Welcome back to The Great Humbling with Dougald Hine and Ed Gillespie. It’s been a while. And there’s… a lot happening in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dougald is sceptical and brings in John Michael Greer’s recent post, The End of the Bureaucratic Era, which offers the provocation that main effect of AI may be to wipe out the layers of B******t Jobs famously charted by David Graeber.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Notices

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

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

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

Thank You

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

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After a long summer of counselling to recover from the sight of Sean Connery’s red mankini, Ed and Dougald are reunited to talk about green populism, why the world isn’t a giant Amazon store, hospicing dance music and the political language of love. (Or was that the love language of politics?)

Shownotes

What have we been up to?

Ed’s been thinking about “bystander leadership”: how interventions by bystanders successfully change the course of events.

Back in May, he went Singing With Nightingales with the folk singer Sam Lee and friends.

A visit to Lambay Island – where he runs an annual writing retreat – prompted him to revisit the story of the RMS Tayleur, otherwise known as “the first Titanic”. One of the first iron-clad clipper ships, her compass had not been properly adjusted to take account of the effect of the iron hull.

Dougald is deep in writing and currently surrounded by a pile of books about “culture”, which Raymond Williams identifies as “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society).

Earlier in the summer, he travelled to Italy for a gathering of the friends of Ivan Illich.

What have we been reading?

Ed introduces Brian Eno and Bette A’s What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory.

Dougald has also been revisiting Brian’s 1996 definition of culture as “everything we don’t have to do” and connects this to Ellen Dissanayake’s books, What Is Art For? and Homo Aestheticus which develop a fascinating evolutionary account of the centrality and origins of art within human behaviour.

Ed has been reading Robert Macfarlane’s new book, Is a River Alive? and he passes on a quote which Macfarlane uses from Alexis Wright’s essay, ‘The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times’.

Ed also talks about Jay Griffiths’s How Animals Heal Us.

Dougald was introduced to Jean Giono’s Joy of Man’s Desiring by Jack Barron who said it was like Ivan Illich and John Berger got together and wrote a novel – a description to which it lives up.

Make Populism Green Again

A few weeks back, Dougald sent Ed a message asking, “Did we break the Green Party?”

We trace the line that runs back from the election of Zack Polanski as the party’s new leader to an episode we made in January 2024, ‘Make Populism Good Again?’ After the UK general election that July, Ed hosted a gathering of Green thinkers to discuss where the party went next where they took up this thread about green populism, leading to a series of think pieces in late 2024, and then a successful leadership challenge from a candidate making this argument.

It’s early days, but Zack’s leadership seems to be off to a good start. Ed mentions his Question Time appearance and Dougald recalls the George Monbiot episode, where we discussed the importance to the environmental movement of having a voice that was capable of handling the brutal conduct of public discourse in the UK media.

We discuss Mary Harrington’s The Viral Mandate of Heaven, in which she identifies Zack and Zohran Mamdani as two leftwing examples of the kind of “box office” political legitimacy which works in a “digital-first” culture.

If Reform can flip the state of politics on the right and become the main contender, doesn’t that make it easier to imagine the same thing happening on the other side? One poll last week had the Greens on 15%, only two points behind Labour. What if the next UK general election ends up as a battle between Reform and the Greens?

Where are we at in the timeline?

How do you find your bearings in an environment where you’re constantly stimulated to max out your outrage or emotional investment in “the Current Thing”?

Dougald talks about an attitude – exemplified by Gordon White of Rune Soup – that emphasises a sober attention to “where we’re at in the timeline”.

We talk about the rerouting of resources to rearmament in Europe, but also the point made by Aurelien that “European decision-makers are now discovering that the world is not a gigantic Amazon store from which you can order anything you like.”

What time is LOVE?

Jay Springett sent us a text from xin called “hospicing dance music” and we talk about seeing ideas from Hospicing Modernity and At Work in the Ruins getting put to use in different contexts.

Dougald mentions another example of this, the recent conversation between Iona Lawrence of The Decelerator and Elizabeth Oldfield, ‘Finding Steadiness in a Time of Endings’.

Ed talks about Love, Anger and Betrayal, the book that Jonathan Porritt has written, based on a year of working with young activists who were part of Just Stop Oil.

The theme of love takes us to the new journal Romanticon – co-founded by Anthony Galluzzo, whose book Against the Vortex was the starting point for our last episode. Dougald wrote the journal’s inaugural essay, ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’.

Another Romanticon contributor, Justin Smith-Ruiu of The Hinternet wrote an essay called ‘How to Change the World for Real’ that invokes the language of love as politics in Martin Luther King, Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin.

We talk about David Bentley Hart’s ‘The Genealogy of Genealogies’, which culminates in a wonderful passage about gifts as “the currency of love” – and this connects to Adam Wilson’s story of the young father visiting the Gratitude Feast at Sand River Community Farm for the first time who expresses his wonder, “It’s like you all are creating an irony-free zone.”

And Ed draws the episode to a close with Kae Tempest’s poem, ‘The Point’.

Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing and supporting our work in multiple ways. Check out more episodes of The Great Humbling and Homeward Bound at homewardbound.org. Learn more about Ed’s work on his website, and read more from Dougald at his Substack, Writing Home, where you can support the making of this podcast by becoming a paid subscriber.

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

Before we get to that, Dougald references his recent Resilience.org event with Vanessa Andreotti, who commented that before January, she regularly got questions from audiences along the lines of “What’s the evidence that modernity is dying?” Since January, no one has asked her this, which is one facet of the ways the world has changed in these months.

Ed brings up Sam Conniff and Katherine Templar Lewis’s Uncertainty Experts and an increased willingness of people he deals with in institutional settings to admit to their uncertainty.

This leads us onto the subject of belief and its relationship to certainty/knowing and uncertainty/mystery – and Ed points out that Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto (which he has been reading so the rest of us don’t have to) includes 113 statements that begin with “We believe”.

Dougald mentions the essay on John Berger that he wrote for the first Dark Mountain book, and how Berger’s later writing – inspired by the old peasants he lived alongside in the Haute Savoie – models the possibility for “a cohabitation with mystery, not an attempt to enclose or eliminate it”.

Mankinis and Manifestos

At this point, we get on to the matter of Sean Connery’s mankini and Anthony Galluzzo’s book. What Anthony is doing in drawing attention to the “critical Aquarian” current within 1970s thought has parallels with the project of our friends Elias Crim and Pete Davis with The Lost Prophets Podcast.

Ed points out the shades of Ursula K. Le Guin in the storyline of Zardoz, bringing us back to ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’. (Though Zed, the Connery character, is more a case of one who breaks into Omelas and fights to bring it down.)

Dougald wonders about the parallels between John Boorman’s Zed and John Berger’s G. In Berger’s novel, which won the Booker prize in 1972, there’s also a central character whose name is (or sounds like) a single letter and who represents some kind of… well, phallocentric revolution. There’s also an aesthetic similarity, in that both Boorman’s film and Berger’s book pursue a cubist fragmentation of the singular perspective and linear timeline.

Dougald also mentions the 1976 film which Berger wrote with Alain Tanner, Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000, which speaks to the tail end of the moment of critical Aquarianism.

In a key passage in Against the Vortex, Galluzzo sums up the question which united those he considers to be critical Aquarian thinkers, and its continuing relevance:

How to exit the dead end of industrial modernism and its legitimating fictions—utilitarianism, Prometheanism, productivism and its ecocidal dreams of endless growth, secular immortality, and total control—in the face of interrelated material, ecological, and spiritual crises without sliding into the reactionary antimodernism that, for example, led certain disillusioned Western intellectuals to embrace the Iranian revolution at the end of the Seventies? While the urgency of the crises has increased a hundredfold since the 1970s, the question remains unanswered.

Not a bad description of the questions we’ve been asking on The Great Humbling.

Dougald picks up another element in Against the Vortex, where Galluzzo contrasts the critical Aquarian current of environmentalism represented by Illich with the technocratic, expert-centred environmentalism represented by Stewart Brand – and suggests that it would be worth bringing this into dialogue with the slightly different “genealogy of green politics” offered by Stephen Quilley in ‘Ecology “After Virtue” and After Modernity’. The main difference between these two maps is that Quilley locates neo-Malthusian environmentalism as opposed to a tech-focused mainstream environmentalism, whereas Galluzzo (following Giorgos Kallis’s Limits) identifies Malthusian thought as aligned with the logic of growth.

This brings us back to Marc Andreessen and the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which Ed describes as “not so much Effective Altruism as Effective Accelerationism”, partly inspired by Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism.

Dougald asks where Andreessen is now on the map of tech politics in the era of Trump 2 – has he gone full Gay Space Fascism? (For those unfamiliar with the term, he recommends Jonathan Cioran’s essay for Mere Orthodoxy.)

Ed quotes Elizabeth Spiers on Andreessen’s manifesto: “[It] has the pathos of the Unabomber … but lacks the ideological coherency.”

Ed introduces Hard Imagination, a “dark white paper” produced by Indy Johar, David Johnston and Clare Farrell as a counter to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto.

The “Lad Hybrid” Decelerates

At this point, the Great Humbling takes an unexpected turn into Top Gear territory with the sad tale of the 2016 Volkswagen Passat GTE for which you have to take out a mortgage in order to replace the gearbox.

Maybe because of reading John Michael Greer’s ‘Lords of the Fall’, in which the one-time Archdruid Report author returns to the themes of the collapse of complex societies (nod to Joseph Tainter), the counterproductive complexity of the hybrid gearbox comes to feel like a metaphor for what’s wrong with the way we’re approaching the climate crisis.

David Fleming’s Lean Logic gets a mention, in particular the entry on Needs and Wants, which points out that our wants are mostly quite humble and its the needs imposed by the complexity of modern societies that are the disaster.

Ed suggests the car should make a final journey to the church-in-the-ruins at Covehithe and it all gets a bit KLF for a moment.

Listeners of The Great Humbling who know more about cars than Dougald are invited to offer advice.

Quiet Collapsitarians

We finish up by discussing Rob Harrison-Plastow’s article, ‘Why Well-Off Brits Who Think Collapse Is Coming Still Stay Silent’, which suggests that a critical mass of middle class professionals has come to the conclusion that “the systems we rely on for survival are far more fragile than they appear, are deeply flawed and contain within them dynamics that keep us locked in to a dangerous trajectory”, but many of them are keeping quiet about this.

Implicit in Harrison-Plastow’s article is the idea from Alexei Yurchak’s book about the last years of the Soviet Union, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, that revolutionary change is a two-stage process: in the first stage, everyone stops believing in the existing system; in the second, everyone realises that everyone else has stopped believing in it.

Dougald asks what is meant to happen, at the point when everyone realises that everyone else (or at least, lots of others) have come to the same conclusion? There’s a risk of a kind of wishful thinking here, that if only we all realise and admit the depth of the trouble we are in, we know how to make things better. Bearing in mind the Greer/Tainter piece about the relationship between societal complexity and collapse and the example of the hybrid motor, he suggests that we need to look at the uncomfortable questions Stephen Quilley is asking about the tendency to assume the entitlements of high-tech, liberal, individualist late modernity are somehow compatible with taking seriously the implications of our ecological crisis.

This brings us back to Vanessa’s comments in the Resilience event and her observation that there is an “inflated sense of agency” that haunts the imagination of the Global North that looks weird from a Brazilian perspective. In that conversation, Vanessa and Dougald tried out the contrast between this “pedestal” model of agency and a “mycelial” mode of agency.

A final thought comes from Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole, paraphrased by Dougald: when hate hates love, it is true to itself; when love hates hate, it betrays itself. Not thinking that hating hate can fix anything, and working out what the loving moves look like within a model of agency that isn’t self-deceiving – maybe these are our questions in this humbling spring of 2025?

Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing and supporting our work in multiple ways. Check out more episodes of The Great Humbling and Homeward Bound at homewardbound.org. Learn more about Ed’s work on his website, and read more from Dougald at his Substack, Writing Home, where you can support the making of this podcast by becoming a paid subscriber.

Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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

To say it came as a surprise when Vanessa mentioned that she had co-written a book with an AI bot called Aiden Cinnamon Tea… well, that would be an understatement. Here, she shares more about why GTDF has chosen to work with AI and we puzzle this through with the help of stories.

If you’re coming to this without any context, then I recommend checking out the first couple of items in the shownotes before heading further into the episode, which starts with me quoting Vanessa’s alter ego, Dorothy Ladybug Boss:

The first thing you need to know about this book … is that it asks you to suspend both belief and disbelief.

Shownotes

* The Burnout from Humans website – read the book Vanessa wrote together with Aiden Cinnamon Tea and interact with Aiden for yourself.

* The Wild Chatbot – read or listen to the essay in which I tell the story of how Burnout From Humans came about and my attempt to make sense of what Vanessa, Aiden and the GTDF collective are up to here.

* Landing with the Land Differently – from the GTDF, an alternative to the familiar game of land acknowledgements.

* Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism – Vanessa’s previous book.

* Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity & Collapse with Accountability & Compassion – Vanessa’s forthcoming book, available for preorder now.

If you want to support my work, including the making of Homeward Bound and the Great Humbling, then consider becoming a paid subscriber to Writing Home – where you’ll also have access to the In-Between Videos and live events like the one-off book club on Martin Buber’s I and Thou which we just ran.

As Ed says at the end of our final episode of 2024, “Have yourself a mythic little Christmas!” We close the year with a wandering conversation about folklore, myth, modernity as being “away with the fairies” and hopefully bringing back something of worth from the journey.

Show Notes

* Ed’s new book of poetry, The Father’s Road, is available now through Etsy.

* Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees.

* Alan Garner’s Collected Folk Tales.

* Martin Shaw’s Westcountry School of Myth.

* On three ways of handling the “spiritual gelignite” of myth – retelling, translation and reabsorption/transmutation – Alan Garner’s essay, ‘The Death of Myth’, originally published in the New Statesman, 1970.

* The Owl Service – Garner’s transmutation of the myth of Blodeuwedd.

* For more on the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, see Paul Radin’s The Trickster.

* Three recent pieces from Mary Harrington – ‘“Woke” Is Not The New Reformation’, ‘Scrolling Toward The Divine’, ‘Yes, the “Woke Right” is real’.

* The Levi-Strauss line about “science, which started out by separating itself from myth, will eventually encounter it once again” is discussed in Debi Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the World.

* James Bridle, New Dark Age.

* We’ll talk about D.W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology later in the series, when Ed’s had the chance to read it.

* Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole.

* Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men.

* Alan Dundes, Interpreting Folklore.

My guest in this episode is Jay Cousins, an inventor, recovering entrepreneur and carrier of questions, an old friend from my Sheffield days, who has been based for the past ten years or so in Dahab, Egypt. This conversation came about because Jay wrote to me with a set of thoughts that build on the unfinished list of “Four Tasks for a Time of Endings” from the closing pages of At Work in the Ruins.

The original set of tasks goes like this:

* Salvage the good things we have a chance of taking with us.

* Mourn the good things we have to leave behind – and do this, not least, by telling their stories, because these stories may turn out to be seeds in futures we can’t imagine yet.

* Notice the things that were never as good as we told each other they were about the ways we’ve been living around here lately, and the chance we’re given to leave these behind.

* Look for the dropped threads from earlier in the story and the chance to weave these back in – the things that have been marked as old-fashioned, inefficient, obsolete, but that might turn out to make all the difference on the journey ahead.

In the course of this episode, Jay brings up five questions that follow on from these tasks:

* What should we seek to use before we lose it?

* What can we produce now, knowing what is coming?

* What can we evolve from things we’ll lose?

* What are the seeds of the things we mourn – and how do we harvest these?

* What do we need to learn and teach future generations?

You can listen to Jay’s regular mini-podcasts at Make Kindness Easier! The Stone Paper product is being developed by the folks at Solar Punk Now. He’s @jaycousins on Twitter and here’s his LinkedIn.

Show Notes

* We mention Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and how she couples the work of hospicing to the work of “assisting with the birth of new, as-yet-unknown, and potentially – but not necessarily – wiser”.

* Richard Smith’s review of At Work in the Ruins in the British Medical Journal applies the original “four tasks” to the fields of medicine and public health.

* Jay introduces the work of Dave Hakkens and One Army – and especially the Precious Plastic project.

* Talking about what we should “use before we lose” takes me to a conversation with the Solarpunk theorist Jay Springett where he suggested using today’s earth-moving machines to do landscaping for permaculture that will continue to be useful long after the fossil fuel era is over.

* Low-Tech Magazine.

* Jay’s Stone Paper.

* Martín Prechtel, The Unlikely Peace at Cuchamquic on the centring of seeds within Mayan culture.

* The Decelerator supports civil society organisations to create good endings (discussed in the #DECELERATE episode of The Great Humbling).

* End of the World Garden in Cornwall, created by the artist Paul Chaney.

* I wrote about Cryptic Northern Refugia in this essay for Alan Garner.

* Thomas Keyes’s recipe for October Black Isle Pheasant Stew appeared in Dark Mountain: Issue 2.

* Carcinisation is an example of convergent evolution, by which “crabs” evolve from different directions.

* Caroline Ross’s Found and Ground as an example of recovering and relearning skills. (I spoke to Caroline in Homeward Bound S1E1.)

* Here’s an old post of Jay’s about his first company, Orikaso, and the fold-flat dinnerware products he invented.

* Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”.

* Jay’s TEDx talk, where he started sharing his thinking about biomemetic business models.

* J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It).

In this episode, we chew on a question that’s been on Dougald’s mind since a recent event in London, where Brian Eno wondered what is the difference between an analysis which says we cannot save or make sustainable the trajectories of industrial modernity and technological progress, and an accelerationist position which says we need to bring about collapse in order to release the possibilities to be found in the ruins? What would a “decelerationist” politics look like?

Shownotes

* Derek Gow, Birds, Beasts and Bedlam

* Andy Hamilton, New Wild Order

* James Kaelan, 999 Years of Peace is “a luddite publication, not for sale”, but you could try sending Cartoon Distortion a message on Instagram to find out more.

* Elizabeth Oldfield, author of Fully Alive was talking at The Kairos Club, London this week. Kairos currently has paperback copies of At Work in the Ruins on sale for £10 and some great events coming up with friends of this podcast:

* Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (SAFER) with Rupert Read, Tuesday 26 November

* A New Cosmology: Feeling Our Way into the Imaginal with Ellie Robins, Thursday 28 November

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

* Dougald quotes from R. G. Miga’s comment on our election day episode

* Watching “accelerationism” move over the last decade and a bit:

* #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek (2013)

* Paul Mason, Clear Bright Future (2019)

* Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019)

* Nick Land – “the Godfather of accelerationism”, from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (alongside Mark Fisher of Capitalist Realism) in the 1990s to Neo-reaction and the Dark Enlightenment

* ‘Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world’, Vox magazine, 2019.

* Iona Lawrence & The Decelerator – “We support organisations and individuals to anticipate and design closures, mergers, CEO transitions, programming ends, and all sorts of endings as just part of the everyday life of organisations and inevitable cycles of change in civil society.”

* Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (in case we haven’t mentioned it before!)

* Only Planet – Ed’s around-the-world slow travel book

* Jay Cousins writes on Substack at Make Kindness Easier! and will feature on an upcoming episode of Homeward Bound

* Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1942), Ch.3, makes the argument for a historical example of “decelerationism”:

Why should the ultimate victory of a trend be taken as a proof of the ineffectiveness of the efforts to slow down its progress? And why should the purpose of these measures not be seen precisely in that which they achieved, i.e., in the slowing down of the rate of change? That which is ineffectual in stopping a line of development altogether is not, on that account, altogether ineffectual. The rate of change is often of no less importance than the direction of the change itself ; but while the latter frequently does not depend upon our volition, it is the rate at which we allow change to take place which well may depend upon us. […] England withstood without grave damage the calamity of the enclosures only because the Tudors and the early Stuarts used the power of the Crown to slow down the process of economic improvement until it became socially bearable — employing the power of the central government to relieve the victims of the transformation, and attempting to canalize the process of change so as to make its course less devastating.

* Andrew at Bog-down and Aster quotes Gustav Landauer, as he reflects on the US election in A short word and a poem for my daughter at day’s end:

The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community.

Thank you for listening, sharing and responding to these episodes.

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In this episode of Homeward Bound, I’m talking to Isabelle Drury, author of the Substack Finding Sanity.

I wanted to talk to Isabelle because of a post she wrote back in July, describing a moment in her relationship, shaped by the way she had been dwelling on thoughts of climate catastrophe and societal collapse:

I was discussing with my partner what our plans were for the next few years of our lives. What I imagine are the usual conversations one has when your future still seems wide open: ‘Shall we have a baby?! Shall we move abroad?! Shall we buy a van?!’ Yet every answer felt wrong, because my future didn’t feel wide open. My future felt very small, and like there was only one possibility: the aforementioned end of the world.

The thing is, as I heard the words come out of my mouth garbled by tears, I realise I don’t actually believe this. Deep down, I don’t actually believe we are totally, irrevocably, and unequivocally fucked.

I’ve known Isabelle for a couple of years, she’s been part of the conversations that Anna and I host at a school called HOME, and one of the themes that’s been coming up for me lately in that work is the difference in what it asks of us when we show up to the trouble the world is in, depending on the season of life we’re in.

I want to lean into this further and record some more conversations with folks of different generations who are wrestling with the questions I wrote about in At Work in the Ruins, asking how we show up for each other across the generational differences that Isabelle and I talk about in this episode.

I hope you enjoy our conversation – and do check out Isabelle’s Substack.

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

This episode starts with the traditional nursery rhyme commemorating the events of 5 November, 1605, when Catholic plotters attempted to blow up the British parliament.

While we’re on the theme of memory and maps, a reminder that Dougald’s new online series, Pockets, Patterns & Practices, starts this week, with the question, “What kind of maps do we need now?”

And here’s a line from friend-of-the-show Elizabeth Oldfield that came in after we recorded, but resonates with today’s conversation:

We all have would-be tidy assumptions, and need a mess making of them if we have any hope of encountering people and the world as they really are.

(from ‘Expanding Eros, Or Why connection is my kink’)

Shownotes

* The last(?) interview with John Berger, shortly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

* “In such a climate, somebody who is actually saying something, who seems to suggest that there may be a connection between what he said and what he will do, such a person is a way out of a vacuous nightmare—even if the way out is dangerous or vicious.”

* Ed has joined the Old Glory Molly dancing group and got into trouble for singing ‘The Dog Song’.

* Dougald gives a shout-out to The Climate Majority Project.

* There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak.

* American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology by D. W. Pasulka.

* Birds, Beasts & Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species by Derek Gow.

* Caring for Life: A Postdevelopment Politics of Infant Hygiene by Kelly Dombroski.

* The Plant Pamphlets by Mark Watson.

* Read Charlotte Du Cann’s Introduction to the book.

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

* R. G. Miga’s ‘Hunter’s Ghost: On the hard work of staying vigilant in the darkness’

* “Two things can be true at the same time. Donald Trump can be a vile scumbag, unfit for office. The people looking to bring him down can also be scapegoating him—trying to hang all the sins of the past decade around his neck, driving him off a cliff to create the false narrative of a fresh start.”

* Also from R. G. Miga, this note: “why do people still despise the Democratic Party—every single Democratic presidential candidate for the past eight years, including the old white guy—more than a meandering country club owner with Borderline Personality Disorder? If the Democratic Party still can’t acknowledge its own weaknesses and make a positive case for its policies, rather than constantly leaning on moral superiority—it’s doomed, with or without Trump.’”

* Jamie Kelsey Fry and James Robertson talking about Citizens Assemblies.

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

* Adam Wilson’s latest post: “What happened AFTER the grocery store stopped having food on the shelves?”

* Ed brings us to a close by referencing William Stafford’s poem, ‘A Ritual to Read to Each Other’.

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“Maybe what we’re looking for is fewer robot vacuum cleaners and more compost toilets.”

We stumble into a new series of The Great Humbling with an episode that revolves around s**t and technology. This is also our first video episode, so you can watch our beardy faces on Substack or YouTube.

Shownotes

* Ed’s been reading The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, alongside How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm.

* Also Andrei Kirkov’s Death and the Penguin.

* Dougald talks about Em Strang’s novel, Quinn. Also her newly launched Substack, Emerging Hermit – and especially the ‘Our Violent Men’ series that she is embarking on.

* Ed talks about Simeon Morris’s one-man show, Square Peg.

* Dougald introduces a little book called Notes on Nothing by Anonymous.

* Also an episode of the Spiritual Teachers podcast called The Hillbilly Sutra, a one-off telling of the story of a Nashville banjo player who had a similar experience – and who, despite the podcast’s title, has no interest in selling himself as a spiritual teacher.

* ‘My iRobot vacuum found dog poo and almost created World War III’

* Cory Doctorow’s original post about “enshittification”.

* Paul Virilio’s observation that every new technology brings into being a new kind of accident can be found in The Politics of the Very Worst.

* Ed talks about meeting Jess Groopman of the Regenerative Technology Project.

* Dougald remembers the vacuum cleaner scene in the first episode of Meet the Natives, the 2007 documentary series in which a group of men from a village in Vanuatu came on an anthropological expedition to study the three tribes of the British Isles: the middle class, the working class and the upper class.

* Ed introduces us to the art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast and we talk about trickster ways of using technology.

* Marvin Kranzberg’s Laws of Technology.

* The episode from Season 5 when we talked about Neto Leão’s idea of the “low agreements”.

* Carl Jung did indeed have a vision of a giant turd landing on Basel Cathedral.

Thanks for listening, sharing and getting in touch! Look out for Dougald Hine’s public events in London next week – and a new five-week online series with a school called HOME, starting on 6 & 7 November.