The continuing rightward drift of Paul Kingsnorth (cofounder of The Dark Mountain Project, essayist, novelist and self-described "recovering environmental activist") is interesting to observe. On his Facebook page, he posts articles from conservative magazines such as "Unherd" (my nominee for most sanctimonious publication title in recent years), The Spectator (edited by Boris Johnson from 1999-2005) and The American Conservative, co-founded by Pat Buchanan in 2002 and currently edited by Rob Dreher, who also appears to write most of its articles at this time. Rob Dreher is a conservative who focuses a fair amount of his energy on crusades against gay civil rights (writing apoplectic posts about Chick-fil-A when they agreed to stop funding anti-gay campaigns, as one example among an ongoing list of such work) and writing articles bemoaning the "woke-pocalypse" (my term) and what he considers to be out of control and overzealous people working on behalf of misguided notions of "diversity." Kingsnorth is maintains a strong intellectual relationship with Dreher, who recently published an extensive interview with him, as well as a glowing review of his most recent novel, "Alexandria."
Kingsnorth is a smart guy, a very good writer and somebody with views on localism versus capitalist globalization, the global industrial consumer capitalist economy I agree with. However, upon reading the articles promoted by Kingsnorth on his FB page, I found the substance of them to be reactionary and facile in their analysis of the ongoing cultural crisis of the West. A comment I wrote about one of the articles promoted by Kingsnorth sparked an exchange between myself and him on his Facebook page, which I'll detail below.
Last summer, when Kingsnorth posted an essay by John Gray that dismissed the 2020 anti-police violence uprisings in the US as the unconsidered work of mostly over-educated upper middle class white intellectuals and also stated that he (Kingsnorth) didn't have an opinion on what was driving the protests, I commented. I said that he should take a stance on a basic human rights issue such as police violence against unarmed Black Americans if he were going to promote an article which holds a very contrarian stance on the topic and we had a somewhat heated back-and-forth. Kingsnorth's point was that he should not be required to take public stands on every human rights issue facing the world currently, that such a demand is unreasonable. That is true. But he promoted an article that does take a stand on such an issue.
Responding point by point to the shallow takes I've encountered in pieces by Dreher and stuff Kingsnorth has linked to from Unherd would require a lengthy essay, if not a book. For now, suffice it to say, the angle being peddled by them is that movements for social justice, such as BLM and groups fighting anti-trans bigotry, are not actually responses to long standing oppression and exploitation of disenfranchised people, but are cause célèbres dreamed up by bored, naïve and perpetually adolescent people of upper middle class white status. I don't find much, if any, evidence to support that take. And I find it to be analytically lazy, unsubstantiated and extremely out of touch.
Part 2 - Kingnorth's Christianity & Mine
Kingsnorth identifies the malaise that grips the West as found in our lack of recognition of something greater than ourselves, than the merely human. In Christianity and in certain aspects of conservatism, he believes he has located that something. Indeed, England has a Western pre-capitalist Christian tradition that the US does not and it appears to be from there that he is deriving much of his inspiration. His essay "The Dream of the Rood," goes very deeply into this theme of the culture of "Christendom" in Europe that preceded the Enlightenment.
Having grown up Catholic, my experience of Christianity was radically different than what Kingsnorth is positing. While I did gain capacities for ethical thinking from my Jesuit education, for which I am grateful, I'm not sure that Christianity provided me with a lot of the awe or reverence for the sacredness of the Earth the Kingsnorth claims it does. On the contrary, Catholicism quite often was projecting my thinking into the abstract and the speculative, asking me to initiate a dialogue and build a relationship with an invisible 3-part being whose most important stories occurred 2-3000 years ago in the Middle East - in a landscape that looked nothing like the Wisconsin where I grew up, among people whose history I knew nothing about.
Paul Kingsnorth is on his own journey and I shall not be accompanying him. In his recent essays, there is a portentousness, a feeling of strained naivety and of the authoritatively patriarchal that repels.
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