Long view: Is the West's alienation from its own culture going to be its undoing?

I found it in Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, never mind his conflation of the West’s particular predicament with that of the rest of world.

It is one of those rare books that I liked a lot despite disagreeing with many of the author’s arguments. It makes grand claims without presenting empirical evidence. It invites the reader to accept the author’s life experiences as a guide to one’s own. It looks to the past for answers to problems of the future.

Normally, any one of these would have caused me to label the book as dubious and discard. Yet, how could I dismiss a book that recommends throwing away your television set and limiting exposure to social media?

Kingsnorth argues that “the West, in short was Christendom. But Christendom died." This left Western culture without a “sacred order," or as societies without higher meaning.

The vacuum that Christianity left was filled by consumerism and the pursuit of money. Reason, industrial society, technology, market capitalism and economic growth are facets of what he calls “the Machine," which is unstoppable and has entrapped humans. It’s the Matrix:

“The Machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits. Its momentum is always forward, and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world.

To do that, it must raze or transmute many older and less measurable things: rooted human communities, wild nature, human nature, human freedom, beauty, faith and the many deeper values which we all adhere to in some way or another but find difficult to describe or even to defend.

Its modus operandi is the abolition of all borders, boundaries, categories, essences and truths: the uprooting of all previous ways of living in the name of pure individualism and perfect subjectivity. Its endgame is the replacement of nature with technology, in order to facilitate total human control over a totally human world."

And as we are told later, we live in a Baudrillardian hyper-real world, where our perception of reality is itself shaped by the Machine. The West’s problem didn’t start with the internet, television or industrial revolution. It started with the Enlightenment and the ascent of Reason in the conduct of human affairs.

This is not a new argument. We in India are quite familiar with trite dismissals of Western civilization, from the famous one-liner attributed to Gandhi to the smug condescensions expressed by our uncles. For over a century, entrepreneurial spiritual gurus have found lucrative markets in Western countries, helping their followers find higher meaning.

What Kingsnorth does is to connect the weak sacred order to various pathologies of Western culture, politics and business models. Causality is established with the use of beautiful prose and quotations, which is consistent with the author’s dismissal of reasoning and the scientific method to make an argument.

It is, however, compelling. If you don’t bother to ask for evidence, you will be convinced.

It is refreshing to see a critique of the excesses of the Western progressive left in what the book calls a “culture of inversion" where the elite—some of whom are “adversary intellectuals"—are engaged in disparaging and dismantling their own culture while being overindulgent of others. The loss of faith in one’s own culture, he argues, is pathological.

On the controversies around gender, he argues, “The real issue is that a young generation of hyper-urbanised, always-on young people, increasingly divorced from nature and growing up in a psychologised, inward-looking anticulture, is being led towards the conclusion that biology is a problem to be overcome, that their body is a form of oppression and that the solution to their pain may go beyond a new set of pronouns, or even invasive surgery, towards nanotechnology, ‘cyberconsciousness software’ and perhaps, ultimately, the end of their physical embodiment altogether."

Given the immensity of the West’s problems, Kingsnorth’s prescriptions are weak. He advocates a “reactionary radicalism," building resilient, human-scale alternatives in zones beyond the Machine’s total control, trying to minimize dependence on technology and rebuilding a culture rooted in Four P’s: People, Place, Prayer and the Past. I am not persuaded.

We do need to rethink the relationship between the individual and society and arrive at new norms of rights, a broader definition of utility and a serious treatment of culture. But it cannot mean abandoning reason and jumping to religion instead.

To me the most powerful insight—and West’s way out of its current crisis—is where Kingsnorth quotes Toynbee: “Only birth can conquer death. At the end of a culture, the real work is not lamentation or desperate defence—both instinctive but futile reactions—but the creation of something new."

The author is co-founder and director of The Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy.