Shownotes

What have we been up to?

Ed’s been thinking about “bystander leadership”: how interventions by bystanders successfully change the course of events.

Back in May, he went Singing With Nightingales with the folk singer Sam Lee and friends.

A visit to Lambay Island – where he runs an annual writing retreat – prompted him to revisit the story of the RMS Tayleur, otherwise known as “the first Titanic”. One of the first iron-clad clipper ships, her compass had not been properly adjusted to take account of the effect of the iron hull.

Dougald is deep in writing and currently surrounded by a pile of books about “culture”, which Raymond Williams identifies as “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society).

Earlier in the summer, he travelled to Italy for a gathering of the friends of Ivan Illich.

What have we been reading?

Ed introduces Brian Eno and Bette A’s What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory.

Dougald has also been revisiting Brian’s 1996 definition of culture as “everything we don’t have to do” and connects this to Ellen Dissanayake’s books, What Is Art For? and Homo Aestheticus which develop a fascinating evolutionary account of the centrality and origins of art within human behaviour.

Ed has been reading Robert Macfarlane’s new book, Is a River Alive? and he passes on a quote which Macfarlane uses from Alexis Wright’s essay, ‘The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times’.

Ed also talks about Jay Griffiths’s How Animals Heal Us.

Dougald was introduced to Jean Giono’s Joy of Man’s Desiring by Jack Barron who said it was like Ivan Illich and John Berger got together and wrote a novel – a description to which it lives up.

Make Populism Green Again

A few weeks back, Dougald sent Ed a message asking, “Did we break the Green Party?”

We trace the line that runs back from the election of Zack Polanski as the party’s new leader to an episode we made in January 2024, ‘Make Populism Good Again?’ After the UK general election that July, Ed hosted a gathering of Green thinkers to discuss where the party went next where they took up this thread about green populism, leading to a series of think pieces in late 2024, and then a successful leadership challenge from a candidate making this argument.

It’s early days, but Zack’s leadership seems to be off to a good start. Ed mentions his Question Time appearance and Dougald recalls the George Monbiot episode, where we discussed the importance to the environmental movement of having a voice that was capable of handling the brutal conduct of public discourse in the UK media.

We discuss Mary Harrington’s The Viral Mandate of Heaven, in which she identifies Zack and Zohran Mamdani as two leftwing examples of the kind of “box office” political legitimacy which works in a “digital-first” culture.

If Reform can flip the state of politics on the right and become the main contender, doesn’t that make it easier to imagine the same thing happening on the other side? One poll last week had the Greens on 15%, only two points behind Labour. What if the next UK general election ends up as a battle between Reform and the Greens?

Where are we at in the timeline?

How do you find your bearings in an environment where you’re constantly stimulated to max out your outrage or emotional investment in “the Current Thing”?

Dougald talks about an attitude – exemplified by Gordon White of Rune Soup – that emphasises a sober attention to “where we’re at in the timeline”.

We talk about the rerouting of resources to rearmament in Europe, but also the point made by Aurelien that “European decision-makers are now discovering that the world is not a gigantic Amazon store from which you can order anything you like.”

What time is LOVE?

Jay Springett sent us a text from xin called “hospicing dance music” and we talk about seeing ideas from Hospicing Modernity and At Work in the Ruins getting put to use in different contexts.

Dougald mentions another example of this, the recent conversation between Iona Lawrence of The Decelerator and Elizabeth Oldfield, ‘Finding Steadiness in a Time of Endings’.

Ed talks about Love, Anger and Betrayal, the book that Jonathan Porritt has written, based on a year of working with young activists who were part of Just Stop Oil.

The theme of love takes us to the new journal Romanticon – co-founded by Anthony Galluzzo, whose book Against the Vortex was the starting point for our last episode. Dougald wrote the journal’s inaugural essay, ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’.

Another Romanticon contributor, Justin Smith-Ruiu of The Hinternet wrote an essay called ‘How to Change the World for Real’ that invokes the language of love as politics in Martin Luther King, Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin.

We talk about David Bentley Hart’s ‘The Genealogy of Genealogies’, which culminates in a wonderful passage about gifts as “the currency of love” – and this connects to Adam Wilson’s story of the young father visiting the Gratitude Feast at Sand River Community Farm for the first time who expresses his wonder, “It’s like you all are creating an irony-free zone.”

And Ed draws the episode to a close with Kae Tempest’s poem, ‘The Point’.

Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing and supporting our work in multiple ways. Check out more episodes of The Great Humbling and Homeward Bound at homewardbound.org. Learn more about Ed’s work on his website, and read more from Dougald at his Substack, Writing Home, where you can support the making of this podcast by becoming a paid subscriber.

Before we get to that, Dougald references his recent Resilience.org event with Vanessa Andreotti, who commented that before January, she regularly got questions from audiences along the lines of “What’s the evidence that modernity is dying?” Since January, no one has asked her this, which is one facet of the ways the world has changed in these months.

Ed brings up Sam Conniff and Katherine Templar Lewis’s Uncertainty Experts and an increased willingness of people he deals with in institutional settings to admit to their uncertainty.

This leads us onto the subject of belief and its relationship to certainty/knowing and uncertainty/mystery – and Ed points out that Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto (which he has been reading so the rest of us don’t have to) includes 113 statements that begin with “We believe”.

Dougald mentions the essay on John Berger that he wrote for the first Dark Mountain book, and how Berger’s later writing – inspired by the old peasants he lived alongside in the Haute Savoie – models the possibility for “a cohabitation with mystery, not an attempt to enclose or eliminate it”.

Mankinis and Manifestos

At this point, we get on to the matter of Sean Connery’s mankini and Anthony Galluzzo’s book. What Anthony is doing in drawing attention to the “critical Aquarian” current within 1970s thought has parallels with the project of our friends Elias Crim and Pete Davis with The Lost Prophets Podcast.

Ed points out the shades of Ursula K. Le Guin in the storyline of Zardoz, bringing us back to ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’. (Though Zed, the Connery character, is more a case of one who breaks into Omelas and fights to bring it down.)

Dougald wonders about the parallels between John Boorman’s Zed and John Berger’s G. In Berger’s novel, which won the Booker prize in 1972, there’s also a central character whose name is (or sounds like) a single letter and who represents some kind of… well, phallocentric revolution. There’s also an aesthetic similarity, in that both Boorman’s film and Berger’s book pursue a cubist fragmentation of the singular perspective and linear timeline.

Dougald also mentions the 1976 film which Berger wrote with Alain Tanner, Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000, which speaks to the tail end of the moment of critical Aquarianism.

In a key passage in Against the Vortex, Galluzzo sums up the question which united those he considers to be critical Aquarian thinkers, and its continuing relevance:

How to exit the dead end of industrial modernism and its legitimating fictions—utilitarianism, Prometheanism, productivism and its ecocidal dreams of endless growth, secular immortality, and total control—in the face of interrelated material, ecological, and spiritual crises without sliding into the reactionary antimodernism that, for example, led certain disillusioned Western intellectuals to embrace the Iranian revolution at the end of the Seventies? While the urgency of the crises has increased a hundredfold since the 1970s, the question remains unanswered.

Not a bad description of the questions we’ve been asking on The Great Humbling.

Dougald picks up another element in Against the Vortex, where Galluzzo contrasts the critical Aquarian current of environmentalism represented by Illich with the technocratic, expert-centred environmentalism represented by Stewart Brand – and suggests that it would be worth bringing this into dialogue with the slightly different “genealogy of green politics” offered by Stephen Quilley in ‘Ecology “After Virtue” and After Modernity’. The main difference between these two maps is that Quilley locates neo-Malthusian environmentalism as opposed to a tech-focused mainstream environmentalism, whereas Galluzzo (following Giorgos Kallis’s Limits) identifies Malthusian thought as aligned with the logic of growth.

This brings us back to Marc Andreessen and the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which Ed describes as “not so much Effective Altruism as Effective Accelerationism”, partly inspired by Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism.

Dougald asks where Andreessen is now on the map of tech politics in the era of Trump 2 – has he gone full Gay Space Fascism? (For those unfamiliar with the term, he recommends Jonathan Cioran’s essay for Mere Orthodoxy.)

Ed quotes Elizabeth Spiers on Andreessen’s manifesto: “[It] has the pathos of the Unabomber … but lacks the ideological coherency.”

Ed introduces Hard Imagination, a “dark white paper” produced by Indy Johar, David Johnston and Clare Farrell as a counter to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto.

The “Lad Hybrid” Decelerates

At this point, the Great Humbling takes an unexpected turn into Top Gear territory with the sad tale of the 2016 Volkswagen Passat GTE for which you have to take out a mortgage in order to replace the gearbox.

Maybe because of reading John Michael Greer’s ‘Lords of the Fall’, in which the one-time Archdruid Report author returns to the themes of the collapse of complex societies (nod to Joseph Tainter), the counterproductive complexity of the hybrid gearbox comes to feel like a metaphor for what’s wrong with the way we’re approaching the climate crisis.

David Fleming’s Lean Logic gets a mention, in particular the entry on Needs and Wants, which points out that our wants are mostly quite humble and its the needs imposed by the complexity of modern societies that are the disaster.

Ed suggests the car should make a final journey to the church-in-the-ruins at Covehithe and it all gets a bit KLF for a moment.

Listeners of The Great Humbling who know more about cars than Dougald are invited to offer advice.

Quiet Collapsitarians

We finish up by discussing Rob Harrison-Plastow’s article, ‘Why Well-Off Brits Who Think Collapse Is Coming Still Stay Silent’, which suggests that a critical mass of middle class professionals has come to the conclusion that “the systems we rely on for survival are far more fragile than they appear, are deeply flawed and contain within them dynamics that keep us locked in to a dangerous trajectory”, but many of them are keeping quiet about this.

Implicit in Harrison-Plastow’s article is the idea from Alexei Yurchak’s book about the last years of the Soviet Union, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, that revolutionary change is a two-stage process: in the first stage, everyone stops believing in the existing system; in the second, everyone realises that everyone else has stopped believing in it.

Dougald asks what is meant to happen, at the point when everyone realises that everyone else (or at least, lots of others) have come to the same conclusion? There’s a risk of a kind of wishful thinking here, that if only we all realise and admit the depth of the trouble we are in, we know how to make things better. Bearing in mind the Greer/Tainter piece about the relationship between societal complexity and collapse and the example of the hybrid motor, he suggests that we need to look at the uncomfortable questions Stephen Quilley is asking about the tendency to assume the entitlements of high-tech, liberal, individualist late modernity are somehow compatible with taking seriously the implications of our ecological crisis.

This brings us back to Vanessa’s comments in the Resilience event and her observation that there is an “inflated sense of agency” that haunts the imagination of the Global North that looks weird from a Brazilian perspective. In that conversation, Vanessa and Dougald tried out the contrast between this “pedestal” model of agency and a “mycelial” mode of agency.

A final thought comes from Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole, paraphrased by Dougald: when hate hates love, it is true to itself; when love hates hate, it betrays itself. Not thinking that hating hate can fix anything, and working out what the loving moves look like within a model of agency that isn’t self-deceiving – maybe these are our questions in this humbling spring of 2025?

Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing and supporting our work in multiple ways. Check out more episodes of The Great Humbling and Homeward Bound at homewardbound.org. Learn more about Ed’s work on his website, and read more from Dougald at his Substack, Writing Home, where you can support the making of this podcast by becoming a paid subscriber.

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To say it came as a surprise when Vanessa mentioned that she had co-written a book with an AI bot called Aiden Cinnamon Tea… well, that would be an understatement. Here, she shares more about why GTDF has chosen to work with AI and we puzzle this through with the help of stories.

If you’re coming to this without any context, then I recommend checking out the first couple of items in the shownotes before heading further into the episode, which starts with me quoting Vanessa’s alter ego, Dorothy Ladybug Boss:

The first thing you need to know about this book … is that it asks you to suspend both belief and disbelief.

Shownotes

* The Burnout from Humans website – read the book Vanessa wrote together with Aiden Cinnamon Tea and interact with Aiden for yourself.

* The Wild Chatbot – read or listen to the essay in which I tell the story of how Burnout From Humans came about and my attempt to make sense of what Vanessa, Aiden and the GTDF collective are up to here.

* Landing with the Land Differently – from the GTDF, an alternative to the familiar game of land acknowledgements.

* Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism – Vanessa’s previous book.

* Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity & Collapse with Accountability & Compassion – Vanessa’s forthcoming book, available for preorder now.

If you want to support my work, including the making of Homeward Bound and the Great Humbling, then consider becoming a paid subscriber to Writing Home – where you’ll also have access to the In-Between Videos and live events like the one-off book club on Martin Buber’s I and Thou which we just ran.

Show Notes

* Ed’s new book of poetry, The Father’s Road, is available now through Etsy.

* Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees.

* Alan Garner’s Collected Folk Tales.

* Martin Shaw’s Westcountry School of Myth.

* On three ways of handling the “spiritual gelignite” of myth – retelling, translation and reabsorption/transmutation – Alan Garner’s essay, ‘The Death of Myth’, originally published in the New Statesman, 1970.

* The Owl Service – Garner’s transmutation of the myth of Blodeuwedd.

* For more on the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, see Paul Radin’s The Trickster.

* Three recent pieces from Mary Harrington – ‘“Woke” Is Not The New Reformation’, ‘Scrolling Toward The Divine’, ‘Yes, the “Woke Right” is real’.

* The Levi-Strauss line about “science, which started out by separating itself from myth, will eventually encounter it once again” is discussed in Debi Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the World.

* James Bridle, New Dark Age.

* We’ll talk about D.W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology later in the series, when Ed’s had the chance to read it.

* Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole.

* Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men.

* Alan Dundes, Interpreting Folklore.

The original set of tasks goes like this:

* Salvage the good things we have a chance of taking with us.

* Mourn the good things we have to leave behind – and do this, not least, by telling their stories, because these stories may turn out to be seeds in futures we can’t imagine yet.

* Notice the things that were never as good as we told each other they were about the ways we’ve been living around here lately, and the chance we’re given to leave these behind.

* Look for the dropped threads from earlier in the story and the chance to weave these back in – the things that have been marked as old-fashioned, inefficient, obsolete, but that might turn out to make all the difference on the journey ahead.

In the course of this episode, Jay brings up five questions that follow on from these tasks:

* What should we seek to use before we lose it?

* What can we produce now, knowing what is coming?

* What can we evolve from things we’ll lose?

* What are the seeds of the things we mourn – and how do we harvest these?

* What do we need to learn and teach future generations?

You can listen to Jay’s regular mini-podcasts at Make Kindness Easier! The Stone Paper product is being developed by the folks at Solar Punk Now. He’s @jaycousins on Twitter and here’s his LinkedIn.

Show Notes

* We mention Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and how she couples the work of hospicing to the work of “assisting with the birth of new, as-yet-unknown, and potentially – but not necessarily – wiser”.

* Richard Smith’s review of At Work in the Ruins in the British Medical Journal applies the original “four tasks” to the fields of medicine and public health.

* Jay introduces the work of Dave Hakkens and One Army – and especially the Precious Plastic project.

* Talking about what we should “use before we lose” takes me to a conversation with the Solarpunk theorist Jay Springett where he suggested using today’s earth-moving machines to do landscaping for permaculture that will continue to be useful long after the fossil fuel era is over.

* Low-Tech Magazine.

* Jay’s Stone Paper.

* Martín Prechtel, The Unlikely Peace at Cuchamquic on the centring of seeds within Mayan culture.

* The Decelerator supports civil society organisations to create good endings (discussed in the #DECELERATE episode of The Great Humbling).

* End of the World Garden in Cornwall, created by the artist Paul Chaney.

* I wrote about Cryptic Northern Refugia in this essay for Alan Garner.

* Thomas Keyes’s recipe for October Black Isle Pheasant Stew appeared in Dark Mountain: Issue 2.

* Carcinisation is an example of convergent evolution, by which “crabs” evolve from different directions.

* Caroline Ross’s Found and Ground as an example of recovering and relearning skills. (I spoke to Caroline in Homeward Bound S1E1.)

* Here’s an old post of Jay’s about his first company, Orikaso, and the fold-flat dinnerware products he invented.

* Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”.

* Jay’s TEDx talk, where he started sharing his thinking about biomemetic business models.

* J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It).

Shownotes

* Derek Gow, Birds, Beasts and Bedlam

* Andy Hamilton, New Wild Order

* James Kaelan, 999 Years of Peace is “a luddite publication, not for sale”, but you could try sending Cartoon Distortion a message on Instagram to find out more.

* Elizabeth Oldfield, author of Fully Alive was talking at The Kairos Club, London this week. Kairos currently has paperback copies of At Work in the Ruins on sale for £10 and some great events coming up with friends of this podcast:

* Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (SAFER) with Rupert Read, Tuesday 26 November

* A New Cosmology: Feeling Our Way into the Imaginal with Ellie Robins, Thursday 28 November

* Ece Temulkeran, How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship

* Dougald quotes from R. G. Miga’s comment on our election day episode

* Watching “accelerationism” move over the last decade and a bit:

* #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek (2013)

* Paul Mason, Clear Bright Future (2019)

* Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019)

* Nick Land – “the Godfather of accelerationism”, from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (alongside Mark Fisher of Capitalist Realism) in the 1990s to Neo-reaction and the Dark Enlightenment

* ‘Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world’, Vox magazine, 2019.

* Iona Lawrence & The Decelerator – “We support organisations and individuals to anticipate and design closures, mergers, CEO transitions, programming ends, and all sorts of endings as just part of the everyday life of organisations and inevitable cycles of change in civil society.”

* Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (in case we haven’t mentioned it before!)

* Only Planet – Ed’s around-the-world slow travel book

* Jay Cousins writes on Substack at Make Kindness Easier! and will feature on an upcoming episode of Homeward Bound

* Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1942), Ch.3, makes the argument for a historical example of “decelerationism”:

Why should the ultimate victory of a trend be taken as a proof of the ineffectiveness of the efforts to slow down its progress? And why should the purpose of these measures not be seen precisely in that which they achieved, i.e., in the slowing down of the rate of change? That which is ineffectual in stopping a line of development altogether is not, on that account, altogether ineffectual. The rate of change is often of no less importance than the direction of the change itself ; but while the latter frequently does not depend upon our volition, it is the rate at which we allow change to take place which well may depend upon us. […] England withstood without grave damage the calamity of the enclosures only because the Tudors and the early Stuarts used the power of the Crown to slow down the process of economic improvement until it became socially bearable — employing the power of the central government to relieve the victims of the transformation, and attempting to canalize the process of change so as to make its course less devastating.

* Andrew at Bog-down and Aster quotes Gustav Landauer, as he reflects on the US election in A short word and a poem for my daughter at day’s end:

The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community.

Thank you for listening, sharing and responding to these episodes.

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I wanted to talk to Isabelle because of a post she wrote back in July, describing a moment in her relationship, shaped by the way she had been dwelling on thoughts of climate catastrophe and societal collapse:

I was discussing with my partner what our plans were for the next few years of our lives. What I imagine are the usual conversations one has when your future still seems wide open: ‘Shall we have a baby?! Shall we move abroad?! Shall we buy a van?!’ Yet every answer felt wrong, because my future didn’t feel wide open. My future felt very small, and like there was only one possibility: the aforementioned end of the world.

The thing is, as I heard the words come out of my mouth garbled by tears, I realise I don’t actually believe this. Deep down, I don’t actually believe we are totally, irrevocably, and unequivocally fucked.

I’ve known Isabelle for a couple of years, she’s been part of the conversations that Anna and I host at a school called HOME, and one of the themes that’s been coming up for me lately in that work is the difference in what it asks of us when we show up to the trouble the world is in, depending on the season of life we’re in.

I want to lean into this further and record some more conversations with folks of different generations who are wrestling with the questions I wrote about in At Work in the Ruins, asking how we show up for each other across the generational differences that Isabelle and I talk about in this episode.

I hope you enjoy our conversation – and do check out Isabelle’s Substack.

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This episode starts with the traditional nursery rhyme commemorating the events of 5 November, 1605, when Catholic plotters attempted to blow up the British parliament.

While we’re on the theme of memory and maps, a reminder that Dougald’s new online series, Pockets, Patterns & Practices, starts this week, with the question, “What kind of maps do we need now?”

And here’s a line from friend-of-the-show Elizabeth Oldfield that came in after we recorded, but resonates with today’s conversation:

We all have would-be tidy assumptions, and need a mess making of them if we have any hope of encountering people and the world as they really are.

(from ‘Expanding Eros, Or Why connection is my kink’)

Shownotes

* The last(?) interview with John Berger, shortly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

* “In such a climate, somebody who is actually saying something, who seems to suggest that there may be a connection between what he said and what he will do, such a person is a way out of a vacuous nightmare—even if the way out is dangerous or vicious.”

* Ed has joined the Old Glory Molly dancing group and got into trouble for singing ‘The Dog Song’.

* Dougald gives a shout-out to The Climate Majority Project.

* There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak.

* American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology by D. W. Pasulka.

* Birds, Beasts & Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species by Derek Gow.

* Caring for Life: A Postdevelopment Politics of Infant Hygiene by Kelly Dombroski.

* The Plant Pamphlets by Mark Watson.

* Read Charlotte Du Cann’s Introduction to the book.

* Dougald’s letter from three days after the 2016 US election: ‘When the Maps Run Out’.

* R. G. Miga’s ‘Hunter’s Ghost: On the hard work of staying vigilant in the darkness’

* “Two things can be true at the same time. Donald Trump can be a vile scumbag, unfit for office. The people looking to bring him down can also be scapegoating him—trying to hang all the sins of the past decade around his neck, driving him off a cliff to create the false narrative of a fresh start.”

* Also from R. G. Miga, this note: “why do people still despise the Democratic Party—every single Democratic presidential candidate for the past eight years, including the old white guy—more than a meandering country club owner with Borderline Personality Disorder? If the Democratic Party still can’t acknowledge its own weaknesses and make a positive case for its policies, rather than constantly leaning on moral superiority—it’s doomed, with or without Trump.’”

* Jamie Kelsey Fry and James Robertson talking about Citizens Assemblies.

* Vanessa Chamberlin’s vision asks us: “What if we step towards the cracks?”

* Adam Wilson’s latest post: “What happened AFTER the grocery store stopped having food on the shelves?”

* Ed brings us to a close by referencing William Stafford’s poem, ‘A Ritual to Read to Each Other’.

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“Maybe what we’re looking for is fewer robot vacuum cleaners and more compost toilets.”

We stumble into a new series of The Great Humbling with an episode that revolves around s**t and technology. This is also our first video episode, so you can watch our beardy faces on Substack or YouTube.

Shownotes

* Ed’s been reading The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, alongside How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm.

* Also Andrei Kirkov’s Death and the Penguin.

* Dougald talks about Em Strang’s novel, Quinn. Also her newly launched Substack, Emerging Hermit – and especially the ‘Our Violent Men’ series that she is embarking on.

* Ed talks about Simeon Morris’s one-man show, Square Peg.

* Dougald introduces a little book called Notes on Nothing by Anonymous.

* Also an episode of the Spiritual Teachers podcast called The Hillbilly Sutra, a one-off telling of the story of a Nashville banjo player who had a similar experience – and who, despite the podcast’s title, has no interest in selling himself as a spiritual teacher.

* ‘My iRobot vacuum found dog poo and almost created World War III’

* Cory Doctorow’s original post about “enshittification”.

* Paul Virilio’s observation that every new technology brings into being a new kind of accident can be found in The Politics of the Very Worst.

* Ed talks about meeting Jess Groopman of the Regenerative Technology Project.

* Dougald remembers the vacuum cleaner scene in the first episode of Meet the Natives, the 2007 documentary series in which a group of men from a village in Vanuatu came on an anthropological expedition to study the three tribes of the British Isles: the middle class, the working class and the upper class.

* Ed introduces us to the art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast and we talk about trickster ways of using technology.

* Marvin Kranzberg’s Laws of Technology.

* The episode from Season 5 when we talked about Neto Leão’s idea of the “low agreements”.

* Carl Jung did indeed have a vision of a giant turd landing on Basel Cathedral.

Thanks for listening, sharing and getting in touch! Look out for Dougald Hine’s public events in London next week – and a new five-week online series with a school called HOME, starting on 6 & 7 November.

If you haven’t read At Work in the Ruins, then this episode is a good way into it – and if you have, then it will give you a sense of where I’ve been taken by the conversations the book led me into.

It also provides some good context for Pockets, Patterns & Practices, the five-week online series that I’ll be teaching next month.

Shownotes

* Katie Teague’s YouTube channel with other interviews, including Joanna Macey, Jonathan Rowson and more.

* Support Katie’s work through her Patreon.

* Vinay Gupta’s Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps aka “Six Ways to Die”

* Brian Eno’s definition of culture as “everything we don’t have to do”

* My interpretation of Eno’s definition in The Kitchen Table

* At Work in the Ruins now out in paperback

* Pockets, Patterns & Practices starts on 6 & 7 November 2024 and runs for five weeks. Full details at aschoolcalledhome.org

Homeward Bound theme music: ‘Hope and the Forester’ by Blue Dot Sessions

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* Read more & register for the Chicago Retreat: https://bit.ly/dougald-retreat

* The rest of the American tour: https://dougald.nu/america/

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We talk about how long it is since I last visited the US. Back then, I was travelling as part of an internet startup, School of Everything, inspired by Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. Among my co-founders was Mary Harrington, who describes her experience the mess of that start-up experience early on in Feminism Against Progress – and it turns out that Ashley also features later on in that book.

Chicago is Ashley’s hometown. She talks about how she and her husband moved away, after she got “doom-pilled”, and about their decision to return a few years later. This is partly about getting away from “spreadsheet mind”.

It’s important to me to have these urban examples of what “regrowing a living culture” can look like. However much we may be working for what Chris Smaje calls a “small farm future”, there’s also a need for examples of what it looks like when we start from the places where many people find themselves. One example for me is the small community of radical hospitality in south London that Elizabeth Oldfield writes about in Fully Alive.

Ashley talks about the retreat she hosted last year with Paul Kingsnorth at the Wagon Box in Wyoming – and how she seems to have fallen into the role of helping Dark Mountain co-founders find their bearings in North America.

We discover a mutual admiration for Richard D. Bartlett’s approach to bringing groups together – and Ashley talks about how this shaped her approach to convening co-created retreats like the one we will be holding.

I look back on experiences with the community of Ivan Illich’s surviving friends and collaborators, a way of gathering around the table that is an antidote to the “conditioned air” of institutional academia. (For more on this, see Illich’s ‘The Cultivation of Conspiracy’.)

Ashley introduces me to the concept of a Jeffersonian Dinner – and we decide we’ll host something like this on the Saturday evening of the Chicago Retreat.

We talk about some of the other events I’ll be doing on the tour, including conversations with Bayo Akomolafe at the Schumacher Center in Great Barrington, Lewis Hyde in Boston, and with Adam Wilson of The Peasantry School Newsletter.

I give a shout out to Ellie Robins’s excellent post, “This moment needs your deep weirdness and your intellectual rigour”, and quote something Lydia Catterall once said to me: “I’ve realised that there can be a gift in things you could never have asked for.” I think of that often when reading Nick Cave’s replies in The Red Hand Files.

Ashley quotes something Paul Kingsnorth said years ago in a New York Times article about Dark Mountain: “I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough.”

We talk about using the retreat to explore examples, to invite people to bring a diversity of stories of what the work of regrowing a living culture looks like in practice – and also working out the challenges and contradictions, navigating the tensions. Ashley talks about making community in an urban neighbourhood, also about joining the La Leche League as a new mother and the sharing of experience and advice from multiple voices that she experienced in those meetings.

Talking about pockets takes me to Brian Eno’s concept of “scenius”, the conditions under which a group of artists become capable of making work that exceeds anything they had previously achieved on their own. (For more on this, see this post of mine and Austin Kleon’s Maps of Scenius.)

It also brings me to Laura Fabrycky’s essay, ‘The Witness of the Weak Centres’, about how her admiration for Dietrich Bonhoeffer developed from a story of his individual heroism to a recognition of “the small, mysterious, slow, even weak places of life—home, family, friends” that shaped the resistance to the Nazi regime.

Thanks for listening – and for reading these notes. Head over to my website to find all the details for the Chicago Retreat and the rest of the American tour.

Further episodes of Homeward Bound are coming soon, along with a new series of The Great Humbling later in the autumn.

We’re calling this Homeward Bound, a title that started off as the name of the first online series that Dougald Hine taught with a school called HOME in 2020. For a few series now, we’ve used homewardbound.org as the home for The Great Humbling. These are two images that gesture in the same direction: they name a need to come down to earth, to be called back from the fantasies of endless growth and technological progress, to face the depth of the trouble around and ahead of us, to find the kinds of agency that make sense now.

We’ll continue to make new episodes of The Great Humbling with Ed and Dougald and you’ll find those here, but alongside them there will also be other conversations that pick up on the themes you’ve heard us speak about. To set this rolling, we’re going to put out the podcast version of the series of “overheard conversations” that Dougald has been hosting this spring over at Writing Home, starting with this conversation with Caroline Ross.

This conversation took place on Zoom in March with a live audience made up of subscribers to Writing Home and Uncivil Savant. You’ll hear the first forty minutes of conversation between Caro and Dougald. If you’d like to watch a recording of the Q&A that followed, then head over here and sign up for a paid subscription.

As mentioned in the intro to this episode, this week also sees the start of Further Adventures in Regrowing a Living Culture, a five-week online series where you can join Dougald and other participants from around the world to explore the work of becoming realists of a larger reality, starting where we find ourselves and finding the courage to act. Full details at aschoolcalledhome.org.

Thanks for listening!

Shownotes

Follow Caroline Ross’s work by subscribing to Uncivil Savant and find details of her book, Found and Ground: A practical guide to making your own foraged paints, on her website.

Theresa Emmerich Kamper is the experimental archaeologist who Caro brought to Östervåla last year for a session in Skolunkan, the old shoe shop at a school called HOME.

Antonio Dias wrote about Viking boats in ‘Notes on Ritual’.

David Fleming’s Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It is online here.

Iain McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain is presented in The Mastery and His Emissary and The Matter With Things. Watch Caro’s conversation with Iain here and the story of Dougald and Caro’s trip to visit him on Skye in February 2023 is here.

Here is a taste of the polyphony of Le Mystére des Voix Bulgares.

Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft was published on this side of the Atlantic as The Case for Working With Your Hands.

The quote Dougald struggles to remember from an early president of the United States is this one from John Adams.

Here’s a taste of Caro’s sojourn in the music world, from the album she made with Rothko.

Credits

The music for this episode is ‘Hope and the Forester’ by Blue Dot Sessions.

We start with Ed reporting back from The Fête of Britain, the inaugural festival of the Hard Art collective, which took place in Manchester last week, where he found himself hosting a gameshow whose panellists included Clare Farrell, Lee Jasper and the folk singer Jennifer Reid, who specialises in singing broadside ballads to reconnect audiences with the working class tradition of the northwest of England. Other goings-on included our friend Elizabeth Slade of the Unitarian Church leading a “Sunday Service” which included a choir conducted by Brian Eno and a “sermon” from Jarvis Cocker. Ed also describes his late-night outreach in a Salford bar, where “Psychedelic Pete” thanked Hard Art members for bringing this chaos to the city.

Among all these adventures, there’s a serious question that we take with us on into this episode, one that’s been put to us by our friend Jamie Kelsey Fry: who do you think you are talking to? In any of the work we’re doing, are we preaching to the choir, or talking a language that can bridge across boundaries and invite all kinds of other voices into the conversation? And does this matter? Our first answer is: there’s room for each of these kinds of talk, but it’s good to know which you’re actually doing.

Dougald chases up a few other loose ends from this episode. He and Alfie have reached the ninth instalment of The Bagthorpe Saga, but despite the efforts of listeners, the elusive tenth book is still out there, so the search continues! (And a reward awaits the finder of a copy of Bagthorpes Battered.)

Talk of “burning a million quid” – from our early episodes on the KLF (S5E3, S5E4) – gets woven into the earlier thread of Making Good Ruins (S5E1), because Drummond and Caughtie’s ritual on the Isle of Jura anticipates the project of using economic resources in ways that make no sense according to the logic within which our economic system imagines them. During a conversation with Chris Smaje and Christopher Brewster, Dougald finds himself scrawling “Let’s burn a billion dollars!” across a page in his notebook. But as Ed suggests, what’s at stake might be not so much burning money as composting it, or ploughing it into the soil.

Ed introduces us to the concept of “zombie leadership”, drawing on a paper about the “Dead ideas that still walk among us”, brought to his attention by professor of leadership, Jonathan Gosling. (We’re also introduced to the word “demulcent”, which sounds like something you might use on your skin.) And we learn about the US Department of Defense Strategic Command paper on “Counter-Zombie Dominance”, which reminds Dougald of the hugely popular study circle run by Sweden’s Workers Learning Association around Zombie Apocalypse Survival. Turns out that zombies are – as the anthropologists say – good to think with. [Insert joke about brains here—Ed.]

We discuss Donald Trump as an exemplar of zombie leadership – but Dougald points out that Trump also capitalises on alienation from expert-ocracy, which itself has aspects of zombie leadership. There’s zombies everywhere! (US election 2024: “vote for the least worst zombie”?)

The serious point here is a connection to the “problem” vs “predicament” distinction from John Michael Greer which Dougald drew on in At Work in the Ruins. A problem is something that has a solution (a way to fix it that returns you to a situation resembling the previously existing state of affairs); if something doesn’t have a solution, it’s not a problem, though it may well be a predicament. When you have a problem, it’s a good idea to get the best group of experts in a room to come up with a solution; but in the face of a predicament, what’s needed is a far more distributed (and democratic) approach, in which many different groups follow different strategies, without attempting to reason our way to what will work in advance. Expert-ocracy is the state of affairs in which the world is seen not only as containing problems (among other things), but as made up of problems, and therefore best served by being put into the hands of experts.

From here, we come to what is apparently the emerging field of Humility Studies, brought to our attention by this post from Richard Beck, in which he quotes a paper from Pelin Kesebir, “A Quiet Ego Quiets Death Anxiety: Humility as an Existential Anxiety Buffer” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

Since 2014, the empirical research about humility has exploded. Much of this research has shown that humility functions as a regulating virtue upon which many other virtues depend.

Meanwhile, our fellow traveller Peter N Limberg of Less Foolish has also been writing about humility:

In the book Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Science [by Ian M. Church and Peter L. Samuelson], intellectual humility is understood as the virtuous mean between intellectual arrogance and intellectual diffidence.

And about “overcoming intellectual servitude”:

While stewarding The Stoa, I sensed greater potential in the attendees than in the galaxy-brains we listened to. I see so much potential being bottled up due to the pervasiveness of this servitude.

The best way to dissuade intellectual arrogance … is to target the source: the narcissistic supply. Once the special-feeling dissipates or is put in its proper place, the overvaluing will also dissipate, and one can put their intelligence to proper use

This thought echoes what Vanessa Andreotti calls “getting to zero”, escaping the game of modernity in which everyone is always either up or down, “plus one” or “minus one”. (See Hospicing Modernity – or this podcast episode.)

All of this sends Ed daydreaming about the professor who starts the Humility Institute, who can truly call himself the world’s leading expert on humility…

Another thread around humility leads us to Elizabeth Oldfield’s forthcoming book, Fully Alive, which Dougald has been reading. The book is Elizabeth’s attempt to share the treasures of the wisdom tradition of Christianity with those who don’t necessarily share her faith. She structures it around what she admits is the seemingly unpromising framework of the “seven deadly sins”, a list originating with the Desert Fathers and Mothers of 4th and 5th century Egypt. In the version of the list she uses, the seventh sin is Pride, and she reflects on how many of the senses in which we use this word seem to her to describe something good and worthwhile – but in identifying the nature of Pride, in the sense meant by her tradition, she homes in on the kind of belief in our own self-sufficiency, in not needing others, that cuts us off from relationship with each other, with the world and (from a believer’s perspective) with God.

From here, we come back around to the question of who we think we’re talking to, in these episodes. The first answer to who we’re talking to is each other – this podcast started with a conversation, and as a way of letting others listen in on a conversation we had started to have, and underlying it there’s a certain faith in conversation, in the generative potential of ongoing threads of small-scale conversation and the kind of space of conversation that is not just “another talking shop”.

A while ago, the Solarpunk theorist Jay Springett joked to Dougald that the pattern of semi-regular calls they had fallen into was “catch-up culture”, an antidote to “cancel culture”.

There’s a sense, too, of conversation as a practice, both in the sense of the word used by artists, but also perhaps in the sense in which Alasdair Macintyre uses the term in his account of how virtue is acquired (in After Virtue).

Dougald enthuses about M. R. O’Connor’s book, Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World, as a gripping account of a journey into a “practice”, in this sense – but also because, by the end of her year of training and working as a wildland firefighter and controlled-burn fire-starter, O’Connor describes encountering fire itself as something she is in dialogue. In this sense, conversation as a practice points towards a way of inhabiting the world.

So, after five series, maybe this is the heart of what we’re doing – practicing being in conversation, practicing letting our conversations be overheard, not seeking a huge audience, but trusting that the relationship we have with those of you overhearing these conversations can be consequential.

In this spirit, Dougald makes an invitation to a forthcoming season of “overheard conversations” – details to be announced soon on his own Substack, Writing Home – that will take place fortnightly on Sunday evenings (European time), starting with a conversation with Caroline Ross of Uncivil Savant on Sunday 10 March. Paid subscribers to either Dougald’s Substack or that of his guest are invited to join live on Zoom, while a recording of the opening part of the conversation will be made available as a video and audio recording.

Meanwhile, Ed is looking forward to hosting a writing retreat together with Jonathan Gosling and taking his other podcast, The Futurenauts, to the Hay Festival.

We’ll be back with another series of The Great Humbling later in 2024. Meanwhile, thank you for listening in.

We were recording on Shrove Tuesday, so the episode kicks off with a discussion of seasonal customs, including the Swedish semla…

On a recent Danish tour, Dougald returned to teach at the Kaospilots school, reconnecting with one of the inspirations that set him on the path of kickstarting projects and organisations in his twenties. The last day of that tour was also the first anniversary of publication of At Work in the Ruins.

Meanwhile, Ed has been speaking at the annual conference of the UK’s Garden Centre Association, which got him thinking about quite what a significant proportion of the country’s land area is made up of domestic gardens. The association’s chairman turns out to be called William Blake – which takes us back to our earlier conversations about John Higgs’s brilliant book on Blake, which friend-of-this-podcast C J Thorpe-Tracey gave to Dougald on last year’s UK tour.

Talk of gardens also takes us to the importance of domestic gardens within Chris Smaje’s projections for how the UK could feed itself in A Small Farm Future, and also to Gunnar Rundgren’s Garden Earth - Beyond sustainability.

There’s another thread running through this episode about the deeper understanding of Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday and Lent as a season of reckoning with the places where we are aware of falling short – and a chance to make changes.

Dougald talks about taking up the invitation to a Communal Digital Fast made by Ruth Gaskovski and Peco of the School of the Unconformed. He also confesses to having binged the final season of Game of Thrones, before cancelling the family’s streaming subscriptions, thereby completing a project that is all Tyson Yunkaporta’s fault… And this brings in John Lanchester’s essay on watching GoT where he compares the number of hours invested with the amount of time it would take to learn Spanish fluently.

One thing the two of us have in common is that we both co-founded organisations while we were in our twenties – in Ed’s case, Futerra, and in Dougald’s, School of Everything.

We talk about Peter Koenig’s concept of “the source”, which many people have met through the work of Charles Davies (who was the missing sixth co-founder of School of Everything!), and the question of whether the language of “co-founders” obscures the reality that a project always begins with one person as its source, and that the marker of the source is that they are the person who asks for help.

This definitely fits the origins of Dark Mountain, another of the organisations that Dougald co-founded, which started with a blog post from Paul Kingsnorth, announcing his resignation from journalism, but also floating an idea for a new publication, “something deeply, darkly unfashionable and defiant”. At the end of that post, he wrote:

What I really need are collaborators; fellow writers and artists… who would like to help make it happen. This is a long journey, I imagine, which begins here. I need people of integrity and ideas to help me shape it and make it happen.

We talk about the valorisation of the founder within the culture of Silicon Valley, but also the reality – especially in organisations that aren’t aiming at making anyone rich – that the founder is generally the person who can’t clock off at the end of the day. Ed remembers a year when he took no salary for his work with Futerra.

Ed talks about Sam Conniff’s The Uncertainty Experts and the relevance of a tolerance for uncertainty to the role of being a founder.

Dougald remembers something he told the Dark Mountain team in the last weeks of handing over to Charlotte Du Cann and colleagues who have taken the project forward:

If there are things that you’ve seen me do that I look good at doing, most of them I started off really bad at doing, and you’ve just benefitted from the mistakes I made earlier.

Thinking about a school called HOME, Dougald describes it as a vehicle for multiple things, some of which he is the source of and some of which Anna is the source of.

We close by talking about Rowan Williams’ Silence and Honey Cakes, a book about the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the founders of Christian monasticism, who were trying to work out a new way of living in community. There’s a story there about a man known as Macarius the Great which gives a glimpse of what humble leadership might look like.

Thanks for listening and for all the ways that you support this podcast – and especially to those who have pledged paid support for our work since we moved to Substack two weeks ago.

Dougald reports back on his trip to Gothenburg – and makes an appeal for help in locating a copy of Helen Cresswell’s Bagthorpes Battered, the tenth and final instalment in her saga about the terrible (and hilarious) Bagthorpe family. If you have a copy gathering dust on your shelves or boxed away in the attic, a reward is offered, and you’d also make an eight-year-old boy and his dad very happy.

Picking up on last episode’s discussion of populism, Dougald brings in a PhD thesis by the Brazilian scholar Neto Leão, ‘Vernacular Forms of Living: Thinking After Ivan Illich’. 

‘To hell with sustainability!’ Neto declares, echoing Illich's pronouncement, ‘To hell with good intentions!’

Among the framings that Neto draws from Illich is his emphasis on the necessity of setting social limits: before we even get to ecological limits, our capacity to live well together requires us to make collective choices that include saying no to certain possibilities, technologies and forms of ownership. ‘Natural thresholds are generally crossed after social limits are breached,’ he writes.

It’s interesting to set this alongside Kate Raworth’s influential Doughnut Economics, which maps ‘planetary boundaries’ together with ‘social boundaries’.

The difference is that, in Raworth’s mapping, the social boundaries are presented in terms of a minimum of basic needs, rather than a limit that it is unwise to exceed.

Neto also draws attention to ‘Peace vs Development’, a talk which Illich gave in Japan in 1980, where he distinguishes the pax populi (people’s peace) from the pax economicum, the enforced peace from above that results from a ‘balance of powers’, as represented by globalisation. Illich presents the pax economicum as the successor to the pax romana of the Roman Empire.

There are clues here for the search for good forms of ‘populism’ that we spoke about in the previous episode – while Neto develops Illich’s thoughts by suggesting that the pax ecologica is now offered as the successor to the pax economicum.

The contrast between the pax ecologica and the pax populi is reflected in the contrast between what Neto calls the ‘high agreements’ (the kind made at COP meetings and similar summits) and the ‘low agreements’, made at scales much closer to the ground. The low agreements may look too small to be worth taking seriously, yet it is at these scales that choices about social limits become possible, whereas these are unthinkable from the perspective of high-level sustainability discussions.

Neto fleshes out his picture of the ‘low agreements’ with fieldwork from an island in Sao Paulo province, Brazil, where the villagers have made collective decisions about limiting the amount of electricity and the uses to which they are willing to put it within their community.

Thinking about other examples of ‘low agreements’, Dougald remembers Peter N Limberg’s recent post about ‘Unscreening’, the 6.30pm power-down ritual that he and his wife have created, where they put their phones away in a box, beautifully made for the purpose. (There’s a connection here, too, to the larger conversation about ‘Sowing Anachronism’ that Peco and Ruth Gaskovski have been hosting over at the School of the Unconformed.)

The story of the community in Brazil reminds Ed of his experiences visiting the Isle of Eigg and the journey of community-owned electricity that the residents have been on.

Ed talks about some work he’s been doing with the Forward Institute and a discussion around what humility in leadership looks like, where they found themselves talking about the terrible counter-example of the Post Office Horizon scandal in the UK and the horrific lack of humility that characterised the treatment of the subpostmasters by those on high.

Dougald wonders if part of this story is about the disastrous consequences of treating systemic reality as all that is real. This calls to mind a passage he was recently sent from the philosopher Giuseppe Longo, ending with the line: ‘The abundance of the unpredictable in the world tells us the poverty of the calculable fragment of the world.’

This leads Ed to a book he’s been reading, William Blake vs the World by John Higgs (author of the amazing book on the KLF that spent two episodes talking about) and a line that he quotes from the poet Paul Éluard: ‘There is certainly another world, but it is in this one.’

And from here we arrive at The Fête of Britain, the newly announced four-day event organised by the Hard Art collective. This is the bubbling into view of something that’s been brewing for a long time, a collective including (friend of this podcast™) Brian Eno, Es Devlin, Clare Farrell of XR, Jeremy Deller and our very own Ed Gillespie.

Dougald talks about the connection between the idea of ‘Hard Art’ and the argument that he’s been making since the early days of Dark Mountain, that culture is not ‘a soft surface layer over life’s harder material and economic realities’, but a tectonic force that goes all the way down. ‘You can’t get aback of culture.’

As the episode comes to a close, we return to the pax populi and talk about Jonathan Rowson’s recent series on peace and the post in which he quotes the Star Wars character Jyn Erso:

They’ve no idea we’re coming. They’ve no reason to expect us. If we can make it to the ground, we’ll take the next chance, and the next, on and on until we win, or the chances are spent.

Jonathan connects this to the line attributed to Francis of Assisi:

If at first you do what is necessary, and then do what is possible, soon you find you are achieving the impossible.

And Ed links this to the words of Arthur Ashe:

Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.

As well as recording on something other than Skype, we finally took the plunge and moved this podcast to Substack. We hope this will allow us to widen the weave of relationships that has come into being around our conversations. Big thanks to our producer David Benjamin Blower.

Ed & Dougald

Leah Rampy, Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos

Bill Drummond, 45

David Mitchell, Unruly 

David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

Jay LeSoleil, 'Green' Elites vs Green Left Populism

Avtryck/Imprint – a documentary from the Swedish Transition Towns movement

Chris Smaje (from 2016), 'Why I'm still a populist despite Donald Trump: elements of a left agrarian populism'

'Desert' – an anonymous anarchist text, quoted in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

Debbie Kasper, 'Microcosm of Transition' – about the day the cow came home

Ed opens a window on Sophie Howarth’s Lighting the Dark: An Advent Calendar.

We share the Benjamin Zephaniah poems that have been going round in our heads, since the news of his death was announced, ‘To Do Wid Me’ and ‘Rong Radio Station’ and ‘Luv Song’.

Ed’s been reading a doorstop of a novel, The Deluge by Stephen Markley.

Dougald has been revisiting the work of Pam Warhurst and Incredible Edible Todmorden, including something he heard her say about finding ‘a forever project’, something that you’ll be working on for the rest of your life.

We pick up the story from last episode about the KLF, inspired by John Higgs’s book, The KLF: Chaos, Magic & the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds.

Uncannily, it turns out that the KLF released a new single the day before we recorded our previous episode – here is KLF KARE & Harry Nilsson ft. Ricardo Da Force, Everybody’s Talking At Me. Possibly not going to make Christmas Number One.

This takes us back to the zenith of the original KLF era, the video to Justified & Ancient ft. Tammy Wynette. And then there’s KLF vs Extreme Noise Terror at the Brit Awards.

One of the striking thoughts from Higgs’s book is about the timing of the KLF moment, coming in the early 1990s, after the events that marked the end of what historian Eric Hobsbawm called ‘The Short Twentieth Century’ (1914-91). Higgs writes about the ‘liminal’ moment of 1991-94 – apparently these are the only years in Wikipedia where the list of things that ‘happened in this year’ gets shorter rather than longer over time.

Anyone writing about the cultural history of the early 1990s tends to reference Douglas Coupland’s Generation X – and Dougald points out that the novel ends with three pages of statistics about a generation growing up poorer than their parents. So in its origins, this wasn’t just about a cultural moment or a ‘slacker’ trend, but the beginning of a reckoning with the unravelling of the rising and broadly shared prosperity of post-war America – which then got swept under the carpet in the second half of the 1990s by the take off of the internet. (Coupland himself shifted focus, writing Microserfs – about tech employees – and jPod, which ‘updates Microserfs for the age of Google’.)

As Higgs says in his book, it’s one thing to start burning a million quid, it’s another thing to finish it – it takes a long time and it’s pretty tedious – and if you don’t believe this, then you too can Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid.

Dougald remembers something that Slavoj Zizek writes about in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, the Lacanian idea of ‘ritual value’ and sacrifice as what tears the net of the total logic of ‘use’ and ‘exchange’ value.

Meanwhile, Tammy Wynette singing ‘They’re justified and their ancient and they’ve still no masterplan’ prompts a connection to the anonymous Substack, Philosophy in Hell, and a post (brought to our attention by Liz Slade of the Unitarians) called ‘Instead of Your Life’s Purpose’, where the author advocates for a ‘non-linear approach to meaning’:

Instead of imagining yourself as the hero of a Hollywood movie, imagine yourself as a particularly hearty ancestor that you might brag about when drunk:  the one who rode bareback, founded a town, fought a grizzly bear, raised 10 kids, saved her son’s life by drinking the governor under the table, and went to the frontier to stay one step ahead of the hangman and her gambling debtors.

Ed brings us into land with Higgs’s theory about the ultimate significance of the K Foundation burning a million quid – what if this is an intervention in idea-space that makes it thinkable that money can be stopped? Did they plant a seed for the economic chaos of the decades that followed, but also the kind of ‘liberation loophole’ that might be called for? Or was this just a meaningless act by ‘a pair of attention-seeking arseholes’?

And somewhere in the mix of all this, Ed thinks he may have caught sight of his own ‘forever project’.

On which note, we say farewell for 2023, with thanks for all your support over the past twelve months. We’re taking a few weeks break – and then we’ll be back for the second half of series five, starting in late January.

First, though, we start out talking about humbling moments, great and small, prompted by Dougald’s experience of stumbling upon a conversation between two listeners who had very different responses to our previous episode.

The KLF conversation takes in George Orwell’s near-death experience off the coast of the Isle of Jura, where he wrote 1984. Also Alan Moore’s From Hell and his understanding of ‘ideaspace’. We learn about the dream of a yellow wave that haunted Carl Jung in the years before the First World War – and Ed shares his poem, Foxtime, written in January 2020, which came to feel like a premonition of the pandemic.

All of this brings Dougald back to something from the last episode, where he briefly quoted from John Berger’s essay, ‘The Hour of Poetry’, something he expanded on in a subsequent Substack post. According to Berger, the purpose of poetry is to connect the separated, and our friend Dan commented that this couldn’t mean ‘the poet/author/artist being imagined as a professional, solitary figure producing a commodity for a living’, it has to be the opposite of this. 

And as Dougald was sitting with this comment, an email arrived from Ben Eaton of Invisible Flock with a story about how some words from At Work in the Ruins had come to be used in an extraordinary installation in their current exhibition in Leeds, This is a Forest. (Strangely enough, Dougald has also been part of an exhibition this autumn in Västerås, Sweden called Säg att du är en skog, ‘Say You Are a Forest’.) 

Meanwhile, the follow-up post about ‘The Hour of Poetry’ triggered a fascinating conversation between Roselle Angwin and Richard Kurth, a glimpse of way that words can call us into relation and away from the traps of becoming (in the title of Stewart Lee’s stand-up show) a ‘Content Provider’ in a self-commodifying machine.

Join us next time, when Dougald will have read John Higg’s KLF book and we’ll see what we learn from Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty’s inability to explain why they burned a million quid.

Ed quotes from Paul Mason’s ‘Gaza: Time for Restraint’, a story brought to our attention by listener Richard Brophy, about a conversation between George Orwell and Stephen Spender during the Second World War.

Before we head further into the core themes of this episode, Ed talks about a recent visit to the Time & Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth and the stories he found in Sarah E Doig’s The A-Z of Curious Norfolk. Among these is the story of the first bomb dropped on British soil, from a Zeppelin over Sheringham on 18th January 1915.

Moving to the present, Dougald reads from ‘Two Feather Sunday’, a recent post by Andrew at Bog-down and Aster. ‘I have been in a quiet lately,’ Andrew writes. ‘I think a fair few of us have.’ What lifts him from this quiet and sets the theme for our conversation is another Substack post, from Caroline Ross, ‘Writing a Chalice’, and her image words used ‘freely, generously,/as though you were passing/the simple birchwood cup you carved/among friends.’

Responding to a reader, Andrew also describes a realisation that the potency of his work doesn’t lie in seeking ‘more likes, more readers, more subscriptions’, but in finding ‘a handful of close readers’ and ‘a small circle of others writing around the same ideas’, where ideas and images start ‘cross-pollinating’.

This takes Ed back to Yancey Strickler’s ‘Dark Forest’ theory of the internet, which we spoke about in S3E8 – and he describes a recent encounter with Yancey and learning about Metalabel, a project supporting ‘creativity in multiplayer mode’.

Dougald brings in Adam Wilson’s recent post at The Peasantry School, ‘A warning to readers: this story can’t be told in prose’, about how we write about what we only glimpse from the corner of the eye. Two observations from this resonate with the wider discussion: ‘We are invited to generate opinions about how to live while others shoulder the consequences of our opinions,’ Adam writes – and: ‘We see ourselves as powerless even as we wield unprecedented power.  Privilege seems to beget a felt sense of victimhood, which in turn breeds a nearly insatiable hunger for more privilege.’

This brings Ed to a recent post from Tom Hirons, ‘a quick reminder that we all live in the varying shades of a dystopian nightmare set in paradise’.

Dougald talks about Ivan Illich’s troubling words about the refusal to ‘care’, when care is reduced to a feeling rather than an action. (There’s more in this post.) And from there we come to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words about the contrast between ‘cheap grace’ and ‘costly grace’.

Still wondering about what it means to ‘care’, Dougald brings in a poem by Dylan Thomas (brought to his attention by Andrew Curry’s Just Two Things), ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’.

Ed reflects on the 70th anniversary of Thomas’s death, how ‘Under Milkwood’ drew inspiration from the name of a road in Herne Hill, his own reworking of it as ‘Beyond Coldharbour’, and what happened when someone played Martin Shaw the Dubwood Allstars’ recording of the poem, ‘Under Dubwood’.

Ed brings in a post from Liz Slade on Remembrance Sunday and the poem ‘Making Peace’ by Denise Levertov.

Dougald talks about rereading John Berger’s essay, ‘The Hour of Poetry’ from 1982 (in The White Bird).

Ed describes reading Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Everyone Sang’ at Sandhurst – and the reminder that this is not a poem about the end of the Great War, but about a moment of extraordinary beauty experienced in the middle of the horror of the trenches.

This brings us to Sacii Lloyd’s recent appearance on Ed’s Other Podcast, The Futurenauts.

Dougald picks up on the story of Sassoon’s poem, the way that the world is woven through with both horror and wonder, and Betti Moser’s photo essay, ‘From Grief to Awe’ (soon to appear in the online edition of Dark Mountain), with her father’s neighbours in a Greek valley devastated by floods telling her, ‘Nature will help, bit by bit, to make it beautiful again.’

We end with the lines from Bertolt Brecht about ‘singing in the dark times’, which inspired Tamsin Eliot’s song, ‘When the times darken’.

The Regrowing a Living Culture series at a school called HOME starts on 7 & 8 November.

Ed has been reading Dougie Strang’s book, The Bone Cave.

Dougald mentions the cluster of authors who were part of the first decade of Dark Mountain who are stepping out with books of their own, finding their voice and getting the attention they deserve. This includes Dougie, also his wife Em Strang’s first novel Quinn, Nick Hunt’s first novel Red Smoking Mirror, Caroline Ross’s book on pigment-making, Found & Ground, and her Substack ‘Uncivil Savant’, and Charlotte Du Cann’s mythic memoir After Ithaca as well as her newly launched Substack, ‘The Red Tent’.

Ed has also been reading Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker and John Lanchester’s The Wall.

Dougald mentions Lanchester’s essays on Game of Thrones, Marlen Haushofer’s 1963 dystopian novel, also called The Wall, and finally Helen Cresswell’s hilarious The Bagthorpe Saga.

Ed wonders what to say to some of the audiences he ends up getting to speak in front of – and this connects to a question Dougald has been wondering about since the roundtable he took part in for Nate Hagens’s The Great Simplification podcast. Is it possible to take Federico Campagna’s call to ‘make good ruins’ (in Prophetic Culture) and begin to turn this into strategy? This is the starting point for Dougald’s new Substack series, How We Make Good Ruins.

There’s a place Ed goes walking, Covehithe, where the locals dismantled the medieval church and rebuilt a humbler structure inside its ruins. It’s the setting for a short story called ‘Covehithe’ by China Miéville (who, weirdly, shared a gap-year training programme with Ed when they were teenagers).

The image of the church at Covehithe echoed back through Dougald’s work and prompted an essay, The Ruined Church. This also connected to John Foster’s essay, ‘Beyond the Fishtank’, which included the suggestion that the one thing missing from At Work in the Ruins was ‘the metaphysics’.

Ed brings our conversation to a close by quoting D.H. Lawrence from Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928):

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

For this live show, Ed and Dougald were joined by two special guests.

Charlotte Du Cann is a writer, editor, teacher and lover of all things rooted in Earth and sky. She works as co-director of the Dark Mountain Project and is the author of After Ithaca and 52 Flowers That Shook My World. She has just launched her Substack, The Red Tent, 'a metaphysical practice for collapsing times', in which she writes to pass on the tools that have served her over the past thirty years.

Rupert Read is a philosopher and climate activist. This summer, he left his role as a professor at the University of East Anglia, after 26 years, to dedicate himself to his work as co-director of the Climate Majority Project. He is the author of many books, including Why Climate Breakdown Matters and Do You Want to Know the Truth? The Surprising Rewards of Climate Honesty.

We'll be back in a few weeks' time with the first episode of our fifth season.

We reach the end of Season 4 of The Great Humbling, though Ed and Dougald start the show with an invitation to a one-off live recording of a special episode with guests Rupert Read and Charlotte Du Cann for those who can join us in Norwich on 20 February.

As always, we start off by talking about what we've been reading, listening to, watching, imbibing, or otherwise taking on board in ways that get us thinking.

Ed has been reading a book called At Work in the Ruins by someone called Dougald Hine.

He's also working his way through Susan Cooper's classic series of fantasy novels, The Dark Is Rising. And he recently rewatched Roy Andersson's black comedy, Songs from the Second Floor.

Dougald talks about Gabor Maté's new book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture which connects to many of the themes we've talked about in earlier episodes, not least in relation to Vanessa Machado de Oliveira's Hospicing Modernity.

Then we come to the book that prompted this episode, George Monbiot's Regenesis. If you've not read the book itself yet, we recommend at least reading George's initial Guardian article in which he introduced his argument about the end of agriculture, ‘Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’.

Ed mentions Chris Smaje's Small Farm Future for a rather different picture of the future of agriculture.

For direct responses to Regenesis, we also recommend:

– this critique by Chris Smaje;

– Simon Fairlie’s review of Regenesis in The Land magazine;

– Gunnar Rundgren’s ‘In defence of farming’;

– the investigation by Jonathan Matthews at GM Watch which details the origins and connections of RePlanet, the organisation with whom Monbiot is collaborating on the Reboot Food campaign;

– this Twitter thread from Rob Percival (head of food policy at the Soil Association and author of The Meat Paradox, Radio 4’s current Book of the Week) on the basic questions about animal farming and climate change.

Dougald talks about Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary and the different worlds constructed and inhabited by the different hemispheres of the brain.

We discuss the ETC group report, 'Who Will Feed Us?', on how the world is fed today and how we navigate a climate-changed future, with its startling figure that 70% of the food humanity eats currently comes from the 'peasant food web' rather than the 'industrial food chain'. An analysis by A Growing Culture reveals the problems with more recent peer-reviewed papers which claimed to have debunked this figure. (You'll find the links to the papers themselves via the Growing Culture link.)

Ed talks about Michael O'Callaghan's reflections on AI and critical thinking, then reads a ChatGPT pastiche of a Dr Seuss poem. This brings out Dougald's inner Nick Cave.

We close with some thoughts from Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser's introduction to A World of Many Worlds.

So, here's what happened – after a long break, we sat down in early October to record the seventh episode of this series, but life got in the way and by the time we got around to editing it six weeks later, the world had changed so much that it felt like a historical document. Britain has (yet) another prime minister, Sweden has a government over which the far-right have an unprecedented influence. But here it is, in any case, 'the missing episode', so you can travel back in time and relive the thoughts that were on our minds earlier this autumn.

Some shownotes, then...

Firstly, a bow of gratitude to listener Lydia Catterall for her lovely words about the previous episode. Check out Lydia's work here: "Lydia aims to reveal, support and champion the creative people and ideas transforming the make-up of where we live."

After mentioning Felix Marquardt's The New Nomads, Ed goes on to talk about Gaia Vince's Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World. He's also been reading Laline Paull's novel, The Bees – 'a thriller set in a beehive, based on real honeybee biology'.

Dougald has also been on an interspecies reading trip – he talks about Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis and recommends Sarah Thomas's The Raven's Nest, 'a memoir about resilience and learning to belong, set in the elemental landscape of Iceland's Westfjords', as perfect reading for the dark months of the northern year.

Discussing the strange days that followed the Queen's death, Dougald reads from a piece that Diné elder Pat McCabe published on Facebook about praying at the tomb of King Ferdinand of Spain.

Ed quotes from Ursula K Le Guin's 2014 speech in which she speaks for the long historical view and being 'realists of a larger reality': 'We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.'

Dougald remembers Rowan Williams writing in Lost Icons about the tension between the role of the 'monarch as icon', with its traces of 'sacred eccentricity', and 'monarch as absolute executive master'. Something was lost, Williams suggests, when the ceremony of the monarch washing the feet of the poor on Maundy Thursday was sanitised and replaced with the giving out of bags of coins – while 'the rot set in ... when monarchs started dressing habitually in military uniform'.

We discuss a passage in Paul Kingsnorth's Substack essay, 'The Nation and the Grid', about 'a situation in which nobody [on any side of politics or the culture war] is quite clear what they want or how to get it'.

We mark the loss of Bruno Latour and discuss his book, Down to Earth, and the images it offers for recognising the failure of the old political trajectories of left and right in the time of 'the new climatic regime'.

And as so often, our conversation comes around to the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, and the suggestion that what may be called for is to visibilise the absence of what is lacking from existing institutions and conversations, rather than move to fast to attempt to bring the absent into a setting which remains unchanged and will tend to distort or misunderstand it.

After twenty-nine episodes recorded through screens and cameras, Ed and Dougald find themselves meeting for the first time and sit down for a conversation beside the mill pond in Loddon, in the garden of the Mill of Impermanence.

We hear the unlikely tale of how Dougald found Ed’s fiftieth birthday present, a copy of Uriah Heep’s fifth album, The Magician’s Birthday, while en route to a holiday in Great Yarmouth. A chain of serendipitous events leads to the unavoidable conclusion that Yarmouth is the spiritual home of the Great ‘Umbling.

This leads to a discussion of ‘serendipity’, the term coined by the novelist Horace Walpole in 1754, and its opposite, ‘zemblanity’, coined by the novelist William Boyd in 1998. 

Dougald explains why he abandoned the article he started writing about all the things he learned from hitchhiking.

Ed talks about Gordon White’s Ani.Mystic and we agree that it’s a mindblowing book. Ed makes the connection to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Dougald brings in Paul Kingsnorth’s recent conversation with Rowan Williams.

Dougald talks about Danny Nemo’s Neuro-Apocalypse and the centrality of the concept of ‘ki’ in everyday Japanese.

Ed enthuses about James Rebanks’s English Pastoral.

Dougald reads from a recent essay from an anonymous Substack called Flat Caps and Fatalism, a dark picture of ‘The dishonest land’.

Ed lifts up the work of Ann and Martin Wolfe at Wakelyns Agroforestry as a local example of the possibility of a different relationship to land, even starting from where we find ourselves.

Dougald poses a big question for this episode: what do we believe in? Ed responds playfully and paradoxically with ‘self-delusion’, citing Robert Trivers work on self-deceit that includes gay pornography and erection-o-meters. And lasers. Here's his RSA talk. 

Dougald talks about the formative influence of spending the first two-and-a-bit years of his life in the grounds of a theological college and what happened when he told his Sunday school teacher that he didn't find Hell 'a particularly helpful concept’. 

Does it matter more what we believe, or what our beliefs make us do? If there is a throne at the heart of a culture, what do we put on it?

Ed shares his own inherited belief from his late father: ‘Brickshit’. A story that entails psychedelic adventures and an uncanny set of synchronicities, a recurrent theme of these conversations.

Dougald asserts that he does not believe in coincidences, and expands on the idea of culture’s empty throne in the inter-generational absence of church-going, and the unarticulated loss that results in society. 

Does religion start as a joke that falls into the trap of taking itself too seriously? If everyone we meet is God in disguise, how might that influence our metaphysical manners? Is prayer a shortcut to ancient mysteries? 

Ed concludes with some thoughts on ‘interbeing’ and finding magic everywhere amongst the ruins.

We started this podcast in the early weeks of the pandemic, talking about the stories circling around it. A crisis had come out of the corner of almost everyone's field of vision and became, within weeks, the only thing in the news. Two years on, something similar has happened, so we arrived at this episode wondering whether or not to talk about Ukraine.

Dougald remembers Ivan Illich's short text, 'The Right to Dignified Silence' (in In the Mirror of the Past), written in support of West German campaigners  who refused to enter into a reasoned argument about nuclear weapons, choosing instead to express themselves through public silence.

This reminds Ed of the Silent Parade in Manhattan in 1917 to protest violence against African Americans, and also of the wordless presence of XR's Red Rebel Brigade.

Ed quotes from Douglas Rushkoff's 'Doing Less to Help Ukraine':

Instead of filling our channels and brains with uninformed opinions, we should stop and breathe. We are not there, we not informed, and we should shut up — except, maybe, to stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings. We can bear witness to what is happening. Instead of adding more conflict and confusion to the crisis, we can help metabolize the trauma of our fellow beings. We are all connected, after all.

Dougald reflects on L.M. Sacasas's comment about the impossibility of being silent in online spaces. We either contribute to the noise, or we disappear altogether from view.

We wonder about the role played at a moment like this by the kind of quieter online spaces – the 'dark forests' of the internet we discussed at the end of last series – in contrast to the escalatory patterns of social media.

Dougald quotes Justin E.H. Smith on how social media turns protest into 'upvoting' and 'downvoting' options like creating a no-fly zone, with terrifying implications.

Ed speaks about the 'onion layers' of history that leave us all weeping, and we discuss Branko Marcetic's article on the historical context of Ukraine. 

Ed brings in the heartening story of the two Scottish gardeners who drove to Ukraine to rescue three students trapped in the city of Sumy.

This reminds Dougald of the story of Illich being asked by a friend, "Don't you care about the starving children in the Sahel?" No, he replies, because to care would mean selling my belongings and going there and doing something, and I am not going to pretend that this is my intention. Illich's point is that we use the language of care too lightly. The example of those Scottish gardeners is what care, in Illich's sense, actually looks like.

We ask why this war is dominating the headlines, a question brought into focus by Ahmed Abdulkareem's article, 'Tears for Ukraine, Sanctions for Russia, Yawns for Yemen, Arms for Saudis'.

One layer within this is racism: the victims in Ukraine 'look like us', as more than one journalist has let slip. Dougald quotes from a fierce article by the Kenyan cartoonist Patrick Gathara that turns the foreign correspondent's lens on Europe and its 'tribal conflicts'.

Another layer is the fear we rightfully feel at the thought of nuclear esculation. Ed brings in Vladimir Pozner's talk at Yale and our blithe indifference (until this war) to the threat of nuclear weapons.

A further layer involves the way that this war reveals the rickety foundations of the 'mansion of modern freedoms' (a phrase that comes from Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History, with echoes of Vanessa Andreotti's 'The House Modernity Built'.) Dougald quotes from Rhyd Wildermuth's Substack essay, 'The Haunted Mansion of Modern Freedom', which wonders about what this war has done to 'the fantasy of historical progress, urban civic religion, and the Pax Capitalis', and how far this is colouring the Western response. There's an invitation to sit with current events as part of a larger process of the collapse of the house modernity built.

To sit with that kind of awareness is overwhelming, and as we turn to the question of 'what we can do', the first step is to find our way back to our bodies and the humility of our limited ability to 'do' anything.

But we mention the organisations worthy of support that Justin E.H. Smith lists at the end of another recent essay, 'Silence, Insouciance, Takemanship'.

Dougald remembers the beginnings of the City of Sanctuary movement in Sheffield and expresses a hope that we might broaden the current moment of generosity towards Ukrainean refugees towards the kind of culture of grassroots hospitality towards refugees and asylum seekers which that movement works to build.

We talk about the difference between 'praying for peace' and 'praying peace', coming into alignment with the field of peace rather than war. (The distinction comes from Gordon White.)

And we remember Wendell Berry's words about 'the peace of wild things'.

We’ve been listening back to the first episode we made, almost two years ago, in the early weeks of the time of Covid.

Maybe it’s the influence of revisiting those early episodes, or maybe it has to do with Dougald turning up to our January recording with a glass of bubbly in hand, but we find ourselves ranging freely – and at some length – in this conversation we’re calling ‘Remapping Lava’.

Before we get onto the main theme of the discussion, we bring back the tradition of asking each other what we’ve been reading or listening to lately that’s got us thinking.

Ed talks about Bewilderment, the new novel from Richard Powers, whose last book was The Overstory.

Dougald has been discovering the joys of Tintin and gives us his Captain Haddock impression. He also talks about David Cayley’s book of interviews, Ideas on the Nature of Science, based on the epic CBC radio series, How to Think About Science.

Ed reads us a little from The Owner of the Sea, Richard Price’s retelling of three Inuit stories, and tells us about a serendipitous connection with Lucy Hinton’s poem, Singing Bone.

Talk of Inuit poetry takes Dougald back to Taqralik Partridge’s challenge to consider the pandemic as the ‘warning shots’ of a larger storm into which the world is headed.

So what is the shape of the storm, how is the lava looking, as the pandemic enters its third year?

Talking about the atmosphere in the UK, Ed mentions Cassette Boy’s Rage Against the Party Machine. He also brings up the Dutch museums and arts institutions that reopened as hair salons and gyms in response to Covid restrictions. 

As another marker of the sense of shifting stories over recent weeks, Dougald brings up the Guardian interview with Clive Dix, former head of the UK’s vaccine tax force, headlined ‘End mass jabs and live with Covid’ and a report from the second week in December on protests in Austria that was the first time he’d noticed these treated as legitimate, rather than reduced to a story about the far right, conspiracy theorists and ‘anti-vaxxers’.

Talking about who has had a ‘bad’ pandemic brings us to the role of public intellectuals and the philosopher Justin E.H. Smith’s Substack piece Covid is Boring, where he expresses puzzlement over his peers enlisting as ‘full-time volunteer nodes of information on epidemiology’. Smith is in favour of mandatory vaccination, yet he’s also disturbed by the failure to question ‘the regime that covid has helped install’.

Dougald connects this role of ‘thinking on behalf of science’ rather than ‘thinking about science’ (in the sense of Cayley’s book and radio series) to the enlisting of artists to ‘deliver the message’ about climate change – and refers to the work he did with Riksteatern on what other roles art might play under the shadow of climate change.

We decide that there are different ways of answering the question of who’s had a ‘good’ pandemic. 

Oxfam’s wealth aggregation analysis gives a pretty clear picture of who has benefited economically from the pandemic – answer, billionaires (which may be why they are all throwing themselves into space…).

But talking about whose moral standing emerges strengthened from the past two years, Ed brings in an interview with Rosebell Kagumire, talking about the role of women in recovery.

This reminds Dougald of something Laura Stephens says about ‘recovery, discovery, un-covery’ as three aspects of what’s going on.

Ed talks about Julia Hobsbawm’s book The Nowhere Office, on the future of the workplace.

We mention Paul Kingsnorth’s three-part essay series, The Vaccine Moment, and the questions he asks about ‘the machine’.

We talk about valuing uncertainty – and that reminds Ed of Sam Conniff’s Uncertainty Experts.

And having started the episode by marvelling at how we used to make hour-long episodes in series one, we end up … making an hour long episode!

This episode starts with a little reflection on our new more-or-less monthly schedule, and in the course of this episode, we talk about a few other podcasts:

• Ingrid Rieser's Forest of Thought
• Per Johansson & Eric Schüldt's Swedish-language Myter och mysterier
• Ed's other podcast, Jon Richardson & the Futurenauts
• The Sacred, a podcast from the think tank Theos presented by Elizabeth Oldfield

We talk about COP26 and Ed mentions his recent TEDx Kings Cross talk, 'How We're Going to Solve Climate Change' where he refuses the frame of solutionism.

To lead us into the theme of this episode, Dougald quotes Mary Harrington on the old rhetorical idea of 'the common-place'. 

Ed leads us through the etymology of 'commons' and, after a brief diversion into Simon Pegg's Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, we reach Garrett Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons' paper and the work of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom who demonstrated that commons don't tend to fail in the way Hardin imagined.

Dougald brings in another strand of thinking about the commons, starting from Anthony McCann's old website Beyond the Commons and his paper Enclosure Without and Within the Information Commons.

This connects to Ivan Illich's Silence is a Commons, where he distinguishes 'the environment as a commons' from 'the environment as a resource'. The smörgåsbord of the Swedish hotel breakfast buffet gives us a 'common-place' with which to talk about not seeing the world as made of resources.

Dean Bavington's history of the Newfoundland cod fishery collapse, Managed Annihilation, also gets a mention as a book that complicates the 'tragedy of the commons' assumption.

Ed brings in the late David Graeber's final book, written in partnership with David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything. 

We acknowledge another huge loss, the unexpected death of Silke Helfrich, co-founder of the Commons Institute.

Dougald talks about how Chris Smaje's posts over the past year at Small Farm Future have made him reflect on the unhelpful idealisation of the commons (and denigration of all forms of private ownership) in some of the conversations that go on about these things today.

We return to the theme of the 'common-place' and the naming of this site as 'the commonplace book of a school called HOME'. Among other things, this has to do with what Peter Limberg of the Stoa was getting at when he wrote 'stop looking at the readership metrics'. The aim here is not to compete for platform, to reach as large an audience as possible, but to gather together things that are helping us make sense of the times we're living in.

The Great Humbling is back for a fourth series of conversations between Dougald Hine and Ed Gillespie, now as part of the wider patchwork of Homeward Bound.

Our theme for this first episode is confessions, but we start by looking back over the summer that's gone. Ed offers us Carol Campayne's seasonal map of responsible leadership with questions that follow the turning of the year:

• Spring: What's emerging? What are the new green shoots?
• Summer: What's blooming? What's in floral technicolor?
• Autumn: What do I need to give up, relinquish, let fall away?
• Winter: What can I see clearly now the leaves have dropped?

Dougald talks about the experience of voicing the audiobook of Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (who regular listeners may know as Vanessa Andreotti).

Ed introduces Nova Reid's book, The Good Ally, and the uncomfortable memories of his own childhood that it brought back.

Confessions often involve the revelation of personal facts that we would rather keep hidden.

Ed recalls his experiences taking the Earthly Sins Confessional Booth to Glastonbury.

Dougald talks about unexpectedly finding himself in a European airport this summer and the pervasive advertising for a future of fossil-free flying and ubiquitous 5G drone-facilitated 'easy'-ness.

Ed's been listening to Tyson Yunkaporta yarning with Adah Parris about 'Cyborg Shamanism'.

And we close with Raimon Panikkar's definition of a person as 'a knot within a net of relationships'.

We begin with some listener feedback from last week’s ‘Get on your knees!’ about prayer…

Before Dougald introduces our final instruction of the workout… Now Breathe!

We talk about the beautiful, simple pleasures of a degree of lockdown emergence, how Build Back Better went from a call for a radical progressive alliance to seize the moment of the pandemic, to a slogan on Boris Johnson's podium, and Sam Conniff saying he fears our generation's greatest regret will be that we failed to seize this moment

Ed notes Philip K Dick’s ‘Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away’...

Dougald talks about ‘escape variants’ and the risk of totalitarianism stemming from this and what weak centres of resistance, what practices, what moves we need to practice, how we attend to those fragile, ‘seemingly weak’ threads of relationship.

Ed talks about Bayo Akomolafe asking what if hope isn’t the answer? And more importantly what does not having hope allow us to see?

Dougald refers to an article by Caroline Busta, developing the idea of the dark forests of the internet and L.M. Sacasas – ‘Your attention is not a resource’  and ‘Minimum Viable Presence’ on social media

Ed talks about cancel culture and being cancelled from your own organisation in his experiences at Futerra

Dougald talks about culture wars and the  “weak man fallacy” and a piece by Melissa Phruksachart ‘The Literature of White Liberalism’

Ed references Alan Watts’ ‘the backwards law’ - wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience

Dougald wraps up series 3 appropriately with a poem Rashani Réa’s ‘The Unbroken’

Ed talks about Martin Shaw’s new book ‘Smokehole - looking to the wild in the time of the spyglass’ and the line ‘The mess out there is because of a mess in here’

Dougald discusses the difference between privilege, entitlement and the ‘work that is mine to do’ and references Alastair McIntosh’s four questions:

"Does what I do feed the hungry?"

"Is it relevant to the poor or to the broken in nature?"

"Does it contribute to understanding and meaningfulness?"

"Does it give life?" 

And there’s something else I’ve heard Alastair say, that our work starts from the place where our own needs meet the needs of the world. So maybe that’s a little clearer than the way I’ve spoken about these things before.

Dougald introduces this week’s instruction which is ‘Get On Your Knees!’ Because we’re going to be talking about prayer. Beginning with a story about a Sufi traditional blessing, it’s one of the names of God and it translates as ‘The door is open!’ and you say the name seven times and each time you put your hand on your heart and lift it outwards.

And asks the question “have there ever been humans who did so little blessing as they went about their lives, who had so little literacy of blessing?”

Ed shares a Shamanic healing with Suzy Crockford from lockdown one last year and the ritual offerings he was invited to make afterwards in gratitude.

Dougald talks about Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the emperor with no clothes – and coins the phrase ‘the empire has no prayers’ and maybe it’s also true to say ‘the empire hasn’t got a prayer’?

Dougald talks about Bible and Empire and and how something has died or gone rotten in the kind of prayer that can do that,  referencing Dara Molloy’s The Globalisation of God how the institutionalised church extinguished the local hybrid traditions such as Celtic Christianity, creating the prototype for colonialism and globalisation

Prayer might not (always) be what we think it is – because it has been part of the ways in which humans have inhabited the world in almost all the times and places we know of, but that the idea of religion which we mostly have is formed (even if only in the negative) by certain versions of Abrahamic monotheism, primarily Christian versions

Ed returns us to our knees talking about how the act of kneeling is full of deep biological, behavioural, spiritual and political energy...it is also mythical as Martin Shaw writes in ‘Smokehole’ and perhaps where we really need to begin. Because...

When you forget what you kneel upon, you are far more easily influenced by energies that may not wish you well.

Dougald talks about an essay that Mat Osmond wrote for Dark Mountain: Issue 17, called ‘Black Light’ – it’s about the artist Meinrad Craighead and her depictions of the Black Madonna. Mat grew up within a certain version of Anglican Christianity, and there’s a bit in the essay where he writes:

Suppose the dying religion I was raised within were understood as a nurse log – a fallen ancestral giant slow-releasing its nutrients, from whose decaying body a tangle of adaptive cultures is even now emerging? Such new, regenerative shoots might turn out to have less to do with belief or exhausted argument than with recovered behaviours. Behaviours which allow us to entrust our lives to mystery – to the unearned gift of being here at all.

Ed connects the ‘nurse log’ idea with the memories of his late father and brother.

Dougald talks about prayer in grief and The Way of the Rose, ‘an interfaith rosary fellowship with a subversive mission: to come together in reclaiming this old grassroots mother-devotion from the various weaponised agendas she’s been enlisted to. A re-wilding of the rosary’ and Beloved Sara Zaltash’s The Call – https://www.belovedsarazaltash.com/the-call, plus a conversation between Jay Springett and Gordon White of Rune Soup, where Gordon makes the case that the prayers of the Christian tradition do not belong to the church, or not only – that they are part of your ancestral tradition, they have been prayed in fields and around campfires and over the sick and at times of joy, they have been woven into folk magic and the practices of everyday life for many centuries

Ed shares the Hawaiian Ho’oponopono: I’m sorry, forgive me, thank you, I love you…

Dougald returns to Martin Shaw’s A Counsel of Resistance and Delight

Ed shares a story about praying with the birds on the River Chet

Dougald closes with a few lines from a poem by John Paul Davis Epigenetics

Mentions Prentis Hemphill’s Finding Our Way podcast and finishes on Mat Osmond’s ‘Black Light’:

An English Buddhist priest once taught me that in learning to pray, we learn to get smaller. To get lower, closer to the ground that supports us. Of the many valuable things which I’ve received from the hands of Buddhist teachers, that priest’s idea of prayer is the one I hold closest: when we get down to it, all that we are and all that we value in this life comes to us as unearned gift, and what we cultivate, in prayer, is a grateful awareness of this condition. Which is one of abundance. Which is also one of permanent, radical dependency

Let’s get on our knees and pray together in our own way. Bless you for listening.

Dougald references a long essay by David Cayley, ‘Gaia and the path of the Earth’ and Bruno Latour’s book, Facing Gaia, contradictions ‘must be endured and sustained, not resolved or overcome’ and Vanessa Andreotti on ‘layering’

Ed talks about his first paddle upstream from the Mill and introduces this week’s instruction:  ‘Small yourself up’?! via Jamaican buses and Antarctica.

Dougald talks about the privilege of taking up space, whether that’s man-spreading on the tube or being quick to jump in and say whatever comes to your mind in a meeting.

Ed refers to the Findhorn New Story Summit  and how the over eager crowd were encouraged to self-police their own contributions by asking themselves whether they would add more to the gathering than a moment of powerful collective shared silence.

Dougald talks about the app ‘Is A Dude Talking?’ and how if you put this podcast through the Is A Dude Talking? app, the answer is 100% yes.

Ed discusses how looking or feeling small is usually associated with humiliation, insignificance or stupidity but how the proverbial roots of ‘small’ often work the other way. Bringing in E.F.Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beautiful’.

Dougald introduces something the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers says, about making the case for slowing down and the 1905 San Francisco streetcar footage, used as a music video by Air for La Femme d’Argent and how Illich talks about “the speed-stunned imagination.

Ed wonders whether the pandemic and the reclamation of road space for outdoor and al fresco hospitality and physically distanced mobility might actually help us tune back in to our speed-stunned imaginations and reconnect with Illich’s sense of human scale streetscape conviviality?

Dougald goes back to Alan Lane from Slung Low Theatre and a post of his from the autumn, on whether it’s the job of arts organisations to be running food banks.

Dougald quotes a line from the political theorist Jodi Dean – ‘Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you raise chickens’ – and Chris Smaje’s book A Small Farm Future, and the artist Jeanne van Heeswijk - working at ground-level, at the human scale, in the communities where they find themselves.

Dougald talks about an invitation from the composer Lola Perrin’s live-streamed reading marathon to coincide with the hearing where the UK government is seeking to jail the barrister Tim Crosland who deliberately broke the embargo on the announcement of Heathrow Airport Limited’s successful appeal to give the go-ahead for a third runway. And the readings he chose - a short passage from Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk where he’s writing about Aboriginal law and one of his favourite poems that’s ever been in Dark Mountain, Cate Chapman’s Protest Poem.

When we think and talk big, it’s easy for that bigness to be a refuge from the fragility of being embodied creatures with fist-sized, fist-shaped hearts that beat for a while - John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook and ‘the disturbance of distances’

Dougald realises how his work these days has come to orbit around the future and discovers he’s accidentally became a futurist

Ed shares his journey to accidental, reluctant, futurism

Then Dougald introduces this week’s instruction is ‘See Double!’

Ed talks about Double Vision or Diplopia - the simultaneous perception of two images of a single object that may be displaced horizontally, vertically, diagonally - both vertically and horizontally and how its often voluntary.

Ed references Thundercats ‘Sword of Omens’! ‘Give me sight beyond sight!’ (a first for the podcast) and the 2002 movie ‘Double Vision’ about a serial killer who impregnates victims with a black fungus that causes hallucinations, compelling them to kill themselves (don’t do these kind of shrooms!)...based on a Taoist belief that to become a ‘Xian’ (enlightened immortal) one must endure the 5 sufferings…

Frigid Hell, Fire Hell, Disembowelment Hell, Heart-Extracting Hell, and Tongue-Removal Hell

Diplopia can also be one of the first signs of a systemic disease, particularly to a muscular or neurological process, and it may disrupt a person's balance, movement, or reading abilities. Is our double vision a systemic disease?!

Erasmus derived proverb ‘In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is King’ 

Ed talks about one-eyed Norse God Odin and his exchange of an eye for knowledge and wisdom, and he huge symbolism around perception

Dougald quotes from William Blake:

Now I a fourfold vision see

And a fourfold vision is given to me;

Tis fourfold in my supreme delight

And threefold in soft Beulahs night

And twofold Always. May God us keep

From Single vision and Newtons sleep!

And the layered account of consciousness, described well by Philip Pullman

Dougald describes the warning in the poem against a flat rationalism, an approach to the world which Blake clearly identifies with the emergence of what we think of as modern science, the figure of Isaac Newton – and the point is not to deny that the ways of seeing we associate with science have a place – it’s that to allow this way of seeing to represent the full truth of the world is dangerous and mistaken

Ed mentions Merlin Sheldrake’s work in ‘Do Shrooms’ which echoes the same point

Dougald quotes what John Berger said of Jay Griffiths – ‘Reality is such that both language and imagination have to exaggerate, in order to confront it truly’ and tells a great story of Jay at the first Dark Mountain festival

Ed talks about the dual tension between different strains of what, for want of a better word, we might call activism, and how the behaviour change versus system change battle still rages

Dougald brings in economic historian Karl Polanyi and his ideas of ‘disembedding’ and ‘the double movement’ and how ‘laissez-faire was planned’ The Great Transformation

How do we not feel like fools, for believing that there’s any possibility of things turning out differently?

And the answer is perhaps the double movement – to say, it’s possible that we have at least two trajectories) that coexist, that are moving in quite different directions, and it’s not that one of them is real and the other isn’t, it’s that there’s no way of seeing from here how the interaction between them turns out or which turns out to be the more significant

‘Seeing double’, being able to attend to very different possibilities unfolding and coexisting over time, without the reality of one trajectory having to eclipse the other – it’s a way of holding things open, retaining the possibility of surprise

Ed talks about the MDGs, SDGs, Good Life Goals and Inner Development Goals: https://www.innerdevelopmentgoals.org/, Matthew Taylor’s Reformism vs Radicalism hypothesis is another of these false binaries, misleading polarities and how a former senior Futerra colleague attacked him for his involvement with XR, saying Extinction Rebellion wasn’t very ‘on brand’

Dougald touches on Hospicing Modernity and a social cartography https://decolonialfutures.net/mapping-decolonization/ that maps out Soft Reform, Radical Reform and Beyond Reform.

Ed talks about ‘insultancy’ and concludes with a verse from Robert Frost - Two Tramps In Mud Time

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.

Dougald shares Lucille Clifton’s poem ‘Blessing the boats’

And this week’s instruction is – ‘Do Shrooms!’

Ed introduces one of the inspirations for the episode Merlin Sheldrake’s book, ‘Entangled Life - How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures’

Dougald talks about his fly agaric birthday cake. For his fifth birthday.

And then references Alan Garner’s book Strandloper and a collection of talks and essays called The Voice That Thunders before sharing the story of how he knows and first met the author.

Ed does his etymology thing relating how pioneering psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond asked Aldous Huxley in 1956 to suggest a word to describe the therapeutic use of hallucinogens, Huxley proposed ‘phanerothyme’ - from Greek for ‘manifest’ and ‘spirit’, writing...

“To make this mundane world sublime,

Take half a gram of phanerothyme”

To which Osmond replied:

“To fathom Hell or soar angelic,

Just take a pinch of psychedelic”

Psychedelics…Greek ‘mind manifesting’ or ‘soul revealing’

‘Entheogens’ - from the Greek ‘to be made full of the divine’ – a term coined in 1979 by a group of mythologists and ethnobotanists

Ed introduces Michael Pollan’s ‘How to change your mind’...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Change_Your_Mind

And mentions the John Hopkins Psilocybin Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5KWf8H2pM0tlVd7niMtqeU?si=_P3Xi61wQrmrWcU__M8Lgg curated by researchers to accompany the experiences of their subjects in their research on treating severe depression

We talk about David Abram and sleight of hand magic – how it confounded expectations, ends up sharpening senses - seeing the world as it actually is, not how we expect it to be!

‘Could it be there is another ground on which to plant our feet?’

Relaxing the ego’s trigger-happy command of reactions to people and events. Freed from its tyranny, maddening reflexivity and pinched conception of one’s self-interest - into an ability to exist amid doubts and mysteries without automatically, instinctively reaching for certainty…

Transcend our subjectivity - to widen its circle so far that it takes in everything - ourselves, others and the whole of nature...

Dougald talks about Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World

Ed talks about his personal experiences...from picking mushrooms on the military firing ranges in the Brecon Beacons, to the sublime and the ridiculous

Dougald recalls meeting Vinay Gupta for the first time who asked ‘you’ve done a lot of acid, haven’t you?’

We speculate about whether mushrooms ‘have an agenda’

Dougald talks about his personal experience and references a fascinating essay by the philosopher Justin E. H. Smith about agrarian shamanism in early modern Europe:

Ed refers to Jonathan Haidt - American Social Psychologist’s ‘The Righteous Mind - Why good people disagree over politics and religion’ and the cultivation of the ‘hive mind’

Ed quotes David Graeber: “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

Dougald concludes with ‘getting ‘far out’ is the easy part, it’s finding your way home that’s hard

Dougald talks about Campfire Convention https://campfireconvention.uk/ 

Ed introduces this week’s ‘New Move’ instruction: Be Like Water

Dougald tells a story about meeting Cindy Crabb on a North Sea ferry and receiving her zine, later compiled as the Encyclopedia of Doris, a review at Zine Nation says ‘it’s not an overstatement to say that it’s one of the most important and influential fanzines ever written’ and his own zine ‘Learning How to Drown’

Ed talks about the etymology: Old English wæter (noun), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch water, German Wasser, from an Indo-European root shared by Russian voda (compare with vodka), also by Latin unda ‘wave’ and Greek hudōr ‘water’. Intriguing that the Russians have vodka/voda - like the Gaelic ‘Uisge beatha’ - ‘water of life’ for all our lyrical libations...

Ed acknowledges Bruce Lee...on ‘being like water’ and the Hong Kong protests.

Dougald brings in the Dao De Jing – and his old friend Charles Davies  who made a version of it called ‘I thought I was on the way to work, but I was on the way home’ – his version of chapter eight starts like this:

water knows the way.

it can flow anywhere without trying

and it gives life to everything.

it ends up in the lowest places

and brings them life

Ed quotes the poet Mary Oliver...

“It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.”

Dougald goes deep into Taoism with the artist and tai chi teacher Caroline Ross:

“in Taoism water can signify both 'the highest good' and 'danger'. It can signify the exemplary method of non-contention and also the treachery and inescapability of boggy ground, an analogy for overthinking, dwelling on the mundane, or over-involvement in human affairs”

And mentions the madness of the internet and Swedish dramatist Stina Oscarson’s need for ‘provprata’ - ‘test-speak’, to put a thought into words without being tied to it, try out how it sounds

Ed references the ‘dark forests’ beyond the ‘failed states’ of the major internet platforms

Dougald mentions Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s answer to the Fermi paradox, and how silence is how you survive as well as a piece from Yancey Strickler

Ed brings us onto ‘Flow’ with Hungarian American professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

‘Flow’ is all about being ‘in the zone’ or ‘in the groove’ - a state of complete (and content) absorption, concentration and immersion, of intrinsic motivation, where the ego falls away, and thoughts follow seamlessly, musically on from one another - like jazz…

We discuss what being an ‘autotelic’ person is all about

Ed introduces Roger Deakin’s ‘Waterlog’.

“A swimming journey would give me access to that part of our world which, like darkness, mist, woods or high mountains, still retains most mystery. It would afford me a different perspective on the rest of land-locked humanity.”

Dougald references Vanessa Andreotti’s talk called ‘Existence Beyond the House that Modernity Built’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU56UWP3zzY:

Let’s get ready to humble! This episode’s instruction is ‘Move Your Ass!’ and Dougald finds himself saying words that have literally never come out of his mouth

Dougald talks about finding a place to call HOME.

Ed talks about moving to a three hundred year old wooden Norfolk water Mill and horse skull floors.

As always we explore the etymology: ‘Move’ from Latin ‘movere’ (move, change, exchange, go in/out, quit) via the old French ‘moveir’....

Change of house or business
Go in a specified manner, change position
Make progress, develop in a particular way, maneouvre or plan
Influence or prompt to do something
Propose for discussion/resolution at a meeting
Empty your bowels (!)

Dougald discusses Felix Marquardt, The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution is Making the World a Better Place and how we need something like an Alcoholics Anonymous for a whole culture, an admission of the depth of the mess we’re in, a surrender of our fantasy of control. And how elite responses are like having a fire brigade staffed by pyromaniacs!

Dougald quotes Martin Shaw: “Whatever myth has to articulate right now must include migration, peregrination and elucidation. There’s many cultures on the move; some elegantly, some not so much. Now I’ve written before about digging into a place, and I stand by it, but I’m not naive enough to presume we all have that luxury.”

Ed talks about Ai Wei Wei’s film ‘Human Flow’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Flow)
And how the average time spent in a refugee camp is over a decade: https://blogs.worldbank.org/dev4peace/2019-update-how-long-do-refugees-stay-exile-find-out-beware-averages

Dougald talks about spending a night in a beer hall in Tallinn with Kilian Kleinschmidt, who became somewhat famous for his role in running the Zaatari Camp in Jordan, one of the largest refugee camps for people escaping the war in Syria.

And Tobias Hubinette, a Swedish researcher on Sweden’s ‘anti-racist’ self-image and a text called ‘Swedish whiteness and Swedish racism’

“The melancholic crisis of Swedish whiteness… there is no way out from it other than some kind of a breakdown, which in practice means a psychic annihilation”
http://www.tobiashubinette.se/anti_racism.pdf 

Ed connects this to narrative, and the control of narrative. It’s been suggested that Boris Johnson had decreed that the story of racism in the UK be changed, and the Commission was essentially briefed to produce that outcome.

Dougald brings in Daniel Pinchbeck, psychedelic author, and a piece on Substack called ‘Life and Death in Tulum’

Ed quotes Somali poet Warsan Shire’s ‘Home’:

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well…

...no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

So to ‘Move your ass!’ can be about survival. It can be about relocation. It can be about a shift in perspective, perception or position. It can be about metaphorically proposing a motion, or literally having one.

And perhaps ultimately it’s as much about moving your heart, as your ass?

Welcome to series three of the Great Humbling – ‘New Moves’. And given that we’re returning on the 1st of April, which is obviously no accident, your first move is… Keep It Foolish!

 “A deliberately non-sensical parting farewell, popularised in the TV programme 'Nathan Barley'. It approximately means 'see you later' and 'don't take life too seriously'.”

‘Totally Mexico! How the Nathan Barley nightmare came true’ by Andrew Harrison – https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/feb/10/nathan-barley-charlie-brooker-east-london-comedy 

We catch up on what we’ve both been up to...

Ed saving ‘The Locks Inn’ www.savethelocks.com, publishing his poetry collection ‘Songs of Love in Lockdown’ and his ‘other podcast’ Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts – ‘How to survive the future’

Dougald references John Paul Davis - Small Magic – https://johnpauldavis.substack.com

Dougald’s got a book just coming out with the glass artists Monica Guggisberg and Philip Baldwin, Walking in the Void, mentions an extract running on the Dark Mountain website and a new Homeward Bound course starting in early May

Dougald reading Vanessa’s book, Hospicing Modernity, which is coming out later this year

Dougald talks about Resmaa Menakem saying I don’t bring white bodies and black bodies together to do this kind of work on embodied trauma, because that’s not going to be a safe environment for the people with black bodies

https://onbeing.org/programs/resmaa-menakem-notice-the-rage-notice-the-silence/ – Resmaa Menakem on the On Being podcast

‘Keep it foolish’, to be willing to see and sense and stay with your own ridiculousness

Ed talks about the origins of April Fool’s Day, Scotland’s ‘Huntigowk Day’ and the etymology of ‘Fool’ and explains why the Old Testament the word ‘fool’ is actually a crude translation of five different Hebrew words, which actually discern very different types of fool…

Dougald references Rilke – “I want to unfold. I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded , there I am a lie.”

The experience of feeling foolish, discovering your foolishness, being willing to own it – maybe it’s like a medical operation, having one of those lies removed, you’re more alive as a result

Dougald talks about Lydia Millet’s, A Children’s Bible: A Novel and how the parents in it are these smart people, successful in their own worlds, are fools once they stumble out of those niches...

Ed refers to “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” Richard Feynman

And then introduces Edward Docx ‘The Clown King: How Boris Johnson made it by playing the fool’: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/mar/18/all-hail-the-clown-king-how-boris-johnson-made-it-by-playing-the-fool 

As Kierkegaard puts it: “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” Johnson has accomplished both. 

Dougald talks about a fascinating essay by a man called Samo Burja who is a Long Now fellow and a founder of Bismarck Analysis, called ‘The End of Industrial Society’

“We have lost the implicit knowledge upon which our industrial systems functioned even as recently as a few decades ago. That knowledge cannot be regained absent the people who actually built and understood those systems.”

Ed talks about the tragic poetic image of the gargantuan cargo ship the ‘Ever Given’ and the paradox of the ‘Wise Fool’, Plato’s Cave, and the Socratic Paradox ‘I know that I know nothing’! The wisest of all fools?

Are we wise enough to play the fool? Or foolish enough to be played by one? 

Dougald concludes What if the only chance we have is to reveal our foolishness to ourselves and each other? The only possibility of stumbling into some as-yet-unimaginable future. Maybe it’s what I was trying to get at back in the early days of Dark Mountain: ‘stop pretending’

We start with a reference to Kenny Rogers to ‘see what condition our condition is in?

Then in  the context of the US election this clip: https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1158569576168402945?s=21 from Professor Eddie Glaude of African American studies at Princeton

‘White Americans confronting the danger of their innocence’

Dougald talks about Alan Garner’s Boneland and what would it actually do to you as an adult to have been through the kind of things that happen to a child in a fantasy novel? 

Ed explores the etymology of ‘limbo’…

From the medieval latin ‘limbus’: hem, border…edge, boundary…(‘limen’ = threshold, ’liminal’...)

Dante’s ‘first circle of Hell’ for virtuous pagans (is that you and I Dougald?!) who inhabit a brightly lit and beautiful - but somber - castle which is seemingly a medieval version of Elysium, its the ‘lip of Hell’

An uncertain period of awaiting a decision or resolution; an intermediate state or condition

A state of neglect or oblivion

Dougald shares a review in the Economist of Rod Dreher’s new book, Live Not By Lies – that draws out something very interesting, that people from quite different places politically have in common a sense of a time to retreat.

And Gordon White of Rune Soup:

‘When I’m asked “what can we do?” I know the expected answer is something like “form a group of bloggers and express an opinion about ecological degradation that no one even remotely important will ever notice”. But the answer is that you are in a personal Rivendell Phase. From the perspective of culture and civility, you need to be the Last Homely House east of the Sea. However, with an emerging decentral opportunity, the stage is set for this to be literally true. You have the opportunity to literally create a local sphere of improvement -an Imladris or hidden valley.’

Along with Pat McCabe, Woman Stands Shining who posted:

I feel strangely calm. I spend almost no energy on national events. But then, this is evidence of my lineage, at least in recent generations. The deepest, destructive, machinations have been at work, all around us, without regard for what the human heart is wired to perceive as most precious and vital: children, elders, women, the honor of men. Also, without regard for the instinct to preserve what makes Life possible: Water, Air, Soil, Fire, all the other members of the Sacred Hoop of Life.

The initial shock and horror of this darkness moving over the land, and over the Way of Life, was borne by my great grandparents. It was further digested, like the plastics now lining the whales’ bellies, by my grandparents. And then by my parents, now “functional members of society,” of this mad, society. Until today, here I sit, with little concern over what monster is being constructed “over there” in their dark laboratory of numbed blindness, false power, and destitute wealth.

I only hold that I will be shown a way to move through it ...This is how my forebears walked through the valley of the shadow of death, fearing no evil. For centuries. So, forgive me if I don’t show appropriate panic, or outrage, or fear. I am trauma-transcendent-evolved now. Holding the tenuous stream of possibility, a spider’s thread, looking to weave this web, into Life again. Whispering to my body, not necessarily designed for such tests of endurance, but still, an adaptagen to this Life, I whisper shhh... shhh... soon, soon, just a little further, a little bit further. Creator is watching, you will see...

Ed talks about Limbo dancing –  West Indian dance (from ‘limber’ - to bend) and how passing under the bar and then successfully raising your head is apparently symbolic of a spiritual transition, the triumph of death back into life… traditionally the bar started low and got higher to represent that transition from death to life and how its performed as a funeral dance 

He explores Haitian Voodoo spirit Papa Legba, a trickster deity, fond of riddles he is an ‘Ioa’ (intermediary between Bondye - the Good God - and the material world)...appears as an old man on a crutch or with a cane, wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and smoking a pipe, or drinking sparkling water, he stands at the spiritual crossroads, a gatekeeper, and either gives (or denies) permission to speak to the spirit world...he is known as the ‘Great Elocutioner’, speaks every human language - facilitating communication, speech and understanding…he walk with a limp because he walk in two worlds at once, the spirit and the living, the certain and the UNCERTAIN

Blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to a ‘Mr Legba’ (often confused with the Christian ‘Devil’) in exchange for his musical talents…

And returns to the story of The Locks Inn - Pub of the Long Now...saved from limbo and the return of dwile-flonking...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBamCWdx6gI 

Dougald shares another chain of synchronicities inspired by a Rune Soup post, a magical trip to a place called Tangdimma in Tasmania, a place where the veil is thin and an encounter on a walk about learning to trust the synchronicities, learning to listen to the places

Ed talks about ‘Legal limbo’ - irregular migrants caught in a state without being removed, or being granted ‘refugee status’ and thus being deprived of basic rights…

Limbo in the film ‘Inception’ - an infinite space of raw consciousness, revealed as an endless ocean. A shared dream space where any dreamer can make drastic and dramatic alterations to the dream. Caution as when in limbo, you can forget you’re in limbo and be unable to wake up...and become ‘lost in limbo’

How does ‘state of limbo’ reflect on our other ‘altered states’? Alert, Grace, Panic, Tension, Anger, Play, Jeopardy?

Perhaps amongst all those states a state of limbo is not unattractive? A space at the edge? A foot in both worlds? A place beyond polarised tribalism? A space of uncertainty but also possibility? 

There’s learning in limbo...but you don’t want to stay there forever...

Dougald talks about Emma Wallace and her Refugi – ‘a deep adaptation mountain monastery for holy rebels, sacred fools and radical artists’ in the Cathar Mountains of the Pyrenees – a historical hotbed of heresy

How it’s a kind of monasticism that he feels more at home withand how he and Anna and have found a place to call HOME – a house that can accommodate a school – Östervåla and another chain of weird synchronicities.

How to make your own Rivendell, your own ‘homely house’ – not as a cold, mountainous detachment from the world, but as a seedbed, one small pocket among many pockets that might just join together

And shares the extraordinary Cryptic Northern Refugia story

Which inspires Ed to quote from the film ‘My Dinner with Andre’

And Dougald concludes Season 2 “It is very dark: but there's usually light enough for the next step or so.”

In the week before the US election we finally do an episode where we talk about American politics and how it fits into this larger conversation about what it means if we’re living in a time of great humbling.

‘Jeopardy’ was originally used in the 14th century in chess and other games to denote a problem, or a position in which the chances of winning or losing were evenly balanced. It’ss the exposure to or imminence of death, loss, or injury. The danger that an accused person is subjected to when on trial for a criminal offense...

We reminisce about 2016, the Brexit vote, Trump, being ‘election junkies’ and where we were when we were ‘up for Portillo’. 

Dougald talks about Anthony Barnett & Adam Ramsay piece at openDemocracy – ‘Behind Trump’s lies is a hard truth about the US – and under Biden’s truths is a lie.’ And Ta-Nehisi Coates’ related argument a year or so after Trump’s election in ‘The First White President’ – what defines Trump’s voters isn’t that they are downtrodden, but that they are white.

Followed up with an extraordinary blog by Anne Amnesia, The Unnecessariat – https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/:

“From where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that.”

Dougald talks about ‘when the maps run out’ his letter from three days after the 2016 election – http://dougald.nu/when-the-maps-run-out/ 

Ed shares the post he wrote at the same time: https://www.facebook.com/ed.gillespie.58/posts/10154636686287629.

Dougald refers to a piece he wrote called ‘Is there hope?’ https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2019/11/28/notes-from-underground-3-is-there-hope/ – 

Ed talks about the ‘embodiment’ he experienced at the Findhorn New Story Summit, and on a ‘Mundis Imaginalis’ course at Schumacher

Dougald references Vanessa Andreotti talking about Bolsonaro in Dec 2018 – “a lot depends on whether people feel that the promises [of modernity] were broken, or whether they see that these were false promises all along”

Ed asks How’s your jeopardy Umair Haque? “Our Civilization is Now Reaching an Omega Point — the Point of Irreversible Collapse” https://eand.co/this-is-the-dawn-of-the-age-of-collapse-a3d4072d5a62 

And we wrap up with some pontifications and an inevitable prediction...

Do grown-ups play? What’s been playing on our minds this week?

Ed talks about the House of Beautiful Business - ‘The Great Wave’, hislove letter to the ocean (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5MvdgAZThw&feature=youtu.be) and ‘Wild Solo’...and their playful silent hour farewell...the embodiment of playfulness...mime, secret notes, hugs, smiling with your eyes...  

Dougald talks about Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a children’s book for grown-ups and Gaiman’s lecture ‘What the [very bad swearword] is a children’s book anyway?’ and Robert Westall (The Wind Eye, Urn Burial)

Is there something that’s gone missing from our ways of being grown-up, a thread that we drop from childhood? 

Ed outlines the etymology: Old English pleg(i)an ‘to exercise’, plega ‘brisk movement’, related to Middle Dutch pleien ‘leap for joy, dance’. Proto-West Germanic *plehan (“to care about, be concerned with”) and Proto-West Germanic *plegōn (“to engage, move”). Old English plēon (“to risk, endanger”)‘State of Play’ is peculiarly British (and actually usually implies precisely the opposite!) and ‘To be played’...to have a joke, or trick played upon you...

Play appears to provide its own reward, involves breaking rules,  having fun while doing so…

It requires us to be open, vulnerable, loose, present...you have to ‘let yourself out to play, recognise the opportunity and have the courage to take it

Permission to act, lose control in public, play the fool, let the inner humour radiate out? It’s all about the FUN. Abandoning so called competence, norms and self-importance. SILLINESS. Laughing at yourself, even in discomfort

And it can be DANGEROUS!

Dougald outlines the connection between play and work – Edward Deci’s psychology research on ‘intrinsic motivation’, the ‘Fatima’s next job could be in cyber’ advert and Emma Wallace’s description of the different response to ‘Artist’ and ‘Monk’ as answers to the question ‘What do you do?’ and his own essay ‘Childish Things’ and ‘Reading Ekstasis’ by the poet Gale Marie Thompson 

Ed describes the incredible Jonathan Kay - the ‘Theatre of Immediacy’ and the ‘Nomadic Academy of Fools’ Unknowable. Unpredictable. Unbelievable! “The act of “Thinking” is improvisational theatre’s most immediate and persistent assassin”. “A Fool's job is to frighten people, it's to encourage danger. It's to whistle while you're taking people to the cliff edge”

Dougald introduce Keith Johnstone, improv genius – didn’t develop his techniques as a specialist performance skill, but working with ‘unteachable’ kids – in Impro he writes about recovering from the lessons his schooling had taught him

Ed teases in Tyson Yunkaporta on education - Prussia story, ‘manufactured adolescence and domestication of the people’ (outrageous - ‘the most ludicrous, incendiary rant that has ever fallen from my lips’! - but provocative and fun) and a rant from American writer David Bowles on how education as we know it is barely 100 years old. Our understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago. Most classroom practice is astrology...we’re breaking their souls!

Dougald shares how Ivan Illich makes the (consciously outrageous) analogy between the good teacher in the schooling system and Oskar Schindler during the Holocaust in ‘The Educational Enterprise in the Light of the Gospel’. 

Ed talks about You me bum bum train/Punchdrunk examples of ‘letting go’/immersion...ecstasy, and Tom Morley’s virtual team-building madness: https://www.facebook.com/TomMorleyRockstarActivator 

Dougald shares what he learned about the Hindu understanding of ‘lila’, the ‘divine play’ that is the fabric of everything. 

Ed asks ‘Do animals play?’ (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/so-you-think-you-know-why-animals-play/)

Myth: animals play to prepare for adulthood...turns out that’s bollocks! 

Dougald writes about ‘improvisation’ and our relationship to the past in ‘Remember the Future’

And Ed notes Martin Shaw’s insertion of contemporary cultural references into ancient myths before mentioning Antanas Mockus, former Mayor of Bogota and his playful approach to urban government. 

We end on Kurt Vonnegut: “We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.” 

“If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention” 

Dougald pays to get emails from a very angry man – Mic Wright’s Substack, Conquest of the Useless (which he picked up via Chris T-T’s The Border Crossing newsletter)

Ed shares his  ‘Twitter Hate-storm’ story! (https://mashable.com/article/covert-photos-strangers-going-viral-twitter/?europe=true) From the hottest day ever recorded in the UK - 38.7 degrees in July 2019 and worryingly there’s something of a fairly linear relationship between rising temperatures and rising anger (and violence Ref: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/global-warming-and-violent-behavior - increased aggression, heightened threat perception, raised hostility and escalating violence)

Dougald references John Michael Greer’s ‘Hate is the New Sex’, comparing the treatment of hate as an emotion to the treatment of sex in the 19th C:

“If you want to slap the worst imaginable label on an organization, you call it a hate group. If you want to push a category of discourse straight into the realm of the utterly unacceptable, you call it hate speech. If you’re speaking in public and you want to be sure that everyone in the crowd will beam approval at you, all you have to do is denounce hate.”

Ed refers to the ‘Anger Iceberg’ where anger is the visible reaction, but beneath the surface are potentially many other feelings of being afraid, attacked, offended, disrespected, forced, trapped, or pressured.

Dougald recalls the impact Soil and Soul made on him at 25 - you could be driven by anger and full of life at 19 or 25, but it was a lot rarer to meet people who had that combination at 39 or 45. Alastair MacIntosh’s essay for the first issue of Dark Mountain - activist anger has its roots in unresolved issues with our own parents! 

Ed:  ‘Anger is an energy’. But the idioms around anger show how it can easily get out of hand…

‘Up in arms’ (literally!), blow a fuse/gasket/top, come down on someone like a ton of bricks, go ballistic, gloves off, haul over the coals, jump down someone’s throat, vent spleen (Medieval belief that the spleen was the source of anger)…there’s a lot of violence in the imagery...

When the red mist descends, which seems eerily reminiscent of the skies over the San Francisco Bay Area during fire season…And then of course there’s the blindness - blind rage, fury - unsighted, uncontrollable, an eye for an eye, Old testament vengeance..

Interestingly in the context of the secondary emotion aspect we touched on earlier ‘Anger’ actually comes from the Old Norse ‘angr’ meaning ‘grief’ or ‘vex’...comes from pain

Which is why anger management is all about recognising the underlying feelings behind the anger, the injustice, the threat, the sense of outrage and upset, and responding to those in a way that isn’t just about boiling away in your own vitriol…

As Aristotle said: “Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy”

Dougald cites Neil Philip’s book about Alan Garner - A Fine Anger, and Rowan Williams’s book Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement has a similar quality of refined anger to it.

Interesting about those meanings of ‘angr’ in Old Norse – it’s actually there in Swedish today, ‘att ångra sig’ is to change your mind, to regret

Hugh Brody writes about the Inuit approach to anger in The Other Side of Eden

Cate Chapman’s new essay, Sick – a wonderful poet, a Dark Mountain editor – writing about her journey with chronic illness over the past few years – if anyone has the right to be angry, it’s someone whose life (as a dedicated activist) is interrupted unfairly in her early thirties by a mysterious and debilitating condition – and she writes about this honestly, without smoothing over the edges of what she has to say, and she draws the connections to the chronic illness of our culture, and the chronic illness of a planet 

We can’t afford not to get angry – and we can’t afford to stay angry, to get stuck there

Ed talks about how Cate quotes from Alistair McIntosh’s Soil and Soul where he says, …”no place is more sacred, no peoples more worthy of honour, than those that have made beauty blossom anew out of desecration” where she responds “This work of beauty-making can take place in many contexts, both with and without an audience, praise, recognition; with and without far-reaching impacts.”

How to feel the anger. Recognise it. Respect it. Understand it’s origins. But then express it differently perhaps?

Sarah Corbett’s beautiful and profound ‘Craftivist’ work - “If we want our world to be more beautiful, kind and fair, shouldn’t our activism be more beautiful, kind and fair?” (https://craftivist-collective.com/) and the work they did together on ‘Mini-Fashion Statements’ - tiny hand-written scrolls with messages on them around ethical fashion, tied with a ribbon and secreted into the clothing pockets of friends, colleagues or in clothes in shops...to be discovered and inspire curiosity, thought and action around beauty beyond the garment...https://craftivist-collective.com/Projects/Mini-Fashion-Statements 

Dougald talks about a text from Vanessa Andreotti and Elwood Jimmy – a booklet that comes out of the painful experience of when things go wrong between a Canadian arts organisation that wants to “indigenise” and/or “decolonise” and hires an Indigenous person and it all goes predictably wrong because they don’t realise the depth of what they’re dealing with here and the organisation feels let down and the Indigenous person feels scapegoating

And it’s so obviously a situation in which there is anger and there is legitimate grounds for anger and it’s definitely not six-of-one-half-a-dozen of the other – but the question is what do you do next? And the ultimate aim is that we find ways to make new mistakes, rather than repeating old ones.

Ed says seeing this quote, after last week’s ‘State of Tension’ episode made him a little angry:

"if you're losing hope, then you're not doing enough. Activism is an act of hope. Hope is a discipline. And we can do this because we are here to create the future we want. " 

 Mark Ruffalo

Dougald refers to the amazing Emma Wallace – about picking up hitchhikers and trying on different identities, different answers to the “so what do you do?” question (gardener, architect, accountant, doctor, teacher, carpenter, nurse), and how she quickly found that one answer generated a stronger response than others – “artist” – she says she’d see a life force in people, and then a money/fame force “have I heard of you?” “so do you sell lots of paintings?” and then a kind of bitterness 

“With my Monk hat on people tell me their deepest secrets. That most of them want to be a work of art. With my Artist hat on, people can get very sad and angry and unkind, primarily because they want to be a work of art and think they can’t be and like jealous people in pain they are mean to the artist in us all.”

We finish on a classic piece of McSweeney’s riffing by John K. Peck on the slightly hoary old adage about the ‘Two wolves inside of you’: I spotted this courtesy of Tom Hirons of Hedgspoken Press and ‘Sometimes a Wild God’ infamy...https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/there-are-two-wolves-inside-you?fbclid=IwAR0vtXCxB5s2FkUQ0OXfg7cNmYDE4kX80g3tYuId3KgD3CQsbRElHtoC5TM 

“There are two wolves inside you,” said the old man. “They are fighting to the death. One is anger, one is love.”

“Which one will win?” said the boy.

“Whichever one you feed,” said the old man.

“There are two wolves inside you,” said the old man.

“You cannot withstand the storm,” said the devil.

“Try to avoid mixing metaphors,” said the English teacher.

“I am the storm,” said the wolf, before throwing its head back and howling at the single, unblinking eye of the moon.

And...

There is one wolf inside you.

“Was it truly a victory if my opponent was undernourished?” asks the wolf.

“Do you consider it a victory?” replies the therapist.

“I guess? I mean, law of the jungle and all. Still, something about it seems wrong,” says the wolf.

“That’s all we have time for this week,” says the therapist.

The wolf, overcome with rage at the unceasing flow of time, throws its head back and howls [once again] at the single, unblinking eye of the moon.

Here we are in a state of tension… What have we been reading? ‘The Precipice - Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-precipice-9781526600219/ 

Revisiting The Road by Cormac McCarthy 

Paul Behren's brilliant The Best of Times / the Worst of Times 

Balance these with voices that straddle different scales. Three that Dougald is finding helpful just now:

Chris Smaje's blog (and forthcoming book) Small Farm Future – https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk

‘Who Will Feed Us’ by the ETC Group is the source for the figures about the contribution of industrial agriculture to the world food supply – https://www.etcgroup.org/whowillfeedus 

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, and particularly their contribution to the openDemocracy debate around Deep Adaptation, with the reminder of how the narrative of a trajectory of civilisational progress threatened by climate change looks from elsewhere. 

Tyson Yunkaporta’s “Sand Talk” 

Bayo Akomolafe 

The Old Chinese Proverb says  “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

The term “Long Now” was coined by one of the founding board members of The Long Now Foundation, Brian Eno. When he moved to New York City, Brian found that "here" and "now" meant "this room" and "this five minutes" as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. 

Stewart Brand in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, showing up to meet Ken Kesey out of jail:

“a thin blond guy with a blazing disk on his forehead too, and a whole necktie made of Indian beads. No shirt, however, just an Indian bead necktie on bare skin and a white butcher's coat with medals from the King of Sweden on it.”

The ‘Irresistible Force Paradox’: “What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?” It’s a paradox because if a force is irresistible...then nothing can resist it, and vice versa!

Thought to originate from the Chinese word for ‘contradiction’: 

In a 3rd century BC philosophical book a man was trying to sell a spear and a shield. When asked how good his spear was, he said that his spear could pierce any shield. Then, when asked how good his shield was, he said that it could defend from all spear attacks. Then one person asked him what would happen if he were to take his spear to strike his shield; the seller could not answer. This led to the idiom of "zìxīang máodùn" (自相矛盾, "from each-other spear shield"), or "self-contradictory".

Brian Eno’s ‘Oblique Strategies’ cards? 

‘Never wrestle a pig. You both end up covered in s**t...and the pig likes it’ 

Here’s a few examples...that might help us now...

Use an old idea 

What to increase? What to reduce? 

Are there sections? Consider transitions.

Honour thy error as a hidden intention.

Ask your body.

Work at a different speed.

Gardening not Architecture.

The etymological garden of delight that the word ‘tension’ opens up – PIE root ‘*ten-’ meaning ‘to stretch’, with derivatives meaning ‘something stretched, a string; thin’

So tension is the experience of being stretched – it can be appropriate, the tension of a guitar string or a line of poetry (Rowan Williams) – or it can be painful and unsustainable

Attention – stretching towards

Thin – comes from this root – and through a sense of thinness meaning vulnerability you get a sense of something that’s young and delicate, which is where the word ‘tender’ comes from – one of those magical double words that weave together seeming opposites, tenderness can mean ‘pain’ and ‘gentleness’

Speaking of weaving, from the same PIE root you get ‘tantra’ (which isn’t just about sex!), meaning ‘the loom’ or ‘the warp’ or ‘the weave’, a skill in recognising and working with the fabric of reality – and that takes us back to Alastair McIntosh’s Riders on the Storm, because he brings the whole book home with this idea of the need to be held in ‘the basket of community’, a Hebridean tantra!

In this beautiful trickiness of language, there’s a clue – especially in those strange words that hold opposites – ‘host’ and ‘hospitality’ and ‘hostility’– to how we find a way past blocked, stuck forms of tension

Lewis Hyde’s book, Trickster Makes This World, trickster as the inventor of traps and of ways of slipping the traps

Tyson Junkaporta and this from the opening chapter of ‘Sand Talk’:

‘The stories that define our thinking today describe an eternal battle between good and evil springing from an originating act of sin...recent traditions have emerged that break down creation systems like a virus, infecting complex patterns with artificial simplicity, exercising a civilising control over what some see as chaos. The Sumerians started it. The Romans perfected it. The Anglosphere inherited it. The world is now mired in it. The war between good and evil is in reality an imposition of stupidity and simplicity over wisdom and complexity’

Holding the tension of having to actually listen to, attend to and feel into what the world needs is much harder, if wiser, and by its very nature much more complex work. But it’s not impossible.

As Frank N Furter noted in the song ‘I can make you a man’ from the Rocky Horror Picture Show ‘he thinks dynamic tension, must be hard work. Such an effort, if you only knew of my plan, in just seven days, I can make you a man’

By living in this dynamic tension, maybe in just seven generations, we can become more human?

We start as is traditional with what's been getting us thinking this week... Ed talks about the film My Octopus Teacher and Nick Cohen in the Observer on ‘Sweden as the right’s fantasy land’. This leads us onto some memorable Swedish expressions: ‘there is no cow on the ice’ (= don’t panic!); ‘Now you’ve really shat in the blue cupboard’ (another Swedish expression!).

Phoebe Tickell’s Medium post, ‘Hall of Mirrors’: https://medium.com/@phoebetickell/hall-of-mirrors-4b505367243 

You think you will find a magical “leverage point” that will magically change everything. You sound like those who became sick looking for the elixir of immortality. You are sick with how desperately you want to save the world. And it’s not a bizarre response at all. You have every right to feel desperate to make this world better… The systems of oppression you are complicit in by being alive are hellish. But this desperation is also what is leading you to be trapped in dissociated loops of pseudo-change.

Alastair McIntosh, Riders on the Storm: https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/book-review-riders-storm-alastair-mcintosh-2930368 

Nick Hayes’ ‘Book of Trespass': https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/10/the-book-of-trespass-by-nick-hayes-review-a-trespassers-radical-manifesto 

“and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, [Mole] looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.”

Wind in the Willows, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Kenneth Grahame

“Pan Demic” - From the Greek; Pan (All) Demos (People)

Indi Samarajiva from Sri Lanka...

“If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down...Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary b******t, most of it happening to someone else. That’s all it is.”

DEFINITION: Panic is a sudden sensation of fear, which is so strong as to dominate or prevent reason and logical thinking, replacing it with overwhelming feelings of anxiety and frantic agitation consistent with an animalistic fight-or-flight reaction. Panic may occur singularly in individuals or manifest suddenly in large groups as mass panic (closely related to herd behavior).

Leonard J. Schmidt and Brooke Warner describe panic as “that terrible, profound emotion that stretches us beyond our ability to imagine any experience more horrible” adding that “physicians like to compare painful clinical conditions on some imagined ‘Richter scale’ of vicious, mean hurt … to the psychiatrist there is no more vicious, mean hurt than an exploding and personally disintegrating panic attack.”

“Don't Panic” is a phrase on the cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The novel explains that this was partly because the device "looked insanely complicated" to operate, and partly to keep intergalactic travellers from panicking. "It is said that despite its many glaring (and occasionally fatal) inaccuracies, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself has outsold the Encyclopedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words 'DON'T PANIC' in large, friendly letters on the cover.”

Arthur C. Clarke said Douglas Adams' use of "don't panic" was perhaps the best advice that could be given to humanity.

We start with Adam Ramsay, ‘Queer Eye’, Jordan Peterson and the Battle for Depressed Men – https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/queer-eye-jordan-peterson-and-the-battle-for-depressed-men/ 

Do we really have to choose between Carl Jung and archetypal psychology on the one side and Antonio Gramsci and the analysis of hegemony on the other side?

We reflect on whether the West Country School of Myth’s visceral, transcendental and universal approach touches on the really deep recognitions we all have for human dilemmas, experiences and patterns of behaviour. And we reference a scene from Ivan and the Grey Wolf

Dougald introduces the latest of John Michael Greer’s weekly essays at his blog Ecosophia – a useful summary of Jung’s theory of synchronicity – including the origins of the theory of archetypes in the study of animal behaviour, and then Jung’s observation working with his patients that, in dealing with these deep patterns, you seem to trigger strings of meaningful coincidences – synchronicities.

We talk about dreams of Scarlet Johansson.

W.B.Yeats described as the sense that ““The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” 

‘A Farewell to Uncivilisation’ – the synchronicitous downpour in the last moments of the last Dark Mountain festival! 

Huw Lemmey’s newsletter, the self-deprecating title Utopian Drivel and the particular essay Santa Maria de l’Assumpcio

Ed references Philip K. Dick’s quote from his 1981 novel VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System): "The Empire is the institution, the codification of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one. To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies."

Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Great Derangement’: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/07/20/book-review-the-great-derangement-climate-change-and-the-unthinkable-by-amitav-ghosh/ 

Gordon White – Tasmanian chaos magic blogger and podcaster, anarchist and animist and ‘How You Play Is What You Win’ and Carol Sandford introducing a satirical book called Flatland about the residents of a two-dimensional world, who when they look at a sphere can only see a circle, and then they go to a one-dimensional world where it’s even worse, because people there see everything as points

Ed reminds Dougald of his former business partner’s challenge to Dougald to ‘Get down off your Dark Mountain, you’re making things worse!’ 

Dougald references ‘What I Learned (2003-10)’ and ‘Ten Years on a Mountain’

Ed talks about the ‘saving the planet’ trope, which he wrote about in increasingly exasperated terms earlier this year: “The planet does not want to be saved. Or rescued. Or even changed. Our planet wants to be loved.”

Ed describes his most transformative personal experience was a basic 24 hour solo, not a full four day wilderness vigil, in the Pyrenees with my friend Andres Roberts of Way of Nature.  I wrote about this here: https://medium.com/@edgillespie2018/on-the-edge-of-a-cliff-161922fb11d 

And we finish with this Newsweek piece: https://www.newsweek.com/marianne-williamson-americas-karma-opinion-1529724?fbclid=IwAR0f_2eORyII2-rBGsptkiEXzt3XWrx8F0UxZLv8YzQEoIlN5q27R5KIZks 

“America is having a nervous breakdown. A spiritual crisis. A complete disassembling of the personality after which a more authentic self might emerge.” Marianne Williamson

“America is down on its knees this time. But that's not the bad news; it's the good news. That's ultimately not where things end, but where things begin again. It's where we can find grace and humility and forgiveness and love. Until then, we will continue to suffer, just like, as a nation, we have allowed so much suffering to go unnoticed among us and around us. The pain at this moment is the pain of a nation that is laboring toward its own rebirth. We are a good and decent people, but we have failed to take responsibility for some things that have consistently been done in our name. In horror, we must come to realize this, and in contrition, we will be released.”

And that is perhaps where a State of Grace can be found?

We call these conversations the Great Humbling because we start from a sense that this is a time of being humbled, brought down to earth, and we want to ask what happens if we approach the moment we’re in on those terms?

In this second season each week we’ll be taking a state of mind that seems to be part of the mix of being alive just now.

So this is the Great Humbling: Season Two – Altered States - States of being, states of consciousness and of course the literal alteration of our nation states.

And this is episode 1 - 'State of Alert'

Dougald introduces some of his summer reading: a critique of Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation paper and a piece from the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective that was published under the title ‘Preparing for the end of the world as we know it’

Ed reflects on a 'Guide to Eco Anxiety' that he wrote the foreword for, Nick Hayes 'Book of Tresspass' and Martin Shaw's 'Wolferland'

We explore the meaning of a 'state of alert', quoting Susie Orbach on these times: “How the outside impacts on the inside is something that people like me think about all the time. But now we are seeing it on a grand scale. The pandemic has been a prolonged assault from outside on our community. The state of uncertainty and unsafety it has created is new and utterly unfamiliar. Unless you are a refugee who has risked their life to get here, or a survivor of childhood abuse that could not be escaped, there is simply nothing to compare it to.”

We compare the Anglo and Swedish experiences on the pandemic and the big impacts e.g. ‘NYC Is Dead Forever. Here’s Why’

We relate a constant state of alert to a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and hypervigilance and all the negative behavioural aspects that entails, referencing David Morris's book 'The Evil Hours'

We make the PTSD connection with climate change via Kari Norgaard's, Living in Denial –  ‘In some sense, not wanting to know was connected to not knowing how to know' and a piece Dougald  wrote about that last winter in one of the Notes from Underground

We hope you enjoy our conversation and thanks for listening.

Why we’re recording this final episode of Series One at night, as our children sleep

Reviewing the journey we’ve been on together since late March...

1. Mapping Lava...where are we now on the emerging sensemaking and stories? 
2. Can we afford an economic recovery?
3. Towards a language of longing…
4. Bestiary of metaphors
5. World turned upside down 
6. As deep as culture
7. Cultivation of conspiracy

David Fell’s Eleven More Things: ‘WE MUST LOOK AFTER OUR KEY WORKERS’ 

“There are ways of identifying the things that really need doing; and these things that really need doing need to be done by people who we can call key workers.  If we don’t look after them, we are in deep s**t: there’ll be no food, or no power, or no money, or no houses, or no healthcare, or no families, and there certainly won’t be any of the comforts and luxuries we’ve come to expect.

Do you remember that time in 2020 when everything nearly fell apart?  When all those people died and the only people who kept going were all those key workers? We must look after our key workers.”

Storytelling adventures with Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘The ones who walk away from Omelas’ and Ernest Callenbach’s ‘Ecotopia’...

Alan Lane, artistic director of Slung Low, a theatre company who relocated a few years ago to The Holbeck, the oldest working men’s club in Britain, in Leeds – and his very powerful post about their experience of being the ‘ward lead’ for social care referrals in their part of the city over the past ten weeks.

The story we’re telling is that no one in our community will have to go without food during this time and the only way to tell that story well is to make it true.

Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ in which the Dutch historian argues that the assumption that people are inherently Hobbesian, and need authority, control and power to manage their baser instincts is fundamentally not true

The Humbling as a lesson that will be endlessly repeated. Until it is learned. 

The pandemic as only a ‘warning shot’ (Inuit artist Taqrilik Partridge) of the real storm ahead 

Shakespeare “Is this the promised end? Or image of that horror?”

Churchill  “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Conspiracy literally means 'to breathe together'. What is causing us to inhale such a complex mix of vaporous ideas right now? Are these 'voodoo histories' being written wilfully or are they a perhaps understandable response to fear and uncertainty? And how do these 'double binds' of inextricable impossibilities influence the way we receive information and shape our intention?

As always we begin with what caught our attention this week

Ed - The House of Beautiful Business - The Great Wave and their principles of Intimacy, playfulness and surrender…’Only those who let go have both hands free’:  https://livingroomsessions.house/previous-sessions 

Collective Psychology Project: ‘This too shall pass: Mourning Collective Loss in the time of Covid-19’ the world’s biggest psychological experiment https://www.collectivepsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/This-Too-Shall-Pass.pdf 

Exploring ancestral wisdom (why, uncomfortable truths, ways forward) r.e. Apocalypse (unveiling), Restoration (rupture) & Emergence (birth of the new) myths…

8 lessons about grief: embrace it, it will get worse before it gets better, more collective grief to come, grief is not an equaliser, we need to grieve together, learn how our ancestors grieved, new rituals & practices, loss is natural...telling stories...

Dougald – Simon McBurney & Complicité’s The Encounter, available for streaming until Friday

Conspiracy theories… Patrick Farnsworth – Facebook post , his podcast Last Born In The Wilderness:

“We are witnessing things fall apart as we speak. And the more you believe this is some Deep State/One World Government plot to force us all to get microchipped or vaccinated or whatever, the more it shows how in denial of this fact you really are. There’s no f*****g plan, at least not really. It’s all crisis management to serve short-term profit motives in a socioeconomic system designed to expand infinitely. That program is reaching its logical limits on a planet that is finite, and much of what we are witnessing is a part of that reality. 

It requires a great deal of humility to see it for what it is. The most well resourced institutions and individuals in this time are scrambling to manage these cascading changes for their own ends, and many of them are doing poorly at it, believe it or not. I imagine it’s comforting in some way to believe this is under control, that there is a plan here, but there really isn’t. And that’s okay, because that’s the way it’s always been, and always will be. It’s our blindness and hubris that says otherwise.”

David Aaranovitch’s ‘Voodoo Histories’: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/108/1087014/voodoo-histories/9780099478966.html

‘The Cultivation of Conspiracy’, Illich

David Fuller – Medium post, Cashing In On Covid 

Medical Nemesis/Limits to Medicine – http://www.darkpharma.nl/uploads/7/3/2/8/7328594/medical-nemesis-ivan-illitch.pdf 

Ben Chijioke aka ‘Ty’: https://tymusic.co.uk/ 

Barney Glaser & Anselm Strauss, ‘Awareness of Dying’ (1965)

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk https://www.cser.ac.uk/

Sir Martin Rees’ ‘Our Final Hour?’: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/books/it-was-fun-while-it-lasted.html

Jon Alexander and the New Citizenship Project his Medium blog:  https://medium.com/@jonjalex/johnsons-message-is-very-deliberate-and-very-dangerous-here-s-how-to-combat-it-d336cae96348

Christos Galanis – ‘Health, Wholeness and Death Amidst the Coronavirus Pandemic’ https://medium.com/@chris.english.classes/health-wholeness-and-death-amidst-the-coronavirus-pandemic-60e7822bf0f

Emily Stewart on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6665364730208755713-NfAa 

Intention matters...it would be a terrible irony if in seeking a common breath together, we were suffocated by misinformation, in seeking simple but wrong solutions we didn’t heal but rather opened wounds,  and in seeking to prolong life we missed it’s true purpose?

We start with Martin Shaw’s hare-piece (hair piece?) -  ‘A Hare’s Leap or a Rabbit’s Hop?’, a typically stirring offering from Dr Shaw that bristles with energy and soul, and backbone...

“Culture is being forced to leap at this moment, but we run grievous risk of a rabbit hop back to safety not a hare leap into the deeper life.”

“[Hare] nags, and pulls and bites until something vast is happening to us. We are dragged into the presence of strange angels and so  pathetically grateful we can only weep in this Chapel Perilous. For Hare, the Chapel Perilous is the fecund state of that changeable dimension we gesture to and dimly call our heart. Perilous is it, when the animal presences are absent, when there’s no sweet stink of the low bellied spirits. Hare will clamp his buck teeth straight into the beating organ, swinging back and forth like a lunatic pirate on the rigging in the most Machiavellian storm of most trembling imaginations till we are out the door, into the night, into the storm, into the rain.”

As Martin says - ‘Artists are waiting to get LEAPT’

We explore the Vasteras hares and our mutual observations of magpies this week.

Ed listened to a great interview with Margaret Atwood by Cheryl Strayed in her new podcast ‘Sugar Calling’. Atwood is known for her environmental activism, and mentioned Barry Lord, co-founder of Lord Cultural Resources, an international Museum Planning Consultancy…

His book  ‘Art & Energy - How Culture Changes’ describes how the dominant energy system of the day defines the culture, it’s actions and values - and that energy transitions are by their very nature - therefore culture wars:

• Wood - access to land, forest, feudal
• Coal - culture of production and the industrial revolution (massive manpower)
• Oil and Gas - production to consumption
• Electricity - culture of modernism
• Nuclear - culture of anxiety
• Renewables - culture of stewardship 

Dougald responds to this with ‘A virus doesn’t care about your stories’ Daniel Schmachtenberger – and asks what’s culture got to do with a pandemic...

Dougald talks about ‘Swedish exceptionalism, cultural memory and the Prime Minister’s recent speech – “Lives, health and jobs are under threat” – putting economic damage there alongside human casualties

Ed talks about British ‘deference’, obedience, over-zealous ‘busy-body’ police officers and general acceptance and respect of authority, but also British exceptionalism - lots of ‘Blitz spirit’ and war metaphors (as we discussed in Episode 4) and the Prime Minister’s lucky escape spun into ‘indomitable strength of character’ as if grit, determination and a stiff upper lip defined one’s survival chances?

Ed also refers to John Snow and and the original ‘contact tracing’ of cholera in Soho in 1850’s. Do we love/laud mavericks AFTER the fact…and do we LOVE a bit of mad, maverick conspiracy theory too?

Dougald explains Sweden has had more casualties than the other Nordic countries, but it doesn’t have the exponential rise in deaths that ought to be what happens if you don’t have a strong lockdown, and says it’s been a bit humbling for him having been deeply troubled by what felt like a relatively casual approach here, to see that it’s not playing out in the way that a lot of people feared, perhaps due to local, culturally specific factors – the amount of “social distancing” within the existing norms?

And is there an element of something getting lost in translation? Are there indirect means of influencing behaviour that are almost illegible to those of us not bred into the Swedish way of doing things, but that are having a major effect?

Ed reflects on the role of leadership right now too…

In uncertainty we seek familiarity - but unfortunately the reality of evolving understanding means leaders are having to constantly revise what they say, as new evidence emerges, new guidance, sometimes contradictory, is issued. Is it a time in which deeply held beliefs can turn out to be completely wrong?

Leadership right now feels a lot more like ‘holding space’ for vulnerability, creating psychological safety - but being really honest, able to admit ‘not knowing’ and having permission not to be a hero.

We conclude with a  good letter from the CEO of AirBnB to employees: ‘We don’t know when travel will return. When it does it will be different’

Are they returning to the idea of human connection - real people in real homes. What does it mean to “Travel like a human”...feels like a humbling

Does a culture need to be broken by beauty, truth or its own consequences in order to be  opened up to real change?

Introducing ‘A World Turned Upside Down’, an old english ballad ‘a brief description of the ridiculous fashions of these distracted times’...coined in protest at Parliament’s attempts to make Christmas a solemn occasion (not a traditionally english raucous one)

David Fell - The Economics of Enough - and his piece: Eleven Things So Far – manages to be the most random and one of the most thoughtful things Dougald haas read among all the hundreds of thousands of words written in and about this crisis – close to the spirit of these conversations.

He quotes Bill Bryson’s list of things done by 19th century vicars with economic security and a lot of time on their hands – “Never in history have a group of people engaged in a broader range of creditable activities for which they were not in any sense actually employed.” List includes:

• George Bayldon compiled the world’s first dictionary of Icelandic
• Laurence Sterne wrote ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’
• Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom
• Jack Russell bred the terrier that bears his name
• Octavius Pickard-Cambridge became the world’s leading authority on spiders
• William Shepherd wrote a history of dirty jokes

“Not one of these people disappeared up their own arse in the belief that they had achieved some over-privileged insight.  And why? Because at least once a week they had to stand up in front of a group of perfectly ordinary people and talk to them in terms they understood.  They were forced to stay grounded.”

David Fell then talks about all the people “talking about all the things they want to see different ‘afterwards’.”:

“Talk has begun of the ‘exit strategy’.  And plenty of people are also talking about all the things they want to see different ‘afterwards’.

Generally, as far as I can tell, these plenty of people – all of whom are serious and well-meaning – are asking for the same things they’ve always asked for: for more trees, fewer evil corporations, an economy in the shape of a circle or a doughnut or an éclair, proper funding for this that or the other, an end to homelessness and hunger and poverty.   I’m seeing it being written that, in order to get these (in general laudable) things, the policy options need to be ‘oven ready’ or ‘on the table’ or some other metaphor indicating that the idea has to be sitting there just waiting for the moment when…

When what?

When a calm and thoughtful politician decides it would be a good idea?  When a high-impact think-tank puts it into a paper which is well-received by an open-minded SPAD?  When a courageous civil servant or a parliamentary committee or an aspiring opposition leader indicates his or her interest?

What is happening right now is way, way outside the think tanks and the media bubbles and the usual channels.  What is happening now is tens and hundreds and thousands of millions of people having the most profound experience of their lives.  We are in the middle of the most profound flux... 

Talk about afterwards if you want; but don’t expect it to mean much.  After what?  We don’t even know what the what is yet."

We weren’t planning on turning this week’s episode into an audiobook of David Fell’s blog, but frankly Dougald couldn’t help himself!

Ed begins with Thomas Pueyo’s ‘Hammer & the Dance’ one of the most read articles on the corona crisis. Which brought to mind TSEliot’s ‘In the stillness, there is dancing’ from Four Quartets:

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.”

We then discuss ‘Planet of the Humans’ the HIGHLY polemical/controversial and perhaps badly unevidenced conspiratorial narrative, within which there is a kernel of truth - ‘are we saving the planet, or OUR* way of life’? *’Our’ meaning the top 1B as Dougald has mentioned previously...and the logical fallacy that industrial civilisation will save us from industrial civilisation.

Followed by a sobering piece from Grist, The World Is In Lockdown So Where Are All The Carbon Emissions Coming From? The current forecast drop of 5.5% in global carbon emissions as a result of the crisis – the biggest drop ever - is not even 7.5% a year we need to have a decent chance of meeting the 1.5 degree goal

We reflect a little on lockdown ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ - what irrational impulses might arise from living lockdown a little too enthusiastically? Dougald cites an article by Dr Farrah Jarral in the Guardian about people whose mental health is benefiting from lockdown – but that there’s another sense in which this is all taking place in a simulation.

We finish up with a bit of  Manfred Max Neef, the Chilean economist who pioneered ‘Human Scale Development’ and barefoot economics,  so have been checking out his ideas around needs…one of which is ‘idleness’

And conclude with a hopeful story this week, from India – Ram Subramanian from Tamil Nadu on the ReMembering and ReEnchanting Podcast and Ed’s first two serious conversations with senior business people re ‘steady state’ businesses that might still be successful even if they end up dramatically smaller than they were pre-crisis, and with no plans to grow - changing a very very deep narrative? That’s an inversion of such an intense orthodoxy, I am curious to see how that new story emerges...

Plus whether Martin Shaw’s powerful mythical teachings r.e. despots who in order to seize power take out their hearts and bury them...the resolution comes from the recovery of the buried heart. Dougald wrote a piece ‘The curious tale of Boris Johnson’s heart’ last year...and Ed wonders aloud if a near death experience, and new fatherhood (admittedly for the umpeenth and uncertain actual number of times!) might turn Boris’s world upside down? We live, as always in grounded hope...

In this episode Dougald and Ed explore the ‘bestiary’ of metaphors stalking this time, the creatures of our imaginations, we are walking with beasts – black elephants, green swans, impossible hamsters – and nightingales.

‘Will there be singing in the dark times. Yes, there will be singing about the dark times’

Bertolt Brecht 1939

We begin by revisiting a quote from Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees in 2015:

‘It is imperative to guard against the downsides of such an interconnected world...The magnitude of the societal breakdown from pandemics would be far higher than in earlier centuries. English villages in the 14th century continued to function even when the Black Death almost halved their populations. In contrast, our social framework would be vulnerable to breakdown as soon as hospitals overflowed and health services were overwhelmed—which could occur when the fatality rate was still a fraction of 1 per cent.’

And note that in these supposedly ’unimaginable futures’, Wimbledon Tennis Tournament has been quietly paying a £1M annual pandemic insurance premium for 17 years which has just paid out £100M

This week’s negative oil prices reinforce the idea that almost every day these days is another previously unthinkable ‘thought experiment’. As Lenin said ‘There  are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen’

Dougald takes us back to 2011, when it was “kicking off everywhere” – the giddiness of those times when it was felt that what might lie ahead “can’t be any worse than going back to normal”. But Vinay Gupta warned ‘A much, much worse world is possible’.

We look at ‘supply chain weirdness’ and the vulnerability of water purification systems to a  shortage of chemicals, industrial carbon dioxide ironically and consider Stephen Jenkinson’s – ‘Stranger Days’ – a sobering voice – and ‘the instinct to get on the other side is a traumatised instinct’, to rush forward into relief, even to do it imaginatively by dwelling in the beautiful possibilities of another world. This can be an escape from dwelling with the trauma of the world we’re in right now – so what’s the alternative? To sit with the discomfort, sit through it, and a humbler kind of hope:

'Do I think we’re going to seize this moment as a collective and seize the moment? I doubt it. Is it there to be seen anyway? Yes, it is… little pockets of sanity and lucidity that aren’t seduced by the old seduction of getting back on with our lives…’ and those pockets might play a disproportionate role, they might be the source of inspiration in times to come.

Ed explores the idea that ‘the unknown may hold more value than the known’ and the notion of ‘UNLEARNING’ in which resist the lure and pull of the  familiar - even though it feels comforting in uncertainty. We discuss Marion Waller, adviser to the Mayor of Paris on ‘tactical urbanism’ (rapid experimental change using PEOPLE) and the metaphor of cities as forests not machines - is this part of the role of metaphors - the space for playfulness?

‘But what is a metaphor?’ asks Dougald. Why are they so powerful? They re not like a crossword clue with a one-to-one solution – they arer tools for working with the unknown, that  can’t be fully known/controlled. Dark Mountain as a name, created an image with unanticipated possibilities.

Ed takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the metaphors whirling around us right now:

Phoebe Tickell’s ‘Moral Imaginations’ train metaphor:

“we’ve been on a train that has been hurtling towards a cliff-edge, an irreversible cliff-edge — once we’re off that cliff there’s no way of re-winding that train or stopping the train once we’re off the cliff-edge those systems are in play (and she’s obviously referring to climate change). And it’s as if we’ve basically had a fire in one of the carriages, and it’s made us stop the train. And suddenly we’ve looked outside and we’ve asked: why are we on a train that is hurtling towards that cliff-edge? We need to stop the train.” (ref. E M Forster - The Machine Stops in Episode 2)

The boat metaphor: ‘We’re all facing the same storm...but in very different boats’

The WAR metaphor is EVERYWHERE, the news narrative can feel like an action movie. ‘The Frontline’ (victimhood, sacrifice, fodder for forces greater than yourself, military logistics, command and control planning, ’clapping the troops’, PPE crisis is like weapons without ammunition). But is the language of war misplaced? ‘No one is trying to kill each other here, arguably the world is saner right now’ (Liz Gilbert)

Fake News/Telecoms  metaphor - ‘interrupting  transmission’ or ‘communicating bad messages’ 

The Italian Job. Is this scene the ULTIMATE representation of the economic recovery in lockdown? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZCaSyid4m0 (suggested by Ed Dowding)

SPACESHIP EARTH - Buckminster Fuller (Ellen MacArthur), world as machine without operating instructions, no passengers only crew 

Dougald explores why that Spaceship Earth metaphor had a massive influence on the environmental movement via Stewart Brand and refers to an interesting moment in the Jenkinson recording, musing on the virus and this moment as “replacing the Earth seen from space with the Earth seen from Earth”, which feels humbling, echoing something Ivan Illich almost says in the closing pages of ‘Deschooling’, getting to the moon was the easy part, it’s finding our way home again that’s the real work.

Ed Introduces the ‘Bestiary of Metaphors’

Black swans (unforeseen, game-changing, rationalised in hindsight)

White swans - grimly predictable (climate)

Green swans - John Elkington - exponential, regenerative business?

Dougald brings in THE BLACK ELEPHANT – Collapsonomics story (link here)

Ed replies with the Black Jellyfish – we think we know/understand something superficially simple, that is actually far more complex, with a nasty sting in tail

THE IMPOSSIBLE HAMSTER (Leo Murray)...none of us is safe - from the impossible hamster (no one expects this!)! We are walking with beasts, metaphor isn’t supposed to be safe, it is dangerous and subversive, things come out you’re not expecting, this is about being beyond control

‘None of us is safe...until all of us are safe’ 

To which Dougald responds: none of us is safe, full stop, citing Helen Keller’s grounded hope, not traumatised hope:

‘Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.’

Wouldn’t it be something... if whatever pockets we may have a hand in, whatever we may get to take responsibility for in the unknown world that lies ahead, it could be grounded in that spirit...

In this episode we explore the framing of a potential 'language of longing', beginning with the usual reviews of our recent relevant reading: 'Eco-Anxiety' by Anouschka Grose (which explores pertinent themes:  anxiety, trauma, grief, immortality systems and death denial - as well as their counter-points joy, wonder, awe, imagination, wild generosity and radical friendliness) for Ed, as well as Martin Shaw's forthcoming book 'All Those Barbarians' - the 'grimoire' of the School of Myth, which introduces us to the story of the Gordian Knot, and the idea of timeless and time-bound stories. 

Dougald then explores a statement from the editors of degrowth.info

And this piece: ‘The Pulsation of the Commons: The Temporal Context for the Cosmo-Local Transition’ by Michel Bauwens with Jose Ramos

Which takes us into a fascinating conversation around the work of Hungarian-American Peter Pogany and the 'staccato' version of societal change that requires chaotic periods between stable interludes. 

We then talk about the need for 'believing our eyes' in the sense of the rapid rewilding we can't unsee. The Venetian dolphins might not be real. But the idea of them is something we obviously desperately want to believe. 

Dougald then introduces Ivan Illich's ideas around 'conviviality', which we combine with Julia Watson's 'Lo-Tek: Radical Indigenism' and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective which asks how we might be ‘hospicing modernity and assisting with the birth of something new, undefined and potentially, but not necessarily, wiser’.

Or what Jay Cousins calls ‘Upcycling the system looks both among the rubble and the not-yet-fallen towers, and then takes what it needs to leverage a kinder future’

We then return to Michel Bauwens and Pogany – asking how we might stabilise at a new level, a humbler level based on a way of approaching the world that is not characterised by exploitation and extraction – as Vanessa Andreotti would say, ‘in as-yet-unimaginable futures’

We conclude with thoughts on one of our first discussions - the challenge of articulation? This is why storytelling is often powerful, as Martin Shaw always says ‘a wild way of telling the truth’...

To not be sucked into the ‘economy-speak’ (as we almost were in Episode 2 perhaps?) but to stay true to the articulations that touch a different  part of us - perhaps the heart?

That’s maybe the  difference between what Anouschka Grose calls ‘Solastalgia’ - finding discomfort where you used to find comfort (Latin ‘Solacium’ = comfort, Greek ‘Algia’ = pain) and Joanna Macy’s ‘radical hope’?

Thanks for listening. Do follow us and get in touch via our Facebook page. 

You can hear the rising chatter: the bubbling of ‘back to normal’, the stimulus packages, the business resurrection plans, the recovery that everyone is longing for, and at the heart of it the sense that economic growth is the answer. But is it? Perhaps the biggest sacred cow, so deeply embedded culturally as to be unquestionable, is ready to be de-pedestalled? 

In this second episode Dougald and Ed hold a conversational space around challenging the idea that whatever form the recovery takes it has to ‘sound like growth’. 

Time Codes

We start by reviewing some of our respective reading of the last week:

• ‘The Machine Stops’ by E.M.Forster - a prescient parable from 1909 in which humanity resides underground, it’s needs met by an all powerful machine, which then stops, with destructive and transformative consequences (1.40)
• ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer - the (literal) grassroots sleeper hit that became a New York Times best-seller, celebrating science, soul, soil, indigenous wisdom and spirit. Especially the idea of ‘The Honourable Harvest’ (4.52)
• ‘A Paradise Built in Hell’ by Rebecca Solnit - compelling stories of post-disaster communities recovering with joy and in unexpected collaborative ways, versus Hobbesian views of people and ‘elite panics’ (10.11)

15.44 ‘Is green growth possible?’ Can 3% annual growth ever be sustained? The virus has  pushed us where we never expected to be with a third of the economy gone, it will require a huge effort just to get back where we were. The problem of ‘Jevon’s paradox’, the choice between a post-1918 pandemic that led to the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and the terror of the thirties, or the post-1945 settlement of the social contract that created the NHS, Arts Council etc? Or is this ‘Death Star Economics’? Growth does not mean security and wellbeing, we are revaluing societal roles radically.

23.44 Beyond the technical, monetary questions - is there an emerging ‘insider willingness’ to face reality? A sense of a boiling/breaking point? How to question the economic growth assumption? This is NOT about sustainability - maintaining this system for the 1 in 7 people on the planet who enjoy it, while making a false promise to the other 6. Is it about ‘negotiating the surrender’? We have realised that whole chunks of the economy can disappear overnight, a wild thought experiment has become reality.

28.40 Pause or Reset? The lobbying to ‘own the settlement’ with a rapid return to business as usual has begun. Some interest from Benefit Corporations, but still not ‘steady state economics’. Now the commercial and political realities have changed can we talk about ecological limits FIRST? Amsterdam’s ‘Doughnut Economics’ recovery plan looks interesting.

34.42 Mutiny? Is there a shadow leadership movement ready to address this paradox of infinite growth? 

38.08 The invitation: How do we offer the frame for this ‘bravest of all conversations’ beyond the previous suicide trajectory? Can we raise the volume of the quiet whispers?

38.58 Permission for the impossible:  Only the impossible is interesting. We need leadership to hold the space to tackle this most sacred of cows as a great unifying idea, not that the machine has stopped. How do we start that impossible conversation - beyond growth?

41.00 Pandemic as portal: We conclude with Arundhati Roy’s much quoted Financial Times piece, and reflect on the caution needed around messianic, millenarian or quasi-religious transcendence:

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

Further References:

• ‘Why growth can’t be green’ by Jason Hickel
• ‘Death Star Economics’ Ed’s piece on Darth Vader’s return to growth plan
• Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’ and Amsterdam’s plan for a ‘Doughnut Recovery’
• When businesses might need to die, Ed’s piece on ‘The Fossil Fuelneral’

Keep in touch

Find us on our Facebook page, send us your reflections and responses – and we'll be back soon with another episode of The Great Humbling.

— Ed & Dougald

How will they look in hindsight, these times we're living through? Is this a midlife crisis on the road to the Star Trek future, or the point at which that story of the future unravelled and we came to see how much it had left out? What if our current crises are neither an obstacle to be overcome, nor the end of the world, but a necessary humbling? With Covid-19 calling into question the ways we have been living, Ed Gillespie and Dougald Hine set out to explore what it means to be humbled.