In the coming weeks, join Elias Crim and Pete Davis as they journey into the land of the Lost Prophets, the mid-century figures who asked deep question and had big visions about what happened, where to go, and how to get there.
Here in the mid-2020s, we are lost in the woods. We do not trust the established systems, and the established systems are revealing themselves daily to not be, as presently designed, worthy of our trust.
Most of us don't feel like we are members of the places in which we reside, nor co-creators of the structures in which we inhabit — and as a result, loneliness, cynicism, and unease abounds. Powerful words like neighbor and citizen and solidarity, democracy, community, and ecology, participation — prophecy! — have been lost by years of abandonment and misuse.
And none of the silver bullets of the past decades — the latest politicians, the latest technologies, the latest cultural trends — have delivered on their promise to get us out of this mess. Where to now?
One way of thinking about what’s been going is that we are living in an age of what could be called declining hegemony.
From the late 1980s to early 2010s, most of the questions that were raised about public life had conventional wisdom answers. There were always alternatives, critics, and dreamers, but the conventional wisdom dominated — if you had a question, the system had an answer, and most of us believed it.
But eventually, that conventional wisdom started unraveling. Two decades of cultural malaise, disastrous wars, financialization, monopolization, Trump, an environmental crisis, technodystopias, and more have resulted in the conventional wisdom answers being much less believable today. That’s what declining hegemony feels like — unanswered questions, the most important being: Where to now?
But here’s something we noticed: So many of the questions that we’re asking today were also asked by people who lived before the rise of the current, now-declining hegemony. In the mid-20th century, there was an explosion of reflection about big questions: How do we make sure our tools serves us instead of the other way around? How do we build community in the modern world? How should we relate to nature and to one another? How do we design our cities? Our systems? Our government? Where to now?
Jane Jacobs, Dorothy Day, Hannah Arendt, Paul Goodman, Martin Luther King, Wendell Berry, Ella Baker, Ivan Illich, Simone Weil, Abraham Joshua Heschel, James Baldwin, Marshall McCluhan, E.F. Schumacher… it was an era of deep questions and big visions. It was an era of prophecy.
If we want to figure out where to go from here, we may need to hear their voices again.
And that’s exactly what we’re doing with Lost Prophets. Each episode, we will feature a Lost Prophet of solidarity — discuss their life, their work, and what they can teach us about today. Additionally, we’ll bring on a guest that’s a much bigger expert on their work to go deeper. And hopefully in this excavation, we’ll find some light that can shine a path forward today.
Come digging with us, Listener!
Get full access to The Lost Prophets Podcast at www.lostprophets.org/subscribe