The devastating critiques of our apocalyptic mess keep coming. I was blown away by McCarrareh The Enchantments of Mammon (2019), by Eisenstein's Sacred economics: Money, gift and society in the age of transition (2021), Heying's A hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century: Evolution and the challenges of modern life (2021), Graeber's The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity (2021), by Monbiot's Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet (2022). So many brilliant, moral-boosting calls to use modernity's tools to dissect modernity and make a dent in our looming apocalypse. Each one seems to be the best yet. That goes for Kingsnorth (Welsh roots. Roots are part of the answer). He's not just Chicken Little. There is a path forward – back to the future.

Grounded in 4 Ps (past, people, place, prayer). Return land to commons. Control money (i.e., greed) rationally. Better a world with less maps, no GPS. [maps are disembodied space, Newtonian, sterile].

Arthur Clarke: our role is not to worship God but to create him.

Modernity, i.e., Machine-think, promises liberation from matter (but is still materialist!), sees biology as a problem to be overcome, the body as a form of oppression. Humanity-as-God but at the expense of our own neutering. 'A woman in a man's body?' No problemo for the Machine. The promise of AI is: give up some control of your life so you can live in an AI world. Bliss and progress without the messy real life stuff.

The Western Deviation

Why did Europe then North America, now 'the collective West' take over the world and lead us down the garden path to Machine culture, which is now destroying the world? European Christendom was an unusually violent place, dozens of warring tribes. Great for encouraging innovation and preparing the way for Marx's 'primitive accumulation'. Ditto American in spades. Our claims to democracy rest on 18thc factions differing only is how and how fast to 'progress'. Chesterton provides a humorous take on the left-right western binary: progressives are there to make mistakes. Conservatives to prevent mistakes from being corrected. I.e., we fiddle with age-old ways of living, creating a religion of technology, and end up divorcing us from real life, which makes things worse. Attempts to reverse are doomed, as the past is unretrievable except as 'memories of forgotten time'.

Adam and Eve are our founding protagonists, humans still young, only partially formed. Always the question 'eat the fruit?' Why not have power you are worthy of? So reject the state of questless ease. Chose knowledge over communion, power over humility. Our birthright is gone. Everything is eating everything else. Christendom as a culture, then civilization, built on this myth, changing everything in its image. But we've lost the thread, the old telos of worship and a moral life based on traditional truths.

If there is no telos then there is no meaning to virtue. So we have an Age of Anxiety that just gets more and more anxious as the West undermines precapitalist cultures and spreads its physical and mental illness. Polynesian taboos unravelled; when the context evaporated, taboos lost their meaning. Our story dismantle from within when we deny a sacred order. The Enlightenment attempted to build a more rational morality (humanism, liberalism). But with no real guide, without a sacred order, it is emotivism, relativism, disintegration. Dethroning Christ did not lead to universal equality and justice. Rather it yielded to the power of money. All revolutions have failedⁱ, merely clearing space for the money culture to commodify the ruins of genuine cultures.

The vacuum from the collapse of old taboos is filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism, infiltrating our lives the way Christianity once did. Pseudo-Christianity lined itself up with interests of those who exploit the people. The alternative, state socialism, nationalism were/are con tricks – exploiters posing as liberators. The totalitarian idols of grand world-saving ideologies. We are pushed away from our cultures, so we take that restlessness into world, deny our links with past, plan for a future that never arrives. We must see through this Machine-age global anticulture, unmoored from reality and increasingly at war with itself, and rediscover meaning and roots. An uprooted plant withers and dies. Our culture is already dead and we are in denial.

From Apollonian to Faustian civilization

Spengler could see the outlines of our current rise and decline, as our 'owl of Minerva' was already taking flight by the late 19^th c. The Greek-Roman classical civilization gave way to our Faustian culture/ civilization around 1000AD, a restless warrior culture, starting with the Crusades, marked by curiosity, a forward drive, conquest, invention. The flowering of monumental art in the gothic cathedrals, the music of Bach, the 16^th c Reformation marking the beginning of decay as the Faustian culture atrophies into rigid civilization. Romanticism looks back with nostalgia. Organic ways of living are replaced by abstract systems. Science is the servant of technology. Will-to-power replaces will-of-God, religion is replaced by liberalism then socialism as secular answer to our woes.

Max Weber: the fate of our times is rationalization and intellectualization, disenchantment of the world. As the civilization crumbles, in the 21^st c we live by a kind of stoicism and hope for a cultured, strong Caesar (Trump sees himself as this) to steady ship as it sinks. Others hope for revolution or reaction. The underlying, overriding ideology: Progress = the Machine. This makes our current decline and crises unique in history, as technology's logic is to supersede humans or at least to make them subservient to the Machine.

Capitalism is modernity's most beguiling form of enchantment, remaking the moral and ontological universe in its pecuniary image and likeness. Communism/ fascism were/are alternatives to the decadence of liberal capitalism. Universalist utopian societies but still machine ideologies. Materialistic, totalitarian, scientific twisted forms of rationalism.

Capitalism did not 'evolve' from small-scale artisan peasant societies. It had to destroy them, as it needed concentrated land ownership, which was possible as aristocrats made the laws. England managed this as it was an high income-disparity oligarchy, making a desert of itself.ⁱⁱ The US managed this through genocide of the natives. (Muslim countries didn't manage and are still resisting the Machine.) Chesterton's answer was distributism, i.e., equally distributed small property, a Jeffersonian nation of mostly farmers. But capitalism swept such fantasies aside, as the monster grows in clear-cut deserts and industrial servitude. US the cleanest slate. Luddites resisted, protesting the factory system divorced from the home, regimentation of body and soul, to no avail.

This all claims to be very efficient at producing wealth, but at what cost to nature? The human metabolic rate is100 watts but 'collective westerners' use 11,000 i.e., 110x more. In terms of living a good life, this is very wasteful and unsustainable as we heat up the planet and pollute it beyond repair. A brief reflection with a spiritual lens would tell you happiness is relative, a state of mind, unrelated to wealth.

The way of the world

The revolutionaries from Voltaire on scorned ancient hierarchies. Instead, individual liberty, nationalism, market economics became the new paradigm. John Ralston Saul's Voiltaire's Bastards warned of the dictatorship of reason. Damasio's Descartes' Error went further to show that reason and emotion are indelibly linked. Damage to emotional centres of brain render patients unable to feel but still think. They still have normal logic (math, memory, and speech skills) but no feelings, no joy, sadness, fear, or anger. They can list pros and cons for hours without picking an option, which effectively disables them for life. Reason is a manifestion of intuition, emotion, instinct. There is no mind without body. There are no unprejudiced concepts or unpolluted models of reality. The best we can to is temper our emotion, instinctual nature with reason.

Reason is embedded in a world of instinct and emotion. So a culture/ civilization supposedly based on disembodied reason – the collective West – must fail. We must look back to where we got lost, starting with older ways of seeing (religion, mythology, folk cultures, mysticism). Emotion tempered by reason. McGilchrist's 'Right hemisphere served by its emissary left hemisphere.'ⁱⁱⁱ

I've only scratched the surface of my notes and I'm just getting started. Kingsnorth's magnum opus is highly readable and chock full of protein. Some highlights to get us to the 'way forward'. Do what thou wilt. Not. Crowley made Protagoras's sophism the foundation of his Satanism, fitting nicely with the new telos of power and the Machine as means. Science was facilitated in the dehumanization of man and society by Augustine and Aquinas separating Man from Nature. We are now approaching total control, with street cameras,, cars/ mass transit, mass entertainment, police and more police, cashlessness (Canada's globalist bankster PM Carney is a big proponent of cashlessness for the masses). Perfect for the Machine to accelerate the process of mechanical control.

We are no longer even cogs in the Machine. It doesn't even need us, except as consumers and sources of information about our actions/ feelings to better commodify us. We are the the fuel, the catalyst to inspire the Machine, slugs in the slot Machine. The village and countryside, reservoir of fresh life, ancestral patterns of behavior, human limitations, possibilities are being sucked dry by the Machine. Nature itself disappears to us, replaced by the Machine and its emanations.

We live in a simulacrum of a real culture, with organized sensory gratification replacing activity with lasting meaning. The only relation left is naked self-interest, the cash nexus. Personal worth in exchange value. The only freedom 'free' trade (as defined by the Machine oligarchs). Precapitalism, the merchant had the lowest rank. Interest/usury was a sin. Money was kept under control as its power to ignite the flame of unbridled want was all too well-known. Keynes urged allowing avarice a bit longer, the Invisible Hand, to 'lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.'^iv This is the same promise as communism.

A devil's bargain is ludicrous. Once you adopt these values, they will remake you. Schumacher's Small is beautiful (1964) dismissed this. Such a road destroys intellligence, happiness, the peacefulness of man. Rather 'prosperity' is relative: you are always prosperous if happy, peaceful. You can increase material wealth but only honorably, justly, limited, in harmony with nature. Dao: The goal is the way. Economics is a subcategory of culture, quality of life. If our 'way' is greed then our life, our goal is perverted by definition. With the except of sloth, we now celebrate the 7 deadly sins. There are no limits for the Machine. Anything goes. Do what thou wilt. Guidance is not from science or technology but traditional wisdom.

4 Ps, 4 Ss

Like Napoleon, Hitler, the Machine does not know when to stop. That's a recipe for nihilism, an empire of the Machine. Organic is superseded by planned, natural by technological, culture by anticulture of Machine. (Brain)dead end.Kingsnorth condenses the system crises and the way forward in some nice memes. Past, people, place, prayer. (I would add purpose, play.) Vs science, self, sex, screen. Our prayerless reality preys only to the ultimate idol: -- our own image, reflected back at us from our little black mirrors.

Past: Robert Bly, in Iron John: A book About Men (1990) depicts our society as a 'sibling society'. Not patriarchy with hierarchy, continuity, maturing oedipalinitiation struggle to create men. We can't produce adults. All are still uninitiated teens. Destroying the age-old initiation rites for men, vaunting women's sports, erasing that last remnant of male initiation, makes perfect sense for the Machine. It makes perfect sense that the next James Bond should be a black woman, i.e., Machine levelling, erasing all tradition. The 'left' prides itself in decolonizing schools and public meetings with land acknowledgments, acknowledging our genocide of natives, but there is no meaningful change or new thinking. Symbolic rejection of past: we condemn our past and legacy. We have redrawn the cosmic map, we are entirely new but have no idea what.

We are a society of impulse. Where repression was, now is fantasy. Adults do not mature to wisdom, but regress to adolescence. Late 20^th c society is soooo blind, ugly, meaningless, better to remain adolescents (uninitiated, afraid to grow up and take responsibility). Your cause? 'Whaddaya got?' sneers Brando in Wild One (1953). This self-referential pseudo-critique is western culture colonizing itself. Hostile invasion? Yes, but from within.

Place: Western elites have create parallel alternative institutions removed from masses. Gated communities. Globalization and private jets (Toronto Islands) cancel place. We are alienated from own past-place. Nations are disparaged, a relic from the past. Yes, British and American imperialism were/are awful, but there is wisdom, psychological well-being in loving your past. Rediscover the beauty there, mostly buried under 'the victor writes history'.

Our culture from the 18^th c has been based on revolution, permanent revolution. Christian and all previous cultures were rooted in tradition, stability, an ascetic attitude of seeking liberation from the world.. 1789 was a declaration of war on the past, even creating a 10-day week and replacing Catholicism with the atheistic Cult of Reason. Build utopia on bones of old world. Jacobins, Bolsheviks, fascists all start fresh with creative violence. Che Guevara vs Christ. Progress is to move beyond nature. Progress wants to replace us. Replace God, 'become God'.

Mass rapid travel remodelled and homogenized the entire globe. Forms of the Machine: grid, car, plane, STEM, skyscraper, internet. Ancients had advanced technological knowledge but often chose not to use it. Egyptians realized technology treated matter as if it was no longer the dwelling place of spirit, rather a mass with extension, density and weight. They were war of a machine to irrigate vs bucket, seeing it as sacrilegious, defying the 'laws of nature'. Kingsnorth adds the car as a sin against the ensouled natural world. Yes! I feel like I'm tearing through space when travelling at 100kph in a car or 600kph in a jet, defying nature and God, acting like a god.

The Russian and Chinese revolutions were more of the 1789 spirit. The latter's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution will surely remain the apex of revolutionary insanity. And with each revolution, who won? Not the revolutionaries, quite a few of whom were chewed up and spat out, ditto the masses, but the state. China is the apex of that, with the all-powerful state in service to the Machine outdoing all others in the race to ...?

 

(opposite of) Freedom is you and your tablet on a beach

The loss of place and past is poignantly shown in the lost of the hearth (note virtually same word), the evening fire, where stories were woven, intimacy and solidarity nurtured.

Home was killed by cars (work and leisure separate), TV (consuming better than producing, going out), the school system to keep children away from home so the state can mould them on behalf of the Machine. The Luddite's bete noire, the factory system, is now the office system. Premodern woman, working in her home with husband and family, had more agency and power – at least there – than today. The 'liberated' woman was liberated from home and children (losing the key to feminine power). This is not advocating 'women back into kitchen' but rather we all should get back home. The wife and husband put the wider family ahead of their own desires. Marriage was not a transactional but rather a transcendent relationship. The Machine rejects this. Better to put the self ahead. The machine needs your selfishness to thrive.

Scientists are the priest in the Age of Machine. Our liturgy is sex. Sexual expression is the core of our human being. Pride month is a corporate-sponsored festival. The queering of everything previously normative. The vehicle is the screen. We create (i.e., we do what god does) with technology. We reenact Adam and Eve. Guenon called this the Age of Iron, the time of satanic counter-initiation, where we daily sacralize the profane. Right is wrong. Male is female. Homosexuality is normal. Ivan Illich called it the time of the antichrist. Still Christian in name, but spontaneous expressions of Christ's love now codified in institutions, systems. The church, then secular liberal states, transmuted love into obligation enforced by law, a new form of oppression.

Transcendence is now within the world, i.e., progress. The singularity is where humans and the Machine become one superintelligence. We bend the universe to our desires. Replaced religion with philosophy. Science as only form of knowledge. The Other is mere subjective reactions. Everything is immanent, i.e., down to earth. Man cannot live by immanence alone. Up until now, we were filling the spiritual hole with revolution. No time to lose.

Counter-revolution, restoration

The Kingdom of Mammon feasts on the world and itself that it may continue to 'grow'. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. We must build real human culture from the roots. We are in a blind alley, so we must turn around and discover where we went wrong. First, change our quality of attention. How you attend to it changes what you find. See world as organism of c rather than dead mechanism. Be reasonable rather than rational, distinguish intelligence from wisdom. We unmade the world now remake it.

No more utopias. No more revolutions.

*Take a stance,

*live modestly, refuse technology that will enslave you in the name of freedom,

*build life where you can see the stars and taste the air. Live on the margins, in your home or in your heart.

*Speak truth and try to live it,

*set your boundaries and refuse to step over them, be a conscientious objector to the Machine.

*Celebrate local folk heroes. Roby Hode flits through his shatter zone with his merry band of refuseniks.

Now our ideology is 'no religion'. A theology of material 'progress'. No left, right. Communism failed to abolish capitalism. Some attempts were okay but none challenged the core values of the Machine. Machine ideologies are too centralized, statist, mesmerized by technological promise, rationalized notions of how humanity should remake Eden on Earth. Anarchism is too weak. Greens too absorbed by the technosphere. Fascism is just shadowy manifestations of a Machine mind, infested with power-worship, love of straight lines and marching columns, and an explicit call to impose the will of strong on bodies of weak.^v Left hemisphere tyranny. Conservative is merely 'a hesitation within liberalism'. It tries to slow the modern revolution rather than turn it around. Now there is less to conserve. Also its love affair with private property and sovereign individual is a problem. Yes, it is a bulwark against top-down collectivism of left but leads to top-down collectivism of oligarchic capitalism. Political factions which bear the name are merelly Mammon-worhsipping business cabals, throwing out anti-woke red meat to the proles to disguise the fact that all they really want to conserve is their money.^vi

The left hemisphere has been infected with progress. We must preserve traditional communities, small farmers, a decentralized. Jeffersonian social formation. Zapatistas, neo-Luddites, West Papua's tribal-freedom movement, anti-privatisation campaigns. Reactionary radicalism. Not work vs home, consumption vs production. They are/should be the same thing. Now we live in separation, isolation, Machine learning, working, consuming. The Machine is mobile, can even be a brain implant. No. This is not the 'traditional' class-consciousness motivating change. Rather it is a cri de coeur to return to traditional values. Defending the moral economy, community bonds, local economics, human-scale systems in the face of colonization by the Machine. Which sucks wealth out of place-based communities to distant stockholders. Power away from local people into (inter)national bodies whose interests align with Machine. Replaces people with technology, makes passive, dead consumers of us all. The moral economy rarely makes rational sense, but it makes human sense.

Ellul, The technological society (1954): learn to live on the edge of this totalitarian society, not simply rejecting it, but passing it through the sieve of God's judgment. Stay at home. You can't fight it head-on, but you can circumvent it. Upland southeast Asia from India to Malaysia hill tribes escapees, fleeing oppression of state-making projects in the valleys—slavery, conscription, taxes, epidemics warfare. Shatter zones. Gypsies, Cossacks, sea peoples, marsh Arabs.

The state is a colonial entity. Internal colonization creating a homogenized national identity, flattening language, a myth of loyalty to community indistinguishable from loyalty to the state. The state expands, assimilates, not voluntarily. It represents only 1% of human history. It did not evolve. It was created through slavery, land seizures, taxation. Sir Stamford Raffles from Sumatra to Queen Victoria: we need despotism, the strong arm of power to bring men together. Now they are 'wandering in their habits as the birds of the air.'^vii

No. Better to break down a monolithic 'nation' into smaller units and/or flee when pursued. Jellyfish tribes and cultural refusal and becoming barbarians by choice. Better to build parallel systems—economies and cultures—which are hard to assimilate and robust enough to last. Not utopia the goal but free survival outside the dictates of the Machine, to uphold values of true human life. Chinese have two kinds of barbarians: the raw and the cooked. The cooked Li submit to state authority and the raw Li lived in mountain caves and were not punished and do not supply labour. But even the cooked Li were not exactly friends. The liminal space: state officials suspected them of outward conformity while slyly cooperating with the raw Li. Neither group were trusted.^viii Better to see God and experience creation.

The screen has abolished time, distance, boredom, longing. Mother is a problematic word like home, body, god. Soon there will be no farmers, food will be manufactured efficiently, boundless and formless, like your culture, your very being. Codes scan our access to things that yesterday you never knew you needed. Children are taught STEM by an AI. The algorithm will know your children better than you do.

How to live in this digital dystopia? Self-discipline, asceticism. Fasting, limiting needs, restraining desires. The cooked ascetic chooses limits of their engagement and sticks to them. Use the Machine against itself, the internet to connect with like-minded and learn skills to help your refusal. The raw ascetic: band together, build analogue, real-world communities, no screen swiping, bring up children knowing blue light is as dangerous as cocaine. Amish as lodestones. Make real things with your hands, pursue nature and truth and beauty. Question technologies served up to us.

We are still people, we still inhabit places, have our inheritance and God is still all around us and within us if we want to go looking for him. We have all the ingredients. John Moriarity, Live in our cultural Dreamtime (1994): go walk-about, creatively, with the old myths into the unknown, access your own aboriginality, learn how to be indigenous again in the Age of the Machine.

Everything is relationship. Our left-hemisphere world has long forgotten this. The most radical thing you can do is stay at home. Our aboriginal desire is to be in league with the Earth. Not rebellious individualism but a reactionary radicalism:, a rejection of Machine values based on an embrace of eternal things.