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When the two of us sat down a couple of weeks ago to record a new episode, it was developments in UK politics that were on the top of our minds – and particularly the Gorton and Denton by-election, where Green Party candidate Hannah “the plumber” Spencer achieved a notable victory. This was swiftly followed by the first national opinion polls showing the Greens overtaking the Labour party and claiming second place, something that we’d anticipated in our previous episode, back in October.

Dougald arrived at this recording having just put the last full stop on a mammoth chapter for his new book, discussing George Monbiot’s Regenesis and ’s Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, matters we touched on back in season four with an episode called We Need to Talk About George.

Meanwhile, Ed recently read Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom and it has inspired him to stand for office, as a Green candidate in East Depwade for Norfolk County Council.

Dougald talks about going out on her local high street in the southwest of England, inviting people to have a conversation about politics:

We’re not from a political party. We’re just a bunch of grumpy women who think the quality of political conversation on the TV and social media is rubbish, and we think we can do better right here on the high street. Do you want to come and try it out?

The More in Common pre-budget briefing brought a striking statistic: 57% of Britons suspect that the “cost of living” crisis will never end. (And that was before the US-Israeli war on Iran had started.)

Ed talks about the threat to trial by jury in the UK under the current Labour government – and the vital role that juries have played in exercising their consciences in recent prosecutions of activists, including in the case of the Filton 24. Read more at the Defend Our Juries site.

Dougald connects the role of juries to experiments in broader and deeper forms of democratic participation, including Citizens Assemblies and Flatpack Democracy.

We talk about Alana Newhouse’s pair of essays, Everything is Broken and Brokenism, mapping a political faultline between those who believe existing systems can be fixed and made fit for purpose, and those who see them as broken beyond repair.

Ed mentions ’s Long Now lecture, Civilizational Optioneering, in which he imagines ‘a future that leverages human–machine systems that expand our civilizational capacity for complex discourse and problem solving’.

Dougald is sceptical and brings in John Michael Greer’s recent post, The End of the Bureaucratic Era, which offers the provocation that main effect of AI may be to wipe out the layers of Bullshit Jobs famously charted by David Graeber.

But as a counter to this, he also brings in ’s fascinating essay, ‘The Wet Route to the Stars’.

Ed recently interviewed our friends and for an episode of his other podcast, The Futurenauts. Dougald enthuses about Sam’s recent post on why it makes sense to throw a street party, even at the end of the world. (Look out for the Street Party Squad WhatsApp group at the end of that post.)

It turns out Ed is currently working with the Big Lunch, the UK’s biggest celebration of community. Dougald had listened to Sam and his co-conspirator Alex Barker interviewing its founder, Tim Smit, for the Be More Pirate podcast.

Another source of inspiration comes from and Tyler Heath’s post about what they’ve learned from the eight years of “asking questions about community, gathering, and connection” which led them to set up Wednesday Night Pizza Club.

And Ed puts in a word for the People, Planet, Pint sustainability meetups around the UK.

Dougald talks about how he’s been revisiting James C. Scott’s classic Seeing Like a State and got inspired by his account of the veillée gatherings on winter evenings in rural France in the nineteenth century.

As we recorded this episode, Ed was about to head off to host a retreat called Led By Fools with Jonathan Gosling and special guest . (Here’s John’s write-up of the week.)

Ed mentions that he’s been reading Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy.

Dougald gives a shout-out to a unique collaboration between two old friends of the podcast, the artist-magician and trance technician , who have created Between as “an experimental evocation of altered states, combining visual art, poetry and hypnosis to access the intelligence of your deep mind, for insight, creativity and healing”. Check it out!

We also talk about ’s big new book, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us, which Dougald highly recommends.

That takes us to Mackenzie Crook’s TV series Small Prophets, which Ed has been enjoying, before we wrap up the episode with our bits of news.

The Notices

After a long break to work on the new book, Dougald is finally teaching another online series with a school called HOME, starting in late May, when he and Anna invite you to join for a five-week journey called A Bit More Practice.

Between now and then, there’s also a five-week series hosted by Beehive Productions and the Rotterdam Change Days called At Work in the Ruins and based around the “four tasks for an age of endings” from the closing chapter of Dougald’s last book.

And Ed will be hosting his next writing retreat in September on Lambay Island, details for that here.

Thank You

…to all of you listening, sharing, commenting and joining in the conversations which this podcast is a part of. The episodes have been a little sparse lately due to writing commitments, but it’s always a joy when the two of us get together again after a break. We’re aiming to reconvene soon after the UK elections in May.

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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 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 ’s The Viral Mandate of Heaven, in which she identifies Zack and 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 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 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?

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 of The Decelerator and , ‘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 – co-founded by , 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 contributor, 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 ’s ‘The Genealogy of Genealogies’, which culminates in a wonderful passage about gifts as “the currency of love” – and this connects to ’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, 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.

In our first episode of 2025, we get inspired by ’s Against the Vortex to watch the cult 1974 movie Zardoz, featuring Sean Connery in what appears to be a prototype for the mankini. In Galluzzo’s book, Zardoz features as a surprisingly prescient story for thinking about techno-utopias (or dystopias), degrowth and deceleration in the 21st century, as well as bringing into view an under-recognised current of “critical Aquarianism” in 1970s counterculture, distinct from both the self-centred therapeutic turn (see Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self) and the “hippie modernist cults of technology” (touched on when we discussed ‘Spaceship Earth’ in S1E4).

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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 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”.

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Mankinis and Manifestos

At this point, we get on to the matter of Sean Connery’s mankini and ’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 and with .

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 ’s essay for Mere Orthodoxy.)

Ed quotes 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 , David Johnston and as a counter to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto.

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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.

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Quiet Collapsitarians

We finish up by discussing ’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, , where you can support the making of this podcast by becoming a paid subscriber.

This episode is the podcast version of a live event a few weeks ago, hosted by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, where I joined Vanessa Andreotti – who some of you will know as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira – to wonder about what she is up to with AI.

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:

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.

• ’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 – ‘“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 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 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.

• ’s 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

• , 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.

• , 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 , Thursday 28 November

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

• Dougald quotes from ’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

• writes on Substack at 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.

• at 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.

Finding Sanity

I don’t believe we are f*cked

I recently noticed I have been operating on the assumption that catastrophic climate change is a given, societal collapse is a given, and it is simply a matter of years until we’re all totally, irrevocably, and unequivocally fucked…

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2 years ago · 18 likes · 24 comments · Isabelle Drury

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.

Finding Sanity

Finding Sanity is a newsletter about making sense of the world we live in and imagining the world we want to create.

By Isabelle Drury

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

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?”

Read more & book a place

And here’s a line from friend-of-the-show 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 ’s Introduction to the book.

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

• ’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 , 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.

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

• ’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’.

“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 shit 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 ’s public events in London next week – and a new five-week online series with a school called HOME, starting on 6 & 7 November.

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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, 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

In this episode, my guest is Dr Ashley Colby for a joint episode with her Doomer Optimism podcast. Ashley is hosting a weekend retreat around my work in Chicago as part of next month’s North American tour.

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

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

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 , 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 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 writes about in .

Ashley talks about the retreat she hosted last year with 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 ’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 of .

I give a shout out to ’s excellent post, “This moment needs your deep weirdness and your intellectual rigour”, and quote something 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 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 ’s Maps of Scenius.)

It also brings me to ’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.

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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 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 , starting with this conversation with .

This conversation took place on Zoom in March with a live audience made up of subscribers to and . 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 ’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.

The end of this fifth series of The Great Humbling finds us looking back over the loose ends from earlier episodes, exploring the wider field of “Humility Studies” and asking who exactly we think we’re talking to, anyway?

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 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 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 , 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 of 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 ’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 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, – that will take place fortnightly on Sunday evenings (European time), starting with a conversation with of 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 ’s brilliant book on Blake, which friend-of-this-podcast gave to Dougald on last year’s UK tour.

Talk of gardens also takes us to the importance of domestic gardens within ’s projections for how the UK could feed itself in A Small Farm Future, and also to ’s .

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 and of the . 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 (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 , 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 and colleagues who have taken the project forward:

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.

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The Great Humbling

In 2020, Dougald Hine (co-founder of Dark Mountain and a school called HOME) started recording a series of conversations with the poet, futurist and 'recovering sustainability consultant' Ed Gillespie. This grew into a podcast called The Great Humbling.

By Dougald Hine

This is the episode where we finally left Skype, which we’ve for some reason been using to record these conversations for four and a half series. Switching off the lights as we go, Ed wonders about other examples of old systems and technologies that are still in use, such as Windows Submarine.

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 ’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 and have been hosting over at the .)

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 (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 .

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 ’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 . 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 .

Ed & Dougald

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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’.