Finding Lights in a Dark Age – or, writing ἀποκάλυψις

I’ve all but finished my new book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft, which will be out in the autumn. A few words here about its context, and some other bits and bobs of news.

I got quite a lot of input from readers of this blog about suggested content as I was preparing to write the book. Thank you – it was much appreciated. Some people were interested in more of the staple fare of this blog: agrarianism, climate change, energy futures, politics and suchlike from a quasi-academic perspective. Others pushed me to explore distributism, Catholic Social Teaching and matters of faith and spirituality in more depth. Some suggested a global overview of small-scale farming and societies oriented toward renewable local livelihoods. Yet others were interested in the story of my own little smallholding. And some advocated for a turn to fiction, with a future-focused novel about how local societies might fare in the context of climate change.

Obviously, I couldn’t encompass all those things within the pages of one relatively short book. There was a need to narrow it down. So what I did was … no, actually the book does encompass elements of all those things within its pages. It’s been quite a journey writing it over the last few months. Perhaps the book runs the risk of breadth over depth, or too many different approaches jumbled together. But on the whole I’m happy with it, and I hope others will find it interesting.

I’ll write a little more on this site about the book’s themes and content in due course. For now, I’ll just make a few remarks about the overarching context. The first being that I just can’t take seriously any more the idea that the existing global political economy is going to survive for long in anything like its present form – high-energy, statist, welfare capitalist, consumerist etc. That’s quite a dark idea, because there’s no way its dissolution can occur without a lot of suffering and conflict. Yet one of the features of past dark ages is that they weren’t so dark for everyone, especially for many ordinary people. So the challenge is to seek what light is to be found in the present impending dark age, and try to help manifest it.

We have numerous ways of ducking that challenge. Perhaps they can be broadly divided into (1) the belief that technological innovation will rescue the status quo, (2) the belief that some favoured brand of politics – socialist, liberal, conservative, green, whatever – will rescue it, or (3) a more generic belief that the resilience of the human spirit will prevail. While there’s a lot to be said for technological development, good politics and the resilience of the human spirit, nevertheless it seems clear to me that none of these are going to rescue the status quo.

Writers are particularly prone to falling into these erroneous beliefs. I think this is partly because we’re under a lot of pressure to tell a version of the modern Promethean hero narrative, which I discuss a little in the book. It’s also partly because this is a deeply satisfying and seductive mythic structure that, like a moth to a flame, is really hard for writers to avoid. Broadly, the way it goes is ‘there’s all sorts of trouble and conflict in the world that confuses us, but nevertheless I’m optimistic things will turn out well because of this MacGuffin that appears toward the end of my book (technology, politics, human positivity etc.)

Probably some readers will think that I succumb to this same myth in Finding Lights… All I can say is that I did my best to avoid it, while also trying to avoid an impotent hopelessness. I’m grateful to my publisher for giving me the space to do that.

As I see it, writers generally need to try to write apocalypse more thoughtfully. I used the Greek lettering for apocalypse, ἀποκάλυψις, in my title not (just) to be pretentious, but with a view to casting a different light on it from its usual connotations. It’s hardly original to observe that, in the Greek, apocalypse means a revelation or uncovering. Yet we routinely talk nowadays about the need to avoid apocalypse, to maintain the status quo, to solve our problems. I’d suggest instead we need to embrace what apocalypse is revealing to us, while for sure trying to mitigate the miseries it inevitably entails.

The apocalypse we’re entering, however disastrous, is a revelation or uncovering of what we’ve been getting wrong, and we need to look unflinchingly at that if we’re to avoid worse disaster. What we’ve been getting wrong is not fundamentally things like the carbon we’re putting into the atmosphere, the fossil fuels we’re burning, the meat we’re eating, the excess water we’re using, or the endless habitats and wild species we’ve been obliterating. These are more symptom than cause. What we’ve been getting wrong is culture. What we’ve been getting wrong is our spiritual orientation to place and to meta-place. I explore this a little in my new book, but it needs a lot more exposition.

Exposition is only a small part of what’s required, though. I think writers, lawyers, analysts, policymakers and other wordsmiths need to dial down our inflated sense of our ability to understand, model and solve.

In a recent post, I wrote “so much of our public narrative about the future is in the hands of academics, journalists and politicos – basically wordsmiths, aka symbolic capitalists or the professional managerial class, who like to write and model on paper or on the computer”. John Thackara wrote in response “So help me understand: why write another book which will be read by – well, that same group?”

Fair question! I hope John will forgive me for only belatedly attempting to answer it here. The first thing to say is I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing, with being a wordsmith, as such. Nor can people in the professional-managerial class help being in it. And there are a lot of them – expanding its numbers and diminishing the numbers of those creating local material livelihoods has been one of modernism’s major projects.

The problem arises when we delude ourselves into thinking that we PMC wordsmiths can offer actual solutions via our words on the page, through language tricks, through our MacGuffins, our ‘game-changing new technologies’ and our ‘but I’m optimistics’. Fundamentally, I don’t think we should be in the business of trying to ‘solve’ problems – rather, that’s part of the problem itself, and proffering prose solutions typically involves a refusal of the revelation that’s available to us. The best a writer can do, if they feel called to write, is to use words to draw attention to things that command responses beyond words, models or ‘solutions’. I don’t think you can ever fully succeed at that as a writer, but maybe there are degrees, and it can be worth trying to fail as well as possible.

That, at any rate, is one way in which I would like to frame Finding Lights in a Dark Age. We need to find ways to inhabit place and meta-place differently to the present, ways that are equal to the challenges of our times and what they’re revealing to us.

Anyway, talking of words, I have been and will be spilling quite a few more of them in various podcasts and other presentations – see the list below, and also the Events page on this website. I have to confess something of a contradiction here, not so much in respect of my previous point about the limitations of words as in the fact that usually I don’t greatly enjoy public speaking. Something along the lines of “I’ve already expressed this better in my book than I can think of to say right now off the top of my head – go and read the book!”

However, I guess speaking with people is the beginning of something less abstracted – an invitation into encounter and specific place or context. So I will try to do this as well as I can in forthcoming events.

And so, regarding events, I spoke recently with my friends Ashley and Jason on the Doomer Optimism podcast about N.S. Lyons, who I wrote about recently here. Lyons also did an interview at Unherd here. I have some agreement with him on a few points, but mostly I find his positions antithetical to the world we somehow need to bring about.

I also spoke recently at a We Feed the UK event in Bristol, alongside Helen Keys who’s involved in helping to revitalize the linen industry in Northern Ireland. I’d recommend We Feed the UK for the stories they’re trying to weave about place, food and fibre. I gave another talk to the Planetary Limits Academic Network – an interesting group and discussion.

Looking forward, I’ll be speaking at the Glastonbury Festival on 27 June and again on 29 June. I fear I may have left it a bit late in life for my first Glastonbury Festival, but I’m hoping to enjoy myself there. The last chapter of my book involves a fictional future walk ending near Glastonbury. It’s too good an opportunity to miss to walk there next month. Life imitating words. I’ll report back here on any strange and wonderful events I encounter along the way.

The programme at Glastonbury looks quite interesting, with talks from people like Adam Greenfield and Caroline Lucas, discussed recently here. Maybe I’ll bring my guitar as well, in case Neil Young fails to show.

Then I’ll be speaking at the Green Gathering in Chepstow/Cas-gwent on 3 August. I’ve got various podcasts in the offing too. I’ll share information about those as and when.

But right now, I’m going to get outside and try to pick up some sorely neglected threads in this little smallholding that I call home.