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Paul Kingsnorth on environmentalism, converting to Christianity and his concerns about authoritarianism

Paul Kingsnorth on environmentalism, converting to Christianity and his concerns about authoritarianism

Elizabeth Oldfield speaks writer Paul Kingsnorth 21/09/2022

Elizabeth 

Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about our deepest values, the ways ideas shape us, and how we might build empathy and understanding for people who might be very different from ourselves. In these increasingly divided times, I have made a practice of listening deeply, and I hope with curiosity and openness through a range of guests from all manner of different professions, perspectives and points on the political spectrum. I want to understand the principles that drive them and how they’ve come to some of the conclusions that they’ve reached. I’m basically interested in the three–dimensional person behind what is usually a two–dimensional public persona. I’ve spoken to actors and archbishops, artists and activists, poets and politicians, farmers and philosophers. It’s my shame, I usually come with some prejudices and misconceptions, and almost always end up a bit humbled. If you feel like listening across our differences is important, if you feel like you’ve learned anything or changed your mind on anything through listening to The Sacred, please would you consider leaving us a review on Apple podcasts, or sharing an episode with a friend? I am sure there will be at least one episode that you can see would spark a deeper conversation with someone than you would necessarily normally be able to have. In this episode, I spoke to Paul Kingsnorth. Paul is an award–winning novelist and essayist, perhaps currently best known for his Substack, which is called ‘The Abbey of Misrule’. We spoke about his deep and ongoing environmental commitments, his recent conversion to Christianity, and why he has real concerns about the technological and bureaucratic context of the COVID vaccine rollout. As always, my reflections are at the end, and I hope you enjoy listening. 

Paul, I am going to ask you a not standard small talk, or podcast opening warming up question. But I’m going to give you a couple of seconds. Before I get to what is sacred to you by just asking, how does the word feel for you? You’re a writer, you care deeply about words, how does the word sacred land? 

Paul 

It’s one of those words like spiritual, which is so vague as to be useless in a way, but also not really replaceable with anything else. I’ve spent years trying to work out whether there’s a better word than spiritual to use when we talk about these things, because it’s such a horrible word, but there isn’t.  

Elizabeth 

Yeah, yeah.  

Paul 

I feel the same about the word sacred, actually. I mean, it has quite a specific meaning in a way, but it’s one of those words that can mean anything to anyone. So, you have to be really careful how you use it. 

Elizabeth 

I will try and give you some parameters, but you feel free to completely ignore them. 

Paul  

Well, you’ve probably thought about it a lot more than I have given that it’s the title of your podcast. So, you can tell me how to do it. 

Elizabeth  

Yeah, this is one of my favourite words. And obviously, you know, it’s often translated in religious contexts as holy. People are very familiar with it in that use, but I have a hunch that we can use it as a way of getting to our very deep motivations and our very deep values that are often clashing in public. And I was originally inspired by an anthropologist called Scott Attran, who uses it a lot in peace building and reconciliation. He says, people apply the kind of rational actor, you know, rational economic theory to peacebuilding, reconciliation and just see if we can just get everyone’s self–interest aligning, and we can get, you know, these people enough money and these people enough comfort, then we’ll be able to fix this deep division that we have. And he says, there’s actually some sacred values at play, which are not economic values are not kind of rational actor values; they sit somewhere different, somewhere deep in us. And if you offer someone money to give up a sacred value, they will be less likely to want to reconcile with you because they get that repulsion. 

Paul Kingsnorth  

Now that you say that that makes me think about it. I wrote an essay called ‘In the Black Chamber’, which was about visiting a cave in France, which had Palaeolithic cave paintings in it. And which I did with my family years ago, going to see these paintings, and being struck by this huge, awesome sense of, of the sacred when I was there. And I wasn’t religious at that time. And I was trying to work out what this was. And I remember writing that essay of what the meaning of the word sacred was, and also the meaning of the word holy. And they’re quite interesting when you look at the etymology, because sacred comes from this word. I think it’s a Latin word ‘secrare’ which means to set apart. So, something that is sacred is set apart from other things, from the normal things, from the worldly things, I suppose. Holy is from an old English word ‘hālig’, which means whole. So, something that’s holy is whole, and something that sacred is set apart. And it’s quite interesting. So, in that sense, if you’re asking what is sacred, was it means, as you said, just then actually, the sacred is something that is set apart from whatever your worldly concerns might be right? Whether you’re earning enough money, or whether you’re doing something you like, or whether you’re healthy, or where you live all of these things, which, you know, we all have those concerns. But the sacred is something way beyond that. And it can’t have a price on it. And also, this is what vexes people in the modern West. You can’t explain it. Can’t pin it down. You can’t put numbers on it, you can’t rationalise it. And there are things that this is what really frustrates modern people, especially intellectual people. There are some things that you can’t reach with your rational mind, which is what every religion in the world has always taught. And we are absolutely determined to ignore in the modern world. We think we can work everything out. And we hate the idea that we can’t, but we can’t, and that the sacred in some ways is the thing that we can’t work out. And the only way you can reach it is through letting go of all that, which is why, say, you know, if you go to the New Testament, and what does Christ talked about all the time? He talks about faith; his whole life is about faith. It’s about saying, I’m just going to trust this, even if it gets me crucified. Because that’s the only way you can see the truth, which is a terrible message, because, you know, it means we’re not in control. And we can’t work things out. But that’s true. That’s the reality of it. It’s kind of a hard lesson anyway, especially for modern people, I think.  

Elizabeth 

Yeah. It feels to me like something about the sacred demands, surrender, and surrender is not at all comfortable. But the older I get, I’m just trying to be done with cool, I’m trying to pursue wisdom and the wise people, the people who seem to have weathered the struggle and suffering of life and come out, not bitter, not apathetic, you know, not cynical, not shut down, or madly hedonistic, seem to me to have surrendered to something at some point, right. But it’s so countercultural to our… 

Paul 

Yeah, totally. Well, it’s sacrifice is what it is. And again, you know, from a Christian perspective, I mean, as you know what you might want to talk about this, but I, weirdly, became a Christian in the last few years entirely unexpectedly. And that was kind of the… people talked to me about having converted, but I didn’t feel like I’d converted, I felt like I’d come back to something I didn’t know I was in the first place. Because the teachings, the actual ancient teachings of Christianity, and I am an Orthodox Christian, are not what I thought they were. And they’re all built around sacrifice. They’re all built around walking away from the world, which actually is what we’re being taught in the Gospels. We’re being taught that we have to let go. And the conclusion I’ve come to recently is the whole of the modern world, the whole of the modern, post–Enlightenment West, is a rebellion against that notion. The whole of that project is a rebellion against God, it’s a rebellion against the idea that we’re not in control. And we seek to use technology and science and, and our rational minds, to grip and control the world. And you can do that to a certain degree, we can create lots of funky machines, but then look at the consequences of that. Now, the climate is changing, and we still don’t know what we’re doing. We’re even more lost than we were before. And we’re horrified by the possibility that actually, all along some of these old religious teachings might have been right. And as you say, I mean, I have a similar thing to you actually, I look, as I’m getting older now, I look at the older people in society, and I say, well, where’s the wisdom to be found? Because if I can find wise people, then I know that they’re in a true tradition, not everybody following a tradition is going to end up wise, but if you’re doing it properly, you will do. So where are the saints? You know, where are the elders? Where are the mystics? That’s where the wisdom is. That’s where the truth is. There aren’t any in there aren’t any in the New Atheist movement, put it that way. You know, there aren’t any in there in the kind of rationalist control society that we’re living in at the moment. And it’s, you know, that we’re coming, I think we’re going to be dragged back to the terrifying reality that we have to let go, that we’re not in control, and that the things that we consider to be meaningful are actually not creating meaning for us. Yeah, I think we kind of we sort of know that at some level already. But we don’t want to have to deal with it because it would mean changing an entire worldview of our society. 

Elizabeth  

Yeah. And we no longer are part of communities, right, the sort of, often the morally formative communities who could carry you through that kind of life arc, are gone. I really want to dig in with you to this idea of ‘the machine’ and the kind of intellectual and emotional spiritual journey you’ve been on. But first, I am going to try and pin you down to what do you think might be sacred to you? What are some of the values that… yeah, and the theory around this is you don’t really know, it’s like semi–conscious thing, but you feel it when something’s transgressed. And bracket out your family, you know, bracket out those kinds of concepts. Do you have anything bubbling up of a value that might be sacred to you or of something that might be sacred to you? 

Paul Kingsnorth  

Well, for most of my life, it was the natural world. I mean, that was, you know, I was an environmental activist for a long time. But before that, I was just a young person who had a strong sense that there’s something sacred in nature, although I wouldn’t have used that word because I wasn’t brought up to talk like that. But the things that got me writing about this, acting on this… when I was younger, were a sense of violation when we ravaged something of natural beauty, so say, the destruction of a primal rainforest is such an act of… it’s like a rape. It’s like an act of supreme violation of something that should not be violated. The poisoning of water, the destruction of ancient landscapes. I feel the same about the destruction of ancient human cultures, actually. It’s a similar sort of thing that that kind of mass, industrial destruction of nature, for profit or just for utility, is a kind of, for me, it’s always been a violation at a level that can’t be explained. I mean, we can all talk about carbon emissions and sustainability and all this stuff, and that is fine. But it’s not that it’s something else. It’s a string sense that there is something deeply, deeply sacrilegious going on, actually. So, I’ve always had that. And I still have that. And that, funnily enough, has led me to, I think, now that I look back, I can say, that was always a religious sensibility, although, I would have never put it like that. There was always a strong sense that something was sacred, which is why I’ve always been very uncomfortable with a certain type of environmentalism, which talks in numbers, you know, and tries to rationalise the world I understand why people do that, but it’s not the point. It seems to me that life, the natural world is a sacred thing. And if we’ve got a society that can destroy it, in the way that we do, something’s really wrong. And I think I tried to work out for my whole life what that was. So yes, it was it was always nature for me from a very young age. 

Elizabeth  

And I I’d love to hear a bit about your childhood and that period. Am I right in thinking that came partly through your dad and spending time in nature with him? 

Paul Kingsnorth 

Yeah, my dad accidentally made me an environmentalist, he didn’t want me to be, my dad. My dad was a that was a businessman. He wanted me to be a kind of successful lawyer or something like that. So, he didn’t get his way. But he loved walking in the country, and he used to take me on these very long mountain walks when we were kids for a couple of weeks. We’d walk the long–distance paths of Britain the Pennine Way, the Offa’s Dyke Path and all the other kind of long–distance tracks and we camped in the hills. And that had a really powerful effect on me, because I grew up in the kind of suburban England. I did a very kind of ordinary, perfectly fine suburban life, but that was uninspiring for me because I was a romantic child. I wanted to be living in the Shire, really, you know, or something like that. Rohan ideally, not High Wycombe. So yeah, but that that had a very very powerful effect on me it just experiencing these you know, waking up in the tent and watching the sunrise over the mountain. Yeah, so my dad accidentally gave me a strong love of the natural world. I mean, I think he had it too, but he would never have framed it in the same way.  

Elizabeth   

Give me a sense, I know you were an environmentalist. Were you primarily a campaigner, or primarily a kind of writer about the environment? 

Paul  

Well, I went to university and when I was at university in the early 90s, there was a big road protest movement going on in England. There are a lot of roads being built, the government said they were building the biggest, or they had the biggest road building programmes since the Romans, they used to like boasting. This was the Tory government back at the time and they were slamming these roads and motorways through all these areas of natural beauty. And this great road protest movement arose, and it was quite a very particular moment. It sort of arose out of partly out of the travel and movement. There were a lot of sort of crusties that had been thrown out of Stonehenge, but there are also a lot of students…  

Elizabeth 

Was it the sort of Swampy era? That’s what I remember.  

Paul 

It was the Swampy era, definitely. He was one of my contemporaries, Swampy, yeah. And he became a micro celebrity for a while. So, there was a real counterculture there, but what was interesting about it wasn’t just a sort of the crusty traveller ethic and a few students like me …you know, there were a lot of sort of middle–class, middle–aged ladies who would bake cakes and bring them along to the protest sites and there were public school boys who joined in all that sort of stuff. And it was a very, it certainly… when I was involved in places like Twyford, down in Newbury, it was a very kind of English thing actually. It seems to go back in a sort of very particular English tradition of rebellion against the state. And it was very tied up with a notion of the sacred land. And there was lots of stuff about stone circles and sacred trees and a bit of paganism in there. And it was it was great actually, and I just went along, got involved as a student, so it was perfect. I was the perfect age for it. And I spent a lot of time kind of up trees and damp tunnels and things, getting arrested for putting myself in front of bulldozers and all that stuff, and that just radicalised me, really, because I thought: Okay, well, I live in a society which is prepared to destroy a hill with an ancient monument and an ancient forest on the top of it, so that they can save three and a half minutes on the journey from London to Winchester, right? So that’s the society whose values are in the toilet, as far as I’m concerned. And that has to be opposed. And I still believe that, although I don’t go on the protests anymore. We’ve gone even further down the toilet since then. So that was what radicalised me and what once you start doing something like that, you start asking all the questions, why have we got these values? Who’s running the society? Why is this happening? Why are we building these roads? And then you start coming to conclusions about the global economy and consumerism and capitalism and growth and all of the other big things. And then you think if you’re 21, oh, my god, the whole world’s wrong! Then you have to spend the next 20 years writing about it, which is what I did. 

Elizabeth  

And when did, the kind of the shorthand in my head is ‘The Dark Mountain turn’…Tell me a bit about the Dark Mountain project. And what was the shift happening in you and Dougald and others around that project at that time? 

Paul  

Yeah, well, for me, it was, I think I’d spent about 20 years as an activist, I’d written two books. One of them was about globalisation and how it was trashing cultures and nature around the world. And another one was a book about England, which actually wrote about the same subject, but on a kind of local level in my country, and how local cultures were being ravaged by what I call ‘the machine’, and people fighting back against it. So, I’ve done all this. And I’ve been a kind of idealistic activist, and I’d hoped we could turn things around. But you know, as you grow up, you start thinking, we’re not going to turn things around. There are things you can do on a local level, there are things you could do at a national level. But if you look at the grand scheme of things, if you look at the direction of society globally, you’re not going to stop the climate changing, you’re not going to stop the direction of industrial growth and progress because people want it and there are huge interests behind it. And so I became, as a lot of people do, quite disillusioned about the possibility of changing things. It’s a sort of fairly, I suppose it’s a cliche journey, you go from a young, idealistic activist to being a more disillusioned man. But I was, because I was a writer, I was looking around at the culture (this has changed, it was more than 10 years ago now). And thinking, okay, the climate is changing, we’re clearly in for a huge, probably systemic collapse at this point, right? Because all of the forces are converging. We’re crossing all of the planetary boundaries. Society is unsustainable in every way ecologically, culturally, spiritually. It felt like we were kind of standing on the edge of this precipice, but no one was talking about it. And everyone, including all the activists was still pretending that kind of one more push would get it through or…and as a novelist, I’d written novels and I was looking at other novelists in the culture generally and thinking no one’s really writing about this actually, in any way. So, I just wanted to get together, I had a notion that I’d get a few people together and we’d be like the Inklings like CS Lewis and Tolkien would all sit together in the pub and have a little literary movement. And I just wrote something about that on my blog I had at the time, and this guy Dougald, who I’d never heard of before, got in touch, and said, this sounds interesting, I’d like to get involved. And we ended up… to cut a long story short writing this little manifesto called ‘On Civilization’ in 2009, which was a call for writers and artists to take the collapse seriously. And to create culture as if it was real. And that kind of spiralled, got a bit out of control, we ended up running festivals and having a project and running journals. And we were sort of making it up as we went along. So, it was a bit chaotic, but we did some good work, some good things, and it’s still going but Dark Mountain was a movement that came out of that sort of desire for people to get real, actually, about where we were. And interestingly, more than 10 years later, there’s a lot of people acknowledge that now. It’s the kind of stuff we were publishing in our books. In the early days, when people were calling us nuts and telling us we needed therapy, because we were depressed, you can now read in the New York Times. So, it’s quite interesting to see the shift and it’s become harder and harder to deny the reality of kind of where we are. 

Elizabeth   

Yeah, in ‘Savage Gods’, I think, or from some of your writing at the time you talk about losing faith in words and a bit losing faith in nature and losing faith in progress. Would you have identified as someone who was broadly left wing before that? Were you losing faith in that movement as well? 

Paul 

Yeah, I seem to do a lot of losing faith in things don’t I, now that you mention it! Yeah, my ‘Savage Gods’ period was a bit later, it was just before I ended up becoming a Christian. And when I look back at it, it’s a kind of a midlife spiritual breakdown, basically, which is exactly a precursor. I didn’t know what was coming. But yeah, I mean, I suppose I was a sort of a man of the left in a broad sense. I’ve never been a kind of a socialist or a Marxist or anything. I’ve always been very anti–utopian actually, in some ways, I was a leftist. I was anti–capitalist, I still am. In other words, I was quite conservative, quite traditionalist. You know, I’ve always been a fan of, you know, people like Chesterton, and Orwell who managed to combine a sort of anti–capitalist radicalism with a sort of traditionalist sensibility, which I quite like, there’s not enough of that around. So yeah, but I was I was certainly moving with the sort of the Green Left, and I certainly lost faith in that. But there was a broader sense of losing faith in politics, really. But what happened with that… ‘Savage Gods’, I moved here to Ireland, and we set up a small holding. And I suppose it was part of me that thought, oh, great, I can have a nice, easy, peaceful existence now. But that wasn’t gonna happen. But I also, you know, having sort of lost faith in activism, I then started losing faith in writing, because I thought, I got to the point where I thought, I don’t know, I’ve written a lot of books, eight or nine books. And I don’t quite know anymore, what writing can reveal, it got to the point where words felt like they were a wall instead of a window. Now, because at its best writing can show people what the world’s like, but when you’re a writer, you can get so jammed up with words that you get confused between words and reality. You lose track of the thing that words are trying to point out. So, I think that’s where I was, I sort of basically… everything worldly, that I’d put my faith in, I basically, by this point, I’d lost faith in, which felt terrible, but was actually really necessary, now that I look back on it. It was just a grand process of going through, looking at the world, seeing that it’s wrong, because we can all do that. And then trying everything from writing to politics to whatever it is activism, to try and fix it in a kind of arrogant, intellectual way, and then realising you can’t. And that’s a realisation of the limits of your power, and a limit of worldly things. And at that point, you have a sort of spiritual crisis. And if you’re lucky, that’s a precursor to going oh, right! Something else is going on which is much bigger than all this, which is, yeah, so where I ended up. 

Elizabeth  

Am I right in thinking that your Christianity sort of wasn’t the first wisdom tradition, or faith tradition, or religion, whatever you want to call it, that you’d encountered out a period of being a kind of ‘Wiccan– Zen mixture’? 

Paul Kingsnorth   

Yeah, you could say that. At the same time as having gone through these sort of rolling, crises of faith in worldly things I was I was exploring the spiritual alternatives from about the age of 40 or so late 30s, I started realising… okay, I’m gonna have to start seeing what else there is. And I’d always been interested in Buddhism. So, I went on some Buddhist retreats, I became a Zen Buddhist for a while. Did a lot of work, did a lot of reading and studying and practice. And you know Zen is a really interesting tradition that can sort of reeks profound changes in you because you spend a lot of time sitting on a cushion, just examining the reality of yourself, and realising that a lot of it isn’t there. And a lot of what we thought was yourself is not yourself. It’s just a bunch of stuff you’ve constructed and that can really break the world open very usefully. But it hadn’t, it’s it didn’t meet in the end the kind of need I’d always had for I suppose it was, I don’t know if it was a need for worship, but it was a need for connection with this great sort of power in the universe, this great thing that runs through nature, because then it can be quite dry. And I felt like the terrible realisation for me was I was talking about God which I never wanted to do. Because obviously, growing up as a good little boy in an atheist society, we all knew that that was nonsense. But I felt like I needed a connection with God or with gods, but being a nature lover, I thought, well, you know, what I needed to be is some sort of pagan. I need some sort of pagan religion here that will connect me to the gods of nature. So, I was looking around to Druidry, and all sorts of things. And I ended up with Wicca, which is modern witchcraft, which is a weird little mashup of the Western magical tradition and, and Neo Paganism and all sorts of other bits and pieces. And it was interesting, I think, because, yeah, I was just, I was looking for something, and the last place I would ever have looked for it would have been say in Christianity, or because it’s very interesting, in the West, in countries like Britain, you know, we’re Christian countries, that’s our heritage, that’s our culture that has formed all of our values, and yet, when we look for God, we don’t go anywhere near the church, which is certainly a failing of the church. But it’s also a failing of, there’s something in society that just makes us run away from it: it’s very interesting. So, we’ll look everywhere else. And also, almost every other religion is more socially acceptable than Christianity as well. You know, it’s the only thing that people will look at. So, well you did what? You know, I had no problem being a Buddhist or a witch. But since I became a Christian people looked at me as if I had a mental breakdown. So, so that’s very interesting. But yeah, I became a Wiccan. And, yeah, again, there’s some truths in that faith, but there’s also some dark things in there which are not good. And fundamentally, also, it’s just, largely, it’s a modern made–up religion that attempts to fill the gap that has been left by the retreat of Christianity. And there’s so much of that in the culture. I mean, it’s, you know, if you want to find a kind of, or build a kind of sort of New Age mashup of every bit of faith on Earth, with bits of other faiths just stuck in there, then you can get that anywhere, because I think there’s such a hunger…it is a real hunger for God, for faith, for religion. You don’t know how to fill it. So, we just scrambled around with all sorts of things. And I realised with horror that that’s what I’ve been doing all my life really? So yeah, there it is. 

Elizabeth 

We’re going to talk about vaccines in a little bit. And I often think that it feels like British people have been inoculated against the powerful strain of Christianity by having had an incredibly mild cultural dose. And so, it, it just kind of it makes people think they know what they’re rejecting. And they actually haven’t at all. 

Paul Kingsnorth  

Yeah, I like that. That’s really good. 

Elizabeth   

What made you willing to write about it, so publicly? And what’s been the experience of that? Because I would love, you know, we will talk about these things… I would like all people who are already Christians, whenever someone discovers it, there’s this like: yes, both for them! But also selfishly, I think the kind of someone else can see, you know, the stories that the culture tells about this, my best thing, my most precious thing, seems so different from my lived experience. So it feels like a win. But that can turn into something slightly weird and grabby and pressurising for people who have had that experience in public. What’s your journey been with that? 

Paul  

Yeah, I think I could have made a career for myself being a Christian convert over the last year, actually.  

Elizabeth   

Yeah. Don’t. That seems not wise to me. 

Paul  

I’m not doing that. I’m not like, there’s been a lot of people asking me to go on their podcast, very kindly. But I mean, you know, I understand it completely. Because like you say, it seems that Christianity is so on the backfoot in the West now that, as you say, people coming out of other things, and coming into it, and discovering it is like revelatory. And it’s revelatory to me. And I think  what you just said is really interesting about the mild dose that we’ve been inoculated with, because I, you know, I’ve written about this, so I won’t go on about it. But I basically got, I had all sorts of kind of visitations and strange things happening to me and dreams and people coming and talking to me over a long period of time while I was a witch, and I resisted it. And then I realised I was basically I was being ‘Hunted by Christ’ was the way I put it. And I thought, oh, God, this is terrible and wonderful. So, I just sort of gave in and then then I realised after a while that I had to be a Christian. And then for a while, I thought, well, I’ll just do it on my own in my bedroom, because, you know, I’m that sort of person. I’m not very good at joining things. I can start things, but I can’t join them. Maybe that’s just arrogance. But I thought I can’t obviously I can’t join a church. I’ll just be a Christian. No. And then after a while he realised you can’t be a Christian without a church, because it’s kind of the whole, it’s the whole point of it really, it’s the way it works. So, then I thought, what’s the church? Where’s the church? There’s about 1,000 of them now. In fact, I read recently there are 10,000 Protestant churches in America alone at the moment astonishingly so …yeah, and I looked around the Church of England seems to me to be a sort of weakened, broken thing. And, and the Catholic Church in Ireland increasingly. So, I sort of ended up in the Orthodox Church. And I wrote about it because well, you know, I actually thought I wasn’t going to say much, what I did was, I was updating my website, and I was updating the little ‘about me’ section. And I just put a little thing in there about how I’d become a Christian. And I thought, I’ll just sort of sneak it out quietly like that. And then somebody saw it, and somebody who will admire my writing, saw it and wrote about it. And then that got around. And then I got this magazine, ‘First Things’ magazine writing to me and saying…Well, would you like to write us? Would you like to write something about how you became a Christian? And I thought, well, since people are talking about it anyway, maybe I will, maybe I’ll have a go, I thought it would actually be quite good for me to try and write down what happened and maybe useful for other people. So, I did. And yeah, that was, you know, good for people. And it’s a funny thing, because I don’t really want to be the guy who goes around talking about being a convert all the time. But at the same time, I know that when I’ve talked about it and written about it, it’s been useful because a lot of people write to me now. And they say this has happened to me as well! Especially people who’ve come out of environmentalism, but not just them… people who say, I never wanted to be a Christian. And then all this stuff has happened to me and… what do I do? And where do I go? And I’m so glad to read your piece… So, it’s been useful. So, I thought that was why I did it. But yeah, you’re right. It would be easy to… I could probably have my YouTube channel just endlessly talking about it. I think that there’s the danger, you see, because of the way the media landscape works at the moment, yeah, whatever you’re doing, you can make yourself a career just blathering about it. Yeah. For me, I think, if I go back to what I wrote in ‘Savage Gods’, you know, it’s a danger to get caught up in that because especially if you’re, you know, if you’re following this Christian path, this Orthodox path that I’m following, you’re supposed to give a lot of your time to prayer and silence. And that’s kind of the opposite of what I do. So, it’s difficult. I have to make space for that. And I don’t make enough. And it would be really easy, If you’re good at talking or writing just to go on and on and on about this for years, But not to actually practice it. Yeah, that would be that would be the trap. So, I’m trying to avoid that. 

Elizabeth   

Yeah, it’s, it’s the first step right. And then there’s discipleship, if it’s not too personal, and I’m pretty sure I’ve cut this out, I do pray for you and other people who become Christians in public. Because you know… 

Paul 

Thank you, I appreciate that. It means a lot. 

Elizabeth   

…There’s a sort of euphoric homecoming, and then everyone I think, goes through the like, moments of the dark night, the soul or when things get hard. And if people are expecting you to still be in a euphoric conversion phase, and actually you are in the like, this got real and hard, and I’m just like, trudging the path to the next, to the next mountain experience, then that’s too much pressure for anyone. 

Paul 

In a way there’s a part of me that thinks I wish this had happened 30 years ago, because then I’d have had more of a head start. But there’s another part of me that thinks I’m quite glad it’s happened later in life, because I’m not so naïve about where it’s likely to go. I’m prepared for the dark night of the soul, you know, so yeah, you just have to balance this. The public realm can eat you up very quickly. There’s this desire to eat you up and spit you out. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah, you become a symbol in other people’s symbolic games. 

Paul  

I think yeah, easily. Yeah. 

Elizabeth   

You also make me think of the John Donne line from the ‘Hound of Heaven’ that I always come back to because I had a similar, Anyway, I won’t go into it. But he said, John Donne talks about fleeing God, ‘I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind’. And I love that image. But we are not going to talk about that now, because I want to ask you about vaccines, your essay series, the vaccine moment, I think, was very widely read and very widely shared. And I’d love to hear when you started feeling uneasy about, I think COVID vaccination in particular, right? You hadn’t been particularly vaccine hesitant before that?  

Paul  

Well, I mean, the stuff that I was writing about was not really the vaccines. I don’t really like to phrase ‘vaccine hesitant’ because I think it’s a bit of a propaganda phrase, the notion that you’re hesitant to take the lovely thing but eventually you’re going to take it. 

Elizabeth   

How would you self–describe and then I will try and use your phrase? 

Paul  

What I was writing about in those essays, was not really the vaccine. It was the whole system of control that had driven the build up around it, and the whole way that COVID was dealt with. So, I suppose what happened with me was, you know, along came COVID and we were told there was a deadly virus and we had to shelter in our houses and go into lockdown. And this was all pretty radical stuff. But we sort of did it because we thought, well, we’ve got to be careful. So that was fine for a bit. But then it seemed, it just became a lot of people, including me became very nervous about what was going on quite quickly, because a lot of what we were being told didn’t quite add up in terms of the severity of the illness and the evidence for lockdowns and masks and all the rest of it. And it also became quickly, very quickly that there was a media narrative developing that it was almost impossible to dissent from. And then we started to see the people who did dissent for it were being booted off social media. And we started to see that there was a very clear alignment between the government, between the media between lots of social media companies on what we had to do, and there was a line, and the line was very clear, terribly dangerous virus, we must all be locked down. And then we must take these vaccines. And if you don’t do that, you’re going to be certainly where I live, shut out of society. And in some cases, you’re going to be mandated to do that. Now, this is completely unprecedented. There’s never been anything like this. Never any reaction to an illness that involves this level of social control, this level of technological control, this level of conformity amongst the media and the social media community, and the kind of demonisation of people who were asking questions, never seen anything like it. I’m married to a doctor with a good deal of experience in public health. So, you know, we talked about this a lot. And we were all very disturbed about it. So along came these vaccines, which were quite new, quite experimental, we didn’t know whether they’re going to work. We didn’t know what the long–term effects were going to be. And we still don’t. And so some people decided to take them in some people didn’t, which is fine by me. I don’t have a particular opinion about that. If you want to be vaccinated, you should be. I think it’s worth saying that the things they told us the vaccines we’re going to do have not been done, right? They haven’t prevented infection or transmission of the illness. But what we got to very quickly was a situation in which this one particular medicine was being used as a tool of social control. So, the issue for me is not whether the vaccines are safe or effective, that’s up to you to make a personal decision about, I’m not telling anyone what they should do about that. But for a government and for society as a whole, to create an entire system of technological control and monitoring, to, for example, in my country, push anyone who didn’t have a vaccine out of society for six months. So, if you didn’t have a vaccine passport on your smartphone, you couldn’t go out effectively. And you had to open the papers every day and watch yourself being called a fascist and a conspiracy theorist by all the newspaper columnist, because you hadn’t taken a vaccine, which, to say the least there were a lot of question marks over… now what there should have been, was a was a debate or conversation about any number of things. So, I just found myself in a situation like a lot of people did, where I didn’t quite know what was going on, it was very hard to ask the questions. As soon as you open your mouth, people call you all sorts of names, you’re told that you’re a dangerous person for not taking a vaccine, even though the vaccine doesn’t prevent the spreading of the illness. And it was just very kind of it was another revelation, actually, I mean, it was, in my essays I wrote about it being apocalyptic. In the original sense of the word that Apocalypse means Revelation, it showed a lot of stuff about how authoritarian society and science and technology could be. So that disturbed me, and it still disturbs me. And as I say, the issue is not really the vaccine, the issue is that it’s all the control systems that were built around that. And the pressure that was put on people to conform to that. And it was very disturbing to see what was possible. 

Elizabeth 

You had a line, I think in one of those essays, if we don’t want the future to look like a QR code, flickering across a human face forever, we’re going to have to do something about it. We’ve referenced this idea of ‘the machine’ and your kind of political and social philosophy, I guess, for a wonderful, less shorthand. Could you talk a little bit about this idea of ‘the machine’? Maybe how it relates to vaccines, but more broadly, that so much of your writing seems to me to be in resistance to? 

Paul  

Yeah, I think it is, I think I’m kind of obsessed with it. And that’s why I reacted in that way to the vaccines as well, or at least to the system that grew up around them. I’m very sensitive, and I’ve always been to the way that technology is developing, particularly digital technology, as a system of control and management. And this has been going on for a very long time. It’s really striking to me that if COVID had come along, say ten years ago, or even six or seven years ago, before the smartphone existed, it would not have been impossible to put the system of control and monitoring in place that exists that you could not have had had vaccine passports, you could not have controlled people as easily as you could. And that’s going to get more intense because what’s happening is developing around us very quickly is a system of digital control and monitoring, which is moving us very quickly into what’s called the ‘Internet of Things’, which will then become the ‘Internet of Bodies’ as we start to start to get the chips inserted under our skin, which is already starting to happen. And this kind of stuff when I was young would have sounded like terrifying science fiction, but it’s growing up around us all the time. And it’s very interesting to look at this from a religious perspective, I think, because what I see is that in the West, we’ve obviously rejected God, the sacred, the transcendent, anything that’s beyond the material realm. And so, what can we do? The only thing we can do is attempt to control the material realm and build our own Utopia here, because we don’t believe there’s anything better anywhere else. And we do that through technology. So, we’re moving very, very fast into an increasingly globalised system of control and monitoring, which we’re going to sell as being and probably believe as being a way of healing the earth and stopping the climate from changing and creating equality and all the other kinds of good things that we say that we want. And we’re in danger of walking, sleepwalking into the kind of thing that science fiction writers have been warning us about for 100 years, which is a kind of ‘brave new world’ of technological control and monitoring, where we cannot escape the kind of eye of Sauron on the smartphone in our pockets or the chip under our skin. But it’s all done in the name of public good. That’s what I saw with COVID people really believe this was being done in the name of the public good. And I understood that. But if you actually looked at what was happening to people who dissented, if you actually looked at the impossibility of questioning the science that we’re all supposed to be following, it was really terrifying. And how there was just no possibility of a conversation for a long time. And what made it come home to me was that if you can tell people that something is going to keep them safe, they’re prepared to put up with a lot of things that they shouldn’t be prepared for that with. So, this thing I call ‘the machine’, I suppose is this is this global technological system, which is rising very, very fast around us now. And which I regard as really, increasingly sinister, not because it’s run by a secret evil Cabal, but because the ability to control whole populations and monitor them in the name of the public good is so obviously gonna get out of hand very quickly, as it already has. I mean, you can use other examples, you can see people being arrested for saying things on social media that other people don’t like, I mean, literally being taken out of their home in handcuffs for causing people anxiety by expressing their opinion. Once you get to the possibility…once you get to the situation where you’ve got very, very high levels of technological control and monitoring, and a society in which nobody has a kind of moral centre, no one can agree on what’s right and wrong, then you’ve got endless possibilities for technological conflict. And so that’s, that’s my fear for the future. And as the climate changes, and our systems continue to collapse, there’s going to be more and more incentive to create these great systems of control that attempt to solve those problems. And I think that’s where we’re going. So, that’s just kind of obsessed to me for a long time, I think. And I sort of saw with COVID that happening, and the balance is always trying to write about that without becoming paranoid or giving in to the sort of wild or conspiracy theories that are out there, but also not being naïve about what’s going on. So, it’s a bit of a razor’s edge. You have to try and walk on. Not always successfully, perhaps. 

Elizabeth   

Yeah. The vaccine thing seems to be one of many incredibly painful divides. And I know that you know, people in families have had to stop talking about it. Have you lost friends? What’s the kind of emotional journey been of being someone who’s publicly trying to create space for that conversation? 

Paul 

Oh, yeah, no. I definitely got attacked by people who I’d consider to be friends in the past. I mean, I’m not on social media, so I don’t know most of the things that people are saying about me.  

Elizabeth 

That’s helpful! 

Paul 

That’s the way I keep myself sane. But yeah, definitely, I got attacked for that, and I got criticised for that. And mostly, I mean, the frustrating thing I think, for a lot of people, whatever side of the debate you’re on, is just the kind of misrepresentation or the refusal of people to actually listen to what you’re saying. So, you know, with the issue of vaccines, you can write yourself a 5,000–word essay, in which you try and explain everything you’re saying, and someone will just go, Oh, he’s an anti–vaxxer! He’s one of them. He’s probably on the far right… So that’s all we need to know about him. And it’s just very, very frustrating to see that that’s part of the cultural division in society at the moment, that people are just putting each other into boxes, deciding who the enemy is, and then going for them and it’s social media, and the algorithms of social media are a big part of the problem there because they just divide us against each other. There’s a lot of money and clicks to be made in going down that kind of route of demonising the other.  

Elizabeth 

I sometimes try and guess what someone will say their sacred value is when I’m reading and thinking and listening to them. And I did wonder if freedom might come up for you because of this fear of authoritarianism and control? What do you what do you think about that? 

Paul Kingsnorth  

Well, it’s a good question, isn’t it? Because there’s a lot of different types of freedom. In one sense, yes, totally. I’m really, really sensitive to big systems of control. Because they’re always tyrannical. They’ve always been tyrannical throughout history. And they can be extra tyrannical when you have this degree of technology. On the other hand, there’s a particular analysis of the notion of freedom, which you see a lot in America, that’s kind of very individualistic, very libertarian kind of freedom, which ends up kind of flowing quite easily into selfishness. It’s just, it’s just me, basically, I want to be able to do what I want. So, I have a conflicted relationship with it. I think in one sense, you could say that the individualism of the modern West is all about a desire for freedom, it’s all about all of us saying, I should be able to do what I want with no social controls on me. And that actually causes a form of social collapse in itself. Because if we’re all choosing to just follow ‘our passions’, as we put it in the Orthodox Church all the time and demanding the right to do that in the name of our individual freedom, then we don’t have a society and we’re not paying attention to each other. So, I think there are probably different kinds of freedom to think about, I’m entirely opposed to joint control systems. And I would like all politics to be radically localised, so that those systems don’t exist, which will never happen, but I still want it to. But at the same time, I think we have to, I suppose if I look at it from a Christian perspective, you know, what, what would the Christian idea of freedom be? It wouldn’t be this kind of selfish, radical individualism where we just say, I can do what the hell I want, and it doesn’t matter what happens to my neighbour. But at the same time, it would not be bowing down before a giant system of control and doing what you’re told. So, I suppose there’s a kind of sense of community freedom, maybe, that you need to assert freedom, freedom from giant systems, but maybe responsibility for other human beings. I don’t quite know how you put that. But freedom is another one of those words… it is a bit like sacred actually, that people can project anything they want on to, so you probably have to define it carefully. But yeah, freedom without selfishness sounds like a good thing. 

Elizabeth  

Yes. And you’ve alluded to becoming without intending to be, a controversial figure, and obviously, anyone talking about vaccines or, you know, you’ve written about Brexit… there’s certain topics that wherever you sit on them, will make you, you know, ‘controversial’ and you know, one of the narratives about you is that you’ve moved from the left to the right, which I think is a misunderstanding of how complicated those categories are, what they even mean anymore. But you know, you have described and been in spaces that are right on the fracture points of kind of culture war, deepening division, deepening sense that it’s really hard to hold people who disagree with us on these neuralgic issues as fully human. And I was really kind of grateful and encouraged to see you writing about the temptation in yourself, the partisan temptation here to write people off as sheeple, to say, you know, these who think differently from me are malicious enemies of truth, to do the thing we all do, which is to get that little hit of dopamine when we read someone who agrees with us, because they make us feel great, you know, like self–righteous and to feel hard feelings when we read somebody disagrees with us. So just to avoid that unless we want to feel angry, what are your practices or habits or even aspirations… what it is sometimes for me, to be someone who is not making those divisions worse? 

Paul  

Yeah, I think it’s the most important thing to think about, isn’t it? People like to put me in boxes. They like to put everyone in boxes. And I’ve always really wanted to avoid boxes. Actually, I hate them. Maybe that’s just my radical individualism. But you know, the notion that I’ve moved from the left to the right, for example, I mean, I was never on the left, and now I’m not on the right. So, I don’t I don’t even know what these terms mean. And there’s nobody’s gang that I want to join, there are certainly, you know, a lot of my politics, you might say, was conservative or traditionalist, with a small ‘c’ anyway. But there’s a lot of other parts that get me called a socialist by some people. So, I actually don’t feel I mean, I’ve certainly, you know, become older and wiser and probably more traditionalist than I used to be. But actually, I don’t feel fundamentally that I believe, radically different things to what I believed in 20 years ago. But there’s more of an appetite now for putting people in boxes, like you say, and there’s more of an appetite for dehumanising people. One of the things I do is I don’t go on social media ever, for example, I haven’t had any social media accounts for a long time. Because I think those places, especially somewhat something like Twitter, is an atmosphere in which even if you’re trying to have a conversation, you’re not going to be able to. I think the algorithms are designed to dehumanise the people you’re attacking or talking about there. They’re designed for war. So don’t do that.  The other thing I do is when I’m writing about these issues, I try never to personalise them. So, I don’t, I very rarely write about individual people or even organisations, I try to write about the big themes. So, when I was writing about Brexit, for example, I saw Brexit from the perspective of an environmentalist as small as beautiful Greenie, which is what I always was. And I said, look, I don’t like big systems, so I don’t like the EU. You know, I like sort of sovereignty and localization. And there are lots of people who disagree with that, but I didn’t write about them. And it’s the same when I wrote about vaccines, I don’t want to pull out particular people and start having a fight with them. I want to talk about the issues. I’m trying to talk about the themes. And yeah, just always having in mind, especially if you’re a Christian, you better have this in mind all the time, that you’re supposed to love your neighbour and your enemy, and forgive everybody, including the people who call you a fascist. You just have to…whatever, people are going to say things and just try to write honestly about what you believe in. I mean, my problem is that I’ve always lived in a world that I thought was wrong, or that something just cracked about it. And since I can’t shut up, I’ve had to write about that. And that just gets you into the middle of the maelstrom and I have to deal with that. But it’s actually really good. I see it now is really good spiritual practice. You know, can you write about these things in a way that is not… something I quoted something that Wendell Berry said, when I first started writing my essays that I’m writing at the moment, he said, How can you challenge what the world is doing? How can you challenge what’s wrong with the world without becoming evil?’ And that’s the question, actually. And his answer, interestingly, was that you should never fight against what you hate, you should always fight for what you love. And that was really good. And if you look at the writing of Wendell Berry, he always does that. You know, he certainly criticises systems and, and businesses and ideas. But again, he doesn’t ever personalise it. And he writes a lot about what matters instead. Because it’s really easy to do the Nietzschean thing of looking into the abyss and then becoming the abyss. Because whatever you believe in, you can go on the internet, and you can find 1000 things that make you angry in five minutes. And then you can get on your Twitter account, start ranting about that. And the whole of the algorithm is designed to make you do that. So can you write about what’s wrong, without becoming evil, without dehumanising other people so that it’s a really good spiritual challenge, actually? And that’s what I try and see, as I’m not suggesting I always get it right at all. But I’m trying to do that.  

Elizabeth  

Paul Kingsnorth, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred. 

Paul 

And thank you. 

Elizabeth 

Well, what a rich conversation, I love talking about surrender, and wisdom, and the fact that there are some things we can’t think ourselves into. I wonder how many of you were shouting at your phone, probably, for who that idea is just deeply disagree with it, and you’re very resistant to it, I would love to hear from you. If you think it’s dangerous to believe there are some things that our reason cannot get us to. We obviously talked about climate change. And I always feel a duty of care when talking with people who are very pessimistic about where society is heading, which I sort of feel, sadly, is a lot of people and a lot of people who are quite thoughtful and sensible. So, we don’t necessarily think it’s a scare mongering and that is a hard thing. So, I just wanted to name that that might have been hard to listen to, it was hard to listen to. For me, it is something I’m working through personally, how do we settle our souls and stabilise ourselves and become the kind of people that are needed if the future is indeed going to be more turbulent than the present? So, I just wanted to name that. Such an interesting line, I seem to have a habit of losing faith in things, worldly things, words. All the things we throw ourselves at, in some ways, it’s a sort of classic midlife crisis, isn’t it? It’s, you know, David Brooks, his second mountain thing, you spend the first half of your life, building and climbing and framing this identity and pulling on levers, and then the second half of your life, coming to terms with what isn’t achievable, and what you won’t be, and kind of reorienting your priorities. But it is always so interesting to me to hear people who have come to faith later in life, particularly those who didn’t have it in their childhood. I think there’s a slightly more well–trodden path of people who, who had some connection with religion and then returned to it later. But for Paul, it’s all brand new and interesting to hear about. That, obviously, and we talked about vaccines, and I don’t think looking back he gave me a good alternative phrase for vaccine hesitant and obviously anti–vax is used as an insult. I genuinely don’t therefore know how to describe his position in a way that is honouring. But if you’ve listened, you will know his position, which is I think, genuinely not so much about vaccines themselves, but about the broader context, the social pressure and stigmas, some of the techniques that were used to try and get vaccine take up upwards. And actually, I have read his essays ‘The COVID moment’, and he was writing one of them at a time when Austria had actually passed a mandatory vaccine law, it was really quickly repealed. But it did pass that you could be forced to take a vaccine. And that kind of helped me understand a little bit in hearing the broader sense of the way vaccines played into pre–existing set of sensitivities and worries about technological social control also really helped me understand the position. It was one of the more interesting ones, I really like Paul’s writing and find it provocative and illuminating, even when I don’t agree with it at all. And having someone on who vocally hasn’t personally taken the COVID vaccine and is happy to talk about the reasons why someone might not take the COVID vaccine, although he’s very careful to say he is not pushing people one way or the other. Because I’m the daughter of two medics and did have a real sort of wrestle with myself editorially about harm and responsibility, and we’ve got to take our kids, for polio boosters in London, because the polio vaccine uptake in London is so low, that it is beginning to threaten a polio outbreak. And in fact, there has been a polio outbreak in London. So, it’s very real and life for me at the moment, the consequences of people not being vaccinated. And I will send this to Paul in advance. So, I don’t, I hope it won’t be a shock to him. And I’m sure he is very able to take me saying this. But I did have a moment of like, how responsible is it? If I believe that people being vaccinated is for the public good to air these views, which complicate that narrative a bit? But having listened to him, I am glad that I have, I think it is more complicated than we make out. And certainly, the COVID vaccine in particular, because of the speed and the scale. I can understand why. Why I have little understanding or empathy for vaccine hesitancy generally sorry, I know that’s not the preferred term. Although we can respect people who hold those views and be in conversation with them, and indeed, love them, I now have more when it comes to COVID, because of the wider context. But there it is interesting, when you’re listening across difference, and you’re wanting to create a space for a range of views or the limits of that, or I don’t know, for example, if I would have… would I have someone who is a very direct and persuasive climate change denier? Because I think that people who have denied climate change and been publicly active around that have terribly slowed down our appropriate response to a problem that we should have acted on decades ago. And creating legitimacy for not acting feels like it could have real harm. But is that letting myself off the hook listening to things I find very difficult? I really valued talking to him at the end about controversy and becoming a controversial figure and this sense that there is a sort of quite bullish and often male willingness to upset people and to say quite harsh things, which actually, I don’t see in Paul. And I wonder if it’s because he’s not on social media. You know, there’s a kind of constellation I spoke to Jonathan Pageau, about this, who’s on later in the series…a constellation of commentators who are seen as kind of conservative or traditionalist or more on the right of the spectrum. Some of whom were very interesting and very thoughtful and some of whom, because of their behaviour online, I struggled to listen seriously to their ideas and feel like they’re just scrapping out for a fight and don’t care if they’re part of the problem rather than part of the solution. But Paul is not that, he is both controversial and careful, and thoughtful, I think. That is all from my slightly rambley reflections today.  

 


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Elizabeth Oldfield

Elizabeth Oldfield

Elizabeth is host of The Sacred podcast. She was Theos’ Director from August 2011 – July 2021. She appears regularly in the media, including BBC One, Sky News, and the World Service, and writing in The Financial Times.

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Posted 21 September 2022

Climate change, Conversion, Coronavirus, Environment

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