Key Principle
Chapter XXIII identifies the Machine as a perceptual pathology, not merely a political or economic problem. Drawing on Iain McGilchrist's hemispheric thesis, Kingsnorth argues that the left hemisphere — which apprehends by manipulating, fragmenting, fixing, and decontextualising — has usurped the right hemisphere, which comprehends the whole picture, flow, context, and the animate. The Machine is structurally a left-hemisphere product: "Machines and tools are alone coded in the left hemisphere" (Chapter XXIII). Both political "left" and "right" operate entirely within this way of seeing, which is why neither offers genuine resistance. The counter-revolution is therefore not political but perceptual: "Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there" (Chapter XXIII).
Chapter XXVII completes the arc by naming what restored attention recovers. Rootedness — Simone Weil's "perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul" (Chapter XXVII) — is the Machine's antithesis. The Four Ps (People, Place, Prayer, the Past) are not nostalgic preferences but neurologically grounded counter-practices that cultivate right-hemisphere engagement with reality. The culminating image is Aidan Carl Mathews' phrase for John Moriarty's project: "raindance on the astroturf" — performing sacred acts in desacralised spaces, not as escapism but as defiance (Chapter XXVII).
Why This Matters
This is the book's culminating vision. Twenty-six chapters of diagnosis — Mumford's megamachine, Ellul's autonomous technique, the culture of inversion, the datafied self, the Machine-as-religion — resolve not into a programme but into an orientation. Kingsnorth refuses the endgame: "What if we also slough off the idea of 'saving the world'?" (Chapter XXVII). Releasing the need for a grand solution makes authentic, local action possible. The prescription is attention, rootedness, and sacred practice within the Machine's territory.
What prevents this from collapsing into sentimentality is the diagnostic weight behind it. If the Machine is a left-hemisphere pathology, then the Four Ps are not quaint conservatism but a neurologically grounded restoration of how human beings are meant to attend to reality. The raindance is not nostalgia performed for comfort. It is the creature's nature reasserted against the Machine's nature — and Kingsnorth reframes the crisis as vocation: "The age of the Machine is not after all a hopeless time. Actually, it is the time we were born for" (Chapter XXVII).
Good Examples
The raindance on the astroturf: Moriarty's concrete plan was a modern hedge school teaching mystical Christianity beside motorway junctions and data centres — echoing the illegal Irish hedge schools that defied eighteenth-century British penal laws. The image captures the book's final stance: the sacred performed within the Machine's territory, refusing to wait for conditions to improve before beginning (Chapter XXVII).
The European Dreamtime: Moriarty adapts the Australian aboriginal concept of Altjeringa — the mythic dimension underlying the present — to propose active, mystical re-engagement with ancestral story expressed locally: "An Earth-wide story which is told everywhere in a local dialect" (Chapter XXVII). Without mythic re-engagement, rootedness remains merely material and lacks the transcendent dimension that gives cultures their cohesion.
Attention as counter-revolution: McGilchrist's thesis applied practically — seeing the world through art, creativity, writing, conversation; refusing to see the world or its inhabitants as machines; being "suspicious of rationalisations and dogmatic insistence and easy answers and false divisions" (Chapter XXIII). The Four Ps are what this restored attention cultivates.
Counterpoints
Aspirational mythology: The European Dreamtime presupposes a mythic substrate that can be recovered. Whether modern Europeans — several generations removed from the cultures Moriarty invokes — can authentically re-enter this Dreamtime rather than merely performing it is left unresolved. The raindance may remain a beautiful image without a viable pedagogy.
The absorption problem: Kingsnorth himself demonstrates that the 1960s counter-culture was absorbed because it shared the Machine's anthropology of the sovereign, self-defining individual. But a rootedness movement mediated through books, podcasts, and digital platforms faces its own version of the same trap — the medium reshaping the message.
Scale and locality: "The most radical thing you can do is to stay at home" (Chapter XXVII, quoting Snyder) is compelling as individual practice but raises the question of collective force. If everyone starts from where they are and "things ripple out," this is faith, not strategy — and Kingsnorth is candid that it must be so.
Key Quotes
"We no longer live in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it." (Chapter XXIII) — McGilchrist
"Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there." (Chapter XXIII) — McGilchrist
"It took two decades for the hippies to become yuppies; three for the simple-lifers to become Silicon Valley billionaires; four for 'imagine there's no countries' to become the policy of the WEF and the WTO." (Chapter XXVII)
"The age of the Machine is not after all a hopeless time. Actually, it is the time we were born for." (Chapter XXVII)
Rules of Thumb
Attention before action: The quality of attention precedes and determines the quality of response. If you attend to reality through the Machine's lens — fragmenting, quantifying, decontextualising — your resistance will reproduce the Machine's logic.
Root before you resist: Opposition without positive content is mere negation — and negation is the Machine's own method. Ask what you are rooted in (people, place, prayer, past) before asking what you oppose.
Abandon the endgame: Releasing the need to "save the world" is not defeatism but the precondition for authentic local action. Start from where you are.
Test counter-cultures by their anthropology: Any movement that shares the Machine's view of the human person — atomised, self-defining, liberated from obligation — will be absorbed by the Machine, regardless of its stated aims.
The raindance test: Are you willing to perform the sacred act in the desacralised space, without guarantee of result? If not, the orientation has not yet taken hold.
Related References
- Technological Askesis — Spiritual Discipline and Technology - the individual practice this communal vision requires
- The Four Ps and Four Ss - the framework being restored
- Reactionary Radicalism and the Moral Economy - the political stance accompanying the spiritual vision