The Gifts in the Ruins with Dr Ashley Colby

In this episode, my guest is Dr Ashley Colby for a joint episode with her Doomer Optimism podcast. Ashley is hosting a weekend retreat around my work in Chicago as part of next month’s North American tour.

* Read more & register for the Chicago Retreat: https://bit.ly/dougald-retreat

* The rest of the American tour: https://dougald.nu/america/

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We talk about how long it is since I last visited the US. Back then, I was travelling as part of an internet startup, School of Everything, inspired by Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. Among my co-founders was Mary Harrington, who describes her experience the mess of that start-up experience early on in Feminism Against Progress – and it turns out that Ashley also features later on in that book.

Chicago is Ashley’s hometown. She talks about how she and her husband moved away, after she got “doom-pilled”, and about their decision to return a few years later. This is partly about getting away from “spreadsheet mind”.

It’s important to me to have these urban examples of what “regrowing a living culture” can look like. However much we may be working for what Chris Smaje calls a “small farm future”, there’s also a need for examples of what it looks like when we start from the places where many people find themselves. One example for me is the small community of radical hospitality in south London that Elizabeth Oldfield writes about in Fully Alive.

Ashley talks about the retreat she hosted last year with Paul Kingsnorth at the Wagon Box in Wyoming – and how she seems to have fallen into the role of helping Dark Mountain co-founders find their bearings in North America.

We discover a mutual admiration for Richard D. Bartlett’s approach to bringing groups together – and Ashley talks about how this shaped her approach to convening co-created retreats like the one we will be holding.

I look back on experiences with the community of Ivan Illich’s surviving friends and collaborators, a way of gathering around the table that is an antidote to the “conditioned air” of institutional academia. (For more on this, see Illich’s ‘The Cultivation of Conspiracy’.)

Ashley introduces me to the concept of a Jeffersonian Dinner – and we decide we’ll host something like this on the Saturday evening of the Chicago Retreat.

We talk about some of the other events I’ll be doing on the tour, including conversations with Bayo Akomolafe at the Schumacher Center in Great Barrington, Lewis Hyde in Boston, and with Adam Wilson of The Peasantry School Newsletter.

I give a shout out to Ellie Robins’s excellent post, “This moment needs your deep weirdness and your intellectual rigour”, and quote something Lydia Catterall once said to me: “I’ve realised that there can be a gift in things you could never have asked for.” I think of that often when reading Nick Cave’s replies in The Red Hand Files.

Ashley quotes something Paul Kingsnorth said years ago in a New York Times article about Dark Mountain: “I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough.”

We talk about using the retreat to explore examples, to invite people to bring a diversity of stories of what the work of regrowing a living culture looks like in practice – and also working out the challenges and contradictions, navigating the tensions. Ashley talks about making community in an urban neighbourhood, also about joining the La Leche League as a new mother and the sharing of experience and advice from multiple voices that she experienced in those meetings.

Talking about pockets takes me to Brian Eno’s concept of “scenius”, the conditions under which a group of artists become capable of making work that exceeds anything they had previously achieved on their own. (For more on this, see this post of mine and Austin Kleon’s Maps of Scenius.)

It also brings me to Laura Fabrycky’s essay, ‘The Witness of the Weak Centres’, about how her admiration for Dietrich Bonhoeffer developed from a story of his individual heroism to a recognition of “the small, mysterious, slow, even weak places of life—home, family, friends” that shaped the resistance to the Nazi regime.

Thanks for listening – and for reading these notes. Head over to my website to find all the details for the Chicago Retreat and the rest of the American tour.

Further episodes of Homeward Bound are coming soon, along with a new series of The Great Humbling later in the autumn.

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