Dogmatic Disenchantment

Is the modern world spiritually famished, or is that just Paul Kingsnorth?

“When I was a child, I wanted to live in a pine forest,” writes Paul Kingsnorth in the opening to Against the Machine, his sweeping 2025 indictment of modernity. It was a well-chosen first line. It reveals a lot about both Kingsnorth himself, and the book. He still wants to live in a pine forest. What’s wrong with the world these days, that the simplest pleasures seem so far out of reach?

Kingsnorth has a lot of fans. Many people think he’s brilliant. “Prophetic, poetic, and erudite,” crows the Amazon page on this book. Perhaps he is all of those things! I myself find him almost unreadable; it was heavy sledding ploughing through this book. But I acknowledge that this reveals things about me, not just about Kingsnorth. You might say, I’ve always had something of an aversion to “writing that seems to be driven to an unseemly extent by emotion.” The most common manifestation is florid, overwrought prose, which just bugs me. (This has impacted my ability to enjoy, among other things, the Brontë sisters, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and the spiritual writings of St. Alphonsus Liguori. I’m not saying they aren’t good! Hard for me personally to get into them.)

Kingsnorth’s prose is not particularly florid, but one does have a powerful sense of careening through the world helter-skelter, trapped in the head of an emotionally unstable person. Apparently some people loved this. I sort of just wanted to tell him: “Pine forests exist in the world! Maybe go sit in one for awhile and chill.”

He does nevertheless capture with great effectiveness a view that many people take of the modern world. It’s disenchanted. Spiritually desiccated. The magic has been lost. Our bellies are full but our souls are empty.

There’s a lot of truth to this. And yet, I think it’s clearly a mistake to take this as far as Kingsnorth does, all the way to “The West Must Die” (which is indeed the title and subject of one of his late chapters). Since this is the conclusion of Autopsy Week, let’s call this the “starvation thesis.” Christendom as a moral and spiritual reality has wasted away and left us rootless and miserable.

It should be said from the start that Kingsnorth makes no pretense that he is arguing for the position that modernity is bad and wrong. He assumes it! He tells you in the opening pages that he has from childhood felt in his bones the total brokenness of the modern world. He seems to view his entire adult life as a quest to understand the problem better, which has led him through radical environmentalism, the “collapsitarian” movement (where poets, zoomers, and preppers await the end of the world), Zen Buddhism, eco-paganism, and finally Romanian Orthodoxy. When he’s not writing bestsellers and keeping up with his popular Substack, he’s now a beekeeper, homeschooling his kids on a homestead in rural Ireland.

He’s aware of the paradoxes (the anti-tech, anti-modern global influencer) though I wonder if he quite grasps the extent to which this book radiates the vibe of the “navel-gazing, self-aware modern artist.” (He’s sure his soul belongs in Middle Earth, but it feels like he’d fit in pretty well in Greenwich Village.) Maybe he does know this, and that just fuels his angst and self-loathing. I’m able to feel compassion for such a man, who’s clearly found the modern world very bruising. (Even though he hates St. Thomas Aquinas, which is always a bad sign.) I hope his newfound Christianity gives him some peace. Insofar as he’s hailed as “a prophet” though, I’d caution people to take his vision with considerable salt. This is a despair book on steroids. It won’t leave you feeling energized and newly empowered to revitalize our culture.

Yet, he’s not wrong that Westerners today are spiritually hungry. And his framing is worth reflecting on, even if overwrought. Kingsnorth draws everything bad about modernity into a single concept: The Machine. This is not a single idea, institution, or trend, but a kind Platonic Form (or anti-Form?) of Malignant Modernity. It draws together techno-capitalism, hyper-rationalism, and man’s rebellion against nature. It alienates us from everything good and holy, and reduces us to mechanical cogs. Modern people have no real defense against this, because they have abandoned the “four P’s” of a more complete world (past, people, place, prayer) for the four S’s of our benighted modern one (science, self, sex, screens). All the good, authentic, spiritually nourishing things have been traded for things that are synthetic, alienated, and empty.

All right, so it’s hyperbolic. But he’s rather clever, no? I understand why Kingsnorth has his fans. And there are some big-picture problems here that are relevant to the project of Christendom Reborn. Let’s grant (even if Kingsnorth likely wouldn’t) that there are significant ways in which modernity helps us to be better and more fulfilled people. We can read the Bible! Start charities, which have the capacity now to serve needy people all over the world! Normal people today can immerse themselves in classical music, great literature and philosophy, beauties of art and nature that were inaccessible to all but a few until quite recently. Isn’t modernity wonderful?

Here’s a question worth pondering, though. If we can do all those things… why don’t we? Or, rather, why don’t we do those things more often? Classical music societies are absolutely tiny compared to, say gamer conventions. Trashy romances sell much better than the Summa Theologica. People today devote countless hours to scrolling rage porn and playing phone games, but can’t find time to read good books, cultivate meaningful hobbies, or get together with family and friends. People who say they believe in Jesus increasingly wander away from church because it seems like too much bother. Men and women are deeply lonely but seemingly less and less able to find each other and get married, as people have done for millennia, enabling civilization to continue.

Is it wrong to see these as very grim indicators about the health of our society? Surely not. We have deep spiritual problems, and I’m pretty sure Kingsnorth’s “four P and four S” list is at least in the ballpark of a fair explanation. It does seem to me like a serious problem that Kingsnorth’s entire life paradigm makes it impossible for him to distinguish the brokenness of modernity from the general fallenness of the world. But he hasn’t been a Christian very long. Maybe over time that influence will shift his perspective.

I myself have a lot more hope than Kingsnorth. Partly that’s true for a simple reason: I like my life. It’s full of joy! I love being a mother. I love living on a Minnesota lake. Being part of a vibrant Catholic community that does, in my view, give me a real and sustaining conduit to the True, Beautiful, and Good. I love going to the symphony with my husband and relaxing with a book from my home library. I also love a lot of fairly simple things that modernity has made more accessible to me: chocolate, over-fired pizza, hot baths. I love the expensive, expertly engineered running shoes that enable me to take regular jaunts through the woods and meadows in my region without destroying my joints.

I don’t insist that it’s better to be a modern. How would I know? But I do insist that the world is still full of beauty, goodness, and truth. We can still access those things, if we choose to. I’m not downplaying the real problems of Western cultures today, but I do think continuing to enjoy and preserve the good things is better than marinating in apocalyptic despair, even if the latter does sometimes yield arresting insights.

Truthfully though, the point I’m making here was already made by Gerard Manley Hopkins. He says it much better. So I’ll let him have the final word for this week:

God’s Grandeur

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Thanks for reading. This concludes Autopsy Week. Next week, we’ll turn to the subject of rebuilding! Stay tuned!