Mr. Berry’s co-belligerents

The opening paragraphs of Brad East’s review of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine asks a good question, and provides a nice list of writers and thinkers that should be of interest to anyone who has benefited from Mr. Berry’s work:

Wendell Berry turned ninety-one last summer, and though he has not yet put down his pen, his life and career are nearing their end. For nearly seventy years Berry has been writing poems, novels, and essays—longer than many people’s whole lives. His work has always spoken from and for another world, a lost world, one that for the rest of us is beyond recovery or even memory. And it now possesses a double measure of distance, because in his time Berry was a contemporary, cobelligerent, or friend of so many famed critics of the technological society: Thomas Merton, C. S. Lewis, Romano Guardini, R. S. Thomas, Lewis Mumford, Edward Abbey, Jacques Ellul, Wallace Stegner, Marshall McLuhan, Ivan Illich, Mary Midgley, Guy Davenport, Leo Marx, Ursula Franklin, Christopher Lasch, Neil Postman, Walker Percy, George Grant, Denise Levertov, John Lukacs, Albert Borgmann, and Gary Snyder. Besides Snyder, who is four years older than Berry, these great humanists are all deceased. They belong to another age, all of them born before World War II. This raises the question: Once Berry goes on to his reward, who will take up his mantle?

There are some serious candidates: Byung-Chul Han, Hartmut Rosa, Alan Jacobs, Nicholas Carr, Matthew Crawford, Andy Crouch, L. M. Sacasas, Antón Barba-Kay. Each of these writers is a formidable analyst of the digital age, has studied the older generation of thinkers listed above, and is read widely. But none of them is a poet or a novelist, unlike Berry, who is both. They write essays and nonfiction books in addition to blogs and Substacks, but they don’t produce works of the imagination.

There is one contemporary critic of the technological society who has produced such work: Paul Kingsnorth