The Cassandra of 'The Machine'

One day, Mrs. Pengelley came to London seeking the assistance of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective with the mustache, whose “little grey cells” assist him in solving mysteries. With a troubled look, she tells him that she fears she is being slowly poisoned. The doctor doesn’t see anything much the matter, she says. He attributes the stomach trouble to gastritis. She even sometimes improves, but strangely this happens during the absence of someone in her life, confirming in her a certain suspicion.

After listening to her tale with great interest, Poirot agrees to take up the case. He sends the lady back and plans to catch a train the following day to begin his investigation. Discussing the matter with his close friend, Captain Hastings, Poirot admits the case is especially interesting, even though “it has positively no new features,” because “if I mistake not, we have here a very poignant human drama.”

When Poirot arrives the next day, he discovers that the lady has been murdered after unwittingly taking the final dose of poison. Having found the case intriguing enough to look into it, Poirot chastises himself, a “criminal imbecile,” for not having taken her story more seriously. “May the good God forgive me,” he declares, “but I never believed anything would happen at all. Her story seemed to me artificial.” Had he been convinced enough to return with her right away, he might have saved her. All that remains for him now is to catch the murderer.

“The Cornish Mystery” occurred to me while reading Paul Kingsnorth’s new collection of essays, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. In the story he weaves, a sinister force has been lurking for some time within our civilization, especially in the West. His suspicion falls upon something to do with science, technology, and how we misapprehend the world. It has been slowly sapping away at our life, creating problems that have been diagnosed as this or that malady and treated with such and such a remedy. Sometimes we feel better. And yet, we sense we are being dehumanized, unmade, that something essential is being destroyed piece by piece. Such a process is hard to pin down. This is the genius of murder by slow poisoning: it leads to doubt and misattribution. There is little ambiguity about a gunshot to the heart. Yet when killing dose by dose, one easily mistakes murderous intent with the body’s frailty, a lingering affliction, or incidental complications: murder disguised as natural causes.

And so, as Mrs. Pengelley appeals to Poirot for help, Kingsnorth appeals to us for our attention. His tale, holding traces of a crime in action, leaves us with a choice: How much do we believe it? Will we take the train today?

Kingsnorth, an Englishman who lives in rural Ireland, has been sounding some version of his warning for over two decades, as a journalist, novelist, essayist, and poet. Against the Machine gathers together some of his more recent essays, coming from both a time of heightened crisis and a spiritually dense period of his life.

We may recall how, beginning in late 2020, journalists, Twitter personalities, and authors found themselves increasingly censored for their reporting on Covid. In one of those moments of perfect alignment, a new online platform for writers had opened its doors only a few years before and now became the place for dissident, fired, and canceled authors to continue their work. Being edgy then had the effect of being listed on the index of prohibited blogs. You were unpublishable elsewhere, which meant you had a growing readership, as many readers were eager to hear and support voices outside the mainstream. It was in 2021 that Kingsnorth began his Substack, The Abbey of Misrule, which is the basis for this book.

His warning at the time was that the global response to the pandemic was “pure technique, all the way down”: authoritarian control at an unprecedented scale; a narrow focus on an equally narrow set of carefully calculated numbers; official projections guiding social behavior; the anointing of a clerisy of official spokespeople intoning “Follow the Science” like a hushed prayer; collusion between state and media to promote an ever-changing approved narrative and suppress questioning voices …

For Kingsnorth, as for many others, the pandemic response laid bare for all to see some of the underlying forces at work deep within our civilization, and what he saw was disturbing. His Substack, and thus this book, is the record of that discovery.

There is another reason, however, why his Substack marks a new moment in his thinking. Also in 2021, he published in First Things his essay “The Cross and the Machine,” which tells the story of his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. Having rejected the spirits of his Wiccan past, not without some spiritual warfare, he found in Christ a radical, revivifying hope. Gradually, his faith began to infuse itself into his writings. Covid and conversion thus serve as the backdrop for these essays. The lesson Kingsnorth has taken from both is that “the Machine” is as much a physical as a spiritual threat.

The culprit of our slow poisoning is the always-capitalized Machine. So then “what exactly is this Machine, where did it come from and how might we pin it down?” Eagerly I awaited the unveiling of Kingsnorth’s answer. But it never comes in the way you would expect. In a way, I was not wholly disappointed. Like one of detective Poirot’s cases, there is no lack of hints and traces and evidence. But what they add up to is a great everything pointing in many directions. For example, one answer to the question appears in a reflection on Lewis Mumford’s classic book The Myth of the Machine: “This then, is the Machine. It is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies we have cleverly managed to rustle up…. The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition.”

So the Machine is an impulse. But it is also a spiritual presence, a new god we have enthroned, replacing Christian or earlier powers. In the essay “The Universal,” Kingsnorth writes about computers, particularly AI, that they are “not just machines.” They are “a body whose mind is in the process of developing; a body beginning to come to life.” We are not disenchanted but bewitched, enthralled to new and malevolent entities. Every time we look into the obsidian-black rectangles, we are paying our attention to something, and to someone.

The Machine is many other things besides. It defines our “Faustian age.” It is a sovereign “dressed up as mere ‘economy.’” The building of the Machine can be found at the beginnings of civilization, especially the serpent in the garden, and with the Egyptians. Centralized civilizations, “which coalesce into megamachines,” grow and progress and revolutionize, and “like Sauron, they will always rise again.” The Machine emerges through capitalism. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas contribute to it, enabling “the philosophical separation of humanity from the rest of nature, and the rest of nature from the divine.” The city is an omen of its presence: “Once a society becomes primarily urban, it is locked into a process of metastasising growth which will, in the end, lead to the destruction of other ways of being.” “The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest.”

One way to read Against the Machine is as a local telling of a world-historic drama, a cosmic sci-fi horror, with menacing black ships on the horizon and rebellious villagers conspiring at the pub, as told by a seen-it-all sage whose loves are bold and whose hopes have cooled but not died. At his best, Kingsnorth is a storyteller. It is often the images, not the ideas, that linger after reading.