental movement, Berry argues that you don’t need to wait for the apocalypse or expert determinations of how we can sustain the Machine without fossil energy. You can actually take positive steps to extricate yourself from this trap now. Unless you decide to live like a homesteader, you may not materially extricate yourself fully from the trap in your lifetime, but you can put yourself immediately in a mental process of extrication from the Machine by very simple acts, such as growing something:
If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be responsible for any food that you grow yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.
So struck was I by the poetry of Berry’s advice that I started to garden, very modestly, and very awkwardly at first, before I enrolled (shortly before the Covid age of terror) in a regenerative farming program at a local urban farm; there I learned many more things in a matter of a few months than in eight years of legal education in three different countries. Since then, I have worked as a farmhand for three regenerative farmers. It is hard work, poorly remunerated, in a tragic sector of the economy under constant attacks on all sides from very powerful interests, not least the net zero lobby which promotes a system of food production ultimately completely detached from the land. But farming and gardening done on a proper scale never involves trafficking in abstraction and gives a constant sense of engagement in something primordial and a sense of belonging to the peasantry, which Jean Clair called “the original people.”[2]
Thanks to my farming experience, I considerably increased my gardening skills, transformed my yard into a productive potager and a haven for pollinators, and am applying these acquired skills in coaching families to grow their own nourishing and pesticide-free food. More importantly, I have gone from a life where most of what I was doing involved being inside and in front of a screen—which abolishes all sense of distance, time, boredom, and longing, as Kingsnorth put it—to a life outside. It feels like a very hard-fought repossession of my senses. For example, the weather is now not simply an element of the décor around me that changes a few times per year and more or less alters my moods. It is a structural element of my life. Going outside to do what humans have done for most of their history: pay attention to the color of leaves, the flight of birds, the insects crawling, buzzing and flying around crops, the interactions between various plants, makes an inert nature suddenly spring to life. It might not reenchant the whole world, but it certainly reenchants mine. It is another way to inhabit the world, one that requires the use of all senses (to smell, to touch, to hear and not simply to see or, a fortiori, to blindly reason).
By a strange twist of events, at the same time that I reintegrated into the very diminished community of the “original people,” I also reintegrated into another tragic community, that of the Christians.
Although there were other events that led me to convert to the religion of my ancestors, I don’t think it is an accident that the God of my ancestors entered my life when I began to engage actively with the world. I have not fully left the world of the Machine, with its straight lines, its QR codes and its cashless transactions, but I have definitely closed myself to it, and it has opened a big space for God. Interestingly, my friends who still believe in progress, i.e. the relentless growth of the Machine, pejoratively call what I’ve done “withdrawal into oneself.” I am sure that the re-enchantment of the world my body has been sensing prepared my mind and soul to return home to Christianity. But I would lie if I did not admit that the house to which I’ve returned is vulnerable to the same headwind forces as the farming community. In a way, having a foot in these two fragile communities battered by the Machine’s winds makes me view each of them as extremely complementary, yet estranged from each other. Too absorbed by the harshness of the task of regenerating dead soil and a dead countryside, farmers have no time to lift their eyes to the sky, as if the garden they maintain had no home to go with it, let alone a cathedral. Heaven and earth seem only remotely connected if at all.
At the opposite end, the Christians I live with live are too busy trying to regenerate their souls to notice that their cathedral, if they are lucky enough to have a proper one, has a direct view on the interstate or on a toxic waste landfill. Again, heaven and earth are estranged. As beautiful as Christianity’s cultural inheritance and liturgy can be, I’m not sure it is enough to withstand the fundamental ugliness of the world of the Machine without reconquering a material buffer zone between the two antagonistic forces. Worse, the contemporary devout Christian’s psychic protection against the onslaught of the Machine is essentially defensive, sharing in this respect the same obsession for psychic comfort as his woke nemesis. Both, in a way, are cultures of survivalism, inclined to techniques of emotional self-management to cope with life in a bureaucratic society turned into a far-flung system of total control.
In other words, I feel that I’m spending most of my time in two mutilated communities which will probably stay around for a while without ever encountering each other until all our food is manufactured in labs and until the Eucharist makes no more sense than participating in a cannibal banquet. What each of these communities faces is a fragmented world, but so far neither has offered an integrated solution.
Wendell Berry is again insightful here. Berry explains that, with the notable exception of the Amish, contemporary Christians have completely dissociated their economic and spiritual lives, as if they were living in the world and the Machine most of the time and in Christendom the rest of the time. The churches, he complains, have specialized in soul-management, while disregarding our responsibilities to our bodily and earthly life. Notably, the Amish have “remained coherent, economically and culturally,” and have remained uniformly Christian. The reason for this cultural and economic good health, explains Berry, is that they, alone among Christian denominations known to him, have understood Jesus’s Second Commandment, “Love thy Neighbor like thyself,” as an economic imperative. Neighbors, Berry insists, “are to love one another by work as well as by kindness. If one takes that commandment seriously, one cannot replace one’s neighbor and one’s neighbor’s help with a machine or a chemical.”
Thus, far from plaguing a community with economic dereliction, taking the Second Commandment seriously entails a solid economic foundation and a living human community because neighborly love acts like a safeguard that keeps economic life within a human scale: “The practical limit required by the commandment is imposed by the use of horses for farmwork and local travel. The size of the farms and the radius of each family’s daily economic and social life, both acreages and distances, are determined by the speed and endurance of living creatures. Small-scale shops and trades can flourish on this scale. . ..” In essence, Berry tells us that there is a direct correlation between the scale of human communities, the kind of economy such a scale warrants, and being close to God. Only by cultivating a human scale in what we do for a living can we, as children of God, accept our singular role in this world as loving caretakers and cultivators of creation. Though important, close attention to the liturgy, to the education of children, to the treasures of classical culture and to the dangers of electronic stimulation are no substitute for an economic life shaped by Jesus Christ’s Second Commandment. It might be enough for the souls to float for a while in the world dominated by the Machine, but it is not enough to swim.
Don’t be mistaken. I’m not arguing that Catholic families such as the ones in my parish need to resign en masse from their well-paying jobs in academia, in government, or at private corporations to improvise themselves overnight as farmers, let alone emulate an Amish way of life. But I think it would be equally rewarding for communities who dream of recreating Christendom in a Thomistic mold to do the serious work of introspection about how to treat economic life as a form of prayer. What I’m trying to get at is that I don’t think we can create living communities, robust enough to withstand the onslaught of the Machine, while living economic lives dictated by its aspiration to recreate heaven by technological means, which would be one good way to define what Berry characterized by the expression “Faustian economics.” This Christian alternative to Faustian economics will not be invented overnight, but I don’t think there will be a Christendom if Christians forever stick to a life of spiritual weightlessness in a material world shaped by the Machine.
Here again Simone Weil offers very meaningful advice. At the end of her magnum opus, The Need for Roots, Weil examines why the countries south of the Loire Valley in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were the “main hub” of what she called “almost a Christian civilization,” where “all of life” was illuminated by the Christian light. That’s because, writes Weil, the descendants of the Barbarian invaders who settled there took Christianity seriously by maintaining a well-ordered social life where “physical work occupied the spiritual center.” No doubt Wendell Berry would say that, like the Amish, the Christians south of the Loire Valley were living as close a life as can be to Jesus Christ’s Second Commandment as an economic imperative. In other words, it is not an accident, then as it is now, that Christianity found its most fertile ground in an agrarian society where “the domain relating to the well-being of souls” and “the domain relating to so-called profane matters” interpenetrated each other. Whoever spends some time south of the Loire Valley, contemplating the majestic and mysterious beauty of what was Christendom at its pinnacle, would understand what I mean. And it will take more than policies, theological doctrines, or classical education curricula to rebuild something remotely approaching this scintillating moment.
[1] In 2013, David Graeber wrote a provocative essay entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” for the online magazine Strike. Graeber defined “bullshit jobs” as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” He later elaborated on the topic in a longer book, Bullshit Jobs, A Theory (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), where he classified the bullshit jobs into 5 categories: the flunkies, the goons, the duct tapers, the box tickers, and the taskmasters.
[2] “At the same time as the first monks, it is they who deforested, cleared and delineated a landscape and gave it the name of ‘couture,’ i.e. “culture,” our culture, that word that even the Greeks had not invented: a way to inhabit the world otherwise than as savages, to sow together and practice a cult in common” (Jean Clair, Les derniers jours [Paris: Gallimard, 2013]).
