Reading the Ruins

Indeterminacy, apocalypses, and the hard work of divining the unsaid.

Recently, I had the very good fortune to share some time with

Dougald Hine

, on the first leg of his book tour around the Northeast United States, promoting the new paperback edition of At Work in the Ruins.

There’s a lot about the experience I’d like to share, but it’s a challenge to frame it properly, so bear with me.

Why challenging?

For starters, meeting Dougald felt like being invited to sit at the grown-up’s table for the first time. I volunteered to give him a ride from Great Barrington, Massachusetts—where he’d given a talk at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics—to Kingston, New York, for his next stop on the tour. “Star-struck” isn’t exactly right: when I drove down to meet him, it felt like bringing my own wobbly, rough-hewn work to be assessed by an expert craftsman.

I’m still apprenticing in the trade that Dougald has been plying for over a decade now. He’s a well-respected writer, speaker, and public thinker, keeping company with figures like

Paul Kingsnorth

,

Caroline Ross

, and

Martin Shaw

. After co-founding the Dark Mountain Project, he’s made a career out of bringing people together, with A School Called Home, the Great Humbling podcast, and the publication of his book. What I call “the grown-up table” is something he had a hand in building himself. Influential people sit there with him.

I, on the other hand, have been tinkering in my basement workshop for just a few years, with the little chunks of time I’m able to scoop up. Sometimes I forget to measure twice, cut once, and not the other way around. I’m happy if I can nail together an essay that stands on its own without getting toppled by a moderate breeze.

It’s not like Dougald’s harsh or intimidating as a person. Not at all. He’s exactly as good-natured, thoughtful, and easygoing as his writing suggests. Wonderful company on the hour’s drive to Kingston. We talked about writing, and Substack, and the colossal weirdness of trying to navigate a highly charged political environment as noncombatants—discussing things that are adjacent to politics, without getting dragged into the cowboy saloon brawl that mainstream discourse is quickly becoming.

Apart from being professionally outranked, I was also trying to be considerate of the demands on Dougald’s attention. He was still jetlagged from his long flight over from Sweden, recovering from a lively event after a train ride up from New York City. There was only a short window of potential peace and quiet before his call time at the Good Work Institute in Kingston that evening; in spite of my enthusiasm, I tried very hard not to talk his ear off.

All this gave me something of a backstage perspective on the event, somewhere on the periphery: not quite a member of the general audience, and also not one of Dougald’s full-fledged peers.

What was interesting about the event, from that perspective, was less the content of the experience and more the shape that it took.

At Work in the Ruins addresses a certain kind of indeterminacy at an ominous moment in human history. It’s a challenging book; few people besides Dougald—with his unique perspective and generous spirit—would be able to pull it off with such grace. It’s nominally about our response to crisis, to climate change and Covid, and what those catastrophic moments reveal about our culture. More significantly, it’s about what to do when we don’t really know what to do, but need to do something; about crafting the tools for the work ahead, before the work itself can begin.

It’s a tough book for those who are looking for definite answers—who have been told, and sincerely believed, that somebody would have a solution to all this.

Dougald is neither putting himself forward as the person with the answers, nor pointing toward a place where the answers can be found. His book begins with a realization of what he can no longer talk about: climate change as a problem that can be addressed by a modern, technocratic political apparatus. It ends with a deliberately-incomplete collection of workings that might carry us through the difficult transitions ahead. What he proposes is emphatically not a list of policy proposals and action items, in the way we’ve come to expect from books that are nominally “about climate change.”

As a whole, the book circumscribes an unfinished narrative, and reads like a contemplative middle chapter. The story that precedes the book’s opening is a familiar one of activism, advocacy, and optimism, in a world that’s already slipping away. The final page of the last chapter is not a conclusion, exactly, but the preface for a different story. We can’t skip ahead to the end of that new story and find out what happens—impatient though we may be for a resolution—because it hasn’t finished taking place, is still unfolding in the space around the book. The ruins described in the title haven’t tumbled into themselves yet; that unevenly-distributed future hasn’t fully arrived.

This leaves the book, as a text, with the shape and feeling of an ensō, a so-called “zen circle”: an expression of the artist’s state of mind at a particular moment in time, rendered in a quick, decisive, almost abstract flourish, leaving the viewer to reflect on their own inner state. In authoring it, Dougald has taken on the difficult task of identifying sites of possibility without offering ready-made solutions.

And, lord, do people want solutions. Badly.

The audience that filled the space at the Good Work Institute was nothing but polite and generous. Nevertheless—for me, on the periphery, looking at the form as much as the substance—there was an air of uncertainty around the whole event.

The venue itself is a center for activism, geared toward speakers and causes with clearly-defined stances: for this, against that. Sign this petition. Join this march. That’s not to diminish the vital work done by the community at the Institute. There are many issues demanding exactly that kind of attention. It’s only to suggest, as Dougald himself puts forth, that climate change might be a different class of problem than the ones around which these spaces are typically constructed: culturally, ideologically, and logistically.

And maybe we’re coming late to that realization.

This delayed awareness was reflected in the people who attended the event. Again, from my perspective, it was more evident in the things left unsaid than the actual discourse. The crowd was cut from the same Certified Fair Trade Organic cloth as the college-town audiences where I live: attentive, intellectual, eager to do something about the problem—to march, to donate, to boycott, to rally. No doubt many of them were regular attendees at the Institute, accustomed to being urged toward some decisive action. Activist culture spotlights the well-educated, the progressive and the affluent as significant participants in these struggles. They’re the people regularly told to dig deep and contribute something in order to win the battles being fought. It’s a role that many habitual activists cherish.

And so those who attended the talk without reading the book may have been puzzled by the lack of strident rhetoric. In Dougald’s framing of the scene, there are no ramparts to defend or overtake. No votes to cast. No petitions to sign. The aim of the book is to draw attention to exactly this cultural absence: at a civilizational level, the way we’ve defined the issue of climate change is presenting a problem with no solution.

If there is a path forward—and maybe there isn’t, in the way we’ve been told to expect—we seem have lost it in the underbrush of cultural conflict and convenient narratives. The book suggests that, maybe, instead of charging ahead into this new wilderness, searching for familiar landmarks, we need to pause and get our bearings. We might even consider backtracking to figure out where we lost the trail.

The audience was game to get involved in any way they could, primed for action. But they seemed a bit confused—quietly, politely perplexed—by the suggestion that a relentless forward progression might not carry the day.

The question of “backtracking” was taken up by the event’s co-presenter, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, who shared the stage with Dougald. As a member of the Lakota Nation, Tiokasin had the heavy task of filtering the questions posed by Dougald’s book through the perspective of a culture that isn’t hopelessly addicted to its own toxins. His explanations revealed how our impatience for solutions could overturn us: when it comes to climate change—and everything else—our ways of knowing can’t describe the problems, and our ways of speaking can’t define the remedies.

That’s the void in the center of this particular ensō: all the things we can’t say because we don’t know how, and often don’t even recognize.

It’s amazing how much of All This Mess is a failure of explanatory tools, language and story and myth. Many times throughout the evening, Tiokasin paused the flow of conversation to point out a specific mechanical fault: “You don’t have a word for this in your language. For us, this is a verb; for you, it’s a noun. We wouldn’t speak like this, about this, with these words, in this setting, with these expectations, in this way.”

The risk, of course, is in hearing someone like Tiokasin speak, and rushing out to appropriate the language and traditions of people who haven’t (as we say in our native language) absolutely lost their fucking minds. This is just another form of solutionism. We can’t fix the crisis by hot-swapping our broken culture for one that’s still functioning. Indigenous thinking—as presented by Tiokasin, as well as people like Tyson Yunkaporta and Robin Wall Kimmerer—should be studied, carefully, for inspiration and guidance. But cultivating our own native species of sustainable wisdom will take generations.

What we call “myths” are repositories for these ways of thinking, the metaphysical substrate that carried the elder cultures we admire through their own apocalypses.

Unfortunately—not only has modern civilization clear-cut its own myths, it’s also lost the understanding of what a myth really is.

We think of myths as fictional constructs: campfire stories, fables, allegories, written and completed long ago. They’re blobs of fossilized narrative containing little drops of ancient time, suspended in amber. Thanks to the metaphysical conservatism I’ve written about recently, we treat them as artifacts destined for the display case, flanked by printed placards with forensic data about what they “really” mean.

For elder cultures, myths are the always-recurring stories that define right relation within and throughout the cosmos. The more-than-human figures that populate these stories are the living forces—the hyperobjects, if you like—that shape reality. Everything flows through this formulation of interbeing: how people should conduct themselves and their communities; obligations toward the Living and the Dead, human and non-human alike, across the physical world and the other dimensions that suffuse it.

The ongoing maintenance of this relationality is how cultures survive the ending of their world.

And if our world is ending now, it’s because our civilization only has one myth left, after all the others were hacked away. All we have left is the myth of Progress: infinite growth, perpetual freedom, frictionless momentum. It’s a single diseased tree standing in the middle of an empty wasteland. Its branches shelter no saplings. When it dies, its rotting hulk will eventually mulch into soil for new growth—but the dying will be hard. When it dies, it will fall heavily; it will lie a long time under the parching sun, before life takes hold again.

There’s no shortcut to circumvent this. A viable myth takes a century or more to germinate. Resilient cultures need a forest of myths to sustain themselves. We can’t take myths from other cultures without carefully transplanting them into new soil—and the tools of reductive materialism, the scalpel and the specimen jar, aren’t up to the task.

So without those common tools—the shared mythic vocabulary, the narratives of relationality—wisdom-keepers like Tiokasin and wisdom-seekers like Dougald are left to describe the presence of an absence: a stopped heartbeat, a no-sided container, a space without a circle.

That, and endings. Maybe the uncertainty I felt among the audience at the Good Work Institute was that of people showing up for a campaign speech and getting an elegy. Dougald’s positive message is that “the end of the world as we know it doesn’t mean the end of the world, full stop.” But there will still be endings. There already have been. More will follow. The types of good work described at the end of his book are salvage missions: preserve the things that truly hold value; restore the things that were discarded too soon; mourn the good things that are lost, and let go of the things that were never that good. We can’t begin that work without first identifying the end of something.

I don’t want to make it all sound too gloomy; not the book itself, and not the event. Despite being difficult, these conversations are vitally important, and still hopeful. The message is emphatically not that we’re all doomed. There is work to be done, as the title suggests. But it might not be the work we expected.

There is plenty of hope in Dougald’s work. That’s where the contemplation comes in—the indeterminacy, the big middle, the unfinished story. Deliberateness in the face of urgency. We’re trying to plant things that won’t bear fruit for decades or centuries, in the ruins of the future, while the present is still standing. The ways of thinking venerated in those elder cultures took thousands of years to evolve; we can’t speed-run that process, any more than we can pry open the petals of a flower to make it bloom. There is no manufactured solution. We need to make the tools ourselves, by hand, before we can even begin to do the real work.

Meanwhile, as part of the work that Dougald recommends, I’m grateful for the continued opportunity to participate in the spaces that these moments create. The event was a big success. Dougald is an engaging and compelling speaker. It was a great privilege to get a backstage pass to something like this, with somebody I admire so much. For now, we still live in a world where these things are possible: transatlantic flights, book tours, road trips, intellectual discussions about a theoretical future, restaurant dinners with friends. Those are good things. It remains to be seen which of those can be salvaged, and which we’ll be left to mourn; for now, if we’re lucky enough to have them, while they last, we can be thankful.

Like I wrote at the start—for me, personally, it’s a tricky experience to frame properly, because my feelings about it are complicated. There are so many things I can’t put into context, because there’s so much I don’t know.

I get to live in this world, for now, without knowing how long it will last.

I don’t know if the trade I’m learning from people like Dougald will be one I can ever pass on. Don’t know if I’ll get a chance to do a book tour of my own. Don’t know if I’m part of the next generation of something new, or the final generation of something already turning into mist. I don’t know if what I write now will be anything but infuriating for future readers—solipsistic wittering from the Last of the Lucky—if it’s even legible at all. I don’t yet know what to save and what to discard, how to build something with the tools I don’t have. Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know.

Sites of possibility. Unfinished stories. Incomplete circles inked onto the negative space of the future, with a stroke of anxiety or frustration, hope or resignation, depending on the day.

Finally, at the risk of going full-blown Suburban Orientalist, I’ll invoke my crude understanding¹ of mono no aware as the feeling I keep returning to, in characterizing this experience and the work ahead: quietly beautiful in its fleeting transience, a bright filament of hope stretching into an uncertain future, just outside our capacity to fully catch and keep.

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If you want to support Dougald’s work and buy your own copy of At Work in the Ruins, you can request a copy at your local independent bookstore, or find a listing of online vendors by following this link. You can also subscribe to Dougald’s Substack, Writing Home.

1. Most of the credit goes to my Very Patient Wife, who introduced me to this concept and helped me nail down my inarticulate feelings, as she often does. (I take partial credit for being smart enough to marry someone more intelligent than I am.)