Episodes
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As the fifth season of The Great Humbling came to an end, we recognised that what we’ve been doing is letting you listen in on a conversation that we would want to have anyway – and this inspired us to expand the podcast, to bring you overheard conversations with other friends, co-conspirators and people who get us thinking.
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.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org -
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.
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Episodes manquant?
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In our latest episode, Ed and Dougald compare notes on the experience of being founders – or co-founders – of organisations. What did we learn along the way? And what do humble forms of leadership look like?
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:
If there are things that you’ve seen me do that I look good at doing, most of them I started off really bad at doing, and you’ve just benefitted from the mistakes I made earlier.
Thinking about a school called HOME, Dougald describes it as a vehicle for multiple things, some of which he is the source of and some of which Anna is the source of.
We close by talking about Rowan Williams’ Silence and Honey Cakes, a book about the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the founders of Christian monasticism, who were trying to work out a new way of living in community. There’s a story there about a man known as Macarius the Great which gives a glimpse of what humble leadership might look like.
Thanks for listening and for all the ways that you support this podcast – and especially to those who have pledged paid support for our work since we moved to Substack two weeks ago.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org -
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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Here's a rundown of references from this episode...
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
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org -
Our final episode of 2023 finds Dougald already in his Christmas jumper, as the tiredness of a busy year catches up with the pair of us.
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.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org -
We take a different route into our conversation this time around, in what turns out to be the first in a two-parter woven around John Higgs’s book, The KLF: Chaos, Magic & the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds, which Ed has been reading. It’s the kind of book that detonates in the mind, sparking a million connections.
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.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org -
We recorded this episode on Dougald’s birthday – and Ed starts with the image of him wearing Anna’s family’s Coyote coat, triggering unsettling flashbacks to the QAnon shaman, who is apparently now running for Congress. Welcome to the dark weirdness of 2023.
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’.
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Welcome back to Season 5 of The Great Humbling! Here are some show notes...
The Regrowing a Living Culture series at a school called HOME starts on 7 & 8 November.
Ed has been reading Dougie Strang’s book, The Bone Cave.
Dougald mentions the cluster of authors who were part of the first decade of Dark Mountain who are stepping out with books of their own, finding their voice and getting the attention they deserve. This includes Dougie, also his wife Em Strang’s first novel Quinn, Nick Hunt’s first novel Red Smoking Mirror, Caroline Ross’s book on pigment-making, Found & Ground, and her Substack ‘Uncivil Savant’, and Charlotte Du Cann’s mythic memoir After Ithaca as well as her newly launched Substack, ‘The Red Tent’.
Ed has also been reading Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker and John Lanchester’s The Wall.
Dougald mentions Lanchester’s essays on Game of Thrones, Marlen Haushofer’s 1963 dystopian novel, also called The Wall, and finally Helen Cresswell’s hilarious The Bagthorpe Saga.
Ed wonders what to say to some of the audiences he ends up getting to speak in front of – and this connects to a question Dougald has been wondering about since the roundtable he took part in for Nate Hagens’s The Great Simplification podcast. Is it possible to take Federico Campagna’s call to ‘make good ruins’ (in Prophetic Culture) and begin to turn this into strategy? This is the starting point for Dougald’s new Substack series, How We Make Good Ruins.
There’s a place Ed goes walking, Covehithe, where the locals dismantled the medieval church and rebuilt a humbler structure inside its ruins. It’s the setting for a short story called ‘Covehithe’ by China Miéville (who, weirdly, shared a gap-year training programme with Ed when they were teenagers).
The image of the church at Covehithe echoed back through Dougald’s work and prompted an essay, The Ruined Church. This also connected to John Foster’s essay, ‘Beyond the Fishtank’, which included the suggestion that the one thing missing from At Work in the Ruins was ‘the metaphysics’.
Ed brings our conversation to a close by quoting D.H. Lawrence from Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928):
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
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In February this year, we took The Great Humbling into a new format, a live conversation on stage at Norwich Arts Centre as part of the UK tour that Dougald made to launch his book, At Work in the Ruins. It's taken us rather a long time to get the recording edited, but here it is at last.
For this live show, Ed and Dougald were joined by two special guests.
Charlotte Du Cann is a writer, editor, teacher and lover of all things rooted in Earth and sky. She works as co-director of the Dark Mountain Project and is the author of After Ithaca and 52 Flowers That Shook My World. She has just launched her Substack, The Red Tent, 'a metaphysical practice for collapsing times', in which she writes to pass on the tools that have served her over the past thirty years.
Rupert Read is a philosopher and climate activist. This summer, he left his role as a professor at the University of East Anglia, after 26 years, to dedicate himself to his work as co-director of the Climate Majority Project. He is the author of many books, including Why Climate Breakdown Matters and Do You Want to Know the Truth? The Surprising Rewards of Climate Honesty.
We'll be back in a few weeks' time with the first episode of our fifth season.
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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.
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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.
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After twenty-nine episodes recorded through screens and cameras, Ed and Dougald find themselves meeting for the first time and sit down for a conversation beside the mill pond in Loddon, in the garden of the Mill of Impermanence.
We hear the unlikely tale of how Dougald found Ed’s fiftieth birthday present, a copy of Uriah Heep’s fifth album, The Magician’s Birthday, while en route to a holiday in Great Yarmouth. A chain of serendipitous events leads to the unavoidable conclusion that Yarmouth is the spiritual home of the Great ‘Umbling.
This leads to a discussion of ‘serendipity’, the term coined by the novelist Horace Walpole in 1754, and its opposite, ‘zemblanity’, coined by the novelist William Boyd in 1998.
Dougald explains why he abandoned the article he started writing about all the things he learned from hitchhiking.
Ed talks about Gordon White’s Ani.Mystic and we agree that it’s a mindblowing book. Ed makes the connection to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Dougald brings in Paul Kingsnorth’s recent conversation with Rowan Williams.
Dougald talks about Danny Nemo’s Neuro-Apocalypse and the centrality of the concept of ‘ki’ in everyday Japanese.
Ed enthuses about James Rebanks’s English Pastoral.
Dougald reads from a recent essay from an anonymous Substack called Flat Caps and Fatalism, a dark picture of ‘The dishonest land’.
Ed lifts up the work of Ann and Martin Wolfe at Wakelyns Agroforestry as a local example of the possibility of a different relationship to land, even starting from where we find ourselves.
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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.
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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'.
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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!
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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 OldfieldWe 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.
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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'.
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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’
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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.
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