Burnout is common to idealists who invest deeply in their dreams. It is easy to overreach, and promise more than you have to give. Then too there is that tempered hidden anchor called hope, the mountain climber’s friend driven into cracks to belay and secure him as he goes, which still may fail first or last. So following the story that underlies these essays it is not hard to see how, as Kingsnorth says, finding himself increasingly mired in endless meetings with corporate spokesmen paid to resist him, enough futile effort might lead to despair.

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.