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Posted on May 12, 2025 | 43 Comments
I’ve all but finished my new book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft, which will be out in the autumn. A few words here about its context, and some other bits and bobs of news.
I got quite a lot of input from readers of this blog about suggested content as I was preparing to write the book. Thank you – it was much appreciated. Some people were interested in more of the staple fare of this blog: agrarianism, climate change, energy futures, politics and suchlike from a quasi-academic perspective. Others pushed me to explore distributism, Catholic Social Teaching and matters of faith and spirituality in more depth. Some suggested a global overview of small-scale farming and societies oriented toward renewable local livelihoods. Yet others were interested in the story of my own little smallholding. And some advocated for a turn to fiction, with a future-focused novel about how local societies might fare in the context of climate change.
Obviously, I couldn’t encompass all those things within the pages of one relatively short book. There was a need to narrow it down. So what I did was … no, actually the book does encompass elements of all those things within its pages. It’s been quite a journey writing it over the last few months. Perhaps the book runs the risk of breadth over depth, or too many different approaches jumbled together. But on the whole I’m happy with it, and I hope others will find it interesting.
I’ll write a little more on this site about the book’s themes and content in due course. For now, I’ll just make a few remarks about the overarching context. The first being that I just can’t take seriously any more the idea that the existing global political economy is going to survive for long in anything like its present form – high-energy, statist, welfare capitalist, consumerist etc. That’s quite a dark idea, because there’s no way its dissolution can occur without a lot of suffering and conflict. Yet one of the features of past dark ages is that they weren’t so dark for everyone, especially for many ordinary people. So the challenge is to seek what light is to be found in the present impending dark age, and try to help manifest it.
We have numerous ways of ducking that challenge. Perhaps they can be broadly divided into (1) the belief that technological innovation will rescue the status quo, (2) the belief that some favoured brand of politics – socialist, liberal, conservative, green, whatever – will rescue it, or (3) a more generic belief that the resilience of the human spirit will prevail. While there’s a lot to be said for technological development, good politics and the resilience of the human spirit, nevertheless it seems clear to me that none of these are going to rescue the status quo.
Writers are particularly prone to falling into these erroneous beliefs. I think this is partly because we’re under a lot of pressure to tell a version of the modern Promethean hero narrative, which I discuss a little in the book. It’s also partly because this is a deeply satisfying and seductive mythic structure that, like a moth to a flame, is really hard for writers to avoid. Broadly, the way it goes is ‘there’s all sorts of trouble and conflict in the world that confuses us, but nevertheless I’m optimistic things will turn out well because of this MacGuffin that appears toward the end of my book (technology, politics, human positivity etc.)
Probably some readers will think that I succumb to this same myth in Finding Lights… All I can say is that I did my best to avoid it, while also trying to avoid an impotent hopelessness. I’m grateful to my publisher for giving me the space to do that.
As I see it, writers generally need to try to write apocalypse more thoughtfully. I used the Greek lettering for apocalypse, ἀποκάλυψις, in my title not (just) to be pretentious, but with a view to casting a different light on it from its usual connotations. It’s hardly original to observe that, in the Greek, apocalypse means a revelation or uncovering. Yet we routinely talk nowadays about the need to avoid apocalypse, to maintain the status quo, to solve our problems. I’d suggest instead we need to embrace what apocalypse is revealing to us, while for sure trying to mitigate the miseries it inevitably entails.
The apocalypse we’re entering, however disastrous, is a revelation or uncovering of what we’ve been getting wrong, and we need to look unflinchingly at that if we’re to avoid worse disaster. What we’ve been getting wrong is not fundamentally things like the carbon we’re putting into the atmosphere, the fossil fuels we’re burning, the meat we’re eating, the excess water we’re using, or the endless habitats and wild species we’ve been obliterating. These are more symptom than cause. What we’ve been getting wrong is culture. What we’ve been getting wrong is our spiritual orientation to place and to meta-place. I explore this a little in my new book, but it needs a lot more exposition.
Exposition is only a small part of what’s required, though. I think writers, lawyers, analysts, policymakers and other wordsmiths need to dial down our inflated sense of our ability to understand, model and solve.
In a recent post, I wrote “so much of our public narrative about the future is in the hands of academics, journalists and politicos – basically wordsmiths, aka symbolic capitalists or the professional managerial class, who like to write and model on paper or on the computer”. John Thackara wrote in response “So help me understand: why write another book which will be read by – well, that same group?”
Fair question! I hope John will forgive me for only belatedly attempting to answer it here. The first thing to say is I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing, with being a wordsmith, as such. Nor can people in the professional-managerial class help being in it. And there are a lot of them – expanding its numbers and diminishing the numbers of those creating local material livelihoods has been one of modernism’s major projects.
The problem arises when we delude ourselves into thinking that we PMC wordsmiths can offer actual solutions via our words on the page, through language tricks, through our MacGuffins, our ‘game-changing new technologies’ and our ‘but I’m optimistics’. Fundamentally, I don’t think we should be in the business of trying to ‘solve’ problems – rather, that’s part of the problem itself, and proffering prose solutions typically involves a refusal of the revelation that’s available to us. The best a writer can do, if they feel called to write, is to use words to draw attention to things that command responses beyond words, models or ‘solutions’. I don’t think you can ever fully succeed at that as a writer, but maybe there are degrees, and it can be worth trying to fail as well as possible.
That, at any rate, is one way in which I would like to frame Finding Lights in a Dark Age. We need to find ways to inhabit place and meta-place differently to the present, ways that are equal to the challenges of our times and what they’re revealing to us.
Anyway, talking of words, I have been and will be spilling quite a few more of them in various podcasts and other presentations – see the list below, and also the Events page on this website. I have to confess something of a contradiction here, not so much in respect of my previous point about the limitations of words as in the fact that usually I don’t greatly enjoy public speaking. Something along the lines of “I’ve already expressed this better in my book than I can think of to say right now off the top of my head – go and read the book!”
However, I guess speaking with people is the beginning of something less abstracted – an invitation into encounter and specific place or context. So I will try to do this as well as I can in forthcoming events.
And so, regarding events, I spoke recently with my friends Ashley and Jason on the Doomer Optimism podcast about N.S. Lyons, who I wrote about recently here. Lyons also did an interview at Unherd here. I have some agreement with him on a few points, but mostly I find his positions antithetical to the world we somehow need to bring about.
I also spoke recently at a We Feed the UK event in Bristol, alongside Helen Keys who’s involved in helping to revitalize the linen industry in Northern Ireland. I’d recommend We Feed the UK for the stories they’re trying to weave about place, food and fibre. I gave another talk to the Planetary Limits Academic Network – an interesting group and discussion.
Looking forward, I’ll be speaking at the Glastonbury Festival on 27 June and again on 29 June. I fear I may have left it a bit late in life for my first Glastonbury Festival, but I’m hoping to enjoy myself there. The last chapter of my book involves a fictional future walk ending near Glastonbury. It’s too good an opportunity to miss to walk there next month. Life imitating words. I’ll report back here on any strange and wonderful events I encounter along the way.
The programme at Glastonbury looks quite interesting, with talks from people like Adam Greenfield and Caroline Lucas, discussed recently here. Maybe I’ll bring my guitar as well, in case Neil Young fails to show.
Then I’ll be speaking at the Green Gathering in Chepstow/Cas-gwent on 3 August. I’ve got various podcasts in the offing too. I’ll share information about those as and when.
But right now, I’m going to get outside and try to pick up some sorely neglected threads in this little smallholding that I call home.
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If even a handful of people take action because of your words and start the process of becoming a small farmer, your effort will not be wasted. And even if nobody does anything new, there’s nothing wrong with caring about what happens to others and trying to help them. I think Cassandra was a hero, a tragic hero perhaps, even though her warnings were futile. “Chris Smaje, tragic hero” would be a fine epitaph. Only a very few can be a saint.
You also said, “What we’ve been getting wrong is culture. What we’ve been getting wrong is our spiritual orientation to place and to meta-place. I explore this a little in my new book, but it needs a lot more exposition”.
True, but the forces of evolution, biological and cultural, are inexorable. Not many (any?) species can resist the temptation to make use of newly discovered bounty and expand their populations.
I don’t know if you covered the Maximum Power Principle in your book, but it explains a lot about how we managed to get ourselves into this predicament. The world would be a completely different place if there were no fossil fuels.
@Joe Clarkson
“The world would be a completely different place if there were no fossil fuels.”
I would add to that
“the world would be a completely different place without the relatively stable climate of the Holocene “
Hey Chris, long time blog reader, first time commenter.
Congratulations on the book, it sounds jam packed and wide ranging, I’m really looking forward to reading it! (and the cover art is gorgeous)
I’m a little intrigued (and glad) to see you address religion and spirituality in more detail.
Not necessarily from Orthodox motivation (not that I’m against it) but I feel like traditional religion is a enduring bulwark in opposition to the more destructive impulses of modernity in its communal focus, its exaltation of God-created nature and its toppling of the human aspirations to omnipotence and omniscience.
There’s been a few books that continually run through my mind when reading your blog. I’m sure you’ve got plenty on your plate, but I’ll list them below in rough order of how impactful I’ve found each of them.
Thank-you for your work in the world.
Mammon’s Ecology: Metaphysic of the Empty Sign – Stan Goff
The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics & the Politics of Work – Cara New Dagget
Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment – Michael and Joyce Huesemann
That is one smart looking cover to the book! I can’t wait to read it.
“What we’ve been getting wrong is culture. What we’ve been getting wrong is our spiritual orientation to place and to meta-place. I explore this a little in my new book, but it needs a lot more exposition.”
I used to dislike the word spiritual because of it’s supernatural connotation, but I think it really gets to the core problem. I do like a good techno-fix, that’s my day job, but the sorts of questions you get paid to answer all basically boil down to: “how to make X% more money than last year”, while the real questions of how to feed and shelter people in a harsh climate with hand tools, go unaddressed aside from my “free time”. But it must be possible, people have lived here for 10-12,000 years. It would be a different story if technology was driven by people who worried about whether it is (to borrow the chrisitan terminology) immoral to own a microwave for instance. (So the Amish? Though they’re still dominionists)
Maybe I’m rambling but recently I’ve found myself drawn to a materialistic, Buddhist, animism? The fear of the big religions is that by removing the “soul” from the human you denigrate them to the level of ‘mere’ animal, but I find the inverse more interesting/troubling in that you have elevated all life to the level of the human. Now all life is ‘sacred’ and you can’t just do whatever you like with/to it. Of course it is normal for animals to kill and eat other animals and all life is only possible via death, and so it goes, and the stars wheel overhead.
Looking forward to the book, I worry both that I’m too far from power to make any difference, but also too close to really stand to benefit from a ‘Dark Age’ so I’m sure I’ll have a lot to think about from it. Apologizes again if I’m way off the mark here. I’m not doing enough farming at the moment and it gives me enough time to think about these things and where I should direct my efforts next. The common thread currently seems to be supporting as much life as possible, which I shouldn’t really imagine I have the power to do, but maybe I can attempt to unhitch some land, water and associated sunlight from the capitalistic death machine.
One cannot “get culture wrong.” Culture is adaptation and solution. It works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t work, it fades away – or goes dark if you prefer. If it works, it increases the ability to thrive and reproduce. As for place, I usually default to Eliade’s concept of shamanism as rooted in place. This is also a critical difference between spirituality, which is limited by space, and religion, which purports to be global. In other words, you can get away from the spirits that hang out in snags in the forests of Samiland (northern Scandinavia) by getting out of Samiland. You cannot get away from the demons of Christianity by leaving the Christian lands. They will pursue you to the ends of the earth – along with their priests! Instead of the individual getting an ecstatic experience in spirituality, the class-based religion provides a priest. Instead of an understanding of how the world works in spirituality, class-based religion provides dogma. Instead of a limiting factor of space in spirituality, class-based religion provides a global reach. Now, this should give a person a clue to why exactly religion is so bad. It is because it does not have a built-in limit. Oops. As long as we prioritize religion over spirituality, we are doomed. So Chris is on the right track with a focus on culture AND spirituality.
Disclaimer: Yes, I know that every culture has some form of religion or spirituality. But shouldn’t we be focused on the distinction between the two? It then becomes a distinction between social organization, such as state vs. tribe.
What we are “getting wrong” about culture is the time element. Culture is a faster adaptation than either genetics or physiological adaptation. You do not have to live in the Himalayas for 15,000 years or so to develop genetic adaptations to altitude. Nor do you have to live for generations at altitude to adapt with physiological changes like greater lung capacity. Nor do you have to acclimatize over a couple of weeks so you can build up more red blood cells. You can just put on an oxygen tank. Which leads me to my final point. Even culture can be too slow. What the 1960s was all about was some of us realizing that our cultural train in the US was going off a cliff. The smart move was to jump off – or “drop out” in the parlance of the times. And of course, it is very, very difficult to drop out, so one has to scale it back a little and live with much less. This became, “Reduce, reuse and recycle.” It was not just an environmental slogan, but a Movement slogan. (Remember The Movement?) Then there was an even more refined slogan in the 1970s, “Live simply so others may simply live.”
For what it’s worth, for me difference between spirituality and religion is that spirituality is a personal affair. It’s up to the individual to set the parameters.
Where as religion is someone telling others how to behave/what to think and is therefore hierarchical by nature.
“One cannot “get culture wrong.” Culture is adaptation and solution. It works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t work, it fades away – or goes dark if you prefer.”
Looking at the birth rate of the west we got it wrong , it does not work , western civilization is dying for lack of replacements , there are not enough children being born and it is fading away .
I look forward to the book, great cover, something of the illuminated manuscript. I like to think Alice and I have had some part in the understanding of the craft part.
To extend Blue Jay’s discussion of your quote above, culture, spirituality and place, meta place – this for me is really the process of craft. Culture as an emergence of the making of objects of care from the land and animals using embodied crafts iterated over time and in place. Even the theta meditation states that are reached through hand craft activities, usually in groups, underpins insights into the world and reality, the basis of spiritual knowledge, the building blocks of religion. Communities form around practice – the crafts of making the things that we really need.
The alienation from this embodied practice of crafting our livlihoods from nature’s abundance has wounded us, even apart from the horrors of the enclosures. The Luddites fought for a reason. Crafts are through out our languages, the meta- phor of all abstractions. Making is the wordless process that holds together place, culture and spirituality, it is innate to our humanity.
“What we’ve been getting wrong is culture. What we’ve been getting wrong is our spiritual orientation to place and to meta-place. I explore this a little in my new book, but it needs a lot more exposition.”
Yes. It is always culture.
For me, it’s the culture of hierarchy that’s is the root problem.
Once we decided (culturally ) it was a good idea to first domesticate animals, (dogs, I guess?) it was only a small step to the idea of domesticating other humans. And from there we get hierarchy.
Controlling, limiting, manipulating, containing, suppressing, corralling, exploiting…………..
Very much looking for to reading the book, Chris. Lots else to say but, like you, I am behind on my outdoor chores so will see what still sticks in my mind once I come up for air…
Briefly,
– Thanks Joe. Getting called a tragic hero is the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all week! Regarding the maximum power principle, no I don’t discuss it in the book but I think it creates scope for an interesting discussion. Humans are surely like other organisms in the way we proliferate around usable resources like water and good soil. On the other hand, when you have a geologic quantity like fossil energy, was it inevitable that a species would eventually turn up to light the match? And was it inevitable that that species, despite its internal debate with itself, would ultimately use up that quantity to the point of its own extinction, like nettles exhausting an old compost heap? If yes to the latter, that leaves few avenues open. I might as well give up being a tragic hero and go and have some fun… But possibly no? I wrote something bearing on this a few years back here: https://chrissmaje.com/2020/04/the-three-causes-of-global-ecocide/
– Interesting thoughts, bluejay, hinting at the other route from maximum power dynamics – something like the Luddite route mentioned by Joel and touched on in my book also. The possibility that humans, unlike nettles, can say no to exploiting a resource (‘Saying no to a farm-free future’!). All I can hope is that the book indeed will give people ‘a lot to think about from it’ … it doesn’t contain answers partly because it’s not in depth in that way, and partly because there aren’t answers for the more philosophical reasons outlined above.
– Walter, if culture doesn’t work, could we not then say that we got it wrong? I suppose the timeframe of the analysis is relevant. Also, I’d argue that there’s what amounts to a natural law basis as distinct from an evolutionary fitness basis for determining the rightness or wrongness of culture – a discussion for another time perhaps. Your distinction between spirituality and religion is interesting and similar to Sahlins’ distinction between immanent and transcendent cultures that I draw on in the book. Much to agree with there, but I’d argue it’s also possible to overdraw the duality. Perhaps also a discussion to be had about the 60s – a bit before my time (I was born in the middle of it), but I’d see (at least) two derivations from 60s counterculture. One was the principled dropping out you mention (in some ways influenced by interesting and powerful but quite class-based South Asian religions?) and the other was a kind of hedonistic individualism presaging a lot of the later crap we’re now wading through. Much to discuss!
– Joel, I always enjoy the ways you connect craft, embodiment and community so richly in your comments here. I wish I could have channelled that a bit more in the book, but my discussion in it is at least compatible and hopefully food for further discussions.
– Thanks also Brian, Kathryn & John. John’s point about hierarchy is a constant if often somewhat submerged theme in the book. It will be good to discuss that more in due course too.
Yes, there was quite a bit of influence from South Asian religions, as well as East Asian. Robert Bly once critiqued the trend towards Hinduism around 1971 by saying young Americans are not “grounded” in Indian culture. He had a point, but he also had a different agenda at the time, which later evolved into the Iron John nonsense. Nevertheless, Bly did a wonderful translation of Hunger by Knut Hamsun in 1967 which I quite like. And on a related note, Hamsun also wrote a savage critique of “modern” America – in 1889! It is titled The Cultural Life of Modern America. One reviewer on Amazon called it, “A cynical, savage, relentless attack on the culture, intellect and spirit of modern America, infused with Hamsun’s wit. In short, a must read!”
And on another related note, Thorstein Veblen was a struggling academic in 1889, just like Hamsun. As the EconLib entry notes:
“Veblen had to struggle to stay in academia. In the late nineteenth century many universities were affiliated in a substantial way with churches. Veblen’s skepticism about religion and his rough manners and unkempt appearance made him unattractive to such institutions.”
And why bring up Veblen? The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) introduced the term “conspicuous consumption,” which still explains a lot about modern America to this day. What made Veblen so prescient in critiquing “modern” America was his familiarity with the anthropology and sociology of the day. In other words, a familiarity with the bedrock disciplines of social science provides a meaningful grasp of present-day economics and where we have gone so wrong. Long before Galbraith and Piketty started critiquing the “affluent society” and the Gilded Age, there were a couple of scruffy Norwegians doing a more down-to-earth job of it. In the same manner, it would be wise for young people today to listen to a few of us snaggle-toothed old hippies. It is not just acid flashbacks, gray ponytails and fading memories. There is some real content there. Disclaimer: I was able to afford to get my teeth capped a few years ago, so I have lost my snaggle-toothed appearance.
The personal spirituality versus overbearing religious command that John formulates seem to me two horns of a dilemma we somehow need to transcend. Perhaps collective spirituality, enspirited culture, in the context of hierarchy seen as parts within wholes rather than who’s hot and who’s not might be a way? That, at any rate, is an argument I press in the new book and hope to explicate here in more detail in the future.
Some interesting names to juggle with from Walter – Thorstein Veblen, Robert Bly, Knut Hamsum. I read Hamsum’s ‘Growth of the Soil’ and thought it was an astonishing book. Hamsum’s later enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler is, to put it delicately, less appealing, though apparently the Fuhrer was never more furious than after he met with Hamsum, so perhaps one can take a positive there. I’d argue that ultra-nationalism and racism are quite modern phenomena, but they’re good at attaching themselves to ideas of soil, localism and agrarian holism. We need to make the case like Hamsum did for soil, localism and agrarian holism without treading his political path.
Names!
I very recently heard Robert Bly quoted as saying “a writer should learn to trust his obsessions”, which struck a chord as I was feeling particularly obsessed with the donkey field’s hedgerows and unending interest at the time.
That quote came to me through Australian writer Gerald Murnane, whose short fiction (published under the title ‘Stream System’, much of it available ‘free’ online) I found captivatingly original, albeit with shades of Beckett and Sebald.
A final literary quote: “My home was poor, but infinitely precious.” Hamsun wrote that, though I don’t know where or when. This winter I struggled through his short novel ‘Shallow Soil’, probably the worst thing he’s ever written in my opinion, so to anyone curious, I wouldn’t start there. ‘Hunger’ seemed the bleakest and funniest thing I’d ever read at the time (25 years ago), while ‘Growth of the Soil’ and most of his other books all played quite a large part in why I’m now obsessed with fields and hedges and gave up working in an office. Powerful stuff! Proceed with care!
Back to that lovely quote, though – “My home was poor, but infinitely precious.” So many things to cherish in those few words, it seems to me. How does it sit with the Maximum Power Principle, for example (leave me to my dreams, Joe!). Anyhow, that’s today’s Meditation Tip sorted.
Your book looks and sounds great, Chris – looking forward to it. Something else to keep fire in the belly, no doubt.
I think it’s fairly easy, in an individualist, consumer-choice-focused culture, to frame religion in terms of hierarchical dominance and restriction of personal liberty. But there are certainly individualist flavours of religion, and in the meantime true communitarianism without hierarchy is something that is historically extremely rare, regardless of faith tradition.
A lot of damage has been done, and continues to be done, by the way political and economic powers in the West have co-opted Christianity for their own ends, whether this is to do with the “divine right of kings” in Europe or the current flavour of right-wing Christian faux-populist nationalism on display in much of the US. I don’t to rehearse the failings of colonialism here.
My own perspective is that these are not problems with religion per se but with the way human beings handle power (generally badly) — of which I believe Jesus has some strong criticism! The fashion for portraying religion as a whole as diametrically opposed in some way to liberal humanist values is also far too simplistic when you know the history of modern humanist thought (which grew up at least partly out of Christian humanism).
Chesterton wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” I am not deeply familiar with the surrounding context (and probably should be), but my lived reality as a person of faith is that the church is made up of human beings who make mistakes of grave consequence despite our best intentions. I don’t believe any non-faith groups can say they truly do much better on that front.
The tendency to write off religious movements and those who participate in them as dusty relics of a superstitious past is not helpful in a realistic discussion about the future we share.
(PS — Chris — I’m not trying to imply you are writing off religious movements etc — but I see the tendency towards an oversimplification and mischaracterisation of them in some of the other comments here.)
@Kathryn
I don’t think it is consumer capitalism that has co-opted Christianity.
The co-opting of Christianity happened a long time ago.
I blame the Romans!!!!!!! 🙂
Christianity/Church/Hierarchy have been bedfellows for a very long time.
I mean, I said “political and economic powers in the West” and I would include Rome in that, taking a broad and loose view of what counts as “the West”.
Touching on this religion/personal spirituality dilemma, Rupert Sheldrake speaks, with typically eloquence, about his own spiritual journey (he’s in his eighties now) from growing up in a Methodist household as a child, to hard-core atheism as a young scientist adopting the default materialist worldview of his chosen discipline (biochemistry), to developing an interest in Eastern religion working in agronomy in India in the 60s, further investigation into spirituality through the portal of LSD in the 70s, discovering the bridge between Hindu and Christian mysticism, to finding his way back into his own Christian heritage. He makes the point that the idea that Christianity is ‘all about belief’ is largely atheist propaganda, and instead highlights the personal and communal benefits of ‘the experience’ – of attending church, being part of a community, singing together, helping others, receiving blessings, partaking in the structure granted by the liturgical calendar, etc – some of the many aspects that he feels enriches life and that he missed out on while adhering to an atheist world view. For 10 mins or so in the penultimate section of this interview, entitled ‘Rupert’s spiritual journey’, he provides much food for thought and is always a pleasing, often funny and provocative talker I find.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZJENuRG82I
Wendell Berry writes somewhere that hierarchy is inescapable, because it’s natural. After all, the food chain is a hierarchy, for instance. Berry writes that the problem isn’t with hierarchy per se, but with just vs. unjust hierarchies. I wish I could remember which book he discusses this in — “Standing By Words,” maybe…
Such interesting observations, everyone! Much to ponder there… I can only add something else to ponder, which is “What you mean WE, white man?” which is one version of the comment allegedly made by Tonto to the Lone Ranger in a Mad magazine cartoon of the 1960s, in which the two characters are facing hostile Native Americans, and the Lone Ranger asks Tonto what ‘we’ are going to do about it.
I am not sure when what I call the ‘globalist we’ or the ‘colonial we’ became common parlance for those critiquing the current system as much as for those spruiking it. Another change in the culture which is always changing? Chris rightly shrinks the ‘we’ he is part of and writing for to a much smaller group of those of us who think along similar lines and act accordingly – which is in turn just a small fraction of the ‘professional class’. As I ponder my own writing and what the alternatives to the misleading usage of ‘we’ might be, the main options seem to be adopting Anglicised versions of First Languages collective pronouns (as Tyson Yunkaporta does when he coins the term ‘us-two’ and uses it in his book ‘Sand Talk’), or avoiding the misleading usage altogether. Avoidance means not using it as a conflation of all people everywhere (‘humanity’) and only using it when referring to a specified group. This could be as large as ‘we Americans’ as Chomsky uses it in the introduction to ‘American Power and the New Mandarins’ or as small as ‘we dwellers in this valley’. Whatever – something (else) for ‘you-three-and-more’ to think about?
Not to be a fanboy or anything, but Chris’ piece on “writing ἀποκάλυψις” is not only observational and uncovering, but reflexive; something sorely needed. In cultural field studies reflexivity came to be important because it empowered the informants, i.e. the indigenous groups being studied by the ethnologist. In the bad old days, the anthropologist would steam up the river and tell the local guides to, “Go get me some natives.” Then it progressed to participant/observation where the novice anthropologist working on their advanced degree went out to “study and live with the natives.” Then the newly minted “doctor” got a cushy job at a university or research facility. (To be fair, many anthropologists stayed in touch and advocated for their informants’ welfare. But this was secondary to keeping their cushy job. And yes, there are exceptions that prove the rule.) After enough indigenous groups realized that a family consisted of a mother, father, several children and an anthropologist (a common trope from the 1980s!), they started to complain and withhold access. The answer was to let the “natives” have their say and this new focus was firmly in place by the turn of the 21st century. Unfortunately, this reflexivity was largely a way of preserving the old system and made little progress in breaking down neo-colonialism. And there are still many groups that have yet to receive any meaningful recompense for the money made by genetics and pharmaceutical companies for access to their DNA and blood and native plants. Nevertheless, reflexivity is an important tool. But to bring it around to Chris’ perspective in this piece: We are “writing ἀποκάλυψις” every day. Some of us are acutely aware of this, including the people who read this blog. You may not use this term, but actually being aware of how your actions reflect on themselves as you do them is critical to surviving and thriving in ἀποκάλυψις.
I agree Christine, the explanation of relational structures in Sand Talk, of Us Two and Us Lot, is a brilliant model for breaking down the inherent division in the English language and for a model of how to even begin to talk about ‘The World’. I first came across this insight into language through the Rastafarian phrase of ‘I and I’ as a rejection of the division inherent in ‘me and you’.
Are we a ‘mob” yet? Our Mob.
I was wondering if Walter followed Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human? Rushkoff was a good friend of, I think I’ve got this right, Timothy Leary who on his passing gave Rushkoff the mission to ‘find the others’ – which incidentally, relates to Tyson Yunkaporta’s pod cast ‘The Other Others’. Both are supporters of the Commons governance models. Rushkoff is a scholar (in the medieval sense) of that great electric wizard of the 60s Marshal McLuhan, in which he finds an appreciation in McLuhan of the guilds and crafts of that original dark age. I wonder how you find McLuhan Walter? I’ve read his work on the invention of the printing press The Gutenburg Galaxy and found it remarkable – can’t remember a thing about its argument! Jokes.
It’s all pretty much encapsulated in his phrase ‘the medium is the message’ which for me underpins the inability of broad cast media of any sort to galvanise and embody meaningful change. That cleaving as close to nature is the clearest path to enspiriting cultures everywhere. This can also be a cleaving to language that helps our relationship to nature and each other.
I agree with Kathryn also, regards Christianity ‘s Co option by capitalism, and in this way, all the world’s religions have capitulated, not one can claim purity in this respect.
So The Movement goes on; see Clare Farrel’s, a founder of Extinction Rebellion, substack, a powerful call to love and care in the face of the outlawing of peaceful protest, of getting together, face to face and working it out. Maybe this is a place and time for you to present our mobs case Chris?
Joel – I haven’t read Team Human but it seems to me I watched Rushkoff on Nate Hagens’ Great Simplification podcast a couple of years back. I am not familiar with him otherwise. As for McLuhan, I didn’t pay much attention to him. My roommates in 1968 and 1969 were art school students, so they were fans and talked about him once in awhile. I know little of his work. But if he has a resonance now, so much the better.
Here’s the link to Absurd Intelligence, ‘the fate of Britain is in our hands’
https://www.absurdintelligence.com/on-reflecting-the-goodness-of-humanity-an-invitation/?ref=absurd-intelligence-newsletter
Also, the discussion of the components of a ‘Care Home Farm’ continue here:
https://alicesuzanneholloway.substack.com/p/care-home-farm-4-care-home-food-forest?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
All welcome!
Thanks for the further comments. Just briefly, in respect of a few of them:
Christine & others: yes, thanks for the reminder of the treachery of the ‘we’ word. I try to stay aware of it, without always succeeding. There’s a warning paragraph in my new book about this. Hat tip to Joel for referencing the Rastafarian ‘I and I’, and also Tyson Yunkaporta’s ‘Us-Two’. I’m reading his more recent book ‘Right Story, Wrong Story’ at the moment and enjoying it.
Kathryn: I’m with you in your defence of religion, or at least in your plea for even-handedness. I’ve got a certain sympathy for the early ‘age of reason’ thinkers in their efforts to decentre religious authority – but we now know that secular authority is no better. The problem was never religion (or spirituality) as such – I hope to come back to this soon.
Thanks also to Simon on Hamsun, BolshoiBaker (welcome) for yet more books for me to read (sound interesting), Walter on anthropology and much else besides. Hopefully all themes to explore further…
I’ve got a certain sympathy for the early ‘age of reason’ thinkers in their efforts to decentre religious authority
So have I! But I am not sure they succeeded as well as they hoped to.
You might find this BlueSky thread interesting: https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile%2Frahaeli.bsky.social%2Fpost%2F3loqsfhswjk2r&viewtype=tree
Thanks Chris, I’m looking forward to this latest book.
“but we now know that secular authority is no better”
Yes. Here at the western end of the Atlantic Ocean, Thomas Jefferson is the poster boy for enlightened humanism. And we all know about him and slavery.
As for defense of religion, well it depends, doesn’t it?
It seems to me that the question is more about the individual practitioners and communities than the nominal Religion. “Christianity” runs the spectrum from the Shakers to Generalissimo Franco.
So I applaud Kathryn’s efforts and energy at making Christian community, but I can’t help worrying about a cosmology headed by an all-powerful male dictator, however benevolent he may be.
It seems too easy for we mortals to take that as an appropriate model for our terrestrial affairs.
Just as long as I get to be king.
Very few seem to be interested in the impoverished communal Judaism practiced by Jesus.
And I can’t quite figure out how Jesus’ actual practices would translate to anything resembling a national government. Maybe that was his point.
Sorry to poke at a tender topic. I certainly don’t mean to denigrate anyone’s faith.
@Eric F.
You put it much more eloquently than I.
And , I too, am not trying to attack anyone’s faith.
I wonder if the collective/societal aspect of faith is only really possible with the hierarchy.
It’s only possible to have a broad sense of the collective if everyone is literally “singing from the same hymn sheet”!
Once the hierarchy of a religion starts to waver, then it splinters into different “sects”, “factions”, “subgroups”. Which is what seems to have happened to Christianity.
Something that would have been unthinkable 300 years ago.
The plethora of esoteric bookshops on Glastonbury high street, are a testament to what happens when people are left to decide their own particular flavour of faith.
Thanks John.
“…if the collective/societal aspect of faith is only really possible with the hierarchy”
Yes, we see religious communities that suggest this is true.
And I can’t claim any expertise on the topic, but it is my belief – faith – that a society of believers does not necessarily require a hierarchy to control it. Though I also believe that such communities probably need to remain fairly small, and not create much power that could be concentrated.
When my religious practice was surfing, it was just me as an individual with the wave, providing no information about societal issues, and it was easy to fall into a mindset of competition for resources, especially in a crowded place like southern California.
But now that my religious practice is Tango, (and not in a crowded place) I see that all our little community requires to remain coherent is a basic agreement on a surprisingly small set of principles. Which principles basically come down to respecting and paying attention to the people around you.
This agreement doesn’t require any government, because we can all see how everybody benefits from those principles. And everyone is prepared to educate newcomers about how to get along in the group. Occasionally, persistent bad behavior requires banishment, but those instances are vanishingly rare. Usually people who don’t agree to the community principles self-select themselves away.
But what makes this work is the fact that the rewards are very high, and everyone can see the benefit of working together. I don’t see much of that clarity and reward when I look around at “normal life” here in the US.
“Sharing Land, Work and Craft”
A superb little book has just come out which speaks to these very things:
https://www.littletoller.co.uk/shop/books/little-toller/angels-in-the-cellar-by-peter-hahn/
Thanks for the note Rob
Chris wrote “proffering prose solutions typically involves a refusal of the revelation that’s available to us.”
This seems so true. While experiential learning can involve revelations that are profound and extremely pertinent.
Hi everybody,
it really looks like interesting book is coming, and I fully hope it will bring some new insights with similar level of novelty as Chris’s first book.
When reading this article, it struck me the sentence about this high-energy, consumerist economy does not survive long.
I somehow inside believe it also and for quite many years, but I need to admit I am less sure lately.
I see there difference between growing further, colonizing space or whatever, and keeping in some similar levels as today, going down and up, oppressing some new groups of people, using some new unfound resources. And I somehow do not see the much hopped for end of this.
Reading Andreas Malm How to blow also highlights the fact, that current situation, system is not a real problem for enough big groups. Because if it was, we would use the means used in previous struggles described in the book quite precisely.
And just admit it for ourselves, even the most concerned people in the north-west are living their comfortable lives in the mainstream society.
I am small farmer in Czech republic for 20 years, being mostly sustainable for food for our family, but it is so hard to keep the ideas in line against the “normal” culture. And it is bringing hard questions not just about me, but also our kids, what we should prepare them for, what we should create for them.
So I am for radical change and I hope for it, but I can not see it coming and you are so alone these days to try to live some alternative.
Sorry for the language, it is not my native, and form, written after the night in the car in Denmark where we transported a horse.
Well, thanks for being a farmer first of all. And I for one am sympathetic to the distance problem. I live in France now and It is difficult to keep track of what is going on in the US if one does not live there. I have been gone for over seven years, but my partner has children and grandchildren still trapped in Seattle and Florida, so we are able to keep up on how it is declining. Unfortunately, the US is still determining how fast western civilization collapses. Huge land mass, large population, excessive military buildup, petrodollar, world reserve currency, world’s leading stock market, etc. My hope is that the BRICS bloc continues to rise and move forward into a multi-polar moment. So I concentrate on the US as a precursor to the coming recession, depression and collapse.
Here is my argument for doing what you are already doing. The US is not just a complex society, but hypercomplex. This means that the economic, social and political systems in the US are not just dependent on growth, but an ever-accelerating growth. In other words, the US does not just depend on increasing growth, but an acceleration of the acceleration of the growth rate. In calculus terms, this is the third derivative (acceleration of acceleration) rather than the second derivative (acceleration). The first derivative is the linear growth rate. Since WW II, the US has integrated an accelerated growth rate into its economic planning and policies. It has never really moved into a peacetime economy. The term for this is military Keynesianism, which is a relatively new term for a process that has been going on for over eighty years.
Now, the US is accelerating the acceleration. Artificial intelligence is a symptom of this, as well as a reinforcing feedback. So it really is different this time. And of course, once one has accepted that collapse is inevitable, all attempts to reform a failing system fall under the economic term of “opportunity cost.” In other words, there is a cost in loss of opportunities when you try (and fail!) to reform the system. Since most of us are powerless and have few resources, it is not smart to spend time trying to “save the system.” Just let it fall and build community so we can have viable local and regional groups amidst the smoking ruins of failed empires.
You are already doing the best thing you can do. As for advice for your children, what I said in my first book comes to mind. “Teach them how to use a shovel. They will be burying a lot of bodies.” I did my best to prepare my partner’s children for this eventuality and they are well grounded in their respective jobs. Good luck to you.
By the way, Czechia will likely be able to contract in a much more measured manner than the US.
Concerning acceleration, I often come back to the image of a machine that is being run faster and faster, even as pieces of the machinery are flying off and hitting people. Because the appearance of acceleration often makes it hard to believe that there is a process of collapse going on.
This morning, I was editing an old essay from 2011. It starts with something I saw while visiting Moscow in 2004. In the Space Pavilion at VDNKh, the vast show-ground on the north side of the city, there were the remains of a Soviet-era display which charted the history of the space programme, onwards and upwards to the Buran shuttle blasting off into the 21st century. Presumably the display had last been updated sometime in the 1980s. Most of the other exhibits were gone from the pavilion and it was full of babushkas with stalls selling seedlings. While re-editing the essay, I discovered that the pavilion has since been revamped and reopened in 2018 as The Cosmonautics and Aviation Centre, a shiny new museum of the (ongoing) space age.
It would be a lot easier to make sense of these times if everything was pointing in the same direction, but that’s not how it looks, so I sympathise with Hynek’s questions, even if I share Chris’s basic analysis.
I agree . The Americans I know only think things will get better , bigger, without end , Americans think nothing of putting holidays on a credit card , assured that they will be able to pay it off ” in the future ” .
Europe I believe thinks differently , the USA has never had cities bombed flat or suffered the long aftermath of rebuilding after the conflict , friends were stunned by the ration book I own , 2 oz of bacon a week , madness ! austerity does not compute . The wall street slump is a century ago , beyond living memory , Americans will not take lightly to de
industrialisation or shortages , violence will be normal . It will take at least a generation for what’s left of the population to work out a new way of living .
Perhaps fittingly, perhaps not, the physics term for a nonlinear and increasing acceleration is “jerk”.
While some metrics are indeed still positive, there are definitely some that have begun their deceleration, and some that have gone negative. Not that this has raised any red flags in the public consciousness. A glance at the growth rate of the national debt should make one shudder.
Point taken however, that the U.S. is central to the mindset that things can keep expanding forever. We have the furthest to fall, and I am sad, embarrassed, and disappointed.
Doing what I can to make local preparations, but one never knows exactly how things will play out or where the pieces will land.
So it goes.
Yes, jerk is a fitting term for what is happening in Amerika today.
From Wikipedia: “The first derivative of displacement is velocity. The second derivative of displacement is acceleration. The third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth derivatives, though less commonly used, are coined, jerk, snap, crackle, pop, lock, and drop respectively.” Jounce is sometimes used for the fourth derivative, but since that starts with the letter J, like “jerk,” it has been largely dropped in favor of “snap.” And yes, the snap, crackle and pop nomenclature comes from the commercials for Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. The characters were invented by Kellogg’s Marketing Department in 1933, but the TV commercial we are familiar with comes from the 1950s. Here is the aforenamed commercial from a more innocent age. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6TIsxTdrCU
Hi Steve and Walter and of course Chris,
thank you for your replies.
First of all I am very happy to hear that you address some of my questions in your book 🙂
As of now, I am looking for two clear metrics of the system situation, you may laugh for me, but those are easy to track and I fully believe before anything happens with them, nothing will start to change.
First is oil production in US, and I think until it will go clearly down for a year, the system will prevail.
For me this metric is about physical stuff.
Second is Tesla stock price. Until this crash completely all will go wrong direction. This is for me metric of people trust in the system, because there is no substance in this stock. Someone can argue that the bitcoin price can be use similary, but I believe Tesla stock is more mainstream.
And yes, America may be now wired for growth or super-growth, whatever we name it, but that does not mean it can not exist without it. My wife Alena often mentions the catabolic capitalism idea, which states that the capitalism does not need growth but profit and that can be done even in decline.
And just about the bodies, I do not think that will be problem, because in the cities there will stay no one to care (and there is no place where to work with shovel) and on the countryside they will be far apart …
I fully hope in fast crash, so we do not take all the trees and wild animals with us, I do not see it there.
Good to see you here Hynek. Yes, I think it’s quite likely that high-energy consumerist society might survive in some places for quite a while at the increasingly obvious expense of other places/people – and indeed that this is a reality many of us are living now.
I discuss this in my new book via the metaphors of suns, supernovas & solar systems. More on that soon. I don’t see things progressing in orderly ways that have been prefigured much in prior politics.