Homeward Bound (including The Great Humbling)

Dougald Hine
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Homeward Bound (including The Great Humbling)

How will they look in hindsight, these strange times we are living through? Is this a midlife crisis on humanity's road to the Star Trek future – or the point at which that story of the future unravelled and we came to see how much it had left out? What if our current crises are neither an obstacle to be overcome, nor the end of the world, but a necessary humbling? These are the kind of questions which we set out to explore in The Great Humbling. We hope you'll join us and let us know what you think. Ed Gillespie & Dougald Hine www.homewardbound.org

  1. The Great Humbling S6E4: The Consolations of Folklore

    12/16/2024

    The Great Humbling S6E4: The Consolations of Folklore

    As Ed says at the end of our final episode of 2024, “Have yourself a mythic little Christmas!” We close the year with a wandering conversation about folklore, myth, modernity as being “away with the fairies” and hopefully bringing back something of worth from the journey. Show Notes * Ed’s new book of poetry, The Father’s Road, is available now through Etsy. * Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees. * Alan Garner’s Collected Folk Tales. * Martin Shaw’s Westcountry School of Myth. * On three ways of handling the “spiritual gelignite” of myth – retelling, translation and reabsorption/transmutation – Alan Garner’s essay, ‘The Death of Myth’, originally published in the New Statesman, 1970. * The Owl Service – Garner’s transmutation of the myth of Blodeuwedd. * For more on the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, see Paul Radin’s The Trickster. * Three recent pieces from Mary Harrington – ‘“Woke” Is Not The New Reformation’, ‘Scrolling Toward The Divine’, ‘Yes, the “Woke Right” is real’. * The Levi-Strauss line about “science, which started out by separating itself from myth, will eventually encounter it once again” is discussed in Debi Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the World. * James Bridle, New Dark Age. * We’ll talk about D.W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology later in the series, when Ed’s had the chance to read it. * Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole. * Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men. * Alan Dundes, Interpreting Folklore. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

    1h 4m
  2. Five Questions for a Time of Beginnings

    12/12/2024

    Five Questions for a Time of Beginnings

    My guest in this episode is Jay Cousins, an inventor, recovering entrepreneur and carrier of questions, an old friend from my Sheffield days, who has been based for the past ten years or so in Dahab, Egypt. This conversation came about because Jay wrote to me with a set of thoughts that build on the unfinished list of “Four Tasks for a Time of Endings” from the closing pages of At Work in the Ruins. The original set of tasks goes like this: * Salvage the good things we have a chance of taking with us. * Mourn the good things we have to leave behind – and do this, not least, by telling their stories, because these stories may turn out to be seeds in futures we can’t imagine yet. * Notice the things that were never as good as we told each other they were about the ways we’ve been living around here lately, and the chance we’re given to leave these behind. * Look for the dropped threads from earlier in the story and the chance to weave these back in – the things that have been marked as old-fashioned, inefficient, obsolete, but that might turn out to make all the difference on the journey ahead. In the course of this episode, Jay brings up five questions that follow on from these tasks: * What should we seek to use before we lose it? * What can we produce now, knowing what is coming? * What can we evolve from things we’ll lose? * What are the seeds of the things we mourn – and how do we harvest these? * What do we need to learn and teach future generations? You can listen to Jay’s regular mini-podcasts at Make Kindness Easier! The Stone Paper product is being developed by the folks at Solar Punk Now. He’s @jaycousins on Twitter and here’s his LinkedIn. Show Notes * We mention Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and how she couples the work of hospicing to the work of “assisting with the birth of new, as-yet-unknown, and potentially – but not necessarily – wiser”. * Richard Smith’s review of At Work in the Ruins in the British Medical Journal applies the original “four tasks” to the fields of medicine and public health. * Jay introduces the work of Dave Hakkens and One Army – and especially the Precious Plastic project. * Talking about what we should “use before we lose” takes me to a conversation with the Solarpunk theorist Jay Springett where he suggested using today’s earth-moving machines to do landscaping for permaculture that will continue to be useful long after the fossil fuel era is over. * Low-Tech Magazine. * Jay’s Stone Paper. * Martín Prechtel, The Unlikely Peace at Cuchamquic on the centring of seeds within Mayan culture. * The Decelerator supports civil society organisations to create good endings (discussed in the #DECELERATE episode of The Great Humbling). * End of the World Garden in Cornwall, created by the artist Paul Chaney. * I wrote about Cryptic Northern Refugia in this essay for Alan Garner. * Thomas Keyes’s recipe for October Black Isle Pheasant Stew appeared in Dark Mountain: Issue 2. * Carcinisation is an example of convergent evolution, by which “crabs” evolve from different directions. * Caroline Ross’s Found and Ground as an example of recovering and relearning skills. (I spoke to Caroline in Homeward Bound S1E1.) * Here’s an old post of Jay’s about his first company, Orikaso, and the fold-flat dinnerware products he invented. * Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”. * Jay’s TEDx talk, where he started sharing his thinking about biomemetic business models. * J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

    1h 20m
  3. The Great Humbling S6E3: #DECELERATE

    11/19/2024

    The Great Humbling S6E3: #DECELERATE

    In this episode, we chew on a question that’s been on Dougald’s mind since a recent event in London, where Brian Eno wondered what is the difference between an analysis which says we cannot save or make sustainable the trajectories of industrial modernity and technological progress, and an accelerationist position which says we need to bring about collapse in order to release the possibilities to be found in the ruins? What would a “decelerationist” politics look like? Shownotes * Derek Gow, Birds, Beasts and Bedlam * Andy Hamilton, New Wild Order * James Kaelan, 999 Years of Peace is “a luddite publication, not for sale”, but you could try sending Cartoon Distortion a message on Instagram to find out more. * Elizabeth Oldfield, author of Fully Alive was talking at The Kairos Club, London this week. Kairos currently has paperback copies of At Work in the Ruins on sale for £10 and some great events coming up with friends of this podcast: * Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (SAFER) with Rupert Read, Tuesday 26 November * A New Cosmology: Feeling Our Way into the Imaginal with Ellie Robins, Thursday 28 November * Ece Temulkeran, How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship * Dougald quotes from R. G. Miga’s comment on our election day episode * Watching “accelerationism” move over the last decade and a bit: * #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek (2013) * Paul Mason, Clear Bright Future (2019) * Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019) * Nick Land – “the Godfather of accelerationism”, from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (alongside Mark Fisher of Capitalist Realism) in the 1990s to Neo-reaction and the Dark Enlightenment * ‘Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world’, Vox magazine, 2019. * Iona Lawrence & The Decelerator – “We support organisations and individuals to anticipate and design closures, mergers, CEO transitions, programming ends, and all sorts of endings as just part of the everyday life of organisations and inevitable cycles of change in civil society.” * Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (in case we haven’t mentioned it before!) * Only Planet – Ed’s around-the-world slow travel book * Jay Cousins writes on Substack at Make Kindness Easier! and will feature on an upcoming episode of Homeward Bound * Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1942), Ch.3, makes the argument for a historical example of “decelerationism”: Why should the ultimate victory of a trend be taken as a proof of the ineffectiveness of the efforts to slow down its progress? And why should the purpose of these measures not be seen precisely in that which they achieved, i.e., in the slowing down of the rate of change? That which is ineffectual in stopping a line of development altogether is not, on that account, altogether ineffectual. The rate of change is often of no less importance than the direction of the change itself ; but while the latter frequently does not depend upon our volition, it is the rate at which we allow change to take place which well may depend upon us. […] England withstood without grave damage the calamity of the enclosures only because the Tudors and the early Stuarts used the power of the Crown to slow down the process of economic improvement until it became socially bearable — employing the power of the central government to relieve the victims of the transformation, and attempting to canalize the process of change so as to make its course less devastating. * Andrew at Bog-down and Aster quotes Gustav Landauer, as he reflects on the US election in A short word and a poem for my daughter at day’s end: The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community. Thank you for listening, sharing and responding to these episodes. Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it. Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

    55 min
  4. "Maybe I'm NOT a Doomer?" with Isabelle Drury

    11/15/2024

    "Maybe I'm NOT a Doomer?" with Isabelle Drury

    In this episode of Homeward Bound, I’m talking to Isabelle Drury, author of the Substack Finding Sanity. I wanted to talk to Isabelle because of a post she wrote back in July, describing a moment in her relationship, shaped by the way she had been dwelling on thoughts of climate catastrophe and societal collapse: I was discussing with my partner what our plans were for the next few years of our lives. What I imagine are the usual conversations one has when your future still seems wide open: ‘Shall we have a baby?! Shall we move abroad?! Shall we buy a van?!’ Yet every answer felt wrong, because my future didn’t feel wide open. My future felt very small, and like there was only one possibility: the aforementioned end of the world. The thing is, as I heard the words come out of my mouth garbled by tears, I realise I don’t actually believe this. Deep down, I don’t actually believe we are totally, irrevocably, and unequivocally f****d. I’ve known Isabelle for a couple of years, she’s been part of the conversations that Anna and I host at a school called HOME, and one of the themes that’s been coming up for me lately in that work is the difference in what it asks of us when we show up to the trouble the world is in, depending on the season of life we’re in. I want to lean into this further and record some more conversations with folks of different generations who are wrestling with the questions I wrote about in At Work in the Ruins, asking how we show up for each other across the generational differences that Isabelle and I talk about in this episode. I hope you enjoy our conversation – and do check out Isabelle’s Substack. Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

    48 min

  5. 11/05/2024

    The Great Humbling S6E2: Remember, Remember!

    Remember, remember, the 5th of November,Gunpowder, treason and plot.I see no reasonWhy gunpowder treasonShould ever be forgot. This episode starts with the traditional nursery rhyme commemorating the events of 5 November, 1605, when Catholic plotters attempted to blow up the British parliament. While we’re on the theme of memory and maps, a reminder that Dougald’s new online series, Pockets, Patterns & Practices, starts this week, with the question, “What kind of maps do we need now?” And here’s a line from friend-of-the-show Elizabeth Oldfield that came in after we recorded, but resonates with today’s conversation: We all have would-be tidy assumptions, and need a mess making of them if we have any hope of encountering people and the world as they really are. (from ‘Expanding Eros, Or Why connection is my kink’) Shownotes * The last(?) interview with John Berger, shortly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. * “In such a climate, somebody who is actually saying something, who seems to suggest that there may be a connection between what he said and what he will do, such a person is a way out of a vacuous nightmare—even if the way out is dangerous or vicious.” * Ed has joined the Old Glory Molly dancing group and got into trouble for singing ‘The Dog Song’. * Dougald gives a shout-out to The Climate Majority Project. * There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. * American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology by D. W. Pasulka. * Birds, Beasts & Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species by Derek Gow. * Caring for Life: A Postdevelopment Politics of Infant Hygiene by Kelly Dombroski. * The Plant Pamphlets by Mark Watson. * Read Charlotte Du Cann’s Introduction to the book. * Dougald’s letter from three days after the 2016 US election: ‘When the Maps Run Out’. * R. G. Miga’s ‘Hunter’s Ghost: On the hard work of staying vigilant in the darkness’ * “Two things can be true at the same time. Donald Trump can be a vile scumbag, unfit for office. The people looking to bring him down can also be scapegoating him—trying to hang all the sins of the past decade around his neck, driving him off a cliff to create the false narrative of a fresh start.” * Also from R. G. Miga, this note: “why do people still despise the Democratic Party—every single Democratic presidential candidate for the past eight years, including the old white guy—more than a meandering country club owner with Borderline Personality Disorder? If the Democratic Party still can’t acknowledge its own weaknesses and make a positive case for its policies, rather than constantly leaning on moral superiority—it’s doomed, with or without Trump.’” * Jamie Kelsey Fry and James Robertson talking about Citizens Assemblies. * Vanessa Chamberlin’s vision asks us: “What if we step towards the cracks?” * Adam Wilson’s latest post: “What happened AFTER the grocery store stopped having food on the shelves?” * Ed brings us to a close by referencing William Stafford’s poem, ‘A Ritual to Read to Each Other’. Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

    57 min
  6. The Great Humbling S6E1: When the S**t Hits the Roomba

    10/23/2024

    The Great Humbling S6E1: When the S**t Hits the Roomba

    “Maybe what we’re looking for is fewer robot vacuum cleaners and more compost toilets.” We stumble into a new series of The Great Humbling with an episode that revolves around s**t and technology. This is also our first video episode, so you can watch our beardy faces on Substack or YouTube. Shownotes * Ed’s been reading The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, alongside How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. * Also Andrei Kirkov’s Death and the Penguin. * Dougald talks about Em Strang’s novel, Quinn. Also her newly launched Substack, Emerging Hermit – and especially the ‘Our Violent Men’ series that she is embarking on. * Ed talks about Simeon Morris’s one-man show, Square Peg. * Dougald introduces a little book called Notes on Nothing by Anonymous. * Also an episode of the Spiritual Teachers podcast called The Hillbilly Sutra, a one-off telling of the story of a Nashville banjo player who had a similar experience – and who, despite the podcast’s title, has no interest in selling himself as a spiritual teacher. * ‘My iRobot vacuum found dog poo and almost created World War III’ * Cory Doctorow’s original post about “enshittification”. * Paul Virilio’s observation that every new technology brings into being a new kind of accident can be found in The Politics of the Very Worst. * Ed talks about meeting Jess Groopman of the Regenerative Technology Project. * Dougald remembers the vacuum cleaner scene in the first episode of Meet the Natives, the 2007 documentary series in which a group of men from a village in Vanuatu came on an anthropological expedition to study the three tribes of the British Isles: the middle class, the working class and the upper class. * Ed introduces us to the art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast and we talk about trickster ways of using technology. * Marvin Kranzberg’s Laws of Technology. * The episode from Season 5 when we talked about Neto Leão’s idea of the “low agreements”. * Carl Jung did indeed have a vision of a giant turd landing on Basel Cathedral. Thanks for listening, sharing and getting in touch! Look out for Dougald Hine’s public events in London next week – and a new five-week online series with a school called HOME, starting on 6 & 7 November. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

    52 min

  7. 10/16/2024

    The Times Into Which We Were Born (Solo Show)

    Midway through last month’s North American tour, the filmmaker Katie Teague sat me down to record an interview. Sometimes an interview happens at just the right moment, when all the work you’re carrying is on the top of your tongue. That’s what happened here – so with Katie’s permission, we’re releasing an audio version of her edit of what I told her that morning. The result is more or less a solo show, since you don’t hear Katie’s questions and my answers come in stories rather than paragraphs. If you haven’t read At Work in the Ruins, then this episode is a good way into it – and if you have, then it will give you a sense of where I’ve been taken by the conversations the book led me into. It also provides some good context for Pockets, Patterns & Practices, the five-week online series that I’ll be teaching next month. Shownotes * Katie Teague’s YouTube channel with other interviews, including Joanna Macey, Jonathan Rowson and more. * Support Katie’s work through her Patreon. * Vinay Gupta’s Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps aka “Six Ways to Die” * Brian Eno’s definition of culture as “everything we don’t have to do” * My interpretation of Eno’s definition in The Kitchen Table * At Work in the Ruins now out in paperback * Pockets, Patterns & Practices starts on 6 & 7 November 2024 and runs for five weeks. Full details at aschoolcalledhome.org Homeward Bound theme music: ‘Hope and the Forester’ by Blue Dot Sessions Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it. Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

    1h 9m

  8. 08/21/2024

    The Gifts in the Ruins with Dr Ashley Colby

    In this episode, my guest is Dr Ashley Colby for a joint episode with her Doomer Optimism podcast. Ashley is hosting a weekend retreat around my work in Chicago as part of next month’s North American tour. * Read more & register for the Chicago Retreat: https://bit.ly/dougald-retreat * The rest of the American tour: https://dougald.nu/america/ Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. We talk about how long it is since I last visited the US. Back then, I was travelling as part of an internet startup, School of Everything, inspired by Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. Among my co-founders was Mary Harrington, who describes her experience the mess of that start-up experience early on in Feminism Against Progress – and it turns out that Ashley also features later on in that book. Chicago is Ashley’s hometown. She talks about how she and her husband moved away, after she got “doom-pilled”, and about their decision to return a few years later. This is partly about getting away from “spreadsheet mind”. It’s important to me to have these urban examples of what “regrowing a living culture” can look like. However much we may be working for what Chris Smaje calls a “small farm future”, there’s also a need for examples of what it looks like when we start from the places where many people find themselves. One example for me is the small community of radical hospitality in south London that Elizabeth Oldfield writes about in Fully Alive. Ashley talks about the retreat she hosted last year with Paul Kingsnorth at the Wagon Box in Wyoming – and how she seems to have fallen into the role of helping Dark Mountain co-founders find their bearings in North America. We discover a mutual admiration for Richard D. Bartlett’s approach to bringing groups together – and Ashley talks about how this shaped her approach to convening co-created retreats like the one we will be holding. I look back on experiences with the community of Ivan Illich’s surviving friends and collaborators, a way of gathering around the table that is an antidote to the “conditioned air” of institutional academia. (For more on this, see Illich’s ‘The Cultivation of Conspiracy’.) Ashley introduces me to the concept of a Jeffersonian Dinner – and we decide we’ll host something like this on the Saturday evening of the Chicago Retreat. We talk about some of the other events I’ll be doing on the tour, including conversations with Bayo Akomolafe at the Schumacher Center in Great Barrington, Lewis Hyde in Boston, and with Adam Wilson of The Peasantry School Newsletter. I give a shout out to Ellie Robins’s excellent post, “This moment needs your deep weirdness and your intellectual rigour”, and quote something Lydia Catterall once said to me: “I’ve realised that there can be a gift in things you could never have asked for.” I think of that often when reading Nick Cave’s replies in The Red Hand Files. Ashley quotes something Paul Kingsnorth said years ago in a New York Times article about Dark Mountain: “I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough.” We talk about using the retreat to explore examples, to invite people to bring a diversity of stories of what the work of regrowing a living culture looks like in practice – and also working out the challenges and contradictions, navigating the tensions. Ashley talks about making community in an urban neighbourhood, also about joining the La Leche League as a new mother and the sharing of experience and advice from multiple voices that she experienced in those meetings. Talking about pockets takes me to Brian Eno’s concept of “scenius”, the conditions under which a group of artists become capable of making work that exceeds anything they had previously achieved on their own. (For more on this, see this post of mine and Austin Kleon’s Maps of Scenius.) It also brings me to Laura Fabrycky’s essay, ‘The Witness of the Weak Centres’, about how her admiration for Dietrich Bonhoeffer developed from a story of his individual heroism to a recognition of “the small, mysterious, slow, even weak places of life—home, family, friends” that shaped the resistance to the Nazi regime. Thanks for listening – and for reading these notes. Head over to my website to find all the details for the Chicago Retreat and the rest of the American tour. Further episodes of Homeward Bound are coming soon, along with a new series of The Great Humbling later in the autumn. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

    1h 3m
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How will they look in hindsight, these strange times we are living through? Is this a midlife crisis on humanity's road to the Star Trek future – or the point at which that story of the future unravelled and we came to see how much it had left out? What if our current crises are neither an obstacle to be overcome, nor the end of the world, but a necessary humbling? These are the kind of questions which we set out to explore in The Great Humbling. We hope you'll join us and let us know what you think. Ed Gillespie & Dougald Hine www.homewardbound.org

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