DOUGALD HINE

Category: Conversations

  • The Vital Compass: A Conversation With Vanessa Andreotti

    The Vital Compass: A Conversation With Vanessa Andreotti

    The second time I meet Vanessa Andreotti, we’re in the lobby of a Paris hotel. There are signs warning guests against trying to get around by taxi. It’s Saturday, 1st December, 2018 – or Act III, according to the calendar of the gilets jaunes protesters who are converging on the capital for the third weekend in a row, bringing half the city to a halt.

    We’re here for the Plurality University, a gathering of designers and thinkers and sci-fi writers brought together ‘to broaden the scope of thinkable futures’. There are distant sirens and smoke rising from the city below, and it feels like the future already arrived while we were busy looking the other way. So Vanessa and I slip away through the back streets, talking about what happens when the future fails. She’s just been back to Brazil, her home country, and she traces the lines that run from an eruption of anger that spilled out onto the streets there five years earlier to the election of Jair Bolsonaro. How much of today’s politics, around the world, is shaped by the dawning recognition that the ship of modernity – sailing under the flags of development and progress – is going down?

    ‘A lot depends,’ she says, ‘on whether people feel that the promises were broken, or whether they see that these were false promises all along.’

    The first step is an admission that something has gone badly wrong. This is the advantage that Trump had over Clinton, or the Brexiteers over the Remainers: whatever pile of lies they served it up with, they were able to admit that the ship is in trouble, while their opponents went on insisting that we were sailing towards the promised destination. In Brazil, the promise was that everyone could have the lifestyle of a new global middle class – and when this future failed to materialise, Bolsonaro was able to ride the anger of voters by claiming that it could have been theirs, if it hadn’t been for the corruption of his opponents. If the promises were broken, then we look for who to blame and how to take revenge. A lot depends, then, on the recognition that the promises could never have been kept; that they were not only unrealistic, but harmful. For only with this recognition is there a chance of working out what remains, what might be done, starting from the wreckage in which we find ourselves.

    For more than ten years, I have been seeking out conversations about what remains, looking for people with whom to think about the wrecked promises of modernity, ways of naming our situation and making it possible to talk together about it. The most illuminating of these encounters have been with people whose thinking was formed by finding themselves and their communities on the hard end of the processes of modernisation. As Gustavo Esteva and I discussed in Dark Mountain: Issue 4, there is a sense that the West is belatedly coming to know the shadows of development and progress, shadows all-too-familiar to those unto whom development was done.

    Vanessa Andreotti’s work deals with these shadows. Her institutional position at the University of British Columbia overlaps with her work as part of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, a collaboration between academics, artists and indigenous scholars and communities. Six months on from that day in Paris, we record a conversation, and as I listen back to the recording, I’m struck by the sense that she is always speaking out of a collective, collaborative, ongoing process of thinking together. Every time we talk, there are new versions of the ‘social cartographies’, poetic maps that make it possible to have difficult conversations. The maps that emerge from Vanessa’s collaborations are boundary objects, places where we meet, where there is a chance of sitting with our discomfort, with our limits, maybe beginning to find a place within a world that is larger and stranger than that allowed for in the ways of seeing that shaped the modern world.

    DH — Looking back at the Dark Mountain Manifesto, there’s a passage towards the end where we talk about ‘redrawing the maps’, a theme I’ve found myself returning to regularly over the past decade. The drawing of maps is full of colonial echoes, so we talk about seeking the kind of maps that are ‘sketched in the dust with a stick, washed away by the next rain’. It’s this image of maps that are explicitly provisional and not pretending to the objective, detached, view-from-above quality that mapping often implies.

    That makes me think of what you call a ‘social cartography’ and the collection of maps that you’ve built up with your collaborators. Maybe a good place to start is to ask just what this way of mapping means to you?

    VA — You mentioned the colonial approaches to knowledge production, and I think we started there, with an intention to interrupt this totalising relationship with knowledge. In the work of the collective, we felt that maps – as images that could visibilise or invisibilise certain things – had the potential not to represent reality but to create metaphors. We wanted to create spaces for difficult conversations where relationships didn’t fall apart – and the cartographies have been our main tool for working through the difficulties, the hotspots, the tensions, the paradoxes and the contradictions of these conversations.

    So, for example, we have the cartography of ‘the house modernity built’ which is talking about the fundamental structure of modernity. There are two carrying walls and there is a roof that is structurally damaged, which is why the house is unstable, facing imminent collapse.

    We talk about the foundation of the house being the assumption of separability between humans and what we call ‘nature’. That separation then generates other types of separation, creating hierarchies between humans, and between humans and other species, and this is our understanding of the foundation of colonialism. In the collective, we don’t see colonialism as just the expansion of territory or the subjugation of people; we believe it starts with this foundational separability that interrupts the sense of entanglement of everything, that interrupts the sense that we are part of a metabolism that is the planet and that we belong to a much wider temporality within this metabolism. This separation takes away the intrinsic value of life within a wider whole and creates a situation where we are forced to participate in specific economies within modernity in order to produce value to ‘prove’ that we deserve to be alive.

    In the image of the house, one of the carrying walls is the carrying wall of the Enlightenment, or what we refer to as universal reason – this idea of a totalising, universalising form of rationality that wants to reduce being to knowing, that then creates a single story of progress, development and human evolution. The other carrying wall is the carrying wall of the nation state, which is often presented as a benevolent institution, but was primarily created to protect capital.

    The current roof of the house is the roof of financial shareholder capitalism, which is different from industrial capitalism. We talk about the differences between the two in terms of the possibility of tracing investments and of using the state as a means of both redistribution and some form of checks on capital.

    DH — The way the state used to act as a stabilising force within the system?

    VA — Yes, so now we have a speculative financial system where those checks and balances are eroded and where investment is at the expense of others. This investment in destruction is so normalised that even people fighting against climate change or for social justice end up not realising that by using a credit card – or by thinking about the continuity of, for example, our own pensions – we are participating in an economy that is primarily grounded on anonymity and destruction. So there is no way anybody participating in this economy can be innocent, whereas with industrial capitalism, it was much easier to trace the responsibilities: Ford as a manufacturer was embodied in Henry Ford, a person, where it was possible to say, ‘You have responsibilities in relation to society, in relation to your employees’. Today, Ford is a shareholder company and I don’t know if my pension contributions are already invested there, giving me a shareholder interest.

    I’m trying to make it simple enough, without losing the complexity of the connections between these things – because I think what these cartographies do is to connect dots in a way that works against our unconscious desires to not talk about the ways we are complicit in harm.

    DH — You said that a map like this is not claiming to represent reality, it’s offering a metaphor – and that reminded me of a thought about language that I found really helpful in one of your texts. It’s a two-fold distinction about what’s going on when we use language: one of which is an assumption that an objective description is being made, and the other is that language is always an action within the world, rather than a description of the world from above.

    VA — In this sense language mobilises realities. So instead of trying to index reality and meaning with a view to this totalising knowledge that can control reality and engineer something, what we do is see language as an entity that plays with us and we play with it. So the relationship with language becomes very different – and that’s why also, with the maps, they move and they do what they need to do and they need to change, because they are affectable by the world and by how people interact with them.

    We see that some of the maps are more stable than others because they are useful for more contexts, up to a point, but they can’t become canonical answers to universal problems. The keeping of the artificiality is really important, I think, because then it draws the attention to the process. It makes it an ongoing movement rather than an accurate description.

    DH — So going back to the cartography of the house – and the impossibility of not being tangled up with the systems that are perpetrating the destruction – that’s clearly part of what you’re trying to render visible, which makes for more difficult conversations than the ones that people often want to have. I feel like one of the reasons people shy away from those conversations is because they don’t know what to do if they let all this stuff in. It’s like a pit of despair opening before them – and so it’s easier to go off and have a conversation over here, where we’ve got some simplified version of the future and of how the world is, that allows us to talk as if we had a chance of setting things right.

    Letting go of that is both vertiginously frightening for people – it’s like looking off a cliff – and it’s also highly moralised. The terrible thing that Paul and I were accused of in the early days of Dark Mountain was ‘giving up’, and that’s about giving up on the stories of progress, giving up the teleological sense of direction and the possibility of mastery. So I’m interested in your experiences of what happens as we create and hold spaces of conversation beyond reform, beyond revolution, beyond any kind of promise of the direction of history.

    VA — I think the giving up of illusions and seeing disillusionment as a generative thing, this is what we’ve been looking at. As you said, modernity is falling and we need to create spaces for things to fall apart generatively. Partly these are the connections that need to be made through the cartographies. Partly it’s about supporting people to work through denial. In this sense, we have been talking about three denials.

    The first is the denial of violence: this house, this system that rewards us and gives us enjoyment and security, was created through violence and it is maintained by violence. So there’s an illusion of innocence and a denial of systemic violence that needs to go. Then there’s an illusion about linear progress and the possibility of continuity, this is the denial of the limits of the planet. The third denial is the denial of entanglement. We are not separated from the metabolism that is the planet, but there’s an illusion of separation – from land, from other beings, from each other, and even within ourselves, from the complexities of our own being. Once you start connecting these three illusions together, there is a falling apart. There’s also a sense that if you can’t do anything that leads to something in a teleological way, you’re not doing anything.

    This structure of modernity has created a feedback loop that starts with fears: a fear of chaos, a fear of loss, a fear of death, a fear of pain, a fear of pointlessness, worthlessness and meaninglessness that then become allocated desires for specific things. So for example, the fear of scarcity becomes a desire for accumulation. And then these desires, within the modern structures and feedback loops, become entitlements: the desire for accumulation becomes, in turn, a perceived entitlement to property or ownership.

    There are several of these feedback loops that make it very difficult for us to imagine anything otherwise or feel secure in embarking on things that could emerge, but that are unfamiliar and that don’t feed the feedback loops. At this point, we talk about the grammar of modernity, what makes things legible within modernity. Because of the reduction of being to knowing, legibility and the idea that reality can be indexed is what provides security. So from there we ask: what is the grammar that makes things legible and thus the only things that become real and ideal? If you want to put the world in a box, what is the size of this box and is it a square box? How does the world need to be, in order to be contained in this box? So we talk about illegibilities: things that are viable, but unimaginable, unthinkable within this grammar.

    DH — Possibilities that can’t be seen through these lenses.

    VA — Yes – and because we’re working with indigenous knowledge systems, or systems of being, we talk about the problems of trying to graft these systems into the same boxes we are used to. In that sense, we talk about what’s invisibilised. And there’s a need for not trying to make this visible. You need to make what’s invisible visibly absent first; otherwise, what you’re doing is just a translation into the grammar that you already have. We talk about exiled capacities, which are neurobiological states that may offer different kinds of security or stability, even without having a formalised notion of security. These could help us be together without the need to mediate our relationships in articulated knowledge. Through modernity, we relate to each other through knowledge filters, which makes sense to its grammar – but there are other possibilities for relationship, where these knowledge filters are not as important or as thick as we have been socialised into wanting.

    If we are not well in our relationship first with where we are – not just in geographical terms, but in a broader sense – there’s no chance we’re going to be able to have healthy one-on-one relationships. We need to be there and then through the unknowability – because there is not a knowing place, it’s a being place – through the unknowability of this being there is where you can connect with other people. So first, you relate through a vital compass, a compass of vitality. Then you have a more intellectual compass that works with it, but is not more important.

    DH — That image of a compass of vitality, it makes me think of Ivan Illich talking about conviviality and placing that emphasis on certain ways of being together, coming alive together.

    VA — That’s definitely part of it, but this vitality is not just human. It’s through the perception of vitality in everything, the unknowable vitality, that we sense our entanglement with the world.

    Suely Rolnik also talks about the vital compass, about how we are being fertilised by the world in unmediated ways, all the time; some gestations come to term, others do not. She talks about the fact that our vital compass is not being given space or developed, so we are having a lot of abortions of possibilities. This is because we want the moral compass to be the only mediator of reality, and this compass is broken.

    DH — Wow, what a powerful set of images.

    VA — I know! The abortion of possibilities really struck me… I suppose it’s true because if you are afraid of engaging with the world in an unmediated way, you’re not going to allow most gestations to come to term. You want to have autonomy and control over the life that you perceive to be only yours.

    DH — There’s a conversation I’ve had with various people about steering by a sense of what you come alive to – and learning to trust, to pay attention to this subtle sense of vitality. If something is dying a little, notice that, and don’t allow anything to be so important that it overrides that awareness and the message it is bringing, the message that something is wrong. To me, this image of the vital compass speaks to that set of conversations and experiences.

    VA — Suely Rolnik also has ten propositions to decolonise the unconscious. We have translated them from Portuguese in one of the collective’s publications. There are five in our version – and I think this little death you are talking about is there in those propositions.

    DH — That mention of the unconscious brings me to something else I wanted to ask you about. I’ve noticed you talk about your work as a collective in terms of a form of ‘non-Western psychoanalysis’. That struck me as a very curious phrase and I’m interested to hear more about that as a framing of what you’re up to.

    VA — Western psychoanalysis draws attention to the unconscious, to the desires and yearnings that drive our decisions and the ways we think. However, the ontology behind it is either anthropocentric or anthropomorphic. It’s all about bodies or archetypes. It’s useful, but it doesn’t really offer any way to manifest entanglement.

    The idea, for example, that the land dreams through us is not contemplated by Western psychoanalysis – but it is contemplated by other cultures, including indigenous cultures that use psychotropics, for example, where an encounter with a being in a plant will give you dreams that you wouldn’t have otherwise. These dreams help you work through practical knowledge, knowledge of the psyche and knowledge of the divine, and there are neurological, neurobiological and neurochemical changes too. That is how it becomes neurofunctional.

    If these practices are part of your lived reality, you’re talking not just about a chemistry of the brain or its biology, but its functionality: how you start to rely on these dreams, not as a different reality for an escape, but as an extension of the same reality. So we’re coming from learning about practices that do not see the body as the end, the human body – or even the human mythical frame – as the basis of existence…

    DH — As the place where the thing that psychoanalytic tradition is dealing with comes to an end, the limit of the reality it can speak of. I see that.

    VA — Let’s take the land as a living entity – not as a concept, but as a manifestation, because there’s a difference. A manifestation that is more powerful than just human cognition, but where humans are also part of this manifestation. If we flip that, what possibilities for being and knowing and doing and yearning are opened up? We talk about a metabolic intelligence, we’re thinking about a metabolism not only of the Earth but also of what the Earth is embedded in. In this sense, the land is not a resource or an anthropomorphic extension of ourselves, but we are an extension of the land itself.

    If you turn everything to an organic metaphor, we can talk about a metabolism that we’re part of, a metabolism that is sick or that has a big constipation – a lot of shit for us to deal with! Personal shit, collective shit, historical shit, systemic shit. It needs to pass, it needs to be composted, we need to be attentive to it. This shit involves the systemic violence, the complexities of different forms of oppression, the unsustainability of what gives us enjoyment and security, and the illusion of separation. So the denials are probably the cause of the constipation.

    We also talk about a ‘bio-internet’ and accessing a new operating system with new ‘apps’ or un-numbing and re-activating capacities that the house has exiled. In that sense, the engagement with indigenous practices is not about coding these practices as an alternative to modernity or as a supplement to modernity. Rather, it relates to (re)learning or (re)creating habits that can help us to figure out if we can interrupt the feedback loops (of fears, desires and perceived entitlements) of the house of modernity in order to open up possibilities that are currently unintelligible and unimaginable.

    DH — That thought about the possibility of new possibilities brings me back to a phrase of yours that has stuck with me. You talk about ‘hospicing modernity and assisting with the birth of something new, undefined and potentially, but not necessarily, wiser’. After we first met, I was teaching on the first course at a school called HOME, and those words of yours became a touchstone for that week. Afterwards, a guy who was there wrote an article for VICE and hung his whole piece on those words – except that, firstly, he managed to write you out of the story and just ascribe the words to me, and then he left out the second half, the part about the birth of something new.

    What I find striking is that this language of ‘hospicing’ gets used quite a lot in some of the places and conversations that cross paths with Dark Mountain. However, the other half, the assisting with the birth of something new, is often missing in those conversations. Part of that comes, I suspect, from an inability to see much space in between the end of modernity and the end of everything.

    I guess that’s what Paul and I were trying to name in the Manifesto, when we wrote that ‘The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop.’ Then, a couple of years later, in a conversation with David Abram for our second book, I stumbled on a further iteration of that thought: ‘the end of the world as we know it is also the end of a way of knowing the world.’ That feels to me like somewhere you’ve been spending a lot of time, finding language for that.

    VA — I think it goes back to the grammar and the feedback loops, too. So there is this desire for certainty, predictability and totalisation, right? You need to know where you’re going, even if it’s extinction! It gives you some security. So how do we open up and interrupt these desires in ways that allow us to take an integrative step into the metabolism, allowing the metabolism itself to show us the way through the vital compass that then recalibrates our intellectual compass.

    It’s very interesting that everywhere I speak about hospicing, there’s always a very strong normative desire for humans to create the new reality. It’s this archetype of agency that is extremely ingrained: the idea that we can create something, and then the lack of faith in humanity to create it, which then plays into this sense of resignation. People say ‘Well, I don’t believe we can do it’, and that’s it.

    What we are trying to get at is that the death we are talking about is an interruption of the totalisation. If it is about a move of integration, a move towards entanglement, towards the metabolism itself, then it’s the metabolism that does the dreaming and the creation. That’s why we don’t say ‘creating’ something new, we say ‘assisting with the birth’ of something new. We are assistants to it, we are not the ones doing it.

    DH — So it’s a humbler role that we might be arriving into, if we’re lucky?

    VA — Absolutely. And it’s very different from this bravado thing about saving the Earth or saving humanity or even saving ourselves or our families, prepping for the end of the world. Existentially, it’s a very different starting point. It’s not even about letting go of the ego, it’s shifting existential direction rather than focusing on form: that’s why we don’t use the word ‘transformation’.

    We are interested in the shift of direction from the neurobiological wiring of separability that has sustained the house of modernity to the neurofunctional manifestation of a form of responsibility ‘before will’, towards integrative entanglement with everything: ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’. This form of responsibility is driven by the vital compass. It is not an intellectual choice nor is it dependent on convenience, conviction, virtue posturing, martyrdom or sacrifice. You can see this responsibility at work in practices of indigenous and Afro-descendent communities that collaborate with the collective.(1) We have been working on the question of how to invite the interruption of the three denials and the composting of our collective and individual ‘shit’ in non-coercive, experiential ways.(2)

    Notes

    (1) See bit.do/billcalhoun and bit.do/webofcures

    (2) See bit.do/decolonialfuturesimpact

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 16 – REFUGE, a special edition to mark the tenth anniversary of the Dark Mountain Project.

  • Extending the Glide: A Conversation with Jem Bendell

    I first met Professor Jem Bendell at a festival in the middle of a Swedish forest. This was back around the beginning of the 2010s, and he wasn’t a professor in those days, and to be honest we didn’t find that much in common.

    The festival was called Future Perfect. The organisers had brought together sustainability thinkers, ecologically-minded designers, organic food entrepreneurs and a whole smorgasbord of buzzwords. At several points, I was provoked into forceful interventions, which led to the invention of the role of ‘difficultator’ – a kind of anti-facilitator or heckler-in-residence – in which capacity they invited me back the following year.

    My impression of Jem from that event was of a big NGO, sustainable development, Corporate Social Responsibility guy. He was living in Geneva, working as a consultant to the UN. He’d done things: the Marine Stewardship Council was one of his projects, and he’d been in at the beginning of the UN Global Compact. He was all about getting big business to drive sustainability. He struck me as driven, ambitious, serious, but I didn’t get much sense of someone wrestling with the existential implications of the mess in which we find ourselves. And fair play, he was too busy for that.

    So it came as a surprise when we crossed paths again last year and he told me that Dark Mountain had been much on his mind. I’d been aware of the ripples made by a keynote that he had given at a climate change conference in Australia, setting out an agenda for what he calls Deep Adaptation, based around the three ‘R’s of Resilience, Relinquishment and Restoration. It’s been picked up in places like the Planet B festival in Peterborough last summer and a forthcoming season of events at the NewBridge Project in Newcastle – while Charlotte Du Cann wrote about it in the call for submissions for the next Dark Mountain book.

    When I caught up with Jem over Skype a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’d been struck by how far he had travelled since our first meeting, so I was curious to know what had set him on that journey.

    JB: I gave my inaugural professorial talk in March 2014 at a big literary festival in Cumbria. I’d already become aware of some of the latest science on climate change, so I decided to frame sustainability as an adventure – to say that we have to let go of our incremental, non-ambitious, conformist approaches. I gave a speech about that, because it was a frame that could be palatable to my colleagues, my employer, my academia and my audience. But I was coming down with the flu during the speech. And for the week after, I was in bed ill.

    There’s something emotional about a conclusion – that’s what you do in an inaugural lecture, you try and synthesise twenty years of your work, and by summarising, you’re also concluding it. So I spent that week in bed, with a fever, not doing much apart from reading scientific papers and watching traumatising videos from the Arctic. And I actually went into despair.

    It took years before I became more deliberate and public about this, and in a way it’s taken me until now to realise that I’ve been going through a professional catharsis which goes back to March 2014.

    DH: I read a piece that you wrote for openDemocracy later that year, arguing that the mainstream debate around climate change had become detached from the facts that were now coming in from the science. You highlight four different conversations going on around the edges which you say have more to do with the reality of where we find ourselves, one of which is a conversation you identify with the radical end of Transition Towns, the work of people like Charles Eisenstein, as well as with Dark Mountain.

    JB: The reason I wrote that article was that after the experience I’d had that year, I couldn’t help but have conversations with friends about this topic, and I found that I just left people sort of staring into space with their jaws wide open. So I wanted to give them something that would help them think things through, and then they could end up with whichever of those agendas that I mapped out in the piece – and working on any of those agendas would be better than the mainstream denial of how things are.

    DH: That brings me to the speech where you presented what you call the Deep Adaptation agenda. Can you say a bit about how you arrived at that framing?

    JB: Looking back over the last few years, I didn’t really know what to do about this realisation that we can’t fix climate change, that so much of the impact for our civilisation is already locked in. I didn’t know how to work on that. And I realised that one of the reasons was the lack of a framework to get your head around all this. So I thought it might be useful to come up with a map for people who are climate experts, policymakers, researchers about what this might mean. A map that would sound approachable, but would actually be the thin end of a wedge, in terms of where it would take them.

    This coincided with an invitation to a place in Australia where I used to work, Griffith University. It was the tenth anniversary of their centre and they invited me to give the keynote. They are at the centre of the climate change adaptation network of Australia, so they had hundreds of climate change policymakers coming from across the country, and researchers and academics. And I couldn’t justify flying down there and just giving a speech about, you know, the latest great ideas about investment in solar, and so on.

    I was a bit scared, because I knew the guy who was organising the conference and I knew he’d want me to be dynamic. Everyone who’s organising a conference wants to be upbeat – and suddenly the keynote person is going to give a speech about the end of the world, or that’s how it might come across, anyway.

    It was a bit of a coming out. Standing in front of these climate experts who work with this all day and saying: well, this is my reality, this is what I’m struggling with, and this is a map that I have that I think we could use to work on it.

    I called it Deep Adaptation. I introduced the three ‘R’s: Resilience, Relinquishment and Restoration.

    DH: So this is where you’re trying to say, OK, what kind of stuff is worth working on, if you start from climate change as an unfolding tragedy, rather than as a problem that can be fixed and made to go away. Can you just elaborate on what falls within each of those three spheres?

    JB: Sure, well the first one – Resilience – I chose because it’s so mainstream already in the adaptation field. Even in the business schools and the sustainability field, the term resilience had become popular. Because businesses have been experiencing, through their supply chains in particular, disturbances and disruptions through weather events correlated with climate change. But I talked about resilience in a deeper sense than just, ‘How do we diversify our suppliers so that if one gets knocked out by a hurricane, we’ve still got something else?’ So for example, I was talking in a hall which was next to the Brisbane River, which had had flood water lapping at its doors just a year previously – and I pointed out that the place had been refurbished with the electric sockets still near the ground. We need to think again, to switch our mind-sets. These once-in-a-century events will be happening every five years, so resilience needs to wake up to that.

    That brings you into Relinquishment which is about not just, how do we preserve what we want to preserve, but what do we need to let go of? Because if we don’t let go of it, we’ll make matters worse. And I felt that the discourse of sustainability would have seen that previously as peculiar and defeatist – and I wanted to say that, we’re going to have to let a whole lot of things go, ways of life, cultural patterns. You know, in that room we were all wearing suits with ironed shirts and ties, with blasting air con. There are patterns of behaviour which we have to let go of – and I thought, give it a fancy name and you recode it as something interesting, rather than defeatist.

    Then the third one, Restoration – again, it exists already, with people talking about the restorative dimension of environmentalism, restoring ecosystems. Not just stopping the damage, but improving things. But for me, I wasn’t saying that in terms of how we can fix everything, but that you rewild because it is going to happen anyway and you build that into your thinking. But it’s also about restoration in terms of how did people have joy, fun and love, and wonder, celebration and meaning, prior to this hydrocarbon civilisation?

    So Resilience is ‘how do we keep what we really want to keep?’, Relinquishment is ‘what do we need to let go of?’ and Restoration is ‘what can we bring back to help us through this?’

    DH: So you said you were nervous in the run-up to that speech. What kind of reaction did you get?

    JB: I was surprised and delighted at the warm round of applause and the things people were saying to me afterwards. I remember one lady came up to me and said she used to be a pilot in the Outback of Australia and in her training, they used to do quite a spooky exercise which was called ‘extend the glide’. And it’s about, if the aircraft has a problem with the engines and they cut out, how do you then extend the glide to just give yourself more time to find yourself a safer place for the crash landing, but also on the off-chance that the engines might kick in again. And she said, that’s what you’re inviting us to start working on: how do we extend the glide?

    There were other people coming up to me and what I understood was that they had already been talking about these things in their own ways, making sense of it, but not really in their day-jobs, despite being paid to be environmental professionals.

    DH: How has this changed the work you’re doing – that experience of despair and catharsis that you described, going back to 2014, and then creating a framework for those who want to work with this professionally – where has that taken you in the years since?

    JB: Well, in 2017 it took me into politics, writing speeches for Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, because it seems to me that we need a cultural shift towards compassion and a spiritual awakening, an awakening from the delusion of materialism. We don’t see much of that in politics, but Corbyn was saying something similar in a secular way.

    Meanwhile, I decided to approach education in a very different way, as a sort of emancipation from your received assumptions and received wisdom, as a preparation for people to be able to approach these very disturbing and troubling times. But also to see it as an amazing – it’s kind of crazy to say, isn’t it – an amazing opportunity for reflection into the true meaning of being alive. Because climate change is holding up a severe mirror to our consciousness: it means we have to really ask why we are here. Because somehow, we delay that question, and now we can’t.

    So on the one hand, I see that I’ve been doing quite a lot of stuff that I’m OK with that flows from that point in 2014, but I also realise that part of this has been getting busy in order to distract myself, because I didn’t have a good way of living with this knowledge. My sense of self-worth as a good guy, working hard, becoming an expert, becoming a professor – along the way, I made sacrifices in order to achieve that, and then suddenly I had a loss of a sense of self-worth, my role, my identity in life. So I think quite a bit of what I’ve been doing over the past years has been reconstituting a sense of self.

    So thank you for inviting me to talk about this, because it made me reflect in the last few days, and I realise that maybe it’s useful to share this. Because this cathartic process that I went through, some of it conscious and some of it actually only making sense to me looking back, is perhaps something that other people will go through and need to go through. And maybe it’s something we can go through together and help each other.

    I guess I’ve gone through a grieving process and now I realise that it was pretty damn obvious that I will die, everyone I know will die, any community or culture I could ever contribute to will die out, this human species will die out, and the Earth and everything on it will die – well, that’s just obvious, we all knew that, anyway.

    DH: Yes, all of those things were true before the great hydrocarbon episode in humanity’s history. Arriving at that is an important part of the journey of making sense of what it means to be alive right now.

    JB: I feel free of some forms of delusion, some forms of social pressure, and I am approaching things with fascination and playfulness. And what I didn’t have over the past few years were fellow travellers and community, and now I’m realising that I do need a community around this very realisation that we’ve been talking about. And what will emerge from that, I don’t know, but there will be love within it, there will be creativity within it, there will be a sense of wonder at being alive at this incredibly strange moment in human history.

    This conversation with Jem Bendell was published on Dark Mountain’s Online Edition in March 2019, four months prior to the publication of the Deep Adaptation paper.

  • Believing in Holidays: A Conversation with Elizabeth Slade

    Believing in Holidays: A Conversation with Elizabeth Slade

    An extract from ‘The God-Shaped Hole’ by Elizabeth Slade

    We sit on cushions in a circle, about 25 of us surrounding one lit candle. Each of us is invited to place a personal object in the middle. Some put jewellery, a hat, a piece of quartz. I stay still, very conscious of being in a minority: not wearing yoga pants, not barefoot, no piercings or tattoos. I’m wearing a top from Whistles, for fuck’s sake.

    I feel the stiffening in my shoulders as a wave of discomfort passes over me. My cheeks flush with embarrassment – what would the me of just a few years ago have made of this situation?

    Now, I’m able to notice the discomfort, let it go (mostly), or just be OK with noticing it. I know that through the discomfort the good stuff lies. I notice my desire to stay in a safe, practical, intellectual, rigid, mask-wearing state, and I gently try to put these elements down.

    The work involves sharing meaningful personal stories with each other. Gazing into the eyes of strangers. Exploring political issues that we care deeply about and retelling them from different personal angles. We’re firmly in the emotional and out of the intellectual.

    This is London, days after the Grenfell Tower fire. Everyone has a lot of pain.

    And when the workshop is over, back in the circle around the candle and altar of objects, we all feel connected. It’s like our hearts are bigger than they were at the start. There is an undeniable connection between all people, all life. Afterwards, it occurs to me that this is the third role of the sacred: between the sky of possibility and the ground of being held, to encourage the felt knowledge of connection.

    When big events come, a hunger for connection breaks the surface of our current way of living. I remember the 7/7 bombings in London back in 2005, long before I had any interest in the sacred. That sunny day, after news of what happened spread, everyone left work early to slowly make their way home and it was inarguably apparent that we’d all go to the pub. I look at something I wrote back then: ‘In earlier days (or in America), people would have gathered their families together and prayed. In London, we got our mates together and drank.’ It was a kind of communion, I guess.

    Last November, on the day we learnt that Donald Trump was going to be president, my minister opened the church for the evening. About fifteen of us sat in candlelight and shared how we felt, and a violinist played exactly the right music, and we wept. Brits, Americans, people in their twenties and their eighties, all feeling the need to be together.

    On days like that, people recognise the need to be close to others, to gather together while they’re hurting or scared, for their emotions to be held in the right way, whether oiled by beer, or by candlelight and violin and the work of an experienced minister. It feels like a very basic human thing, so I assume we had the words for it long before the language of church.

    A conversation

    DH – What you’re saying in the piece is that, until the last fifty or sixty years, in our part of the world, it was very normal that lots of people were part of a local church. That was part of the fabric of society, and it went away pretty quickly. And maybe we haven’t got the measure of some of what was lost, things that aren’t necessarily to do with your big cosmic beliefs about the Universe, but about some basic human needs. You draw on your own experiences with new kinds of non-religious gathering spaces like Sunday Assembly, as well as your local Unitarian church, where the minister is an atheist who used to be a scientist at MIT – but you’re also looking at it from the perspective of the work you’ve done with public health?

    ES – Absolutely. So some of the work that I’ve done has been around the limitations of the health care system. You know, if you’ve broken a leg or something, it’s really well geared-up to treat you. But doctors have known for a long time that so much of what makes us healthy happens outside of biomedical health. It’s more to do with how we live – and that’s so much more than just, take more exercise, stop smoking, don’t eat as many doughnuts! We can live in ways that create health and that has a lot to do with how we live in our communities and the sense of purpose that we have in our lives. All those things that are not well provided for either by the state or the market. And right now, we can’t see what we’re missing, because there’s been this sort of generational gap there. There’s not a lot of common language to talk about these aspects of our lives.

    DH – You’ve been thinking about the role of serving a community that might have been played once upon a time by somebody who wore a strange collar and stood up in front of a building full of people on a Sunday morning. And it’s not necessarily a desire to herd everybody back into churches that you’re talking about, but a sense that there is a role there that we need in other ways and haven’t necessarily got good at recovering?

    ES – Yeah, definitely. And the language does get in the way and I’m really conscious that I use a lot of church-based language which to a lot of people is either alien or meaningless. But yes, there is a kind of role of ministry. I don’t think there’s an appetite in our culture to have someone who stands up in front and has all the answers – I think there’s something a bit repulsive about that idea – but we can be equipped to support each other, to be each other’s ministers and spiritual guides and help each other through life. And people are doing that, but it’s not yet a role that’s really valued in our culture. It’s not really something that’s seen. So you know, back when I went into the church for the first time, I didn’t feel: oh, I really need some kind of counsel from a minister. I didn’t really know what it was I wanted, I just had a sense of a gap, but it feels like it would be a hugely valuable thing if it was like, oh, I need a bit of guidance – I need to go and speak to someone who is in one of these community leadership roles with certain skills and knowledge. It would be good if we had some understanding, some way of talking about this, as a culture.

    DH – It strikes me there are skills that in other times and places would have been regarded as something that you spent twenty years of your life learning how to do, before you were let loose as somebody could practice, where now we think you can go on a few weekend courses and get a certificate that allows you to sell your services – and that’s true whether we’re talking about some of the things that go under the name of ‘hosting’ and ‘facilitation’ these days, or whether we talk about some of the more New Age spiritual services that are on offer. So I wonder, without simply copying and pasting from the way things have been done in the past or in other cultures, how do we home in on a less flimsy way of dealing with these parts of being human?

    ES – Thinking about the health care example, there’s been a lot of discussion in the last few years, reminding nurses and doctors alike, ‘Oh, we should be caring and compassionate.’ And you know a lot of people go into those roles because they are caring and compassionate – but actually, if the culture of the organisation loses its way and focuses on the hard clinical outcomes and the costs and all of that stuff and forgets ‘Oh, we’re here to be caring and compassionate’, then you have to remind people to do it. And so, in this sort of new, post-church spiritual world, there’s a sense of there not being much of an appetite for dogma. You don’t really want to say, ‘Oh yes, we all believe this, we all believe the same thing and these are the rules.’ But there is a danger of exploitation, people using powerful tools and techniques from the world of the sacred for their own gain, or just using them clumsily.

    DH – We’ve been talking about how removed our culture has become from the experience of what you’re saying the church, at its best, used to provide. But there’s also a rediscovery going on in lots of places of what you might call the technology of the sacred – ritual, the mountaintop experience, the things that take you to those wild beautiful moments of meaning – which is often drawing on knowledge and practice that has existed within religious or spiritual cultural traditions. Maybe it’s tempting for us, as these things are being rediscovered, to focus on these ecstatic experiences?

    ES – Yeah and you can see why, because it feels like that’s where the action’s happening. It’s exciting to be part of a ritual where you enter a different world for a little while and you know that the people around you are also entering that different world, that different mind-set, for a little while. And all of that stuff is hugely valuable – and still I think it’s a very tiny slice of the whole picture and actually the value is much more in the slow, gentle, day-to-day engagement with the sacred. Which can’t be these euphoric experiences, you know. You can’t have Christmas every day.

    DH – You can’t live on a mountaintop. You go there to spend four days in retreat and have a powerful experience, but you still come back, hopefully to somewhere more sheltered.

    ES – If the thing that you’re looking for is the euphoric experience and you’re looking to find it in a way that fits your everyday life in a sustainable way, I don’t believe that’s possible. So it’s more about accepting the slow and gentle, day-to-day, and having the things in your life that make that sustainable. Rather than just like, oh, if I can just get through to Christmas, then I can get through all of this difficult stuff that I know I’ve got on, but you know, just around the next corner, I’ll be OK. A lot of our culture at the moment is – oh, get through to your next holiday, get through to the weekend. You know, wait till you get home and you can have a glass of wine. And yeah, I guess I was totally in that pattern of living, pre-church, and I’m not entirely not within that pattern of living now, I guess! But I totally see that those bits of cultural infrastructure that you can bring into your day-to-day, just help us cope with this brilliance of being human so much better. Because it feels like we’re missing a lot of the sort of struts and supports that would really help us, I guess, stay level.

    DH – Where I’m sitting, it’s also about coping with – or just not cutting ourselves off from – some of the darkness of what it means to be living at this moment. Living with the paradox that our ways of life are tangled up with processes that we’ve set in motion that are making it hard to imagine that we’ll be able to go on living like this – you know, it’s hard to imagine that this is going to be made sustainable. And at the same time, as you describe it, there’s a lot within even the privileged, successful version of that way of life which is not worthy of being sustained. Because living for the weekend, living for the next holiday, that doesn’t seem much like making a good job of being a culture.

    ES – Exactly, it’s just deferring, isn’t it? It’s like, we don’t believe in heaven anymore, but we do believe in holidays.

    Published on Dark Mountain’s Online Edition to accompany the release of SANCTUM, a special issue on ‘the sacred’.

  • We Are the Only Species We Have the Option of Being: A Conversation With Anne Tagonist

    We Are the Only Species We Have the Option of Being: A Conversation With Anne Tagonist

    A couple of weeks before COP21, I did an interview with an American radio station. They set me up against another guest, a professor at Yale who specialises in the psychology of climate communication. I don’t know what my credentials were meant to be, on this occasion, except that the producer said, ‘I spend a lot of time interviewing people about climate change and the things you say are the things the others only say after I’ve switched off the mic.’

    The ISDN line from the broom cupboard in Stockholm where I was sitting to their studio in Chicago kept dropping out, so I only heard half of what the guy they wanted me to argue with was saying. What stuck with me was a question that came from the host. I had been talking about the lifestyles that most of us take for granted, just now, in countries like these. I said, ‘I don’t believe these lifestyles are going to be made sustainable.’ The next time the host came to me, he asked, ‘So, in this future you’re talking about, how many humans are left at the end of the century? Are we talking a hundred thousand, a million?’

    The question threw me, I didn’t know how we had got here, but afterwards, as I went over the interview again, the best explanation seemed to be that he had taken my suggestion that the lifestyle of the western middle classes is going away and equated this to the elimination of 99.99% of the human species.

    For ten years or so now, I have been lurking around a few of the ‘collapse’ blogs, the corners of the internet where people think out loud about the end of the world as we know it. There are sites whose authors are loudly certain that this means imminent human extinction, but the ones to which I find myself returning are written by people who are trying to think around the edges of the world we have known, to catch sight of the unknown worlds that may lie around the corner. It is easy to imagine the apocalypse – easier than to sustain the belief that things can go on like this – but what is hard is to recognise the space between the two, the messy middle ground in which we are likely to find ourselves. At its best, like certain kinds of science fiction, the writing of the collapse bloggers provides a work-out for the historical imagination.

    Among these online conversations, one of the distinctive voices belongs to an American who usually writes under the name Anne Tagonist – or at her current site, More Crows Than Eagles, Anne Amnesia. Over time, I’ve been struck by the breadth of her frame of reference, but also by her willingness to puzzle through a question, sharing her uncertainties. Lately, I had noticed her picking up on posts from Tom James and Charlotte Du Cann on the Dark Mountain blog, so I got in touch to propose an interview. Thinking back over the decade since I stumbled across the collapse blog scene, and knowing that Anne has been around it longer, I started by wondering what shifts she had noticed – though, as she pointed out, the timeframe we are talking about is rather a short one.

    DH: I’m curious how you found your way to this corner of the internet in the first place – and how you’ve seen it change, between then and now.

    AA: I wanted to start by saying something like, ‘Growing up, I would reread Walter Miller’s Canticle for Liebowitz every autumn,’ or some such deep explanation. But anxiety about the long-term stability of a complex and interdependent lifestyle has been part of western culture since at least Tacitus. Have you read the Germania? It’s pretty clear that Tacitus was the late Roman Jim Kunstler: it’s all about what intolerant hard-asses the Germans are, completely unlike the effete and decadent Romans, and how this makes them a much more honourable people. It seems to me to be a document of a sort of self-doubt in the heart of what was still, in 98CE, the most powerful empire on the planet, worrying that too much ‘civilisation’ had sapped Roman vitality and – it’s clearly gendered in the text – manliness.

    I should note that by the time the Vandals sacked Rome three hundred years later, they had become an intercontinental trade empire with bigger cities than Tacitus had even seen, so it’s up to interpretation whether he was ‘proven right’.

    Anyway, the point is, people have worried that they were getting ‘too civilised’ and were risking some sort of collapse, if the interdependence implicit in cosmopolitan society were disrupted, for a very long time. Tracking my own interest is really only the story of my own life, which is why Walter Miller isn’t a bad place to start. Worth noting, though, is that I also grew up with a ‘nuclear air-raid drill’ every Wednesday at noon in my hometown. It wasn’t the much-mocked duck-and-cover, just a test to make sure the siren still worked, but the reminder of an existential threat was just as piercing as it would have been in the sixties. The library stocked civil defence pamphlets, if you wanted to know how to make a hand-powered ventilator for your underground shelter that would screen out all but the smallest fallout particles. It was just something that you learned to accept.

    Canticle is a three-part story, set at different stages of future history after a nuclear war. Unlike most of the global disaster science fiction, it was less about conflict between the ‘good’ survivors and the ‘bad’ and more about how to restore a sense of dignity and meaning to a human race that now live undignified, hard-scrabble, starvation-plagued, miserable lives, and, worse, has brought this condition on itself through hubris and self-destruction. It’s a very Catholic book, obviously: how do you exalt the fallen?

    I think that’s still the contradiction that runs through my own writing: we are prone to horrible rages and self-destruction, and yet we are still beautiful and imaginative and worth loving. We have fucked up pretty much every part of our ecosystem worth up-fucking, and yet we are the only species we have the option of being. We are both fragile and indestructible, stupid and self-sacrificing, fear-shot and able to party in the ruins of any catastrophe. What do you even do about that?

    I was a zine writer and a traveller, and somebody swapped me a copy of Evil Twin’s Not For Rent just before the US got its first road occupation, in Minnehaha, Minneapolis. So of course I had to go. It was back just before the WTO protests in Seattle, and John Zerzan and Live Wild or Diewere the big deal on the radical-eco scene, so that was the world I lived in. The Y2K bug pushed a lot of people to imagine what would happen without computers, and living as we did in an extremely improvisational and DIY sort of way, it was hard to see that kind of collapse as a bad thing, especially because it would probably bring an end to the paving and deforestation that we were fighting. I developed this sort of double-vision where I would see things as they ‘were’ and superimposed I would see them as they would be after a century of abandonment and neglect. I can’t explain this, it still comes over me sometimes; sometimes it’s beautiful and sometimes it’s terrifying.

    I had a tense relationship with the anti-civilisation kids because, on the one hand, I helped organise a few gatherings, while on the other hand, I thought most of them were nuts. I took a road trip with one kid who kept trying to convince me that being polite to strangers was a crippling weakness induced by civilisation, and so this person was intentionally rude, all the time. There were also a few professional gadfly types who showed up, for instance, to a collective in Texas where I was living and spent a week on the couch denouncing things. The positive ‘rewilding’ lifestyle hadn’t really come together and there was no way for people to live that felt like they weren’t betraying themselves constantly, so of course they were very grouchy all the time.

    I became fairly disenchanted with the anti-civ/collapse idea in Texas, but two things happened in rapid succession to change my outlook. First, in the July 2005 issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows wrote ‘Countdown to a Meltdown’, an article that pulled together peak oil, the housing bubble (still largely unrecognised) and a pending currency crisis that doesn’t seem to have come true. This was the most significant and official acknowledgement of the instability of ‘progress’ that I’d come across that was immediate and concrete, rather than just being a hand-wavy extension of cultural anxiety and disguised Cold War nuclear horror. It put the possibility of serious changes in the ‘American Way of Life’ back on the table.

    The second event was Hurricane Katrina. After joking sarcastically on my then blog that anti-civ kids should all go down to Katrina and see what life was like without the infrastructure of a functional community, I watched several people, friends and unknowns, go do exactly that and turn what was probably the biggest disaster in the US in my lifetime into a brilliant experiment in post-collapse living. The punk/squatter scene in New Orleans before the storm was more notable for axe fights and really bad drunkenness and suddenly, with a shared purpose, those same kids started improvising electrification schemes for storm-damaged neighbourhoods and building out community-run infrastructure. It made me rethink my cynicism about anti-civ activism. I now think that in the absence of civilisation, most people – perhaps not anti-civ activists, but that’s another story – would be helping improve the lot of strangers and would recreate the best parts of a society to the best of their ability.

    Seeing this happen mellowed me a lot to the new generation of collapse writers, at least to those who weren’t daydreaming about shooting their neighbours at the first sign of currency depreciation. I found Ran Prieur’s blog when another collective I was living in, this time in Philadelphia, was looking into growing edible algae on the roof. He had written about a book that he’d been unable to track down on microalgae, and my college library had a copy. So I read it, sent him a review, and we’ve been trading emails ever since. Having Ran and his readership to interact with made me more comfortable with writing collapse-y articles for a general audience. 

    DH: Reading this, I got a string of flashbacks. To being eight years old and finding out about nuclear weapons and wondering why all the adults seemed to be going on with their lives, acting normal, as if this wasn’t the most important and horrifying thing ever. (I wonder if kids still have that now, when they learn about the missiles in their silos, or if it was specific to the Cold War and the explicit promise of Mutually Assured Destruction?) And then to being twenty and reading about Y2K, the sensation of vertigo, that the world as we know it might just end. As I turned this possibility over in my head, wondering what to do with it, another thought came – that everything is going to end, sooner or later, anyway, from one chain of events or another. I remember this as a weirdly comforting realisation.

    The way you describe your trajectory, it sounds like you came across the anti-civilisation and collapse stuff within a whole context of zines, activism, punk, DIY culture. On this side of the Atlantic, it seemed to be less grounded, something I came across late at night on blogs written by people I’d probably never meet, or through books by Zerzan and Jensen. When Paul and I wrote the manifesto and called it Uncivilisation, we were thinking on slightly different lines – not so much ‘anti-’ some big other of civilisation, more how do we start disentangling our thoughts and hopes from all these illusions and grand narratives – but one effect was to create a meeting point where people who were trying to figure this stuff out could find each other, including getting together around festival campfires and having conversations that there didn’t seem to be room for in the activist spaces that a lot of us had been involved in.

    One thing that’s troubled me over time, and you touched on this already with Tacitus and the Germans, is how male and white and straight the perspective of most of the writing about collapse tends to be. Not that this is in any way different to the perspectives that get most of the attention on almost any other subject, but still, it distorts the way this stuff gets talked about. I remember Vinay Gupta coming to the first Dark Mountain festival, looking out at this very white audience, and saying, ‘What you people call collapse is living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.’ And I’m thinking of a post of yours about ‘Poverty, Wealth and the Future’, where you wrote, ‘Your meditation for today is this: Who would you be in a refugee camp?’ I keep coming back to that post.

    So I wonder if you could say some more about the way those distortions shape the tropes of collapse writing, and what it might mean to ground our thinking in a broader range of human experience?

    AA: Well, it’s interesting to read your question about the persistence of the nuclear threat on the same day that I learn about a ‘mishap’ with an intercontinental ballistic missile in May of 2014. I’m not sure it still has the same emotional resonance that it did in my own childhood, but we’re stuck for the foreseeable future living in a world where a dropped wrench can potentially end the planet. I’d be interested to ask young people how often they worry about this sort of thing – it’s probably important that in my childhood (and yours, it sounds like) nuclear annihilation would have been a deliberate action by a hostile agency, rather than a stupid mistake. I think we have an easier time psychologically facing down an opponent, no matter how implacable or even incomprehensible, than we do confronting random chance and tragic error.

    You’re definitely right that my own development as a ‘collapse’ writer happened socially, rather than in isolation, but I don’t know whether that’s common or not. The internet would suggest that the typical apocalypse fan came by their beliefs consuming media alone, and in fact tries to hide their ‘preparation’ from their friends and neighbours, either because they don’t want to be besieged by hungry zombies when the shit hits the fan or because they’re embarrassed to subscribe to a philosophy that treats their nearest and dearest as a zombie-level liability in need of murdering some time in the near future. Then again, isolated angry people tend to make up a disproportionately large part of any internet conversation, so I’m not sure whether this is actually a relevant metric.

    I think this gets to what you’re saying about one person’s collapse being someone else’s daily life. There’s a meme that crops up whenever there’s a major disaster anywhere in the world: American journalists report back from the scene, bewildered at the ‘resilience’ of the local population, who are struggling onward, getting out of bed and tending to things on schedule, despite the horror that has befallen them. Having seen disasters in the first and third worlds, I am most taken by the aspect of surprise. It’s as if the reporters assume that the natural response to an earthquake, or a coup, or an outbreak of a terrible disease is to run in circles fluttering your hands until you are too exhausted to continue, or worse yet to kill yourself.

    For a long time I thought this was just the idiocy of the American journo narrative, but since Superstorm Sandy, we’ve seen several crises hit not just the US, but relatively affluent parts of the US. Surprisingly I have seen people quivering before the cameras, seemingly helpless, asking, as if the amassed TV audience were able to answer, what they are supposed to do? It struck me that this is actually not a disaster response, it’s a fear response – it’s the sort of thing people do, not when their way of life has been completely overwhelmed and they have an extended to-do list just to get through the day, but when they feel that way of life is deeply and permanently at risk, and there’s (as yet) nothing they can actually do about it. When you live in a crappy corrugated iron shed, next to a thousand other crappy corrugated iron sheds, and you walk two miles each morning before dawn to pick coffee, a flood is a crisis that demands attention, and your whole mind is full of getting the kids to high ground, waiting at line for the satellite phone to call your cousin in the city, and otherwise managing your situation. Freaking out would be counterproductive and as a rational, caring human being, you don’t. When you have a mortgaged, expensive, oversized house with flood insurance and a national guard that will make sure your family won’t die, when you have a credit card to stay at any cheap hotel in the state, when your daily social status concern is whether people like your posts on Facebook, you have the luxury to freak out, even if it is pointless to do so.

    I think collapse writing, when it isn’t pathological anger, is something like a luxury freak-out. It’s about a looming fear of shame, of loss of status, loss of comfort, a return of the repressed hardships we know are entailed by our lifestyles, if not by life itself, but which we generally manage to outsource to someone else. I think this is why so many collapse narratives are moral in nature – there’s a sense that we’ve got it coming, but so far we can continue to work at our near-sinecure jobs, worry about our near-frivolous social status variations, argue about increasingly minute differences in consumption patterns (organic? paleo?) and otherwise ignore our insecurities. There’s no pile of cinderblock to be dismantled, no giant slop of mud in the cowshed, no long road to safety that we can walk, nothing, that is, to ameliorate our situation – it is as fixed and inaccessible as history itself, which is why it often seems like something that’s already happened.

    As to your question about whiteness, I’d come at it from a slightly different angle. Especially since the anti-colonial renaissance of the sixties, people from the Global South have been writing passionately of their experiences losing their social structures, their way of life, their sense of self when an aspect of the natural world, or the political superstructure, or some seemingly insignificant part of ‘the economy’ rolls over and takes a crap. Why are collapse bloggers not reading these, or at least not incorporating them into their understanding of the future? Why are the experiences of the third world not considered collapse writing? Why, when you see a reference to a kinship society torn to pieces by a land-grabbing human-enslaving culture-ignoring ‘civilisation’ storming in with guns, is it always Braveheart and not, say, Chinua Achebe? Where, in all the paranoia about Ebola a few years back, was any acknowledgement of slave trade or the ivory trade or the rubber trade or any of the long history of civilisation-ending catastrophes in that exact region?

    I would proffer two unflattering analyses. First, it is hard for western white people to identify with people of colour, especially poor people of colour, especially poor people of colour living outside what we think of as the west. That’s a disgrace and perhaps a damnation upon us, but it’s a bigger problem than the collapsosphere. Secondly, I think the stories from The Everybody Else don’t contain that vertiginous loss of status, that plunge from the precipice into the subaltern, and hence aren’t readily associated with the same frisson of hand-fluttering panic. These two analyses are connected of course – much of the social status in the world seems insignificant to the very wealthy, hence the popular reading of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind as a tale of a third-world startup entrepreneur. The idea that a family who grows corn, sells cattle, and has a market stall would be the absolute last family who should be starving seems unfamiliar to a western culture where farmers, at least farmers who did not grow up on organic box cereal in Brooklyn, are assumed to be ignorant and dangerous, so readers don’t pick up on exactly how socially fraught, even shameful, the Kamkwambas’ plight actually is.

    Exceptions worth mentioning are Delaney’s Dhalgren and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower which are both by and about black Americans. Underrated, I think, both of them, but still reasonably well incorporated into the collapse bibliography. Also, several science fiction books and articles about the third world, written by first-worlders, have achieved some celebrity. I’m thinking of Gardiner Harris’ work on sea-level rise and slavery in Bangladesh, Margaret Atwood’s backstory to the character Oryx in Oryx and Crake, Ian McDonald’s Chaga Sagaand Brasyl, Paolo Bacigalupi’s entire oeuvre. Still, these are observations and fictional projections, not first-hand experience, and they certainly shouldn’t substitute for the (existing) shelves full of analysis on social disruption written by subaltern populations themselves, so Vinay’s point stands.

    I imagine that as more people are directly affected by climate change, in the west as well as elsewhere, first-world collapse writing – at least first-person first-world collapse writing – will become more measured, realistic, and task-saturated, plaintive in its appeals to justice but competent in its approach to the immediate future; in other words, more like the last century of third-world collapse writing. Whether this displaces status-shame-panic as a genre, or whether ‘collapse’ will continue to refer only to the terrors of the shrinking pool of people who have not yet been directly impacted by changes in the world remains to be seen.

    DH: What you say about the luxury of freaking out makes me think of a conversation in the Dark Mountain Workshop here in Sweden. Two of the artists in the workshop have been studying with the same teacher, an autistic woman who had to develop her own models in order to understand the reality which people around her take for granted. These models start from the distinction between ‘the primary’, the reality of life itself, and ‘the secondary’, the reality of values, culture, a particular way of living. We need both of these, she says, but there is a danger if we treat the secondary as primary. There’s a particular ugliness, it seems to me, when we start defending our way of life as if our lives themselves were at stake. We’re seeing this in Europe, just now, as people whose lives actually are at stake – at home in Syria, on the wretched rubber dinghies crossing the Mediterranean – are greeted as a threat to our way of life, so that the Greek government is being urged by ministers from elsewhere in Europe to start sinking the boats.

    Thinking about this collapsosphere that we’ve been talking about, there’s a similar confusion that runs down the middle of it. A lot of folks who are drawn to these online conversations are certainly ‘apocalypse fans’ – people for whom ‘the end of the world as we know it’ means zombies and cannibalism and fortified compounds, who read Cormac McCarthy’s The Roadas a guide to the future. But the other side – which I guess is the reason I find myself coming back, despite the ambivalence that we’ve touched on in this discussion – is that this can sometimes be a space in which people are developing a language in which to talk about the difference between ‘the end of the world as we know it’ and ‘the end of the world, full stop’. That feels interesting, maybe even useful.

    One more question, before we wrap this up. Anyone who has followed your blogs will pick up that your work is related to medicine. The conversations around the collapsosphere are often intertwined with some kind of critique of progress – and the achievements of medicine and public health are often used as a trump card by those defending the idea of progress. So I’m curious what reflections you might have on how these things fit together?

    AA: I worked as a ‘street medic’, then on an ambulance, and then I became a medical student before shifting gears to become a researcher. The idea that medicine and public health are ‘trump cards’ for progress is only relevant if you believe that progress (or not) is a decision being made by rational people on the basis of evidence, which it isn’t. If it were, I’d choose progress which allows everyone on earth to enjoy the actual benefits of a modern western standard of living (not losing half your kids to dysentery, seawalls, language schools and construction methods that acknowledge the inevitability of fires and earthquakes), low- to zero-consumption technology, rewilding of land, informed stewardship of agricultural areas, and continued best practices in medicine and public health –and avoids wasting any resources on the bogus fake benefits (candy, cheap long distance travel, extra clothing, jet skis, Facebook). But progress doesn’t work that way. I’m not the queen of the world and don’t want to be; I’d imagine pretty much everybody on the planet could make their own lists of which developments count as progress and which don’t; and I doubt there’d ever be any consensus. Plus, when you think about what it would take to actually create and enforce ‘rational progress’, you realise it isn’t going to happen.

    That said, hell yes – you can keep your ‘man walks on moon’, I say the high point of collective human achievement is the elimination of smallpox. We’re less than five years from eradicating polio and guinea worm too.

    DH: Yes, I guess where I was going with the ‘trump card’ thing is that, if you try bringing the idea of progress into question, pretty soon you will be met with an argument along the lines of, ‘Are you saying smallpox eradication, aspirin and the reduction in infant mortality aren’t real, good and important developments?’ And it’s hard to imagine a sane standpoint from which to deny the reality, goodness or importance of these things. So it seems like a fairly unanswerable argument that progress exists as an objective historical phenomenon – even if it is a phenomenon that’s vulnerable to setbacks and reverses, not an inevitable one-way force. Against this, I’d want to say that it may be wiser to attend to the specific, to celebrate these good things for what they are – whereas once we start talking in terms of progress, however carefully, this tends to become a generalised idea under the heading of which things we would want to celebrate and things we might want to question get bundled together. This is one of the senses in which progress is not ‘a decision being made by rational people’, as you say, but an intensely-charged narrative with a particular cultural history.

    AA: Ran talks about this phenomenon – that people lack the imagination to picture a world other than one we’ve already lived through, so if you don’t like The Now, you must be arguing for some time in the past with all its warts and insufficiencies. There are two ways to approach this, I think: one is from an engineering perspective, explaining that just because we won’t have ubiquitous cheap energy at some point in the near future, or just because our current patterns of settlement are unlikely to persist, that doesn’t mean we’re going to forget everything we know about waterborne diseases. This is a difficult argument to make, though, because I am not a water treatment engineer and chances are neither is whoever I’m talking to, so it’s hard to avoid making wild and inaccurate claims about technology and technê. 

    The other approach is one that I’ve seen used to refute eugenics – imagine a future historian looking back at the early twenty-first century. Would they, in all likelihood, have any more respect for us today than we have for open-pit lead smelting and leech-doctors? Whoever comes after us will probably look at us as flawed, short-sighted and blind to the effects of our actions, just as we see our predecessors in hindsight. Their successors will view them the same way. Even if they do re-adopt older technology, or forget some aspects of ‘progress’ that are unblemished boons to humanity, they’ll still see us as morons, just as we can lament the passing of the Stick Chart or the ability to recite the Odyssey from memory, while being grateful that we don’t actually live in those worlds.

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 9.

  • The Limits to Measurement: A Conversation With Christopher Brewster

    The Limits to Measurement: A Conversation With Christopher Brewster

    These days, people talk a lot about ‘the art of hosting’, but that is only one half of the dance of hospitality: there is an art of guesting, too. I can say this with conviction, because I have been a lousy guest, in my time, and lately I’ve had the luck to live with someone who teaches me to notice the things that make a person easy to have around: the moments at which an artful guest steps forward with a gentle insistence, the moments of well-timed withdrawal. Perhaps because he is one of life’s wanderers, Christopher Brewster has mastered this art. If I picture him now, it is standing in our kitchen, chopping vegetables at speed and maintaining an unbroken conversation while preparing a lunch that will show the influence of the years he lived in Greece.

    He could be a classicist or a philosopher—either of those things seems more probable, from his manner, than that he should be a computer scientist working in a business school. In fact, as he touches on near the start of this conversation, his route into computer science came through the philosophy of language, and it was his feel for the ways of thinking embedded in digital technology that suggested the theme around which we wandered together.

    It was the spring of 2014, my first year in Västerås, a middle-sized city by a lake in central Sweden. A string of friends had invited themselves to visit, so that I had taken to telling people, ‘We’re running a residency programme in our spare room.’ It occurred to me that a residency programme should really include a public events series, so one afternoon, I wandered into the local branch of the Workers’ Learning Association and a week later sixteen of us were gathered in their foyer for the first of what became eight weeks of Västerås Conversations. Our first guest was Anthony McCann, talking about tradition, the commons and the politics of gentleness. From week to week, certain themes would loop back: hospitality; friendship; the challenge of speaking up for things that are hard to measure or adequately define.

    What follows is an unfaithful transcript of the fourth of those conversations. We have taken the opportunity to straighten out our more crooked sentences and to fill in details where memory failed us at the time. Still, what emerges from this process should be read as a sample from a larger conversation: both the relay of stories and ideas that ran over those eight weeks in Västerås and the ongoing conversation that is my friendship with Christopher. 

    It is a friendship that began at one of the handful of conferences I have been to where people seemed to be there to listen to each other; a conference whose theme was ‘the university in transition’ and the possibility of new, radical spaces of learning growing at the edges of a dysfunctional system. It seems appropriate, then, that our friendship should have become a strand in a web of convivial conversations that form a kind of ‘invisible college’ in which many of us have found nourishment over the years since. This text and the other Västerås Conversations are among the visible manifestations of that web.

    DH: If we’re going to talk about the measurable and the unmeasurable, perhaps we could start with this observation: to a computer, the world is made up of numbers, while to a human being, that is not the case. Yet the more inseparable they become from our lives, the more likely we are to fall into ways of thinking which do treat the world as made of numbers, even though this is not our experience. 

    Now, do you agree with that as a starting point?

    CB: As a starting point, yes, but the story is more complex. When I first set out on my PhD, I remember meeting a man who said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could make human language behave like a programming language—if we could reach that level of precision?’ And my response is that this would be a complete loss, because it’s exactly the ‘failures’ of human language that are its virtue. So the fact that human language is ambiguous and vague is a feature, rather than a bug.

    Computers are precise. It’s the digital nature of computers that gives the particular effect that we observe. They require everything to fit into either-or categories. This goes back into the intellectual heritage of computer science, which originates partly in logic and partly in mathematics. And because of this logical heritage which is physically embodied in the transistors and the physical hardware, it has been natural for computer scientists to wish to analyse the world in logical terms. They have been deeply influenced by thinkers like Frege and Carnap who believed that one could represent the world completely in logic. That remains to this day a fundamental, if very often tacit, assumption about all activity in computer science, whether at the theoretical end or in the development of business systems where you believe that you can have an enterprise resource management system that can put people into different categories and then describe the world in a perfect manner.

    DH: So what you’re saying is that the way that computers represent the world has a heritage in particular areas of philosophy—particular ways of thinking about the world that are by no means the only ones available. Yet since these machines are now everywhere and intertwined with our lives to such an extraordinary extent, they carry these ways of thinking into our lives, they shape the way we see the world and the way that we reshape the world?

    CB: Yes. Each computer, each system we use, each piece of software embodies a particular model, a particular perspective on the world—and we tend, in the end, in using these systems to believe the model rather than the world. Whether it’s an accounting system or a personal fitness management system, what happens is that you create a set of categories, a model, and then either things fit or, if they don’t, they tend to be ignored.

    DH: And when you’re interacting with these machines, you either agree to act as if the world is like that, or the interaction with the machine quickly becomes difficult. So, to the extent that we spend a lot of our time dealing with these machines, we have to spend that time agreeing to pretend that the world is more logical and more capable of being reduced to things that can be measured than the full range of our background experience might suggest. And for as long as our focus is held by the machine, that way of seeing the world is being affirmed.

    CB: Part of the problem here is the plasticity of the human mind: our own native ability, agility, flexibility to deal with things. 

    Several years ago I was a reviewer on a research project that concerned the analysis and production of emotions by computers. The idea was that you would construct computer systems that could detect emotions in the voice or gesture of people and that would then produce something that would represent an emotion. They had an example, a system which would have an artificial tree on a screen, and if you spoke to it nicely it would grow and if you spoke to it harshly it would slowly shrink. And they were terribly pleased with this because they said, ‘Look, we have managed to capture human emotion and analyse it in a way so that the tree grows when people are nice and happy and positive…’

    DH: And it will shrink if people are being nasty?

    CB: The trouble is, they didn’t really think about the likelihood that human beings would observe the tree and, within seconds, respond appropriately and figure out how to control the tree. So it had nothing to do with your real state of emotions, but technically it was a brilliant success!

    DH: So, to go back to that conversation from when you were starting out on your PhD, there is this utopian ambition—which people who are enamoured of the ways of thinking embedded in these machines tend towards—which is a belief that the world would be better if we could get rid of the vagueness and achieve the same kind of precision that these machines are capable of?

    CB: Well, this tendency has deep intellectual roots. You can trace it back to Descartes and the Enlightenment, or all the way back to Aristotle’s attempt to enumerate all the possible kinds of things within a fixed set of categories. There has been a repeated attempt throughout western intellectual history to develop a total system of categories that will cover all of human experience. My favourite example is in England, in the mid-17thcentury, when you have people like Francis Lodwick with his project for A Perfect Language. There was a whole movement of ‘philosophical languages’ and at the centre of it was John Wilkins, one of the founders of the Royal Society, who produced this extraordinary taxonomy of every known scientific concept. He founded the Royal Society to ensure the longevity of his project and when he had produced his taxonomy, he told everybody, right, now you have to keep it up to date! And, of course, everybody ignored it. But the tendency continues—and the next step, in the 18thcentury, is Linnaeus from Sweden who produced a taxonomy of all animals and plants, the foundation of the modern biological naming system. So you have a growing sense that, yes, we can describe the world completely.

    DH: We can know the world by having a box for everything!

    CB: In the late 20thcentury, there are innumerable failures. There’s a wonderful project which began in the mid-80s called Cyc which has put hundreds of man-years of work into constructing a logical system to represent the whole of the world. Now, there are some fantastic examples of people trying to use the system and failing completely, yet it carries on—it’s a recurring human ambition. 

    And of course, if you pin a computer scientist to the wall, they will say ‘Well, no, of course we don’t mean to describe the whole world.’ But you see it creeping out in all kinds of ways, even if it’s just a small corner of the world, even if there’s an acknowledgement that we won’t describe the wholeworld in our set of categories—there is still an assumption that those categories will represent reality perfectly.

    The other thing to say is that there is a lot of money riding on this assumption. If you want to find the current version, it goes under the name of ‘smart cities’ or the ‘Internet of Things’, a vision of a world in which everything we interact with is connected to the network. But it has consequences, socially, that people have not yet fully worked out, because what it means is that we are trying to construct systems that will model every aspect of reality. And you need to tell your story of trying to use the electronic toilet…

    DH: Yes, this is about what that interconnected vision looks like in practice. It was six weeks ago. I was at the railway station in Borlänge—a small city in Dalarna, which is Sweden’s answer to Yorkshire—and I needed to use the toilet. There was a toilet there, it was vacant, and there was a keypad on the door. To open the door, you had to put in a code and a notice on the wall explained that, to get a code, you needed to pay 10kr by sending a text message to the number provided. So I sent a text message to pay my 10kr. After a couple of minutes, I got two replies. The first was from the toilet company, telling me my payment had failed. The second was from my Swedish mobile provider, explaining that, in order to make the mobile payment, I needed to download an app. So now I had to get online, find the app, download and install it, then give it my bank card details and approve the safety request from my bank, allowing me to transfer 10kr from my current account into the ‘virtual wallet’ that now existed on my phone and, presumably, somewhere out there in a data-centre. At which point, I could send the text message again, pay my 10kr and get texted back with a code that would open the door—and finally, after twenty minutes, I had access to the toilet. In among all this technological wizardry, the real miracle is that I had managed to perform all these tasks whilst keeping my legs crossed.

    CB: So, this is a perfect example of smart cities! And one consequence is, now the mobile phone company and the app company and possibly the company operating the toilet door all know who has gone to the toilet and when!

    DH: I guess so—or maybe there is some way in which the controlling of access to the toilets is saving the local council money? But I wonder if it’s really that rational, or if it’s just that the idea of the Internet of Things sounds so shiny and new, and whoever was responsible for deciding that the bathroom of Borlänge railway station should be part of it couldn’t envisage the reality of how it would turn out, the reality of the Internet of Toilets?

    I guess what I’m asking is, did anyone ever know what the problem was that this was meant to solve? And maybe we could extend this to the whole project that you’ve been describing, this recurring project to come up with a complete set of categories for describing the world—is it a problem that we don’t have a complete set of categories like that?

    CB: I think it’s very important that we don’t have that set of categories! I’d argue that it’s actually a positive thing. 

    But I think what we’re getting to now is this concept of ‘legibility’, which comes from James C. Scott’s book, Seeing Like A State. And this construction of categories is part of the need that organisations in authority have to describe their territory, to describe their universe. That’s where the ‘problem’ comes from.

    DH: Yes, Scott’s concept of legibility, that the modern state has a great desire and demand for the ability to see and read activity of all kinds from above. He’s talking about the kind of centralised political systems that came about in the past two or three centuries in Europe and were gradually extended across the world. To meet this demand, you need to standardise things, to reduce the complexity to a manageable model. And the classic example that Scott uses is forestry in Germany.

    CB: So in the 18thcentury, in Prussia and Saxony, forests were a major source of income to the princely states. They developed ‘scientific forestry’ as an attempt to rationalise the revenue: new measurements were developed, trees were categorised into different size categories and their rates of growth were charted, so that the output of the forest could be projected into the future. But everything else that made up an actual living forest had vanished from these projections, all the other species, all the other activities—as Scott says, they literally couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Then, in the next phase, they began planting ‘production forests’, monocultures with trees all the same age, lined up in rows. And of course, with our ecological perspective, we know where this is heading: as the soil built up by the old growth forest becomes exhausted, the trees in the new rationalised forests no longer grow at the rates projected, the forest managers get caught up in needing fertilisers and pesticides and fungicides, trying to reintroduce species that had been driven out, struggling to reproduce something like the living forest that their way of seeing had destroyed.

    DH: And at the root of this, there’s a ‘problem’ that was only there from the perspective of the office at the centre of a huge area of territory that wants to be able to ‘know’ what is going on everywhere and then improve the numbers in the model that has come to stand for the forest. There was no ‘problem’ from the point of view of the old-growth forest, or the people who were actually living and working there.

    CB: Scott uses the concept of legibility to explain a number of seemingly disparate phenomena. Things like surnames, which only arrived in some parts of Europe as late as the Napoleonic period—they give the state a way of knowing who is who, how many people there are in a population, so that they can be taxed or conscripted effectively. Standardised weights and measures—the metric system was invented in France at the end of the 18thcentury and then gradually imposed upon the whole of Europe, replacing measures that varied from one market town to the next. The introduction of passports is another example. And you see this desire for legibility, too, within companies. The whole concept of Taylorisation and time-and-motion studies is another form of increasing the ability to read activity from above. 

    Now, one of the origins of computing is in the construction of machines to do some of this work. It took seven years to process all the data that had been collected in the 1880 census in the United States. Between 1880 and 1890, the population was growing so fast that, not only was the data from the last census out of date, it was reckoned that it would take 13 years to process the data from the next census. But right on time, you get the Hollerith machine, a punchcard database system that allows all the data to be processed within six weeks.

    That was a huge improvement from the point of view of the state’s ability to understand what’s going on—and it fits right into the story that we’ve been talking about of the intellectual origins of computers in the desire to measure, observe, count and categorise. 

    But we mustn’t only view this as negative, it has produced wonders.

    DH: I think this is why I wanted to frame this conversation in terms of ‘the limits to measurement’, rather than ‘the problem with measurement’. Because you’re right, however anarchistic our instincts might be, I don’t know many people who would honestly choose to forego all of what the state provides for them. I remember Vinay Gupta saying, ‘I’ve stopped worrying about the power of the state, I’ve started worrying that the state is going to collapse before we’ve built something to replace it.’

    And I remember the first time I tried to speak about this question of the measurable and the unmeasurable, realising that there were people who heard what I was saying as an argument against measurement. Actually, what I would like to bring into conversation is this: under what circumstances is measurement helpful and appropriate? Under what circumstances does measurement become problematic? And how do we develop a language for talking about these things more subtly?

    And perhaps one way of approaching that subtlety is to bring in an idea from Ivan Illich. In his early books, in the 1970s, he talked a lot about counterproductivity and ‘the threshold of counterproductivity’: the point beyond which increasing the intensity or the amount of a given thing begins to produce the opposite of the effect that it has been producing so far. Beyond a certain point, he argued, our schooling systems end up making us stupider as societies, our health systems end up making us sick, our prison systems end up creating more criminality. Illich brought together a lot of detail to make those arguments, but I think the general principle of the threshold of counterproductivity can be a good tool for thinking with, because it gets us free of thinking in either-or terms, without replacing that with slacker relativism. Instead of debating whether X is a ‘good thing’ or a ‘bad thing’, or claiming that it’s all just a matter of opinion, you can say that, up to a certain point, X tends to be helpful—and beyond that point, it becomes actively unhelpful.

    This doesn’t have to be particularly esoteric. Think about food: we can pretty much all agree that food is a good thing, but once you’ve eaten a certain amount, it’s not just that you get diminishing returns, it’s that you’re going to make yourself ill.

    CB: I think this is an excellent concept. I think there’s a complete lack, though, of applying anything like this to technology and asking at what point one reaches the level of counterproductivity. I’m thinking of the kind of software that is imposed to track accounting in an organisation: where you used to just get a piece of paper and hand in your receipts and somebody would sort it out, you now have to fill in all kinds of forms online, collecting far more information than used to be the case. Now, as far as the accountants are concerned, this is wonderful: they can analyse exactly what’s going on in the system. The trouble is, you’re getting a huge counterproductivity effect because it becomes so complicated to do something. Now, where in the system can one actually make that decision to say, actually, we don’t want to have that type of accounting system, because the effect on the core activity of the organisation is going to be negative? That’s missing.

    DH: Even the possibility of that being a legitimate conversation is missing. But I wonder whether we can look at small, grassroots organisations as spaces within which you don’t have the requirement for the level of measurement and legibility—and, in its absence, certain kinds of human flourishing tend to be more likely to happen than they are in most institutional spaces. Equally, within institutions, you often find pockets within which people seem to be coming alive. If I think of the examples that I’ve experienced, those living corners within larger institutions, what is going on is usually that you have one or two individuals who are smart in a particular way—and they are effectively holding up an umbrella over this human-scale space.

    CB: Hiding it!

    DH: Yes. They are producing the necessary information to feed upwards and outwards into the systems, to keep the systems off people’s backs…

    CB: Strangely, in the business world—where I have half a foot—there’s a whole vast literature about the wonderful energy and passion and creativity that occurs in startups. There’s a slightly smaller literature on what are called ‘skunkworks’, these hidden projects that occur in large organisations that sometimes then emerge as being very important. There are some classic inventions that were invented by somebody working in a big organisation, a little part-time project that they were pursuing out of curiosity, and eventually it becomes their best-seller. Post-It notes is the example that always gets used.

    DH: So what you’re saying is, within the business school world, there’s at least a partial recognition of the need for spaces in which the rules are off people’s backs…?

    CB: But there’s a cognitive dissonance, because then there’s a whole other literature which develops all these systems for tracking and tracing, Taylorizing and managerialising things.

    DH: So, the thing that we’re talking about, when we talk about the kinds of spaces in which people come alive—spaces in which there is room for human flourishing—we’re asserting that one of the characteristics of such a space is that there is less pressure for reality to be reduced to things which can be measured. Things which can’t be measured are allowed to be taken seriously—and, somehow, some individual or group has built an interface to the systems that require measurement, that keeps those systems satisfied, without reducing the activity within the space to activity to satisfy those systems. 

    So, the thing that goes on within those spaces, I think, is very closely related to what Anthony McCann is getting at when he talks about ‘the heart of the commons’. His starting point is Irish traditional music, the field where he started his studies, and he’s talking about what it is that matters to people within the traditional culture and that goes missing from the version of that culture that you find in the archives of the folk song collectors. Those archives are the legible version of the culture, but you won’t find any people there, and you won’t find the thing that matters most, what it feels like to be there. And when Anthony was here a few weeks ago, he was talking about the need to develop language for this thing that matters. And I guess that means developing a sufficient degree of legibility, so that this is not completely invisible, in order to defend it. In order for it not to be crushed. 

    And this is where it gets uneasy, especially when we’re talking about business schools trying to put their finger on this. How do you describe ‘the thing that matters’, how do you word it, is it even possible to do so…

    CB: Without destroying it?

    DH: Yes, exactly. That’s the paradox, isn’t it? What’s the answer?

    CB: Well, if you look at many spiritual traditions, they would say that you can’t word it. And you get this in philosophy, Wittgenstein’s ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ 

    So what could function in the formal world? Again, I’m thinking back to the business literature, where there’s a contrast in this fascination with top managers. There’s this obsession: what gift do top managers have that makes an organisation really work? And they really talk about it as some kind of magical property. ‘We don’t really know what it is, but if we can find somebody who’s got it then we’re going to pay him a lot of money!’ All kinds of people try and describe it, one way and another, but there is a language there about—whoa, this is something that we can’t really measure, but we know it exists.

    DH: Maybe it would be interesting to start looking for the different examples from different places where we do seem to have some common vocabulary left for talking about things that can’t be reduced to that which is measurable. I say that, because I listen to you and I realise that this is what you’re doing, with your half a foot in the business world—you’re spotting the places within the literature of a rather unlikely field where there is language for talking about this. And I’ve come across a completely other example in the ideas that I’ve been working with around commons and resources. 

    To summarise the problem, first: a resource is something that can be measured, something that is seen in the way that those German princes were looking at a forest. There is a very dominant idea, when people talk about commons—whether they’re talking about the ‘information commons’, the environmental commons, or whatever—that what we’re talking about is a pool of common resources. Again, this is something that Anthony McCann has directed attention towards. We are so used to thinking of things in terms of resources—our organisations have Human Resource departments—but a resource is something to be exploited. And there are very few areas of modern existence where we have a good vocabulary for talking about the idea that some things just shouldn’t be exploited. But one place where we have it is friendship. Because when somebody who you thought of as a friend treats you as a resource, you say, ‘I feel used.’ And everyone knows what you mean. It’s an everyday expression, you don’t have to get into a long explanation of why everything shouldn’t be treated as a resource. We still have that as common knowledge.

    So I’m getting this idea that there might be a project to document, to gather together, the unlikely mixture of pockets where there is still shared vocabulary for talking about the importance of the part that can’t be measured.

    CB: I think that good organisations are aware of this. They are aware of the community that is built within the organisation and the dependence of the organisation on non-contractual relationships, on collaboration, on the ability of people to do favours for each other at a friendship level, even though it’s in a workplace.

    DH: This is what David Graeber calls the ‘everyday communism’ which subsidises the world. The whole world system that we’re in, which might look like this globalised, capitalist, neoliberal system, would grind to a halt without the everyday communism of people doing things for each other without asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’

    CB: So good organisations recognise this. The thing is, because it’s not measured, because it’s not worded, it’s often difficult to defend. It can be very simple things, like cancelling Christmas parties. Good managers know that the best way to get their team to work is to take them out, get them all drunk and next time they meet have the problems will be solved! 

    DH: That sounds like a rather culturally-specific approach to management…

    CB: There are certainly variations on the theme! But the basic concept applies. And that’s really creating a space for illegible activity, illegible conversations, which then can break down barriers, can break down categories and solve problems. But that needs to be defended, because it’s very easy for the Christmas party or the social space to be the first luxury that gets cut.

    Where these things work, it’s very often, as you say, those particular people who create an umbrella, who create a protected space. So perhaps there is an opportunity there to try and teach people who are in positions of leadership that there is a particular aspect which has to do with creating these special spaces. Developing a language for that can make them work much better as organisations.

    DH: There is a difficulty here—and I suppose one way into talking about it might be through a lovely story that I came across. I met a guy who had been the managing director of a company with about 200 people working for him. The company was taken over and the nature of the takeover was such that this company was going to be wound down, none of these people were going to work for the new company, but everyone continues to be employed for the next year until the process is complete, with relatively little to do. And he thought, what are we going to do, for the next year? And, in particular, so that these people are in the best position possible to go off and find new work or do whatever it is they do next. And he decided that they would just get out on the table everything that people were interested in, the things that they did, the things that they had never told anybody at work about, that were really important to them in their lives—and just get everyone’s skills and talents and ideas out there, and see what would happen as they started matching things up together. And he said it was the most amazing year of his career—and I could see it, in the way he talked about it.

    So, here’s the problem: things can become amazing when we can bring more of ourselves into the workplace, the school, whatever space it is that we spend most of our waking hours. But… the shadow side of this is that, you’ve talked about Taylorist management and we think of Henry Ford and the production line, that whole model of 20thcentury capitalism, but there is this whole other thing of the post-Fordist, post-industrial economy, where we are absolutely expected to bring more of ourselves to work, because it’s not just our bodies but our emotions that our employers want to use as resources.

    Once upon a time, I used to work as a corporate spy. Well, really I was a struggling freelance radio journalist, taking bits and pieces of other work to pay the bills, and every few weeks I used to get paid to go and sit in Starbucks, drink a coffee, make various observations, then buy a takeout coffee and run round the corner to weigh it and take its temperature, and fill out a twelve-page form that went back to Starbucks headquarters to tell them how their staff in this local branch were doing. The bit that sticks in my mind was that, not only did I have to stand in the Starbucks queue with a stopwatch in my pocket, timing the process and remembering whether the staff were following the different stages of the script—I also had to report whether, over and above the script, I had observed staff recognising and acknowledging regular customers and initiating spontaneous conversations. So Starbucks was essentially trying to write the computer program for how you simulate, systematically, the friendly local cafe, only with precariously employed staff who have no real connection to the place they are working and are at the mercy of this mystery shopper who is sent once a month to check up on them.

    At the same time, I was living around the corner from an independent cafe run by a couple of old hippies who were seriously grumpy. You went in there for the first time and you’d get a good cup of coffee, but they would be surly with you. If you kept coming back, though, they would begin to acknowledge your existence and you would begin to notice that they had their regulars who got to sit at the table at the back and play chess with them and decide what music went on the stereo and smoke a joint together when it was quiet in the afternoon. 

    And I realised that the one thing that Starbucks couldn’t attempt to simulate was customer unfriendliness—and that there was something about this customer unfriendliness that felt right. If we think in terms of thresholds, again, maybe it’s kind of OK to use money to pay for a good cup of coffee, but if I’m paying for someone to act like they’re my friend, we’ve crossed one of those lines?

    But this is the thing: we want to create spaces in which we can bring more of ourselves to what we do, in which we can be more than just getting through the day, trying to avoid drawing any unwanted attention and trying to satisfy the requirements of the system that we’re plugged into—yes, we want to be doing something more meaningful with our lives, bringing more of ourselves into the situation. But if we try to make legible ‘the stuff that matters’, the stuff that would bring more of ourselves into the situation, how do we do it without it becoming another resource to be harnessed, allowing the extension of exploitation even further?

    CB: I don’t know. I think that’s a real danger and I think, equally, in creating the vocabulary that we might develop, we are in danger of formalising it. And even if our terms are very vague and abstract, somebody will say, ‘Ah, here I have a collection of categories and I will construct a form or an application that will then be used to describe that.’ Just like your Starbucks example: is the barrista behaving like he is happy?

    DH: Yes, they create the model and then they try to run the model in a way that is as convincing a simulation as possible, whilst extracting as much…

    CB: The aspect of this creation of models that we haven’t really addressed, but is intimately related here, is that we create the models and then we believe the models and don’t believe reality. We see this everywhere around us. The classic phrase is ‘All models are wrong, but some models are useful.’ Models don’t represent reality perfectly: a perfect representation of reality would be a cloned copy. Necessarily, they are abstraction and simplification, in order to be useful. The trouble is, we create a model, typically today on a computer screen, and then what we see in front of us on the screen becomes ‘reality’. 

    My favourite example is a parcel I sent in Britain by Special Delivery, guaranteed to arrive the next day. It didn’t arrive. I rang the Post Office the following day and said, ‘My parcel didn’t arrive.’ The Post Office employee said, ‘Yes it did, it says so on my computer.’ And at that moment, the friend to whom I had sent it rang me on my mobile and said, ‘The postman is just coming and giving me your parcel now!’ I told this to the Post Office employee on the other line and she said, ‘No, that’s not possible, it was delivered yesterday.’

    DH: So that’s the most absurd version of believing the model, rather than the evidence of our experience. But your point is that this is a pattern.

    CB: It’s systematic and it’s very dangerous, because you get a completely warped view of reality, very often. Reality changes, human beings change, and if your model doesn’t change appropriately, you fall into all kinds of pits. Governments collect the wrong data, or miss some major social change that is completely outside their perception at every level. Equally, in organisations, you have this problem. So, as part of the development of this language that we’re talking about, we also need to develop a language for making people aware of the limitations of the model. Making people aware that the model is useful within these limits, but there may be more, and to have a look outside the window occasionally to see what else there is.

    DH: So, this brings us back to the idea of treating the vagueness and imprecision of language as a feature rather than a bug. As not a problem that we need to try and get rid of, but actually as something helpful.

    You mentioned Wittgenstein’s line about remaining silent—and the way that different religious traditions have treated the thing that matters most as incapable of being put into words. But religions haven’t exactly remained silent! One thing that does go on within religious language is the deliberate multiplication of language to keep in mind its inadequacy. So you have the hundred names of God, because one way of speaking about the unspeakable is by never forgetting that none of the language that you use is adequate to it. And, in some ways, we need a hundred names for everything! This, again, recalls something that Anthony talks about—lifting up the words and looking underneath—and I think that part of the way that you avoid forgetting to do that is by using a multiple vocabulary. Rather than using one word all of the time, at which point that word quickly comes to be treated as if it’s a perfect match. 

    So perhaps that’s one principle that we could try to use?

    CB: It sounds like a very good starting point. The challenge is making that acceptable, socially. There is a long history in the religious traditions that you’re talking about of the difficulty of language and the difficulty of spiritual concepts—and that this is OK. You know, if you look at the Talmudic traditions of interpretation, it is OK to struggle with concepts, that is a valid task. Whereas the modern tendency is to want to simplify, to take away effort, to take away difficulty all the time. 

    Nearly every Computer Science paper will start off by saying ‘We wish to reduce the effort involved in doing X and here is the method…’ That’s the basic principle by which you do research. We actually need to write new Computer Science papers which start ‘We are now increasing the effort to do X because this will have beneficial effects.’ I have suggested this in the past, under the heading of ‘slow computing’. 

    Based on our discussion during the Västerås Conversations, this text was first published in Dark Mountain: Issue 7.

  • Dealing With Our Own Shit: A Conversation With Gustavo Esteva

    Dealing With Our Own Shit: A Conversation With Gustavo Esteva

    There were eagles riding the air overhead as we took the backroad out of San Pablo Etla to the Casa Esteva. The taxi driver had left us at the crossroads: at ease in the highspeed free-for-all of the highway, he had no desire to risk his exhaust on the unpaved road ahead, so a young man from one of the neighbouring households drove down to collect us. It was three months into the dry season. We bumped across the bed of an empty stream before climbing again towards the adobe house among the trees.

    After days in downtown Oaxaca, its streets clogged with fumes, the air up here was a release. Twenty-five years earlier, when Gustavo Esteva and his partner left Mexico City to settle here, they must have felt that same contrast. For Gustavo, it was a return to his grandmother’s village: the grandmother who, in his childhood, was not allowed to enter his parents’ house by the front door, nor to speak to her grandson in Zapotec.

    ‘For my mother,’ he told me, ‘the best thing that she could do for her children was to uproot us from any connection with our indigenous ancestry, to avoid the discrimination she had suffered.’

    Despite this, the summers he spent with his grandmother on her stall in the market in Oaxaca planted stories that would come to life much later.

    Meanwhile, as a young man, he took refuge from the cultural confusions of his family in the promise of ‘development’. The term which would frame the relation between the countries of the post-war world, embodying a unifying model of global economic progress on which even Cold War opponents could agree, was first used in its modern sense by President Truman in his inaugural address of 1949. At 15, following his father’s death, Gustavo found work with the first wave of global corporations bringing the reality of development to Mexico. Before too many years had passed, he would become the youngest ever executive for IBM; but instead of taking his place at the centre of this grand narrative of economic progress, he found himself standing on one side, the side of the bosses, being asked to cheat the workers.

    So, in his early 20s, he walked away from that career and before too many years had passed, he had become a Marxist guerrilla. This was the era of Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution: if capitalism could not deliver the promise of economic progress for everyone, it was time to fight for the alternative. Marx would remain a deep influence on his thinking, but this phase of his life ended, again, in disillusionment: he parted with the idea of violent revolution after one of the leaders of his group shot the other in a row over a woman. ‘It was a revelation of the kind of violence we were imposing on ourselves and we wanted to impose on the whole of society.’

    For a second time, he walked away from what had looked like a means of making a better world. In the years that followed, he continued to read, study and write about economics and social change, and before too many years had passed, he had become a senior official in a government agency. By the early 1970s, he was running programmes to control the market in basic staples, providing food security to millions of the urban and rural poor. Yet this phase, too, would end in a decision to walk away, one that would shape the rest of his life.

    In 1976, due to the success of these programmes, he was in line for a ministerial post in the new administration. ‘By that time, I knew at least two things: first, this is not what the people want, these beautiful development programmes. I did not know exactly why or what it is that the people want, but I knew that it was not this. The second was, the logic of government and the logic of the people are completely different. Even this populist president – I was in the presidential house, many times, in cabinet meetings – how they take decisions and what the people need and want are two different planets.’

    I knew the outline of this story, but as we talked on the porch of the house that they had built, what struck me was his willingness to trust in his own uncertainty. At each of the turns in his journey, he had been willing to renounce the security of existing structures, structures he had come to find intolerable, even though he had no answer as to what else could be done. Willing to go and wait in the wilderness, with patience, to see what new things might come into view as a result of that letting go.

    Having walked away from the prospect of high office, he went to work at the grassroots, in the villages and on the urban margins, with peasants newly arrived in the city. He talks about this as a time of happiness and confusion: among those with whom he was now working, those who were supposed to be the underdeveloped, he found what seemed to him a good life. Yet none of this made sense within the frameworks of economics, anthropology, sociology or political science. It was as if he had to choose between the whole theoretical frame of development which had shaped his life and the evidence of the lives of those around him. This was pushing him to a crisis.

    ‘Suddenly I said, one day: I will take off the glasses, the lenses I am using, all the different lenses of development. To abandon those categories, it was like the moment when you come from the darkness into the light, and you are just seeing shadows.’

    Two things, he said, helped him to make sense of his experience. The first were the memories of his grandmother that began to surface again, the stories that she had told him in those childhood summers. Lessons which he had not understood at the time now took on meaning. It was this, he says, that made it possible to connect with the people around him.

    The second was his encounter with Ivan Illich. On the Marxist Left in the early ’70s, in the years of his most famous work, he had been no more than a reactionary priest, not worth reading. His critiques of schooling and health systems were beside the point: of course, in a capitalist system, these things would be bad, but after the revolution we will have good schools!

    When they met in 1983, what struck Gustavo was that the terms of Illich’s thinking made sense in the light of the lives of the peasants and migrants with whom he was working. I had heard this before, but it was brought home to me later that month at a conference in Cuernavaca: after two days of dispiriting academic presentations, the one talk in which Illich’s ideas actually came to life was given by a woman from an indigenous community who had only come across his books a few months earlier.

    It was in Cuernavaca, five years earlier, at a gathering to mark the fifth anniversary of Illich’s death, that I had first met Gustavo. Then, the following year, he came to London and I saw him polarise a room full of social entrepreneurs and young NGO workers with his stories about the paradoxes of development. Somewhere around that time, I began to meet up with a guy called Paul Kingsnorth who had an idea for a journal called Dark Mountain, and it turned out that the one person we knew in common was this old Mexican who called himself a ‘deprofessionalised intellectual’. Paul had interviewed him in Oaxaca, when he was writing about the Zapatistas, and it was Gustavo who gave him the title of his first book, One No, Many Yeses.

    That is not the only way in which Gustavo’s thinking is entangled with the roots of Dark Mountain. The life out of which that thinking has grown is a story of faith in progress, the loss of that faith, and the finding of the kinds of hope which remain on the other side of loss. Then there is the willingness to walk away, even though you have no answers to give when people ask what you would do instead, to walk away with only your uncertainty, rather than to stay with certainties in which you no longer believe. Finally, the distinction he makes between ‘the better life’ promised by universal visions of progress and development, and ‘the good life’, which has to be worked out on a human scale, improvised, in the times and places where we find ourselves.

    The conversation reproduced here was recorded by Nick Stewart as part of a film on which we are collaborating. His is the unspoken presence in what follows: not only because he was moving about with a handheld camera, finding the angles from which to catch our expressions as we talked, but because he then produced the initial transcript on which this text is based.

    DH: It seems to me that ‘development’ begins by talking as if one country is a poor version of another and ends by making that the case: you end up with poor copies of things that were developed in other times and places. It’s not to say that ‘living well’, as you put it, involves a hermetic sealing, keeping out the new. It’s that, if one is starting from the idea that this is something we have to work out here and now, rather than something that is worked out by others on our behalf, that will lead to a kind of questioning of new technologies and new ideas. A dialogue with them, rather than an unquestioning acceptance or demand for them.

    GE: There are two things that I am involved with in your observation.

    One is, we are now forced to put limits to our hospitality, because of hospitality abuses. The people here in this area of the world are very, very hospitable. They open their minds and their hearts and their arms to everything. But then, the occupation of Mexico by the Spaniards started with an abuse of hospitality. Montezuma was hosting Cortez as a great guest and then Cortez took him hostage in his own palace. Well, this kind of hospitality abuse we can see for the last 500 years. All the time, we open our minds and our hearts and our arms, and then something horrible happens. And this can be a person, a country, invading us. Or it can be the Green Revolution, or whatever kind of technology. Then what we are saying, now? It’s not closing ourselves, no, but let’s be careful. We cannot be so hospitable to anything that comes. We need to first examine what is coming and then define if we want it or not. That is being careful, particularly about these technologies.

    But there is another point in your observation: for many years we accepted that something like poverty or underdevelopment was objective. We were underdeveloped. There were ‘the poor’, as something very clear. And then, after years, we discovered that poverty is just a comparison. ‘These people are poor because they don’t have what we have!’ Because they lack the family car or the college degree, or the beautiful house, or a certain kind of shoes, or iPod, or whatever…

    DH: All of which become the markers on this scale of ‘the better life’, as you tick off one after another, reaching upwards, hoping that somewhere up there it’s going to get less lonely than it seems to have become along the way.

    GE: But if you are seeing the people by what they don’t have, then you are not seeing them.

    That is the problem with ‘poverty’. Who are really the poor? One thing the anthropologists are all the time asking themselves is: why are the people in these very poor villages laughing so much, celebrating life so much? They should be very sad, because they are so poor. They are not so sad. Let’s try to see them for what they are, who they are. Not just comparing them: oh, they don’t have this or have that.

    DH: I think this is where some of the fear comes from now in what I have come to think of as the ‘undeveloping countries’ of the postindustrial West. There’s an assumption, which comes from this scale of development, that what we have had in Britain or America is the better life. Given that, for many people, it’s actually quite a disorienting, stressful life, imagine how much worse it must be once you go further down that scale! We must at all costs prevent any kind of falling down, even if it means we have to sacrifice more and more of the things that we used to think were part of the deal for us. So the deal keeps getting worse, but we have to keep working the longer hours and retiring later, and so on, because the alternative is to fall into this hell of poverty which is projected onto the lives of most of the people on the planet.

    Part of what I’ve been wondering about, as I think about this phenomenon of undevelopment, is how people find the clues that it might not work out like that. That, in the process of losing many of the things that people like me grew up taking for granted, we might catch some of the threads that we dropped further back in time, find new ways of picking them up. Becoming part of the world again.

    GE: Some friends of mine from Italy and Spain have been telling me with great concern that now the people on the streets are very, very conservative. They are there to conserve what they still have. And it’s a legitimate concern, of course: they had jobs yesterday, then they want the job back. But this implies that there is something worse than being exploited: not being exploited. I want my chains back! I want to be exploited again! We cannot see that way, we are seeing only the loss.

    I would say the most important point for me, in this kind of conversation is, first, let’s be brave enough to see the horror in which we are today. It’s a real horror. We must not qualify it, it is a horror. We are destroying everything. The idea of trying to keep, only to keep, what we have today in the world: this is to continue the destruction on a bigger scale. And because we are in that condition, and because the people are reacting to that condition, the powers-that-be are reacting in a horrible way. And that means you are seeing a lot of violence, a lot of control of the population and many terrible things.

    So first, we need to be aware of the horror, and not just falling into a kind of apocalyptic randiness and saying, December 21st will be the end of the world. It is really discovering in our own societies, in our own beings, every one of us, the elements of that horror.

    And then, in that same observation, discovering the absolute irrationality of our desires: how we define our wants, what kind of definitions of the good things we have. If we begin the reflection of ‘What is it that I really want?’ Not what the market is telling me to want, not what the state is telling me. What is it that I really want? Then we start saying, ‘Oh, I want love!’ I want a very close relation with someone, I want to laugh all the time or I want to cry all the time…

    DH: ‘I want to not be constantly feeling precarious.’ I think that’s one of the deep desires in the undeveloping countries: the sense of precarity that affects most of the population, now.

    GE: This is a very important point. I know that this word is now used more than ever. Precarity. And the immediate reaction, a conditioned reflex, is: the institutions can offer me protection from precarity.

    DH: Yes. There’s a kind of yearning for a return of the social democratic golden age. I sometimes talk about the fantasy of the social democratic End of History, which afflicts many people on the left in Europe. That, if it wasn’t for these neoliberals coming along, then we could have had social democracy for everyone, forever. And it’s as historically illiterate as the Fukuyama ‘End of History’ fantasy. It’s the same thing, albeit in a kinder form. So, yes: what’s the alternative? Rather than imagining that we can rebuild the social democratic institutional support that kept people for a while from a sense of precarity in the West, where else do we look?

    GE: We have reached the point in which the institutions, in every country, cannot offer us any sense of stability and the elimination of precarity. It is, I think, a fact that no country will be able to pay the bills of education and health and pensions. It is useless to continue the discussion about that kind of thing. Of course, we need some institutions, and, of course, we need some operation of these institutions to keep the society going. I’m not saying dismantle all the institutions tomorrow morning and that’s it.

    But if you want to abandon that feeling of precarity, then it’s to rediscover that the only way to have a kind of security is at the grassroots. With your friends. With the kinds of new commons emerging everywhere. Then, together, the people themselves, with their neighbours, we can create the kind of social fabric that can really offer us security, protection and a good life. The possibility of living well.

    DH: For that to work, there has to be a rediscovery of a ‘self’ which is not the self that economics has taught us we have. Part of what I see is that the nightmares that are haunting the West now are nightmares which economics has projected onto history. I just began to read this novel for teenagers, The Hunger Games, which is set in a dark future America. In the first few pages, I couldn’t get past the sense that I was reading another of the kinds of fables that economists use. It was another Robinson Crusoe story. It was a story in which all of the characters are atomised individuals – and in which this has intensified as people have got poorer. Which bears no clear relation to how people do continue to make life work during difficult times. The qualities of the highly-individualised self that this book starts out with are precisely the qualities that emerge among people who are able to use money to solve all of their problems.

    To me, I think that is one of the greatest challenges to the emergence of a new commons taking root within countries like mine: people have bought into so much of what they’ve been told to believe about themselves. Even what we think we know about science and evolution, so much of it is entangled with projections of these economic stories about the competing lone individual. How does that begin to break down? Where do new-old concepts of the self begin to emerge?

    GE: I think that this is already happening, because people have had enough of this hyper-individualism. And the good news is that, we have been constructed as individuals, we can feel that we are individuals, we can experience the world as individuals – but we are not! As Raimon Panikkar said very clearly, we are ‘knots in nets of relations’. This is what people are rediscovering, that we are really the relations. That behind this individual mask, the mask of ‘I am a mammal and this body is the body of animal, an individual body, a unique individual body’, behind this, what I find is an ‘I’ that is always a ‘we’. Because I am a collection of relations, my story of relations, my relations with other people. It is important to see how we have been constructed as individuals in order to abandon that idea.

    I have been using one example. I don’t think that in Europe it is so famous, this book of Dr. Spock that is basically prepared for young couples who don’t know how to raise a child. It has a magnificent index about how to discover anything happening to the baby. For five years, the book has the catechism, the commandments for the young couple. First commandment: the parents’ bed is forbidden territory for the babies. They should never be there. Second commandment: it is very good, it’s really necessary, for the child to be alone in his or her own room as soon as possible. If possible, the day they come back from the hospital. Third commandment: it is very good for the physical and mental development and psychological development of the child to cry alone, at least half an hour a day. I imagine at some point the poor mother saying, ‘Oh god! Twenty minutes…Twenty-five minutes…I cannot bear this suffering of my poor child!’

    Well, what kind of being is this baby? The very first day he is in the house, he’s being raised as an individual. Then you go to India, you go to Mexico and you see that fantastic invention of the shawl, the rebozo, in which the baby is attached to the body of the mother for months. But the mother is doing many things, is doing her own life with the baby, here, on her breast, close. That is a different kind of relation.

    DH: In a sense, this is my question, because what we see in the West are generations of people who have been brought up according to one set of experts or another who are essentially guiding the formation of the atomised individual from the moment of arrival back from the hospital. That damage is inscribed into the adults. I often think that the subject that’s assumed by economics, Homo economicus, is actually the damaged child. The assumption of scarcity in every situation, that’s the behaviour of a child that has not had love and not been able to trust in early childhood. And this is normalised as what we are all meant to be like, what the marketers are teaching their students in marketing to manipulate.

    So, how do we go from societies like Britain or Sweden or the United States, where most adults have had an upbringing that was calculated to produce the atomised individual? How do those atomised individuals re-learn the belonging within the larger we?

    GE: I think it is happening, it is really happening. Millions of people are desperately looking for an alternative.

    DH: There’s a hunger, certainly. There is a gap between what we’re told we are and what we feel we are. Often people don’t have a language for it, all they have is the sense that something’s not right. A sense that there’s meant to be more to life than this. Sometimes they’re then told: well, the sense that there’s meant to be more to life, this is a universal experience. ‘This is what life is. Life is the feeling that there ought to be more to life.’

    But, there is … an opening. That gap is the place through which, when people then find things which help them make sense of their experience and don’t simply accept that sense of lack, there is a coming-alive that you see in them. I’ve certainly experienced that a lot in the work that I’ve been part of in Europe over the last few years.

    Again, though, I come back to the anxiety which I think a lot of us feel: ‘But this is so small!’ This is little cracks in the corners, against the vastness of the ideology and the structures that exist to tell us that this, the horror as you call it, is all that there is or could be.

    GE: That is why it is important to discover that we are not alone. We don’t see in the news the examples of people reclaiming the commons. From Peru, we did not hear that the indigenous people reclaimed one million hectares, one by one. One million hectares is a lot of land. Now they are producing 40% of their food in Peru within their own traditional system. That is reclaiming the commons.

    But the most important thing, I think, for people in Europe is creating new commons. It is the people, particularly in the cities…We know we all have a thousand ‘friends,’ but real friends we have only two, three, four or five, perhaps eight friends. Here, I remember Illich again, he was talking all the time about his polyphilia, that was his thing, the need to be with friends. He elevated friendship as the main category for the reorganisation of the society, for reconstructing our society in a different way.

    DH: The starting point of hope.

    GE: Absolutely.

    DH: I encounter a lot of people who are alive to the seriousness of the mess we’re in, alive to the horror, and who can’t put their faith in something as soft as friendship. Who say, ‘Our cities are three meals away from catastrophe because of the agro-industrial supply chain.’ Who say, ‘We’re looking at the climate predictions and, you know, we’re going to be lucky if we keep climate change down to four degrees by the end of the century. There’s a good chance it will be six. We will probably have, at best, half a billion people left on the planet at the end of the century.’ Many of the people I work closely with, this is the reality that is weighing on their minds, and it is very hard to…

    GE: It is their reality? That is the problem.

    DH: This is what they would say is the hard reality that we face. And it is very hard for them to hear what we are talking about, when we talk about friendship as the new commons, as the ground from which things grow. What do you say to them?

    GE: How can we formulate the problems, the reality in a different way?

    What I see in global warming, and the other horrors, this is a formulation that implies the continuation of the manic obsession of industrial man to be God. And, he failed. We are not gods.

    To put this in a provocative way: it is, I would say, equally arrogant to affirm or deny global warming. In both cases, we pretend that we really know how the Earth is behaving. That we have all the information. First, that we know from the past how the Earth behaves. Second, that we know how the Earth will react. And third, that we know how to fix the problem.

    That is too arrogant. To say, yes, there is global warming, or to say, no, there is no global warming: both positions are absolutely arrogant.

    What we do know for sure, however – you and me and your friends and everyone – is that we have been doing something very wrong. That our behaviour is wrong. That our behaviour every day is wrong.

    DH: If I understand what you are saying, then this connects to something that has troubled me about the way that climate change is talked about. Most of the time, there seems to be an implication – which the people who are most actively voicing it would not agree with – that, if it weren’t for the misfortune of the fragility of this global climate system, we could keep doing all of this. If it weren’t for the accidental, unforeseeable byproduct of what would otherwise have been Progress, then it would be fine. And I don’t know if any environmentalist, in their heart, believes that. But perhaps this is the arrogance you are talking about, the persistence of the god-like arrogance of industrial man, even within the way we talk about the horror of the mess we have made of the world?

    GE: At the same time you have the best scientists in Germany at the Wuppertal Institute, after five years and a great amount of funding, they presented a most radical proposal: they suggested the reduction of the consumption of everything by 90%. That is really more radical than any other environmentalists. But, basically, to avoid any change!

    DH: Yes, to achieve a version of how we live now which is as close as possible to how we live now, but without doing the damage on that particular front.

    GE: That is what we need to stop doing. We cannot continue in that path. Because after two or three great disasters, a few tsunamis or Fukushimas – after that, some people will say: well, given the irresponsibility of the 7 billion people, what we need is a good, global authoritarian government to save poor Mother Earth. Then we will have control over everyone. And many people will say, ‘Oh yes, finally something is being done!’

    DH: It’s true, those arguments are starting to be voiced.

    GE: That is part of the horror. That is why the horror is inside us. It’s not only outside. It’s not just the powers that be, we have been infected with it. Then we need to stop. But I think, again, people are doing that. I think that there are millions of people saying, ‘No, I need to stop by myself,’ doing whatever it is.

    DH: This is one of the things that Paul and I have encountered with Dark Mountain, over the last few years. The response to what we’ve been doing has been incredibly polarised. It’s been polarised between relief and anger. Relief from people who feel like they have been given permission to be honest, to voice their misgivings about where we had ended up, in an environmentalism that had ended up focused on calculative rationality and engineering solutions. And anger from those for whom it is absolute heresy to admit the limits of our ability to control things. There is a real problem in Western culture of not being able to conceive of any gap between control and despair. Either we can take control of a situation, or we’re in hell and we might as well curl up and die right now. It is difficult for people, particularly in the West, particularly in the environmental movement, to hear the idea of letting go of the illusion of control as anything other than giving up.

    GE: Well, instead of talking in general about global warming and these statistics, let’s bring it down to things that matter for all of us. Like what is happening with food today. There is a poem by Eduardo Galeano which says: in these times of global fear, there are some people afraid of hunger, and the others are afraid of eating. There is a very real reason to be afraid of hunger, in every country. It’s not just a question of poor countries. In Britain or the United States, there are people who are afraid of hunger today because they do not know what will happen next month. The others are afraid of eating, why? Because we know what is in our plates. Our bodies are already poisoned, infected. It is not only junk food, it’s not only that it is not nourishing, it is full of poison, things that are damaging our health. And then, what … are we going to hope that the G8, the G7, the G20 or whatever will control the agribusiness and will stop what is happening, fix it? Are we hoping that Monsanto and Walmart will have a kind of moral epiphany and will stop doing what they are doing?

    DH: I think the reality is that people aren’t hoping at all. But what they are fearing is, firstly, that there are 7 billion people on the planet now. People say to me, ‘You can’t feed that number of people without the agro-industrial complex: the only reason why the global population has got so big is because these agro-industrial technologies have enabled us to feed so many more people than the Earth can feed on its own.’ That’s the first fear that is very prevalent, when people think about this. And the second is almost a culture-level fear, that says, ‘Peasant life is nasty, brutish and short – and you’re saying that we should go back to that life?’

    GE: I can understand, because that has been constructed in our minds for many, many years, particularly in the North. Since the 1970s it was constructed that way. That’s when hunger became the great business of the century and justified all the subsidies for food in Europe and the United States: they started to talk about ‘food power’ and hunger and all these kind of things.

    But we need to see the alternative picture. First, one figure that is not well known: more than half of what we eat today in the world is produced by the people themselves. Not by Monsanto, not by agribusiness, not by the big companies: it’s by the people themselves. The Via Campesina, the biggest organisation in history, they have been talking about this figure. They know it, because they are part of these millions that are producing their own food. They defined the idea of ‘food sovereignty’: it’s not the market and it’s not the state that must tell us what to eat, but we must find it and produce it by ourselves.

    But this is not going to be the back-to-the-land movement of the ’60s. First of all, because now more than 50% of the people on Earth are urban, we cannot produce food for everyone in the countryside. We need to produce food in the cities. And the beautiful thing is that it is absolutely possible. One hundred years ago, Paris was exporting food. Today, people are discovering that producing food in the cities is not only very simple but it is very beautiful.

    * * *

    GE: As you know, one Mr. Crapper invented for Queen Victoria what we now know as the water closet, the first toilet and the whole thing of the sewerage, and this clearly reformulated the whole urban environment. First of all I must say that this is very, very modern. In 1945, in the most advanced country, which was the United States, only a third of the people had sewerage. This clearly is something very modern that reformulated all the cities and created a real addiction to the flush toilet. There are some people who cannot live without the flush toilet. For them, it’s a fundamental need. But now there are many environmentalists seeing that it was a very wrong decision, that it was a very stupid technology, that it is doing more damage than cars to the environment. When you mix these three marvellous substances, shit, urine and water, you are creating a poisonous cocktail that contaminates everything. It’s a problem of public health, of cost, everything…

    DH: It’s a waste of all three things that can, if handled better, be put to better use. But it’s not just that, it’s that once you have the flush toilet you are connected to a system. Think of the nightmare of The Matrix, with everyone in their tanks, stuck full of tubes, plugged in to this virtual reality. Part of why that nightmare haunts us it that is such a good description of what we take for granted: the kind of relationship we have to infrastructure is a relationship of dependence on unthinkably large, centralised systems. It’s not just that we are born into incubators where we’re stuck full of tubes, or that we die stuck full of tubes. It’s that we plug ourselves in to tubes at critical junctures in our life, every day.

    GE: We wash our hands and that’s it, we don’t see how we are connected. When we create our composting toilets, this is about how to disconnect your stomach from any centralised bureaucracy. What is the feeling of political revelation that you have, when you don’t have those tubes and when you are not controlled!

    DH: You’re dealing with your own shit.

    GE: That is the fundamental question. Are we ready to deal with our own shit?

    Another story that usually is very counterproductive, I don’t know if you can include this. I was visiting a magnificent group of people in Mexico City after the earthquake, reconstructing their houses. It was really an incredible group of 48 families working together for the reconstruction. I came one day to visit them with a colleague from my office, a woman, and then we found them very excited, in an assembly, discussing the problem. That morning one guy, one of them, attempted to rape a four-year-old girl of the community. He could not conclude the thing because they found him when he was trying to do that. They of course immediately examined the girl, the girl has no physical harm, and then they had him in a room and they were discussing what to do.

    My colleague and I say, ‘But what are you discussing? You need to call the police to put this guy in jail!’

    And then they immediately reject this, saying, ‘What is the purpose? To transform him into a criminal?’

    Then my colleague did not know what to say. ‘Well, at least you need to send him to a psychiatric clinic because he’s a very sick guy. It’s a clear pathology.’

    ‘What is the purpose? To transform him into a fool?’

    She did not know how to react and they continued discussing and then someone suggested, ‘Let’s send him to another neighbourhood.’ And then the others say, ‘No, that will be absolutely unfair for the other neighbours, because they will not know what was happening.’

    And then, after four hours of discussion they came to the conclusion, let’s keep him, if the mother of the girl accepts. Then the mother accepted and the guy stayed.

    Ten years later, I came back, I saw the girl was flourishing with an incredible amount of love that she got in the neighbourhood. The guy had married with another young woman of the place and they said she had already two children and they said they became the best neighbours of the group.

    I’m telling this terrible story just to ask this question: are we ready to deal with our own shit? Because it is not just the physical shit, it’s the moral shit.

    DH: The metaphor is so close because the institutional way of dealing with such a situation, whether it’s through the courts or through the psychiatric system, has the apparent virtue of allowing everyone else to wash their hands. It is pulling the chain and the shit is being taken somewhere else. It looks clean and powerful and efficient. But what are the chances of the shit actually being allowed to decay into something that contributes to the ongoing life of the community, rather than coming back to haunt it?

    Published in Dark Mountain: Issue 4.

  • Rehoming Society: A Conversation with Sajay Samuel

    Rehoming Society: A Conversation with Sajay Samuel

    The work of editing has its rewards: often, during that collaboration to bring into view the full richness of another’s words, I find my own thoughts clarified by insights that I might have missed, had I only read those words in passing. So it was that, six months after this conversation with Sajay Samuel – pupil and friend of Ivan Illich – I found myself editing an essay by Bridget McKenzie which would be published as “Turning for Home”. At its heart, it seemed to suggest a simple and powerful reframing of that process to which Illich invited us, more than forty years ago, of “Deschooling Society”.

    The essay was a reflection on Bridget’s experience as the parent of an eleven-year-old who said no to her secondary school. To explain this decision, her daughter offered a drawing of a narrowing tunnel of time, beyond which stood skyscrapers and riot police: the world is going to get more modern and violent, she said, and the tunnel of school “would not protect her, but crush her identity and stop her from doing anything to make the world better”.

    I know Bridget as someone whose voice is listened to on education – a former Head of Learning at the British Library, among much else – and yet, as she wrote in that essay, after twenty years of professional involvement with schools, the experience of home schooling her daughter was to shake her assumptions:

    I had always seen a division between home as a place of comfort (if you’re lucky) and school as a necessary “outing”, a place that prepares you to go out into the world… However, I have also come to think that learning defined as “learning to work out there in the world” is a framing that is both unhelpful and untrue.

    For a start, the dichotomy of home and work embedded in our culture is incredibly damaging, and does this damage not least because it seems so innocuous. The idea of separation between home and work is responsible for increasing isolation in communities and for the loss of status and confidence of many people with home-based lives […]

    When most of us push off from home into the world of work, we enter an industrial system that is antithetical to the living world. We enter places that are abstracted from our planet home, represented in the dislocated nature of workplaces and effected in the systematic commodification of the planet’s resources.

    While editing these passages, the thought came to me: would Illich have been better understood if the book for which he was best known had been titled, instead, Rehoming Society? For our school systems were not his particular obsession: rather, he saw them as a graphic example of a deeply and damagingly counterproductive way of organising our lives.  (Another of his books from the 1970s, Medical Nemesis, goes further in analysing the same patterns of industrial counterproductivity, as seen in our systems of healthcare; but his original plan, on this occasion, had been to use as his example the U.S. Postal Service.)

    Illich had no desire to tell people what they wanted to hear.  “He could be so rude!” his friend Barbara Duden told me.  She recalls him exploding at a questioner, “You’re too stupid, I cannot talk to you!”  Probably it would not bother him, then, that his work is read by many as offering critique without hope of an alternative.  Yet this perception is not true to my experience of his writings, nor of the surviving community of his friends.  From John McKnight’s Asset-Based Community Development to Gustavo Esteva advising the Zapatistas, the members of the Illich Conspiracy – as I like to think of them – have hardly retreated from the world in despair.  Their work is evidence of the hope to be found in his writings; but finding it may be closer to the experience of getting a joke than of signing up to a manifesto.  There are no blueprints for building a better world here; only clues to how we might act, given the kind of world in which we find ourselves.

    The desire to offer a more positive spin on Illich’s message would scarcely justify the cheek of this retitling with which I am playing; but Rehoming Society works for another reason: it points to the continuity between those critiques of industrial society which brought Illich to international attention and the themes of his later writings. For a while, in the 1970s, Illich enjoyed – or endured – a level of intellectual celebrity comparable to that of Slavoj Žižek today, but in a time when the neoliberal mantra of “There Is No Alternative” had yet to entrench itself.  Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica opened the 1970 edition of its Great Ideas Todayseries with a symposium on “The Idea of Revolution”, including contributions from Illich, the historian Arnold Toynbee and the anarchist thinker Paul Goodman.

    By the end of that decade, the world had taken a different direction, and Illich’s profile waned.  The writings which followed feel, to me, like the work of a man who has been relieved from the bother of fame and finds himself free to pursue, in the company of friends, what matters most to him; though there is also a sadness at the path the world had not taken.  Together, they form a deeper historical enquiry into the buried assumptions underlying industrial society.  They have had far fewer readers than Deschooling Society(1971) or Tools for Conviviality (1973), but they are gradually being rediscovered, for the converging economic and ecological crises of the new century only sharpen their relevance.

    When people ask me where to start with Illich, I hesitate.  His writing is not obscure – it is powered by the desire to be understood, rather than the desire to dazzle – and yet it is not easy, either.  As Ran Prieur puts it, “Illich was so smart, and wrote so clearly, that I can barely stand to read him – it’s like staring at the sun.” If there’s one of the later books that will really take you into the heart of his thinking, though, it is Shadow Work(1981) – the collection in which he introduces the concept of “the vernacular”.  Starting from the history of language, he broadens this term out to encompass its fuller Latin meaning of all things home-made, home-spun, home-brewed. The vernacular, in Illich’s usage, names the mode of life (in all its plurality) which was overshadowed by the rise of industrialism, in which the dominant form of production was within the household or the local community, while commodities traded for money formed an exceptional class of goods.  As industrial society destroys itself, the remnants of the vernacular emerge from the shadows, not as some prospect of a return to an earlier and simpler way of life, but as clues to how we may continue to make life work and make it worth living.

    If such a historical argument seems removed from the business of our day-to-day lives, the experience of the vernacular is not so far from reach:  Think of the difference between a shop-bought birthday card and one made by a friend, or between the experience of cooking for people you know and care about, and that of working in a restaurant kitchen.  None of this is to say that exploitation and domination cannot exist within the vernacular domain; but it is to suggest that there are possibilities for meaning and joy within it that are far rarer within the production of commodities for strangers.

    And, at this point, we are back to Bridget’s challenge to the assumption that life is a journey outwards, through school, into the world of work.  In her essay and in the direction of Illich’s thinking I find the suggestion of another orientation: that we might choose, instead, to find our way home, wherever that turns out to be.

    The conversation which follows took place in the garden of a cafe in The Hague in June 2011.  I had spent two weeks hanging out with a gang of Illich’s surviving friends and co-conspirators, first in a small town in Tuscany, then on the edges of an academic conference on the marketisation of nature.  On our last morning, I wanted to make a record of a little of the thinking that had gone on during our time together.

    Sajay Samuel trained as an accountant in India before arriving at Penn State University in his late 20s. There, he found himself invited into the household that formed around Illich and, over the next ten years, he travelled and studied as part of that group.  We first met in Cuernavaca in 2007, at a gathering to mark the fifth anniversary of Illich’s death: I arrived knowing no one, and immediately found myself encircled with friends.  Since then, I have found in Sajay’s work a kind of intellectual trellis on which my winding thoughts have been able to climb.  It has had a powerful influence on my thinking and fed into the background of Dark Mountain.  Too little of that work has yet been published, so – as I told him when we sat down to this conversation, hoping that the presence of a recording device would not inhibit its flow too greatly – it is a pleasure to be able to contribute to making his thinking more widely available.

    SS: Thanks for the opportunity.  It’s perfectly true that not much of my stuff is out there, and hopefully conversations such as this will serve as vehicles to find people such as yourself to think in common with.

    I’ve devoted perhaps the last seven or eight years of my thinking to follow the threads put in place by Illich and see whether or not I can elaborate on them to enable my own understanding; which is different to saying I need to elaborate on them to make his work better  – that’s not the mood or the stance in which I approach his work.  Of course, it’s built on the conviction that the corpus of his writings represent a stumbling block for most of contemporary thinking– and that, if you don’t engage with it, you miss out on a significant, new and enduring way of thinking about the contemporary situation.  And therefore engagement with Illich is not only personal for me, but also because I think it illuminates our condition.

    Perhaps the best way to enter this line of reflection is to start with what most of us now take for granted and as obvious: the economic crisis and the ecological crisis.  Curiously and unsurprisingly, Illich had suggested the shape of both of these a generation ago, which points to the fecundity of his thought and the errors of ignoring the warnings of that kind of… prophetic seeing, if you want.

    DH: Indeed, and I would just add that what that prophetic seeing involves is seeing what is already obvious, but is unspeakable to those who have something to lose.  It’s not a supernatural divination of the future, it’s not futures “scenario mapping”. It’s speaking the truth about that which is already manifesting in the world, but which many people can get away with still pretending is not there.  That’s the spirit in which I see Illich anticipating so much of the mess that we’re in.

    SS: Right, so a clear-eyed view of the present – and I perfectly agree with you, there’s nothing of the tones of mysticism and New Ageism.  For me, it’s an extraordinarily tightly thought through set of arguments that start from intuition, but then are shown by argument and reveal the present in a very new light.

    DH: So among Illich’s concepts and thinking, what do you think is most useful to the present moment?

    SS: Well, this also touches upon something I’ve learned from you, in the last couple of months. I think the key concept is “the vernacular”– and I’m encouraged and emboldened by your way of thinking about, or not thinking about, “the future”– the sense of the tension between the Promethean stance versus an Epimethean stance. So, the vernacular for me is now increasingly occupying the position of the pivot in an argument that I think, if one does not engage with, we miss a moment and might continue in our blindness to exacerbate the Promethean temper. We risk flying away from being tethered to the earth in any sense.

    DH: And so how do we define “the vernacular”?

    SS: This is a question that becomes important to Illich around the eighties, at the end of his reflections on industrial society expressed in, for instance, Deschooling Society, Disabling Professions and Medical Nemesis.  He is attempting to write a postscript, he says, to the industrial age.  And in doing that, he is prompted to ask: what did the industrial age destroy?  What were the historical conditions that persisted and prevailed, upon which the industrial mode of society built by destruction?

    DH: And there is a sense that, in witnessing the end of an age, one is able to notice more clearly than one’s immediate predecessors the things that were lost in the beginning of that age – I think that’s a returning pattern in Illich’s later work.  So you’re saying that the vernacular emerges as a description of what was lost and destroyed in the foundation of an industrial age which he is witnessing the beginning of the end of?

    SS: And therefore, for him – or so I argue – the deliberate use of the vernacular as a term – instead of, for instance, “subsistence”, which would be Polanyi’s term, or “primitive accumulation” in Marx, and so on – is precisely to broaden the frame within which we think of that which was destroyed.  In the fading moments of the industrial age, something comes into view: that which the industrial age destroyed.  But it comes into view in its fullness, not in the mirror of the industrial age, which is confined to a kind of economic understanding…

    DH: And this word “vernacular” means home-made, home-brewed, home-spun.  It’s got a richer sense than simply “production for use value”, but it refers to some of the same things that, from a Marxian perspective, might be referred to through that lens.

    SS: So, for instance, we can predicate of the vernacular, “vernacular architecture”– we can’t speak of “subsistence architecture”– we can think of “vernacular dance”, “vernacular music” and so on, to indicate forms of life that are characterised as based on the household.  So it expands the view of the past beyond the lens of the economic. 

    And this then will become the pivotal thinking block about what happens today, in the light of the economic crisis, in the light of the ecological crisis.  I’m convinced that we’re thinking about these crises in two ways, both of which are limiting.  In the case of the economic, we think of the choice available to be between a “managed” capitalism and a free market.  With the ecological, we think the choice is between industrial machinery and a Prius car, eco-friendly technologies.  But in both cases something goes unexamined– in the case of the economic, the realm of exchange value is not problematised: it’s a question of how best to arrange those exchanges – and in the case of the ecological, the realm of technology is not problematised: it’s a question of its intensity vis à vis the environment.

    DH: And so, in the argument you’re making, the attention is drawn to the hidden consensus between the poles around which an area is generally framed.  It’s still very common to speak as if the space of politics is mapped out by the state at one end and the market at the other end, and what we’re doing is sliding a rule somewhere between the two.  And in terms of how we respond to ecological crisis, to look at how far down we can slide from the dirty tech into the clean tech. And in both cases, this is a way of framing things which misses out – and makes it almost impossible to see, from the perspective which these frames create – a whole world of people’s lived experience and how people have made life work, and continue to do so.

    SS: I love that image of the sliding scale: you have these two poles, and you have a little meter that slides more or less.  And it absorbs a great deal of the contemporary conversation, this frame.  So the Illichian argument, as I’ve understood it, is – let us first historicise this frame and ask, what is it predicated on? What does it lead to?  What kind of ways of living does it lead to?  And what does it mean to inhabit a way of life that is outsideof these frames?  

    So, in the case of the economic, if the sliding scale that unites these two poles – market and state, market and regulation – is in fact the commodity, then the question is to problematise the commodity.  To ask, can we not think of the commodity as putting into the shadow, putting into abeyance, something else – the non-commodity?  And ask what is the balance between these two that leads to a more enriching kind of life, a life that is not disabled by dependence on things that you have to buy, which means you need cash, which means you have to be inserted in the economy and subject to jobs and production and consumption.

    DH: The question that immediately begins to arise, as we try to talk about this – and, in some ways, is used to police the boundaries and keep the conversation within these sliding scales – the question is, aren’t you being romantic?  We know the argument: life in the past was actually a Hobbesian nightmare; people’s lives were shorter and more miserable, and yes, we might have traded a new dependence on money in modern industrial societies for massively increased material production, but it was a trade worth making.  Polanyi is a dirty word to a lot of people because they hear what he is saying as a romantic, declensionist narrative about a Golden Age of the past.  So how do we speak about the vernacular, in the way that we are beginning to do here, without immediately being heard as and shut off by that response?

    SS: So, the more trivial response to that kind of reaction – you’re being romantic, you’re telling us a story of the Fall – is to say, “Who speaks?”  Arguably, one would say, today, of the benefits of industrial society – of which you and I are beneficiaries, to some degree – that such a statement does not hold for the vast majority, who are in fact driven from relatively low levels of cash dependence into total cash dependence.

    It is only through an economic lens that the peasant is understood as poor.  I grew up in a time when my grandfather still wore no shirt and had a towel thrown over his head and we used to draw water from a well. For a man such as he, there was no need of a shirt.  Now, to say that a shirt improved his life, on the condition that he got a job so that he could pay for a shirt, is a curiously perverse kind of view.  

    So yes, who speaks – and for whom do they speak?  Arguably, the beneficiaries of this industrial way of life are a few, which necessarily entail that the many be uprooted, removed from vernacular ways of living that are low levels of dependence on the commodity, and be thrust into the commodity economy, which I would call being introduced to a life of destitution.

    DH: And one of the clues that has come increasingly into focus for me is to see how clearly the winners of what Illich called ‘the war against subsistence’ proceed to reenact the vernacular, under conditions of scarcity.  So that those who can afford a five-dollar artisanal loaf get to eat what was once everyone’s bread.  Unravelling that – unpicking the consistency with which those who do best out of industrial society restage, as commodified and pay-to-access worlds, things which look a hell of a lot like what we are describing when we talk about the vernacular – is itself a clue to what we’re trying to bring into view here.

    SS: So the rich man today is the one who can avoid the traffic jam, imposing the jam on everyone else!  Curiously, the industrial society and the industrial system is now denigrated by those who benefit from it the most.  And, as you correctly point out, and this is really worth looking into, the vernacular is brought back in a counterfeit form – in an intensely commodified form…

    DH: Or in a complex, muddled form – when I was talking about this with someone here yesterday, they said, “Among my friends, who are of a generation who don’t have a chance of buying a house because of what has happened in the property market, there is a willingness to spend more on really good food from the farmer’s market.”  So there’s a complexity to this – I don’t want to say that the survival of things which have a flavour of the vernacular in these privileged zones is totally counterfeit. Even this can contain a line of transmission which, as the industrial age unravels, might play its part in the reemergence of the vernacular.

    SS: Fair enough! But to go back to the challenge – you’re being romantic!  You want to bring back forms of life that were nasty, brutish and short!  – the second response is, I think, what the contemporary moment shows, and has been showing for a generation – the utter impossibility of the industrial, commodified exchange system to produce the kind of jobs that it promises.  The default condition for the vast majority of people today is to figure out ways to inhabit the interstices of a collapsing market system – and unless and until as many of us figure out how to do this in an open, joyful, constructive way, we get mired in a kind of helplessness, a kind of self-destructive, other-destructive hatefulness.  To experience destitution and not have a way out, either in thought or in practice, seems to me to compound misery with evil, to leave people – to leave myself! – in a place of hopelessness.

    DH: This reminds me of a conversation I had with the photographer Sara Haq, who was talking about her father.  He came to England from Pakistan over thirty years ago and has worked as an accountant. The one change that he has seen in the time that he has been here, he says, is that back then it was possible to support a family on an ordinary salary, and now it is not.  He sees England heading into the problems that poor countries have, without the things which allow people to get by and make life work where he came from.

    So what we are talking about is the return of the vernacular: the rebirth, the reemergence of the things which made life liveable in the past.  Because, in a sense, Illich’s historical enquiry starts with the question: why is it that these people in the past, who according to our lights ought to be thoroughly miserable, don’t seem to have been?

    SS: Exactly! I never forget the impression that “Stone Age Economics” made on me. Marshall Sahlins, the anthropologist, points out that the Aborigines of Australia spend vastly more time in leisure, in playing around – they are not this image of nasty, brutish and short, by any means.  And so, you know, the second vector of responding to this somewhat dismissive charge of romanticism is to highlight the fact that the promise of industrial society, the promise of market society, is undeliverable.  It just can’t deliver to the vast majority. And therefore, to continue to inhabit a thought-space which excludes thinking about the vernacular is to make impossible an escape from that which condemns you to destitution.

    This is the line of reflection where I think Illich has something very profound to say: look here, the vernacular was destroyed, but not destroyed completely, there are always rests and remnants.  People continue to reinvent, to invent in creative modern ways, increasingly unplugging themselves from the market or dependence on the commodity.  And unless thought aligns with that mode of existence, unless we rethink the vernacular in modern ways, in contemporary ways, I think we reach an impasse of the mind where not much more can be said.  The industrial system has failed: within that industrial mindset, no new ideas are possible, nothing new is possible, and we lurch between free market and state, free market and state, continually.

    DH: So does the vernacular have a hope, in the age of management?  Jennifer Lee Johnson was talking here yesterday about her work around Lake Victoria, or Nyanza, where vernacular fishing-to-meet-one’s-own-needs is criminalised because it doesn’t fit the fisheries management policies.  Is management in the broader sense, managerial politics, systems administration – is that a totalitarian thing against which the vernacular doesn’t have a chance of emerging, or does the vernacular have a fighting chance?

    SS: Right, so this has impelled a line of reflection: can we characterise in some way the nature of ideas and practices that emerge from and support the systems administrator? And it seems to me that here one can do a certain amount of history of the ways of scientific thought, for instance, or of managerial thought– and the first thing to observe is that the manager speaks from nowhere.  Arendt has this beautiful image, in attempting to describe scientific thought at the moment when the first moon landing happened, she says: modern science is predicated on viewing the earth from very far away, from the point of view of the moon, a kind of lunar– with all its resonances– a lunatic view of the earth.  The first thing to note about the systems administrator, he does not inhabit the space or the place that people inhabit.  Forms of knowledge that grow out of practices that are embodied and in place are foreign to and antithetical to the ways and styles of thinking that managers and systems administrators presuppose.  

    So you ask, is there a fighting chance for the vernacular to come back in a world of systems administration?  One way to get at this is to ask, is there a systematic difference in the nature and the kind of ideas and practices systems administrators deploy, versus that which grows out of embodied practices in place?  As a first pass – and one can elaborate the steps of an argument – but as a first pass, the lunatic view of the earth is sufficient to get at it.  So you ask, under what circumstances can the vernacular reemerge legitimately within the system administrator world, and it seems to me this fight has to be fought on the plane of legitimacy first. One has to make illegitimate and improper certain ways of knowing and seeing and doing, without which what people are attempting to do on the ground can fall prey to this charge of romanticism– Ludditism, cussed, backward– these words are clubs that stand in the frontline of the fight, the fight between two ways of seeing the world, seeing oneself, seeing what one does.  Unless one takes that fight to the right plane, it seems to me, we hobble ourselves.

    DH: So how do we do that?

    SS: What I’m attempting to do is to work out an argument which suggests or shows that the system administrator’s view of the world presupposes, as a necessity, the absence of persons.  The system administrator must necessarily look at persons as objects, as variables, not as embodied beings – not as father, mother, sister, brother – not as fleshy people with hopes and desires, but abstract models of people.  Statistical representations and medical systems, economic models, homo economicusin economic policy and planning – so you get these strange, one-sided, reductive, desiccated views of people that populate scientific models that are then used as armature, the weapons in a policy programme, and then of course become realised.  And what this way of seeing does is to destroy the condition for people to inhabit their own livelihood.  

    So the way to counter this is to make that illegitimate…

    DH: …to bring into focus the extent to which that is a way of seeing, rather than part of background reality – and to question its foundations, the assumptions with which it begins, and what we become, in our own description of ourselves, once we’re talking about ourselves as components within a system…

    SS: Let me give a concrete example: I’m in the university system, and one of the enduring vehicles by which the teacher and the student come into relationship is the reward and punishment grade.  And this goes back seventy, eighty years – work hard, you get a little grade; don’t work hard, we punish you with a grade – and now that relationship is reciprocally cemented: teacher does well and the student evaluation is good, else it’s not. This relationship modulated by rewards and punishment is based on a Skinnerian view of people, a view of people that Skinner gets from thinking about rats and pigeons.[6] The more we engage in this kind of technology of behaviour modification and control, the more students and teachers play to that description of themselves.  Today there is a great hue and cry: “What has happened to the students’ curiosity to learn? Why do they do only that which is demanded for grades?”  Well, surprise!  For seventy years we’ve been using this reward system, and now they behave like Skinnerian monkeys or pigeons – and everybody’s shocked?  The deployment of a particular view, model or seeing of people then gets realised within particular institutional settings, and the question facing us is to delegitimise those ways of seeing people.

    So what is the work that I’m attempting to do?  It’s to clear the space, if you want, in these small forays of war against– let’s say, scientific ways of thinking, for instance, or the systems view of man, or the war against the vernacular– open up different fronts, to clear the space for something different, which is already there– it’s not an act of heroism– these little wars, these battles are as much to clear my own mind.  The act of working through something, thinking through something, with you, with friends, writing about it, clears up in one’s own mind the space that needs to be cleared.

    DH: One of the things that I’ve valued about your work is the – I don’t know if this is quite the right description, but the search for a qualitative rationality.  Because the dominant mode of rationality for many generations in the west has been quantitative – and you can say more about the history of that.  But the gut reaction, the intuitive reaction against that reduction of reality to things that can be measured and counted is very strong, and the risk has been – and in some ways, this is where the charge of romanticism manages to get a purchase on us, or our friends – that the qualitative reaction against quantitative rationality often celebrates the irrational.  Whereas what you’re doing is an out-reasoning of Cartesian rationality.

    SS: I’m glad you brought me to think through again with you this particular issue.  Because you’re perfectly right that the fault-line, if you want, in contemporary discourse is drawn along rationality/irrationality.  Say something about the systems administrator and his or her view of the world, and they say you’re courting irrationality.  Say something critical about scientific ways of understanding the world, you’re courting irrationality.  And so my interest has been to get out of that game, to ask– who framed this game the way it is framed today?– just as we’ve asked regarding economy or ecology.  

    And there I find, with the help of masters, a curious moment in seventeenth century Europe, for which we can take Descartes as an example.  They’re inheritors of a theological question coming out of the high Middle Ages, as best I can understand it: how and why does God know everything?  Answer:  God knows everything because he made everything.  Ah, so God’s knowledge is complete and he’s omniscient because He’s made everything, so “making” and “knowing” are an identity!  

    Descartes asks the following question (I paraphrase):  Is the geometric form of a perfect circle given to us in nature?  No.  So how did it come about?  Answer:  We must have made it up.  Now notice that what he’s reacting to, or what he’s fighting against, is a long tradition – one might say, as shorthand, the Aristotelian tradition – of how “understanding” happens.  For Aristotle, very quickly, man’s “concepts” – which, etymologically has a resonance with grasping and touching – man’s concepts are tethered to the senses, the sensual understanding of the world…

    DH: So knowledge begins with perception?

    SS: With perception.  This is not the same class as what Hume and Locke, the empiricists, will call sensation, it’s of a different kind because for Aristotle, for example, that chair there, that object emanates, emits its form to you.  It’s not as if it is undifferentiated sensation…

    DH: …it’s not the sensation that ripples off from a mathematical reality; the chair is a presence which is speaking to you, and your gaze goes out to the chair – so perception begins with an encounter.

    SS: Right, and so coming back to Descartes, he says, look here, about these geometrical things, the perfect circle, who cooked that up?  We did.  Ah, so the imagination must be creative, in the strong sense – in the sense of creation ex nihilo, something from nothing.  We know there is a perfect circle because we made it through our imagination.  And thus you immediately get the context in which this claim comes around; we want to be masters and possessors of nature.  And the way we do that is by realising the identity between knowing and making.  We can makesociety, knowing and making, in Hobbes.  We can make property, knowing and making, in Locke.  And so this general idea that knowing is identical to making, exemplified by mathematical objects, forms the pivot on which the modern move turns.  And for me, then, that constitutes the frame, you see:  The reason why we privilege mathematics so much is, in part, because it discloses the knowing/making connection, and that’s the thing we don’t want to give up.  

    In this fight between qualitative and quantitative, the next move Descartes makes is to insist that any object can be reduced to a set of characteristics that can be quantified.

    DH: A set of variables, a statistical representation.

    SS: So the thing itself disappears and it can be re-presented as a set of variables in mathematical symbols – and we’re the inheritors of this move.  We have to understand that this move is done in the context of mimicking, if you want, the all-knowing God.  And what disappears from view is the world of the given, and so, for me, the qualitative/quantitative argument is an attempt to resuscitate, to go behind this original framing that privileges the quantitative: for what reason do we do it? Why do we privilege the quantitative? For a certain reason.  At what price does it come?  The extinguishing of quality.  

    And I find a very potent argument in Plato, for instance, where he says, look here – I adapt this – the distinction, quality and quantity, need not be that between irrationality, emotion, etc,  and rationality, thought and so on.  Rather there are two kindsof quantities – numerical, which we can call arithmetic, and then, “too much”and “too little”.  By definition, “too much” and “too little” are quantities, but they’re not numerically measurable.  What we have done in the modern world is to privilege 1, 2, 3… as the only kind of quantity.  But I can relativise, I can put under epistemic brackets, that kind of quantity by insisting on the superiority– and showing the superiority– of the second kind of qualitative understanding, “too much” and “too little”. For example, we can ask: have you gone too far, by measuring love in terms of numbers?  A perfectly legitimate, perfectly logical, perfectly sensible statement.  Number cannot provide an answer to the question of “too far”.  The measure of going too far by measuring love in terms of numbers is six…  Totally insane!  

    So, you say I want to out-argue the fixation with the quantitative in the modern – yes, but on quantitative grounds.  I’m counter-arguing it, not on privileging the emotions, not on privileging sentiment – which are, by the way, staged “others” to the privileging of number – but rather on quantitative grounds, though not numerical.  Insisting on the importance of “too much” and “too little” as the matrix within which number can be thought through.  Have we gone too far, mathematising the world?  Do we have too much of mathematics around?  It’s a question of using judgment regarding “too much” and “too little”.  

    And I think that comes back into the question of common sense – a commonsense understanding of the world, which is then rooted in the sensual and therefore rooted, more or less, in vernacular modes of being.  So, some have accused me of an overly structured kind of argument – but for me, that would be the line of thinking.  The vernacular was destroyed by a certain style of thinking, and therefore a certain way of being – call it “commodity-intensive”, call it “disabling technologies” – all superintended by a kind of mathematical understanding of the world that is untenable.  The question is, how to make the vernacular legitimate again?  You can fight on multiple fronts.  For me, having trained as an accountant, number and that zone – my thinking has been devoted to unpacking that.

    DH: And I think it’s a very powerful – partly because an unexpected – place to take the fight.

    SS: Right!

    DH: There are so many further places we could go from here, but what fascinates me about this conversation and many others that have been going on around Dark Mountain is the intimate entanglement between very long historical views and deep cultural questioning of ways of seeing, ways of knowing the world which have been background assumptions for centuries, with the urgent sense of living in a moment where a lot of things are in flux.  Maybe we could finish with – I don’t know if, even, ‘what happens next?’ is the right question – but, where do we go..?

    SS: I was very impressed by your way of thinking about where we go from here – the metaphor of return is not such a bad place to go, comprehended in its fullness. So, we had a brief discussion some time ago, and I told you of reading this essay where the man says, “When you’re at the edge of a cliff, you can fall off, and the sensible thing to do is to turn back.” That’s a kind of turning back, but as you pointed out, one doesn’t get a feel for return…

    DH: …because a cliff is something that can be drawn with a straight line…  To me, the return is – it has an element of the uncanny, because at the moment in a story where you bring back something from earlier on, everyone, including the storyteller and the audience, experiences this deep satisfaction. And that is because you have performed something which brings the cyclical and the linear experiences of time into rhythm, into timeliness.  And… I haven’t theorised this properly, but there is something about that which is very deeply connected to meaning, as we experience it.  It’s not the same thing as a desire to rewind – which is what is perceived as the romantic thing – you want to rewind to 1641, or wherever.  It’s not that, it’s recognising the moment when something from further back in the story weaves in and provides the next move, as you’re stumbling into the unknown.

    SS: That’s exactly right.  The present reveals, exposes itself in a way that the past, sort of, bubbles up again. Do we have the patience, the stillness to recognise that?  And through it, something else forms.  I think that’s the answer to where we go from here.  And in a funny way, my intellectual labours are directed to clearing the space so that we can recognise the past as it bubbles up.

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 3.

  • Coming to Our Animal Senses: A Conversation with David Abram

    Coming to Our Animal Senses: A Conversation with David Abram

    In the opening pages of The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram stands in the night outside his hut in Bali, the stars spread across the sky, mirrored from below in the water of the rice paddies, and countless fireflies dancing in between. This disorientating abundance of wonder is close to what many of his readers have felt on encountering Abram’s words and his way of making sense of the world.

    Philosopher, ecologist and sleight-of-hand magician: even the barest outline of his work already suggests the webs he spins between worlds, the unexpected patterns of connection that make his books unique. As a college student in the 1970s, he took a year out to travel across Europe as a street magician, ending up in London where he hung out with the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, exploring how the magician’s craft of playing with the attention might help open connections with people whose levels of distress placed them beyond the reach of clinical practitioners. Later, he travelled to Nepal and Southeast Asia, to study the healing role of traditional magicians; once again, his own craft opened possibilities for conversation where the professional anthropologist would not have been welcome.

    From those encounters, he found himself drawn beyond the relationship of magic and medicine into larger questions about the ongoing negotiation between the human and the more-than-human world. This is the landscape he explores in The Spell of the Sensuous, which draws together a re-understanding of animism – rejecting the supernatural projections of missionaries and anthropologists – with a distinctive take on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. If that sounds heavy going, the book is also woven with passages of extraordinary beauty in which Abram relates his own encounters with the wider-than-human world in all its strangeness. And at the heart of it is the deep question of how we became so distanced from our surroundings, so unaware of ourselves as animals in a living world, as to become capable of rationalising the destruction which surrounds us?

    Thirteen years passed between the publication of Abram’s first book and the arrival of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (2010). The length of time perhaps reflects the priority he gives to the spoken and the embodied, his refusal to accept the dominance of the written word. (As Anthony McCann, who first introduced me to The Spell of the Sensuous, muses, ‘Chances are, most of the helpful things that have been thought and spoken throughout our history were never written down, and most of the things that have been written down might not be all that helpful.’) When it came, however, the new book was if anything more ambitious.

    ‘A central question was: what if we were to really honour and acknowledge the fact that we are animals?’ he explains. ‘How would we think, or speak, about even the most ordinary, taken-for-granted aspect of the world, like shadows, or gravity, or houses, or the weather? So much of the language we’ve inherited is laden with otherworldly assumptions. So many of our patterns of speech, so many of its phrases, so many of the stories embedded in our ways of speaking, hold us in a very cool and aloof relation to the rest of the animate earth that enfolds us. Can we find ways of speaking that call us back into rapport and reciprocity with the other beings, the other shapes and forms of this world?’

    We met in Oxford, a strange place for such a conversation; a city which epitomises the heights and the strange coldnesses of ‘civilisation’. But from the moment we spot each other across Radcliffe Square, a pocket of warmth and wildness seems to open up. We spend a couple of hours exploring and eating breakfast, before sitting down at last in the gardens of New College, in sight of the old city wall, to film a conversation that would ramble across our mutual fascinations and our desire to make sense of the situation of the world. 

    What stays with me is the heightened sense of animality which you come away with after spending time with Abram. Later that afternoon, I stepped off the coach in central London and walked down Oxford Street, aware of myself as an animal among other animals, all of us always already reading each other in deep ways which go back thousands of generations. 

    DH: It’s funny that we’re sitting where we are, because one of the ways I’ve talked about Uncivilised writing is as writing which comes from or goes beyond the city limits, which negotiates with the world beyond the human Pale. And in The Spell of the Sensuous, you go to meet these traditional sorcerers, to learn about their role within the human community, but you notice how often they live outside or on the edge of human settlements. And it’s a stance that recurs in the writers and thinkers who have inspired me – Alan Garner talks about the mearcstapa, the boundary-walker, and there is a text in which Ivan Illich calls himself a zaunreiter, a hedge-straddler, an old German word for witch.

    DA: Ah yes, the hagazussa (from whence we get our word ‘hag’), which means: she who rides the hedge. The magicians are those who ride the boundary between the human world and the more-than-human world of hawks and spiders and cedar trees, those who tend the boundary between the human community and the wider community in which we’re embedded. It seems to me that the human hubbub is always nested within a more-than-human crowd of elementals, a community composed first of the particular geological structures and rocks of our locale. The stones and minerals of each place give rise to certain qualities in the soil, and that soil invites a specific array of plants to seed themselves and take root there. Those shrubs and trees, in turn, provoke particular animals to linger and sometimes settle in that terrain, or at least to feast on their leaves and fruits as they migrate through that landscape. Those animals, plants, and landforms are our real neighbours, the folks with whom we need to be practicing real community, if we want to be living well in any place.

    DH: One of the things I get from your writing is the sense of the abundance of the natural world. It strikes me that a lot of environmentalism has the opposite quality, that we often describe the world in terms of scarcity. The crises we face are expressed in terms of limits, shortages and scarceness of resources. So how do we make sense of the relationship between the hard walls against which our civilisation is hitting up, and the quality of endlessness in the world as you invite us to experience it?

    DA: It’s a puzzle for me, as well. The term ‘resource’ always befuddles me. If we would simply drop the prefix, ‘‘re,’’ whenever we use the term, it would become apparent that we’re almost always talking about ‘sources’, like springs bubbling up from the unseen depths. But when we put that little prefix in front of the word, and speak of things as ‘resources’, we transform the enigmatic presence of things into a reserve, a stock of materials simply waiting for us to use. When we conceive it as a stock of stuff, then there naturally comes a sense that that stock is limited, and bound to run out. 

    If I sense the things of this earth not as a resources but as sources, if I feel them as wellsprings bubbling out of the unknown depths, well, this is not to deny that many of those springs seem to be drying up. This is a horrific circumstance that we’ve gotten ourselves into. But the way beyond this mess has to involve, first, a reconceiving and a re-seeing and sensing of this wild-flowering world as something that cannot ever be fully objectified, a zone of unfoldings that can never be understood within a purely quantitative or measurable frame. This ambiguous biosphere, in its palpable actuality, is not so much a set of quantifiable objects and determinate processes as it is a dynamic tangle of corporeal agencies, of bodies – or beings – that have their own lives independent of ours. To feel this breathing biosphere as something other than an object is to begin to sense that there’s something inexhaustibly strange about this world, something uncanny and unfathomable even and especially in its everyday humdrum ordinariness. The way any weed or clump of dirt seems to exceed all of our measurements and our certainties. And it’s this resplendence of enigma and otherness, this uncanniness, that we eclipse whenever we speak solely in terms of scarcity and shortage. 

    DH: When you talk about how this world can never be adequately reduced to the quantitative and the measurable, it strikes me that there is a difficulty for environmentalism since it has become focused on climate change. Because Carbon Dioxide is so inaccessible to our senses, something we can only measure and not experience. So we are trying to train ourselves to a consciousness of something utterly outside of our direct experience.

    DA: You point to a genuine problem in the broad environmental movement, one which mimics a tremendous problem within contemporary civilisation: our culture places a primary value on abstractions, on dimensions of the real of which we have no direct visceral or sensorial experience. We are born into a civilisation that straightaway tells us that the world we experience with our unaided senses is not really to be trusted, that the senses are deceptive…

    DH: That realreality is this mathematical layer, which you can get at, if you use the right tools to probe beneath the experience of reality.

    DA: If we probe beneath the ‘‘illusory’’ appearances. Exactly. So this world that we directly encounter, through its smells and textures and colours, comes to seem an illusory – or at best a secondary – realm, derivative from these more primary dimensions. Like the fascinating but largely abstract dimension of axons and dendrites and neurotransmitters washing across neuronal synapses – all of these hidden occurrences unfolding behind our brows – which many of our colleagues believe is what’s really going on when we imagine we’re experiencing the world: the apparent world that we experience is actually born of processes unfolding within the brain. Meanwhile, other colleagues will insist that what’s reallycausing our ways of feeling and tasting and touching are molecular patterns and processes tucked inside the nuclei of our cells; that is to say, our experience is primarily caused and coded for by the nucleotide sequences in our genome, by the way certain strands of DNA are transcribed and translated into the proteins that compose us and catalyse all our behaviours. 

    Still other comrades of ours, working in laboratories very different from those of the molecular biologists and the neurologists, will insist that what’s reallytrue about the world is what’s happening in the subatomic dimension of mesons and gluons and quarks. 

    So the world of our direct experience seems always to be explained by these other, ostensibly truer and realer dimensions which are nonetheless hidden behind the scenes, and so our felt encounter with one another and with the ground underfoot, and with the wind gusting past our face, is always marginalised…

    DH: …and mistrusted.

    DA: …and one can sense, perhaps, that this is the very origin, the secret source of the ecological mayhem and misfortune that has befallen our world. Because it’s so hard, even today, to mobilise people to act on behalf of the last dwindling wild river, or the last swath of a great forest that is about to be clear-cut, since people no longer feel any deep affinity with the sensuous, palpable earth. Their allegiance is elsewhere, their fascination is held by these other dimensions, which seem more trustworthy and true than this very ambiguous, difficult, and calamity-prone earth that they share with the other species. 

    And although many of the experts who speak in this manner – relegating the sensuous world to a kind of secondary or derivative status – are avowed atheists, and although they will rail passionately against the creationists and any others who they think are caught up in a superstitious worldview, this approach that privileges abstract dimensions, whether subatomic or genetic, over the ambiguous world of our direct experience has much in common with old theological notions. It’s deeply kindred to the old assumption that the sensuous, earthly world is a sinful, problematic, and derivative realm, fallen away from its truer source – from a heaven hidden beyond all bodily ken, to which the human spirit must aspire.

    DH: This reminds me of a conversation that I got into on Twitter last week. Somebody posted: ‘All children are born anarchists and atheists.’ I sent it on and I said, ‘I think they’re born anarchists and animists.’

    DA: Well, there’s a lot of evidence that what we call ‘animism’ – which simply names the intuition that everything is animate, that each thing has its own active agency – that this is a kind of spontaneous experience for the human organism…

    DH: A sort of default state of consciousness?

    DA: A default, baseline state for the human creature. It doesn’t really seem to be a belief system, but rather a way of speaking in accordance with our spontaneous, animal experience. Since, for all their differences, the various entities I meet – brambles, stormclouds, squirrels, rivers – all seem to be composed of basically the same stuff as myself, well, since I am an experiencing, sensitive creature, so this maple tree must also have its own sensitivities and sensibilities. Doubtless very different from mine (and different even from those of a birch or an oak) but nonetheless this tree seems to have its own agency, its own ability to affect the space around it and the other creatures nearby. And to affect me. 

    Given the ubiquitous nature of this animistic intuition among the diverse indigenous peoples of this planet – given its commonality among so many exceedingly diverse and divergent cultures – it would seem that this is our birthright as humans. To feel that we are alive within a palpable cosmos that is itself alive through and through. From an indigenous perspective (and even, I would say, from the creaturely perspective of our sensate bodies) there’s no getting underneath the felt sense of the world’s multiplicitous dynamism to some basically inanimate, inert stratum of matter; rather, to the human animal, matter itself seems to be animate – or self-organising – from the get-go. Such is the most commonplace human experience: in the absence of intervening technologies, we feel ourselves inhabiting a terrain that is shot through with sensitivity and sentience (albeit a sentience curiously different, in many ways, from our own). 

    DH: And yet to articulate that is immediately to be told that you’re projecting: that this is Romantic, sentimental, anthropomorphic nonsense!

    DA: The assumption and the knee-jerk objection that comes toward us, over and again, is that such a participatory way of speaking involves merely a projection of human consciousness onto otherwise inanimate, insentient materials or beings. This reaction often seems (at least to me) a kind of wilful blindness and deafness to anything that does not speak in words; a resolute refusal to hear these other voices as anything other than meaningless sounds. Humans alone have meaningful speech; the sounds of birds and humpback whales and crickets (to say nothing of the whoosh of the wind in the willows, or even the night-time hiss of tires rolling along the rain-drenched pavement) cannot possibly carry their own meanings! There is no openness to the likelihood that these other sounds are genuinely expressive, and communicative, although they carry meanings that we humans cannot necessarily interpret or translate. Certainly we cannot know, in any clear way, what these other utterances – of redwing blackbirds, for instance, or of an elk bugling on an autumn evening – are saying. But nonetheless, if we listen with our own animal ears, uncluttered with assumptions, then these other voices do move us as they reverberate through our flesh. And if we listen year after year, watching closely the patterned movements of elk, perhaps apprenticing ourselves to the ways of the herd as it migrates with the seasons, then one day we may find ourselves spontaneously hearing, like an audible glimpse, some new edge of the meaning embodied in that bugling call.

    DH: One of the things I become more aware of over time as a speaker is the extent to which language acts as a frequency on which something else is being transmitted. The experience of the audience, or of the other people with whom we’re interacting, is as much an experience of something else that passes through words, in the way that music passes through a string on a cello or on a guitar, as it is of the rational, the formal content of language.

    DA: Yes, even in this conversation, it’s as if the denotative meaning of our words rides on the surface of a much richer, improvisational interchange unfolding between our two animal bodies. There is a rhythm and a tonality and a melody to our speaking, like two birds gradually tuning to one another; via the soundspell of our phrases, and the rise and fall of our singing, our voices affect and inform one another. I suspect that much of the real meaning that arises in any genuine, human dialogue originates in this inchoate layer, far below the dictionary meanings of our words, where our bodies are simply singing with one another. 

    But also, I was thinking of our brothers and sisters who insist that human consciousness is so profoundly different from anything else we encounter in the surrounding landscape, and that our sense of the life that we meet in a lightning-struck tree or in a lichen-encrusted rock or even a rusting, overgrown bulldozer is entirely just a projection – their insistence that the world be seen from outside, as it were, by a human consciousness that isn’t really continuous with the world…

    DH: That echoes the role of God, in a monotheistic cosmology…

    DA: It does, yes, it’s a kind of bodiless view from outside the world, one which flattens all of this diverse, multiplicitous otherness into just one kind of presence, the so-called material world, a mass of basically inert or mechanically-determined stuff. But as soon as we allow that things have their own agency, their own interior animation – their own pulse, so to speak – it becomes possible to notice how oddly different these various beings are from one another and from ourselves. If I insist that rocks have no life or agency whatsoever, then I can’t easily notice or account for the way that a slab of granite affects me very differently than does a sandstone boulder, or the manner in which each influences the space around it in a distinct way. But as soon as I allow that that rock is not entirely inert, then I can begin to feel into the very different style and activity of that sandstone relative to the granite’s way of being, or to that of a piece of marble. So this is really a way of beginning to access the irreducible plurality of styles, or velocities, or rhythms of being, of waking up to the manifold otherness that surrounds us, rather than reducing all this multiplicity to one flattened-out thing, ‘the environment’.

    I can’t really feel into, or enter into relationship with, an inert object. I cannot suss out the changing mood of a winter sky if I deny that the sky has moods.

    DH: It feels like what we’re talking about are ‘ways of seeing’, to use John Berger’s phrase – or ways of sensing, since it’s not only about the visual. That takes me to something I was thinking about before. It’s a painting from 1649 of a man called William Petty, who was Professor of Anatomy here in Oxford, at the ripe age of twenty eight. I’ve been fascinated by this painting since I stumbled across it in the National Portrait Gallery, years ago. In the painting, he’s holding a skull in one hand, and in his other hand is an anatomy textbook open at the drawing of the skull, and from where the hands are it’s as if you are watching the scales of the seventeenth-century tipping away from the symbolic and the physical, real skull, towards the new reality – quantitative, measured, anatomised, cut open to reveal its mathematical properties.

    DA: Wow.

    DH: And what’s remarkable is that Petty the anatomist stands between two other phases of Petty’s life. Before that, during the Civil War, he had been in Paris with Thomas Hobbes, studying optics. And this is the moment in which, as Illich discusses, you are passing from an earlier optics, in which the gaze is understood as something tactile, a reaching out towards what you are looking at, to a new, lens-based, passive-receptive understanding, which sees our eyes as cameras in our heads. So that’s where Petty was before he was here in Oxford, and afterwards, in the 1650s, he went with Cromwell to Ireland, where he carried out the first econometric survey of a country, after the bloody subjugation of Ireland by Cromwell’s forces. And so you have, in this one figure, the conjunction of the transition to a new way of seeing; the anatomical cutting open of reality to reveal the mathematical new reality, hidden behind the untrustworthy evidence of our senses; and the foundation of modern economics, which is bounded in the same assumption that the measurable is the real and that the fundamental character of reality is scarcity. 

    DA: It’s amazing to think of that one painting as presenting an image of the hinge between these realities.

    DH: Yes. And I suppose where this takes us is back to how on earth we relate these things to the sense of urgency which characterises environmentalism, and the consciousness of the crises we’re facing. Because what I hear people saying is, ‘Come on, we’ve got five years to save the planet. It’s hard enough getting people to change their bloody light bulbs, and you want to up-end 350 years of people’s worldviews? This is self-indulgence!’ So what do we say back?

    DA: It’s a tough one, because it’s trying to speak across such different bodily stances, such different ways of standing in the face of this outrageous event breaking upon us, rolling like a huge wave over the earth. But the idea that we can master this breaking wave, and control it, and figure out how we’re going to engineer a way out of this cataclysm, is an extension of the same thinking that has brought us into it.

    DH: It presents us with a choice: either we can get control of this reeling system, or we have to give in to despair. To me, what I’ve been looking for – and what Dark Mountainis rooted in – is the search for hope without control. And I know, at the level of my human experience, that it’s only when I let go of control that I can find a deep hope, as opposed to a wishful thinking.

    DA: Control or despair, it’s a false choice. Total certainty or complete hopelessness – they amount to much the same thing, and they’re both useless. But also, the insistence that we’ve got just five years, or we’ve got twenty years, or two – these are all framed within the mindset of a linear, progressive time that is itself very different from the kind of timing, or rhythm, that the living land itself inhabits. The other animals seem to align themselves within the roundness of time, a curvature that our bodies remain acquainted with, although our thinking minds have become mighty estranged from this cyclical sense of time’s roundness. The round dance of the seasons, the large and small cycles of the sun and the moon. Certainly, there’s no way through the onrushing instability of climate change and global weirding without at least beginning to recouple our senses into the larger body of the sensuous, without beginning to tune ourselves and our intelligence back into these larger turnings and rhythms, even as the seasonal cycles, in many places, are beginning to shift. 

    Sensory perception is like a silken thread that binds our separate nervous systems into the wider ecosystem. Perception, beginning to attend to the shifting nuances around us, taking the time to slow down, rather than speeding up to meet the urgency – slowing down to notice what is actually happening in the local terrain, even if it’s a buzzing cityscape that we inhabit, noticing whatever weed is breaking up through the pavement at this spot, or on which skyscraper ledge the peregrines are nesting, or why these apples have so much less taste than they did when I was growing up, and what that says about the soils in which these apples are growing, or how they’re grown. I won’t notice those tastes if I’m motivated only by a frantic sense of urgency and of time running out.

    DH: One of the phrases from the manifesto which I’ve held onto most is when we say, ‘The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop.’ And I’d add to that, that the end of the world as we know it is also the end of a way of knowing the world. Whatever happens, to the extent that we are still going to be here, we’re going to live through the end of a lot of the certainties that characterised the ways of knowing the world that have served us for the past few lifetimes. And that’s not a utopian goal, that’s something that is going to happen whether or not we manage to do anything about climate change.

    DA: That’s right, and as these very conventional, long-standing ways of knowing begin to spring leaks – and in many cases the leaks are already turning into floods – this also suggests a replenishment of much older and deeper and more primordial sensibilities that we’ve cut ourselves off from for many centuries, and in some cases for several millennia. 

    But how do you approach the shuddering aspect of this turning point that also entails that there will be many, many losses? Not just losses of facile pleasures that we’ve come to take for granted, but the disappearance or dissolution of whole ecosystems, and the dwindling and vanishing of myriad other species from the lifeworld, other creatures with whom we’ve sustained a kind of conviviality, throughout the long stretch of our human tenure within this biosphere. We find ourselves living, today, in a world of increasing wounds. In the course of my speaking, hither and yon, I encounter many people who are frightened of their direct, animal experience, who are terrified at the mere thought of trusting their senses, and of stepping into a more full-bodied way of knowing and feeling, because they intuit that a more embodied and sensorial form of awareness would entail waking up to so many grievous losses. People sense that grief and they immediately retreat, they pull back and say ‘no, I want to stay more in the abstract.’ Or they want to retreat into relation with their smartphone or their iPad, taking refuge in the new technologies with their virtual pleasures. Because they quite rightly sense that there is some grief lurking on the other side of such a corporeal awakening. 

    What they don’t realise is that the grief is just a threshold, a necessary threshold through which each of us needs to step. The first moment of coming to our senses is indeed one of grief. Yet it’s as though the parched soil underfoot needs the water of our tears for new life to begin to grow again.

    DH: Well, the soil of ourselves needs us to go through that. But one goes through it, into being alive and being present.

    DA: It’s as if the grief is a gate, and our tears a kind of key, opening a place of wonder that’s been locked away. If we step through that gate we find ourselves slowly but with new pleasure being drawn into first one and then another and then a whole host of divergent relationships, each of which nourishes and feeds different aspects of our organism. We abruptly find ourselves in active relation and reciprocity with dragonflies and hooting owls, and with the air flooding in at your nostrils, with streetlamps buzzing as they break down, and with gravity, and beetles. There’s a kind of eros that begins to spark up between your body and the other bodies or beings around you.

    DH: I think it’s about a different relationship to time. Part of the numbness of the way of being in the world which has been orthodox in recent times is the enslavement of the present to the future, which to me is the core of the myth of Progress. So when people attack Dark Mountain for being gloomy and pessimistic, it bemuses me, because to me believing in Progress is absenting yourself from the joy of being alive now. And this is connected to the denial of death that is characteristic of modern culture. Part of the reason we have so much difficulty facing the ecological grief that is part of what it means to be alive right now is because we are terrified of our own deaths. And so much of the activity of our societies is a way of staying busy enough not to pass through the full entry into consciousness of the fact that you are going to die, and that this does not cancel out what makes being alive good.

    DA: I think you’re right. This great fear and avoidance of our mortality. Not just of our death, however, because there’s also a tremendous terror of vulnerability; a real fear of being vulnerable in the present moment. If I’m fully here, where my fingers and my nose and my ears are residing, then I am subject to a world that is much bigger than me, exposed to other beings in it like yourself who can see me and perhaps disdain me. If I acknowledge and affirm my own animal embodiment, then I am vulnerable to the scorn of others, and to all the sorts of breakdowns and diseases and decay to which the body is susceptible. There are so many reasons to take flight from being really bodily here, deeply a part of the same world that we share with the other animals and the plants and the stones. So yes, a fear of being bodily present within a world that’s so much bigger than us, a world that has other beings in it that that can eat us, and ultimately will eat us. The palpable world, this blooming, buzzing, wild proliferation of shapes and forms that feed upon one another, yes, and yet also jive and dance with one another – this earthly cosmos that our work is trying to coax people into noticing – is not a particularly nice world. It’s not a sweet world. It’s shot through with shadows and predation and risk – it’s fucking dangerous, this place – but it’s mighty beautiful, it’s shudderingly beautiful precisely because it’s so shadowed and riven with difficulty. 

    DH: It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. Easiness and happiness and convenience are things we seem to have fallen into the habit of believing are worth pursuing. And yet, if we think about our most meaningful relationships, the people we love most closely, even the best of our relationships are not characterised by easiness and they’re not characterised by everything being happy ever after. Most of the relationships we will have in our lives are easier than the relationships that will mean most to us. 

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 2.

  • Black Elephants & Skull Jackets: A Conversation with Vinay Gupta

    Black Elephants & Skull Jackets: A Conversation with Vinay Gupta

    Before I know who he is, Vinay Gupta has started telling me about his plan to start a small African country. The drug factory is the important part, apparently – that and the Gurkha mercenaries.

    We’re sitting on the bare floorboards of a townhouse in Mayfair: five storeys of gilded mirrors, marble hallways, handpainted Chinese wallpaper and furniture that looks like it just came out of a skip. In one corner, a large bracket fungus is growing out of the wall, about two feet below the ceiling. It’s the kind of scene that makes you think the world as we know it already ended, you just weren’t paying attention.

    It is January 2009. For months now, the world economy has been visibly in chaos, and even the politicians are starting to acknowledge that the consequences of this won’t be confined to the financial markets. Gupta seems like a man who relishes chaos.

    I’m here because the artists and activists who have squatted this Mayfair palace are about to open its doors to the public. For three weeks, it will become the Temporary School of Thought, a free university where anyone can pitch up and offer classes. Gupta and I have just joined the faculty: I’m offering lectures on ‘Deschooling Everything’ and ‘Economic Chemotherapy’, but this feels pretty tame compared to his curriculum which takes in ‘Infrastructure for Anarchists’, ‘Biometrics for Freedom’, ‘Avoiding Capitalism for the Next Four Billion’ and ‘Comparative Religion’.

    For some reason, this last one sounds like a euphemism.

    He’s the kind of character you want to run a background check on. Anyone who shows up in a squat, wearing a black jacket with a black skull printed on the back, telling stories about his work for the Pentagon, his plans to fix global poverty and his friendly Gurkha mercenaries deserves a background check.

    What makes it worse is when the stories check out. You can find the Defense Horizons paper he co-authored with the former Chief Information Officer of US Department of Defense. Then there’s the Hexayurt – the refugee shelter he invented, which can be assembled from local materials, costs less than a tent and lasts for years. Evidence of this turns up in photographs from the park at the centre of the Pentagon to the playa at Burning Man.

    Like a one-man Alternate Reality Game, he’s conscious of the need to leave a trail of evidence. ‘Otherwise, no one would ever believe me!’

    The jacket, the hand-printed business cards, the over-the-top invented organisations – for a while, the cards say ‘Global Apocalypse Mitigation Agency’ – are partly geek humour, the residue of his early career as a software engineer. They’re also a strategy for living with the kind of extreme situations Gupta spends his time thinking about.

    He works on big problems: how to prevent biometrics becoming a tool for genocide; how to deal with the survivors after a nuclear terror attack on a US city; what to do if H5N1 goes pandemic at a 50% Case Fatality Rate. (His briefing paper on severe pandemic flu contains the advice: ‘Do not count the dead. Count the living.’)

    At the Rocky Mountain Institute, he helped edit two of Amory Lovins’ books: Small is Profitable, on decentralised energy, and Winning the Oil Endgame, on moving the United States to a zero-oil future. The latter was paid for by Donald Rumsfeld’s office, when he was Secretary of Defense, and is credited with shaping Bush’s State of the Union speech in 2006, with its pledge to end America’s ‘addiction’ to oil.

    ‘I wish they’d followed up that speech with action,’ Gupta says, when I mention this.

    His real obsession, though, is poverty – something he attributes to his family background, half-Indian, but born and raised in Scotland.

    ‘When I was a kid, my mother and father visited some of our family in Calcutta. I remember them telling me stories of how these relatives – middle class people, teachers – lived in a swanky area of town, but in a really lousy apartment. In the kitchen they kept a brick on top of the chapatis so that rats coming in through the open window wouldn’t drag them away!’

    The complex cultural awareness bundled together in that story bears unpacking: that people have drastically different experiences of life, that things he – as a child growing up in Scotland – couldn’t imagine living with were normal to others. ‘And that they were my relatives, people like me.’

    A few weeks after the encounter in the Mayfair squat, and after a lot of long conversations over Chinese food, the Institute for Collapsonomics comes into being. Gupta and I are among its founders.

    The Institute is at least half a joke, a sister organisation for the Global Apocalypse Mitigation Agency. But it is also a crossing point for people from very different personal and professional backgrounds who, for one reason or another, have found themselves thinking seriously about what happens if and when the systems we’re meant to rely on start to fail.

    We convene in the back corner of Hing Loon, which does the best eggplant with garlic sauce in Chinatown, or after hours in somebody’s office. We invite former hedge fund managers and Ukrainian government officials to discuss the causes and realities of economic collapse. We gatecrash think tank seminars, with mixed results. The two of us spend three hours at a cafe in St James’s Park, arguing about pandemic flu and the role of government with a guy from the Cabinet Office. One Friday afternoon we invite ourselves to the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, turning up mob-handed to what turns into the most chaotic meeting I have ever attended.

    On our way back from that meeting, we alight upon a logo which embodies the spirit of collapsonomics. The Black Elephant is an unholy union of two boardroom clichés: the Elephant in the Room, the thing which everyone knows is important, but no one will talk about; and the Black Swan, the hard-to-predict event which is outside the realm of normal expectations, but has enormous impact. The Black Elephant is an event which was quite foreseeable, which was in fact an Elephant in the Room, but which, after it happens, everyone will try to pass off as a Black Swan. We think we have spotted a few of these.

    A year on, by the time we sit down to record this interview, two things have happened.

    On the one hand, the sense of panic which characterised the early months of the economic crisis has subsided. Stock markets have regained most of their losses, economic statistics inform us that the recession is over – for now, at least.

    Yet even as green shoots continue to be spotted, the headlines suggest another possibility. Emergency talks over a bailout for Greece to prevent a Euro collapse. Sarah Palin tells Tea Party activists America is ready for a second revolution. And here in the UK, more news piles up every day about huge cuts in public spending for schools, universities, local authorities.

    Reading the papers, it feels less like the crisis is over – more like it became the new normal. Did collapsonomics just go mainstream?

    Then again, in the UK, our idea of a crisis is that we have hit Peak Student: the point at which economic reality and funding cuts mean less young people will go to university year-on-year, rather than more. Meanwhile, in Haiti, a country which had little left to collapse, a disaster is playing out on an utterly different scale.

    Two days after our interview, Science for Humanity announces that it is raising funds to carry out research into the deployment of the Hexayurt as a shelter solution for some of the million people made homeless by the Haitian earthquake. This would be the first large-scale application on the ground of a project on which Gupta has been working since 2002.

    After a year of kicking around together, one of the things that strikes me is his ability to bridge these different worlds, the changes underway in Western countries – inconveniences perceived as disasters, for the most part – and the present day extremes of life and death in the world of the very poor. This is one reason I’ve been keen to put some of our conversations on the record, to talk about where the kind of practical thinking he’s doing connects to the cultural questions opened up by a project like Dark Mountain.

    The interview takes place, naturally, in a Chinese restaurant. It is after midnight. Both of us on laptops, talking and typing, so that a transcript is produced as we go. This method seems to work. A flow of other diners come and go, their conversations our backdrop: the Estonian girl who sold books door-to-door for the same company I had done a decade ago, the stand-up comics who just finished a gig, the group of drunk guys who interrupt us to ask if we’re playing Battleships.

    ‘Something like that,’ we tell them.

    DH: Dark Mountain is about what happens when we accept that our current way of living might just not be sustainable, however many wind farms we build. So I guess I wanted to start with your prognosis for that way of living.

    VG: Well, firstly, which ‘we’ are we talking about here? We as in Europeans and Americans? Or we as in people, period, globally? Because the hard part of this problem is actually thinking globally, about all of the people – and the diversity in our ways of lives and exposure to environmental and economic risks is huge.

    Some cultures are right at the edge of the envelope already, and washing over the edge: island nations, the Inuit, semi-arid agriculturists in general. Other cultures are pretty bang-centre and fairly stable. Iowa isn’t going to stop growing corn any time soon, but the whole of sub-Saharan Africa could be a dustbowl in 20 years.

    So it’s not regular and uniform, it’s all of these little lifestyle niches, some of which will fare better than others against various future scenarios.

    DH: So when people think about ‘collapse’, they should be asking where it’s going to happen, rather than whether it’s going to happen?

    VG: Well, in terms of sustainability, there are two questions. Sustain what? And then, can we sustain those things? Right now, more or less the whole of the debate focuses on whether we can sustain hyperconsumption – and the answer is no, of course not. Something is going to give: oil, climate, topsoil, some other factor we’re not even paying attention to. You can’t just burn the earth’s natural resources like a gas flare on an oil rig forever.

    DH: Yes, for me the thing which sums up what’s screwed about the discourse of ‘sustainability’ is Marks & Spencer’s Plan A campaign. You remember the slogan? ‘Plan A: Because there is no Plan B’. And what I want to know is, well, for whom is there no Plan B? For high-end supermarkets? Or for liveable human existence? Or did we stop making that distinction?

    VG: Precisely. And that’s the cultural narrowing of the sustainability discourse to mean the American and European lifestyle. There is no possible way in which that standard of living is going to be sustained. It’s impossible for two reasons.

    Firstly, ecological constraints. Not just climate, but land use patterns in general. We just don’t have the ability to keep doing this indefinitely, and climate is just the first of a long list of things that can and eventually will go wrong.

    Secondly, and this is less widely understood, even in the most optimistic scenarios globalisation is going to get us. Migration of jobs and capital around the world is making the poor richer, and the rich poorer, with a lot of noise on top of that basic pattern. Another thing that moves wealth around is natural resource scarcity: when people start paying top dollar for oil, the oil states start getting rich. Suppose we wind up with a ‘global middle class’ of, say, four billion people, we’re going to see that same kind of auction pricing and wealth transfer for more or less all natural resources: copper, iron, nickel, even wood.

    So one way or another, even with all the new high tech stuff you can think of, we’re not going to be so much richer than our neighbours on the planet forever. We’re all headed, on average, for a lifestyle about where Mexico is today, and possibly a good deal worse if climate or other factors really start to bite.

    If things go wrong, we could wind up anywhere.

    DH: One of the questions Dark Mountain opens up is what it takes to make life ‘liveable‘. This is very much in play from a cultural perspective. For example, a book like Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road – leaving aside its literary achievement – subtly reinforces a very common, seldom-stated cultural assumption, that life outside of a continuation of American late consumerism is unliveable.

    VG: And that’s where most people are already living! Not in The Road, but outside of the Western consumerist bubble.

    DH: And those are not the same thing. Part of what I find so interesting about your work is that it feels like you’ve arrived at this question – about how we distinguish what makes life liveable from the way you and I happen to be living right now – from a completely different perspective. I got there by reading Ivan Illich and John Berger. You got there by working with Rocky Mountain Institute and the US Department of Defense.

    VG: That and the fact that I’m half-Indian. You can’t underestimate the effect of that: even growing up thousands of miles away from India, there was still the curiosity about how the other half lived, combined with the sense that these people were my relatives, some of them. People like me.

    So fast forward to my early 30s and I’m involved with Rocky Mountain Institute. Now, RMI is really extremely good at infrastructure. Amory is personally incredibly intelligent and sensitive to how large-scale systems work: he’s a master of the complex. I, on the other hand, like simple systems. There was an event called the Sustainable Settlements Charrette in 2002 and what came out of that was a question: can we do a new kind of refugee camp?

    And that was where I suddenly found a new angle on things: apply the RMI infrastructure insights, not to the big, complex western cities, but to the refugees!

    This turned out to be incredibly fruitful, because refugees are a special case of the very poor. Villagers all over the world share many problems with them, problems like water and shelter. So through thinking about how to make life liveable for refugees, you arrive at practical ideas for all these people.

    DH: Ideas which also apply to people in rich countries, when things go wrong?

    VG: Absolutely. Like, what happens after a nuclear attack on a US city? The work on that started at a disaster response event called Strong Angel III, run by Eric Rasmussen, an ex-US Navy surgeon who’s now running InSTEDD.

    A couple of friends and I came as self-supporting American refugees. We swung by Home Depot, picked up about $300 of equipment, and were self-sustaining for shelter, for water, for cooking – and we would’ve been for sanitation, if they’d let us use our composting toilet. People sat up and took notice, because that opened up a lot of new terrain – decentralised response to extreme crisis situations, where you have to make what you need from what you have.

    DH: What strikes me here is that the situations you’re talking about are situations which people – even in government or NGOs or the military – prefer not to think about, because they’re too alarming or too hopeless. And in that sense, there are very strong parallels to the scenarios we’re talking about with serious climate change, resource scarcity, social and economic collapse – take your pick!

    The point being that a lot of the people who’ve been drawn to the conversations around the Dark Mountain Project have reached a place where they no longer find the future offered by mainstream sustainability narratives believable. They’re coming round to the likelihood that we’re going to outlive our way of living – and that feels like giving up, or like once you face that, you might as well give up. We get accused a lot of defeatism – of being the guys who say ‘we’re fucked!’ – and you’re the guy whose job starts at the point where people admit they’re fucked!

    VG: Well, take the work on nuclear terrorism. What I found was that nobody had actually thought about cleaning up after a one-off nuclear attack in a realistic meat-and-potatoes way. They just hadn’t. Worse, the people who looked at my work – senior folks in the kinds of organisations which get to think about this stuff professionally – agreed it was the best plan they had seen, but to my knowledge have not committed to building that response capability. Not because it would not work – nobody’s ever suggested it wasn’t feasible, efficient and necessary – but because it would.

    And that means admitting you might get hit, and are prepared to deal with it. Not a popular position.

    DH: Sounds a lot like being in denial.

    VG: Yes, absolutely it’s denial, and a lot of what I do is denial management.

    When Mike Bennett and I started Buttered Side Down, we consciously did everything possible to push people out of that denial – branding it as a ‘historic risk management consultancy’ and the scary, scary homepage, leavened with the humour of the name.

    You always hit the denial and cognitive dissonance when dealing with the real world. It’s all over everything in our society. TV isn’t helping!

    DH: So I guess the question for a lot of people is, how do you handle these possibilities? How do you admit that it could happen, without feeling like just giving up?

    VG: There’s an easy way, and a hard way. Only the hard way produces results.

    The easy way is nihilism, which is basically escapist. ‘This situation is hopeless,’ you say, ‘but if something else were true then it wouldn’t be hopeless, and then I could re-engage.’

    DH: You mean like people who say ‘well, the climate situation is hopeless, so I’m not going to worry about it’?

    VG: Yes, exactly. They haven’t given up on the hope that somehow it’s all going to work out and allow them to continue to live (and consume) in their current way. They’ve abandoned trying to fix the situation, but deep down they still unconsciously expect that it will somehow all be OK in the end.

    People who are in that position say they’ve abandoned all hope, but they haven’t really. It’s wishful thinking. It’s Goth. It’s the easy way.

    The hard way is mysticism. ‘Look, we are all going to die.’

    ‘The question is only when, and how.’

    DH: Is that mysticism?

    VG: Yep, one way or another. Anybody who thinks about these questions seriously is a mystic. Even atheism, if it’s fully informed by a consideration of death, is a mystery tradition. The mystery is, ‘If we’re all going to die, what is worth living for?’ And the answer is, must be, everything.

    DH: For a lot of people, ‘mysticism’ suggests escapism – a retreat from reality.

    VG: You know, that’s largely a cultural issue in the West. There’s a legacy here of religion being about a mythical state, a salvation. That’s not at all how it worked in pre-Christian traditions, Greek, Roman, Hindu. Those roots go back to something else, not the hope of an afterlife, but a hope for this life.

    Stoicism is European Zen, more than anything else. And Diogenes looks a lot like a sadhu.

    DH: So how does this help you think practically about dealing with situations in which large numbers of people are going to die – whether that’s a climate disaster, or a situation like Haiti right now?

    VG: Large numbers of people? 100%. Everybody is going to die. The only question is when, and how. So it’s not about saving anybody. Talking about saving lives is perpetuating the illusion of living forever. I cannot save a single life. At best, my work allows people to experience more life before they face death, as we all inevitably must: a universal experience which we all face alone; an initiation or an extinction, we cannot say with certainty.

    It’s this vision of the certainty of death which is at the heart of my work.

    DH: How does that change the way you approach these extreme situations?

    VG: There’s this model I came up with called Six Ways to Die. It’s like a mandala, a picture of life and death. In the centre is the individual self: you. At the perimeter of the circle are the six ways to die: too hot or too cold, hunger and thirst, illness and injury. What stands between you and these threats is infrastructure, the stuff that gives you shelter, supply and safety: your house, the power grid, the water purification plant, the sewer pipes, hospitals and Marks & Spencer’s.

    You can’t draw an accurate map of what keeps people alive without having one eye squarely on death, and if you haven’t faced your own mortality more or less fully, Six Ways to Die is very hard on you. Because you will die.

    To fight for people’s lives effectively means understanding that you are fighting for something measured in years, in days, in seconds and moments, not in the sense of some abstract salvation from death itself.

    ‘How can I add to the span of your years?’ is not the same mindset as ‘How can I save you?’ If I fail, I failed to buy you five or 10 or 15 or 50 years, made of days and moments. It’s this time to live and experience which is at stake, not your life per se.

    DH: That shift in mindset – apart from anything else, that’s a substantial change in your sense of your role. I think a lot of us who have been activists, or in some way trying to ‘change the world’, are familiar with the ‘How can I save you?’ role – whether it‘s ‘saving lives’ or ‘saving the planet’.

    VG: It’s all going: us, now; the planet, in a few billion years.

    At birth, we leapt from a building, and it takes 70 or 80 years to hit the ground on a good day. On a bad day, you miss the lower 30 or 50 floors!

    DH: Now that’s dark! But you know, I see a lot of major figures in the environmental movement wrestling with this at the moment. They’ve spent years telling people, if we just try hard enough and get it together, we can save the planet – or rather, we can save our way of living. And they’re no longer convinced, but they feel like if they admit how serious things are, everyone will just give up. And this becomes intensely morally charged.

    When Paul Kingsnorth, my Dark Mountain co-founder, debated George Monbiot in the Guardian last year, the key bit in George’s argument – the bit that got thrown backwards and forwards endlessly in the comments and the blog posts – was his suggestion that we were passive in the face of (or even enthusiastic about) mass death.

    Here’s the bit I’m thinking of. He writes: ‘How many would survive without modern industrial civilisation? Two billion? One billion? Under your vision several billion perish.’

    VG: Look, ‘modern industrial civilisation’ cannot scale to seven billion people. Two billion people in that ecosystem niche are effectively trashing the entire global ecosystem, with climate going first, followed hard on by oceans, deforestation, topsoil and all the rest. Even if it stabilises, the impact as the poor billions who don’t currently use many natural resources pile on to the consumption bandwagon is going to destroy everything.

    This is absolutely and completely obvious. Either the poor are going to continue living in their current conditions or worse – conditions which most industrial nations would consider an apocalypse – or they are going to ‘develop’ and follow us into the burning building.

    DH: I wonder, sometimes, whether the absolute focus on climate change in the environmental movement today is partly a way of avoiding thinking about this larger question?

    VG: Well, climate hits the rich and the poor. It’s scary because it’ll flood Venice and Bangladesh at the same time, and nobody can buy their way out of it. Most of the other ecological collapses allow the richest to buy their way to the end of the line: last tuna syndrome.

    DH: How much will the last tuna to come out of the sea fetch in a Japanese fish market?

    VG: That’s the one.

    DH: Perhaps. I see something else, though. The focus on climate change allows the implication – which I don’t think many environmentalists actually believe – that if it wasn’t for the pesky sensitivity of our climate system to CO2, our way of living, our mode of development, our model of progress would be just fine. I see this in the popular discourse about climate change, from politicians and in the media, and I don’t see it being challenged clearly by mainstream environmentalists.

    VG: It’s all very complicated, and there’s a huge, huge amount of stuff going on. We can’t master the complexity, we don’t have the ability intellectually to master all the science. People are at the edge of their limit to cope. Picking the most pressing problem and screaming about it is an ancient human reflex. TIGER! Climate is our tiger.

    DH: That’s a good point, about people struggling to cope. It’s all very well talking about how someone who comes up with disaster plans for a living handles the possibility of major, discontinuous change – of life being shorter and messier than we grew up expecting it to be – but how about the rest of us?

    VG: Well, I’m not proposing a Zen revolution – not yet, anyway!

    DH: It is quite a thought! But I have a strong sense of people looking for new ways of thinking, tools to adapt, ways to get their heads round the changes we’re likely to live through. I think that’s why Paul and I have had such a strong response since we published the manifesto.

    VG: Well, a simple humanism gets you most of the way: think about poverty first. The poor are already living without all these things we are afraid of losing. They’re too poor to consume much carbon. They eat all organic produce because they can’t afford fertiliser. We are afraid of becoming them, if we trash the planet with our insane greed and the standard of living that comes with it. So when you start to get clear about poverty – and I’ll show you what that’s like in a moment – you start to get clear about limitation.

    Here’s how this works, the back of an envelope version. Six and a half billion people. Half rural, half urban. Of the urban population, about two-thirds are doing OK or very well. One-third – one billion – live in utter, abject poverty. Of the rural population, you’ve got about a billion who are OK, a billion who are really struggling, and a billion who are regularly hungry.

    With me, so far? Four billion in various states of poor, and a couple of billion of those, a third of the people on the planet, with really serious daily personal problems like no dental care beyond having your teeth pulled with rusty pliers.

    This is poverty – and it’s everywhere.

    And how does it work? Average income in the USA is about $100 per day. Average income for the poorest billion is maybe $1 per day. So at global averages, there are 100 people living on this income.

    Now, think about the kind of will-to-blindness it has taken us all to build our consumer paradise while all this is going on around us. That blindness, that wilful ignorance, is what climate change threatens. But it did not start with climate, it started, as everything on Earth does, with poverty.

    All of these people who discovered climate recently? They’d been ignoring poverty their whole lives. The denial is cracking, and it’s going to be messy, but do not assume that the environment is all that’s under the rug.

    DH: This is one of the things we tried to do in the manifesto, though I don’t know if it was clear enough, to piece these things together: climate, resource scarcity, social and economic instability. All these unpredictable, converging tsunamis that we’re facing, all rooted in forms of denial that go generations deep.

    VG: The kind of suffering we are afraid of coming from climate collapse is the ordinary condition of half of the human race.

    DH: Yes. And here’s the question we’ve been moving backwards and forwards across: once you admit that, what do you do next?

    VG: Well, let’s talk about what we really need. Back to Six Ways to Die: shelter, supply and security. Take water: there’s a simple technology, a clay water filter called the Potters for Peace Filtron. It’s a few dollars a unit, can be made anywhere in the world, and it takes out all the bugs. There are lots of similar little innovations for other basic needs. Taken together they can make the villages healthy and good places to live.

    That’s what you need. Everything else is what you want.

    DH: Now, this reminds me of Illich. One of the recurring themes in his work is the massive, unexamined extension of our definition of ‘need’ that has gone on in modern societies: our failure to distinguish between the kind of ground-level needs that you’re talking about and the systems and institutions we happen to be dependent on right now.

    There’s another point from Illich, from one of his essays, ‘Energy and Equity’ – which feels incredibly relevant today, even though it was written nearly 40 years ago. Here’s the passage I’m thinking of: ‘A universal social straitjacket will be the inevitable outcome of ecological restraints on total energy use imposed by industrial minded planners bent on keeping industrial production at some hypothetical maximum.’ In other words, if we frame the question of sustainability as – how do we achieve the most energy-intensive society we can, within ecological limits? – the result is the end of democracy. There is no political choice left about our way of living. Whereas, if we include the range of positions below those limits, we have many possible ways of living.

    VG: You’re talking about hard optimisation, technocratic maximisation of utility. That’s very hard to think through, as you say, without totalitarian control.

    DH: Yes, although today it comes disguised as pragmatism. If you read something like Heat, for example – to pick on George Monbiot, again – it’s not immediately obvious that you’re dealing with ‘maximisation’ of anything. For the purposes of his argument, reducing our emissions to reasonable levels is an almost-impossible task, therefore the least impossible option is the closest we have to a realistic one.

    So there, we’re still talking about achieving maximum possible consumption – what Illich warned was a social straitjacket – but because of the context, in which we’re also talking about such a massive reduction of consumption, it’s easy to miss the assumption that we should consume as much as we can.

    VG: The problem is that we live without restraint in a limited world.

    DH: Also, it’s important to acknowledge the extent to which that problem is cultural. It’s not simply an evolutionary drive that leads us to unlimited consumption, so that every human who ever lived would be doing the same were they in our shoes. You can find examples of times and places where people have lived very differently – and not necessarily because of local ecological constraints or lack of technology, but because they were not acting on the assumption that the source of meaning or satisfaction in life is the maximisation of consumption.

    VG: In general, old cultures get to be old cultures by wisely negotiating with whatever their limits are. In some places it’s land use, not wrecking your soil, in other areas it’s population. But old cultures get to be old cultures by not doing this or anything like it.

    OK, so here’s what it boils down to: are we going to get to be an old culture?

    DH: And again, which ‘we’ are we talking about? Is it really about whether Europe or America becomes an old culture? The ecological problems aren’t limited by one culture or another: all over the world, we see the same patterns of hyperconsumption emerging in their own local versions. It’s a global issue, not just one for us in the West.

    VG: Absolutely – and there’s a historical context to this. American and European exceptionalism has existed in one form or another since the early days of colonialism. It’s hundreds of years of gunboat diplomacy and technological breakouts, as the rest of the world struggled to understand what was happening, and cope with the invaders. And the last cards in that game are going to be played in this present generation.

    In the future, we’re all Mexicans. That’s the standard of living towards which globalisation is driving us. Every country will have its rich and its poor, and some will generally do better than others, but the overwhelming military and technological superiority, which was the foundation of the economic hegemony of America and Europe, is largely at an end.

    Europeans and Americans are soon going to live in the same world as everybody else: the world in which you do not have everything you want, and sometimes you do not have enough. That is coming because the plenty we took for granted was based on the absurd political power imbalances that gunpowder and mechanised war brought us, when only we controlled them. As military force runs out as an option, and industrial production becomes available to everybody, America and Europe lose the economic advantages which came with being in control of the majority of resources of the globe.

    In the future, all of us on Planet Earth are going to be dealing with the fact that there are seven billion of us. In the future, you do not get a jacuzzi. Not unless you are very, very lucky and are one of the rich, or unless your jacuzzi runs on abundant resources, not scarce ones.

    If you live in a hot country, you can use the sun. In a country with abundant biomass, you can burn wood. In a cold country with geothermal springs, you can use the ground. But you are not going to burn natural gas for fun in 50 years time in any scenario I can imagine from here, and that’s the end of a brief, short, foolish age.

    We can still live well, but it must be wisely and appropriately, as if we were going to live a thousand years, but knowing we will not.

    DH: You know, that sounds pretty upbeat, from a man wearing a skull jacket! What’s left, though, is the question of how we get there from here?

    VG: That’s exactly what we don’t know. It’s where the history of the 21st century is going to be made, in the same way that wrestling with the nuclear bomb was the defining dilemma of the twentieth-century.

    We don’t have a canned solution for this one, it’s a whole culture, and a whole world, engaging with a problem we’ve never seen before. It’s a pass/fail grade on evolution. It’s not a problem which can be project-managed.

    DH: What’s striking is, when you talk about this, you sound hopeful.

    VG: The hope starts at the point when you give up. I’m going to die one day, so are you, and the most we can expect from this life is to enjoy the ride. As long as the grass still grows, and the young are optimistic, life will be wonderful.

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 1.