Just as we desire peace but not the things that make for peace, so we desire art but not the things that make for art. We put the cart before the horse. Il pittore pinge sé stesso; we have the art that we deserve. If the sight of it puts us to shame, it is with ourselves that the re-formation must begin. A drastic transvaluation of accepted values is required. With the re-formation of man, the arts of peace will take care of themselves.
— Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Alright, let’s get this over with.
Several moons ago, I wrote two brief defenses of Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine (here and here). And I said I had one more in me, so here it is.
These are not reviews of the book, or even, really, defenses of Kingsnorth so much as reflexes against the critics that I have certainly found wanting. I get that some folks have not particularly liked it, and that is fine; there are certainly good criticisms of the book. But most reviews, and reviewers, that I have read seem plagued by what I can’t help but describe as a pettiness, or perhaps just a wiggliness.*
(I’m weirdly prompted by a nearly 30-year-old book by Stanley Hauerwas — another toddler-prompted read — which I may get back to.)**
This defense may be coming together last, but it was first in my mind and it is one of my bigger, primary complaints not only with critics of the book but with the general subject itself. In fact, some of what I put in the first one after reading Tara Isabell Burton’s review was actually written well before. And it was originally aimed at… Alan Jacobs.
Contra Austin Kleon, I am not with Alan Jacobs when he says about the damage of phones, social media, A.I., etc., “We really don’t need any more stories explaining what people are doing to themselves.”
Not that I haven’t similarly protested (er, raged), so I want to be careful. I have no problem with a good ol’ vent-post. And I don’t deny that such things need to be redirected to love of neighbor, which is something Jacobs wonderfully and reliably does. In fact, I’m very much onboard with most of Jacobs’ program as far as any of that is concerned. This is not a criticism of Jacobs per se.
Or maybe it is and I’m just hesitating. But I definitely think we need more and more and more stories about the damages of Evil Tech, not fewer. We need more people reading them and hearing about them and sharing them. We need some momentum.
As far as I can tell, Jacobs is confusing stories we need (or don’t need) to hear with stories in The New York Times. And he’s confusing “what everyone knows” with “what lots of people are talking about.” The fact that another new story might accomplish, in Jacobs’ words, “literally nothing” is not surprising if, as seems largely the case, it’s gobbled up by the same tired group of people who read the last story — and maybe even wrote some of the ones before that!
So when someone like Jacobs says, “We have known about this for a long time so we don’t need any more stories about it,” I trust neither his use of “we” nor his use of “know.” What “we” “know” about the subject is that many academics have made it a good hobby of theirs to study and write about it.
Yet this seems to be the way that many like Jacobs have responded to Kingsnorth’s book, a not unfair summary of those critiques simply being: “Meh. We don’t need it.” Jacobs goes one smuggy step further, saying “Well, there’s really nothing to see here since I’ve already read his blog posts, but of course I loved his eeearlier work, and do check out my own work on the Standard Critique of Technology (SCT), which Kingsnorth is basically restating.” Which is about as self-involved a response as I can imagine coming from Jacobs.
And it’s ironic, too: If we don’t need Kingnorth’s book, then we definitely don’t need Jacobs’ “SCT.”
As I said, we need some momentum. And from what I can tell, that momentum ain’t coming from Jacobs and company. But it can come from a Kingsnorth.
Or at least I believe it’s more likely to. For every person (or rather, for the exactly zero persons) that I can get to read Lewis Mumford or Ivan Illich — or Alan Jacobs for that matter — I can get 50 to read Paul Kingsnorth. (I’m not up to 50 yet, but it’s been so easy that I don’t think this estimate is exaggerated. I’ve vocally praised Jacobs for years. So much so that when I verbalized some of this critique to a friend over a beer, he was surprised to hear me dissenting. Yet not one person I know has ever sought Jacobs out. With Kingsnorth, however, a name relatively new to me, almost every single person I have recommended the book to has taken it up with gusto.)
Though it will always be the case that this story or that story will be the one to reach someone who needed to hear it, it’s certainly possible that we don’t need any more stories published in the Times. And heaven knows we don’t need more time to study the matter. But please, let’s have more stories, more books, more talk, more momentum in a better direction.
Jacobs writes a lot and has an active online presence that I have absolutely benefitted from. But last year I stopped following his writing. I am very fond of the memory of discovering his essays, first in the pages of Comment magazine about eight years ago and then in the published form of Wayfaring and Shaming the Devil. I loved them! (Even if he may not like most of his own essays while simultaneously complaining that no one reads them.) This may feel like some obligatory caveat, but it’s really more than that. I have regarded and still regard Jacobs as a lifeline. I love him and I like what he’s doing and I praise what he is about. And, perhaps the most important thing to say, I believe that his role and influence as a teacher will be for him, and for many who have known him, like those great ocean depths that, as Albert Schweitzer said, go unseen under the foam and waves of public information.
On this topic, however, I don’t see Jacobs touching grass. In this way, he resembles (not coincidentally, I think) Brad East. In fact, I’m tempted to rewrite this and aim it all at East, whose writing I have not liked one bit and whose review of Against the Machine was particularly bumptious. I have not known exactly how to describe why I have so disliked East’s writing, but the nearest I can say at this point is that I find a kind of above-it-all condescension*** in every single thing he looks at and writes about — and he looks at and writes about a lot, and therefore ruins much. A point not unrelated to where I am going here.
Yet to call East’s review of Kingsnorth condescending would be insufficient. Though most of it is just East’s summary of Kingsnorth, written in his usual (to my ears, at least) smuggish, I-already-knew-this way, his final remarks are downright belittling. “Swing and a miss,” East essentially tells Kingsnorth. “Can’t hit ‘em all. Better luck next time, li’l buddy.”
Here’s the main point I’m driving towards. For many many many readers of Against the Machine, this is or will be their first introduction not only to Kingsnorth, whose neither fiction nor blogposts they have ever read, but to much of the philosophy and tech-critique that he distills in the book. And even among those more familiar, many may, and many have, found Kingsnorth to be more readable and/or relatable. And this seems to be a point entirely missed by “academics” like Jacobs and East.
“We already know all this and I’ve covered all of it in my work before,” says Jacobs. “Kingsnorth is no Illich or Han or Barba-Kay,” says East. And blah and blah and blibbity blah.
When yet another academic says yet again how thoughtful critics of technology predicted this or that, I’m listening, because I’m into that sort of thing. But, at least for this reader, it often feels very casual and hobby-like. Here’s another great quote about how television was destroying us long before smart phones and — oh, look, another stamp for my collection.
Or, getting back to Jacobs: When someone with a decades-long love affair with Apple products says “please refer to my essay on the standard critique of technology — and look at my nice distraction-free techie setup,” the decidedly non-weightiness should not be very surprising. There’s an army of people out there who, like Jacobs, want to love and quote Wendell Berry but at a very, very safe and MacOS-supported distance.
Getting back to the momentum thing: In the same way that stories about Evil Tech need a new audience, the entire “tech critique,” I think, needs new handlers. And I would happily see that mantle taken up by a Kingsnorth — and taken away from a Jacobs.
Again, I have no desire to thoroughly denounce Jacobs. But on this topic, I say read him for the footnotes, not the advice. And to the degree that he has an influence on whether and how you read Kingsnorth, ignore him entirely.
All of this has been written for the better part of 5 months. I’ve hesitated with it in part because I think there’s an element of unfairness in it that I haven’t known how to disclaim.
(In fact, I think Jacobs knows much of this, or a version of it, perfectly well.)
But even if I admit it might not be entirely fair, it can still be a point worth making. In my own way, I am also pointing rather than detailing. I’m trying to say something and I’m trying not to take it too far.
Surely one reason to hesitate is that I’m easily pointing a finger at myself. As I said above, I too have complained about what we “know” and do nothing about. And I too think Byung Chul Han is brilliant, and what little I’ve read of him is great because he is essentially right on almost every point. (Which makes it all the more strange to say that Han’s books are the answer to no one’s problems.)
Perhaps another reason why this has taken so long is that it is very much not a final word. Like many, I really don’t know what to do. Like many, I am constantly working on a healthier arrangement with the Internet and technology. (A dumb phone and a stationary computer have probably always been more than enough.)
Answers to this dilemma are not easily laid out.
For example, Kingsnorth didn’t say as much as many would have liked about the “homestead.” But then, Chris Smaje, who has written a lot about the homestead and who I have found to be a far more hopeful writer overall, has spent about as much time as anyone disclaiming the inability to fully prescribe what he is prescribing. That’s because they know there’s only so much that wordy-words can do. Here’s the thing we feel in our bones is bad; we believe there is a better, more human way; go try it for yourself.****
Legitimate criticism notwithstanding, some nail is certainly being hit on the head — a contact with need and with reality that has been sorely missing and that Against the Machine hits with accuracy and force.
And it does not seem a coincidence to me that Wendell Berry’s daughter can praise the book Kingsnorth wrote as the right book for our time, while the self-congratulatory echo chamber of scholars and self-appointed heirs claiming to bring you the wisdom of The Tech Critique cannot.
“Come with me into a field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here,” wrote Mary Oliver, “and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.”
To quote Jacobs, everyone knows this — to one extent or another. The question is, Who is more likely to compel you, to drive you with a loving human madness, away from the screens and machines and into that field?
To the degree that Kingsnorth can, however imperfectly, help to fill the void where that drive has been missing, questions about his worthiness to take up the mantle are irrelevant; he is simply doing a better job than his critics.
—
*One thing I have found particularly among heavier readers who were disappointed with Kingsnorth: they are usually reading him in addition to much attention given to the material at hand. This is mostly from (in as healthy a way as possible) the online crowd. They have read, and even write, much tech critique. Ivan Illich is not a new name to them, and L.M. Sacasas’ newsletter probably shows up in their inbox. Against the background of their library, I certainly can see that Kingsnorth appears… gruff, to say the least. Not that this covers all their criticisms, but it has mileage. However, though there may be some overlap, these are not the reviewers I have in mind in this post.
**Being so many months out, I cannot be sure what this reference to Hauerwas was. My best guess is that I saw something in his introduction to his 1998 book Sanctify Them in the Truth. In that introduction, Hauerwas writes,
The power of the view of Christian belief I am trying to counter is apparent just to the extent that we continue to speak of “Christian beliefs or belief.” Of course Christians believe such things as God created the world, that God called Abraham, worked through the prophets, chose Mary, and raised Jesus from the dead. Indeed, it would be quite strange to say that one “believes,” for instance, in the resurrection and yet assume that some further decision or attitude needs to be taken in relation to such a belief. Even stranger would be the notion that believing any of these things as true could be abstracted from the kind of life commensurate with holding such beliefs. For example, what could it possibly mean to “believe” that Jesus has been raised from the dead if a people do not exist who continue to “eat and drink” with their Lord?
The emphasis there is my own. He goes on to express the dangers he sees in turning “convictions“ and “beliefs” into “thoughts.” Worse, the language of those beliefs is taken off the ground, out of the common world.
I fear that too often contemporary theology is produced in such a way that it can be read only by other theologians. This may be quite fortunate, given the kind of work that currently passes for theology today. Yet if theology is a servant ministry in and for the church, I do not think the alienation of theology from the church’s common life, which is so prevalent today, can be a matter of indifference.
It may seem strange that any of this would motivate me to post the argument above. And strange it may very well be. But I hope it’s possible to see the connection between Hauerwas’s theologians and the “theologians” of tech-criticism who have, it seems to me, been mostly interested in displaying their own knowledge to each other.
***Call East’s the anti-essay approach.
****I spoke above of “momentum.” And I believe that momentum absolutely can be driven in very large part by a no. Kingsnorth may be, to borrow from a podcast title, more doomer than optimist. But one of the schticks that I’m increasingly schticky about is the credit that a morally sound no actually deserves. Credit to the no and credit to the goodness that thrives off a good no! What we’re discovering, and what I think it takes a Kingsnorth to say plainly, is that you really do need a hard no somewhere. Dabbling in theory and ever-new “distraction free” tech setups will simply not do.