Paul Kingsnorth on Fighting the Machine

Please note that the venue is in the vicinity of the Scott Monument and will be announced closer to the event date. We will NOT be meeting at the monument, itself.

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We hope that you’ll join us for a discussion of a recent interview with Paul Kingsnorth about his new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.

Here are a few interview highlights:

“[There’s] a sense that we are living inside something that is quite inhuman and becoming more and more inhuman. It's a system that you can feel encroaching upon you and it becomes tighter and tighter and tighter. I think most people can feel that we're losing something or a set of things that are quite important to what it means to be human… It's like boiling a frog or something.”

“The modern way of seeing divorces us from things which most pre-modern ways of seeing have taken for granted. I try and categorize this in the book… I call it the four Ps, which are people, place, prayer, and the past. And I say, well, if you look at most cultures throughout most times, they're based on a combination of those four things, right? So there's a people, there's a community that you're part of. There's the place, there's your relationship to nature, which is the place you're in… There's prayer, which is your relationship to God. And there's the past, which is your sense that you're in a tradition, that you're coming from somewhere and therefore you're going somewhere.”

“We've lost all of our actual real culture… Modernity has stripped so much of that…away from us… Maybe we can concentrate on creating human-scale cultures again, which is, I think, the best way to create some form of friction or resistance to this machine way of seeing.”

“I think if you're going to talk about politics, you have to have one that's rooted in eternal things: people, place, prayer, [and] the past, however you want to formulate it. But it also has to be against the machine.”

Find the interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ofxl4bWoH8

Please join us!

Best wishes,

Sonja and Christopher

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Please note that this will be a joint event with the New Culture Forum Edinburgh (https://www.meetup.com/new-culture-forum-edinburgh-meetup/) Meetup group, with an invitation extended to members of the NCF Locals platform as well.