June 11, 2023 - 4:15pm
On Monday 22nd May, writer and regular UnHerd contributor Paul Kingsnorth visited the UnHerd Club. In a wide-ranging discussion with Freddie Sayers, Kingsnorth covered artificial intelligence, environmentalism, religion and the Covid-19 experience, all in an effort to understand how we can find meaning while living in what he calls “the machine”.
Previously used by the likes of D.H. Lawrence and George Orwell, “the machine” can be defined as “this giant technocratic monster of a culture that we’ve built”. Once upon a time, an effective way to combat this new bureaucracy was through the advocacy of environmentalism which, according to Kingsnorth, was focused on “standing up against the machine’s destruction of the natural world”. However, in recent years environmentalism has been “swallowed by the machine […] It’s been colonised by the Left, who now see it as their movement.”
Kingsnorth’s idea of protecting the natural world is quite different from the prescriptions of modern eco-activism. “Environmentalism has to be about connection and people’s relationship to place, to nature and each other” he told UnHerd. The “globalised machine culture” in which we live, on the other hand, “militates against all of those relationships. It unsettles everything and breaks everything up and throws us out all over the world following the money.”
Bringing humanity further away from nature has been the boom of technology in the last few decades, pioneered by “a bunch of people who have created a system which they know is addictive”. He referenced Ray Kurzweil, Google’s former head of engineering, who, when asked whether God existed, said, “Not yet” because, in Kingsnorth’s words, “he’s building God” through artificial intelligence.
At least as troubling was the technocratic establishment’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. “It’s not conspiratorial to say that vaccine passports and digital health IDs on a global scale were being discussed long before Covid happened,” Kingsnorth said. “The rational, global machine-like way to respond to this illness is shut everybody down, control everybody, monitor everybody, give them a digital ID and push them off the internet if they’ve got a problem with it, and it worked.” Public hysteria only enabled this approach.
Arguing that contemporary culture isn’t “going in the right direction”, the writer said that “you can see the mess the machine is getting us into […] and none of the people running the thing seem to have a clue what they’re doing.” Revolution isn’t the answer, though. “If you try to change the world without changing yourself, then you get Bolshevism,” Kingsnorth warned. “You get every other revolutionary movement that thinks it can create a utopia and actually creates hell. Because that’s the trap, I think. So you have to work on the spirit first.”
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SubscribeI think disconnection is an important theme underlying much of what is happening in the west.
We are disconnected from nature and the sheer brutality of the natural world. We have this Disney conception of a fragile and nurturing ecosystem, that can only be conceived by people who have never spent time confronting the realities of the natural world.
We are disconnected from production and the interconnected extraction, manufacturing and distribution steps involved in bringing us the trinkets we so dearly love. This stuff just doesn’t magically appear on our doorstep everyday.
We are disconnected from each other. We dehumanize people who think differently from us because too much of our interaction happens behind a keyboard. When we do interact in person, it’s almost always with people who are the same as us.
We are disconnected from knowledge gathering and actually using our brains to logically work through a problem. We now have unlimited information available at our fingertips, but 30 years ago we could do simple math when making change, or figuring out percentages, or reading a map.
I think this helps explain the hysterical reactions to every big and little problem that confronts us as individuals and society. It helps explain the authoritarian and incompetent response to covid, and the public’s willingness to accept every diktat and pronouncement from govt as gospel, even though it often defies common sense and contradicts what was said a week earlier.
It helps explain the hysterical response we are seeing today to the wildfires ripping through Canada and the blanket of smoke that has descended on places like New York. We have hundreds of climate activists sprawled out on the ground crying we can’t breathe. Then there’s Trudeau and Biden telling us this is the reality of climate change. We must change our ways and embrace solutions to save our fragile planet, even though it will impoverish us and destroy our way of life. Political leaders make these pronouncements, and we accept them, even though there is extensive data from forestry depts in Canada and the US that explicitly show wildfires have decreased in both countries by a significant degree. This information is readily available to any political leader, any activist, and anyone even slightly curious.
We only accept this nonsense because we are so disconnected from the natural world around us, and we no longer have the tools or inclination to separate fact from fiction.
What it doesn’t explain is why our political elite uses this disconnection against us. They knew herd immunity was a lie when they were selling vaccine compliance. They knew lockdowns would have devastating social and economic consequences. Just like Trudeau knows today that wildfires have decreased in Canada. The numbers come from his own forestry dept.
Great post – loved the bit about nature. I lived years in remote camps in some of the wildest places – often solitary. Nature is depressing you could say, even when you get past the cruelty that is the life of every creature. A Squirrel has half a dozen kits, 2 will survive to bear young, and then usually soon go too. Wild things die badly -want, injury, predation, disease, and alone and with no comfort. Anyone who lived years in the wilds without a social group feels this…
And it is not the cruelty – it is the utter indifference. Nature is as cold as an ice meteor in space, so cold it is utterly alien to us, who have had mothers, and then community – someone would help, someone cared – of it not – you knew they cared about some one else. Care, compassion, love – it exists for us…
Nature is Cold, it cares nothing, yet is huge, powerful, grand awesome… and cold…
Modern people think like the Romantic Poets of Nature, think of TV documentaries – it is not like that……. (and as this guy says – there are layers – there is stuff out there, stuff like us which exists out there – the dark things which he mentioned may come when called. The more remote, or the more you go to some places where what ever it is is around, and really spend time there – you will see things – feel stuff – existence is more than the silly Dawkins and his selfish gene – no nature gods – but stuff best left alone. And then God. Good and evil exist. Nature is apart from that, it just is….. that is why it is so cold…
Wow. Great post.
Nature is not separate from anything, and neither are you. It is all deeply interwoven, just not in a utopian, or lovey-dovey, or merely heavenly sense. Warmth coexists with coldness; gentleness alongside harshness; cruelty with kindness; good with evil–within every person, in some complex balance or lack thereof. And a very rare few are almost totally good or totally bad.
The notion that the world God created is hated by God or serves as some contrived proving ground for the Real Life that begins after death is mistaken, an escapist fantasy. It bears an essential, misfired connection to the escapism of the futurists and social engineers you rail against daily, while you brand them as deluded at best, but usually as just plain evil.
What is it about this world that you love or regard as worth saving? I hope that you are not purely motivated by resistance and opposition. What do you embrace–or even hope for–here in this life, the only one any of us know we we will ever be granted?
We shouldn’t be all touchy feely about Nature, but you possibly overstate the “cooperative” (not quite the right word, I realise) elements and understate some of the disjunctions there actually often are between the man made world and “Nature”. I don’t believe we can make some sweeping generalisation that they are either always part of the same greater whole, or alternatively in eternal conflict. Or those extremes aren’t always useful ways of looking at the issue – we are often speaking in analogies and metaphors in any case.
For example, there is the very common phenomenon of short /medium term benefits, and long term costs, the overuse of pesticides and antibiotics being good examples. Something is going significantly wrong, it seems, with bee populations, and that is rather important for if only at a self-interested level. Many faunal and floral populations have indeed crashed, as more intensive (and amazingly productive – for us) agricultural systems are established. And we don’t always understand exactly the mechanisms applying.
So, it’s often just got to be more scientific research, humility, and fine judgements.
We shouldn’t be all touchy feely about Nature, but you possibly overstate the “cooperative” (not quite the right word, I realise) elements and understate some of the disjunctions there actually often are between the man made world and “Nature”. I don’t believe we can make some sweeping generalisation that they are either always part of the same greater whole, or alternatively in eternal conflict. Or those extremes aren’t always useful ways of looking at the issue – we are often speaking in analogies and metaphors in any case.
For example, there is the very common phenomenon of short /medium term benefits, and long term costs, the overuse of pesticides and antibiotics being good examples. Something is going significantly wrong, it seems, with bee populations, and that is rather important for if only at a self-interested level. Many faunal and floral populations have indeed crashed, as more intensive (and amazingly productive – for us) agricultural systems are established. And we don’t always understand exactly the mechanisms applying.
So, it’s often just got to be more scientific research, humility, and fine judgements.
Wow. Great post.
Nature is not separate from anything, and neither are you. It is all deeply interwoven, just not in a utopian, or lovey-dovey, or merely heavenly sense. Warmth coexists with coldness; gentleness alongside harshness; cruelty with kindness; good with evil–within every person, in some complex balance or lack thereof. And a very rare few are almost totally good or totally bad.
The notion that the world God created is hated by God or serves as some contrived proving ground for the Real Life that begins after death is mistaken, an escapist fantasy. It bears an essential, misfired connection to the escapism of the futurists and social engineers you rail against daily, while you brand them as deluded at best, but usually as just plain evil.
What is it about this world that you love or regard as worth saving? I hope that you are not purely motivated by resistance and opposition. What do you embrace–or even hope for–here in this life, the only one any of us know we we will ever be granted?
Fantastic. It reminds of the events following the financial crash where a lot of professionals, especially in banking and commerce, resigned and retrained in jobs as disparate as plumbing, landscape gardening and construction. A great many revealed how much happier they were despite earning far less money.
Disconnection is a great heuristic. I’ve often thought of this phenomena as one of abstraction. Money is an abstraction of resources, for instance.
I wonder if the response to Covid would have been quite the seem if we weren’t so disconnected from the real world.
I agreed with much of the first part of your comment but it veered into conspiracy territory in the latter. Western nations essentially panicked, copied China, lockdowns seemed to make some sort of sense (viruses can’t pass through walls) – and found that at least initially most people accepted and even embraced the restrictions from a sense of common purpose. It was hugely easier for the wealthier half of the population – people rather similar to those in government and civil administration. That majority position persisted – despite being very illiberal, and by the third lockdown was in my opinion both wholly unjustified and hugely costly, but it wasn’t being imposed on the majority of the population. The tyranny of the majority, if you like.
I think it’s basically nuts to say Boris Johnson, say, deliberately imposed what he knew would be a disastrous policy on England. In any case every government policy – in fact every single thing we do – has both costs and benefits. We can’t take the kids to the seaside and put that endlessly delayed shelving up on the same day. There seems to be strong tendency of some anti-woke people to be drawn to these sorts of over-simplistic analyses… Quarantine was a well established policy in the Middle Ages and that also took away the liberty of people for the common good. I’d prefer to think that the world is complicated, with millions of interconnected strands and feedback mechanisms.
In any case, this is not the same subject, and it’s been rehashed here numerous times. Why do we find it so hard to stick to one subject instead of rehearsing yet again our pet theories?! (I’m sure I do it as well).
People may have been more connected with nature in the Middle Ages, but were certainly by no definition freer – there were manifold legal, social and religious restrictions on the the vast majority. (Except perhaps that there vastly fewer choices to make, and having to make an endless series of decisions is itself stressful).
Great post – loved the bit about nature. I lived years in remote camps in some of the wildest places – often solitary. Nature is depressing you could say, even when you get past the cruelty that is the life of every creature. A Squirrel has half a dozen kits, 2 will survive to bear young, and then usually soon go too. Wild things die badly -want, injury, predation, disease, and alone and with no comfort. Anyone who lived years in the wilds without a social group feels this…
And it is not the cruelty – it is the utter indifference. Nature is as cold as an ice meteor in space, so cold it is utterly alien to us, who have had mothers, and then community – someone would help, someone cared – of it not – you knew they cared about some one else. Care, compassion, love – it exists for us…
Nature is Cold, it cares nothing, yet is huge, powerful, grand awesome… and cold…
Modern people think like the Romantic Poets of Nature, think of TV documentaries – it is not like that……. (and as this guy says – there are layers – there is stuff out there, stuff like us which exists out there – the dark things which he mentioned may come when called. The more remote, or the more you go to some places where what ever it is is around, and really spend time there – you will see things – feel stuff – existence is more than the silly Dawkins and his selfish gene – no nature gods – but stuff best left alone. And then God. Good and evil exist. Nature is apart from that, it just is….. that is why it is so cold…
Fantastic. It reminds of the events following the financial crash where a lot of professionals, especially in banking and commerce, resigned and retrained in jobs as disparate as plumbing, landscape gardening and construction. A great many revealed how much happier they were despite earning far less money.
Disconnection is a great heuristic. I’ve often thought of this phenomena as one of abstraction. Money is an abstraction of resources, for instance.
I wonder if the response to Covid would have been quite the seem if we weren’t so disconnected from the real world.
I agreed with much of the first part of your comment but it veered into conspiracy territory in the latter. Western nations essentially panicked, copied China, lockdowns seemed to make some sort of sense (viruses can’t pass through walls) – and found that at least initially most people accepted and even embraced the restrictions from a sense of common purpose. It was hugely easier for the wealthier half of the population – people rather similar to those in government and civil administration. That majority position persisted – despite being very illiberal, and by the third lockdown was in my opinion both wholly unjustified and hugely costly, but it wasn’t being imposed on the majority of the population. The tyranny of the majority, if you like.
I think it’s basically nuts to say Boris Johnson, say, deliberately imposed what he knew would be a disastrous policy on England. In any case every government policy – in fact every single thing we do – has both costs and benefits. We can’t take the kids to the seaside and put that endlessly delayed shelving up on the same day. There seems to be strong tendency of some anti-woke people to be drawn to these sorts of over-simplistic analyses… Quarantine was a well established policy in the Middle Ages and that also took away the liberty of people for the common good. I’d prefer to think that the world is complicated, with millions of interconnected strands and feedback mechanisms.
In any case, this is not the same subject, and it’s been rehashed here numerous times. Why do we find it so hard to stick to one subject instead of rehearsing yet again our pet theories?! (I’m sure I do it as well).
People may have been more connected with nature in the Middle Ages, but were certainly by no definition freer – there were manifold legal, social and religious restrictions on the the vast majority. (Except perhaps that there vastly fewer choices to make, and having to make an endless series of decisions is itself stressful).
I think disconnection is an important theme underlying much of what is happening in the west.
We are disconnected from nature and the sheer brutality of the natural world. We have this Disney conception of a fragile and nurturing ecosystem, that can only be conceived by people who have never spent time confronting the realities of the natural world.
We are disconnected from production and the interconnected extraction, manufacturing and distribution steps involved in bringing us the trinkets we so dearly love. This stuff just doesn’t magically appear on our doorstep everyday.
We are disconnected from each other. We dehumanize people who think differently from us because too much of our interaction happens behind a keyboard. When we do interact in person, it’s almost always with people who are the same as us.
We are disconnected from knowledge gathering and actually using our brains to logically work through a problem. We now have unlimited information available at our fingertips, but 30 years ago we could do simple math when making change, or figuring out percentages, or reading a map.
I think this helps explain the hysterical reactions to every big and little problem that confronts us as individuals and society. It helps explain the authoritarian and incompetent response to covid, and the public’s willingness to accept every diktat and pronouncement from govt as gospel, even though it often defies common sense and contradicts what was said a week earlier.
It helps explain the hysterical response we are seeing today to the wildfires ripping through Canada and the blanket of smoke that has descended on places like New York. We have hundreds of climate activists sprawled out on the ground crying we can’t breathe. Then there’s Trudeau and Biden telling us this is the reality of climate change. We must change our ways and embrace solutions to save our fragile planet, even though it will impoverish us and destroy our way of life. Political leaders make these pronouncements, and we accept them, even though there is extensive data from forestry depts in Canada and the US that explicitly show wildfires have decreased in both countries by a significant degree. This information is readily available to any political leader, any activist, and anyone even slightly curious.
We only accept this nonsense because we are so disconnected from the natural world around us, and we no longer have the tools or inclination to separate fact from fiction.
What it doesn’t explain is why our political elite uses this disconnection against us. They knew herd immunity was a lie when they were selling vaccine compliance. They knew lockdowns would have devastating social and economic consequences. Just like Trudeau knows today that wildfires have decreased in Canada. The numbers come from his own forestry dept.
Environmentalism is essentially misanthropic, pitting humanity against nature, as if they are two separate things.
But humanity and all its works are part of the environment. Maybe people like Paul are starting to get that.
See my response to AJ Mac above (if you want to!)
See my response to AJ Mac above (if you want to!)
Environmentalism is essentially misanthropic, pitting humanity against nature, as if they are two separate things.
But humanity and all its works are part of the environment. Maybe people like Paul are starting to get that.
Bit of a snooze fest…. Yes, but……. Maybe for some, maybe not for you… bland.. what is the opposite to Yeats
”The worst are filled with a passionate intensity”
Because the oppisite of that would be this guy. Non-judgemental, vague, yea, well…..
I hung with an Archbishop a bit, a seemingly bland, older, guy – say Welby-esk, but under was rock hard, wisdom, fire, strength, compassion, what Welby has not – and he told us,
‘Nothing Happens By Accident’.
And I hung with a lot of Muslims, and they also have that Fatalism, Inshallah and all that…
So at minute 26 exactly; the book behind Freddy spontaneously flops over. Go back and watch it – wild. Not like books do, which is to just sit there, but just falls over, thud… by its self.
OK, so if I had been there I would have said my question –
”What was that Book?
haha, Jungian synchronicity, gotta be paying attention, stuff happens….I hope Unherd watches minute 26, goes and sees what the book is, and tells us, haha, maybe we will get something from this after all, may be important.
P.S. vax free, never masker, never had a smart phone – or cell phone, never will. You do not own the phone, it owns you. Anti War – especially this ultra evil one we fund as a proxy… I get where the talker is from a bit, but he is too white bread – he needs to get a bit ‘Wild Eyed’ (when Linus was asked what kind of fanatic he would be, he replied, ‘‘A wild Eyed Fanatic’‘, best kind…) I wish this guy would throttle the message delivery up a couple notches. The message needs shouting out – the sheep need waking up….haha
“haha, Jungian synchronicity, gotta be paying attention, stuff happens….I hope Unherd watches minute 26, goes and sees what the book is, and tells us, haha, maybe we will get something from this after all, may be important.”
Sorry to disappoint, but a careful review of that segment on my desktop shows the book was the Collected Poems of Maya Angelou.
I imagine you have a computer, no? What is the fundamental difference?.Or are you going into the public library to make these comments? You are nonetheless using modern communication technology. It is actually possible to turn off mobile phones, get rid of the notifications etc. Who knew?! I use mine extensively to plan public transport journeys on the move – it would be considered magic in past ages, as Carl Sagan once wrote.
Yes, you can spend too much time on, say, social media (though the irony of various people posting similar reactionary sentiments on Twitter!). So, just, don’t! Let’s certainly provide better guidance for kids – that’s what adults are supposed to be doing. Go out for a walk, for a swim, maybe to the gym, perhaps even hunting might sometimes be possible. Learn a language – smartphones can be so useful there! Learn to play a musical instrument.
I was really heartened to hear the other day at my local railway station, in a very unfashionable part of London, a young black kid bashing out a great ragtime piano tune of his own composition, with loads of variation. The installation of pianos at railway stations is, by the way, a simply brilliant way of bringing people together. I reckon the idea is genius, albeit it may have come from one of those awful public sector apparatchiks!
Even in Joe Biden’s neo-Commumist United States these escapes are mostly possible! We can get badly burned by fire, and many people still do. I wouldn’t nonetheless like to live in a world where we couldn’t cook anything. Hell, water is vital for life, but it’s still possible to drown in it!
Every age has its problems, and as David Deutsch, the scientific philosopher has stated, as we solve one set of problems, another will emerge. Is it a tragedy we don’t live in a Utopia, or would a real Utopia actually take away much of the purpose and direction of living?
The vast majority of people would in any case not want to go back to live in the Middle Ages, or Victorian times. Wisdom is on their side, I think, not that of a motley crew of various loony tunes verging on, if not actual, conspiracy theorists.
But you are clearly, far, far down the anti-modernity (or at least bits of it) and anti-western rabbit hole, Yes, the Russia Ukraine war is indeed evil, but there is pretty much only one person responsible for that, and his name is Vladimir Putin and not Joe Biden.
“haha, Jungian synchronicity, gotta be paying attention, stuff happens….I hope Unherd watches minute 26, goes and sees what the book is, and tells us, haha, maybe we will get something from this after all, may be important.”
Sorry to disappoint, but a careful review of that segment on my desktop shows the book was the Collected Poems of Maya Angelou.
I imagine you have a computer, no? What is the fundamental difference?.Or are you going into the public library to make these comments? You are nonetheless using modern communication technology. It is actually possible to turn off mobile phones, get rid of the notifications etc. Who knew?! I use mine extensively to plan public transport journeys on the move – it would be considered magic in past ages, as Carl Sagan once wrote.
Yes, you can spend too much time on, say, social media (though the irony of various people posting similar reactionary sentiments on Twitter!). So, just, don’t! Let’s certainly provide better guidance for kids – that’s what adults are supposed to be doing. Go out for a walk, for a swim, maybe to the gym, perhaps even hunting might sometimes be possible. Learn a language – smartphones can be so useful there! Learn to play a musical instrument.
I was really heartened to hear the other day at my local railway station, in a very unfashionable part of London, a young black kid bashing out a great ragtime piano tune of his own composition, with loads of variation. The installation of pianos at railway stations is, by the way, a simply brilliant way of bringing people together. I reckon the idea is genius, albeit it may have come from one of those awful public sector apparatchiks!
Even in Joe Biden’s neo-Commumist United States these escapes are mostly possible! We can get badly burned by fire, and many people still do. I wouldn’t nonetheless like to live in a world where we couldn’t cook anything. Hell, water is vital for life, but it’s still possible to drown in it!
Every age has its problems, and as David Deutsch, the scientific philosopher has stated, as we solve one set of problems, another will emerge. Is it a tragedy we don’t live in a Utopia, or would a real Utopia actually take away much of the purpose and direction of living?
The vast majority of people would in any case not want to go back to live in the Middle Ages, or Victorian times. Wisdom is on their side, I think, not that of a motley crew of various loony tunes verging on, if not actual, conspiracy theorists.
But you are clearly, far, far down the anti-modernity (or at least bits of it) and anti-western rabbit hole, Yes, the Russia Ukraine war is indeed evil, but there is pretty much only one person responsible for that, and his name is Vladimir Putin and not Joe Biden.
Bit of a snooze fest…. Yes, but……. Maybe for some, maybe not for you… bland.. what is the opposite to Yeats
”The worst are filled with a passionate intensity”
Because the oppisite of that would be this guy. Non-judgemental, vague, yea, well…..
I hung with an Archbishop a bit, a seemingly bland, older, guy – say Welby-esk, but under was rock hard, wisdom, fire, strength, compassion, what Welby has not – and he told us,
‘Nothing Happens By Accident’.
And I hung with a lot of Muslims, and they also have that Fatalism, Inshallah and all that…
So at minute 26 exactly; the book behind Freddy spontaneously flops over. Go back and watch it – wild. Not like books do, which is to just sit there, but just falls over, thud… by its self.
OK, so if I had been there I would have said my question –
”What was that Book?
haha, Jungian synchronicity, gotta be paying attention, stuff happens….I hope Unherd watches minute 26, goes and sees what the book is, and tells us, haha, maybe we will get something from this after all, may be important.
P.S. vax free, never masker, never had a smart phone – or cell phone, never will. You do not own the phone, it owns you. Anti War – especially this ultra evil one we fund as a proxy… I get where the talker is from a bit, but he is too white bread – he needs to get a bit ‘Wild Eyed’ (when Linus was asked what kind of fanatic he would be, he replied, ‘‘A wild Eyed Fanatic’‘, best kind…) I wish this guy would throttle the message delivery up a couple notches. The message needs shouting out – the sheep need waking up….haha
A short cut for the modern world. Block access to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Anyone who complains they don’t know what to do, wasn’t really doing anything anyway.
Sorry, but that is an utterly ridiculous comment. PowerPoint is overused perhaps to the point of cliché, but a series of punchy points IS often actually a good way to get any message across, perhaps even with environmental objectives in mind!
Excel and similar spreadsheets are simply brilliant, ingenious and on the whole intuitive ways of displaying and analysing information, without which most modern business couldn’t function.
Banning Word would be in a different league altogether. It would be rather like burning all the papyrus, parchment – and later paper, of earlier ages, so that no books could be published. Knowledge and understanding would not just stagnate but hugely regress in a surprisingly short period. (I’m assuming here that you are not just making the narrow point that you use a better word processor!)
Talk about hating human ingenuity and development! The modern world is on almost every metric vastly better for people’s welfare than at any time in our past. (Ok, it might be better if we were a bit more adept at mental arithmetic, for example, but that could be fixed quite easily).
The state of Nature may be a somewhat different story, but it is so glib and easy to take the benefits of modern life for granted from the comfort of our computer chairs tapping out comments on UnHerd (we really ought to prohibit that; it’s so unnatural!).
I see no reason whatsoever why we can’t benefit from the amazing (less polluting, fewer materials, vastly more powerful etc) modern technology we have at our disposal while still making a much bigger effort to make much better connections with the natural world. Not many climbers are going to try and ascend K2 wearing tweed jackets and hobnailed boots!.
This is certainly an area we can do much better in, especially in our increasingly large urban populations. But again, cities give people a much better life and more opportunities, on the whole, than toiling on the family subsistence farm. People are not being forced into cities; in fact countries like India and Brazil sometimes make the error of destroying informal favela type housing, rather than having a proper plan for the cities to grow in a desirable way with the right public amenities and services.
Sorry, but that is an utterly ridiculous comment. PowerPoint is overused perhaps to the point of cliché, but a series of punchy points IS often actually a good way to get any message across, perhaps even with environmental objectives in mind!
Excel and similar spreadsheets are simply brilliant, ingenious and on the whole intuitive ways of displaying and analysing information, without which most modern business couldn’t function.
Banning Word would be in a different league altogether. It would be rather like burning all the papyrus, parchment – and later paper, of earlier ages, so that no books could be published. Knowledge and understanding would not just stagnate but hugely regress in a surprisingly short period. (I’m assuming here that you are not just making the narrow point that you use a better word processor!)
Talk about hating human ingenuity and development! The modern world is on almost every metric vastly better for people’s welfare than at any time in our past. (Ok, it might be better if we were a bit more adept at mental arithmetic, for example, but that could be fixed quite easily).
The state of Nature may be a somewhat different story, but it is so glib and easy to take the benefits of modern life for granted from the comfort of our computer chairs tapping out comments on UnHerd (we really ought to prohibit that; it’s so unnatural!).
I see no reason whatsoever why we can’t benefit from the amazing (less polluting, fewer materials, vastly more powerful etc) modern technology we have at our disposal while still making a much bigger effort to make much better connections with the natural world. Not many climbers are going to try and ascend K2 wearing tweed jackets and hobnailed boots!.
This is certainly an area we can do much better in, especially in our increasingly large urban populations. But again, cities give people a much better life and more opportunities, on the whole, than toiling on the family subsistence farm. People are not being forced into cities; in fact countries like India and Brazil sometimes make the error of destroying informal favela type housing, rather than having a proper plan for the cities to grow in a desirable way with the right public amenities and services.
A short cut for the modern world. Block access to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Anyone who complains they don’t know what to do, wasn’t really doing anything anyway.
Never mind the machine, I find myself resisting the cult of Kingsnorth (and his Traditionalist kindred spirit Mary Harrington).
Is that really ‘quite different’ from the usual back-to-nature, small-is-beautiful shtick we hear from any Romantic ‘man v nature’ writer? It’s just another signpost pointing to those sure-to-fail alternative communes which insist that mankind (in his foolishness and greed) has no future if he doesn’t get himself in ‘harmony with nature’ – whatever that means.
Hah! amusing resistance. I can empathise with the inclination, messengers with crosses rouse my suspicions that they have need of a crutch. Kinsworth and Harrington do espouse some scenarios which are attractive but the population – the dependency upon it increasing – and the small matter that there are very few areas of the world which are agrarian and temperate (let alone affordable/available) make this a fantasy solution. There was a very nice book written in the past few years – touted by many – about a man who moved back to the deep woods of Virginia and found all kinds of solace. What about the billions living in cities? Are these people advocating that we flood the 5% of the Earth’s wooded land with these billions of people? These things are a recipe for but a few.
I get the impression that the Traditionalists regard the ‘billions living in cities’ as a blight on that sacred entity The Planet. I’m sure they wish we would die off soon. For believers in the great cycles of time it is always Kali Yuga and the Age of Gold is always just over the horizon.
Didn’t someone calculate that Thoreau probably put in 45 man days of to process a load of wool (what are the stages called? – am being a bit lazy here…).and then weave his own “sustainable” self sufficient jacket?
I get the impression that the Traditionalists regard the ‘billions living in cities’ as a blight on that sacred entity The Planet. I’m sure they wish we would die off soon. For believers in the great cycles of time it is always Kali Yuga and the Age of Gold is always just over the horizon.
Didn’t someone calculate that Thoreau probably put in 45 man days of to process a load of wool (what are the stages called? – am being a bit lazy here…).and then weave his own “sustainable” self sufficient jacket?
Hah! amusing resistance. I can empathise with the inclination, messengers with crosses rouse my suspicions that they have need of a crutch. Kinsworth and Harrington do espouse some scenarios which are attractive but the population – the dependency upon it increasing – and the small matter that there are very few areas of the world which are agrarian and temperate (let alone affordable/available) make this a fantasy solution. There was a very nice book written in the past few years – touted by many – about a man who moved back to the deep woods of Virginia and found all kinds of solace. What about the billions living in cities? Are these people advocating that we flood the 5% of the Earth’s wooded land with these billions of people? These things are a recipe for but a few.
Never mind the machine, I find myself resisting the cult of Kingsnorth (and his Traditionalist kindred spirit Mary Harrington).
Is that really ‘quite different’ from the usual back-to-nature, small-is-beautiful shtick we hear from any Romantic ‘man v nature’ writer? It’s just another signpost pointing to those sure-to-fail alternative communes which insist that mankind (in his foolishness and greed) has no future if he doesn’t get himself in ‘harmony with nature’ – whatever that means.