Paul Kingsnorth: science doesn't have all the answers

both sides in this horrible toxic culture battle that's going on are talking about identity as if it's something that's under threat for them and something that they've lost and something they feel attached to and something that the other side wants to take away from them you know and there's it's a very curious thing i don't think you know a healthy society doesn't have stuff like this going on hello and welcome this is lockdown tv from unheard our guest today i'm really excited about he's called paul kingsnorth you may not have heard of him you may have heard of him but he's a big thinker a former activist in the environmental movement and now a novelist poet who lives on his own farmstead out in western ireland in county galway so hi paul can you see me and hear me i can see you and hear you freddie thank you so there's a lot that i would love to get into in the time we have um these are big topics and i know part of what you're against is the kind of mediated technological world so it's going to be a bit of a challenge to tackle it via skype yeah here we are on skype um but we do our best so exactly let's start by giving a sort of introduction you were formerly an activist in the environmental movement and you've since left that behind and you've moved out to ireland you've turned your back more on not just environmentalism as it was conceived but kind of on a whole way of life haven't you i i grew up in the west of in the northwest of london in a in a suburban house and very much a kind of urban lifestyle suburban lifestyle but when i was young i was taken on a lot of long mountain walks by my dad and we used to walk walk across the penins for weeks on end and walk across the the welsh mountains and the moors and and the wild places so i had something something sank into me that was some sort of inexplicable deep connection to the natural world and i didn't quite know what it was and i spent many years sort of trying to work out what that was um when i went to university i ended up getting politicized this kind of love of nature turned into an a sort of activist drive i suppose as it does for a lot of people um i got involved in the road protest movement back in the mid 90s um and from there into anti-globalization politics and anti-corporate activism and all of this kind of stuff and what happens is is when you become an activist in that way you start pulling on threads so you start saying okay this this road is being built through this piece of historic downland and it's destroying this ancient woodland why are we building the roads and then you start spiraling upwards and you you discover answers about economic growth and then you discover what globalization is and you discover corporate power and you discover capitalism and all of this so you start to understand the kind of uh the growth mentality of the economic monster that we're all kind of in um and that that informs a lot of activists then as now um and like a lot of people um i ended up you know campaigning against climate change wanting to turn around really the whole direction of industrial society which is what you sort of end up having to campaign for in some way because what you end up seeing if you are an activist long enough and you do enough sort of thinking and reading and and and the rest of it is that we have built this enormous unsustainable economic monster that now envelops the world which requires endless growth to keep it going it isn't possible to feed it with enough natural resources to power that endless growth the fossil fuels that it uses to power that endless growth are changing the climate so we all know these terrible stories we've kicked off a mass extinction event the climate is changing all of the kind of horrors so you end up having to try and turn this around um you end up campaigning to stop climate change and after many many years of doing that i was unable to avoid the reality as it seemed to me and it still does that it actually isn't possible to do it um in the way that we wanted to do it you are for example not going to stop climate change at this point it's not possible and you're not going to somehow abolish capitalism either until it abolishes itself by collapsing um and i think a lot of activists get to the point where they see this and it sort of go into a form of denial um and i did for a while until i just had to accept that that was the case um and i also had to accept something else which is that environmentalism was becoming so technocratic so obsessed with technological solutionism that actually it was almost doing as much damage as it wanted to prevent um in terms of the the wild lands being destroyed by uh giants solar arrays and barrages on the rivers and the kind of techno solutionism of nuclear power and all of this kind of stuff so i really got to the point where i didn't believe in that kind of environmentalism anymore um not because i'd stopped caring about nature or that i didn't think people should do things to protect it they should but because i could see that we weren't going to turn that machine around anytime soon so that sort of um precipitated a bit of a crisis in me which as usual i dealt with by writing about it and eventually you also you moved to ireland and you you left the kind of urban life behind and you are living closer to the land yeah i would say so i mean look i'm lucky enough to have been able to do that um my wife who is a former psychiatrist who had become as disillusioned with what she was doing as i had i suppose um we were you know ten years ago we had already decided that we wanted to go and try and live differently it's a kind of secession from the system which is always a good idea if you can manage to do it in some way um i've been talking about nature and writing about nature for 25 years but i didn't really actually live in it or know how to do anything practical really and as as is true with so many of us so yeah we we were able to find ourselves a little bit of land and a house we could afford and we just came here and we homeschool our kids and we grow as much food as we can and i resist any sort of um attempt to paint it as a rural idol because there's no such thing but there is such a thing as being able to get your hands dirty and it makes a difference to me as somebody certainly as a writer who lives in his head all the time actually to be able to do that and to sort of put your money where your mouth is a bit but also one of the things i feel about this giant kind of machine as i call it that has enveloped us now and is enveloping us faster and faster and you kind of alluded to it at the beginning is that it's creating for us this kind of hyper reality this mediated life in which the world we are all moving towards is almost a kind of virtual reality and ultimately it will be a virtual reality because our our role all of us is just cogs in this machine which is kind of being designed by states and capital and the the the heroes of silicon valley um and we're pretty much encouraged to be powerless and in that in that kind of situation any self-reliance that you can get for yourself is is a radical act um for me i'm i continue to be inspired by quite an old-fashioned version of the green movement you know the original green thinkers of the 60s and 70s the ef schumachers and the leopold cause and it's very much about what evan ilitch called appropriate technology you know how much can we make ourselves as self-sufficient as possible as self-reliant as possible how many skills can we learn and can we learn to live within limits which is a big question for me personally and i think it's a question for us as a culture because we have as i say this giant economic machine which always needs growth always needs to expand and always needs all of us to break down all of our limits in almost all regards so that we can continue to consume and consume and consume and the way the way off that treadmill is is literally if you can in whatever way you can to try and step back so your act then instead of faced with a system that is so big and moving in such a pace that you didn't feel you were gonna over either overthrow it or change its course your act of rebellion as it were was to withdraw from it yeah to a degree to a degree i mean what i would say is you can never you can never withdraw because this is the world we're talking about right so you can't withdraw from it completely and you shouldn't want to because you're connected to everything in it um so it isn't possible to just sort of hide away on the margins or rather it is but it's it's not quite what i'm doing you know we're bringing up our kids here and they're involved in the world and here i am on the internet so it's not it's not a total withdrawal but as much as possible as i say it's an act of self-reliance um when i when i wrote my first book which is 20 years old now nearly which makes me feel very old um that was a book about resistance to globalization and it came out in 2003 it was called one no many yeses and i spent nine months travelling the world and i visited a lot of communities that were being destroyed or challenged by this model of hyper capitalism by neoliberalism effectively um and i spent time with tribal people in west papua and i spent time with the zapatistas in mexico and with people in the townships in south africa and various people you know people in europe too um campaigning against the g8 and what i saw was that then actually as now as well i think the fundamental means of any kind of rebellion to this machine is in whatever way you can do it some form of of self-reliance as a community or as a person i was very inspired by the zapatista movement down in mexico which originally took up arms against the north american free trade agreement the first movement in history there's been a rebellion against a treaty rather than a government and they were very much opposed to what neo-liberalism was doing to the the tribal people not tribal people the indigenous people of chiapas um but they were also very rooted in their culture very rooted in time and place so there's a kind of rooted rebellion going on there in which they say okay well look here's here's what we are and we are trying to put up some form of barrier um against this this machine that's coming coming to eat us whilst at the same time actually being a very kind of internationalist-minded movement um it's very very interesting to me inspiring form of of resistance so um some form of yeah some form of succession um is useful and interesting i think possibly with the hope that it can kind of keep alive some sort of wisdom uh until some future moment of collapse potentially at one point in your writings you talk about the monks and the monasteries holding you know keeping copies of the bible and keeping the kind of flame of christianity alive during the dark ages and they're like do you mean do you do you think there's a parallel there well i don't know if i've got any wisdom but um i do think that we're heading into a really dark and difficult time i think that this global machine is going to keep running and running until it's consumed everything it can consume despite the many heroic attempts of various activist groups and others it isn't really possible to turn it around on a global scale not least because if we're honest with ourselves we like the fruits of it right we all like what modernity gives us in terms of comfort at least those of us who are lucky enough to have that in the in the rich world people don't want to turn away from that so i don't see any way in which this is not going to continue to eat the the wild world continue to change the climate continue to sort of uproot people all over the world and kind of feed us into this market machine that we've created everywhere so it's a very difficult time for people um there is all you can do is what you can do actually is is really all i can say on it there's no there's no we have a tendency i think especially sort of intellectual talky people like us to come up with to identify a big problem and then want to create a big answer to it you know to come up with a sort of five-point plan to save the world they don't usually work they often create more problems than they solve so the solution ends up being quite piecemeal and quite local and you do what you can do where you can do it um you sort of start from where you stand if you like so that to me is you know it's all i can do all i can do is i can work some land here i can teach my kids as much as i can teach them about this and i can write some things which might be useful and which might help me to work out what the hell i think about it is that's all i can manage what do you say to those people who find it quite a bleak vision in that having given up on the larger machine if you feel like it's headed for catastrophe one way or the other um you know maybe you should have retained some hope in it maybe there are good things coming out of it maybe at least around the edges and maybe it could be turned around in part and you know the machine might benefit from your input well the machine has my input here we are i mean it's um look it's it's very easy to get black and white about it and and to sort of see a terrible destructive monster that you have to run away from but as i said you can't do that anyway we're all enmeshed in this so all you can do is think the only way i can see this is okay what can i put what wheel can i put my shoulder to am i going to keep pushing this destructive machine in the direction it's going which is a direction which i think ends up basically destroying human freedom and and creating a sort of artificial world to replace the one that we've we've got now i mean this is basically the direction we're heading in towards a kind of what i regard as a very frightening uh hyper reality a sort of transhuman future the kind the science fiction writers have been warning us about for a hundred years and those science fiction warnings seem to be being taken as blueprints by the guys in silicon valley at the moment we can either do that or we can we can push in a slightly different direction in terms of hope um i found myself and i know other people have felt this because they've written it to me um that actually you can end up feeling very hopeless if you have to pretend to believe something you don't believe so if you have to pretend that you can stop climate change in 10 years if you just make enough effort that can be a very difficult thing to carry because at some level you don't believe it you're like a priest who doesn't believe in god but he has to stand up and give a sermon every sunday and actually accepting that that isn't possible feels like a big weight off your shoulders and at that point you can then think okay well what is possible what can i still do that will be useful and there's a million things you can do that are useful because actually there's a lot of hope and beauty in the world um but i think that it's just to me anyway it's a question of just trying to be honest and realistic about where we actually are and what is possible and what isn't describe what it is you think the rest of us over here are doing wrong i suppose i mean you're in your books you're you talk about um how we've somehow become detached from what matters most we have built all of these layers of technology which separate us not just from nature but from a whole sort of understanding of our place in the world i mean tell us what is it that you think is is wrong with the the modern world we are building oh look i mean this is my perspective right a lot of people love this and and think that what i'm saying is nonsense so of course they're entitled to that view and maybe they're right um but from my perspective um the things that i value most are being eaten by um as i say this kind of technological monster i mean like rooted human cultures uh wild nature natural beauty um a sense of slowness and peace uh that can be found in those in the best of those places um are being transformed into a kind of uh a consumer desert um that was to some degree what my first book was about and my second book which was called real england was an investigation in how into how local cultures in my country were being again raised and homogenized and replaced by this kind of consumer shopping mall experience that we're all familiar with now and really you know the the the machine of industrial capitalism which has been colonizing and enclosing people around the world for the last 300 years or so has as its goal creating a sort of one world global marketplace in which we are all consumers um we're not citizens we're not people rooted in a culture we're not in individuals who have a sort of wider sense of worth we're primarily consumers and producers for that for that machine we measure everything in terms of economic growth we measure that in a material sense rather than in any other sense we've become a kind of a society of of merchants and those consumer values have infiltrated everything absolutely every aspect of our lives from the from the health service to to the um to the arts scene to education all around the world these are the values that have been really pushed primarily by western corporations and their enablers since the second world war so we're trying to create this great giant global consumer marketplace in which we are primarily consumers and secondarily producers and i think that's a i think that's a tragedy it's a cultural tragedy and it's an ecological tragedy too do you think the all of the political turbulence of the past few years is connected to this in your book real england talked about searching for a kind of english spirit that somewhere was there beneath all of the tarmac of all of the shopping malls maybe that found expression in the brexit vote and similarly the other populist waves around the world i mean do you think they are connected i think there's yeah i think they can be i think it's interesting what i feel is that um this this consumer machine fundamentally makes everybody homeless i think and that to me is seems to be the most important thing about it because we where we stop becoming citizens we stop becoming humans members of a community members of a culture and we start becoming uh global consumers if you like um we have to you know we're up we're uprooted from our place where we're expected to go where the money is we're expected to go where capital needs us where the jobs are um we're expected to be upwardly mobile we're expected to value the value the the to value the the values if you like of commerce over everything else then i think we end up with a sense of homelessness who are we where do we come from where are our roots in time and place and i think there is a real sense that so many people feel like rooted by it by because they literally have been uprooted all over the world in so many ways um physically spiritually culturally that there's a sense of there's a great sense of loss amongst a lot of people especially in the modern world the more modern and the more westernized the world is the more lost people seem and i do think about the kind of cultural stuff which is so toxic in this sense and i don't know whether it's true but it seems to me that both sides in this horrible toxic culture battle that's going on are talking about identity as if it's something that's under threat for them and something that they've lost and something they feel attached to and something that the other side wants to take away from them you know and there's it's a very curious thing i don't think you know a healthy society doesn't have stuff like this going on right we're not fighting each other about identity every day wherever we come from so in other words whether you're a sort of trump voting uh white person in rural america or whether you feel like your minority group is somehow under threat in a urban center it's a similar potentially it's the same kind of alienation that comes from the same it seems like that doesn't it i mean it seems to me like yeah there's a sense of a sense of a threat to your identity sense that a certain type of racial or cultural identity has become more important um the more alienated we've become and the more uprooted we've become the more more sunk into the same i mean curiously enough you know we're all looking at the same screens all day right we've all got the same smartphones we're all looking at the same facebook feeds and yeah at the same time as this this machine has made us more homogenous we've become more attached to a sense of you know who i am and that's very important to me and i think that's there's got to be a connection between those two things the more uprooted we become the more at some level we think well who am i where do i come from what's my identity and we get then we start to cling to that and the more we cling to that the more we're capable of getting drawn into the um the online identity wars and the algorithms that make us want to hate each other and then off can one call it a kind of universalism that has been the problem because being virtuous and progressive and having a vision for the future has in recent decades anyway been about kind of universal values and and minimizing differences between people um maybe people want differences back well yeah they probably didn't yeah i think they probably do i mean again it strikes me that if i look on on the sort of progressive left in the culture war there's a lot of people talking about the the importance of racial and cultural identity all the time obviously and then on the other side in the culture war uh increasingly and disturbingly you've got you've got a bunch of white nationalists doing the same thing but you've also got more benign nationalists saying that our national identity is important to us and again all of those people are saying this sense of who i am which is defined by a cultural identity that comes from a place is important to me and the only reason you would need to be fighting about that is if you felt that it was under threat um and so there is a sense of universalism but it's not i mean look there are different ways to be universalist aren't there you can be universalist in your sense that we're all human and we should all act from love and cooperation which seems to me to be kind of a basic level of decent humanity that everybody should be engaging in and then there's this kind of universalism which is very tied up to global capitalism which is effectively creating this borderless world in which there's a giant corporate capitalist marketplace in which everybody's drinking coke and everybody's wearing blue jeans and everybody's watching netflix and that is the the model of corporate globalization that's been spread around the world since the second world war primarily by the us and by its supporters in the west and increasingly by corporations elsewhere and that requires us to create a giant borderless placeless world in which we're all fundamentally the same and the only thing we have in common as i say is our sense of consumerism one of your essays in your earlier book which is your collection of um essays confessions of a recovering environmentalist was called quants versus poets and in a sense that's a parallel but very related distinction isn't it between the way of thinking about the world as in a kind of purely rational mathematical scientific way versus a more poetic way where there are other things and and i i wonder whether you think in the last year this year of covid that quants versus poet's distinction has become even more marked because we've been having so much data and so many numbers about the movement of this virus and then there's a whole bunch of people who simply don't recognize that as a way of explaining their world and reject it have you seen that distinction there are potentially two ways of looking at the world which ought to be complementary there's the kind of mythic way of looking at it and then there's the the rational way of looking at it so you've got sort of mythos versus logos and you know we often see that represented as the right and the left brain which is a useful uh useful metaphor even if it's not science um so we have a very rationalistic very uh secularistic scientific mathematical way of looking at the world right which is useful obviously we need to behave like that otherwise we can't function but we also have something which is deeper and to some degree truer than that which is the mythic way of looking which is you know which is where true poetry comes from it's where art comes from but it's also where i think our deep love of nature comes from it's where religion comes from and that stuff flows through absolutely every human being and every human culture always at all times and i think liberal modernity and neo-liberal capitalism as well have operated on the um the false assumption that the the the mythic way of seeing will be ultimately superseded by the rational way by the logoic way of seeing if you like um because obviously myth was just a silly old thing we believed in before we have science that we don't need that anymore that's not what's happening you know there are more religious people in the world than there have ever been and again i think you could come back to people's sense of attachment to culture and place that's a very mythic thing they can't it can't really be rationalized what's identity what does it mean why did you choose that sense of identity what's your country why are you i mean it's interesting to me that so many people on the left have spent so many decades trying to um sort of disintegrate the notion of nationhood in a way and say that it's all a social construct and in one sense it is a social construct and yet people still feel very attached to it all over the world so something's going on which is not rational and we fundamentally are not rational beings and we hate that idea in the modern world but actually we're not we're fundamentally beings who operate on intuition and emotion and a sense of what matters to us which is actually quite mythic um but but we do rationalize it and and we're moving into this hyper rational computer world of algorithms and and mathematics and and covert is interesting i suppose in that way in the sense that we've all been acting like uh science is going to solve this but and yeah as you say using the algorithms and the the mathematical formula in the rest of it but it's uh there's also something very mythic about this virus isn't there it's very apocalyptic i think in the original sense of the word the word apocalypse is is greek for unveiling it means revelation it's revealed so i'm really interested in the idea of what kovid has revealed about us all personally you know because i think for all of us individually we've discovered things about ourselves that we might not have noticed before i've discovered that i'm more sociable than i thought i was which is interesting now that i've been locked down i enjoy being a hermit maybe less than i thought um but i think as a society we've seen how much to me certainly as an environmentalist or a former environmentalist the um the degree to which everything quietened down during the first lockdown was really interesting the the world with fewer cars on the road the world with more birds singing the world with wild animals wandering around in the cities but also how much we are sort of desperate to get back to normal you know we want to get back on the planes we want to be flying around we want to be going on holiday we want the kind of machine to crank up again um and there's something very there's a kind of deep stream there which is not rational that is something to do with that our sense of meaning and the virus has been a big challenge to that sense of meaning which has been very it's it's you know it's it's sort of useful in a tragic way because we have to it's enabled us to sit back and say well what do i actually value what's the society about where are we going talking about uh myths i mean you could actually see sort of online conspiracy theories through that lens couldn't you and the virus has certainly provoked its fair share but actually there's a kind of a group in the global society who just can't understand what people are objecting to and as far as they're concerned as long as people take their vaccines and behave according to the latest government recommendations that is what virtue looks like um and it does feel like these from growing groups that are online for example there's the whole bill gates plus world economic forum um conspiracy around the great reset and you know arguably you can say although the details of it are not true you know the as a myth it's quite a well-constructed one you've got the sort of global head of technology and the global head of finance as the two representatives i mean do you think online conspiracy theories are part of that mythic realm well it's interesting this isn't it because if we talk about this great machine this great globalized corporate techno thing that's been building up for so long that i've been writing about for so long in different ways um what it fundamentally does is it removes power and agency from us as individuals and from us as communities i mean at the local level it does that um at the national level it does that the governments have so much less power now um so what increasingly although we have far more technology at our fingertips than we've ever had you know here we are talking to each other on the screen across the ocean um we feel more powerless than we ever had i have no idea how this computer works if it broke down i couldn't fix it um and we know that the level of inequality in society is astonishing now the number of billionaires that exist is revolting they shouldn't even be billionaires in the world let alone the number that there are now we've got a huge amount of economic and technological power and political power accumulating in very few hands and we don't understand it so you mean you mentioned bill gates it's an interesting one this because you know you've got all the crazy conspiracies about how bill gates is going to inject you with microchips and all this stuff but there's a realist as you say there's a basis for this bill gates is a very powerful man and he's using his money to change the world in particular ways he's using his money to fund newspapers he's using his money to promote development in places like africa in a very particular pattern he's doing certain all sorts of things and the same is true of soros who's always the center of conspiracy theories as well so although the conspiracies themselves are crazy and often dangerous and unpleasant the sense of powerlessness that fuels them is real and i think that these conspiracies come about when people try to join dots so they don't understand because we don't really know how it's working anymore and to come back again to that sort of early green philosophy of of self-reliance that i was talking about earlier um in a world in which communities are self-reliant and power is within reach of human beings and communities you don't get that kind of craziness because you can see how things work and that's really the pre-modern or the pre-industrial world we're talking about and also in the in the context of the last year the possibility of living in a more organic more natural way becomes much harder if in order to just check in and be a counted member of society you have to be vaccinated that's do you think that's a do you think do you have sympathy for people who reject that whole direction of travel and say no i want to to live in a more sort of natural quote-unquote world it's it's vital to allow the freedom to to to have that possibility still going on you know and as i say almost every level all the time the the the kind of the the power of the state and and the corporations if you like are clamping down on that i mean look how how easy is it to live without a smartphone now i mean that's an interesting question you don't i don't have a smartphone i hate smartphones because they're monitored surveillance technologies and also i don't want to be looking at the internet all the time which i know i would do if i had a smartphone so i haven't got one but it's harder and harder to survive without one and it's it's quite possible to imagine in five or ten years it being pretty much impossible to say have a bank account that you could check without having one um and that's starting to happen already so we're all sort of we're sucked into this against our will and it's always the same story you know well this is great this is good for you look at all the stuff you've got that you didn't have and there's a truth in that but what you've lost is a sense of autonomy and freedom that you did have before a lot of what you write about is is uncivilization or slowing down or in some way you might not call it going backwards but peeling away some of these superfluous layers um and you've even replaced your toilet with a kind of what is it called i don't even know i'm so i'm so metropolitan i don't even know the word for that kind of complex toilet it's basically a big bucket so you literally you smashed out the the normal toilet with all its pipes and instead you replaced it with it with this bucket i did do that we took out the dishwasher at the same time if it's yeah if it's consolation yes so i read that and thought good on him you know he's he's practicing what he preaches but am i wrong to prefer a mechanical toilet well nobody's wrong to do anything they want to do are they i mean if if i'm going to live the life i'm trying to live here if i'm going to try and um get myself closer to the living world than i was before then that's one way to do it it's um it's also a great source of uh of compost for the garden you'd be surprised the reaction to the compost toilet always interests me actually because it's so normal for me now that i've totally forgotten about it but other people think it's an outrageous i guess the question is can you be against which i think a lot of people would come with you up to a certain point and say that civilization has become too big too monolithic and there's a kind of tyranny in that and that to break it up and to bring it closer to home so that there were you know real cultures that were living together in a more natural way and stuff i think a lot of people would go along with that but i think they would still want their mechanical toilets in those smaller more authentic cultures you know can you make a distinction between the bits of civilization we like and the bits of civilization we're less happy about yeah well i mean look of course people always do don't they and you know it's it's not a coincidence that many of the poorest people in the world are desperate for the kind of things that we've got in the rich world right so nobody's nobody's in a position to be telling people who are living in poverty that they shouldn't have x y and z right so which is why i don't tell anyone what to do by the way because i don't i you know this is just how i'm doing things it's the conclusion i've come to it's not a model for anybody else um if if the direction of travel bothers you you're gonna have to work out some form of self-reliance from it you have to make a decision about what matters to you if you're somebody who says well i don't care about any of this it sounds like nonsense then you've got no problem um if on the other hand any of this does concern you the direction of travel the kind of clamp down on freedom the corporate control the the sort of sense of powerlessness then you need to think about what i can do about that and there's no right answer i was thinking about the kind of creativity of new technology and how that is the best thing we do in some way um you know whether you're a bronze age person inventing a new tool you know that's sort of the best of humanity isn't it to to think how better to engage with our environment and invent new technologies it's that's sort of the best thing we've got um and so i understand that people in silicon valley who think it's akin to just virtue that innovation is always good because there is something very deep in us that wants to innovate and create well firstly people like me sitting on the margins without compost toilet are not really a threat to any of that going on uh nobody in silicon valley is listening um but it's there's an interesting distinction that the philosopher even ilitch drew between a tool and something he called technique or maybe even you could describe a distinction between a tool and the technology but you know i even wrote an essay about this years ago called dark ecology which looked at the difference between a scythe and a brush cutter when you're trying to mow grass what what does your new innovation do does it give you more power as an individual does it give you more power as a community does it benefit the natural world around you or does it take power away from you is it does it rely on say external fuel sources like fossil fuels that are damaging does it hook you into a web of interdependence that's a that's a more useful way of looking at it to me so the humans are always going to innovate that's what we do we'll be doing that until we're dead um the question is what direction of travel are you being taken in by the innovation and who controls the innovation you know uh does it i mean obviously we're told that all innovation benefits all of us but does it really you know does who's i mean i don't know who has so who's benefited from social media who's benefited from the alexa the canadian pizza i mean these guys are using these things to build algorithms that can monitor absolutely every aspect of who you are and what you do and know you precisely so that they can sell you things we know very well that social media is developed deliberately so that we get a dopamine hit every time we get a little like or a retweet and so we spend all our time doing that stuff so yeah maybe we benefit from some of that we can promote our books and all of this kind of stuff but there's always a price to pay so maybe the question to ask is what price are you paying and who as i say ultimately is controlling this stuff where does the where does the power lie all of this stuff comes down as every other political question does to a question of power again you come back to this machine who's running this show anyway and who's who are you dependent on it's always a really useful question one of the complexities of that which we get kind of caught out by is the kind of status um association with it that actually it's it's quite often an elite view that these more simple things are desirable uh but it's quite often the more educated people who have been through it and now miss it that romanticize living closer to the land having less technology the way things used to be um you know whether it was william morris in the 19th century or we sitting here talking now you know and to someone who is coming out of poverty say rural poverty the invention of a flushing toilet or technology that's going to make their life radically easier that will enable them to spend more time thinking higher thoughts to them feels incredibly exciting and liberating what do we do about that tension well i think that can sometimes be true but sometimes it isn't true i mean i would say firstly on the technology thing again there's a difference between an appropriate technology that makes somebody's life better and the technology that sucks them into a matrix of control um i'm not in the business of telling anyone what technologies they should have and they wouldn't listen anyway but all i would say is that in my experience of for example spending time with indigenous people or landless people um very often actually again it comes back to this question of power and control so we've we've created this great myth around development that everybody in in the so-called developing world wants to come and be a western-style consumer well yeah to some degree people especially if you're living in poverty you don't want to live in poverty that's true but people are deeply attached to their land they're deeply attached to their way of living and very often people actually are being forced out of say small tribal communities that they do not want to leave and into the city so that they can make smartphones in factories with suicide nets outside the window i mean years ago i spent some time in brazil with the mst the landless workers movement over there and that's a movement of people who have effectively been made landless by um by large land owners often forced into cities having to live in slums and what they want is what they wanted then certainly was to get their land back again so they could go out into the countryside and be independent they don't want to be poor they don't want to live without technology they don't want to be miserable but they want the power of having that sense of place that land that control and so again it all comes it is really a conversation it's not a question a conversation about how technology gives you wealth otherwise you have to be poor it's really a conversation about power and control and who decides what that should be and who decides what development looks like there was a good example of that last week when the um president xi president of china announced into great fanfare that he has lifted 100 million people out of rural poverty in the past five years i think it was this was then repeated without criticism on the bbc on the morning news program and it just sort of hit me that you know what has changed for those 100 million people is it entirely definitely a positive story or does it mean that we've just built more ugly horrible cities that are you know devoid of any kind of authentic sense of place and fast-forward one generation what will those people what will their lives be like i mean do you think we should question those kind of announcements certainly in china the the you know the development push in china has made for example you know hundreds of thousands if not millions of people land let's do the construction of dams through the construction of giant cities obviously the state in china is all powerful and so people are just moved and then they're put into cities and often if you take people who've been living on their own land in a subsistence economy where they have enough and you put them into a city and they then are earning say wages but very low wages and they've lost any sense of control through that process of enclosure that we talked about earlier then you can stick that on your balance sheet you can say look at these people we've lifted out of poverty maybe some of them wanted to be but did they do we know that how many people there were dispossessed how many people were forced against their will off the land i mean aaron datty roy in india has done some fantastic work on this over the years uh the building of the narmada dams over there and the mass destruction of rural communities by the indian government again always in the name of poverty alleviation they're doing the same thing now with the farmers you know you basically effectively enclose people's land give it over to corporations create a development model that benefits global capital and then you say oh look at all these lucky people lifted out of poverty um you know that you have to be very careful with these claims because their claims that very often as usual benefit power not always but very often and then and then we uh you know again we we sort of um guilt-trip ourselves by saying oh well you know who would want to stop people from being lifted out of poverty well no you wouldn't if it was genuinely happening and sometimes it is but you've really got to dig into what that means especially when those claims are made by autocratic governments the thing that i wasn't quite sure reading your books over the past few days is where you stand on the kind of role of humanity in the world because at some points it feels like humans are a beautiful part of creation and we just need to you know try to behave better and be more in harmony with it and at other points i got some flashes of actually humans are pretty much bad and if you look at the effect we've had on the world it's been negative we need to prioritize the non-human and stop thinking in a kind of human-centered way um and i wasn't really sure where you stand on that is humankind a good thing yeah well you're not sure i understand because over the years i've never been quite sure where i stood because like every other human being as whitman put it i contain multitudes so i'm capable of thinking you know several different things about humanity in a day um it's very difficult to be an environmentalist as i used to be without sometimes despairing about humanity given the mass destruction that we unleash um but that's not a useful situation to be staying in you know you can't allow yourself to end up there otherwise you're kind of nihilistic or misanthropic and ultimately we're human um i think what i you know look um we've got as much right to be here as anything else right we're creatures and we share this planet with billions of other creatures and my view is that for so much of history and in so many parts of the world we have been able to live in reasonable balance with everything else um it's it's modernity it's industrialism it's it's this kind of giant fossil fuel machine that has allowed us to to some degree take the worst aspects of our character the sort of the greed and the ambition and the the more destructive side of our natures and kind of supersize them in a way that has gone so fast that we haven't even really had time to think about it and so what we're dealing with is the kind of um the destructive outgrowth of our own technological cleverness if you like that doesn't make humans bad it just makes humans human and the the sort of point i've come to i suppose is it's really a question of how we live within limits it's the old green question actually how do you live within limits how do we reign in our appetites how do we take the best of us which is the capacity for love and the capacity for as you say creativity which can benefit everybody and the capacity for cooperation all of this stuff and the capacity to live in a rooted way with the rest of nature is it possible to take those things and and to push forward in that direction and to move away from this kind of destructive um consumer beast if you like that that is somehow consuming us it's not possible to change the direction of the machine at this point from here but there's plenty we can do to to live better actually and so you know anything's possible in that sense but it all starts at home you've written elsewhere about a recent conversion to christianity do you feel that that has played a part in some way i mean christianity is a very human-centric religion god became man do you feel that that has made you more [Music] warm about humankind than you might have been in previous decades well you can't be a misanthropic christian um you're quite right it's not possible i'm as surprised as becoming a christian as anyone else i have to say it's something that's happened to me over the last year which is very unexpected and rather glorious um but i've been on a sort of spiritual search for 10 years or so i suppose um because actually so much of what we've been talking about seems to me to be at root a spiritual question in the broadest sense of that slightly horrible word that it's actually about what we value and so much of our destructive nature it seems to me comes from our sense of self-worship actually i said once you believe that there's nothing above you once you believe that there's nothing sacred about the world that the world is simply a material object a giant resource that you can harvest then you can become quite tyrannical and i think that's what's happened to us so i've i've seen it as a kind of spiritual matter if you like for a long time and then as i say christianity kind of blindsided me on that one so it's so it's been it's been rather good but yes look i mean it made you more forgiving of a human-centered understanding of the cosmos well i've always tried to be forgiving uh based on the my long-term knowledge that i'm probably much worse than everybody else in many ways i mean that's one of the things that's nice about christianity actually you start off from the assumption that you're a failed sinner and you work from there upwards so yeah humility right i mean look it seems to me that if you're going to read the sermon on the mount if you go and read the beatitudes you've got a recipe for actually solving all the problems we've been talking about for the last hour right if if you if the meek are blessed and we're turning the other cheek and we're serving the poor and we're loving our neighbors and if our neighbors are not just our human neighbors but they're everything that lives around us um and if we're serving rather than trying to rule and all the things that that christ is teaching us then this very old message that's kind of got subsumed by various you know corrupt churches and all the rest of it actually when you go back to the roots of it it's a message of radical humility and and voluntary poverty and love and compassion and actually those things are very hard they're certainly hard for me which is why it's good for me to do them um and to learn them so yeah there's there's all whether whether or not you're a christian actually so much of this comes down to limits it comes down to humility it comes down to what we're prepared to give up or not do and it comes down to how much we're prepared to share rather than attempt to you know impose power and i know these are very old stories but that's because actually at roots this is a very old human problem you know this it's it's very interesting to go back to the teachings of jesus 2000 years ago and see him basically addressing the same flaws in human nature that we have now um and of course that's not just true of christianity so there's a there's a lesson in radical humility that you can get from it which i hadn't realized until i started to look at it properly and that's i'm still sort of that that's still working its way through me it's quite it's quite a radical and exciting thing to be happening in a way well well thank you for telling us about it paul uh and thanks for all your thoughts on this uh big wild journey we just went on for the past hour the whole world yes we've solved the whole world's problems it's good to know and thanks for having me on i really appreciated it that was paul kingsnorth the writer poet former environmental activist talking to us from his farm in the west of ireland about the environmental movement global politics technology and even at the end there his conversion to christianity quite an amazing hour thank you to him and thanks also to you for joining this was lockdown tb

2021-03-12 15:39

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