DOUGALD HINE

Category: Reviews

  • End of an Epoch?

    A review of ‘The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet’ by Christian Schwägerl and ‘Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made’ by Gaia Vince.

    Walking aimlessly through north London, a decade ago, I was stopped in my tracks by a glowing sign that read ‘Holocene Motors’. What dark coincidence or twisted joke was this, an auto repair shop named after the geological epoch that our motorised way of life is bringing to an end?

    That end is on its way to becoming official. A working group of 30 scientists will report next year to the International Commission on Stratigraphy to determine whether the Holocene – the epoch from about 10,000 years ago to the present, covering the period since the last glaciation – has been superseded by the Anthropocene: Greek for ‘the age of humans’. Meanwhile, the idea of the Anthropocene has already escaped from the laboratory of scientific discourse, into the wider social and cultural landscape, seeding art projects, philosophical symposia and newspaper op-eds. Two well-written books by experienced science journalists – one from Germany, the other based in the UK – each offer a beginner’s guide to this terrain.

    Christian Schwägerl juxtaposes a history of the emergence of a scientific awareness of the planetary impact of human activity with the deep perspective of the history of the planet itself. He tells us that we have joined ‘The Club of Revolutionaries’, a shortlist of species that have created change on a geological scale, beginning with the cyanobacteria that first harnessed the Sun’s energy through photosynthesis and changed Earth’s atmosphere by doing so.

    While he is convinced that it is good and necessary to think of ourselves as living in the Anthropocene, Schwägerl also takes time to acknowledge the criticisms that have been directed at this way of naming and framing our situation. Gaia Vince’s journey is more breathless, a world tour of how our transformation of the planet is playing out on the ground.

    The strength of Vince’s book is that her attention is focused on the far end of the supply chains that wrap the world. She reports vividly on the destructive consequences of our way of living, but also on the grass-roots ingenuity by which people go on making life work and improvising solutions in the contexts where they find themselves, often by reviving older traditions. She visits the human-made glaciers of Ladakh and the underground tankas that collect rainwater in Indian cities, banned and filled in under British colonial rule, but starting to be put to use again.

    When Vince starts to put together the pieces, she has a tendency towards the rhetoric of benign technological globalisation that you hear from Google executives and TED speakers. The lack of a more careful analysis means that she often overlooks or glances only briefly at clues within the stories she is telling that might have brought the whole frame of development into question.

    Schwägerl’s writing is more reflective. He gives a striking account of the origin of his own conviction that humanity needs the idea of the Anthropocene. “I became thoroughly despondent in 2009 during an interview with Dennis Meadows, one of the co-authors of the bestseller The Limits to Growth. After our meeting, it took me a long time to shake off the apocalyptic visions he’d evoked.” The book’s epilogue is built around a conversation with Paul Crutzen, the chemist and Nobel laureate jointly credited with having given the Anthropocene its name, in which Schwägerl keeps pushing him to agree that we need optimism rather than pessimism.

    There’s an impulse at work here that is important. We do need stories that go beyond the prophecies of doom that environmentalism has often seemed to offer: not because the warnings are wrong, or because we can apply positive thinking to escape this mess we’re in, but because, bad as things may get, there will still be creatures like us, trying to make life work as best they can, for some time to come.

    The attraction of the Anthropocene as an idea is that it opens up a space that is neither denial nor apocalypse. The trouble is that it is haunted by a shadow of self-congratulation, a dark heroisation of the scale of humanity’s achievement, and an elision by which the power to destroy is taken as evidence of the ability to control, steer or master. The Greeks had a word for this, too: they called it hubris, the kind of pride that comes before a fall. Whatever stories we tell, our eruption into planetary history is likely to leave us humbled, though a humbling may bring with it hidden blessings.

    To think geologically is to face the overwhelming depth of time, the vastness during which nothing like us existed, and the smallness of our own place within that overall expanse. As geological epochs go, the Anthropocene looks set to be nasty, brutish and short. But, read with care, each of these books contains clues as to how we might endure and come through it.

    First published in Resurgence: Issue 292.

  • When Promises of Progress Fail Us

    When I hear the word ‘postmodernism’ outside of a seminar room, it is usually spoken with distaste. It has come to signify a deliberately impenetrable intellectual jargon, cliquish, fashion-conscious, its fashions suspected of coming straight from the Emperor’s New Wardrobe. For many, its chief characteristic is a radical relativism that leaves no ground for the kind of value judgments that make it possible to act for change.

    Whether or not this is fair to the thinkers most closely associated with the term, it is certainly unfortunate for Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash’s recently reissued book Grassroots Postmodernism, first published in the late 1990s. For this is a book that will bemuse those expecting a contribution to the esoteric discourses of the seminar room, yet one that may prove more satisfying to those whom the title might put off.

    The idea that we are living ‘after modernity’ reflects a sense that the future has failed. The origins of academic postmodernism lie in the retreat into the university of activists and thinkers whose hopes for revolution had been disappointed in the events of 1968. Since then, a more general disillusionment has spread through the Western world, beginning in the crises of the 1970s, muddied by the neoliberal boom years, then given new clarity by the systemic crisis that broke out in the autumn of 2008. Opinion polls confirm that the basic assumption of economic progress – that each generation will grow up more prosperous and with greater opportunities than their parents – no longer rings true for most of us. The failure of the promises of modernity is no longer a theoretical matter, but part of the everyday experience of people in Western societies.

    Despite its radical roots, the postmodernism of the seminar room has little to offer to people trying to make sense of their lives in the absence of progress. But another set of voices may be more helpful: the voices of those of the same generation who retreated not to the universities, but to the mountains, the villages and the slums, where their thinking was challenged and deepened by encounters with the stubborn refusal of peasants and Indigenous people to be confined to history. This is the source of the other postmodernism, which Esteva and Prakash seek to articulate, whose echoes can also be caught in the words of John Berger, Subcomandante Marcos, or Vandana Shiva – who has written the introduction to this new edition.

    In both Grassroots Postmodernism and The Future of Development – Esteva’s most recent collaboration – the failure of modernity is exemplified by the failure of the promise of international development, as experienced in countries such as Mexico and India. The unravelling of this promise leads to the questioning of a number of concepts previously held to be beyond criticism. These include the fantasy of ‘thinking globally’, which always in practice means attempting to extend a way of seeing the world with roots in a particular time and place into a framework into which other cultures are required to contort themselves. In the case of international development, the most problematic aspect of this framework is the idea of the atomised individual, possessed of a set of rights. The question of how we can challenge injustice within our own and each other’s cultures without appealing to this kind of individualism is one of the major discussions in Grassroots Postmodernism, while The Future of Development offers advice for those who want to know how to put their idealism into practice.

    Both of these books belong to a larger set of conversations particularly associated with the friends and collaborators of Ivan Illich, and they represent an ongoing improvisation around themes that are recognisable from Illich’s own work. Of particular value is the contribution of Salvatore Babones to The Future of Development, drawing on his background in quantitative social policy to provide a forensic analysis of development statistics.

    The greatest strength of both books is that they avoid the academic trap of treating critique as an end in itself. Rather, they are the work of people engaged at the grassroots, for whom thought and action are inseparable. They deserve to be read widely within the international development sector, but they also contain important clues to finding our own ways beyond the dead ends of modernity in the troubled societies of the post-industrial West.

    Published in Resurgence: Issue 289.

  • An Outlandish Generosity

    An Outlandish Generosity

    A review of Martin Shaw’s A Branch from the Lightning Tree and Snowy Tower.

    The condition of Capitalist Realism, according to the political theorist Mark Fisher, is defined by ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative.’ When I try to explain in daylight terms, rather than in the flicker of the campfire, why I think that Martin Shaw’s writings on myth, wilderness and wildness matter, I find myself remembering Fisher’s diagnosis. Then another passage comes to mind, from Mike Hulme, the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research:

    Climate change is not ‘a problem’ waiting for ‘a solution’. It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is re-shaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity’s place on Earth.

    They differ in the focus of their arguments, but both Fisher and Hulme point towards a crisis in which imagination — or its failure — plays a central role. The grip of neoliberalism is tightened by its success in closing down our imagination, while the ongoing collision with planetary boundaries forces us into a confrontation with the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place within it. To take these suggestions seriously would mean giving the work of culture an importance that goes well beyond the familiar deployment of the arts as a transmission mechanism for messages about change.

    The past decade has seen no shortage of high-profile attempts to ‘tackle’ climate change as a theme in the arts. The results are generally disappointing. We get Ian McEwan writing an Ian McEwan novel about a philandering climate scientist. We get the National Theatre’s Greenland, in which storylines with all the depth of a soap opera play out against a background of melting icebergs and failing negotiations. Part of the trouble, I think, lies in the forms and conventions we have inherited from the recent past. Writers are schooled to grind sharp lenses of observation, to offer a microscopic attention to social detail, stereoscopic panoramas or endoscopic explorations of the individual psyche. There are some subjects, though, which can only be looked at indirectly, through the dark mirror of the shield with which Perseus approaches Medusa. As the shadows were driven into corners, by Enlightenment and then by electrification, we felt we had outgrown such ways of telling: stories that once belonged to everyone were sanitised, moralised and packed off to the nursery. Now, to our surprise, we find there is no position of detached observation left. As shadows lengthen over our whole way of living, we may once more be in need of the kind of storytelling that stalks truths so monstrous they turn our minds to stone if looked at straight on.

    This is the territory in which Martin Shaw works. Like the trickster characters who inhabit his stories, Shaw is a trafficker between worlds: as likely to be found retelling medieval epics around a Devon campfire or guiding rites-of-passage retreats for inner-city teenagers on a Welsh mountainside as lecturing on the course in Oral Tradition that he devised at Stanford. Readers of these, the first two volumes of what promises to be a trilogy on myth, wilderness and wildness, will meet him in all these guises. At times a little out of place in the formality of the written word, some of his sentences seem to have been dragged through a hedge backwards, but they build into a feast of language and image, infused with an outlandish generosity. Here is rich food for the imagination: old stories from Ireland and Norway and Siberia, stories of witches and knights, bear kings and wild women of the woods, capped with a full-scale telling of the Grail epic of Parzival.

    Running through both books is Shaw’s conviction that all of this is more than entertainment, romance or a relief from life’s hardships: that there exists, within stories like these, a kind of ‘mythological thinking’ that has its own rigour and that is of practical relevance to the largest and most urgent questions we encounter. Start out in this direction and, before long, you will pass the bounds of what it is respectable to take seriously as grown-ups in the kind of culture in which most of us grew up. Shaw is not remotely troubled by this: ‘If you don’t want to be Crazy Horse, Boudicca, or Pablo Neruda,’ he announces at the start, ‘stop reading now.’ Those afraid of looking foolish need not apply. Yet he insists on both the difficulty and the importance of bringing whatever wild insights we find out there back to the everyday world, the world which appears in these stories as that of the village or the court. ‘Don’t make a marginal life out of a marginal experience,’ he says, more than once, warning against the ‘smugness’ of an alternative culture in which we surround ourselves with like-minded souls.

    Within the traditions on which he draws, Shaw distinguishes two modes of story, the pastoral and the prophetic:

    The pastoral offers a salve, an affirmation of old, shared values, a reiteration of the power of the herd. The prophetic almost always brings some conflict with it — it disarms, awakens, challenges, and deepens. It is far less to do with enchantment and much more to do with waking up.

    It is this second kind of story we need right now, Shaw suggests: the kind that takes us out of who we think we are, that allows for the emergence of something new. Yet one of the characteristics of mythological thinking is that such pairings are not reduced to oppositions: instead, if we look carefully, we catch sight of the mutual dependence between seeming opposites.

    The old stories most often end with a homecoming, a feast, a celebration of the union of opposites. By contrast, if we go any distance along the wild paths to which Shaw invites us, our own return to the everyday is likely to be lonelier. We come back to a reality in which a myth is something to be debunked. Our experience of the possibility of other ways of knowing is met with incomprehension or disinterest. One of the strengths of these books is that they contain a great deal of experience of how to live between worlds — which is to say, between very different ways of understanding the world — without withdrawing, going crazy or burning out. That alone is worth the price of admission.

    There remains, though, the larger question: what does it mean to appeal to the imagination, to the realm of fairytales, in a world of failing negotiations and melting icebergs?

    One answer is that it provides a clue to the real nature of this crisis. The environmental movement has long tended to frame things in terms of the vulnerability of the planet. This is, in an important sense, a misunderstanding of what is at stake. Yes, we are living in a time of extraordinary ecological destruction, a mass extinction, perhaps the sixth in our planet’s history. But there’s the thing: the planet has been here before. Even the rapid shift in climate we have set in motion may not be unprecedented from a geological perspective. A million years from now, the planet will almost certainly be here, alive, in some as yet unimaginable ecological configuration. This is not to excuse the epic of destruction we have unleashed, but to try to understand it better.

    What is at stake is not the planet, as such, but a way of living within it that we have created as a species, parts of which go back tens of thousands of years, while other parts are barely a generation deep, though we already struggle to imagine living without them. Our sense of loss at all the shadowed beauty being driven out of existence, our guilt, our still-remaining desire to feel proud of our place as a species — all of this exists in tension with our attachment to what we know and our sense of powerlessness within the structures we have built. These forces play out within us and on a planetary scale.

    To understand the relationships between the inner and outer worlds that define the crisis, something like the subtlety of mythological thinking is required, its ability to dance with paradox and its openness to surprise. And perhaps, even now, there remains within the stories the capacity to make those relationships anew. For as Shaw says, that has always been the power of story: to ground us in such a way that a universe becomes a cosmos.

    First published in STIR: Issue 07.

  • Excavating Buried Assumptions

    Excavating Buried Assumptions

    A review of Beyond Economics and Ecology: The Radical Thought of Ivan Illich.

    Order a second-hand copy of one of Ivan Illich’s books over the internet, and it will more than likely come with the insignia of a university library and a stamp confirming that it has been ‘Withdrawn’. This says something about the trajectory followed until recently by the reputation of this deeply radical thinker – but the publication of a new collection of four of his most insightful essays suggests that the rediscovery of Illich is gathering momentum.

    For a time in the 1970s, Illich was a kind of intellectual celebrity, brilliant and controversial. At the centre of his work was the idea of “the threshold of counterproductivity”: the point beyond which more schooling starts to make us stupider and more health care makes us sick. He dedicated himself to revealing the idiocies of industrial society. He once calculated that, when all the hours worked to pay the direct and indirect costs of cars and roads were taken into account, the average speed of automotive transport was less than 5mph.

    What is harder to imagine now is the reach that these ideas had. The essay in which he made that calculation – an extended version of which appears in this collection as Energy and Equity – was first published on the front page of Le Monde. The New York Times dedicated an extensive article to the details of his falling out with the Vatican. (Illich had started out as a Catholic priest, though his critique of institutions included a call for the church to get rid of professional clergy, and the fierceness with which he criticised more modern institutions grew out of his sense that they were repeating the mistakes of institutionalised Christianity in secular form.) He hated the loudspeaker, calling it the most anti-democratic technology humanity had invented, but when he gave public lectures in those years, his voice would often have to be relayed to audiences that spilled over into neighbouring lecture halls.

    Around the start of the 1980s, he slipped from view. History had turned a corner: many of the possibilities for a saner reaction to resource scarcity, environmental and economic crisis that had been glimpsed during the previous decade were now lost in the dustcloud of the neoliberal juggernaut. From a status in which no university library would be without his books, Illich reached the point where they could be safely discarded.

    Yet, as Sajay Samuel argues in the introduction to this new collection, Illich’s voice speaks now more clearly than ever. When the contradiction of ‘sustainable development’ was launched upon the world later in the 1980s, Illich immediately saw through it. He warned, too, of the danger of treating the environmental crisis in isolation, rather than recognising its roots in the deep cultural contradictions of our economic order and the worldview that underpins it. In the company of an extraordinary collection of friends and collaborators, he sought to excavate the buried assumptions on which modern societies have been founded and to show us how strange those assumptions would have looked to most of the people who have ever lived. “All through history,” he points out, “the best measure for bad times was the percentage of food eaten that had to be purchased.”

    Sometimes the insight is contained in a single sentence, sometimes we are led to it over pages, through the back alleys of history, but the reader will encounter many of them in these pages. And even now, perhaps there are university librarians placing orders for Beyond Economics and Ecology as a first step towards rebuilding that gap on their shelves.

    First published in Resurgence: Issue 286.

  • The Capacity for Second Thoughts: Ivan Illich

    A review of Beyond Economics & Ecology: The Radical Thought of Ivan Illich.

    I want to cultivate the capacity for second thoughts, by which I mean the stance and the competence that makes it feasible to enquire into the obvious. This is what I call learning.

    ‘Ascesis’, 1989

    Those words could stand for the desire which underlies the work of Ivan Illich and the effect his writing can have on the reader. Sometimes the second thoughts are triggered by short, simple statements, capable of detonating what we think we know: ‘All through history, the best measure for bad times was the percentage of food eaten that had to be purchased.’ In other cases, they come when we have the patience to stand alongside him, looking into the mirror of the past, until our eyes adjust and we begin to recognise the strangeness of ideas we have always taken for granted.

    From his rise to prominence in the late 1960s to the last conversations with David Cayley, published as The Rivers North of the Future, Illich sought to uncover the hidden assumptions on which modern industrial societies had been built. He saw this as a revolutionary project, one that went deeper than most formulations of revolution:

    The political revolutionary wants to improve existing institutions—their productivity and the quality and distribution of their products. His vision of what is desirable and possible is based on consumption habits developed during the last hundred years. The cultural revolutionary believes that these habits have radically distorted our view of what human beings can have and want. He questions the reality that others take for granted, a reality that, in his view, is the artificial by-product of contemporary institutions, created and reinforced by them in pursuit of their short-term ends.

    ‘The Need for Cultural Revolution’, 1970

    Ten years after his death, the promises of industrial society are unravelling all around us, yet this does not bring any great confidence in the possibility of change. The project of political revolution belongs to an earlier age, one in which the future still seemed capable of serving as a vessel for people’s hopes and desires, rather than a source of anxiety, something from which we try to distract ourselves. Yet there is an anger and a hunger below the surface of our societies for which nothing short of the language of revolution seems large enough. The reverberations of Russell Brand’s performance on Newsnight are one signal of this.

    In such a context, the four short, powerful essays republished in this new collection deserve to be read widely. A quiet rediscovery of Illich has been underway for some time, whether (as David Bollier has suggested) within the commons movement, through events such as last summer’s After the Crisis conference in Oakland, or in the pages of the Dark Mountain journal. Yet this hardly compares to the level of public attention which their author enjoyed, or endured, in the period in which the earliest of these essays was written.

    ‘Energy and Equity’ first appeared on the front page of Le Monde in early 1973, as the rising prosperity of the post-war decades was giving way to oil shocks and limits to growth. By then, Illich had reached the strange position of an intellectual celebrity. (The closest equivalent today is Zizek.) A Catholic priest who had fallen out with the Vatican, the story of how he outwitted the Inquisition was reported in entertaining detail by the New York Times. His critiques of the sacred institutions of secular society—the education system in Deschooling Society, the healthcare system in Medical Nemesis—were debated in journals and by professional bodies whose members polarised between responses of outrage and recognition.

    The memory of those debates means that his name is often included on lists of radical educators, alongside the likes of Paulo Freire and John Dewey. Yet this is misleading, for he did not write about these institutions to lay out pedagogical principles or advocate for educational reform, but as key examples of a larger phenomenon. He sought to illuminate the underside of economic development, to give us tools for thinking about those aspects which go conveniently unmeasured and those which elude measurement. So he talks about the ‘thresholds of counterproductivity’ beyond which the increased production of goods and services becomes self-defeating—prisons make us criminal, hospitals make us sick and schools deaden our minds—and the realm of ‘shadow work’ which grows in parallel with the industrial production of commodities. However good our intentions, he insists, if we do not pay attention to this underside, we will define the problems we face in terms that lead us to make matters worse. This happens today when economic and ecological crises come to be defined as a lack of jobs and a lack of clean energy.

    Against this, Illich asks us to revisit the histories out of which the industrial world of ‘energy’ and ‘employment’ came into being. Neither of these terms, he argues, names a phenomenon that was simply waiting to be discovered by economists and physicists:

    Most languages have never had one single word to designate all activities that are considered useful … For the last three decades, the Ministry for Language Development in Djakarta tried to impose one term bekerdja in lieu of half a dozen others used to designate productive jobs … But the people continue to refer to what they do with different terms for pleasurable, or degrading, or tiresome, or bureaucratic actions—whether they are paid or not.

    The unifying abstraction of ‘employment’ in its modern economic sense did not arrive as a revelation of a reality that had been there all along, but as an imposition that was massively resisted by ordinary people for generations. Until the Industrial Revolution was well under way, ‘wage work’ was considered a sign of destitution. What changed was that the other means by which people had been able to support themselves were taken away, through the enclosure of commons and the outlawing of subsistence practices. Under these conditions, radical dependence on the money economy became normalised to the point where it is those who do not have employment who are in need of rescuing.

    In drawing attention to such histories, Illich does not pretend that it is desirable or possible to turn back the clock. There is no golden age here, but a refusal to reduce the ways in which people have lived in other times and places to a homogeneously miserable past from which we should simply be glad to have escaped. At which point, we may come to recognise ourselves as seen through the eyes of Miguel, a young Mexican visiting Europe in the 1970s, who writes to Illich of his host:

    Señor Mueller behaves as todo un senor [a true gentleman might be the English equivalent]. But most Germans act like destitute people with too much money. No one can help another. No one can take people in—into his household.

    ‘Destitute people with too much money’: does that not touch precisely on the paradox of the ‘developed’ societies, the strange coexistence of what remains—even in these times of ‘austerity’—an unprecedented consumption of goods and services, with a pervasive atmosphere of insecurity and precariousness? The percentage of food eaten that has had to be purchased can never have been higher.

    Since the rise of the modern environmental movement, critics of industrial society have generally looked to ecology as a source of hope. Yet here, too, Illich asks us to think twice. ‘Energy’ like ‘employment’ is an abstraction by which quite different phenomena are merged together. To define the problems we face primarily in terms of environmental crisis is to mistake the symptom for the disease, to ignore the social and cultural roots of the mess in which we find ourselves. Long before today’s schemes for geo-engineering, he saw the nightmares that experts would propose in the name of saving the planet.

    It is sometimes said that Illich is too negative, offering criticism without practical alternatives. In fact, the influence of his ideas can be traced in practical projects from John McKnight’s Asset-Based Community Development to the work of Gustavo Esteva and friends in Oaxaca and Chiapas. In another sense, though, this objection underestimates the practical value of criticism. As Sajay Samuel writes in the introduction, ‘The task of living differently entails the task of thinking differently.’

    I don’t expect this book will reach as wide an audience as Brand’s YouTube video—though someone should probably send him a copy—but there is something in the approach of this cultural revolutionary that has survived the failure of the future, that continues to be useful in making sense of our situation and tracing the possibilities that remain, when we can no longer put flesh on the resonant words of political revolution.

    First published in STIR: Issue 04.