One of the great intellectual provocateurs of our time, Paul Kingsnorth, is headed to Madison for a Nov. 9 lecture on the UW-Madison campus.

Kingsnorth’s most recent book — Against The Machine: On The Unmaking Of Humanity — is a deep and unsettling examination of the technological imperative at the heart of modern life.

An English-born essayist/novelist/poet/ and a once upon a time green movement leader, Kingsnorth is a singular figure. He tacks right on the culture issues that roil a town like Madison. Yet he champions Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto for what he sees as its enduring insights on the societal costs of voracious capitalism.

It’s clear from his history that Kingsnorth is a classic “seeker,” a man in search of meaning. A practicing Wiccan early on and later a Buddhist, he now embraces the Romanian Orthodox Church. He rose to prominence in England as a Green leader only to conclude that environmentalism had been captured by the machine as well.

By the “machine” he means the global systems of control rooted in industrialism, materialism, and above all technology that replaces a living nature. (I am summing up a helpful AI reply.)

“I haven’t been an activist environmentalist for quite a long time,” Kingsnorth says in a telephone interview from Ireland, where he lives with his wife and two children. “I’m still motivated by my love of nature and a desire to protect it. But I no longer have any faith” that a political movement will deliver on his hopes.

He goes on: “There’s an environmental movement today that is very mainstream, very much about making capitalism stable with the use of technology. More and more people are interested in solar panels and wind farms.”

This is not said as a compliment.

“It breaks my heart,” he says of the environmental movement.

Kingsnorth broadens his indictment to include what he sees as the takeover of the movement by the left’s tireless social justice activists. Not good either, he says. For Kingsnorth, protecting nature is primarily a moral and spiritual obligation and not a political one. (He cites the late Wendell Berry, the Kentucky antiquarian philosopher, and Simone Weil, the French mystic who died in World War II, as his inspirations.)

If all this personal history produces a degree of vertigo in readers and journalists, it’s perhaps understandable. You sense the irritation in the headlining of the marquee profiles of Kingsnorth in The New Yorker (“A Dark Ecologist Warns Against Hope”) The New York Times Magazine (“It’s The End Of The World As We know It...And He Feels Fine”) and “ The Atlantic (“What A Cranky New Book About Progress Gets Right”).

Truth is, Kingsnorth is the proverbial cocklebur under the saddle of most contemporary thinkers. And there is something serious, powerful and coherent to his critique. Does anyone doubt that we live in dangerous times?

And, yes, I’m talking about everything from giant data centers devouring the countryside for purposes not entirely clear, to autonomous artificial intelligence “agents” programming themselves independently of human control, to Bill Gates’ startling — no, make that mind-blowing — admission that artificial intelligence could kill a billion people. Less abstract and more painful to consider is the suicide story of a Florida teenager who sought advice from a supportive chatbot before hanging himself.

Not to be outdone on the fear frontier, veteran Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, in a carefully detailed investigation, says Silicon Valley leaders are already quietly girding themselves for their “day after” response to a catastrophic hacking of U.S. infrastructure and/or financial systems.

This doomy prediction happens to be a good fit for Kingsnorth, who sees darkness all about. “We in the West are living inside an obsolete story,” he writes in Against The Machine. “Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead. And we are in denial. This, now, is the reality we have to wrestle with, and transcend.”

The search for transcendence in every day seems very much the motivation for Kingsnorth and his wife packing up for County Galway to raise their two children on a semi-self-supporting rural homestead. Computer screens and smartphones were not allowed in their home. Not surprisingly the kids were homeschooled and later enrolled in a Waldorf program, which follows a quirky but revered alternative educational philosophy.

“They’re older teenagers now, so they have their own computers and things, but grew up in a screen-free and phone-free childhood,” Kingsnorth says. “I think that’s made all the difference in the kind of people they’ve become.”

This sort of measured realism strikes me as essential for functioning in the modern world. Kingsnorth may eschew the use of a smartphone, but points out he is conversing with me via WhatsApp. “I use social media,” he says , including posting on his Substack, The Abbey Of Misrule. (It has almost 85,000 subscribers.)

“There are things you have to do for your work and some things you can avoid,” he says. ‘It’s an ongoing compromise, an ongoing negotiation you have depending on your lifestyle.”

For Kingsnorth that means carving out time to chop wood, tend to his beehives, fish with his kids, teach a class in scything, raise a new puppy...and build a small writers cabin separate from his home to conduct digital business.

“I think the future hasn’t looked very good for the last 100 years or so,” he tells me. “But at the end of the day, we don't know where things are going, so all we can do is live our lives in a way that promotes what we think is true.

“Because if we don’t have values, if we don’t have a spiritual core, if we don’t know who we are as a country or what we are as a people or, whatever, then it really doesn’t make much sense to talk about anything called western culture, because it’s all been reduced to pure materialism at this point.”

Paul Kingsnorth will deliver a free public lecture on “What Is A Human?” on Nov. 9 at the University of Wisconsin’s Pyle Center from 5 p.m.-6:30 p.m. at the Alumni Lounge. The UW Center For The Study Of Liberal Democracy is the sponsor. In-person registration is at capacity but virtual tickets are available.