Looking forward...

A little bit more about my forthcoming book Finding Lights in a Dark Age and related things.

So, the book has a UK publication date of 14 October and a US publication date of November 11. Preorder links are here. If you’re planning to buy it, please also consider supporting your local bookshop/bookstore (I’m working on the copyedit at the moment – I’m shocked at how confusedly mid-Atlantic my English has become).

Talking of working on the copyedit, my summer seems to be evaporating before it’s even started in a welter of editing and writing work, speaking events and farm projects so I’m afraid new web content from me here may be a bit sparse over the next few months. Please bear with me. I’m keen to keep writing online and I always like to see the discussions under my posts.

I’ve got a few things I’m hoping to write about, and then in the autumn I’ll start a brief-ish blog cycle about the new book. Perhaps I’ll list here the things I want to write about in my next few posts to act as a teaser, and to help focus my mind on getting them written –

• A post engaging with a new initiative, the Root and Branch Collective, discussed here and here, which I find thought-provoking in relation to its overlaps and tensions with the case for agrarian localism and the broadly distributist, civic republican and agrarian populist politics I advocate for.

• A post discussing the idea of overshoot. By which I really do mean overshoot this time – i.e. the relationship of human populations to a renewable ecological base.

• A post picking up on recent discussions here about religion and spirituality as the gods of secular modernity approach their date with Ragnarök.

• A post on the concept of the professional-managerial class and its significance today.

• A lamb’s tale, or a sheep’s tail…

If anybody would like to suggest topics for an open comment thread of mostly reader-generated discussion, I’d also be open to that to tide things over while I attend to other things.

Incidentally, news is recently in of the death of Alasdair MacIntyre, a major influence on me in general and on my new book in particular. This obituary in The Guardian probably gives some clues as to why he matters to someone like me, even if it does scold him for influencing “the now fashionable distrust of liberalism, individualism and the Enlightenment”. It’s good to be reminded why I’ve stopped reading The Guardian regularly. I learned from the obituary that Bernard Williams called MacIntyre’s seminal book After Virtue a “brilliant nostalgic fantasy”. As a fellow sufferer from that jibe (usually minus the ‘brilliant’ bit), I’m liking him even more. There are a lot of differences between MacIntyre’s writing and mine, but one thing we seem to have in common is eminent critics who kinda miss the point.

Anyway, I hope I’ll see you here soon. But for now, back to the copyedit.

Current Reading

Tyson Yunkaporta Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking

Nick Bano Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis

Priya Parker The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters