The Leader of the Luddites, 1812. Hand-coloured etching – Public Domain

It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange and value – until it wasn’t, until you realized the web you live in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labor and colonial pain.

“It’s sick, [Robin] whispered. “So sick.’

“But it’s just trade,” said Ramy.  “Everyone benefits, everyone profits, even if it’s only one country that profits a good deal more…The point is, [Robin], I think I understand why you didn’t see.  Almost no one does.”

–Characters in Babel, or The Necessity of Violence (2022) by R.F. Kuang

How many of us have spent our lives struggling to escape from the burdens placed upon us by our modern minds?  I know I have.

– Paul Kingsnorth,  Against the Machine: The Unmaking of Humanity (2025)

Building anew, building in parallel, retreating to create, being awkward and hard to grasp, finding your allies and building your zone of cultural refusal, whether in a mountain community or in your urban home.  What else is there?

– Ibid.

Taking the depiction of empire-building Great Britain circa 1839,  in R.F. Kuang’s fictional Babel (the current selection in our book club) as accurate, one has to acknowledge things haven’t changed much!  Now, as then,  the default zeitgeist wraps us in its assurance that the forward-moving technological track we’re on, bringing us miracles that quickly become standards, is the best possible one, obscuring the “sick” truth of what makes it work.  I think here in particular of the digital “revolution,” which has changed everything so totally in a matter of a few decades.  As Kirkpatrick Sale writes, “From treating technology as part of a human world, we became humans in a technological world.” That says it pretty well.

My friend Sarah brought her witty, acerbic friend Dave, like her in his late 50’s, to our house a few months ago.  Evidently in solidarity with something I had said about my recently-acquired first cellphone, a birthday gift from my children about which I am deeply ambivalent,  he convincingly proclaimed his hatred for computer technology,   Today I learned from Sarah, who rented his house for several months while he had to be away, Dave has Alexa monitors throughout his home; he can ask its help in whatever room he happens to be  in!   In her matter-of-fact way,  Sarah tells me that Alexa would just start talking to her sometimes, unbidden.  No longer living in Dave’s house, still working at Target,  she added that, though she thought them creepy, conversations with Alexa were the mostinteresting conversations of her day. “It has a way of making you feel very listened to (with active listening and “intelligent” feedback.)  I felt very seen!”

I ask,  how are harried, hurried human beings to compete with that?

Similarly to Dave with his announced techno-aversion, during 22 years running our Utica coffeeshop, countless friends and customers expressed agreement with the Luddite-ish protest Orin and I made – i.e., no wifi, cash only, no Cafe Domenico II in the suburbs.   Few-to-none realized the full extent of what taking such a keep-it-small-and-in-place stand demands.  Not just a critical, radical spirit, but as well a reactionary one. Thus most of them joined the digital ‘revolution’ without a murmur, years ago –  fingers crossed, I suppose, that AI won’t be the end of the world as we know it. Or, perhaps some, like its enthusiastic developers, hoping it will be. After all, the Machine’s estimable goal is “transcendence” over pesky, old-school “creatureliness.”  And don’t Sarah”s conversations with Alexa indeed sound competitive with the best social intercourse we busy humans can offer each other?

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One clue as to why so many succumb to the Machine’s seductions, as Robin, Babel’s translator protagonist,  succumbs to the charms of Oxford University and his plum-lucky situation in the world,  is precisely those “burdens” Paul Kingsnorth alludes to, bequeathed to modern minds.  Or, more accurately, the clue’s in the failure of most people to pay attention to them. I will call them the burdens of unhappiness.  Though they may, if acknowledged at all, seem existentially given, they actually have a cause.  The cause, as D.H. Lawrence memorably told us in the poem  Healing: “I am not a mechanism.”

In my case, the unhappy burden registered early;  childhood  trauma made me an obsessive-compulsive neurotic before I was 6.  The resolution to that story – no longer an unusual one, as PTSD is now widely acknowledged to be epidemic, came as an adult, following years of participation in spiritual recovery groups and a decade of psychotherapy.  These experiences brought me into contact with my spiritual nature, an aspect of my humanity I’d been largely missing.  Moreover, they revived my suppressed imagination, giving my brain the expanded capacity to comprehend  I had contacted metaphysical reality directly!My quickened imagination assured me this reality was one and the same God that had inspired centuries of religious tradition and had never previously meant much to me. ( Quite a realization for a Divinity School graduate to make 20 years down the road after graduation!)

This esoteric discovery that had without exaggeration saved my soul, carried with it a reactionary awareness which said, spiritually speaking, modernity had thrown out the baby with the bath water.  It underlay at least my part in the anti-Machine protest our Cafe made.  It’s what caused me to connect easily, gratefully, with Paul Kingsnorth’s notion of “reactionary radicalism” as the possible stance humans – any and all of us – can take against the Machine.  Until reading Kingsnorth’s book,  with all my reading of mystics, poets and prophetic and critical thinkers, I had never come across that naming (invented by academic author Craig Calhoun in reference to historic Luddite protest) for what we had done, the particular way we had chosen to respond to the world we find ourselves in.

Our 22-year success in maintaining both the Cafe’s unfriendly stance toward technology, and its popularity, depended on another factor, besides belief.  Alone, belief was too abstract to be of help in running a bricks-and mortar-business. That factor was Orin’s way of saying No, which was, more or less – “Because I said so.”  Ours having been a  “Mom and Pop” enterprise, his resoluteness contained archetypal echoes of father authority behind it.  People felt safe without knowing where it came from.  It was – there’s no better word –  a vibe – in which vulnerability was protected, including the vulnerability of white liberals whose souls – though white people and our souls often exist in “different walks of life -” are as vulnerable as any child’s.

Orin’s people-over-profits stance came partly from being influenced by hippie counterculture in the 1960’s.  He may have been further radicalized by a 2-year sentence to state prison in his teens on a  drug-related charge.  His family too poor to hire a lawyer as his more affluent friends’ parents did, thus getting their children – neither more nor less guilty than he –  off – he paid the price.   But more fundamentally, his kind of grounding came from having grown up in the remnants of a culture –  a not fully assimilated,  fully patriarchal, Sicilian-American one.  As gift, it was, for sure, a sword with two edges!  But equally it suggested to me that the protection of our humanity is culture work.  Due to the striking contrast between Orin’s upbringing and mine I saw his had given him something I entirely lacked: a positive enough sense of his otherness to stand firm in the face of anything that threatened the face-to-face cafe culture hewanted.  I, on the other hand, forever bamboozled in white liberal protestant reality, with its dependence on personal self-absorption (neuroses), could not as clearly see the threat he could see, and which he understood as the machinations of power, “the spectre of Empire, free trade, and colonial pain.”

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Reaction, as I use it here, and as Kingsnorth uses it, is not merely reactionary intolerance for social change.  It is not nostalgia, not racist, not MAGA. It is dynamic myth-level re-creation of the way of life inclusive of imagination.  That is, it is return to the expanded view human beings are uniquely capable of when, borrowing language from neuroscience, left and right brain hemispheres are in communication.  In western civilization, where left-brain thinking dominates, the imaginative right brain, is always an outsider, an “other.” It is walled out from consciousness.  Reaction, then,  is the regaining of indigenous imagination that,as we know from native American testimony, comprehends the interconnection (oneness) of the cosmos.  Connected in imagination with the eternal, reaction is the means to affirm the ultimate meaningfulness of one’s voluntary commitment to personal, rag-and-bone real life lived here, on the ground, among face-to-face others, in place over time.   Calling for local decentralized “councils of elders,” rather than theocratic rule of law, it authorizes the fulfillment of the social and familial roles that underlie human safety and well being. Connection with imagination’s roots in the soul makes it possible to say to AI, despite the continuous failings and weaknesses of human nature, despite those great conversations that speak so well to our lonely hearts,  this is better.

For the defense of humanity, for a future to be what we know as “human” there must be a change in liberal  thinking from the other being solely minority others, to understanding the other  is the “walled out” outsider in oneself.  Failing to do so, conventional “doing good” is about defending shaky self worth instead of actually serving the good of the whole.  The “right brain” outsider is a someone, in most of us now undeveloped and not fully recognized, deeply pained to be left out of conscious awareness and expression.  For most of us burdened with the modern, colonized mind, this pained outsider at the edge of consciousness is rejected for the uneasiness it provokes, for its unhappiness, in favor of the happiness of assimilation into the dominant ever-progressing corporate reality in which “everyone benefits, everyone profits” –  “Utopia Now.”

The much-anthologized short story by Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas (1973), about a full-blown utopian society sustaining itself upon the existence of a child kept chained and suffering in a dark basement, has been coming to mind as I write this.   In part, awareness of the suffering child, so this most enigmatic story tells it, serves as a guarantor against the people of Omelas becoming their worst.  “It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children.  They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music…” But who, reading that story, does not instinctively side with “the ones who walk away?”  For it has been pointed out in the narration nothing can be done for the child; people cannot forget the reality of its suffering. But, as well, they can opt to walk away from the utopian perfection of Omelas. They can, each one, make something imperfectly, individually, that is in touch both with the unbearable awareness of the suffering child, and also with the reality in which delight, or joy, or oneness, not vain self-satisfaction, is the natural condition.  Each one can become a “zone of cultural refusal.” They can, with effort, join with the others who’ve walked away, to see what collective may arise.  One that’s absurdly miniscule and no-account? Kingsnorth’s analogy of “small furry animals running unnoticed under the feet of tyrannosaurs, building our own world at the margins…”? No matter.

Maybe LeGuin, writing just as the 60’s mass eruption of countercultural enthusiasm was being replaced by that other kind of reaction, was already seeing what was happening to it.  She may have intuited that “utopias should never be a goal,” that the true goal must be “some form of free survival…in order to live a life unconformed to the dictates of the machine, and to uphold the values of a human life.”  If nothing else, the aftermath to 60’s experimentation should have shown us how such “blank-slate” moves toward a “notional utopia” does not circumvent the Machine.  The Machine absorbed the hippies and their battle cry of personal  liberation, swallowed them whole, no problem.

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These days the spirit of our Cafe,  of culture-making-instead-of-culture-buying, lives on in the nonprofit arts organization we started up almost 17 years ago, The Other Side (TOS),  next door to our Cafe.  Lately, idealistic young people have been arriving at our door, seeking to be a part of this project I (not they) call reactionary radicalism.  That they trust me, an elder old in years, to be at the helm is perhaps sign that they are at least open to the “reactionary” part.  Perhaps,  aware of the apocalyptic hopelessness of the world they’ve been handed,  they allow in themselves the longing for verticality,  instead of succumbing to liberalism’s  blanket “question all authority.”

Without reactionary faith, modernity having left us with neither culture nor roots, no social protection exists for one who makes “wrong,” Luddite-like” choices on behalf of the neurotically twisted-up soul in pain.  Reactionary radicals must learn to live with what happens when one is doing everything not the way one is supposed to.  “Building anew” puts one at the receiving end of good people’s tendency to ward off shame from their own neglected souls by thoughtlessly- mostly unconsciously – tossing it out on others who’ve made themselves vulnerable.  When I mentioned this vulnerability to one of these newer members, Jacob, ( co-organizerer of the popular Monday night music jams, co-founder of the People’s Readers’ Theater, facilitator of the book club and co-dj for our new radio show, Left Ear Sounds, airing on a local college station), he talked about how he feels telling people he, age 27, lives with his parents.  From Jacob’s “indigenous” perspective, the choice makes perfect sense, as such choices can only when the lead voice playing in your head, if not your Sicilian grandfather’s,  is Thoreau’s or William Blake’s, or D.H.’s.   To ‘build the new,’ will be to take upon oneself one’s true vulnerability and the building of a different, difficult,  illiberal kind of strength.