Raging against the Machine Liberalism is finally dying

Twenty-​­five years ago, I found myself sitting around a fire in an Indonesian rainforest. There were people around the fire from a few different countries. I remember well enough the horrible moment when ­somebody — the kind of person who brings an acoustic guitar into an Indonesian rainforest —​­ suggested that we should all sing traditional songs from our home countries. I looked around quickly to make sure the guitar wasn’t coming in my direction, but I was thankfully spared. One of our hosts from Borneo began singing something beautiful in his language. Then a German picked up the guitar and belted out something lusty and Germanic. Then a couple of others. It was all quite fun. Then the guitar came round to another English ­person —​­ one who, unlike me, knew how to play­ it —​­ and there was a momentary silence, followed by a hushed consultation with a couple of other English people. What shall I play? It became quickly clear that none of us had a clue what a traditional English song was. Somebody suggested “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?”, but we only really knew the chorus. In the end, the inevitable happened: the Englishman played a Bob Dylan song. Everybody, including the people from Borneo, sang happily along.

It made me slightly angry and embarrassed and confused all at the same time, but most of all it made me feel like I was missing something. Why didn’t I know any folk songs from my own country? Why did nobody else from my country know any, either?

I felt the same way once at school, when I saw in a book an illustration of the national costumes of various European nations. There were the Welsh with their lace and the Scots with their kilts and the Dutch with their clogs, and it was all faintly ridiculous, but the most ridiculous of all were the English. Our national costume, according to this picture anyway, was a pinstripe suit, a bowler hat and a rolled‑­up umbrella. The Welsh made lace, the Dutch grew tulips, the Irish played the fiddle, the French did whatever they did with those strings of onions: hell, at least it was colourful. What did my people do? We made money.

That illustration was telling me the same thing as the jungle version of “Hard Rain”, and what it was saying was loud and clear: you don’t have a culture.

Since then, I seem to have picked away endlessly at this notion of “culture”. The quest for culture is always a quest for home. Probably humans can never be truly at home on this earth, but there are degrees of homelessness, I think. When you’re young you want to run away from home and sit around an Indonesian campfire with people from many nations and sing. But you find that home has followed you and that you don’t know what it quite is, or why that bothers you so much. As you get older, you realise both why home matters and how fragile and elusive it is. Then you find you are living in a world whose forces have set out to destroy your sense of home wherever it can be found.

Our age, I think, is unique. It might be that everyone thinks this about their time, but I think that today we have a good case. The sheer scale of global culture, the degree of technological interconnectedness, the dangers of those technologies, from AI to nuclear missiles, the human impact on the natural world and the rapid ­falling​­ away of many things that have buoyed and sustained us for centuries, from languages to religions, means that the times we live in are perhaps less rooted than any time in history. We may be in the process of creating something unique in human history: a global anticulture, unmoored from reality and increasingly at war with it.

This anticulture is not limited to any particular political or cultural tradition: though it arose in the West, from peculiarities of Western culture and history, it has since become universal. It is an “anticulture” because the elements of human life from which cultures of all kinds, however different, have traditionally sprung are negated by today’s way of life. The values of the Machine are an attack on the values upon which ­pre-modern, traditional societies were built. The new values are predicated on the pursuit of liberation: a ­one-​­word descriptor of the essence of the Western programme since 1789. Our aim, stated or unstated, is to liberate ourselves from nature in all regards, so that we may conquer the stars, conquer death, and become as gods, knowing good and evil.

The philosopher Patrick Deneen, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, presents this modern drive towards liberation as an ideological project, suggesting that “liberalism” is one of three ideologies which have dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other­ two — communism and ­fascism —​­ were ­shorter lived, he suggests, and died in the West in the 20th century. Liberalism —​­ the elder ­brother —​­ is finally dying now. One reason for its longer life is that it piggybacked on an older story, presenting itself as the inheritor of older traditions of “liberty”, when in fact it was something quite different. While liberty is “the condition of self-​governance, whether achieved by the individual or a political community”, liberalism “re‑conceives liberty as the opposite of this older conception. It is understood to be the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms.”

“Freedom from external constraints” is a good description of the central drive of the Machine’s anticulture. This pursuit, claims Deneen, seeks freedom for the individual from society itself, and it is built upon a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted, ­Weil-​­like in time and place, this new lens offers a new vision: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans are now, in Deneen’s words, “rights-​bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life”.

In this new world, the sovereign human person, ­disembedded from community, history and nature, will utilise reason, informed by science and enabled by technology, to choose how to live. The rational individual, making choices in a marketplace overseen by a government committed to “liberty” and guarding individual “rights” through a “social contract”: this was the basis of a wholly new world. The commitment to this ­post-​­Enlightenment liberal order is not a partisan one. The factions we refer to today as “Left” and “Right” are simply two different flavours of the same liberal food.

What is crucial to understand ­here —​­ and this is what makes liberalism an ideology —​­ is that in order for the new, “liberated” world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the family, the Church and private land ownership so that communism could materialise, so liberalism did not naturally “evolve” from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the “sovereign individual” from new cloth. The individual “as a disembodied,­ self-​­interested economic actor”, claims Deneen, “didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order”.

This echoes Chesterton’s argument that ­capitalism —​­ a system referred to as “liberal economics” for good reason —​­ did not “evolve” either, but also had to be created by force. Liberalism, suggests Deneen, grew in the same desert. And the biggest obstacle to the growth of ­both —​­ then as now —​­ was real culture. “Culture was the greatest threat to the creation of the liberal individual,” writes Deneen. Rooted trees are hard to fell. The Machine anticulture which is felling them one by one “is at once a crowning achievement of liberalism and among the greatest threats to our continued common life”.

There has always been a certain pathos, and a kind of nobility, to the modern human attempt at breaking the bounds and soaring to the stars. It is the pursuit of cosmopolis: a utopian desire to replace religious and ethnic conflict with universal peace and love. It strives, at its best, for equality and brotherhood, rather than prejudice and conflict. The problem emerges when the ideals are divorced from the reality of what humans are, and what the world is made of. Liberatory ambition, in the abstract, can never be sated. Like a dictator marching on Moscow, the Machine doesn’t know when to stop, and now we can see where this project of globalised liberation is leading us: into the world of the nihil.

As a result, human culture is in the process of being consumed by the Machine. Something organic is being superseded by something planned; something natural by something technological. This is the anticulture of the Machine, and it supersedes and replaces the values on which older societies the world over are based. At the risk of gross generalisation, I think we can boil those older values down into a simple formula. I call it the Four Ps:

1. Past. Where a culture comes from, its history and ancestry.
2. People. Who a culture is. A sense of being “a people”.
3. Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local and particular manifestation
4. Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religious tradition, which relates it to God or the gods.

Maybe cultures can survive, and even thrive, without one or more of these elements. In fact, some measurably do: nomadic cultures, for example, do not have a permanent link to a particular place, but are not necessarily less culturally or spiritually rich for it. Still, if you remove more than one element from this list, your chance of sustaining a cultural story in place and through time is slim.

Looking again at my home country, England, in the light of this theory of culture, seems instructive. England, like much of the West, currently seems to be in a kind of freeform cultural collapse. Why? Well, if the Four Ps have anything going for them, the explanations are clear enough. The English long ago gave up on the religion that formed their nation and their ­values —​­ Christianity. They are one of the most urbanised nations on Earth, and the one which urbanised earliest. Our memory of the land, and our understanding of it, is almost entirely dead. We are an urban people. And we have largely forgotten our history, or had it taken away from us, depending on your point of view.

For this reason, we have no meaningful folk culture. Folk culture comes from a ­folk —​­ a people rooted in time and place, with dirty hands and a particular perspective. The English are no longer this, and have perhaps not been for centuries. Finally, the redoubts of high culture have fallen, since at least the Sixties, to a postmodern faction which believes that the very notion of “high culture” is elitist, bigoted folly, and that nations are too. England’s cultural elite today, fired by a ­longstanding oikophobia, are far more likely to be found cheering on the toppling of statues than thinking about what to replace them with. When an elite regards its people with thinly veiled contempt, and when it sneers at its own ancestors, the culture it claims to speak for and guard is not long for this world.

This same energy seems to be displayed to different degrees throughout the nations of the West today, and has elicited a growing reaction from those who object to it. But it is nonetheless the dominant understanding, pushed from above by those in power. We have forgotten who we are, or we don’t like who we are, or somehow both.

If this is true, we are in a situation in which the Machine has advanced to such a degree that the very possibility of living cultures in “advanced” countries (i.e. the countries most under its sway) is impossible. The direction of modernity is away from land and towards megacities, away from both folk and high culture and into mass online anticulture, and away from any manifestation of God and towards the rule of Mammon. The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest. In the new civilisation it is building, culture will be made not by that magical, strange, impossible and miraculous combination of human bodies, wild nature and the soul, but by the Algorithm and the AI.

The anticulture of the Machine brings with it its own values. They supersede the values of the ­pre-technological age, and they spring from the need and the drive of the Machine itself. We could call them the Four Ss:

1. Science. Where we come from. Science can offer us a ­non-mythic version of this story, and assert a claim as to the true (i.e. measurable) nature of reality.
2. The Self. Who we are. The highest good is to serve the self and ensure its longevity.
3. Sex. What we do. Both the highest means of sacral pleasure and, through public expressions of “sexuality”, an affirmation of individual identity.
4. The Screen. Where we are going. The screen is both our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming posthuman reality of the Machine.

If the Machine has an ideology, I suggest that these four notions are a fair summary of it. Perhaps, though, it is less an ideology than a theology. Salvation, in the modern era, comes not through eucharist, pilgrimage or prayer, but through government action, technological progress or capitalist “wealth creation”. Ideology promises us a material world remade for the better; unfortunately, as the 20th century demonstrated, it often ends up drowning it in tyranny as often, if not more often, than religion ever did.

The Four Ss, then, offer a kind of catechism for the Machine age. We remain, I think, despite our ostensible belief in “science and reason”, fundamentally religious people in a religious time. We will always seek some greater meaning, some transcendent truth, and if we can’t or won’t find the real thing we will attempt to create it. When we forget the proper direction in which to aim our prayers, we will end up aiming them at the ultimate idol: our own image, reflected back at us in our little black screens. We will be kings and queens of a deceptively free world, parading through a liturgy of the self, wondering why the chaos seems to persist so close beneath the surface of this world.

***

This is an extract from Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, which will be published by Particular Books on 23 September.

---