Ascetic Ghosts in the Machine

M. D. Usher on Paul Kingsnorth’s impassioned and flawed new manifesto against the pervasiveness of technology in modern life.

By M. D. UsherJanuary 24, 2026

• Philosophy & Religion

• Science & Technology

IN MODERN TIMES (1936), Charlie Chaplin captures, with pitch-perfect ire and ennui, the inanity of living under a capitalist regime. The Little Tramp’s slapstick misadventures in just trying to get by in the Age of Industry bring tears to the eyes, and not only tears of laughter. At one point, he is caught in the sprocket of a factory machine, a human cog grinding in a corporate wheel. He suffers a workplace nervous breakdown, is fired, is hospitalized, and recovers, only to wander into a picket line, where he is mistaken for a communist and thrown in jail. He is soon released for accidental good behavior, but the living conditions inside, he finds, are more congenial than life on the outside. The rest of the plot unfolds as a series of thwarted attempts to get rearrested. That the film is mostly silent and marks the last appearance of Chaplin’s signature character adds pathos and poignancy to the satirizing. The bright future promised by modernity, the film is trying to tell us—at the height of the Great Depression and on the cusp of World War II—ain’t what it used to be.

Slapstick and pathos are conspicuously absent in Paul Kingsnorth’s impassioned screed on this same theme. Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (2025), too, is about the human costs of capitalism and modernity, though the tone of Kingsnorth’s cultural critique is stern and prophetic—full-on Old Testament, in fact—lacking the bemused irony of the Little Tramp. The author’s titular metaphor to describe the predicament of our own modern times—“the Machine”—seems outdated in the information age, but he chose it, he tells us, “because a machine […] is what it feels like” to live under the totalizing oppression of digital technology. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also put “Machine” in the title of his 2024 manifesto defending the opposite view—“Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better”—though he seems unaware that the phrase stems from a sarcastic Richard Brautigan poem from 1967 that laughs at the prospects of a “cybernetic ecology / where we are free of our labors / and joined back to nature, / […] all watched over / by machines of loving grace.” Kingsnorth doesn’t mention Amodei, perhaps because his book had already gone to press. But the shared imaginary of Machines seems a sign of the times.

The Machine, though, is not an epoch, Kingsnorth points out. It’s an epic—a story we tell ourselves about the glories of technological progress, irrespective of the costs and losses. The problem with this story, he argues, is that we have internalized it and become estranged from our own humanity along the way. “If the Machine is a story,” Kingsnorth writes, “then the first step to its dismantling is neither monkey-wrenching nor revolution—it is to stop believing the story. The second step is to stop telling it to others; and the third is to begin the search for a better one.”

Thus far, I’m all in, but the alt narrative Kingsnorth proposes to replace Machine ideology—what we might title The Return of the West to Christendom—is unappealing and erroneously conceived. For one thing, it leaves out swaths of non-Western human thought and experience, past and present, that also plays a part and has a stake in this unraveling tale. What’s more, in rarefying “the West,” Kingsnorth skips over Greek and Roman antiquity altogether. Yet our pre-Christian, polytheist ancestors contributed as much or more to the civilization of so-called Christendom than the handful of fringe texts written in newspaper Greek that we call the New Testament. When the Gospel of John assures us that “In the beginning was the Logos,” for example, the first thought for an ancient reader would not have been the Son of Man but Heraclitus, or the Stoics. The Hellenic backstory of the word “logos,” in fact, can explain the bulk of Christology. It was only because Christianity had appropriated so much of what had gone before it that the classics-educated church father Tertullian (ca. 160–240 CE) found it necessary to insist that Jerusalem has nothing to do with Athens and that the best reason to believe the Christian story is because it is absurd.

One of Kingsnorth’s refrains is modern humanity’s contempt for biophysical limits. We can never get enough of anything, it seems. When Earth is exhausted, we’ll colonize and vandalize Mars. Death itself, for the cryogenics crowd, is only a temporary obstacle, soon to be removed. Here, too, I’m all in. Yet the notion that there are natural and ethical limits that human beings cannot and must not exceed is arguably the characteristic feature of all ancient thinking. It is hardly the calling card of Christendom. To cite but one unlikely example from the precious West (to say nothing of philosophers and Indigenous savants further afield), the Epicurean Lucretius, as good a materialist, atheist, and pleasure-seeker as the next person, repeatedly describes respect for limits as a “pact” or “treaty” with capital-N Nature in his poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things, ca. 50 BCE). From what he believed to be atomic, scientific fact, he argued that “there is a limit to growth and of preserving Life to things, each according to its kind”; that “it is solemnly decreed by the treaties of Nature what each kind of thing can and cannot do.” As with territorial boundaries drawn between nations and the laws that govern international affairs in the human realm, Lucretius avers, it is incumbent on the world community to abide by the compacts of Nature. That is an ethical imperative that would go a long way toward solving contemporary problems, with nary a word of God.

Now I am not a strict materialist or atheist myself, so I don’t object to Kingsnorth’s call to inoculate ourselves and our societies against dehumanizing and transhumanizing forces with traditional religion or contemplative practice. Indeed, I applaud it. But Christians do not hold the patent on religiosity. Christendom built the great cathedrals, yes. It empowered craftsmen though the guild system and honored the commons. Thank goodness it gave rise to the cult of the Mother of God. But it was also a thousand-year stretch in which unorthodox dissenters were tortured on the rack; enemies eviscerated, drawn, and quartered; witches burned or drowned; unbelievers annihilated; and all manner of disease treated by bloodletting, exorcism, enemas, or worse. And that was if you were an educated elite. If you were a peasant in the High Middle Ages, you might have known your rightful place in this world and the next, but your experience of this one, at least, was likely to have been nasty, brutish, and short. To say so is not to try to vitiate Kingsnorth’s larger argument about the need to return to spiritual roots with whataboutery; all religions have their dark sides. It is just to point out a few important facts that he fails to mention. For the recent Christian convert that he is, such details should be an embarrassment.

What I found most disconcerting and objectionable in Against the Machine, however, is just how much of what Kingsnorth says about re-Christianizing the British Isles and Europe is now fashionable in the United States. And it’s not just his anti-vaxxing stance, transgender unease, or nativist proclivities: the whole call to arms against pluralism and digital technology strikes me as misdirected. The implicit crusade afoot against inclusivity, at any rate, is at the very least unchristian. The Christian magazine Sojourners recently compiled a list of over 2,000 verses from the Bible that call for compassion, charity, and justice for the poor, the marginalized, and oppressed. “[L]ove thy neighbor as thyself” is clearly not a one-off. Nor, according to Christianity’s Figurehead, does it appear to be optional.

At one point in the book, reprised in an interview with Ross Douthat for the New York Times column Interesting Times, Kingsnorth suggests, with a glint in his eye but no tongue in cheek, that artificial intelligence might be possessed by demonic “powers and principalities” and that the Machine is in fact the Antichrist. I wish either he or I were just kidding about this, but no. That’s where a Dungeons & Dragons worldview of Absolute Good versus Ultimate Evil will eventually take you if you let it. (Technologist, transhumanist billionaire Peter Thiel, who has appeared on Douthat’s show as well, also believes we live in the age of the Antichrist, but he thinks that the Beast is incarnate as government regulation of Big Tech—a diabolical conspiracy to impede human apotheosis.)

Where does such Christian-doom talk come from, and where does it lead?

Mark Sedgwick, a scholar of Sufi Islam at Aarhus University, calls the wheelhouse in which Kingsnorth is working “Traditionalism,” a philosophical movement that took hold in the early 20th century. Traditionalism, also called perennialism, rejected encroaching modernity. Its aim was to restore what Traditionalists believe is a primordial sacred order. Key figures include René Guénon (1886–1951), a French convert to esoteric Sufism, whose spiritual analysis in The Crisis of the Modern World (1927) Kingsnorth invokes approvingly in several places. Two close cousins of Traditionalism—the armchair historian and German nationalist Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), author of The Decline of the West (1918–22), and the Austrian esoterist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), the founder of anthroposophy, Waldorf schools, and biodynamic agriculture—also make main-stage appearances in Against the Machine, as does Jeremy Naydler, whose anthroposophy of the computer, In the Shadow of the Machine: The Prehistory of the Computer and the Evolution of Consciousness (2018), was issued by Temple Lodge Publishing, an advocacy press for Steiner’s thought.

Sedgwick’s study of Traditionalism is far from sensationalist muckraking. It is borderline dull, in fact. But one’s attention is piqued when he points out how much the intellectual genealogies of a Stephen K. Bannon, Jordan Peterson, or Aleksandr Dugin (Vladimir Putin’s court philosopher) owe to this line of thinking. I neither impute nor imply guilt by association here, but the kinds of overarching, overschematized, undersubstantiated grand narratives that Traditionalists are fond of rarely hold up to the scrutiny of careful analysis. Trying to understand and come to terms with the Big Picture, as Kingsnorth does, is always a laudable endeavor. But it does no one any favors to exaggerate, overstate, or vaguely prescribe. The catchall, emotive term “the Machine” and sweeping indictments of technology as its insidious minion seem to me to fall into this trap.

Several reviewers have called attention to the “hypocrisy” of Kingsnorth’s jeremiads against the internet, seeing that he earns his living from Substack, where most of the writing in this book first appeared. I would characterize the issue differently, in even stronger terms: the internet is what made his lifestyle, livelihood, and worldview possible in the first place. It is the catalyst that actualized his newfound sense of belonging to a place—one of four P-words he recommends we cultivate to counter the Machine (people, place, prayer, and the past). Without the internet, he could not have relocated to rural Ireland and retreated to his writer’s cabin with good wi-fi on the smallholding where he lives with his family, homeschooling his kids. Thanks to the internet, he has been able to learn to scythe his lawn in the old style and has planted some coppice willow, too, to harvest for firewood in winter. Insofar as the internet is concerned, the soundtrack for this idyll is less Rage Against the Machine than “I can’t live with or without you.” I know because I live a similar life on a farm in Vermont.

The question then seems to be, rather, How can we use technology to serve human- and Creation-affirming ends? The notion of “appropriate technology” advocated in Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered (1973) by economist E. F. Schumacher, whom Kingsnorth also cites, albeit only briefly, can come to the rescue here. Schumacher himself used the term “intermediate technology,” by which he meant a technology superior to inefficient, rudimentary tools and techniques, yet one “simpler, cheaper, and freer than the super-technology of the rich.” Philosopher Ivan Illich called such technology “tools for conviviality,” the title of his own book on the topic, published the same year as Schumacher’s.

What makes technology “appropriate” and “convivial” is simplicity of design and its sole function as a human helpmeet to further what are ultimately personal and interpersonal aims—or, as Schumacher puts it, technology “designed to serve the human person instead of making him the servant of machines.” The thrust of the idea is never to use more than you need, of either labor or materials, to get a job done. Today it goes by the name “Low-tech,” the title of Kris De Decker’s voluminous instruction manual cum manifesto—a veritable Bible in four volumes (2,398 pages, 709 images)—of low-tech solutions for modern living. De Decker is a Belgian eco-journalist living in Barcelona, Spain, where he rents a small apartment atop a bar and produces his household electricity with a bicycle generator. His website runs on a solar-powered server that is, appropriately, weather-dependent.

The internet, and even AI, could become a low-tech helpmeet for human needs if we wanted it to be, and if we accepted the required trade-offs. What’s wrong with technology, of course, is not technological at all. Humans have been employing tools and techniques to flourish or survive ever since we climbed down from the trees and walked on two feet across the savannas of Africa. We were Homo habilis (“handy man”) and Homo ergaster (“working man”) before we were Homo sapiens. Agriculture, writing, STEM, and AI are all interventions of the same kind as poking an anthill with a stick, different only in scope and magnitude. The problem with technology in the dispensation of Kapital is that it is never developed or deployed with genuine altruism or general welfare in mind but rather for the sake of profit and the accumulation of wealth. Can technology be decoupled from the growth paradigm of capitalism and its externalities? It depends on what we want and what we think is right and best. The West’s failure on this score is a failure of social imagination and political will. Kingsnorth’s writing and thinking are at their best when he is describing this failure. His selective praise of Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for example, is spot-on.

Kingsnorth’s curtain call in Against the Machine invites us to reconsider asceticism. “As we think about how to live through the digital age, perhaps ancient Christianity can be our guide,” he suggests, harping on his heartfelt theme. “Specifically, perhaps we can look for help to an ancient Greek word: askesis.” I agree completely that self-restraint, self-control, and self-discipline are essential for a happy life and healthy community. But Kingsnorth’s peroration here is symptomatic of the book’s whole problem: asceticism is not a Christian invention or prerogative. “Askēsis,” a word drawn from the vocabulary of ancient Greek athletics, means “practice” or “training.” It was coined to describe an attitude toward life in general by Cynic philosophers, not Christian monastics. The Cynics were the Little Tramps of antiquity—satirists, performance artists, stand-up comedians—whose resilient lifestyle was a philosophy of doing. Cynic philosophers like Diogenes of Sinope lived rough, outdoors, begging for their food, and defecating on doorsteps like dogs—all according to the perverse logic of their thought experiment to live with autonomy “according to nature.” Putting up and making do is a form of calisthenics, they argued, that will strengthen you and make you impervious to the buffetings of misfortune while tempering your self-infatuations.

The Cynics took living within limits to the limit and found it liberating. They were irreverent, anarchic, and mostly godless. They were also gurus of degrowth and appropriate technologists before the fact: “Once, after observing a child drink water from his hands,” one ancient anecdote informs us, “Diogenes hurled his cup from his knapsack, saying: ‘A child has vanquished me in simplicity!’” Kingsnorth might want to contemplate this moment of satori in his preferred idiom—the words of a psalm quoted by Jesus: “Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.” One can only hope that contemporary humanity, the sanctified and profane alike, will get the message too, and learn to live with technology with some such childlike wisdom and abandon. Against the Machine, despite its shortcomings, is a useful point of entry—and departure—toward that end.