📚Finished Reading: Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth.

A book both enjoyable and disappointing at the same time.

@isaacgreene Pretty much how I felt about his recent Plough article. “I should be liking this more…”

@calebgreene Probably would have been better off reading The Gift of Good Land or Life Is a Miracle again.

@isaacgreene @calebgreene That was pretty much my reaction: I resumed my project of reading through all of WB’s fiction. I’m not exactly a careful thinker so, for me, it comes down to feeling far more trust in WB than PK.

@jabel He’s a punchy writer, but as you say, it doesn’t give his words authority. When you read Berry he’s unassailable.

Halfway thru I thought it was kind of like reading a series of blog posts. Then I found out that’s what it basically is.

@jabel This seems like the wisest course of action in so many ways (fiction form, WB prescience).

@isaacgreene Thanks for sharing your feedback on this. I still plan on reading it (or listening to it as an audio book), but I’m always happy to supplement with the much richer work of Wendell Berry.

@ablerism It certainly does me good, at least.

@jabel @isaacgreene @calebgreene

Should I be a dogmatic partisan of PK because he’s Orthodox? Well, he’s still a relative novice, and I get a greater sense of wisdom from WB.

@isaacgreene I had the same reaction - it felt oddly disjointed, and I got tired of so may chapters starting with the formula “The other day I was doing X normal activity when I suddenly had Y deep revelation about why X is part of the machine.” Made more sense once I realized it’s largely smooshed together Substack posts.

@ReaderJohn I actually thought a stronger version of the book would be arguing that Christianity itself (in a form quite unfamiliar to modern audiences) could be the antidote for machine machine. The vague “spiritualism” of a lot of it I thought was a weakness.

@bethanyh And what is The Machine actually? Turns out, anything Paul Kingsnorth doesn’t like.

@mwerickson He’s very good at summarizing and combining ideas from different sources, some new to me I’m quite interested in now. That was its main strength. Maybe a good intro for someone brand new to this world of thought, except that his rhetorical stance is so aggressive it could be a turn off.

@JohnBrady I’ll put it on my list! Always up for a cranky read.

@isaacgreene Exactly. Jokingly saying “and THAT’s The Machine, too!” about anything slightly annoying has become a family bit in our household.

@isaacgreene 💯

@JohnBrady I wouldn’t call it blasphemy, though it is a bit confusing. I mean, this list alone would constitute a lifetime’s worth of things to do.

@JohnBrady I have Sherrard’s Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition on my to-read list for this year, but haven’t read anything else by him other than the Philokalia translations with the other on that team.

@isaacgreene I’ve had some people describe Against the Machine as prophetic. Not sure if that’s the correct word or not.

@JohnBrady Berry’s concept of “membership” I see as ultimately a very practical commitment to a specific place in a specific way.

@dwalbert Probably would have bailed, but it was a gift and I promised discussion with the gift-giver after completion! It was worth finishing, though I kept waiting for it to become more cohesive. It didn’t. In fact, the final section felt like an 11th hour edition at an editor’s request.

@ReaderJohn @isaacgreene @mwerickson @jabel Perhaps not fair at this point in his “project,” but it seem that PK is mainly writing against something. What’s so rich about WB, is that he is not only polemical, but writes with such an obvious love for something.

@mwerickson I think he would be flattered and perhaps aspires to that register. Just doesn’t have enough original things to say to make it work.

@ReaderJohn @isaacgreene @mwerickson @jabel of course, that’s what makes Tolkien so valuable too. It’s the love of the good that is essential to resist evil, which is why the Hobbits are so resilient (in contrast to someone like Saruman).

@JohnBrady I started to address the whole outsider question and got into the weeds. Let me instead recommend WB’s early novel A Place On Earth, if you haven’t read it, which is to me simply a wonderful story of people trying to love one another, mostly failing, and trying again. (Mostly men, which frankly I also appreciate.) Very concrete, but universal in the way that individual stories well told often are, and abstractions usually fail to be. He wasn’t an essayist yet, and wasn’t trying to make a point.

@JohnBrady His early essays read more like stories; his later novels read more like essays. I imagine it’s inevitable given how much essaying he’s done, but I think it’s also that early on he was still figuring out how to live in the world, and using his fiction and his poetry as part of that process. I find the outworking of the struggle (and the not-always-deeply-buried anger) more helpful than the distilled wisdom. But, anyhow. See what you think.