I’ve been a guest on a number of podcasts over the past year, but this was a particularly enjoyable experience: sitting under the trees in a nearby park, telling stories about what gets left out of the big story of progress and what’s left when that big story fails us. Thanks to Ingrid Rieser for inviting me into the Forest of Thought.
Tag: progress
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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.
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The Consequences of Unacknowledged Loss
The village is full of memories, scenes that loop in the minds of these four characters, setting in motion the events of Mayfly. In lots of other ways, the village is empty: there are no kids anymore, the pub is closing down, the pigs on the farm were sold off years ago.
As I start to list these losses, I hear another voice, a memory from somewhere else: ‘Surely you agree that it’s a good thing that we don’t all have to work on the land anymore?’
It was New Year’s Eve, a long way to go till midnight, and the conversation had taken a wrong turning. I’d made the mistake of trying to explain the book that I was writing. It made no sense to him: how could I not see that history was headed in the right direction? He had a PhD in political science and a job in a government ministry. From where we were sitting, in a desirable neighbourhood of a European capital city, the arc of progress looked obvious and undeniable.
I thought of an afternoon, ten years earlier, when I’d sat at the kitchen table of a farmhouse in South Yorkshire. The press release that brought me there was cheerily worded, sent out by an organisation that gave out grants to support rural entrepreneurship. The producer thought it would make a piece for the Saturday breakfast show: ‘Meet the farmer who’s swapped cows for cats!’ His wife showed me round the new cattery, a holiday home for the pets of nearby townies, but as we arrived in the kitchen, I was faced with a man in deep grief. When the dairy herd had gone, the silence nearly killed him. The farm that had been his life was an empty shell. For a month, he said, he couldn’t sleep indoors: the only thing that worked was to go out and lie on the grass.
History is an accumulation of changes, playing out through lifetimes and across generations. Among them, there are changes which no sane person would wish away: who wants to forego antibiotics or anaesthetic dentistry? We could each add to that list. History is made up of gains as well as losses. Sometimes it is easy to say which is which. Sometimes it depends on where you’re sitting.
There is a dream of a standpoint from which it would be possible to settle the accounts of history, to weigh all these gains and losses against each other, to say whether we are up or down from year to year. No such standpoint exists. Even where we agree on the gains and losses, they do not balance like numbers in a table. For the purposes of national population statistics, the death of your father and the birth of your son may cancel each other out, but this statistical fact bears no relation to the reality which you or anyone will experience.
Just now, we seem to be dealing with the consequences of a great deal of unacknowledged loss. For years, the number of people whose experience bore little relation to the stories of progress told by politicians had been growing. When surveys showed rising fears for the future, these were reported with barely concealed scorn, for the long-term trends in GDP showed the slow miracle of economic growth to be unstoppable. When loss goes ungrieved, it doesn’t go away, it festers. Out of this may come dark eruptions, events declared impossible by people with PhDs in political science, sitting in the desirable neighbourhoods of capital cities.
That New Year’s conversation took place on the last evening of 2015. Twelve months later, maybe it would have had a different flavour. We have seen the rise of political movements which appeal to an imagined past, promising to recover a lost greatness. Against this, there are those who want to double down on progress. Public intellectuals publish books the size of bricks which prove with statistics that things have never been better. Others acknowledge that something has gone badly wrong and ask how we can recover the kind of collective faith in the future which took men to the moon and built the welfare state.
Well, perhaps another attitude is called for. Perhaps we need room to do the work of grieving. Not to write off the losses of the past, nor to romanticise them. Not to pretend that they can be recovered. Grief changes us, calls our stories into question. It can sharpen our sense of what matters. The journey it leads us on is seldom pretty, but it cannot be headed off with calls to optimism, or cost-benefit analyses proving our losses are outweighed within the greater scheme of things.
There is plenty of loss in the village where we find ourselves. It can take people to the edge of humiliation, or self-destruction, or mistaken identity. But none of this need be the end of the story.
First published in the programme for the Orange Tree Theatre production of Joe White’s Mayfly.
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We Are the Only Species We Have the Option of Being: A Conversation With Anne Tagonist
A couple of weeks before COP21, I did an interview with an American radio station. They set me up against another guest, a professor at Yale who specialises in the psychology of climate communication. I don’t know what my credentials were meant to be, on this occasion, except that the producer said, ‘I spend a lot of time interviewing people about climate change and the things you say are the things the others only say after I’ve switched off the mic.’
The ISDN line from the broom cupboard in Stockholm where I was sitting to their studio in Chicago kept dropping out, so I only heard half of what the guy they wanted me to argue with was saying. What stuck with me was a question that came from the host. I had been talking about the lifestyles that most of us take for granted, just now, in countries like these. I said, ‘I don’t believe these lifestyles are going to be made sustainable.’ The next time the host came to me, he asked, ‘So, in this future you’re talking about, how many humans are left at the end of the century? Are we talking a hundred thousand, a million?’
The question threw me, I didn’t know how we had got here, but afterwards, as I went over the interview again, the best explanation seemed to be that he had taken my suggestion that the lifestyle of the western middle classes is going away and equated this to the elimination of 99.99% of the human species.
For ten years or so now, I have been lurking around a few of the ‘collapse’ blogs, the corners of the internet where people think out loud about the end of the world as we know it. There are sites whose authors are loudly certain that this means imminent human extinction, but the ones to which I find myself returning are written by people who are trying to think around the edges of the world we have known, to catch sight of the unknown worlds that may lie around the corner. It is easy to imagine the apocalypse – easier than to sustain the belief that things can go on like this – but what is hard is to recognise the space between the two, the messy middle ground in which we are likely to find ourselves. At its best, like certain kinds of science fiction, the writing of the collapse bloggers provides a work-out for the historical imagination.
Among these online conversations, one of the distinctive voices belongs to an American who usually writes under the name Anne Tagonist – or at her current site, More Crows Than Eagles, Anne Amnesia. Over time, I’ve been struck by the breadth of her frame of reference, but also by her willingness to puzzle through a question, sharing her uncertainties. Lately, I had noticed her picking up on posts from Tom James and Charlotte Du Cann on the Dark Mountain blog, so I got in touch to propose an interview. Thinking back over the decade since I stumbled across the collapse blog scene, and knowing that Anne has been around it longer, I started by wondering what shifts she had noticed – though, as she pointed out, the timeframe we are talking about is rather a short one.
DH: I’m curious how you found your way to this corner of the internet in the first place – and how you’ve seen it change, between then and now.
AA: I wanted to start by saying something like, ‘Growing up, I would reread Walter Miller’s Canticle for Liebowitz every autumn,’ or some such deep explanation. But anxiety about the long-term stability of a complex and interdependent lifestyle has been part of western culture since at least Tacitus. Have you read the Germania? It’s pretty clear that Tacitus was the late Roman Jim Kunstler: it’s all about what intolerant hard-asses the Germans are, completely unlike the effete and decadent Romans, and how this makes them a much more honourable people. It seems to me to be a document of a sort of self-doubt in the heart of what was still, in 98CE, the most powerful empire on the planet, worrying that too much ‘civilisation’ had sapped Roman vitality and – it’s clearly gendered in the text – manliness.
I should note that by the time the Vandals sacked Rome three hundred years later, they had become an intercontinental trade empire with bigger cities than Tacitus had even seen, so it’s up to interpretation whether he was ‘proven right’.
Anyway, the point is, people have worried that they were getting ‘too civilised’ and were risking some sort of collapse, if the interdependence implicit in cosmopolitan society were disrupted, for a very long time. Tracking my own interest is really only the story of my own life, which is why Walter Miller isn’t a bad place to start. Worth noting, though, is that I also grew up with a ‘nuclear air-raid drill’ every Wednesday at noon in my hometown. It wasn’t the much-mocked duck-and-cover, just a test to make sure the siren still worked, but the reminder of an existential threat was just as piercing as it would have been in the sixties. The library stocked civil defence pamphlets, if you wanted to know how to make a hand-powered ventilator for your underground shelter that would screen out all but the smallest fallout particles. It was just something that you learned to accept.
Canticle is a three-part story, set at different stages of future history after a nuclear war. Unlike most of the global disaster science fiction, it was less about conflict between the ‘good’ survivors and the ‘bad’ and more about how to restore a sense of dignity and meaning to a human race that now live undignified, hard-scrabble, starvation-plagued, miserable lives, and, worse, has brought this condition on itself through hubris and self-destruction. It’s a very Catholic book, obviously: how do you exalt the fallen?
I think that’s still the contradiction that runs through my own writing: we are prone to horrible rages and self-destruction, and yet we are still beautiful and imaginative and worth loving. We have fucked up pretty much every part of our ecosystem worth up-fucking, and yet we are the only species we have the option of being. We are both fragile and indestructible, stupid and self-sacrificing, fear-shot and able to party in the ruins of any catastrophe. What do you even do about that?
I was a zine writer and a traveller, and somebody swapped me a copy of Evil Twin’s Not For Rent just before the US got its first road occupation, in Minnehaha, Minneapolis. So of course I had to go. It was back just before the WTO protests in Seattle, and John Zerzan and Live Wild or Diewere the big deal on the radical-eco scene, so that was the world I lived in. The Y2K bug pushed a lot of people to imagine what would happen without computers, and living as we did in an extremely improvisational and DIY sort of way, it was hard to see that kind of collapse as a bad thing, especially because it would probably bring an end to the paving and deforestation that we were fighting. I developed this sort of double-vision where I would see things as they ‘were’ and superimposed I would see them as they would be after a century of abandonment and neglect. I can’t explain this, it still comes over me sometimes; sometimes it’s beautiful and sometimes it’s terrifying.
I had a tense relationship with the anti-civilisation kids because, on the one hand, I helped organise a few gatherings, while on the other hand, I thought most of them were nuts. I took a road trip with one kid who kept trying to convince me that being polite to strangers was a crippling weakness induced by civilisation, and so this person was intentionally rude, all the time. There were also a few professional gadfly types who showed up, for instance, to a collective in Texas where I was living and spent a week on the couch denouncing things. The positive ‘rewilding’ lifestyle hadn’t really come together and there was no way for people to live that felt like they weren’t betraying themselves constantly, so of course they were very grouchy all the time.
I became fairly disenchanted with the anti-civ/collapse idea in Texas, but two things happened in rapid succession to change my outlook. First, in the July 2005 issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows wrote ‘Countdown to a Meltdown’, an article that pulled together peak oil, the housing bubble (still largely unrecognised) and a pending currency crisis that doesn’t seem to have come true. This was the most significant and official acknowledgement of the instability of ‘progress’ that I’d come across that was immediate and concrete, rather than just being a hand-wavy extension of cultural anxiety and disguised Cold War nuclear horror. It put the possibility of serious changes in the ‘American Way of Life’ back on the table.
The second event was Hurricane Katrina. After joking sarcastically on my then blog that anti-civ kids should all go down to Katrina and see what life was like without the infrastructure of a functional community, I watched several people, friends and unknowns, go do exactly that and turn what was probably the biggest disaster in the US in my lifetime into a brilliant experiment in post-collapse living. The punk/squatter scene in New Orleans before the storm was more notable for axe fights and really bad drunkenness and suddenly, with a shared purpose, those same kids started improvising electrification schemes for storm-damaged neighbourhoods and building out community-run infrastructure. It made me rethink my cynicism about anti-civ activism. I now think that in the absence of civilisation, most people – perhaps not anti-civ activists, but that’s another story – would be helping improve the lot of strangers and would recreate the best parts of a society to the best of their ability.
Seeing this happen mellowed me a lot to the new generation of collapse writers, at least to those who weren’t daydreaming about shooting their neighbours at the first sign of currency depreciation. I found Ran Prieur’s blog when another collective I was living in, this time in Philadelphia, was looking into growing edible algae on the roof. He had written about a book that he’d been unable to track down on microalgae, and my college library had a copy. So I read it, sent him a review, and we’ve been trading emails ever since. Having Ran and his readership to interact with made me more comfortable with writing collapse-y articles for a general audience.
DH: Reading this, I got a string of flashbacks. To being eight years old and finding out about nuclear weapons and wondering why all the adults seemed to be going on with their lives, acting normal, as if this wasn’t the most important and horrifying thing ever. (I wonder if kids still have that now, when they learn about the missiles in their silos, or if it was specific to the Cold War and the explicit promise of Mutually Assured Destruction?) And then to being twenty and reading about Y2K, the sensation of vertigo, that the world as we know it might just end. As I turned this possibility over in my head, wondering what to do with it, another thought came – that everything is going to end, sooner or later, anyway, from one chain of events or another. I remember this as a weirdly comforting realisation.
The way you describe your trajectory, it sounds like you came across the anti-civilisation and collapse stuff within a whole context of zines, activism, punk, DIY culture. On this side of the Atlantic, it seemed to be less grounded, something I came across late at night on blogs written by people I’d probably never meet, or through books by Zerzan and Jensen. When Paul and I wrote the manifesto and called it Uncivilisation, we were thinking on slightly different lines – not so much ‘anti-’ some big other of civilisation, more how do we start disentangling our thoughts and hopes from all these illusions and grand narratives – but one effect was to create a meeting point where people who were trying to figure this stuff out could find each other, including getting together around festival campfires and having conversations that there didn’t seem to be room for in the activist spaces that a lot of us had been involved in.
One thing that’s troubled me over time, and you touched on this already with Tacitus and the Germans, is how male and white and straight the perspective of most of the writing about collapse tends to be. Not that this is in any way different to the perspectives that get most of the attention on almost any other subject, but still, it distorts the way this stuff gets talked about. I remember Vinay Gupta coming to the first Dark Mountain festival, looking out at this very white audience, and saying, ‘What you people call collapse is living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.’ And I’m thinking of a post of yours about ‘Poverty, Wealth and the Future’, where you wrote, ‘Your meditation for today is this: Who would you be in a refugee camp?’ I keep coming back to that post.
So I wonder if you could say some more about the way those distortions shape the tropes of collapse writing, and what it might mean to ground our thinking in a broader range of human experience?
AA: Well, it’s interesting to read your question about the persistence of the nuclear threat on the same day that I learn about a ‘mishap’ with an intercontinental ballistic missile in May of 2014. I’m not sure it still has the same emotional resonance that it did in my own childhood, but we’re stuck for the foreseeable future living in a world where a dropped wrench can potentially end the planet. I’d be interested to ask young people how often they worry about this sort of thing – it’s probably important that in my childhood (and yours, it sounds like) nuclear annihilation would have been a deliberate action by a hostile agency, rather than a stupid mistake. I think we have an easier time psychologically facing down an opponent, no matter how implacable or even incomprehensible, than we do confronting random chance and tragic error.
You’re definitely right that my own development as a ‘collapse’ writer happened socially, rather than in isolation, but I don’t know whether that’s common or not. The internet would suggest that the typical apocalypse fan came by their beliefs consuming media alone, and in fact tries to hide their ‘preparation’ from their friends and neighbours, either because they don’t want to be besieged by hungry zombies when the shit hits the fan or because they’re embarrassed to subscribe to a philosophy that treats their nearest and dearest as a zombie-level liability in need of murdering some time in the near future. Then again, isolated angry people tend to make up a disproportionately large part of any internet conversation, so I’m not sure whether this is actually a relevant metric.
I think this gets to what you’re saying about one person’s collapse being someone else’s daily life. There’s a meme that crops up whenever there’s a major disaster anywhere in the world: American journalists report back from the scene, bewildered at the ‘resilience’ of the local population, who are struggling onward, getting out of bed and tending to things on schedule, despite the horror that has befallen them. Having seen disasters in the first and third worlds, I am most taken by the aspect of surprise. It’s as if the reporters assume that the natural response to an earthquake, or a coup, or an outbreak of a terrible disease is to run in circles fluttering your hands until you are too exhausted to continue, or worse yet to kill yourself.
For a long time I thought this was just the idiocy of the American journo narrative, but since Superstorm Sandy, we’ve seen several crises hit not just the US, but relatively affluent parts of the US. Surprisingly I have seen people quivering before the cameras, seemingly helpless, asking, as if the amassed TV audience were able to answer, what they are supposed to do? It struck me that this is actually not a disaster response, it’s a fear response – it’s the sort of thing people do, not when their way of life has been completely overwhelmed and they have an extended to-do list just to get through the day, but when they feel that way of life is deeply and permanently at risk, and there’s (as yet) nothing they can actually do about it. When you live in a crappy corrugated iron shed, next to a thousand other crappy corrugated iron sheds, and you walk two miles each morning before dawn to pick coffee, a flood is a crisis that demands attention, and your whole mind is full of getting the kids to high ground, waiting at line for the satellite phone to call your cousin in the city, and otherwise managing your situation. Freaking out would be counterproductive and as a rational, caring human being, you don’t. When you have a mortgaged, expensive, oversized house with flood insurance and a national guard that will make sure your family won’t die, when you have a credit card to stay at any cheap hotel in the state, when your daily social status concern is whether people like your posts on Facebook, you have the luxury to freak out, even if it is pointless to do so.
I think collapse writing, when it isn’t pathological anger, is something like a luxury freak-out. It’s about a looming fear of shame, of loss of status, loss of comfort, a return of the repressed hardships we know are entailed by our lifestyles, if not by life itself, but which we generally manage to outsource to someone else. I think this is why so many collapse narratives are moral in nature – there’s a sense that we’ve got it coming, but so far we can continue to work at our near-sinecure jobs, worry about our near-frivolous social status variations, argue about increasingly minute differences in consumption patterns (organic? paleo?) and otherwise ignore our insecurities. There’s no pile of cinderblock to be dismantled, no giant slop of mud in the cowshed, no long road to safety that we can walk, nothing, that is, to ameliorate our situation – it is as fixed and inaccessible as history itself, which is why it often seems like something that’s already happened.
As to your question about whiteness, I’d come at it from a slightly different angle. Especially since the anti-colonial renaissance of the sixties, people from the Global South have been writing passionately of their experiences losing their social structures, their way of life, their sense of self when an aspect of the natural world, or the political superstructure, or some seemingly insignificant part of ‘the economy’ rolls over and takes a crap. Why are collapse bloggers not reading these, or at least not incorporating them into their understanding of the future? Why are the experiences of the third world not considered collapse writing? Why, when you see a reference to a kinship society torn to pieces by a land-grabbing human-enslaving culture-ignoring ‘civilisation’ storming in with guns, is it always Braveheart and not, say, Chinua Achebe? Where, in all the paranoia about Ebola a few years back, was any acknowledgement of slave trade or the ivory trade or the rubber trade or any of the long history of civilisation-ending catastrophes in that exact region?
I would proffer two unflattering analyses. First, it is hard for western white people to identify with people of colour, especially poor people of colour, especially poor people of colour living outside what we think of as the west. That’s a disgrace and perhaps a damnation upon us, but it’s a bigger problem than the collapsosphere. Secondly, I think the stories from The Everybody Else don’t contain that vertiginous loss of status, that plunge from the precipice into the subaltern, and hence aren’t readily associated with the same frisson of hand-fluttering panic. These two analyses are connected of course – much of the social status in the world seems insignificant to the very wealthy, hence the popular reading of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind as a tale of a third-world startup entrepreneur. The idea that a family who grows corn, sells cattle, and has a market stall would be the absolute last family who should be starving seems unfamiliar to a western culture where farmers, at least farmers who did not grow up on organic box cereal in Brooklyn, are assumed to be ignorant and dangerous, so readers don’t pick up on exactly how socially fraught, even shameful, the Kamkwambas’ plight actually is.
Exceptions worth mentioning are Delaney’s Dhalgren and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower which are both by and about black Americans. Underrated, I think, both of them, but still reasonably well incorporated into the collapse bibliography. Also, several science fiction books and articles about the third world, written by first-worlders, have achieved some celebrity. I’m thinking of Gardiner Harris’ work on sea-level rise and slavery in Bangladesh, Margaret Atwood’s backstory to the character Oryx in Oryx and Crake, Ian McDonald’s Chaga Sagaand Brasyl, Paolo Bacigalupi’s entire oeuvre. Still, these are observations and fictional projections, not first-hand experience, and they certainly shouldn’t substitute for the (existing) shelves full of analysis on social disruption written by subaltern populations themselves, so Vinay’s point stands.
I imagine that as more people are directly affected by climate change, in the west as well as elsewhere, first-world collapse writing – at least first-person first-world collapse writing – will become more measured, realistic, and task-saturated, plaintive in its appeals to justice but competent in its approach to the immediate future; in other words, more like the last century of third-world collapse writing. Whether this displaces status-shame-panic as a genre, or whether ‘collapse’ will continue to refer only to the terrors of the shrinking pool of people who have not yet been directly impacted by changes in the world remains to be seen.
DH: What you say about the luxury of freaking out makes me think of a conversation in the Dark Mountain Workshop here in Sweden. Two of the artists in the workshop have been studying with the same teacher, an autistic woman who had to develop her own models in order to understand the reality which people around her take for granted. These models start from the distinction between ‘the primary’, the reality of life itself, and ‘the secondary’, the reality of values, culture, a particular way of living. We need both of these, she says, but there is a danger if we treat the secondary as primary. There’s a particular ugliness, it seems to me, when we start defending our way of life as if our lives themselves were at stake. We’re seeing this in Europe, just now, as people whose lives actually are at stake – at home in Syria, on the wretched rubber dinghies crossing the Mediterranean – are greeted as a threat to our way of life, so that the Greek government is being urged by ministers from elsewhere in Europe to start sinking the boats.
Thinking about this collapsosphere that we’ve been talking about, there’s a similar confusion that runs down the middle of it. A lot of folks who are drawn to these online conversations are certainly ‘apocalypse fans’ – people for whom ‘the end of the world as we know it’ means zombies and cannibalism and fortified compounds, who read Cormac McCarthy’s The Roadas a guide to the future. But the other side – which I guess is the reason I find myself coming back, despite the ambivalence that we’ve touched on in this discussion – is that this can sometimes be a space in which people are developing a language in which to talk about the difference between ‘the end of the world as we know it’ and ‘the end of the world, full stop’. That feels interesting, maybe even useful.
One more question, before we wrap this up. Anyone who has followed your blogs will pick up that your work is related to medicine. The conversations around the collapsosphere are often intertwined with some kind of critique of progress – and the achievements of medicine and public health are often used as a trump card by those defending the idea of progress. So I’m curious what reflections you might have on how these things fit together?
AA: I worked as a ‘street medic’, then on an ambulance, and then I became a medical student before shifting gears to become a researcher. The idea that medicine and public health are ‘trump cards’ for progress is only relevant if you believe that progress (or not) is a decision being made by rational people on the basis of evidence, which it isn’t. If it were, I’d choose progress which allows everyone on earth to enjoy the actual benefits of a modern western standard of living (not losing half your kids to dysentery, seawalls, language schools and construction methods that acknowledge the inevitability of fires and earthquakes), low- to zero-consumption technology, rewilding of land, informed stewardship of agricultural areas, and continued best practices in medicine and public health –and avoids wasting any resources on the bogus fake benefits (candy, cheap long distance travel, extra clothing, jet skis, Facebook). But progress doesn’t work that way. I’m not the queen of the world and don’t want to be; I’d imagine pretty much everybody on the planet could make their own lists of which developments count as progress and which don’t; and I doubt there’d ever be any consensus. Plus, when you think about what it would take to actually create and enforce ‘rational progress’, you realise it isn’t going to happen.
That said, hell yes – you can keep your ‘man walks on moon’, I say the high point of collective human achievement is the elimination of smallpox. We’re less than five years from eradicating polio and guinea worm too.
DH: Yes, I guess where I was going with the ‘trump card’ thing is that, if you try bringing the idea of progress into question, pretty soon you will be met with an argument along the lines of, ‘Are you saying smallpox eradication, aspirin and the reduction in infant mortality aren’t real, good and important developments?’ And it’s hard to imagine a sane standpoint from which to deny the reality, goodness or importance of these things. So it seems like a fairly unanswerable argument that progress exists as an objective historical phenomenon – even if it is a phenomenon that’s vulnerable to setbacks and reverses, not an inevitable one-way force. Against this, I’d want to say that it may be wiser to attend to the specific, to celebrate these good things for what they are – whereas once we start talking in terms of progress, however carefully, this tends to become a generalised idea under the heading of which things we would want to celebrate and things we might want to question get bundled together. This is one of the senses in which progress is not ‘a decision being made by rational people’, as you say, but an intensely-charged narrative with a particular cultural history.
AA: Ran talks about this phenomenon – that people lack the imagination to picture a world other than one we’ve already lived through, so if you don’t like The Now, you must be arguing for some time in the past with all its warts and insufficiencies. There are two ways to approach this, I think: one is from an engineering perspective, explaining that just because we won’t have ubiquitous cheap energy at some point in the near future, or just because our current patterns of settlement are unlikely to persist, that doesn’t mean we’re going to forget everything we know about waterborne diseases. This is a difficult argument to make, though, because I am not a water treatment engineer and chances are neither is whoever I’m talking to, so it’s hard to avoid making wild and inaccurate claims about technology and technê.
The other approach is one that I’ve seen used to refute eugenics – imagine a future historian looking back at the early twenty-first century. Would they, in all likelihood, have any more respect for us today than we have for open-pit lead smelting and leech-doctors? Whoever comes after us will probably look at us as flawed, short-sighted and blind to the effects of our actions, just as we see our predecessors in hindsight. Their successors will view them the same way. Even if they do re-adopt older technology, or forget some aspects of ‘progress’ that are unblemished boons to humanity, they’ll still see us as morons, just as we can lament the passing of the Stick Chart or the ability to recite the Odyssey from memory, while being grateful that we don’t actually live in those worlds.
First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 9.
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Expectations of Life & Death
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
Psalm 90:10What it means to grow old has changed enormously, within a handful of generations, yet not in the way that we tend to assume.
The headline figures are startling: no country in the world today has a lower life expectancy than the countries where life expectancy was highest in 1800. A baby born that year in Sweden could expect to live to the age of 32; a descendent of that baby, born in the same country today, can expect to live to 82.
What is commonly misunderstood is the nature of the change behind these figures. They seem to suggest a world in which to reach your early thirties was to be old, in the way that someone in their early eighties would be thought of as old today; a world in which life was truly ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Yet the reality is that the age at which a person is thought of as old has changed relatively little from century to century, even as far back as biblical times, when the psalmist could lament the brevity of human life which stretches to 70 or 80 years. What is different today is that living to grow old has become a reasonable expectation, something we can almost take for granted, rather than a matter of luck.
The reason for clarifying this distinction is not to downplay the extraordinary achievement represented by the increase in life expectancy at birth, but to seek to understand it better. This matters, not least, if we want to think clearly about the promises and claims being made today in the name of life extension. To do so, we need a subtler feel for statistics and also for the cultural assumptions that shape our understanding of death.
Among the contradictory tendencies that make up our culture, there is a habit of treating the fruits of measurement and calculation as revealing an underlying reality that is ‘truer’ than the deceptive evidence of our senses. It may be more helpful to think of the results of quantitative labour as the traces left by reality: footprints in the sand, clues in need of interpretation.
If the figures of life expectancy at birth are one set of footprints left by the lives our ancestors led, another trail of clues is found in the measure of the modal age at death. This tells us at what age it has been most common to die, a slightly different question to the average length of life, and one that takes us closer to the experience of growing old in a particular time and place.
In England, reliable records don’t stretch back quite as far as they do in Sweden, but it is possible to pick up the trail in 1841, when life expectancy at birth was a little over 40. In the same year, the modal age of death was 77 for women and 70 for men.
Over the following century and a half, these ages would go up to 88 and 85, respectively: a significant increase, but not of the same order as seen in the more commonly cited figures for life expectancy.
What is going on here? Why do these two ways of tracing the changing patterns of death tell such different stories? Part of the answer is that the figures for modal age at death ignore all deaths before the age of 10. Until relatively recently, the age at which it was most common to die was zero: a significant proportion of those born never made it past the first weeks and months of life. The decline in infant mortality is not the only factor in the changing of our expectations of life and death, but it is a large one, and it separates the world in which we now live from the world as our ancestors knew it.
What grounds could there be for leaving aside the great swathes of death in infancy and early childhood? Clearly, they must be part of any attempt to form a picture of what age and dying have meant through time, but there are reasons for treating them separately from death in adult life. The first is that it is their inclusion in the averages of life expectancy which creates the misleading impression of a world in which old age began in one’s early thirties. The second is that the causes of death in infancy are different to the causes of death in adult life.
Broadly speaking, it makes sense to think of a human life as falling into three phases: the vulnerability of the first years gives way to the strength of adulthood, then after five or six decades, this strength gives way in turn to the frailty of age. In each of these stages, we are less likely to die in a given year than were our ancestors, but the things that are likely to kill us are different and so are the factors that increase our chances of survival.
Along with the idea that our ancestors could expect to die in their thirties, perhaps the most common misconception about the changing nature of age and death is that it is the result of advancements in medicine. While medical technologies and interventions have played a part, it is not the leading one. Of the 30 years increase in life expectancy that took place in the United States during the 20th century, only five years could be attributed to medical care: the remaining 25 years were the result of improvements in public health.
This is good news. Compared to medical procedures and drug treatment programmes, public health measures tend to be cheaper and therefore reach those who do not have access to highly-trained medical staff. What is more, while medical treatments frequently come with negative side-effects, improvements in public health tend to correspond to broader improvements in quality of life for the individual and society. A recent project in the north-east of England saw the National Health Service paying to insulate the homes of people with chronic health conditions, a move which could be justified in terms of the savings from reduced hospital admissions among the group.
The benefits of clean water and sanitation are particularly important to increasing the chances of survival in the vulnerable first years, whereas the benefits of advanced medical treatments are more likely to add years to the end of our lives. The importance of public health explains why increases in life expectancy have spread far beyond the reach of highly-equipped hospitals. The most striking example is the Indian state of Kerala, where the average income is three dollars a day, yet life expectancy and infant mortality rates are close to those of Europe and the United States.
Such examples matter because they can bring into question the ways in which the future is usually framed. Among these is the tendency to present it as a choice: either we find a way to sustain and extend the way of life taken for granted by roughly one in seven of the people currently alive, with its technological and economic intensity, or we lose this way of life and fall into a Hobbesian nightmare. The Kerala story is complex, but among other things it is a clue that there are more futures available than we are often encouraged to think about.
Death is a biological reality, a hard fact that lies in front of all of us. It is also deeply cultural, entangled with and inseparable from the stories we tell about ourselves, the world and our place within it.
In the 1960s, the sociologists B.G. Glasser and A.L. Strauss identified two contrasting attitudes to death in American hospitals. Among one set of families, mostly recent immigrants, the approach of death was time to leave the hospital so that one could have the dignity of dying at home according to custom; for another group — those ‘more involved in modernity’, as the historian Philippe Ariés puts it — the hospital has become the place where you come to die, because death at home has become inconvenient. Much could be said about these two attitudes, those who ‘check out’ to die and those who ‘check in’, but it is hard to reduce them to a simple trajectory of historical progress in which the modern approach renders the older traditions conclusively obsolete.
Life expectancy — and death expectancy, for that matter — is good ground from which to think about the ideology of progress. It is hard to imagine anyone who would dispute that the improved life chances of the newborn represent an unqualified good. And at this point, I must disown any pretence at detachment: as I write this, I am thinking of my son, who was born nine weeks ago. I can be nothing other than thankful at the good fortune that he was born into a world — and into a part of the world — where childbirth no longer carries a significant likelihood of death for mother or baby, and where the conditions, the knowledge and the facilities are present such that we can almost take it for granted that he will make it through the vulnerable first months and years of life.
Having acknowledged this, what else could there be to say? Except that, as we have already seen, when the great changes in infant mortality are compounded into a single vector of improvement in life expectancy, the result tends to give us a misleading picture of the relationship between our lives and the lives of our ancestors. In the same way, the problem with the ideology of progress is that it requires the reduction of the complex patterns of change from generation to generation into a single vector of improvement, and the result is similarly misleading.
This may come into focus, if we begin to think about life extension, a proposition around which bold predictions and promises are currently made. Those who foresee a future in which human life is measured in centuries rather than decades often appeal to the historical statistics of life expectancy, as if the offer they are making is a natural extension of a process that has already been under way for generations.
Yet, as we have seen, this is based on a misunderstanding of what lies behind those statistics. 80 is not the new 30 — and if someone wishes to convince us that 200 will be the new 80, they cannot call on trends in historical life expectancy as evidence for this.
In fact, it is not clear that the possible duration of human life has been extended. The existence of an upper limit to the human lifespan is a matter of dispute among those who study this area. (Those who study human bodies seem to be more inclined to believe in such a limit than those who study statistics.) It is true that there has been an upward movement in the age of the oldest attestable human over the past two centuries, with the record held by Jeanne Calment, who died in France in 1997 at the age of 122.
However, while Calment’s case is considered exemplary in terms of the documentary proof available, attesting the age of the extremely old remains difficult in many parts of the world, even today, and in earlier historical periods, absence of evidence cannot simply be taken as evidence of absence.
What can be said more confidently is that almost all of the increase in longevity that we now take for granted consists of a shift in the distribution of death within historically-known limits. It has not been unusual for some individuals within a community to live into their late 80s; what is new is that living into one’s late 80s is becoming the norm in many societies.
Changes in infant mortality may represent an unqualified good, but when the strength of adulthood gives way to the frailty of age, the changes in what we can expect may be more open to dispute.
To generations of doctors, pneumonia was known as ‘the old man’s friend’, a condition that tends to leave the healthy untouched, but offers a relatively peaceful death for those who are already weakened. This expression reflects the idea that there is such a thing as a time to die, rather than the role of medicine being always to sustain life at all costs. Today, pneumonia in the very old is fought with antibiotics. Meanwhile, 40% of those aged 85 or over are living with dementia. Our culture can still talk about an ‘untimely death’, but the idea that death is sometimes timely is harder for us to acknowledge. To anyone who has watched a person they love pass into the shadow of Alzheimer’s disease, the question can arise, whether there is indeed a time to die — and whether our way of living increasingly means that we miss that time, living on in a state that is neither life nor death.
To such thoughts, the answer will come: we are investing great amounts of money and talent in the search for a cure to Alzheimer’s.
And, for that matter, in the search of a cure for ageing and a cure for death.
If I were to claim that these goals are unattainable, I would be exceeding the bounds of my knowledge. Instead, to those who seek them, I would make two suggestions.
First, as I have tried to show, the search for life extension is not the natural continuation of the trends that have led to increased life expectancy over the last handful of generations. The bulk of the achievements in life expectancy have been the result of public health improvements, rather than high-tech medicine, and their overall effect has been to increase the likelihood of growing old, rather than change the definition of what it is to have grown old.
Secondly, it seems to me that the pursuit of vastly longer human lifetimes is itself a culturally-peculiar goal. To see it as desirable to live forever is to have a particular understanding of what it is to be a person: to place oneself at the centre of the universe, rather than to see oneself as part of a chain of generations.
When I look at my son, I feel gratitude for the chance at life that he has. I hope to live to see him grow strong and take the place that is mine today, as I learn how to grow old and take the place which is now my parents’. And I hope that he will outlive me.
I know that there is much that he and I can almost take for granted, just now, that our ancestors could not. Yet I suspect that my hopes are not so different to theirs, and as I hold him and look into his new face, I understand myself more clearly as a small part within something vastly larger.
First published by Mooria magazine.
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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.
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Dealing With Our Own Shit: A Conversation With Gustavo Esteva
There were eagles riding the air overhead as we took the backroad out of San Pablo Etla to the Casa Esteva. The taxi driver had left us at the crossroads: at ease in the highspeed free-for-all of the highway, he had no desire to risk his exhaust on the unpaved road ahead, so a young man from one of the neighbouring households drove down to collect us. It was three months into the dry season. We bumped across the bed of an empty stream before climbing again towards the adobe house among the trees.
After days in downtown Oaxaca, its streets clogged with fumes, the air up here was a release. Twenty-five years earlier, when Gustavo Esteva and his partner left Mexico City to settle here, they must have felt that same contrast. For Gustavo, it was a return to his grandmother’s village: the grandmother who, in his childhood, was not allowed to enter his parents’ house by the front door, nor to speak to her grandson in Zapotec.
‘For my mother,’ he told me, ‘the best thing that she could do for her children was to uproot us from any connection with our indigenous ancestry, to avoid the discrimination she had suffered.’
Despite this, the summers he spent with his grandmother on her stall in the market in Oaxaca planted stories that would come to life much later.
Meanwhile, as a young man, he took refuge from the cultural confusions of his family in the promise of ‘development’. The term which would frame the relation between the countries of the post-war world, embodying a unifying model of global economic progress on which even Cold War opponents could agree, was first used in its modern sense by President Truman in his inaugural address of 1949. At 15, following his father’s death, Gustavo found work with the first wave of global corporations bringing the reality of development to Mexico. Before too many years had passed, he would become the youngest ever executive for IBM; but instead of taking his place at the centre of this grand narrative of economic progress, he found himself standing on one side, the side of the bosses, being asked to cheat the workers.
So, in his early 20s, he walked away from that career and before too many years had passed, he had become a Marxist guerrilla. This was the era of Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution: if capitalism could not deliver the promise of economic progress for everyone, it was time to fight for the alternative. Marx would remain a deep influence on his thinking, but this phase of his life ended, again, in disillusionment: he parted with the idea of violent revolution after one of the leaders of his group shot the other in a row over a woman. ‘It was a revelation of the kind of violence we were imposing on ourselves and we wanted to impose on the whole of society.’
For a second time, he walked away from what had looked like a means of making a better world. In the years that followed, he continued to read, study and write about economics and social change, and before too many years had passed, he had become a senior official in a government agency. By the early 1970s, he was running programmes to control the market in basic staples, providing food security to millions of the urban and rural poor. Yet this phase, too, would end in a decision to walk away, one that would shape the rest of his life.
In 1976, due to the success of these programmes, he was in line for a ministerial post in the new administration. ‘By that time, I knew at least two things: first, this is not what the people want, these beautiful development programmes. I did not know exactly why or what it is that the people want, but I knew that it was not this. The second was, the logic of government and the logic of the people are completely different. Even this populist president – I was in the presidential house, many times, in cabinet meetings – how they take decisions and what the people need and want are two different planets.’
I knew the outline of this story, but as we talked on the porch of the house that they had built, what struck me was his willingness to trust in his own uncertainty. At each of the turns in his journey, he had been willing to renounce the security of existing structures, structures he had come to find intolerable, even though he had no answer as to what else could be done. Willing to go and wait in the wilderness, with patience, to see what new things might come into view as a result of that letting go.
Having walked away from the prospect of high office, he went to work at the grassroots, in the villages and on the urban margins, with peasants newly arrived in the city. He talks about this as a time of happiness and confusion: among those with whom he was now working, those who were supposed to be the underdeveloped, he found what seemed to him a good life. Yet none of this made sense within the frameworks of economics, anthropology, sociology or political science. It was as if he had to choose between the whole theoretical frame of development which had shaped his life and the evidence of the lives of those around him. This was pushing him to a crisis.
‘Suddenly I said, one day: I will take off the glasses, the lenses I am using, all the different lenses of development. To abandon those categories, it was like the moment when you come from the darkness into the light, and you are just seeing shadows.’
Two things, he said, helped him to make sense of his experience. The first were the memories of his grandmother that began to surface again, the stories that she had told him in those childhood summers. Lessons which he had not understood at the time now took on meaning. It was this, he says, that made it possible to connect with the people around him.
The second was his encounter with Ivan Illich. On the Marxist Left in the early ’70s, in the years of his most famous work, he had been no more than a reactionary priest, not worth reading. His critiques of schooling and health systems were beside the point: of course, in a capitalist system, these things would be bad, but after the revolution we will have good schools!
When they met in 1983, what struck Gustavo was that the terms of Illich’s thinking made sense in the light of the lives of the peasants and migrants with whom he was working. I had heard this before, but it was brought home to me later that month at a conference in Cuernavaca: after two days of dispiriting academic presentations, the one talk in which Illich’s ideas actually came to life was given by a woman from an indigenous community who had only come across his books a few months earlier.
It was in Cuernavaca, five years earlier, at a gathering to mark the fifth anniversary of Illich’s death, that I had first met Gustavo. Then, the following year, he came to London and I saw him polarise a room full of social entrepreneurs and young NGO workers with his stories about the paradoxes of development. Somewhere around that time, I began to meet up with a guy called Paul Kingsnorth who had an idea for a journal called Dark Mountain, and it turned out that the one person we knew in common was this old Mexican who called himself a ‘deprofessionalised intellectual’. Paul had interviewed him in Oaxaca, when he was writing about the Zapatistas, and it was Gustavo who gave him the title of his first book, One No, Many Yeses.
That is not the only way in which Gustavo’s thinking is entangled with the roots of Dark Mountain. The life out of which that thinking has grown is a story of faith in progress, the loss of that faith, and the finding of the kinds of hope which remain on the other side of loss. Then there is the willingness to walk away, even though you have no answers to give when people ask what you would do instead, to walk away with only your uncertainty, rather than to stay with certainties in which you no longer believe. Finally, the distinction he makes between ‘the better life’ promised by universal visions of progress and development, and ‘the good life’, which has to be worked out on a human scale, improvised, in the times and places where we find ourselves.
The conversation reproduced here was recorded by Nick Stewart as part of a film on which we are collaborating. His is the unspoken presence in what follows: not only because he was moving about with a handheld camera, finding the angles from which to catch our expressions as we talked, but because he then produced the initial transcript on which this text is based.
DH: It seems to me that ‘development’ begins by talking as if one country is a poor version of another and ends by making that the case: you end up with poor copies of things that were developed in other times and places. It’s not to say that ‘living well’, as you put it, involves a hermetic sealing, keeping out the new. It’s that, if one is starting from the idea that this is something we have to work out here and now, rather than something that is worked out by others on our behalf, that will lead to a kind of questioning of new technologies and new ideas. A dialogue with them, rather than an unquestioning acceptance or demand for them.
GE: There are two things that I am involved with in your observation.
One is, we are now forced to put limits to our hospitality, because of hospitality abuses. The people here in this area of the world are very, very hospitable. They open their minds and their hearts and their arms to everything. But then, the occupation of Mexico by the Spaniards started with an abuse of hospitality. Montezuma was hosting Cortez as a great guest and then Cortez took him hostage in his own palace. Well, this kind of hospitality abuse we can see for the last 500 years. All the time, we open our minds and our hearts and our arms, and then something horrible happens. And this can be a person, a country, invading us. Or it can be the Green Revolution, or whatever kind of technology. Then what we are saying, now? It’s not closing ourselves, no, but let’s be careful. We cannot be so hospitable to anything that comes. We need to first examine what is coming and then define if we want it or not. That is being careful, particularly about these technologies.
But there is another point in your observation: for many years we accepted that something like poverty or underdevelopment was objective. We were underdeveloped. There were ‘the poor’, as something very clear. And then, after years, we discovered that poverty is just a comparison. ‘These people are poor because they don’t have what we have!’ Because they lack the family car or the college degree, or the beautiful house, or a certain kind of shoes, or iPod, or whatever…
DH: All of which become the markers on this scale of ‘the better life’, as you tick off one after another, reaching upwards, hoping that somewhere up there it’s going to get less lonely than it seems to have become along the way.
GE: But if you are seeing the people by what they don’t have, then you are not seeing them.
That is the problem with ‘poverty’. Who are really the poor? One thing the anthropologists are all the time asking themselves is: why are the people in these very poor villages laughing so much, celebrating life so much? They should be very sad, because they are so poor. They are not so sad. Let’s try to see them for what they are, who they are. Not just comparing them: oh, they don’t have this or have that.
DH: I think this is where some of the fear comes from now in what I have come to think of as the ‘undeveloping countries’ of the postindustrial West. There’s an assumption, which comes from this scale of development, that what we have had in Britain or America is the better life. Given that, for many people, it’s actually quite a disorienting, stressful life, imagine how much worse it must be once you go further down that scale! We must at all costs prevent any kind of falling down, even if it means we have to sacrifice more and more of the things that we used to think were part of the deal for us. So the deal keeps getting worse, but we have to keep working the longer hours and retiring later, and so on, because the alternative is to fall into this hell of poverty which is projected onto the lives of most of the people on the planet.
Part of what I’ve been wondering about, as I think about this phenomenon of undevelopment, is how people find the clues that it might not work out like that. That, in the process of losing many of the things that people like me grew up taking for granted, we might catch some of the threads that we dropped further back in time, find new ways of picking them up. Becoming part of the world again.
GE: Some friends of mine from Italy and Spain have been telling me with great concern that now the people on the streets are very, very conservative. They are there to conserve what they still have. And it’s a legitimate concern, of course: they had jobs yesterday, then they want the job back. But this implies that there is something worse than being exploited: not being exploited. I want my chains back! I want to be exploited again! We cannot see that way, we are seeing only the loss.
I would say the most important point for me, in this kind of conversation is, first, let’s be brave enough to see the horror in which we are today. It’s a real horror. We must not qualify it, it is a horror. We are destroying everything. The idea of trying to keep, only to keep, what we have today in the world: this is to continue the destruction on a bigger scale. And because we are in that condition, and because the people are reacting to that condition, the powers-that-be are reacting in a horrible way. And that means you are seeing a lot of violence, a lot of control of the population and many terrible things.
So first, we need to be aware of the horror, and not just falling into a kind of apocalyptic randiness and saying, December 21st will be the end of the world. It is really discovering in our own societies, in our own beings, every one of us, the elements of that horror.
And then, in that same observation, discovering the absolute irrationality of our desires: how we define our wants, what kind of definitions of the good things we have. If we begin the reflection of ‘What is it that I really want?’ Not what the market is telling me to want, not what the state is telling me. What is it that I really want? Then we start saying, ‘Oh, I want love!’ I want a very close relation with someone, I want to laugh all the time or I want to cry all the time…
DH: ‘I want to not be constantly feeling precarious.’ I think that’s one of the deep desires in the undeveloping countries: the sense of precarity that affects most of the population, now.
GE: This is a very important point. I know that this word is now used more than ever. Precarity. And the immediate reaction, a conditioned reflex, is: the institutions can offer me protection from precarity.
DH: Yes. There’s a kind of yearning for a return of the social democratic golden age. I sometimes talk about the fantasy of the social democratic End of History, which afflicts many people on the left in Europe. That, if it wasn’t for these neoliberals coming along, then we could have had social democracy for everyone, forever. And it’s as historically illiterate as the Fukuyama ‘End of History’ fantasy. It’s the same thing, albeit in a kinder form. So, yes: what’s the alternative? Rather than imagining that we can rebuild the social democratic institutional support that kept people for a while from a sense of precarity in the West, where else do we look?
GE: We have reached the point in which the institutions, in every country, cannot offer us any sense of stability and the elimination of precarity. It is, I think, a fact that no country will be able to pay the bills of education and health and pensions. It is useless to continue the discussion about that kind of thing. Of course, we need some institutions, and, of course, we need some operation of these institutions to keep the society going. I’m not saying dismantle all the institutions tomorrow morning and that’s it.
But if you want to abandon that feeling of precarity, then it’s to rediscover that the only way to have a kind of security is at the grassroots. With your friends. With the kinds of new commons emerging everywhere. Then, together, the people themselves, with their neighbours, we can create the kind of social fabric that can really offer us security, protection and a good life. The possibility of living well.
DH: For that to work, there has to be a rediscovery of a ‘self’ which is not the self that economics has taught us we have. Part of what I see is that the nightmares that are haunting the West now are nightmares which economics has projected onto history. I just began to read this novel for teenagers, The Hunger Games, which is set in a dark future America. In the first few pages, I couldn’t get past the sense that I was reading another of the kinds of fables that economists use. It was another Robinson Crusoe story. It was a story in which all of the characters are atomised individuals – and in which this has intensified as people have got poorer. Which bears no clear relation to how people do continue to make life work during difficult times. The qualities of the highly-individualised self that this book starts out with are precisely the qualities that emerge among people who are able to use money to solve all of their problems.
To me, I think that is one of the greatest challenges to the emergence of a new commons taking root within countries like mine: people have bought into so much of what they’ve been told to believe about themselves. Even what we think we know about science and evolution, so much of it is entangled with projections of these economic stories about the competing lone individual. How does that begin to break down? Where do new-old concepts of the self begin to emerge?
GE: I think that this is already happening, because people have had enough of this hyper-individualism. And the good news is that, we have been constructed as individuals, we can feel that we are individuals, we can experience the world as individuals – but we are not! As Raimon Panikkar said very clearly, we are ‘knots in nets of relations’. This is what people are rediscovering, that we are really the relations. That behind this individual mask, the mask of ‘I am a mammal and this body is the body of animal, an individual body, a unique individual body’, behind this, what I find is an ‘I’ that is always a ‘we’. Because I am a collection of relations, my story of relations, my relations with other people. It is important to see how we have been constructed as individuals in order to abandon that idea.
I have been using one example. I don’t think that in Europe it is so famous, this book of Dr. Spock that is basically prepared for young couples who don’t know how to raise a child. It has a magnificent index about how to discover anything happening to the baby. For five years, the book has the catechism, the commandments for the young couple. First commandment: the parents’ bed is forbidden territory for the babies. They should never be there. Second commandment: it is very good, it’s really necessary, for the child to be alone in his or her own room as soon as possible. If possible, the day they come back from the hospital. Third commandment: it is very good for the physical and mental development and psychological development of the child to cry alone, at least half an hour a day. I imagine at some point the poor mother saying, ‘Oh god! Twenty minutes…Twenty-five minutes…I cannot bear this suffering of my poor child!’
Well, what kind of being is this baby? The very first day he is in the house, he’s being raised as an individual. Then you go to India, you go to Mexico and you see that fantastic invention of the shawl, the rebozo, in which the baby is attached to the body of the mother for months. But the mother is doing many things, is doing her own life with the baby, here, on her breast, close. That is a different kind of relation.
DH: In a sense, this is my question, because what we see in the West are generations of people who have been brought up according to one set of experts or another who are essentially guiding the formation of the atomised individual from the moment of arrival back from the hospital. That damage is inscribed into the adults. I often think that the subject that’s assumed by economics, Homo economicus, is actually the damaged child. The assumption of scarcity in every situation, that’s the behaviour of a child that has not had love and not been able to trust in early childhood. And this is normalised as what we are all meant to be like, what the marketers are teaching their students in marketing to manipulate.
So, how do we go from societies like Britain or Sweden or the United States, where most adults have had an upbringing that was calculated to produce the atomised individual? How do those atomised individuals re-learn the belonging within the larger we?
GE: I think it is happening, it is really happening. Millions of people are desperately looking for an alternative.
DH: There’s a hunger, certainly. There is a gap between what we’re told we are and what we feel we are. Often people don’t have a language for it, all they have is the sense that something’s not right. A sense that there’s meant to be more to life than this. Sometimes they’re then told: well, the sense that there’s meant to be more to life, this is a universal experience. ‘This is what life is. Life is the feeling that there ought to be more to life.’
But, there is … an opening. That gap is the place through which, when people then find things which help them make sense of their experience and don’t simply accept that sense of lack, there is a coming-alive that you see in them. I’ve certainly experienced that a lot in the work that I’ve been part of in Europe over the last few years.
Again, though, I come back to the anxiety which I think a lot of us feel: ‘But this is so small!’ This is little cracks in the corners, against the vastness of the ideology and the structures that exist to tell us that this, the horror as you call it, is all that there is or could be.
GE: That is why it is important to discover that we are not alone. We don’t see in the news the examples of people reclaiming the commons. From Peru, we did not hear that the indigenous people reclaimed one million hectares, one by one. One million hectares is a lot of land. Now they are producing 40% of their food in Peru within their own traditional system. That is reclaiming the commons.
But the most important thing, I think, for people in Europe is creating new commons. It is the people, particularly in the cities…We know we all have a thousand ‘friends,’ but real friends we have only two, three, four or five, perhaps eight friends. Here, I remember Illich again, he was talking all the time about his polyphilia, that was his thing, the need to be with friends. He elevated friendship as the main category for the reorganisation of the society, for reconstructing our society in a different way.
DH: The starting point of hope.
GE: Absolutely.
DH: I encounter a lot of people who are alive to the seriousness of the mess we’re in, alive to the horror, and who can’t put their faith in something as soft as friendship. Who say, ‘Our cities are three meals away from catastrophe because of the agro-industrial supply chain.’ Who say, ‘We’re looking at the climate predictions and, you know, we’re going to be lucky if we keep climate change down to four degrees by the end of the century. There’s a good chance it will be six. We will probably have, at best, half a billion people left on the planet at the end of the century.’ Many of the people I work closely with, this is the reality that is weighing on their minds, and it is very hard to…
GE: It is their reality? That is the problem.
DH: This is what they would say is the hard reality that we face. And it is very hard for them to hear what we are talking about, when we talk about friendship as the new commons, as the ground from which things grow. What do you say to them?
GE: How can we formulate the problems, the reality in a different way?
What I see in global warming, and the other horrors, this is a formulation that implies the continuation of the manic obsession of industrial man to be God. And, he failed. We are not gods.
To put this in a provocative way: it is, I would say, equally arrogant to affirm or deny global warming. In both cases, we pretend that we really know how the Earth is behaving. That we have all the information. First, that we know from the past how the Earth behaves. Second, that we know how the Earth will react. And third, that we know how to fix the problem.
That is too arrogant. To say, yes, there is global warming, or to say, no, there is no global warming: both positions are absolutely arrogant.
What we do know for sure, however – you and me and your friends and everyone – is that we have been doing something very wrong. That our behaviour is wrong. That our behaviour every day is wrong.
DH: If I understand what you are saying, then this connects to something that has troubled me about the way that climate change is talked about. Most of the time, there seems to be an implication – which the people who are most actively voicing it would not agree with – that, if it weren’t for the misfortune of the fragility of this global climate system, we could keep doing all of this. If it weren’t for the accidental, unforeseeable byproduct of what would otherwise have been Progress, then it would be fine. And I don’t know if any environmentalist, in their heart, believes that. But perhaps this is the arrogance you are talking about, the persistence of the god-like arrogance of industrial man, even within the way we talk about the horror of the mess we have made of the world?
GE: At the same time you have the best scientists in Germany at the Wuppertal Institute, after five years and a great amount of funding, they presented a most radical proposal: they suggested the reduction of the consumption of everything by 90%. That is really more radical than any other environmentalists. But, basically, to avoid any change!
DH: Yes, to achieve a version of how we live now which is as close as possible to how we live now, but without doing the damage on that particular front.
GE: That is what we need to stop doing. We cannot continue in that path. Because after two or three great disasters, a few tsunamis or Fukushimas – after that, some people will say: well, given the irresponsibility of the 7 billion people, what we need is a good, global authoritarian government to save poor Mother Earth. Then we will have control over everyone. And many people will say, ‘Oh yes, finally something is being done!’
DH: It’s true, those arguments are starting to be voiced.
GE: That is part of the horror. That is why the horror is inside us. It’s not only outside. It’s not just the powers that be, we have been infected with it. Then we need to stop. But I think, again, people are doing that. I think that there are millions of people saying, ‘No, I need to stop by myself,’ doing whatever it is.
DH: This is one of the things that Paul and I have encountered with Dark Mountain, over the last few years. The response to what we’ve been doing has been incredibly polarised. It’s been polarised between relief and anger. Relief from people who feel like they have been given permission to be honest, to voice their misgivings about where we had ended up, in an environmentalism that had ended up focused on calculative rationality and engineering solutions. And anger from those for whom it is absolute heresy to admit the limits of our ability to control things. There is a real problem in Western culture of not being able to conceive of any gap between control and despair. Either we can take control of a situation, or we’re in hell and we might as well curl up and die right now. It is difficult for people, particularly in the West, particularly in the environmental movement, to hear the idea of letting go of the illusion of control as anything other than giving up.
GE: Well, instead of talking in general about global warming and these statistics, let’s bring it down to things that matter for all of us. Like what is happening with food today. There is a poem by Eduardo Galeano which says: in these times of global fear, there are some people afraid of hunger, and the others are afraid of eating. There is a very real reason to be afraid of hunger, in every country. It’s not just a question of poor countries. In Britain or the United States, there are people who are afraid of hunger today because they do not know what will happen next month. The others are afraid of eating, why? Because we know what is in our plates. Our bodies are already poisoned, infected. It is not only junk food, it’s not only that it is not nourishing, it is full of poison, things that are damaging our health. And then, what … are we going to hope that the G8, the G7, the G20 or whatever will control the agribusiness and will stop what is happening, fix it? Are we hoping that Monsanto and Walmart will have a kind of moral epiphany and will stop doing what they are doing?
DH: I think the reality is that people aren’t hoping at all. But what they are fearing is, firstly, that there are 7 billion people on the planet now. People say to me, ‘You can’t feed that number of people without the agro-industrial complex: the only reason why the global population has got so big is because these agro-industrial technologies have enabled us to feed so many more people than the Earth can feed on its own.’ That’s the first fear that is very prevalent, when people think about this. And the second is almost a culture-level fear, that says, ‘Peasant life is nasty, brutish and short – and you’re saying that we should go back to that life?’
GE: I can understand, because that has been constructed in our minds for many, many years, particularly in the North. Since the 1970s it was constructed that way. That’s when hunger became the great business of the century and justified all the subsidies for food in Europe and the United States: they started to talk about ‘food power’ and hunger and all these kind of things.
But we need to see the alternative picture. First, one figure that is not well known: more than half of what we eat today in the world is produced by the people themselves. Not by Monsanto, not by agribusiness, not by the big companies: it’s by the people themselves. The Via Campesina, the biggest organisation in history, they have been talking about this figure. They know it, because they are part of these millions that are producing their own food. They defined the idea of ‘food sovereignty’: it’s not the market and it’s not the state that must tell us what to eat, but we must find it and produce it by ourselves.
But this is not going to be the back-to-the-land movement of the ’60s. First of all, because now more than 50% of the people on Earth are urban, we cannot produce food for everyone in the countryside. We need to produce food in the cities. And the beautiful thing is that it is absolutely possible. One hundred years ago, Paris was exporting food. Today, people are discovering that producing food in the cities is not only very simple but it is very beautiful.
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GE: As you know, one Mr. Crapper invented for Queen Victoria what we now know as the water closet, the first toilet and the whole thing of the sewerage, and this clearly reformulated the whole urban environment. First of all I must say that this is very, very modern. In 1945, in the most advanced country, which was the United States, only a third of the people had sewerage. This clearly is something very modern that reformulated all the cities and created a real addiction to the flush toilet. There are some people who cannot live without the flush toilet. For them, it’s a fundamental need. But now there are many environmentalists seeing that it was a very wrong decision, that it was a very stupid technology, that it is doing more damage than cars to the environment. When you mix these three marvellous substances, shit, urine and water, you are creating a poisonous cocktail that contaminates everything. It’s a problem of public health, of cost, everything…
DH: It’s a waste of all three things that can, if handled better, be put to better use. But it’s not just that, it’s that once you have the flush toilet you are connected to a system. Think of the nightmare of The Matrix, with everyone in their tanks, stuck full of tubes, plugged in to this virtual reality. Part of why that nightmare haunts us it that is such a good description of what we take for granted: the kind of relationship we have to infrastructure is a relationship of dependence on unthinkably large, centralised systems. It’s not just that we are born into incubators where we’re stuck full of tubes, or that we die stuck full of tubes. It’s that we plug ourselves in to tubes at critical junctures in our life, every day.
GE: We wash our hands and that’s it, we don’t see how we are connected. When we create our composting toilets, this is about how to disconnect your stomach from any centralised bureaucracy. What is the feeling of political revelation that you have, when you don’t have those tubes and when you are not controlled!
DH: You’re dealing with your own shit.
GE: That is the fundamental question. Are we ready to deal with our own shit?
Another story that usually is very counterproductive, I don’t know if you can include this. I was visiting a magnificent group of people in Mexico City after the earthquake, reconstructing their houses. It was really an incredible group of 48 families working together for the reconstruction. I came one day to visit them with a colleague from my office, a woman, and then we found them very excited, in an assembly, discussing the problem. That morning one guy, one of them, attempted to rape a four-year-old girl of the community. He could not conclude the thing because they found him when he was trying to do that. They of course immediately examined the girl, the girl has no physical harm, and then they had him in a room and they were discussing what to do.
My colleague and I say, ‘But what are you discussing? You need to call the police to put this guy in jail!’
And then they immediately reject this, saying, ‘What is the purpose? To transform him into a criminal?’
Then my colleague did not know what to say. ‘Well, at least you need to send him to a psychiatric clinic because he’s a very sick guy. It’s a clear pathology.’
‘What is the purpose? To transform him into a fool?’
She did not know how to react and they continued discussing and then someone suggested, ‘Let’s send him to another neighbourhood.’ And then the others say, ‘No, that will be absolutely unfair for the other neighbours, because they will not know what was happening.’
And then, after four hours of discussion they came to the conclusion, let’s keep him, if the mother of the girl accepts. Then the mother accepted and the guy stayed.
Ten years later, I came back, I saw the girl was flourishing with an incredible amount of love that she got in the neighbourhood. The guy had married with another young woman of the place and they said she had already two children and they said they became the best neighbours of the group.
I’m telling this terrible story just to ask this question: are we ready to deal with our own shit? Because it is not just the physical shit, it’s the moral shit.
DH: The metaphor is so close because the institutional way of dealing with such a situation, whether it’s through the courts or through the psychiatric system, has the apparent virtue of allowing everyone else to wash their hands. It is pulling the chain and the shit is being taken somewhere else. It looks clean and powerful and efficient. But what are the chances of the shit actually being allowed to decay into something that contributes to the ongoing life of the community, rather than coming back to haunt it?
Published in Dark Mountain: Issue 4.
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Coming to Our Animal Senses: A Conversation with David Abram
In the opening pages of The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram stands in the night outside his hut in Bali, the stars spread across the sky, mirrored from below in the water of the rice paddies, and countless fireflies dancing in between. This disorientating abundance of wonder is close to what many of his readers have felt on encountering Abram’s words and his way of making sense of the world.
Philosopher, ecologist and sleight-of-hand magician: even the barest outline of his work already suggests the webs he spins between worlds, the unexpected patterns of connection that make his books unique. As a college student in the 1970s, he took a year out to travel across Europe as a street magician, ending up in London where he hung out with the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, exploring how the magician’s craft of playing with the attention might help open connections with people whose levels of distress placed them beyond the reach of clinical practitioners. Later, he travelled to Nepal and Southeast Asia, to study the healing role of traditional magicians; once again, his own craft opened possibilities for conversation where the professional anthropologist would not have been welcome.
From those encounters, he found himself drawn beyond the relationship of magic and medicine into larger questions about the ongoing negotiation between the human and the more-than-human world. This is the landscape he explores in The Spell of the Sensuous, which draws together a re-understanding of animism – rejecting the supernatural projections of missionaries and anthropologists – with a distinctive take on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. If that sounds heavy going, the book is also woven with passages of extraordinary beauty in which Abram relates his own encounters with the wider-than-human world in all its strangeness. And at the heart of it is the deep question of how we became so distanced from our surroundings, so unaware of ourselves as animals in a living world, as to become capable of rationalising the destruction which surrounds us?
Thirteen years passed between the publication of Abram’s first book and the arrival of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (2010). The length of time perhaps reflects the priority he gives to the spoken and the embodied, his refusal to accept the dominance of the written word. (As Anthony McCann, who first introduced me to The Spell of the Sensuous, muses, ‘Chances are, most of the helpful things that have been thought and spoken throughout our history were never written down, and most of the things that have been written down might not be all that helpful.’) When it came, however, the new book was if anything more ambitious.
‘A central question was: what if we were to really honour and acknowledge the fact that we are animals?’ he explains. ‘How would we think, or speak, about even the most ordinary, taken-for-granted aspect of the world, like shadows, or gravity, or houses, or the weather? So much of the language we’ve inherited is laden with otherworldly assumptions. So many of our patterns of speech, so many of its phrases, so many of the stories embedded in our ways of speaking, hold us in a very cool and aloof relation to the rest of the animate earth that enfolds us. Can we find ways of speaking that call us back into rapport and reciprocity with the other beings, the other shapes and forms of this world?’
We met in Oxford, a strange place for such a conversation; a city which epitomises the heights and the strange coldnesses of ‘civilisation’. But from the moment we spot each other across Radcliffe Square, a pocket of warmth and wildness seems to open up. We spend a couple of hours exploring and eating breakfast, before sitting down at last in the gardens of New College, in sight of the old city wall, to film a conversation that would ramble across our mutual fascinations and our desire to make sense of the situation of the world.
What stays with me is the heightened sense of animality which you come away with after spending time with Abram. Later that afternoon, I stepped off the coach in central London and walked down Oxford Street, aware of myself as an animal among other animals, all of us always already reading each other in deep ways which go back thousands of generations.
DH: It’s funny that we’re sitting where we are, because one of the ways I’ve talked about Uncivilised writing is as writing which comes from or goes beyond the city limits, which negotiates with the world beyond the human Pale. And in The Spell of the Sensuous, you go to meet these traditional sorcerers, to learn about their role within the human community, but you notice how often they live outside or on the edge of human settlements. And it’s a stance that recurs in the writers and thinkers who have inspired me – Alan Garner talks about the mearcstapa, the boundary-walker, and there is a text in which Ivan Illich calls himself a zaunreiter, a hedge-straddler, an old German word for witch.
DA: Ah yes, the hagazussa (from whence we get our word ‘hag’), which means: she who rides the hedge. The magicians are those who ride the boundary between the human world and the more-than-human world of hawks and spiders and cedar trees, those who tend the boundary between the human community and the wider community in which we’re embedded. It seems to me that the human hubbub is always nested within a more-than-human crowd of elementals, a community composed first of the particular geological structures and rocks of our locale. The stones and minerals of each place give rise to certain qualities in the soil, and that soil invites a specific array of plants to seed themselves and take root there. Those shrubs and trees, in turn, provoke particular animals to linger and sometimes settle in that terrain, or at least to feast on their leaves and fruits as they migrate through that landscape. Those animals, plants, and landforms are our real neighbours, the folks with whom we need to be practicing real community, if we want to be living well in any place.
DH: One of the things I get from your writing is the sense of the abundance of the natural world. It strikes me that a lot of environmentalism has the opposite quality, that we often describe the world in terms of scarcity. The crises we face are expressed in terms of limits, shortages and scarceness of resources. So how do we make sense of the relationship between the hard walls against which our civilisation is hitting up, and the quality of endlessness in the world as you invite us to experience it?
DA: It’s a puzzle for me, as well. The term ‘resource’ always befuddles me. If we would simply drop the prefix, ‘‘re,’’ whenever we use the term, it would become apparent that we’re almost always talking about ‘sources’, like springs bubbling up from the unseen depths. But when we put that little prefix in front of the word, and speak of things as ‘resources’, we transform the enigmatic presence of things into a reserve, a stock of materials simply waiting for us to use. When we conceive it as a stock of stuff, then there naturally comes a sense that that stock is limited, and bound to run out.
If I sense the things of this earth not as a resources but as sources, if I feel them as wellsprings bubbling out of the unknown depths, well, this is not to deny that many of those springs seem to be drying up. This is a horrific circumstance that we’ve gotten ourselves into. But the way beyond this mess has to involve, first, a reconceiving and a re-seeing and sensing of this wild-flowering world as something that cannot ever be fully objectified, a zone of unfoldings that can never be understood within a purely quantitative or measurable frame. This ambiguous biosphere, in its palpable actuality, is not so much a set of quantifiable objects and determinate processes as it is a dynamic tangle of corporeal agencies, of bodies – or beings – that have their own lives independent of ours. To feel this breathing biosphere as something other than an object is to begin to sense that there’s something inexhaustibly strange about this world, something uncanny and unfathomable even and especially in its everyday humdrum ordinariness. The way any weed or clump of dirt seems to exceed all of our measurements and our certainties. And it’s this resplendence of enigma and otherness, this uncanniness, that we eclipse whenever we speak solely in terms of scarcity and shortage.
DH: When you talk about how this world can never be adequately reduced to the quantitative and the measurable, it strikes me that there is a difficulty for environmentalism since it has become focused on climate change. Because Carbon Dioxide is so inaccessible to our senses, something we can only measure and not experience. So we are trying to train ourselves to a consciousness of something utterly outside of our direct experience.
DA: You point to a genuine problem in the broad environmental movement, one which mimics a tremendous problem within contemporary civilisation: our culture places a primary value on abstractions, on dimensions of the real of which we have no direct visceral or sensorial experience. We are born into a civilisation that straightaway tells us that the world we experience with our unaided senses is not really to be trusted, that the senses are deceptive…
DH: That realreality is this mathematical layer, which you can get at, if you use the right tools to probe beneath the experience of reality.
DA: If we probe beneath the ‘‘illusory’’ appearances. Exactly. So this world that we directly encounter, through its smells and textures and colours, comes to seem an illusory – or at best a secondary – realm, derivative from these more primary dimensions. Like the fascinating but largely abstract dimension of axons and dendrites and neurotransmitters washing across neuronal synapses – all of these hidden occurrences unfolding behind our brows – which many of our colleagues believe is what’s really going on when we imagine we’re experiencing the world: the apparent world that we experience is actually born of processes unfolding within the brain. Meanwhile, other colleagues will insist that what’s reallycausing our ways of feeling and tasting and touching are molecular patterns and processes tucked inside the nuclei of our cells; that is to say, our experience is primarily caused and coded for by the nucleotide sequences in our genome, by the way certain strands of DNA are transcribed and translated into the proteins that compose us and catalyse all our behaviours.
Still other comrades of ours, working in laboratories very different from those of the molecular biologists and the neurologists, will insist that what’s reallytrue about the world is what’s happening in the subatomic dimension of mesons and gluons and quarks.
So the world of our direct experience seems always to be explained by these other, ostensibly truer and realer dimensions which are nonetheless hidden behind the scenes, and so our felt encounter with one another and with the ground underfoot, and with the wind gusting past our face, is always marginalised…
DH: …and mistrusted.
DA: …and one can sense, perhaps, that this is the very origin, the secret source of the ecological mayhem and misfortune that has befallen our world. Because it’s so hard, even today, to mobilise people to act on behalf of the last dwindling wild river, or the last swath of a great forest that is about to be clear-cut, since people no longer feel any deep affinity with the sensuous, palpable earth. Their allegiance is elsewhere, their fascination is held by these other dimensions, which seem more trustworthy and true than this very ambiguous, difficult, and calamity-prone earth that they share with the other species.
And although many of the experts who speak in this manner – relegating the sensuous world to a kind of secondary or derivative status – are avowed atheists, and although they will rail passionately against the creationists and any others who they think are caught up in a superstitious worldview, this approach that privileges abstract dimensions, whether subatomic or genetic, over the ambiguous world of our direct experience has much in common with old theological notions. It’s deeply kindred to the old assumption that the sensuous, earthly world is a sinful, problematic, and derivative realm, fallen away from its truer source – from a heaven hidden beyond all bodily ken, to which the human spirit must aspire.
DH: This reminds me of a conversation that I got into on Twitter last week. Somebody posted: ‘All children are born anarchists and atheists.’ I sent it on and I said, ‘I think they’re born anarchists and animists.’
DA: Well, there’s a lot of evidence that what we call ‘animism’ – which simply names the intuition that everything is animate, that each thing has its own active agency – that this is a kind of spontaneous experience for the human organism…
DH: A sort of default state of consciousness?
DA: A default, baseline state for the human creature. It doesn’t really seem to be a belief system, but rather a way of speaking in accordance with our spontaneous, animal experience. Since, for all their differences, the various entities I meet – brambles, stormclouds, squirrels, rivers – all seem to be composed of basically the same stuff as myself, well, since I am an experiencing, sensitive creature, so this maple tree must also have its own sensitivities and sensibilities. Doubtless very different from mine (and different even from those of a birch or an oak) but nonetheless this tree seems to have its own agency, its own ability to affect the space around it and the other creatures nearby. And to affect me.
Given the ubiquitous nature of this animistic intuition among the diverse indigenous peoples of this planet – given its commonality among so many exceedingly diverse and divergent cultures – it would seem that this is our birthright as humans. To feel that we are alive within a palpable cosmos that is itself alive through and through. From an indigenous perspective (and even, I would say, from the creaturely perspective of our sensate bodies) there’s no getting underneath the felt sense of the world’s multiplicitous dynamism to some basically inanimate, inert stratum of matter; rather, to the human animal, matter itself seems to be animate – or self-organising – from the get-go. Such is the most commonplace human experience: in the absence of intervening technologies, we feel ourselves inhabiting a terrain that is shot through with sensitivity and sentience (albeit a sentience curiously different, in many ways, from our own).
DH: And yet to articulate that is immediately to be told that you’re projecting: that this is Romantic, sentimental, anthropomorphic nonsense!
DA: The assumption and the knee-jerk objection that comes toward us, over and again, is that such a participatory way of speaking involves merely a projection of human consciousness onto otherwise inanimate, insentient materials or beings. This reaction often seems (at least to me) a kind of wilful blindness and deafness to anything that does not speak in words; a resolute refusal to hear these other voices as anything other than meaningless sounds. Humans alone have meaningful speech; the sounds of birds and humpback whales and crickets (to say nothing of the whoosh of the wind in the willows, or even the night-time hiss of tires rolling along the rain-drenched pavement) cannot possibly carry their own meanings! There is no openness to the likelihood that these other sounds are genuinely expressive, and communicative, although they carry meanings that we humans cannot necessarily interpret or translate. Certainly we cannot know, in any clear way, what these other utterances – of redwing blackbirds, for instance, or of an elk bugling on an autumn evening – are saying. But nonetheless, if we listen with our own animal ears, uncluttered with assumptions, then these other voices do move us as they reverberate through our flesh. And if we listen year after year, watching closely the patterned movements of elk, perhaps apprenticing ourselves to the ways of the herd as it migrates with the seasons, then one day we may find ourselves spontaneously hearing, like an audible glimpse, some new edge of the meaning embodied in that bugling call.
DH: One of the things I become more aware of over time as a speaker is the extent to which language acts as a frequency on which something else is being transmitted. The experience of the audience, or of the other people with whom we’re interacting, is as much an experience of something else that passes through words, in the way that music passes through a string on a cello or on a guitar, as it is of the rational, the formal content of language.
DA: Yes, even in this conversation, it’s as if the denotative meaning of our words rides on the surface of a much richer, improvisational interchange unfolding between our two animal bodies. There is a rhythm and a tonality and a melody to our speaking, like two birds gradually tuning to one another; via the soundspell of our phrases, and the rise and fall of our singing, our voices affect and inform one another. I suspect that much of the real meaning that arises in any genuine, human dialogue originates in this inchoate layer, far below the dictionary meanings of our words, where our bodies are simply singing with one another.
But also, I was thinking of our brothers and sisters who insist that human consciousness is so profoundly different from anything else we encounter in the surrounding landscape, and that our sense of the life that we meet in a lightning-struck tree or in a lichen-encrusted rock or even a rusting, overgrown bulldozer is entirely just a projection – their insistence that the world be seen from outside, as it were, by a human consciousness that isn’t really continuous with the world…
DH: That echoes the role of God, in a monotheistic cosmology…
DA: It does, yes, it’s a kind of bodiless view from outside the world, one which flattens all of this diverse, multiplicitous otherness into just one kind of presence, the so-called material world, a mass of basically inert or mechanically-determined stuff. But as soon as we allow that things have their own agency, their own interior animation – their own pulse, so to speak – it becomes possible to notice how oddly different these various beings are from one another and from ourselves. If I insist that rocks have no life or agency whatsoever, then I can’t easily notice or account for the way that a slab of granite affects me very differently than does a sandstone boulder, or the manner in which each influences the space around it in a distinct way. But as soon as I allow that that rock is not entirely inert, then I can begin to feel into the very different style and activity of that sandstone relative to the granite’s way of being, or to that of a piece of marble. So this is really a way of beginning to access the irreducible plurality of styles, or velocities, or rhythms of being, of waking up to the manifold otherness that surrounds us, rather than reducing all this multiplicity to one flattened-out thing, ‘the environment’.
I can’t really feel into, or enter into relationship with, an inert object. I cannot suss out the changing mood of a winter sky if I deny that the sky has moods.
DH: It feels like what we’re talking about are ‘ways of seeing’, to use John Berger’s phrase – or ways of sensing, since it’s not only about the visual. That takes me to something I was thinking about before. It’s a painting from 1649 of a man called William Petty, who was Professor of Anatomy here in Oxford, at the ripe age of twenty eight. I’ve been fascinated by this painting since I stumbled across it in the National Portrait Gallery, years ago. In the painting, he’s holding a skull in one hand, and in his other hand is an anatomy textbook open at the drawing of the skull, and from where the hands are it’s as if you are watching the scales of the seventeenth-century tipping away from the symbolic and the physical, real skull, towards the new reality – quantitative, measured, anatomised, cut open to reveal its mathematical properties.
DA: Wow.
DH: And what’s remarkable is that Petty the anatomist stands between two other phases of Petty’s life. Before that, during the Civil War, he had been in Paris with Thomas Hobbes, studying optics. And this is the moment in which, as Illich discusses, you are passing from an earlier optics, in which the gaze is understood as something tactile, a reaching out towards what you are looking at, to a new, lens-based, passive-receptive understanding, which sees our eyes as cameras in our heads. So that’s where Petty was before he was here in Oxford, and afterwards, in the 1650s, he went with Cromwell to Ireland, where he carried out the first econometric survey of a country, after the bloody subjugation of Ireland by Cromwell’s forces. And so you have, in this one figure, the conjunction of the transition to a new way of seeing; the anatomical cutting open of reality to reveal the mathematical new reality, hidden behind the untrustworthy evidence of our senses; and the foundation of modern economics, which is bounded in the same assumption that the measurable is the real and that the fundamental character of reality is scarcity.
DA: It’s amazing to think of that one painting as presenting an image of the hinge between these realities.
DH: Yes. And I suppose where this takes us is back to how on earth we relate these things to the sense of urgency which characterises environmentalism, and the consciousness of the crises we’re facing. Because what I hear people saying is, ‘Come on, we’ve got five years to save the planet. It’s hard enough getting people to change their bloody light bulbs, and you want to up-end 350 years of people’s worldviews? This is self-indulgence!’ So what do we say back?
DA: It’s a tough one, because it’s trying to speak across such different bodily stances, such different ways of standing in the face of this outrageous event breaking upon us, rolling like a huge wave over the earth. But the idea that we can master this breaking wave, and control it, and figure out how we’re going to engineer a way out of this cataclysm, is an extension of the same thinking that has brought us into it.
DH: It presents us with a choice: either we can get control of this reeling system, or we have to give in to despair. To me, what I’ve been looking for – and what Dark Mountainis rooted in – is the search for hope without control. And I know, at the level of my human experience, that it’s only when I let go of control that I can find a deep hope, as opposed to a wishful thinking.
DA: Control or despair, it’s a false choice. Total certainty or complete hopelessness – they amount to much the same thing, and they’re both useless. But also, the insistence that we’ve got just five years, or we’ve got twenty years, or two – these are all framed within the mindset of a linear, progressive time that is itself very different from the kind of timing, or rhythm, that the living land itself inhabits. The other animals seem to align themselves within the roundness of time, a curvature that our bodies remain acquainted with, although our thinking minds have become mighty estranged from this cyclical sense of time’s roundness. The round dance of the seasons, the large and small cycles of the sun and the moon. Certainly, there’s no way through the onrushing instability of climate change and global weirding without at least beginning to recouple our senses into the larger body of the sensuous, without beginning to tune ourselves and our intelligence back into these larger turnings and rhythms, even as the seasonal cycles, in many places, are beginning to shift.
Sensory perception is like a silken thread that binds our separate nervous systems into the wider ecosystem. Perception, beginning to attend to the shifting nuances around us, taking the time to slow down, rather than speeding up to meet the urgency – slowing down to notice what is actually happening in the local terrain, even if it’s a buzzing cityscape that we inhabit, noticing whatever weed is breaking up through the pavement at this spot, or on which skyscraper ledge the peregrines are nesting, or why these apples have so much less taste than they did when I was growing up, and what that says about the soils in which these apples are growing, or how they’re grown. I won’t notice those tastes if I’m motivated only by a frantic sense of urgency and of time running out.
DH: One of the phrases from the manifesto which I’ve held onto most is when we say, ‘The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop.’ And I’d add to that, that the end of the world as we know it is also the end of a way of knowing the world. Whatever happens, to the extent that we are still going to be here, we’re going to live through the end of a lot of the certainties that characterised the ways of knowing the world that have served us for the past few lifetimes. And that’s not a utopian goal, that’s something that is going to happen whether or not we manage to do anything about climate change.
DA: That’s right, and as these very conventional, long-standing ways of knowing begin to spring leaks – and in many cases the leaks are already turning into floods – this also suggests a replenishment of much older and deeper and more primordial sensibilities that we’ve cut ourselves off from for many centuries, and in some cases for several millennia.
But how do you approach the shuddering aspect of this turning point that also entails that there will be many, many losses? Not just losses of facile pleasures that we’ve come to take for granted, but the disappearance or dissolution of whole ecosystems, and the dwindling and vanishing of myriad other species from the lifeworld, other creatures with whom we’ve sustained a kind of conviviality, throughout the long stretch of our human tenure within this biosphere. We find ourselves living, today, in a world of increasing wounds. In the course of my speaking, hither and yon, I encounter many people who are frightened of their direct, animal experience, who are terrified at the mere thought of trusting their senses, and of stepping into a more full-bodied way of knowing and feeling, because they intuit that a more embodied and sensorial form of awareness would entail waking up to so many grievous losses. People sense that grief and they immediately retreat, they pull back and say ‘no, I want to stay more in the abstract.’ Or they want to retreat into relation with their smartphone or their iPad, taking refuge in the new technologies with their virtual pleasures. Because they quite rightly sense that there is some grief lurking on the other side of such a corporeal awakening.
What they don’t realise is that the grief is just a threshold, a necessary threshold through which each of us needs to step. The first moment of coming to our senses is indeed one of grief. Yet it’s as though the parched soil underfoot needs the water of our tears for new life to begin to grow again.
DH: Well, the soil of ourselves needs us to go through that. But one goes through it, into being alive and being present.
DA: It’s as if the grief is a gate, and our tears a kind of key, opening a place of wonder that’s been locked away. If we step through that gate we find ourselves slowly but with new pleasure being drawn into first one and then another and then a whole host of divergent relationships, each of which nourishes and feeds different aspects of our organism. We abruptly find ourselves in active relation and reciprocity with dragonflies and hooting owls, and with the air flooding in at your nostrils, with streetlamps buzzing as they break down, and with gravity, and beetles. There’s a kind of eros that begins to spark up between your body and the other bodies or beings around you.
DH: I think it’s about a different relationship to time. Part of the numbness of the way of being in the world which has been orthodox in recent times is the enslavement of the present to the future, which to me is the core of the myth of Progress. So when people attack Dark Mountain for being gloomy and pessimistic, it bemuses me, because to me believing in Progress is absenting yourself from the joy of being alive now. And this is connected to the denial of death that is characteristic of modern culture. Part of the reason we have so much difficulty facing the ecological grief that is part of what it means to be alive right now is because we are terrified of our own deaths. And so much of the activity of our societies is a way of staying busy enough not to pass through the full entry into consciousness of the fact that you are going to die, and that this does not cancel out what makes being alive good.
DA: I think you’re right. This great fear and avoidance of our mortality. Not just of our death, however, because there’s also a tremendous terror of vulnerability; a real fear of being vulnerable in the present moment. If I’m fully here, where my fingers and my nose and my ears are residing, then I am subject to a world that is much bigger than me, exposed to other beings in it like yourself who can see me and perhaps disdain me. If I acknowledge and affirm my own animal embodiment, then I am vulnerable to the scorn of others, and to all the sorts of breakdowns and diseases and decay to which the body is susceptible. There are so many reasons to take flight from being really bodily here, deeply a part of the same world that we share with the other animals and the plants and the stones. So yes, a fear of being bodily present within a world that’s so much bigger than us, a world that has other beings in it that that can eat us, and ultimately will eat us. The palpable world, this blooming, buzzing, wild proliferation of shapes and forms that feed upon one another, yes, and yet also jive and dance with one another – this earthly cosmos that our work is trying to coax people into noticing – is not a particularly nice world. It’s not a sweet world. It’s shot through with shadows and predation and risk – it’s fucking dangerous, this place – but it’s mighty beautiful, it’s shudderingly beautiful precisely because it’s so shadowed and riven with difficulty.
DH: It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. Easiness and happiness and convenience are things we seem to have fallen into the habit of believing are worth pursuing. And yet, if we think about our most meaningful relationships, the people we love most closely, even the best of our relationships are not characterised by easiness and they’re not characterised by everything being happy ever after. Most of the relationships we will have in our lives are easier than the relationships that will mean most to us.
First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 2.
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Defusing the Apocalypse: A Response to John Gray
Published on the Dark Mountain Website, following John Gray’s review of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto in the New Statesman.
When Paul and I wrote the Dark Mountain manifesto, our hope was start a conversation. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been encouraged by how far this has spread, and by the range and thoughtfulness (in most cases) of the responses we’ve received.
In a good conversation, you don’t just reiterate the first thing you said: listening and engaging with how you are heard by others can lead you to explore further, think harder, revisit earlier attempts to put things into words. In that spirit, I want to pick up on one of the most recent and high profile contributions we have seen. A couple of weeks ago, in the New Statesman, the author and political philosopher John Gray published a detailed review of our manifesto – an unexpected honour for a small, self-published pamphlet. Gray is generous and, up to a point, sympathetic:
Much in contemporary thought is made up of myths masquerading as facts, and it is refreshing to see these myths clearly identified as such. The authors are right that none is more powerful than the idea that we are separate from the natural world, and free to use it as we see fit…
He questions, though, whether ‘civilisation’ can also be treated as a myth, and he detects in the manifesto a desire for ‘a cleansing catastrophe… a Romantic dream that history has proved wrong time and again.’
‘Romantic’ is a term that has been used more than once in criticism of this project, not all of it as measured and thoughtful as this review. The territory we are exploring comes with a danger of sliding into Romanticism – one we may not always have avoided successfully. It is easy to get carried away. Yet when Gray describes our perspective as ‘apocalyptic’, I think there is a misunderstanding going on, rooted in a difference between our understandings of ‘myth’ and of the role of the imagination in human history.
Of the various authors we mention in the manifesto, there is one I would want to reconsider. Not Conrad, whom Gray suggests we misread – but Cormac McCarthy, included in our list of ‘voices… rooted in a sense of place’. We have discussed The Road on this blog before: it is a remarkable novel, the work of a master craftsman who can work language like few of his contemporaries. Even so, I would hesitate to hold it up as an example of the kind of writing this project is about.
In fact, in my Long Now talk and elsewhere, I have used The Road as a marker for the imaginative challenge facing us. What McCarthy offers is the most brilliant literary expression of the nightmare which haunts our collective imagination. Its scenes present a photographic negative of the world as we know it, framed by the icons of contemporary civilisation: the man and boy push a shopping cart; the internal combustion engine may be almost extinct, yet their instincts drive them down a tarmac road; what may be the last ever can of CocaCola appears as a sacramental gift from the world before the never-quite-defined Fall.
At some level, though we may not wish to, we find it easy to imagine such a nightmare, because it validates one of the defining beliefs of our civilisation: that life without the supermarket and the superhighway is not liveable. What is harder is to imagine futures in which we do not have many of the things we take for granted, but in which life turns out still to be liveable. When we assert that the converging crises of our century present a cultural challenge, as distinct from the political and technological responses generally called for, it is this imaginative work which we have in mind. This is not about conjuring up apocalyptic visions, but defusing the apocalypse which already haunts us. As we put it in the principles which close the manifesto, ‘The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.’
Here, we hit what may be the basic difference between Gray’s position and ours: how much does the imagination matter? Do myths shape reality, or merely obscure it?
So far as I can tell, when Gray talks about myths, he sees them as a means by which people try to escape from facts: hence, the “dream-driven” nature of the human animal stands between it and any likelihood of sanity. Whereas the Dark Mountain attitude is that some dreams are saner than others and that myths serve us as a navigation aid. When we talk about “the myth of civilisation”, our issue is not that it is a myth, but that it is a bad myth: a map which has brought us a long way, but which no longer corresponds to the landscape, and never really did. As we write:
It has led the human race to achieve what it has achieved; and has led the planet into the age of ecocide. The two are intimately linked. We believe they must be decoupled if anything is to remain.
‘Uncivilisation’ is this process of decoupling, of reworking the myths by which we live.
Whether this matters depends on how we understand the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in shaping human history: to what extent is our fate dictated by human nature, biological drives, competition for resources? To what extent do our practices and beliefs also shape it? Gray believes overwhelmingly in the role of nature – and seems to regard any belief in a significant role for culture as humanist (in the sense of treating humans as uniquely exempt from nature) and utopian. It feels to me like there is a gap here.
Certainly, to view culture as a uniquely human phenomenon is humanist – but, along the lines of David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, I am inclined to see this as a starting point for a broader conception of culture, which is open to the cultural aspect of non-human behaviour.
As for Utopia, it is one thing to reject the pursuit of heaven on earth – and another to deny that some times and places are better to live in than others, and that the beliefs and practices of the people living there play a significant role in this. Gray doesn’t seem to regard this distinction as significant, which may be why his historical vision tends towards the monochrome – and sometimes towards what I think of as the CNN version of history, as when he claims (in Black Mass) that ‘over the long run war is as common as peace’. (An alien tuning in to CNN would doubtless conclude that humans spend a large amount of their time killing each other, but this would not make it true. As with news, so with history, war generates more column inches than peace.)
It seems to me that it is possible to share much of Gray’s critique of humanism and of utopian thinking, while taking a different attitude to the balance between nature and culture. Human nature, resource scarcity and other facts of this order are always modulated through a cultural layer which may substantially alter how they play out: ‘reality’, lived experience, is the result of these interactions, not a pure factual terrain underlying the delusion of culture. Some times and places are better to live in than others – and this is down (for example) not only to the material abundance or scarcity of things people depend on, but also to the social and cultural construction of scarcity, which has a great deal to do with the stories people tell each other about what the world is like.
The Dark Mountain Project is a cultural movement – both in the narrow sense, that it is primarily about the role of writers, artists and others who work with the imagination, and in the broad sense, that it is about the habits, beliefs, artefacts and practices by which we live and make meaning. We do not suggest that cultural responses should be the only responses to the crises we face, only that without them we may find ourselves in even greater trouble than we are already.
Hope and wishful thinking are often mistaken for each other. A great deal of sustainability talk is wishful thinking dressed up as hope, because people are too afraid to look directly at what they know about the situation we are in. If we really advocated, as Gray puts it, ‘[awaiting] disaster in the hope that the difficulties will magically disappear’, that would also be wishful thinking. For me, though, the ‘hope beyond hope’ which we write about is closer to what Ivan Illich described, interviewed at the time of the Brundtland Report, when he contrasted the vision of ‘sustainable development’ with the reality around him in Mexico:
Some novelists, like Doris Lessing in The Fifth Child, create a sense of the emergent future, of what kinds of relationships are possible in the ruins. There is a sense in Lessing’s writings of the frightening beings who have survival capacity.
It is fascinating to discover this shared experience of outsiders in post-earthquake, pre-ecological apocalypse Mexico City. There is something here of the taste of the gang, the ragpicker, the garbage dump dweller. Our difficulty is finding a language to speak about this alternative, because, contrary to professional wisdom, people with unmet basic needs are surviving with new forms of conviviality.
That is hardly a utopian picture, but it is one which includes the relentless human capacity for improvisation, for going on, for picking our way through the mess we make and continuing to find meaning in it all – beyond the point where the language of ‘sustainable development’ runs out of things to say.
There’s a great quotation, used by Gray as an epigraph for Black Mass, which makes me want to go and read Joseph de Maistre’s St Petersburg Dialogues, from which it is taken:
THE SENATOR: This is an abyss into which it is better not to look.
THE COUNT: My friend, we are not free not to look.That we could easily have used that in the Dark Mountain manifesto says something about the overlap between the territory we are exploring. In writing this, I have been conscious of places where I could be misconstruing Gray’s position. As the project unfolds, I hope there will be opportunities to continue this conversation with him and with others who raise questions or propose routes we haven’t thought of.