THE GREAT ACCELERATION

A superb treat for my readers today...Peter Russell is, for my money, one of the most interesting writers about CHANGE – one of my favourite topics for the past few decades. As far back as 1992 he published a fascinating and extremely accessible book called Waking up in Time whose text (marvellously) was broken up with pictures and paragraph headings to allow the reader to get an immediate sense of the argument. Too many books fail this simple test and have pages full of unrelieved text.

Russell has a great website which offers us an opportunity to experiment with ChatGP and I used it to ask the simple question “Why didn’t the book make a greater impact?” to which the algorithm responded

Peter Russell's "Waking Up in Time" was indeed a profound exploration of the interplay between consciousness, evolution, and the potential for human beings to change their perspectives on time and space. However, it's not uncommon for such thought-provoking books to not receive the widespread recognition they may deserve. There could be multiple reasons why this book hasn't made a more significant impact:
- Timing: The book was published in 1992, a time when the collective consciousness and mainstream media were perhaps not as open to new-age thinking and topics as they are today.
- Mainstream Acceptance: The concepts in the book push the boundaries of conventional thought, delving into spirituality, consciousness, and the nature of reality – subjects that have traditionally been on the fringe of mainstream acceptance.
- Competition for Attention: There is a vast volume of self-help and personal development literature available. Unfortunately, even deserving books can get lost in the crowd.

That said, the impact of a book is not just measured by its popularity or sales figures, but also by the profound transformation it can bring about in individual readers. Peter Russell's work continues to be discovered and appreciated by many who are seeking to explore these concepts. It's important to remember that sometimes, seeds are sown quietly, but they still have the potential to sprout into something beautiful over time.

To which one can say only - Wow!! 

Russell has, this year, updated the 1992 book with Forgiving Humanity – how the most innovative species became the most dangerous (2023) which he used AI to interview himself about (surely a first?!). Both books emphasise the importance of exponential change 

I have added these books to my short note on CHANGE along with some other recent books which fall more into the category of social change to which I may try to do justice in some future posts

Neither Vertical nor Horizontal – theories of political organisation by Rodriguez Nunes 2021 who is interviewed here

Augmented Humanity – being and remaining agentic in a digitised world by Peter Bryant 2021

World Protests – study of key protest issues in the 21^st Century I Oriz et al 2022

If we Burn – the mass protest decade and the missing revolution by Vincent Bevins 2023 interviewed by Chris Hedges here

End Times – elites, counterelites and the path of political disintegration by Peter Turchin 2023 with Turchin interviewed by Aaron Bastani

SHOWCASING THE YOUNGER HISTORIANS

The UK discourages new entrants onto the political market and prefers to see the two main political parties slugging it out. Although there have been calls recently for a change to an electoral system which better reflects citizen preferences, expecting change is equivalent to encouraging Turkeys to vote for an earlier Christmas.

This has been a series on books about the Labour party and I’m pleased to report that one of the most recent Rethinking Labour’s Past edited by Matt Yeowell (2022) is very readable, indeed journalistic (in the best sense). Nothing annoys me more than the style of academic writing which ends each sentence with a bracket and several names, which – if you want to follow up, require you to interrupt your reading and go what is usually a long bibliography at the end of the book.

But this book is different – not only is it beautifully written but each page is extensively footnoted, giving you all the references you need

In the last two great turning points in British political history, in the late 1970s and in the immediate wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Labour – and progressives more widely – were unable to prevent their political opponents from framing events in ways that contributed to major rightward shifts in British politics

Unlike earlier books in this series, this book showcases younger historians such as Ben Jackson whose chapter

investigates how Labour leaders have interpreted the party’s past, comparing the rhetoric used by the three postwar, election-winning Labour prime ministers – Attlee, Wilson and Blair – in order to identify what was distinctive about Blair’s understanding of Labour history. However, the aim of this comparison is not to castigate Blair as a regrettable anomaly but rather to understand why the more traditional historical self-understanding of the Labour Party lost its allure in the late twentieth century. The chapter will conclude by considering, as the party looks to the future, how we might …..seek to reinject into Labour’s account of the past the idealism that the architects of New Labour so scrupulously removed. Weber acknowledged that ‘disenchantment’ risked leaving the modern world adrift from meaning or purpose in the absence of agreed ethical and spiritual values. The task for the Labour Party today is to reconnect with the inspiring aspects of its past without sliding back into the self-congratulatory and uncritical historical ambience that was dispelled by the political ruptures of the late twentieth century.

Another chapter I enjoyed was the one on “social democracy and community”

We can crudely identify four stages in Labour’s twentieth-century history in which a community-oriented critique of social democracy came to the fore.

• Firstly, the immediate period following the high watermark of 1945, through to the late 1950s: as the party struggled to come to terms with ‘affluence’ and the apparent disappearance of a wartime spirit of community and social solidarity, the decay of working-class community became a prominent concern for writers and thinkers, such as Richard Hoggart and Michael Young. The apparent erosion of localized working-class cultures by the ‘massification’ of culture, rise of new towns and suburbs, and physical decline or dismantling of ‘traditional working-class neighbourhoods’ featured prominently in such accounts.

• Secondly, by the late 1960s, ‘community’ was increasingly invoked by activists practising grassroots politics within Britain’s ‘crisis’-hit inner cities. Labour politicians saw the rise of community action in this period both as a challenge to the party’s political primacy and to the central priorities of social democracy, yet also as an opportunity to align the party to new concerns and new constituencies.

• Thirdly, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, revisionist social democrats (including key founding figures of the SDP) and ‘new urban left’ councils would both try to channel these energies, drawing on related critiques of Labourism and its reliance on centralized state power.

• Finally, the 1990s would see the communitarian critique of social democracy take centre stage within the party, as New Labour sought to centre the concept of ‘community’ within its politics, and to distance itself from many of the perceived shortcomings of past Labour governments and the cultural politics of the left. However, this engagement would wane in government. By the 2010s, Blue Labour was levelling a similar critique at the Blair–Brown governments.

Many on the Left were beginning to question whether Labour could successfully reconnect with people’s everyday lives’. Sociologists – like Young himself – and cultural critics such as Hoggart and Raymond Williams showed an increasing interest in popular culture and in the everyday lives of working-class people. The emergence of the First New Left after 1956 saw a deeper engagement with culture and an emphasis on nonstate forms of socialism from the Marxist left. Meanwhile, a debate played out amongst social democrats about the apparent ‘embourgeoisement’ of parts of Labour’s electoral base

The Labour Party’s Trajectory

If there is one book I would recommend to people trying to understand the British Labour party, it is Interpreting the Labour Party (2003) which explores the hidden assumptions of the leading interpreters of the party – authors such as Anderson, Coates, Giddens, Marquand, Miliband, Minkin, Morgan, Nairn, Pantich and Pelling,

The opening chapter of the book Understanding Labour’s ideological trajectory probably offers the best overview of the struggle for the party’s soul which has characterised the party in the post-war period.

The party suffered in the 1970s when a mixture of inflation and public debt caused it to seek damaging assistance from the IMF – and even Mitterands’s France was forced to a shameful reversal of economic strategy. The irony is that it is the Conservative party which generally makes a mess of the economy with the role of the Labour party often being to recue the country from the damage austerity has inflicted on the country. Political Economy and the Labour Party by Noel Thompson (2003) throws a very helpful light on the different strands and phases which the party has been through in the past century – at least until 2003.

1 Marxism, state socialism and anarcho-communism

2 Fabian political economy

3 Guild socialism

4 Liberal socialism and the challenge to Fabianism

5 R. H. Tawney and the political economy of ethical socialism

1970–2005

14 Rethinking socialism: left-wing revisionism in the 1970s

15 Liberal socialism revised: the 1970s

16 The alternative economic strategy and after, 1972–86

17 Liberal socialism rejuvenated: the 1980s

18 Supply-side socialism: the 1990s

19 From stakeholderism to the Third Way

The Moral Economists by Tim Rogan (2017) is a rare book which does justice to a neglected aspect in analyses of the party – namely the moral considerations. I became an act -ive member of the Labour party when I was 16 or so – in 1958. Indeed I became, at University, in the early 1960s chairman of the local Young Socialist branch which led me to being invited to a session at Hugh Gaitskell’s house, then the leader of the Labour party and hung on his words at my home when he gave a couple of hostile speeches to Labour party conferences about the Common Market and unilateral disarmament. It was the moral arguments which persuaded me at the time – expressed, for example, in Tony Crosland’s “The Conservative Enemy” (1962) which, unfortunately, I can’t download and readers will have to do with a New Left riposte. “The Moral Economists” was nicely reviewed by the LRB. . 

From 1903 to 1906, Tawney lived at Toynbee Hall, where well-meaning graduates undertook 

social work in the East End of London. But, as he quickly realised, he had no aptitude for doling out ‘soup and blankets’ to the ‘demoralised’ poor of Whitechapel. Charity wasn’t a solution to the crisis of capitalism. Tawney looked instead to the newly formed Workers’ Educational Association. He moved to Manchester in 1909 and worked as a tutor in Rochdale and other places in the North-West, becoming the WEA’s president from 1929 to 1945. The WEA was distinctive in its highly decentralised organisation, supported by trade unions, the co-operative movement and the Labour Party. Tawney supported its paternalistic aim of neutralising class conflict, a mission resented by Marxist critics. Many of its students, however, found the experience politically energising. Tawney’s admiration for the working-class solidarity he found in these Northern industrial towns was so great that during the First World War he joined up as a private in a Pals battalion, returning to Manchester after being wounded at the Somme. His reflections in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism on the discrepancy between the medieval social order and atomised modernity were informed by his experience of the differences between Lancashire and London.
In 1948, Thompson moved to Halifax with his wife, Dorothy, to work as a tutor in history and English for the extramural department at the University of Leeds. The subject and approach of “The Making of the English Working Class” reflect the time he spent there. 
Its opening chapter on the London Corresponding Society of the 1790s described a radical working-class coterie of the sort Thompson admired. But the majority of the book is about the wool croppers and artisan craftsmen of the towns and villages of the West Riding of Yorkshire. In the culture, idioms and, most important, the solidarity of his students, Thompson detected the legacy of their ancestors, those who became class conscious as a result of the Industrial and French Revolutions.
Polanyi also taught for the WEA in London and for the Oxford extramural department in 
the 1930s, but according to Rogan, Polanyi’s Damascene conversion occurred when he fled Hungary for Austria following the failed revolution of 1919. He arrived in ‘Red Vienna’, where a new autonomous municipal government run by the Social Democratic Workers’ Party was pioneering reforms in health and education. Polanyi saw this as a truly democratic form of socialism. Living with his new wife in a rundown area and teaching economics, he began to believe that ‘an alternative to Wilsonian and Leninist principles of social order was conceivable’. 
Postwar Austria was flooded with British relief workers, interested in the latest trends in social thought. Because of them, Polanyi read and admired Tawney and other British critics of capitalism. The admiration became mutual. Tawney wrote an article for the New Statesman in November 1935 in which he cited Polanyi as a thinker who linked Christianity and popular communism through ‘an idea of human personality’.

The three books offered different chronologies of the rise of capitalism.

In Tawney’s version, the process took place in the period 1540-1640. The Protestant 

Reformation displaced a medieval society in which ‘economics is still a branch of ethics

 … the appeal of theorists is to natural law, not to utility; the legitimacy of economic 

transactions is tried by reference, less to the movements of the market, than to moral standards derived from the traditional teaching of the Christian church.’ The dissolution of the monasteries created a market for land and employment. It was every man for himself (and this was a male world; family ties were also increasingly separated from economic life). The individualising ethos of Calvinism and Puritanism secularised economics, resulting in ‘the new science of Political Arithmetic’, which ignored or eroded the social bonds that had been upheld by religious and moral obligations.

Polanyi and Thompson located the origins of free-market economics much later
, during the Enlightenment.
In Polanyi’s view, laissez-faire peaked in England with the introduction in 1834 of the New Poor Law, a punitive welfare system influenced by utilitarian ideas of efficiency and Malthus’s theories of population control. 
In Thompson’s account, English society had originally been governed predominantly by a 
‘moral economy’ based on age-old ideas of a just price and a fair wage, enacted through 
negotiation, customary regulations and tradition. During the French wars, however, economic elites became increasingly enamoured of the laissez-faire political philosophy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Landowners enclosed common land, and employers took on unskilled labour and introduced machinery, transforming skilled workers into ‘hands’, subject to the whims of the free market. This process was intensified by government withdrawal from regulation of the new industrial economy, including the repeal of the Elizabethan legislation which controlled the number of apprentices and set piece rates for cloth. During the Napoleonic Wars, Thompson complained, ‘almost the entire paternalist code was swept away.’

One book remains to which I will try to do justice in the next post

A superb 4 hour video about Labour - the wilderness years can be viewed here

THE DECLINE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

It was just over a decade ago that the (rare Coalition) government asked the British public whether they wanted to change the First Past the Post electoral system and its citizens (by a 2/3 margin) gave a resounding NO – thus losing the opportunity to loosen the grip the the Conservative and Labourl parties (uniquely) have on the British mind. Virtually all European countries have very different electoral systems which value consensus and lead to coalitions. But European citizens have, since 2000, become very cynical of politicians – and Britain is no exception

The previous post looked at the influence Harold Laski had on the Labour Party in the interwar years. Parties are elusive animals – difficult to pin down as the famous parable about the elephant and the blind men recounts. But political parties have a very clear purpose which I tried to explain in a 1977 article

The modern political party is a creature of a pluralist society - in this role its function is to:

• recruit political leaders

• represent communitygrievances, demands etc.

• implement party programmes - which may or may not be consistent with those community demands.

• extend public insight - by both media coverage of inter-party conflict and intraparty dialogue - into the nature of governmental decision-making (such insights can, of course, either defuse or inflame grievances!)

• protect decision-makers from the temptations and uncertainties of decision-making.

These days, they probably perform only the first and fourth of these roles – which perhaps accounts for the public cynicism which Peter Mair explored in this 2006 article in NLR developed, after Mair’s too early death into the seminal Ruling the Void book of 2013.. And the two British parties are torn by profound internal divisions – with the right-wing elements in both having so far won out. Today’s post continues the focus on the Labour party and will use 4 books which have appeared in the past couple of decades to give a sense of those divisions. The first and last titles, it should be noted, are the only ones which offer a compendium of views – the others are written by sole authors and reflect, as a result, a rather partial view.

Title	Takeaway
Interpreting the Labour Party ed Callaghan et al (2003)	Useful about the period from the 1970s to  the new millennium
Political Economy and the Labour Party Noel Thompson (2003)	Excellent on the different strands and phases  of the party
The Moral Economists Tim Rogan (2017)	Fascinating study of people such as Tawney  and EP Thompson
Rethinking Labour’s Past ed Matt Yeowell (2022)	Seems a very useful stock-taking

The next post will try to give a more critical appraisal of each of the books

An Inspiring but neglected UK Intellectual of the early 20thC

It was Horia-Roman Patapeivici‘s praise of the clarity of Harold Laski’s A grammar of politics (published in 1925) which set me off yesterday in pursuit of the giants of the British Labour movement who are all too rarely celebrated. I’ve selected several figures, starting with Laski – GDH Cole and RH Tawney being older inspirational figures to whom I hope to do justice in future posts.

Laski was born in 1893, got himself married at the age of 18 (to an older academic), graduated with first class Honours from Oxford University in 1914 but failed his military physical and took an academic position (in history) at McGill University in Canada in 1916 – also lecturing at Harvard whose Law Review he edited, making many highly-placed American friends.

Returning to the UK in 1920, he was made Professor of Political Science at the LSE in 1926 – by which times he had published several popular books

“promoting pluralism, especially in the essays collected in “Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty” (1917), “Authority in the Modern State” (1919), and “The Foundations of Sovereignty” (1921). He argued that the state should not be considered supreme since people could and should have loyalties to local organisations, clubs, labour unions and societies. The state should respect those allegiances and promote pluralism and decentralisation”

He was one of the few leftists to pay attention to the State (his student, Ralph Miliband was another) – indeed it was the very first chapter of his “Grammar of Politics” where he set out what was then the highly controversial view (for an academic) that it reflected class interests. This is a subject of considerable interest to me and I was sad to see that the classic work in the field – Bob Jessop’s The State – past, present future (2016) fails to mention Laski – even in the index.

In a highly insightful memory of Laski, Miliband put it very well

It is his treatment of these themes which gave Laski so remarkable an influence on the intellectual configuration of his times. For a period of some twenty-five years, Laski contributed more to the discussion of the meaning and challenge of Socialism than any other English Socialist. From 1925, when his Grammar of Politics was published, until his death in 1950, countless men and women were given a new insight into the problems of their times because they heard or read Laski.

Miliband went on, in the same essay to argue that

"The Grammar of Politics" is one of the most comprehensive attempts ever made by an English Socialist to give concrete meaning to the ideals of the Labour Party. Sidney Webb, who was not given to exuberant praise, called it a 'great book'.4 The modem reader is unlikely to go quite so far, not least because so many of the ideas of the Grammar have now been accepted as part of the common currency of contemporary thought. But there can be no doubt that it remains one of the few fundamental 'texts' of English Socialism.

Laski was, by all accounts, an inspiring lecturer (many of his students later becoming leaders of newly-independent nations) and I particularly enjoyed his own admission that he owed that to his early experience of lecturing to soldiers during the Great War. I know from my own experience in the late 1960s how valuable it is to have your academic language knocked out of you by no-nonsense citizens.

Although he became a Labour activist when he returned to the UK, he turned down an offer of a parliamentary seat and one in the House of Lords in the early 1920s and became a left-wing critic (not averse to using revolutionary language) - chairing the Labour Party Conference in 1944 and becoming its chair 1945-46 where he earned the stern rebuke from Atlee that “a period of silence from you would be most welcome”

FURTHER READING – the following are, for me, more accessible texts than “The Grammar”

The Foundations of Sovereignty Harold Laski 1921

The State in Theory and Practice Harold LASKI 1923

The Limitations of the Expert a short and fascinating article by Laski (Fabian Society 1931)

The danger of being a gentleman – and other essays; Harold Laski 1939

Reflections on the Revolution of our Time Harold Laski 1947

SUBSTACK ENCOURAGES EASILY-BRUISED EGOS

I’ve just been thrown off a substack to which I was a paying subscriber for daring to make a negative comment about Ian Leslie’s latest post which was about a member of the gilded elite I had never heard of and which read to me like a typical entry in a celebrity columnist. This is what Leslie said in his reply -

This is absurd. The piece concerns one of the biggest financial news stories of the last year and the ethical questions surrounding it. I can't help it if you haven't been paying attention but just because you haven't heard about the story doesn't mean it's not important. The piece is quite clearly critical of the elites it describes; hardly brown-nosing. I will now voluntarily cancel your subscription for being such a dick

For anyone actually interested in the contretemps and Leslie’s stupid reaction I suggest you try to access https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/can-we-blame-sam-bankman-frieds-parents

The irony is that Ian Leslie wrote a (good) book called "Conflicted" in which he extolls the benefits of disputation - something which he clearly can't now bear!!

My blogger friend Boffy was kind enough to send me a note of support, making the good point that substack people tend to develop their little bubble which brooks no criticism – except that he put it rather more eloquently viz

Typical of the intolerance of a lot of discourse, nowadays, fuelled by the fact that large sections of the petty-bourgeois Left have closeted themselves away in "safe spaces" so as not to have to justify their arguments and behaviour, and can simply massage their ego by only talking to sycophants in their own tiny silos, whilst "no platforming", i.e. bureaucratically excluding any alternative view. It is actually the basis of totalitarianism.

So, even when they could simply defend their arguments, they now choose, often, not to do so. The whole atmosphere generated by the idea of "safe spaces", is also one that generates paranoia, particularly in the era of the Internet/social media, in which anyone, as with you, in this case, who simply posits an alternative view, even if based on a lack of knowledge/information, is immediately identified as being a cunning "bad actor", to be excluded without further ado. No good will come of it, and the Left certainly will only go backwards rather than forwards on that basis, much as happened with Stalinism in the 20th century.

UPDATE; And Ian Leslie is simply wrong in saying that "this is one of the biggest financial news stories", since there is a far more important issue – namely the US prosecution of Google for its monopolisation - see John Naughton’s latest article https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/30/google-antitrust-us-department-of-justice-court-case-monopoly

THE PIC - is of some French bookmarks I bought in a flea-market a decade or so ago. The ones at the top are wooden; those at the front plastic. And they are on the oak desk in my Carpathian mountain house

A Change from my usual technocratic reading

My normal reading tends to be on technical matters – about, for example, the dangers facing democracy; clinate change; development; or reform – in which a problem and possible causes are identified and solutions floated. I often get bored and impatient with the dryness with which an important tale is told – so it came as a great delight when I stumbled on At Work in the Ruins – finding our place in a time of science, climate change, pandemics and other emergencies by Dougald Hine (2023). Instead of the usual dryness, I find an almost poetic originality – a baring of the soul. Let Hine introduce his work

When we start to talk about climate change, we enter into a conversation that is framed 

by science. How could it be otherwise? Climate change is a scientific term. It refers to a 

set of processes that are described by the natural sciences. Yet climate change also asks

 questions that science cannot answer. Some lie downstream of the work of science. When 

it comes to what to do about climate change, responsibility passes from the scientists to the 

engineers and the economists, while psychologists and marketing experts are brought in to 

figure out how to ‘deliver the message’ and ‘drive behaviour change’. 
In the rooms where I was brought together with religious leaders and artists and Indigenous 

elders, it mostly felt as though we were being enlisted in this downstream effort. The hope 

was that we had some wisdom or experience or practice that might help the news from the 

climate scientists to reach the wider public imagination. But the point that I would make in 

those rooms – and that often seemed to land and lead to fruitful conversations with the scientists 

present – is that there are also questions that lie upstream of the work of science and take 

us beyond the frame it draws. These are not about what needs doing and how, but about 

how we got here in the first place, the nature and the implications of the trouble we are in. 

Such questions might sound abstract compared to the practical concerns of those who want 

to find solutions, but how we answer them has consequences. It shapes our understanding of 

the situation, what kind of problem we think we’re dealing with and, therefore, what kind of 

solutions we go looking for.

You could hear this vulnerability in the voices of those at the heart of the climate movements 

that erupted in 2018 and in the quieter conversations going on within the local groups that 

formed during that moment. Yet all this talk was still taking place within the vessel of science,

 and this produced strange contortions and contradictions. The language of science is 

understated by design. It is hardly suited to speaking in prophetic tones, but this was the 

signature of these movements. The strangeness of the shift in register applied as much to 

Greta Thunberg, who was fiercely careful to keep her statements within the bounds of the 

scientific consensus, as it did to Extinction Rebellion’s Roger Hallam or to Jem Bendell, the 

Cumbria University professor whose self-published paper ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for 

Navigating Climate Tragedy’ – based on his alternative interpretation of the scientific data 

– went viral that autumn. Whether in alliance with or antagonism to the actual climate scientists

, the calls to action were increasingly framed in the name of something called ‘the science’. 

An understandable shorthand for the consensus over the key processes of climate change 

built up over decades of research by thousands of teams around the world, this way of talking 

also had the effect of invoking a singular authority whose implications remained to be seen. ‘

Unite Behind the Science’ read the placards and the hashtags, and the more this message 

was repeated, the stronger the frame of science around our climate conversations became 

and the less room there would be for looking beyond that frame.

It may seem odd to be calling a book premised on the world ending
shortly “delightful” but it is one of these rare ones which makes
you look at the world differently.There’s an excellent video discussion here for 

those of you who prefer to see the interaction and how people deal with difficult 

questions

Two things happened next to change the context of anything that any of us 

might have to say about climate change. First, in the time of Covid, the political 

invocation of science took on a new colour. Faced with a novel threat about which 

there was far less scientific understanding or consensus than climate change, politicians 

nonetheless discovered the effectiveness of introducing radical policies in the name of 

‘following the science’. Meanwhile, the implications of the demand to ‘Unite Behind the 

Science’ became clearer. I saw the people who had taught me to think carefully about 

science and the questions that it cannot answer on its own, when they attempted to 

address the questions raised by the pandemic, being told by angry, frightened readers 

to ‘Just shut up and take the fucking vaccine!’ Or being scolded by their peers for drifting 

towards ‘conspiracy theory’. In the name of ‘the science’, it is possible to decree what 

should be done and to close off the possibility of further public conversation.

And I particularly liked his image of a fork in the road

Here is what I’m seeing, then: the political contours emerging from the pandemic 

foreshadow a fork in the road for the politics of climate change. We would always have 

come to this fork, one way or another. As long as the goal was to have climate change 

taken seriously, this could unite us, however different our understandings of what taking 

climate change seriously might mean. As we near that goal, though, the differences in 

understanding come more sharply into focus. But we have reached that point, or something 

like it, under conditions in which the authority of ‘the science’ has been supercharged.
Two paths lead from here: one big, one small. The big path is a brightly lit 

highway on which many lanes converge. It unites elements of left and right, 

from Silicon Valley visionaries and Wall Street investors, through a broad 

swathe of liberal opinion and in some form it will constitute the political orthodoxy 

\of the 2020s. It sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale 

efforts of management, control, surveillance and innovation, oriented to sustaining a 

version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development.

The small path is a trail that branches off into many paths. It is made by those 

who seek to build resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships,

oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic

growth and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a ‘world 

worth living for’ nonetheless remains. Humble as it looks, as your eyes adjust, you may

recognise just how many feet have walked this way and how many continue to do so, even now.

Which of these paths I would have us take is clear enough. The big path is a fast track to 

nowhere. We will not arrive at the world of fossil-free jumbo jets promised by the airport 

adverts. The entitlements of late modernity are not compatible with the realities of 

life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy. But we may well follow that 

path for a while longer, as it leads us deeper into dystopia and leaves us more dependent

on fragile technological systems that few of us understand or can imagine living without. 

And what I think I can see now is that the very language of climate change will be owned, 

from here on out, by the engineers and marketeers of the big path. Any conversation about 

the trouble we are in, so long as it starts within the newly politicised frame of science, 

will lead inexorably to their solutions.

A critical review of the book can be found here  

Further video discussions about the book

https://www.youtube.com/@dougald

Feb Leeds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iCzlw9e2hM&ab_channel=DougaldHine better sound

April 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B42sHf9p80&ab_channel=JohnGIClarke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaCatcin7n8&ab_channel=DougaldHine