Opinion | For a spiritual response to AI, learn from the Amish - The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/09/25/spiritual-response-ai-learn-amish/
#PaulKingsnorth
#paulkingsnorth — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #paulkingsnorth, aggregated by home.social.
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Jesús Olmo reseña "Against the Machine" de Paul Kingsnorth: https://www.15-15-15.org/webzine/2026/03/26/paul-kingsnorth-contra-la-maquina-del-progreso/
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#VielenDankBücherschrank für »Against the Machine. On the Unmaking of Humanity« (2025) von #PaulKingsnorth
Die Eröffnungszitate:
»Die Vorstellung fällt mir leicht, dass die nächste große Spaltung der Welt zwischen denen verläuft, die als Geschöpfe leben wollen, und denen, die als Maschinen leben wollen.«
— #WendellBerry»Gut möglich, dass unsere Bestimmung auf diesem Planeten nicht darin besteht, einen Gott zu verehren, sondern einen zu erschaffen.«
— #ArthurCClarke -
“The world of the Machine, which thrives on change like a horse on hay, will ensure that everyone who lives long enough ends up in a world they barely recognize.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 148 -
"...We are, in short, going to have to grow up. This is long, hard work: intergenerational work. It is myth work. We don't really want to begin, and we don't really know how to. Does any child want to grow up? But there is nothing else for it; no other path is going to get us home.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 147 -
"...seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial and xenophobic) much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or “alternative institutions” in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.’”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 144 -
“The poet and storyteller Robert Bly, who died in 2021, had a name for the culture we now inhabit in the West and increasingly in much of the rest of the world too. He called it a ‘sibling society’. In his book of the same name, published a quarter of a century ago, Bly took a prescient scalpel to the failures of Western modernity and identified what he believed to be a foundational problem: we had forgotten how to produce adults.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 141 -
“The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest. In the new civilization it is building, culture will be made not by that magical, strange, impossible and miraculous combination of human bodies, wild nature and the soul, but by the Algorithm and the AI.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 133 -
“Liberalism did not naturally ‘evolve’ from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the ‘sovereign individual’ from new cloth. The individual ‘as a disembodied, self-interested economic actor’, claims Deneen, ‘didn't exist in any actual state of nature, but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 130 -
"...were shorter-lived, he suggests, and died in the West in the twentieth century. Liberalism—the elder brother—is finally dying now. One reason for its longer life is that it piggybacked on an older story, presenting itself as the inheritor of older traditions of ‘liberty’, when in fact, it was something quite different.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 129 -
"...The new values are predicated on the pursuit of liberation, a one-word descriptor of the essence of the Western programme since 1789. Our aim, stated or unstated, is to liberate ourselves from nature in all regards, so that we may conquer the stars, conquer death, and become as gods, knowing good and evil.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 128-129 -
"... the human impact on the natural world and the rapid falling-away of many things that have buoyed and sustained us for centuries, from languages to religions, means that the times we live in are perhaps less rooted than any time in history. We may be in the process of creating something unique in human history: a global anticulture, unmoored from reality and increasingly at war with it.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 128 -
“The Machine is virtually impossible to resist, not least because it is found both around us and within us. As Lewis Mumford explained, the ‘myth of the Machine’ comes from within the human heart: we carry its drive for planning, efficiency, profit, clarity, straight lines, organization, domination, within us daily. Human cultures can either trammel or release these desires upon the world. Our culture, such as it is, glorifies them and sets them loose and running.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, ATM, p. 127 -
“All of the enclosures, the destruction of alternative lifeways, the early modern revolutions, the fanning of want, the unsettling of peoples, the journeys of the Black Ships, the myth of progress: all that leads here to the triumph of technique, to the kingdom of the Machine.”
#PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 121 -
"...‘It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression,’ says [Jacques] Ellul, ‘but what if victory has been gained at the price of even greater subjection to the forces of the artificial necessity of the technical society which has come to dominate our lives?’”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 118-119 -
"...This does not require a global conspiracy, or a wizard behind the curtain. There is no wizard. There is no curtain. There is only technique, which ‘has become an autonomous; it has fashioned an omnivorous world which obeys its own laws and which has renounced all tradition. Technique no longer rests on tradition…its evolution is too rapid, too upsetting, to integrate the older traditions.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 117 -
"...Technique, on the other hand, when it is taken up as a way of seeing, gives birth to an entirely new type of technology: one which exists to remake the world in the image of technique itself. The kind by which, today, we are all increasingly enslaved.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 116 -
"...something which, in some indefinable way, seems to be struggling to be born through us. Something which we are midwifing into existence every time we click and swipe, whether we know it or not. The question is how we can begin to understand it.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 115 -
"...Open is good, closed is bad. Why? Because closed things can't be harvested, exploited or transformed in the image of the new world which the Machine is building. ‘Open’ things, on the other hand; well, they’re easy prey.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 108 -
"...‘Openness’ is both the aim and the core value of the age of globalism. It is, in the telling of those who promote it, always a good thing. Open minds, open hearts, open doors, open borders; open to trade, to growth, to change, to progress, to ‘diversity’ in all its manifestations.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 106-107 -
"...All of this creates not universal peace but universal upheaval. Like Perry's arrival in Japan, its effect is to dissolve our previous social bonds, cultural stories, social arrangements and religious commitments in a sea of open, boundless nothing.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 110 -
"...If Japan was a hidebound ancient nation, America was a newly incorporated business, and it had ambitious plans for expansion—plans which involved spreading its core values of individualism, commerce and competition to every corner of the globe.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 103 -
“To those who ask, ‘What can I actually do?’, he [E. F. Schumacher] said, the answer was ‘as simple as it is disconcerting: we can each of us work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.’”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 99 -
"...sees our world as a blank slate to be written on afresh when the old limits of nature and culture are washed away. This is our faith: that breaking boundaries leads to happiness, that boundaries are barriers rather than opportunities. We strain against all limits. It is who we are.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 99 -
“‘What is at stake,’ asserts [E. F.] Schumacher, ‘is not economics but culture; not the standard of living but the quality of life. Economics and the standard of living can just as well be looked after by a capitalist system, moderated by a bit of planning and redistributive taxation. But culture and, generally, the quality of life, can now only be debased by such a system.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 97 -
"...‘economic problem’? When we look around us, we can see that Keynes’ naive notion—that a society which cores itself around ‘avarice and usury’ can suddenly drop those vices when some undefined plateau of perfection is reached—is ludicrous. Once you adopt these values, they will make and remake you. The world they have built will depend upon their being pursued forever.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 96-97
* Join our #BookStudy @gadflyacademy on YouTube! -
“We are all bourgeois now, which is to say that we are all driven forward by want. We have all learned a bourgeois version of history too, in which medieval ‘feudalism’ is seen as dark and barbaric, while modern capitalism is equated with freedom and liberty. Even those who can see through this partial version of history and can see the damage done by our modern enthroning of money and commerce will often promote it anyway, even as just a temporary expedient.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth -
“This Metropolis breeds a globalized elite class who feel more at home in each others’ cities than they do in the hinterlands of their respective nations, and who promote and represent the ideology of Progress that keeps the metropolis humming. This global network of megacities represents the Machine's core.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 85 -
Join us for our Against the Machine book study! → https://gadflyacademy.substack.com/p/paul-kingsnorths-against-the-machine?r=44pus2
#PaulKingsnorth #TheMachine #Philosophy #Orthodoxy -
Gegenüberstellung alte Menschen-Welt und neue Maschinen-Welt von #PaulKingsnorth.
4 Ps für Alte Welt:
Place
People
Prayer
Past4 Ss für Neue Welt:
Science
Self
Screen
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Neugierig auf Altersgenossen #PaulKingsnorth, Mitgründer des #DarkMountainProjekt, Co-Autor des von mir verehrten #Uncivilization Manifest. Grad erschien sein Essay-Magnum Opus »Against the Machine«.
Ich würde sehr gerne mal seine ›Buccmaster Trio‹ lesen. Drei Romane ausm Ostenglischen Fens-Sumpfgebiet: 1066 nach Normannen-Invasion; Einzelgänger-Gegenwart a la Schmidts »Brand’s Haide«; Post-Apokalypse 1000 Jahre in der Zukunft.
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Notiz: #ProgressivePhantastik #Uncivilization #NarratÖkologie #LiterNatur
»Buccmaster«-Trio des UK-Umweltaktivismus-Urgesteins #PaulKingsnorth klingt genau nach meiner Art guten Shit. Post-Apokalypse vor 1000 Jahren (Band 1); allein in der Wildnis (Band 2); und in 1000 Jahren (Band 3).https://www.paulkingsnorth.net/buckmaster
Mehr zur Person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kingsnorth
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Quite enjoyed & identified a fair bit with this #PaulKingsnorth piece from 2011 (I think). The focus on health-and-safety environmentalism, sustainability for a world of soulless consumerism leaves me cold too
https://orionmagazine.org/article/confessions-of-a-recovering-environmentalist/
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Just finished #Beast by #PaulKingsnorth. If I was to describe it in three words, it'd be intense, intense, intense. Amazing.