In the future, the writers warned, we will surrender ourselves to our entertainment. We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. The result will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathize with one another, even how to govern and be governed.
That future has already arrived. We live our lives, willingly or not, within the metaverse.
Rachel found the cleverest little frog taking a nap on our fence. I believe it is a gray treefrog.
Sugar snap pea pods are developing!
Dougald Hine suggests
an approach to tradition that deviates from the default moves of both progressive and conservative currents within modernity. Where they sought either to destroy or to preserve, we might recognize the possibility of composting the traditions that matter to us; tending to their decay in such a way as to contribute to the possibility of life going on.
Some things will be left behind in a future beyond the current madness of modernity. Some of those things will be missed and some will be abandoned gleefully. Some things will be carried forward, but not unchanged. Part of the work to be done is to engage in practices derived from what has come before in a way that makes sense in a new context.
First evening of frogs croaking at our little pond. What a lovely, lovely sound.
Finished reading At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine. This book is worth your attention. Dougald is best known—to me anyway—as the co-founder with Paul Kingsnorth of the Dark Mountain Project.
This book originated with Dougald’s realization that he needed to stop talking about climate change. Not that he came to believe any less strongly in the reality and serious threat of climate change—rather, the problem with talking about climate change is the framing. Climate change is a finding of data-driven science but climate change points us to larger issues that science cannot answer. Are our current troubles merely the result of unfortunate effects of atmospheric chemistry or are they the result of a disastrous way of living on the Earth?
Most people who talk about climate change, especially the philanthropists and technocrats who steer the course of governments, see climate change as a problem to be solved by STEM. These are the people on the “big path” that
sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale efforts of management, control, surveillance and innovation, oriented to sustaining a version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development.
Yet this is more of the same thinking that brought us to this point of converging crises. It is the program of human control over nature.
Dougald writes in favor of the “small path”, which is
made by those who seek to build resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships, oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a world worth living for nonetheless remains.
The dream of modernity, the technocratic future, may well lie in ruins. But as the title of Dougald’s book suggests, there is work to be done in these ruins. As he and Kingsnorth wrote in the Dark Mountain Manifesto:
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths that lead into the unknown wold that lies ahead.
The crude choices offered at the ballot box encourage us to reduce politics to such us-and-them challenges. What goes missing is the possibility that we live in a time that is stalked by multiple dangers. Beyond the judgments we are forced to make on election day, the question is not which of these dangers is least bad but how we try to evade them: what paths might lead beyond their double bind.
We need other stories than the ones we’ve been told. Alternative modes of living.
We added a dozen bullfrog tadpoles and a dozen large snails (species unknown) to our little wildlife pond today, along with a few more plants. Been looking forward to this for months. A good day.
It’s good to hear the music of the ice cream truck rolling through the neighborhood.
Finally feeling better after a back injury and flu/covid–but now I’m so far behind on everything during an already busy time. I’m blocking my calendar ruthlessly. I’m also behind on my mail so my apologies to those of you waiting on a return letter.