Mind, Muscle, Bone & Spirit vs. Machine

by Paul Hunter of Seattle, WA

I’ve been following Paul Kingsnorth as a novelist, thinker and doer in environmental matters for a good while now. I was most taken with what might count as the despair expressed in his Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (Graywolf Press, 2017), at the impossibility of any political or social human group accepting responsibility for and reversing the destruction of nature including ourselves and all other life-forms on this planet. In that book he explained his retreat from active engagement with the powers-that-be, resigning from corporate and governmental boards who were content to run out the clock over trivial or manufactured objections, all the while continuing to rake in their profits. He and his wife settled on a small patch of land in the rural west of Ireland, where they are raising two children and attempting to feed, shelter and warm themselves in ways that do no more violence to the Earth.

The reader doesn’t need to wade through all of Paul Kingsnorth’s heavy intellectual artillery to understand the scale and violence of the struggle he details in his new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (Random House, 2025). The Machine of his title is the engine of technological progress that has been an ever-expanding constant in Anglo-American culture and economics for the last 250 years. The reader soon gets the sense from Kingsnorth’s exploration and analysis that there is effectively no one to blame but ourselves for the collapse of our values and loss of a modest, human-scaled culture, though those effects are definitely part of the mechanistic “progress” that feels ongoing and unstoppable, with its cadre of corporate winners notable for their economic positioning, clear success, and hunger to proceed with ever more demolition of the culture for profit.

Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine offers a patient and thorough exploration that carries the reader along with a well-nigh irresistible momentum. It is a book that he claims (and largely supports from the book’s wide-ranging quotes and carefully parsed arguments) has been 30 years in the making. Across the historical span of this detailed argument his earnest efforts and shifting allegiances reveal both moments of hope and heartbreaking losses. The book establishes that there is at the very least a strong through-line extending from the European Enclosure Movement starting around 1750, that erased the workers’ medieval bonds, privileges and ties to the land (not to mention self-respect), that reaches forward to touch the equivalent loss of workers’ livelihood and identity amid the A-I chatter of today, where he attempts to deflate the bubble of its overt deceptions, hysterias and fears.

Small Farmer’s Journal has been supporting and encouraging small-scale diversified and sustainable farming for going on 50 years, and considers itself part of the enduring mind, muscle, bone and spirit that make us who we are. As such it has long been relatively immune to the feverish rush to new technologies, though we in the SFJ family have felt the weight of a culture that since the 1970s has tacitly accepted the judgment that fields can be machined by ever-larger and more remote-controlled equipment, to the point of being considered no longer essential to the art, craft and practice we call farming at all. That dismissal extends to super-crops conjured in labs, rather than grown and harvested as the result of an accumulated and anonymous wisdom practiced on the land over many centuries, in some cases as much as 13,000 years spent raising, refining and breeding domesticated plants and animals. In the realm of what is now labeled without irony Industrial Agriculture, crop yields mostly matter only for the short list of domesticated plants that can be commodified, treated as ingredients or raw materials processed heavily to create an artificial simulacrum of a healthy diet so concentrated on mouth-feel and the balance of savory and sweet that eating “fast food” has become an exercise in quickly inhaling what might be bad for us, before that thought can even rise to consciousness.

So how can we respond better to technology on the farm? Perhaps for starters we need to resist technology’s endless pretense of “perfectibility” and abandonment of older solutions, with its ultimate demand that users replace all processes and processors every few years, which effectively renders all past inventions useless. I think of the classic sicklebar mowing machine, that by 1900 had its gearbox and axles fully enclosed to keep out dirt and keep in lubricant, that ever since has proven durable and capable of being rebuilt and repaired almost indefinitely, whether drawn by a good team of American Belgians or a two-cylinder John Deere Model B. As Kingsnorth points out, early 19th century Luddites gained an ugly reputation in the press and law courts of the time as smashers of machines, which they were mostly not. That movement was a workers’ protest, yes, but also a search for appropriate technology that could and would be operated safely and humanely under human control. But what happened was that managers and operators of looms and other machines in the quest for more profits pretended to let the soulless machine dictate factory conditions and working hours. Just because a loom could be run 24/7 did not mean it was in the interest of anyone but corporate owners and managers that they do so, just as the narrow spaces under and around looms did not mean that the machines required women and children with small bodies and small nimble hands to change the spindles and shuttles on such machines, much less that they be paid a smaller wage while performing that more valuable service for owners. It seems that the history of technological progress has often meant that both the value of human workers and the humanity of overseers should be checked and discarded at the door.

Here well into the 21st Century we need to be publically admitting several obvious truths about technological progress – first, that it mostly benefits a few managers and executives at the top, with often incalculable harm to ordinary workers. Second, that for a century and a half the march of such progress has been accompanied by a continuous reduction in skilled jobs and job security. Manufacturers and Industrial Ag workers alike have seen the rise of work as mostly not a matter of skill, treated as more an option than a necessity, that robot technology is trying to erase altogether, in the interest of profit. Whether in the field or on the factory floor, each job often amounts to a set of moves and motions refined to be taught and learned in a matter of minutes, that often prove stultifying, tedious and unhealthy when repeated thousands of times over a shift or working day.

The one complaint I have with Kingsnorth’s new book is that it spends hundreds of pages flogging a dead horse. Whether that soulless irresistible force he labels The Machine is to be blamed on Christians, Romans, Communists, Socialists, Free-market Capitalists, Economists, Scientists linked with Industrialists in a Technocracy, or Consumers linked with Ad Agencies (and now AI) in a parody of comfort and entitlement, the blame game is very old, runs deep, and currently matters little if at all. We are here, locked in a fatal embrace with powers that mean us no good, that endlessly gather our personal information employed to manipulate and fleece us, that shout us down from their bully pulpits.

Which brings me to the enduring question: What are we going to do about it? I can say that small farmers on modest land holdings using traditional methods have never been the culprits, and their neighbors will have ever-increasing and nutritious reasons to support, admire and thank them. And Paul Kingsnorth is right that we can’t wait for a general uprising to escape the corporate overlords and the population that has been sleepwalking, in counterfeit love with products that promise to save its time, health, sanity, productivity and spending power. We should all limit our screen time and monitor our information inputs. These are matters of commitment and personal choice. But we need to find better motivations that outweigh mere comfort. The hard part is that every choice each of us makes at this point affects us all. And the disinformation and mis-information campaigns (mostly outright lies protected by the First Amendment) are professionally orchestrated to win our approval, with the latest photographs cunningly doctored by AI, employing liars in public places to tell us exactly what we want to hear. What could possibly go wrong? I would recommend reading Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine if you’re sleeping too well, and need an armload of good reasons to provoke you to taking braver and bolder stances against the Machine that threatens to run us all into the barren, exhausted, poisoned ground.