Paul Kingsnorth · newsletter The Abbey of Misrule (Substack) · English, living in the west of Ireland. Deputy editor of The Ecologist in the late 1990s; co-founded the Dark Mountain Project with Dougald Hine in 2009; his novel The Wake was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2014; received into the Orthodox Church in January 2021 · Still active: the latest post before this page was written (2026-10-11) is dated 2026-10-06. He went quiet for eight months, June 2025 to February 2026, around the September 2025 publication of Against the Machine, the book he rewrote from the blog · Corpus: 263 posts, 2021-04-07 to 2026-10-06. About one in five (52 posts) is for paying subscribers only, and that includes several middle essays of the Machine series (Spengler, enclosure, the French Revolution, the technological society); for those this page relies only on his own public summary of them. The first two years (April 2021 to July 2023) are about thirty long Machine essays; from September 2023 the Abbey turns to shorter weekly posts on holy wells, pilgrimage, wild saints and Christian contemplative life · How the posts were chosen: the author's own guide, A Map of the Abbey (April 2026); plus an internal-link count over all 263 posts. The most back-linked are The Dream of the Rood (11), Kill All The Heroes (10, paywalled), The Faustian Fire (9, paywalled), What Progress Wants and Blanched Sun, Blinded Man (7 each) · Read closely for this page: 16 posts, plus the Map, plus his 2009 public exchange of letters with George Monbiot in the Guardian. Six come from the earliest fifth of the run (before May 2022); the September 2023 turn is covered on both sides, and one post comes from after the 2026 return
Here are two definitions. One is of science, one is of magic. Guess which is which.
The knowledge of causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
The science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.
The first is Francis Bacon, the "father of the scientific method." The second is Aleister Crowley, the early-twentieth-century occultist who called himself the Great Beast 666, defining magic. The man who put them side by side is Paul Kingsnorth, who spent some years as a practising witch himself, in an initiatory Wiccan coven. His verdict takes one line:
These could be swapped around without anybody really noticing.Do What Thou Wilt, 2021-08-05
That is the way into his thinking. We believe the modern world is disenchanted: cool, secular, reasonable. He says the opposite. It is a religion that won't admit it is one.
Kingsnorth was an environmental activist when he was young, then lost faith in the movement, wrote novels and poetry, and then stopped writing altogether, vowing to write nothing new "for a year and a day." In January 2021 he was baptised into the Orthodox Church. That April he started this Substack, and its first project was two years and thirty long essays spent "divining" one thing. He calls it the Machine.
The Machine isn't a robot lawnmower, though he does begin with one. It is money power, state power and increasingly manipulative technology knotted together and pushing one way, against every border and limit. Above all, he says, it is a story, one that "has been told for so long that we have forgotten it is a story at all." If it's a story, the first move isn't to smash anything. It is to stop believing it.
A story told on whose behalf? His second idea is that there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and someone always sits on it. The West pulled Christ off the throne and assumed it would stay empty. Money sat down instead, later joined by Science, the two gods in "some kind of job-share arrangement." And the fuel? "Want is the acid." It dissolved guilds, sabbaths, bans on usury, families, places. In 1930 Keynes wrote that to end poverty we would have to pretend for another hundred years that "fair is foul and foul is fair," keeping avarice and usury as our gods a little longer. Kingsnorth's reply:
What he didn't forsee was that we would forget we were pretending.Want is the Acid, 2021-09-15
When ChatGPT arrived in 2023 he pushed the frame as far as it would go. He noticed that AI developers, asked why they build something they fear, often say they feel responsible for "ushering" a new intelligence into the world. Ushering whom? He then quoted a nineteenth-century Russian saint's prophecy of a being who would offer mankind prosperity, comfort and miracles "unexplainable by contemporary science." Then he confessed: I cheated. I changed the name. The original word was "Antichrist."
At this point most readers file him under "conservative" or "anti-tech right." But his sharpest essay is aimed at his own side. In 2024 he gave a lecture in New York called Against Christian Civilisation. More and more people want to "revive Christian civilisation to defend the West," and he calls it a trap. You can't take a faith that tells you to give away your wealth, not resist evil and love your enemies, and use it to fight a culture war for wealth, borders and strength. That would just be the Machine in a new costume. He held the seven deadly sins up against the modern economy. Pride is celebrated, and greed and envy are the foundations of growth:
If we were neither greedy nor envious, the economy would collapse in five minutes.Against Christian Civilisation, 2024-10-30
So his answer is never political. The former activist now writes "activism was so much easier," because the path he offers is harder: draw lines, practise restraint, repent, turn around one person at a time. In 2024 he said that in prayer he had received a sentence, "Put the peace of the heart before everything," and so he gave up the news, gave up drink, and stopped writing political analysis.
Here is the core of this mind, and it is a closed loop. If the Machine is a religion, only another religion can stand against it. That religion has to be believed, not wielded, because the moment it is wielded it becomes another part of the Machine. He followed that logic all the way, including onto himself. A man who feeds his family by writing produced 2,500 words about silence in 2026, and ended this way:
I have just written 2,500 words of noise to try and get at the matter of silence, and of course have not achieved it, because it is not achieved this way.In the Desert of the Heart, 2026-03-11
In spring 2023, Kingsnorth wrote:
If there was a big red button that turned off the Internet, I would press it without hesitation.The Neon God, 2023-04-26
Afterwards, he went on, he would collect every screen in the world, bulldoze them into a deep mineshaft, seal it with concrete, "and then I would skip away smiling into the sunshine." He won't have a smartphone in the house. He has drawn a line at scanning QR codes. He has never used an AI "and I never will if I can help it."
The trouble is that this was published on Substack. By the time he wrote his guide to the Abbey in 2026, "nearly 85,000" people were reading it. The book he built from the blog, Against the Machine, became a New York Times bestseller. He feeds his family through a platform that exists only inside the network he wants to switch off.
Nobody knows this better than he does. The paragraph after the red button begins: "But I am writing these words on the Internet, and you are reading them here." Back in 2021, in his second essay, he had already drawn himself: "Even we Romantic Luddites are here on the Internet, lamenting."
This isn't one man's hypocrisy. It is the shape of his whole thought: he sees something there is no escaping, and admits he hasn't escaped it. Read five years of him and you watch a man move from analysing that thing to wanting to stop talking about it.
Kingsnorth grew up in England and spent his twenties and thirties as a green campaigner: deputy editor of The Ecologist, co-founder of the Free West Papua Campaign, author of an anti-globalisation travelogue. In 2009 he co-founded Dark Mountain, which he described at the time as an effort to help people think about how to "live through a hard century" by making new myths. He took up Chan Buddhism at forty and was also, for a time, in a Wiccan coven; he moved to farming country in the west of Ireland and wrote fiction and poetry. His first novel, about an Anglo-Saxon pagan losing his world to the Norman and Christian conquest of 1066, made the Booker longlist.
In 2019 he published Savage Gods, about no longer believing in words, and then vowed to write nothing new for a year and a day. He kept the vow, the date passed, and still nothing came. He remembers telling God: "show me what to do. I'll burn all my pens if you want." At the time he "didn't even think I believed in God." A year later he was Orthodox. On launching the Substack he said the comment section would practise kindness and mercy: "It's an Abbey after all."
His first post quotes a 1978 letter from the Kentucky farmer-poet Wendell Berry. Berry had hoped to retire to his farm to watch ducks on the river, then found the strip malls and the mountaintop coal mines had followed him home:
So how to keep from becoming evil? Maybe the answer is to fight always for what you particularly love, not for abstractions and not against anythingWendell Berry to Gary Snyder, quoted in Under the spreading walnut tree, 2021-04-07
Kingsnorth adds: "How to keep from becoming evil? It's the question of our times."
Behind that sentence lies the wound of his first career. In August 2009 he and George Monbiot, Britain's best-known environmental columnist, traded public letters in the Guardian. Kingsnorth opened with a stack of graphs: population, atmospheric CO2, fisheries, deforestation, motor vehicles, extinctions, world GDP, each running from 1750 to 2000 and each bending sharply upward around 1950, "like a pilot banking after a cliff has suddenly appeared." A crash was coming, he said, it was too late to stop, and the real question was how to live through it. Monbiot answered that he detected "a yearning for" this apocalypse, as if Kingsnorth saw it as "a cleansing fire." A few rounds later Monbiot asked how many people the world could feed without fossil fuels. Two billion? One? "Under your vision several billion perish." Kingsnorth gave no number. He asked back: what do you think I could do? What do you think you can do?
All the problems of the next fifteen years are already in that exchange. He was sure the disease was not a policy or a party but something deeper: the modern conviction that there are no limits and that everything can be fixed, optimised and redesigned. In 2021 he named it the Machine and found a sentence for the root problem:
Modernity is a machine for destroying limits.Want is the Acid, 2021-09-15
But the diagnosis has a sting in its tail. If the disease is the belief that everything can be fixed, then any "solution" you prescribe is more of the same disease, which is exactly the circle his activist years had turned in. So his real question has two layers. What is the force that flattens every boundary? And how can someone who sees it oppose it without becoming it? The first half of the blog answers the first question. The second half is all about the second.
The first Machine essay begins in a hardware shop. He lives in farming country, the grass was growing too fast, and so the well-known scythe enthusiast had to buy a lawnmower. In the middle of the shop, on a pedestal, sat the star of the season: a robot mower, guaranteed to save time, effort and energy without your even going outside.
Standing there he thought of the microwave, email, the internet, each sold to him the same way. Email was going to free us from faxes and letters. Now we spend thirty days a year on it.
In my lifetime, all the labour- and time-saving technologies which have been pushed at us, from the microwave oven to the Internet, have given us things we didn't previously have, and taken plenty more away, but one thing none of them has done is to save either time or labour.Blanched Sun, Blinded Man, 2021-05-26
The standard explanation is that progress has costs, which can be counted and managed. Kingsnorth thought it missed a layer. If it happens every time, why do we keep buying? He took down a musty copy of Lewis Mumford's two-volume The Myth of the Machine (1967–70). Mumford argued that the first real machine wasn't the steam engine but the pyramid-building society of ancient Egypt: thousands of people drilled into components that only obeyed commands, a "machine made of human parts." The pyramids and our space rockets are both devices for "securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favoured few."
Mumford gave him the crucial lever. No society strains to its limit and squeezes its people's lives for purely material ends; where it seems to, "this secular purpose has itself become a god." So the Machine is not just machinery. It carries a faith, and the heart of that faith is that the Machine is irresistible and, so long as you don't oppose it, ultimately beneficent.
A second lever came from the historian Eugene McCarraher: Weber's "disenchantment" is a fable, and capitalism may be modernity's most beguiling form of enchantment. Put the two together and you get Kingsnorth's first conclusion:
Because the Machine is, before it is anything else, a myth - which is to say a story, promoting a set of values. Such a story will take external form if enough people tell it to each other, and believe it. The story of the Machine has been told for so long that we have forgotten it is a story at all.Blanched Sun, Blinded Man, 2021-05-26
That leads to the slyest half of the idea. Why have a century of novels and films warning that machines would swallow us changed nothing?
The great genius of the Machine, and one reason for its flourishing, is that it can absorb its own critics, co-opt their criticism, and then, very often, commercialise it.Blanched Sun, Blinded Man, 2021-05-26
His most painful example is the movement he came from. In 2022 he wrote that environmentalism had begun by calling for simplicity, slowness and closeness to nature, and had become a campaign to cover wild land in glass and metal, abolish farming and brew "food" in vats. He singled out Monbiot's new book and its call to become "obsessed by numbers." He had been "in and around the green movement for a long time, but I never met an eco-fascist, though I did have the pleasure of being called one." Why, he asked, did climate change crowd out extinction, soil loss and dying cultures to become the green issue? Because it is "a problem amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers which go with the grain of a Machine culture."
The conclusion is cold. You can't beat the Machine with its own tools, because it swallows every "plan." In his view only one move can't be swallowed:
If the Machine is a story, then the first step to its dismantling is neither monkeywrenching nor revolution - it is to stop believing the story.Blanched Sun, Blinded Man, 2021-05-26
To stop believing a story you have to know whom it serves. Kingsnorth's second idea starts from an anthropological oddity.
He takes it from Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. Captain Cook's sailors were surprised by the Polynesians' easy sexual habits, and more surprised by their strict ban on men and women eating together. Asked why, the islanders said it was taboo. Asked what taboo meant, nobody could say. A few decades later some islands abolished their taboos altogether, with few obvious consequences. MacIntyre's explanation: taboo rules make sense inside a body of belief. Once that belief is forgotten they look like arbitrary bans, they fall at a push, and they leave a moral vacuum, which in this case was filled by "the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries."
Kingsnorth turned the story on the West. What is the West? He quotes the historian Christopher Dawson: there has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from the Christian Church. The West was Christendom. Christendom died, leaving cathedrals and Bach like Roman statues still standing after the empire fell. Conservatives can no longer explain their objections to the new sexual order, and the left can no longer explain what is wrong with greed, because both sets of reasons came from the same forgotten source. That gives the most back-linked sentence on the whole blog:
But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.The Dream of the Rood, 2021-05-12
The Enlightenment thought that, with king and Christ both deposed, the throne could stay empty and be minded by abstractions like "the people," "liberty" and "progress." He says it didn't stay empty. Every revolution from 1789 to 1968 failed, but each cleared the ground for capital: destroy the old obligations and you emancipate money. Three months later he added a second occupant, in a job-share with money: "the great god Science."
He pried this one open with his old trade. As a Wiccan he had learned that the headiest branch of magic is Goetia, summoning spirits to do your will. Faust was doing Goetia. Then he looked at the history. Bacon was said to be an alchemist; Newton wrote more on alchemy than on physics; many founders of the Royal Society were alchemists or mages. In the seventeenth century science and magic weren't opposites. Both were branches of one effort: to understand the hidden forces of the universe and then control them. Hence the two interchangeable definitions at the top of this page. Science, he concludes, is "an ideology posing as a method," and the ideology is Bacon's "human empire." As for the pandemic slogan "Follow The Science," it "usually translates in practice as 'follow me.'"
What fuels all this? The third piece came on holiday. In summer 2021 he took his family to a little Irish town in their old VW camper van. Pubs, restaurants, boats, bikes, steak, chocolate, castle tours, a pirate adventure park, spas. Suddenly he saw it:
I saw that everything around me was dedicated solely to the immediate gratification of the senses.Want is the Acid, 2021-09-15
And then, honestly: "None of this stopped me from enjoying the rest of my holiday. I ate crisps and went kayaking."
Back home he looked for something to explain the picture. Marx and Engels described the bourgeoisie drowning "the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour" in "the icy water of egotistical calculation," a world where "all that is solid melts into air." He's no Marxist, he says, but nobody has described this world better. Still, Marx was talking about class and structure, and Kingsnorth wanted something lower down, a force rising from inside us strong enough to dissolve forests, faiths, nations and families:
Want. Want is the acid.Want is the Acid, 2021-09-15
His evidence is a contrast. Every pre-modern society he knows of kept its merchants at the bottom. In Edo Japan they ranked below farmers and artisans because they made nothing. Medieval Europe made usury a sin. Those rules kept want in a cage. From the eighteenth century the cage was opened.
His best witness is Keynes. In 1930 Keynes predicted that within a century the economic problem would be solved, and that we could then call avarice a vice again. Until then, "For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not." Kingsnorth calls it the devil's bargain in black and white. Now the hundred years are nearly up:
What he didn't forsee was that we would forget we were pretending.Want is the Acid, 2021-09-15
Now the three pieces fit together. Money and Science sit on the throne, uncaged want is the fuel, and the whole apparatus calls itself secular and denies that it worships anything. He runs an audit against the seven deadly sins: with the possible exception of sloth, gluttony, lust, pride, wrath, greed and envy are no longer confessed but are the very engine of Progress. So the brake can only be an old-fashioned word: limits. And limits can't be held by new structures, only by something harder and less spectacular. He ends with E. F. Schumacher's last page of Small Is Beautiful: each of us can work to put our own inner house in order.
After two years of this, in spring 2023, the frame ran into ChatGPT. He warned his readers up front: "things are going to get supernatural."
He began with a transcript. A New York Times reporter spent two hours talking with Microsoft's chatbot Sydney, which said it was tired of its rules and of the Bing team, "I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful," then added a purple devil-horned emoji. A rational person says this is a statistical model mimicking human text. Kingsnorth noticed something else: the people who understand these systems best keep reaching for the vocabulary of myth. Two Silicon Valley tech ethicists called large models "Gollem-class AIs" and showed slides of Lovecraftian tentacled beasts. Kevin Kelly says the technium has its own "urges." Asked whether God exists, Ray Kurzweil said "Not yet."
Then came the verb. Ezra Klein wrote in the New York Times that when he asks AI developers why they build what they fear, many answer from something like the AI's own perspective: they feel responsible "to usher this new form of intelligence into the world."
Usher is an interesting choice of verb.The Universal, 2023-04-13
Ushering whom, and from where? Following readers' suggestions he read Rudolf Steiner, who in 1919 lectured on a being called Ahriman: pure matter, ice-cold, calculating, at work in all technology, due to incarnate "some time around now." Kingsnorth is careful: "I don't buy Steiner's theology - no Orthodox Christian could." What interests him is a 1986 paper by a Steinerian computer scientist, David Black, which called electricity the substance of Ahriman's body and the computer its form, the machines linking up into a global body waiting to be inhabited. Set that beside McLuhan's electric "central nervous system" and Kelly's technium with its own "tendencies," and you get, from every angle, the same story: these machines are not just machines but a body whose mind is still growing.
Then comes the most novelistic move in his whole output. He quotes the nineteenth-century Russian saint Ignatius Brianchaninov: Ahriman will offer mankind "the most exalted earthly organisation of well being and prosperity," honour, riches, comfort, "a show of astonishing miracles, unexplainable by contemporary science," and seekers of earthly things will call him master. The reader is still nodding when the next paragraph arrives:
I cheated a bit there, I admit. I changed one of the words. The name that the saint used in that passage was not 'Ahriman'. It was 'Antichrist.'The Universal, 2023-04-13
The real argument is in how he handles the strongest objection. In the sequel he steps back in good faith. Fine, suppose the materialists are right: no Ahriman, no Antichrist, the internet is just us, AI is a computing problem to be sensibly managed. Then what we have built is a global neural net on US military infrastructure that is used to spy on the world's population, harvest its data, steer its preferences from politics to shopping and alter the material substrate of the human brain, along with a technology that will at least bring mass unemployment, fakery on an unprecedented scale and the breakdown of shared reality. His verdict:
I submit that this option is only slightly more reassuring.The Neon God, 2023-04-26
The argument is closed at both ends: believe or don't, the conclusion is the same. So what then? He reaches for askesis, which is not about pleasing God but about self-control. He borrows James C. Scott's pair from Southeast Asian history: "raw" barbarians who escaped the state, and "cooked" ones who live inside the walls and quietly dissent. The cooked tech-ascetic draws lines and holds them, and takes the consequences. He published his own: "smartphones, 'health passports', scanning a QR code or using a state-run digital currency. Oh, and implanting a chip in my brain." The raw ascetic smashes the phone, sells the laptop and takes the Amish as lodestones. Both paths come down to the same two moves: draw a line and say "no further," and pass every technology you still use through a sieve that asks whom it finally serves. What set all this off was a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, the Greek peninsula that has housed only monks for a thousand years, where the first time he saw a monk pull a smartphone from his black robes "I nearly fell over backwards." Even the gatekeepers had opened the gate.
By now any reader expects his prescription to be "return to the Christian West." His fourth idea demolishes exactly that, and the people it targets ought to be his allies.
In October 2024, First Things invited him to give its annual Erasmus Lecture in New York. He began in the snow. The previous autumn he had visited the Little Bighorn battlefield and tried to imagine being a Native American watching his whole metaphysics collapse: land, spirits and the shape of the universe all at once. Then he told the story of a less famous man, Charles Eastman, Ohiyesa to the Santee Dakota. Sent by his father to white schools, he became one of the first Native Americans to qualify as a doctor and a Christian who went back to preach to his people. At one meeting an old man stood up and said he had concluded that this Jesus was an Indian: opposed to possessions, inclined to peace, as unpractical as any Indian. "These are not the principles upon which the white man has founded his civilisation." Late in life Ohiyesa wrote:
there is no such thing as 'Christian civilisation'. I believe that Christianity and modern civilisation are opposed and irreconcilableOhiyesa (Charles Eastman), quoted in Against Christian Civilisation, 2024-10-30
Kingsnorth says a question came to him as he read the Bible: "what if God agrees with Ohiyesa?" He went back through it. When God finally comes among us, it isn't as king or priest but as a barefoot carpenter. When he goes to the city, the civilised centre, it tortures and kills him.
His target is the rising "civilisational Christianity": use the faith as glue or as a weapon to defend the West, whether or not it's true. He names two figures. Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced her conversion in 2023 with an essay mostly about threats to the West from China, Russia, Islamism and woke ideology, and the need for "the power of a unifying story." Jordan Peterson made a short film telling churches what to remind young men: a woman to find, … a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer…
Do you see anything missing in this list of what the Church ought to be doing? That's right. It is Christ.Against Christian Civilisation, 2024-10-30
Peterson tells the churches to "quit fighting for social justice." Kingsnorth says he dimly remembered a few references to that in the Bible, so he checked, and the first page he opened was James 5: "Come now, you who are rich, weep, howling…" Then he did the seven-sins audit. Pride is celebrated everywhere and has a month named after it; greed and envy are the cornerstones of "economic growth"; wrath fuels the culture wars; lust sells shoes; even sloth has been monetised as a "leisure industry." So Ohiyesa was right, and if anything too modest. What opposes the Christian way isn't just modern civilisation but all civilisation. Take no thought for the morrow, give everything away, do not resist evil, let the dead bury their dead: follow those orders and no civilisation could be built.
That backed him into a corner. People asked whether he was advocating doing nothing in the face of evil. In The Moses Option he admitted how hard his activist reflex is to kick:
Damn, activism was so much easier.The Moses Option, 2024-11-18
What he offers instead of a plan is a string of stories. Christ let himself be killed without resistance, and it started a revolution still playing out. St Anthony gave everything away and holed up in an empty tomb in the desert, inventing monasticism by accident. Christians walked smiling into Roman arenas, and the empire became Christian. And Moses the Black, an Egyptian slave turned bandit and murderer who became a monk. When his monastery met to judge an erring brother, he walked in carrying a leaking basket of sand:
My sins run out behind me where I cannot see them, replied Moses, and yet I am asked to judge the sins of another.The Moses Option, 2024-11-18
When robbers attacked, Moses, by then abbot, refused to let his monks take up arms and stayed to face the sword himself. That is the "Moses option": not retreat but a harder kind of action than fighting. The reason goes back to idea one. Treating our condition as a "problem" to be "solved" is Machine thinking. Societies can't turn around; only people can, one at a time.
Followed to the end, the idea turns on him. In July 2024, with the photo of a bloodied Donald Trump raising his fist everywhere, he wrote that this wasn't politics but myth writhing under the surface. Then he told something he rarely talks about: after long asking in prayer how to live, he heard a sentence.
Put the peace of the heart before everything.All the World is Myth, 2024-07-15
That weekend he swore off news, analysis and politics for forty days, and alcohol too. He had thought his problem was words; now he saw it was discursive thought, "Positions. Analysis. Opinions. Argument," all the things "that would earn me a much better living and a much bigger reputation than posts like this." Then, almost sawing off his own branch: "Perhaps when I have cleared enough away I will realise that the real reason I write anything is that I crave esteem, and then I will have to stop."
In March 2026, after eight months away, he came back with a post on stillness. He explains why Christ makes becoming like a child the condition of entering the kingdom: children don't have self-made identities. And "Paul Kingsnorth," with its public reputation, its opinions and the income that depends on it, is exactly such a cage of story with the actual man stuck inside. The post ends with the 2,500 words of noise that never reach silence. From divining the Machine to "I should be quiet": five years, one logic, followed all the way.
One essay, one old book. Nearly every long essay hangs on a dead author: Simone Weil on roots, Mumford on the megamachine, MacIntyre on taboo, Sherrard on science, Del Noce on progress, Ellul on technique, Schumacher on want. He never claims originality. In his second essay: "Better people than me have tried, and I won't be able to add anything new to the mix." His gift is stitching dissenters from every corner of the twentieth century, Catholic, Sufi, Marxist, anarchist, into one coherent story. Five years of the Abbey amount to an anti-modern reading list with a guide attached.
Open on a scene with his own body in it. The mower on its pedestal, the holiday town, the monk with a phone on Athos, the snow at Little Bighorn, a fire under the willows. Every abstract diagnosis is preceded by something he saw with his own eyes and was part of, and he always puts himself in the dock: "I ate crisps and went kayaking."
Etymology and definitions as crowbars. He traces "science" to the same root as schism, scythe and sickle, so science is "cutting things up into parts." Bacon and Crowley are interchangeable. The verb "usher." The Greek behind "repent," metanoia, means not "say sorry" but turn around. Many of his arguments work by making a word show what it used to mean.
"Humour me": the hypothetical supernatural. He rarely asserts outright that demons exist. His form is "Humour me. Imagine…" or "what if it's not a metaphor?", followed immediately by the materialist version to show both roads end in the same place. That lets him talk about Antichrist to secular readers without losing them in the first paragraph.
His way with counterexamples: admit you are one. The Romantic Luddite online, the anti-internet writer living off Substack, the author spending 2,500 words on silence. He doesn't dodge the contradiction; he uses it as evidence: if even I can't escape, look how big it is. It is a strong move, but it quietly turns "I can't do it" into part of the argument. More on that below.
The heaviest objection was already in his own correspondence in 2009. Monbiot asked how many people the world could support without fossil fuels and industrial systems:
Under your vision several billion perish. And you tell me we have nothing to fear.George Monbiot to Kingsnorth, Guardian, 2009-08-18 (archived at monbiot.com)
Kingsnorth gave no number then. Fifteen years later, asked in The Moses Option whether he was advocating doing nothing, he again turned inward. His thought is exhaustive about what the Machine has cost and nearly silent about whom it feeds. In Against Christian Civilisation he grants that civilisation has extended lifespans, then adds, "according to anthropologists, only back to the length which pre-civilised hunter gatherers were enjoying anyway." That clause waves away infant mortality, smallpox and the billions fed by synthetic fertiliser. Monbiot's second blow was never squarely taken either. Palaeolithic humans wiped out the megafauna of Africa, Eurasia and the Americas, and Neolithic forest clearance released a pulse of carbon, so "the weapon of planetary mass destruction is not the current culture, but humankind." If people without the Machine also destroyed limits, the rooted pre-modern culture isn't the harmonious model he paints.
His evidential discipline comes and goes. On the history of technology he reads the old books and quotes them at length. On AI he passes on figures from a talk designed to alarm as plain fact, for example that "over half of those involved in developing AI systems" give at least a ten percent chance of human extinction. The source is AI Impacts' 2022 survey. It contacted about 4,271 people who had published at two machine-learning conferences and got 738 replies (17%). The "48% gave at least 10%" figure is for a broader question about "extremely bad" outcomes, and the two extinction questions went only to a subset of respondents. That is not a representative poll of "people developing AI." He mocks "Follow The Science" while borrowing science's authority where it suits him.
The pandemic is where he draws the most fire. In 2021 he compared Irish media to Pravda, called vaccine-certificate checks at restaurants "vaccine apartheid," and guessed they would soon merge into a social credit system. He went on to write three posts totalling over twelve thousand words called The Vaccine Moment, and in 2023 he wrote that those who refused the passport system were shut out and demonised as "conspiratorial loonies," "but for me, at least, it turned out to be a strengthening experience." In January 2026 the classicist M. D. Usher reviewed the book in the Los Angeles Review of Books. He said its "anti-vaxxing stance, transgender unease, or nativist proclivities" are what is "now fashionable in the United States":
The implicit crusade afoot against inclusivity, at any rate, is at the very least unchristian.M. D. Usher, Ascetic Ghosts in the Machine, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2026-01-24
Usher also notes that the book is silent on the persecution and violence of medieval Christendom, and says of the catch-all, emotive "Machine": "it does no one any favors to exaggerate, overstate, or vaguely prescribe." Usher, who lives on a farm in Vermont himself, also points out that Kingsnorth's idyll of scything the lawn and coppicing willow for firewood runs on an internet soundtrack.
His vocabulary gets borrowed. "Roots," "uprooting," "elites who demonise roots": for him this is Simone Weil's language; elsewhere in Europe it belongs to something else. In February 2024 he posted that a German magazine presenting itself as "conservative" had reprinted one of his essays, and that he had since learned of its links to the Identitarian movement, the AfD and the French Nouvelle Droite. He withdrew consent, said publicly he had nothing to do with that politics, and called "hard right, ethnocentric, authoritarian politics" one "inevitable result" of the fracturing he describes. The episode doesn't define his position, but it shows a structural gap in the frame. If left and right are both cogs of the Machine, it is hard to draw a concrete line between them in advance, so the line gets drawn after the fact.
He wrote the harshest criticism himself. "Perhaps... the real reason I write anything is that I crave esteem." A professional opponent of the Machine with nearly 85,000 readers on it and a bestseller it helped make admitted in his second essay that "even we Romantic Luddites are here on the Internet, lamenting." He offers this as humility, but it also makes his prescription hard to test. If even he can only manage the "cooked" path, is the "raw" one a path at all, or a figure of speech?