Cover art for the book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth – Fair Use
A machine made of human parts. This is what (Lewis) Mumford called the ‘megamachine’: an entire society ordered from the top down, justified by a mythos employed by its leaders and driven by a desire for ‘order, power, predictability and above all, control.’
–Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
‘Communities never exert themselves to the utmost…except for what they regard as a great religious end…Where such efforts and sacrifices [are]made for purely economic advantages it will turn out that this secular purpose has itself become a god, a sacred libidinous object, whether identified as Mammon or not.”
–Lewis Mumford quoted in Kingsnorth
“Since every human being incorporates in his own person the cultural environment in which he lives, its disagreements and incoherence are to be met with again in each individual personality”
–Jacques Ellul, quoted in Kingsnorth.
The younger family members seated at the dinner table, post-dinner, were avidly building a list of “robot” songs vs. “human” or “people” songs, (i.e., Mr. Roboto by Styx, Human by the Human League, songs mostly unknown to me) for Molly to play during her bar-tending shift the following week. I finally decided to intervene. I ran (or, truthfully, walked swiftly) upstairs to get Kingsnorth’s book so I could say to them, this is what all these musicians with their robot songs are talking about, about what is happening to us. My intention wasn’t to abort their fun. And I even reflected that, if they read the book, they might find it distasteful for Kingsnorth’s conservatism and for his ringing denunciation of digital technology. But these aspects of his thought are mainly why I want them to read it. I added, as a sort of reminder, these family meals, the fact of us being together here, is something we do “against the machine” (i.e., consciously conservative). My interruption finished, they continued building their list.
Kingsnorth did not introduce me to the idea of the return to “the local,” that is, to a rooted human culture. And I hesitate before sounding like a Kingsnorth acolyte. But he helped me greatly to understand why actually implementing the idea, as Orin and I committed to here in Utica – its values summarized in Kingsnorth’s “4 P’s” of past, people place, and prayer – feels im
A thought is now emerging, a reason for the feeling of impossibility – besides the loss of our Cafe*, my ‘lifeboat’ for 22 years. This is that, prior to now, I have not credited the experiences and influences that shaped me (the past), that made me who I am, before, that is, the experience came that I’ve long considered to have changed everything. I refer tothe personal spiritual transformation of the 1990’s that was for me a watershed. But that experience did not mean that the person I’d been up to that time was null and void! There is pain in me in recalling this spurned youth. Surely I was not appreciative enough of parents and grandparents during their lifetimes. It was all about me. But, I remind myself, this was their doing! That is, without much conflict that I ever discerned, my parents adapted themselves to the modern Machine reality. They believed their artist’s rebellion was different from the entire modernist movement towards “no strings on me.” Like everybody else in their liberal milieu, they left God and verticality behind, the past was not important enough to tell their children its stories, and in these ways they effaced themselves and the sense of a past, including the parents one might honor.
And what they did to the sense of place! They moved their young family from a place, Utica, to a no-place, a brand-new lower middle class suburb, accomplishing an erasure in all of us of the emotional meaning there might be in attachment to place. Instead, meaning was replaced by a weird sense of status. Our father’s creative additions to the ticky-tacky house, that did indeed make it distinctive and even interesting, could not vanquish the sterility – identical houses except for paint color and make of car parked in the asphalt driveway, no businesses, churches, libraries, eateries – no signs of commerce anywhere – gave it – as I think of it now – a kind of fascistic purity over the village of Whitesboro down the hill, with its human blemishes – i.e., aging housing stock, uneven sidewalks, overgrown trees and neglected yards, kids who walked to the school I was bused to, and range of socio-economic circumstances (very little ethnic variation, however).
Even so, I feel the need growing in me to include my past, need for a healing of some kind, for the strength that comes from not being so divided within/against myself and my past. In making me aware that the Machine is the context and has been so throughout my 75 years on the earth – and for far more than that! – Kingsnorth has allowed me movement in this direction of self-forgiveness. For years I’ve known that the deep disturbance in myself, from my earliest days, had a cause. The disturbance went beyond my parents and family “dysfunctions”; it had to do with larger trauma, that of the civilization that less and less values human beings and their needs, including prominently, their need for roots.
And now, from Kingsnorth’s book I’m taking a deeply, poetic-mythic-level conviction for my ever disloyally wavering self: my truest inclinations, that I have never been able to fully trust except in my writing, have valid meaning and purpose. I can trust them beyond the written page. In my case, the spiritual vacuum created by my parents’ embrace of modernity was filled by nighttime monsters disturbing my sleep, driving compulsions and obsessions. Perhaps, disturbing visions turned into symptoms because when first experienced, I was “pre-reasoning” age. The negative vision, goading me, became sign of my unwellness, my need for “special treatment.” More so, and without my parents having means to provide treatment, the need became theirs, that is, that I “get over it,” that I be resilient, that I let go of all that plaguey darkness and join the club of cheerfulness and forgetting.
My own experience taught me if the elders, having lost their faith, have nothing to teach, if they cannot give words and stories that “positivize” existence, imaginations will supply negative alternatives. On the other hand, the child, being human, has in herself a powerful need for grand, enlarging feelings, such as devotion, loyalty, religious feeling. Her soul cannot be satisfied with sarcasm, irony, cynicism – the attitudes I learned to cover the vacuum so I could keep walking the road of liberal forgetting. In my case, these dissenting, perverse perceptions that I had not asked my soul to have but she had them anyway led to the indefensible streak of conservatism in me, those true inclinations I never could trust, and must distance myself from. Because the bread appeared to be buttered on one side, not the other, I clung – in truth, I cling still – to liberalism’s cancellation of “vertical” tendencies. For much of my life I fit perfectly black revolutionary Assata Shakur’s idea of “liberal” as “the most meaningless word in the dictionary.” It’s hard not to be what one was raised to be!
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What I’m writing here is a grandmother’s manifesto. In unforgiving old age, when one has to confront one’s uselessness, unwantedness and out-of-jointedness in the human-made world, with people around you compliantly disappearing into their handheld screens, when one has to search for another ground of meaning to stand upon, the machine context is discernible without hardly trying. In the dismay of grandmas, whether or not one has read Kingsnorth, there’s a window that opens onto the Machine reality. On one hand we are disturbed by obvious breaches we see in our children’s lifeway choices from “the way things used to be,” or the way we would like them to be, and on the other, we fear to make waves. My experiences of this kind, because my family has remained local and I have a concrete place in my grandchildren’s lives are not, perhaps, the usual ones. (However, how are the children to learn devotion? Loyalty? Not only do I fear treading on that ground, I have no clue how to go further, except privately, than “spiritual-but-not-religious.”
At the school playground last week my fellow playground Grandma spoke to me about her elder grandson – who lives 75 minutes from here by car – having decided to attend college in South Carolina. She cried even as she told me her reaction to this news from his mother. Like me, she watches her younger grandchild after school at the very same elementary school hers and my children attended. She, like me, has sustained her roots in these South Utica neighborhoods. Unlike me, hers was a more or less “natural” development. Mine, a choice from my idealistic soul.
It was the idealism, fed by my growing social consciousness and spiritual awareness, that developed into the desire – and shaky sense of purpose – to encourage my adult children – to remain local. That this could actually happen was thanks to the fact Orin and I allowed ourselves to dream a dream of community that could make rustbelt, Dollar Store-proliferating Utica a place. The dream of our Cafe business that we brought into existence and which lasted over 2 decades, made the sense of place powerful enough that both our children chose to remain here, and other family members to follow suit thereafter. Without the Cafe – the intrinsic worth it brought to this place, sacralizing it, holding my family – and other people! – here, convincing them to stay, against pulls of career, “betterment,” or “greener grass -” the aging, eccentric parents could only have been wrong.
Thus, I found myself saying to my friend, Of course, going off to college is just the beginning – your grandson will follow a career, and he will not return to central New York. Why did I say this? Did I want her to take her pain at this inevitable separation more seriously? Did I want her to make a futile protest against the kid’s leaving home to go to college like he’s supposed to do? How wrong is that!
This is fully my constant, plaguey dilemma. My feelings just do not match the demands of the liberal reality, the reality of progress that we are supposed to fall in line with because it is without question right! Of course you are sad about your grandson leaving, growing away from you – such feelings are only natural. You’ll get over it, and he can be freed to pursue a successful career someplace as he should. And what will I say when it’s time for my grandchildren to go off to college? They’ve had the rare advantage of growing up in an extended family, but what will that mean in 7 years?
Grandma’s dismay can only be justified, that is, if we can agree the western civilizational project is wrong, instead of inevitable. And who among us has the balls to say something so black-and-white! So declarative! So judgmental! Well, Orin was one! And Paul Kingsnorth’s another. I must say when a person has the balls to say it loud and clear, it makes a difference! Another such person whose clarity helps me is young “Luigi,” our Peoples’ Classroom history teacher, who will not compromise historical truth with the version we’ve received and been conditioned by our entire lives. Or like our friend film maker Lech Kowalski, currently teaching at a Cuban film school, relieved for awhile of western Machine consciousness, now sharing experience with its victims.
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Sometimes, our minds/imaginations, reduced in modern liberal reality, just cannot grasp one’s personal life might have another purpose than the one laid down for us in liberal reality. There might indeed be a call one’s soul hears even if one is deaf to it. The call may have come earlier; for those of us who did not follow it in youth it colors all we have done; we never find quite the right thing even when we are doing it! What if the better purpose is not only to serve our “fellow human beings,” which in our loyalty to liberalism – to our privilege – we do not do anyway? Referring to the epigraph quoting French philosopher Jacques Ellul, since “every human being incorporates in his own person the cultural environment in which he lives,” the purpose would seem to be to meet the “disagreements and incoherences” of that culture in one’s own person.
The task of reclaiming purpose in order to remake human culture that has already been drastically and tragically unmade cannot be done without positive imagination; it is a creative task and a religious one. That is, it is honest. The art one makes does not have to be cheerful and optimistic, but it has to be true, it has to see through the lies and incoherences of the (false) culture incorporated in oneself. To me, this is the work of building roots, which is more than just a task of staying in place, drawing your line and holding to it as best you can, though it is that too. It is reincorporating into one’s humanity what is essential to it, its mythical-poetic-spiritual “verticality,” without which it blends and adapts, leaving itself – willing or unwilling – fodder for the Machine.
*Cafe Domenico, 2011 Genesee St., Utica, NY, July 22, 2002-March 30, 2024 R.I.P.
