The global pandemic response is a microcosm of the global climate collapse response. In both we get to see what’s really under the hood when the pressure is on. In the face of endless and relentless odds and near-constant demoralization, what stories do we turn to, what bonds do we form, and who do they help?Climate journalist emeritus George Monbiot joins Matthew to discuss the never-ending road of empathy and activism, and what happens on that road when otherwise brilliant and sensitive people “lose their mirror,” or sense of responsibility to the commons. What happens when they aestheticize grief. What happens when they have enough privilege to fetishize renunciation. Their discussion orbits around the recent conspirituality spiral of a writer who has been a hero to many in the realm of climate literature and consideration. Paul Kingsnorth has recently converted to Romanian Orthodox Christianity... and vaccine skepticism. He's also wondered aloud whether the virus is not "a delicious little sign from God" that humanity deserves punishment. Show NotesThe Dark Mountain Manifesto Earth Talk: Five years on a mountain - Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald HineIs there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse? | Paul Kingsnorth and George Monbiot | The Guardian After the failure of Cop26, there is only one last hope for our survival | George Monbiot The Vaccine Moment, part one - by Paul KingsnorthThe Vaccine Moment, part two - by Paul Kingsnorth The Vaccine Moment, part three - by Paul Kingsnorth George Monbiot on Twitter: "I've read Paul Kingsnorth's anti-vaccine essay on Substack, and I suspect it might contribute to quite a few deaths. Why? Because his writing is elegant and powerful, but some of his facts are simply wrong. Here's a very small sample: Thread/"
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Welcome to Conspirituality Podcast, where on most days we're eavesdropping on the booty calls pinging between new age alt-healthers and right-wing paranoiacs.
But we've got something a little more somber and solstice-y this week.
It's Matthew here, I'm piloting Solo, and we've pre-recorded by a few days so that myself, Derek, and Julian can all enjoy the holidays a bit with our loved ones.
You can catch us, as always, on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod.
We're on Facebook.
We're also under our names on Twitter, except for Julian, he's at Embodied Sacred.
And we're also at Patreon backslash Conspirituality, where, if you subscribe for $5 a month, you get access to a second weekly episode and you help keep us ad-free and editorially independent.
Now we really hope that somehow you're finding sources of resilience and support amidst all of the continuing and accelerating bad news.
Here in Ontario, Omicron might well overwhelm hospital capacity and even PCR testing capacity.
And our right-wing government has basically been missing in action, spending as little as possible on mitigation in places like schools, while keeping the hockey arenas full and mask-free, and basically running lockdown interference according to the polling they get from their business demographic.
We had to pull our kids from school two days before the break, and now we're planning for the pivot online after the new year.
Meanwhile, out in the wider world, Joe Rogan gets paid $100 million to host three-hour-long podcasts with COVID conspiracy theorists for an audience of millions.
And I guess this is just what these issues feel like.
Endless and relentless.
With variations and mutations.
And unresponsive, if not abusive, power structures holding the reins of power.
And we all develop coping strategies.
In the best cases, the strategies are adaptive and pro-social and call out the best in us.
And then there are coping strategies that can give some private relief while at the same time pouring kerosene on the dumpster fire.
I think actually that might be a pretty good psychosocial definition of conspirituality, in fact.
It's a way of seeking private relief by justifying one's alienation.
A way of finding forgiveness for having defaulted to a kind of selfishness.
It's a way of making despair feel spiritual, if not pleasurable.
And if that's a newish or expanded take on conspirituality, I think it also describes what this episode is about, especially if we consider the global pandemic response as a microcosm to the global climate collapse response.
Because in both cases, we get to see what's really under the hood when the pressure is on.
In the face of endless and relentless odds and near constant demoralization, what stories do we turn to?
What bonds do we form?
And who do they help?
Climate journalist emeritus George Monbiot joins me to discuss this never-ending road of activism.
And what happens on that road when otherwise brilliant and sensitive people, quote, lose their mirror, unquote, to use Monbiot's phrase, or their sense of responsibility to the commons.
And in particular, we'll be discussing the recent fall of someone who has been well-nigh a hero to many people in the realm of climate literature and consideration, Paul Kingsnorth.
Kingsnorth came onto my radar in 2009, and a lot of people took notice of him at that point, along with his co-author Dugald Hine.
They published this jagged little book called The Dark Mountain Manifesto.
Now previously Kings North had done really solid climate and local ecology journalism.
So the Dark Mountain Manifesto was a departure from that.
And at the time it was the most romantic and well-written bit of poetry in what we might now call the burgeoning Doomer movement.
And it really rattled me.
During my conversation with Monbiot, I'll read a little bit from it, but let's just listen for a moment to Kingsnorth himself talking about the book, in hindsight, in 2014.
Found it threatening because they felt that it undermined their sense of necessary hope.
Okay, so there he is, and I'd say the very premise of the book was to eviscerate the principle of hope with a kind of radiant glee, but let's hear a little bit more.
A sense of necessary hope, and that we were arguing against it, which wasn't actually what we were doing.
But let me answer your question, Satish, and tell you why it's called Dark Mountain.
And I'll do it by reading out the poem that starts the manifesto.
This is a poem that was written by the Californian poet Robinson Jeffers in 1935, and it's called Rearmament.
Okay?
And it's written during the time of the run-up to the Second World War.
And Jeffers could see the war about to begin in Europe, and he could also see America being whipped up to enter the war, and he didn't think America should do so.
But he also knew that there was nothing he could do about it.
So he found himself living in his house on the cliff in California, watching these great wheels turning, and knowing that they'd gone past a certain point, and he could see the war was coming, and he could see how destructive it would be, and he could see that he couldn't do anything to stop it.
Okay?
This is the poem.
These grand and fatal movements toward death, The grandeur of the mass makes pity a fool.
The tearing pity for the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous to admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing, or a slowly gathering glacier on a high mountain rock face, bound to plough down a forest.
Or as frost in November, the gold and flaming death dance for leaves, or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire to change the future.
I should do foolishly.
The beauty of modern man is not in the persons, but in the disastrous rhythm.
The heavy and mobile masses.
The dance of the dream-led masses down the dark mountain.
Now, I read that poem at a time when I was looking at climate change and feeling the same way that he was feeling when he looked at the Second World War.
I was seeing this enormous thing, which isn't approaching, it's already here.
And I was seeing how much of this stuff was already up in the atmosphere, how many changes we were clearly already committed to, and all of the things that the scientists were saying and the crumbling ice caps and all of the terrible stories that we all know about so we don't need to go over them.
And I was also seeing the mass extinction underway that we all know about as well.
And all of the general ecological horrors that have been unleashed.
And I was seeing that the momentum of civilization was going in the wrong direction.
And after many years of campaigning, writing and activism, I didn't feel that I could actually change that.
And I didn't think that collectively we had much hope of changing that in the short term either.
So, we were committed to something very dangerous and serious.
We're committed to collapse, because we're already in it.
We're committed to a sense that the climate is going to do something extremely radical and we don't know what.
That there's all sorts of spiralling ecocide underway and we are having to live through it.
No, that doesn't mean nothing can be done.
But it does mean that at the moment, we're in this momentum, which we are powerless to stop and we don't know how.
And many, many people seem to feel like this.
I certainly felt like this.
Indeed, I felt like that too.
And that's important to note because, as we know, it's an axiom of conspiracy theorists that they are right about some key things of great emotional gravity.
But what was Kingsnorth's answer?
What did he do with that big feeling?
What he did was he turned his talent to the aesthetics of collapse.
The melancholic beauty of destruction.
Now, inherent in that commitment is a structural privilege.
The ability to fuck off into the woods.
Kiggs North is now hobby farming in rural West Ireland and ponder the great mysteries.
You know, it's the ability to go within two sentences from the projective, this is what we were all feeling, to the narcissistic, this is what I now believe to be true.
And I just want to repeat that last bit of his talk that I clipped there because I think that the shift from first person plural to singular holds a clue.
He says, we are powerless to stop it.
So many of us feel it.
I certainly feel it.
And if you remember our studies of Charles Eisenstein, you'll recognize this pivot, this very white, I have to say, willingness to speak for everyone, when what's really going on is that you're speaking for yourself, for your own anxiety, your own depression, into a microphone that the culture just handed you because you were there at the right time and you looked the part.
Now it's significant that Kingsnorth and Hine opened the Dark Mountain Manifesto with Robinson Jeffers, who was a pretty controversial pre- and post-war poet, as he described.
He was this early outdoorsman hero of ecological literature devoted to de-centering the human experience, which sounds great, but also tending towards homogenizing all politics as irrelevant.
We're offering this transcendent both-sides-ism that had him fantasize in one poem that one day Roosevelt and Hitler would quote, hang from the same tree.
Now it's easy to understand the critique of global militarism, but really?
His main thing was called inhumanism.
The belief that humankind is just too self-centered and too apathetic to readily recognize the astonishing beauty of things.
In a work called The Double Axe, Jeffers describes inhumanism as the following, quote, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man.
the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.
This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist.
It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate, and envy.
It provides magnificence for the religious instinct and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.
It sounds compelling, and yet, as we'll see, Kingsnorth's love of Jeffers is predictive of his own inhumanist path, and it's cloaked in such beautiful language that he can plausibly say that he's rejoicing in beauty, though not in the beauty of relationships, nor in the beauty of human society.
George Monbiot was at one point collegial and friendly with Kings North, and we'll go through that story now several decades deep.
And I ask him what it feels like to stick to the marathon of empathy, and what it feels like to watch the exhausted peel off into conspiracism and religious ecstasy.
Because as we'll learn, Paul Kingsnorth has recently come out with a series of anti-vax essays and also disclosed his conversion to Romanian Orthodox Christianity.
I also ask George Monbiot what he would say to people when they very understandably feel despair.
I hope you enjoy it.
George Monbiot, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast, and thank you so much for taking the time.
Thanks very much, Matthew.
It's a real pleasure.
Now, I think I first became aware of your work with the book called Heat, How to Stop a Burning World.
That's back in 2006.
And I've followed your Guardian columns ever since as a kind of mainstream moral anchor of progressive democratic thought with seemingly endless energy and an ability to rally through bad news.
So good on you for that.
Are you surviving?
Yeah, I have to say that since the climate meeting in Glasgow I have been struggling a bit with it.
You know, it was all billed as, you know, this is our last chance now.
Government's going to get together.
And I didn't have much, really much optimism about it.
My expectations were low, but even so, they were disappointed.
And I came away feeling pretty bitter about it.
You know, not least because so many of us there, like thousands of us, were working so hard that we scarcely had time to eat or sleep.
And Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, who was hosting the talks, turns up on the first day, makes some rubbish speech about being James Bond, the great white saviour who's going to sort everything out, falls asleep while other people were talking, and then flies back to London on a private jet to have dinner with some climate deniers.
It was just like...
I mean, you couldn't have mocked the process more effectively than he did, and there's this sort of sense that, well, I've been banging on about this for 36 years now in my professional life, and the sense that, you know, all that time, time has been running out, and now politicians at last are saying, yeah, this is a really crucial issue and we've got to pay it the attention it deserves, and yet all they pay is lip service.
I think it's a good way to open because what we'll be talking about today is how I think we approach that kind of demoralization, both as citizens and also as, you know, as journalists, as professionals.
And there's two layers of it that I'd like to unpeel.
There's a macro layer of this sort of global backdrop of ineptitude, but also real almost conspiracies of neglect and how that tangles with conspiratorial theorizing that comes along with responses of demoralization.
And we're going to talk about how an erstwhile or former or maybe still friend of yours, the British writer and poet Paul Kingsnorth, is increasingly turning away from the effort.
I imagine if he had attended COP26 that he, well, maybe he wouldn't have, but he would have come back even feeling more dire than you do.
But we're going to track how he's increasingly turning away from the commons, especially with recent essays on the so-called medical tyranny of vaccination programs, which has been upsetting to a lot of Kings North readers.
But before we get to that, to give listeners a sense of where you are now and what kind of world you see, you've told us a little bit about your experience at COP26.
Was there any good news at all?
The good news was all outside the gates and so you had this almost like a space station where the talks were going on where you go through a sort of virtual airlock to get in you know pass through this intense security and you're in this weird world which could be anywhere it felt a bit like an airport terminal but outside
On the streets there was this fantastic, colourful panoply of activists from around the world, and what I had there was a strong sense that this at last has become a genuinely global movement, that the leadership now is clearly coming from the global south,
from the poorer nations of the world, and that people from the richer nations are stepping back and allowing people from the global south to lead on this, which is crucial because it's people in the poorer nations who are being hit first and worst by climate breakdown.
And yet, as much lower emitters, they're far less responsible for the problems.
So their voices should be at the forefront.
And we saw this beginning to happen.
And I think that's really important for the consolidation of this movement as an effective political force, where it's got that moral authority, that legitimacy of being led by the people on the front line.
And while it got very interrupted by the pandemic, I do see signs that the climate and environmental movement is beginning to come back and beginning to regain some of the power that it was starting to develop before the pandemic struck.
Well, that street-level protest, especially when influenced and directed by the Global South, is also now increasingly targeted by your government there in the UK.
You've also been covering this new police and protest bill, which basically criminalizes all public protest and gives courts leeway to ruin the lives of activists.
Why has this bill come about, and who is it targeting?
The first question, why, Is why not?
What's stopping them?
We have this extraordinary system in this country of first-past-the-post elections, so on a minority of the vote you can get a massive majority of the seats in Parliament.
We don't have a formal constitution, so a ruthless Prime Minister like the one we have can exploit all its weaknesses and gaps greatly to extend his power.
The media It might scarcely exist at all, in terms of holding this government to account.
If it does anything, it picks up on where the government has failed to be effective, but I'm much more concerned about where the government has succeeded in being effective, because it's been very effective in rolling back fundamental political freedoms, like the freedom to protest.
Like the freedom to secure your citizenship.
There's another bill being going through Parliament which would allow the government arbitrarily to remove citizenship from anyone who was not born in this country.
Putting up to 5 million people at tremendous threat.
A whole series of these deeply illiberal bills, there's voter suppression measures, there's measures curtailing the effectiveness of election regulators.
Right across the board now, they're basically making it much, much harder to challenge the government Much, much harder to change political outcomes.
They're rolling back democracy on an industrial scale.
You make the point in several places that the anti-lockdown, Covid-contrarian, my-body-my-choice crowd that are opposing vaccine mandates and masking, they're largely silent about this development.
And I wanted to ask whether this is a kind of hypocrisy?
Is it a lack of organisation?
Are they just as taken aback as anybody else?
Or do they just not care?
It is an extraordinary thing because this anti-mask and anti-public health brigade are led by people who for many years have been positioning themselves as the champions of freedom.
Right.
And they're the ones who've been waging the culture wars against those who want to censor us by pulling down statues or whatever it might be.
And yet here we are faced now with The greatest threat to our freedom there's been in at least 70 years.
I mean, I asked people on social media, I said, when was the last time that democratic powers were rolled back to this extent?
And the best answer I had was, oh, the Stuarts in the 17th century, the Stuart restoration.
Because actually in the modern era, it's very hard to see a comparable grabbing of power from the people.
The 1920s trade union legislation might more or less compete with this in terms of its scope and scale, but I don't think it quite does.
I mean, this is absolutely huge, and yet these people are entirely silent on it.
And the implication, I think, is yes, they care about freedom, their own, and nobody else's.
I mean, it also illustrates that so often, reporting for this podcast and observing movements like QAnon, there seems to be almost an alternate reality civic universe in which a lot of this plays out.
Where, yes, if one's personal liberties are not infringed upon, then whatever the state is doing is sort of invisible.
It's taking place in a different It's like there's two different countries.
There's the country of sort of libertarian fantasy and then there's a country in which, you know, the state has real power over real people and they're not really intersecting.
And the country of libertarian fantasy is generally a very privileged one.
Yeah.
And it's generally people who Who are extremely unlikely to be bothered by the sort of coercive measures that I've been discussing.
They were born in this country.
They're not going to lose their passports.
They're not going to protest about anything because the system is working for them.
So they don't mind if their rights to protest are taken away because they would never exercise them.
They're very comfortable within the inner circle of power and it's that inner circle of power which they're trying to defend and their so-called campaigns for freedom are actually a campaign just to defend that power against those who might contest it.
And so if they were to intervene in this debate at all they would be cheering on these democratic rollbacks because those help to protect that sanctum in which they live.
Well, that's a bit of background for what I'd like to move on to, but I'll start that move by putting a question to you that I asked Daniel Sherrill, who's the author of Warmth.
I don't know if you've come across his book yet, but it's extraordinary.
He was a guest about a month ago.
I said that our podcast focuses on conspiracy theories and how they melt brains and disrupt discourse.
But when we're talking about climate policy, we're encountering something of a real conspiracy that for the past 50 years, the captains of industry have known exactly what's going on and have moved heaven and earth to keep the money burning.
So I asked Daniel, do you view the bad actors that you've dedicated your life to pushing back against as having engaged a conscious conspiracy?
And I'd like to ask you that as well.
So we have the memos from the late 1970s onwards but particularly early 1980s onwards from Exxon and other companies showing that they completely recognised that burning fossil fuels would lead to global heating and all sorts of potentially extremely damaging effects.
They were fully aware of this and then they set out to deny that in public.
Much like the tobacco companies did, whose internal memoranda show that they knew exactly that tobacco caused lung cancer and other health effects, but in public completely denied that they did.
And what Exxon and other fossil fuel companies did was to sponsor a network of professional liars around the world who We've tried to either cast doubt on the science of climate or simply to deny it and just to tear up the entire scientific record of what we knew about global heating.
And they were highly successful, and they delayed action unquestionably, and they seeded the public mind with doubt.
And so, given that these were conscious actions, they didn't stumble into this, they knew exactly what they were doing, and we now have quite enough internal memos and reports to show that they were fully cognizant of what they were doing and why they were doing it, We can say unequivocally, this was a conspiracy, and in some quarters remains one.
And you report on it for, you were saying, 36 years, and then you watch the world explode with QAnon and with Covid-related conspiracy theories.
That must do your head in.
What's so frustrating about it is I want to take these guys by the lapels and say, look, if you want a conspiracy, here's one.
Look, here's plenty.
There's plenty going on.
Right.
Which is real.
Like the stuff we were talking about in New British Legislation, which everyone's ignoring.
If you want to show that there are some really bad actors doing bad things to us and imposing enormous costs and damage to our lives, I can furnish you with abundant evidence.
But they're not interested in that.
Not remotely.
In fact, There seems to be an inverse relationship between the amount of evidence there is for genuine conspiracies and the interests that people take in them.
The ones they're interested in are the ones for which there's no evidence.
And that also, just going back to this bifurcated world that I suggested, it also Maybe more empowering to feel as though you're active in that fictive space, where because there's no evidence, then what you actually do won't really matter, but you can say that it does.
I mean, I think that we're going to get to this with the difference between, you know, climate doom prophecy and climate journalism, but I think the difference between actually dealing with real-world evidence and being scared by things that have sort of great emotional impact but are not evidenced, is that you can actually work with the latter.
You can imagine a fantastical ending or an outcome.
Like QAnon gives you a pathway to the storm and the resolution of this disastrous world situation.
But climate change, it doesn't.
And in fact, the more evidence you have for climate change, the less agency I think people feel.
It's a real problem.
And the other thing about QAnon and the rest of it is it creates a fantasy of individuated agency.
So you can be the hero, you can be the one who unmasks the conspiracy and strides up the capital steps to overthrow this outrageous takeover and the rest of it wearing your shaman's helmet or whatever.
Right.
But climate, it's just a big grind.
Yeah.
It's a big soul-sapping grind.
And I know that because I've been doing it for 36 years.
And it means engaging with unbelievable complexity, political complexity, ethical complexity, technical complexity, social complexity, everything complexity.
I mean, we're dealing with complex systems here, complex earth systems, complex social systems, financial systems, and trying to understand it, to get your head around it, to see how they interact, I mean, no one's wholly succeeded in doing that.
It's just so damn complex, and it's a brainache, and it requires reading thousands of scientific papers.
And there's no heroism in that.
You don't get to the end of the day and think, yes, there's me striding into the sunset, having sorted out the bad guys.
It doesn't feel like that at all.
It's like, Right, tomorrow we'll resume this long, slow trudge against human fortuity and stupidity, and there's just none of that grand satisfaction that I think you get from these unfounded conspiracy theories.
You know, I actually just want to flag for our listeners that a really good insight into this, into the complexity and the endlessness, is unfolded in, is his name Kay Robinson Stanley?
The Ministry of the Future, the novel.
Kim Stanley Robinson.
Kim Stanley Robinson, yeah, was fantastically diverse and tangential and complex and multivocal book about various ways in which people are struggling to deal with the climate emergency.
And the solitary hero, actually, is the person who Anyway, wonderful book, but we're going to talk about another romantic solitary hero, I think, because against this backdrop of criminal climate inaction, runaway capitalism, increasing state repression,
These are all things that Paul Kingsnorth has made a career out of elegantly eviscerating with really penetrating imagination and shimmering prose.
How did you first meet and how would you describe his position and impact within the environmental movement and then British letters more generally?
Yeah, so we first met I think in the mid-1990s on the protests against the road building program in this country and I was struck by him as a talented Interesting, insightful person who had a lot to offer, a lot to bring into the movement, and we got to know each other very well.
And he went on to write some very interesting stuff.
We began to diverge, I guess, Sort of after about 15 years of meeting each other, it was clear that we were taking very different paths within the environment movement, but they were, I felt, both entirely legitimate paths and interesting ways to explore this huge existential crisis we face.
And let's face it, it is the The biggest challenge humanity has ever confronted, the prospect of systemic environmental collapse, the loss of our life support systems.
And so it's entirely right that there are lots of different voices approaching this in lots of different ways, but the rifts began to appear after a while.
Well, they come to the public in 2009 because The Guardian published this exchange of letters between you on really the ethics of, I guess, what we could call collapsology.
You know, it's this long exchange about navigating despair.
I'll just quote you both briefly.
Kingsnorth writes, We need to get real.
Climate change is teetering on the point of no return while our leaders bang the drum for more growth.
The economic system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for it relies upon that growth to function.
And who wants it tamed anyway?
Most people in the rich world won't be giving up their cars or holidays without a fight.
And some people, perhaps you, believe that these things should not be said, even if it's true, because saying them will deprive people of quote-unquote hope.
And without hope, there will be no chance of saving the planet.
But false hope is worse than no hope at all.
And as for saving the planet, what we are really trying to save, as we scrabble around planting turbines on mountains and shouting at ministers, is not the planet, but our attachment to the Western material culture, which we cannot imagine living without.
So that's one repartee, and then you reply, I'm just selecting here.
I detect in your writings and in the conversations we have had an attraction towards almost a yearning for this apocalypse.
A sense that you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of a diseased society.
If this is your view, I do not share it.
I'm sure we can agree that the immediate consequences of collapse would be hideous.
The breakdown of the systems that keep most of us alive, mass starvation, war.
These alone surely give us sufficient reason to fight on, however faint our chances appear.
But even if we were somehow able to put this out of our minds, I believe that what is likely to come out on the other side will be worse than our current settlement.
And this is why, despite everything, I fight on.
I'm not fighting to sustain economic growth, I am fighting to prevent both initial collapse and the repeated catastrophe that follows.
However faint the hopes of engineering a soft landing, an ordered and structured downsizing of the global economy, might be, we must keep this possibility alive.
Perhaps we are both in denial.
I, because I think the fight is still worth having, and you, because you think it isn't.
So, Kingsnorth is calling hope a form of deception, but you're calling hope a moral obligation.
You're both speculating on how this is going to play out.
Do you still believe your answer is correct here?
Look, I don't have any confidence that anything I've ever said or done is correct.
It's all there to negotiate with and to constantly reconsider.
I think it was Around then I saw something change and I saw Paul and some of the people who he was aligned with beginning to sweep away all the complex and conflicted ethical and political and technological questions that so many of us were grappling with.
And it was like, you know, we don't have to do this anymore.
We don't have to find ways of reconciling human welfare with planetary survival because we're going to collapse.
So let's not try to engage with this complex thing.
Let's instead think about what that collapse looks like and could any good come out of it?
And the suspicion that indeed I voiced in that discussion, and that I feel much more strongly today, and really alarms me very much indeed, is that Paul and a few people like him could so blithely sweep away all these complex and difficult and conflicting issues Because he didn't seem to care.
He didn't seem to care about whether human beings survived or not.
And, you know, if you don't care, it's much easier to rail against civilisation and it's much easier to dismiss the green technologies which might help us to reconcile human welfare with planetary survival.
If you see collapse at best as Some kind of curious phenomenon which you can sort of look down on from a god-like height and say, hmm, I wonder what's going to happen here.
Or, indeed, something to be gleefully anticipated, as I think, and sometimes, you know, I feel that strong sense of that coming through.
Then you don't have to engage in all that complicated stuff.
You don't have to worry about how the eight billion people on planet Earth Might best be fed and housed and clothed and provided with energy, because it's like, oh no, it's all going to go.
You're all going to be swept away.
And now, to my alarm and distress, and really this is the final red line for me and I can't hack it any longer, I'm seeing these same attitudes applied in a much more explicit and overt way to the pandemic.
And in particular, with a comment that Paul posted beneath the first essay he wrote on the pandemic on Substack, in which he said, I've been idly wondering whether this virus is not a delicious little sign from God.
It seems that when we need punishing or correcting, he doesn't need to strike us down with lightning, just offer up a little virus that will expose the hollowness of progress.
I mean, I still feel very upset from when I first read that, which was a couple of weeks ago.
Oh, he goes on.
Yeah, he goes on.
He says, if the poorest people do best out of it, the weak being used to humble the strong, then it would be entirely in keeping.
Which is strange, because that's not actually how it works.
It's certainly not how it's played out.
It's the poorest people getting hit hardest by it, as per usual.
Millions of people have died prematurely as a result of this virus, and it's like a delicious little sign from God to punish us.
Well, I mean, it just so strongly reinforces this sense that I had when I was debating with him about the environmental issues, as you mentioned, that there's this attraction towards almost this yearning for apocalypse.
Well, there's a lot here.
And we've jumped ahead a little bit in the story to his views on the pandemic, which is kind of microcosmic.
scenario really for how people are responding to the global climate crisis, I believe.
And I think it's really indicative.
I think what we get in that comment that you just quoted from his substack is a little bit of the fictional and sort of poetic diction that can be really edged with a strong amount of bitterness and acrimony that is expressive of grief.
And that is very, in that context, it comes out with absolute cruelty.
But in earlier writings, and I think writings that attract or attracted people to Kingsmore, including me, there was a real sort of edge of despair and rage that I think was very compelling.
I I first came across his work just after 2009, I think, when he published something called The Dark Mountain Manifesto.
And I've got a paragraph here of it.
He describes, of course, he runs down some of the terrible climate details of that age.
Of course, they've worsened.
And he writes, this is with his co-writer Dougald Hine, and so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised, trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it.
None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down.
Secretly, we think we are all doomed.
Even the politicians think this.
Even the environmentalists.
Some of us deal with it by going shopping.
Some deal with it by hoping it is true.
Some give up in despair.
Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm.
Our question is, what would happen if we looked down?
Would it be as bad as we imagine?
What might we see?
Could it even be good for us?
We believe it is time to look down.
And it strikes me as I'm reading this that this is all written in the first person plural, and there's this feeling of almost like collective or shared fate.
But that's something that I think you're saying specifically disappears from his concerns over time.
But what does writing like that bring up for you, and what did it bring up for you?
I mean, I felt there was a lot of interest in that writing.
There was a lot there which was worth engaging with.
I wasn't sympathetic towards Dark Mountain when it was launched.
In fact, I went to their first festival to have a debate with Dugald Hine about exactly these themes that they were bringing up, because It was, you know, what I detected in it, and they did to some extent deny this, but I detected this sense that, fine, let's bring it on.
You know, this is, we can't stop it now, there's no point in trying, it's futile and arrogant to suggest that we can.
So let's first of all look down on it, observe it from this godlike height, see what it is.
And then, sort of, there was a real sense I had of hand rubbing, of saying, OK, right, fine, you know, maybe a better world will come out of this.
And, you know, Paul, in our exchange, had been quite specific about, you know, maybe a better world will come out of this.
And I can see no possible scenario in which a better world comes out of collapse.
Yeah, I mean, generally, when societies collapse, psychopaths take over.
That seems to be a fairly common characteristic of a post-collapse society.
But also, you know, vast, vast numbers of people will die.
And even if we can sort of say, oh, well, a few billion, what's that?
You know, it's like a hangover moment.
But even if you can somehow dismiss a few billion people dying, the idea that what comes out the other side of it is going to be any better than what we have today.
I just find that completely implausible.
And so I felt that the whole basis of this discussion was fundamentally flawed and unrealistic, was simplified, was stripped down to the point at which it was, just as we were saying at the beginning of this talk, describing a different world, a world which doesn't actually exist, a fantasy world of simple choices, or a world which doesn't actually exist, a fantasy world of simple choices, or indeed of not having to make choices at all, because you're not even considering one half of the equation, which
You know, just to flag for the listeners, we'll post the Guardian exchange of letters in the show notes, but George is referring here to the fact that you bring up in one of your letters that billions will die, and in the next exchange, it's not something that Paul picks up on.
He doesn't address the actual sort of casualty rate that any sensible collapse scenario would project.
Casual about casualties.
I think that pretty good sums it up.
You know, there's also something about, it's a weird form of aesthetic accelerationism.
Most of the time, you know, we see accelerationism in extremist groups, white supremacist groups, ethno-nationalists, the traditionalists of the Steve Bannett variety want things to become disrupted and chaotic so that the Kali Yuga can come to an end or whatever.
But There's, I don't get that so much from the Dark Mountain group as much as we want to accelerate our self-extraction from the discussion so that we can have a different lifestyle.
We can recreate a kind of you know, maybe 19th century harmonialism or something like that.
It's an accelerationism that is nonviolent, but it's nonviolent because it sort of forgets about the violence that would be coming.
Yeah.
I think there's a fetishization of renunciation, turning your back on the world and its ways, It's corrupt.
It's evil.
We don't like it anyway.
We see no value in it.
We're going to turn away, go off-grid, literally or metaphorically, and retreat from this while denouncing the wickedness that we're retreating from.
It's quite Old Testament in some ways.
Woe to the bloody city, the prey departeth not.
It's that sort of Old Testament prophetic tone.
Which I often detect in Paul's writing and in Dark Mountain writing.
And I totally understand, you know, I don't have any difficulty in grasping why people would want to retreat and turn their backs on the world.
I mean, it is, it's difficult and it's depressing and you need to have You know, pretty well cast-iron constitution to just keep going, knowing what we now know.
It's really hard and occasionally, you know, I do find it overwhelming and, you know, my approach happens to be different that, you know, I think, you know, I just keep borrowing further in and in and in into the system to try to, what can we do about this?
But I do understand the desire to pull back.
But I think what happens when you do so, Is that you lose your mirror.
When you cut yourself off, you lose contact with your critics.
You lose contact with the people who can say, hang on a moment, are you really saying this?
Is that really the position you want to take?
And you surround yourself only by the other off-grid people who might have a similar perspective.
And then I think things start to spiral.
And you can easily find yourself in an accelerative spiral of glee at the collapse of civilization.
And if you have a kind of Old Testament diction that contrasts so sharply with the bump that the rest of the public is hearing out of the mouth of Johnson, Then you might have a very ready audience as well.
Because there's something, I think, what's so compelling about his discourse is that he's an extraordinarily good writer.
And, you know, he'll speak in full paragraphs, and, you know, he's quite, you know, convincing, and there's this sense that there is this overwhelming concern for the situation that's always sort of presented in a contrarian fashion.
There's no answers, really, because collapse is actually fetishized.
And so I suppose it's not surprising that he recently has carved out yet again another articulate pathway in anti-vax discourse, which is now the new counterculture in a way.
And I think if you can apply romantic cynicism, you know, in one place, you can apply it in another place, wherever it sparks.
So, starting on November 24th, just a couple of weeks ago, he published the first of two, and I think there's a projected third installment of a series called The Vaccine Moment.
What did you think when you first saw that?
So, the first thing that struck me was that he got a lot of things wrong in those essays.
And, And they were all wrong in the same direction.
Wrong about the efficacy of vaccines, wrong about whether vaccines have been fully tested or not.
They were all playing into the story that vaccines don't work or don't work Very well.
And they, and they're not properly tested and we're being experimented on, etc.
Which is a very attractive story to some people and, and gets you a ready made audience, but it's also exceedingly dangerous.
You know, human lives are at stake here.
We've all seen and heard the stories now.
And in fact, some of us have Direct contact with people who believed that for various reasons they shouldn't have the vaccine and then caught COVID and either died or only just survived having been through intensive care.
And, you know, it's one of those cases where careless talk really does cost lives.
And if you are a brilliant and articulate writer and you lace your essays with incorrect facts, which all point in one direction, against the vaccine and against public health measures, then you could contribute to people's deaths.
This is not something which you should do lightly, but I feel he's done it too lightly.
And so I read them with a growing sense of dismay.
But also with a sense of familiarity, because again, it's like, you know, this sense that he can easily dismiss public health measures, because perhaps actually he doesn't really care.
He doesn't feel the need in these two essays to engage in the complex questions, like how best to balance the prevention of millions of premature deaths on the one hand, caused by the virus, against the freedoms that we value, which of course are real freedoms, and there's definitely been a constraint of those freedoms by the public health measures.
But he doesn't feel the need to balance that, because I suspect And this may seem harsh, but that comment of his below the line which we mentioned seems to reinforce this sense that deaths don't matter to him.
They don't seem to matter.
And so this leaves him completely free to ignore one half of the equation, sweep away all those complexities and unreservedly condemn any restriction on our freedoms, because why are they doing this to us?
So he can portray the public health measures in Austria and Germany as a resurgence of Nazism, Because he conveniently forgets what they're for.
Right.
Now, you know, if you just say, right, look, look, here's the Austrian state and here's the Nazi, here's the German state doing these Nazi things to us.
You say, yeah, but hang on a moment.
There's a reason why they're doing those things.
Now, we can quite reasonably dispute that.
We can say, well, maybe they're going over the top.
Maybe there shouldn't be these Intensive control measures, these vaccine passports, the vaccine mandate coming up in Austria.
We can argue, it's perfectly legitimate to argue about it.
But if you sweep away the genuinely difficult dilemmas that the pandemic presents, just as he, I felt, also swept away the genuinely difficult dilemmas the environmental crisis represents, because human lives don't matter, you don't have to have that debate.
You know, you don't have to recognise that both preventing untimely death and preserving our freedoms are worthwhile and reasonable goals.
And so what came out for me very strongly in these essays is what I sort of picked up as what I saw in that debate with him back in 2009 as an essential callousness, a lack of empathy.
Which I think now defines and marks out the political philosophy we're seeing here.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Kingsnorth did legit journalism for a good part of his writing career.
And so one ground zero question I have is, why, I mean, there's motivated reasoning, but what happens when somebody like this gets basic facts wrong?
I mean, you've, we'll link to the Twitter thread where you go through the essay bit by bit, but I mean, nobody's looking over his shoulder, he's publishing on Substack, it's not like he has an editor.
You wouldn't submit an essay like that to anybody, so what's going on with that?
Well, I think it's this loss of the mirror.
It's this loss of the reflective capacity that you get when you have gone Literally or metaphorically off-grid.
When you've turned your back on society, on civilisation, and you've walked into the wilderness in your robe and sandals, and you say, well all that is rotten, there's no point in engaging with it anymore, you lose your link to the people who can pull you up on this stuff and say, hang on a moment, hang on a moment, is that right?
Can that really be right?
And what about this?
What about this issue which you're not attending to?
And, you know, social media and comments below the line on my articles and stuff, they're the bane of my life, but they're also the salvation of my life.
I get incredibly frustrated and annoyed by the trolling and all the rest of it, but at the same time, every single day there are people saying, I think you got that wrong.
Or, I don't think you're seeing the big picture here, and stuff.
And you've got this constant feedback, these constant correctives, and so all the time, as a result of that, you know, if you're open-minded about this stuff, you're just changing your responses and your views and your approach to this, because, you know, actually he's got a point.
Yeah, and, oh God, I do have to consider this issue, which I've completely forgotten about.
And also, people are constantly feeding you new information, which is very interesting, which might conflict with the information you have.
But if you go into the bubble, if you cut yourself off from the rest of the world, and you enter a bubble of like-minded people, and you don't have access to those who are going to criticise you and hold up the mirror to yourself, then I think you can very easily get into that downward spiral of self-reinforcement.
And, you know, speaking of taking one's robe and sandals into the wilderness, and I suppose leaving the mirror behind because one carries a kind of internal light, He published a long essay called The Cross and the Machine earlier this year, and it's about how he converted to the Romanian Orthodox Church.
So I'll just quote from it.
He writes, I went looking, and I found one as usual in the last place I expected.
This January, on the Feast of Theophany, I was baptized in the freezing waters of the River Shannon on a day of frost and sun into the Romanian Orthodox Church.
In orthodoxy, I had found the answers I had sought in the one place I never thought to look.
I found a Christianity that had retained its ancient heart, a faith with living saints and a central ritual of deep and inexplicable power.
I found a faith that, unlike the one I had seen as a boy, was not a dusty moral template, but a mystical path, an ancient and rooted thing, pointing to a world in which the divine is not absent but everywhere present, moving in the mountains and the waters.
The story I had heard a thousand times turned out to be a story, I had never heard at all.
Two things here.
Well, a number of things.
First of all, that sounds wonderful for him.
And he's describing a church, I think as he would have described the natural world.
Ancient, mystical, full of divine presence.
Am I mistaken that this is what he went out to Western Ireland to find?
That this is what has driven his environmentalism to begin with?
There has been this long search in his writing for belonging, for place, for a sense of being permanently rooted.
And I think this is one way in which we differ in that I think you can find belonging anywhere and you can find it temporarily.
You know, if you, as many of us now have to move a lot, And sometimes people will live in a place for just a few months, and we should try to find ways of establishing belonging for just that few months.
And then, you know, you'll have to find belonging somewhere else, because that's the constraints that we're under.
But I think the difference with Paul is that he's looking for a sort of undying, permanent sense of belonging.
And sometimes, you know, he'll talk about indigenous people and their sense of belonging, and then in the next breath about nationhood, which I see is too very different.
Yeah, that's a bit of a problem.
And I think what he's finding here is that sense of belonging which he might not be finding elsewhere.
And of course, as always, it's beautifully expressed.
It's rich and evocative, resonant writing, as ever.
I mean, he sure can write.
But, you know, this is what worries me so much.
It's like, because it's so powerful, his writing's so powerful, and then it gets mixed up with Misrepresentations on issues of the utmost importance, whether it's public health or whether it's environmental issues, you know, these are life and death issues.
And if you get it wrong, while at the same time being tremendously persuasive and charming and poetic, You can get it very wrong for other people, and other people's lives could end up on the line as a result.
So, rounding up, we have an extraordinary writer who produces this deeply moving work about the living world.
He criticizes the insanity of technology, globalization, late capitalism.
He drops out of journalism life in the UK to farm on the west coast of Ireland.
He converts to Romanian Orthodoxy.
Is there a scenario in which these elements do not push a person towards eco-fascism?
I mean, I'm always reluctant to use that term because it gets thrown around quite widely.
I think in Paul's case it might be something slightly different.
I think we see here a combination of a Randian disregard for human welfare.
With the grandiose and paranoid style of the Old Testament prophet denouncing civilization and walking into the wilderness and invoking God's wrath against a society that he no longer feels part of, and that comment about this delicious little A little sign from God.
That's pure Old Testament prophet.
God is going to punish us, he says.
It seems when we need punishing or correcting, he doesn't strike us down with lightning, he just offers up a little virus.
And so I think it's not the same as some of the genuine eco-fascism I've seen, which is also very nasty and very dangerous.
I think this is very dangerous indeed.
I think it marks a very dark turn.
Does it lead inexorably to fascism?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But I would hesitate to say that's what it is at the moment.
Well, maybe what you can say, having known Paul Kingsnorth as a friend and understood his temperament, that there's this acute artistic sensibility, a contrarianism that I think you probably identify with, and also a bias towards the melancholic, which I certainly identify with.
You know, what would you say to the person who shares these qualities in their life about pacing themselves in the marathon of staying engaged with the real-world work of supporting the commons?
It is hard.
It's really hard.
You know, I don't want to pretend that it's not, but taking these shortcuts Of saying, yeah, we don't have to think about human welfare.
We don't have to engage with difficult technological questions.
We don't have to balance different political ideas.
We don't have to balance freedom against life.
We don't have to balance welfare against planetary survival.
We don't even have to align human welfare with planetary survival because Because I think by and large they are quite closely aligned, but we don't even have to think about that anymore because we can sit back and contemplate in a relaxed fashion the collapse of civilization.
Don't take those shortcuts.
By all means, drop out if you need to.
I can totally understand that because so many people end up burnt out.
It is so difficult.
It's so hard to sustain yourself.
grow organic grapes and make wine, that's great.
That's absolutely fine.
I don't mind that at all.
But if you are gonna take that route, don't then say out of the void, I have found the answer.
And I don't need all that complexity.
And I don't need all that compromise.
I don't need to compromise with humanity because here is this clear and ringing, resonant answer, which I've produced in the woods without reference to anyone else.
And I can strike you down with my rhetoric.
I can invoke the wrath of God against you, having turned my back on you.
That is no answer at all.
So, you know, either we engage with the complexity in full, and not everyone can do that, but it's definitely a worthwhile thing to do.
Or we pull away and cultivate our garden, which is also fine and also a worthwhile thing to do.
Trying to do both at once, that's when it gets problematic.
Thanks for listening, everyone.
Hey, if you have a minute, leave a review for us.
That really helps.
And also, please look forward to our upcoming episodes.
Episode 84 features Derek interviewing Angela Denker.
Who is the author of Red State Christians, and it's a great interview, I have to say.
Episode 85, we're going to take a look at how Charles Eisenstein has taken a new gig as the intellectual in residence at Aubrey Marcus's Austin body fascism outfit.
And then we think, we're not quite sure yet, but episode 86 might be the long-awaited answer to the question, is Sam Harris a conspiritualist?
