(Michael Hanby, reviewing Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth, a snippet)
...no proposal to rehumanize ourselves can be fully satisfying in a Machine culture that is already a regime beyond our control—and, I would add still more emphatically than he does, beyond the reach of politics. Political order is permanently reactive to the machinations of technological order, whose deeds are scarcely imaginable, often to those responsible for producing them, until they are accomplished fact. (Kingsnorth’s own reflections on AI amply illustrate this.) Law cannot legislate what it cannot anticipate. Of course, it must be said that if the Christian vision were ever true and actual, it must also be possible, even if the times compel us to experience the presence of the real in the guise of its apparent absence. Kingsnorth could actually do with a little more nostalgia, which longs not for an impossible return to the past but for that glimpse of eternity shared by previous ages. He voices a widespread frustration when he says:
The reality is that most of us are stuck. . . . I can’t feed my family without writing, I can’t write without using the laptop I am tapping away on now, and I can’t get the words to an audience without the digital platform upon which I first published this series of widely read essays critiquing the Machine. I know that many people would love to leave all of this behind, because I often receive letters from them—letters mostly sent via email. But the world is driving them—us—daily deeper into the maw of the technium.
“There is no getting away from any of this,” he says. All one can really hope to do is “give [the machine] the slip” and loosen its grip by creating “shatter zones” in our homes and in our souls, and perhaps in a “Savage Reservation” benignly neglected by the Machine as the forward march of progress renders the savages themselves obsolete. He counsels what he calls “cooked” and “raw” askesis, and through myth, work, story, ritual, and a redoubled commitment to the four P’s, he aspires to “older ways of seeing” in a new historical key.
We Western people: we have to learn to inhabit again. We have to learn how to live sanely in our lands. How to write poems and walk in the woods and love our neighbors. How to have the time to even notice them. How to take an interest in the parts without detaching them from the whole. How to remember that the Earth is alive and always was, and that no ‘culture’ which forgets that can last, or deserves to.
Beyond ‘the West’ there might just be another way of seeing. An older way. Beyond the West, we might find Europe. We might find Albion. We might find Cockayne, or Doggerland. We might find the mind that painted the cave walls. We might find hunters and clear rivers and countries and saints and spirits and painted churches. We might find shrines and pilgrim routes and folk music and fear of the sea. We might find ourselves again.
... those who would resist the Machine need to be able to contest the truth of the Machine account of the world, even if the Machine is uninterested in truth or measures truth only by success. The rediscovery of “older ways of seeing” also surely entails the rediscovery ... of an older conception of intelligence, that have become largely unintelligible to us. “The name intellect,” Aquinas says in his De Veritate, “arises from the intellect’s ability to know the most profound elements of a thing; for to understand (intelligere) means to read what is inside a thing (intus legere). Sense and imagination know only external accidents, but the intellect alone penetrates to the interior and to the essence of a thing.” But where quantity reigns, where there is neither interior essence nor depth of existence, there is nothing to penetrate or read. Intellect, in the traditional sense, ceases to be intelligible or necessary when what is technically possible is the measure of what is true. The world cannot be spared from the “reign of quantity” unless reason is rescued from pragmatic and technical reductions and those “dimensions of reality” we are prohibited from seeing are rediscovered and restored.
