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.