Against the Machine

Highlights

• I never ended up in that pine forest, but that was probably a good thing. Part of me has always wanted to be a hermit, but the job opportunities are just not there these days.

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• The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. What does that make us, its descendants, living amongst its beautiful ruins? It makes ours a culture with no sacred order. And this is a dangerous place to be.

  Location 464

• The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions—‘the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress’.

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• We—at least if we are among the lucky ones—have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us, but we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning, and roots.

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• We in the West invented this thing called ‘modernity’, and then we took it out into the world, whether the world wanted it or not. Once, we called this process ‘the white man’s burden’ and exported it with dreadnoughts. Now we call it ‘development’ and export it via the World Bank.

  Location 614

• And as the wilderness writer Edward Abbey once pointed out: ‘growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell’.

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• The pyramids may be four thousand years old, but the legacy of the megamachine assembled to build them is horribly familiar to us now: ‘a waste of destroyed villages and cities, and poisoned soils: the prototype of similar “civilised” atrocities today.’ As for those pyramids, ‘what are they but the precise static equivalents of our own space rockets? Both devices for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favoured few’.

  Location 896

• The once-radical green movement, in which I cut my teeth, has been transformed into a Machine accelerant. A movement which began by calling for more simplicity and slowness, closeness to nature and simple living, has mutated into a crusade to coat wild landscapes with glass and metal, abolish farming, further industrialise the global food supply, track and trace our consumption patterns and promote a vision of ‘sustainability’ that would make any Fortune 500 company smile.

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• The mass enclosure of the commons was, from the point of view of many ordinary rural families, a cultural tragedy which reduced entire communities to penury. The result at the grassroots level was noted by the eighteenth-century Rector of Cookham, Berkshire, who said of his local area that ‘an amazing number of people have been reduced from a comfortable state of partial independence to the precarious condition of mere hirelings, who when out of work immediately come on the parish’. Taking away peoples’ ‘comfortable … partial independence’ and substituting it with ‘the precarious condition of mere hirelings’ has been the working basis of Machine capitalism worldwide since the 1700s. Once England’s ruling class had perfected this process, through a system of experiments carried out on their own people, they were ready to take the system live. It was carried out into the world through trade and empire and it still goes on today, from eastern Europe to the Amazon.

  Location 998

• But while the Luddites lost their war, their case was always correct. That war was not fought against technology per se—what Lewis Mumford called ‘technics’. Most Luddites operated weaving looms themselves, and were quite comfortable with machinery. What mattered was who controlled it. They were fighting what they called ‘the factory system’—the destruction of lived freedom, and the regimentation of both body and soul.

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• If they could see us today, transfixed by our glowing screens, deskilled and dependent on oligarchs for permission to earn, eat and speak, with the factory system gone global and the Earth heating up from its exhaust, they might be permitted a grim smile.

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• In his 1992 book Voltaire’s Bastards, a broadside against what he calls ‘the dictatorship of reason in the West’, John Ralston Saul notes that the ‘grandiose and dark events’ which ‘overcame Western society’ in the modern period, from religious bloodbaths to the Napoleonic wars, ‘seemed to do so thanks to rational methods’.

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• In his 1994 book Descartes’ Error, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses the fruits of a lifetime’s work to demolish the notion that anything like an abstracted ‘reason’ existed. Reason, he showed, was intimately connected to emotion; one could not exist without the other. In fact, in many of Damasio’s own patients, damage to the emotional centres of the brain, which rendered them unable to feel but still able to think, rendered them effectively disabled. Reason, it turned out, was not a superior alternative to intuition, emotion or instinct, but a manifestation of it. There could be no mind without the body; no unprejudiced ‘concepts’ or unpolluted ‘models’ of reality. There could, in short, be no Reason without the messy world it was embedded in.

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• The standard choices presented to us—reason versus superstition, progress versus barbarism, past versus future, Earth versus space, growth versus stasis—were always chimeras. The choice is not between ‘going forward’ or ‘going back’, but between working with the complexity of human and natural realities, in all their organic messiness, or attempting to supersede them with abstractions which can never hope to contain them.

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• Then we would sit on the beach, or be dragged around vineyards to taste wine, or sometimes visit castles and all the time I would be too hot. I have a thousand years of English blood running through my veins, and this is not conducive to any temperature above twenty degrees Celsius.

  Location 1267

• In his book The Rape of Man and Nature, the English writer Philip Sherrard explicitly paints the scientific enterprise as one designed to remake the basic building blocks of life.

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• A city dweller doesn’t even need to know where his lunch comes from. In the city, we can live ignorant of our neighbours, of the seasons, of anything but our own direction and ambition.

  Location 1509

• Fifty million tonnes of ‘e-waste’ is dumped every year, much of it shipped to the poorest countries on Earth, which are least equipped to deal with it.1 But then they’re not really supposed to deal with it: they’re supposed to keep it away from us. We don’t know what else to do with all this crap, so we—for example—ship thousands of tonnes of toxic waste, containing carcinogenic chemicals, to Nigeria, and just dump it on the beaches. The same way we dumped asbestos on the beaches in Bangladesh, and millions of tonnes of poisonous waste in Indonesia. The same way we run our old ships up onto the beaches in China and India, and leave them for the locals to break up—if they can. The same way we dump nineteen million tonnes of plastic into the environment every year.

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• The best and most poetic chroniclers of their—our—revolution remain Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who, despite their many flaws, have never been bettered in their description of the new world which grew from the ruin of the old, and which is now coming to ruin itself.

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• Pre-modern societies, in every case that I know of, always kept the merchant class in their place, and that place was usually right at the bottom. This was the system known today as ‘feudalism’. The social pyramid during Japan’s Edo Period, to take a typical example, placed the Emperor at the top (of course), followed by the military leader—the shōgun—and then the aristocratic daimyo class. Next were the military nobility—the samurai—and beneath them the peasants—those who produced the food for the nation. Below the peasants came the artisans—the makers. And then, right at the very bottom, came the merchants. Why were the merchants the lowest order of society? Because their work created nothing of value. In fact, it created nothing at all.

  Location 1729

• The dangerous results of untrammelled want have been known since the dawn of time, which is why every sane culture has discouraged it rather than making it the basis of its value system.

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• America had not come to Japan on a cultural exchange trip: it had come to break open new markets for its goods, and to inject its commercial attitudes into a country which had always held those attitudes in contempt. Feudal Japan was a nation which kept its merchants and traders at the bottom of the social pyramid, while the United States placed them at the apex. If Japan was a hidebound ancient nation, America was a newly incorporated business, and it had ambitious plans for expansion—plans which involved spreading its core values of individualism, commerce and competition to every corner of the globe.

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• The story was cautionary but also typical: before taking power, the ANC had promised its people a ‘liberatory’ economic policy, involving the nationalisation of privately held companies, land reform, mass housebuilding, clean water and sanitation and affordable healthcare, all aimed at achieving a long-denied degree of racial justice. The policy had been drawn up after long consultations with communities, unions and local NGOs, and enjoyed broad support in the newly democratic country. Then the Black Ships came. Upon taking power, the ANC was informed by the powers-that-really-be that its policies did not meet with the approval of the global markets, and that capital flight from the country would result if the party tried to implement them. Faced with the threat, the government caved. A new economic policy was drawn up by economists from the World Bank, neoliberal think tanks and South African finance houses. This one was designed to promote ‘free trade’ and ‘competition’. In order to achieve this, the government agreed, amongst other measures, to privatise the water and electricity networks, and to abandon plans for land redistribution and nationalisation.

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• In an essay which opened my eyes to this reality some two decades ago, entitled ‘Development as Colonialism’,2 the philosopher Edward Goldsmith summarised how the process worked. ‘Development’, said Goldsmith, in a critique echoed by others before and since, was a term first popularised by US President Harry Truman after World War Two. It presented America’s mission in the world as helping to lift poor, benighted, ‘under-developed’ nations out of their backward and unenlightened state and into the glorious new world of fridges, traffic jams and suburban bliss.

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• I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net. I think: These are things designed to trap prey.

  Location 2014

• Since at least the end of World War Two the declared aim of the Western powers, led by the USA, has been the spread of that global market economy, combined with a liberal politics and culture, to every benighted corner of the Earth. Since a globalised market cannot function without globalised tastes, and since liberalism also needs an appropriate soil to seed in, the momentum of this ideological crusade has been towards the creation of one global culture, whether the world wanted it or not. This threefold rollout—global economy, global culture and global political system, all of them based on the American model—is usually referred to using the bland term ‘globalisation’. In reality, it is a form of colonialism—the latest iteration of the Western empires—and a hugely successful one.

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• The very notion of a political ‘left’ was birthed with modernity: the term comes from the seating arrangement of the anti-monarchy faction of the French assembly after the revolution.

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• IWAS IN THE SUPERMARKET the other week, pushing my trolley, looking at my little list, trying not to get distracted by the Easter egg selection, when I looked up and I had an epiphany. I looked around me in that moment, and the sheen of dull normality that my mind had constructed around the supermarket experience seemed to briefly fall away. You probably know what this feels like: sometimes, just for a minute, the stories that support your life dissolve, and something raw is revealed. What was revealed to me in that split second was how fake the whole thing was. I saw all of a sudden what was lurking below the cellophane and the slogans and the special offers. I saw the sheer unnaturalness of this way of obtaining food, and the unnaturalness, too, of our wandering these straight-lined, strip-lit plastic aisles inside this giant metal box instead of gathering mushrooms from a forest floor. I saw identical produce in identical boxes on identical shelves. I saw lumps of meat sheared from the carcasses of living creatures bred in slavery in factory farms, hung and stunned in abattoirs, sealed in plastic and shelved beneath a picture of a field in the sun. I saw the planes flying in bulk boxes of aubergines and peppers from other continents, and the sweatshops where the cheap trainers and trousers and brittle plastic toys were made for us by the silent poor, and the marketing meetings where people sat around designing slogans for the door stickers and the sustainability leaflets. I saw the canning factories and the shipping containers and the mines and the fertiliser plants and the annual shareholder meetings. I saw the machinery of this great operation, in which I was just one tiny, nameless tube in the global delivery mechanism between production and consumption. At this point, I noticed a slogan over the vegetable aisle. It informed me that the company was ‘passionate’ about its carrots and potatoes.

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• Solzhenitsyn was right: nations matter. A nation is a story which a people tells about itself across time, and while it is dangerous to be too attached to these stories, or to forget that they are stories at all, it is more dangerous to try and uproot them in some pseudo-egalitarian frenzy.

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• the phrase ‘eco-fascist’ is a label which is increasingly being applied to the wrong kind of environmentalist: those who offer up a vision of humanity and nature that involves roots, smallness, simplicity, a return to previous lifeways, or any other kind of challenge to Machine modernity. This in turn is contrasted with the right kind of green: that which is modern, global, ‘progressive’ and—most importantly of all—friendly to the onward march of the technological society.

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• Even as he promotes it, Schwab can see what is coming. Google maps and smartphone apps were always just the beginning. We are headed into a Brave New World of all-knowing smart homes and vat-grown sludge for breakfast, and every step along that road will make perfect rational sense. A panopticon world, remade at the nano level by the allegedly well-meaning, lies just around the corner. C. S. Lewis understood the trap well: Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.11 When the robber baron is also an omniscient moral busybody, we might be in trouble.

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• In short, ‘the West’ as we know it today is an overwhelmingly left-hemisphere culture, and this descent into a narrow way of seeing has been accelerating as modernity has progressed. At one point, McGilchrist even makes the startling claim that Western art from the modernist period onward often looks like the kind of representation of the world that is produced by people who have suffered brain damage to the right hemisphere, and he is neither being insulting nor speaking metaphorically. Are we in ‘the West’ literally a culture with brain damage? It would explain a lot.

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• Manufacturers everywhere were availing themselves of the many wonderful inventions that were being brought out for cheapening labour, and as the new machinery threw thousands out of employment when extensively introduced, the poor, misguided wretches, who could not understand how that could be a benefit which deprived them of the means of earning a livelihood and reduced them to beggary, met in secret conclaves, and resolved in their ignorance to destroy them. Had they been better instructed, they would have known that it was their duty to lie down in the nearest ditch and die.

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• To read Scott’s book is to be made to think hard about the conditions that a state needs to thrive, and thus the conditions that its cultural refuseniks might need to create in return. Based on Scott’s studies of Southeast Asia, we can see the basic necessities that a state needs to flourish: a reliable staple crop (in Asia this is wet rice; in Europe, wheat; in South America, maize); an effective transportation system; a settled population; enforcement of law and order; a central government; a system of taxation and classification of the population; a system of communication or propaganda; and last but not least, slavery or forced labour. All of this applies today to the state in which I live, including the last one. The slavery and forced labour now takes place far from the core of modern Western states, in places like central Africa or China, where the poor mine our smartphone components or sew our cheap clothes in regimented workhouses, but that doesn’t make them any less necessary for the system to function.

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