I should be working on my novel (which is coming along nicely. I can tell it’s going well because I can no longer sleep. My mind keeps whirring away, crafting new sentences in the wee hours, splendid lines that will be immediately forgotten, but leave—I like to think—a loamy residue for the next day).
But yesterday, I saw a YouTube video from the writer Paul Kingsnorth and went into fangirl mode. My young nieces are dedicated Swifties, and that’s how I feel about Paul Kingsnorth. Is he attending a televised football game? I’ll watch it. Is Etsy selling a hoodie with a stylized image of his face? Where do I sign? Are tickets to his live show going for $6,000? Money is no object!
I feel emotionally bonded to Paul Kingsnorth because, in the early 2020s, he was one of about five people on Earth who were making any sense. And because he was just a nerdy British writer, sitting in a peat bog in Ireland and talking abstract symbolism, no one bothered to cancel him. Unlike the other four people who made sense, he wasn’t spouting “dangerous disinformation.” He was just some sweater-wearing nebbish rattling on about nonsense to other nerds.
So, circa 2020-2021, Paul Kingsnorth was given free reign to write whatever he wanted. He was an obscure novelist, totally harmless.
And in his harmless way, beneath the notice of important people, he began writing about something called The Machine. You can read about it here.
And in my view, he was simply correct. There were no two ways about it. He was describing something happening in real time, before our eyes.
Then last year, he took a break and started writing about holy wells. Now, I like holy wells as much as the next person, but I’m a busy mom with only so many hours in the day. I lost track of Paul Kingsnorth for a while, hero though he was.
But yesterday, the old Paul was back, fulminating about The Machine. Hooray! Once again, everything he says strikes me as plain truth, so I quote from the video at length:
There’s something really special and strange and frightening about this time. We are living in the Age of the Machine, and [it] is very specifically an Age of Atheism. There are not many societies in history that . . . have denied the existence of God at all. They may have had a million different ways of . . . understanding what the divinity is, and what the light beyond this world is, but they never deny it exists. And we do. Our culture says there’s nothing: nothing except what we can measure with our instruments.
And that is going to drive us mad. . . . Look at the collapse of our societies going on right in front of our face . . . the sense of meaninglessness, especially among younger generations. . . . [It’s] a culture that opens a spiritual void up within itself, and all sorts of monsters will flood into that. Extreme political ideologies, pseudo-religions, all sorts of things are going to happen. You’ll also have a drive toward real religion again, whatever that might be.
But you’re going to have a period in which things really fall apart, and I think that’s where we are. I’ve written about this at great length . . . The major pseudo-religion that’s being built to fill that void is the religion of The Machine, and that takes us towards transhumanism . . . the complete reframing of what we are as human beings. . . .
And I think it’s something that just has to happen, and we’re going to go through it. That’s the Age of the Machine. Fundamentally, it’s not really about technology, it’s about who we think we are. . . . What is a human being? What is nature? What is our place in the universe, and what are we going to do about it? Those are the [religious] questions that The Machine is designed to answer.
[As a writer,] I want to try to dig into what’s going on from a Christian perspective, but also from a human perspective, too. What does this new Faith of the Machine mean? . . .
It’s an interesting time to be alive, and I think it’s important to try and work out what’s going on . . . without being paranoid or fearful. To keep walking toward the light, but also trying to analyze what’s closing in around us. . . . It’s moving so fast, it’s very difficult to write about.
Ladies and gentlemen: a writer. I wish that The Machine would clone him, to be honest. We could use five of him in California alone, scribbling away. I tell my kids that I need to achieve sainthood so I can bilocate, because there’s too much work for one of me. But we need Paul Kingsnorth in triplicate, at least.
Barring that miracle, the rest of us are going to have to get to work.
It’s moving so fast, it’s very difficult to write about. So true. It’s a meme that 2019 feels like ten years ago, and I cannot even imagine 2030. We can’t just sit back and wait for the dust to settle before we attempt to render some kind of artistic comment on the present age. Because it’s not going to settle. We all know this. It’s something that just has to happen, and we’re going to go through it.
And here is where the elephant comes in. No one of us can write definitively about the 2020s. It’s too confusing, too overwhelming. We don’t know know what’s true anymore or whom to trust.
We are all hunkered down, blind to the bigger picture. Maybe you’re over by the right foot. Maybe I’m here, grasping the tail. Maybe someone out there is clinging to an ear. No one knows what the hell this thing is or where it’s going. Will it hurt us? We cannot even see each other, and we feel spooked and alone. Is this thing moving? Whoa! What is it?!
Maybe it’s too big and too scary, and it’s not safe to say anything.
Or maybe, we each write about our little piece.