Paul Kingsnorth

The Weekly Wrap: December 28-January 3

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The Weekly Wrap: December 28-January 3

Readers as Endangered Species

I suspect you’ve read at least one book this year. It wouldn’t surprise me if you’ve read a book a week. This week, I’ve been seeing everyone’s end of the year posts of all the books they’ve read. However, one of the articles below woke me up to the bubble we are living in.

Less than half of Americans read ONE book this year. And that number is rising. It might be time to declare the reader an endangered species. But the protection of endangered species is itself endangered, so I wouldn’t count on it. And I would hate to be part of a future zoo exhibit titled “the endangered reader” with the mock habitat of a wing chair and a booklined room.

I’ve long pondered what we can do. About all I’ve concluded is that we avoid at all costs “should-ing” over non-readers. I almost wonder if we need to reach a cultural moment where people discover reading as this “cool new thing,” kind of like how the masses seem to have rediscovered vinyl when we all thought vinyl was dead, replaced by shiny discs in cheesy jewel cases.

My sense is that things like this still spread by word of mouth as people simply gossip about the good thing of reading in their lives, and maybe pass along books they’ve loved. In other words, don’t protect booklovers, but rather turn them loose to share the “disease!”

Five Articles Worth Reading

On that note, “Reading Is a Vice” argues against our strategies of arguing the virtues of reading. After all, we “do it for the thrill of staying up late to read under the covers by flashlight, unable to stop and hoping no one finds out.”

Reviewers have positively reviewed Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine in a number of major publications (even at Bob on Books!) In “Against Doom,” Emma Collins challenges Kingsnorth’s anti-technology jeremiad, concluding, “I’m tired of doom, and of doom being passed off as Christianity. Remember this: faith is about life. It’s about joy. It’s about salvation. Don’t get it twisted.”

I’ve been in a number of conversations, the gist of which is “young men are not doing well.” Richard Reeves, in “Making Men,” argues for “rites of passage,” in helping boys make the transition to responsible manhood.

However, some would argue our society as a whole is not doing so well. on one hand, we exalt radical individualism. But then we wring our hands over how to address the loneliness epidemic. Kristin M. Collier, a physician, argues that at the heart of Christian faith is restoring relationships with God, others, and ourselves. She explores the significance of communion as health in “Religio Medici.”

Lastly, this time between the end of one year and the beginning of another lends itself to consider the complexities of time, which we often take for granted. JSTOR posted a great collection of articles, “Keeping Time: A New Year’s Collection,” offering a variety of slants on this mysterious phenomenon we call “time.”

Quote of the Week

Historian John Hope Franklin was born on January 2, 1915. This quote makes the case for why we don’t erase the unhappy episodes of our history:

“If the house is to be set in order, one cannot begin with the present; he must begin with the past.”

Miscellaneous Musings

I wonder if book influencers will remember books published this month when they make their “best of the year” picks for 2026.

I love Ohio history and so I’m enjoying getting into Ann Hagedorn’s Beyond the River. It’s an account of the abolitionist and underground railroad efforts of the residents of the Ohio River town of Ripley. In particular, it focuses on Rev. John Rankin, who coupled prayer, and fighting off fugitive slave hunters with his rifle.

However, I hate cancer, which has killed people I loved and afflicted many who are near and dear. I’ve even had brushes with it in the form of a couple of skin cancers caught early. I’ve liked Siddhartha Mukherjee’s elegant writing and so have picked up his fascinating “biography” of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies. I’m early my reading, but one striking advance is that a cancer diagnosis is no longer a badge of shame.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

Tuesday: Gerhard Lohfink, Prayer Takes Us Home

Wednesday: Nicole Massie Martin, Nailing It

Thursday: Andrew Hui, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries

Friday: William F,. Buckley, Marco Polo, If You Can

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap  for December 28-January 3.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

Review: Against the Machine

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Cover image of "Against the Machine" by Paul Kingsnorth

Against the Machine

Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth. Thesis (ISBN: 9780593850633) 2025.

Summary: An account of the rise of techno-capitalism and the threat it poses to humanity and to the Earth.

“What Progress wants is to replace us.

“Perhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.”

That stark concluding heading and sentence in a chapter titled “What Progress Wants” stopped me dead in my tracks. It explained the urgency behind Paul Kingsnorth’s cultural and historical analysis in Against the Machine. He believes the advance of what he calls “the Machine,” the culturally embedded expression of techno-capitalism marks the death of a culture, threatens humanity, as well as the earth.

Kingsnorth refers to himself at points as a Luddite. But these are not the stark ravings of a mad man. Rather, he offer a thoughtful piece of cultural analysis drawing upon a range of voices from Simone Weil, Lewis Mumford, and Jacques Ellul and many others. But first, what does he mean by “the Machine”? This statement captures the essence:

“This then is the Machine. It is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies we have cleverly managed to rustle up–cars, laptops, robot mowers, and the rest. In fact, such ‘technics’, as Mumford calls them, are the product of the Machine, not its essence. The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control, and ambition” (p. 37).

In part one of the book, Kingsnorth explores our need for roots and how the Machine has uprooted us from both nature and culture. Our “culture wars” are symptomatic of that rootlessness, Part two traces how the Machine evolved, particularly in the “disenchantment” of Enlightenment science, the rise of the cosmopolis, and the driving force of want.

Part three lays out the aspects of life Machine culture is eroding. He contrasts four “P’s” of traditional culture with four “S’s” of Machine culture

Past. Where a culture comes from vs.

Science. Where we come from, a non-mythic story.

People. Who a culture is. A sense of being ‘a people.” vs.

The Self. Who we are. The highest good is the self.

Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local, particular manifestation vs.

Sex. What we do. A means of sacral pleasure and affirmation of individual identity (“sexuality”).

Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religious tradition, relating to God or the gods. vs.

The Screen. Where we are going, both as distraction and interface for a post-human reality.

Finally, part four turns to the choice we face. He argues that the way of seeing that he calls “The West,” that gave birth to the machine must die. He calls for a kind of asceticism, either “cooked” (moderated) or “raw” (radical) with regard to technology. However, he doesn’t entertain “a two-edged sword” view. The Machine, as he’s construed it is destructive of both humanity and culture. He doesn’t believe we can escape the Machine, but he calls for a different vision that once again embraces the four “P’s” of past, people, place, and prayer. He speaks of building alternative communities in language reminiscent of Ron Dreher’s The Benedict Option. In his home in western Ireland, he is attempting to live out his ideas.

I had a couple responses as I read. Firstly, I was struck by his references to Weil, Mumford, and Ellul. He really wasn’t saying anything they had not already said, only chronicling how their ideas had played out. My generation was reading these thinkers fifty years ago–at least a few of us! I wonder why we didn’t pay them heed!

Secondly, it is interesting to me that Paul Kingsnorth is a recent convert (2020) to Christianity. His vision of the “two ways” starkly delineates the idolatry of techno-capitalism that leads to death and the four “P’s” that lead to life. His book, I believe, is a prophetic word to Christians as well as the wider culture caught up in the captivities of a dying culture, epitomized by the Machine. Will we turn back to what he calls “the eternal things” or will we let the Machine replace us?

The Weekly Wrap: October 26-November 1

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The Weekly Wrap: October 26-November 1

Why I’m Not a Horror Fan

I’ve made through the month of Spooktober! No twelve foot skeletons have snatched me up. Nor have I been bitten by any giant spiders. I’ve not been spirited away by any goblins hanging on trees. And I’ve not read any of the horror novels that were the subject of so many newsletter articles this month.

I’m just not into horror. That’s not a judgement on anyone else’s literary tastes. One could argue that horror makes a great escape from the scary realities of modern life. But not for me. I find that what I need is either perspective that helps me face these things or books of consolation for the precious things we are losing that I have little hope of changing.

One of the phrases that occurs over and over in my Bible is “be not afraid.” Horror functions by saying “be afraid; be very afraid.” So do conspiracy books. Every imaginary fear functions by making us believe something could be so. I’ve simply made a personal decision that I will not live by fear. That doesn’t mean I won’t reckon with danger.

Ultimately what is feared in horror is death–often in a grisly manner. I wonder whether it is good to fascinate oneself with macabre forms of death. And the beings that inhabit the beyond are usually not Caspar the Friendly Ghost. C.S. Lewis offers good guidance that we neither disbelieve in devils nor excessively focus on them. I try to follow that.

Finally, there are just so many other books I am interested in reading that what life I have left is too short a time. And in the Eternity that follows, horrors real and imagined will come to an end. Somehow, horror just doesn’t fit, for me.

Five Articles Worth Reading

But if I were to take a dip into horror, I would probably start with Stephen King. The only one of his books I have read is 11/22/63. Gilbert Cruz has written “The Essential Stephen King,” a guide to his work beginning with your interests

One of the first American masters of horror was Edgar Allen Poe. As it turns out, the most enigmatic mystery has to do with the cause of Poe’s own death. In “The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death: 19 Theories on What Caused the Poet’s Demise,” Open Culture explores the different explanations and the evidence.

In addition to his poetry, T. S. Eliot wrote a lot of prose. Essays, printed lectures, and book reviews (lots of them). People wondered whether he really read all the books he seemed acquainted with. At very least, the reviewer of his Collected Prose, Vols. 1-4, insists that the quality of analysis confirms that he read carefully what he reviewed. “What We Can Do Is to Use Our Minds: T. S. Eliot, Collected Prose” is a fascinating glimpse into the mind of T.S. Eliot and what he gained from all that writing.

I’ve seen several reviews of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine, which contends that our modern techno-capitalism is undermining the foundations of our civilization and destroying the earth. I have the book and will be reviewing it soon. “Let ‘The West’ Die” is adapted from his book and will give you the gist of his thought.

In my early adult years, it was not uncommon to get some friends together, put on some music (usually on vinyl),” crank it up and either dance to it, or just take it in. Recently, my son brought back a vintage Tony Bennett album. Perhaps the greater gift was savoring it together. Jonathan Garrett, in “How to Make Music Popular Again,” considers what we’ve lost as music listening has become a private experience on headphones.

Quote of the Week

Novelist Evelyn Waugh was born October 28, 1903. He made this fascinating observation:

“When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.”

Have any limitations you want to keep?

Miscellaneous Musings

I lost a day to sickness on Wednesday. It was kind of weird–just profound tiredness accompanied by unsteadiness on my feet and a fever. I nearly fell asleep in my soup during lunch! Slept all afternoon into the evening, took some acetaminophen and started feeling better, and by Thursday, felt better other than feeling somewhat drained. When I was awake, I couldn’t read–nothing registered. I could handle an episode of The Chosen, a video series. That was all. It meant delaying my reviews by a day. I was in no state to write one on Wednesday for a Thursday posting. It reminded me of what a gift health is, and the amazing, even at 71, recuperative powers of our bodies.

Ironically, on the day when I missed my regular posting time, I had one of the best days of the year with traffic on the blog. Louise Penny’s and Charlie Mackesy’s new books had just dropped and it looked like people were looking up my reviews of their previous books. There’s a lesson for me here. By the way, I have both of the new books and hope to review them in November.

I wonder if there is a silver lining to cuts to the humanities and the arts, and to libraries and public media. If they can replace lost revenue with private support without becoming “beholden” to a particular interest, it seems that they would gain a new degree of freedom in our highly politicized atmosphere. We all can make a difference in our buying decisions and charitable contributions to help make that possible.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: The Month in Reviews: October 2025

Tuesday: Ian Mc Ewan, What We Can Know

Wednesday: Georges Simenon, Pietr the Latvian

Thursday: Crystal L. Downing, The Wages of Cinema

Friday: Jonathan Marks, Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case For Liberal Education

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for October 26-November 1.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page