Chris Smaje, in the preface to what promises to be an excellent book:

Before long, the self-reinforcing cycle of interlinked trading, raiding, slaving and adventuring built a vast economic and military Viking diaspora stretching from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and from the edge of North America to the western Eurasian Steppe. The access of some more than others in Viking society to the fruits of this extractivism-fuelled social stratification within it. The gap between lord and peasant widened.

Eventually, the Vikings embraced Christianity and their story merged with the development of a relatively unified medieval culture in northwest Europe, woven out of more disparate earlier strands.

But it retained a combative edge. William, Duke of Normandy — a Norse settler culture in northern France, Norman meaning Norse or Northman — famously invaded England in 1066 and installed himself on its throne. The Domesday Book he commissioned was a colonial document prefiguring many later ones. It asked, in enormous quantitative detail, exactly what the country could yield, and in what quantity, with a view to appropriating as much as possible to the Anglo-Norman exchequer. The Norman conquerors bequeathed to England a centralized and extractive state apparatus that arguably prepared the ground for England’s own expansion much later as a global power, helping to spread this predatory mindset across the Earth.

~~~

TODAY, WORLDWIDE, our societies and governments are still asking exactly what our countries can yield, and in what quantity. It’s too easy to see this as benevolence — lifting the poor, feeding the world and so forth. It’s as much because they’re still conquest societies — Viking societies. The trading-raiding-slaving nexus of Viking-era globalization is our world, directly paralleling the globalization of modern centuries.

The modern style of globalization has sometimes been tamer and more rationally framed than its medieval precursors. Nowadays, it’s typically expressed through an implausible universalism: everybody can aspire to being a Viking, organizing a flow of trade goods and labour services to their personal advantage, while nobody has to be disadvantaged and reap the consequences of this plunder. Or else it manifests in an embrace of a ‘Viking’ warrior or winner-takes-all attitude, typically among social-media-saturated young men who are not very plausible candidates for effecting it.

Either way, these implausible positions reveal the beating dark-age heart of our modern age of enlightenment: a world built on slavery, colonialism, labour exploitation and the levelling of nature in pursuit of a relentless material throughput.

From the introduction:

In any case, the livelihood model … is not a technological fix like nuclear fusion that you don’t understand and have no agency over, but that the government uses to keep the lights on so that you can carry on getting to work, paying the mortgage and taking your mind off things with Netflix in the evening while your wider culture trumpets its manifest destiny. The model is that you yourself can learn the skills to live well in the place you call home by working to generate your livelihood, and that this work, this way of being, is your culture, of which you are an important bearer.

John Prine:

The bells ring out on Sunday morning
like echoes from another time
All our innocence and yearning
and sense of wonder left behind
Oh gentle hearts remember,
What was that story? Is it lost?
For when religion loses vision,
That’s how every empire falls
[…]

Padlock the door and board the windows,
put the people in the street
“It’s just my job,” he says, “I’m sorry,”
and draws a check, goes home to eat
At night he tells his woman,
“I know I hide behind the laws”
She says, “You’re only taking orders”:
That’s how every empire falls

A bitter wind blows through the country,
a hard rain falls on the sea
If terror comes without a warning,
there must be something we don’t see
What fire begets this fire,
like torches thrown into the straw?
If no one asks, then no one answers:
That’s how every empire falls

Here my journal stutters with a squirrel story bigger than words:

Unfathomably, it plunges back into blue chance—into uncharted. 

We are never done, it says, with a body tiny enough to know.

The world is large, it says, with a courage I am greedy to learn. 

Praise here all fabulous unwritten. …

what little rooms are words in these seasons of plenty.

— Kimberly Blaeser

---

For from the least to the greatest of them,
    every one is greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest,
    every one deals falsely.
They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
    saying, ‘Peace, peace,’
    when there is no peace. […]

Thus says the Lord:
“Stand by the roads, and look,
    and ask for the ancient paths,
where the good way is; and walk in it,
    and find rest for your souls.
But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
I set watchmen over you, saying,
    ‘Give heed to the sound of the trumpet!’
But they said, ‘We will not give heed.’

---

I’ll grant that Wyatt Graham might be onto something helpful by (sort of) defending Kingsnorth’s book as “philosophy of history” — though, if correct, not nearly as explanatory and high-mileage as he thinks. And I can’t tell if he merely sympathizes with other critics or inadvertently falls into the very same category of disappointment and misplaced expectations that he’s trying to explain away.

“[A]s I read the whole work,” writes Graham, “I did find myself grasping for a full argument. Kingsnorth has mastered the office of assertion, but I too wanted to be carried along the flow of an argument to the end. I did not always feel that the author led me as well as he could have.”

For this, whether from Graham or the other critics he has in mind, I don’t think a category like “philosophy of history” is needed. Instead, I just want to say (with a genuine smile), So what? Why do you, why should I, expect “a full argument”? You want to be “carried along the flow of an argument to the end”? Tough shit. Read the Gospel of Mark and let me know how that works out for you. (In fact, “I did not always feel that the author led me as well as he could have” is a pretty good description of how most people feel when they read their bibles.)

“The positivity of the unambiguous only allows for sequential processes,” writes Byung-Chul Han, who prefers what Jean Baudrillard called “delirious contiguity” over the sequential — functional and informational — use of language. It can be partly out of some grander respect for the unknown and unknowable, and it can be partly out of respect for their readers, but in my experience, the best writers, and the best books worth reading, don’t lead their readers through a full argument; they resist systematization. Or, as Kingsnorth puts it, “Sometimes the ridiculous ideas are the only ones worth having.”

Though Graham seems aware of this, it’s not clear to me how much he appreciates it. But when he gets to his own review of Against the Machine, it’s not even clear to me that he read the book. “I mostly agree with his criticisms of the deleterious effects of modern technique,” he writes. “But I also wonder at Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 4:4–5: ‘everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving, for it is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer’ (bold text in original).”

Putting aside the issue of forcing 1 Timothy 4 to say something about modern technique, I have to ask: Did Graham hear in Kingsnorth a rejection of the thankful and sanctifying reception of the earth and all God created?

He goes on:

And has not God shaped and formed human life? Has not God given the city of Enoch music, metallurgy, ranching, poetry, and city works (Gen 4:17–26)? These techniques and tools that built the pyramids, which Kingsnorth associates with the Machine, do not evince in and of themselves something unredeemable.

Let’s again put aside the question of whether Graham gets it right with this Genesis 4 reference. (This I really do not know. I am moved by the God of restraint and blessing Marilynne Robinson sees abiding over Cain, but there’s also Robert Alter’s commentary on the passage: “The first recorded founder of a city is also the first murderer, a possible reflection of the antiurban bias in Genesis.”) In fact, I’ll happily give it to him. It still doesn’t fit. Perhaps I missed something — I did listen to the audiobook and I do have a bad memory — but I did not come away from the book with anything even close to the impression that Kingsnorth would automatically associate “music, metallurgy, ranching, poetry, and city works” with The Machine.

Near the end of the book, Kingsnorth says this:

I have come to the end now, and here is what I think: that the age of the Machine is not after all a hopeless time. Actually, it is the time we were born for. We can’t leave it, so we have to fully inhabit it. We have to understand it, challenge it, resist it, subvert it, walk through it on towards something better. If we can see what it is, we have a duty to speak the words to those who do not yet see, all the while struggling to remain human.

As tempted as I am to say that Wyatt must not have finished the book, his review is more confusing than that. Because this among Kingsnorth’s closing passages did not surprise me or strike as something wholly different from the chapters that preceded it. For this reader, at least, the whole argument led pretty consistently to conclude with “We must fully inhabit the age of the Machine while understanding, challenging, and resisting it.”

Against Kingsnorth, Wyatt would pit Jacques Maritain’s “ambivalence of history,” and he seems to think that this is something very similar to the sanctifying practice he sees in 1 Timothy. But I don’t see it. To say, as Maritain does, that evil and good will inevitably grow alongside each other in no way implies that something called the Machine must be received with thanksgiving. Likewise, to say that in every age we must practice thankful sanctification for everything God has given us is not the same as sanctifying everything known to man or created by him.

I think dwelling more on Maritain’s “ambivalence of history” would probably be helpful… some other day. But I’ll say this: the law of ambivalence does not require a philosophy or a religion or an ethics or a metaphysics of ambivalence. To call something what it is, that is what I see Kingsnorth doing. And, contra Graham, living in the law of ambivalence is also exactly what I see Kingsnorth doing. And the fact is, I hear a better — wiser and more sanctifying — ambivalence of history in Kingsnorth than I do in Wyatt’s “receive the machine with thanksgiving” approach.

More simply: Inhabit the age, not the Machine.

Kevin Williamson:

Do you know what might have saved Renee Good’s life? A necktie.

Bear with me.

Good’s death was the result of a lack of professionalism on the part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Whatever silly shenanigans Good may have been up to before the shooting, the video of the incident makes it clear that it was the federal agents, not Good, who escalated the situation to the point at which it became dangerous. Good may have been guilty of a traffic violation or two, possibly even a misdemeanor, but she did not set about trying to ram ICE agents, in spite of the obvious lies told by Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in the case.

What did happen: ICE agents approached Good’s car bellowing obscenities and giving her contradictory orders, one telling her to clear the street and the other demanding she “get out of the f—–g car,” with one of them calling her a “f—–g bitch” after she had been shot in the head. Good seems to have been complying with one of those demands and not the other, for reasons that are not difficult to imagine. The contradictory demands and the obscenities are prima facie evidence of a lack of ordinary professionalism on the part of the ICE agents, which comes as no surprise: ICE has abandoned any pretense of high standards when it comes to recruiting, its most recent classes of officers having been recruiting from the bottom of the same barrel from which we extract Transportation Security Administration creeps and thieves and corrupt Customs and Border Protection agents.

The ridiculous mall-commando get-ups in which ICE agents are costumed are an affront to republican manners: The masks—which should be forbidden, categorically, to all American law enforcement—symbolically violate the fundamental promise of public accountability for public servants. The tactical vests and plate carriers and helmets and the rest of that imbecilic fantasy dress-up gear is almost always inappropriate, and it is comical in light of the fact that this particular ICE squad apparently did not have the tactical acumen to deal with the challenging environment of an ordinary Midwestern city in a relatively mild January and kept getting their vehicles stuck in the snow—but I suppose snow is not what one is planning for when one is dressed for Fallujah.

Allow me to address the ladies and gentlemen at ICE in what apparently is their mother tongue: Take off the masks and put on a f—–g tie.

Just to add something to the previous post. I occasionally tune in to John Podhoretz and the folks on the Commentary Magazine Podcast. I can’t really recommend the practice unless you a) are pretty centrist, and b) read or listen pretty broadly, and c) maintain a pretty strong moral and political compass, and then, and only then, d) you do it for science. To put that differently, if you find it even a little bit difficult to put down your side or to genuinely understand the other side, I will not recommend them. From my perspective — I can’t speak to Commentary magazine itself, but in terms of political content from the podcast — they are basically what Fox News would probably be if Trump never happened, or at any rate if “conservatives” had simply stayed on their pre-Trump, anti-Left trajectory regardless. That is not a compliment. And while I have zero compliments to give them, I will say that they can genuinely surprise me, in both good and bad ways. 

Yesterday’s podcast was bad. Very bad. I’m still thoroughly baffled as to where the hell these guys are coming from. I can’t say for sure if any of them are card carrying libertarians, but I’d be surprised if they don’t all have a decent amount of libertarian blood in their veins. Regardless, to listen to these so-called constitutional conservatives lambaste Renee Good was absolutely grotesque. 

This is something Nick Catoggio touched on earlier in that same newsletter yesterday. “The hard truth,” he wrote, “is that, apart from its negligible libertarian faction, the right has always had a blind spot about police brutality.” I’m definitely not as confident about the libertarian faction being excluded here, but his point sticks:

GOP Rep. Wesley Hunt wasn’t announcing some creepy new Trump-era strain of thought on Thursday when he sneered that “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.” That’s been the de facto position of many rank-and-file Republicans for decades, one that resurfaces whenever a cop kills someone dubiously. They’ll tell you that it derives from their sympathy for police in having to make impossible split-second life-and-death decisions, but “obey or die” comes straight from the darkest part of the dark authoritarian id.

If you’ve ever wanted to know how the president became so fantastically popular in what was supposedly a small-government movement, start there.

In other words, for many, this issue was settled long before it started. More importantly, it is representative (and reminds us — whoever the ‘us’ I have in mind even is anymore) of a political orientation that very much preceded Trump, a house made ready and a seat kept nice and warm for a long time for someone just like him.

Catoggio:

Once Good partially blocked that street, the officers who needlessly confronted her and then even more needlessly fired a few rounds as she fled were destined to receive every benefit of the doubt and then some from the Republican base. She knew the traffic rules. They told her to get out of the car. She chose to be an outlaw. Obey or die.

To their credit, the folks at Comment have resisted the Trump movement. But not infrequently I listen to them and think, The daylight between you and them is negligible. And yesterday, the space between them and “obey or die” was a black hole.

When the boots are stomping on your face — John, Abe, Christine, Eliana — just remember, you didn’t care when they stomped on (or shot) theirs.

Nick Catoggio:

Republicans straining to absolve Good’s shooter are overlooking all of this political context, deliberately and dishonestly. Your main reaction to a fascist president going full Orwell to absolve his secret police force after it has killed a protester should not be, “I dunno, maybe the first shot was justified?”

That’s why I said earlier that you can get a sense of someone’s politics from where they land here. Zeroing in narrowly on the legality of the shooting will be how anti-anti-Trumpers spin it, having it both ways as usual by declining to forthrightly defend the president while aligning themselves with him anyway by parrying left-wing criticism of what happened. Whereas celebrating the shooting, overtly or obliquely, with variations of “that’s one less lib we need to worry about” will be the province of true-blue MAGA psychopaths.

Last night entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand drew a provocative picture of Trump’s recent moves on foreign policy by connecting a few dots. The president, he noted, has just called for a massive increase in the Pentagon’s budget, is threatening to annex neighbors’ territories, has proclaimed his very own imperial doctrine, and is withdrawing from international organizations. When the New York Timesasked him in an interview if he sees any limit on his global powers, he answered, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

“Any student of history would tell you: All the lights are blinking scarlet red,” Bertrand observed of that pattern. “At this stage we’re not even watching warning signs anymore. We’re watching the thing itself, in motion.”

That’s how I feel about the White House’s response to the Minneapolis shooting. We’ve reached the point already, still not quite one full year into this nightmare, where everyone understood instantly yesterday that there’s no chance the agent who killed Renee Good will face federal justice even if the facts clearly show what he did was unlawful. It’s not even a matter of Trump pardoning him; it’s unthinkable at this point that Pam Bondi’s rotten, servile Justice Department would prosecute him for killing an undesirable. The main role of the DOJ in this incident, per the FBI kicking state police off the case, will be to shield the agent from accountability under Minnesota law rather than ensure it.

The thing itself is in motion. Wake up.

William E Pannell, writing in 1968, reflecting on the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 that killed Carol Denise McNair, age 11, Carole Robertson, age 14, Addie Mae Collins, age 14, and Cynthia Wesley, age 14:

I now knew that I could no longer be a standard evangelical Christian, content merely to preach a typical evangelical Gospel. This ghastly event—to be followed by so many like it—happened in the “Bible belt.” The time had come to reevaluate the Gospel in terms of its meaning and application for our times. For me, the illusion was over.

This attitude may well surprise some of my friends. But then, I must confess to disappointment when they register disappointment at my concern. “But surely,” they like to say, “you are not sympathetic to all this rioting, are you?” There seems to be a hope expressed here that at least one Negro—a friend—can be counted upon to resist this civil rights insanity, and bring some assurance that the establishment has been right all along. There was a time when some of us could do that, when some of us could understand and support the Negro whose ad appeared in a Southern newspaper declaring, “This is to inform my white friends I am not now and never have been a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” But those times are over.

“But surely,” they still like to say, “you are not sympathetic to all this rioting, are you?”

Well? Are you?

William E Pannell:

Gradually, and without any conscious realization, the world got smaller too. We were taught to shun the world, to be separate from it, and while I am sure the interest was right, the result of such instruction developed a negative and defensive mentality. I found myself viewing people as the enemy, especially if they smoked or cursed. They were to be saved, of course, but not necessarily to be loved as they were. Imperceptibly, I came to be more doctrine and program-centered than people-centered. Our negative world-view was further compounded by the constant stimulation we received to live a holy life. I fought the struggle and became progressively more self-centered. We wanted to become sanctified in order to serve, but for many of us the kind of sanctification we sought served only to separate us further from the world we professed to love.

I became a fundamentalist. Not that I understood what that meant, but I became one. I was, of course, anti-modernist, anti-RSV, anti-World or National Council and anti-Roman Catholic. Men became guilty by association with any of these issues or movements. I now know that we were not really trained to think. I could not have given you a good reason for many of my views. But no matter, since “orthodoxy” was all-important and at that time even love for those who differed was considered compromise, betrayal or apostasy. The same could be said, of course, for my contemporaries in liberal schools. From our “deep wells” we fought our verbal battles, never caring that we were strangers to the love of God.

But we did have zeal. There was a job to be done, a world to be saved, and time was running out.