The West's rejection of its own culture may have led it to a crisis

Perhaps the only way out of its current anxiety is to start afresh instead of trying to reverse course

- NITIN PAI

My previous column was a reflection on how America, like the triumphant Yadus after the Kurukshetra war, might be defeating itself from within.

Today, I want to discuss a grand diagnosis of where the West, in general, went wrong and why it finds itself wrapped in anxiety and insecurity. I found it in Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, never mind his conflation of the West's particular predicament with that of the rest of world.

It is one of those rare books that I liked a lot despite disagreeing with many of the author's arguments. It makes grand claims without presenting empirical evidence. It invites the reader to accept the author's life experiences as a guide to one’s own. It looks to the past for answers to problems of the future. Normally, any one of these would have caused me to label the book as dubious and discard. Yet, how could I dismiss a book that recommends throwing away your television set and limiting exposure to social media?

Kingsnorth argues that “the West, in short was Christendom. But Christendom died.” This left Western culture without a “sacred order,” or as societies without higher meaning. The vacuum that Christianity left was filled by consumerism and the pursuit of money. Reason, industrial society, technology, market capitalism and economic growth are facets of what he calls “the Machine,” which is unstoppable and has entrapped humans. It’s the Matrix: