Restoring the Moral Economy
A Review of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine
Peter Allen Nov 20
Back in October I was fortunate to be able to travel to North-central Kentucky to attend a lecture by Paul Kingsnorth about his new book, Against the Machine. The lecture was sponsored by the Wendell Berry Center – a nonprofit run by members of Berry’s family to further the mission of supporting small farmers and restoring a healthy rural community. The lecture was held in the Port Royal Baptist Church – the home church of Wendell Berry. The small church was packed. To open the event, we sang all six verses of the hymn “For the Beauty of the Earth” accompanied on the piano by Wendell’s wife Tanya, the church’s piano player.
If you’ve ever read any of Kingsnorth’s books or essays on Substack, you know he is a very talented writer. His written works are a joy to read and experience, even if the content is often depressing. I have seen Paul speak several times before, and his lectures are much the same. He is so gifted with words, you almost feel bad so thoroughly enjoying a lecture that so thoroughly destroys any optimism you might have placed in the current system or culture. And his new book is no different.
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Against the Machine tells the story of the rise of the “factory system” in Great Britain and how it brutally destroyed the existing “moral economy” of home-based businesses that flourished in England up until the 17th century. The “Luddites,” following their folk hero Ned Ludd, were not, as is popularly assumed, anti-technology. They used advanced machines such as looms in their cottage industries. Instead, the Luddites were fighting against the factory system that was destroying their businesses, livelihood, and entire economy. He argued in his lecture, as he does in his new book, that “The Machine” that we are facing now, did not organically emerge from developing human economies, but was forcefully introduced, first in England, to dispossess its people of land, destroy their families, traditions, and culture, and make them ultimately subservient to a powerful technocratic elite. This factory system turned Machine started in Northern Europe and has since taken over the world, first colonizing, then destroying the indigenous moral economies, cultures, and religions of every region on Earth. Opposition to the Machine has been ubiquitous as existing cultures and moral economies fight back to try to maintain their traditional ways of life. Unfortunately, the Machine has overtaken them all. Kingsnorth describes these local opposition movements as “revolutionary radicals,” a term borrowed from sociologist Craig Calhoun. If anyone is a revolutionary radical in our modern time, it’s Wendell Berry.
Wendell Berry
Berry’s home of Port Royal, Kentucky is located in the foothills East of the Appalachians on the banks of the Kentucky River, just before it empties into the Ohio River to the North. Just a few miles on the North side of the Ohio was the territory of the Shawnee Nation which stretched from Southern Illinois through Indiana and Ohio. As I was sitting in the Baptist Church listening to Kingsnorth’s telling of the destruction England’s indigenous moral economy, I couldn’t help but think of the story of the Shawnees and the role that this specific part of Kentucky played in the story of their defeat to the European colonists.
One of the great stories of Native resistance took place right in this part of Kentucky. Tecumseh was a Shawnee warrior and skilled organizer and orator. He urged the Shawnees and surrounding tribes to embrace their traditional Indigenous culture, which had been disrupted by European technologies, alcohol, and export economy. He also sought to unite the various tribes, who normally didn’t get along so well, in opposition to the wave of Colonists that he predicted would soon sweep west of the mountains and into their homelands.
Tecumseh
The Indians didn’t live in Western and Central Kentucky, the region around Port Royal. The Shawnees lived to the north and west, Cherokees to the East, and Choctaws to the South, but they all agreed not to live in Kentucky west of the mountains. They could occasionally hunt there, but not dwell. The land was referred to as the “dark and bloody ground.” According to the Shawnee, their ancestors in the distant past had massacred an entire race of giants that had once lived there. Ever since, the ghosts of those giants had haunted that part of Kentucky, and the Indians knew better than to live there. The Shawnees were warriors and the land-hungry Americans for the most part couldn’t penetrate west of the Appalachian mountains. Until Daniel Boone realized that Western Kentucky was open for business. The Americans were able to set up forts and settlements here, precisely because the Indians didn’t live there. It was perhaps this non-occupied ground in Kentucky that gave Colonists the necessary leverage to ultimately defeat, through treachery, theft, and sabotage, the surrounding tribes.
Just as the Luddites were unsuccessful in defeating the ascendant factory system, Tecumseh’s force of revolutionary radicals were ultimately unable to fully unite the tribes in opposition. He ended up, ironically for this telling, forming an alliance with the British, the nation who created the factory system, colonized their own people, and were imposing their system around the world, against the Americans in the War of 1812 and was killed in Canadian battlefield. America had its own Indigenous economy, that very well may have survived west of the Mountains. What I realized, sitting there in the Port Royal Baptist church, is that it was not inevitable that America stretch from sea to shining sea. The thirteen colonies may have remained hemmed in by the Appalachians had it not been for this exact part of Kentucky and the ancient war with the giants. Perhaps it is appropriate that Wendell Berry, the most eloquent and prominent voice urging a return to a moral economy, was rooted in this very place.
Against the Machine tells the story of the rise of the factory system and various opposition forces to it, and how it eventually took over the Earth and her peoples. It thoroughly explores the resulting culture wars, political divisions, and the coption of the various environmental and cultural resistance movements that have emerged. It also recognizes that the Machine is not only an external force, but also is a part of us. We feed the Machine with our greed, lust, and desire for money and power. Religion was once able to contain these destructive human forces. Since the reformation, the enlightenment, and the subsequent decline of organized religion, however, those forces have been unleashed and have uprooted our cultures, laid waste to our landscapes, and have decimated any moral human-scale economies.
Now the Machine is manifesting in digital technology and AI. It is changing how we think, feel, and act. It is creating systems of control and seeking to transform human beings into machines via transhumansm. This movement is becoming a global religion that is replacing the religions of old. Instead of religion creating a connection between humans and the divine, this new religion insists that humans can become divine through its merging with technology.
What can we do about it?
Kingsnorth urges us to find our own limits. Draw our own lines in the sand. Unplug from technology however you can. Find a piece of land and love it. Find and nurture what is human in our lives. Try to live at human scales. Stop telling the Old Story and start writing the New Story. Plant the seeds for a future human civilization.
Many writers and thinkers have been warning about the encroaching Machine for at least a century, but most of them present a fairly vague picture of what the machine actually is. Kingsnorth has succeeded in pinning down and ripping the mask off the Machine. Now we know. Now we can do something about it.
Sure, there are holes one could poke in the historical analysis of the text. Kingsnorth is a journalist, not a historian. We could argue over the merits of the analysis and interpretations presented in the text by historians such as Oswald Spengler and Lewis Mumford. The overall narrative, however, is robust and compelling. I especially appreciate Kingsnorth’s nuanced analysis of culture war issues, skillfully critical of both sides and seeking some reasonably firm ground to stand on. For example, he describes his nationalistic tendencies – his love for his country and its history, culture, and traditions – but also how much he despises the current British State and it’s anti-cultural policies and practices. Is he a White Nationalist? A racist? A right wing extremest? A left wing nut? I think the answer to all these questions is a resounding no. Kingsnorth is a human being honestly fleshing out his attempts to rediscover his own humanity in the age of the machine.
To me, the most valuable take-away from Against the Machine is this notion of a human-scale and human-centered “moral economy.” It is these economies where human culture, tradition, and livelihoods can flourish, and it is up to us to establish a toe-hold in the current global economy. I know many Amish folks in the surrounding settlements and they have perhaps the most robust example of a functioning moral economy in the twenty first century. But is it possible to recreate our own version of a moral economy and community without strict personal and behavioral restrictions?
In the last twenty years, there has been a movement back to more human-scale livelihoods. Artisans and craftsman have been able to produce high-quality products and sell them on the internet on sites like Etsy and Ebay. People have become hungry for locally grown food and small farms like ours have sprouted up to supply the demand. The internet has allowed communications and networking of like-minded humans that has transcended geographic constraints. Ironically, it is exactly this technology that has largely facilitated revivals of local production and consumption.
What lines should we draw in the sand with technology? What is the role of technology in the development of human-scale moral economies, and what rules and limitations should they follow? These are the big questions we need to be wrestling with and working out our own answers to.
Against the Machine opens a door outside of the dark maze of the Machine and the incoming light is blinding and we can’t yet discern exactly what it looks like outside and which way we should go. But our eyes will soon get used to the light and we will find our way. But first we have to open the door.
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Peter Allen, in this compelling book review, helps make the case for returning to community-based marketplaces, safe and separate from the Machine: https://nobull.mikecallicrate.com/2025/10/06/do-maker-owned-markets-offer-the-transformational-change-needed-to-feed-ourselves/