“The point, I think, is to be found beneath the surface layer of politics, and beneath the lower layers of nationhood, ethnicity, and culture too. The point, as ever, is spiritual. If our nations seem hollowed-out, if our countries seem to be prey for the Machine, surely it is because they have no soul. If people, place, prayer, and the past are the group upon which real culture is built, many of us today would have to look at our own countries and conclude that they have no real connection to any of these. Blame the immigrants if you like—it’s always the easiest option—but they didn’t strip the soul out of the West. We did. Do you think you can build your country around nothing but money and then complain when people want to come in and earn some of it themselves?” (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

“As you get older, you realize both why home matters and how fragile and elusive it is. Then you find you are living in a world whose forces have set out to destroy your sense of home wherever it can be found.” (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

I can still smell my grandmother's house. She's been gone now for going on ten years but the memory of her cooking is still there. It's a more visceral memory than almost anything I have from any of the houses I grew up in. It taps into something deeper, a tradition of cooking that was brought with her out of Poland and re-rooted itself in her home in Oshawa. Some of her kids have carried it on in small ways, but I think a lot of it has been forgotten.

Our disconnect from a sense of rootedness, or home, is hard to notice. It's not one thing, nor is it immediate. It happens slowly, subtly over time and through many different things. It's the loss of the traditional way of doing things in exchange for faster and easier. It's the unfamiliarity many of us feel towards the natural world, even that which is directly around us. It's the forgetting of stories, of songs, of cultural artifacts that hold deep significance to where we came from. It's the creeping dominance of a digital world and culture that is swallowing everything else.

The last few Christmas Eve's I have attempted to make a Polish dish for my family meal. It's a small nod to that sense of home I feel when I think of my grandmother's house. This year we attempted a Sernik, a Polish cheesecake. All four of us were involved in this tricky process of making something we'd never made before. It was fun—and delicious.

"But a value system which glorifies wealth and accumulation, which builds itself on a platform of want, which inflames and creates more of it daily through a marketing machine that colonizes the human mind—this is what every spiritual tradition in history has warned against, and with good reason." (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

Just tagging off yesterday's post here with a followup quote from the book that I think hits what I was getting at a bit better. The point here isn't to say that a religious society is better or more just—far from it. Nor should we equate modern religious identity with its pre-modern versions. Capitalism has consumed religion just as much as anything else. But, there is wisdom to be found in these traditions if we are willing to listen.

"The notion that the Machine is inevitable and natural, and that there is no 'realistic' alternative to its reign, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is also a fiction...

The reality is that Machine capitalism did not 'evolve' from small-scale artisan of peasant societies: they had to be deliberately destroyed in order that it might replace them." (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

Capitalism does not feed the local economy; it feeds on it. It preys on our sentiment and tells us a story to make us feel as though we are supporting local businesses but instead it is devouring any semblance of that. A good example of this has been the 'Buy Canadian' response to US tariffs over the last year. Many massive corporations exploited this idea in order to increase their profit margins while their existence hurts actual local, independent retailers. Not to mention that the little of the profit of those larger corporations stays within the community.

“Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer could." (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

The sort of central point—at least in the early parts of this book—is that we have all become uprooted by The Machine, a sort of loose term for the global crisis that has severed us from tradition, culture, nature, community, ourselves, etc... It is driven by the global economy and although it was created by the West we can see it being furthered by States all around the world.

We have all been uprooted.