Category: Writings

  • When the House Is Built, the Scaffolding Can Be Taken Down

    I started my first blog in an internet cafe in Xinjiang. It was early 2004, I was teaching in a language school set up by a man named David, who was younger than I was, smoked a pipe and talked like he’d walked straight out of a 1930s movie version of England. (In fact, he came from one of the English port dynasties, grew up in Australia and went on to settle in China.) I was the first teacher he’d hired who wasn’t already a friend.

    Everything about the experience was intense, and early on I began sending out emails to a list of friends back home, telling stories as a way to stay sane. Then I found a site where you could keep an online journal, so I told my friends I’d spare their inboxes and post my stories there, in case they wanted to go on reading. After a couple of months, I found that I was getting comments from people I’d never met. It’s hard to explain how strange and exciting that felt in 2004.


    That memory came back to me as we were preparing the invitation to Homeward Bound, our first online offering from a school called HOME. This is an eight-part series which I’ll be teaching, starting on Thursday evening next week.

    Besides the obvious transfer of a significant proportion of all human interaction to Zoom, several recent experiences convinced me that it was time to make this invitation, one which Anna and I have been mulling for a while.


    First, in February I embarked on a six-month course led by my old friend Charlie Davies, entitled Clarity for Teachers. It made me realise what a charged word ‘teacher’ is, the power and the possibilities for confusion involved in claiming it.

    If someone asks what you do and you say you’re a teacher, they will assume you mean in a school. It’s hard work, being responsible for classrooms full of children and teenagers. I’ve seen people broken by it, and I’ve seen people come alive in it. If you don’t belong to the professional body of qualified classroom teachers, then to call yourself a teacher could verge on the shady, like passing yourself off as a surgeon or a lawyer.

    Among the group of us on Charlie’s course, there’s at least one with a classroom career behind him, but the others include the head of a national church, the head of a Buddhist monastery, a former naval officer and a ritual designer. It’s quite the crew.

    During the first part of the course, we worked with a set of forty-two cards, each carrying a line from A Teacher’s Advice on How to Be Clear. This is Charlie’s reworking of a thousand-year-old Buddhist text, Advice from Atisha’s Heart, rendered in fiercely commonsense, modern-day English.

    Because I absorb and process experience by writing – not much has changed since I was teaching in classrooms in Xinjiang – I began writing a more-or-less daily commentary as I worked my way through the forty-two lines. Since I started this in early March, it became my companion through the strange weeks in which the world slid sideways and so much else changed: one exercise I’d sit down to, usually at the start of a working day, that still seemed to make sense.

    There’s so much I could say about where this led me. Not least, it means I accidentally wrote a book in two months, though it remains to be seen whether anyone will want to publish it! For tonight, I want to pick out a passage from one of the later commentaries, where I’m reflecting on the difference between what I do and what my friends who teach in universities do:

    I work with words and thoughts, it’s a big part of what I bring to any stage on which I get asked to speak, and yet my favourite piece of feedback after a talk was the time my friend Ansuman told me, ‘What you said was great, but what mattered was the way you were.’ There is a song beneath the words, and if that song is not there or does not come through clearly, then it doesn’t matter how clever the words are, it’s all just noise.

    Having spent two months in the company of this gang of irregular teachers, and writing about these lines of A Teacher’s Advice, this has brought me to a place of claiming my role as a teacher – and getting clear about the kind of teaching that has been increasingly central to my work.


    In the way that sometimes happens when you reach a place of clarity and commitment, a series of messages then arrived in quick succession. First, when I shared that passage about Ansuman’s beautiful piece of feedback, I received an equally beautiful response from the artist and teacher Toni Spencer:

    I remember vividly your day at Dartington last year. And the talk the night before. I can be pretty reactive when talked at for too long. Especially by a man, especially a white educated man, especially with big words and academic and literary references in there. But none of that reactivity happened. We were all there in it together. I kind of didn’t notice. And you facilitated something so simple (which gave plenty of space for everyone’s voices too) and with a quiet magic. It made me smile how I couldn’t quite see how but didn’t care!

    Then it came time to deliver a guest lecture at the centre at Uppsala where I have been a frequent visitor in recent years, except that this time I was to give the lecture over Zoom. Now, because I live in a small city in Sweden and work with people around the world, I was an experienced Zoomer before most people had heard of it, but still I was unprepared for how rich and lively and intimate the experience of teaching to twenty students over this platform turned out to be. The course leaders let the session run half an hour over because the questions and discussion were flowing so beautifully.

    Afterwards, I was shaking my head. ‘That felt better than when I go there and teach in person,’ I said to Anna. Apart from anything else, this seems a pretty damning verdict on the physical and social construction of the spaces in which we usually gather for academic teaching, because in years of editorial meetings and family calls over Zoom or Skype or Hangouts, none of them ever felt better than it would have been to be together in person. ‘Maybe it’s time I made an invitation to that online course we’ve talked about.’

    Two nights later, in the kitchen, I brought up the subject again.

    ‘Well,’ Anna said, ‘are you going to do it?’

    So here we are.


    I’ve been reading Mark Boyle’s book, The Way Home, about his year of living ‘without technology’. When I say reading, I mean listening to it read by an Irishman with a lovely voice, on my headphones, using the Audible app, on the smartphone that is one of the great love-hate relationships of my life.

    I remember crossing paths with Mark a couple of times, around the time he became The Moneyless Man. I can see him bounding onstage at a new media awards ceremony where members of the Freeconomy Community had organised to vote themselves ‘the people’s choice’; there’s a photograph of him at the first Dark Mountain festival, delivering a speech to crowd on a mound outside the venue, in solidarity with those who objected to paying money for a ticket. It’s quite a messianic image.

    I’ll admit, back then his zeal set me on my guard. I’ll buy that money is the root of many of our evils, but not all of them. But there’s much in his writing and his example these days that I admire, and it seems a good book to spend time with, as we embark on the proposition of offering something of the heart’s work of this small school of ours through the unsettling miracles of instant global communications systems.

    In a conversation with William Wardlaw Rogers, not long ago, the pair of us landed on the thought that the technologies in which many of our lives are swathed just now might be used as scaffolding. It’s a humbler role than the one afforded them in the grand narratives of technological progress. Much of the best of what I’ve seen these technologies do over the years has been a kind of compensation for the damaged social and cultural landscape of our heavily-monetised societies. The danger is that such compensation numbs us to the accelerating damage that surrounds us. But sometimes, perhaps, we can turn them against their own logic. We can use them to build a house worth living in, a place worth calling home. And when the house is built, the scaffolding can be taken down.

    Meanwhile, perhaps the way to hold the contradiction is the one recommended by Ivan Illich: ‘Only the gratuitous commitment of friends can enable me to practice the asceticism required for modern near-paradoxes, such as renouncing systems analysis while typing on my Toshiba.’


    I can’t imagine how my six months in Xinjiang would have been, if I hadn’t had that online journal as a window to lean out of and throw words to friends and strangers, although part of the answer is that my Mandarin would have come a lot further. I can’t imagine how my life from that point onwards would have gone, without the friendships and connections that began in online spaces, and the ways that we used those tools to dream up projects and make them happen.

    This time last year, I spent a day in Doncaster with Warren Draper, first at Bentley Urban Farm, and then at the shop from which he and Rachel Horne have run Doncopolitan magazine. There aren’t many people whose work is as close to my heart as the work that Rachel and Warren have done over the years, and I’ve had glimpses of how much of a struggle it has been, how wearing it can be, the ground-level making of culture in and with and by communities that have borne the hard end of forty years of neoliberalism and deindustrialisation and the rest, where what funding there is rarely trickles down to the local culture-makers. But though I’ve only spent small handfuls of time with them over the years, every time I’ve come away inspired.

    As I walked back to the station with Warren that afternoon, I felt a touch of sadness. I said something like this: ‘I’ve seen you put the last ten years into building the magazine and the shop and the farm, in a place you can call home, and the work matters to so many people here. I’ve put ten years into building Dark Mountain and the rest of it, and it matters to a lot of people, but they are scattered across the world.’

    Someday soon, all being well, this school called HOME will have a place to call home, and Anna and I will enter a time when there is more possibility for rooting in our lives than there has been.

    All will not be well, of course – except in the mysterious sense of those old words that Julian of Norwich heard in her vision: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’ These days, I am surprised at how directly I feel old words speaking to my heart.

    Yet even with all the things that will not be well, in any ordinary sense, we will go on making a home that offers what shelter and hospitality it can, as long as we are able.

    My hope for those of you who are able to join me, a week from now, in the strange in-between space of these online encounters, is that it’s possible to offer you something of that hospitality, in the words we share with each other and the song that runs beneath them.


    For details of future Homeward Bound series and other courses and events, visit the website for a school called HOME

    If you’d like to learn more about Charlie Davies’s work around clarity and teaching, visit his How To Be Clear website. 

    You can sign up for future issues of Crossed Lines here.

  • The Price of Life

    https://open.spotify.com/show/5xgoppriB1m3ahUB83cheA

    Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.

    Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

    Kent: Is this the promised end?
    Edgar: Or image of that horror?

    King Lear, V.iii.264-5

    We’d walked eight miles already, on a warm July day, when the accident happened. That detail matters, because my mum is in her mid-70s, but this was nothing like what you think of as an old lady taking a fall. It was a slip and a headlong tumble on a steepening slope: a treacherous, skidding slope, like nothing I’d met in the six days since setting out from London. That morning in Reading, my parents had been waiting under the bridge, behind the Thames Water building, along with my friend Lloyd, to join us for the stretch to Streatley. Now my mum was in an ambulance, speeding back across the distance it had taken us hours to cover, to the A&E department of the Royal Berkshire Hospital. Later, one of us heard from a nurse who had been on duty when she came in that they hadn’t expected her to pull through.

    She did – and eight months later, she’s doing well – but this week, as the unfolding reality of the Coronavirus pandemic has spread itself across all our lives, I’ve found myself thinking back to those days in the hospital. Because there is a particular quality to this pandemic, a particular encounter to which it is bringing us. It’s not the whole story, but it’s a big part of it: what we’re going through right now is a collective encounter with parental mortality on a planetary scale.

    Just imagine, if you can bear it, how things would be right now if the group this virus mainly took was children under the age of ten. Or if, like HIV in Africa, it scythed through the middle generation, taking healthy adults in their 30s and 40s, leaving the kids to be raised by the grandparents. Compared to the visceral panic we would be living through, if either of those were the case, the panic we are actually witnessing looks like what it partly is – a live-action role play for the bored citizens of the late capitalist West, hoarding supplies of toilet roll, taking ‘shelfies’ of emptied supermarket aisles and posting them on Instagram.

    I don’t want to diminish the real fears that are at large. There are people I love who have been through bad pneumonia in recent years, or whose immune systems are whacked for other reasons, who are right in the firing line of this virus. Do all the sensible things you are being told to do. Look out for those who are most vulnerable, whether to the virus itself or to the falling dominoes of what we call an economy. And then, somewhere in the middle of all this, make time to feel the strangeness of the moment we are in – this sudden, forced interruption of business-as-usual – and the collective encounter that it calls us to.


    If you study Shakespeare, you soon learn that what marks a comedy from a tragedy is not how many laughs it raises, but how the story ends. A comedy ends with young people getting married; a tragedy ends with young people dying. Since getting married implies having children, comedy is a successful completion of the intergenerational cycle, while tragedy is the interruption of the intergenerational cycle. At some level, you’re dealing with the deepest fear and the deepest satisfaction of any human community: are our kids going to have kids and keep the show on the road? What makes this such rich material for storytelling is that the price is so damned high, and so nearly universal.

    I remember being a kid and the sheer force of wanting to grow up! I used to think this had to do with all that’s mad about the ways we corral children into schools, and no doubt there’s something in that, but now what strikes me is that this was the force that Dylan Thomas wrote of: ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age.’ Something absolutely primal pushing us up, pushing up through us, towards adulthood. And somewhere along the way, it hits you that the price of your growing is your parents’ ageing, their journey towards death. The marriage that seals the comedy might be overseen by the parents, they may seem to be in command, but it augurs the end of their time as ‘the parents’, the handing on of that role and the entry into old age.

    It happens in lurching steps, the encounter with parental mortality. Many years may go by after that first loss of innocence that comes with knowing the price of your growing up, but for most of us there will be an event that brings the knowledge home. It stops being a fact that you can see out of the corner of your eye, and you are confronted with this reality, the tangle of thoughts and feelings it tows behind it, the mundane practicalities and the deep pulls on the heartstrings. And in the middle of it all, there is a lurching shift in the balance of power between the generations: these people who cared for you in your earliest vulnerability, with whom – if you’re lucky – you achieved some kind of adult relationship, are now pitched into vulnerability themselves. They will need you to care for them, now or soon, and sooner or later, they will be gone.

    Shakespeare takes the pathos of this power shift to its extreme with King Lear, where the old king is pitched into vulnerability and madness. Yet this pathos is not what makes the play a tragedy: what makes it a tragedy is the ending, in which Lear lives to see the death of his faithful daughter. The journey into age and death can involve great sadness, but a parent dying ahead of their children does not disorder the world in the way that a child dying ahead of their parents seems to do.

    Those of us who have parents over a certain age already live with the knowledge that there is a non-trivial likelihood of their dying in any given year. We know the journey they are on. I remember the spring my mum turned seventy, scrambling up Arthur’s Seat together, thinking to myself, we won’t be doing this in ten years’ time. Still, for a long while, this knowledge can hang out there at the edge of the field of vision. Every day, there are falls, diagnoses, ambulances rushing to hospital; events that bring this knowledge home to thousands of families, that call us out of ordinary time and into the strange moment of our vulnerability, of our participation in the great mystery of living and dying. But it doesn’t happen to us all at the same time, not usually. Not until now.


    The first death from the virus in Britain happened two weeks ago at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. I think of the maze of its corridors that we got to know over those 11 days last July.

    I get a message from Lloyd, who walked the first few miles with us from Reading that morning but left to catch a train home before we came to the hill where the accident happened.

    ‘Until this week,’ he writes, ‘I don’t think the younger half of us really believed that the older half would ever be gone.’ That has changed, quite suddenly, he suggests; and with the tangle of feelings which the change drags up, there comes a release of energy. ‘It has to do with letting go of the idea that we all need to wait until mummy and daddy have finished talking. It’s the release that most people experience more naturally when they go through mourning the actual death of a parent.’

    There’s something obscene, isn’t there, about admitting that the death of a parent can bring release? It brings other things too, and it comes wrapped in grief, but it’s best to own the shadowed complexity of all this. And the release is foreshadowed in this sudden, disorienting shift in the balance of power between the generations.

    In Italy, they are running out of coffins. Beloved old ones are buried or cremated without ceremony. Elsewhere, we wait and watch the numbers, knowing the likelihood that such a crisis will reach us soon.

    There is so much that we don’t know yet. It is so easy to fill the gaps with the stories we are used to telling. We’re too close to this event to tell its story yet, but we can notice things about it and feel the places where it roots down into truths that were always there. We can tell the kinds of stories that don’t try to fill the gaps, that leave room for the mystery, that set a place at the table for the stranger. How do we open our hearts and make ourselves hospitable, when we have to close our doors and keep our distance from each other’s bodies? To name the strangeness of what is called for, that in itself can be a start.

    The price of life is so damned high. It always was, but maybe we forgot this for a while, numbed to all the cycles we belong to and depend on. Whatever it is, this moment, and whatever stories will be told of it, let us find in its dark soil a seed of anamnesis, ‘unforgetting’, from which the next world can begin.


    First published in the online edition of Dark Mountain.

  • The Dream-led Dance: Ten years of learning to publish Dark Mountain

    The Dream-led Dance: Ten years of learning to publish Dark Mountain

    for Charlotte Du Cann & Mark Watson

    In dreams begins responsibility.

    W. B. Yeats

    Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.

    Mierle Laderman Ukeles

    The books live under the stairs. There are boxes of back issues stacked in a Narnia wardrobe. Twice a year, a truck pulls up in the lane outside the cottage and offloads the latest issue, stacked on wooden pallets. If they are lucky, the truck driver stops to help Charlotte and Mark get the boxes indoors, where they will be repacked and sent out to over a thousand subscribers.

    This work could be outsourced. There are distributors who take on publications like Dark Mountain and they probably charge less per copy than the handling fee the pair of them get paid, but the money would no longer go towards paying the rent on this old cottage which serves not only as depot but as editorial headquarters and the home of the people who carry the day-to-day responsibility for the whole operation as it heads into its second decade.

    I visit in early June and it’s still chilly enough to light a fire in the wood stove in the living room. (Those pallets don’t go to waste.) It’s a rare chance to work together face-to-face, rather than the hundreds of hours we’ve spent on Skype, as I hand over the last of my responsibilities for the publication I co-founded a decade ago.

    We walk from Reydon into the small town of Southwold, a seaside place where London people come at weekends. Charlotte takes me to see the mural of Orwell under the pier. We stop in at the Sailor’s Reading Room where Sebald stops off in The Rings of Saturn and I realise that it’s time I read that book again. At the beachfront café, we find a sheltered table to eat our ice creams. Soon we’re joined by Heidi, the new bookkeeper, who lives in a flat above the market square.

    On the way back, we call in at the Post Office, where all those books get posted. The postmaster comes out to shake my hand. ‘Thank you,’ he says with feeling. ‘You don’t have to put your business through us and it makes a huge difference.’ In recent years, Dark Mountain has grown to be his biggest customer, sending thousands of packages a year. There must be cheaper and more efficient ways to do this, but to change it now would be unthinkable. Standing here, I feel what it means that our small publishing operation has become a part of the economic ecosystem of this corner of Suffolk. It’s one of the reasons why Southwold still has a Post Office, when many English places of its size do not.


    I wish I could say that we set out to create a publishing operation which embodied a Polanyian idea of the social embedding of economic activity, but the truth is things ended up this way more by accident than design.

    Like the stapled together news-sheets I made as a child, or the photocopied zines of my late teens, Dark Mountain was the product of the pleasure of making a platform together with the necessity of doing so in order to write the things I wanted to write. Something similar applied to my co-founder, Paul Kingsnorth, whose idea it was in the first place, and our collaboration was born of a hunch that we weren’t the only ones in need of this platform.

    The first few hundred copies of our manifesto lived under my bed in Brixton. Orders got sent out when I remembered, or when readers emailed to ask why theirs still hadn’t come. The way that leads from dreams to responsibility was a shaky one. Even the crowdfunding of the manifesto was a close thing: a few months later, the site we had used went bust, taking with it the funds of any outstanding campaigns.

    The playwright Mark Ravenhill gave a lecture a few years ago at the opening of the Edinburgh fringe festival. He started with a story from the Facebook feed of a younger theatremaker, describing a dream in which he is at dinner with a man who plans to kill his wife. No one else knows about his plan. The man is also the owner of a fleet of rental vans. If the dreamer keeps quiet, he’ll give him a cheap deal on a van to get his show to Edinburgh. He wakes before the choice is made, but is troubled to realise he was tempted.

    To get our artistic dreams on the road, Ravenhill goes on to argue, we have to make a cut between two sides of ourselves, to be like Jekyll and Hyde, or the heroine of a play by Bertolt Brecht. On the one side:

    to be a good artist you have to be the person who walks in to a space and tells the truth. That’s what marks you out from the audience and why they’re sitting over there and you’re standing up there: you are the most truthful person in that room.

    On the other side, how do you get there? ‘Chances are by being a liar, a vagabond and a thief.’ You have to be cunning and ruthless enough to make your own luck.

    I don’t want to play the innocent, to pretend I don’t recognise what Ravenhill is getting at, and I’ve quoted his speech with enthusiasm elsewhere. That line about the duty to be ‘the most truthful person in that room’ catches at something important. Yet as I reflect on a decade as writer, editor and publisher at Dark Mountain, it makes me want to unsettle the neatness of the binary he sets up, because it is in danger of affirming an idea with which I cannot hold: the separation between the high, true work of art and the low, grubby business that supports it, a necessary evil and a source of contamination from which the art itself must be protected.

    For a start, it should be obvious that art deals in a tricky kind of truth. It’s hardly as though we leave our cunning at the stage door. To make theatre is to traffick in illusions: I think of Simon McBurney inThe Encounter, alone on stage, whispering into a cast of microphones, turning the audience’s headphones – the ultimate technology of isolation – into a device of hair-raising intimacy. To be an artist is to be a trickster, and that holds for poets, performers, playwrights and painters alike. Picasso had a point, old monster that he was, when he said, ‘Art is the lie that tells the truth.’ Having tried it on for size in the early years of Dark Mountain, I’d caution against the mantle of the artist as lonely truthteller. Self-proclaimed honesty is a dodgy business, as the signs over used car salesrooms attest. Do what you have to do and let others be the judge of how close to the truth you came.

    Meanwhile, the clean cut between the truth-work of art and the wheeler-dealing that underpins it sits uneasily with me, too. I want to call instead on the Maintenance Art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, refusing to respect the cordon sanitaire between high and low status work, making the shit-work visible, maybe even playful, honoured instead of taken for granted. I’d call too on the cunning and grace of an artist like Theaster Gates, and on Kate Rich’s Feral Trade, where the art is another way of doing business. I don’t say we got close to the way these artists work in the practice of publishing Dark Mountain, only that the times when the work felt truest for me were the times when I caught a glimpse of those possibilities.


    ‘Poets are a special case,’ I wrote in Issue 1 of Dark Mountain. ‘Yeats is allowed to be silly, because poetry is not required to make sense.’ It’s a theme to which I’ve returned more than once: the artist as a special kind of grown-up, the only grown-up allowed to go out in public without wearing the clothes of economic rationality. The other side of this strange coin is that the everyday economic reality of life for the average artist in many modern societies has involved a degree of precarity that was, until recently, beyond the experience of most of their fellow citizens. One consequence is that many of the artists and writers I have worked with show signs of post-traumatic stress in their relationship to money.

    This colours the tensions that exist between the artistic vision of a project and its economic viability. Among the initiators of artistic projects, the work of book-writing might be seen as a higher calling than the work of bookkeeping, but it seems that society at large does not agree, since bankers make fortunes and accountants rarely worry about how to pay the bills, while award-winning authors often struggle to make ends meet. In the background of all this is a pervasive though rarely disclosed assumption: that pay should come as a reward for doing things you didn’t want to do. The very self-directedness of artistic work, the sense that we do things we love, contributes to the vulnerability of the artist as economic actor. The experience of being out of place in the economic game, of knowing the work you do doesn’t make sense according to the logic that dominates the society you live in, can breed an aversion to thinking about the economic aspects of that work. So you insist that a spreadsheet is beyond your comprehension, because innumeracy has become a matter of identity, a sign and a symptom of being on the side of the poets.

    The time would come when I made my peace with spreadsheets, but early on I was as prone to this as anyone. It was a humbling moment when it finally hit me how much of the hassle we went through with Dark Mountain might have been avoided if we had set the price of our first issue five pounds higher, but I don’t remember putting any serious thought into that decision at the time. We didn’t model its implications, we just plucked a number from the air.

    In the first two years, we ran the project unfunded, fitting the work in around other paying gigs, raising money through crowdfunding to cover the upfront costs of publication, paying ourselves a bit when there was money spare. By year three, this approach was under strain, as the workload grew. With the help of Michael Hughes, a friend and supporter, a funding proposal was put together. This was immediately successful, securing a grant of £10,000 per year for the next three years from the Deep Ecology Foundation, along with a one-off donation of £5,000 from a radical philanthropist in the UK.

    Together with the profits from book sales, this allowed us to set up a modest part-time salary for a team of two: Paul was paid for ten days a month as director, with Sophie McKeand as his assistant for one day a week. By this point, I was burning out and moving countries, but I remained sufficiently involved to share responsibility for the decisions that followed.

    There’s a pattern I’ve seen a few times now where money comes into a project previously held together by love and bits of string, and instead of this steadying the ship and allowing those involved to do what they’re already doing without making fools of themselves, it inspires a flurry of further activities. There was a touch of that over the next two years: when the last copies of Issue 1 sold out, we decided to splash out on reprinting it; we put time and energy into an album of music made by friends of the project, and the crowdfunding campaign for this was the first in which we missed our target. The premise of our funding proposal had been to bridge the way to self-sufficiency, to a point where sales of books would cover the work of running the operation, but there was no process in place to get us from here to there. Meanwhile, a decent desire to cheer each other on and avoid shame or blame could lead to a reluctance to name our mistakes and see them clearly.

    Towards the end of year four, we hit a crisis: our small non-profit company was weeks away from running out of funds. For me, this was the moment when responsibility arrived. Having let others carry the weight of the project up to this point, I now became its existential backstop, the catcher in the rye who would do what it took to keep this thing from running off a cliff. That meant dropping other commitments, teaching myself new skills and taking on tasks I would hardly have chosen, because there was no one else around to do them and they needed to be done. 

    So I ditched the crowdfunding model that had funded the first three books, because it meant much of our energy went into banging the drum to bring in money from the same 200 readers every time we wanted to go into print. To launch the rolling subscriptions system that replaced it, I had to plan out a business model that meant we could be confident of fulfilling our readers’ subscriptions, and then build the section of the website where they would subscribe. This worked – and when it proved that seven out of ten subscriptions rolled over smoothly from one year to the next, we finally had a path towards the self-sufficiency we had promised our funders. In the meantime, though, we had to cut back what we spent on paying ourselves to half of the already frugal budget. Rather than take a slice of this for myself, I dropped the creative and editorial side of my involvement to allow time for other jobs that could help pay the rent. Though the truth is, the biggest funder of Dark Mountain in the years that followed was my partner Anna, who brought in the regular income that allowed me to put in so many hours unpaid.

    The next turning point came as we hit year eight. Book sales and subscriptions had steadily grown, and with them the everyday work of running the operation. On paper, we were covering our costs, and we had begun to raise the fees we paid to editors, but in reality much of the work going into the books was underpaid. Two things exacerbated this: a drift in the relationship between work and money, and a lack of communication. When Paul and Sophie started getting paid, the principle was simple, with each of them paid the same amount per day. But as roles changed and were handed on, the memory of this was getting lost, and there was no process for checking how the principle was working out in practice and making changes. In fact, outside of the editorial process for a particular book, there were no regular meetings between those of us involved in running Dark Mountain, apart from an annual gathering that was usually tagged on to the excitements and exhaustions of a public event. Into this gap came all the ordinary human misunderstandings, the stories we tell about who is acting how and why.

    There was a moment when it could have ended badly, but instead out of this drama came a recognition that we were no longer the ad hoc, books-under-the-bed operation of our beginnings. These days, we had a well-organised Narnia wardrobe! And we needed to organise ourselves in other ways. So I undertook to create just enough process to give some rhythm to our work, without draining the life from it. The old structure of directors assisted by staff – which sounds so formal, but had come about by default – gave way to a publishing collective, made up of the half dozen of us involved in the month-to-month running of the project, joined by a couple of members of the wider pool of editors. I instituted a monthly call for this collective and this was met with some resistance: when work already expands beyond the hours that any of us are paid for, spending another two hours together on Skype can feel like the last thing that’s needed. Yet the difference it made to our work together soon dissolved any scepticism. Most months, the first half hour would be spent just checking in, telling each other what we could see outside the window or talking about the books we had been reading. With a small team spread over three countries, some anchor point of shared presence is needed, however artificial it felt at first.

    The other thing that came out of the year eight crunch was a written policy for how we ought to handle work and money. It started by acknowledging the gap between what we could pay ourselves, those of us doing this because it was Dark Mountain, and what we paid outsiders whose skills we needed. Handling our accounts, keeping the website up or printing the actual books: by now, we’d learned the hard way that having these services handled by friends of friends could be a formula for chaos, so we needed to be ready to pay the going rate. When it came to paying ourselves, the starting point was different: if all the work going into the books was paid at the rate it deserved, there wouldn’t be any books, but recognising this, we had to work towards a sustainable relationship between work and money, not just as an ethical commitment, but as a practical necessity. If those on whom the publishing of Dark Mountain depended were paid at a rate that meant they couldn’t make ends meet, it didn’t matter how much they cared about the project, sooner or later they would have to walk away. 

    With this spelt out, I proposed an ordering of priorities: first came the work that goes on week in, week out, handling orders, replying to emails, editing the website, because if the work you do for the project is part of your bread and butter, it has to be paid properly. Then came the project work, the editors who take on a time-limited task as part of the team coming together to work on an issue. This is intensive, hands-on work during the core weeks of the editorial process, but within the shape of your working year, it is feasible to balance it with other work that pays more and means less, so in the process of improving how everyone gets paid, this came second to the ongoing maintenance work. Finally, the hardest part, the payment of contributors to the books: hard because all of us on the publishing collective were also freelance writers or artists, and putting this work to the back of the queue felt like reproducing a pattern we had been on the wrong end of ourselves. From early on, we had commissioned covers for our books and paid the cover artists, but the work inside came from an open call. To pay the 50 or 60 people whose words and images appeared in a typical issue was an ambition we’d long held and one that still seemed out of reach.

    It took until year ten, but we got there. After raising the pay for the core team and the book editors, after experimenting with small commissioning budgets, with Issue 15 – the last before I left – we were finally able to offer a fee to everyone whose work appeared in the pages of a Dark Mountain book. How best to do this was a challenge in itself: should we try to differentiate between a full-length essay, a twelve-line poem and a piece of flash fiction, or between a photograph documenting an existing art project and a drawing made for this book? What to do about the different situations and expectations of our contributors? In the end, my answer was to be as open with them as possible. We set aside a contributors pot, £1,200 in the first instance, and wrote to everyone whose work appeared in the book, explaining the situation:

    From conversations with contributors over time, we know that there are those who are trying to make a living from their creative work (or simply to make ends meet), as well as others who are in full-time positions or have other means of support and would therefore be happy to go on contributing without a fee.

    Contributors were invited to opt in or out, based on which of these best described their situation, with the pot split equally between everyone who opted in. (‘And if you have any hesitation,’ the instructions continued, ‘then we would encourage you to choose Yes.’)

    In the event, the contributors to that book split half and half between Yes and No. Those who chose to receive a fee were paid just under £60 each. Not a great amount, but a start.


    How strange to write so many words about Dark Mountain and hardly touch on its subject matter, the questions it asks, the claims it makes, the hunches explored within its pages! That story has been told already many times, by me and others: there’s half a shelf’s worth of books, the original manifesto, hundreds of press articles and interviews, and even the odd PhD thesis.

    This other story I’ve been telling is only one of the lines that could be traced through this web of practice, the dream-led dance of how we became accidental publishers and learned to take responsibility. Name some of those other lines: Charlotte creating the role of producer, corralling editors and setting the tempo and holding the relationship between words, images and design; Mark holding the subscriptions system together and making it work; Ava Osbiston devising a submissions process for a publication that is not exactly a literary journal, that looks for raw potential as well as accomplishment, for the stories our editors can help to tell as well as the ones that arrive fully formed; Nick Hunt taking the website from a simple blog to an online edition that matches the richness of the books; Paul, from the very start, finding that our writing had created expectations and carrying responsibility for its consequences. Then there’s the physical work of printing, taking place beyond the horizon of our publishing team, under the direction of Christian Brett of Bracketpress, the one person to have worked on every single Dark Mountain publication. Each of them could tell another story.

    Within this web of tasks and responsibilities, there is work that is unavoidably monotonous. Where this exists, the aim should be that it is done as humanly as possible, rather than as efficiently as possible; that those doing it are in charge of how it is done, that they know and feel why it matters, that their work is not forgotten or belittled, and that they have the chance to combine this work with involvement in other parts of the creative life of the project. The responsibility for making sure this is the case is shared by everyone involved in making decisions about the running of Dark Mountain.

    Yet it would be a mistake to group together all the maintenance work and background process on which the artistic vision of a project depends and file it under that heading. My experience has been that it is possible to bring a degree of thought and care to these responsibilities that is in alignment with the more obviously artistic aspects of the work I got to do with Dark Mountain. There is an attitude here that can translate into many of the tasks that make up the practice of publishing.

    To take one example: when the need arises to write to readers and supporters, asking them for money, this can be approached as something you hate but have to do. At that point, I’ve seen gifted writers descend into grating cliché, turning out a bad impression of a sales spiel, because they are approaching the task as an evil that cannot be avoided. The alternative is to find a way of writing that message in words that ring clear and true, that embody what you are doing and why it matters. There have been days when I think I found that tone.

    Without making any stronger claim than that for the work I’ve done, I do believe there is a way of working that has truth in it. It isn’t easy, but nor is it complicated. At its heart, this way is about attention, which is why it has a lot to do with art. Attend to experience and let it show you what is missing from the stories you are telling. Attend to the relationships on which the work depends. Attend to what matters and whether it still matters. Attend to the alignment between what we say matters and how we treat each other. Look out for the moment when it’s time to stop.


    First published in OEI Issue 86-87, Publishing Practices, Publishing Poetics.

  • 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.

  • The Curious Tale of Boris Johnson’s Heart

    I want to tell you a story about Boris Johnson’s heart. There’s a woman involved, but this isn’t what you’re thinking.

    It’s a story about an encounter between the Prime Minister and some members of the public, but there’s no shouting, and no selfies, and no phone camera footage of who said what.

    It’s kind of a mythic story, because it takes place in an ancient landscape, at one of the special seasons of the year, with a suggestion that those involved are caught in the play of old powers, in a struggle to break a spell – and also because I can’t prove to you that any of it happened.

    Let’s call it an episode from the political X-Files. To be clear, I’m Mulder here, I want to believe – if not in the spells and powers, then at least in the account as I heard it – but there’s a Scully voice hissing in my ear, insisting on the need for scepticism. 

    The thing is, I whisper back, it doesn’t matter if these events actually happened, or if they only happened in someone’s head, or if this is some live art social fiction project no-one let me in on, because there’s a truth in the story itself. A truth that asks a question about politics and what we think it is. 

    Stay with me and I’ll tell you what I mean.

    *   *   *

    There was a clear blue sky over the Ridgeway, the weekend of the autumn equinox. They say it’s the oldest road in England, though road is stretching it: a path on high, dry ground that tracks southwest through the Chilterns, across the Thames and on along the Berkshire Downs to Avebury and beyond. Near Wendover, the modern walking trail parts company from the old route, diverted to preserve the security of the Chequers estate, the Prime Minister’s country house.

    The group had agreed to meet at 10.30 that Saturday morning, but people were late. By the time they set off, there were seven adults, two dogs, five children and a baby. The invitation had been clear: ‘We are going to sing here on the Equinox [with] the sole intention to open up the hearts and minds of those in power.’

    Tori Lewis is the woman who made the invitation and it was her account of these events that I stumbled on, through a post on Facebook that led to a YouTube video shot a couple of mornings later. She sits in the grass, glowing with her sense of the mystery of the way it all aligned.

    The circuit they walked took them up Beacon Hill, where they sang their songs to the land, and around to Coombe Hill. They had come together through a community that gathers at Lewis’s family home, dedicated to honouring the earth, celebrating the turning of the year and supporting activism that is grounded in the sacred. This year, their focus has been drawn to the work of Extinction Rebellion, the climate action movement which brought parts of central London to a halt for half of April. The pilgrimage over the equinox was a preparation for the next round of rebellion, due to hit the streets on 7th October.

    They walked barefoot, singing as they went. There were unscheduled stops for nappy changes and sore legs and to look at the baby pigs, so it was long after lunchtime when they made it back to the Buckmoorend Farm Shop and Kitchen, which lies up an unpaved lane, a quarter of a mile from the gates of Chequers. The kitchen is a caravan in the farmyard, the shop itself not much more than a shed, with room for a handful of customers at a time.

    A guy called David was the first of the group to go in. He emerged moments later and whispered loudly to the others, ‘You won’t believe this, but Boris Johnson’s in there!’

    Tori and her friend Zoe looked at each other.

    ‘Which song are we going to sing, then?’ Zoe said.

    There were three of them who entered the shop, singing as they went. Tori’s legs were shaking. She remembers hiding from Johnson’s gaze for the first minute, until she caught sight of Zoe standing right beside him. After that, the power of singing took over and she went calm.

    The song they sang was simple, two lines repeating and repeating, based on a chant from Taizé, the Christian community of reconciliation born in the darkness of the Second World War. The English version was written by the singer Sophia Efthimiou, and it goes like this: ‘Listen to your heart, listen to your heart. Let love guide you!’

    The women stood around Johnson as they sang. There were tears in his eyes, Tori remembers, his mouth was open and he had his hand on his heart.

    ‘I don’t…’ he began, bewildered. ‘I don’t know what…’

    A third woman, Annabel, went up to him and put a hand on his shoulder, the way you might with a little boy in need of comfort. They went on singing.

    They saw his defences begin to come up again.

    ‘Oh,’ he said to Tori, ‘do you live locally?’

    ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Listen to your heart…’

    The whole scene lasted around four minutes, before he broke away and left the shop, getting out of a situation that could be awkward or even dangerous. His security detail was in the yard outside. He went over to the caravan to order some food.

    Another of the walkers, Laura, was waiting for her order at the caravan and she overheard Johnson saying to his girlfriend, ‘Where have they come from? It’s like they’ve emerged from the earth!’

    ‘Yes,’ Laura said, turning to him, ‘and they have a message for you.’

    At which, the Prime Minister began to repeat to himself the words of the song: ‘Listen to your heart, listen to your heart. Let love guide you!’

    And then, he left.

    *   *   *

    Well, that’s the story as Tori Lewis tells it. How do you imagine Boris Johnson or Carrie Symonds’s version of events would go? I don’t suppose we’re ever going to know.

    I said at the start, I can’t prove that any of this happened. But one reason why it has a ring of truth to me is that I’ve been a singer. I know from experience that music has a power to slip past the defences of our cleverness, to touch us deeply when we least expect it. I didn’t go in for singing in rituals at ancient sites, but I grew up singing in folk clubs around the northeast of England, and the first way I ever earned a living was ten months busking on street corners all over Europe, from Norway to Turkey and back again. There were years in my life, on the hinge between adolescence and adulthood, when singing was the only outlet I could trust, the only carrier I had for my feelings. If, as the notes he makes on Downing Street memos suggest, Boris Johnson is stuck in some endless loop of adolescence, then I can imagine that the encounter with these singing women who seemed to have sprung from the earth might touch him in a place where he is almost never touched.

    ‘Well,’ I hear a whisper in my ear, ‘that worked well, didn’t it? His heart sure seems wide open now!’

    Squint a little and maybe you could see the weird speech Johnson gave at the UN, three days afterwards, as the words of a Macbeth still shaken by the encounter with these three sisters. By the following night, back at the despatch box, he was serving up a cauldron of hate, crying humbug at the way his words are recycled into death threats and making shameless use of the memory of a murdered political opponent.

    All I can say is that, a few times in my life, I’ve walked someone up to the edge of their worldview and seen them moved deeply by an experience that makes no sense according to the heartless logic of the world as they have known it. I’m not talking about anything obviously shiny and spiritual here, only the humble magic of what human beings are capable of when we come together for reasons beyond the calculus of profit or coercion, the matrix of the market and the state. What generally happens next is that the person concerned goes back to where they came from and finds a way to renarrate the experience through the lens of cynicism. What else could they do, when to put faith in that strange experience would be to feel the solid ground of their status and all it cost them crumble beneath their feet?

    To be touched, touched deeply, is not nothing – but nor is it always, or even often, enough. There’s a reason they say the addict needs to hit rock bottom.

    *   *   *

    Look, I told you this was leading to a question – a thought worth sitting with, whatever you make of synchronicities and sacred singing, whatever did or didn’t happen in that farm shop – so here it is: how do we imagine our opponents? When you think of Boris Johnson’s heart, what comes to mind?

    Back in our twenties, a good friend of mine was invited to lunch at The Spectator, then edited by Johnson. I remember she told us afterwards it was the closest she had come to being in the presence of pure evil. I’ve told that story down the years and I’ve used that kind of language to express my anger at those whose politics I oppose. Looking at my Facebook feed, it seems as though the language in which we share our opinions is saturated with such totalising moral statements, and that’s before you even get to Twitter. Doesn’t it satisfy some fierce part of ourselves to talk this way? It satisfies some fierce part of me.

    How easy to imagine our opponents as black-hearted, to think of the throb in Boris Johnson’s chest as a pulsating epicentre of evil. What the strange story of his encounter with the singing women suggests is another possibility, one that I wonder if we know how to take seriously: the possibility that a politician’s heart might be the site of an unfinished struggle. What does politics even look like, if it includes the struggle for the heart?

    Now, you might say I’m coming on all Russell Brand. For the record, I’ve a great fondness for Russell and the way he wears his flawed heart on his sleeve. But this heart talk is not the preserve of meditating comedians who’ve been to Hollywood and back. It’s there in the thought that comes to Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag, as he lies rotting on the prison straw:

    Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

    It’s there in the language of Martin Luther King and bell hooks and Bayo Akomolafe, whose essay ‘Homo Icarus’ was written in the days after the white supremacist rally at Charlottesville in 2017 that ended in the murder of an anti-fascist activist and the gross equivocation of a US President claiming there had been ‘very fine people on both sides’ that day. Is it enough, Akomolafe asks, to call this evil? Or might some further move be called for?

    It’s a radical thing to say and a most dangerous notion to admit: that in some non-mystical way, I am practically entangled with those people I would rather demonize as white supremacists and Nazi sympathizers. The dual framework permits us to separate the ‘racist’ from the ‘non-racist’, to install a fundamental distinction between their absolute depravity and our detached moral coherence, and to defer and deflect responsibility. There are not too many places to go from there: when we begin from this set of assumptions, incarceration, conversion therapy and reverse oppression are the responses that almost always follow.

    If I turn back to Boris Johnson, with Akomolafe’s words still echoing in my thoughts, what comes to mind is the work of the psychotherapist Nick Duffell with those he calls ‘boarding school survivors’. In a system set up to produce an elite to rule an empire, the British upper classes and those who aspire to join them subject their children to a kind of ‘normalised neglect’. This is not just an education, but an upbringing inside an institution, instead of a family: a life shaped not by love and relationships, but rules and conventions. What does this do to a boy sent away to school at eleven (as Johnson was) or even earlier? ‘He has to lose his childishness,’ Duffell says, ‘he has to lose his emotional self.’ This treatment breeds a ‘pseudo self-sufficiency’, a ‘strategic survival personality’ that is relentlessly upbeat, cut off from empathy, with a sense of entitlement that serves as ‘compensation for irredeemable loss’.

    There is a limit to the sympathy such stories are likely to elicit, I realise, and I don’t suggest we hold a telethon for the survivors. What we might do is reframe the recent proposal to abolish Eton, not as an act of class war, but as the overdue dismantling of a system of organised child abuse whose consequences – for all of us – are hard to overstate. (The end of this system would also be a decolonial act that takes us well beyond the symbolic overthrow of statues, often statues of these schools’ old boys.)

    *   *   *

    Two days after their encounter with the Prime Minister, on the morning of the equinox itself, Tori Lewis and her family greet the rising sun as its light pierces the stone passage of West Kennet Long Barrow, a 6,000-year-old burial mound near the further end of the Ridgeway. Later that morning, she sits in the grass by the River Kennet to film her story. ‘We’ve been in ceremony since Friday,’ she tells the camera.

    I don’t know as much about ceremony as Tori and her friends. My sense of the sacred is less outspoken; it mostly starts at the place where words run out.

    I send the video to my friend Charlie, who used to be features editor at a trendy London magazine. ‘That’s absolutely bonkers,’ he writes back. ‘And if I hadn’t read and been involved in so many absurd stories and hilarious coincidences, I’d say she was recounting a dream. But I do actually know that life can easily be that bonkers.’

    There’s a voice in my ear that says to tell the story in Charlie’s terms and leave out the bit where Tori talks about ‘the Great Mother’. You can watch the video and judge for yourself. I’m conscious, too, that I’m a man telling a woman’s story, a story already loaded with gender dynamics. Before I start writing, I reach out to Tori, and she tells me she’d love the story to be shared far and wide. ‘It’s a story of connection and the truth of spirit and validates our work as spirit workers,’ she writes.

    I doubt I’ll ever shine with the truth of spirit the way that Tori Lewis does. My work is murkier, the storyteller as trafficker between worlds, smuggling photocopied packets of truth. But when it comes to it, you’ll find me with the ones for whom the heart is a site of struggle, for whom there is that in each of us which goes beyond the people our lives so far shaped us to be, for whom the world is under a spell that needs to be broken.

    Note

    I’ve never found myself needing to declare an interest at the end of a piece of writing, but having used strong words about the British boarding school system, I should add a word about my own education. Most of it took place in state schools, with the exception of two periods of two years each in which I was a scholarship student at an independent school. During the first of these, I was also a boarder, albeit at a school made up mainly of day pupils and a long way from the social milieu of Eton. Nick Duffell’s work with boarding school survivors makes me wonder how this shaped me, though what sets my experience apart is that I was not ‘sent away’ to school: it was my own decision at eleven, against my parents’ better judgement, and two years later it was my decision to come home again and go to the local comprehensive. But that is a story for another day.

    First published on Bella Caledonia.

  • The role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change

    In 2015-16, I had the opportunity to spend two years working with Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre, as leader of artistic and audience development. Part of my brief was to bring together practitioners from within and beyond the world of the performance arts to explore the role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change.

    My starting point was to reject the basis on which artists are generally invited to collaborate in projects about climate change: however this is worded, it tends to come down to helping ‘deliver the message’. The result almost always fails – both as art and as political communication – because art isn’t a sophisticated extension of the public relations department or a cheap alternative to an advertising agency.

    One of the fruits of this work was a list of the roles that art might sometimes play. I wrote this up in the context of a longer essay for Dark Mountain, ‘You Want It Darker’, but during this week’s Transformative Imagination workshop with the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, I realised that it might be useful to present this unfinished list on its own terms, as a contribution to conversations that seek to get beyond the old binary of ‘instrumentalisation’ vs ‘art for art’s sake’. So here it is:

    1. Art can hold a space in which we move from the arm’s-length knowledge of facts, figures and projections, to the kind of knowledge that we let inside us, taking the risk that it may change us.
    2. Art can give us just enough beauty to stay with the darkness, rather than flee or shut down.
    3. Like the bronze shield given to Perseus by Athena, art and its indirect ways of knowing can allow us to approach realities which, if looked at directly, turn something inside us to stone.
    4. Art can call us back from strategic calculations about which message will play best with which target group, insisting on the tricky need for honesty – there’s a line I kept coming back to, from the playwright Mark Ravenhill, that your responsibility when you walk on stage is to be ‘the most truthful person in the room’.
    5. Art can teach us to live with uncertainty, to let go of our dreams of control.
    6. Art can hold open a space of ambiguity, refusing the binary choices with which we are often presented – not least, the choice between forced optimism and simple despair.

    (Thanks to Måns Lagerlöf for making the unlikely decision to bring me to work at Riksteatern – and to all the members of the Dark Mountain Workshop which I ran there and the guests who joined us in those conversations.)

  • What’s Happening in Sweden?

    You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden!

    Donald Trump, 18 February 2017

    Sweden was long seen as a progressive utopia. Then came waves of immigrants – and the forces of populism at home and abroad.

    The New York Times, 10 August 2019

    ‘If you get a call from the post office, you tell them we’re separating.’

    So it’s come to this, I think, as I read the message. 

    At the end of a long trip back to England, as we sat waiting for the Eurostar check-in, some light-fingered Londoner stole my daypack. The items lost include the mobile phone on which I have my BankID: the digital login that enables access, not only to my Swedish bank account, but to everything from the tax office to the national change of address system. To make matters worse, I’ve also lost my national ID card, and the bank won’t give me a new digital ID without seeing it, and there’s a two-week wait for an appointment to apply for a replacement. Oh yes – and we’re moving into a new apartment the day we get back, so my other half is understandably keen to get at least one of us listed as living at this new address. Keen enough that she’s about to officially declare our relationship over.

    ‘Can’t you explain the actual situation?’ I message back.

    ‘This is Sweden,’ she replies. ‘There is no template for that.’

    *  *  *

    The Swedish word for immigrant is invandrare, literally ‘in-wanderer’. Like various words in Swedish, it has been subject to critique in recent years: it puts the immigrant in a thankless position, forever the one who is wandering in, never getting to arrive.

    Friends who came here from further away, whose names and bodies mark them as ‘other’ in ways beyond my experience, talk about the daily toll of small reminders of their otherness. The questions in job interviews, the glances on the street. The exhaustion of doing everything ‘right’ and knowing it still won’t help.

    Don’t get me wrong, then, when I say there’s truth in that word. Even for this white guy from England, spared all the shit my friends put up with, the process of wandering in to Sweden seems endless. Probably it is like this anywhere: I remember a bewildering night in a stand-up club in Dublin, as joke after joke flew over my head, missing the references everyone else was getting. Seven years in, while my Swedish is somewhat fluent, I still can’t do half the things I’m used to being able to do with language, and even if I reach that point, I know life will continue to be full of jokes that I don’t get.

    Still, for all its foolishness, the situation of the perpetual half-outsider can bring with it certain gifts. You can find yourself in the role of interpreter, the person who notices details so obvious to everyone who grew up here that it takes a stranger’s eye to see them.

    Or maybe it’s just that, when you’ve been living in another country for a while, friends elsewhere turn to you when they want to understand what’s happening there.

    *  *  *

    An email arrives from a friend in New York with a link to an article in his local newspaper, a New York Times feature headlined ‘The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism’. 

    It’s a story about Sweden and the rest of the world. It’s about the Sweden Democrats, the anti-immigrant party with neo-Nazi roots that took 62 of the 349 seats in the Swedish parliament at last year’s general election. It’s about the way political forces elsewhere seize on stories about Sweden and immigration – and it’s an examination of the role of those external forces in the rise of the Sweden Democrats.

    The Times reports that it has uncovered ‘an international disinformation machine’ with roots in ‘Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and the American far right’, peddling a ‘distorted view of Sweden’ and seeking to influence elections here:

    The central target of these manipulations from abroad – and the chief instrument of the Swedish nationalists’ success – is the country’s increasingly popular, and virulently anti-immigrant, digital echo chamber.

    The implication is that the Sweden Democrats’ electoral success reflects the influence of those manipulations from abroad, and the reader is left to draw the parallels to American politics.

    ‘How much of this is true, according to you?’ my friend wants to know.

    I start writing back to him and then I realise that I’m writing an essay – an essay that’s been coming a long time, about the country that has become my home and the role it plays in the collective imagination of millions of people who have never been here.

    *  *  *

    ‘Welcome to the warm south of Scandinavia!’ declared a poster during the 2014 referendum campaign, a playful invocation of Scotland’s future, drawing on the long tradition of locating utopia at the top of the map of Europe. 

    It’s hard to think of a part of the world more closely coupled to a concept: the two best recent English-language books on Sweden are Andrew Brown’s Fishing in Utopia and Dominic Hinde’s A Utopia Like Any Other

    Hinde’s book starts in Scotland, reflecting on the way the Nordic countries in general and Sweden in particular feature in the political imaginary of the independence movement, but he’s quick to point out how much wider and further back this goes. As far back as Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters from Scandinavia which caught the imagination of readers in the 1790s. Even further, you might say, to Ancient Greece, when Pindar could write of the Hyperboreans, the fabled people of the far north:

    They wreathe their hair with golden laurel branches and revel joyfully.
    No sickness or ruinous old age is mixed into that sacred race;
    without toil or battles they live, without fear of Nemesis.

    The modern version of this myth-making begins with a 1930s bestseller, Sweden: The Middle Way, by the American journalist Marquis Childs, which introduced readers to a society that had found a golden path between capitalism and communism. ‘Eighty years on,’ as Hinde observes, ‘the narrative is remarkably similar, even if the world around has changed beyond all recognition.’

    It was this narrative that David Cameron was able to draw on – in his pre-austerity, husky-hugging days – when he took up the Swedish model of ‘free schools’. Never mind that the policy was actually a landmark of Sweden’s particular strain of neoliberalism, or that the only other country to go down the route of allowing profit-making companies to run its state schools was Pinochet’s Chile. Back when the Tories at Westminster were still interested in detoxifying their brand, the connotations of Swedishness were strong enough to make this part of Cameron’s strategy of flirting with Guardian readers.

    The classic case, though, is the story about Sweden ‘moving to a six-hour working day’. Back in the days when I still went on Twitter, I remember gently chiding my mate Pat Kane for circulating this one, but he was hardly alone. Newspapers from The Independent to the Sydney Morning Herald ran with it, announcing it as though it were a national policy, rather than a short-lived experiment at a couple of workplaces in Gothenburg. Because this is the kind of thing lots of people are longing to believe about Sweden.

    So here’s the first part to get straight, if we’re going to talk about a ‘distorted view of Sweden’: it doesn’t start with Donald Trump and Fox News and the Gatestone Institute and the Russian troll factories. When it comes to making absurd exaggerations about this country to suit their beliefs, they are latecomers. If Sweden occupies an outsized position in the dystopian geography of the nativist right, this is derivative, a sacrilegious inversion of the role it has held for generations in the belief system of their progressive opponents.

    It seemed harmless enough, a few years back, when no one talked about ‘fake news’ – but actually, what’s the difference between taking a small local experiment and blowing it up into a story about a whole country switching to a six-hour day, and taking a few local incidents involving immigrants and blowing these up into a story about a whole country where law and order is breaking down? The content is different, sure, and the consequences darker, but the basic pattern is the same.

    *  *  *

    A year after I moved to Stockholm, there were riots, though the first I heard about it was the messages from concerned friends elsewhere. In London, two summers earlier, there had been a genuine sense of danger, of a city on the edge of chaos. But Stockholm isn’t London, it’s more like Paris: a historic inner city, affluent and white as hell, and then a ring of concrete suburbs where the others live. 

    In one of those suburbs, the police shot and killed a man who had been seen on his balcony carrying a knife. There were protests in the days that followed, and then a few nights of trouble, with stone-throwing and cars set alight. It wasn’t nothing, and it could have got worse – at one point, police stopped a convoy of thirty vehicles, far-right extremists heading for where the trouble was, armed and looking for a fight – but if the same scenes had played out in the Parisian banlieues, it’s hard to imagine them making international headlines.

    DOG BITES MAN is not a story, they tell you in journalism school. MAN BITES DOG is a story. By this logic, it turns out that it’s not just the nativist right who are quick to jump on tales of trouble in the social democratic paradise, it’s also the same mainstream news industry responsible for spreading fantasies about the six-hour day.

    This tendency has coloured the reporting of the entry of the far right into Swedish parliamentary politics. In 2016, I found myself pulling up Jon Henley of the Guardian over a news report that presented the Sweden Democrats as ‘now Sweden’s largest party’. Yes, a handful of outlying opinion polls that year had put them in first place, but the rolling average always had them behind the traditional larger parties of left and right. Now, that might seem like a detail, when set against all that the rise of such a party signifies – and I swear, I don’t actually spend my days fact-checking English-language commentators on their general knowledge of Sweden – but it’s another example of an eagerness to overstate what’s happening in this country, an eagerness that gets in the way of what we could learn together here, the clues that we might find in the particular experiences of this large, sparsely populated country at the top of Europe.

    It’s there in that New York Times feature, too. Read the whole thing and you’ll learn about the national socialist roots of the Sweden Democrats, how their ‘right-wing populism has taken hold’ in a country ‘long seen as a progressive utopia’, but the one thing you won’t learn is that their performance in last year’s general election fell well short of their hopes and others’ fears. Four years earlier, they had beaten the opinion polls and more than doubled their vote, reaching 12.9% – and during the last weeks of this election campaign, many of us expected them to double their showing once more. Against this background, alarming as it remains in its own right, the 17.5% the party achieved on polling day represents a loss of momentum.

    The omission of this context from the Times article matters, because it weakens the argument the article is built around. If what lies ‘beneath the surface of what is happening in Sweden’ is ‘an international disinformation machine’ – if this is the engine powering the rise of right-wing populism, here and elsewhere – then surely the Swedish far right should have been gaining momentum like never before? For who could deny that these past few years have been the historical moment in which digital media and nativist politics fused into a global phenomenon?

    We’ll come back to this glitch in the timeline and what gets left out in the eagerness to centre the story on international networks and external manipulation, but there’s another element in the Times article that is worth lingering over, and that’s the particularly dark roots of Sweden’s right-wing populists. It’s pretty standard for a European democracy today to have an anti-immigrant political party polling between 15 and 20%, but it’s rarer for that party to have its origins so directly in the milieu of uniform-wearing neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

    The way the Times tells it, the breakthrough of such a party in Sweden is all the more remarkable, given the country’s social democratic heritage, a political culture that made voters resistant to the Sweden Democrats’ earlier and more explicitly racist rhetoric. The rosy utopian picture of Swedish social democracy strikes again, I think to myself, and I start to see how much ground this essay needs to cover.

    Maybe I can get there by looking past the stories projected onto this country by its admirers and detractors, to the stories Sweden likes to tell itself?

    *  *  *

    There are many shades of culture shock. In my mid-twenties, I spent half a year in the far west of China. For the first two months, I had to carry a card with my address to show to taxi drivers because I couldn’t produce a recognisable imitation of the six syllables that would tell them how to take me home. Everything about the world in which I was immersed seemed extraordinary and the shock of difference was psychedelic, exhilarating, some days overwhelming.

    When I started learning Swedish, the main problem was getting anyone to speak it back to me: ordering in a café, I’d stumble through a sentence and the guy behind the counter would respond in flawless English. Coming from England to Sweden, the culture shock is subtle and catches you off-guard, like when you go down stairs in the dark and there’s one step more than you’d reckoned on there being: a series of these small jarring encounters with the gap between your expectations and those of everyone around you.

    Reading about Swedish history, I was caught off-guard by the concept of the Stormaktstid, the ‘Great Power Time’. It wasn’t just how ignorant I’d been of the imperial adventures of the Swedish 17th century, when the territory ruled from Stockholm stretched from the Atlantic to the far side of the Baltic and the north coast of Germany; it was the surprise of encountering a country that can speak matter-of-factly about its great power status as something that lies a long way in the past. Needless to say, England has no equivalent to the concept of the Stormaktstid, no common language in which to acknowledge the waning of its global standing, and I’m tempted to see the act of political arson that is Brexit as stemming from this lack.

    The last remnant of Sweden’s greater territorial ambitions was relinquished in 1905 with the peaceful dissolution of the union of the crowns of Sweden and Norway. To travel between these countries today, to listen to conversations in which their two languages blend, is to catch a glimpse of how it might go in Britain, a century or so down the line from the dissolution of another United Kingdom.

    Yet this vision of a peaceable endgame of history, relieved of the burdens of geopolitical self-importance, is complicated by another story of greatness that Sweden likes to tell itself. It was the Swedish diplomat Pierre Schori who coined the phrase en moralisk stormakt, ‘a moral superpower’, to describe the role his country had assumed in the 20th century. The phrase was meant with pride and it marks the point at which the external projections of modern Sweden as a utopia, originating with Childs in the 1930s, loop into the country’s self-narration, producing a sense of exceptionalism strangely parallel to America’s story of itself as ‘a city upon a hill’, a beacon of light in a dark world. The Swedish version of this story is hardly less shadowed.

    A moral superpower may not go around starting wars, but in Sweden’s case, it seems happy enough to profit from the sale of weapons. It’s not just that Alfred Nobel endowed his peace prize from the wealth he made in developing modern explosives, or that this country was responsible for the invention of everything from the landmine to the machine gun; it’s that Sweden remains one of the world’s great arms manufacturers to this day. In per capita terms, its exports of military hardware are exceeded only by Russia and Israel.

    There’s a book called Ambassadors of Realpolitik. It’s about Sweden’s role during the Cold War, but the country’s military-industrial pragmatism continues to collide periodically with its idealised self-image. In 2015, a red-green minority government, which had come to power pledging a ‘feminist foreign policy’, found itself in the kind of fix that Robin Cook would have recognised. The foreign secretary Margot Wallström had been outspoken in her criticism of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. Now a longstanding arms treaty with the kingdom was up for renewal. Eventually, after much-reported cabinet splits, and in the face of opposition from unions and business leaders, the treaty was revoked. It was a sign that there remains life in the ideal of the moral superpower, yet in the broader scheme of things, such a gesture hardly made a dent in Sweden’s role as a global arms dealer.

    Schori’s phrase still surfaces now and then in newspaper debate articles, but there is a suspicion in today’s Sweden that the time of being a great moral power has also passed into history. In 2006, the erudite comedian Fredrik Lindström – Sweden’s answer to Stephen Fry – presented a prizewinning documentary series about the national psyche called The World’s Most Modern Country. It’s a title that plays on the stories of Swedish exceptionalism and the concrete achievements of its 20th century modernisation, but also on the sense that ‘modernity’ itself is now old-fashioned. Lindström’s artful monologues of self-doubt, the montages in which he is edited into archive footage, and the studio set reminiscent of the one in which David Frost interviewed Olof Palme made the series a study in postmodernism, Swedish style. A couple of years later, the historian Jenny Andersson published a book that tracks the decline of social democracy in Sweden and the rise of a nostalgia for the era of high modernity; its title translates as When the Future Already Happened.

    To this picture of early 21st-century Sweden, adrift in the aftermath of its own modernity, having lost and found and lost again its sense of greatness, let me add one more element that jars against my English expectations, and that is the phenomenon of a society in which the Social Democrats have truly been the establishment, hegemonic and replete with a deep-seated sense of entitlement. This may have its equivalents in the experience of local government in certain cities around the UK, but at Westminster, even when Labour has been in office, it has rarely felt itself to be in power. There are times when the contrast can feel like passing through the looking glass. 

    One small example: a few years ago, I was brought in to moderate a three-day event with a network of grassroots cultural projects from around Europe. Our hosts were an organisation based in one of those concrete outer suburbs of Stockholm, and over our time together I noticed a gap between their mindset and the other partners who came from countries to the south and east. The Swedes seemed quite sincere in their enthusiasm for a rhetoric of creative urban entrepreneurship that stank of neoliberal horseshit to the rest of us. Afterwards, it struck me: perhaps these phrases that rang so hollow to us could sound like a vehicle for change, if you grew up with the hegemony and homogeneity and complacency of a society so strongly shaped by one political vision?

    *  *  *

    The New York Times article locates the turn of the Sweden Democrats fortunes in their shift from a rhetoric of outright white nationalism to a defence of ‘the social-welfare heart of the Swedish state’. Where once it sought to deport immigrants as a threat to racial purity, the party now argues for the need to close the borders if the Swedish model is to be saved. At the centre of this model, the Times explains, is ‘the grand egalitarian idea of the “folkhemmet,” or people’s home, in which the country is a family and its citizens take care of one another.’ Though only, it should be added, through the impersonal vehicle of the state.

    In this telling, the far right has taken the social democratic utopia hostage, convincing its voters they can only hang on to their benefits and pre-schools and care homes if they keep the foreigners out. What complicates matters is that the concept of the ‘people’s home’ was itself lifted by the Social Democrats from the language of the radical right in the 1920s.

    If Marquis Childs’ book was the ur-text for the utopian image of Swedish social democracy in the outside world, the equivalent position within Sweden’s own political imaginary is held by the folkhemstalet, a speech given by Per Albin Hansson on 18 January 1928. In it, he held up a vision of the good society as ‘a good family’, a home in which there are no favourites and no stepchildren, and he set out the scale of the work that lay ahead to realise this vision. Four years later, Hansson became the first of the great Social Democrat prime ministers, inaugurating what would prove to be four decades of almost uninterrupted rule, time enough to go about building the people’s home.

    The choice of language in that speech was significant: on previous occasions, Hansson had spoken of the medborgarhemmet, ‘the citizen’s home’, a cooler and more clearly democratic term, but now he deliberately took up an expression associated with the radical conservative thinker Rudolf Kjellén. This was the same language whose potency was making itself felt in Germany in those years: the ‘folk’ in folkhemmet is a close cousin of the Volk of the National Socialists.

    The Swedish writer Katrine Kielos describes this move as a masterpiece of political reframing, capturing the rhetorical ground of one’s opponents. Writing in 2012, she could draw a comparison to Ed Miliband’s – in hindsight, rather less successful – attempt to steal the ‘one nation’ rhetoric of Toryism. Yet this is a little too comfortable a take, steering us away from the shadow side of the project which Hansson launched.

    Few would dispute that the building of the people’s home in Sweden was a feat of social engineering on a grand scale. Chief among its architects were the couple Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, among whose prolific and influential output was the 1934 book, Crisis in the Population Question, which argued for strict laws to preserve the quality of the human ‘breeding stock’. An enthusiasm for eugenics was not peculiar to social democratic thinkers, nor to Sweden; rather, it was commonplace among intellectuals, progressive and conservative, during the interwar period. However, such concerns were more deeply rooted in Sweden than elsewhere and their hold on Swedish institutions more enduring.

    In 1921, the Swedish parliament approved the creation of the Institute of Racial Biology at the University of Uppsala, the first state-funded centre for the study of eugenics in the world. Its founding director, Herman Lundborg, led a research programme that involved measuring the skulls and photographing the bodies of more than a hundred thousand Swedes, in pursuit of a more rigorous statistical basis for policies of ‘racial hygiene’. To Lundborg and his contemporaries, this project of racial categorisation was simply an extension of the work begun in Uppsala two centuries before by Carl Linnaeus, who set out to organise the diversity of the living world into a hierarchical taxonomy; in its original form, the Linnaean system included four subspecies of Homo sapiens, defined according to their skin colour. Despite the difficulty Lundborg had in drawing any meaningful statistical conclusions from the measurements his team had made, he received international recognition for his work, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1936.

    When war came three years later, Sweden declared itself neutral. The country was in no position to defend itself and had no desire to end up under occupation, like its neighbours to the west. So its neutrality was born of pragmatism and had the quality of a weathervane: when the war was going well for Germany, Sweden kept it supplied with iron ore and timber, transporting its soldiers home on leave from occupied Norway, or even en masse to the Finnish border to launch an attack on the Soviets. Later, it would find ways to be of use to the Allies, in their turn.

    This policy had its consequences for Sweden in the post-war world. While much of Europe lay in ruins, Sweden’s cities and industrial plant remained intact, its economy unburdened by war debts, and so the conditions for its economic take-off in the years that followed were closer to those of the United States than to any of the combatant countries of its own continent. The sheer prosperity of Sweden in the post-war decades, which contributed to the sheen of its utopian image, owed much to its peculiar experience of the war and its aftermath. My hunch is that the deep love for ’50s Americana in Swedish working class culture carries an echo of this period; the whale-sized tail-fin cars that gather to cruise the downtown streets of provincial towns are relics of an era of rising and broadly shared prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic.

    The other legacy of Sweden’s World War II neutrality was a lack of reflection. With a few exceptions – most famously, the diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust – the Swedes seemed to have no wartime heroes, and no real villains. Whilst public opinion in the 1930s had been favourable to much of what was going on in Hitler’s Germany, attempts to launch a national socialist movement in Sweden never got much traction. There was not much soul-searching to be done, nor much moral capital to be gained from dwelling on the events of those years.

    Perhaps this explains the persistence of policies and intellectual currents which would not have found a place in the mainstream of other western European societies, more deeply scarred by the legacy of Nazism and the cost of its defeat. The Institute of Racial Biology at Uppsala carried on under that name until 1958. The policies of racial hygiene it was set up to support went on still longer: into the 1970s, the Swedish state was still carrying out the forced sterilisation of groups including Roma and indigenous Sami women. This went on through the high years of social democracy, when Sweden was, by its own estimation and that of many others, ‘the world’s most modern country’.

    It is sometimes said rather glibly that the success of social democracy in the Nordic countries was dependent on the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of these societies, as though it were easier to form a social contract of reciprocity with people who have the same colour hair and eyes. Whether or not there is any truth in this, there is a structural level on which the logic of the social democratic state implies exclusion. Whether you call it ‘the people’s home’ or ‘the citizen’s home’, the sheltering roof is built on top of walls. It offers a set of entitlements to those who hold the right papers. There are always rules that specify who qualifies, geographic and bureaucratic borders that mark the bounds of its generosity. While the moral imagination and internationalist commitments of a social democratic movement may lean away from this logic, that only puts it in the trap described by George Orwell in his essay on Kipling, written in 1942:

    All the left-wing parties in the highly industrialised countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue.

    By the late 1940s, the United States had launched the narrative of international development, whose genius is to locate Orwell’s ‘Asiatic coolies’ no longer as our contemporaries and servants, but as our followers along a chronological path that will lead them to a destination embodied in the prosperity of the western middle classes. New modes of globalisation took the place of crude colonialism and Sweden has furnished the development project with some of its most passionate and sincere advocates, not least the late Hans Rosling. 

    For Swedish men of Rosling’s generation, the experience of the post-war boom felt like an absolute validation of the development narrative, while the failure of Sweden’s early attempts at establishing African and North American colonies has lent the country a sense of innocence, compared to the ghosts of empire that haunt the photo albums of Europe’s other great powers. The 18th century nobleman, Axel Oxenstierna, got closer to the truth when he declared, ‘We have an India of our own!’, his enthusiasm sparked by the promise of mineral wealth in the Sami territories of the north, whose exploitation fuels the Swedish economy to this day. Meanwhile, the net flow of resources into this country and the ecological footprint of its consumers, closer to the American than the European average, mark it as a beneficiary of a system that still resembles the colonial arrangements Orwell had in mind, and his charge of hypocrisy still finds a target in a country that can pride itself on 200 years of peace while selling arms around the world.

    To draw out the contradictions within the social democratic project, bound up as it is with Sweden’s story of itself, is not to indulge in lazy relativism, to tar the party of the folkhemmet with the same brush as the Sweden Democrats. I’ve heard colleagues speak of their children being spat on for the colour of their skin. The chain of white supremacist terror attacks around the world in recent months, the latest just across the border in Norway, is a reminder of how much worse all this can get. Between the two political parties, there is no doubt whose activists have fought against racism in recent decades and whose have fuelled it.

    My point is not to downplay the darkness of the Sweden Democrats, but to recognise it as not simply alien, an external force hijacking the heritage of the Swedish model, but as drawing on something internal to that model, latent within the shadows of social democracy. If there is truth in such a reading, then it calls for a process of reflection that doesn’t stop at moral condemnation of the nativist right.

    *  *  *

    It would have been the spring of 2014, the Euro elections, the first time my Swedish was good enough to read the party literature landing in our mailbox. What struck me when I picked up the leaflet from the Sweden Democrats was that it named the day-jobs of their lead candidates, a care worker and a truck driver. The message could hardly have been clearer: we are the party of the low paid and the low status, those at the bottom of the ladder of economic or cultural capital.

    In 1989, the sociologist Göran Therborn was the sole Swedish contributor to New Times, the influential book-length collection from the editors of Marxism Today, rethinking the role of the left after a decade of Thatcherism. Therborn’s essay introduced his British readers to the concept of ‘the two-thirds society’, a dystopian projection of the socio-economic trajectory of post-industrial Europe, in which a third of the population find themselves locked out of a prosperity which increasingly goes to those with higher levels of technological and cultural literacy.

    At the start of the 1990s, Sweden was hit by its worst economic crisis of the modern era. The literary critic Jonas Thente recalls the nightly news reports in which laid-off workers trooped out of the factory gates for the last time in small towns across the country. While economic growth returned with time, the background rate of unemployment remained higher and in the decades that followed, Sweden has distinguished itself by having the fastest growing inequality of any OECD country. The two-thirds society became a reality, Thente observes, and yet somewhere along the way, we stopped talking about it.

    It’s true at least of Thente’s colleagues in the ‘cultural debate’ pages of the Swedish press, who do much to set the agenda of the public conversation, that they have seemed happier to write about gender, racism, LGBTQ and environmental questions than to touch on the themes of class and economic inequality. One particularly Swedish manifestation of this is the phenomenon of normkritik, the critique of social norms. At its best, this involves the unsettling of unexamined assumptions, what a librarian friend of ours calls ‘norm curiosity’: I remember a powerful session with the Swedish-Kurdish comedian Özz Nûjen at the theatre where I worked, as he mixed laughter with painful insight into everyday racism, challenging us to consider how this played out in our own professional environment. It can also slide into something more didactic, less curious, a kind of ‘norm-replacement therapy’ in which we are taught how we ought to be thinking.

    But given the acute, at times neurotic sensitivity to the policing of norms in the Swedish cultural sector, the uncritical persistence of one particular norm is striking. In the long dry summer of 2017, as wildfires burned out of control in many parts of the country, I listened in disbelief to a pair of young comedians from Stockholm on national radio as they giggled about how stupid the countryside people are and why they don’t just move to the city, instead of living out in the sticks and waiting for their houses to burn down. Maybe it’s another of the jokes I just don’t get, but it can seem as though the one kind of prejudice that is still welcome in polite Swedish society is prejudice against the inhabitants of the small towns and scattered rural communities that make up Sweden’s flyover country. 

    It’s a tendency Andrew Brown picks up on, in one of the later chapters of Fishing In Utopia, when he returns to Sweden in the early 2000s, a quarter of a century after he had lived here. In a prosperous middle-class neighbourhood of Gothenburg, he calls on his ex-wife and her current husband, a university professor, and they get to talking about the two-thirds society:

    They felt pity for the poor and for the immigrants, but for the people who stayed behind in the small towns of the interior, they felt a rather superstitious contempt, as if their bad luck might rub off on everyone else.

    ‘We should just close down the whole of the countryside,’ his ex-wife declares, with a sudden vehemence. He wonders if she is remembering the small town where she lived when they first met. 

    Urbanisation is still a recent and ongoing phenomenon in Sweden. Writing about her experiences making a film here in the late ’60s, Susan Sontag notes that people would often attribute ‘the awkwardness and flatness of their urban life’ to habits brought with them from the farms and the backwoods: ‘most of the people in Stockholm (I’m told) still remember the forest’. So perhaps the exception that seems to be made for this one form of prejudice stems from a lingering assumption that it is somehow self-directed.

    The era of widening inequality that followed the crisis of the early 1990s has also been the era of Swedish neoliberalism. Those profit-making ‘free schools’ were introduced under a one-term coalition government of the centre right, but continued with the support of the Social Democrat prime minister Göran Persson, who embraced Tony Blair and Bill Clinton’s ‘Third Way’, with its echoes of the old story of Sweden’s ‘Middle Way’. Successive governments from both sides of the longstanding block divide went on to oversee the increasing agency of the private sector and the profit motive in shaping Swedish society, a process which accelerated after 2006, when the Alliance for Sweden, made up of four parties of the centre-right, achieved an unprecedented two consecutive terms in government. In our research for a workshop in Gothenburg a couple of years ago, my colleagues from the Dutch architecture duo STEALTH.unltd were startled to discover an official website on which the city authorities pitched themselves to international developers at the MIPIM global real estate fair by promoting Gothenburg’s ‘tax-haven’ rates for companies.

    What is distinctive about Swedish-style neoliberalism is not simply that parts of the old social democratic model remain in place, but the way that widening inequality twists that model. The universal childcare on offer through the pre-school system is a remarkable support for working parents, but the generous bank of parental leave – paid at up to 80% of your usual earnings and available to be drawn on any time until the child turns twelve – benefits the middle classes most. It’s what meant that our family could make a three-month trip to England this summer, but much as it contributes to my quality of life, I can’t pretend not to know that this system is of less use to a low-paid care worker who needs everything she earns to pay the bills. Owen Hatherley sums it up rather well: ‘in Sweden, social democracy was only abandoned for the poor.’

    Three decades on, the predictions of Göran Therborn and his comrades have mostly been born out. Twenty-first century Sweden has become a society of insiders and outsiders, the pattern repeated twice-over: on an urban scale, where immigrants find themselves concentrated in the concrete outer suburbs, and then on the national scale, where the fast-growing urban centres do little to disguise their disdain for the people of the declining small towns and countryside. What made the prospect of the two-thirds society so vicious was that representative democracy would provide little incentive for the established parties to attend to the situation of the excluded third. Into this void has come a party which takes the loss, disorientation and disaffection of one group of outsiders and channels it into a suspicion and barely-disguised hatred of another group.

    *  *  *

    In the spring of 2013, I enrolled in Swedish for Immigrants, the basic language programme offered free to all newcomers to this country. That autumn, we moved from Stockholm to Västerås, an engineering city on the shore of Lake Mälaren, an hour’s train ride west of the capital, so it was here that I took my SFI exams. I’d learned how to be an immigrant and I had the certificate to prove it. My Swedish was coming along OK, too. One of my classmates, an exiled Iranian journalist, told me about a follow-on course she had signed up for, intended as a fast-track for professionally educated immigrants, to speed our integration into a society in need of our skills. I went to the job centre and asked them to sign me up, too. Only when I got there on day one did I discover that the course was intended for non-European migrants only, and I had been admitted due to an administrative error. The course leaders didn’t seem too troubled, though, and they let me stay.

    In the ordinary course of adult life, few things match the helplessness you experience when starting out in a new language. In those classrooms, in my mid-thirties, I relived the childhood experience of being in a teacher’s hands, for better and sometimes worse. But among my classmates, this helplessness had a certain levelling effect, however different the situations that waited for us outside school. 

    Many of those I studied alongside had made unimaginable journeys, taken risks and endured humiliations that I hope I will never have to face. The largest group were young men and families who had been part of the early exodus from Syria as the optimism of the Arab Spring gave way to bloody chaos. As often as not, they had wound up in Sweden by chance. 

    One friend described how, after months in Greece, he got himself smuggled to Spain, where he stood at Madrid airport, trying to get a flight to Munich where he had family, except the only flight he could get a seat on that night was to Stockholm. He took it, planning to lie his way through immigration, to travel south and seek asylum in Germany; instead, he was questioned, fingerprinted and put into the Swedish system, the course of his life turning on that choice of an airline ticket.

    Another Syrian guy I got to know had been studying in Tripoli when the Gaddafi regime fell, spent months hiding from gunmen, only to find by the time he escaped that his home country was unravelling into a civil war of its own. His parents had fled to Germany and he managed to join them there, but they fell out furiously over his father’s support for the resistance, and two days later he had left. Now, alone and deeply traumatised, he would sit in class, scrolling through video clips of street battles and explosions.

    In all the years I lived in England, I could count the people I knew who had been refugees on the fingers of one hand. Now, as I wandered into a life in Sweden, the first friends I made were these people I sat next to at school. While some were clearly broken by what they had lived through, what struck me mostly was their resilience. I began to notice a difference, though, between those who had families or faith communities to anchor them in these new surroundings and those who had come alone, who would spend their weekends counting the hours until we were back at our desks. That was when we started the Saturday fika club. It helped that Anna, my partner, had lived in Alexandria, working with children’s literature across the Middle East, and later with grassroots women’s groups in Palestine and Israel. This tall blond Swede who spoke street Arabic with an Egyptian accent won a lot of hearts.

    Fika is a Swedish institution: a pause for coffee, traditionally accompanied by cinnamon buns or ‘seven sorts of biscuit’, marking a space of sociable conversation in a culture otherwise characterised by reserve. Our teachers tried to instil in us a sense of its importance: when you get a job in a Swedish workplace, they would say, it’s very important that you join your colleagues in the fika room at break-time. So on Saturdays, Anna and I would bake and we’d invite my classmates and her workmates over for the afternoon to hang out and drink coffee and talk Swedish. This went on for a couple of years, long after the course itself was over.

    One other memory sticks with me from that period. It must have been early in the second course I took. The class had been broken up into workgroups of five or six, each group allocated some feature of the city’s heritage. We were sent out to research it and then prepare a presentation. My group was given the castle, a twelfth-century fortress by the river mouth, remade so extensively in later generations, you would hardly think it medieval. I threw myself into this eagerly, trying to play the good student, but my colleagues showed less enthusiasm. Finally, one of the women in the group turned to me.

    ‘Maybe to you this building seems old,’ she said, ‘but we come from a city that has existed for 8,000 years. To us, this is not so impressive.’ She didn’t go on to say that, here they were, treated as barbarians, in a part of the world that had still been in the Stone Age when their ancestors were laying the foundations of what we like to call civilisation.

    *  *  *

    I look at the numbers from the Migration Service and try to hold in mind the stories they represent: the journeys, the losses, the humiliations, the plans put on hold, the persistence, the stubborn rebuilding of lives under the circumstances of displacement. It was the autumn of 2015 when the numbers really took off, the nightly news leading on images of a drowned child, desperate encampments at Balkan border posts, crowds walking along the sides of motorways. These scenes were met with an awakening of conscience, a mobilisation of support, with welcome stalls at railway stations and networks collecting supplies for new arrivals. At the theatre, it was announced that we could each put an hour a week of our work time towards volunteering as part of this effort.

    That winter, I travelled to a conference in Estonia. In a Tallinn beer hall, I sat up talking late into the evening with Kilian Kleinschmidt, who had recently quit the UNHCR and was advising the governments of Austria and Germany on how to respond to the crisis. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘there is no reason why this should be a crisis for Europe.’ One million people arriving in a continent of 500 million, in some of the richest countries in the world – that this should strain our systems or our capacity to respond told us something troubling about ourselves.

    I’d read about Kleinschmidt’s work as Senior Field Commander at the Zaatari camp in Jordan, where he declared himself the mayor and the refugee camp a city whose residents were capable of organising to meet their own needs. His courage, his ability to build relationships and to generate publicity made Zaatari a success story, but it didn’t surprise me to learn that it had also marked the end of his career within the structures of a UN institution.

    Now, he spoke of the agency of the million people who had brought their desperation to Europe, commanding an attention which decades of professional communications work by NGOs and international bodies had failed to deliver. By coming here, they had revealed the gap between Europe’s story of itself and the realities that underlay that story: they were showing us how fractured our supposedly integrated continent remains, and how close to the surface were the ghosts of the politics of hate that European integration was meant to have buried.

    He talked about the threat of the far right – and then, he said, on the other hand, you have these people who want to keep refugees like pet guinea pigs. ‘You see it on Facebook: “How sweet, my Syrian was shopping and now he’s cooking for me!” Well, this is no good, either: a sentimental paternalism that makes victims of people all over again.’

    The next morning, at the opening session of the conference, I found myself sitting next to the Estonian culture minister. Over breakfast, a friend had been explaining the country’s ‘e-residency’ scheme, which allows individuals anywhere in the world to register for an ID card and set up a business that is legally based in Estonia. ‘I hear you have 5,000 e-residents signed up already,’ I said to the minister. He smiled and started to tell me about the scheme’s attractions for entrepreneurs. ‘I’m interested in how a system like this could work for displaced or stateless people,’ I said. His smile froze and he suddenly found an urgent need to speak to someone in the row behind us. Later, I learned that, just that morning, after months of tense political debate, the government had announced the arrival of the first group of refugees under the EU’s resettlement programme. There were seven of them.

    In late November 2015, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, Åsa Romson of the Green party, broke into tears at a press conference, as she stood alongside the Social Democrat prime minister Stefan Löfven to announce the reversal of their government’s previous policy on immigration. In order to give the system a ‘breathing space’, Löfven explained, the right to permanent residency for refugees was being suspended, the right of family reunification restricted and border controls reintroduced on a regular basis between Sweden and Denmark. These were temporary measures, to apply for the next three years. This was a terrible decision, Romson added, but her party had chosen to remain in the government to avoid decisions even more terrible being taken.

    By that point, the numbers of people arriving in Sweden had reached 10,000 a week. The total number of those who sought asylum in the country in 2015 was close to 163,000. The following year, that fell to just under 29,000.

    The change of policy had its desired effect, but it left an edge of bitterness in Swedish politics, not least towards the rest of Europe. In the summer of 2014, the centre-right prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt had given a memorable speech in which he called on Swedes to ‘open your hearts’ to those fleeing for their lives. Now, the thought came: if only other EU countries had been willing to open their hearts, Sweden would not have had to go against its own moral inclinations, its instinct to generosity.

    As Kilian Kleinschmidt said, the million people who came to Europe in 2015 did this continent the service of revealing the gaps within our systems and our stories. What kind of poverty did their arrival disclose within our seemingly so affluent societies? On what basis might Europe become a continent capable of accommodating and living together with the displaced? What we know of climate change, the consequences that lie around and ahead of us, makes this no academic question. Might we need to start somewhere other than the high ideals enshrined in doctrines of human rights, themselves so tangled up with the high-minded stories we like to tell about our continent and its role in the world?

    There’s a thread to pull on here that leads beyond where I am headed in this essay. For now, I remain impressed by the persistence of my Saturday fika friends and by the many small instances of hospitality I witnessed in the autumn of 2015 and the years since. It’s no small thing to live in a country that has as strong a tradition of welcoming the stranger as modern Sweden, and despite the dystopian exaggerations of the fear-mongers, the result has hardly been social collapse. Yet something else nags at me, an echo of Kleinschmidt’s words about keeping refugees as guinea pigs. Here’s what it is: with all its lingering self-image as a moral superpower, I don’t know whether this society realises how much it might have to learn from its newcomers, the extent to which they hold kinds of knowledge and experience that could make all the difference as times get harder, as I suspect they will, as the bubbles within which many of us have been living continue to burst.

    *  *  *

    We didn’t have to break up in order to get our post delivered to the new apartment. The system proved more amenable than Anna had feared, on this occasion, yet the fear was not entirely unreasonable.

    There is a ‘Computer says no!’ quality to Swedish society, a sense that for anything to work at all, it must fit within the categories and fields of bureaucratic forms. What is striking to me, as an incomer, is how natural this seems to everyone else. It’s a testament to how well the system mostly works that it is not treated as a joke, in the way bureaucracies very often are. Instead, Sweden is exceptional for the level of trust that people have in institutions.

    My friend who bought the plane ticket from Madrid describes the experience of being picked up by immigration officials at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport. Among the questions he was required to answer, they asked whether he was a Sunni or a Shia. It was, he says, the first time in his life that he had been made to define himself according to these categories, and he refused. ‘Well,’ his interviewer said, ‘I have to put something here. You’re Kurdish and Kurds are mostly Sunni, so that’s what I am putting.’

    When you are born in Sweden, you are issued with a Person Number, a ten or twelve-digit code that starts with your date of birth. Introduced in 1947, this was the first such system anywhere in the world to cover an entire population. Having a Person Number is a necessity for interfacing with numerous systems, public and private, and all newcomers given residency are issued with one. When I got my last four digits, as the expression goes, I was surprised to discover it even worked for borrowing DVDs from the local video store.

    All societies are full of their local mysteries, ways of doing things that are obvious to those brought up in them and baffling to the alien. But I wonder if any society has so deeply internalised the impersonal logic of the Person Number, the assumption that reality consists of things which can be indexed through categories and forms, existence as an entry in a database? When I listen to enthusiasts for the Blockchain talk about a near future in which entire legal codes have been uploaded and their inconsistencies ironed out, this vision of a world shorn of ambiguity, illegibility and the messy layer of human interpretation sounds to my ears like a strangely Swedish utopia.

    It’s a logic that goes deep. Remember my caveat to the New York Times description of the folkhemmet: ‘the country is a family and its citizens take care of one another’, but only through the impersonal vehicle of the state. The collective project of social democracy, born out of grassroots movements of mutuality and solidarity, became in its institutional realisation the platform for a radically individualist society. Dependence on the flawed and fallible fabric of human relations was swapped for dependence on the impersonal mechanisms of the state, and in many ways this looked like a good deal. The result is a society that resembles the vision of Liquid Modernity described by Zygmunt Bauman, in which all human relationships have become disposable, to be dissolved at will, with little cost or consequence. It is an achievement which produces a kind of liberation I do not want to dismiss lightly, even as I cannot deny my unease at its wider consequences.

    Anna remembers her return to Sweden as the loneliest time of her life. She had lived elsewhere for the best part of twelve years, most recently in Alexandria. There, if she kept to herself for 24 hours, her friends would come knocking at the door to see if she was unwell. In Stockholm, no one ever called by on the off-chance she was home. To make plans with old friends or new colleagues involved planning weeks ahead and coordinating around people’s slots in the shared laundry rooms that sit in the basements of Swedish apartment buildings. From a society only held together by the dense weave of human relationships, she had returned to one of order and independence and isolation, to a city with a median household size of one.

    Is the Swede Human? asks the title of a much-debated book by the Swedish historian Lars Trägårdh and the journalist Henrik Berggren. Trägårdh’s ideas have found an international audience through Erik Gandini’s documentary, The Swedish Theory of Love, while an English synopsis of the book was distributed at Davos a few years ago. It is an enquiry into the peculiarity of Sweden’s ‘state individualism’, following its roots back beyond the beginnings of social democracy and into the cultural history that formed the Swedish character. It is not hard to get onboard with the basic premise: in terms of the argument I have been tracing here, the inclination to treat reality as made up of things that can be indexed and categorised seems to stretch from Linnaean taxonomy to the more didactic forms of normkritik. It’s also fair to note that Trägårdh’s arguments can be turned to serve the interests of those who historically opposed the creation of the Swedish model, in as much as they locate the credit for its achievements within the traits of a national character, rather than with the social movements which built modern Sweden.

    If social democracy flourished in Sweden and came further in realising its vision of modernity here than anywhere else, it seems reasonable to look for the particular conditions that enabled it to flourish. The historical experiences, landscapes and cultural values which shaped this country may well have left it predisposed towards the social contract of state individualism, but the creation of the institutions and agreements by which that deal was made a reality propelled the inhabitants of the people’s home to a previously impossible level of independence from direct human relationships. In the ‘good family’ that grew out of Per Albin Hansson’s vision, not only were there no favourites and no stepchildren, there would be no need for actual family at all.

    Loneliness is not an easy thing to measure. At best you can look for the statistical traces that it leaves like footprints in the sand. Last December, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that every other day in Sweden, a body is found of someone who has lain dead, undiscovered, for a month or more. Other markers of a rising tide of loneliness might be found in the figures for mental illness among the young, or even in patterns of consumption so endemic we rarely acknowledge how closely they conform to the dynamics of addiction.

    This is not the violent dystopia of the Sweden the US president learns about from Fox News. It is closer to the general trends observed across the western societies, though pushed towards the extremes in a society that can seem on the surface to be insulated from the ills of neoliberalism, and that serves too often as a vessel for nostalgic hopes, a place where the dream of a kinder modernity is rumoured to be still alive.

    Of course, you might say loneliness is a price worth paying for all the gains Hans Rosling used to show us on his graphs, a luxury problem in a society that has met its more pressing needs. Except that the ecological realities of the 21st century bring back Orwell’s charge of hypocrisy in a new and deadly form: according to the WWF, the ecological footprint of the average Swede outstrips that of almost all other European countries. For everyone on Earth today to share this enlightened standard of life, we would need three more Earths.

    In the newsagents at the railway station, I pick up a strange publication, a Franco-Swedish ‘bookazine’ called Good Future (‘Inspired by UN Sustainable Goals’). All the articles are in English, including a lead essay from Johan Norberg, Rosling’s successor in the optimism export trade. Alongside it, there’s a ten-page feature in which editor Annelie Karlsson drives a Tesla from Stockholm to Provence.

    No one I know who actually works with climate change is persuaded by the path to the future on offer here, the green consumerism that has become so much a part of Sweden’s identity today. Perhaps it’s telling that Greta Thunberg – the most famous Swede in the world, right now – has received a rather muted response at home. Compared to the mass school strikes in Australia, Germany, Belgium and elsewhere, Swedish pupils have been slow to follow her example. Could it be that the cognitive dissonance between her message and everything the adult world is telling them is just too great?

    ‘We are coming down to earth,’ says the poet-philosopher Bayo Akomolafe, ‘we will not arrive intact.’ It occurs to me that the air of unreality surrounding much of the eager eco-optimism I encounter in Sweden is a reflection of how far this country has to fall. The Swedish model was built on industry, on the export of raw materials and high modernist design, on rising affluence and consumption. Its achievements do not insulate it against its unsustainability. There will be no smooth transition here, or anywhere else, but on the rocky road of the decades ahead, it will surely have to remember some of the skills of mutuality and interdependence that seemed obsolete when it occupied the high ground of modernity.

    If that is so, then Sweden may yet come to be grateful for the knowledge of people who came here from countries further down the league tables of economic development and who carry the lived experience of how to make life work under less orderly conditions. It may find, too, that there are currents within its own past and present that contribute to this remembering – not least, at the edges, including the rural and ex-industrial communities that have been treated as a threat or as a joke. For the grand stories that get told about a country and its national character are always full of gaps, threaded through with other lines of history whose significance may reveal themselves in hindsight.

    *  *  *

    On a Friday lunchtime, three weeks after my bag was stolen, I walk through the sliding doors of the Swedbank branch in the city centre, take a queue ticket and find a seat in the waiting area. At one of the stand-up desks that line the far side of the room, I hear a member of staff explaining to a couple who want to open an account that they need to speak to a national call centre, this isn’t something they can do here in person.

    Like most of us in the waiting room this lunchtime, I’m guessing, the couple are still wandering in to Sweden. There are exceptions: a man around sixty comes in, with a tan that says he’s spent the summer sailing in the archipelago, and is directed upstairs for a meeting with a financial advisor; there’s an elderly woman, accompanied by her daughter, but otherwise we all seem to be what they call New Swedes.

    I remember a conversation one day in class: most of our group were convinced that the old Swedes, the white ones, had become a minority in our city. When we looked up the statistics and found that only one in four of our neighbours had an overseas background, this was met with disbelief. In the queues at banks, at council offices, at bus stops, we are over-represented. We are less likely to go everywhere by car, to do our shopping online or out of town. It takes eight years on average, they told us at the start of that course, for an immigrant with a professional education to reach the point where she gets employment appropriate to her skills: we were here so they could help us get there faster. How much of that eight years is spent waiting around, I wonder? In queues, in the corridors of language schools, on street corners.

    In July, the city lays on a festival, with bands and stalls that line the downtown streets. Among the crowds, we run into Baha, a friend from the Saturday fika group. He laughs and shakes his head, gesturing around us. ‘Swedish people only know how to use the streets when someone tells them that they can!’

    My number comes up on the digital display and I’m shown through to a side office; in my hands, the documents I collected this morning from the police station. Not only a new ID card, but a passport, a magical instrument that means I can walk in and out of other people’s countries as though this were nothing. I know it isn’t nothing.

    Strange to see it there in black and white: Nationalitet: Svensk. I am Swedish people now. For bureaucratic purposes, at least, I stand solidly inside the walls of the people’s home, even if in other ways it still feels like I’m lingering in the doorway, eyeing the whole structure with suspicion. My papers are the proof that I have been adopted into the ‘good family’, with all its quirks and secrets. Like most families, it has stories that it loves to tell and stories no one wants to talk about. In another seven years, perhaps I’ll understand it better.

    After the train had crossed the bridge and we’d left behind the Malmö skyline, it hit me with an unexpected force: this is my country now, with all that is easy to love about it and all the rest, too. Its troubles are my troubles. When I write about its tangled history, I cannot do so with detachment, because I have become part of the tangle. Perhaps this was why I needed the three months in England, so as to come back and see this clearly, to lose any remaining illusion of distance.

    England will always be my past, my childhood home – and the past is never gone – but in as much as one can take such things for granted, I am here to stay. Running in my head are some half-remembered words, recited by Zlatan Ibrahimovic in a Volvo ad, the last lines of the Swedish national anthem, which don’t quite go: ‘I will live, I will die in the North.’

    *  *  *

    So what did happen in Sweden, when the far right won 17.5% of the vote in last year’s general election?

    Three days beforehand, the New York Times had run an op-ed under the headline, ‘How the Far Right Conquered Sweden’. The author, a political editor at a German newspaper, told readers that the Sweden Democrats ‘might end up in government’, that their success ‘makes a coalition between the Social Democrats and the Moderates unlikely’, but that both of these large historic parties might well split as a result of the vote. As James Savage – co-founder of Sweden’s English-language news site, The Local – wrote with some exasperation, these were ‘things that no one who has observed Swedish politics could assert’:

    The piece, like so many others, goes on to paint a dystopian picture of Sweden that is at odds with the experience of most people living here. A few anecdotes about gang violence in the suburbs leave the reader with the false impression of a society in decay…

    Sometimes, disinformation is not the result of dastardly plots by the enemies of democracy, but simply the decline of the foreign correspondent. (When I worked for the BBC in South Yorkshire, we’d sometimes get calls from producers in London who would start, ‘Newcastle, that’s near you guys, yeah?’ I imagine the Times editors calling up Hamburg on a similar basis.)

    When all the votes were counted, the red-green bloc – made up of the governing Social Democrats and Greens, with the arms-length support of the Left party – had 144 seats in parliament to 143 for what’s still known as the ‘bourgeois’ bloc, the four centre-right parties collaborating under the banner of the Alliance for Sweden. During the closing weeks of the campaign, there had been much discussion of scenarios, but few imagined the result would be quite so tight. The leader of the Moderates, the largest of the Alliance parties, Ulf Kristersson kept repeating the mantra that he would push their policies ‘right into the tiles’, a metaphor lifted from the world of competitive swimming that allowed him to hint that he would look for a way to govern with the support of the Sweden Democrats, if need be, without ever actually saying as much.

    One of the quirks of the Swedish system is its reliance on ‘negative parliamentary confidence’: to form a government, a prime minister does not need to command a majority in parliament, only to ensure that there is not an absolute majority of parliamentarians willing to vote against him or her. This makes an abstention as good as a vote of support, so much of the emphasis in building a government can go into which parties are willing to ‘lay down’ their votes and tolerate a prime ministerial candidate.

    When the new parliament met, its first act was to vote down the existing government of Stefan Löfven, the Alliance parties going together with the Sweden Democrats to create a majority against his red-green coalition. This set in motion a drawn-out process of meetings between the party leaders and the speaker of the house, with the mandate to lead negotiations on forming a government passing backwards and forwards. What became clear over the months that followed was that the strength of the far right had driven a wedge between the established bourgeois parties. Kristersson got as far as assembling the numbers to vote down the continuity budget of the caretaker government, still led by the ousted Löfven, and replace it with an Alliance budget. But on the question of forming a government – which, whatever sophistry might be deployed, would be mathematically dependent on the ongoing support of the Sweden Democrats – two of the four Alliance parties had to draw the line.

    Pushed to choose between fresh elections, tolerating a Moderate-led government reliant on the far right, or tolerating the return to power of their Social Democrat opponents, the Liberals and the Centre party finally opted for the last of these, to the indignation of their allies in the Moderates and the Christian Democrats. The far right had not conquered Sweden, but it had succeeded in fracturing the alliance between conservatism and liberalism that had composed the country’s centre-right. In this respect, the wranglings over the formation of a Swedish government prefigured the deepening divisions within the Tory party as Boris Johnson pulls it closer to the national conservatism of the Faragists.

    In the op-ed pages of the Swedish press, there was talk of the left-right axis giving way to the GAL/TAN scale: Green, Alternative and Libertarian voters on the one side, Traditionalists, Authoritarians and Nationalists on the other. The conditions under which the liberal parties agreed not to oppose the new government included tax cuts for the highest earners and other reforms that built on the agenda of the earlier Alliance governments, and at the last minute, the negotiations almost fell through, as the Left party threatened to vote against the formation of a new government on these terms. Meanwhile, commentators began to speculate about the emergence of a new conservative bloc. Recent polls show the combined support for this putative alliance the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Sweden Democrats averaging around 45%: strong, but not enough to take them to power.

    As a weakened red-green coalition settles into its second term of office, Swedish politics remains in a precarious situation, its politicians unsure how to absorb the lessons of recent elections; in other words, it resembles the ordinary condition of most of the Western democracies today. There is a sense of a phony war, a not-quite-convincing simulation of normality, but along what lines would such a conflict be drawn? It is easy to imagine ourselves in a reenactment of the 1930s; the rhetoric is borrowed from that decade, often enough, and any complacency towards the ghosts of history should be gone by now. Yet this reading of the times may be too easy, a way of avoiding harder tasks for the political imagination.

    Some clues as to what these tasks might look like can be found in Bruno Latour’s recent book, Down to Earth. Though far from complete, it contains sketches for a new political cartography that starts from the assumption that widening inequality, mass migration and the oncoming climate crisis are far more tightly interconnected than we have known how to talk about. The politics towards which Latour is gesturing is one that grasps the stakes of the 21st century and the challenge of finding common hopes on the far side of the failure of modernity. It finds in the figure of Donald Trump an embodiment of that which needs to be opposed, but it does not pretend that opposition can take refuge in the reanimated forms of older liberal or progressive politics. Its implications deserve an attention beyond the scope of this essay.

    Meanwhile, in the absence of such a politics, one of the winners of Sweden’s phony war has been Annie Lööf, leader of the Centre party. Born out of the Farmer’s League that helped Per Albin Hansson form a government in the 1930s, Lööf’s party has mutated into a vehicle for social and economic liberalism. Their parliamentary votes and her leadership were decisive in holding the line against the Sweden Democrats, preventing the creation of a government over which the far right would exercise power, yet Lööf herself is a self-professed admirer of Margaret Thatcher and Ayn Rand.

    I met someone who had lunch with her a few years ago and he told me an interesting story. He’d asked what she thought were the greatest challenges that lay ahead for Sweden in the coming generation. An ageing population, the automation of work and climate change, she answered. He pressed her on the last of these: did she really think that technology was going to get us off the hook, that we could continue on our current path of economic growth and ever more consumption? ‘I am an optimist,’ she declared, her smile firmly in place. A statement of faith. An end to the conversation.

    *  *  *

    Before we go, there’s just time for one last question, and this one comes from a caller in New York – the friend who sent me the article that set me writing. ‘How much of this is true,’ he wants to know, ‘according to you?’

    Well, it’s true that there’s a lot of disinformation about Sweden, much of it painting a dystopian picture. Among the actors involved, there surely are dark forces from other corners of the world, though they are far from having a monopoly. As we have seen, the New York Times itself is quite capable of playing its part in the promotion of a distorted view of this country.

    There is a party with neo-Nazi roots that has found that a defence of the political tradition of the folkhemmet has a broader appeal than the direct messages of racial hatred that it used to trade in. This party has established itself as the third largest parliamentary force in Swedish politics. For any of us to whom such politics is inimical, for any of us who bear the mark of otherness or care about those around us who do so, there can be no complacency here.

    As with its associates in other countries, the growth of this party has been fed by an online ecosystem, a digital shadow media, parts of it homegrown, parts of it fuelled by global networks of social media designed by Silicon Valley to profit from antagonism and addiction. Within that ecosystem, as the Times has demonstrated, there are strange alliances and bad actors, some of them state-backed, seeking to stoke hatred and anger.

    From the experiences of people I know, it’s clear that there is a poison at work in Swedish society that is far more toxic than the well-scrubbed, TV-friendly spokesmen of the Sweden Democrats want to admit. It shows itself when people think they are talking among friends, or through the safety of keys and screens and usernames. It spreads fear and despair among those who understand themselves to be its targets.

    In the end, the least convincing part of the Times article is its headline: the claim that a global machine lies ‘behind’ the rise of the far right. As we’ve seen, this argument stumbles on the timeline. It’s not just that the 2018 election result fell short of the Sweden Democrats’ ambitions. As pointed out by Christian Christenson, a Stockholm-based American journalism professor, while the international media reported a ‘surge’ in its support ahead of the election, the party had in fact been flatlining in the opinion polls since 2015. This seems hard to square with the idea that ‘the workings of an international disinformation machine’ lay behind its success, unless we are to believe that the power of this machine had begun to wane, back before Trump had emerged as a contender, before the Vote Leave campaign had started to gear up.

    Sinister as they may be, the connections which the New York Times is able to reveal are at most an exacerbating factor in what has been happening in Sweden. To place them at the centre of the story is to use them as a comfort blanket, a way of avoiding harder thoughts. This kind of comfort, we can ill afford.

    Västerås, 30 August 2019

    First published on Bella Caledonia, 13 September 2019.

  • Negotiating the Surrender

    Negotiating the Surrender

    The place looks like an Italian monastery, all cloistered gardens and red-tiled rooftops. On a bright spring day you can get caught off-guard: stepping out onto the open walkway that links one building to another, you find the air two seasons colder than the view from the windows seemed to promise. We are a long way north of the Alps, in the small lakeside town of Sigtuna, thirty miles outside Stockholm.

    There are advantages to the location. A few weeks after I moved to Sweden, we had a friend passing through, one of the fiercest activists I ever knew, whose work has run from hacking together networks for the Syrian resistance to fighting for transgender people’s right to exist. As we sat together in a patch of sunshine on a chilly April morning, she stretched her arms and sighed: ‘This is the one place I come where it feels like I’m back from the frontline.’ No country is without its frontlines, but two centuries of neutrality have given Sweden a sense of peace that is striking by comparison to most corners of the world, and nowhere more so than in Sigtuna, a town whose street plan hasn’t changed in a thousand years. In an upper room of one of the wooden houses that line its main street, in 1942, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer held secret meetings with George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, bringing news to the Allies from the German Resistance of its plot to overthrow Hitler.

    For a hundred years, the cloistered buildings of the Sigtuna Foundation have been a place of meetings between worlds, where artists and priests and scientists gather on neutral ground. The Climate Existence conference belongs to this tradition: a gathering where the facts of climate change are not kept at arm’s length, where we grapple with the ways that we are changed by what we know. This latest meeting took place over three days, and though it was only the start of May and the leaves had not long been on the trees, the temperature was rising to match the architecture, the first taste of a relentless summer when forests would burn and wells run dry.

    At the end of the first day, Kevin Anderson took to the stage, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre. Before he was a climate scientist, Kevin built oil rigs for a living, and he has the bluntness of an engineer, together with the moral clarity of a man who hasn’t flown in many years, rejecting the logic of many in his field who justify their carbon footprints on the grounds of the importance of their work. His message was stark: to have a chance of meeting the goal agreed by governments in Paris, to keep climate change within a limit of two degrees, impossible things need to happen. Things beyond the bounds of what even the most progressive elements in mainstream politics have been willing to contemplate, even on their best days, over the past thirty years. The less bad news, he went on, is that a lot of things have happened over the past decade that weren’t meant to be possible – and he listed the banking crash, the Arab Spring, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the election of Donald Trump. The point is not whether we would welcome these developments, whether they represent a move in the right direction, but what they tell us about the nature of the times in which we are living: these are times in which impossible things happen, things which all the sensible voices whose job it is to tell us how the world works were busy telling us couldn’t happen until they did, and in this there lies a dark vein of hope.

    As I listened, I thought of something Vanessa Andreotti – professor of race, inequalities and global change at the University of British Columbia – had told us earlier that day. They have a saying where she comes from in Brazil: ‘When there’s a flood coming and the water’s at your ankles, you can’t swim. When the water gets to your knees, you still can’t swim. But when the water reaches your butt, it’s time to start swimming.’ When things get bad enough, types of action that were previously impossible become possible.

    These two thoughts about impossibility set me wondering: whereabouts in our societies is the water high enough already to start swimming? Because when it comes to climate change, it can still seem like it’s only lapping at our ankles. Even against the backdrop of the fires and the drought, the conversations I heard in supermarkets and at family gatherings last summer were mostly: ‘Isn’t the weather amazing?’ and ‘Don’t the farmers moan a lot?’ and ‘The government ought to buy more of those firefighting planes so we don’t have to keep borrowing them from Italy!’

    If I had to guess where the waters are highest, I’d say it’s places like loneliness, mental health among young people, technology addiction. And of course, compared to what climate change means right now in Kiribati or Mozambique, these are the very definition of ‘first world problems’: crises of meaning, rather than ‘existential crises’ in the literal sense of the ability to subsist.

    But what I’m asking is, where are the sources from which ‘impossible’ change might come, the points where things are bad enough right now in the societies whose ways of living need to change most in the next few years, if the worst of climate change is to be averted? And my hunch is that the answer might lie somewhere other than the obvious places in which action around climate and behaviour change tends to focus.

    *   *   *

    17 November, 2018. I’m watching footage shot on camera phones. Against a backdrop of famous monuments, protesters bring traffic to a halt, interrupting the business-as-usual of Saturday in a capital city.

    The images come from both sides of the Channel. There’s something uncanny about the emergence on the same day of these two movements, Extinction Rebellion and the Gilets Jaunes, the similarity of tactics, even the aesthetic coincidence of the fluorescent colours, the yellow vests in Paris and the yellow, green and pink flags on London’s bridges. At first glance, they look like mirror opposites, two sides ranged against each other in the battle for the future – and, as George Monbiot points out, the BBC is far more generous in its coverage of French activists protesting fuel price rises than British activists protesting climate change.

    Yet there are other lessons here. The carbon tax on diesel may have been the last straw for the French protesters, but there had been plenty of other straws. When market incentives are employed to tackle climate change, they tend to fall hardest on the people already getting the hard end of the deal in a market society, whether at a national or an international level. William Davies calls neoliberalism ‘the disenchantment of politics by economics’ – an attempt to get the processes of measurement, competition and price to do the work of remaking society, without the qualitative judgements and collective decisions of politics – and in this sense, what went up in smoke in Paris was the fantasy of green neoliberalism. This is where the third demand of Extinction Rebellion comes in: a serious response to the climate emergency will require a radical democratic process, a transformation of our way of living in which we participate as citizens, not just as consumers.

    The shared tactic of the roadblock already points in this direction, insisting on the urgent need to slow down, to bring the rush of business-as-usual to a halt, so that we can start to have a real conversation about how we are going to live, how we are going to change our lives, given what we know about the mess in which we find ourselves.

    *   *   *

    There’s a clickbait ad that keeps appearing in my Facebook feed for an organisation that wants to plant eight billion trees. I haven’t checked them out, but let’s assume that the people behind it are for real, that they are as scared as you and me by what is happening with the climate and that their over-simple story about how we can fix things is offered in good faith. What gets me is their idea of hope. Because, after a vivid account of the future towards which we are headed, they offer this proposition: if only we plant more trees, then ‘instead of the post-apocalyptic dystopia… everything continues as usual.’

    In this morning’s news, there’s a report that the number of young people in the UK who say ‘life is not worth living’ has doubled since 2009. It now stands at almost one in five.

    Think of the word ‘sustainability’. Whatever it once meant, it ends up meaning the project of sustaining as much as possible of our current way of living, only with wind turbines and electric cars. Like the commentators caught off-guard by Brexit and Trump, the mainstream proponents of sustainability fail to grasp how limited is the appeal of ‘everything continues as usual’.

    *   *   *

    When I think about what is at stake now, there’s a phrase that keeps coming back: this is about negotiating the surrender of our whole way of living.

    How much of the economic activity that you see around you could just go, overnight, and no one would honestly miss it, if this could happen without anyone going hungry or homeless as a consequence? Of course, that’s a huge if, especially when – as in the UK – rough sleeping and dependence on food banks have already been rising for years. Yet this is what a surrender looks like: it’s about how much of the organised activity of a society can be decommissioned, not by 2050 or 2030, or even 2025, but as soon as possible. The fact that, as David Graeber found when he wrote about ‘bullshit jobs’, much of the activity that shows up as GDP is widely recognised as pointless, including by those carrying it out, is one of the hidden assets here.

    To negotiate a surrender, you need a credible threat – and this is where the movement that began in London last November might look again at its strange twin across the Channel. Clearly, Extinction Rebellion would not seek the edge of chaos which drew so much attention to the Gilets Jaunes. Yet if this is truly a rebellion, then – in its own non-violent way – it needs to carry the kind of threat to the existing order that forced Macron to back down. When the big NGOs start talking about ‘the next wave of climate change protests’, we should be alarmed, because if that’s all this is, it will achieve as little as the waves that went before.

    Yet there is another side to negotiating a surrender. The militancy that brings the existing order into question needs to be matched by the quiet places of conversation, away from the frontlines, where unlikely partners enter into dialogue. This is the story of peace negotiations everywhere. It is also the spirit of the campaigners in the Irish referendum on abortion who were willing, as Fintan O’Toole writes, to ‘talk to everybody and make assumptions about nobody’.

    Finally, if this is a surrender, it’s a strange one, for there are no victors here. We are not equally implicated, for sure – but we know that it is our way of living that must be surrendered, and not only the lifestyles of Macron and his friends in the Davos set. Recognising this, we might set the insights of military strategists and peacemakers alongside the understandings of surrender to be found in spiritual traditions or in the treatment of addiction. Between them, they could tell us that to surrender is to give up, to be humbled, perhaps humiliated, but with a chance – not a guarantee – that we may live to tell the tale. 

    First published in This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook (Penguin, 2019).

  • After We Stop Pretending

    After We Stop Pretending

    The setting could so easily seduce you. Painted wooden houses line three sides of a square of grass: the red house, the white house and the low wooden barn between them where the bunk rooms are. On the fourth side, the slope falls away, past the village library, past the station house and the railway tracks to the lake. A strip of an island a hundred yards offshore, then miles of water stretching to a wooded horizon.

    The first clue that something is wrong should be the colour of the grass: dead-yellow already in the first days of June. No rain for weeks. The radio says we had the hottest May in over 250 years, but seeing as the oldest continuous temperature records anywhere began in Stockholm in the 1750s, you can probably stick a few zeros on that figure.

    Now look again at the island – the one in the photograph on the homepage for this school called HOME – and see how it changes when I tell you that the scatter of low buildings by the jetty is the oldest preserved oil refinery in the world, the soil still poisoned from spills before our grandparents were born. This is where we meet, in a landscape whose beauty is haunted by a history of extraction. Whatever else there may be to say, this is the background against which our voices rise and fall.

    A train pulls into the platform. Among the passengers who disembark, there are a number wearing rucksacks, looking around to find their bearings. They take in the lake and the island and the hostel on the hill. Together, they begin the short climb that leads to where we are standing, and, with their arrival, something shifts: this school, which has so far been a story Anna and I are telling, becomes something larger, messier and more substantial. For the next few days, in these borrowed buildings, it will be a place where our ideas and fears and longings get tangled up with those of the people who have taken up our invitation, an invitation to ‘a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of re-growing a living culture.’

    * * *

    One member of the group that week stands out in my memory. Fran is not the loudest presence; a large, gentle man in his early forties, he can be humble almost to a fault, yet there is a steadiness that marks him out. Here’s what I think it is: out of the whole group, he is the only one who hasn’t come alone. I mean, he made the journey solo, sleeping on overnight coaches, but he was able to do this thanks to the support of dozens of people who chipped in to crowdfund his way to Sweden – and so he arrives with a small village at his back, a community to which he already had to explain what was calling him here, and by which he is held. Sometimes in the sessions, I can see their faces leaning in over his shoulder.

    A few months later, I’m planning a trip to England when I get a message from Fran: would I like to come and visit his hometown and give a talk? So that’s how the two of us end up sitting on this low stage in an arts space in Stroud, along with our hosts, Emily and Ali; the four of us watching as the seats fill up and the queue stretches out the door, hoping we don’t end up having to turn people away. Looking out at this crowd, I’m guessing a good few of Fran’s villagers are in the house tonight.

    Well, it seems the folks without seats are happy to stand at the bar, and the whole room listens intently over the next two hours as we talk about what it might mean to take seriously the question with which the invitation to our school began: ‘What if the culture you grew up in was broken in ways that you didn’t even have words for?’ I talk about things I’ve learned over the past decade with Dark Mountain: about how despair is not a thing to be avoided at all costs, nor an end state; about how much of what makes human existence endurable lies beyond the reach of the state and the market, unmarked on the maps we’ve inherited from recent generations; about the role that art has played as a refuge for those aspects of reality that retreat from the gaze of those who would measure and price everything, that slip away like deer into the forest; about the hunch that, whatever hope is worth having today, it lies on the far side of despair, where the maps run out, at the margins or hidden in plain sight.

    Fran and I talk about what it means to make room for this within the ordinary fabric of our lives, among the everyday pressures; creating pockets, spaces to which it is safe to bring more of ourselves than it would be wise to bring to many of the workplaces, educational institutions or families we have known.

    Then right at the end of the night, just as Emily and Ali are drawing things to a close, they invite a friend up to the stage, a woman I haven’t met yet.

    ‘A few of us are organising a rebellion,’ she says. Not words I was expecting to hear, but as she goes on, I realise that I’m listening to something new – or new to me, at least. This is the voice of an activism that comes from the far side of despair, that has room for grief, that calls for courage rather than hope, that frames the stakes of climate change as starkly as anything we’ve published in Dark Mountain: this is not about saving the planet by changing your lightbulbs, it’s not about how we can sustain the way of living of the Western middle classes or fulfil the promises of development or transition to eco-socialism; it’s about how many species will be driven out of existence in the decades ahead, and whether our own is to be among them.

    Two weeks later, Extinction Rebellion delivers its demands to parliament, and as November goes on, their actions bring parts of London to a halt: blocking the five main bridges across the Thames, then holding up rush hour traffic at key junctions around the city, morning after morning. Even the organisers seem taken aback at the scale of the response. The other week, my mum called to say she’d heard a BBC radio documentary about Gail Bradbrook, and wasn’t that the woman I’d told her about from Stroud?

    From the occasional Facebook messages we exchange, I get the sense that Gail and those around her are riding a storm now, so I’m glad we got that chance to meet briefly in the relative calm of the weeks beforehand. And it seems fitting that the thread of serendipity which brought us together should run back to the gentle presence of Fran and the weave of generosity that brought him to Sweden in the endless days of early June.

    * * *

    ‘What do you do, after you stop pretending?’

    I wrote those words one night in the spring of 2010, as we were preparing for the first Dark Mountain festival. They became the frame for the Saturday programme on the main stage, and when Paul and I wrote a comment piece for the Guardian ahead of the event, it ran under the headline: ‘The environmental movement needs to stop pretending’. Among the crowd who gathered in Llangollen that weekend, there were those who came expecting us to offer a vision of what the environmental movement should do instead, and they were disappointed. I remember one guy from Manchester who was outright furious, railing to anyone who would listen, writing to us afterwards to demand that we refund his ticket.

    Maybe there are people whose ideas are born crystal clear and arrive in the world just as envisaged in the imagination, but my experience has always been that projects stumble into being: any new undertaking has to wrestle its way clumsily through the muddle of what you thought it would be, past the temptations of what others want it to be, until – if you’re lucky – it starts to reveal what it’s capable of being. In the case of Dark Mountain, it was only some years in that I saw clearly that this project wasn’t the place from which to ‘do’ anything. Whatever else, it has been a place where people come when they no longer know what to do; a place where you can bring your despair and put it into words, without being judged, without feeling alone, and without a rush to action or to answers.

    There’s a subtlety here that’s not well served by the pugnacious rhetoric of some of what got written in the early days. Activist writing often has the tone of telling everyone else what to do, and that certainly carried over into the ways I used to word things. The subtlety is this: to insist that the space you are holding is not one from which plans can be made or action taken is not to claim that no one should be taking action or making plans.

    There’s a video on YouTube, an hour and eight minutes in the quiet, slightly shambly company of Roger Hallam. It was filmed in a university lecture theatre last May, soon after the meeting at which Roger, Gail and a few others came up with the idea for Extinction Rebellion. If you sit down to watch it, make sure you have time to get to the end: I had to stop halfway and wait till the next morning, and this was a mistake.

    The first 40 minutes are where he presents the climate science, attempting to add up how much warming is already inevitable and where this would take us. There is something mesmerising about the parade of numbers – 1.2° that has happened already; 0.5° within a decade from the loss of the Arctic sea ice; another 0.5° from CO2 already emitted but not yet fed through into warming; the water vapour effect, doubling the impact of warming from other sources to give another 1° – and this is just the start, he adds. Somewhere around the 3° mark, we’ll lose the Amazon – assuming Bolsonaro hasn’t got there first – and this will bring another 1.5° of warming. Having got this far, Earth will tip further into a hot state, outside the conditions under which humans are capable of living.

    I’ve been reading, thinking, writing and speaking about this stuff for long enough to know that a certain caution is called for. As one climate scientist put it to me, the bits we know for sure are scary enough, without stating worst-case scenarios as facts. Still, watching the first half of Roger’s talk was enough to give me a sleepless night. Maybe we need those nights every so often, to be brought back to the existential core of our situation, to have the layers of reasoning with which we insulate ourselves peeled off.

    ‘Why we are heading for extinction,’ begins the title of the talk, ‘and what to do about it.’ The remaining half hour is the bit about doing. What is striking is that Roger makes no attempt to row back on the bleakness of what he has already told us. There is no bargain on offer here – ‘If everyone does X, then all this scary stuff will go away’ – only the observation, backed up by research on social movements, that those whose willingness to act endures the longest are not the activists who are motivated by outcome, who need to be given hope and to believe in their chances of success, but the ones who are motivated by doing the right thing. It’s the first time I can remember seeing a call to action which explicitly invites people to go into despair. In the closing minutes of his talk, Roger speaks about ‘the dark night of the soul’, the need to move through the darkness rather than avoid it. This is a call to rebellion that is framed in the language and draws on the traditions of mysticism.

    I don’t say that this is without precedent; indeed, part of Roger’s argument is that the rational, secular logic of mainstream Western activism, with its dependence on promises of progress, is the anomaly, while the stance for which he speaks has more in common with what has sustained grassroots movements in other times and places, and continues to do so. But this is the first activism around climate change in the West that I’ve encountered that has roots this deep, that draws on spiritual traditions without slipping into New Age wishful thinking or fantasies about a collective evolution of consciousness. It’s the closest I’ve seen to an activism that can answer that question I didn’t know how to answer back in 2010: what do we do, after we stop pretending?

    * * *

    In late July, we hired a car and drove north. This was the middle of the wildfire season, the Swedish authorities were dropping bombs on burning forests and borrowing firefighting planes from Italy. Our county got off lightly, but there were nights when you could smell the smoke on the air. We’d be following a backroad between villages and a convoy of fire engines would come speeding past. Coming home one evening, on the radio, two young hipster comedians from Södermalm were sniggering about how stupid the countryside people are and why don’t they just move to Stockholm rather than live out in the sticks and wait for their houses to burn down – and I thought: what the fuck, does it not occur to them that the rest of the country might be listening?

    We stayed on a farm and the farmer told us that she had a problem: in this heat, the lambs didn’t notice the shock from the electric fencing, so they were getting out and running everywhere. But her farm was lucky, she said, they had about three-quarters of the fodder they would normally have at this point in the year. In other parts of the country, farmers were trying to send their animals to slaughter because they couldn’t feed them, except the slaughterhouses couldn’t handle the number of animals the farmers wanted to send them.

    At almost any moment in human history, this would be the highest-order crisis a human society could face: to have to slaughter your herds before summer is out because of a lack of fodder. For half a dozen generations now, we’ve lived in a world that is bound together by supply chains whose effect is to distribute the impact of any local crisis across the whole system, so that a failed harvest in the American wheat belt is more likely to cause bread riots on the streets of Cairo than on the streets of Chicago. This works until it doesn’t, until the frequency of local crises strains the global system to breaking point. In the meantime, while the system holds, it means that those whose ways of living place most strain upon the system will be the last to notice.

    * * *

    ‘What you people call collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.’

    This was Vinay Gupta, on a Saturday afternoon in Llangollen in 2010, in the soulless converted sports hall of a venue where we held that first festival. It was one of those lines that everyone seemed to remember. There was talk of putting it on a t-shirt.

    I realise now that I have taken consolation in such thoughts.

    When Marks & Spencer put up those posters that said ‘Plan A: Because there is no Plan B’, I asked: no Plan B for who? For posh supermarkets and department stores, or for liveable human existence? Or do we no longer make the distinction?

    When I wrote about Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, it was to point out the thread of irony running through it: you’ve got this kid and his father pushing a shopping trolley down a road. In one scene, the father finds what might be the last can of Coke in the world and presents it to his son like it’s a sacrament. Isn’t there something that gets missed here, among the biblical cadences and the apocalyptic horror: the traces of a satire on our inability to imagine a liveable existence beyond the bubble of supermarkets and superhighways?

    Before Dark Mountain came on the horizon, I’d read my way through the writings of Ivan Illich, from the revolutionary moment of the early seventies, when he wanted to show that ‘two-thirds of mankind still can avoid passing through the industrial age’, to the late eighties, by which time he had seen environmentalism co-opted into the oxymoron of ‘sustainable development’. And still he was able to glimpse in the fiction of Doris Lessing, or the everyday realities of his friends in the barrios of Mexico City, ‘what kinds of interrelationship are possible in the rubble’, among the ‘people who feed on the waste of development, the spontaneous architects of a post-modern future.’

    In talks, I would tell the story of the Natufians. Late in the last Ice Age, in the territory marked on our maps as Israel and Palestine, they lived in year-round villages. They were among the first people anywhere to settle and they lived like this for 1,500 years, fifty generations, long enough for any memory of their ancestors’ wanderings to pass into the dreamtime of gods and culture heroes. Then came the Younger Dryas, the 1,200-year cold snap that turned Europe back to tundra and broke the pattern of the seasons which watered the wooded valleys in which they had made their homes. They knew nothing of the processes by which this climate change had come upon them; it was not a consequence of their actions, only a shift in the weather. Within a short time, they abandoned their settled way of life and became wandering gatherers and hunters, returning to the old villages only to rebury the bones of their dead in the ruins of the houses.

    Then I would recall a passage in After the Ice, Stephen Mithen’s history of the prehistoric world, where I first learned about the Natufians. He sends a time-traveller to walk unobserved through the lives of the people he is writing about: coming upon a band of late Natufian nomads, he follows them to a gathering in one of the ruined villages. The interment of bones is accompanied by storytelling, feasting and celebration; the connection between past and present is reaffirmed. In Mithen’s reconstruction, these days of festival offer a respite from the hardships of the present. Yet afterwards, as the people go back out onto the land, they do so gladly: ‘They are all grateful for the return to their transient lifestyle within the arid landscapes of the Mediterranean hills, the Jordan valley and beyond. It is, after all, the only lifestyle they have known and it is the one that they love.’

    These stories were never meant as lullabies. We are living through a tragedy whose measure exceeds our comprehension and most of us are implicated in this tragedy. We were born into this situation and there is no simple way to free ourselves from it. The grand summits, the uplifting rhetoric of leaders, the protests at the summit gates: none of this will make it go away. The changes we make to our lifestyles, the meat we don’t eat, the flights we don’t take: none of this will be enough. We will not make this way of living sustainable, nor anything like this way of living – and yet, I’ve always felt able to add, this need not be the end of the story. There will almost certainly be creatures like us around for a good while to come, and though they will live with the consequences of the way we lived – though their lives may be hard, as a result, in ways we do not like to think about – they will not simply live in our shadow: the way of life of those who come after us will be, just like our own, the only lifestyle they have known and the one that they love.

    I stop now, as I’m writing this, to take a swig of coffee, and I try to think about the lives of the people who grew the beans, the landscape in which they were grown. I try to think about the lives of the people who assembled the computer at which I type these words, the people who mined the minerals that went into its making, the places they were taken from the ground. The conditions in which the people who grow our coffee live are not simply a default, back to which you and I might tumble should the project of civilisation (or ‘development’, as it’s known nowadays) collapse. Our lives are more entangled than that, joined by global supply chains which stretch back into the unfinished history of colonialism and its plantations, where the lives of people and plants were subject to a brutal simplification.

    Still, I have taken consolation in such thoughts, in the awareness that there are vastly more ways in which humans have made life work than the lifestyle which happens to prevail around here, just now. This way of living could unravel without that being the end of the story, the end of any story worth telling. I still hold this to be true, but lately I find there are more nights when I wonder whether anything will survive the unravelling.

    * * *

    Mid-October. Still tired from the two-day journey back from England, my first morning home, and I’ve agreed to record an interview for the Culture show on Swedish national radio. The presenter and I sit on a bench in the park across from the railway station. He starts off asking me about the fires this summer. He’s hoping I’ll say that something has shifted as a result, but all I can think of is the stream of comments, overheard at the hairdressers or the supermarket, or around my in-laws’ dinner table, through the rainless weeks of July and August. ‘Isn’t the weather amazing?’ people would say to each other, and ‘Don’t the farmers complain a lot!’ and ‘The government should really buy more of those planes so we don’t have to keep borrowing the ones from Italy.’

    After the interview, I start to wonder, though. Perhaps something has begun to shift, below the surface: a change in the conversation about climate change in certain places, a darkening realism, a movement in the boundaries of what it is possible to talk about. I’ve had some strange encounters lately with people on the inside of institutions who have lost all faith in the usual stories about how we’re going to manage this mess we’re in.

    That speech last September by Guterres, the UN Secretary General, was unusually stark: ‘I’ve asked you here to sound the alarm,’ he begins. ‘If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change.’ Of course, in the next breath, he is insisting that there are great opportunities ahead for green economic growth, because anything else is still unthinkable. In quiet corners, though, I’ve heard the unease of people whose job it is to put together the numbers and show how all this can be done: the need to leave the assumption of growth unquestioned is pushing them into claims that are clearly absurd. Their question is how to voice the unthinkable in a way that will have a chance of getting heard.

    Here’s what I think I’m picking up, as we head into 2019: the official narratives about climate change are under strain from so many directions, there may just be a major rupture coming. Another straw in the wind is Jem Bendell’s academic paper, ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy’, released in August and downloaded over 100,000 times by the end of the year. From foreign correspondents to solarpunk hackers, I keep hearing how it’s reframed the discussions going on in all these different worlds. To many Dark Mountain readers, the message of the paper won’t come as a great surprise: ‘near-term social collapse’ due to climate change is inevitable, while catastrophe is probable and extinction possible. But when this suggestion is made by a professor of sustainability leadership with twenty years’ experience working with academia, NGOs and the UN, it has a different kind of impact, at once a symptom of the shift that is underway and a contribution to that shift.

    Something similar applies to Extinction Rebellion. In its framing of the situation in which we find ourselves, in the energy which has gathered around it and the speed with which all this happened, it may well be among the first movements of a new phase in the story of our collision with the realities of climate change. If this reading of the signs is anywhere near right, then there will be other movements along soon, other kinds of rupture and other kinds of work to be done.

    There’s an old video from Undercurrents, the activist film network, shot in 1998 at the Birmingham G7 summit. Thousands of Reclaim The Streets protesters gather outside New Street station. On an unseen signal, the crowd spills out into the road, whistling and whooping, swarming around buses and cars, outnumbering the yellow lines of police. In the chaos of the minutes that follow, a stretch of urban freeway is occupied; part of the concrete collar of ring road thrown around the city centre by modernist urban planners in the 1950s, it’s an appropriate site for a movement that has grown out of protests against the road-building plans of the current government.

    A couple of tripods have gone up, the sound systems won’t be far behind – but right now, there’s aggro up at the front, where a few vehicles are still caught inside the reclaimed zone. A man just drove his car into a small group of protesters – not at any speed, just trying to nudge them out of the way, just threatening them with half a tonne of metal – and now he’s out of the car and arguing with the police, as more protesters put themselves in front of his car, holding a banner, and now the police are letting him get back in, and now he is putting his foot down and driving straight ahead, as everyone manages to leap aside, except for one young man who is still on the bonnet of the car as it accelerates beyond the last police lines and out onto an empty dual carriageway.

    I’ve never managed to track down that video, though people have assured me it exists, but I was the guy on the car, and it was only luck that meant I walked away that day with nothing worse than bruises and shock. And while it was a drama at the time, I’d hardly thought of this in years, until I saw the livestreams of the swarming protests where lines of Extinction Rebellion activists were stopping traffic at major roundabouts in London, the queues of impatient motorists, the sound of car horns. 

    I learned two things the day I went for a ride on a Birmingham bonnet. The first was that I am not the person you want on the frontline, when tempers are fraying and the adrenalin is rushing. There must have been ten of us in front of that car when the driver put his foot down, and the other nine all managed to throw themselves clear. I love the ones who can keep cool and make good calls in the heat of the moment, but that’s not me, and my reflexes aren’t going to come to anyone’s rescue.

    Compared to the days of Reclaim The Streets, Extinction Rebellion seems strikingly sober, yet there’s still a headiness to any movement as it gathers momentum. Watching from afar, as friends use their bodies to stop vehicles, I realise that I believe in the work that they are doing and I know that there are other kinds of work that will be needed, away from the frontlines. Among that other work, there’s still a need for the space Dark Mountain holds, not least as a place to retreat and re-ground, but it’s no longer my time to hold that space: I’ve known for a while, and it’s been official since October, that I’m moving on from this project. So that brings back the old question: what do you do?

    The second thing I learned that day in Birmingham was more unsettling. As the car drove off, I went chest down on the bonnet, looking into the windscreen – and then I rolled over, and he swerved to throw me off and I landed, half-running, tumbling to the ground. But in the moment before I rolled over, I remember seeing the driver’s face and knowing that he had no more clue what to do next than I had, that we were caught in a shared helplessness.

    It’s the end of the year and Anna and I take a couple of weeks offline to rest and reflect. Walking beside the lake in the small town where she grew up, we talk about this sense that something is shifting, and what this means for the work that seems worth doing now, how to frame what is at stake. ‘It’s about negotiating the surrender of our whole way of living,’ I say.

    There’s a thing called the Overton window, the boundary of what is ‘thinkable’ to governments and decision-makers: what you can talk about and still get taken seriously, inside the rooms where the decisions get made. I have an image of the window as a windscreen, an expression of helplessness on the face behind the glass.

    Unthinkable things are going to happen, that much seems clear. 

    ‘You should stop going round saying we’re all going to die,’ someone who spent time in those rooms told me, years ago, in an early online argument about Dark Mountain. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever gone round saying that,’ I wrote back, ‘except in the non-apocalyptic sense that, sooner or later, we are all going to die.’

    There are things you can’t see clearly through that window, possibilities that go unmarked on the maps according to which the decisions are taken. We can come alive in the face of the knowledge that we are all going to die. And in the meantime, before we die, we can try to live out some of those possibilities: the ways of being human together that are hidden from view when the world is seen through the lenses of the market and the state; the ways of feeding ourselves that get overlooked because they don’t work as commodities. We can try to negotiate the surrender of our way of living, without pretending there’s any promise that this would make it all OK, without pretending we even know what OK would look like. We can have some beauty before the story is over, without pretending we can be sure how long we’ve got.

    * * *

    It was Anna who came up with the name – before we thought of it as a school, when we were just talking about creating a hospitable place to bring these conversations together. ‘It’s not a centre,’ she said. ‘We’re not starting a community. It’s our home, and everything else starts from there.’ It doesn’t come into being on those weeks when we advertise a public course, when people we’ve yet to meet make long journeys to be here. Those are just the times when we’re able to open up the work that’s already going on: the conversations we bring together around the kitchen table, the people who come and stay, the thinking that gets done in their company. This part of the story is clearer now than when we made that first invitation to the course last June. We’re clearer, too, about the urgency: the need for quiet spaces where bridges can be built between troubled insiders, an awakening grassroots and what one of our collaborators, Vanessa Andreotti, has taught us to think of as the ‘knowledge-carriers at the edges’; spaces of negotiation, away from the frontlines. Clearer about the role of the network we have built, our ability to bring people together and the consequences this can have. So this is our answer, just now, the place where we might have something to contribute, the work we’re going to do.

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 15.

  • Deschooling Revisited

    Deschooling Revisited

    I grew up in a town in the northeast of England. Billy and I met at the local comprehensive, hanging out in the music department at lunchtime, a quiet corner where we would eat our sandwiches, teach ourselves to play the guitar, and keep out of the way of the hurlyburly that comes with keeping 1,500 hormonal adolescents cooped up alongside one another for a large part of their waking hours. Over the course of our teens, I watched his self-taught musicianship soar beyond my basic busking and came to the conclusion that I’d rather be a writer than a rock star, anyway, because you had a better chance of living past the age of 27.

    Neither of us had heard of Ivan Illich, but when I discovered Deschooling Society in my mid-twenties, it gave words to things we’d known instinctively a decade earlier. There is an innate human capacity for learning, we are not dependent on learning transmitted from professionally accredited teachers, and the primary social function of the schooling system is to shape us for and assign us a place within the existing social order of the world. 

    This last lesson is mostly taught indirectly, by implication, but now and then you get a straight look at what you’re up against. Towards the end of Year 10, they would ship us all out on work experience for a couple of weeks, timed to quieten the place down while the year above sat their GCSEs – and perhaps also to chasten us into studying harder on our return so as to postpone our entry into regular employment. By that stage, Billy had developed a sideline in filmmaking and he’d arranged a placement with the video workshop at the back of the local arts centre. On the Friday before it was due to start, there was a hitch, some paperwork that was needed for insurance purposes. He spent the afternoon running around the school, tracking down the teacher who needed to sign off first one form and then another, and the second time around, this teacher snapped. ‘Why can’t you just go and do your work experience in an office like everybody else?’ she said. ‘After all, it’s what you’ll be doing for the rest of your life.’

    At this point, I’m obliged to insert a disclaimer that the woman in question had doubtless had a shitty day, and not all teachers think this way about their students – and of course I’ve known wonderful teachers, not to mention wonderful people who tried working as teachers and were burned out by the system.

    But it’s the system Illich has in his sights – and for him, it is beyond reform. What’s wrong with our schools is not that they are too liberal or too conservative, too hidebound or trendy in their curricula. For a strongly motivated student, he writes at one point, there are many skills where the discipline of drill teaching and learning by rote is preferable. The problem is that we have structured a society in which huge amounts of resources go into educational institutions which work against the grain of motivation, which initiate us into a needy dependence on scarce commodities – and which lend a rubber stamp of meritocracy to the perpetuation of privilege, since access to desirable fields of work is routinely subject to discrimination on the grounds of how many years the applicant has spent in formal education, whether or not the education in question has any connection to the skills actually required for the job. Needless to say, the strongest indicator of how many years of education an individual is likely to complete is the educational and financial privilege of their parents.

    Deschooling Society was written in the early 1970s and some parts of Illich’s analysis have aged better than others. His vision for ‘learning webs’, using a database system to connect learners outside of institutions, may seem prophetic of the internet age (and inspired the web startup I co-founded in the 2000s), but by the end of his life Illich himself had become deeply sceptical of the hope invested in networked technologies.

    On the other hand, revisiting this book in early 2019 – with the Fridays For the Future school strikes spreading across 130 countries – his idea that school might be the most hopeful location from which revolutionary change could erupt seems less quixotic than it did to his fellow revolutionaries in the 1970s. ‘The risks of a revolt against school are unforeseeable,’ he writes, ‘but they are not as horrible as those of a revolution starting in any other major institution … The weapons of the truant officer … might turn out to be powerless against the surge of a mass movement.’

    Meanwhile, this summer it will be 25 years since we sat our GCSEs. Not long ago I was invited to a Facebook group for organising a reunion. It’s fair to say my life has taken a different direction to most of those I was at school with, but as we each shared the potted version of what happened on the way to our forties, I was struck by how many of the stories involved dropping out of college or university, or following a course that led nowhere, until somewhere further into adulthood you’d find something that actually felt like you – and maybe even go back to school for the necessary study or training. Only this time around, you were there for your own reasons.

    First published in STIR: Issue 25.