Can We Make the World “Better”? | From My Interview With Paul Kingsnorth
Paul Kingsnorth is an acclaimed cultural critic, novelist, gentleman farmer, essayist, and recent convert to Orthodox Christianity. He talks a lot about our contemporary “Machine” culture and the influence of technology on our lives, so it seemed logical that my first interview on this new platform would be with him. If you aren’t already familiar with his Substack, I’d encourage you to check it out!
YANAM: You mention ideology and the hope for big solutions as a dead-end that you’ve encountered, which suggests that one should perhaps focus more humbly on oneself and one’s immediate community. What do you see as the path forward for someone who is seeking meaning, reality, and to make changes that are meaningful for themselves as well as for the people around them? What are some of the most important things that you think they should be looking at?
PK: Well, I’m always a bit nervous to give advice because it makes it sound like I know what I’m doing. So I’m not sure that I do, but I have met plenty of people who do. I’ve always been a localist in political and economic terms, in the sense that I think small is beautiful. I believe societies work best when they’re connected to the ground and to place. There may be a kind of spiritual component to that as well, a kind of spiritual localism, where you have to start with yourself. Many people dislike that idea; they think it means that you’re selfish or self-absorbed and that you should be out there acting in the world, helping the poor, and doing charity work. Those are good things to do, but if you haven’t balanced yourself out, you’re not going to balance the world out.
The thing that people should do most of all is find a spiritual path and follow that path, and it should be the true path. They have to work out for themselves what that is. I think I know, but I’m not going to evangelize. They need to work on themselves. We could do worse than rejuvenating the idea that doing small work is actually quite good. We often think that, in the West, everything has to be enormous to be significant. If we’re not saving the whole world from climate change, then there’s no point in doing anything. Solutions have to apply to everybody, and everybody has to be saved. It doesn’t work like that; you can’t do that anyway. What you can do is quite limited; whoever you are. I can write some things, talk to a few people, do gardening on my land, and bring up my children while trying to do that wisely—probably failing half the time. That’s what I can do. I can’t stop climate change or elect good politicians; there are many things I can’t do. So maybe if you accept the limits to start with, that’s a good start. Then ask yourself: What can I do? How can I achieve wisdom? How can I use that wisdom for the benefit of the people and places around me?
There’s a wonderful quote from American poet Gary Snyder. He was riffing off Andy Warhol’s idea that in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes, and he said in the future, everybody should aim to be famous for 15 miles. I thought that’s really nice—that sense of doing something meaningful in your place with the people around you is a good thing. If you can do that, you’d be achieving a lot. Most of us don’t get to do that. So I think…don’t be ashamed to be small, to work on yourself, and to do all you can around you; that’s a lot more valuable than spending your time on the Internet having arguments about what should happen in the Middle East or something. You can’t do anything about that, but there are things you can influence—focus on them. That’s what I would say.
YANAM: What are you working on now?
PK: Well, I’ve always got about 100 things on at once. One of the things I’m doing at the moment is turning my essays I’ve been writing over the last few years about the Machine—about the technological society we’re living in—and some of the things it’s been talking about into a book. It’s going to be published by Penguin in the States, and hopefully I’ll get some publishers elsewhere. So I’ve got to spend the next few months turning Internet essays into something that reads as a book; that’ll keep me busy.
I’m also tentatively writing two things on my Substack, “The Abbey of Misrule,” at the moment. I’m writing a series of little pilgrimage stories. I turned 50 last year, and I decided that I was going to have a personal pilgrimage. I thought I would visit 50 holy wells around Ireland in a year. Ireland’s got 3,000 holy wells; it’s amazing! I think it’s the highest number in the world. So I visited 50 of them, took photos of them, and researched them; there were little stories attached to all of them that are very interesting. I’m doing one of those a week—writing these little pilgrimage tales—and I’m really enjoying it.
What I’m also doing is starting to write stories of the lives of some of the early Christian Saints, which I’m calling “Lives of the Wild Saints.” I’m writing particularly about the wilderness tradition in Christianity because I think it has something to tell us about the times we’re living in. The aspect of the Christian faith that attracts me most—in terms of how people have lived—is the tradition of the desert fathers and hermits who lived in caves and forests, fled the world, and went into the wilds to seek God. There’s something there that’s very different from what we imagine religion or Christianity to be in the world today—it often seems very civilized and sometimes irrelevant—but it also connects us back to our spiritual traditions’ roots.
I believe we’re living in a spiritual void at the moment; we’re flailing around looking for meaning. We could do much worse than go back to the stories of those who’ve done this before us. If you want an optimistic message, collapsing civilizations is not a new thing. People searching for spiritual meaning and flailing around in this void is not new either; it’s a pretty eternal human problem. In this sense, we’re just where we’ve been many times before. We can look back at our spiritual traditions and ask: What did our ancestors have to say about this? While we’re living in a very different world than they did, we’re still just as human—we experience similar emotions and reactions. By exploring these stories of interesting overlooked wild people, we might find some lessons relevant for us now. I’m trying to tell those stories; I’m enjoying this new departure—it’s good fun!