A Hedgehog in a Fox’s World: Paul Kingsnorth’s "Against the Machine"

Pieter Bruegel, The Wedding Dance - 1566

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On Foxes and Hedgehogs

In one of his best-known essays, Isaiah Berlin mused about how famous writers and sages are either hedgehogs or foxes. Foxes are generalists who know many things. They are versatile but more scattered thinkers, preferring variety to narrow specialization. They reject grand theories of everything. Life is too messy for those. Berlin considered Shakespeare and Aristotle foxes par excellence. 

Hedgehogs, however, know one big thing, and they know it deeply. They are the ambitious system builders who seek unity, coherence, and structure in the world. They want a star to orbit, an idea to anchor themselves to. Plato, Dostoyevski, and Nietzsche are examples of hedgehogs according to Berlin. I'd add Augustine, Kant, Marx, and Heidegger to the list. 

I marvel at the intellectual achievements of history's hedgehogs. Though he identified as a fox, Berlin understood the value of hedgehogs as vital contributors to the richness of our cultural heritage. That's an important caveat: one way is not better than the other; they simply represent different ways of making sense of the world. 

Still, I find Berlin's distinction, which he borrowed from the Greek poet Archilochus, a useful rule of thumb for categorizing thinkers. That said, he warned against taking it too literally. Duly noted. No metaphor is perfect. Even so, this one has endured for so long because it's so evocative. 

I am a fox through and through. I don't believe there's one right way for anything related to how we choose to live our lives. I believe that an open and pluralistic society gives the most people the best shot at flourishing on their own terms. For that to happen, personal autonomy — intellectual, spiritual, and bodily — is crucial. But so is a collective sense of civic responsibility and a respect, or at least tolerance, for those who think otherwise. 

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Paul Kingsnorth's Against the Machine: A Hedgehog's Manifesto

I was reminded of Berlin's famous essay while reading Paul Kingsnorth's recent book, Against the Machine, which I can only describe as a full-frontal assault on modernity. Kingsnorth writes in the tradition of a long line of downbeat doomer hedgehogs, thinkers like René Guénon, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and Alasdair MacIntyre, all of whom view the modern West less as progress than as moral collapse. 

Kingsnorth, who converted to Orthodoxy a few years ago, lived as a fox for most of his life. He was an environmental activist, an atheist, a Zen Buddhist, and even a Wiccan. These days, though, Kingsnorth sounds very much like a hedgehog. Perhaps he was all along. He has his One Big Idea — that Western civilization resembles a godless Machine and, as such, that people should refuse to live on its terms.

He doesn't mince his words either: “Do I want it [The West] to grow? No. I want to uproot it. I want to say that this ‘West’ is not a thing to be ‘conserved’: not now. It is a thing to be superseded. It is an albatross around our necks. It obstructs our vision. It weighs us down".

What is this Machine that weighs us down so much? Think of it as a catchall term to describe the modern West. In Kingsnorth’s telling, it’s totalitarian in its reach: it colonizes religion, economics, communities, and inner lives until everything is judged by efficiency, control, and utility. The Machine to Kingsnorth is "a sacrilegious treatment of a sacred world."

But it's not only about digital media; it’s about the mindset that comes when technology and consumerism infiltrate every aspect of our lives. What’s lost, according to this view, is any sense of mystery. Kingsnorth's Machine is a hyper-individualized society obsessed with what he calls the Four Ss: sex, science, the self, and screens. 

All of those feed the Machine, which feeds us back more of the same. It grows stronger while tightening its grip on our spiritually impoverished lives, leaving us lonely, depressed, and anxious. 

Kingsnorth describes himself as a "reactionary radical" who believes we should recenter our lives on a traditional "moral economy" that emphasizes his Four Ps: people, prayer, place, and the past. By moral economy, he means a society structured to defend those Four Ps against the market logic of the Machine and the alienating tendencies of its technologies. In practice, it's less of a policy program than a tight-knit community of shared religious values.

Reactionary radicals aren't anti-tech, per se, though they'll interrogate each technology and reject whatever doesn't nurture or sustain communities. The same goes for economics. Kingsnorth favors an emphasis on human-scale economies centered on local communities instead of the giant, globalized economy we have now. 

Think farmers’ markets instead of giant-box stores like Costco.

Last, he calls for a culture of refusal and a newfound respect for limits, both moral and material, rather than blindly embracing the Machine's ideology of more, always more, give me more, and supersize it. He also urges us to rediscover the wisdom of the past, to resurrect traditions now long forgotten or abandoned, in order to carve out a sustainable niche in a culture he is convinced is dying.

All fine and good. However, there’s a danger in falling in love with a metaphor, and Kingsnorth’s book shows why.

Left unchecked, it's seen everywhere. It's a powerful frame because it takes a thousand disconnected grievances about the modern world and gives them one name: the Machine. Kingsnorth is a talented writer, but at times his analysis feels like a diatribe against an enemy that’s so broadly defined it could be anything he dislikes about the culture today. I'm always wary when I see such a lopsided argument. Too much gets left out or ignored.

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Herbivores and Carnivores: Two Types of Conservative Christians

Conservative Christians like Kingsnorth lament the gap between the culture today and their traditional Christian beliefs. This skews their worldviews. I've noticed two camps on the religious right; each has responded differently to this apparent crisis of modernity: Let's call them the carnivores and the herbivores. It’s a crude shorthand, I admit, but it captures two styles of cultural response I've encountered in recent years.

The carnivores represent what we're seeing in the United States, with MAGA and the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. These are confident, populist, hard-right movements that aggressively seek to capture the political system as part of a longer-term plan to institutionalize their Christian vision on the nation. The carnivores are wary of pluralism, seeing it as a Trojan horse for anti-religious secular agendas. 

One can often spot them by their overuse of 'woke' to describe everything they hate. They are unabashed culture warriors who show little interest in peaceful coexistence with those who don't share their ideological leanings. They believe it's a war to the death, and to the victor goes the future. If the stakes are that high, they're willing to go to great lengths to win, and make no mistake, they are winning. 

The herbivores are just sick of it all. The left-versus-right culture wars have exhausted them. They see these as two sides of the same corroded coin. They hate the direction the culture is headed for reasons similar to the carnivores, but they won't make the Machiavellian moral compromises required to take and wield power in ways that would force their vision on everyone else. 

Herbivores still endorse pluralism in theory but view themselves as on the losing side of a centuries-long struggle between faith and reason. If the carnivores think the culture war is still being waged, the herbivores say it's already been lost, and that it's time to retreat, dig in, and lay low until the storm passes. 

While Berlin's hedgehog-fox metaphor illustrates two approaches to sense-making, the scope of my own carnivore-herbivore metaphor is much more limited, aiming only to point out a particular tendency within modern Christianity.

In this context, Paul Kingsnorth is a herbivore. He calls for withdrawal from the Machine-dominated society and for engaging in resistance through refusal to live on its terms. If you can't beat the Machine, then at least don't let it beat you. How? By pulling back as much as possible, and by centering one's life on those Four Ps. 

I find the herbivores’ plight sympathetic, if misguided for a number of reasons. 

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Detour for a Reality Check: Happiness and Optimism Today

First, it's not that bad. 

People are more optimistic about their own lives than about the wider world. I'm aware it doesn't appear that way, given how the media conditions us to doomscroll, but it's true. This is called the Optimism Gap. 

A January 2025 Gallup poll showed that 81% of Americans are very or somewhat satisfied with their personal lives, while 77% are very or somewhat dissatisfied with the direction of the country. Even though the numbers vary, the perception disparity between personal and national optimism goes back decades. 

Interestingly, this same trend tracks globally. An IPSOS survey found that 71% of people across 31 countries described themselves as happy as of 2024. This isn’t a one-off, either, but part of a broader pattern that has been stable over time. I'm no different. I'm quite satisfied with my personal life, and I find my community warm and welcoming, but I am deeply troubled at the authoritarian direction America has moved in recent years. 

Of course, we should take polls with caution. But a few polls pointing to the same trends suggest two things: first, people are generally happy. Second, if that's the case, then is the Machine so bad? Or is it a metaphor that traps us in a hyper-negative framing of the world? 

Yes, I know, Kingsnorth is making a spiritual argument, but the material side matters a great deal. What do people want out of life, at minimum, if not some measure of prosperity, safety, and the chance to pursue their own ends with minimal obstacles from society and the government? 

These polls also hint that people may not be as morally and spiritually empty as he implies. Could it be that they're not all sad, lonely, or depressed either? Maybe more people have found fulfillment and purpose in a variety of secular and religious ways.

Perhaps the West isn't such a bad place to be in, after all. 

And think about the alternative: If you don't have enough to eat, or shelter and security, or if you can't even read, then the barrier to happiness isn't any Machine, but poverty, ignorance, and insecurity. It's also worth mentioning that the least happy places in the world tend to be among the poorest. 

Something else to keep in mind: most pre-modern civilizations existed in grinding poverty for everyone except the elites at the top. Life was precarious, and violence and oppressive hierarchies were inescapable parts of life. Death was never far away, whether in childbirth, childhood, disease, or from warfare. By our standards, life sucked. It really did. Never forget that. 

This feels like an obvious point to make, but one that's often forgotten when reading someone like Kingsnorth, whose eloquent pessimism sees only dysfunction and moral decay in the modern world. It might feel true when reading him, but it doesn’t hold up when you pause and look around.

But again, I ask, when was it better? The answer (or non-answer) to this question is crucial. 

Kingsnorth offers a clue to where he stands, which will not be surprising: "The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. What does that make us, its descendants, living amongst its beautiful ruins? It makes ours a culture with no sacred order. And this is a dangerous place to be."

This is frustrating for several reasons. He does what I've found a growing number of disillusioned Christian thinkers are doing: mourning a lost past in which Christianity provided a superior moral language and metaphysical foundation, and presuming that that must have been a better way of living. This is the sacred order he's referring to above.

That's what I want to zero in on, for you'll find in his book that his dislike of the present is more than equalled by a nostalgia for a more authentic past that's been lost. I don't find this convincing. 

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights - c. 1490

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The Sacred Order Explained

What is a sacred order, anyway? At the risk of oversimplifying: a sacred order is more than a religious society, though faith is at its core. It's a shared, inherited moral framework that offers meaning and coherence by anchoring objective truths and values in something transcendent.

And one caveat: I’m talking below about the Western Christian sacred order Kingsnorth gestures toward, specifically medieval Christendom, and not every religious society that has ever existed. I'm not qualified to opine so broadly. 

The appeal is obvious: shared meaning, shared limits, and a moral vocabulary that doesn’t collapse into the relativism of mere personal preference. The West's sacred order, of course, was Christianity. To find the last time the West lived under anything like this, you have to go all the way back to the Middle Ages. 

What happened? That sacred order collapsed over several centuries, a process that accelerated after the Enlightenment. According to Kingsnorth, its demise set us on the path to a world ruled by technology, secularism, and money — i.e., the Machine. Kingsnorth sees this as a tragic loss, a descent from a higher to a lower form of being. Remember, we live "among its beautiful ruins." 

But the West's last sacred order wasn't an actual society anyone would want to live in today, and he understands that. The Middle Ages aren't exactly remembered as a golden age of human flourishing. I don't want to focus so much on the material side of that as on the medieval mindset. For once you get a glimpse of that, you'll find it quite bizarre, at least compared to our individualistic, pluralistic ways of thinking. 

A sacred order is the Christian hedgehog's dream world, but it would be a version of hell for us foxes who value our freedom and autonomy. 

All of this leads to the question: Did our medieval ancestors really live the kind of rooted, prayer-centered life Kingsnorth praises?

In a way, yes, they did. But it's more complicated. I want to disenchant that enchanted world a bit.

Pieter Bruegel, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent - 1559

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About that Medieval Sacred Christian Order

First of all, yes, some monks and priests took it all quite seriously, gazing up at the high heavens in awe of God's sublime creation. They prayed and fasted and did their best to follow scripture. Alas, they are disproportionately represented in the written records of daily life in the Middle Ages. This skews perceptions, making the average medieval Christian appear more devout than they actually were.

The ascetics and saints are the ones who resonate with theologically sophisticated Christians like Kingsnorth. For the rest of us, who like to eat and drink our fill, make some love and money, and sleep in warm, comfortable beds in cozy homes, it's not an appealing option. Indeed, I've always found something grotesquely self-annihilating about the ascetic temperament of medieval saints when taken to such extremes. 

But what about everyone else? How did the masses experience reality in a sacred order?

I'm more interested in them, since they represented the vast majority of people, even if they are mostly silent in the historical records. Johan Huizinga's wonderful book, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, offers a sense of what this world looked like for everyday people.

"Life was permeated by religion to the degree that the distance between the earthly and the spiritual was in danger of being obliterated at any moment. While on the one hand all of ordinary life was raised to the sphere of the divine, on the other the divine was bound to the mundane in an indissoluble mixture of daily life."

Huizinga provides examples of what it was like to live in a culture saturated with symbols and enchanted with meaning. To modern readers, it's odd, which is why I want to dwell on it a bit. It's quite a different way of experiencing the world.

On the more devout end of the spectrum, Huizinga describes how Henry Suso (1295-1366) cut his apple into four parts: three he ate in commemoration of the Trinity; the fourth, in memory of "the love with which the Heavenly Mother gave the infant Jesus a little apple to eat." However, in the days following Christmas, he doesn't even eat the fourth part because the infant Jesus couldn't have eaten it. 

Whenever Suso drinks, he takes five swallows in remembrance of the five wounds Christ received before his crucifixion. Then, "since blood and water flowed from Christ's side, he takes the second swallow twice." Something as simple as eating and drinking was awash in biblical symbols. 

Of course, this is a marginal case coming from a man who took his devotion to extremes, but I could fill this account with many more such examples. Across the social hierarchy, religious symbolism saturated everything, though the mixing of profane and transcendental created contradictions that can only seem bizarre to modern readers. 

Huizinga goes on, "To every holy mystery, there attaches itself like a barnacle to a ship, a growth of external elements of faith that desecrate it." Religious festivals became excuses for drunken debauchery. Prostitutes (shrewdly?) hung out around cathedrals to attract customers. Holy relics were treated like gaudy magical charms; a colorful pantheon of Saints resembled the old pagan gods they vanquished, each with some superpower over a particular aspect of the world. 

Though the Church fought against this, the cult of the Virgin turned Mary into a quasi-goddess for the lower orders, a kinder, gentler mediator between a cold and remote God and his fallen human progeny. Worse, in the later Middle Ages, a cynical marketplace of absolution emerged, turning sin and salvation into commodities purchasable for the right price, rather than freely obtained through disciplined and virtuous living. 

The typical medieval mind contained the usual vices and bizarre superstitions that characterize every age, including ours. The common folk called themselves Christians, but couldn't read the Bible in any language. They went to mass and mumbled Latin words that they didn't understand. They didn't live in some pristine Christian culture with Christ at the center on a throne, as Kingsnorth seems to imagine, but in a world filled with sorcery, black magic, witches, warlocks, forest spirits, and werewolves (Manchester 60). 

Hieronymus Bosch, Haywain - c. 1485

What you got throughout most of society was the divine reduced to a kind of religious kitsch (my term, not Huizinga's). Huizinga’s point is that this sacred order wasn't necessarily deepened by being all-encompassing: it was also flattened and diluted by its contact with the realities of daily life. When that happens, it loses its power. It becomes ridiculous, diminished, cheapened — kitsch. The sublime high is brought to a profane low by the masses, for only in this way can they grapple with the sublime on their own conceptually impoverished terms.

(To be fair, this "kitschization" of belief remains with us this day. It just manifests differently. That's a topic for another day.) 

And one last point: whatever comfort people got from their Christian faith to face life's suffering was countered by the constant dread of eternal damnation, a fear that would linger on long after the Reformation ended the Church's monopoly on belief. Sure, it was a moral economy, but it was one grounded in fear. "Be good, or else!" That's worth remembering, by the way, when you hear Christians like Kingsnorth complain about how we are "cut loose in a postmodern present, with no centre, no truth and no direction." 

There's another side to that.

Imagine living in constant terror of spending an eternity in hell, or at least a very long time suffering in purgatory, and what that means for one's existential well-being. I'll take Pascal's dread at "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces" over that any day.

To be clear, none of this makes our medieval ancestors stupid. It just makes them different, living within a radically different symbolic universe under a very different set of assumptions.

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Sacred Orders Disenchanted

This detour into medieval Christianity was meant to highlight one thing: the Western sacred order Kingsnorth gestures toward wasn’t some lost Eden. On the contrary, I find it antithetical to human flourishing except in a very narrow, one-size-fits-all way. It stifled learning and innovation; it suppressed difference and was allergic to change. 

And yet, for cultural nostalgists, the impulse always remains the same: to lament a past that never existed as a way of expressing dissatisfaction with the present. 

I'm picking on the Middle Ages, but I could do a similar exercise on any of the mini-sacred orders that emerged after the Reformation. It got worse before it got better: witch trials, the Münster Anabaptist revolt, Calvin's oppressive theocracy in Geneva, the Thirty Years' War, the eradication and forced conversions of indigenous peoples, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Protestants in France — the list goes on, hedgehogs killing other hedgehogs for reasons that appear trivial four centuries later. 

That's what an awareness of the past means for me, by the way: a reminder of a world we don't want to return to. 

The villain in Kingsnorth's story is the Enlightenment, which put science and reason at the center of Western civilization rather than Christ. That's only half true, though. He downplays how much Christianity had discredited itself by the eighteenth century. Centuries of medieval ecclesiastical corruption, followed by generations of sectarian strife after the Reformation, will do that. Don't blame the Enlightenment for Christianity's failings. 

Though it might not seem that way, given all that I have just written, my goal here is not to denigrate Christianity, per se, but to disenchant its past from the nostalgia merchants who would idealize it from the good, safe distance of six centuries. Their goal is to condemn today's more individualistic, therapeutic culture as some sort of moral abomination. It isn't. There’s always been a chasm between elite moral theory and ordinary life. That's probably a good thing for humanity. 

Ruins always look breathtaking from a distance, but you don't want to live in them. The same goes for the past. That's an important point to remember when listening to hedgehogs preach about how it ought to be in the future.

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Final Thoughts

I'd add one more thing worth remembering: Christianity has never been monolithic. Its greatest strength has been its ability to adapt to diverse cultural milieus. The Christianity of third-century Asia Minor is radically different from that of fourteenth-century England, and both are alien to contemporary Christianity, which itself comprises a multitude of denominations across many countries. Every time and place has its own unique expression of Christianity, and some are quite different from each other.

He writes, ‘The West’ today thinks in numbers and words, but can’t write poetry to save its life. ‘The West’ is the kingdom of Mammon. ‘The West’ eats the world, and eats itself, that it may continue to ‘grow’. ‘The West’ knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. ‘The West’ is exhausted and empty.

And, "Cut loose in a postmodern present, with no centre, no truth and no direction, we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers of the self."

That's the disillusioned hedgehog talking. I don't buy it. 

What I've seen over the last few years since my return to America challenges Kingsnorth's all-encompassing Machine metaphor. I find churches packed on Sundays, thriving farmers' markets, community events like concerts, over-crowded marathons, and stadiums full of sports fans. My stint volunteering at the local food bank turned into a kind of social club because so many volunteers would show up that we didn't have much to do. 

In my average Midwest city of 100,000 people, Bloomington-Normal, there are around 193 religious organizations, mostly Christian churches. People here still pray; they gather and worship. Perhaps not in the traditional Orthodox way that Kingsnorth does, but they do so nonetheless.  

This doesn't sound like a culture that's 'exhausted and empty.' It's what's out there when one stops doomscrolling and engages directly with the world, which, to be fair, is what Kingnorth wants more of. I agree with him on that. My point is that this is already happening far more than you would conclude just by reading his book or staring at a screen all day.

Of course, a personal anecdote is not evidence, but it serves as a reality check for me. It's possible that what I'm seeing is atypical, though I suspect it's not. I would only request that you, dear reader, examine if Kingsnorth's apocalyptic vision matches your own experience. Or, perhaps, like me, you're being nudged by content algorithmically engineered to distract, addict, and outrage you. Are you representative of that Optimism Gap I discussed above: "I'm happy but the world sucks?" I confess that's the case with me. 

It's wickedly difficult these days not to be influenced by what we see online. I get that. I'm not immune either. Instead, lean on real life, not the screen, as your baseline. If you do that, my bet is that the world doesn't look nearly as fallen as it's being portrayed. 

But it's more than that. I'm not nearly as anti-tech as Kingsnorth. For certain purposes like learning and connecting with others of shared interests, it's a godsend. And I disagree with Kingsnorth on the state of the culture. Our era overflows with poetry, music, and art, and the internet has made it possible to both share our own creative work and experience the awesome creativity of others out there who would otherwise not have a voice. This blog is an example of that. Another is Substack, where Kingsnorth calls home.

While I share Kingsnorth's concern about the corrosive effect of digital technologies on society — and have written about it occasionally over the years (here, here, here, and here) — I've come to believe this is a question of agency. We all have a choice about how we engage with the world, about how much we stare at a screen, and what purposes we pursue. I'd rather have those choices than not. I'd rather live in a fox's world of material abundance and individual autonomy than one of limitations and prohibitions — i.e., a hedgehog's world. 

I would point out another tension in Kingsnorth's anti-Machine manifesto: he's found a lucrative niche on Substack. There, he's created an online, screen-mediated community where he can post his anti-Machine essays and make a lot of money doing so. Two of his hated Ss, the Screen and the Self, are tailor-made for Substack, a site that emphasizes the individual author over the large publication. He's done a masterful job creating a community of shared interest on his own Substack page: the Abbey of Misrule. 

I applaud this. A fox's world has room for everyone, including the hedgehogs who hate it. Alas, the inverse is rarely true. 

And after 200 pages of 'Death to the West,' all Kingsnorth can muster at the end is a tepid call for people to withdraw from the Machine as much as possible. He understands that not everyone can make enough money by writing to buy a farm in the remote Irish countryside and live a low-tech, pre-modern life. The rest of us must get by the best we can. 

On the last page of his book, he writes, "I have come to the end now, and here is what I think: that the age of the Machine is not after all a hopeless time. Actually, it is the time we were born for. We can’t leave it, so we have to fully inhabit it. We have to understand it, challenge it, resist it, subvert it, walk through it on towards something better. If we can see what it is, we have a duty to speak the words to those who do not yet see, all the while struggling to remain human."

I say, fine, there's space in this world for such an approach to life. That said, over the last year or so, I've grown weary of the naysayers, the doomsters, and those who would rather tear the whole thing down and start over. They're part of the problem, either actively or passively. There's too much resignation, apathy, and quietism in this worldview. I've come to abhor it. Rather, we should have some gratitude for the fortune we all have to be alive today, when such preferences (and so many others) can still be pursued openly. 

It's never been this way before in all of human history. If it took the deconstruction of the old sacred order to make it this way, then fine. Good riddance. Moreover, don't look at the world as a Machine. We're part of a vibrant civilization built over generations by millions of men and women working to make it what it is today. Human flourishing has reached levels unimaginable to most of our ancestors.

Should we expect any restored sacred order to do any better? I doubt it. 

Of course, the world we live in is far from perfect. We face immense challenges like climate change and the rise of neo-fascism that could easily derail the future. I find the daily mass slaughter of sentient animals done for our dining pleasure to be a moral travesty. 

No, don't count me as one of those guys who think progress marches inevitably into a Star Trek future. It doesn't. It can all come undone very fast. But I marvel at the tangible moral and material progress we have made over the last two centuries. 

Our responsibility, therefore, should be to preserve what we have, reform what's broken, and work to make the future better for our children and our children's children, rather than longing for it all to fall apart because it doesn't agree with one's reactionary worldview. 

In other words, defend and cherish the West, not destroy it. Yes, that is the way!

I think you would find the alternatives appalling. 

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Berlin, Isaiah, and Henry Hardy. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. Princeton University Press, 2013.

Huizinga, Johan. The Autumn of the Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Kingsnorth, Paul. Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. Thesis, 2025.

Manchester, William. A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age. Little, Brown, 1998.

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PDW

January 17, 2026

Dry Grove, Il