At Work in the Ruins

This book is a searching critique of the destructive and exploitative features of modernity both in terms of its fundamental approach, and also how this translates into the modern world and its challenges. The author is the co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project with Paul Kingsnorth and has spoken about climate change in many different forums. This has led him to think more deeply about how we approach this and other immediate crises, and in this respect he rightly asserts that the Earth is not a manageable fish tank or a mechanism to be optimised within a framework of endless progress and economic growth. This whole extractive view is obsolete, and needs to be decommissioned, as Ivan Illich argued 50 years ago. It is assumed by institutions that there are solutions to problems in terms of centralised governance and regulation, but this is based on outmoded science that does not account for localised self-organisation and complexity.

An important theme is that we have come to put too much faith in science, which has been fused with politics and economics in terms of funding and messaging. This has been particularly apparent during the Covid crisis, where we have been told to ‘follow the science’, with censorship of dissenting views. Reliance on facts and figures in an attempt to bypass the need for human judgement is insufficient as science itself is based on limited assumptions – even hubris according to Kingsnorth – and, as Mary Midgley insisted, cannot provide all the answers to every type of question - which means that interpretation and judgement is always necessary. The author points out that some questions can be answered by numbers, but others require a judgement of whether an intervention is too much or too little. Science gives us ‘information on the basis of which judgements have to be made. To make a judgement is to take responsibility for its consequences, and it is this responsibility that can be hidden from view behind the talk of “following the science”.’ (p. 87) There are important philosophical questions upstream of science.

Hine gives a telling example of the difference between a ‘technological’ Israeli hen and the indigenous Palestinian hen: ‘the first cannot survive, grow, or produce eggs without special shots, a special mixture of food, specific temperatures, and a specific schedule; it requires some kind of “scientific and rational” planning and constant support from the outside.’ (p. 149) This is a microcosm of industrial farming and breeding and also of mRNA ‘vaccines’ that ultimately undermine innate immunity, as explained in Aaron Kheriaty’s book on the biomedical security state reviewed in the last issue. The book shows that we need major reframe, choosing a path towards a small farm future and ‘peasant ethics’ rather than the current ‘shopping aisle ethics’ reflecting an industrial farming system that can only conceive the future in its own terms and is currently the mainstream narrative model. Missing for me was any mention of suppressed new energy technologies and an informed critique of the Agenda 2030 SDGs (see my review of Patrick Wood above). This aside, the book asks the right fundamental questions, and encourages us to choose the small path with many branches rather than that of Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Food and Big Tech.