Every now and then, a book comes along that makes such a sweeping, powerful and insightful argument about the nature of our lives, our world and our culture that it leaves you disturbed and almost disoriented, as if the ground has shifted under your feet and you’re not quite sure where you’re standing anymore. Paul Kingsnorth’s book, Against the Machine, is like this. It’s very broadly speaking a Christian book—or at least, is written from the perspective of a Christian worldview—and it makes a quite stunning argument about the dysfunctional nature of our contemporary, very technological machine-like society that resonates very deeply and yet raises many questions.
In this episode of the CCL podcast, Tony Payne talks to speaker, author and cultural analyst Stephen McAlpine about these questions, and about the strengths and weaknesses of Kingsnorth’s book and what it means for our lives as Christians in this machine-like culture we inhabit.
Runtime: 42:12 min.
Links referred to:
- Against the Machine (Paul Kingsnorth)
- Information about the 2025 shooting at Bondi beach
- Made in Our Image (Stephen Driscoll)
- Find out more and register for “Left right out: The strange position of the political Christian” (Wed 20 May 2026, 7-9pm)
- Support the work of the Centre
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been checked against the audio and lightly edited, but still may contain errors. If quoting, please compare with the original audio.
Introduction
[00:00:05] Tony Payne: Every now and then, a book comes along that makes such a sweeping, powerful and insightful argument about the nature of our lives and our world and our culture, that it leaves you disturbed—almost disoriented—as if the ground has shifted under your feet and you’re not quite sure where you’re standing anymore.
[00:00:22] Paul Kingsnorth’s book, Against the Machine, is like this. It’s very broadly speaking a Christian book—or at least, is written from the perspective of a Christian worldview. And it makes a quite stunning argument about the dysfunctional nature of our contemporary, very technological machine-like society that resonated very deeply with me and yet left me with many questions. And in looking for someone to talk to about those questions, I could think of no one better than Christian speaker, author and cultural analyst Stephen McAlpine. And our ruminations about the strengths and weaknesses of Kingsnorth’s quite extraordinary book and what it means for our lives as Christians in this machine-like culture we inhabit, well, that’s the subject of this week’s edition of the Centre for Christian Living podcast.
[Music]
[00:01:25] Tony Payne: Well, hello once again. I’m Tony Payne. Welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living podcast. Great to have you with us again for this episode. And it’s being recorded, this one, right at the end of 2025, and I’ve been fortunate to be able to snag Stephen McAlpine to come in and have a little chat about a couple of different things—particularly about a book that we’ve both been reading. Stephen, thanks for coming in and for being on the CCL podcast.
[00:01:49] Stephen McAlpine: Oh, it’s great to be with you, Tony.
[00:01:50] Tony Payne: Somehow we’ve finally gotten together. We’ve seen each other from afar on, and on blog posts and emails, but it’s nice to meet you face-to-face.
[00:01:57] Stephen McAlpine: Yeah, we have circled each other and now we’re sitting down facing each other. That’s good.
Introduction to Stephen
[00:02:00] Tony Payne: Tell us a little bit about what you do and who you are.
[00:02:03] Stephen McAlpine: Hmm. Yeah, the last few years has been very different to the sedentary 25 years in Perth of pastoral ministry and church planting. I run my own consultancy, helping schools and churches grapple with the cultural frame that we’re living in. Why is it so hostile to Christianity? What can you do about that without despair or anger? And also, one of the things I enjoy, I think, is going to especially some of the bigger sandstone schools and just doing evangelism with the Year 12 boys, especially. You get opportunities like that in Sydney, I think, which has been great.
[00:02:33] And the questions that young men have: very interesting. That they’re a pilloried group at some level, but they have deep questions about meaning and purpose. And I’ve enjoyed that aspect of the role as well.
[00:02:45] Tony Payne: And you’ve been living here in Sydney now for …
[00:02:47] Stephen McAlpine: oh, 15 months; 13, 14 months. I’m trying to think of it in rental payouts. So my wife and I and my son moved, and my son did Year 12 online with his old school. So Sydney’s a buzz to us. I said to—I have a twin brother who’s lived here for 10 years—and I said, “I feel like a tourist here.” I still feel like a tourist. So it’s that kind of city.
[00:03:08] Tony Payne: It is that kind of city. I’ve been here for, oh, 45 years now. Lived here as a student. And it’s just home now. But it’s a vibrant, interesting place with all its own tribes and places.
[00:03:19] Stephen McAlpine: And the geography of the city sets the tribal boundaries.
[00:03:21] Tony Payne: Yes, yes, very much.
[00:03:22] Stephen McAlpine: That’s very, a very modern city with very ancient rhythms in some sense.
The Bondi attacks and the West
[00:03:27] Tony Payne: Well, the subject of our conversation today is some ways the contrast between ancient and modern. The reason that I invited you into talk, as you know, is that I just happen to see online that you’re reading the same book I was reading. And it’s a fascinating book: it’s a book by Paul Kingsnorth called Against the Machine, and it was one of the things I read as part of my work here at the Centre for Christian Living: the workshop and podcast that we put together on technology, I read a lot of different stuff critiquing modernity and critiquing modern technology. And Kingsnorth is a very powerful voice in that sphere. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
[00:04:00] But I thought we might begin at a slightly different place—a place that does connect to Kingsnorth’s book. That’s hard to say. And that is, we’re speaking just before Christmas 2025. It’s the 22nd of December. It’s just over a week since those awful events, and I know you’ve had a bit to say about what happened at Bondi and I haven’t; I’ve said nothing publicly about it—in some ways, because lots of people were already saying lots of things. But personally, I felt that to say something publicly, like “We stand with the Jews” really would just indict me for the fact that I haven’t been saying for the previous 18 months, “We stand with the Jews”. In other words, I think if I was going to put out a statement, it would be “We should have stood with the Jews”, as opposed to, you know, the immediate emotional response—which we all have: the response of horror and the response of love.
[00:04:53] But the reason I wanted to start with this topic here is that there is this kind of connection with some of the issues swirling around the Bondi attack and our inability to really cope with it or deal with it as a society. And that is the strange relationship we have with Islam and extremist Islam, in particular, as Westerners, and the strange kind of alliance there is between the progressive Left in our culture and with Islam. And it’s strange that those two groups who are so different are united in their opposition to Israel and, in a sense, in their own way, are seeds for antisemitism.
[00:05:27] Stephen McAlpine: Yes, it may sound like a tenuous link between Kingsnorth and that, but one of the things I note in reading the book, and in thinking about this Islam and progressive issue, is our Western culture and its modernity doesn’t recognise that there might be a thing behind the thing, if that’s the way to put it—that is there a deeper, darker, spiritual aspect to what’s going on. And so, even in the response to Bondi, we’re going to clamp down on this and clamp down on that and, but that kind of thing—
[00:05:51] Tony Payne: We’ll enact some policies and we’ll, we’ll solve it. We’ll stamp this out.
[00:05:54] Stephen McAlpine: That’s right. But we can only firewall things. We can’t actually get to the root cause of things. And the Islam thing for me, with the progressive, you know, we’ve discussed what is it about the nature of who God’s people are in the Old Testament and the, I guess, the grafting in of the church into God’s salvation plans—what is it about that that seems antithetical to the progressive culture so much that it would align with something like Islam? There seems to be something at base.
[00:06:20] Tony Payne: There’s a strange kind of common antipathy, isn’t there? And it’s hard not to see it, in some respects, as being a spiritual thing. What the progressive Left and, in a sense, what Islam and especially radical Islam, deeply oppose is the Christian West—is the West of Christendom—and therefore also the Jewish tradition, which is so closely tied to all of that and out of which the Christian West emerges. There’s a kind of a hatred of something there that’s deeper than just the hatred of a particular people group. There’s something spiritual behind it in some respect, although it’s hard to kind of put your finger on.
[00:06:54] Stephen McAlpine: Yeah, and there is a political aspect to it if you think about, say, Foucault and Herbert Marcuse—all those French philosophical framework of deeply secular Marxist frameworks that lean into that deep sort of binary thing of colonial non—you know, oppressor/victim thing like that. And that narrative is the narrative of the humanities departments of our universities the last 30 years. I remember going to university in the 80s, doing the postmodern literature degree and going, “These ideas will never fly.” But these ideas do fly, because those people become the poets, the writers, the media people and the journalists of the next 40 years. Ideas trickle like that, and it’s the people who tell the stories that set the popular imagination in the culture, and that’s always going to be the way.
[00:07:38] So I think, and what I like about Kingsnorth’s work is its vivid imaginary world as well, because we have bypassed that in our attempt to try to shift people intellectually without being able to shift them emotionally. And unless you can do both at the same time, you’re going to struggle.
[00:07:58] Tony Payne: Indeed. Yes, what was really striking about Against the Machine for me, and it’s a book, as I said, that I read as I was thinking about technology more generally, is that it wasn’t just an attempt to come to terms with technology—to look at its costs or benefits, to just look at our technological society in a kind of pragmatic way. How can we make the best of it? It’s a jeremiad against our technological society. It’s looking at it as a whole and saying there’s something profoundly wrong—something that profoundly doesn’t resonate—that, in fact, makes us anxious and on edge and feels like things are not working and not right. This is one of the themes of Kingsnorth’s book: really, that the modern West—the contemporary West—is kind of built on the death of the older West—the West of Christendom, the West that came out of, in a sense, Judaism.
What’s wrong with modernity?
[00:08:46] Tony Payne: And it’s a sprawling and fascinating book, as you say. It’s poetic, it’s novelistic, it draws together multiple different voices from different fields and kind of weaves them together. But he starts with this sense of feeling that something is profoundly wrong, and that resonated with me as well as I read that opening chapter. He says he grew up feeling like he would like to live in Lothlorien in the woods, in a place of wisdom, where there was a deep, deep tradition—a deep sense of unity in the world. But instead, he said he feels like he’s living in Isengard, where there is technology and fire and creativity and destruction. Did that resonate with you as well—that sense—his description of what he felt is wrong with modernity and that many people feel?
[00:09:28] Stephen McAlpine: Yeah, it did. And I think, in some senses, he’s partly an extension of the Romantics. But also a rejection of their Neo-Pagan framework. So he’s saying, “You Romantics, you thought that you could loose us from the surly bonds of Christendom and be in nature as a child. But Christendom was the framework in which you needed to live that out, otherwise something else would eat you up.” So it’s interesting that the machine itself promises much in the sense of deliverance, but then is just another form of captivity.
[00:09:59] And I think the key thing for me was how he was able to, over the course of the book, do more than what Jonathan Haidt would do, say, talking about technology. And someone who’s a psychologist for the business background as he is, he’s adding up the levels. It does this much damage percentage, but there’s this much good. Would that be saying if we could get it to tip to be better for us as people, it’s a good thing? Kingsnorth’s saying “No”; he’s saying there’s something almost spiritual behind it. Or imbibed by it. It is something, if you pull the mask away, of machine, you see something even darker. That is the vivid imagination that I think sort of stirred my heart and also made me feel a deep sense of unease the next time I picked up my phone.
[00:10:42] Tony Payne: It is a disturbing book, isn’t it?
[00:10:43] Stephen McAlpine: Yeah. It feels like the deeper you go into it, it feels like heart of darkness. It feels like you’re getting to the middle of that.
[00:10:49] Tony Payne: You’re right. It’s very different sort of book. It’s not kind of book built on lots of statistical studies and “Studies show”. It’s a book that pulls together lots of different voices from different places to address this question.
The machine
[00:11:00] Tony Payne: I guess we should talk about what we mean by “the machine”, or what he means by “the machine”—Against the Machine. It’s really his word for modernity. And he starts off the book by telling the Christian story, interestingly: imagine this story. Imagine a world that was created by a God. There was Adam and Eve. And he tells that story all the way up to the cross and beyond, and then says, “Imagine a culture that’s built on that story and built on that story for 1500 years. And now imagine what happens when you reject that story fairly profoundly. What happens to that culture? Where does it head?” So it starts, in that sense, with a very Christian frame, although much of the rest of the book doesn’t come back to that so much. But he then sees modernity—the features of modernity—as being machine-like. In what sort of ways? What struck you as his kind of metaphor of the machine?
[00:11:44] Stephen McAlpine: I think the machine framework is about technique and process and end product, without any valuation of what gets you there. So in one sense it’s a—the modernity project, he’s saying, is offering an imminent transcendence. Charles Taylor wrote that—that it will provide you with a vision of life and a hermetically sealed life that somehow, if you align yourself with its goals, it will bring you to that place. But in the process, it strips out anything that’s actually life-giving.
[00:12:16] That’s the interesting thing: so much of this book is about death and the death of something, or the requirement of things to die, for the machine’s sake. The machine’s offering you a version of life that requires a lot of death. And I found that there was something HG Wells about it as well as I was reading it. You can see there’s that grappling with that whole issue.
[00:12:38] Tony Payne: I’ve got a quote here: he prefers to call modernity—that is, this process by which the West has gradually sloughed off its Christian foundation and crafted a new world for itself, a world of technology and a world of progress in particular:
[00:12:51] I prefer to call it “the machine”, because a machine, as the poets showed me, is what it feels like. This process, which has been going on for centuries, of uprooting us from nature, culture and God, leads us into a mass society controlled by and for technology, in which we have been on course to become since at least the Industrial Revolution, mere cogs in a giant mechanism that we have no control over.
[00:13:18] Tony Payne: And I found that a very striking image—a poetic image, not a scientific one in a sense, but that’s the point: that the way we’ve come to think about and live in our world—the way that the intersecting streams of technology and the growth of science and a mathematical view of the world, a view of the world in which everything can be broken down and understood and reconfigured, along with a rejection of roots and of meaning: we don’t have any metaphysic; we don’t have any metanarrative; we don’t have any foundations anymore. We’ve gotten rid of that. We’ve rejected all of that. The absence of foundation and the absence of roots has come to kind of create a very technological culture in which we consume and grow and work without roots, without meaning, all just in pursuit of sensation and stimulation and entertainment and pleasure and life and property—all driven by and kind of driven on by a technological impulse. It’s a slightly frightening image, but a kind of resonant one of what our culture is like. Certainly this city that we talked about at the beginning that we live in.
[00:14:18] Stephen McAlpine: Yeah. It very much feels like that. And I think he does hit a lot on the Industrial Revolution, doesn’t he. Because, in one sense, it broke history with the land, but it also broke the way you value work, the way you value relationships, the units and the measurements of production. And obviously there’s a whole couple of hundred years of that. But then you get the Marxist framework of just valuing people in the same way. So you have two competing viewpoints: the Industrial Age and the Marxist framework—both completely devoid of transcendence. And history’s bunk in that sense.
[00:14:50] And that’s partly why you get where you’re in the universities today, where people are aligning progressive values with Islam, ‘cause they don’t know the history of how these things come about.
[00:15:00] And so for me, when I was reading it, it felt like we were offered a prize of control and ended up being controlled. I think that’s the primary issue of the machine. I will give you control. And that almost goes back to how the pagan gods: if you sacrifice a little bit, I’ll give you something a lot. And then with the pagan gods, you end up sacrificing everything—your children—and getting nothing back. And in that sense, that’s the spiritual aspect of the machine that is no different to 4,000 years ago—sacrificing children to Molech. It feels the same.
[00:15:34] And Kingsnorth is very adept at making you feel that. It feels like a dark paganism rather than simply a technological shiny machine.
The four Ps vs the four Ss
[00:15:44] Tony Payne: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All sorts of things jumped out at me as I read. One of them was, for a long time—I don’t know if you know this, but for a long time in ministry stuff and other things I’ve been writing, I’ve talked a lot about the four Ps of Christian ministry: of proclamation and prayer and people and patience, you know.
[00:15:57] Stephen McAlpine: And Kingsnorth comes up with the—
[00:15:59] Tony Payne: He’s got his own four Ps! And he basically says that the older values—the values of traditional cultures, but especially of the Christian West—that older and traditional kind of rooted cultures have these four Ps. They have a past: they have a sense of history and ancestry and where we’ve come from that’s real and valuable and important. We have a sense of people: that is, we’re a certain group of people. We’re a community. We belong together. There’s a sense of who we are as people. There’s place: there’s somewhere where we belong that is our place, and we belong, especially in nature and in connection with our part of the earth. And there’s prayer: there’s some sort of sacred, religious connection. He argues that many societies—traditional societies—have those characteristics. And certainly that—Christendom, in a sense you could say, had those characteristics.
[00:16:48] And that modernity is the process by which those four things are systematically broken down over time—in which we no longer value the past. The past has to be sacrificed constantly. It’s always all about the future and about progress. You want to break up people’s sense of being in communities. We want people to be mobile and interconnected and interchangeable. You break down place: it doesn’t matter where you belong. And you break down a sense of connection with nature. And of course, you say that prayer is the superstition we need to get beyond.
[00:17:18] And so, in modernity, he says, in the machine world, there are four S’s instead. I mean, I’ll give you those: science, which is where we come from, which explains everything, which configures everything, which is the frame for understanding everything; self, instead of community or who we belong to, it’s who I am and what I express; sex, which is what we do—it’s the highest kind of meaning of pleasure that we have; and the screen: the screen is—mediates reality to us and tells us the future. I found that kind of summary of what the machine in world that he kind of feels so uncomfortable with is creating and what it’s rejecting quite a powerful summary.
[00:17:58] Stephen McAlpine: Yeah, I thought it was a great summary. And in one sense, it’s been summarised in different ways by different people if you think of the somewheres and the anywheres. That aspect. Or Tara Isabella Burton in her book, Strange Rites, she said—she calls the modern generation of people “the remixed”. Though they’re slaves to technology, she said, they’re still looking for meaning, purpose, community and ritual.
[00:18:19] Tony Payne: Very similar.
[00:18:19] Stephen McAlpine: That’s very similar.
[00:18:19] Tony Payne: Similar set of elements.
[00:18:20] Stephen McAlpine: So you—you’re getting convergence of these writers thinking about these things from different perspectives. What I particularly like about Kingsnorth is just because he encapsulates it in that word “the machine”. ‘Cause I feel like you can say that now and people viscerally feel what that means, without being able to fully articulate how it’s expressed and everything.
[00:18:41] But I have a 17-year-old-going-on-18-year-old son, and he’ll doomscroll for a while and then he’ll just get sick of it. And then we’ll go and play basketball or something. And I go, they know: they feel it viscerally. But we can’t break out of that loop, in some senses.
Icons and thing behind the icon
[00:18:58] Stephen McAlpine: And I think that’s where the spiritual aspect of it comes in. Now, don’t forget: Kingsnorth is capital O Orthodox. So he’s gone from wiccan pagan, and I’m not saying it’s a small, paper-thin wall between pagans and Orthodox.
[00:19:10] But what I’m saying is the Orthodox look at an icon on the wall and they say, “We don’t worship it, but we know there’s something behind it.” So he’s already got a framework that says, “I can look at a thing and say that there’s something behind it” in a way that some of us can’t, and in a way that’s become compelling. So at the same time the machine is on the rise, there’s a trickle towards Orthodoxy and Catholicism and some of the more deeper ritual Christian expressions in our western world—and also the Islam thing, because it seems to offer something visceral and on the ground as well.
[00:19:44] And I think we’re not in a hyper secular world; we’re in a crazy kind of spiritualised world that has secular impact and expressions. But we have never been able to get rid of the thing behind the icon.
[00:19:58] Tony Payne: Yeah. I guess it’s both his critique and his hope, isn’t it? I mean, his critique of modernity is it’s constantly trying to say there is no beyond: there is nothing behind. It’s just us and what we create. And that’s why we break down everything, uproot everything, reconfigure everything, pave everything.
[00:20:14] Stephen McAlpine: Yeah. Well it’s the queering: we call it queer theory. The reason for queer theory was they looked at the foundations of the Western castle and said, “We don’t want to destroy it, but how about we replace that foundation stone with this foundation stone?” We want to build it differently. And, in one sense, it will be too late: by the time they’ve changed out 10 of those foundation stones, if the thing crumbles, it’s hard to put it back together. So it’s about replacement of frameworks. It’s not about destruction of everything for the sake of it; it’s about “Can I rebuild this in a different vision?”, which is very Babel.
[00:20:46] Tony Payne: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And which requires and presupposes destruction. He talks a lot in the books about uprooting and about—
[00:20:53] Stephen McAlpine: It’s parasitic.
[00:20:54] Tony Payne: Yeah. The process of uprooting. But it ends up being parasitic on other frameworks of meaning, because you can’t invent anything; everything’s been done before that.
[00:21:01] Stephen McAlpine: Correct.
[00:21:02] Tony Payne: It always ends up being parasitic on something.
Advertisement: Left right out?
[00:21:31] Tony Payne: As Christians, how interested and involved should we be in the political life of our society? Now, some of us couldn’t be less interested in politics. We ignore it as much as we possibly can, and try to just get on with what we see as the important aspects of living the Christian life and ministering to others.
[00:21:49] Others of us are really much more interested in politics. We dive right into the online debates, we keep ourselves informed, and we think that Christians have a real contribution to make politically.
[00:22:01] Now which of these two kind of approaches is the more faithful Christian approach? Or is it somewhere between the two? And why is it that when we do get involved in politics in some way as Christians and we try to engage in the debate, we often feel that we don’t fit in? We’re not quite Left; we’re not quite right; we’re kind of both and neither at the same time. Christians often feel marginal in the political life of our society and wonder where we fit.
[00:22:30] I’m Tony Payne and we’re going to be examining these questions at a Centre for Christian Living ethics workshop on Wednesday, May 20th at Moore College starting at 7:00 pm. The title of the workshop is “Left right out: The strange position of the political Christian”, and I do hope you’ll join us to talk together about these important matters.
[00:22:50] You can get all the information, including how to register, at ccl.moore.edu au. That’s ccl.moore.edu.au. I do hope you can join us on Wednesday, May 20th for this important workshop.
[00:23:05] And now, let’s get back to our program.
Marxism and capitalism
[00:23:07] Tony Payne: There’s two things I want to go on to talk about that were very striking to me. I just want to get your comment on it. One was, we touched on it briefly: in telling the story of the West—of the development of the West and of the commitment of the modern West, the machine West, to progress—that is, a progressive view of history and constant improvement—the commitment to the technological and scientific methodology as the way to achieve that, and the rejection of past traditions and spiritual foundations as a presupposition for achieving all of that. More succinctly and kind of poetically than anyone before, he showed me how, in a sense, Marxism and capitalism, or progressivism and sort of more classic liberalism, really are just two sides of the same coin. And I thought that was very powerful, and I’d never thought about it that way—that, really, the goals and presuppositions of Marxism and capitalism really are similar.
[00:24:01] Stephen McAlpine: It’s very much that horseshoe thing: they’re coming around to each other. I found that very challenging, because at the moment in our Western setting, there’s a, “Well, if we can just get it conservative and capitalist, that will give us safe ground for Christianity.” And I’m going, “Well, no. No.” And I found that a very compelling part of the book, because it’s a challenge to my own presuppositions.
[00:24:22] Tony Payne: Likewise. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:24:23] Stephen McAlpine: And so, I could see the big bogeyman of Marxism over there. But the gentle lure of technique that will give me a clear framework to get what I want. And in one sense, the conceit of modernity is we sit above, watching all of you below, and we have the view from everywhere, rather than realising that everyone is captured by the machine; no one’s above it to be able to critique it. And that kind of scared me, in some senses, because I feel, what am I blind to in my own setting?
[00:24:58] Tony Payne: Yeah. That’s why I find it challenging and interesting book from that point of view as well, in that I’ve kind of always thought of capitalism and free market liberalism as, you know, a bit like Churchill said of politics: you know, it’s the worst system except for all the other systems. You think, “Well, I’ll plump for that.” It seems to do better and have better results. Marxism and socialism just seems to be disastrous wherever it’s properly tried.
[00:25:21] But the challenging thing of his critique is that he points out, in some respects, how global capitalism and socialism—Marxism—do have very similar goals, but just different ways of getting there and different methods of distribution in the end.
[00:25:36] And that kind of explains sort of the strange phenomenon that I’ve been looking at over the last couple of years: how is it that the really rich people in the West—in other words, the people who have benefited most from global capitalism in the free market—our most progressive Left, in a sense, like the elites, as they as people—
[00:25:54] Stephen McAlpine: They call the “luxury beliefs” that they can hold, at some level.
[00:25:56] Tony Payne: Yeah. And he says, this is an interesting quote here: “What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the progressive Left, what if they had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same root stock?”
[00:26:11] Stephen McAlpine: That scared me. It made me think we’ve been lured into something.
[00:26:15] Tony Payne: “What if the Left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the machine?” That’s, that’s a scary, scary sentence.
[00:26:27] Stephen McAlpine: Well, it’s Huxley versus Orwell. Which is it to be? Why can’t it be both? Is the—
[00:26:32] Tony Payne: Yeah.
A better future?
[00:26:32] Stephen McAlpine: You know, and that’s probably what we’re looking at—is that it’s the immanentisation processes that both of those worldviews push. And ironically, still based on a view of soon and very soon; there’s a future coming that is better. Which is basically a Christian idea. It’s not a Greco-Roman idea. It’s not—
[00:26:53] Tony Payne: It’s a stolen eschatology, isn’t it?
[00:26:54] Stephen McAlpine: It’s, it’s the eschatological focus of the machine—what it promises—which is always one step ahead, like Homer Simpson chasing a donut on a stick, you know, for those who remember such metaphors from 20 years ago.
[00:27:07] But it feels like it’s just a step ahead. And if you allow us to give you one more click of the machine to tighten it up, we might arrive there. But that’s Marxism and capitalism at one level, isn’t it? Both of those things are true. And I found that disturbing, and if I weren’t a Christian, harrowing and almost nihilistic.
[00:27:27] Tony Payne: Yeah, because it takes both the main kind of suggested solutions or models for contemporary life for the last 300 years and, and says they’re both really flawed in exactly the same fashion. They seek their ends in different ways, and they want to distribute the fruits of it in different ways. But they’re seeking the same thing: a technologically driven, foundation-less pursuit of progress that destroys and uproots traditional cultures and is sceptical and destructive of foundational beliefs and spiritual beliefs. And put in that way, they do share that in common.
[00:28:03] Stephen McAlpine: They do. One of the things I thought Kingsnorth was doing is he’s struggling in his own life as he makes his life a little harder than a technology would say it has to be to rediscover agency. And when you rediscover agency the way he does—he has to dig this peat and he has to burn this wood and he has to cut that and he has to slaughter the cow, whatever it is—that muscles you up in a different way.
[00:28:25] So in one sense, it feels like to do those things reconnects you with the roots. And that can become pagan roots, if you’re not careful. But for him, there’s something visceral about having to gristle it out, rather than smooth it out. ‘Cause he says the machine offers you the smooth option.
[00:28:43] Tony Payne: Always faster. Always more convenient. Always less effort.
[00:28:45] Stephen McAlpine: Now, he did cancel a major tour because he got sick. And I’m sure he didn’t recover with mandrake root. You know, there’s the tension of this book is that at the same time that he’s railing against it, I’m reading it on Kindle and he’s flying around the world promoting the book. I felt the struggle of “Give me a solution that doesn’t look like me going back to Ireland to live in a—
[00:29:07] Tony Payne:—in a peat bog. Yeah.
[00:29:08] Stephen McAlpine: That’s what I felt.
The raw and the cooked
[00:29:09] Tony Payne: Yeah, indeed. His framework for that towards the end of the book was this metaphor he uses of the raw and the cooked.
[00:29:15] Stephen McAlpine: I love that. Yeah, that was, that was great.
[00:29:17] Tony Payne: It’s a reference to the efforts of the Chinese dynasty back in the 12th century to assimilate and control a particular group of people: the Lee people. And they were very difficult to control. They refused to knuckle under and assimilate and be part of a society and live under the law. They wanted to live under their own laws, right.
[00:29:32] So some of them would live in caves and in the bushes and the forests and elude capture and just live their own life. And they were the raw. But some of the Lee came and lived in the cities and kind of became part of things, but were never to be trusted. They were the cooked. That is, they were within the bounds, and they participated, but they weren’t participating either. They were always rebellious. They were always standing out. They were always different.
[00:29:57] In a sense, that’s the two options he gives towards the end of the book: you got two choices. You can either go off-grid completely and be a radical rejecter of all of modernity and of the machine, and some people may choose that. But many more will choose this cooked existence where you change your framework and your way of thinking about the world and make your limits and your compromises and where you’re going to live and stick to them.
[00:30:19] Stephen McAlpine: It is exile. It’s another, another text on exile, isn’t it?
[00:30:23] Tony Payne: It’s interesting, right? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:30:23] Stephen McAlpine: Because Daniel was in Babylon as the cook, right? So he has to do that and he has to navigate it. So it’s the cultural negotiation question that I think that the church has to help its people decide.
[00:30:36] And I’ve noticed it. I met a bunch of young people in New Zealand who are great young Christians, and they were asking themselves the hard questions about how do we live together in a discipleship community that doesn’t become a cult, but we share a commonality, we share many things together, and we raise our children in ways that offers an alternative reality to the what’s going on? And can we do that for 40 years together? Because the alternative is we all get a great job in some other city and we atomize. Now, there’s nothing wrong with moving to another city. But it comes, as I’ve known in the last, you know, someone who’s nearly 60, moving from another planet called Perth, it comes at cost. It comes at a cost of rootlessness. And so, if you hang yourself out to dry in that rootless world, you can buffer yourself through the gospel against this machine. But it’s much harder. It’s much harder. And your next generation of children may not. That’s part of the issue.
Critiques
[00:31:29] Tony Payne: I think where the book started to kind of—for me, it started to go off the rails a little bit for me or become not perhaps less convincing or it was less interesting, were in two levels. At one level, as he tried to diagnose the nature of the spiritual problem and give a name to it, it got a bit weird.
[00:31:47] Stephen McAlpine: Yes, it did.
[00:31:48] Tony Payne: So if you read the book, be ready for that. He’s in a sense, trying to do the kind of thing Jacques Ellul did and Karl Barth did, and others, and trying to kind of say that human creations can assume a power of their own and get away from us and almost have an autonomous existence and start to control us, with the way you were saying before and the way that an idol can. That sort of idea I can get, but he takes it and runs with it—a fair, a fair way.
[00:32:13] Stephen McAlpine: And that’s a novelist for you, right? So in the sense, the point of the great science fiction novels isn’t that they’re so outlandish; it’s just that they take what is and just give a little twist.
[00:32:23] Tony Payne: Little twist.
[00:32:23] Stephen McAlpine: So he hasn’t been able to get away from that.
[00:32:25] Tony Payne: No.
[00:32:25] Stephen McAlpine: I’m more convinced by Stephen Driscoll’s book—Australian Christian Book of the Year, Made In Our Image—that this isn’t sentience. We’re made in the image of God. God has breathed into us in a way that he hasn’t into other things. But Stephen’s solutions, I think, are much more punchy, because the further I got into Against the Machine, the further away the solutions seem to be for me, in a frustrating but almost compelling “keep me going. Like, where’s the next section?”
[00:32:51] Tony Payne: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was the value of the book for me—that it, as an exercise in diagnosis, in a sense—as an exercise, in analysis and drawing together a whole series of voices who are noticing there’s something profoundly wrong with contemporary western culture, it does a great job of pulling those together and highlighting the fact that technology and our pursuit of progress, in particular—our relentless pursuit of technological progress—is not just a wonderful story of curing of cancer and so on; it’s a story of a whole way of thinking about the world that has quite toxic effects for us as communities and for the world. And his diagnosis and pulling together of those voices were the strongest aspect.
[00:33:28] The other side of it where it kind of was disappointing towards the end, it just wasn’t Christian enough. It starts with the Christian story at the very beginning, but it’s like that story, having been rejected, he finds it difficult to come back to it or to have a sense—in other words, he talks about the four Ps, but the P of proclamation is missing there. And—
[00:33:46] Stephen McAlpine: Yes, that’s interesting.
[00:33:47] Tony Payne: It, it—there’s no sense in this book that Jesus Christ is the living Lord of the world, and that what’s happening in the world is a manifestation of humanity’s rejection of God and the consequences of that rejection, and no sense that the solution or the answer of God is the work of Jesus Christ, both in the world now and eschatologically, when he restores everything. So in that sense, there’s no gospel in the book. And that disappointed me.
[00:34:14] Stephen McAlpine: That’s literally no good news, right?
[00:34:15] Tony Payne: No good news.
[00:34:16] Stephen McAlpine: Yeah. It came apart/adrift a little bit for me perhaps just because of the cheap line, “and this all started when the Protestant Reformation sort of created the no”, you know, the effect of this splintering. And I’m going, “No, actually, I think the ad fontes aspect of the Protestant Reformation is the key” again.
[00:34:33] Tony Payne: Back to the fountain. Back to the sources.
[00:34:35] Stephen McAlpine: Yeah. If I were to give that book to someone, I’d say, “Now, I want you to show me what the church of the living God would look like. Write me a final chapter of what the great discredited source Lenin says, “What then is to be done?” And I felt there was no, “What then is to be done?” that had a gospel framework to it.
[00:34:53] Tony Payne: Yeah, I would agree.
[00:34:55] Stephen McAlpine: And that would leave you in despair if you didn’t have other books to read, right. If you’re not going to hand that to a young, searching person who’s worried about technology, because it will drive them into despair, unless you’re going to give them a framework of the gospel. It hasn’t been—that’s the thing: Jesus hasn’t been caught by surprise or on the hop by technology.
[00:35:12] Tony Payne: Yeah. He’s not sitting up there thinking, “What on Earth am I going to do now?”
[00:35:14] Stephen McAlpine: Mobile phones. Smartphone was well ahead of me, you know? He wasn’t thinking that. Yeah. Yeah. And so I really believe there are ways through it. And the next chapter of that book would have to deal with that for me for it to feel like a complete book and solidify the gospel. You can’t start by saying, “We lost this”, without coming to the end and saying, “And let’s strip back the dross on the diamond and show you it again”, which it doesn’t do.
[00:35:36] Tony Payne: It’s like a book that poetically and brilliantly expounds Romans 1 and Romans 2, perhaps, with respect to how our world has rejected God, and it’s all its foundations, and has reaped perversity and strangeness and folly and inhumanity and irrationality, all the while thinking ourselves very wise and very rational. In one sense, it’s an extended meditation on that theme as it plays out in the West. But there’s no Romans 3 or Romans 4 or Romans 5.
[00:36:03] Stephen McAlpine: That’s, uh. There’s no “but now”.
[00:36:04] Tony Payne: No, exactly.
[00:36:05] Stephen McAlpine: And, and I think one of the things that struck me reading it too was, okay, we can go back to the ancient ways, but the Incas did slaughter, you know—
[00:36:11] Tony Payne: There’s—not every ancient way is—
[00:36:13] Stephen McAlpine:—thousands of people for the sake of their machine. So machines aren’t just modern. They’re things that—
[00:36:19] Tony Payne: Well, he points out that Pharaoh’s Egypt was a classic machine. When people are cogs.
[00:36:22] Stephen McAlpine: And Mark Sayers has written book on that as well—that the platforms versus pillars versus platforms, and the modernity of being the platform place, and the ancient world being the pillar place. And so I think—this is a conversation that Kingsnorth has been, ‘cause he’s a brilliant writer. His book is to me, the jewel and the crown of those books. But they’re all forming and storming. Or the storming, but they haven’t formed yet in some senses.
[00:36:46] Tony Payne: Yeah, that’s right. And it came out for me too, in if you were thinking about this question from a genuinely Christ-centered Christian framework, which sees the gospel as the centre of human history and Jesus Christ as the fulfilment of human history, you would be saying, “Where on earth and how could we somehow respond to all of this such that we found real community, real place, a real sense of roots and meaning, and a real and true understanding of the sacred nature of all of reality?” Well, surely it’s the Christian community. If you’re approaching this Christianly, it’s saying to me that what Christ is doing and what he’s formed in the church and what he’s formed in the Christian communities that are his body on earth are places where all of these things are the nature of a really healthy, functioning Christian community. They’re places where the kind of things that modernity destroys are consciously and continually built.
[00:37:45] Stephen McAlpine: Yes, and I think COVID was the revealer—the apocalyptic moment of that—that modernity could not hold those things that we value the most together. And if you’ll indulge me with the story, one of my running friends, who’s a lapsed Irish Catholic, was involved with a running group that I was involved with that was Christian around a church—a household church network. And she said to me one time after COVID, “I envy you Christians.”
[00:38:09] I said, “You can’t envy us. You’re a lapsed Irish Catholic.”
[00:38:11] She said, “I do. I envy you, because look at the way you responded during COVID at church. You just cared for each other like it was second nature.”
[00:38:19] I said, “It is, but that’s because Jesus is at the centre of the community.”
[00:38:23] I said, “What about your other running communities?”
[00:38:24] “It’s not the same.” And she picked it up, because COVID stripped away modernity’s lie, at one level. But we haven’t done a good job of actually responding to that as well as we could have.
[00:38:36] But I do think Christian community came to the fore at that time in a way that people thought, “Oh, churches will die off.” Maybe got burned off and things became a little bit more, uh—it did a little bit of a pruning of us—for a good reason: to highlight those four Ps again, or the fifth P: proclamation.
[00:38:53] Tony Payne: Yeah. Yeah, quite so. And in saying this—in saying the gospel’s the answer—I’m not trying to kind of cut across the power of the critique or have a simplistic, “Let’s just all go and evangelise” and that’s the answer. It’s—in one sense, it is the answer: to speak the gospel to each other constantly and to the world. But it’s to not distance who Jesus Christ really is and what he’s done from our understanding of the world, as if he isn’t presently ruling now, as if he’s not working his purposes out now, and as if those purposes aren’t centred on his people and on gathering people into his people.
[00:39:28] Books like Kingsnorth’s book, I think, are really valuable, and I’d encourage our listeners to go and have a read. It’ll shake you up.
[00:39:34] Stephen McAlpine: It will.
[00:39:34] Tony Payne: It will make you think twice about how thoroughly and totally your life and our lives are enmeshed in a technological system—a system that is profoundly godless in a sense that divine action has no place within the consideration of how this system acts. It’ll shake you up, but it won’t necessarily tell you what to do.
[00:39:53] Stephen McAlpine: No. And it doesn’t have the confidence of “Greater as he that is in you than he that is in the machine”, in some senses, if that makes sense.
Conclusion
[00:40:00] Tony Payne: Very nice. Stephen, that’s perhaps a good point for us to round off our rambling. But I hope, dear listener, helpful conversation about this fascinating book. We hope that it stimulates you to have a read and a think and a talk about these questions, especially about the place of your own life and of technology in your life, and of the way our lives are, in a sense, determined by realities of our economy and by technology that are bigger and beyond us and shape us, and to be aware of that and to rethink that Christianly—radically Christianly, because of our commitment to Jesus Christ.
[00:40:34] Stephen, thanks so much for being with us on the Centre for Christian Living podcast.
[00:40:37] Stephen McAlpine: Oh, thanks for having me, Tony. It’s been great.
[Music]
[00:40:54] Tony Payne: Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living podcast from Moore College. For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website: that’s ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the way back to 2017, videos from our live events, and articles that we’ve published through the Centre.
[00:41:20] And while you’re there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax-deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College.
[00:41:29] We’d also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources. And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions. Please get in touch. You can email us ccl@moore.edu.au.
[00:41:49] Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this podcast; to James West for the music; and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week. Thank you for listening.
[00:42:03] I’m Tony Payne. ‘Bye for now.
