The Great Humbling S6E7: We're Better Than This!

Welcome back to The Great Humbling with Dougald Hine and Ed Gillespie. It’s been a while. And there’s… a lot happening in the world.

When the two of us sat down a couple of weeks ago to record a new episode, it was developments in UK politics that were on the top of our minds – and particularly the Gorton and Denton by-election, where Green Party candidate Hannah “the plumber” Spencer achieved a notable victory. This was swiftly followed by the first national opinion polls showing the Greens overtaking the Labour party and claiming second place, something that we’d anticipated in our previous episode, back in October.

Dougald arrived at this recording having just put the last full stop on a mammoth chapter for his new book, discussing George Monbiot’s Regenesis and Chris Smaje’s Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, matters we touched on back in season four with an episode called We Need to Talk About George.

Meanwhile, Ed recently read Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom and it has inspired him to stand for office, as a Green candidate in East Depwade for Norfolk County Council.

Dougald talks about Anthea Lawson going out on her local high street in the southwest of England, inviting people to have a conversation about politics:

We’re not from a political party. We’re just a bunch of grumpy women who think the quality of political conversation on the TV and social media is rubbish, and we think we can do better right here on the high street. Do you want to come and try it out?

The More in Common pre-budget briefing brought a striking statistic: 57% of Britons suspect that the “cost of living” crisis will never end. (And that was before the US-Israeli war on Iran had started.)

Ed talks about the threat to trial by jury in the UK under the current Labour government – and the vital role that juries have played in exercising their consciences in recent prosecutions of activists, including in the case of the Filton 24. Read more at the Defend Our Juries site.

Dougald connects the role of juries to experiments in broader and deeper forms of democratic participation, including Citizens Assemblies and Flatpack Democracy.

We talk about Alana Newhouse’s pair of essays, Everything is Broken and Brokenism, mapping a political faultline between those who believe existing systems can be fixed and made fit for purpose, and those who see them as broken beyond repair.

Ed mentions Indy Johar’s Long Now lecture, Civilizational Optioneering, in which he imagines ‘a future that leverages human–machine systems that expand our civilizational capacity for complex discourse and problem solving’.

Dougald is sceptical and brings in John Michael Greer’s recent post, The End of the Bureaucratic Era, which offers the provocation that main effect of AI may be to wipe out the layers of B******t Jobs famously charted by David Graeber.

But as a counter to this, he also brings in John Encaustum’s fascinating essay, ‘The Wet Route to the Stars’.

Ed recently interviewed our friends Sam Conniff and Katherine Templar Lewis for an episode of his other podcast, The Futurenauts. Dougald enthuses about Sam’s recent post on why it makes sense to throw a street party, even at the end of the world. (Look out for the Street Party Squad WhatsApp group at the end of that post.)

It turns out Ed is currently working with the Big Lunch, the UK’s biggest celebration of community. Dougald had listened to Sam and his co-conspirator Alex Barker interviewing its founder, Tim Smit, for the Be More Pirate podcast.

Another source of inspiration comes from Rich Speeney and Tyler Heath’s post about what they’ve learned from the eight years of “asking questions about community, gathering, and connection” which led them to set up Wednesday Night Pizza Club.

And Ed puts in a word for the People, Planet, Pint sustainability meetups around the UK.

Dougald talks about how he’s been revisiting James C. Scott’s classic Seeing Like a State and got inspired by his account of the veillée gatherings on winter evenings in rural France in the nineteenth century.

As we recorded this episode, Ed was about to head off to host a retreat called Led By Fools with Jonathan Gosling and special guest John Elkington. (Here’s John’s write-up of the week.)

Ed mentions that he’s been reading Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy.

Dougald gives a shout-out to a unique collaboration between two old friends of the podcast, the artist-magician Rima Staines and trance technician Danny Nemu, who have created Between as “an experimental evocation of altered states, combining visual art, poetry and hypnosis to access the intelligence of your deep mind, for insight, creativity and healing”. Check it out!

We also talk about Martin Shaw’s big new book, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us, which Dougald highly recommends.

That takes us to Mackenzie Crook’s TV series Small Prophets, which Ed has been enjoying, before we wrap up the episode with our bits of news.

The Notices

After a long break to work on the new book, Dougald is finally teaching another online series with a school called HOME, starting in late May, when he and Anna invite you to join for a five-week journey called A Bit More Practice.

Between now and then, there’s also a five-week series hosted by Beehive Productions and the Rotterdam Change Days called At Work in the Ruins and based around the “four tasks for an age of endings” from the closing chapter of Dougald’s last book.

And Ed will be hosting his next writing retreat in September on Lambay Island, details for that here.

Thank You

…to all of you listening, sharing, commenting and joining in the conversations which this podcast is a part of. The episodes have been a little sparse lately due to writing commitments, but it’s always a joy when the two of us get together again after a break. We’re aiming to reconvene soon after the UK elections in May.

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