Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Joy Polman,
the executive editor over here at the Federalist. Joining me
today is Paul Kingsnorth. He is both a fiction and
non fiction author with a subsack following of some seventy
three thousand. He's a father and husband, and a anti
globalist activist. His latest book, Against the Machine is out
this month. Paul, welcome, Thank you. Now, Paul, let's do
a couple of preliminary questions before we get into a
discussion based on your book. So we'll start with your
relatively recent conversion to Christianity. Apparently the pre press said
you converted from some blend of Wicca and Buddhism to Christianity,
and it was a very public sort of thing post COVID,
A lot of people watching on your sub stack, including me,
and I believe if I you know, if I read
your bio off sources accurately, and you were baptized Eastern
Orthodox in twenty twenty one, could you just kind of
tell our listeners how that thing happened for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it was a very long journey. I mean this,
I think this is fairly common for people who were
brought up without any religion, which I was. I grew
up in England in the in the eighties and seven
was born in the seventies, grew up in the eighties
and nineties, and if you grow up in England, it's
a very irreligious society. It's not anti religious, it's just
very secular. So my family wasn't Christian or anything else particularly.
But when I was young, I was I think I
used to. I had a lot of experiences in the
natural world which were very spiritually powerful to me. I
used to go on along walks with my dad in
the mountains, and I had a lot of experiences, which
I later discovered through reading say William Wordsworth, were actually
kind of spiritual experiences, but I didn't really know what
to do with them. But I always had a sense
that there was more to the world than the materialist
story was telling me, but I didn't really know what
to do with that. Became a kind of environmental activist
for a long time when I was a young man,
because I wanted to protect the thing that was giving
me these sort of sacred feelings from destruction, I suppose,
And as I grew older it became a more open
spiritual searcher. I wanted to know what the truth of
things was and what the nature of things was. And
if you grow up in grow up in a sort
of secular Western environment, and you're looking for spiritual truth,
you tend to go east. So off I went to
the Buddhists to see if they could see if they
could help me. I was a Buddhist for about five
or six years. I was practicing zen, which is a
very interesting, useful practice for teaching you about yourself, but
doesn't teach you anything about God because it isn't designed too.
And I was feeling more and more that I was
being I was being called by somebody or something, but
I didn't know what it was. And I certainly didn't
go to the Christian Church because it didn't seem like
it had any answers for me. And so, you know,
I think if you come from my sort of background,
you look anywhere but Christianity for truth. So I started
reading myths, and I started looking into paganism because I thought, well,
I'm a nature lover, so maybe I should be a pagan.
Ended up in wicker, which is kind of modern witchcraft,
sort of sort of blend of nature paganism and magic
and all sorts of other bits and pieces, And the
long story short is effectively I was dragged out of
there by the scruff of my neck by Christ. Actually,
I wrote an essay called The Cross and the Machine,
which you can read in First Things. You can find
it on my website as well, which kind of goes
into the story at longer length. But basically, it took
me about twenty years to go from being a young
activist to being a Christian. But in my mid to
late forties, I basically was I felt a bit like C. S. Lewis,
like I was being dragged reluctantly towards this thing which
I knew was true, but I didn't want to be true.
I thought I knew what Christianity was and that it
wasn't relevant. And then when I actually read the Gospels properly,
and when I actually started going to a church again,
I realized that it was the story that explained everything.
And so I was baptized nearly five years ago in
the River Shannon in Ireland. As you say in to
the Orthodox Church. I was baptized in a small Orthodox
monastery that opened up near me. And yeah, it's been
completely transformative. It's been the story that explains the thing
I was looking for when I was about twenty five.
I think it's yeah, long and winding journey, but I
sort of got to the harbor in the end.
Speaker 1: Now you mentioned just I think there's one sentence about
this in your book, but I'm curious about kind of
how that works being an adult comfort It sounds to me,
since you're traveling to all these holy wells, that your
wife is at least supportive of your religious beliefs. But
I think you both still now have different religious beliefs,
and so what to religious tradition are you raising your
children in?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: This is interesting. So my wife and I both grew
up not particularly religious, but she comes from an Indian
family of her parents were seek though Indian immigrants to England.
She was born British like me, so we both sort
of grew up secular and in middle age we went
looking for faith. She had a face to go back to.
So she's practicing her Sikhism and I'm practicing Christianity. They're
actually quite compatible religions. Not all religions are compatible with
each other, but you know the teachings of Sikhism and
the teachings of Christianity are very similar in many ways.
And Sikhs also like to support other people in the
religions that they practice. And my wife's quite happy to
come along to church. My daughter. I have a daughter
and a son. My daughter is Orthodox as well. She
became Christian a year after me. I think actually she
was Christian before I was. She's been there from a
very early age. She was well ahead of me, so
she was baptized. She comes to church with me. My
family often comes to church. My son is fourteen. He's
not particularly interested. He wants to worship terrible guitar bands
and football clubs, but he comes to church anyway. We
take him along. I'm not going to force him into anything,
but we're trying to give him the kind of grounding
in the church. So even my wife is not Christian,
where there was still a pretty the family environment is
quite Christian, and she's very happy to to kind of
be part of that. So it's it's it's it works
strangely well, actually, I.
Speaker 1: Mean that's wonderful. I know that often could be a
difficult thing for a marriage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it can be sometimes, I think.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know several people right that you love
each other, but it's just kind of something an additional
kind of thing to work on. All the other things
totally requires a view. So and this kind of is
a preface for some things that you know later in
the book, you know, kind of as a developing Christian,
would you and say that you believe that the Old
Testament is literally true? And you can set aside kind
of the first three or four chapters of Jennifics that
conflict with the Big Bang or other kind of origin
stories if you want. But you know, is Abraham a
real guy, Isaac a real guy, et cetera. It was
King David? You know that actually is real legitimate history?
Or what's your understanding there of the Old Testament.
Speaker 2: That's a very good question. I don't really know the answer.
I mean, I think that all the different books of
the Bible are to be read in slightly different ways.
Certainly this is the way that the Orthodox teaches. You
don't have to read You don't read the Bible as
a science book. You don't read it as I mean.
I think it's a mistake to approach I think it's
a mistake to approach the Bible, firstly as one book,
because it's more like a library. It has about fifty
to sixty books in it, depending on which Bible you're reading,
because different churches have different books in their Bible, and
different books are to be read literally. As you say
you can't, you probably are not going to be reading
the first few chapters of Genesis completely literally. That certainly
wouldn't be a traditional understanding of it. The Orthodox Church
has never read it that way. It's quite a modern
idea to treat the Bible as if it were a
scientific book. But at the same time, you can't read
the Gospels and treat them as metaphors, otherwise you're not
a Christian. So I don't really know the answer to that.
I mean, I suspect that these are real, yes, I
mean King I'm sure King David is a real person.
I'm sure the Psalms are written by him. I'm sure
that Abraham and Isaac in some way are real people
as well. Exactly what was happening and exactly when, I
don't know. These are not history books in the way
that we would treat them now. But at the same time,
I don't think they're invented stories either. These are not
like the Greek gods. You know, there's something going on
here that we can understand as truth. There's a level
at which you can read them where you say these
events historically happen. But then below that, the bigger question
is what story they're telling you about what God wants
from you and what your relationship with God is. That's
the way I would see it. So, I mean, the
Orthodox approach is often not even to worry so much
about these questions. You know, whether these things are literally
true in the Old Testament, maybe it doesn't matter. I
don't know. We don't have to say either way. We
just read the stories. We assume that these stories have
come to us for a reason, and we have to
learn from them. So but yeah, I mean, I'm these
are not you know, I would not treat these as
fictional stories. You know, they're clearly not. They're clearly true
in some fundamental sense. But it's a very difficult question.
Speaker 1: To answer, and we that apply them to the New Testament. Right,
So Jesus Christ, real historical figure actually was physically nailed
to across et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Well, of course, yeah, I mean that has to go
without saying, Okay, otherwise you're not a Christian.
Speaker 1: I'd say I would say so too, but.
Speaker 2: I know there are a lot of Christians who try
to fumble that. But if you if you don't believe
in the incarnation and the resurrection, you know, then you're
not a.
Speaker 1: Christian, right Hello, acumenical creeds.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, exactly? Yeah. I mean you know, you could,
you can be inspired by the Bible and all this stuff,
but fundamentally, if you know that's the essence of it,
there's there's no there's no compromising with that.
Speaker 1: And now I did try to read some of kind
of the interviews done with you, but and you may
have been asked this before, but I didn't see it.
So you write very movingly about you know, the erasure
of local cultures, the importance of localism tradition, and very
you know, small cultures rather than kind of big, homogenized cultures,
and about a lot of your book is about how
the Internet flattens and races those and lends them all together,
and so that Okay, you know, I think a lot
of peopeople are open to that idea, but for me,
it was kind of confusing that you fundamentally clearly believe
that very deeply. But then you know you're opting into
a former Christianity that is very distant culturally and theologically
from you know, the religious commitments of your very English ancestors.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's an interesting point. So what I would
say is this, I'm an orthodox Christian because that was well,
there's a couple of reasons really. Firstly, that was where
prayer led me when I became a Christian. For a while,
I thought, well, I'll just be a Christian on my
own in my bedroom, in a very kind of modern
individualistic way, and then I realized that's not going to happen.
I need to join the church. But then, of course
the problem in the modern world is which church do
I join. I'm English, but I live in Ireland, so
most Irish people are Catholic. My background is Anglican. Now
I can't be an Anglican because I think the Anglican
Church is so completely it's just.
Speaker 1: In their first female bishop.
Speaker 2: I mean, where shall we start with the Anglican Church.
I'm sorry I can't. Much as I love my English ancestry,
I don't think the Anglican Church has any strength or
truth in it really much anymore. And I know some
good Anglican people, but they're kind of hanging on by
their fingertips the Catholic Church. You know, I don't know.
I have my own problems with the pope and the
power of that and things. But it's more than Actually
I was. What I was looking for was. I thought
to myself, well, what is the original church? What's the
oldest church? Where where's the continuous tradition to be found?
And I just prayed. I said to God, could you
please send me to the church I'm supposed to be in,
and could you send me a priest to talk to me.
And I spent a long time stopping and sitting in
churches and hoping a priest would arrive. And it was
when I went to the Orthodox monastery and I went
to an Orthodox liturgy for the first time, and I had,
you know, the strength and power of an Orthodox liturgy,
which is a thousand years old, was extremely extreamly moving.
And I thought, something is going on here. You know,
I think Christ is in the church, you know, the
Holy Spirit is here. I can experience it. And even
though half of the liturgy was in Romanian, which I
didn't understand, the power of the things still hit me.
So you're right, I end up in this paradoxical situation
of believing in the importance of local culture but living
in Ireland and going to a Romanian church. But the
interesting thing is if you go back far enough in
Ireland or in England, and certainly if you go back
before the eleventh century where the East in the Western
Church is split, you have a culture which if you
go and look at the earliest Irish Saints or the
earliest English Saints and the English Church, say in the
Anglo Saxon period or the Celtic Irish Church, it's very
very similar to what the Orthodox are doing now, or
indeed what the traditional Catholics are doing now. It's not
a centralized, sort of homogeneous church. It's if I go
and look at the stories of say the early English
Saints like I don't know, Saint Cuthbert, or the Irish
saints like Saint Coleman or some Brigid, and the services
they were going to in the lives they were leading,
which are very much closer to the lives of the
Desert Fathers than say the Anglican Church today, I can
see something that's very close to what the Orthodox do so. Paradoxically,
I think that the Orthodox Church in the East, because
it hasn't gone through the Reformation and the Enlightenment and
the Scientific Revolution and all the religious wars we've had,
has somehow managed to hold on to a version of
Christianity which is much closer to what we used to
be in our early centuries. And it's almost like that's
being brought back into countries like England and Ireland now
which have almost given up on the Christian faith. So
it's almost like this church from the East, which in
many ways is very different to us, is actually bringing
us back to what we were at the beginning of things.
It's a strange paradox, but I mean the church I
go to in Ireland, for example, which is a Romanian church,
is nevertheless, you know, the nuns in the monastery I
attend are absolute lovers of the early Irish saints. The
monastery is dedicated to Saint Kieran of Colonic Noise. My
church in Galway is dedicated to Saint Brigitte, the early
Irish saint, one of the patron saints of Ireland. So
the Orthodox have no trouble connecting themselves back to the
early Saints of the West, which is quite interesting considering
that a lot of the modern churches in the West
have forgottennnection with those things. So even though it's in
some ways quite culturally alien, in another way, it's quite
familiar to what I think what a similar to what
early Christianity would have been like. Here.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's get into your recent book. Can you
just start describing for our listeners what you mean by
the machine that is in the title. You know, basically
I'm asking give the elevator pitch summary of your argument.
And now we'll say for readers, there's a lot in there,
so he's obviously has to leave a lot out and
giving a summary, talking for a couple of minutes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think i'd have to have an elevator
that goes up a lot of stories. Yeah. So this
book is basically the sort of the culmination of about
thirty years of my life's work obsessing about the kind
of oppressive nature of modern culture. As I said, when
I was young, I used to it used to be
a great lover of nature. Still am had a strong
sense that there was something wrong with modern culture. There's
something that takes us away not just from the natural world,
but from a sense of what a real human life
is supposed to be, like real communities. I grew up
in an English suburban. There was something wrong with it,
and I still think there is something wrong with it.
And I've spent most of my life wondering what it
is about modern life that seems to alienate us from
actual human life, the fundamental things of human life. And
this book Against the Machine is the kind of culmination
of trying to think about that and what I call
the machine. It's a phrase I took from a lot
of other writers over the years, from Mary Shelley to
George Orwell, who have always used this phrase since Industrial
Revolution to describe a society which treats us like cogs,
a society which sees the natural world and which sees
human community and human history and culture as a kind
of mechanism that we end up trapped in. And I
think if we look around us today in the digital age,
where we can't survive without smartphones and internet connections, where
we're endlessly monitored and controlled, where we feel like cogs
in the corporation we're in, where society is mechanistic and
scientistic and it's harder and harder to live a kind
of nad simple human life all the time. It can
feel like we're in a giant machine. So the point
of this book is to try and ask ourselves how
we got into this situation, how we created this giant,
mechanistic digital culture that we live in, what it is,
where it comes from, how it's circumscribing real human life.
And then if people agree with that, what we can
do about it, how we can actually live through it,
how we can retain our humanity in this in this
increasingly digital age in which we're rushing very fast towards
you know, the supposed creation of non human intelligence and
superhuman aiyes, and this extremely alienating system that's that's enveloping
us today. So what is it and what can we
do about it? Is basically the pitch.
Speaker 1: Well, I think you know a lot of people not
only agree with the alienation points that we can also
see the problems with for example, you know, the you
know the West as really important kind of Eastern style
totalitarianism with So for example, China has a social credit system, right,
that's the same thing as you know DEI banking for example, right,
Or we're going about and across Europe right now. You know,
they're implementing, for example, these digital IDs. You know, Hello,
that's the same as basically as the vaccine passport idea
applied to the entire rest of your life, which we
you know, those of us who were opposing lockdowns and
COVID yanism, yes, said that was coming here. It is.
Speaker 2: OVID pandemic was like it was like a dry run,
you know, all the technology that was used then that
was all the QR code scanning and the rest of
it that was that was a trial run for for
for as you say, the systems that are being rolled
out elsewhere all the time, and that's that's the direction
we're going in. And once we have, once we have
the AI systems that can that can that can run
things without human intervention as well, then then we're into
a deeply alienated in human world.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people agree with that. And
you kind of talk about your count of One of
your counterpoints is what you call the four p's of
a genuine culture. So could you list those for our listeners,
And again, listeners, there's a lot in here, but this
is one of kind of your organizing principles that you
return to several times in the book, So kind of
go through this and explain why they matter and how
they are kind of fundamentally sent against you know, this
machine that you're really ready against.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the big questions in this book and
throughout all of my work has been what is a
real human culture? Because you know, I'm complaining a lot
about how we're alienated and you know, real culture is
harder and harder. But the question is what does that
actually mean? And the best formula I've managed to come
up with in this book is, as you say, this
thing like all the four p's, which are people placed
prayer in the past. And my suggestion is that these
are like four legs of a table, and pretty much
all traditional cultures all around the world, whatever they are,
are based on these four legs. So you have people
that's your community, that's your cultural group, whoever, whatever, that
is the thing that you're part of the culture that
you grow up with. Then there's place that's the place
that you come from, or at least the place that
you're in. It it's your relationship with the natural world
around you. It's that you know, maybe it's your ancestral home,
or even if it's not that, it's certainly the place
that you're familiar with and you go up in. Then
you have prayer, of course, which is your connection to God,
the connection to the transcendent that's above you, the thing
that gives life a wider meaning and a story. And
then you have the past that's the place that you
come from, the story you tell about what your culture
is and your history is, which you're also going to
then pass on to your children. That's the sort of
the stream of tradition that you're living in now. Maybe
you could take out one of those legs of the table.
For example, if you're in a nomadic culture, you wouldn't
have a connection to one particular place, but you still
have the other things. But if you knock all of
those things out, I don't think you have a culture
at all. And I think if we look at this
machine culture that we live in now, it pretty much
attacks all of those things. So, you know, we don't
have a sense that we're all part of a people
because we're living in this globalized system. We're all following
the money, we're all chasing jobs. There's large scale migration everywhere.
People have not. It's very, very much harder to be
rooted in a place and to stay there. Again, your
sense of place will be changed because of that or uprooted.
The natural world is being destroyed at a rate of
not so it's much harder to have a connection to nature.
And of course most people now live in megacities. Most
of the human population lives in cities where it's harder
to have a relationship to place. Now, Prayer certainly still exists,
and you can't get rid of that. But certainly in
the modern world religion is treated as I mean, I
think this is less so in America, but it's certainly
so in Western Europe. Religion is treated as a sort
of superstition. Maybe you can do it on a Sunday,
but it's not fundamentally the root of your culture. And
then of course, again the past, the stories of our
past are relentlessly under attack. Our culture is under attack.
And the sense that you belong to something that you
can pass on to your children, it's very difficult to
do that in this kind of mobile, technological world. So
these four p's, which are the basis of I think
most human cultures are fundamentally under my by the machine
system that we live in, and that in turn undermines
us sense of what it actually means to be human,
Because what it means to be human is in some
ways quite simple. You know. It is being part of
a community, having your family around you, having your sense
of God, having your tradition, being part of the natural world,
the simple things of life, all of which are replaced
by this kind of giant consumer machine which is said
to make us happier but actually undermines our sense of meaning.
Speaker 1: All right, And so we're going to go a little
deeper into some of those things, cause, as I said,
I think a lot not I think part of the
reason that your work is resonating with a lot of
people is your description of the problem is very You
know on people, your express in really beautiful language. You
know what people are sensing and feeling, and maybe don't
always know how to put words to But so, but
before we kind of look at a couple of other things,
including some of your solutions, I wanted to kind of
check my comprehension on a few underlying things. So to
start within your bio on your website, you describe yourself
as an Orthodox Christian anarchist, and in your book you write,
I'll have two short quotes here. You say a state
is like a vortex or a black hole. At a
certain point it begins to suck in everything around it.
And you also say the state is fundamentally a colonial
entity that institutes a process of internal colonization that eventually
will move beyond its borders. So I'm curious, based on
these sorts of things, do you believe that there's any
form of government at all that is legitimate or is
every government inherently illegitimate.
Speaker 2: I think I like to call myself an orthodox Christian anarchist,
partly because I like paradoxes. I mean, I wouldn't align
myself with the kind of political anarchist movement out there,
because it's a bit boncers. But fundamentally I'm a localist.
I mean, if I were to choose an American figure
who I would find myself most aligned with, it would
probably be Wendell Berry. At the moment. Wendell Berry is
a manner who. I mean, I edited a collection of
his essays for a British audience or a few years ago.
So fundamentally I'm a localist. I'm not sort of ideologically
principally opposed to governance. There has to be some form
of governance and authority in any society. But the bigger
it gets, the more tyrannical it gets. And it doesn't
matter whether your system is capitalist or communist or liberal
or whatever it is. The further away a government gets
from the people, the more impossible it is for the
people to influence the government. And you know that that matters.
And that's true in America, which is a democratic system
as well, just as it is in Britain. Even if
in theory or a democracy and you can vote for
your government every five years, the reality is you can't
really influence what power does. So I'm in favor of
taking power down to the lowest level possible. I'm not
completely naive. There's always there always going to be states,
there are always going to be nations. There are probably
always going to be kings and presidents. There's always going
to be people who want power. But you just have
to be able to hold those people who account in
as local a way as possible. And modernity, I mean,
the interesting thing is we tell ourselves a story about
how we have more liberty than we used to have,
and in many ways that's true, it's quite true, but
in other ways it's not true. So although you could example,
look back at I don't know medieval Europe, hauld say
many of these kings had totalitarian power. They absolutely did,
but in some ways they had much less power than
the modern state. There's no way that a medieval king
could have monitored and controlled their population in the way
that a modern state could. They couldn't tax them and
control them and control their freedom of speech and put
them into super prisons and the rest of it.
Speaker 1: So there's a reason totalitarian didn't happen until kind of
the technological abilities to.
Speaker 2: Exactly. So, I mean you mentioned China earlier. The reason
that China managed is to control its citizens so effectively
is that it has a technological system which could monitor
and manage them. If it didn't have the technology, it
could do that. So fundamentally, I am just somebody who
believes that power has to be devolved down to the
lowest level possible, and that citizens have to have as
much influence over their systems as they possibly can. And
as I say, I'm not naive about the possibility of
that actually happening. I think it's a constant struggle for people.
I think the American Revolution was part of a struggle
to do that. How America has become a giant technological
system as well, and so that struggle continues. It's I
think it's a constant struggle for people, endlessly trying to
push back against those who want to centralize power over them.
I think that's the human story. But yeah, fundamentally, that's
the that's the position I'm always in that the more
localization the better.
Speaker 1: So rather than kind of political anarchy, you sounds like
you mean more subsidiarity, that kind of principle, the disapronment
can get to the people, that's the better.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm not I'm not technically an anarchist in
the sense that I don't believe any government should exist,
But I just I like I like local societies where
government is responsive to the people and power is exercised
at the lowest level possible. Yeah, you could call it
subsidiarity if you want to. I think that's just I
just find the word more boring, So it is more boring,
I agree, less exciting to call yourself a subsidiarist. But yeah,
basically I think that's that's what we're talking about.
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Speaker 1: So another thing in the book that I noticed is
that you never seem to praise any Western culture or people,
but you frequently do hold up examples of different Barbarian
tribes as examples to emulate. And so I wanted to
get out and get clarity on your thinking about that issue. So,
for example, Pilgrims and Commanchees, which one had a better culture?
Speaker 2: That's a good question. Well, I don't think it's really
true what you say, though, I mean I spent a
lot of time in the book talking about English culture,
and this is something that I'm very interested in. I
talk about that, I've written several books on this. Actually,
I talk about that, for example, the Bloodites in the
book Resisting, you know, early forms of English cultures, that
the fn Tigers, those who resisted enclosure. I mean, I
have a sense from the history of my own country
that it is a constant struggle of people against power.
I've written a whole book, for example, based on I
wrote a whole novel set in the Norman during the
Norman Conquest, which is about an Anglo Saxon farmer trying
to resist the Normans. So there's there's a sense that
in my own country I can look back and see
my own ancestors struggling to retain their culture against the
power of landlords and the power of what became the
British Empire later. So I'm quite nostalgic for that. So
it's not that I'm not positive about it at all.
Pilgrim's all command. I don't know much about the Comanches.
I don't know. Look, I mean, I think there were
some very beautiful cultures that the Native Americans had, and
there were some pretty terrible ones as well. I think
that when the original pilgrims turned up, the way that
they lived was in some ways quite beautiful and in
some ways not. I would see the American story almost
in the same way as I would see the English
story that eventually what started off as an attempt to
live a small scale and simple life in a service
to God ends up becoming a colonial empire. And you know,
what the Americans did to the Native Americans later in
history in the nineteenth century is pretty evil in many ways,
not to suggest that the Native American cultures were utopian
at all, but eventually you end up with a lust
for power, because when the culture decides it's going to
run west and start looking for gold and importing slaves,
then you get the usual desire to build a giant
power system rather than to live in some form of
harm with nature and culture. So it's a difficult question.
Speaker 1: To an example that you might know better be you know,
the Conquistadors and the Aztecs. Which one of those had
a better culture, right, because they both participated in mass slavery.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, Well I don't. Well, that's why I wouldn't.
I mean I wouldn't have to. I wouldn't want to
choose between either of them. I mean, the Aztecs run
this giant, monstrous empire based on human sacrifice, and the
Conquistadors destroy the empire so they can enslave the people
and steal the gold. So I don't like either of them.
I mean, you shouldn't have the idea, you shouldn't have
to choose. But this is the tragedy of human history,
isn't it. Once Once that kind of once that kind
of contact is made, you have It's almost like having
to choose between fascists and Bolsheviks or something. I mean,
let's let's not have either of them if we can
possibly avoid it. So I don't know if we if
we go back to trying to serve God as Christians
and trying to live that humble Christian life and wanting
to have a small scale culture. I just think these
these are the set the essences of human life, and
they're always under attack from empire, you know. I mean
Christ Christ is destroyed by the Roman Empire. He's tortured
and killed by on on a torture device invented by
one of the most monstrous empires. The world as they
ever seen, which is also basic.
Speaker 1: And he sends missionaries back to that empire, right and exactly,
and then he goes back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and where do those How do those missionaries conquer Rome?
They don't conquer it by sending in armies. They conquer
it with you know, martyrdom and self sacrifice in Christian love.
But eventually, amazingly, the empire becomes Christian, at least in theory.
So so that's the strange paradox. I just think that
that human culture is always a battle against this kind
of tyrannical power. And I mean, this is one of
the reasons I found Christianity so revolutionary in my own life.
It teaches that that kind of power can be overcome
with love and humility, which is which is a paradox,
but it's the truth, okay.
Speaker 1: And to me, the big mic drop in this book
is your argument that the West is dead and it's
time to move on. I'll quote that again. You're right,
We in the West are living inside an obsolete story.
Our culture is not in danger of dying, it is
already dead, and we are in denial. Here's another quote
along that lines, from much later in the book. So
if you ask me to help defend the West now,
I will reply that although this place is my home,
in the hull of my ancestors, I can't avoid the
reality that the modern West bursts the machine and is
building that in human future. Do I want it to grow? No,
I want to approved it. I want to say that
this West is not a thing to be conserved, not now.
It is a thing to be superseded. Is an albatross
around our necks. It obstructs our vision, It weighs us down.
So I have a couple of questions for you about
this one. First, I'm curious that you know the West
great minds always described our culture is descending from Jerusalem
and Athens. Right. That is an ancient and persistent understanding
that the West really is more than thousand, one thousand
years old. If not, you know, going all the way
back to Jerusalem, we're talking, you know what, three thousand
years right. So I'm curious about how you define the
West and your description and why your description seems to
kind of of the West is kind of entertained with
the machine. But your description of the West basically is
now a thing that you want to reject. Is the
same as rich societies that have become basically intertwined with
the machine right in tandem as they've discarded the ancient
Western culture and ideals.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so a lot of the incentive of writing this
book was looking at the kind of culture war that's
raging across the West at the moment and thinking, Okay,
what's going on here. You've got a bunch of people,
broadly on the left, who are trying to undermine everything
that they think is traditional, everything that's Western, everything that's Christian,
Undermine the history, rewrite the history, relativize everything that you know,
attack all of the all the stories that we've been told.
And then you have a bunch of people broadly sort
of on the right, on the conservative right, who are saying, no,
we need to defend the West against these people. I'm
not a fan of the postmodern left. I'm very much
against much of what they've done. I think it's basically
a nihilistic movement that's going on to attempt to destroy
all of the stories we have and they have nothing
to replace it with. But when I look at the
defense of the West, I think, well, in many cases,
I want to know what they're defending and the conclusion
I really came to in the book is that we've
made an idol of this thing called the west. The
west is actually quite a new phrase. It's only a
phrase that comes about in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries,
actually only, but it's popularized in the nineteenth century. And
I think that what it.
Speaker 1: Didn't happen with the greats East West.
Speaker 2: Well, within the Church you have a sort of eastern West.
But so one of the questions I asked quite early
in the book is what in the west? What is
the west? That I go to the Christian historian, Christopher Dawson,
great Catholic historian, and he says, look, the only reason
we talk about I think called the west is that
it's the domain of what used to be the West
the Catholic Church, right, the western half of the Christian Church.
So you have the Latin West and you have the
Greek East, and they split in the eleventh century. And
what we call the west is basically the domain of
the Roman Church. But it's not called the West for
a long time. It's called Christendom. It's the Christian culture
of Europe. And even though all these European countries are
endously at war with the each other. They still share
this Christian faith that starts to disintegrate. You could argue
about when after the Reformation, the Enlightenment, whatever, the Renaissance,
that you can choose your period, but clearly Christianity is
disintegrates as the story we tell ourselves, and it's replaced
by this story of science and reasons. We say, we
don't know christian we don't need superstition anymore. Science will
tell us what reality is, and technology will create a
better world, and we start to create this theology of
progress that we live within now. So what I would
call the West is a society that's actually based on
a progress theology which replaces a Christian theology. So it's
not a Christian culture. It's the descendant of a Christian culture.
But believes you're saying.
Speaker 1: The West is not Jerusalem and Athens, it is, for
lack of a better word, Enlightenment, industrial Revolution, progress.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say that, And clearly it descends from
Jerusalem and Athens. And clearly the principles and the ethics
of the liberal West are still basically Christian principles. This
is the case that Tom Holland quite famously made in
his book Dominion. I think it's quite right. Even all
the liberal atheists have basically have Christian values, even though
they often don't admit it. But I think the West
has become a sort of corrupted, almost like a Christian heresy.
Actually we worship technology, progress and culture. So my argument
about leaving the West behind is not the same argument
that say, the woke left would make you know that
this is a terrible racist culture or something. It's that
we need to drop that heresy and go back to
looking for a culture based on the four p's, go
back to something that's much more local and much more
Christian if we are Christian, and much more real, because
the thing that we call the West is basically this
modern idol of progress, technology, growth, and money, and that's
what's leading us actually into the age of AI, the
age of the machine, the age of literally trying to
create gods to be gods ourselves. It's turning into something
very demonic, actually, I think, and quite dangerous. So I'm
not going to defend that if that's what the West is.
I'm not going to defend this cult of progress and reason,
but I will defend you know, real cultures and real
places and real faith, and I think that's the thing
we sort of need to return to or go forward to.
So that's that's the argument I'm trying to make there.
Speaker 1: So it sounds to be almost so this is a
thing that I think for I mean, I don't know
how familiar you are with American politics, right, I don't
expect you because I only know very broad you know
things about British politics, for example. But so you know,
for for our American largely American audience, you know, we've seen,
for example, the Republican Party claiming that they're champion in capitalism,
you know, for all the years, while they're really championing
a big business cronyism intertwined with government, which is the
enemy of capitalism. So it sounds like you're kind of
saying they, you know, we have the definition of the
West has changed from being Christendom, from being the Western heritage,
from our cultural inheritance from Jerusalem and Athens, that thing
that people who love the classics and the ancient and
you know, want to still protect and love and cherish
and learn about. But it's turned into like you said,
it's no longer it's really turned into the antithesis of
what that original West is, using the West as its name,
the same way as you know, we're told that capitalism
is you know, two thousand you know, page long free
trade imrovements that give preferences to everybody who has a
very expensive lobbyist.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, totally. Well, I mean, you know, America is
certainly not an expert on American politics, but you know,
I've always liked the Jeffersonian vision of America, of the
kind of the agrarian farm, of the human farmer. As
you say that you're what you're given and we get
the same in Britain and Europe is a story that
you know, free markets are good for you, and free
trade is good, and free trade is liberty, but actually
what you get is Amazon selling ninety two percent of
the books in America and Walmart destroying the high Street
and all of this stuff. And it's a con. It's
a conn in the same way that yeah, it's a
common in the same way that communism was a con.
You know, Communism says wouldn't be wonderful if we all
shared things and lived in a in a light fairly
egalitarian life, which sounds nice, but what you've actually got
is state power and goolags and death camps and evolution,
you know, the most horrific system in history. So yes,
it is a con and I think it's it's it's
a giant system of power pretending using the language of
sometimes of Christianity, sometimes of tradition, sometimes of you know,
your your heritage and your faith, in order to effectively
create this system which I mean to give it. To
give you example what I'm talking about, there is no
government across the Western world or anywhere else in the
world actually, whether they're supposedly left wing or right wing,
or capitalist or socialist, which is not rushing ahead with
deregulating AI systems and moving us towards a technological system
in which it's easier and easier to try and create
these giant superintelligences which are manifesting around us, create AIS
which will replace so many people's jobs just in the
next five to ten years. Every government's in favor of that.
So you've got this giant technological system which is going
to be impossible for most people to influence and is
going to be very destructive for many of us, and
everyone's in favor of that. All these governments are in favor.
That's got nothing to do with real culture, that's got
nothing to do with Western history. That's got nothing to
do with living a Christian life or having a decent
community around you. That's about power, and that's about money.
And if that's what the West is doing, then I
don't want anything to do with it. So I think
the argument I'm making is if we just forget this
term the West entirely, then we can look at what
actually matters. We can say what kind of a country
have I got, and what values has it got? And
what kind of a community do I have? And do
the people in power actually respect human scale life? Are
they giving power back to people? Can people influence them?
Do they focus on what is good and true? Or
do they focus on what is going to create wealth
for a small number of people? And almost systems are
doing the latter. So I think this thing called the
West is almost a It's a it is a bait
and switch. It's exactly that they tell people that this
is our this is our culture and heritage, but it isn't.
It's it's a it's an idol, Okay, So.
Speaker 1: It sounds it kind of like I mean, to refer
to C. S. Lewis again, right, they took the name
but then followed out the inside and put something else
in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I think that's exactly what's happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2: And I think it's easy to get people to want
to defend the West because it's an instinct. Of course,
we want to defend our culture. Of course we want
to protect our heritage. Of course we want to live
in a good country. But the people who are telling
us those things very often the people rushing us into
a system which is undermining all of that, which is
I think why you have populism across the Western world, right,
because people can see that the people who are in
power are not do not have their best interests are hard.
So then we have these populist rising and then the
question is whether they have our best interests are hard
as well? And that's that's an open question. But I
think it's a it's a it's a time in which
we need to go right back to basics. We need
to go back to those four p's. We need to say,
what are the values that a culture is based on?
You know, can we actually live lives based on the
good and the true or are we living in this
system which is enclosing us and controlling us and serving
a fairly small number of people at the drop of
the pyramid, And I think that's where we are.
Speaker 1: Okay, So that I think helps answer another question that
I had related to this, which you know would be
you know, you have you know, you really say one
of the worst things about the machine is the destruction
of kind of indigenous, local, smaller cultures. But you know,
so then I was thinking, you know, but okay, so
if it is a problem to flatten now people's you know,
small local cultures, then why wouldn't also be bad to
destroy the Western culture right to you know, to erase
what we have that is, you know, our cultural inheritance,
not the fake the one that you're talking about, you know,
but the real, true one. Right. So for example, you
mentioned the transcendenttionals, right, true, good, and beautiful. Is you know,
core western you know, certain thing that Western culture has
always held up as the things to be sought for,
and that's kind of the purpose of everything else in life, right,
So that shouldn't be raised.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, well I think all cultures would say
that they do that. I mean I think I would
say that if you leave aside the notion of the
West again and just say to yourself, okay, what matters?
So if I'm English, which I am, then I would
say to myself, well, what is it about English culture
that's valuable that I want to protect? And if I
go even lower down, what is it about the culture
of my town or my county or my place at
a very local level that I want to protect? And
then I would go wide, isn't that in a spiritual
sense and say, well, I'm a Christian, so it's Christianity
that I want to follow. So I need to ask
myself what is it about the Christian Church that is
true that needs to be protected? And those are the
questions I would ask. And I think once I start
talking about the West in a general sense, it actually
confuses the matter. I think we could say to ourselves.
You know, I say, I'm English and you're American, right,
so we haven't got the same things that we want
to preserve in exactly the same way. There are clearly
relations between them, but you know, your culture is going
to be a bit different to mine. And that's what
localism looks like. Indigeneity if you like place based culture,
those things are things that communities can fight for in
their own towns. And if you're a Christian, those things
are going to be in some way driven by your
Christian values, by your sense of what is good and
true and real, and all of those things can be
fought for and defended at quite a specific level. I mean,
I'm not against people talking about the West, but the
reason I ask these questions in the book is that
there are so many different definitions of that. It's almost
like talking about something like capitalism or using a word
like freedom right. I mean, we all think we like freedom,
but what do we mean?
Speaker 1: Lots of people will be freedom to buy another woman's
body and just take baby from exactly.
Speaker 2: Totally. So you can use a word like freedom and
it sounds nice, but everyone has a different definition. And
it's the same thing with the West. You know, what
do we mean? Why not just leave the word aside
and say, Okay, what do we actually want? We want
something that's good and true. We want to defend Christian values.
If we're Christian, we want to live Christian lives. We
want a healthy local landscape and a local economy and
a community that works and children who can play in
the street, and you know, the freedom to have a
local economy that serves people rather than corporations. That stuff
is real and true everywhere in the world. And it's
almost like if we leave the abstract words like freedom
and the west and the rest of it aside, then
we can actually focus on what's real rather than getting
caught up in an almost bit of an esoteric debate
that doesn't necessarily help us. So anyway, that's the suggestion.
But I'm also quite happy if people read this book
and want to argue with me, because at least they're
thinking about the stuff I'm raising. So as much as
anything else, what I'm trying to do with this book
is to really get people thinking about what this machine
is and what the system is that's encroaching around us,
and whether or not they agree with exactly what I'm saying.
I think it's really necessary to understand that there is
this enormous technological system rising up around us, which is
almost unprecedented, I think, in history, and if we don't
define our relationship with us, it's going to define.
Speaker 1: It for us. So here's the last question. I mean,
we have spent most of the time, I think, you know,
talking about what you define is the problem and kind
of definitions that I had some confusion about, and thank
you that I understand a lot better now. So but
so so, just to kind of tease your sections about
responding to this monstrosity that I think pretty much all
of our you know, listeners, the vast majority will agree
you are identifying real, legitimate problems. So but you and
you know, when you get to your section about responding
it to you, you end your book by saying that
the way that people should respond to all these problems
of modernity is and I quote, to rain dance on
the astro turf. Now, it strikes me that the Aztecs
and the Comanches and all the other barbarian tribes you
know did infacted plenty of green dances trying to stop
the coming of modernity, and none of it worked. Obviously,
here we are sitting talking to each other on zoom
over the evil Internet.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: Perhaps perhaps you've heard of like the famously impotent Sue
ghost dances. Right, they thought it would prevent bullets and
they were all mowed down. So why would rain dancing
work now for your audience when it's never worked before
in human history.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, the rain Dancers is an image. I like,
I'm not literally proposing that we do it. I'm quoting
something from the Irish writer John Moriarty. What I tried
to do in the last few chapters of the book
is try and work out how you can actually live
through this thing. I don't think that it is possible
to well. I mean, it's clearly not possible to say,
overthrow the technological system, even if you wanted to do that,
in the same way that it isn't possible to overthrow capitalism.
Speaker 1: Even if you wanted to do that, it would probably
require like terrorism, right somebody, and then you would kill
the right. So I'm just thinking, like, you know, I
must have set at EMPs against all the power boxes
and to interact red or whatever.
Speaker 2: You know, We're in a system and any attempt to
overthrow the system is only going to lead to mass
misery and it won't work anyway. Go back communism, right,
Communism as an attempt to overthrow capitalism and create a
just and fair world, and it was monstrous and hideous
and it didn't work anyway, So you can't you know,
we are living in the world. We are living in now.
You can't get rid of technology. You can't get rid
of the internet, can't get rid of the machine, can't
get rid of human power, because powers that's the problem
that humans have always had to struggle with. So you
have to work out how you're going to live through it.
You have to work out how you can define your
relationship with modern technology at the very basic level. Do
you want to have a smartphone? Are you going to
engage with an AI system? Are you going to give
your children screens? How are you going to practice a
Christian faith in a world that seems to be very
un Christian? What are you going to do about trying
to have a functioning local community and a local economy
in a world which militates against it. So as much
as the conclusion I can only come to, and I've
spent so many years thinking about this, is that things
can only be done usefully really at local community level.
You know, in your town, in your family, in your church.
How can you get together with other people and talk
about these things? How can you form a community that
has a specific relationship with technology? How can you say
no to certain things that are coming towards you? I
mean I've never used an AI and are not going
to use one for example. You need that. And I
think these things are more and more urgent all the time.
We have this giant system closing around us which is
changing our relationship with what it means to be human.
I mean spending time on the average screen time in
this country I think is nine hours a day for teenagers.
Speaker 1: Amazingly, that changes the ground timed out by the time
they're in high school. Right, you were taking forty five
forty hours a week non educational screens exactly.
Speaker 2: And that changes the way they think, It changes the
way they relate to other people, it changes their brain chemistry.
We know all this, that all the studies have been
done on this stuff. So we've got a system which
is closing around us, which is fundamentally dehumanizing us. And
so we've got an urgent need to rehumanize ourselves. And
it's not something the state can do for you. They
might be useful things the government can do in terms
of regulating technology. That's fine, But ultimately this is our
question in our families and our communities, in our churches,
how are we going to define our relationship with the machine.
And that's a spiritual question, it's a practical question, and
I think it has to start from the bottom up.
So really the last part of the book is an
attempt to work out how to do that. There's no
point in trying to sort of defeat the machine at
a global level. But you can defeat it in your heart,
you can defeat it in your community. You can define
your relationship with it. You can ask how you should
live as a Christian and how you should live as
a just a human being in the culture. And it's
my feeling, my strong feeling, that if we don't do that,
we're just going to be swallowed and we're going to
be turned into something which is fundamentally unhuman and fundamentally unreal.
And that's the direction we're going in. And I think
we have to just know what's going on. I mean,
as much as anything else, If this book just gives
people an idea of what's going on, gives them a
picture and an understanding of what the system is that's
manifesting around them, so they can work out themselves what
they want to do with it, then it would have
done something useful.
Speaker 1: Paul King's North's latest book is Against the Machine. You
can get it at every major booksheller. My favorite is
bookshop Dot, or support your local independent bookseller. You've been
listening to the Federalist Radio Hour, be lovers of freedom
and anxious from the prey. I'm Joy Polman signing on.
I heard the Fame Boy the Reason, and then it
faded away.