The Dark Mountain Blog
The Poet and the Machine
posted by Paul Kingsnorth
15th February, 2011
Edward Thomas, the young, post-Georgian poet, experienced a painfully brief flowering of his creativity – a few years of verse, unnoticed in his lifetime – before he went to the trenches in World War One and was silenced by the guns. His poems are close-up studies of rural south England in its last Golden Age; the days before its identity and meaning were lost forever, before the war and the car and the suburbs ate it alive.
At hawthorn-time in Wiltshire travelling
In search of something chance would never bring
Travelling before the national grid and the motorways, before the bombing planes and the suburbs and the business parks and the factory shops. At hawthorn time in Wiltshire today the hawthorn can still make you catch your breath, but Thomas’s world is long gone. Golden Ages are always just too far back to touch, something that Thomas himself seemed to know (‘The past’, he wrote, ‘is the only dead thing that smells sweet.’)
In his introduction to the painfully slim Selected Poems, his namesake, the Welsh lyric poet R. S. Thomas, suggested intriguingly that ‘somewhere beyond the borders of Thomas’ mind, there was a world he could never quite come at.’ That phrase, that image, has always stuck with me. R. S. was referring – as he always referred – to a quasi-mythical Welshness of the blood which he believed the younger man had been influenced by, and which he offered as a partial explanation for ‘the vein of melancholy and dissatisfaction which runs through Edward Thomas’ verse.’
Of course there’s something very English, too, about melancholy and dissatisfaction, and I’m not at all sure that the Celtic imagination was what Edward Thomas was trying to come at in his writing. I think, rather, that his dissatisfaction, and the almost painfully evocative poems which flowed from it, may have been a result of living in a world on the brink. A coming European war hung over the rural railway stations and hawthorn lanes of which Thomas wrote and, beyond that, the tearing-up of everything he loved in the pre-motor car and – in many places – still pre-modern English countryside.
I never noticed it until
‘Twas gone – the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill
Thomas never lived to see what industrial agriculture, mass car ownership or consumer capitalism would do to that countryside, but I think he must have felt, on those lonely walks down the holloways, a foreboding. A function of poetry is to give words to intuitions which, if expressed in prose, would fall apart under their own flimsiness; to see what is coming and try to express it and not to have it understood until everybody else can also see it, at which point they will claim that they saw it all along.
Sometimes I think I might know how Edward Thomas felt. He was in love with the lanes and the downs and the people who called them home, and he knew – no, he intuited, felt but could never quite intellectualise – that these things were flaming down a dying arc. He knew he would love and lose, and he wrote to understand how to live with that. The battlefields of Flanders meant that he never had to.
I used to read Thomas religiously, and would often wonder what state he was in before he was killed in 1917, at Arras, at the same age I am now. How did he feel? What gripped him? The melancholy, still? Despair? Stoicism? Even hope? He had a wife and children back in England. He must have known that, if he ever got back, nothing would ever be the same; that walks down the same lanes could never conjur the same lines.
Now I know that Spring will come again,
Perhaps to-morrow; however late I’ve patience
After this night following on such a day.
Edward Thomas was in love with a world that was dying, and all he could do was be present. Perhaps this is a timeless human condition, or at least a Western condition (we often confuse the two). The sweep of history is the story of worlds dying, after all. Perhaps it is the poet’s condition (the theft of his world literally sent John Clare mad.) It’s certainly a condition that speaks to us today, and to this project in particular.
The challenge of Dark Mountain is the challenge of facing this inevitable, unstoppable momentum without flinching - but it is to face, too, the fact that the overwhelming characteristic of our age is that of loss.
Recently, for reasons which may become clear here soon, I have been researching the impact that humanity has had on the natural world since I was born, in 1972. It’s been sobering. Since my birth, Homo sapiens sapiens has managed to kill off between a quarter and a third of all the world’s wild – ie, non-human – life. This bald figure takes in 25% of all land-based species, 28% of marine species and 29% of freshwater species. We’ve wiped out 35% of the planet’s mangrove swamps and 20% of its coral, over a quarter of all remaining Arctic wildlife and 600,000 square kilometres of Amazon forest. Extinction rates are currently between 100 and 1000 times higher than they would likely be were humans not around. This is before we even get to climate change. And it has all happened in less than forty years.
Sit back and think about the magnitude of that. Try even to begin to understand its scale and scope and speed. You can’t; not really. Beyond a certain point, number crunching hinders rather than helps comprehension. Humans were not built to think on this scale, which may be how we got to this point. But however we got here, the Dark Mountain challenge is to face this sometimes agonising reality openly, and honestly, and without any pill-sugaring fantasy talk of turning it all around with ‘sustainability’ or UN treaties or ethical shopping or eco-socialism.
This, I think, is important; in fact, I think it’s vital. But it is not enough on its own; not enough to help us live with it, because it only takes us halfway. Something has to come next. Recently I have been spending more and more time wondering what that something is.
I have been wondering this because I feel – and this is little more than an intuition – that the Dark Mountain Project has probably reached the end of the beginning. I think we have begun to build a genuine cultural movement based around a sense of what might be called ‘green stoicism‘: an acceptance of what is coming and what has come, and of our part and place in it and of the limits to what we can do now. But what do we do with that knowledge?
One thing we do – and this is the other key strand of the Dark Mountain mission – is to strive to create a counter-narrative to the mainstream diet of junk about progress, growth, development, control and the inevitable forward momentum of an all-triumphant humanity. This is a big task, which will not be complete in our lifetimes if ever, but we are, I hope, helping it along. In few days time we’ll be announcing on here the publication of our next book, and next week we hope to have some news for you about this year’s festival.
But what has been gnawing at me is a question that perhaps goes beyond even this: how do we live? I mean, in the everyday. A lot of people have asked me this since this project began. How do we live with this, they say, what do we do? What do you do? A counter-narrative is crucial, new stories and old ones that seek to unravel the poisonous mythology of industrial Man. But each day, each day that more is lost – how do we get through it, and what can we do to stop the worst of it? What still makes sense? How to live, through it and with it?
The second Thomas – R. S., the caustic and contradictory Welsh priest whose later poems in particular are bombs thrown into the cosy front rooms of his countryfolk – used to refer to the onward march of industrial civilisation simply as ‘the Machine’:
The still, small voice
is that of Orpheus looking
over his shoulder at a dream
fading. At the mouth
of the cave is the machine’s
whirlwind, hurrying the new
arts in …
Thomas feared and loathed the Machine so much that he used to preach to his rural parishioners, according to his son, about ‘the evils of fridges.’ His wife tore the central heating out of their ancient Welsh cottage to escape from those new arts which were breathing at her door. But Thomas knew – intuited – that the Machine could not be stopped, only lived with. He lived with it by increasingly retreating into a kind of Celtic Twilight (one brilliantly captured by Byron Rogers biography of the poet) -moving further and further west, to smaller and smaller parishes, searching for a place to belong and never finding it because the search turned out to be the goal. Nostalgia, the retreat, is always a risk. We see it woven like a golden thread through the peak oil and the primitivist movements, both of which have much to say of importance but which often too give off the tantalising odour of wishful thinking.
I am as prone to nostalgia as both Thomases, and visions of past Golden Ages hold a visceral appeal for me. I can dream of those pre-industrial hawthorn lanes for hours, dream until I can physically smell them. But they’re gone, like so much else is going, and we are going to have to live with it. Nostalgia is one of life’s pleasures, but it can only, in the end, take you down a dead end.
Perhaps the answer is summed up by a third Thomas, Dylan, whose famous injunction to ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ calls angrily for a last stand even when the battle is clearly lost. That’s part of it, I think: a determination to fight for what is good and right, to fight against the encroachments of the Machine even though you know that the Machine does not die, only ever slumbers; takes blows but always rises again, because the Machine is us and part of us loves it even as it takes our world apart.
What does this mean in practice? It means, I think, respecting the past – its tools and technologies, our connection to it, the fact that it continues to live in us – without collapsing into nostalgia for it. It means understanding that nothing is coming back, that the future will be very different from then and now, but that the future will be very different from how we recently understood it to be also. Not only will we not be getting the jetpacks and moon bases I was longing for as a child, we will not be getting the pensions and secure jobs I was told to work towards as a student. The future looks more like improvising a way of life as our certainties collapse. But it also looks like holding on to whatever we can of the other-than-human world.
Anything could happen in the next hundred years. The two extremes? Well, we could devastate the Earth and collapse into chaos and mass slaughter and runaway climate change. Or we could create a global ‘sustainable’ society based on large-scale renewable tech, mass rollout of GM crops, nanotech and geoengineering – a controlled world of controlled people living in a closely monitored scientific monoculture. Brave New World with windfarms and CCTV. Which would be better? Who would deliberately aim for either? Why do both look frighteningly possible?
Faced with these poles, the middle way looks like a stumble towards the guns armed only with penknives and tin trays. But that’s where we are. What it means, I think, is that our task – mine, anyway, because I wouldn’t want to speak for anyone else – is to save as much of the wild world as can be saved, even if that means buying half an acre of English woodland and starting a coppice cycle to get the butterflies and the birds back. And it is to practice and to teach ways of being and doing that worked once, work now and will work tomorrow, when the cars look as lumbering as airships and the roads have gone from dirt to asphalt and back again.
Something Edward Thomas would still recognise today is Papaver rhoeas - the common poppy. Famously, these flowers sprung up all over the battlefields of Flanders where Thomas died. They did so because the common poppy seed can lie dormant in the soil for up to 80 years – it can be paved over, built upon or oversown, and it will wait patiently until the plough or the guns tear up the soil again and breathe life into it. The common poppy flowers when everything is turned upside down.
Be a poppy then, in the face of the Machine? It seems, to me, a good task to set myself. To wait and learn and save and sow seeds and wait for them to flower, knowing that they may not do so in my lifetime. In an age of loss, our task is surely to keep safe what we can when the Machine passes by, hungry and howling for blood. To be still and stoical and protective, to pass on truths and skills that will always be truths and skills, and never forget to remember what we are losing, every day that we live.
* Poems quoted are Edward Thomas’s Lob, First Known When Lost and March, and R. S. Thomas’s One Life
Posted by Paul Kingsnorth on 15 February, 11
Comments: 18 comments - Read them and respond
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A symptom of the world I find myself in is the ‘scanning’ or quick-reading of blogs daily. I know enough to send it on, but I worry about how fast I read and move on now. In such a hurry to often, nowhere.
On the flipside, I’ve been reading Dark Mountain vol 1 over the course of six months slowly and mindfully.
Thanks for the consistent inspiration, Dark Mountain is in fact the most hopeful space I’m finding after years in unhappy activism.
Also, thanks for the three Thomases.
This poppy seed effect, lying dormant until a ripe time, is something I remember Dougald talking about at the Really Free School recently…in relation to institutions being staffed by these poppies, ready for a shift of some sort, so they can implement their unconventional beliefs. It reminded me of Cuba, post-Soviet collapse, and how there were people on the sidelines ready to go with ideas on how to feed the population, without the fertilisers and pesticides once imported from Russia.
This talk of parallel infrastructure and counter narrative is a light in a very gloomy outlook for me. A most welcome development.
A beautiful piece of writing Paul. To put pockets of a different vision in the way of the Machine is to let go of any illusion of control over the outcome of our effort, while still making the effort regardless. It’s easy to see how that approach will be called defeatist, or hopelessly naive by some, but to me it’s to calmly and honestly recognise our limits while continuing to do something. The challenge is to live as well as we can in this tension.
We will each have to define for ourselves – as you imply – what it means to live well. A few of us have recently been discussing an interview with Derrick Jensen (can’t find the link right now). In it he talks about each of us needing to understand what we can contribute using our unique gifts and interests, and then to DO IT, rather than follow someone else’s programme or vision of what needs to be done. This rings true to me, and shines out from what you’re saying about the things you love and want to put your protective arm around.
I live in a city, where I sense echoes of wildness, and I want to focus on bringing more wildness back, grow food, like you resurrect skills I have seen my elders use and adapt them to my circumstances, and to look for opportunities to create beauty. I don’t presume that any of this will save the world, but it feels like the right thing to do, and I think we need to absolutely listen to these things that feel deeply right and put our energy into them.
I also remember Dougald talking in Laurieston Hall about hidden pockets (it was something to do with the ice age..)that may at some point reveal themselves and connect in surprising ways – a bit like the poppies. Who knows.
Hey there, good to see a reflection on Edward Thomas. Interesting to see how his reputation has risen in recent years. As you may know, his prose is well worth a look too. John Gray quotes extensively from a beautiful passage in The Icknield Way (1913) in his new book The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death. Robert MacFarlane is just finishing a book after following in the steps of Thomas’s long country walks. I guess this be very good.
Did I coin the term ‘green stoicism’? Probably not, but for a moment I imagined I had ( http://jebin08.blogspot.com/2009/09/towards-green-stoic-philosophy.html ). Elsewhere, William Irvine makes a case for ’21st century stoicism’: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/27/twenty-first-century-2.html
He’s very much the metropolitan intellectual and so perhaps not to your taste, but I quite like Adam Gopnik’s characterization of three schools of thought about advanced technology and specifically the Internet as Never-Betters, Better-Nevers and Ever-Wasers (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/02/14/110214crat_atlarge_gopnik): ‘It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.’
There’s a great line from John Berger that seems appropriate: “Poetry repairs no loss, but defies the space that separates.”
You’re right Paul, and I think your essay beautifully answers those who keep trying to categorise Dark Mountain. We cannot repair the loss, but we can defy and we can create – whether it’s poetry, art, music, a garden – without, as Daniela says, presumption.
I some times worry for us all, as we sit in the front of the kayak as she is sucked towards the raging waterfall, Maybe it is our slightly better view of the rapids that lie up ahead, maybe our ears our a little more atuned to that ominous roar, sureley my fellow paddlers can hear this deafening sound. But it seems not.And there are times that just the sheer weight of the knowledge of the river and the realization that there is no chance of a portage around these falls, that this is a particular rapid that we cannot avoid . That we might as well just keep paddling.. And there will be alot of refugees and a lot of bodies in the water.. How do we carry this weight ? How to carry this knowledge ? And of course we cannot know , what the world will become and how our earth will look in a ten years or a hundred years.But when like you Paul,i look at our earth and see what we have done and start to count up the great losses and relize that even having a cappucino in a takeaway cup adds in some way to this mess .Even making the coffee at home, there is a cost and the great bank of the earth cannot give unlimited credit..
So what to do ? How to live in this ?For it can be as living in continual grief , it breaks my heart..
I think that there our three things that we must make peace with… With the earth , with time and with mortality. maybe they are all and the one thing, and that maybe there exists just beyond our knowing a true peace with these things . I think each and everyone of us has there own way to meet this peace and that it is our most important work.I do believe and returning to my kayaking metaphor that we still need to have a firm handle on our paddles like the river fluid attentive and alive.For you cannot keep fighting the flow and the moods of a river , all the water will eventually join the sea .
These conversations can only be good for us …I am continually touched by words and feelings that are so freely given within the Dark mountain Project
I don’t know if you coined it Caspar, but I did read that blog recently and had meant to link to it when using the phrase here. An oversight, now corrected! I did agree with John Gray in his original review of our manifesto. It’s a shame he made such a hash of understanding what we were about, since we seemed to be about much the same thing. But he’s not the only one who has stumbled on our lack of ‘answers’.
Thanks for the Irvine essay: that’s fascinating, and tempts me to buy the book.
Powerful and well-written. Thank you Paul, I’ve been struggling with many of the same problems myself. I always come back to the image of weeds pushing through concrete. Life is the true unstoppable force; it’s OUR resistance to IT that is puny, ill-conceived and doomed to failure (though yes, we still need to examine and understand the deep emotional reasons behind that rebellion and perhaps deal gently with the part of us that, in spite of everything, still relates to The Machine with a pact of love).
Best of luck with the new book.
Ian
Where’s the appropriate rage ?
http://climatesight.org/2011/02/17/extinction-and-climate/
Yes – there must be a place for rage. There is much beauty that comes from expressing it. Perhaps it can be used to tap into the depths.
I feel an avenue that DM could explore would be the Duende of Lorca.
Much in the natural world is dying, but nature plays to the very end – witness the astonishing beauty of the dying forests in northern Canada or the amazing ochre colours of the oil spill in the gulf. Nature dances with it’s own death as well as burying seeds for a better time.
Lorca’s essay “Play and Theory of the Duende” has much to offer the makers of these times.
Lorca writes: “The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.”. He suggests, “everything that has black sounds in it, has duende. [i.e. emotional 'darkness'] [...] This ‘mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains’ is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched the heart of Nietzsche, who searched in vain for its external forms on the Rialto Bridge and in the music of Bizet, without knowing that the duende he was pursuing had leaped straight from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz or the beheaded, Dionysian scream of Silverio’s siguiriya.” [...] “The duende’s arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm.” [...] “All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present.” [2]
(The above passage from wikipedia but it condenses Lorca’s essay very well and links to the full text.)
That is a great, great piece of writing. Thank you. I’d been reading Thomas’s poems only recently – Adlestrop is a particularly beautiful thing.
A lot of artists and writers were similarly melancholy in the first half of the twentieth century. I’d always thought it was to do with the First War, but I think you’re right, they seemed to sense impending environmental catastrophes before anyone else.
Henry Williamson (unpleasant though he was in many ways) caught the mood, as did in a different way, Denys Watkins-Pitchford and artist/illustrators like Tunnicliffe who recorded the English countryside on the eve of its destruction.
Anyway, well done. Sanity in a world of posturing, wilful stupidity.
Paul,
“And it is to practice and to teach ways of being and doing that worked once, work now and will work tomorrow,”
I’ve read this post over an over and the words above, to me, absolutely hit the nail on the head about what could only be and should only be possible and desirable in the future.
Your comment, with reference to the sheer scale of destruction we have witnessed in the last forty years, about human beings not being “able to think on this scale”, is the same as my belief that humans have passed the point of being able to ‘act’ appropriate to the sheer scale of the complexity of our society today. All around, we have not only natural systems failing, but our human developed systems failing aswell (and it would seem at an ever accelerating rate), whether that is the global financial system, or popular uprisings in Egypt and Libya, or whether its people starving next door to factories packing French beans for export to the tables of Notting Hill.
Whether we accept it or not it seems to me that we have completely lost touch with reality in haze of activity. Being has been replaced entirely by doing. GDP is afterall only about ‘doing’.
What worked then, works now and could work in the future is, to my mind, everything the antidote to our current myths should be. It contains the healthy part of nostalgia, without the pointless act of wishful thinking. It’s been done before so in a sense it must be doable again.
This surely is the core of the counter narrative you hope to create. I think this alone could be the nugget of truth that makes Dark Mountain a truly inspiring movement. It is and should be uncompromising. It is clear and unambiguous. It requires no understanding of the complexities of our current system – the thing that I think makes otherwise well intentioned people give up seeking new ways to live (developing an Energy Descent Plan with a local Council looks to me like dancing to someone else’s tune – how can that be progress ?).
I’ve spent a few days thinking about these words, and if I look at examples of what you mean (eating food we make ourselves, walking, talking, family farming, timber framed buildings, growing in tune with nature, etc, etc) I can think of very few things that are not actually better for people and planet than the system we have today.
You say that you think Dark Mountain has reached the end of the beginning. I think that is correct because to my mind those sage words of yours to look to me like the start of the future.
Andy
Following on from my previous comment, I have been spending quite a lot of time thinking about what we might mean by:
“And it is to practice and to teach ways of being and doing that worked once, work now and will work tomorrow,”
As I mentioned in the post, I think it may be at the centre of what you are doing as a project (some may disagree), and also more importantly how we choose to respond to the unfolding crises of our time (both societal and environmental). I have been debating this with a friend of mine who has at one point been a property developer and builder. Following on from the effects of the credit crunch he now spends his time building structures (houses, etc) using timber framing techniques with only hand tools. His approach is directly in line with the approach Paul suggest. I think we both see that what you have described is not only a way to address the coming problems we are likely to face, but also a means by which human beings can recover the things that are actually the very essence of being human (and in turn being part of not above nature).
I started on a journey where what I thought were the solutions to our problems were windmills on every hill and a country full of Bed Zeds, with people commuting between them in hybrid cars. I eventually find myself with the words “what worked then, works now and will work in the future” ringing in my ears. And for so many reasons this ‘more appropriate, lower energy’ route is not a backwards step (except for the ‘robber barons’). We will clearly eventually see the fossil fuel era as simply a one-off ‘blip’. The institutions that supported it and developed from it are, too, a one-off blip. Thus we will see a move back to more appropriate food production, manufacture, governance, finance, etc.
The ‘Poppy’ anecdote is quite powerful. There is, though, only a finite time in which to retain these old skills or recover them.
Clearly Politicians form no part of the answer. The problem is too complex to justify any attempt at ‘top down’ re-design, and the vested interests too great to allow anything positive to happen anyway. The only way to see Politicians is as close ancestors of King Canute. Simply trying, but failing, to hold back the inevitable. The pace of this decline is picking up speed drastically (as is the resistance to it). It is hard to see the pace abating either. We are, however, sadly throwing a whole lot of energy at trying to hold back the tide, and (damagingly) in the process we may well comfort ourselves that as GDP continues to grow because of this vast input of wasted energy, we get further and further beyond the point of no return without taking the necessary ‘grass roots’ action to come up with alternatives.
This is why, I believe, we need to tackle what Paul is suggesting very quickly.
If we knew what worked in the past we have a good idea as to what needs to be done. Many could be wasting their time trying to invent new solutions (geo-engineering, nano technology, GM foods, etc). I see this as potentially pointless; simply extrapolating the incredibly damaging Western reductionist, science focussed approach, and will waste the precious time we have to re-discover the older methods that can work in the future.
To my mind we have to rebuild our structures from the ground up with a focus on our key needs – Food, Shelter, Community and Security. In doing this we thus change our relationship to nature in a most profound way. We replace unnecessary luxury for the wealthy few, and increasing alienation for the many, with fulfilling, productive activity, centred around these key needs.
My questions though are around how we define this concept. How we defend, and thus gain acceptance for, the approach may focus around questions such as:
How we define ‘the past’ – when ?
What level of external energy input should we assume (middle ages, early industrial revolution, pre second world war ?)
What these methods are and what population they are intended to cater for ?
This is just a very small list of the questions we need to ask ourselves. But clearly, whilst the concept is easy to understand and on the face of it so appealing, the key to its success will surely be in how you define it in detail.
I know I may be trying to specify it too rigorously; being too reductionist myself. Maybe what I am hoping is that it is something that gets much more ‘air time’ and thus the opportunity be debated more fully. If something like Transition Towns can get such a huge following so quickly, then a philosophy like this has huge potential. It gets right down to the ‘nitty gritty’ of our human existence (and relationship to the natural world), without the compromises that I think something like TT sometimes suffers from. How we build, how we eat, how we live with others, how we spend our days, where we spend our days, what knowledge we need to hold on to, what level of comfort we aspire to are incredibly powerful questions we need to ask ourselves, but also in turn powerful aspirations that I think have a good chance of motivating a huge following. I also think you could get a huge ‘snowball’ rolling before you might ever need to look at how all of this might have to fit in with our current system. TT, to my mind, addresses the question of ‘how to fit in?’ too early sometimes. The potential for this approach is that bypasses other more mainstream ‘solutions’ because it addresses so many of our inherent needs (as humans) as well as the problems we face.
I spent a bit of time thinking about the scale of the task and the size of the opportunity.
The solution, to my mind is huge numbers of small scale acts by the ‘grassroots’ to recover, develop and broadcast, the relevant ‘old methods’. Whilst, of course, retaining the best of the (relevant) learning from the fossil fuel age (medical breakthroughs, understanding of our natural history, etc).
To my mind the task is:
- to remember and record what worked in the past (and continues to in many non-western societies – although this is coming under increasing pressure)
- to re-develop those skills as broadly as possible (and remember just how good they were and made us feel)
- to create an appropriate ‘narrative’ about this re-discovery and its relevance to the future (a counter narrative to the myth of progress)
- to keep and record, the best of the appropriate advances of the fossil fuel age (medical and natural history mainly)
- to create ‘institutions’ that promote, support and develop this approach (in the same way as the Guilds and Livery Companies did in previous centuries perhaps)
- to build a new, appropriate, local scale, finance system around this approach (possibly along the lines of the Public Banks that are being proposed for the USA).
Maybe there is a role here for the University idea that Dougald has talked about on his website.
These are just my ideas. Please feel free to shoot them down. I think this is a really important debate to have. It is an area that has been given very little coverage as we grapple with ways to face up to future problems. There is much knowledge and wisdom already out there. How we collate it and make it relevant to our future is a task that must be worth poursuing. Hope this helps the debate.
Andy
Like Andy, I’ve given this post lots of thought, and find it working at me still. There’s a point at which all these questions become very personal. I take stock of my life and realize just how tied in I am to so many things I deplore. I’ve read that the convenience and personal expansion we get from the petroleum age is the equivelant of owning 30 slaves. That’s alot to ask of Earth, today’s meta-slave. Coming to grips with my own complicity, confronting it, seems a critical step in the DM journey.
I think you’ve laid things out pretty well, Andy. We not only need new (old?) ways of doing, but new/old centers of wisdom to guide that doing. Craft guilds, pushed aside by the Machine, may well be like poppies, ready to bloom again, providing communities a new/old base of ethics and ways oflivelihood. One grounded in nature and not this childish notion of “free enterprise.”
“Saving what can be saved.” That’s the notion that I organize my energies around. Not that I or anyone can “save the world.” But we can save what can be saved. The fundemental logic is compassion. It simplifies things for me. I can’t stop the machine because it is inside me, extending out from my own fingers as I type this keyboard. How do I regain myself in the midst of such entanglements? Honesty, Compassion, basic things–and hopefully the courage to do what then becomes obvious.
Rob,
Thanks. I entirely agree with your thinking. Whilst there is no doubt a large body of similarly minded opinion these days, what I hope is that as well as debating the philosophy we can also think about, and discuss, the organising principles that might help this philosophy take root.
Would welcome many more views on this.
Cheers
And
I agree with you that philosophising is not enough, and yet I think it’s still necessary. There is alot of like-minded people these days, but what I see is the ocean of not like-minded. I think it’s safe to say the majority of people by now have a basically consumerist attitute toward Earth. And girding that consumerist mind-set is a Judeo-Christian or Islamic moral architecture that largey doesn’t even see nature.
So before we can change institutions or economies, we need to change minds, a much more difficult and mysterious undertaking. There are plenty of organizing structures at hand. What seems lacking is will and consensus.
A term that comes to mind is cultural actions. What sort of cultural actions might cast stronger light? Public fasts? Work stoppage strikes? Guerilla poetry? How do we stir the human mind to wakening?
Well said Rob – those are some worthy vessels for “raging against the dying of the light.” And rage we must – at least innerly – as a prerequiste for survival. But then in the next breath ‘the inner fire’ needs to find outward expression – or it will fester and cancer and follow the pattern of the dying of the light.
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