\n<\/p>\n
During the five years I worked as an environmental-studies professor at a progressive private college, I undertook a small, semesterly rebellion: I had students read \u201cConfessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,\u201d a 2011 essay by the British writer and former green radical Paul Kingsnorth. In it, Kingsnorth chronicles his disenchantment with the activism that had once been his life\u2019s work\u2014the very kind of advocacy that had driven many of my students, that had driven me, into that classroom in the first place.<\/p>\n
The essay makes the case that mainstream environmentalism has abandoned the commitments and ideas that originally defined it. Classic texts of the 1960s and \u201970s, including Rachel Carson\u2019s Silent Spring<\/em> and E. F. Schumacher\u2019s Small Is Beautiful<\/em>, took a sort of acetic posture as they warned about the ecological risks posed by technology, industry, and development. They asked societies and individuals to live more simply, consume less, and go\u2014grow\u2014more slowly. As Kingsnorth sees it, the ideological landscape began to change in the \u201980s and \u201990s, when ecologically minded people embraced the idea that global industrialization could continue at its breakneck pace and simply be made \u201cgreen\u201d through \u201csustainable development.\u201d To Kingsnorth, \u201csustainability\u201d is not a laudable goal to strive for but rather the emergent rot in the green apple.<\/p>\n This account of mainstream environmentalism is more than a little reductive, at times even a caricature. Kingsnorth unfairly downplays the many individuals and organizations who do<\/em> still have views mostly in keeping with his own degrowth perspectives. But his polemic does capture a change that I have been, and that I think more than a few of my students were, quietly unsettled by: that the dominant strains of environmentalism\u2014the sort that are generally embraced on college campuses and by major nonprofits and the media\u2014have lost their enthusiasm for limits.<\/p>\n Kingsnorth\u2019s new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity<\/em>, expands his critique to include nearly all of present-day culture. A tendency to see nature as raw material that can be engineered to meet our perceived needs or whims, he argues, suffuses most every aspect of social and political life. \u201cModernity is a machine for destroying limits,\u201d he insists. In his telling, this attack on limits is legible in a host of current phenomena, including mass immigration, free-market orthodoxy, the rise of AI, overseas labor exploitation, the clear-cutting of rainforests, and new ideas about gender.<\/p>\n If Against the Machine<\/em> is one of the most insightful works on culture, technology, and the environment published in some time\u2014and I believe it is\u2014it is not so much because Kingsnorth is persuasive, or likely to win acolytes to his cause. It is not even because I think the limits he chooses to draw are necessarily the right ones. It is valuable because he sees with uncommon clarity that not only nature, but human nature, is being redefined by an anti-limit culture, economic system, and technology sector that treat minds, bodies, and environments as ripe for plundering and optimization in the name of progress. \u201cWhat progress wants is to replace us,\u201d Kingsnorth writes. \u201cPerhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.\u201d<\/p>\n Kingsnorth is not the first person to think of industrial modernity as a kind of machine, or to assail the idea of \u201cprogress.\u201d He joins a long list of anti-progress critics, including his British contemporary Mary Harrington and the 20th-century historian Christopher Lasch. Likewise, Kingsnorth\u2019s analysis of civilization\u2019s embrace of what he calls the \u201cFour Ss\u201d\u2014a substitution of religion for science<\/em>, an obsession with personal fulfillment and improving the self<\/em>, a faith in identity-crafting and personal liberation through sex<\/em>, and a fixation on the screen<\/em>\u2014draws on ideas from Catholic intellectuals including Charles Taylor, conservatives such as Carl Trueman and Philip Rieff, and tech critics including Jonathan Haidt.<\/p>\n On these issues, Against the Machine<\/em> is not groundbreaking, though it is still valuable as a synthesis of these earlier strains of thought, and as an articulation of the kind of \u201creactionary radical\u201d tradition Kingsnorth sees himself as belonging to. This tradition blurs the lines between right and left, progressive and conservative. It is skeptical of technology, opposed to market fundamentalism, and deeply concerned about climate change and ecological collapse\u2014and is also troubled by how these forces can erode traditional and indigenous cultures, dismantle local economies, undermine the nation state, wear away at religious life, and make having a family more difficult.<\/p>\n What is<\/em> novel about Against the Machine<\/em> is Kingsnorth\u2019s account of what is at stake in the 21st century: what he calls the \u201cunmaking of humanity.\u201d Human biology, as he sees it, is rooted in a few basic facts: We are born to sexed bodies on a planet with finite resources, endowed with minds capable of exercising creativity and seeking wisdom, and then we die. His book attempts to demonstrate that much of today\u2019s scientific, economic, technological, and cultural activity is predicated on an effort, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, to overcome these realities. He offers several examples of ideas and innovations that he believes are part of this effort: biotech for billionaires seeking immortality; state-assisted suicide for the suffering; IVF and other results of \u201cthe technologisation of sex\u201d; hormone therapy that allows children to change their gender; plans to geoengineer the planet and to abandon it and colonize Mars; robot \u201cpriests\u201d that can preside over funerals. In isolation, the importance of any one of these examples may be easy to downplay. But Kingsnorth argues that, in the aggregate, they point toward a future in which the realities of human life\u2014sex, death, environment\u2014are negotiable.<\/p>\n The English writer G. K. Chesterton, a favorite of Kingsnorth\u2019s, once argued that \u201cthe thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect.\u201d It is these sorts of \u201cgreat plain limitations\u201d that Against the Machine<\/em> frames as being undermined today. Kingsnorth encourages his readers to ask: If civilization is accelerating down a freeway that\u2019s taking us away from our shared humanity\u2014not to mention destroying the ecosystems we depend on\u2014at what exit do we get off? Artificial intelligence, new medical interventions, and other modern marvels allow us some choice about which natural limits we accept, and which we decide to blow past. According to Kingsnorth, each person must make individual decisions about where to begin \u201cdrawing a line, and saying \u2018no further.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n