In a fabulous essay on the ambiguities of Paul Kingsnorth’s lifelong project as summed up in his new book, Against the Machine, Adam Smith takes a stab at defining “the Machine”:

There are various ways to explain what the Machine is, but one way is to start with that fact. If writing books about it is a trap, it’s because the Machine is the sort of thing—though crucially it is not an actual thing—that assimilates resistance. The Machine is a judo artist who uses an opponent’s own energy against him. It thrives on attention, and negative is as good as positive, maybe even better. The Machine is Lululemon selling pricey work-out shirts emblazoned with anti-capitalist slogans to aspiring young socialists. The Machine is people standing patiently in line to see the fourth Matrix movie, vaccine passports in hand. The Machine is people buying Against the Machine on Amazon. The Machine is a website dedicated to local life.

It is perhaps impossibly self-indulgent to note that on a previous occasion, writing in reaction to an essay by N. S. Lyons, I made a similar (if much less elegantly articulated) observation about that other perennial bugaboo, “the Enlightenment”: “Every Counter-Enlightenment inevitably has a great deal of Enlightenment still in it.” In the jargon of critical theory, attempts to subvert the Machine typically end up reinscribing the Machine’s logic. “Modernity,” “capitalism,” “Enlightenment,” “Machine” — all have this quality of indefinitely, and at first invisibly, co-opting their opposition.

This, I have come to think, is the quality characteristic of the demon whom Jesus called Mammon. And if Mammon is not himself the “prince of the power of the air,” he is at least the ruling “spirit of this age.” He is, fundamentally, the demon of reductive exchange: I will take this complex personal reality in front of you, he whispers, and turn it into a complicated balance sheet. He turns the infinitely valuable into something valued, something you can manipulate and trade. He turns the I-Thou into a much more convenient and less demanding I-It.

There is almost nothing on which Mammon cannot work his gentle sterilizing magic. The only exception is found at Golgotha, in the convergence of Cross and empty tomb. Mammon cannot make sense of it. Mammon in his time has sent many to their deaths — even highly valued and useful deaths (indeed, for a righteous person one might even dare to die). But this apparently pointless death of God’s Son — for the wayward orphans? This taking of the world’s sins in exchange for divine righteousness? And the glorying of the redeemed in — the Cross? The joyful exchange does not compute in the world of reductive exchange. Even more is Mammon perplexed by what this “rising from the dead” means. Never has he heard of such a thing. After all, in his world there is no new possibility, nothing unprecedented, nothing without analogy. Life, indeed, is a mystery to Mammon, only made sensible by conversion into the terms of death. But this now-indestructible life beyond death? It is all foolishness, indeed, a scandal to right-thinking people.

The only escape from or resistance to the Machine — that is to say, Mammon — is to live each moment in the power of the Cross, as if the death and resurrection of Christ have truly reconstituted the world, according to the logic and power not of reductive exchange but of the joyful exchange. “These men,” exclaimed the indignant Thessalonian citizen-mob, “who have turned the world upside down have come here also!” That is the authentic exclamation of Mammon when faced with the true gospel. When you meet someone whose life is truly kept free of the love of money (not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect!), you will easily recognize the sublime simplicity of one who lives by the joyful exchange.

So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Let the Cross be our glory and the resurrection the source of our moral order. Everything else Mammon can co-opt, but not those. And once everything else is subjected to those, Mammon will have precious little room. He will wither away into the shadow of Unbeing which he truly is and has been the whole time. So this is the final point: do not be against Mammon simply for the sake of being against Mammon. You must indeed be against him — you cannot serve two masters — but be against him as the natural result of your being for God, the God who is for us.