Are you optimistic about the future? Do you think we're heading in the right direction as a species? If not, you're in good company. In this episode the writer and speaker Dougald Hine explores what's gone wrong with 'modernity', and what it might mean to think generative thoughts about the future. Dougald speaks with wisdom and clarity about our current predicament, and what kind of thinking and acting we are being called to in this moment.
Are you optimistic about the future? Do you think we're heading in the right direction as a species? If not, you're in good company. In this episode the writer and speaker Dougald Hine explores what's gone wrong with 'modernity', and what it might mean to think generative thoughts about the future. Dougald speaks with wisdom and clarity about our current predicament, and what kind of thinking and acting we are being called to in this moment.
sometimes you're born into the ending of a world. This is a thing that happens. It's happened to others before you in other times and places. If your read on, the signs of the times is that you were born into the ending of a world. You were born into a story that was coming to an end that doesn't have much longer left to run. What's worth doing Well, first, to the extent that it's possible, stop worrying so much about making sense according to the logic of the world that is ending, and then seek to make good ruins.
Speaker 2:Do you believe that we as a species are making good progress, that we're heading in the right direction? If you read Steven Pinker, for example, you might be impressed by the staggering progress that has been made in healthcare and education and development globally and you might think that yes, we are, we're doing well and we're going to do better in the future. At the other end of the spectrum, you might find philosophers like John Gray who think progress is an illusion, that we're on a catastrophic trajectory and need to change course. I think today's episode is more for those of you who fall into the latter camp, who think there is a problem with the way we've been taught to think and behave, with the story that we've been telling ourselves. In today's podcast, I'm delighted to be joined by the thinker, writer and speaker, dougal Hynde.
Speaker 2:Dougal Hynde had an early career as a BBC journalist, after which he co-founded the Dark Mountain Project with Paul Kingsnorth. He lives in Sweden, where he runs a school called HOME, and is an associate at the Centre for European and Development Studies at Uppsala University. His latest book At Work in the Ruins Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, climate Change, pandemics and All the Other Emergencies, was published last year. He co-hosts the Great Humbling podcast and publishes a sub-stack called Writing Home. Dougal, as you'll hear, is eloquent and full of insight and I hope you find this conversation as charged with points for both contemplation and action as I did.
Speaker 2:As ever, my plea to like, subscribe and share this podcast with any others you think might enjoy it. Hello Dougal, it's a pleasure to be connecting with you today. Thank you so much for joining me for this podcast conversation. I've been aware of your work, your writing and thinking for a while now, as have no doubt some others who are listening to this podcast, and I found it rich and full of insight. And I wonder whether I could just dive straight in by asking what is the kind of question that's driven it that you think we should be asking ourselves? That's the, as you know, the kind of theme of this podcast, and perhaps we can start with the question, then begin to unpack your thinking on it.
Speaker 1:Well, the question that I find myself carrying as we're heading into 2024 is this question of how do we make good ruins strange way of wording things, but um I, how do we do a good job of the ending of existing structures and what might it mean to approach the time we're in with this idea that it might be a time for making good ruins? So I guess that's. That's sort of where I want to start the conversation with you from today, kenny.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for offering such a rich and enigmatic question. There's so much in it that I'm looking forward to unpacking and understanding better. I wonder if I could begin by asking where it comes from. Whether you can trace this question of how to make good ruins back to a particular time or experience that gave rise to it?
Speaker 1:well I can. I can trace it very specifically because it's a question that comes to me from the work of um an italian philosopher, federico Campagna, who I discovered quite relatively recently and I had been for years working in this space of how do we navigate in a time of endings? When Paul Kingsnorth and I wrote the Dark Mountain Manifesto together, which came out 15 years ago now, in 2009, one of the lines from that that people kept bringing up with us was right at the end when we said the end of the world, as we know, it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the paths that lead into the unknown world that lies ahead. And so that idea that, yes, we're living in a time where many things, including good things that we would not wish to lose, are coming to an end, but that it's important to be alert for the difference between that and being in a time where there's just nothing left worth working for, no more of the story beyond where we're at trying to save the way that we've been doing things around here lately at all costs, or when we let go of that into a kind of black certainty about you know we're headed towards human extinction or whatever it is. And so really, my work for a long time has been trying to open up a space between those two patterns and saying there's a lot of messy middle ground in between. And saying there's a lot of messy middle ground in between.
Speaker 1:And I was writing a book which ended up being called At Work in the Ruins, and as I had almost got to the end of writing it, I came across this guy, federico Campagna, and he was talking about some of the same things from a different angle, and he had what was to me a very compelling way of voicing this. And what he said, or at least what I heard in listening to him and reading his work, was this sometimes you're born into the ending of a world. This is a thing that happens. It's happened to others before you in other times and places. How do you know that you're living at the end of the world you were born into? Well, he says, a world is held together by a story, and when you're living at the end of that world, there's not much of that story left. And so when someone stands up and tries to appeal to the future, when you hear politicians trying to project forwards and bright visions that involve an extension from the recent past through the present onwards, it no longer sounds convincing, and I'd add to that maybe what you start to notice is that a lot of the political energy in the world that you're in seems to lie with people who are appealing to the past instead of the future, and that that might be one of these symptoms.
Speaker 1:Your discernment, if your read on the signs of the times, is that you were born into the ending of a world. You were born into a story that was coming to an end, that doesn't have much longer left to run. What's worth doing? And he says well, first, to the extent that it's possible, stop worrying so much about making sense according to the logic of the world that is ending, about making sense according to the logic of the world that is ending, and then seek to make good ruins. And so that's where my question how do we make good ruins?
Speaker 1:Comes from, because I'd been carrying that and I found it very resonant in a kind of poetic set of images. I'd been speaking about it in all kinds of different places and then, in the last months of 2023, it began to come into focus more sharply for me and I was like maybe there's actually a practicality to this, maybe these enigmatic words have clues that can help us kind of create a new map of where we are and what's worth doing starting from here. So that's why that's a question that's with me now, on the threshold of this year.
Speaker 2:There's an awful lot in what you say about Campania that resonates right. I think probably anybody who hears that can recognize it in the times that we're living in. In your book you use a metaphor by I hope I pronounced her name, all right, vanessa Machado de Oliveira of hospicing and midwifing. Well, hospicing the old world and midwifing the one that's to come. Again, it's a really evocative metaphor. I wonder if you could unpack it a bit more. So if we're giving something a good ending, if we're hospicing it, then what is it that we are hospicing and giving a good end to?
Speaker 1:So, yeah, vanessa wrote this fantastic book called Hospicing Modernity, and the first time I heard her speak about that idea, it immediately clarified something for me. It describes a stance, a way of being with where we find ourselves, where you're not trying to save modernity, you're not trying to kill it, you're not trying to stage a revolution and overthrow it. What you're trying to do is, as you say, give it a good ending. What you're trying to do is, as you say, give it a good ending, allow it to end, allow it to hand on the things Many of us will have had experiences of endings on a human scale, in which there are conversations that were never had, that finally get had once the end is in sight. The same might be true of this thing that Vanessa and I talk about as modernity that in its ending, it might be possible for it to hand on kinds of knowledge that it couldn't admit to itself while it looked like its promises were secure and its future was open-ended. So what does it mean to talk about modernity, the sense in which I usually explain it, is to say, modernity was that window within history where, for certain people, it seemed like our proximity to the future was our defining characteristic was the best thing and the most important thing about us and our times. And so that starts off as a relatively local thing in certain places, in certain European cities, 200, 300, maybe a bit longer years ago, where this sense of identifying with you know we live so close to the future and everyone else will be here soon is how that then unfolds as modernity becomes a larger and larger story that sort of embraces the world and you have this kind of promise that history is a single converging line heading towards the promise that things can get better and better. And part of what makes this so resilient is that you can tell the same story in different keys. You can tell it to people who are feeling good and prosperous and comfortable, and it can be a gentle story of progressive, reformist improvement. Or you can tell it to people who are laboring under oppression, and it can be a story of revolutionary promise of change. But in all of those different versions it animated the creation of the kinds of societies that many of us were born into, and by the 20th century it became a sort of structuring narrative that the whole world was meant to fit into.
Speaker 1:So the promise of development as it was unfolded from the 1940s onwards was that all of the countries in the world. It's a bit like you can line them all up against a wall like kids and measure their heights and you can see who's come the furthest, who's got the furthest to go, but the direction of travel is meant to be the same. And so, instead of recognizing deep difference and plurality, everything's measured and compared in a way that positions certain societies, certain countries, certain groups of people as the ones who live closest to the future and therefore everyone else needs to learn from. And one of the things that does is it hides any sense that those of us who appear to be in that position might have something to learn from the people who are marked as less developed on the maps of modernity and development.
Speaker 1:Now, what began to happen, certainly by the 1970s, was partly because of the messages coming home from the front lines of ecological and environmental science, partly because of processes going on within the most developed societies. This began to be called into question the proximity of the future. The future no longer seemed quite so naturally like a vehicle for hopes, a vehicle for uniting around collective projects. The future began to be more of a thing that we were frightened of, or a thing that we want to distract ourselves from. And so that's where you begin to get, in academic language, this kind of talk about post-modernity and post-modernism. If you look for, why did that coalesce and emerge at the moment when it did in the 70s? It's because that was the point where serious doubt seemed to be cast over this kind of projected forward promise of modernity, of the future, of a single direction, of converging travel, of history and development and progress and so on. And so we're now a long way further down the line. The future hasn't sounded convincing, going back to Campania's terms, for quite a while now for more and more people in most of our societies, and you get a response to that which will say well, we need to try and reboot the future, get it working again.
Speaker 1:Somebody like Paul Mason has often articulated that pretty powerfully, but my read on things, which is more in line with Campania and with Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, is that no, it's not a mistake, it's not a trivial thing or a thing that can be fixed. That is why it feels like the future doesn't work anymore. That's actually a true description of the moment we were in the times we were born into it to end well, allowing it to hand on the good things that it's carrying, that we have a chance of taking with us into the unknown worlds that lie beyond the end of the world as we've known it. And so the midwifing side of it, as Vanessa describes it, is assisting with the birth of something that's the shape of which we don't fully know, that is potentially, but not necessarily wiser, that is, other forms of being human together.
Speaker 1:This is one of the things I try and underline in my book that learns a lot from the ways that humans have made life work in other times and places, including the knowledge and practices and experience that are being carried by people who are our contemporaries but have been marked on their maps of development as if they were living in the past or as if their ways of life were obsolescent.
Speaker 1:But to do that without putting all of the responsibility onto them or projecting onto you know, whether it's indigenous voices or whoever it is. We're listening to that. We're getting into dialogue with real people who are living with the complexities of living now. We're not projecting onto some kind of imagined timeless wisdom, which is one of the tricks of modernity's way of relating to everyone else. So that's, I guess, what I learned from being in dialogue with Vanessa and from her writing around hospicing, and I think, as you say, I think it's possible to bring that together very fruitfully with what Federico Campagna is saying about, you know, the making good ruins and the not worrying so much about trying to make sense according to the logic of the world that is ending.
Speaker 2:Gosh, yeah, that has a lot in it. What kind of thinking can carry us into whatever is going to come next? It's an incredibly generative question. I love the medical metaphor, if you will the care and attention that a hospice nurse would have, or indeed a midwife, what you say kind of brings to mind. I haven't thought of this in a long time.
Speaker 2:Did you ever see Adam Curtis's documentary the Power of Nightmares? He charted the kind of difference in rhetoric around 9-11 and a bit beyond. It went from promises of a better future, which became harder and harder to hold on to, towards we'll protect you from enemies, we'll kind of try and preserve your way of life. That shift from promises of a better future to we will kind of leverage your fears to maintain our power. I mean it makes me think, if I'm not taking this too far, of just the fear of endings, the fear of death, I suppose in ourselves that seems like part of Western culture. It's taboo even to kind of talk about it. And do you think so? What's my question, dougal? It's whether you think fear has a lot to do with a resistance towards hospicing yes, I.
Speaker 1:I think it's interesting that you mentioned adam curtis.
Speaker 1:I think he is like part of the power of his work is that he's somebody who's been navigating in this space of you. You know, there being things missing from the maps that we've been given, of there being a need to sort of retell the stories of how we found ourselves here in such a way as to find our bearings. But the fear that you describe yeah, I mean Stephen Jenkinson is someone who would speak about modernity as a death-phobic culture, having been a peculiarly unreconciled relationship with mortality, about the ways in which we've been living around here lately, and the first thing to say when we bring that to the table is some of the reasons why that is the case are good reasons things a parent holding your young child in recent generations, compared to how it was in any other time and place. So that's part of the story of why we have this paradoxical relationship to this kind of relationship of denial to the fact of death. But that's not the whole of the story. There are other, less healthy and less helpful parts of how we got here, and one of the stories that I try and weave into this is having learned a lot from people who have a foot in both worlds, if you like Vanessa Machado de Oliveira is an example of this Scholars and activists who come from indigenous backgrounds and who are therefore able partly to help us see the things that have been taken for granted in the places that have seen themselves as the centers and as closest to the future within the logics and the maps of modernity, to see that there's something very strange about the way that we are raised and sent off into life in these modern societies and this modern kind of culture that in lots of other times and places it's been taken as axiomatic that children are born but grown-ups are made, and making grown-ups is the work of culture.
Speaker 1:You look at the processes of initiation which young people went through on the threshold between childhood and early adulthood in lots of traditional cultures, and one of the recurring features of them is some kind of staged encounter, taken very seriously and often with real risk involved with the fact of your own mortality, that you have to pass through a situation in which you experience the reality that you are going to die and that that could come to you at any time, as part of crossing the threshold into being capable of being a grown-up. One of the ways that I say this is that to be a grown-up is to live in awareness of consequences, to live in awareness of the cost of your own living, and the cost of our lives is always death. Now, that's the biological nature of the kind of world that we're born into is that we live off death of plants, of animals and everything is living off that, and there are things that live off us and our deaths as well, and that's part of how it is to be here. But the particular ways of living that industrial societies have made possible are such that To take stock of the amount of death that your life or my life costs is chilling. It extends so far beyond the level of resources that humans have required for their lives in other times and places that if we really try and take that seriously and ask, as Robin Wall Kimmerer would ask, how can we be worthy of what we take? How can we give as much as we take in terms of what our lives cost, the life of people and creatures and landscapes around us?
Speaker 1:We're very quickly paralyzed by that sense of cost and of consequence, and I think this is particularly the case because of the nature of the fossil fuels on which our societies have been built. I think that that's actually the point at which any possibility of what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the honourable harvest this principle that she recognises in indigenous and traditional cultures all over the world, including where she comes from in North America, that people have sought to live in such a way as to be worthy of what they take, in such a way as to give as much as we take. And that's not just a kind of moralistic nice to have that. That's actually a kind of pragmatic vernacular ecology, a recognition that any way of living which takes more than it gives is not going to be around that much longer because it's going to erode the conditions of its possibility. But suddenly, for the first time, on a large scale, just over 200 years ago, we began to organize our societies by burning these fossil fuels which are by their nature the product of hundreds of millions of years of dying in ancient oceans and forests. And when that's part of what you're drawing on, when that's part of what makes your way of living possible, the question stops making sense the question of how could I be worthy of that? Or the idea that you know well if I can't be worthy of that, then I shouldn't be taking it.
Speaker 1:That's part of the kind of derangement, the sense of being out of our senses that has been the product of these ways of living over these. You know, whatever it is, seven or eight generations of the, you know, the industrial era, it's not that long within the great human scale of things, let alone the wider natural scale of things. And so you know, this inability to reckon with death seems to be a peculiar product of modernity, with both its shiny side and its shadowed side, both its gifts and its poisons. And for a long time those gifts have been so phenomenal and the poisons have mostly been outsourced to people who we don't meet and to landscapes that we don't see. And so there's been a sense that, well, those people will be here soon, because that's what the promise of modernity, the promise of development, the story that Hans Rosling would tell in every TED talk he did, that allowed us to be sort of okay with the fact that just now they're on the receiving end of all of those poisons and all of those shadow sides.
Speaker 1:But as that promise begins to unravel, as it no longer rings true, which is the case, you know, in one way or another at a gut level for majorities in all of the Western countries. When you look at you know, there are surveys where they go out and ask people, you know, do you think that young people today are going to have a better life than their parents or that they're going to struggle to have the lives that their parents had, and for a long time? Now you get large majorities of people saying, hey, today's young people are going to struggle to have the kind of lives that their parents have had. So, in other words, the promise of progress at the most mundane level has broken down in the lived experience of ordinary people in our societies. And so at that point, all of this stuff that we could outsource is coming back to haunt us and we're going to have to have a reckoning with limits, with costs and consequences, including with our own mortality.
Speaker 1:And I think that the danger is that this is what I was getting at at the beginning when I say the end of the world. As we know, it is not the end of the world full stop, seen through the lenses of modernity, until we start to go into that kind of work of hospicing that Vanessa and her colleagues in the gesturing towards decolonial futures collective are pointing towards. It's very easy for even contemplating that encounter with limits and costs and consequences and mortality, firstly, for it to paralyze us. Secondly, for it to send us into a tailspin of despair where it just feels like there's nothing worth working for, nothing worth living, for, nothing to be done. And I think we even see that sometimes in the ways that the news about climate change lands, when it really lands with us is that we have voices and movements that are kind of speaking as if it's all going to be over in a generation or in 10 years, as if people growing up today are not going to have a world to grow old in.
Speaker 1:And I don't want to diminish in any sense the real grounds for deep fear about the depth of the trouble we're in, but at the same time I think that there's an aspect of projection coming out of modernity and its logics where once we see big trouble coming, once we see that the path to the future we were promised is closed off, that that superhighway into the future is never actually going to be built, then it's as if there's nothing left.
Speaker 1:And so part of what I've been trying to invite people into for years, and what I see in Federico's work or in Vanessa's work and lots of the others I've worked with, is it's a little bit like when you step into a dark room and you have to let your eyes adjust, because at first you can't see anything at all, but gradually your eyes begin to adjust to the darkness and you begin to make out fainter shapes and outlines and things moving. And it's a little like that. We need to create the invitations and the spaces where it's possible to slow down for long enough for our eyes to adjust in order to begin to notice the shapes and forms which hope might take in the kind of world we're actually in, rather than the kind of world that we were promised.
Speaker 2:You're listening to the Examined Life with me, kenny Primrose.
Speaker 2:Today I am in conversation with Dougal Hyne, the writer and speaker, about his question how do we make good ruins?
Speaker 2:If you're enjoying this conversation, do think about liking, subscribing, reviewing and sending it to someone else who might enjoy it. That's really interesting and it brings to mind for me a line from helena norberg hodge, who was on last season, and she said um, that our arms have grown so long that we no longer see what our hands are doing and the consequences of that are now, kind of literally, as well as figuratively, washing up on our shores. So in the space that you've been creating in a school called home and you're writing and so on, if the old story of modernity that we've learned no longer serves or feels plausible and helpful, then what are the new stories that can help us with this transition, those stories that can help us kind of structure and direct our attention yeah, I think part of the nature of making good ruins is that, um, you don't get to rush forward into what's going to be built next, so you can't see clearly a big, beautiful arc of story.
Speaker 1:And sometimes, you know, sometimes I get invited into situations where it feels a little bit like we've been brought together for a weekend on the premise that, you know, with enough goodwill and good intentions and good people in the room, by the end of the weekend we're going to have created the new story that we need to replace the old story, whereas actually I think we're in a time where some of the work is composting and some of the work is salvaging. And that's where the ruins metaphor is helpful to me, because, after carrying that around for quite a while and talking about it in lots of different rooms, what began to come into focus was that the work of creating good ruins is to release capacities and resources that are held within existing structures, where those structures are not going to hold. Those structures are at the end of their time, but contained within them is all kinds of material, all kinds of gifts that might be then capable of being used. And the way I often say it is what we're looking for is to release resources from those existing structures to contribute to the conditions of possibility for worlds that we can't imagine yet. So we don't have to be able to draw the arc of the thing that leads into what's on the far side of this time of endings, because we're still in the process. You can't rush the hospicing or rush the midwifing. But what we can do in terms of finding our bearings is, firstly, that thing of not worrying so much about needing to make sense according to the logic of those existing systems and also looking for the other actors, looking for the players within those existing systems who, for one reason or another, are in a position where they don't have to pretend to make sense according to the logic that those systems are meant to work by, but sticking with them in the sense of an involvement that allows for experimenting with and finding ways to release resources, to release capacity to this work of creating conditions of possibility, whether it's bringing land into forms of ownership and use that mean that we have the capacity for growing food in the kinds of futures that we're very likely to find ourselves in, or whether it's skills from within existing systems.
Speaker 1:For example, at the end of my book I have this sort of little list of four kinds of tasks for an age of endings. The first one is you can look for the good that we have a chance of salvaging and get busy with helping to salvage that to carry it with us. The second one is the work of mourning, noticing the good things that we're not in a position to take with us and mourning those. But part of the work of mourning being to tell stories, because those stories can come with us and they may turn out to be seeds and presently unimaginable futures. Then the third one is the work of noticing the things that were never as good as we told each other. They were about the ways we've been living and the ways we've been organizing life around here lately, and the chance we're being given to walk away from some of those here lately, and the chance we're being given to walk away from some of those. And then the fourth one is to look for the dropped threads from earlier in the story, the things that have been marked as old-fashioned, obsolete, inefficient, that might actually turn out to be what still works, what makes all the difference in hard times around and ahead of us.
Speaker 1:So I made that sort of back of an envelope map of those four types of work, after lots of conversations in lots of different rooms, and when the book came out, it was reviewed in the British Medical Journal by Richard Smith, who's the former editor of the BMJ and he, you know, looking back after over what must be half a century in the heart of the fields of medicine and medical research. He took that list and he went through his professional field and came up with his suggestions of well, what are the things that we can salvage and have a chance of bringing with us? What are the things the good things that we're going to have to let go of? What are the things that were never as good as we told each other they were? And where are the dropped threads, the things that we cropped out of the picture but that we might actually need to weave back in in order to carry the work of health and of creating possibilities for healing and living well into the kinds of futures it looks like we're headed into.
Speaker 1:And that was an extraordinary thing for me to see that someone was able to take this tool that I developed from one set of conversations into a field that I have no background in and apply it in a way that makes it possible to start difficult conversations and stay with them.
Speaker 1:So then you know the making good ruins from where Richard Smith is starting from. Well, maybe it looks like you know asking what barefoot doctors for the 21st century looks like, what the set of skills that both trained professionals and lay people could be equipped with. That could mean that as much as possible of the good that's come out of the achievements of recent generations could be held at community level in places all around the world, in whatever scenarios we find ourselves heading into. So you begin to get a map there of what making good ruins might look like, and I'm really curious about both finding the places within existing systems where people are at that point of wanting to contribute to the making of good ruins, instead of pretending that things that used to make sense still make sense, and then working out where else belongs on this map of the kinds of work of making good ruin I can.
Speaker 2:I can entirely imagine, um, because I would have been one of these people who, when you come to speak for the weekend and say, uh, you know, we're making good ruins, I want to know what they look like, I want to know exactly what to imagine, I'm impatient for it. But, as you say, that work is the deep listening that happens in the darkness, where you're beginning to trace the shapes of what you know what scene is going to emerge. The word that comes to mind is you know that, the Greek word kairos for time. The word that comes to mind is you know that the Greek word kairos for time, as in you've got chronos, chronological time, but kairos, like. It's like a scene change on stage and you don't quite know what's about to emerge.
Speaker 2:And I suppose, yeah, you've been engaging with various guides, prophets, threads from what's come before that you'd like to take forward. And I'm interested, because I'm pretty sure you're engaged in this question If education is the way that a society produces its own future. Right now we are producing the future that we've known, but we know that future is being hospiced.
Speaker 1:I suppose the question is, in a sense, how do we educate when we don't know what the ruins are going to look like so it's a very real question, probably for you, certainly for me as a, as, as a father, I have a boy who's eight and you know, people come to me and they know the stuff that I write about and they say well, you know how do you talk about this with your son, what do you, what are you doing? And people ask you know, are you homeschooling? And um, my first answer is, well, actually, we live in Sweden, my other half is Swedish, that's how we ended up here, and it's illegal to homeschool here, it's not even an option. But also, we live in a community, a small town of about 1,500 people, and we moved here, coming in as outsiders, and actually the school is one of the places through which we're connected to and become part of our community. So, even if we had the option, it, when it comes to being family and being community, children and young people is just to be holding spaces of honesty, spaces of conviviality and hospitality and of spaces in which we're, as grown-ups, modeling humans, being human together, modeling the work of culture and making room for it being possible for the young people around us to have someone they can talk to, someone they can bring their questions to when they have the questions. And obviously there's, you know, part of that modeling is modeling the practical skills of getting involved with land, getting involved, practical skills of getting involved with land, getting involved with place, getting involved with food.
Speaker 1:You know the humble everyday stuff that has always been at the center of human cultures and that we've, you know we've often been able to outsource around here lately, but that we're finding our way back to needing to um, to, to learn and equip ourselves with the skills for. But also, you know, the journey of ways of being. There's a journey of ways of learning that has to involve a kind of confrontation with our own foolishness, our own lack of skill, the extent to which having been born into times and places that were for a while subsidized on these great upwellings of oil and colonialism and the other factors that made it possible to live with an obliviousness to our consequences, that means that the stuff that we've got to adult age not having learned that any eight-year-old in other times and places would have had to have learned. There's a story that's told by the Irish philosopher John Moriarty, who grew up in the early 20th century in rural Ireland and he says you know in the world that I grew up in. If one morning we'd woken up and found that everyone over the age of 14 was gone, those of us who were left could have run things. We could have run the farms and the villages because that was how much you had to learn in your childhood, and almost all of us looked to the lenses of the school system and the university system that he then went off into. We looked like we were ignorant and like we knew nothing, and so there is a kind of especially for those of us who are highly educated, according to the logics of modernity, there's a necessary you know, being thrown on our backs in the mud and the cow shit. That is part of what's called for on this journey that we're on and being, you know, not flinching from that, being willing to let that happen and to laugh at ourselves rather than to be pompous and take ourselves seriously when that does happen, in whatever form it takes. That's also part of it.
Speaker 1:Vanessa, again in Hospicing Modernity, talks about how our education systems tend to have been organized around mastery education, education for mastering things and she says what we need now is to make more room for depth education, and I'd heard her use that phrase, and I'd used that language with her lots of times and then it suddenly hit me well, depth education is an education that moves in the vertical and moves downwards, so it speaks to the same thing as humbling, being humbled, being thrown into the mud and the cow shit and that's you know.
Speaker 1:More and more I see that that's part of what's unavoidable on the the path that we're on, and bio cum laudeumalafé will say we're coming down to earth, we won't all arrive intact, but then the hope is that we can be broken in such a way as to be broken open, in such a way as to allow what's been carried within us and hidden to come out to play, allow our vulnerability into the rooms that we're in, allow our foolishness and our ignorance to teach us, to bring us back into relation with those we were taught to regard as the less developed, the people who live less close to the future, the less progressive, the less progressed, and so on. And I feel like that's all part of the mix now, of the invitation that the times are making to us.
Speaker 2:It seems like, in order to hear that invitation to listen to it, the virtue we most need to cultivate is probably humility, which is also the virtue that I think is most lacking or least encouraged in our culture today, creating that space in which we can pay close attention, that we can listen with a kind of honest openness. When you use this metaphor of making good ruins, it's very evocative and, you know, because, like you grew up in the UK, presumably like me, going to ruined places for your English heritage or whatever. Does it bring to mind any specific site Like, what's your mental picture of making good ruins?
Speaker 1:That's a good question, Because when I think about you know, I grew up in the northeast of England and then I worked as a radio journalist in South Yorkshire in my 20s journalist in South Yorkshire in my 20s.
Speaker 1:So on the one hand I think about the ruins that you'd get taken to as a kid on weekends, the English heritage version of the ruins, but on the other hand I also think about the industrial and post gathering among the ruins, the being with the loss, the real deep loss that was there in a lot of the industrial and post-industrial communities where I worked as a journalist, and the power on those occasions when that's invited to the table, when the conditions are created where people can speak their loss, including honoring what has been there and what has been taken away, without having any easy answers as to where we go next and what's coming next. But that, to me, is part of it. And then I'm thinking as well of maybe you know this there's an extraordinary site on the banks of the Clyde, sort of northwest from Glasgow, where St Peter's Seminary that was built in the 60s. Do you know that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:It was built by the Catholic Church and it's this extraordinary kind of modernist structure that is seriously reckoned by artists to be the most important post-war architecture in Scotland, that was abandoned within 20 years of being built because it had been built for a church that no longer existed, for a trajectory that had been given up on because of all of the changes that were going on within the Catholic church and within wider society. And so you go there and you can walk through these grand Corbusier-style modernist arches that are already ruins, where the forest is already kind of taking over and there's no answer to what to do with it. There's no solution. It's too important architecturally for anyone to agree for it to be demolished and it's too much of a liability and too costly for anyone to come up with a way to bring it properly into use. And so it's just there, abiding with a succession of plans that come and go and occasionally temporary uses and so on.
Speaker 1:But I find something very evocative in that, because it's somehow simultaneously both the ruins of modernity and the ruins of something older, the ruins of our institutional religious traditions which in certain ways birthed Western modernity, and you know, I want to sort of seeing those juxtapositions in that one site. I want to speak to the gifts that are contained within those ruins, both the ruins of modernity and the ruins of our institutional religious traditions, as well as the toxic forms that they've taken and the damage that they've done, and both things have to be allowed into view in order for us to discern where the clues are and where the gifts are that might be worth taking forward, Because if we only look at one and blank out the other, then we don't have a good enough map in order to deal with the complexity of the territory that we find ourselves in.
Speaker 2:That's, as you say, very evocative. If I'm remembering this right, I may not be, but I think I've heard you say these interesting words. I'm not not a Christian, and I wonder, as we maybe excavate as a civilization, what is worth holding on to spiritually, what's toxic, what's not? I get the sense that you're on a personal journey of doing that yourself, um, in in some way, and, and the the climate crisis that we're really talking around without having properly mentioned it is is well, jonathan rousen and many others would say it's a spiritual crisis. A's not too kind of um, yeah, odd a question. Are there things that you've found from your own spiritual excavations, um, that you know? This is a thread to pull on and to take forward that has been buried or forgotten or distorted, um, and needs to be woven back in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as a question and as a theme, that's all very alive for me. In terms of my own background, I grew up around churches. My dad is a United Reformed Church minister and it's part of my formation, it's part of who I am and certainly by my 30s it was not something that was particularly part of what I found myself needing to talk about or make noise about or identify with, which is not to say that I had kind of rejected it or grown out of it. It just it had kind of fallen into the background or into the compost of who I am, how I was doing the work that I was doing. And it's been interesting in recent years to see friends who either didn't have any relation to Christianity at all or who had kind of grown up with versions of it and rejected it in a clearer way when they were younger, finding themselves unexpectedly called back into and having the course of their lives sort of turned by encounters with it. And it brings me back to my own relationship, to my tradition and to what I grew up with and what that means for me now and I don't have any kind of big, simple message or answers coming from that, but I have a lot of respect for what Jonathan is saying, especially as someone coming, in his case from a kind of think tank background and saying actually, I've become more and more convinced that the climate crisis is a spiritual crisis. There's various layers at which that is true for me, and partly it's simply that the secular, materialist account of reality, of what is allowed to be real, may have been sufficient for the good times. It may have been sufficient for the era in which progress looked like something that you could actually witness and describe within the historical reality, at least in some corners of the world. As that gets further and further from what it looks like when we read the headlines or look outside our front doors, we need to draw on deeper wells or else we find ourselves just without anything to grow in, without anything to grow from, and I see that.
Speaker 1:I see folks who come out of traditions that I have a lot of respect for on the left, who are unable to reach back beyond or down under this kind of secular, materialist account of what is allowed to be real, ending up kind of spiraling in a sort of despair that is produced by the gap between what the promises of modernity were and where we find ourselves and I think that it's necessary to look at and to look with maybe a new respect, at how people have anchored themselves and found their bearings, oriented themselves and got through hard times all throughout human history and go well, maybe we were a bit quick to decide that we'd grown out of that and that was all childish. There's another sense in which you know, if you're out on a walk in the woods and you realize that you know we've definitely gone astray somewhere, to turn back and retrace your steps a bit is not a foolish thing to do. So I think that's part of what's going on, part of why people are coming into a new reckoning with the traditions that maybe for a while we thought we didn't have any time for, didn't see any life left in them, and maybe we needed to get out from under them, maybe they needed to fall into ruin for a while in order for us to see what was really alive within these traditions and within these lineages. Another part of the story is that there's been lots of people from our kind of parts of the world who set off looking in other people's cultures for wisdom and tradition and spirituality and so on, and belatedly it's been brought home to us that often the ways in which people went out doing that just reproduced the ways in which people who looked much like us went out, taking all sorts of other things from places and cultures and societies all over the world.
Speaker 1:And, with the best will in the world, in our rejection of our own traditions and our romanticization of other people's cultures and traditions, there has been forms of spiritual colonialism that have been quite dominant in parts of our culture that would see themselves as progressive or countercultural or whatever, and that's only dawned on many of us relatively recently, and that's also part of where there is a sense of being sent back into dialogue and into relation with our own traditions, rather than simply trying to outsource the work of finding a connection to depth to those who we can cast in the role of the other and then go and sit at their feet and learn from them.
Speaker 1:And there are shadows and darknesses and ways that this can go wrong as well. There's a difference between retracing your steps because you've realized that the valorization of all that's new and all that's modern and of our proximity to the future is part of the problem, and replacing that romanticization of the future with a romanticization of the past. You know, there's something trickier, something more tricksterish that's called for in terms of how we really tend to the life within what we've inherited. It doesn't look like historical reenactment or going back and simply restoring the walls of old structures. How we make use of the ruins and how we tend to the life within the ruins is a bit stranger than that, I think.
Speaker 2:Use of the ruins and how we tend to life within the ruins is a bit stranger than that. I think that seems like a very wise um position to hold, to create the space, do the deep listening and the dialogue and see what emerges. In these kind of times of turmoil, where we're inundated with alarming news and distracted a lot, it's hard, in a sense, to imagine what you term as kind of growing a living culture, and so I wonder if I could just kind of bring this conversation to land on one last question, and that's where do you see hope these days? Where are the, the places that kind of lift your spirit?
Speaker 1:I find a lot of hope in, you know, the small examples and initiatives that, uh, that offer clues for these conditions of possibility for um, worlds beyond the ending of the world we're born into. I think of a young woman, ayaka Fuji, who's been part of our community around our school, who's part of a group and a project in Malaysia where they've taken over a palm oil plantation, an incredibly ruined ecology, a place where rainforest has been devastated by extractive agriculture, and they're now bringing it back to life with practices of agroforestry. And I remember hearing her say one day you know, we've realized that the people are dreaming of being community and the land is dreaming of being forest, and that these are two sides of the same thing. And those are the whispers of hope for me, and I come across a lot of them from different corners of the world. And then there is something as well about making room for a strange kind of hope, a strange shape of hope, hope that doesn't look like the forms in which we were taught to look for it.
Speaker 1:And Ivan Illich, who's a thinker I've learned a huge amount from, he used to say hope is not expectation, it's not having a set of rights that you're entitled to, or a project that's planned outwards into the future, that tells you how we're going to achieve this, and that Hope is a stance, it's a way of being in the world.
Speaker 1:Hope is remaining open to surprise. That's one of Illich's definitions Not thinking that you know how the story ends, but staying with the uncertainty, staying with the limits of what you can know, which brings us back to the humility again and being ready for the stranger who shows up at your door and the possibility that they might be the one who's bringing what's needed next in the story. So you light a candle at the table, you set an extra place at the table, you keep your door open and your heart and your hearth open to the possibility that hospitality, conviviality, practices of homemaking and being human together can spark into life even now, even given all that we lost on the way here and all of the loss that's around and ahead of us.
Speaker 2:What a lovely sentiment and practical suggestion. Well, dougal, it's been such a pleasure and a real learning experience. I've loved listening to you talk about what it might mean to make good ruins and what the processes are around discerning that at this current moment Pleasure. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Examined Life podcast. I'm grateful, of course, to Dougal for his time, his wisdom and his eloquence, which has given me a huge amount to chew on, and I'm sure it has for you too. I'm also grateful to my brother, colin, who wrote the music you're listening to and got me started on this podcast journey.
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