If the First Industrial Revolution used water and steam to fundamentally change the nature of work, the current industrial revolution—the disruption of automation, information, the internet, and now AI—is transforming everything about the way we work, connect, and interact with the natural world.
These changes have largely been regarded as a net good. After all, poverty across the world has fallen precipitously in the last 100 years. Life expectancy has nearly doubled. Literacy is four times higher. Hunger, malnutrition, war—all down. All good things.
But today’s guest, writer Paul Kingsnorth, thinks that the way in which this progress has been achieved is detrimental not only to the environment but to our own mental and physical well-being—and that underneath the extreme wealth built by human society is a massive sense of human and spiritual loss.
Paul is someone who has gone through a profound transformation over the past decade, and in a very public way. He was once considered one of the West’s most radical and prominent environmentalists—even chaining himself to a bridge in protest of road construction and leading The Ecologist, a left-wing environmental magazine. But he became disillusioned with an environmental movement that he says became obsessed with cutting carbon emissions by any means, and getting captured by commercial interests in the process.
Paul and his family eventually left urban England to live off the land in rural Ireland, where they currently grow their own food and the children are homeschooled.
One more thing of note this Easter week: Paul converted from a practicing Buddhist and Wiccan to an Orthodox Christian—which is about as traditional as it gets.
As you’ll hear in this conversation, Paul explains why he intentionally “regressed.” In short: in our modern, hyper-connected, tech-obsessed world—what he calls “the age of the machine”—Paul and his family are trying to live wildly. We talk about what that looks like for him, and for any of us trying to be free; we talk about how the left has strayed from its original principles; why the West has abandoned God; and how to fight every day to live. . . simply.
And for more of Paul’s work, check out some of our favorite essays: “The Cross and the Machine,” “The View from the Cave,” and “The Vaccine Moment, Part One” and “The Vaccine Moment, Part Two.”
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Great interview. Listening to Paul talk about all the things he hates about capitalism it sounds like he’s actually against statism or as libertarians like me would call it : crony capitalism . So he supports free markets in the originalist sense but not top-down - politically connected capitalism.
Its interesting to hear an activist admit that most of the 'save the world' activists are performative and foolish. The chants change, from "No nukes!" to "Bush lied, people died" to "Globalize the Intifada" and yet its the same people. When was it anyone's job to 'save the world'? I took particular note that Mr. Kingsnorth rejected Christianity the first time around exactly because it was familiar. I've long noticed that many young people are 'xenophiliac' meaning they are attracted to anything not a part of their home culture, regardless how repellent the alternatives are, or how successful their home culture is. I was never taught to hate my American cultural inheritance until I went to college, and had to undo the damage on my own. Finally, I wonder if Mr. Kingsnorth, having journeyed through so many stations in life, will simply role back around to his previous positions. Or, has he arrived at the 'right' or truthful position? If there is real truth, he should stop changing so drastically, and be fine tuning from here on out. Or, will it be back to the barricades in a few more years?