Chris Smaje, Finding Lights in a Dark Age (thanks to Donny for the recommendation):
Just as mainstream left and right politics realigns around a joint commitment to tech-heavy liberal-modernism, so it’s possible to imagine, in the words of Stephen Quilley, ‘a realignment built on the overlap between libertarians, Burkean localists, and religious communitarians currently (sometimes unwillingly) camped out on the political right on the one hand, and green/anarchist anti-moderns on the left!"
This book represents an attempt by one particular writer inclined to green anti-modernism on the left to find the overlaps with those groups camped out on the right. An easy point of agreement is on the benefits of rich, local associational communities grounded in livelihood-making. Letting go of currently high levels of fossil-fuelled plenty may be a harder journey for both left and right, but if my arguments about our impending dark age are accurate, we don’t have much choice about that. Probably most challenging to traditional left or anarchist thinking is the need to let go of a sense of individualist freedom and self-fashioning, and to embrace the idea that self-realization is possible only within the limiting (but also enabling) structures of already given communities and families - and, what’s more, communities with spiritual underpinnings.
This has been my trajectory for a while now. “Left” and “right” are two drunks having a bar fight: sure, I walked into this bar with one of them but the whole thing is getting stupider by the moment. I’m far more interested in connecting with those on the side of life, against technological death.