American Ghosts

On feeling strange, living well, and asking important questions

Jul 01, 2026

A Few Confessions

I paid someone to mow my grass last week. His name was Jesus. I had to pay a man named Jesus to cut my grass because I had gotten busy and procrastinated and the last of the spring rain came with a vengeance and the grass grew really tall and my push mower could not handle it. I was working in my studio when I heard the familiar sound of a mower start up and I peeked out the window and the sight of a stranger mowing my grass made me feel strange inside. I felt some shame that I had let the grass get so tall and I also felt a little sadness that I probably wouldn’t be seeing the rabbits dine on the clover that had sprouted amidst my procrastination anytime soon.

I made a divisive post on Instagram last week. It was about artificial intelligence and creating art and when I posted it, I knew that it would gain some traction because it would make people feel justified in hating another ignorant luddite who hates artificial intelligence or justified in finding another fellow luddite who hates artificial intelligence. I don’t think I was wrong in my argument but the sight of a stranger calling me a stupid fool and another stranger commenting, “truth” made me feel strange. I felt some shame that I had used a platform that continually causes harm and widened the chasm a little more by stirring it up for my own gain and I also felt a little sadness that I probably distanced myself from a person who I would have genuinely liked and could have had a really interesting, productive conversation.

I bought some jeans at Target the other day. I don’t usually shop for clothes at Target and will buy clothes second hand at Goodwill but I needed a pair of nice jeans because my old ones had holes in them and I thought I needed them that very second. When I rushed out of the store, because I was in a hurry, I glanced at myself in the security monitor they post above the self checkout line and I saw someone who just spent seventy dollars on a pair of jeans and I felt strange. I felt shame about contributing to a system that takes advantage of its laborers and I felt a little sadness that I had missed out on the little pangs of love I feel when I see my wife patching a pair of old jeans or sewing a button on one my shirts.

These confessions are just small insights into the life of someone who is resisting and resisting is hard. I don’t want to be so busy that I can’t mow my yard. I don’t want to contribute to the rage and malice that pours from the sinful spigot of social media. I don’t want to spend seventy dollars on a pair of jeans. I also don’t want to be told that these things are normal because they are not.

Against the Machine

About a year ago, Substack was full of reviews for Paul Kingsnorth’s book, Against the Machine, an attempt to diagnose the illness of the West and its cause of death and I am just getting around to reading it. The subtitle for this book is “On the unmaking of humanity” and according to Kingsnorth, this book is a “spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age”1 This is not a review of that book but I do want to tackle an idea he presents in the first chapter:

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve been writing about this thing all my life, running from it and pursuing it all at once. Wanting to hide from it in a pine forest at the same time as I want to trap it in a jar, or a book, and examine it for what it is. Those suspicions or intuitions I had as a child— that something was off about the world I lived in, about its values and its direction—morphed as I grew older into a way of life, or perhaps an obsession.”2

This is just the introduction of the book but his description of running away from yet pursuing, hiding from yet examining this thing got my attention. Kingsnorth calls this “thing”, The Machine, and he even admits that a definition is hard to pin down:

“You cannot explain or justify it in the terms which are now the terms we live by. You just know that something is wrong. Everybody tells you that you feel this because you are infected with something called “nostalgia”, or that you picked up a dose of “Luddism” or “Romanticism” at a party or in a doctor’s waiting room. Basically, there is something wrong with you. You don’t understand Progress, which is always and everywhere a Good Thing.”3

When I was a kid, I remember posting up in my dad’s garden shed or in the grove of walnut trees behind our house with a notebook and a pencil and lamented this same feeling that “something is wrong”. For a long time, I believed that I was the problem; that something was wrong with me. Everyone around me operated on 5G systems while I was running on steam and coal and for some reason, that made them better. Thank God I do not believe that lie anymore but I do still feel strongly that something is wrong and I imagine that you may feel that way too. In fact, I have come to distrust people who either ignore that feeling or claim that everything is right and orderly. It feels like the definition of gaslighting.

What is Wrong?

Of course, many people will admit that something is indeed wrong but will disagree with what is and then hot topic issues are branded either left or right and we seem to forget that the whole process we use to disagree with each other is probably a part of the problem. As GK Chesterton said,

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”4

Kingsnorth, an Englishman, claims that the West has died because its “sacred order” (Christendom) has collapsed. I am not from England so my perspective on this claim is purely American and living in a country that is so young compared to the two thousand years of a sacred order like Christendom, I have to admit that I do not believe the United States was ever really a part of the West that Kingsnorth mourns after. If the West is dead and buried, then the United States is the ghost that roams the cemetery.

I think we instinctively know this. We know, perhaps deep down, that our addiction to the egregious consumerism of cheap junk made by slaves in other countries on days set aside for the death of our soldiers who fought in wars started by corrupt politicians who have been bought and paid for by the corporations poisoning our food and destroying our land and profiting from our obsession with thirty second, A.I. generated videos depicting the Book of Revelation is the result of a country born while its sacred order is collapsing.

Resisting the Machine

I could write a whole book on an American version of Kingsnorth’s book but this is not what this is. After all, I am just a man trying to live well in a culture that asks the opposite of him. Like Wendell Berry. Because of that, I will ask a few, Berry-esque questions that I believe are worth asking:

What is the price I am willing to pay for instantaneity? Am I willing to pay for it with my physical, emotional, spiritual, or financial health? Am I willing to pay for it with someone else’s health? If so, please name that price.
How much time am I willing to waste while scrolling through social media? Am I willing to waste someone else’s time by engaging in certain platforms? If so, please name the amount of disposable days in the life of a person.
How much of my humanity am I willing to give up for convenience? Am I willing to give up someone else’s humanity for convenience? If so, please make a list of human characteristics that are disposable.
Who am I willing to objectify in order to feel whole? Am I willing to objectify myself? If so, please list the names of the men, women, and children set aside for objectification..
Which humans am I willing to steal from in order to progress artificial intelligence? Am I willing to disrupt their life, their income, their home, and their land for that progress? If so, please list their names and the ways in which one might steal from them.

I ask myself these questions as I gaze into my tired reflection in the security monitor at Target or when I am not as tired as I could have been at the end of the day or when I see the amount of people who have commented on a post that I made. I ask these questions because if Kingsnorth is right and the West is truly dead, then we who are Westerners must truly live and those of us who are living must truly resist. Those of us who are resisting will feel strange and to feel strange means you are still a human.

Peace,

Caleb Christopher Edwards