Mechanical Flaws
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
by Paul Kingsnorth
Twenty years ago, I read a short essay by Theodore Dalrymple, “The Law Is Not Enough,” which appeared in the Autumn 2005 issue of City Journal. In it, Dalrymple told a story about an interview he gave to a polite, well-dressed Dutch correspondent discussing Europe’s civilizational decline. When Dalrymple pointed to the proliferation of tattoos and piercings as signs of cultural rot, the correspondent, who confessed that he would not get a tattoo himself or ever want his children to acquire one, wanted to know what was wrong with tattoos, seeing that there was no law against them. What I remember most about the essay was Dalrymple’s concluding paragraph: “What I found so odd about the correspondent were his perfect manners and refined tastes. But so little confidence did he have in the value of the things that he valued that he seemed indifferent to the mechanism of their disappearance or destruction.”
I’ve gone back to this story many times over the years because I often wonder what Dalrymple could have said to the correspondent, if not to change his mind (the correspondent presented no real opinions of his own to change), at least to get him to reconsider the rather dire presumptions that allowed him to shrug off Europe’s cultural collapse. And although, even now, more than twenty years since my initial encounter with Dalrymple’s correspondent, I still don’t have the words that might have helped him “value the things that he valued,” I do have, thanks to Paul Kingsnorth, a better understanding of that correspondent’s impenetrable indifference to the decline that surrounded him.
The Faustian Machine
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