[xg15]

> The city is an omen of its presence: “Once a society becomes primarily urban, it is locked into a process of metastasising growth which will, in the end, lead to the destruction of other ways of being.” “The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest.”

> And what is to be done? The answer to the Machine, for Kingsnorth, lies not in the Right or the Left, not in capitalism or communism, not in some ideological system or set of conceptual abstractions. [...] The closest we may get in the book to a description of how to secure a more humane future is the term “reactionary radicalism,” which Kingsnorth borrows from sociologist Craig Calhoun. It is a way of life that thrives on tradition, in a local place, in prayer, among a people. “The moral economy rarely makes rational sense. But it makes human sense, which is what matters.”

The book seems to follow the almost traditional dichotomy between "perverted", growth-at-all-costs urban techno-libertarianism (with some stings at liberalism for some reason) and "pure" rural Christian traditionalism.

Interesting that the figureheads of both those movements come from the right today.

As a liberal leftist, none of those two systems look particularly appealing to me. Are there no other options that the author could imagine?

[nathan_compton]

Its libido. The alternatives are not fun and they won't make anyone rich. They present no drama and, I think, drama is the primary thing little minds want from their ideology.

And yet I can sympathize - the world seems sometimes almost absurdly inhumane at the moment, the people in charge seem both incompetent and to have a death grip on power and not out of any particular skill or strength, but because we cannot articulate any real alternative. The fantasy that we can fix this problem by embracing tradition or some other dumb shit is appealing because it doesn't force us to grapple with the real problems of the world.

In the broadest strokes I tend to agree that we will need to return to the human, but I think that doesn't have to look like Christianity or any other made up bullshit. I can be humanism, but we must be willing to do things which might lower GDP to get there. We have to be willing to restrain ourselves and others for the benefit of harmony. Tough sell for Americans.