The Sacred & The Machine: Part One
A discussion with Paul Kingsnorth and Rhyd Wildermuth
This discussion was first published at Another World, the supporters’ journal of Gods&Radicals Press. To get early and exclusive access to essays, reviews, and audio—as well as free downloads and course enrollment and discounts on purchases—become a monthly or permanent supporter of our work.
The following is the first half of discussion between Rhyd Wildermuth and Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth is an author, a former environmental activist, and a brilliant thinker known perhaps best for co-writing the Dark Mountain Manifesto. His deeply reasoned essays on The Abbey of Misrule via Substack combine historical narrative with profound insight into the relationship between humans and the Sacred, as well as humans and the Machine. Rhyd Wildermuth is a druid, writer, theorist, and author, and writes on Substack at From The Forests of Arduinna.
RHYD WILDERMUTH:
Hi Paul,
First of all, thank you so much for agreeing to this discussion. I've followed your work since I first learned of the Dark Mountain Manifesto that you wrote with Dougald Hine in 2009. I was late to that, though—I think it was in 2015 that I first encountered it. Which was best, I suspect, because before then I could be described as a bit of a "true believer" in what I've come to see as a religion: the religion of progress.
Defining precisely what I mean by "religion" would require an essay in itself, but fortunately I don't need to write such an essay—you've written plenty on the subject. Of particular interest to me have been two recent essays in your "Divining the Machine" series, both of which address the way technology has become not just something we humans use, but something we believe in and changes our way of seeing the world.
In the first installment of that series, "Blanched Sun, Blinded Man," you write the following:
"This, then, is the Machine. It is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies we have cleverly managed to rustle up - cars, laptops, robot mowers and the rest. In fact, such 'technics', as Mumford calls them, are the product of the Machine, not its essence. 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."
Could you discuss more about this process, especially in its relationship to belief and the way technology defines or even supersedes more local and community-centered cultural and spiritual forms?
PAUL KINGSNORTH:
I should probably start by saying that for me this is as much as a spiritual question as anything. It’s taken me many years to both realise and admit this. But when I look back, for as long as I can remember–since I was a child—I’ve had a deep, instinctive suspicion, or perhaps fear, of what we so blithely call ’technological progress.’ It seemed—and seems—so obviously to me to be a path to disaster. Perhaps I read too much science fiction as a kid, but I’ve always been clear that we are playing with forces we can’t control, and we are going to end up being eaten by them.
So in some sense what I’ve been writing about for so long has been an attempt to rationalise, explain or understand that older, primal feeling. Because that feeling is still as strong as it was as a child. And in the intervening decades I’ve come to understand that the sci-fi books and films I was reading and watching when I was younger are mirrored by myths from virtually every culture, all of them warning about what happens to humans when we make a god of technology, and when we try to control and exploit what is not ours. From The Matrix to the Tower of Babel, via Terminator and Prometheus, it’s the oldest story around.
Basically—and writers like Ivan Illich or Jacques Ellul, amongst many others, can explain this much better than me—what I call ’The Machine’, this matrix of technology and power that draws us deeper each year, is more than the sum of its parts. Technology has its own metaphysics, if you like. It is not ’neutral’ as is so often asserted. A nuclear weapon can only be used for one end. A car will entirely redesign a landscape, and a whole way of experiencing it. A smartphone will change the way you think and experience the world. An electric lightbulb will revolutionise your relationship with the night.
The way we live now is in what’s been called ‘hyper-reality’: a version of the world that is more immediate to us now than the real thing. That hyper-reality then shapes reality itself. Think of how abstract debates or fights on social media translate into real-world outcomes. What this means is that everything from cars to smartphones to motorways to televisions have so reshaped our world over the past half century or so, that we no longer live in the same reality as even our grandparents, let along our ancestors. This in turn gives us great notions of our own power. We start to talk as if we can remake the whole world, colonise space—become gods. And then we’re right back to the warnings in those old myths. I suppose the reason we need so many warnings is that we never listen.
RHYD WILDERMUTH
You mention that technology has its own metaphysics, for instance the automobile and how it will entirely change the landscape. I’m one of the few people I’ve ever met—and I imagine most will ever meet—who has never driven a car. It wasn’t by choice as a teenager: we were actually too poor to own a car and so lived carless and fully dependent on others until my mother was given one when I was 17 years old. So there wasn’t really an option of learning to drive, and later it never really occurred to me to learn even as an adult.
But I think of how the world has been shaped by the automobile, the way that cities founded within the last 100 years in the United States are extremely unwalkable places. Comparing that to Europe where I’m living in an 800 year old village next to an even older village, and the carting path through a small forest that connected them centuries ago is still there. There is of course a road I could take to get between them, but that road is for cars and feels “dead” compared to that carting path.
So there are still ways to access a world less shaped by machines, but those ways tend to be hidden or increasingly paved over or destroyed by the need of the machine, the car in this case but also the mechanized world of 9-5 work that makes people drive those cars and therefore need those roads. They all feed into each other, creating an inescapable world with its own logics, which is what I take by your statement that the machine "has its own metaphysics."
You also mention the hyperreal, which was Baudrillard’s idea. He, though, was building off the work of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” whose premise is that “mechanical reproduction” (the camera, but also the ability to copy works of art through printing and audio recordings) changed not just our relationship to art but the function of art itself, from ritual and the exploration of beauty to that of politics.
In the part where he speaks about film, he notes that it—along with all these other mechanical apparatuses (machines), promise a kind of false liberation:
The function of film is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily. Dealing with this apparatus also teaches them that technology will release them from their enslavement to the powers of the apparatus only when humanity's whole constitution has adapted itself...
And that seems to be your point in all this, too, that the machine promises a kind of liberation only if you accept its premises and remake your world according to its logic.
You point out that cultures have always had myths that warn against this kind of trap. But of course our myths now are produced for the very machine that they warn against. It’s probably a trick question, but what do you see as the way out of this reproducing madness? You say this is a spiritual question for you, and this also aligns with Walter Benjamin’s point about art once being created for ritual rather than politics. I’m pretty sure you and I both share the sense that the missing or suppressed sacred is a core cause of much of this—what could such a sacred look like now?
PAUL KINGSNORTH
Well, something very strange happened to me over the last eighteen months: I became a Christian, having been pretty 'pagan’ I suppose for many years, in spirit or instinct mainly; though before my strange conversion I was a member of a Wiccan coven for a while. Being a green activist, which I used to be, and a lover of wild nature, which I remain, an animist, pantheist or generally ‘paganish’ sensibility seems to go with the territory.
The story of my conversion is long, and I’ve written about it here in case anyone wants to know more. But the short version is that I’m now an Orthodox Christian, much to my own surprise. The reason I bring this up is firstly that I discovered that this version of Christianity—and indeed the older version that existed many centuries back in my country, England, and in my adopted country, Ireland—was not the version I had come across in my youth. In Orthodoxy, the spirit of God is ‘everywhere present’ –not distant and cut-off from daily life, but flowing with the water and the wind. The divine is in the natural world all the time.
The second reason I bring it up is because it is in many ways the answer to your question: the way out of the Machine’s grip is, in short, to return to God. I’m not suggesting that everyone should become an Orthodox Christian ... But I am suggesting that we are in the middle of a deep spiritual crisis, and that the technological terror we are building, like the ecological crisis it has precipitated, is a result of that. We once knew this, but modernity has trained us out of it.
I keep finding this story in traditional Christianity, where I never expected to find it. I find it, as I’ve written in my Substack series, right at the beginning of the Biblical Creation story. The Garden of Eden, there, represents the primeval Oneness: humanity, God, all living things, all together, all on the same level—literally, and symbolically. And we choose, through eating the apple from the tree of knowledge, to separate ourselves from the rest of life—from creation and creator. We decide that knowledge is better than unity, and power is better than peace, and we are separated eternally from that garden and from its creator as a result. We’re forced to till the soil, to work, to create civilisations, and it’s not long before we’re building the Tower of Babel and then Jeff Bezos’s little spaceship, which both do the same thing: attempt to take us back up to God’s level again, symbolically speaking, but under our own steam.
The Machine—the world we have built—is a result of this hubris. We keep building, keeping trying to play God, and we keep digging ourselves further and further into a hole in which we are trapped by our own creations. The way out of that, for me as an Orthodox Christian, is to do what Christ asks us to do: deny our selves and pick up our crosses. That’s the path of simplicity and humility and love: a path we all find impossibly hard. It’s the opposite of the path of politics, ideology or science, but it is the same, I think increasingly, as what another tradition calls the Dao—the 'Way of Great Nature.’
In other words, to live small, to love God, to live in and with nature and its ways - all of these old, simple lessons we have always known but have been brought up to ignore: this is the way of escape. You and I have grown up in Britain and America, the two great modern empires, and the heart of the global Machine. Maybe that makes the escape harder for us. Or maybe it means we can see the problem with more clarity.
I do think any escape from the Machine can only ever be personal, community-based and small scale though. Try to turn it into its own global ideology and we’re back where we started again.
RHYD WILDERMUTH
I don’t really talk about this very often, but I was heavily invested in that ‘other’ kind of Christianity as an adolescent, evangelicalism, the sort that you really only see in America. That was all by choice —no one forced me to go to church, I went willingly and enthusiastically as it gave me a sense of purpose and meaning I really needed at the time.
Amusingly, it was later at a Christian college that I encountered that older sort via an Episcopal church whose priest(ess, as she was a woman) was much more into that sense of the immanent divine than I’d experienced before. Then, I’d gotten to reading C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, John O’Donahue, and the fiction of George MacDonald, which all inadvertently made me a pagan. Or put another way, I started from the pale American protestant transcendent and distant divine, went looking for the immanent divine, then found that divine to be plural.
So though we’d likely have very long discussions on the nature of the sacred, I think we’d both agree that “nature” and “sacred” are intertwined concepts. Nature without the sacred is just raw material, inert resources to be exploited; the sacred without nature is just a whole lot of mental masturbation.
I n fact, perhaps it’s possible to say that this divorce between the two is part of the problem we’re all in now. The Machine is certainly treated like a sacred thing; something that raises all us humans out of the “terror” of raw life into a solipsistic ecstatic trance. Watch someone staring at a smartphone and you certainly get the sense they are having what pre-industrial people might have suspected was a religious or magical experience. It’s like they’re being swept up by something, into Zuckerberg’s Meta-heaven.
I guess what I mean to say is that we still a metaphysics. For a book I am currently writing on “woke” ideology, I’ve repeatedly noticed that much of their beliefs—for instance, that gender is a kind of inner “felt sense,” or that white male privilege is an indelible guilt like original sin—seems to be a continuation of Christian religious forms, but without the Christ which animated them. Similar to the way people uphold “the science” as the word of God or believe in technological progress as a kind of second coming, the new neoliberal ideology or what John Gray first called and Wesley Yang popularised as the “successor ideology,” has all the forms of belief and religious dogma without an actual god attached to it.
And I do think, as you do, that the problem is the absence of god (though of course I’d add an “s” at the end). It seems in our nature to worship and revere, and killing off all the other notions of god has just left us worshiping ourselves and the machines we create that rule over us. Which is to say maybe there is still a god at its center: the Machine.
Where’s that leave us, then? You said you think the only response can be personal, small scale, community-based: what does really look like? You and I are both living in rural areas (though you’re probably a bit more beyond the pale than I am) and thus it’s a little easier for us to de- machine our lives and relations and tend to the sacred. I’ll admit that never feels like enough, though, even as I realize more and more how little is actually possible besides this...
Paul KINGSNORTH
Dear Rhyd,
I’m interested in the key differences between the way that Christianity sees the natural world and the divine, and the way that ‘pagans’ do, not least because I’ve been on both ends of the telescope. Obviously ‘pagan’ is a capacious word (as is ‘Christian’ today) but I’ve come to understand some of the distinctions. The interesting, and disturbing and wonderful, thing about the Orthodox path is that following it really does remake you from within. I feel myself changing shape daily, and it means I look out at the world through different eyes.
I’ve especially found myself looking at nature differently. One thing I’ve realised is that for much of my adult life I had a deep spiritual longing and I didn’t recognise it or know what to do with it. Orthodoxy is pretty clear about what this is—the longing for theosis, or union with God, which is the desire of all humans. Of course I didn’t know that, or have any interest in it, and so my longing with God became tied up with my love of nature, which I sort-of worshipped. In Orthodox teaching, nature is one place where we experience the energy, the presence of God—but it isn’t God itself, so to worship it is a category error. I think it was Saint Paisios of Mount Athos, though it might have been another Orthodox saint, who said ‘nature is not our mother, she is our sister.’ Which is to say the mountains and the woods are worthy of veneration, but not worship. I like that notion.
It sounds a bit nit-picky but the distinction turns out to matter, because a major criticism that Christians have of pagans is that they worship the creator not the creation, and this opens them up to all sorts of temptations and confusions; not least the worship of the self by the back door. In my experience this is often true. However, a criticism that pagans have of Christians, which is often equally true, is that they don’t notice nature at all, or worse, actively destroy it and somehow use their faith to justify it. I think this kind of worldly Christianity has been a catastrophe, and we are now paying for it in the collapse of the culture here in the West that was built on its foundation. Many young people today, perhaps especially in America but certainly in Britain too, regard Christianity as either a religion of empire or a stale, meaningless set of moral rules, rather than what it always was in its traditional form—a path of transformation, and the road to union with God, which is the natural state of all humans.
I’m sounding a bit preachy –sorry. But I am increasingly passionate about the need to return to our spiritual roots, which is what I think answers your question, in a roundabout way. That means first of all rediscovering the spiritual reality of creation of the beauty of nature, and the energy of God that flows through it. Without this, we have nothing, as you rightly say. from my perspective, I want to rediscover the original Western Christian tradition—the wild monastic spirit of Skellig Michael and Lindisfarne, of St Cuthbert and St Colman, who went to the margins as the Roman empire crumbled around them and protected and encouraged a kind of wild Christianity—Orthodox and orthodox, but also embedded in nature and open to fate and grace. I think that’s a wonderful vision. I think too that, whether Christian or pagan or anything else, the job of returning to our spiritual roots is perhaps the only one worth thinking about at this point. The West is in freefall again, as it was when Rome collapsed and, as Alasdair Macintyre famously put it, our job now is not to prop up the dying empire but to wait for a new St Benedict. Or maybe try to become, or at least emulate, one.
I said I thought the only ‘solution’ could be small and personal, but that wasn’t quite right. I think the work first of all has to be to ensure our hearts and spirits are in order. But then we can retreat and rebuild. I think it may come to that, though perhaps not yet—we’re still too comfortable. But I have a dreamy vision of a network of low-tech spiritual communities—Orthodox in my case—passing on the real work and building for the future. But that’s not a vision that has to be limited to Christians.