Myth and the Machine

The following lecture was delivered to teachers attending the ACCS Repairing the Ruins Conference Thursday, June 25, 2026 in Atlanta.

In Thoroughness & Charm, I ask classical teachers to consider themselves as “guardians of a tradition and keepers of a culture” precisely because you, teachers, are on the front lines of a battle between the real and the artificial, between the embodied and the virtual, between the communal and the solitary.

We say in classical education that we pass on to our students the best of what the West has said, thought, created, and that is true. But what I want to impress upon you this morning is that we are facing a future where some thing other than a man is going to “say, think” and “create.” And we are gathered here in communitas* to remember the human things that have been thought, spoken, created in our collective past, which belong to us as an inherited patrimony. These are the cultural artifacts we need to bring to our students and celebrate in our classrooms because they tell the story we want embedded in our students’ hearts.

In his controversial book, Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth argues that capitalism and greed have overthrown hierarchy, tradition, and even nature to create a machine that runs our lives covertly and consensually. While I don’t follow all of his premises to his conclusion, I do know that I agree with his solution. We must repair our culture through story and ritual.