 Well, I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a fantastic guest and an incredibly powerful subject, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. We've been exploring what climate change might mean for the future of higher education for a year now. My new book is on the subject, which I'll talk about in a session coming up, but I wanted to bring this week's guest here because of a particular angle, a particular approach. Many people who may think about climate change tend to think in terms of optimistic strategies, practical strategies, things that one can do. But our guest comes from a project, a movement called the Dark Mountain, which argues that perhaps these optimistic approaches are not really going to help. Perhaps instead, we are in the middle of a spectacular crisis and will have to get used to a form of decline. That we might not be able to stop or mitigate climate change, and that we will have to deal with a world where progress has stopped. At one point in his new book, which you can find a link to on the bottom left of the screen, our author says this quote, The work that lies ahead looks less like sustaining modern lifestyles at all costs and more like salvaging what we can from these ways of living, while learning from many other ways that humans have made life work in the long history of our species. Dougal Hine is an educator, a creator, a writer. He's done a great many things, including being a journalist for the BBC. And I'm absolutely delighted to welcome him here. Let me just bring him up on stage and he can join us. Hello, Dougal. Hello. You've made it. Greetings. Where have we found you today? Well, I am sitting in a library in an old shoe shop that is on its way to becoming a school called home. And our family live upstairs from here and down here where I'm talking to you from the whole of the ground floor is our workshop space and where we bring people together. Excellent. And this is in central Sweden? It is. It's about 50 minutes by bus from Uppsala. Not that far from Stockholm. We're just sort of between the centre and the edges really in Swedish towns. Very good. And it must be something like 10 o'clock at night there. Not quite. 8 o'clock. It's not too painful. Well, I'm very glad. I'm very glad you could make it. We have a tradition on the forum where we ask people to introduce themselves, not by talking about their past, but about what they're going to be working on in the future. And I'm curious. I've already mentioned, I think, two major things for you. The school called home and also this new book. Are those the main focus for the rest of 2023 for you or do you have something else you're working on too? Well, one way or another, those things are going to be keeping me busy. I guess to start with the school, we're sort of midway through a half year process where we are taking our membership community that came out of five cohorts that came through an online series called Homeward Bound that I taught during the years of the pandemic. We're working with them now to move from a state where Anna and I are actively leading and hosting that to becoming a self-facilitating community ongoing. We have about 100 members around the world who are part of that. We are also working with an organization called Black Elephant, which described itself as a social network based around vulnerability, based on face-to-face and online encounters. That image of the Black Elephant, I thought actually for this context, for this futures world, it's worth telling a little story about because it comes out of some work I was involved in in London back in 2009. There's a little gang that was known as the Institute for Collapsonomics. And of all the things that we did together, the thing that had most attraction and has kind of spread around the world so that people don't really know where it originated, was coming up with this idea of the Black Elephant, which is a cross between the Black Swan and the elephant in the room. So it's the thing that when it happens, everyone will say it was a Black Swan. It was an incredibly unpredictable event. Actually, it was the elephant in the room. So we're working with Felix Marcard and the gang who run Black Elephant. And they're bringing together an event called Meta Plus Physics in Patmos in Greece, on the island of the apocalypse in June. And yeah, the idea with Meta Plus Physics is bringing together the experts in what we know and the experts in what we don't know. And so Anna and I are going to be curating this half year process by which people who are coming to that gathering in June are meeting in small groups regularly over the months beforehand so that we're building a context of relationship before we arrive and get face-to-face. Very good idea. That project is launching next week at Seance-Paul in Paris. And meanwhile, yes, you mentioned already, I'm about to take this book out into the world. So I'll be heading off in just over a week's time, traveling around Europe and the UK. Taking the book into conversation with people who have helped shape the thinking that led me to it. People I'm really curious to meet. Some of those conversations will be taking place on stage in front of audiences and some of them more quietly or with workshops with particular communities. So that's what's lying ahead for me in the next, what is it, 11 months we have left of 2023? You could say this is a road tour on the way to the apocalypse. You could, and then you'd have to be reminded by the theologians and the linguists that the word apocalypse means a revealing, an uncovering, a bringing into view of hidden things. And so in that sense, I'm happy by that what we're talking about is apocalyptic. Ilithea, I think in Greek, or alithea, to uncover the truth. We have, or more prosaically, Tom mentions the road in chat. I know you, in a recent interview, you said that you didn't want to be distracted by chat. But I can handle that and exfiltrate content and ideas for you out loud so you won't have to go through that text. Friends, I have a whole bunch of questions to put to our author. What I'd like to do is put a couple of big ones to him right now so that he can cut loose and really unfold his thinking. And then I'd love to hear questions from all of you. So again, if you're new to the forum, remember on the very bottom of the screen a raised hand button in the question mark, not to mention the chat, which I don't have to tell you because it's already ripping along. One question I have to do while thinking about your whole entire way of approaching higher education. What becomes of the research mission of universities? I mean, to a large extent they've contributed to the modern problem by researching petroleum engineering, all kinds of projects by pushing consumerism, by advancing new liberal economics. How should the research mission change? What should faculty and support staff be looking at in order to better apprehend the next generation or two? Well, Brian, I don't know. And when I realized that the session tonight was being framed with this question of what should colleges and universities do about climate change, my first reaction was, you've got the wrong guy. Because it's not my role to answer questions like that, really. But I have spent a lot of the last 15 years talking with people in many different contexts about climate change. And sometimes that takes me into universities and I've got a deep appreciation for a lot of the work that goes on within higher education, not least within the research side of things. But part of where I come in, I think, is to shake some of the frames in which we even ask these questions. So I'd actually want to start by saying, unless you're a climate scientist, climate change might not be the most helpful frame in which to talk about the things that we're usually talking about in these larger conversations in which climate change plays such a role. I often talk about the trouble that the world is in. And climate change is one of the forms in which that trouble shows up. And it's often the form which shows up most alarmingly to those of us who are most sheltered from a lot of the other ways in which the world is in trouble. I say one of the reasons why I've spent so much of my life talking to people about climate change is because for the winners of modernity, for those of us who are most sheltered from its shadow side, climate change is often the point at which we get shaken and kind of woken up and become aware of our vulnerability. There's a passage from a book that was edited by a couple of anthropologists, Mario Blazer and Marisol de la Cadena, a book called A World of Many Worlds. And they say, you know, all this whole big conversation and buzz around the Anthropocene that's been going on in university departments, cultural institutions, museums, et cetera, mostly emanating from big cities in Europe or on the coasts of the United States over the last 10, 15 years. You know, from elsewhere that conversation can sound a lot like the world of the powerful becoming conscious that its world too could end after five centuries or so of going around the world, ending other people's world and calling it progress, development and salvation and the rest of it. So a lot of the work that I have done has been in dialogue with folks like Vanessa Andriotti at the University of British Columbia who wrote a wonderful book called Hospicing Modernity. And again, you know, in the climate change conversations, we very often, because climate change is so big and so scary and we're right to be disturbed by it. If you've spent any time talking to climate scientists, especially in the kind of conversations they can have when they come to the pub with you rather than the kind of things that they can publish in scientific papers, you know how deep a trouble we're in just from that front and that is not the only front on which we're in trouble. But often where we get to in those conversations is to be talking about either we're trying to save and sustain the world as we know it, you know, modernity in Vanessa's terms or modernity slash coloniality as Walter Minulo, the Argentinian decolonial theorist would suggest that we call it. So either we're trying to sustain that or we're looking at a collapse which is somehow a singular event in the whole of human history. The whole of human history up to now according to this story of progress that is still told in plenty of TED talks has been this kind of upward sweeping curve leading to now and either we come up with the set of hacks and fixes and solutions that allow us to continue that trajectory or the whole game is over and we failed as a species. And I don't think that's a particularly helpful frame within which to be thinking about this. So to bring in one other line of thought coming from someone working in another field of research whose work I've found helpful and maybe in a sense what I'm doing is answering your question by showing you the way that I as somebody who operates mostly outside of the academy but in dialogue with people in different corners of the academy in the arts in activism in many different communities the way that I am nourished by things that are going on today in different corners of higher education and academic research. So the last example that came to mind was a philosopher called Federico Campania who wrote a rather extraordinary book called Prophetic Culture and in this book he's talking about what it's like when it comes to your awareness that you're living at the end of a world and he says you know sometimes this happens sometimes you begin to realize it begins to dawn on you that you were born into the end of a world and he says if you want to be able to tell whether that's your situation have a look at what's happening with the future in the way that it functions in your culture and your society the symptom of living at the end of a world is that the future no longer works that future belongs to a story and that story has an arc and you find yourself at the end of that arc so there isn't much story left there isn't much future left within the ways of looking at the world that belong to that world that is ending and so what Federico is saying is you know that is not a unique if you arrive at the same conclusion that I did quite a long time ago that that is our predicament that's where we find ourselves that's not a unique thing that's not something that's never happened before world's end that's part of how it all goes on and then he says so what's worth doing if you're reading at the signs of the times is that you're living at the end of the world you were born into and the answer he offers or one of the answers is stop worrying about trying to make sense according to the logic of the world that is ending start trying to create good ruins start looking at your work through the lens of what are we leaving behind for those who are coming after who are going to have to make sense of what the hell this was who are going to have to build new stories, new worlds out of the ruins left behind by ours now I'm not saying that's the only kind of work that is called for there is a lot of damage limitation work that is also called for because if it is the case that that modernity is ending and as Vanessa says you know the challenge is not to save it not to try to bring it down but to hospice it to give it a good ending and allow it to pass on the gifts that become available at the end of its time then there's damage limitation to do to make sure that modernity doesn't bring too much down with it clearly it's bringing a lot down with it we have contributed to the sixth mass extinction in the long history of this living world we weren't around for the first five so we shouldn't feel too proud of our achievement of being so central this time around the world has managed these events before without us I think what's at stake is how much and in what form comes through this bottleneck that we brought about including in what forms humanity comes through this bottleneck and so that's when I talk about the work in the ruins those are some of the places you could start from in terms of thinking about what that work looks like that's a fantastic answer thank you there's so much I want to ask you to clarify about that but everything from doing mitigation work to leaving good ruins Ken let me press you quickly on one point so I want to make sure I understand it fully you said there's the idea that you get from Kampanya but also from Mahalo about trying to no longer think through the inherited stories that we have but to am I right to say to make space for the emergence of new ones would that be right? that's part of it so part of it is making space for emergence absolutely rather than kind of planning you know sometimes I get invited to these workshops where people are bringing a group of wonderful folks together for a weekend to try and come up with a new story and I have to gently quietly try and say that is not how living stories come about they emerge as you say it's partly about emergence it's partly about listening because a lot of other stories we've been told are over or might as well be over because they belong to the past but are actually still there among the ruins that are already here you know there are plenty of ruins that have been made in the name of progress and there are plenty of people and stories inhabiting those ruins even now who we need to be listening to and then there is also I often talk about humbling there's a move and this is actually you know this is again one of the dangers of the power of what science has to tell us about climate change is that it can land in one of two ways when we get that awakening of awareness of precarity that our world too could end on the one hand that can be a humbling suddenly we recognize our own vulnerability and we become able to hear the voices of those who have been wounded by people who looked like us by people who have been part of the story that we are beneficiaries of but the danger is it goes the other way and that sense of vulnerability becomes the legitimation the excuse for one last grand push in a desperate mode of the project of modernity to make the world manageable and knowable and controllable from above and so we get these saving the world projects emanating from you know often from the same places from which a century or two earlier literal colonialism was going on and now people are gathering in the same places making plans of how to use the land of India and Africa and so on as a carbon sink in order to achieve net zero so we have to differentiate between those two utterly different things that can be going on in the name of taking climate change seriously one of which is allowing modernity to be called into question the other of which is doubling down in this kind of desperate last ditch attempt to somehow save the world as we've known it so yeah that's you know emergence is definitely one of the characteristics of where I think you know regrowing a living culture to use the language that we often use around this school where that begins and what that looks like well thank you that's a that's a very very powerful answer to my question and that I have I have more questions to come but I want to make sure that the audience gets to ask their questions the forum community for all of you now is your chance and even before I could ask him we have questions from several people including Tom Hames and he has a story question and and I think you self deprecation aside I think you're a perfect place to answer this question which is oops excuse me let me press the correct button how does the narrative of education have to change in order to adapt to this new reality what's what would be a good news story this is my question will be a good news story for us to make and tell all right well here's one idea which is that we notice that our definition of education has blinded us to a lot of the education that is always already going on in the world there's a Canadian scholar I think his name is Derrick Rasmussen either Derrick or David apologies to him who talks about the restaurant theory of education he says modernity has had this idea of how education happens that is a bit like if you had an idea of food where you said in order for there to be food there needs to be a restaurant and the restaurant in this analogy is the school and so we go around the world and when we can't find schools we say there is no education happening here and then we say we must build schools quickly and teach them how schools work and in terms of the humbling that I'm talking about in terms of navigating a situation in which we are just going to have to let go lots of things we've taken for granted lately around here in the downward curve becoming aware having our eyes opened to how much learning and how many deeply rural cultural institutional practices of learning exist in the world that have been invisible to the lenses through which we have been going out into the world from countries like ours over the last couple of hundred years and if you want one person whose research could be really helpful in finding a route into that I'm thinking of Munir Fashe who is a Palestinian mathematician he was a Harvard professor also an educational activist in Palestine in the West Bank and he says the greatest turning point in his career was after he had arrived at Harvard as a mathematician it dawning on him that his illiterate mother who was a dressmaker in a village in Palestine was practicing a complex mathematics in the way that she measured and cut cloth that he could not fully himself understand but that he could recognize was a whole practice of applied mathematics that was off the radar illegible to the way in which he had been taught to value his discipline and so he went back and worked in Palestine working with educational practices that bring into view the forms of knowledge and learning that just go missing when we look at the world through the lenses most of us who have been successful within the academic institutions of modernity have been taught to look at the world so those might be some sources for some helpful stories that we could experiment with, come into dialogue with well thank you for that answer and Tom as always thank you for a really great question again if you're new to the forum that's an example of a text question I'm going to give you another example of a text question and this is from Charles Findlay at Northeastern University who takes us at a different angle but I don't think it's a tangent he asks what are your thoughts on ego disassociation psychedelics and environmental activism Wow, well that's a bundle of things to put together isn't it? It is so we have a whole lot going on right now around psychedelics which is kind of reflected in the fact that a question like this would come up in a forum where plant medicines have been part of many many human cultures including in European contexts for large stretches of human history and then within modernity essentially what happened was that those plants were kind of bred down to things that fitted industrial society that were less mind-altering and more addictive so if you look at the difference between the way that tobacco functions in a ritual context in Turtle Island and the way that tobacco functions in a modern industrial society you get a glimpse of quite how extreme that transformation is and now one of the symptoms of being at the end of modernity is a loss of confidence in the single central narratives we've had 50 years of post-modernity which is both a diagnosis and a symptom of that and so things come in from the edges but they come in to a culture in a society that has been taught to consume if we go back to Yvonne Ilitch 50 years ago he would have been telling us schools teach us to be consumers they teach us to be helpless and dependent on commodities and so the helpful things that are being held in other cultures in relation to plant medicine are arriving in a culture of hungry consumers culture of hungry ghosts we might say arriving also in a culture in which almost the only way that things are ever brought to us are through their commodification and marketing and I think that there's a lot of danger in the way that psychedelics are suddenly going from being completely off the radar or illegal to rapidly turning into the new growth industry nonetheless I would be telling you a lie if I said that I hadn't met many people who have played central roles in the environmental movements including the climate movements that emerged in 2018-19 that I write about quite a bit in the book who have had powerful and important experiences facilitated by encounters with psychedelics so it's there in the mix but I'm pretty wary of the way that we tend to turn to it because we're so well trained in becoming consumers I would be more keen to hold up something like the work that Martin Shaw, the mythographer, mythologist, storyteller and founder of the school of myth and story in the west of England the work that he's done over many years working with the wilderness rights of passage tradition which is also something that appears in very many different cultures you find it in the anthropological and historical record you find it as a living practice in many cultures today and Martin and I have talked about this problem of how well trained we all are at being consumers and he says well the great thing about taking people out to sit for four days and nights fasting on a mountainside is that by the fourth day your body is literally starting to eat itself because you haven't had anything other than water for four days and so there is this sense that the price of entry is to be consumed and so I'm always looking for like where are the things that rupture our habits of consumption powerfully enough that we break through to something real rather than getting trapped back into selling each other things I guess an answer to that combination of things that you brought into the room there Charles, thank you, that's a very bold question and thank you DuVold for wrestling with it friends you can see that we're very friendly here so please bring up your questions and comments we also have a question from Donald Clark who's coming to us from where he is today, he's often on the road I'm guessing maybe Scotland but he'll correct me if I'm wrong, he wants to push back like so he says it seems like this is the same sort of Marxist historicism that Popper criticizes, that certainty about the future that becomes a clothed story and dogma well it's been a while since anyone called me a Marxist but given that I learnt a lot from John Berger and Gustavo Estave both of him owed a lot to Marxist traditions I'm not going to completely shake that off so what am I trying to say I'm certain about not very much in the book I talk about the importance of not pretending we know how the story ends the importance of surrendering to the mystery of all of this rather than surrendering to a kind of dark certainty that the end of the world is nigh but I think we're already a good way into a process which can reasonably be read as an unraveling an unraveling which is coming to us and often the alarm is sounded most loudly on the ecological front and again I say to you just go to the pub and ask them their judgement when I say that climate scientists will tell you things in the pub that they can't put in papers it's not because they're censoring themselves in their academic papers and again I make this point really strongly in the book because it's been heavily influenced by my dialogues with climate scientists over the years that what a climate scientist can offer you in the pub is the benefit of their judgement as somebody who works with this science and scientific research is not meant to be a matter of judgement it's meant to be what you can demonstrate according to the methods and practices of the field within which you work so there is a gap between what can be published as scientific research and the judgement the scientist as human being deeply immersed in this research can offer you down the pub and based on those judgments based on the conversations I've had there is a reasonable reading of the science of the times that what we're dealing with in case of climate change is not a problem that can be fixed and made to go away or made manageable it is falling our whole way of living into question but in saying that I'm not ruling out that somebody can come along and read the science differently you know there are plenty of people out there who are ready to tell you how we can fix all of this and make it all fine and make it go away and my business is not to convince anybody that it's all going in the direction that I read it as going in because if you're not convinced of that there are people who are much better placed than me to lay out what we know and what we have good grounds to fear about the trouble we're in my role is really to come in after that work and create spaces of sense making and conversation in which we can puzzle through what this might mean what moves might be worth making in the face of it like what kinds of tasks can be worth giving out time to if this is our read on the science so yeah that's where I'm coming from I guess well thank you for wrangling with that Donald always always good to hear from you we have a whole bunch of stuff has come up in the chat I just wanted to pull out a couple of things Carl Aho and Carl forgive me if I mispronounced your last name points out a group called Philosopher for Sustainability a group trying to do environmental work in the context of the philosophical profession which is great we've also been trying to track down citations and pages about some of the different scholars you've talked about which is great and we also have apparently a disaster happening near me I'm sorry about that that seems to be sliding past although that's not inappropriate sound effects Peter Rothman asks what about the draw down project draw down grill so I haven't followed the draw down project closely enough to be able to comment on it I guess as a more general comment I'm a big fan of an idea that was first by Michael Greer who is a very interesting kind of writer, scholar and thinker he writes at ecosofia.org and he talks about the virtue of dissensus a lot of us if we've been involved in environmental movements and activism in particular have been sort of taught to value consensus decision making where we engage in these long drawn out processes to try and arrive at something that everyone can go with and what Greer says is when you're dealing with a complex situation where none of us knows how the story is going to end what's needed is not to waste lots of energy on trying to arrive at a single agreed shared plan what's needed is groups of people of goodwill pursuing different possible answers different possible paths into the unknown world that lies ahead without wasting too much energy on pretending what might become apparent in hindsight about what it was that turned out to make all the difference so my default approach whenever I encounter things whether it's the draw down project or other initiatives that are kind of on the edge of my radar but I haven't necessarily had the time to engage deeply with is just to get a read on the people involved in this and the sense of the goodwill of what's going on and to ask the one question which is is people pursuing this path undermining the possibility of there being any other viable path and that's the place where you reach the limits of descensus so that's why I would be strongly against a lot of the geoengineering proposals for example that's why I'm deeply skeptical about a lot of the kind of our destiny in space versions of the future but you know that's the territory that we could dig further into in another conversation but yeah, descensus is a starting point that I find helpful. Thank you, thank you. We have a pause right now where all the questions have been asked which means we have two terrible prospects one is me asking more questions and the other is for those of you to start following up on some of your thoughts and commentary and to turn those into questions you can tell that Dougal is definitely very friendly and taking this very deeply. I guess this does bring us back to education in a different way. If we follow Illich as I do is de-schooling society is for me one of the greatest books that education have written if we see that education as a whole has trained people among other things as consumers is now a good role for education to play to prepare people for the post-progress world to prepare them for the economy and the society and the culture and everything that occurs after the story ends and if so what have you learned from your work with all kinds of different organizations including your school called home that might shed some light on the answer what and how then should we teach As you were speaking about Illich I found myself thinking of some of his later writings on education that aren't as well known but are available there's a website run by a guy in Arizona David I'm doing badly at surnames I'm doing badly at names tonight you can find it if you search articles and papers online and there's one there where he comes to Chicago in the late 1980s and he's been invited to speak about schooling and he says I arrived very jet lagged and I found myself my hosts were organizing a book group where they had people around at their house who had been reading the book of Schindler's List this is before the film ever came along and he said I was drifting off to sleep because of my jet lag in the corner of the room and as I was drifting in and out of sleep this horrible thing happened and he says you know as someone whose mother was Jewish who had to flee from the Nazis in my childhood there is absolutely no way I can justify the association which my mind made on the edge of sleep but as I listened to them talking about the book my mind was thinking about this series of articles about a particular head teacher in an inner city school in Chicago who had been putting his body on the line in front of guns and knives and in the middle of all kinds of chaos and he said and in this dreamlike state I got him confused with Oscar Schindler and it occurred to me that what I ought to say is that if you work in education inside a system today then rather than projects of trying to reform the system what you should be trying to do is a bit like this very strange character of Schindler who emerges in the book trying to just offer a shelter to those within your reach without pretending that you can help everybody and what I mean by that taking it on from Illich's admittedly outrageous analogy is that you can create a pocket in which it is safe to show up as a human being in ways that modern industrial society has not often allowed us to show up this is definitely what we try and do at a school called Home and what I see in the other outsider schools like the one that Martin Shaw runs or like Stephen Jenkinson's orphan wisdom school in Canada and I could name other examples is these pockets we create where it's safe to be vulnerable and safe to bring parts of yourself to the conversation that don't just come from the head intelligence the heart and the gut intelligence as well and the reason that I bring Illich's horrific Schindler analogy into that is because if you're working inside an educational institution and I talk all the time to friends in higher education you know that there is plenty of horror actually in the kind of war of all against all of the academic career in the worsening of the conditions for those coming up behind the more established generations in the rates of attrition between the PhDs and the postdocs and the people who finally get tenure in the conditions that many people in your institutions are working under and you know in that situation I don't think your job is to tell beautiful brilliant stories about how we could reform the institutions or make these institutions and their systemic form the havens within which we can create the conditions for what's going to be needed in the worlds to come but I do think that if you show up as a human being willing to create pockets of safety for those who work with you and those who study with you you can make your classroom you can make your little corner of your institution into something that's not what the institution as a whole is often doing to people maybe if you're lucky if you're in a position of institutional leadership you can even make your particular institution somewhere that has more room for people who are willing to show up and do that you won't be able to do it all yourself from a position of leadership because as I used to say when I worked at the Swedish National Theatre and I was working with the artistic director there and he was in a role of leadership that was way beyond anything that he had experienced in the roles he'd worked in before I used to say to him look what I see is that the kind of power you have in that role it's a bit like driving a car and you know how when you're driving a Land Rover across a field at 15 miles an hour you can throw the steering wheel around like that and you have to because you're bumping around when you're driving down the outer barn in an Audi at 200 kilometres an hour if you move that steering wheel more than a tiny amount you're going to roll the car and crash and cause a whole lot of trouble that's the powerlessness of power is that if you're holding that kind of institutional power your room for maneuver gets smaller and smaller usually there are moments where something utterly different becomes possible but usually that's what it's like holding that kind of institutional power but what you can do is you can look at those occasions to empower the individuals working under you who are creating pockets in which it's possible to show up differently and bring more of ourselves to the classroom in a way that is safe and those are the things that I in dialogue with my friends who are working inside institutions try and support people who are doing it that's a very very clear answer and that reveals a great deal of knowledge about the university's work so you should feel completely confident at that point so it reminds me a bit I'll show this to you afterwards there's a fascinating book by an academic under the pseudonym of Lott-Paperson called The Third University is Possible it's a tiny book, it's about 90 pages but makes a similar case for carving out some crannies within an institution to do something other than what is horrible thank you, thank you we have a question that comes in from a follow-up question from Tom Ames who is reading Ilage this week in fact, which is a nice line and he says isn't post-progress fundamentally at odds with the mission of learning which has a deep connection with growth and progress so I think you've been speaking to this a bit I guess if you want to say a bit more along those lines great question, thank you Tom so it depends what we mean by progress I suppose, progress if we take it back to the roots I studied English literature and language at Oxford that was my academic background so progress literally means movement towards and it seems to me that when you speak about a specific goal then progress is a coherent concept a coherent way of speaking and thinking we can talk about progress towards the eradication of polio or malaria and it's meaningful and rigorous to invoke progress in that context once we move to speaking in more general terms about progress, I think we get into trouble because I'm not sure that it is possible well, let me put it slightly differently I think that one of the characteristics of modernity was that the future worked that the future could be invoked as a vessel for collective hope and possibilities and projects and some extraordinary achievements were made as some horrors perpetrated by using that power of the logic of progress and the appeal to the collectively imagined future and about 50 years ago a threshold was crossed on which the surprising resilience of that concept and that function of the future reached the end of the road and we found ourselves somewhere else and where the future doesn't work the way it used to and the liberalism the future is kind of rebooted in this privatized form where it all becomes about your individual gamble on the future earnings potential represented by your degree and the rest of it so the logic of progress used to work as a way of mobilizing people and when I say the logic of progress here I'm talking about this kind of cultural logic in which we appeal to a general sense of progress and we always had a shadow side and I think Illich was good at bringing these kinds of shadow sides into view which is that in order to speak as if we can have general progress rather than progress towards a specific goal it is necessary to treat history as the kind of thing that can be meaningfully subjected to a cost benefit analysis in a way the gains against the losses that everyone can agree on which are gains and which are losses and we can net that out to a number year by year which tells us whether we're getting closer or further away from a goal that would constitute progress and my provocation is that unless we're prepared to own that which I think is generally a hidden assumption in progress talk then really when we invoke progress in that general sense we are we're kind of using it as a warm fuzzy word to point towards things we like and that we think everybody else should like now the pushback that would be reasonable against this which when I first began to articulate these thoughts influenced by Illich and other thinkers and in dialogue with all sorts of people and I'm talking about 15 years ago a bit more and the path that led to writing the dark mountain manifesto people would say to me but but but you know are you saying that the changes in infant mortality over the last six or seven generations aren't progress and it took me a while to get to the bottom of how to answer that and the answer that I arrived at and actually it was once I became a father myself and had the experience of looking at my young son a few months old and going wow I know and all the things I talk about it still comes naturally to me born in the time into which I was born and him being born into the time in which he was born for me to look at him and almost be able to take it for granted that I will live to see him grow strong and he will see me grow old and as I sat with that and as I was writing about this kind of the problem with the logic of progress in the light of that I said that's the thing you know it is possible to affirm that the changes that have transformed you know what birth means both for infants and for mothers over the last six or seven generations it's possible to hold that those changes are good important and you know pretty much beyond question those changes that matter and should be defended and at the same time to say it does not help to bundle those up into a larger singular story of progress especially if it is the case that we're going to live through the unraveling of the settlements of modernity then we would be much better and I got into dialogue recently with Richard Smith the former editor of the British Medical Journal and he's using it precisely to do this as someone with 50 years at the heart of the field of medicine behind him to move in the opposite direction instead of moving from that achievement upwards to a big singular story to move down into the granular and the specific and say how did that happen what are the conditions that made it possible how do we pay attention to that so that we salvage as much as possible and get to take as many of those achievements with us into worlds that will be in many ways poorer and more difficult than the world of the developed countries into which most of us were born in the generations into which most of us were born and so that's really my challenge is that we can get beyond this narrowing that is inherent in the logic of progress to something that is more true to what biology has to tell us about evolution because it isn't this kind of upward march of progress it's more like a branching interweaving mycelium and we are, you know we're living through the end of the world as we know it I would suggest that's not the end of the world it's the end of a world there are unknown worlds, there are paths to be found into that and there are things that we will want to take with us from what is ending into whichever world we find ourselves growing old in and that's really the invitation that's a part of both what Paul and I were setting out to do in the Dark Mountain Manifesto which was a first attempt from the two of us to frame these things that were still mainly intuitions for us at that stage and now 15 years on at work in the ruins it's me looking back on the conversations and encounters and work that I got to do as a result of the impact that that manifesto made and you know trying to bring that down to at the end of the book I say here is an unfinished list of some tasks that might make sense if you share my read on the signs of the times what's worth doing if we're living in a time of endings and I say well here are four examples of kinds of tasks one is to salvage good things that we can take with us and do our best to contribute to the possibility of those things being taken with us into whatever kind of things we end up in the next one is to mourn good things that we're not going to be able to take with us and as an act of mourning to tell their stories so that the stories are taken with us because those stories may yet act as seeds in worlds that we won't live to see the third one and this is very strongly influenced for me by Elich is to notice the things that were never as good as we told each other they were within what is ending and the chance that we are being given to walk away from some of those things that looked like unquestionable goods and where in that Hegelian sense the owl of Minerva flies at dusk there are things that it only becomes possible to see in the end of the arc of a story and that includes those things that were you know sacred when that story was at its height that are worth calling into question and again we've had 50 years of scholars and now I'm thinking of James C. Scott or Anand Singh as examples of scholars who've done incredibly generative work in helping us begin to do that that kind of owl of Minerva work on the logics of modernity so that's the third one is noticing the things we're being given a chance to walk away from and then the fourth kind of task and I know that there are more than I thought of this is just my list the fourth one is to look for the dropped threads from earlier in the story the things that we've been told are obsolete or already vanished or marginalised the things that look like the past even when they're here in the present that might actually turn out to make all the difference to the finding of viable paths and if you want a single example of that I would point out to you that there are two billion people in the world today who are part of peasant farming households logic of progress is so powerful that even when that fact is invoked in the next breath we usually talk as if that is all going away soon even though the end of that has been predicted since Marx was around and there is a surprising resilience Chris Smage in his book A Small Farm Future does a brilliant job of unpacking the possibilities contained within that but the logic of progress is so powerful that a thinker and activist like George Mombio who I have a huge amount of admiration for can assume that those two billion people and their way of living are going away and that one finished start-up that promises to feed the world with fat grown golden dust is the future of how humanity is going to find paths through a climate changed world and feed itself with respect I just don't believe that that's the most plausible future that lies ahead for us so that fourth task looking for the things that have been written out of the story because they look like they already belong in the past and drawing on scholarship drawing on history and anthropology they're doing it very humbly recognising all of the blind spots that have been there within the work of those disciplines and the ways that they have treated people to find the drop threads from earlier in the story that we might be giving a chance to weave back in alongside the things we're trying to salvage and take with us from the end of the world the end of the house modernity built as Vanessa often puts it not to mention with great sorrow I must say the end of our hour together you timed that perfectly and I had a question Dear Nick in the audience was asking a question along those lines so I'm glad that you anticipated it and got to address it but with great regret I have to wrap things up it's been fantastic talking and thinking with you, Google thank you so much I know well besides getting your book and again everybody on the bottom left of the screen you should see a button that takes you to it how else can we keep up with your work how else can we keep up with a school called home and how else can we keep up with the progress of your thinking well if there's one thing to do aside from getting your hands on the book if you want more of this then I'd say just sign up for my newsletter on substack google.substack.com it's called writing home and I say that because all of the news of things coming up with the school and other projects that I'm involved with will come through that portal so that's the best way to follow along but I'm doing keep in touch and joining the conversations around it the school is pretty quiet at the moment publicly because we're in this process working with our existing membership community and then I'm pretty busy with the book so in half a year or so when we're on the far side of the gathering in Patmos I suspect that we'll be opening out into the world with more invitations and openings to collaborations there and I'll look forward to the chance to be in dialogue with people in the comments there and in other ways I wish you all best on the road to the apocalypse island what are you talking about the UK or the one in Greece just Patmos for this time just Patmos I'll let you go with the UK as well thank you so much please have a good night and continue with this great work thank you take care everyone don't go everyone yet because we have to point you to where we're heading next I do want to thank you all for the questions and comments if you want to keep talking about this already some of you have been tweeting please just use the hashtag FTTE or tweet at me or Shindig events or take this over to Macedon there's my handle or hit my blog up as well if you'd like to look into our previous session where we talk about the great macro questions around the future and higher education and climate change in particular just head to tinyurl.com looking ahead we have a whole stack of sessions coming up some of which are connected to this some of which go off in other directions just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to see more of those and if you'd like to share any of your work either along these lines or others please drop me a note so I can share with everybody else in the meantime thank you again for being in such a dark and large register thank you all for coming and sharing your own thoughts and questions I hope you all stay safe and well and we'll see you next time online bye bye