Against the Machine- On the Unmaking of Humanity

I heard about this book from a few different authors, noteably from Cal Newport who writes about digital minimalism. The other was from Andrew Peterson, a Christian singer/songwriter/author. So two very different areas, both recommending a book. So I gave it a shot. It was saying things that I agreed with but haven’t had the ability to articulate in writing form.

Premise:

The premise of the book is that the West has fallen. Even though we see the beautiful statues, and everything else lovely about the West, it is still dead. Like a plant that was uprooted, it might look pretty in a vase for a few days or even weeks, but it will rot. We are in that stage, Kingsnorth posites, of a beautiful plant that has been uprooted but hasn’t officially withered away yet.

He states that the death of the West came around the World Wars, when “The Machine” started to take over. No longer were people content to be people. We had global wars which meant global supply chains so we could kill each other more efficiently. We had the sexual revolution right after that which meant that sex is now divorced from consequences. Cars became popular which meant that we aren’t teathered to a walking distance radius of our home, which means that your home is no longer the center of your world. Home turns to house.

One of the main killers of the West is hyper rational thought. When we act too much like Spok, we get in trouble. We lose our sense of home, we get to a point where we think we can control nature. We stop being resonable, and instead are strictly rational and trying to obtain peak intelligence while forgetting the other side of the equation, which is wisdom.

Hope

There is hope in this book. There are practical steps on how to resist this global ‘Machine’ from taking over our lives. Things like telling good stories. Stories that embody the values that our civilization should pass on. Stories that glorify sacrifice for instance.

There are also practical things this book talks about that will help us resist this growing global machine that seems to be taking over every aspect of our life.

Verdict:

Worth reading. If you love the world we live in, hopefully it will give you a new perspective. If you hate this world and think it’s a shell of what it once was, you’ll enjoy it. It will give you words to express what you’ve probably felt. It will give you inspiration that you can in fact live a life without a smart phone.