Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to writer Dougald Hine. 31/05/2023
Introduction
Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield. This is a podcast about our deepest values, about where we find meaning, and how we can build curiosity and empathy across our very many divides. Every week, I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or platform, about what is sacred to them. I asked them to reflect deeply about the work that they do and how it aligns with their values. And I try and listen deeply, try and understand what makes them tick. I speak to people from all across the different spectrums on which we all sit: religious and non–religious, political, the nine thousand other things that we find to disagree on… And my hope is that these conversations broaden our horizons outside our own little tribe and our echo chamber, and that they carve out a little bit of space for depth in a shallow and fast–moving world. In this episode, you will hear a conversation I had with Dougald Hine. Dougald started life as a BBC producer, has run startups and social enterprises, and with Paul Kingsnorth started “The Dark Mountain project”. He has been writing and communicating over decades, primarily around and about climate change. And his first book “At Work In The Ruins” explores a question that I think many of us ask privately and can be very explosive to ask publicly: what if our sense of the world is getting worse is accurate? What if we really can’t halt runaway climate change and the future is going to look unimaginably different from the present? So, big and often scary question, but I think an important one. And Dougald’s perspective is pretty direct about the depth of the trouble that he thinks we are in, all of us are in. And I’m aware that listeners may not agree with him, and that is absolutely fine. Part of the point of this podcast is to listen to voices that we do not agree with. But wherever you sit on – agreeing or disagreeing with him – I would encourage you to listen anyway, even if listening to someone from that perspective sounds like it might be very heavy, because the subject matter is heavy. But I have found Dougald’s work and this conversation that I had with him to be bracing, but also quite centring and steadying, strangely, humane and thoughtful. There’ll be some reflections at the end as usual from me, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy listening.
What is sacred to you? Dougald Hine’s answer
Dougald, we are going to go straight in the deep end, and I am going to ask you: what is sacred to you? What bubbled up having had some time to reflect on this nonstandard opening question?
Dougald Hine
Well, I remember listening to an episode of your podcast, Liz, when you had my old friend, Mary Harrington, on here. And you asked her this question. And she came back with a characteristically incisive response of how you couldn’t have personal sacred values. Because sacred values are precisely what emerges from a society, a community a way of being human together. I remember thinking it was a very thoughtful response. And also, that it was totally different to what the word conjured up for me, because, for me, the language of the sacred points to something beyond religion, or spirituality can start out pointing towards something that humans come together and do. But when I ever use the language of the sacred, it’s been to point towards something that lies beyond the edge of that. A sort of encounter, where as a writer, you’re in the place where words start to fail. And so, if I asked myself, “what is sacred to me?”, in a sense, it’s that. What’s not for sale in me is the conviction that there is something more than appears to be the case. There is something more than we’re told is the case. That there’s more to us as humans than the story that we mostly absorb from the kind of societies that most of us have grown up in. That there are experiences, whether it’s kind of out in wilderness, or whether it’s just a small moment of kindness witnessed, or whether its ways of coming together around the kitchen table, that make room for or bring us into awareness of there being something that’s missing from the story the market tells us, or the story the state tells us. The story that science tells us often about what kinds of things we are and what kind of world we’re in. So I guess that’s what’s sacred to me. And I can feel, even as I’m saying it, that I’m proving this thing about the limits of language, or it being the place at which words start to fail us.
Elizabeth
Which is, I think, a helpfully humbling place to start a conversation. And I’m sure we’ll come back to humbling. But do you have a sense of times in your life where the fact that that thing is sacred to you that… The image that’s coming to mind as you speak so beautifully is like something glimpsed out of the corner of an eye that if we turn and look straight on, we can’t see but nevertheless, is vital that we hold it in the corner of our vision as we orient ourselves? Have you made decisions or… can you think of times where following that thread has guided you?
Dougald Hine
I think that at a very kind of gut level, there have been times in my life where I’ve not done the sensible thing. Where I’ve not done the thing that makes sense according to any kind of explicit logic that is there in the world, the society that I grew up in, because there was some kind of pull, some kind of tug. And the time I’ve spoken about on various occasions is being 25 and having been working at the BBC for a year on short term contracts as a radio journalist, and I get offered a staff job. And it’s going to be internal applicants only, and I’m the only person with the experience and qualifications. So I’m basically being given a clear run at this very secure foot on the career ladder. And the same day, like 12 hours later, my phone rings as I’m on my way home at the end of a late shift, and it’s my oldest friend saying, “You always said, if the spare room in our house came free, then give you first refusal on it. Well, my housemates done a bunk and she hasn’t been paying the rent, and our landlord’s given us a fortnight to find someone else. Do you want to move to London?” And there was no sensible basis on which pursuing the second of those options that were kind of laid before me that day was the right thing to do. But there was some kind of tug in the heart and the guts and something that said, “Steer this way, and you will steer towards coming alive.” And I don’t think I could have expressed it like that, then, but that’s sort of the language that I found myself using, and I’ve heard echoed from various other people in the years since about those moments. So that doesn’t feel like a very costly example, when I think about the situations in which what’s sacred to us is really put to the choice. I hope that if I found myself in a costlier situation, I hope I would be as quick to follow that thread, that pull, rather than to do the sensible thing, the thing that’s expected. But those are the kinds of ways in which it shows up as part of the pattern of life for me.
Elizabeth
It’s been really helpful diving into your story and noticing the… So much of your work is about the stories that we tell and whether they’re helpful or not helpful. And I have been seeing echoes in my own life of the story that is up and to the right, the right choice isn’t always bigger, faster, stronger, more money, and more status. And I sometimes get a bit freaked out of that I feel like my life has been downwardly mobile, starting from a similar point at the BBC and continually taking steps away from established paths. But yes, that kind of inner orientation of “what are our values, and therefore, what is the kind of life that we need to be leading, and how do we have the courage to follow it?” is very present.
Growing up in church: a village childhood
But before we get more into your story, I want to dive back into your childhood to get a sense of what were the ideas that shaped you, that maybe shaped this sense of the sacred. What were the big ideas in the air? Just paint a word picture: where did you grow up, and what were the big ideas around you?
Dougald Hine
Well, I mean, you could probably attribute a lot of it to having spent the first three years of my life on the grounds of a theological college in Cambridge. My dad spent 35 years as a United Reformed Church minister, and I was born while he was training for the ministry. And so, the way I always say it is, I grew up around churches. And I grew up sort of taking for granted, almost, that I had two worlds: I had the school world and then the church world. And in both, I had sets of friends. And in the church world, there were people older and younger than me who I knew better, whereas at school, you were kind of squashed together with a bunch of people exactly the same age. Actually, both sides of it – both the very early childhood that I hardly remember of growing up in the grounds of the theological college, we’re in this sort of Tea Room–converted boat shed, but tumble out of the front door as a toddler and be out onto the lawn and all of the grown–ups then you knew and knew your parents at this sort of village childhood. And then I realised as I’m saying this, that in another sense, kind of growing up in church with lots of kind of surrogate aunts and uncles and grandparents, effectively, was a kind of quality of village upbringing that, in hindsight, is quite rare for someone born in our generation in a Western country. But I think there was always also from quite early on a sense of “This is going away”. Like, as I got into my teens, certainly a sense that my dad was kind of the last generation who had grown up with this as part of a memory of this as part of the background fabric of a country like England, and that it wasn’t going to last much longer in that form. And it wasn’t there as a kind of going concern, as a live proposition. Certainly, by the time I became a parent, I can’t just wander into a church near where we live here in Sweden and find something that would be for my son what growing up around church was for me. And that’s before you get to… you asked about big ideas, and I started telling you about actually, the context, the culture, the everyday of it. But that was it. There were ideas or stories kind of permeating the background of that. And I realised now in my 40s how shaped my imagination must have been by the inner language of the Bible and prayer. But it wasn’t the kind of countercultural experience of religion in opposition to the world around it. It was a very ordinary kind of humble culture of being in service and community. And I think if you grew up with a parent who’s a minister or priest or whatever, it can sort of go one of two ways. You can either… I’ve definitely known people who saw a hypocrisy, a gap, between the public and their personal experience, and who were alienated from church by that, and that was never my experience. They always had a respect for what I saw my dad and others within the church doing. The level of just taking care and being there for people. But the big ideas weren’t necessarily in the foreground. You could get into those conversations if you wanted to, but that’s not the thing that sticks out in my memory of that way of growing up.
Exploring faith and belonging beyond religious dutifulness
Elizabeth
And how did you personally… what was your personal kind of orientation/posture? I’m trying to avoid all the kinds of ‘Christianese’ – what was your relationship with God? What was the texture of your connection with your parents’ faith, I guess?
Dougald Hine
I don’t know. I remember being like maybe 11, or 12, and having a conversation with a Sunday school teacher, where I was like, “I don’t find the concept of Hell particularly helpful” – which is a fairly precocious thing to say, in hindsight. And I remember the utter incomprehension, like just the kind of ‘falling down a gap between us’ in this conversation. The idea that Hell might be thought of as a concept or that it might be intended to be helpful didn’t really kind of compute, let’s say, and there were gaps. There were differences between what was going on upstairs and downstairs in this particular church where I was growing up, where there were some more kind of fundamentalist strains of Christianity around in the youth leadership. It just sort of seemed absurd to me to be expected to make a choice between what we were being taught about the history of the Earth in science at school, and the interpretations of the Bible that some of the Sunday school teachers were attached to. But I guess I kind of then grew up and went out into the world with a sort of lingering slightly dutiful attachment, or sense that I ought to have an attachment, to the church. And through my 20s I was still drifting between different churches attending without finding my place particularly. And then somewhere along the way, I had a sort of experience of being released from that, of not needing to try anymore. And I remember I was sitting in Sheffield Cathedral in Evensong on Easter Day, and I would have been around 30, a year or so on one side or the other, having this sense… The only way that I could explain it was suddenly feeling like I’m listening to a joke that has been retold so many times that everyone’s forgotten that this bit is meant to be the punch line. And in the same experience, or somewhere around the same moment, it being a threshold of just no longer needing to try and make this part of my identity, or something I needed to talk about publicly, and being able to just go off and see where I found myself and where I was led, and that letting go of some kind of dutiful feeling that I ought to be better at keeping this thing going, that felt like it was dying in the form that I had been brought up in it. There was a definite release at that stage.
Elizabeth
Do you think that dutifulness came out of love for your dad? How much of it was that you wanted to do it for him?
Dougald Hine
No, I don’t think it was that, especially. It wasn’t that I was pretending to have a faith that I didn’t have, exactly. Though it might be sort of the vessel of the words and forms and rituals, and so on – I wasn’t sure how much of that was real to me. But the sense of connection to something that had always been there through this growing up and for want of a better word, I would use the language of God to talk about that experience. That never went away. But I no longer felt any obligation to be able to talk about that. Or to try and belong somewhere where I didn’t really know how to belong.
From journalism to community engagement: the power of local and coming together
Elizabeth
We’re back to the limits of language. That seems like a sort of pleasingly peaceful transition point, compared to many that I’ve heard. Alongside that journey in your 20s, you’d left this kind of broadcast journalist pathway at the BBC, and then there was a season where building community and thinking about space and how on quite a local level we structure our lives, became a real focus of yours. Could you say a little bit about that season?
Dougald Hine
Yeah, I guess what sort of happened was, because I had walked away from what looked like the beginnings of a career at the BBC, I actually went back off and on and worked as a casual reporter in newsrooms for a few more years. But I made it clear to myself and everyone else that I was not committed to the path of the career there. And quite quickly after that, I found myself… In that first year, when I turned down the job and moved in with Billy in London, I found myself working in warehouses and call centres and just this very humbling experience, having come through a very good education, and always been kind of ticking all the right boxes, and suddenly finding that you’ve fallen out of that reality, and needing to find things that mattered and made sense to me. And that helped me find my bearings. And sort of needing to find “Well, what’s actually worth doing with the life?” and just going around looking for spaces that felt alive. And I remember like, there was a hackerspace in Sheffield called “Access space” where they were reusing old computers that people were throwing away, and free open source software. And I kind of wandered in there one day and felt something, and got drawn back and hung out there a lot. And I got involved with various kinds of activism and found various thinkers who were helping me make sense of things. Whether it was Ivan Illich, or John Berger, or Alastair McIntosh – his book, “Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power” meant a lot to me. And all of this was kind of leading towards trying to learn how you create a different story, how you invite people into a different story, a different way of being together, that makes room for parts of ourselves that aren’t welcome, or that it wouldn’t be wise to bring to lots of the jobs and workplaces and schools and even families that we’ve kind of grown up in. And one of the ways that I ended up starting to put that into practice was through… there was this email newsletter called “Pick me up” that my friend Charlie had started. And he’d been the last Features Editor at the “Face Magazine”. And they used to do stories about activism and about kind of cultural… people trying to make things happen. And so he tried to carry that on, or did carry that on, in the form of this newsletter that came out every Friday afternoon. And he had a couple of rules for how you told stories when you’re writing for this. And I learned a huge amount from working with him. And one was you couldn’t sort of be a journalist and go along and observe some other people doing something and then write about it. You had to get involved in whatever way you could, and help, and then tell the story of what you learned through that experience. And then the other one was, when you told that story, you weren’t allowed to tell it in a story that will make you go, “Oh, I wish I could do that”. You have to show your foolishness. You have to show your mistakes, the ways that you’ve been kind of having to make it up as you went along, so that the reader will go, “I could do that”. And so a few years after that, with some of the people I’ve met through that, firstly, we had this internet startup that was a bit of a disaster, really, that was kind of inspired by Illich’s “Deschooling Society” and trying to create ways of matching up people to organise their own learning outside of institutions. Then I started this meetup called “Space Makers”, which was for anyone who was interested in reimagining the spaces that are sitting empty or underused or overlooked within cities. And we started doing things like, the meetup grew into an agency. And we started doing things like taking over a bunch of empty shops and filling them with new projects, and little startup businesses and so on. And then we created this community–owned and run street market in West Norwood, in South London, and that was the project that, really, it felt to me like it embodied some of what I was reaching for at that point in time. Still going, like 12 or 13 years later, the street market that happens once a month on a Sunday, up and down the town centre of West Norwood. And it’s all kind of, from the beginning, run by volunteers: local people who got involved in making it happen. And we, at Space Makers helped the first year to design it and get it off the ground. And I remember looking – there’s a photograph that someone took of these volunteers at about six o’clock on a Sunday morning on the steps outside the parish church in the middle of West Norwood, waiting for a van where they’re going to be setting up market stalls up and down that part of the High Street, and we’re thinking, “Maybe these people always secretly had a desire to run a street market.” I don’t think that’s why they’re getting out of bed at six o’clock on a Sunday morning, when they’ve had their working week already. I think it’s that the street market is an excuse for something else. Something that can come into play when we come together to make things happen, for our own reasons, in ways that aren’t dominated by the logic of, “Well, obviously I’m doing this because someone’s paying me”. Or “Obviously I’m doing this because someone’s told me, and they have power over me, they can tell me that I have to go to school or whatever.” And this is back to what I was trying to describe when you asked me about what’s sacred to me, that there is something that comes out to play, something that comes into the space when we come together for reasons that don’t fit with those logics: the logic of the market or the state. And part of the reason why I was doing this part of the reason why I was stumbling around bringing people together, trying to learn how to make things happen in this way, was a conviction that things are going to get harder. And things are gonna go on falling apart in a lot of ways in our societies on the trajectory we’re headed into. And how well or how badly that plays out will have something to do with the extent to which we can remember, recover the capacity of coming together to do things for reasons other than because we’re being paid to or being told to. That in some strange sense that I didn’t try and explain to many of the people who I was working with, or who were getting involved in these projects, but that nonetheless, we were kind of rehearsing for being able to come together and make life work under difficult circumstances through these quite local, quite small scale projects that I was part of creating at that time in my life.
Embracing endings: coping with climate change and making good ruins
Elizabeth
I want you to say a little bit more about that trajectory, and knowing how to do that with care – given that listeners will be in really different places around what climate change, but also a lot of other kind of unspooling crises in our world are meaning – is a tricky one, because I know that when we hear things that make us feel afraid, we go into fight/flight freeze… Basically, if we don’t take care here you and me, Dougald, then no one’s gonna hear the entire rest of the conversation. Because I know this, I get to a peaceful place in conversations where the depth of the trouble that we’re in, as you put it in your book, comes out of the box in my head where I’m trying to keep it, and I look it in the face. And there is just a sort of emotional firestorm, then, that that can set off. What is so helpful about your book is the way that it doesn’t leave you there. And I’ve heard you talk about some of the ways we think about the future, and the future we were expecting versus the future we might actually get, is around the stages of grief and these kind of nonlinear processes. So I wonder if a helpful thing might be for you to talk through your own… what led you from kind of environmental activism to “Dark Mountain” as a way of processing, how you got to a sense of the ‘falling apart’ trajectory that we’re on, and how you’ve learned to sit with it.
Dougald Hine
I mean, when I look back, I feel, in a way, getting involved with climate activism in particular, and environmental activism in my late 20s – part of what was going on for me in that… I mean, I definitely had this kind of moment of, I call it in the book an “Oh Fuck” moment, kind of crossing a threshold where you go from being vaguely aware of climate change as something that’s sort of hanging out on the edge of your field of vision on the list of all of the things that might make up the trouble that the world is in, to it being the thing that is keeping you awake at night. And I was still doing some shifts at the “Radio Sheffield” at the time, and I remember kind of climbing around on desks, switching off the monitors that my colleagues had left on when they’d had gone home, recycling, as if it’s going to make everything okay. It’s almost like, you get hit by that. And you go through a season in which you’re kind of frantically trying to keep up some secret deal with the universe where if I do all of this…
Elizabeth
Bargaining. You’re trying to bargain your way out of this.
Dougald Hine
Right, exactly. And then somewhere further down the line, you go across another line, we got Oh, oh gosh, I might change all the light bulbs that my arm can reach and persuade all of my friends to stop flying, and the rest of it, and it might still not be enough. And at that point, you’re kind of hitting a confrontation with an enormity. And this is where I actually think that it might be helpful to bring this stuff closer to the way I was talking about the sacred at the beginning: the encounter with something vastly larger and other than us. And this is the kind of inkling that I’ve had lately, that part of what happens around climate change is that, for those of us who have at least one side of ourselves that has been kind of schooled in and initiated into this modern way of being in the world in which science is the thing that has the authority to tell us what is real and true and all of that, climate change is the place where that side of ourselves gets given the permission to experience the sense of living in a time of endings. And I say it like that not because I’m particularly wanting to question the veracity of what science has to tell us about how deep the trouble we’re in is, but because I think that often there are other sides to the trouble we’re in. I say it in the book: if the IPCC would turn around tomorrow and say, “Guys, it’s terribly embarrassing. Turns out we did our sums wrong. You can put out all the CO2 you want, it’s not going to change the climate system and the atmospheric chemistry, after all.” I don’t think many of us who were in any way kind of alive or awake to or just kind of even keeping in a box in the corner of ourselves this sense of the trouble that we’re in with climate change. I think many of us really believe that if that happened, everything would be okay. I think it’s more that climate change is the place where the news about the trouble we’re in is brought to us with the stamp of the authority of science. And therefore, the modern parts of ourselves get permission to experience this sense of living at a time of being called deeply into question, a time where we can’t go on like this. And I can think of people I talk to who are totally alienated from science and aren’t really willing to consider that climate change is happening, or at least that it’s caused by humans, or at least that it’s a problem, but who, for other reasons, have been brought to that sense of “Things can’t go on like this. We’re deep in trouble. We’re in a time of endings”. And I think part of what I’ve tried to do with the book is actually to build some bridges where we can meet around that deeper sense. There’s a guy whose work I found while I was writing the book, Federico Campania, who has this thing, where he says, “Sometimes you’re born into the ending of a world. This is a thing that happens. It’s happened before in other times and places.” And I think for me, there’s something quieting, and something helpful about that, in contrast to the kind of “Everything is staked on what we do in the next few years”, which is often the tone of voice we move into when we start to talk about climate change. So sometimes you’re born into a time of endings. And what Federico says is, “How do you recognise this?” You recognise it because the future doesn’t work anymore. Because the future in the ordinary sense of the word is a kind of projection that’s made from the recent past through the present onwards offering a trajectory of promise or hope, or at least sense of security, of continuity. And if you’ve been born into the ending of a world, then you’re at the end of the story, the narrative arc of that world. And when people try to talk about the future, when they appeal to the future in that way, it doesn’t sound convincing anymore. And I think we can kind of see how this has been playing out politically over the last 10 years or more. There’s a lot of potency in reaching towards the past and invoking the past. Just now, I think of Anthony Barnett saying about Brexit and the election of Donald Trump and those slogans “Make America Great Again”, “Take back control”. Those are the two most important words there – “again” and “back”. It’s this potency of gesturing towards the past rather than the future, which is true in a certain sense to the kind of moment we’re in, even if the ways that that then gets used might not be helpful and might lead in directions that we would want to resist. So then, Campania’s thing is: if you’re in a time where you recognise that the world into which you were born is coming to an end, then maybe the moves that are worth trying are to stop worrying as much about making sense according to the logic of the world that is ending, and to start trying to make good ruins. Because there’s going to be people around, and there’s going to be work to be done through and on the far side of whatever it is that’s ending. And whatever it is that’s ending is going to leave things behind out of which people are going to have to make ways of living, make lives worth living, under the circumstances that we find ourselves in. Maybe this is how come you and I both find ourselves on this kind of downwardly mobile trajectory, is because in some sense, this kind of call that’s hard to put words to can be a call to worry less about succeeding within the logics of the world that is ending, and attend more to what’s going to be around for those who are realising in one sense or another that something is ending, and nonetheless, that we’re still here, and we’re going to still be here and we’re going to have to find ways of making life work. So I guess that’s kind of the journey that I’ve been on from that first sort of waking up to climate change, to then the “Dark Mountain” work where I find myself now.
Accepting uncertainty: letting go of control and creating space for doubt and fear
Elizabeth
The phrase that comes to mind sometimes when I’m talking to people about the work that my little micro–community is doing is about building the ark. Or, “becoming the kind of people that are needed at the end of the world”, is the phrase I’ve been using for about the last five years. And it is a real kind of repeated process, almost a liturgical process for me, of coming to awareness of the trouble that we’re in, going into panic, going into fight–flight–freeze, going into “This is the only world I’ve ever known. What will the world be like for my kids? What have we done?” Like, grief and horror, and then having to go, knowing I can’t live there, and knowing that if I just go back into denial and numbness, I’ll just ping between those two states forever. And so for me, drawing on my tradition – which I wanted to talk to you about this as someone who was raised with the stories of the Bible and stuff, this new sense of, “I’m a Christian. There should be things in the stories that mean, this is less of a shock.” That if I had fully inhabited the narrative world of the scriptures strongly enough for it to form me more than the countervailing force of the culture, of what you call modernity – Paul Kingsnorth calls ‘the machine’, other people have used different language for – than the idea that the world was always going to end or the world as we knew it was always going to end, should be less of a shock. And that turbulence, challenge, much being asked of us, is the thing that the phrase that’s going around in my head a lot at the moment. “Much will be asked of us.” And too little has been asked of us round here lately, in recent years. Be hot, make money, do your job well. It’s not a high calling, right? Like much will be asked of us, and that might be good as well as bad. That my tradition – which says “Yes, grieve. Yes, lament. Yes, get angry. Do not be afraid. Lean into love. Lean into each other. Love your neighbour” – should, and sort of is now when I let it take up the space it needs to in order to do that, should be the source of kind of steadying. A steadying story or steadying posture. 1. What have you found? I’d love to just hear your thoughts on that. And 2. What have you found to help you go through the emotional and narrative shift that you’re arguing so clearly in the book we need to do?
Dougald Hine
Well, thinking about the experience that Paul Kingsnorth and I had when we started “Dark Mountain”, part of what I saw happening there… Firstly, the two of us met around a common sense of disillusionment with the way in which we’ve been doing environmentalism, the way in which we’ve been doing journalism, the way in which we’ve been, even as writers and artists, trying to meet or not meet the trouble that the world is in. I saw people feeling the same need that we had found and met in each other for not being alone with the sense of trouble, not being alone with the darkness or despair, or uncertainty or doubt, or whatever it was you’re feeling. And then more than that, for a space where it was okay to put that into words, where that wasn’t regarded as letting the side down, as a kind of giving up, where it was possible to voice those things without there being a rush to action or two answers. Because if there’s a rush, then you haven’t allowed the thing that’s been voiced to change you. And for a lot of the people who I worked with, and who were drawn into the spaces that we were making with “Dark Mountain”, it felt like it became a journey to the far side of despair, that there was this acknowledgment of “sometimes you need to give up”. It’s a bit like what was happening to me, I guess, with that experience in Sheffield Cathedral. Until you’ve let go, you don’t know what’s going to be left on the far side of that letting go. You have to be willing to stop saying things that have stopped making sense to you because you feel like you ought to be saying them, and see what’s left in that space of emptiness. And again and again, what people articulated to us in the early years with “Dark Mountain”… Obviously, there was a bunch of people who just kind of bounced off the side of it or got kind of angry at it or whatever. But people who were drawn to it articulated a strange sense of hope and of kind of coming alive and a relief at stepping into a space where it was okay to talk about these things, okay to stop, to let go of that bargaining attitude to the trouble that we’re in, to let go of the need to know how the story ends, or to pretend that we and people like us can be the source of agency that’s going to make all of the difference in the story. And I remember somebody at one of the early “Dark Mountain” festivals – I can’t think of who it was – in a session on a Sunday morning, saying in this kind of embarrassed voice, “This is the closest thing I have to church”. There was some sense that out of that fellowship of people who had been drawn from different directions by a response to the things that Paul and I and others were writing and publishing in the “Dark Mountain” books, had come something that let in whatever that “other” is, that sacred. You can hear me sort of avoiding putting words to it, whether they’re words that come from the tradition I grew up in, or other people’s traditions, but you can translate it as well. I remember there’s one guy, this old guy who kind of came down from the hills in Wales, who had basically been there since the early 70s. He’d been part of the counterculture in the 60s and 70s, and he sort of retreated to the hills as the tide went out in there. And he said, “I always knew it was going to come back one day”, he said to me. I was like, “Wow!” Well, you will find more debauchery, more of the things we might associate with 60s counterculture, more violation of taboos in that way, on any high street in Britain on a Saturday night then you would find that these are the time festivals that we were holding. But there was some other kind of taboo. A taboo isn’t simply a legal prohibition in a modern legal sense, it’s a thing that’s not allowed under ordinary circumstances, but can be allowed or even required under sacred circumstances. And so I began to think that there’s almost a kind of ‘reverse engineering’ process where, if there is a great taboo against expressing powerlessness, fear, doubt, despair – there’s a great cultural pressure not least in activist culture towards a kind of articulation of “We can do it”, an articulation of optimism, of expectation – then by creating a space where people could show up with their doubts and their fears, and put them into words, and that be okay. Almost like we’d ‘reversed engineered’ the logic of taboo, and this sense of the sacred kind of came into the space. And it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of people’s journeys on from that have led into a more explicit encounter with an embrace of religion in one form or another. It seems like the thing that you’re saying, it seems like we can end up getting alongside each other and discovering that we were already a lot closer in what we were experiencing and articulating and trying to make space for than we might have realised.
Climate change and Modernity: asking deeper questions beyond technological fixes
Elizabeth
Thank you. I mean, I’m certainly seeing an very strong uptick in interest to talk about spirituality more generally, and Christianity in particular, primarily from my friends who were very positive about the future or about our ability to save us and are now less so. I had an idea I wanted to test on you and it relates to a previous interview I did with Oliver Burkeman, who’s written this book “Four Thousand Weeks” about time, and we had this lovely conversation about ‘surrender’. And his book seems to me to be basically “Surrender to being a human. Surrender to your limits. Surrender to limits. Surrender to finiteness and fragility.” And we were talking about the instinct in us that tries to quieten that voice, right, that says, “No, you can do it. You can do everything. You just need more time management, more hacks, more tech, more science, more progress…” And I named for the first time this thought that I’m having because I’m trying to write about what pride is, that it might be that that’s what pride is. The bit of us that doesn’t want to be a human. That wants to be more than a human. And as you’re writing about modernity, and I remember you talking about it as like, not wanting to talk about climate change anymore, because it leads us into these technocratic solutionism… basically, panic and bargaining paths. But instead wanting to talk about the bigger posture that has led us to the trouble that we’re in, that you call modernity, and Paul Kingsnorth calls ‘the machine’, and people have had other words for. And I think I might just call “pride” – societal pride, our desire for control. You use this metaphor of a fish tank, this incredibly detailed labour– and energy–intensive attempt to keep fish alive in a fish tank that science can do, and we can do, but a lake or a pond does naturally and with ease. And we’re wanting to make the whole world into a fish tank, when really, we should just receive the gift of the lake and the pond and try not to mess it up too much. How does that language of “pride” sit with you as a lens on modernity? And however it does, could you just unpack a little bit more what you mean by that, about the “Big Path”?
Dougald Hine
The question that I ask early on in the book is, “How did we find ourselves in this trouble?” And I’m talking at that point primarily about climate change. But I’m saying climate change asks us questions that climate science cannot answer. And I say that having sat in a lot of rooms with climate scientists over the years and become friends with some of them. And I say it partly as a gift to them, to let them off the hook of what’s being asked, which is that they do all the work of knowing the trouble we’re in and telling us what to do about it, which is more weight than it’s fair to put on the shoulders of science. But so, how did we find ourselves in this trouble? Are we here as a consequence of a piece of bad luck with the atmospheric chemistry, that it turns out sort of seven generations down the line from the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, that all of this CO2 we’re throwing out is destabilising the benign climate conditions of the Holocene? Or did we find ourselves here as a consequence of a way of approaching the world, a way of seeing and treating everyone and everything that would always have brought us to such a pass, even if the atmospheric chemistry had been different? And I mean, it’s pretty clear from the way I’m talking which way I answer that question. But the point that I’m making with it is that one way or another, any response to climate change is going to imply an answer to that question. And depending on which way we answer it, we’re actually going to respond quite differently. Because if we think it’s all about a piece of bad luck with the chemistry, then our answer is going to be all about techno fixes and trying to just find ways of correcting so that we can continue on a sustainable version of the way we were doing things before we realised that this stuff was getting us into trouble. Whereas if we’re here as a result of a way of approaching the world, then that has to push us towards a deeper inquiry, and it takes us into the kind of territory that Paul, and you, and I are all talking about, approaching it with different languages, but with a lot in common I think in the way that we’re trying to describe it. And I was very struck recently by an Islamic philosopher, Mohamed Amer Meziane, who’s talking about this. And he says, “This thing that we often get end up calling the ‘Anthropocene’, this new geological epoch that is the consequence of certain kinds of human activity changing the planet – I think maybe we should be talking about it as the ‘Secularocene’, that actually the sort of deep root, the place where we began to get into this trouble, was that in Western Europe at a certain point, historically, something strange happened in the way we talked about and related to the sacred. And Mohamed’s way of saying this is, “Heaven didn’t go away, it got relocated”. So modernity sort of changed the address of heaven, from somewhere beyond, somewhere other, somewhere up there or under the surface of ordinary reality, and relocated it to the future “if we work hard enough”. And so, it became this project of trying to realise, to imminentise the eschaton. Trying to realise total freedom and total security on Earth, in a material way, secured by human endeavours. And then he came up with this amazing line, and he said, “The earth never asked to bear the weight of being Heaven”. And so in his telling of it, this trouble that we’re in is a consequence of trying to build heaven on earth without asking the earth, without ever reckoning with whether the earth could take on that weight. And I found myself talking about this on stage with Alastair McIntosh, and Caroline Ross and friends when I started the book tour for “At Work In The Ruins”. And then I heard myself saying, “If this is the case, then part of what is at stake, a part of the work that’s called for is going to involve rethinking, renegotiating the relationship between heaven and earth”. And this is the way that you hear me as well getting drawn into the… when we get deep down into the roots of “How did we find ourselves here? What way of approaching the world is it that has brought us to this path?”, I think we do get called back. Not least those of us who in one way or another are kind of coming out of a Christian heritage, out of Western European heritage. It’s a bit like, you get lost, you’re on a walk in the woods and you get lost. It’s not a foolish thing to do to turn back and retrace your steps. And I feel like to retrace our steps to reckon with what changed in the ways that we talked about the sacred, what changed in the ways we thought about and understood heaven and earth, and what’s worth doing. At the end of the book, I have this sort of scene of a campfire off to the side of the ‘Big Path’ – the ‘Big Path’ is my metaphor for the ‘machine future’, that kind of the default trajectory – and I’m kind of imagining scientists and non–scientists sharing stories around that campfire. But I think it’s also the case that I find increasingly environmentalists, and theologians, and community activists, and songwriters kind of gathering around that campfire and sharing stories, and retracing our paths of how we found ourselves here and what language and what ways of being in the world are called for now is part of where I’m ending on.
Recovering lost skills and agency: acting for climate by realising our ignorance
Elizabeth
So what next question comes when you’ve done the other stages of the grief, and the bargaining and the denial? It does feel sort of weirdly generative and hopeful. And the thing that your book has really helped me kind of crystallise my language about is: yes, what kind of people are needed in a time of endings, at the end of the world as we know it? But also, what does it mean to be a grown up? And the sense that what modernity has done is basically made us helpless, and educated us into imbecility, is really staying with me. If I look even at my grandparents, someone who knew how to build things, someone who knew how to nurse people, someone who knew how to provide food, and someone who knew how to grow food, and someone who knew how to make that food nutritious and available to people. My generation? We can build an app, we can make a podcast, but I don’t know how the sound gets from us, to the people listening to it. The hard skills that our communities are going to need in times of crisis suddenly feel like this urgent sense to reclaim them. I’m going from this podcast to tend my seeds because I want to be someone who can grow enough food. And what is actually worth doing with the life, you asked at the beginning? In my tradition, what is worth doing with a life is loving God and loving your neighbour. And I’d love to just end on that question. If we are, as you suspect, going into a time of more turbulence and more trouble and more endings, and modernity is beginning to break down, which brings great danger and also possibly some gifts, what might it look like to love our neighbour in the next season? What might it look like to become the kind of people that might be needed for the season that we’re in?
Dougald Hine
I think it might look like recovering both the kind of skills that were taken for granted by people who, seen through the lens of modernity, were uneducated. You know, I’ve been listening to John Moriarty, the Irish philosopher and mystic who Martin Shore has been bringing to people’s attention. And he’s talking about the world he grew up in, in rural Ireland in the early 20th century. If all the grown–ups had disappeared overnight, the 14 year olds would have been capable, society was capable of feeding itself and meeting its own needs. But everyone, by the time they were in their teens, knew how to do all of these tasks. And these people were kind of viewed as ignorant from the perspective of the schooling. So on the one hand, there’s the recovery of that, but then what loving the neighbour brings to mind is that alongside that, and maybe helping us not to get overwhelmed and panicked by that, is returning from the models of agency, the ideas of what it takes to be able to act that modernity has infused us with and that I think is still shaping the dominant responses to something like climate change. That model of agency is: first, you have to know the world. As if we are what we imagine it will be like to be God knowing the world. Like, step one, omniscience. And then from there, we can act as if we’re omnipotent. And so that’s where the plans and schemes and designs and so on come in. And so to recover from that, to return to “acting is not coming up with a plan for saving the world”, it’s not “getting the right group of people in a room together”, and coming up with “how we’re going to fix this”, because it’s unfixable at that level. Acting is coming home to where I find myself, the limits of a body, the limits of the particular place, and the particular skills, and lack of skills that I have, and asking, “Where do I go from here?” What can I do once I start noticing and paying attention to the situation around me? And asking the “what is to be done” question at that level of “what can I do with those who I find myself with”, “how can I find others with whom to do something”, rather than “what needs to be done if only everyone would listen to me and follow the plan that I’m laying out in my book for how we get out of this trouble”. Because, if we’re going to find paths through this trouble and find ways of finding the gifts that are there in the hard times, that are around and ahead of us, it’s not going to look like everyone listening to one person, or one committee, or one party or whatever. It’s going to look like people finding ways of being humbled by realising our ignorance, getting our hands dirty in the work of trying to meet the needs of those around us and trying to recover these capacities for coming together and being human together, guided by logics other than the power of money or the power of the state. And I see people stumbling into that, finding ways of keeping that alive or rediscovering it in pockets already, partly in response to how much trouble is already here, even within our societies that are relatively sheltered from the extent of the trouble that something like climate change represents. And we don’t have to know how the story ends. That’s not our job. Our job is just to find a part to play within it, and try and keep the story going.
Elizabeth
You gave me a phrase for something that has shown up a lot in my spiritual life, kind of outside this context, where it’s always felt like there’s a binary of the kind of theological version of ‘The Machine’ or ‘modernity’, which I think is the prosperity gospel. It’s like, “If I work hard enough, if I pray hard enough, if I am good enough, everything will go okay”. It’s control. And there’s a deep hubris in that, and a kind of passive, cynical, disengaged, withdrawal when, as it turns out, we are not in control, and we don’t fully understand what is the action of God in the world, in my language. That kind of like, “Well, fuck it. What’s the point? I’ll just do the Solomon thing of eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”. This incredibly narrow, this narrow path is the path of engaged surrender: surrendering what is not in our hands, surrendering to what we do not know, and then seeing what is still in our hands and how can we use it for the good of others. That resisting the temptation to panic, and withdraw, and attack, and continually “Engaged surrender, love your neighbour. Engaged surrender, love your neighbour…” So I wanted to say: thank you for the thinking that you’ve been doing and the way you’ve been articulating it. Dougald Hine, thank you so much for joining me on The Sacred.
Dougald Hine
Thank you.
Outro and conclusion
Elizabeth
So, I have listened back to that conversation with Dougald, and there’s clearly just a lot in there. We covered a lot of ground about modernity, about this system/kind of cultural liturgy/controlling narrative in which many of us have in the West – and I think we need to be clear that this is not a kind of global unified experience – but that for many of us in the West, it’s been the air that we breathe, and the water that we swim in, and what that might mean, and what might be changing. But we started where we always start, with what is sacred. And Dougald really said “what’s sacred is the place beyond us, what is beyond this world”. But he acknowledged that that’s really, really difficult to talk about, because it’s where worlds word start to fall apart, you know? Words are part of us in this world, and it’s almost like they don’t travel, they don’t translate, and I’ve experienced that. And it kind of reminded me that I’m often asking about the question, “what a sacred to you”, is it the right question? Because it’s so hard to answer. And long–time listeners will know that it’s very rare that a guest’s answer to that question is the most interesting thing they say, even though I think it’s maybe the most interesting question. Because it is so difficult to get to that depth and to that understanding of ourselves, particularly first off the bat. So I thought about moving it to the end, I thought about changing the question… I’d be really interested in what listeners think. But it became quite ‘meta’, you know, what is sacred to you? What is sacred to me is the thing that you can’t say, that goes beyond our ability to put it into language.
Hearing a bit about his story was really helpful. And I think Dougald is so characteristic of many of his generation, and we’re probably kind of half a generation apart, that same ballpark that our generation, many of them, many of your had parents who were Christians, even maybe very strong Christians like Dougald, for whom it did shape their whole life. But that inheritance just kind of failed to pass. It itself didn’t translate down to a new world and Dougald speaks, I think, for a lot of people’s experience of just feeling the need to let go of it. That great line about feeling like listening to a joke that’s been told so many times that we’ve forgotten that this bit is supposed to be a punch line. Is that strange thing with ideas, isn’t it? The power of repetition to form us, but also the power of repetition to kind of dull things, and to hide things from us, and to cover things over with a film of dust. So perhaps their original radical intent is lost to us. I think it’s one of the callings of writers and artists, actually, maybe preachers or teachers in different areas, is to is to help us see hidden underneath the dust what is really there. And the thing that comes through speaking to Dougald is just how much he has sat with the realisation that many of us are coming to for about 20 years.
The ‘Dark Mountain’ project has been around a long time now, and it was a space where those people who had been kind of thrown themselves at the environmental movement and come to the end of Earth themselves and gone: “1. No one’s listening. 2. Even if they do listen, how we’re going to turn the ship around. We seem to have set up systems that make that impossible, we seem to have set up incentives that make that impossible.” They have come to that sense of helplessness that many, but not all of us, have had around what are we doing and how do we change the grief. And so, he’s just had a lot longer than many people I think, to process that sense of a what he calls kind of “being alive at a time of endings, of the future not working anymore”. And it’s so – I know Dougald a bit, he’s a friend – and it is so soothing to sit with someone who is not asking you to be in denial about the level of challenge. And I know that we’ve always thought it might be the end of the world, and every generation thinks it is, and those of you who lived through World Wars or Cold Wars or Missile Crises, maybe feeling way more sanguine about all this, and I want to learn from you too. But to sit with someone who has done what seems like the sort of, whatever it is, four or five stages of grief, and he’s saying there is something on the other side of grief, there is something on the other side of despair. And part of it for him is this letting go of an extractive and controlling posture to the natural world, and maybe to ourselves and each other also. This kind of high level of faith in the human ability to fix things, and too much faith in things, in science – not because he thinks the conclusions of science are wrong, but because it’s too much weight for science, and particularly climate scientists, to bear. To be both the people witnessing and sounding the alarm, and being asked to fix it and to say, “How did we get here”. It’s just too much for them. And so that call that there might be other vocations in this time, in this time of endings to help tell stories, to call people to what is actually of use, I have found tremendously hopeful, actually.
And I found myself beginning to think that, “Okay, I have been made helpless by modernity”, you know. I don’t know where my food comes from. I can’t build anything. I can’t make anything with my hands. I’m a really good cook, but how do I do more than that? But this call to grow up in the ways that our ancestors grew up, to grow up in the ways that previous generations did, and just be some practical use as ways to look after ourselves and to love our neighbours. And the thing that comes out when he mentioned the community building in Herne Hill Village Market was really this sense of, “One of the ways we might be able to love our neighbours into more turbulent times is literally to love our neighbours”. And yes, some people are going to be called to continue to work on technological mitigation for climate change. And if you’re listening to this and thinking, “Dougald thinks that’s pointless”, I don’t think he does. And I don’t. Please keep going! And some of them are going to continue to be called to activism directly around climate change. But I think for a lot of us who haven’t known how to found our place in that, realising that building up links in your local community is as much of a contribution because with adverse weather events or with other emergencies, social capital is what get communities through. People who know each other and help each other endure. And it makes us happier anyway, it makes us healthier anyway. It is a good thing to do in and of itself. But it is also a way we can contribute to the world that is coming. It might be in our little micro–community, we’re talking about learning practical skills, about learning to grow food, about working out what might our neighbours need… How could we be the kind of people that would be able to be a blessing and not a drain on those around us. And beginning to think of those things does feel sort of hopeful to me, because it’s not as if the high comfort, high convenience, high speed, high–tech world that we have inhabited has created a straight line to contentment. I think we could all unreservedly say that advances in medicine have been the most extraordinary blessing. The drop in child mortality has been an extraordinary blessing. But many of the other so called ‘advances’ that our societies have been through have been certainly mixed blessings, and Dougald has helped me narrate that. A time of change, probably not the end of the world, but certainly the end of the world as we know it, will come with great losses that we need to grieve, but it also might come with great gifts. And being attuned to that is the message that I was left with as well as, of course, this theme that has been very present in in this series of surrender. Of surrender to what we don’t know, of surrender to what we can’t control. Dougald doesn’t seem doesn’t say the future is going to be some kind of post–apocalyptic wasteland. He says the future is not yet imaginable by us, we don’t know. We have to surrender to the mystery and work out what work we can do now to be of use. Thank you for listening. That was a dense but I hope valuable episode.
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