I want to say that this ‘West’ is not a thing to be ‘conserved’

 So if you ask me to help ‘defend the West’ now, I will reply that, though this place is my home and the home of my ancestors, I can’t avoid the reality that the modern ‘West’ birthed the Machine, and is building that inhuman future. Something in our way of seeing contained a seed that unmade the world. I have been examining this seed now for hundreds of pages. Do I want it 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 It is a thing to be superseded.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.

Sometimes, you have to know when to let go.

‘The West’ has become an idol; some kind of static image of a past that maybe once was but is now inhabited by a new force: the Machine. ‘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.

Maybe, then, just maybe, we need to let ‘the West’ die. Let it die so that we can live. Maybe we need to let this concept fall away. To let it crumble so that we can see what lies beneath. Stop all the ‘fighting’ to preserve something nobody can even define, something which has long lost its heart and soul. Stop clinging to the side of the sinking hull as the band plays on. We struck the iceberg long ago; it must be time, at last, to stop clinging to the shifting metal. To let go and begin swimming, out towards the place where the light plays on the water. Just out there. Do you see? Beyond; just beyond. There is something waiting out there, but you have to strike out to reach it. You have to let go.

Forget, then, about ‘defending the West’. Think instead about rebuilding a real human culture, from the roots. If we have gone down a blind alley, then we need to back up, to turn around and discover where we went wrong. We need a counter-revolution: a restoration. We need to overthrow the emissary and put the real master back in his place. If we are attending to the world wrongly—if our way of seeing is up the spout—well, then we are going to have to start seeing differently. But first we have to try and unmoor ourselves from this one.

Where would we start?

McGilchrist would tell us that we should start by changing our quality of attention. This may sound nebulous, but it is anything but. If our left-hemisphere-dominated minds cause us to pay attention to the world in one way, then we need to train them, bit by it, to pay attention in another. ‘Attention changes the world’, he writes. ‘How you attend to it changes what it is you find there’.

What would this mean in practice? I think we know already. It would mean attending to the ways of seeing that were central to past cultures, but that Western modernity relentlessly dismisses or downplays as unprofitable, unrealistic, romantic and all the rest. Perhaps central to this is an effort to see the world as an organism rather than a mechanism, and then to express it that way, through art, through creativity, through writing, through our conversations. The last part is the hardest, very often, but maybe the most important too. If we refuse to see the world or its inhabitants as machines, if we are suspicious of rationalisations and dogmatic insistence and easy answers and false divisions, even for a moment, then we are making a start.

This is in effect a rebellion against a whole way of seeing, but that rebellion is also well established by now. I think that, at some unconscious level, we want to win it. Emotional, cultural and spiritual resistance to the Machine has been going on for centuries, and the need for it only grows more urgent. We can take part by going outside and praying beneath the moon, or just sitting in the grass and really experiencing the rain. We can seek to be reasonable rather than rational, and to distinguish intelligence from wisdom.

Once you try to view the world through McGilchrist’s hemispheric understanding of culture, you will probably find that it looks quite different. Look at the world of politics, for example, and you’ll soon notice that both ‘left’ and ‘right’ are, in McGilchrist’s hemispheric terms, both very much on the left. Compare a modern skyscraper and an old cottage, or a Byzantine icon and a Picasso. Or consider contemporary language compared to its older equivalent: nature versus biodiversity, mothers versus chestfeeders, people versus human resources. Consider countries, religions, stories, communities or families from both right- and left-hemisphere viewpoints. How do they look? How do they feel? Like complex, delicate networks of relationship—or like mechanisms to be deconstructed and rebuilt at will?

The attempt to live without the rest of nature, to conquer the world, to rationalise and remake it from the top down and bottom up: this began here, in ‘the West’. So here’s a thought: the alternative needs to come from here too. We started the revolution, so we need to start the restoration. We understand the Machine better than anyone, because it’s in us. We unmade the world. Now we are going to have to remake it again.

We Western people: we have to learn how to inhabit again. We have to learn how to live sanely in our lands. How to write poems and walk in the woods and love our neighbours. How to have the time to even notice them. How to take an interest in the parts without detaching them from the whole. How to remember that the Earth is alive and always was, and that no ‘culture’ which forgets that can last, or deserves to.

Beyond ‘the West’ there might just be another way of seeing. An older way. Beyond the West, we might find Europe. We might find Albion. We might find Cockayne, or Doggerland. We might find the mind that painted the cave walls. We might find hunters and clear rivers and countries and saints and spirits and painted churches. We might find shrines and pilgrim routes and folk music and fear of the sea. We might find ourselves again.

Could we even find home?

Paul Kingsnorth

Against the Machine. On the Unmaking of Humanity