Tag Archives: The Great Humbling

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.

 

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.