As Ed says at the end of our final episode of 2024, “Have yourself a mythic little Christmas!” We close the year with a wandering conversation about folklore, myth, modernity as being “away with the fairies” and hopefully bringing back something of worth from the journey.Show Notes* Ed’s new book of poetry, The Father’s Road, is available now through Etsy.* Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees.* Alan Garner’s Collected Folk Tales.* Martin Shaw’s Westcountry School of Myth.* On three ways of handling the “spiritual gelignite” of myth – retelling, translation and reabsorption/transmutation – Alan Garner’s essay, ‘The Death of Myth’, originally published in the New Statesman, 1970.* The Owl Service – Garner’s transmutation of the myth of Blodeuwedd.* For more on the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, see Paul Radin’s The Trickster.* Three recent pieces from Mary Harrington – ‘“Woke” Is Not The New Reformation’, ‘Scrolling Toward The Divine’, ‘Yes, the “Woke Right” is real’.* The Levi-Strauss line about “science, which started out by separating itself from myth, will eventually encounter it once again” is discussed in Debi Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the World.* James Bridle, New Dark Age.* We’ll talk about D.W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology later in the series, when Ed’s had the chance to read it.* Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole.* Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men.* Alan Dundes, Interpreting Folklore. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

My guest in this episode is Jay Cousins, an inventor, recovering entrepreneur and carrier of questions, an old friend from my Sheffield days, who has been based for the past ten years or so in Dahab, Egypt. This conversation came about because Jay wrote to me with a set of thoughts that build on the unfinished list of “Four Tasks for a Time of Endings” from the closing pages of At Work in the Ruins.The original set of tasks goes like this:* Salvage the good things we have a chance of taking with us.* Mourn the good things we have to leave behind – and do this, not least, by telling their stories, because these stories may turn out to be seeds in futures we can’t imagine yet.* Notice the things that were never as good as we told each other they were about the ways we’ve been living around here lately, and the chance we’re given to leave these behind.* Look for the dropped threads from earlier in the story and the chance to weave these back in – the things that have been marked as old-fashioned, inefficient, obsolete, but that might turn out to make all the difference on the journey ahead.In the course of this episode, Jay brings up five questions that follow on from these tasks:* What should we seek to use before we lose it?* What can we produce now, knowing what is coming?* What can we evolve from things we’ll lose?* What are the seeds of the things we mourn – and how do we harvest these?* What do we need to learn and teach future generations?You can listen to Jay’s regular mini-podcasts at Make Kindness Easier! The Stone Paper product is being developed by the folks at Solar Punk Now. He’s @jaycousins on Twitter and here’s his LinkedIn.Show Notes* We mention Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and how she couples the work of hospicing to the work of “assisting with the birth of new, as-yet-unknown, and potentially – but not necessarily – wiser”.* Richard Smith’s review of At Work in the Ruins in the British Medical Journal applies the original “four tasks” to the fields of medicine and public health.* Jay introduces the work of Dave Hakkens and One Army – and especially the Precious Plastic project. * Talking about what we should “use before we lose” takes me to a conversation with the Solarpunk theorist Jay Springett where he suggested using today’s earth-moving machines to do landscaping for permaculture that will continue to be useful long after the fossil fuel era is over.* Low-Tech Magazine.* Jay’s Stone Paper.* Martín Prechtel, The Unlikely Peace at Cuchamquic on the centring of seeds within Mayan culture. * The Decelerator supports civil society organisations to create good endings (discussed in the #DECELERATE episode of The Great Humbling).* End of the World Garden in Cornwall, created by the artist Paul Chaney.* I wrote about Cryptic Northern Refugia in this essay for Alan Garner.* Thomas Keyes’s recipe for October Black Isle Pheasant Stew appeared in Dark Mountain: Issue 2.* Carcinisation is an example of convergent evolution, by which “crabs” evolve from different directions.* Caroline Ross’s Found and Ground as an example of recovering and relearning skills. (I spoke to Caroline in Homeward Bound S1E1.)* Here’s an old post of Jay’s about his first company, Orikaso, and the fold-flat dinnerware products he invented.* Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”.* Jay’s TEDx talk, where he started sharing his thinking about biomemetic business models.* J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

In this episode, we chew on a question that’s been on Dougald’s mind since a recent event in London, where Brian Eno wondered what is the difference between an analysis which says we cannot save or make sustainable the trajectories of industrial modernity and technological progress, and an accelerationist position which says we need to bring about collapse in order to release the possibilities to be found in the ruins? What would a “decelerationist” politics look like?Shownotes* Derek Gow, Birds, Beasts and Bedlam * Andy Hamilton, New Wild Order * James Kaelan, 999 Years of Peace is “a luddite publication, not for sale”, but you could try sending Cartoon Distortion a message on Instagram to find out more.* Elizabeth Oldfield, author of Fully Alive was talking at The Kairos Club, London this week. Kairos currently has paperback copies of At Work in the Ruins on sale for £10 and some great events coming up with friends of this podcast:* Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (SAFER) with Rupert Read, Tuesday 26 November* A New Cosmology: Feeling Our Way into the Imaginal with Ellie Robins, Thursday 28 November* Ece Temulkeran, How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship* Dougald quotes from R. G. Miga’s comment on our election day episode * Watching “accelerationism” move over the last decade and a bit:* #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek (2013)* Paul Mason, Clear Bright Future (2019)* Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019)* Nick Land – “the Godfather of accelerationism”, from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (alongside Mark Fisher of Capitalist Realism) in the 1990s to Neo-reaction and the Dark Enlightenment* ‘Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world’, Vox magazine, 2019.* Iona Lawrence & The Decelerator – “We support organisations and individuals to anticipate and design closures, mergers, CEO transitions, programming ends, and all sorts of endings as just part of the everyday life of organisations and inevitable cycles of change in civil society.”* Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (in case we haven’t mentioned it before!)* Only Planet – Ed’s around-the-world slow travel book* Jay Cousins writes on Substack at Make Kindness Easier! and will feature on an upcoming episode of Homeward Bound* Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1942), Ch.3, makes the argument for a historical example of “decelerationism”: Why should the ultimate victory of a trend be taken as a proof of the ineffectiveness of the efforts to slow down its progress? And why should the purpose of these measures not be seen precisely in that which they achieved, i.e., in the slowing down of the rate of change? That which is ineffectual in stopping a line of development altogether is not, on that account, altogether ineffectual. The rate of change is often of no less importance than the direction of the change itself ; but while the latter frequently does not depend upon our volition, it is the rate at which we allow change to take place which well may depend upon us. […] England withstood without grave damage the calamity of the enclosures only because the Tudors and the early Stuarts used the power of the Crown to slow down the process of economic improvement until it became socially bearable — employing the power of the central government to relieve the victims of the transformation, and attempting to canalize the process of change so as to make its course less devastating.* Andrew at Bog-down and Aster quotes Gustav Landauer, as he reflects on the US election in A short word and a poem for my daughter at day’s end:The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community.Thank you for listening, sharing and responding to these episodes.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

In this episode of Homeward Bound, I’m talking to Isabelle Drury, author of the Substack Finding Sanity. I wanted to talk to Isabelle because of a post she wrote back in July, describing a moment in her relationship, shaped by the way she had been dwelling on thoughts of climate catastrophe and societal collapse:I was discussing with my partner what our plans were for the next few years of our lives. What I imagine are the usual conversations one has when your future still seems wide open: ‘Shall we have a baby?! Shall we move abroad?! Shall we buy a van?!’ Yet every answer felt wrong, because my future didn’t feel wide open. My future felt very small, and like there was only one possibility: the aforementioned end of the world.The thing is, as I heard the words come out of my mouth garbled by tears, I realise I don’t actually believe this. Deep down, I don’t actually believe we are totally, irrevocably, and unequivocally fucked.I’ve known Isabelle for a couple of years, she’s been part of the conversations that Anna and I host at a school called HOME, and one of the themes that’s been coming up for me lately in that work is the difference in what it asks of us when we show up to the trouble the world is in, depending on the season of life we’re in.I want to lean into this further and record some more conversations with folks of different generations who are wrestling with the questions I wrote about in At Work in the Ruins, asking how we show up for each other across the generational differences that Isabelle and I talk about in this episode.I hope you enjoy our conversation – and do check out Isabelle’s Substack.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,Gunpowder, treason and plot.I see no reasonWhy gunpowder treasonShould ever be forgot.This episode starts with the traditional nursery rhyme commemorating the events of 5 November, 1605, when Catholic plotters attempted to blow up the British parliament.While we’re on the theme of memory and maps, a reminder that Dougald’s new online series, Pockets, Patterns & Practices, starts this week, with the question, “What kind of maps do we need now?”And here’s a line from friend-of-the-show Elizabeth Oldfield that came in after we recorded, but resonates with today’s conversation:We all have would-be tidy assumptions, and need a mess making of them if we have any hope of encountering people and the world as they really are.(from ‘Expanding Eros, Or Why connection is my kink’)Shownotes* The last(?) interview with John Berger, shortly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. * “In such a climate, somebody who is actually saying something, who seems to suggest that there may be a connection between what he said and what he will do, such a person is a way out of a vacuous nightmare—even if the way out is dangerous or vicious.”* Ed has joined the Old Glory Molly dancing group and got into trouble for singing ‘The Dog Song’.* Dougald gives a shout-out to The Climate Majority Project.* There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak.* American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology by D. W. Pasulka.* Birds, Beasts & Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species by Derek Gow.* Caring for Life: A Postdevelopment Politics of Infant Hygiene by Kelly Dombroski.* The Plant Pamphlets by Mark Watson. * Read Charlotte Du Cann’s Introduction to the book. * Dougald’s letter from three days after the 2016 US election: ‘When the Maps Run Out’.* R. G. Miga’s ‘Hunter’s Ghost: On the hard work of staying vigilant in the darkness’* “Two things can be true at the same time. Donald Trump can be a vile scumbag, unfit for office. The people looking to bring him down can also be scapegoating him—trying to hang all the sins of the past decade around his neck, driving him off a cliff to create the false narrative of a fresh start.”* Also from R. G. Miga, this note: “why do people still despise the Democratic Party—every single Democratic presidential candidate for the past eight years, including the old white guy—more than a meandering country club owner with Borderline Personality Disorder? If the Democratic Party still can’t acknowledge its own weaknesses and make a positive case for its policies, rather than constantly leaning on moral superiority—it’s doomed, with or without Trump.’”* Jamie Kelsey Fry and James Robertson talking about Citizens Assemblies.* Vanessa Chamberlin’s vision asks us: “What if we step towards the cracks?”* Adam Wilson’s latest post: “What happened AFTER the grocery store stopped having food on the shelves?” * Ed brings us to a close by referencing William Stafford’s poem, ‘A Ritual to Read to Each Other’.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

The hosts humorously grapple with the blunders of modern technology, using a robot vacuum mishap as a metaphor for political chaos. They explore themes of masculinity and self-discovery through a friend's one-man show, alongside discussions on environmental activism spurred by literary works like Edward Abbey's 'The Monkey Wrench Gang.' The conversation also dives into dark satire with Andrei Kirchhoff's 'Death and the Penguin,' and reflects on the complexities of forgiveness and male violence in Em Strang's 'Quinn.' It's a rich blend of literature and thought-provoking social commentary.

Midway through last month’s North American tour, the filmmaker Katie Teague sat me down to record an interview. Sometimes an interview happens at just the right moment, when all the work you’re carrying is on the top of your tongue. That’s what happened here – so with Katie’s permission, we’re releasing an audio version of her edit of what I told her that morning. The result is more or less a solo show, since you don’t hear Katie’s questions and my answers come in stories rather than paragraphs. If you haven’t read At Work in the Ruins, then this episode is a good way into it – and if you have, then it will give you a sense of where I’ve been taken by the conversations the book led me into.It also provides some good context for Pockets, Patterns & Practices, the five-week online series that I’ll be teaching next month.Shownotes* Katie Teague’s YouTube channel with other interviews, including Joanna Macey, Jonathan Rowson and more.* Support Katie’s work through her Patreon.* Vinay Gupta’s Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps aka “Six Ways to Die”* Brian Eno’s definition of culture as “everything we don’t have to do”* My interpretation of Eno’s definition in The Kitchen Table* At Work in the Ruins now out in paperback* Pockets, Patterns & Practices starts on 6 & 7 November 2024 and runs for five weeks. Full details at aschoolcalledhome.orgHomeward Bound theme music: ‘Hope and the Forester’ by Blue Dot SessionsThanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it.Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

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/Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

As the fifth season of The Great Humbling came to an end, we recognised that what we’ve been doing is letting you listen in on a conversation that we would want to have anyway – and this inspired us to expand the podcast, to bring you overheard conversations with other friends, co-conspirators and people who get us thinking.We’re calling this Homeward Bound, a title that started off as the name of the first online series that Dougald Hine taught with a school called HOME in 2020. For a few series now, we’ve used homewardbound.org as the home for The Great Humbling. These are two images that gesture in the same direction: they name a need to come down to earth, to be called back from the fantasies of endless growth and technological progress, to face the depth of the trouble around and ahead of us, to find the kinds of agency that make sense now.We’ll continue to make new episodes of The Great Humbling with Ed and Dougald and you’ll find those here, but alongside them there will also be other conversations that pick up on the themes you’ve heard us speak about. To set this rolling, we’re going to put out the podcast version of the series of “overheard conversations” that Dougald has been hosting this spring over at Writing Home, starting with this conversation with Caroline Ross.This conversation took place on Zoom in March with a live audience made up of subscribers to Writing Home and Uncivil Savant. You’ll hear the first forty minutes of conversation between Caro and Dougald. If you’d like to watch a recording of the Q&A that followed, then head over here and sign up for a paid subscription.As mentioned in the intro to this episode, this week also sees the start of Further Adventures in Regrowing a Living Culture, a five-week online series where you can join Dougald and other participants from around the world to explore the work of becoming realists of a larger reality, starting where we find ourselves and finding the courage to act. Full details at aschoolcalledhome.org.Thanks for listening!ShownotesFollow Caroline Ross’s work by subscribing to Uncivil Savant and find details of her book, Found and Ground: A practical guide to making your own foraged paints, on her website.Theresa Emmerich Kamper is the experimental archaeologist who Caro brought to Östervåla last year for a session in Skolunkan, the old shoe shop at a school called HOME.Antonio Dias wrote about Viking boats in ‘Notes on Ritual’.David Fleming’s Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It is online here.Iain McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain is presented in The Mastery and His Emissary and The Matter With Things. Watch Caro’s conversation with Iain here and the story of Dougald and Caro’s trip to visit him on Skye in February 2023 is here.Here is a taste of the polyphony of Le Mystére des Voix Bulgares.Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft was published on this side of the Atlantic as The Case for Working With Your Hands.The quote Dougald struggles to remember from an early president of the United States is this one from John Adams.Here’s a taste of Caro’s sojourn in the music world, from the album she made with Rothko.CreditsThe music for this episode is ‘Hope and the Forester’ by Blue Dot Sessions. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

The end of this fifth series of The Great Humbling finds us looking back over the loose ends from earlier episodes, exploring the wider field of “Humility Studies” and asking who exactly we think we’re talking to, anyway?We start with Ed reporting back from The Fête of Britain, the inaugural festival of the Hard Art collective, which took place in Manchester last week, where he found himself hosting a gameshow whose panellists included Clare Farrell, Lee Jasper and the folk singer Jennifer Reid, who specialises in singing broadside ballads to reconnect audiences with the working class tradition of the northwest of England. Other goings-on included our friend Elizabeth Slade of the Unitarian Church leading a “Sunday Service” which included a choir conducted by Brian Eno and a “sermon” from Jarvis Cocker. Ed also describes his late-night outreach in a Salford bar, where “Psychedelic Pete” thanked Hard Art members for bringing this chaos to the city.Among all these adventures, there’s a serious question that we take with us on into this episode, one that’s been put to us by our friend Jamie Kelsey Fry: who do you think you are talking to? In any of the work we’re doing, are we preaching to the choir, or talking a language that can bridge across boundaries and invite all kinds of other voices into the conversation? And does this matter? Our first answer is: there’s room for each of these kinds of talk, but it’s good to know which you’re actually doing.Dougald chases up a few other loose ends from this episode. He and Alfie have reached the ninth instalment of The Bagthorpe Saga, but despite the efforts of listeners, the elusive tenth book is still out there, so the search continues! (And a reward awaits the finder of a copy of Bagthorpes Battered.)Talk of “burning a million quid” – from our early episodes on the KLF (S5E3, S5E4) – gets woven into the earlier thread of Making Good Ruins (S5E1), because Drummond and Caughtie’s ritual on the Isle of Jura anticipates the project of using economic resources in ways that make no sense according to the logic within which our economic system imagines them. During a conversation with Chris Smaje and Christopher Brewster, Dougald finds himself scrawling “Let’s burn a billion dollars!” across a page in his notebook. But as Ed suggests, what’s at stake might be not so much burning money as composting it, or ploughing it into the soil.Ed introduces us to the concept of “zombie leadership”, drawing on a paper about the “Dead ideas that still walk among us”, brought to his attention by professor of leadership, Jonathan Gosling. (We’re also introduced to the word “demulcent”, which sounds like something you might use on your skin.) And we learn about the US Department of Defense Strategic Command paper on “Counter-Zombie Dominance”, which reminds Dougald of the hugely popular study circle run by Sweden’s Workers Learning Association around Zombie Apocalypse Survival. Turns out that zombies are – as the anthropologists say – good to think with. [Insert joke about brains here—Ed.]We discuss Donald Trump as an exemplar of zombie leadership – but Dougald points out that Trump also capitalises on alienation from expert-ocracy, which itself has aspects of zombie leadership. There’s zombies everywhere! (US election 2024: “vote for the least worst zombie”?)The serious point here is a connection to the “problem” vs “predicament” distinction from John Michael Greer which Dougald drew on in At Work in the Ruins. A problem is something that has a solution (a way to fix it that returns you to a situation resembling the previously existing state of affairs); if something doesn’t have a solution, it’s not a problem, though it may well be a predicament. When you have a problem, it’s a good idea to get the best group of experts in a room to come up with a solution; but in the face of a predicament, what’s needed is a far more distributed (and democratic) approach, in which many different groups follow different strategies, without attempting to reason our way to what will work in advance. Expert-ocracy is the state of affairs in which the world is seen not only as containing problems (among other things), but as made up of problems, and therefore best served by being put into the hands of experts.From here, we come to what is apparently the emerging field of Humility Studies, brought to our attention by this post from Richard Beck, in which he quotes a paper from Pelin Kesebir, “A Quiet Ego Quiets Death Anxiety: Humility as an Existential Anxiety Buffer” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:Since 2014, the empirical research about humility has exploded. Much of this research has shown that humility functions as a regulating virtue upon which many other virtues depend.Meanwhile, our fellow traveller Peter N Limberg of Less Foolish has also been writing about humility:In the book Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Science [by Ian M. Church and Peter L. Samuelson], intellectual humility is understood as the virtuous mean between intellectual arrogance and intellectual diffidence.And about “overcoming intellectual servitude”:While stewarding The Stoa, I sensed greater potential in the attendees than in the galaxy-brains we listened to. I see so much potential being bottled up due to the pervasiveness of this servitude.The best way to dissuade intellectual arrogance … is to target the source: the narcissistic supply. Once the special-feeling dissipates or is put in its proper place, the overvaluing will also dissipate, and one can put their intelligence to proper useThis thought echoes what Vanessa Andreotti calls “getting to zero”, escaping the game of modernity in which everyone is always either up or down, “plus one” or “minus one”. (See Hospicing Modernity – or this podcast episode.)All of this sends Ed daydreaming about the professor who starts the Humility Institute, who can truly call himself the world’s leading expert on humility…Another thread around humility leads us to Elizabeth Oldfield’s forthcoming book, Fully Alive, which Dougald has been reading. The book is Elizabeth’s attempt to share the treasures of the wisdom tradition of Christianity with those who don’t necessarily share her faith. She structures it around what she admits is the seemingly unpromising framework of the “seven deadly sins”, a list originating with the Desert Fathers and Mothers of 4th and 5th century Egypt. In the version of the list she uses, the seventh sin is Pride, and she reflects on how many of the senses in which we use this word seem to her to describe something good and worthwhile – but in identifying the nature of Pride, in the sense meant by her tradition, she homes in on the kind of belief in our own self-sufficiency, in not needing others, that cuts us off from relationship with each other, with the world and (from a believer’s perspective) with God.From here, we come back around to the question of who we think we’re talking to, in these episodes. The first answer to who we’re talking to is each other – this podcast started with a conversation, and as a way of letting others listen in on a conversation we had started to have, and underlying it there’s a certain faith in conversation, in the generative potential of ongoing threads of small-scale conversation and the kind of space of conversation that is not just “another talking shop”.A while ago, the Solarpunk theorist Jay Springett joked to Dougald that the pattern of semi-regular calls they had fallen into was “catch-up culture”, an antidote to “cancel culture”.There’s a sense, too, of conversation as a practice, both in the sense of the word used by artists, but also perhaps in the sense in which Alasdair Macintyre uses the term in his account of how virtue is acquired (in After Virtue). Dougald enthuses about M. R. O’Connor’s book, Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World, as a gripping account of a journey into a “practice”, in this sense – but also because, by the end of her year of training and working as a wildland firefighter and controlled-burn fire-starter, O’Connor describes encountering fire itself as something she is in dialogue. In this sense, conversation as a practice points towards a way of inhabiting the world.So, after five series, maybe this is the heart of what we’re doing – practicing being in conversation, practicing letting our conversations be overheard, not seeking a huge audience, but trusting that the relationship we have with those of you overhearing these conversations can be consequential.In this spirit, Dougald makes an invitation to a forthcoming season of “overheard conversations” – details to be announced soon on his own Substack, Writing Home – that will take place fortnightly on Sunday evenings (European time), starting with a conversation with Caroline Ross of Uncivil Savant on Sunday 10 March. Paid subscribers to either Dougald’s Substack or that of his guest are invited to join live on Zoom, while a recording of the opening part of the conversation will be made available as a video and audio recording.Meanwhile, Ed is looking forward to hosting a writing retreat together with Jonathan Gosling and taking his other podcast, The Futurenauts, to the Hay Festival.We’ll be back with another series of The Great Humbling later in 2024. Meanwhile, thank you for listening in. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org