Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on November 11, 2025 | 16 Comments
To coincide with the US publication today of my new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age, I think it’s time to start writing some blog posts about it. I have a bit of unfinished business in relation to other projected posts, but hopefully I can sweep them up somewhere along the way. It’s going to be a slow tick over, though, because I don’t currently have much capacity to turn out blog posts at speed.
I’ll begin by linking something I mention at the very start of the book with something I mention at the very end.
At the start, I describe a process of climate change in early medieval times caused by volcanic activity which ultimately helped prompt the emergence of the Vikings as an expansionary and predatory force across an impressive stretch of the globe. I liken Viking society, both for good and (mostly) bad, to a gangster or pirate culture, with a code of honour that applies to its protagonists but not to its victims. This pirate culture, I argue, is a foundation of modern political culture more generally, even if its violence has often been more sublimated in recent times. People tend to forget this, assuming that violence outside an explicit social contract is just the inherent way of things. It is, for sure, one way that people have commonly done politics, and not only in medieval and modern Europe. But it’s not the only way, and this is worth remembering in our present troubled times. We’ve touched on this issue in recent discussions on this blog.
At the end of the book, I give an acknowledgement to Marshall Sahlins and David Graeber, anthropologists of the Chicago ‘anarchist school’, who were more influential upon me in the writing of it than I’d anticipated. But when I wrote Finding Lights… I hadn’t yet read Graeber’s book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia – perhaps slightly unfortunately in view of my opening piratical theme.
Pirate Enlightenment was, according to Graeber, originally written as a chapter for a book he co-wrote with Sahlins called On Kings, which I did read before writing Finding Lights… I drew on its analysis of stranger kings to try to make some sense of our baffling contemporary politics – again, something touched on in recent blog posts and discussions.
I won’t try to summarise Pirate Enlightenment here, but the mise-en-scène involves European pirates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, who had originally been operating in the Atlantic and Caribbean, ultimately decamping to the northeast coast of Madagascar and settling. There, they were drawn into the complex political affairs of local Malagasy protagonists. In keeping with his wider project to take Euro-American self-importance down a peg or two, Graeber argues that the relatively egalitarian politics that emerged in this pirate-Malagasy encounter influenced the thinkers of the emerging Enlightenment back in Europe as they cast off the received wisdom of old hierarchies and developed modern conceptions of liberty.
I’m in no position to judge the truth of this claim. I suspect Graeber may have over-egged his argument a little here. But the more general point about how new culture and politics often emerges conjointly out of the encounter between indigenes and incoming strangers, especially relatively high-status ones with colonial designs, is interesting. It’s a point I made historically in my book A Small Farm Future using examples particularly from the colonial Caribbean of the slavery era – an especially brutal form of domination out of which nevertheless new local cultural synthesis emerged. In Finding Lights… I make the point prospectively, arguing that new forms of local agrarian politics and practice are likely to emerge in the future as people seek what I call ‘open country’ – places where the landscape, the waterscape and the peoplescape are suited as best they can be to a peaceful and prosperous life.
Contemporary discussion of such collapse scenarios seems to me often a bit too hidebound by existing political theories, or by ‘Viking’, ‘men with guns’, or Hobbesian thinking. In these collapse scenarios in open country, I write in Finding Lights… “neat pre-existing theories about the evils of landlordism, the benefits of land value tax, the nature of class struggle or the war of all against all are less to the point than how you configure new relationships on the ground. Right now, you’re unique participants in a complex drama of real human beings that you’re helping to write, not rote performers of old lines” (p.110).
I’m not suggesting the world will be turned upside down and the meek will inherit the earth. I pay plenty of attention in the book to the way that naked power might assert itself. But I do think Graeber-esque attention to the complexities of political power and the way it can shift as people navigate its contours in new circumstances is appropriate.
In that sense, arguably I paint too negative a picture of the Vikings in the book’s preface, because that complexity no doubt applied to them too. But what I’m trying to do in that preface is guard against over-breezy historical mythmaking of the Mussolini-made-the-trains-run-on-time variety: “Say what you like about the Vikings, they certainly boosted trade along the Dnieper”. Yeah, and in doing that, alongside all the slavery and death, they also tipped the scales that bit further against the possibility of ecologically wise localisms.
And so I still hold to the wider point I was making via the Viking example when I wrote “The trading-raiding-slaving nexus of Viking-era globalization is our world, directly paralleling the globalization of modern centuries” (p.xiii). In other words there’s a need, in contemporary parlance, to ‘de-colonise’ our assumptions about the present world of globalism and its forms of violence, hidden or otherwise. Although that process has its complexities and difficulties too, which perhaps I’ll touch on in another post.
Graeber points out that most European pirate crews in their seventeenth-century heyday were created out of mutiny against the brutal regimes aboard naval and merchant vessels. This meant certain death for them if captured, regardless of any piratical misadventures. The pirate flag often depicted an hourglass to symbolise this borrowed time and nothing-to-lose mentality. Pirates could often capture a lot of lucre, but – cut off as they were from the wider social connections that turned money into a flow of benefit – it was usually an empty form of plenty. Setting themselves up as stranger kings in Madagascar was one creative response.
Perhaps we who are now so connected in a global world of lucre are living in the mirror of such brutal and empty pirate worlds, the sand running unnoticed through the hourglass. Which I guess is why I feel compelled to keep writing books like Finding Lights… and to keep talking about this, because it’s a perspective that gets drowned out by too much celebration of a modernism and Enlightenment sanitised of its piratical ways.
Anyway, a couple more points before I close. Talking of sand and hourglasses, I went to a memorial on Saturday for Des Harris, a steadfast townsman of Frome for many years who helped us greatly nearly twenty years ago when we were establishing our site and market garden. He also taught people gardening skills on the allotments we established on our site, as shown in this picture – Des resplendent in his Eco-Worrier T-shirt. I coined the phrase ‘Dig With Des’ for these sessions, which somehow stuck. Later he took a course with Charles Dowding just down the road and became a convert to Charles’s methods, so it became Don’t Dig with Des.
The memorial was a lovely, and crowded, event. Des touched a lot of lives with his commitment to serving the wider good. I fear that when I was in the throes of trying to establish a commercially viable market garden I sometimes exhibited a certain spikiness in his presence around things that seem unimportant now. Something of a character flaw, perhaps – although the tensions involved in being a community-minded local businessperson raise wider questions that I touch on in my book and that perhaps I’ll return to here in the future.
In the meantime, I’ll venture the opinion that the kind of community connections that Des sought to build through his life are more fruitful than anything the Vikings built along the Dnieper. In the words of Linda Ellis’s sweet little poem The Dash, which was read out at the memorial, “If we could just slow down enough to consider what’s true and real…” And not only in our individual lives. Ain’t that true of our modern, pirate world writ large.
Anyway, so long Des, and all good wishes for your onward journey. You were a great teacher, not just of gardening. And your dash was exemplary.
Finally, the first full-length of review of Finding Lights… that I’ve seen is in, from the pen of the ever thought-provoking Hadden Turner. Happily for me, it’s a positive one, which is always nice to see.
The only point Hadden makes that I’m inclined to unfold a little is this: “Chris is optimistic, and I wish I shared his optimism”.
I don’t mind that description, given that I’m more often characterized as an unrelenting doomer – although I prefer to go with ‘hope’ than ‘optimism’. In truth, I’m not massively optimistic that the new dark age will turn out too well for many people, but I think once one has appraised the reality of the surrounding darkness it’s always worth looking for the light as best one can and seeking least worst responses to our predicaments. Whether we find it or not is another matter. Perhaps the book should have been called Looking for Lights in a Dark Age.
Well, I’m glad it wasn’t. My preferred title was the more ambiguous Lights for a Dark Age, which also scans better. But we don’t always get what we want in life, a truth that I believe will soon be biting harder on a lot more people in the presently wealthy world. All eyes on the hourglass.
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The hour glass immediately made me think of XR’s symbolism, and the rest of the piratical images, skulls and bones.
I’ve recently been listening William Dalrymple’s talks on his book, The Anarchy, a history of the East India Company, whose founding voyage was a great success – and a simple act of piracy! It is so interesting to see these histories criss crossing from creative liberators to corporate authoritarians but all ultimately detached from the day to day reality of the land folk, and land truth. The small farm, local agrarian future is deeply embedded in these truths and realities.
I’ve been reading Anastasia’s substackhttps://substack.com/@anastassiamakarieva
She is a coauthor of the Biotic Pump theory, which proves the action of primary forests as climate regulators and water sources for all continental life. Again, to preserve these forests will entail the structures of local agrarian community provisioning – to regenerate the currently degraded soils from industrial agriculture, agro and re forest, for fuel and timber, and live by skimming the flows of energy. The discussion of these facts only becomes more important, so thank you. Alice and I will be listening to the audio book, next up when we finish ‘Parable of the Talents’.
This is all very fascinating, of course.
I have just realized that when Plato spoke of “the good, the true, the beautiful” he had turned adjectives into nouns, and thus set much of the stage for the entire course of Western philosophy, its worldview. It took me too long to finally realize that syntax and grammar played such a fundamental role in shaping “our culture”. It would have been much better for the world if Plato and Aristotle were treated as grumpy old men rather than sages. If they had dealt in a world of adjectives more, and verbs, rather than nouns.
Kosmology was, I have discovered, basically booted out of the ancient and the modern academy (and Lyceum), replaced with “ontology”. So moderns still call relational kosmology by the misnomer of “relational ontology”.
It took me too long to realize that belonging is not so much a matter of ontology as kosmology, and that modernity had simply inherited the errors of grumpy old men.
But there we have it, my philosophy in a nut shell. We went wrong taking “the world” (kosmos) as a thing and a collection of things. We literally forgot how to belong together. Sigh.
‘We went wrong taking “the world” (kosmos) as a thing and a collection of things.’
Perhaps our error is in “taking” the world instead of “making” the world. Of course I am speaking as a grumpy old man myself.
In what sense do you imagine that we “make” the world, Walter?
When I say “world,” I mean both the natural world and culture/language/etc. — which is rare in non-reductive forms of perception, experience and thought. Modern science tends to be very reductive on such matters, because it lacks a relational kosmology. (As I see it.)
There are makers and there are takers. The makers put food on the plate; a plate they also made. The takers work the System to get money to buy food and plates. The takers usually get a better deal than the makers because the System is set up that way. But there are gradations among the takers too; for instance how much personal risk is involved. See my comment below. But if you are a maker you are “hors catégorie,” or beyond categories.
Yes ĵames, it is more properly descriptive to write ‘land ways’ as opposed to ‘land truths’, I am all about the embodiment if process, ecological, geological and biological and physical. I like your insight.
And another review:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-11-11/finding-lights-in-a-dark-age-sharing-land-work-and-craft-review/
Chris – Since you asked me to comment on your new book, here is a preliminary assessment on the viking/pirate idea. Yes, I have often compared the corporate pirates of our day with the viking predilection to just go somewhere and take the gold and the slaves and even take the land and settle in for a good long while. But T. Boone Pickens, Jeff Bezos and all the rest of the corporate raiders are but pale shadows of the vikings. The current crop of raiders are weaklings who wouldn’t survive crossing the North Sea in an open boat. The corporate overlords nowadays just use their connections and inherited wealth to steal what they want – in a system already set up for them. As a side note, I was traveling on a ferry from Bergen to Newcastle once and we ran into a gale. The ship would ride a wave up and then smash down into the trough. The whole huge ferry would shudder at the impact. I loved it! I was up on the top deck on the bow, drinking beer, getting wet and hanging onto the rail. While I was up there a young Norwegian man came out on deck with his 2-3 year old daughter to show her the power of the sea. They didn’t stay long but his daughter was excited and laughing. When I came back into the cabin area again, the whole ship smelled like vomit. By the time we got to Newcastle, the storm had passed. The idea here is to provide a flavor of the harsh conditions of the real physical environment, just like you did in mentioning the volcanic eruptions of 536-540.
The “trading, raiding and slavery nexus” is a brilliant way to put it. It also fits into the tripartite division that was important back then – and still is today. (The viking sacred number 9 is simply 3 compounded upon itself. Taking 3 to the next structural level, as it were.) Georges Dumézil was a linguist and scholar who popularized the tripartite division of Indo-European mythology and languages, even though he was careful not to extend his analysis into a general categorization of culture. C. Scott Littleton did an essay on this in 1974 titled “Je ne suis pas … structuraliste”: Some Fundamental Differences between Dumézil and Lévi-Strauss.” I myself see the tripartite division as foundational even in our modern world. Indeed, doing things in threes keeps me out of trouble.
Right now I am traveling in the west of Norway. I needed a break from France, I haven’t been here since 1987, and I wanted to see the old country one more time before I shuffle off this mortal coil. It is quite fulsome just to breathe the air and drink the water. I like the laid-back aloof atmosphere. It is addictive.
Which brings me to my final point. There is a certain tendency among the Scandic types to just go along and not escalate in the “proper manner” like the people from other cultures. Then they just explode. This is rare of course, which is why it is codified in the berserker mythology. (The magic mushrooms trope is just crap from the 19th century, by the way.) By the time the sagas had progressed into high drama, like Grettir’s Saga, they had become almost comical. Which brings me back to the structural aspect of your pirate meme. People like Pickens and Bezos can become pirates because the System offers them the chance. Since they are opportunists they just use a system already set up for them. They don’t have to risk much, certainly not crossing seas in an open boat or dragging a trading vessel through long stretches of mosquito-filled forest to get to the next navigable waterway.
I have just started the book, but it is good so far.
I’m not suggesting the world will be turned upside down and the meek will inherit the earth.
Given what happened to the last guy who seriously suggested this, perhaps it’s for the best.
More seriously, though: having the upper hand in the trading-raiding-slaving world we live in, holding power over others and using it to our advantage and their detriment, does a sort of damage to human beings, I think. The likes of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Trump and Musk seem ultimately unhappy, even spiritually bereft in some way. And they’ll die like the rest of us, so what’s the point in storing up all those riches?
I like the idea of governance (and therefore politics) that doesn’t rely on violence or the threat of violence.
From Wikipedia:
“The trophic level of an organism is the position it occupies in a food web. Within a food web, a food chain is a succession of organisms that eat other organisms and may, in turn, be eaten themselves. The trophic level of an organism is the number of steps it is from the start of the chain. A food web starts at trophic level 1 with primary producers such as plants, can move to herbivores at level 2, carnivores at level 3 or higher, and typically finish with apex predators at level 4 or 5. The path along the chain can form either a one-way flow or a part of a wider food “web”. Ecological communities with higher biodiversity form more complex trophic paths”.
Organisms killing and eating other organisms is certainly violent. If interactions between trophic levels always includes violence, it is hard to imagine a living world without it.
There is, of course, lots of inter- and intra-species cooperation, too, but as long as there are trophic levels and trophic cascades, there will always be violent competition. We shouldn’t be surprised that humans, as apex predators, engage in it.
That said, no organism, including me, likes to have violence applied to it and always tries to avoid being subject to violence. Violence is natural, but even though that doesn’t automatically glorify it, we shouldn’t be surprised that it happens.
I think the conflation of trophic biological and animal processes and behaviours that work within ecological boundaries and frameworks to baseless acts of human aggression (genocidal and ecocidal) is a slippery slope my friend. These acts are rooted in layers of propaganda and necessarily take place in communities displaced from ecological context which constrains such behaviours. Simply put, it is the disconnection from ecological trophic structures which allows for this type of human violence that Kathryn is willing us to avoid.
I have noticed that the roughly twenty missiles fired upon mostly Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean over recent months resulted in dead bodies which were not eaten by those who fired the missiles. And the vast aircraft carriers and other military apparatus set up to invade Venezuela is not there for a feast of flesh.
I just learned that China has intervened! Wow!
Trump and his friends are out of their bloody gourds.
PS –
I guess I read too much into a headline there in saying that China was intervening. I assumed that meant that China was sending its own aircraft carriers to the region.
You might want to consider John Mearsheimer’s paradigm of regional hegemony. The US had a brief fling with global hegemony in the “Unipolar Moment” from 1991 (fall of the Soviet Union) to either 2001 (9/11) or 2022 (Biden’s reneging on foreign assets stored in the US), but it is clear we now live in a multipolar world. The Trump Administration sees this and has pivoted away from Asia and Europe to focus on the western hemisphere. I suspect China is okay with this and will let the US get away with seizing Venezuelan oil for multinational corporations. The Iraq model, as it were, but without Bremer’s mistakes.
Another missive from the land of the vikings. “Set and setting,” as Timmy Leary used to say. Last night I did a political two-fer. I finished watching The Quiet American (1958 version with Michael Redgrave), based on the 1955 novel by Graham Greene. It was a blistering takedown of US involvement in Vietnam in 1952 even before the French were booted out. Then I finished watching a Covered Call podcast with Doomberg (the green chicken representing a collective of analysts – warning: lots of libertarianism here!). One of Doomberg’s throwaway lines was how China is holding back US military production by restricting the rare earths necessary for missiles. My Norwegian/American brain, in the setting of the cultural capital of Norway (Bergen), immediately experienced an “Ah-ha!” moment. Control of an essential commodity nullifies military Keynesianism. Brilliant!
Back in 1969 I got onto the paradigm that US military arms production was keeping the economy pumped up. Now the term for this is military Keynesianism. Of course accelerating consumerism was another driver in the USA of the 1960s, but since the deficit was booming because of the War and Nixon had to get off the gold standard in 1971 because of the deficit, I regard the War and military spending as the main driver. Follow the money. So if we can control an essential commodity, we can stop the war machine. (Sidebar: Von der Leyen, Merz, Macron, Tusk and the rest of the EU warmongers don’t really believe Russia is going to invade. It is just military Keynesianism to pump up economies.)
But then I thought, “Wait a minute! I have been saying this and implementing positive alternatives for over fifty-five years!” And of course I am talking about restricting human capital to the System. Make no mistake, the System needs consumers. If AI takes away your job, the System still needs you to consume. Therefore, universal basic income (UBI) is a necessary corollary to AI adoption. So use the most powerful commodity you have – your human capital. STOP participating in the evil, corrupt System – at least as much as you can. Think of it as semi-retirement. If you are living in your mother’s basement and don’t have children, you are halfway there.
@ Walter
“When you open John Mearsheimer’s website, you are greeted with a painting of him, with his head superimposed on the body of the renaissance diplomat-philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. The painting was a gift from students at the University of Pennsylvania. There, in 2016, Mearsheimer gave a lecture to the Philomathean Society. The painting, which now hangs on the wall of the Society, is called “Merchiavelli”.
It is a fitting moniker. Machiavelli is often considered as the first realist theorist because he denied the relevance of morality in politics. When his guidebook for rulers, The Prince, was circulated in 1532, five years after Machiavelli’s death, his name was condemned across Europe. One English cardinal, Reginald Pole, pronounced the Florentine “an enemy of the human race”. The 16th-century scholar John Case said that Machiavelli was a defender of tyranny and “one of the major threats to the continued peace, stability, and prosperity of the Age of Astrea”. In the 20th century, Bertrand Russell called The Prince, “a handbook for gangsters”.”
Excerpted from: The tragedy of John Mearsheimer
How the American realist became the world’s most hated thinker.
By Gavin Jacobson