Feb 2, 2023·edited Feb 2, 2023Liked by Dougald Hine
Sounds like I'm going to have to listen to this one.
I wrote a thing about Monbiot and Regenesis and Machine Environmentalism myself a month or two back. It was interesting to see several people in the comments below saying that they had previously admired George but were now feeling very uneasy about his direction. To my mind, he has taken exactly the direction that he once attacked other 'ecomodernists' for walking.
I have a theory that covid has changed him (along, probably, with most of us.) Since the pandemic - which made him very ill, it seems - he has been much less tolerant of dissent, much keener on top-down technocratic solutionism, and much louder about the importance of 'protecting human health', defined in a particularly narrow way. Backed up by all the peer-reviewed science, of course. But he has always been a member of what your mentor Berger called 'the alternative ruling class', while posing as an outsider.
Good luck with the book tour! Are you coming to Ireland?
Ha, yes, hope you enjoy it! You do get a couple of name-checks along the way... After we'd recorded, it occurred to me that I should probably have fact-checked my claim that you and George once shared an allotment. Did that happen, or did I just dream it?
I'm sorry to hear the virus hit him so hard. He'd hinted at that in a couple of his recent pieces. But you're right that something has changed, or crystallised, for many of us during the Covid time, and that change is reflected in what we're talking about here. There's been a parting of the ways. I remember George showing up to the tenth anniversary Dark Mountain event, on friendly terms with everyone, and I can't imagine that happening now. Maybe it's that we'd spent a decade mapping out the fault line that we stood on opposite sides of, but now that fault has cracked wide open.
One way of making sense of this that I touch on the episode is through the lens of McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary. When I read or listen to George these days, my sense is of hearing the voice of the left-brain. I'm actually going to stay with McGilchrist for a couple of nights while I'm in the UK, so I hope to explore this line of thought a bit further, not as a personal analysis of George, because I don't think that would do any of us any good, but as a way of understanding the fork in the road and the different ways in which we are looking at the trouble around and ahead.
Anyway, sadly I'm not making it to Ireland on this tour – but let's make sure that happens when the paperback comes out!
We did share an allotment, and that fact has been thoroughly peer-reviewed.
It is definitely a left-right brain thing. The rising culture is definitively left brain, and so is George. He used to understand the importance of other ways of seeing, but now he has taken to dismissing them. He sounds like Hitchens or Dawkins or other such public school types now. Probably we all dig in as get older.
I think you're right that we outlined the fork in the road. These days people are choosing which path to walk.
There's a word here I've been lingering on and your latest post, which was particularly fine, brought me back to it. The word is "rising". You've always been bracing in your dismissal of wishful ways of talking that claim to see some more beautiful world rising around us, if only we open our eyes or believe hard enough or whatever. But it gave me pause to think of the Machine culture (which is scarcely a "culture" at all) as rising. I guess I think of it as borne along by a momentum that seems unstoppable, yet surprisingly short on true believers. And then I came to the image of Babel, and I thought, is the tower rising or falling, or both at once, its fall written into its rise? Nicholas Wilkinson would pull me up on the leap of faith involved in claiming the inevitability of the fall, and it's certainly nothing I can prove, yet I do believe it. The beautiful new piece from Flat Caps & Fatalism (which feels like a twin to your latest) catches something of this, perhaps, if these different ways of seeing are related to the different ways of inhabiting time that FC&F describes.
I mean I don't think it's going to just carry on. I just think it's possible that the next thing to rise will rise out of it, not out of its ashes... and that the intuition about the fall belongs to another world or another time and not to mechanical time - as the FFatalism piece calls it. Or to historical or geological time either.
When I first read the Dark Mountain manifesto, and the Robinson Jeffers poem quoted in it, I assumed it was talking about a mountain that had always existed and that we had maybe always been descending - or ascending and descending - since, I don't know, at least the Great Oxygenation Event... It only occurred to me recently that perhaps that wasn't what you meant when you wrote it - or what he meant either.
There seem to be a growing gang of environmentalists who have more in common with WEF anti-democratic globalists than any kind of getting back to the garden. How can anyone really believe that having all your food made in factories by global corporations, who can then control the ingredients, the price, the availability, is a positive way forward for us? Brave New World was supposed to be a warning not a manual. George is in this camp. If we’ve done one thing wrong it is losing our connection with nature. Living in a city and eating chemically produced slop as George seems to advocate is just taking us further down the wrong path.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had a long time ago with Gustavo Esteva, the Mexican activist and "deprofessionalised intellectual" who was a friend of Ivan Illich. There was something he said that unsettled me at the time, but has made more sense in hindsight. I think it offers a clue to how the focus on climate change (and especially the way that climate change is represented, which draws our attention towards the global rather than the specific) is a significant part of how environmentalists end up on this path. What I've tried to do in At Work in the Ruins is open up a conversation about how else we can make sense of and respond to the trouble the world is in, including the part of that trouble that shows up as climate change, without either pivoting into denial or getting sucked into the logic that disturbs you and me in the kind of environmentalism you're describing here.
Anyhow, here's the bit I'm thinking of from the conversation with Gustavo – and the full link is at the bottom:
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.
Monbiot is an example of Kaczynski's "the system's neatest trick" whereby progressive ideas are actually just what the industrial superorganism is after. Why have messy, disorganised, polluting farms when you can have clean, efficient food in The World Without Sin (as Gordon White put it)?
I have to admit I've read almost nothing of Kaczynski, though Paul K once prodded me to do so and tell him what I could find there to disagree with.
The thing is, it takes a lot of work to get far enough inside someone's model of reality to see what becomes visible and possible from there, as well as to find its limits and blindspots. (This is, I realise, similar to the point I made in the post and on the podcast about Monbiot's carefully constructed polemics that are presented as simply a matter of facts, and the skill and knowledge it takes to get inside an argument delivered in this fashion.) Given the amount of work it takes, one reasonable shortcut is to look at where this model of reality has taken someone and judge by that whether or not you want to go there.
Which is my longwinded way of agreeing with James, I guess! Yet none of this is to say that the line about "the system's neatest trick" doesn't capture something that's true to what we're looking at here, that tendency that Gordon evokes so powerfully as The World Without Sin.
As one of my teachers used to say, "The trouble with Gurus is never the bits that they have right." Or (the same teacher, more provocatively), "You know, Hitler was right about a lot of stuff..." My way of going with this is to assume that everyone, me included, is wrong about a lot of stuff, to pick up the bits that seem right, without getting too attached to who they come from and what else that person might want me to believe. Also, it's rare to come across a thought that has only been voiced once or has a single point of origin, so sometimes a good move is to look for who else had that thought, who didn't bundle it together with other thoughts that led them to send bombs or whatever.
Well, he did what he thought he needed to do, which certainly isn't what I would, but his writing speaks to me nonetheless.
I thought Regenesis was a book of two halves: the first bit a solid critical look at the situation and the shortcomings of the alternatives he selected, then ...rapture is what springs to mind. He brushes aside concerns about side-effects and who bankrolls the technology, and gushes about The Answer. I was angry for weeks afterwards. It felt like betrayal.
Just reading Paul K's comnent on the allotment, it seems that both Paul and George have looked into the abyss and taken refuge in opposite sanctuaries: technology and the divine. There were two paths from the allotment, maybe, but only one way home.
Thanks, Benn. That's a good summary of Regenesis. As Ed said in the podcast, the "reveal" in the second half of the book is quite disorienting. I'm sure it's left a lot of people puzzled or angry or both.
Going back to Kaczynski, I was laying it on a bit thick yesterday. Another rule of thumb that I've found helpful is, "I don't have to trust someone in order to learn from them." In a time when lots of people seem to operate by a logic of contamination, dissociating themselves from any thinker who doesn't hold the "right" view on X, Y and Z, I think a willingness to say "I don't agree with what he did, but his writing speaks to me" is a move in the direction of sanity. So fair play!
Kaczynski's theoretical orientation on technology and 'civilization', what little I've seen of it, often makes good sense. But his socio-political praxis was delusionally wrongheaded (and wronghearted). I'm as passionate a revolutionary as anyone has ever been, I suspect. But my praxis is to send flowers, not bombs.
It's a weirdly named thing, prefigurative politics. But it makes sense to me -- heart and head. It makes me want to live and be the change I want to see in the world, and to support and nurture others who hold a similar and resonant vision.
Dougald, in all sincerity, you are perhaps my favorite living model of this spirit of praxis, which in your case appears mostly as courageous sincerity and deeply soulful reflection, and the sharing of all of that with the world. I'm so looking forward to your book!
You're too kind, James – and I'm always a little wary of being a model for anything, knowing all too well my feet of clay. But I'm glad you're finding such resonance in what I'm writing and the web of conversations we're weaving here. Hope your copy of the book gets there soon!
While I understand the whole paid subscribers thing, I can't help wondering if things might work out just as well for you financially if you gave your writing in Substack as a gift while actively welcoming gifts -- not in 'return', but in circulation and flow.
I tend not to subscribe to online publications because my work (full time) is volunteer work, so my budget is very tight. But, still, I'd be inclined to send a one time donation occasionally -- a small one, of course.
Thanks, James. I appreciate the invitation to reflect on this and to share a little more of my thinking. Indeed, I've had in mind for a while to write a post about how I approach money and creative work and my relationship with those who read what I write, starting from my early experiences as a street musician. So you've nudged that up to the top of my to-write list!
The bit that's worth saying here and now is that, while I've not expressed this clearly, I think of the relationship between the public posts and the ones for paid subscribers as more complex than just a matter of creating artificial scarcity in order to get a return on my writing work. What I'm seeking is two different layers of relationship, reflecting different degrees of engagement with and support for the work I'm doing.
With the outer layer, I want to share my public work and announcements, without overwhelming subscribers. With the inner layer, I want to be able to write more intimately than I would in something that was going out onto the public web, assuming a closer engagement and deeper interest in my work.
Maintaining that distinction feels healthy to me – necessary, in fact. And, as the default means by which someone can step across the threshold into that layer of deeper engagement, the paid subscription seems a fine solution. (Again, I'll say a bit more about this when I write a post on this theme.) But – and it's a significant but – the default means shouldn't be the only means.
I like the idea that one of the other means of stepping across that threshold could be to send a one-time donation and I'll have a look at a good way of enabling that. (I did have a Patreon page for a while, but their system is also based on monthly donations, and running that alongside a separate free email list worked nowhere near as well as publishing through Substack, either economically or creatively.)
Meanwhile, James, I'm gifting you a "paid" subscription (we need better words for this, right?) so you'll get all the posts from now on – and I look forward to our ongoing conversations.
Keep that nudged up. Me and Sofia Bustamante converse this, as we speak, in our Weekly Calls, Wednesdays. That generic convo has its meta-titling "Creator's Economy", and holds much deeper significance in the Greater Pic, coined (sic!) The Concept of Money, at large! We feel the times of a deepest of deepest renegotiation of the "conceptual infrastructure" of our times, and rethinking money is surely one of the key issues at hand! Cf. Yanis Varoufakis!
I have landed a conclusion similar to yours, where I actually limit my "supporters"* to a fixed number, to have that cap on the closer and deeper convos. Named, RE:LOVE THE WORLD Coffee Club :).
But, it can be the other way around! The one's in the deep circles of Informal Researching and crafting Transformative Ideas, NOT paying. And those taking part in that process beyond, taking part of the products of high value as the outcome, supporting - voluntarily, still! - subscribing and/or tipping - if they believe in your work and get/have/hold a value of the outcome of it. I have reached the conclusion, that money should not be an issue - at all - and feel paywalls limit the convo and in the end shows out to be counter-productive in relation to the Higher End - "saving planet and people" ...
I refer e. g. to The Guardian or Blankspot** here in Sweden, run by friends Martin Schibbye and Brit Stakston et al, holding nothing behind paywalls.
I end my generic view of money vs. making a living at the end of my daily posting here on Substack (with a bit of a back-log, to be fixed in the coming moments of living ..., with "life coming in between me, and the Daily Streak Self-Challenging ... ), for a more hands-on straightforwardness coupled with the philosophical connection to my view on money at large ...
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*http://buymeacoffee.com/relovetheworld for modelling - soon to be scaled up, beyond final product development of my publicistic outlets and formats - including a platforming mix of Substack, Medium and Wordpress Dot Com / Wordpress Dot Org
George’s techno solution very much reminds me of bill gates holding the competition to design the best composting toilet to improve third world sanitation.
I Shit in a bucket and cover it with sawdust and fine charcoal. Capital S on the Shit, because on my farm, Shit is the king and deserves much respect.
Bill’s toilet was something that will never be installed in a third world village. No one will know how to fix it. Let alone can they afford the energy to turn the thing on.
Big fan of Chris’s book and it’s inspired a lot of what I do here, but here I was getting a bit tired of him always talking about Regenesis, little did I realise George’s scathing essay about him. Forgive me Chris!
You guys did a great podcast on this, loved it. Thank you.
George’s techno solution very much reminds me of bill gates holding the competition to design the best composting toilet to improve third world sanitation.
I Shit in a bucket and cover it with sawdust and fine charcoal. Capital S on the Shit, because on my farm, Shit is the king and deserves much respect.
Bill’s toilet was something that will never be installed in a third world village. No one will know how to fix it. Let alone can they afford the energy to turn the thing on
Looking forward to seeing you and Ed do the next episode in person, Dougald! I'm remembering a rift which a certain paper showed up in the academic conservation landscape at Cambridge while I was there for my PhD and just before the different factions-cum-departmental research groups were due to be amalgamated into the new David Attenborough Building. Here's the paper: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1208742 This split between you(+) and George Monbiot(+) looks to me like a seriously amped-up version of that academic debate. I am not sure how much direct linkage there is - certainly George Monbiot's given talks in the D.A.B. so he may have discussed this paper with its authors and critics directly. I found the whole thing rather bewildering. "But both sides make good points and this is not a no-brainer" was probably the point of view of most conservationists but....
Thanks, Nicholas. Chris Smaje – who I finally met in person yesterday, which was great! – discusses the sharing/sparing debate in his book and, like you, arrives at an "it's not that simple" response. Whereas George seems to have arrived at "against sharing, against sparing (in as much as it means intensive agriculture)" position.
Oh right, I do actually remember that now! I kept away from the debate because it confused me. I think it might actually have had to do with how natural scientists and social scientists treat simplification. You can't go to all the work of carefully constructing a model and believe at the end of it that your model truly represents reality.
And yes, that G. Monbiot solo show, not had the experience and the deeper knowing until recently, since my 'socioenviropreneurial' flow has been at place in my Homeland Sweden. The Public "Green" Conversation / Public Debate at large, in Sweden - as you've been having the experience of since moving here, 'aight? - is more poly-voiced and far broader, with more Talking Heads than one, so to speak.
I've come to reach a concept to get this phenomenon scrutinized: I have been starting to converse "The Narcissistic Prison", where you get all too high on your own "Ego", and you experience a lock-in - neither thinking beyond nor listening deep. Not being able to step off your own cloud, so to speak. You get it, intuitively, I hope! Processing some more worked out Essaying on-topic. Generally: "Guru" is "Wisdom", not a Person!
At the end of the day - the only one holding the key to break out of that prison - is one 'self'.
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The dramaturgic you describe, with what in Sweden we define as "proffstyckare" (Professionals, getting paid to speak out their opinions), learn a game, rather than making social/societal progress, needed. Where neither the deeper P is reached, nor the authentic R is made in the "PR" processing.
On an intuitive level, that "End of Farming as we know it" topic, sounds insane to me. Diving deeper into his arguing, and the counter-arguing, in due time. And your voice-part of this.
ITMT - lobbying to get your book into the Swedish convos, where holding a tour, and passing Norrköping et al, is easier for logistical reasons :). Looking fwd to get your book at my Reading List!
Break a leg, Dougald!
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And yes - a meta note:
Holding our dialogue here in some kind of English, with its Lingua Franca Capabilities, haha! Even if The Swedish Speaking Substack Tribe could be held as Subversive in its own right. Heheheheeee .... ;)
I preordered your book on a whim (was connected to your Substack from Paul Kingsnorth’s) and have begun reading it. Thank you for such a thoughtful book. I am a new parent and my husband and I obviously don’t think the world is completely ending, or we wouldn’t have had children, but we talk often about how to structure our future lives and community with our kids’ future and the world’s future in mind. Looking forward to hearing the conversations about this book and I will be sharing with my networks.
Sounds like I'm going to have to listen to this one.
I wrote a thing about Monbiot and Regenesis and Machine Environmentalism myself a month or two back. It was interesting to see several people in the comments below saying that they had previously admired George but were now feeling very uneasy about his direction. To my mind, he has taken exactly the direction that he once attacked other 'ecomodernists' for walking.
https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-fourth-revolution
I have a theory that covid has changed him (along, probably, with most of us.) Since the pandemic - which made him very ill, it seems - he has been much less tolerant of dissent, much keener on top-down technocratic solutionism, and much louder about the importance of 'protecting human health', defined in a particularly narrow way. Backed up by all the peer-reviewed science, of course. But he has always been a member of what your mentor Berger called 'the alternative ruling class', while posing as an outsider.
Good luck with the book tour! Are you coming to Ireland?
Ha, yes, hope you enjoy it! You do get a couple of name-checks along the way... After we'd recorded, it occurred to me that I should probably have fact-checked my claim that you and George once shared an allotment. Did that happen, or did I just dream it?
I'm sorry to hear the virus hit him so hard. He'd hinted at that in a couple of his recent pieces. But you're right that something has changed, or crystallised, for many of us during the Covid time, and that change is reflected in what we're talking about here. There's been a parting of the ways. I remember George showing up to the tenth anniversary Dark Mountain event, on friendly terms with everyone, and I can't imagine that happening now. Maybe it's that we'd spent a decade mapping out the fault line that we stood on opposite sides of, but now that fault has cracked wide open.
One way of making sense of this that I touch on the episode is through the lens of McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary. When I read or listen to George these days, my sense is of hearing the voice of the left-brain. I'm actually going to stay with McGilchrist for a couple of nights while I'm in the UK, so I hope to explore this line of thought a bit further, not as a personal analysis of George, because I don't think that would do any of us any good, but as a way of understanding the fork in the road and the different ways in which we are looking at the trouble around and ahead.
Anyway, sadly I'm not making it to Ireland on this tour – but let's make sure that happens when the paperback comes out!
We did share an allotment, and that fact has been thoroughly peer-reviewed.
It is definitely a left-right brain thing. The rising culture is definitively left brain, and so is George. He used to understand the importance of other ways of seeing, but now he has taken to dismissing them. He sounds like Hitchens or Dawkins or other such public school types now. Probably we all dig in as get older.
I think you're right that we outlined the fork in the road. These days people are choosing which path to walk.
There's a word here I've been lingering on and your latest post, which was particularly fine, brought me back to it. The word is "rising". You've always been bracing in your dismissal of wishful ways of talking that claim to see some more beautiful world rising around us, if only we open our eyes or believe hard enough or whatever. But it gave me pause to think of the Machine culture (which is scarcely a "culture" at all) as rising. I guess I think of it as borne along by a momentum that seems unstoppable, yet surprisingly short on true believers. And then I came to the image of Babel, and I thought, is the tower rising or falling, or both at once, its fall written into its rise? Nicholas Wilkinson would pull me up on the leap of faith involved in claiming the inevitability of the fall, and it's certainly nothing I can prove, yet I do believe it. The beautiful new piece from Flat Caps & Fatalism (which feels like a twin to your latest) catches something of this, perhaps, if these different ways of seeing are related to the different ways of inhabiting time that FC&F describes.
I mean I don't think it's going to just carry on. I just think it's possible that the next thing to rise will rise out of it, not out of its ashes... and that the intuition about the fall belongs to another world or another time and not to mechanical time - as the FFatalism piece calls it. Or to historical or geological time either.
When I first read the Dark Mountain manifesto, and the Robinson Jeffers poem quoted in it, I assumed it was talking about a mountain that had always existed and that we had maybe always been descending - or ascending and descending - since, I don't know, at least the Great Oxygenation Event... It only occurred to me recently that perhaps that wasn't what you meant when you wrote it - or what he meant either.
There seem to be a growing gang of environmentalists who have more in common with WEF anti-democratic globalists than any kind of getting back to the garden. How can anyone really believe that having all your food made in factories by global corporations, who can then control the ingredients, the price, the availability, is a positive way forward for us? Brave New World was supposed to be a warning not a manual. George is in this camp. If we’ve done one thing wrong it is losing our connection with nature. Living in a city and eating chemically produced slop as George seems to advocate is just taking us further down the wrong path.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had a long time ago with Gustavo Esteva, the Mexican activist and "deprofessionalised intellectual" who was a friend of Ivan Illich. There was something he said that unsettled me at the time, but has made more sense in hindsight. I think it offers a clue to how the focus on climate change (and especially the way that climate change is represented, which draws our attention towards the global rather than the specific) is a significant part of how environmentalists end up on this path. What I've tried to do in At Work in the Ruins is open up a conversation about how else we can make sense of and respond to the trouble the world is in, including the part of that trouble that shows up as climate change, without either pivoting into denial or getting sucked into the logic that disturbs you and me in the kind of environmentalism you're describing here.
Anyhow, here's the bit I'm thinking of from the conversation with Gustavo – and the full link is at the bottom:
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.
https://dougald.nu/dealing-with-our-own-shit-a-conversation-with-gustavo-esteva/
Thank you Dougald for sharing this conversation. That last line is so powerful. I think, believe, hope, that more and more of us are getting that.
Monbiot is an example of Kaczynski's "the system's neatest trick" whereby progressive ideas are actually just what the industrial superorganism is after. Why have messy, disorganised, polluting farms when you can have clean, efficient food in The World Without Sin (as Gordon White put it)?
Too bad Kaczynsky was a murderous lunatic terrorist. Had he not been all of that I might consider his 'philosophy' with more depth of appreciation.
I have to admit I've read almost nothing of Kaczynski, though Paul K once prodded me to do so and tell him what I could find there to disagree with.
The thing is, it takes a lot of work to get far enough inside someone's model of reality to see what becomes visible and possible from there, as well as to find its limits and blindspots. (This is, I realise, similar to the point I made in the post and on the podcast about Monbiot's carefully constructed polemics that are presented as simply a matter of facts, and the skill and knowledge it takes to get inside an argument delivered in this fashion.) Given the amount of work it takes, one reasonable shortcut is to look at where this model of reality has taken someone and judge by that whether or not you want to go there.
Which is my longwinded way of agreeing with James, I guess! Yet none of this is to say that the line about "the system's neatest trick" doesn't capture something that's true to what we're looking at here, that tendency that Gordon evokes so powerfully as The World Without Sin.
As one of my teachers used to say, "The trouble with Gurus is never the bits that they have right." Or (the same teacher, more provocatively), "You know, Hitler was right about a lot of stuff..." My way of going with this is to assume that everyone, me included, is wrong about a lot of stuff, to pick up the bits that seem right, without getting too attached to who they come from and what else that person might want me to believe. Also, it's rare to come across a thought that has only been voiced once or has a single point of origin, so sometimes a good move is to look for who else had that thought, who didn't bundle it together with other thoughts that led them to send bombs or whatever.
Well, he did what he thought he needed to do, which certainly isn't what I would, but his writing speaks to me nonetheless.
I thought Regenesis was a book of two halves: the first bit a solid critical look at the situation and the shortcomings of the alternatives he selected, then ...rapture is what springs to mind. He brushes aside concerns about side-effects and who bankrolls the technology, and gushes about The Answer. I was angry for weeks afterwards. It felt like betrayal.
Just reading Paul K's comnent on the allotment, it seems that both Paul and George have looked into the abyss and taken refuge in opposite sanctuaries: technology and the divine. There were two paths from the allotment, maybe, but only one way home.
Thanks, Benn. That's a good summary of Regenesis. As Ed said in the podcast, the "reveal" in the second half of the book is quite disorienting. I'm sure it's left a lot of people puzzled or angry or both.
Going back to Kaczynski, I was laying it on a bit thick yesterday. Another rule of thumb that I've found helpful is, "I don't have to trust someone in order to learn from them." In a time when lots of people seem to operate by a logic of contamination, dissociating themselves from any thinker who doesn't hold the "right" view on X, Y and Z, I think a willingness to say "I don't agree with what he did, but his writing speaks to me" is a move in the direction of sanity. So fair play!
Kaczynski's theoretical orientation on technology and 'civilization', what little I've seen of it, often makes good sense. But his socio-political praxis was delusionally wrongheaded (and wronghearted). I'm as passionate a revolutionary as anyone has ever been, I suspect. But my praxis is to send flowers, not bombs.
Revolution 2.0
https://rword.substack.com/p/revolution-20
It's a weirdly named thing, prefigurative politics. But it makes sense to me -- heart and head. It makes me want to live and be the change I want to see in the world, and to support and nurture others who hold a similar and resonant vision.
Dougald, in all sincerity, you are perhaps my favorite living model of this spirit of praxis, which in your case appears mostly as courageous sincerity and deeply soulful reflection, and the sharing of all of that with the world. I'm so looking forward to your book!
You're too kind, James – and I'm always a little wary of being a model for anything, knowing all too well my feet of clay. But I'm glad you're finding such resonance in what I'm writing and the web of conversations we're weaving here. Hope your copy of the book gets there soon!
While I understand the whole paid subscribers thing, I can't help wondering if things might work out just as well for you financially if you gave your writing in Substack as a gift while actively welcoming gifts -- not in 'return', but in circulation and flow.
I tend not to subscribe to online publications because my work (full time) is volunteer work, so my budget is very tight. But, still, I'd be inclined to send a one time donation occasionally -- a small one, of course.
If I understand correctly, Patrion allows folks to make donations to writers and other creatives. https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606315-What-is-Patreon-
Thanks, James. I appreciate the invitation to reflect on this and to share a little more of my thinking. Indeed, I've had in mind for a while to write a post about how I approach money and creative work and my relationship with those who read what I write, starting from my early experiences as a street musician. So you've nudged that up to the top of my to-write list!
The bit that's worth saying here and now is that, while I've not expressed this clearly, I think of the relationship between the public posts and the ones for paid subscribers as more complex than just a matter of creating artificial scarcity in order to get a return on my writing work. What I'm seeking is two different layers of relationship, reflecting different degrees of engagement with and support for the work I'm doing.
With the outer layer, I want to share my public work and announcements, without overwhelming subscribers. With the inner layer, I want to be able to write more intimately than I would in something that was going out onto the public web, assuming a closer engagement and deeper interest in my work.
Maintaining that distinction feels healthy to me – necessary, in fact. And, as the default means by which someone can step across the threshold into that layer of deeper engagement, the paid subscription seems a fine solution. (Again, I'll say a bit more about this when I write a post on this theme.) But – and it's a significant but – the default means shouldn't be the only means.
I like the idea that one of the other means of stepping across that threshold could be to send a one-time donation and I'll have a look at a good way of enabling that. (I did have a Patreon page for a while, but their system is also based on monthly donations, and running that alongside a separate free email list worked nowhere near as well as publishing through Substack, either economically or creatively.)
Meanwhile, James, I'm gifting you a "paid" subscription (we need better words for this, right?) so you'll get all the posts from now on – and I look forward to our ongoing conversations.
Thanks for that gift, Dougald!
Your distinction, and all your shared thoughts here, make perfect sense to me.
Keep that nudged up. Me and Sofia Bustamante converse this, as we speak, in our Weekly Calls, Wednesdays. That generic convo has its meta-titling "Creator's Economy", and holds much deeper significance in the Greater Pic, coined (sic!) The Concept of Money, at large! We feel the times of a deepest of deepest renegotiation of the "conceptual infrastructure" of our times, and rethinking money is surely one of the key issues at hand! Cf. Yanis Varoufakis!
I have landed a conclusion similar to yours, where I actually limit my "supporters"* to a fixed number, to have that cap on the closer and deeper convos. Named, RE:LOVE THE WORLD Coffee Club :).
But, it can be the other way around! The one's in the deep circles of Informal Researching and crafting Transformative Ideas, NOT paying. And those taking part in that process beyond, taking part of the products of high value as the outcome, supporting - voluntarily, still! - subscribing and/or tipping - if they believe in your work and get/have/hold a value of the outcome of it. I have reached the conclusion, that money should not be an issue - at all - and feel paywalls limit the convo and in the end shows out to be counter-productive in relation to the Higher End - "saving planet and people" ...
I refer e. g. to The Guardian or Blankspot** here in Sweden, run by friends Martin Schibbye and Brit Stakston et al, holding nothing behind paywalls.
I end my generic view of money vs. making a living at the end of my daily posting here on Substack (with a bit of a back-log, to be fixed in the coming moments of living ..., with "life coming in between me, and the Daily Streak Self-Challenging ... ), for a more hands-on straightforwardness coupled with the philosophical connection to my view on money at large ...
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*http://buymeacoffee.com/relovetheworld for modelling - soon to be scaled up, beyond final product development of my publicistic outlets and formats - including a platforming mix of Substack, Medium and Wordpress Dot Com / Wordpress Dot Org
**https://blankspot.se, with other case stories here and there, similar
George’s techno solution very much reminds me of bill gates holding the competition to design the best composting toilet to improve third world sanitation.
I Shit in a bucket and cover it with sawdust and fine charcoal. Capital S on the Shit, because on my farm, Shit is the king and deserves much respect.
Bill’s toilet was something that will never be installed in a third world village. No one will know how to fix it. Let alone can they afford the energy to turn the thing on.
Big fan of Chris’s book and it’s inspired a lot of what I do here, but here I was getting a bit tired of him always talking about Regenesis, little did I realise George’s scathing essay about him. Forgive me Chris!
You guys did a great podcast on this, loved it. Thank you.
George’s techno solution very much reminds me of bill gates holding the competition to design the best composting toilet to improve third world sanitation.
I Shit in a bucket and cover it with sawdust and fine charcoal. Capital S on the Shit, because on my farm, Shit is the king and deserves much respect.
Bill’s toilet was something that will never be installed in a third world village. No one will know how to fix it. Let alone can they afford the energy to turn the thing on
Looking forward to seeing you and Ed do the next episode in person, Dougald! I'm remembering a rift which a certain paper showed up in the academic conservation landscape at Cambridge while I was there for my PhD and just before the different factions-cum-departmental research groups were due to be amalgamated into the new David Attenborough Building. Here's the paper: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1208742 This split between you(+) and George Monbiot(+) looks to me like a seriously amped-up version of that academic debate. I am not sure how much direct linkage there is - certainly George Monbiot's given talks in the D.A.B. so he may have discussed this paper with its authors and critics directly. I found the whole thing rather bewildering. "But both sides make good points and this is not a no-brainer" was probably the point of view of most conservationists but....
Thanks, Nicholas. Chris Smaje – who I finally met in person yesterday, which was great! – discusses the sharing/sparing debate in his book and, like you, arrives at an "it's not that simple" response. Whereas George seems to have arrived at "against sharing, against sparing (in as much as it means intensive agriculture)" position.
Oh right, I do actually remember that now! I kept away from the debate because it confused me. I think it might actually have had to do with how natural scientists and social scientists treat simplification. You can't go to all the work of carefully constructing a model and believe at the end of it that your model truly represents reality.
Greatest of luck with the tour, D.!
And yes, that G. Monbiot solo show, not had the experience and the deeper knowing until recently, since my 'socioenviropreneurial' flow has been at place in my Homeland Sweden. The Public "Green" Conversation / Public Debate at large, in Sweden - as you've been having the experience of since moving here, 'aight? - is more poly-voiced and far broader, with more Talking Heads than one, so to speak.
I've come to reach a concept to get this phenomenon scrutinized: I have been starting to converse "The Narcissistic Prison", where you get all too high on your own "Ego", and you experience a lock-in - neither thinking beyond nor listening deep. Not being able to step off your own cloud, so to speak. You get it, intuitively, I hope! Processing some more worked out Essaying on-topic. Generally: "Guru" is "Wisdom", not a Person!
At the end of the day - the only one holding the key to break out of that prison - is one 'self'.
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The dramaturgic you describe, with what in Sweden we define as "proffstyckare" (Professionals, getting paid to speak out their opinions), learn a game, rather than making social/societal progress, needed. Where neither the deeper P is reached, nor the authentic R is made in the "PR" processing.
On an intuitive level, that "End of Farming as we know it" topic, sounds insane to me. Diving deeper into his arguing, and the counter-arguing, in due time. And your voice-part of this.
ITMT - lobbying to get your book into the Swedish convos, where holding a tour, and passing Norrköping et al, is easier for logistical reasons :). Looking fwd to get your book at my Reading List!
Break a leg, Dougald!
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And yes - a meta note:
Holding our dialogue here in some kind of English, with its Lingua Franca Capabilities, haha! Even if The Swedish Speaking Substack Tribe could be held as Subversive in its own right. Heheheheeee .... ;)
I preordered your book on a whim (was connected to your Substack from Paul Kingsnorth’s) and have begun reading it. Thank you for such a thoughtful book. I am a new parent and my husband and I obviously don’t think the world is completely ending, or we wouldn’t have had children, but we talk often about how to structure our future lives and community with our kids’ future and the world’s future in mind. Looking forward to hearing the conversations about this book and I will be sharing with my networks.
Hi Amy! This is lovely to hear – and exciting to know that the book is starting to arrive out there in the world! Look forward to having you around.