How the green transition is like the table-cloth trick, why Al Gore didn't want you to panic, and more from Dougald Hine

One of the most interesting public intellectuals in recent years is Dougald Hine. As the co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, he can be sad to have anticipated much of the recent turn in climate-crisis campaigning, which tries to embrace the damage and disaster that’s already occurred (and won’t be stopped) in the environment.

Dougald Hine

The DMP responded with a wide and wild range of new stories, expressed digitally, as publications and forest events. These stories (as their about page says), sought to “see clearly the extent of the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that is now underway. We are making art that doesn’t take the centrality of humans for granted. We are tracing the deep cultural roots of the mess the world is in”.

Hine has started a new series of deeply thoughtful and explorative posts on the Scottish radical website Bella Caledonia - and they are essential reading if you want to figure out how to talk to people about the depth of change, personal and political, required to be adequate to the size of our ecological crisis.

From “Al Gore didn’t want you to panic”:

What kind of process is it, then, that has been underway this past year? Here’s what I’ve been picking up from the people I meet, the audiences I speak to and the stories that come back to me

On a scale not seen before, people are having an encounter with climate change not as a problem that can be solved or managed, made to go away, or reconciled with some existing arc of progress, but as a dark knowledge that calls our path into question.

One that starts to burn away the stories we were told and the trajectories our lives were meant to follow, the entitlements we were brought up to believe we had, our assumptions about the shape of history, the kind of world we were born into and our place within it.

The power of this encounter stems not least from the sense that some secret part of us already knew. We had been sitting silently with this pouch of unnamed fears and darknesses, and now it becomes possible to find each other, to share our fears, to name something of the dark material we were carrying all along.

And for the first time, we have movements in which our engagement is welcome without us having to suppress all this in favour of a can-do rhetoric we can’t quite believe in.

If this read on the processes at work is anywhere close to accurate, then we are in territory where the tools known to mythographers and anthropologists are more help than the standard equipment of communications, campaigning or activism.

I can’t find another language for what’s going on, without risking the suggestion that this is some kind of initiatory process.

In the first instance, the risk is to my own ability to say anything intelligible, since most of us were born into a time and place that hardly knows how to take a thing like initiation seriously.

If “initiation” has any connotations at all, they will be the National Geographic photo essay with boys in tribal costumes, or the humiliations enforced on new members of drug gangs and college fraternities, or the cringeworthy cultural appropriation of white dudes selling their services as shamans. Not a promising frame of reference, then, but it’s what I have.

What we know is that across a great range of times and places, people have taken practices of initiation seriously. They have constructed and relied on rituals, tied to moments of transition, in which the participants are taken out of their everyday reality for a time and brought to a confrontation with limits, to the rough edges of knowledge and perception, to the lived experience of their own mortality.

The purpose of the ritual may be to mark a transition in the life of the participants – as with rites of passage into adulthood – or in the collective life of the community itself, as it encounters the limits of its current way of being. The literature on such practices is considerable, though much of it is corrupted by the colonial lenses through which other ways of being human have been studied.

My claim is that there are elements here that resemble the experiences people are having right now around climate change – and, if this is so, then thinking about these experiences in terms of initiation might help us get oriented to their implications and also to the dangers that go with them.

For one thing, in a context where initiation is taken seriously, the skill of holding a safe-enough space for such experiences is not seen as something you can learn in the course of a few weekend workshops.

We are starting with precious little common language for this work, in a context where deep skill is hard to find, is marginalised or is simply absent.

When it comes to the initiatory encounter with the dark knowledge of climate change and the mystery which it represents, those who are propelled into roles of leadership are often there because of the power with which they articulate their own experience of being broken by the encounter, rather than because they are equipped to hold a space in which others can be broken well and have a chance of healing.

The hardest part of initiatory work is not the rupture from the everyday, the getting ‘far out’, but the return, the reintegration of what we have learned, how it has changed us, who we have become

From “Pulling out the tablecloth”

[After an event in Brussels, Dougald receives] an email from an economist who works at the European Commission, and it concerned what he referred to as ‘the unresolved question of delinking’. The crux of this, he suggested, is not to do with the measurement of GDP, but the viability of the European social model.

If we accept that the long-term trend of economic growth cannot continue, this is not just a problem for Amazon and Tesco, it’s a problem for the National Health Service, the schooling system and the welfare state.

This is one of those places where the right are right, while many of us on the left prefer to avert our gaze. The best achievements of the model we inherited from the twentieth century, which was built in the aftermath of two world wars and one depression, and which we sought to defend through four decades of neoliberalism, are dependent on the functioning of a capitalist economy that cannot operate in the absence of growth.

‘I have not seen any proposal so far that even comes close to addressing the issue,’ his email went on. ‘Most of the talk is about investment, a climate bank, etc., but the much bigger problem is the addiction to current rates of growth via the public spending programmes.’

This is the conversation about decoupling that we need to have.

The need for economic growth is a social construct, not a law of nature, but this construct is the tablecloth on which our current society has been arranged. The question we face, as the 2020s come around, is whether we can pull the tablecloth out fast enough without smashing all the plates and glasses?

What clues do we have as to how to do this? They may not be legible to people who sit in offices in Brussels, or to the bosses they need to convince. They won’t look much like policy proposals, our pathways out of this, depending as they likely will on human capacities that lie beyond the logic of the state or the market.

Yet it will be necessary to build bridges and to keep lines of communication open with those within existing institutions who grasp the situation.

People have been working on ‘degrowth’ economics for decades. Giorgos Kallis, co-author of “green growth” paper, is one of them. When the incompatibility of growth and life has become speakable in the Elysée Palace [referring to Macron’s chat with Greta Thunnberg], it is time for these people to move to the centre of the conversation. At a moment like this, the words of Milton and Rose Friedman come to mind:

We do not influence the course of events by persuading people that we are right when we make what they regard as radical proposals. Rather, we exert influence by keeping options available when something has to be done at a time of crisis.

To find our bearings in a landscape beyond growth, my own suggestion would be to revisit the thinking of Ivan Illich.

Writing in the 1970s, he called into question the achievements of the post-war social model, illuminating the counterproductivity and hidden destruction built into our systems for schooling, healthcare and economic development.

When our dependence on such systems is what makes it so hard to question the growth assumption, the work of Illich and his friends brings other options into view. In particular the work of those such as Gustavo Esteva and John McKnight, who brought Illich’s thinking into dialogue with the experience of communities at the grassroots, in the barrios of Mexico City and the housing projects of Chicago.

Their practical experience mobilising human potential that lies beyond the reach of the market and the state is the fruit of decades of collaboration. Bring it together with the work of the feminist economists J.K. Gibson-Graham, and with David Fleming’s Lean Logic, and we start to find clues as to what still works when we abandon the pretence that green growth can save us.

From, “Is there hope?”

[Dougald has referenced TS Eliot’s idea of the “dissociation of sensibility” in the 17th century. Eliot: “A new distance opened up between thinking and feeling. In the Metaphysical poetry of John Donne and Andrew Marvell, those two activities were still inextricably linked; since their generation, Eliot claimed, poets ‘thought and felt by fits, unbalanced’, no longer able to do both things at once.]

Look again at the terms in which they are set out, those two worldviews, the keywords used for each side of the divide: you have the people of science, reason, technology and progress set against the people of fear and threat. This is not a clash of ideologies, it is a map of a dissociated society.

Start with the partisans of science and reason, things which – almost by definition – stand apart from matters of feeling. A neurobiologist may introduce us to the chemical substrate of our emotional experience, but illuminating as such explanations are, no one acts as if her own life can be reduced to this layer of material causality.

To make sense of the felt experience of being human, we tend to draw on other ways of talking and other kinds of knowledge. We may agree that there are purposes for which it is useful and appropriate to treat the world as though it could be held at arm’s length, we may be glad of some of the fruits of this studied detachment, but we do not imagine that this is how the world is lived.

Now, notice how the sober set of nouns which define the first worldview are queered by the choice of verb: these people are not simply (or perhaps at all) the practitioners of science and reason and technology, they are the ones who believe in these things, who have elevated them to the status of objects of faith.

I have nothing against faith, it is a delicate and precious thing, and like any such thing, you should be careful where you put it. To put faith in reason sounds to me like one of those loops in the code that causes a computer program to start spewing out numerical garbage.

Turn to the others, the Worldview B team, the ones who feel the fear and sense the threat – and I want to say, is this not an appropriate response to the situation in which we find ourselves? Is this not how you feel when you read an article by David Wallace-Wells? You might then want to move through the fear, to find courage, but you don’t get there by mocking the fearful.

If there’s some truth in the simple schema according to which those who are fearful of the future are also ‘the ones who don’t believe that climate change is happening’, then this paradox deserves more than scorn.

The poisoned seeds of climate denial were planted quite consciously by people who were well paid for their trouble on behalf of industries possessed by a demonic drive for self-perpetuation and expansion. They may never face the trials which they deserve.

Yet these seeds grew in soil fertilised by the overspill of a wider culture. As we account for the conditions under which such alienation from and resentment towards science could take root, some share of the responsibility belongs to those who bundled up the practice of science, the faculty of reason and the promise of technology into a belief system.

Their grand story of progress long since ceased to make sense of the experience of many people’s lives; their faith-based worldview contributed to the conditions in which denial could thrive.

With all its well-meant calls to optimism and its othering of fear, this Worldview A ends up approaching the clinical condition of dissociation, identified by psychologists: a pathological detachment from physical and emotional experience.

Something happened on the way to modernity: a severance between heart and head, a loss from which we have yet to recover, which can’t just be written off against the gains that were also made along that journey.

T. S. Eliot was neither the first nor the last to attempt to tell a story along these lines. As the century went on, other voices began to be heard, at last: people carrying parts of the story that could barely be seen, let alone understood, from the vantage points of white men known to us by their initials.

Women, people of colour, indigenous people, rural people told stories of the brutal enactment of the severance on which the modern world was built, the new forms of slavery and exploitation that it brought into being; stories written on the bodies of whoever was other.

Beyond the seminar room talk of postmodernism, the calling into question of modernity was taken up – as Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash declared – by those who find themselves on the receiving end of processes of ‘modernization’.

That map of the two worldviews which set me thinking of Eliot risks to reduce the situation to a stand-off between two groups of old white men: the A-team in their university chairs, turning out paeans to reason and progress for their publishers; the B-team with their MAGA hats, barbarians at the campus gates.

As one more white man who isn’t getting any younger, I want to put my faith somewhere else. If there is any hope worth having, in a time when we are rightly haunted by the thought of an ‘uninhabitable Earth’, then I don’t believe it lies in the triumph of reason, nor in the recovery of an imagined past. If I have any clue where it lies,

I’d say it’s in the difficult work of learning to feel and think together again; to come down off the high and lonely horses that some of us were taught to ride, to recognise how much has been missing from our maps, how much has gone unseen in our worldviews.

Dougald’s weekly essays are building up here at Bella Caledonia.