The Borders of Our Humanity

In chapter eleven of his new book Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth introduces us to his old friend Mark. Paul and Mark have been friends for decades. Once upon a time, they moved in the same neopagan/anarchist/radical hippie circles; their friendship survived Kingsnorth’s conversion to Orthodoxy, and Mark's decision to go completely off-the-grid.

These days, Mark lives in a cabin he built by hand. It has no electricity. Mark doesn’t have a telephone. He gets his water from a local stream. He heats his home with branches and sticks he scavenges from the surrounding wilderness. He doesn’t even allow himself to be photographed. 

“To many people, this kind of puritanism… appears at least eccentric and at worst fanatical," Kingsnorth admits. "But then, many people have not spent as much time thinking about the grip technology has over us as Mark has.”

Mark is a revolutionary, but he’s not expecting a revolution. “Twenty years ago, we were fighting to save wilderness from destruction, he reflects. “Now it seems like we’re just fighting to keep ourselves off screens twenty-four hours a day.”

And yet, as Kingsnorth observes, Mark’s goal is actually quite modest, if no less daunting: “He is trying, in his own small way, to construct a border around his humanity.”

Our friend Mark has accepted the challenge that E.F. Schumacher laid out in his masterpiece Small Is Beautiful, which Kingsnorth quotes in chapter nine. “What can I actually do?” Schumacher asks rhetorically. The answer is “as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order.”

For any of you who subscribe to Kingsnorth's newsletter, The Abbey of Misrule, these will be familiar themes. You’ll know, for instance, that Kingsnorth has a special love for the “wild saints” of Britain and Ireland. In the first millennium—long before the Great Schism—those islands were teeming with mystics who lived in deep forests and on lonely islands. 

Most of them were locals, seeking refuge from the ugliness of city life. Others, however, traveled from Egypt or Armenia. The Sinai was getting a bit crowded, and so they sailed to the North and the West, seeking a new kind of desert at the world's end.

Kingsnorth belongs to this tradition of renunciates and re-wildlings. Some years ago, he and his family threw away their televisions, smashed their mobile phones, and moved to a quiet plot in the West of Ireland, where they homeschool their children and live as best they can off the land.

Kingsnorth finds a kindred spirit in America's first and greatest saint: Herman of Alaska. Earlier this year, after a visit to Spruce Island, Kingsnorth reflected on Fr. Herman's incredible life in a post for The Abbey:

But after a decade working in the [Russian mission in Alaska], Herman decided that remote Kodiak island was not remote enough. He longed to live as a hermit, and so he rowed a mile across the strait to nearby Spruce Island, and built himself a hermitage in the forest. He slept on boards, ate a meagre diet and somehow survived the harsh winters. When he asked how he could possibly live in such a wild place alone, he famously replied, "I am not alone. God is there as He is everywhere. His angels are there. Is it possible to be lonely in their company? Is it not better to be in their company than in that of people?"

That’s what I call Christianity.

Kingsnorth is also drawn to Fr. Seraphim Rose, who was himself inspired by St. Herman's memory. Writing in The Free Press, Kingsnorth calls Fr. Seraphim the “patron saint of lost Americans.” The way he describes Fr. Seraphim’s monastery—built in Platina, California in 1968—makes it sound a lot like Mark’s cabin: “It was a simple, stark, and unworldly place. Most of it was built by hand… using wood from abandoned mining shacks. There was no running water, electricity, or telephone, but there were bears and rattlesnakes aplenty.” 

Kingsnorth goes on to reflect on this strange, puritanical, radically counter-cultural way of life:

He lived a severe, ascetic life in a small wooden cabin he built himself, sleeping on boards, never cutting his hair or beard, fasting regularly, and dedicating himself to prayer. It was a harsh existence, but one that seemed to deeply energize him. He was beginning to experience the paradox of ascetic Christianity that the monks of the Egyptian desert had noticed and taught a thousand years before: that the more you sacrifice for God, and the simpler your life, the more freedom and joy is available to your soul. The less attached you are to the world, the closer you come to God.

Some reviewers have criticized the primitivism and pessimism that underlie Kingsnorth’s theories about history, politics, economics, technology, and ecology. They’ve completely missed the point.

Even before Christ began His earthly ministry, St. John the Forerunner preached the life of renunciation and repentance. The Lord Himself said to the rich young man, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” 

Some commentators try to downplay this passage, claiming that Christ’s words were intended only for this particular young man at this particular stage in his life. And yet the Lord also compares heaven to “a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”

Throughout Christian history, there have been men and women who’ve heard these scriptures and responded with an alarming literalism—folks like Mary of Egypt, Moses the Black, Macrina the Younger, Augustine of Hippo, Benedict of Norcia, Francis of Assisi, Gregory Palamas, Sergius of Radonezh, Herman of Alaska, and Seraphim of Platina.

That’s not to say Kingsnorth is an ascetic on par with these great saints. (Then again, maybe he is! How would I know?) Still, they have this much in common: an absolute refusal to water down the Gospel. In this, Kingsnorth stands virtually alone among Christian thinkers today. 

At its heart, Against the Machine is about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ in the modern West. That may seem odd, as the book is not addressed explicitly to a Christian audience. Then again, Kingsnorth began wrestling with these questions long before his conversion to Orthodoxy. Even in his Buddhist and Wiccan days, Kingsnorth sensed that the basis of his environmentalism was spiritual—indeed, religious. As he wrote in his conversion essay for First Things:

The rebellion against God manifested itself in a rebellion against creation, against all nature, human and wild. We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit our desires, which we now called “needs.” Our new world would be globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyper-real, monitored, always-on. We were building a machine to replace God.

Slowly, he came to realize, there are only two choices. “The stakes become clearer each day,” he wrote. “Surrender or rebellion; sacrifice or conquest; death of the self or triumph of the will; the Cross or the Machine. We have always been ­offered the same choice.”

Kingsnorth doesn’t re-present this choice to the reader of Against the Machine. He doesn’t have to. Instead, he brings us back to the root of everything. “This story begins in a garden,” he writes on the first page of the first chapter. "Everything walks in the garden together. Everything is in communion. It is a picture of integration." Life in the garden is one of simplicity and humility—of joyful dependence on God and our fellow creatures. But then along came a serpent, and man “chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.”

It was in the Garden that man first chose the Machine, and God the Cross.

Kingsnorth doesn’t tell but shows us how Western man is being led, inexorably, to the same choice. The fall of Christendom and the death of conservatism leave the Christian with one stark and terrible decision.

On the one hand, we may do even greater violence—to ourselves, to our fellow man, to Creation, to the Creator—as we cling bitterly to any portion of wealth and power.

On the other, we may follow the path of total self-renunciation, trusting in Christ’s promise that the meek will inherit the earth.

Read also