A defence of quietism

On living with the Machine

First of all, welcome to all the new subscribers who have come here by way of Paul Kingsnorth, and thank you to Paul for your generous words.

Second, sorry for the gap between posts. There’s one that I’ve been struggling to get into a decent form, and my frustration with it led to me not posting at all. I’ll come back to it another time.

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A couplet by Townes Van Zandt rolled into my mind this morning: ‘Living on the road, my friend, was going to keep you free and clean. Now you wear your skin like iron, and your breath’s as hard as kerosene’. Written in 1972, the lines perhaps reflect the grimy end of hippie idealism; but, as he often did, I think Townes also tapped into something more universal.

One way to take the lines is as a reflection on one of the powerful forces in history, a force the hippies both reacted against and succumbed to. Paul Kingsnorth calls it ‘the Machine’, and describes it as an ancient monster, an ‘agglomeration of power, control and ambition’, that uproots people and destroys communities. The Machine’s works can be seen throughout the ages: in wars of conquest; in the slavery that built the pyramids; and in capitalism, communism, and nationalism alike. It is the summation of everything in the shared human character that is opposed to the individual, the particular, and the actual. It is the demon of coercive universalism.

Demons rely on temptation more than force, and so it is with the Machine. That’s part of the beauty of Townes’s couplet, the way it juxtaposes a promise and a reality. ‘Living on the road’ is a good metaphor for the imagined good life under modernity. Picture a self-actualising member of the global middle classes with a freely chosen career that reflects their skills and interests. They live wherever in the country or world best suits their needs. Their partner or partners are chosen only on the grounds of mutual excitement and only for as long as that excitement lasts. They buy only ethically sourced products that reflect their own deepest values. Their ideal is to be ‘free and clean’, with no obligations that they haven’t chosen and no guilt for what they’ve done. The reality, as anyone with half an eye on the global middle class knows, is that those lucky enough to get there wear their skin like iron and their breath is as hard as kerosene. The outward marks of their being reflect the Machine’s dominance over their soul.

I’m mocking the professional-managerial class here, but they are only a product of the Machine. They didn’t make it. If one ambitious conformist doesn’t elbow their way into that coveted media job, then another one surely will. No person, class, or ideology controls the Machine. People, classes, and ideologies serve it. The demon of coercive universalism has its agents in every government, every corporation, every church, and every heart.

The question that I am building to here is ‘what should be done about the Machine?’ and the answer that I am building to is ‘do nothing’. I cannot prove this is the right answer, and I don’t intend to try, but I can share my perspective.

If you think that you can fight the Machine with political action, as it is currently understood, then you do not really grasp what the Machine is. It is the corruption in the human heart that whispers that is hard to lead people to what is good; so it would be better to drive them there, whether they like it or not. It is old, subtle, and clever; and you will not outwit it.

You cannot use the state to fight the Machine because modern states belong to it entirely. Coercive universalism is the marrow in their bones. To attempt to counter the Machine on this front is to put your finger in its trap; and the harder you struggle, the more enmeshed you will be. The same point applies to political movements and political speech. They are little more than attempts to bend the state or other coercive actors one way or another. Such squabbling over exactly how the Machine should reign over us is doubly futile. Futile because it does not oppose the Machine, and futile because it will not listen anyway.

A second response to the Machine is healthier than political opposition. It is to focus on the local, the particular, the communal, and those things that bind people together. In the 1990’s this position was largely associated with the anti-globalist left; but nowadays, as part of a broader process Rhyd Wildermuth calls ‘ideological abandonment’, it has become associated with the right. I doubt that matters. Its best advocates have little interest in the left versus right Punch and Judy show anyway. This particularist tendency knows that the Machine is not the whole of human life. Rather than treating politics as primary, it treats the good life as primary; and focuses on our relationships to one another and to the land.

This is vitally important; but it is not enough. If the history of the last few centuries, and the history of farming in the last few decades, teach us anything, they teach us that the Machine will continue to colonise every corner of the world until nothing is left untouched. If rootedness was enough to stop the Machine in its tracks, then things would not have gotten this bad in the first place. So tie yourself to the land, grow your own food, and tie yourself to people, and nurture them. This is the right way to live, and I wish I was better at it, but make no mistake. It is a desperate rear-guard action. It will neither stop nor slow the Machine.

A third response is easier for the religious, who have the concept of Grace, but it need not be theirs alone. It is accepting that our actions will not stop the Machine; but to nevertheless have faith that its regime will end. This hopeful response springs from the knowledge that the Machine is parasitic on the good parts of life. The demon of coercive universalism cannot create. It can only destroy, corrupt, and subjugate. When it weakens its host too much, then it will also weaken itself.

The fall of the Machine feels closer now, and it will be a terrible thing; but trusting in Grace, or some secular version of it, is not despair. In an earlier post I talked about Jonathan Lear’s concept of radical hope. To have radical hope is to acknowledge that our ways of understanding what is good in life will not survive the catastrophe; but to trust that what is truly good, beyond our limited understandings, will survive. This third response is quiet against the background roar of the Machine; but it was there in the Dark Mountain project, and Rob Dreher has a streak of it. The true exemplars, though, are those who have lived through catastrophes. I think of my grandparents. I think, too, of Eadmer, who lived through the Norman Conquest and the fire that devastated his Cathedral. He dedicated his life to preserving the stories of the Anglo-Saxon saints. I picture him as an old man writing room-by-room descriptions of the Cathedral as it was before the fire, sixty years before. Such is the stuff of radical hope, passing the treasures of the past to a dark and unknown future.

Yet even this is not enough. How can we, wearing our skins like iron and with breath as hard as kerosene, hope to be the ones who sort through the clutter of our times, freeing the delicate strands of tradition from the dead grip of the Machine? Will we not simply pass on the demon that lives in our hearts?

And so I finally come to the point where I say ‘do nothing’.

Focus on the particular, have radical hope; but, also, do nothing. The Machine is the demon of coercive universalism. It is a being of raw will and mechanical action; and, to the extent that it has corrupted us, it has turned us into the same. Worse, it makes it impossible for us to imagine that there is anything else. Iris Murdoch, criticising the philosophical version of this view, says that for it ‘personality dwindles to a point of pure will’. Then she directs us to the concept of attention as understood by Simone Weil.

Attention is not will. In Weil’s words, ‘the soul empties itself of all of its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth’. This is not the same thing as ‘muscular effort’. It is ‘suspending our though, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object’. It is enormously difficult, almost impossible, and the mind has a million tricks to avoid it; but these tricks are mostly of the same kind: a buzz of activity, impatience, busyness, distraction. So do nothing. Sit in silence awhile and let the Machine in your heart begin to rust.

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Image: © Copyright Mick Garratt and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.