A Review of Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies (Chelsea Green Publishing: London, 2023)
The High Holy Days are what the Jewish tradition calls, a kefitzat ha-derekh — a compressed journey, literally, a “shortening of the way.” They are designed this way not to induce us to take shortcuts, but rather, to impress upon us an urgency. This doesn’t mean we need to rush; in fact, it might mean precisely the opposite. But the liturgy is constructed in such a way as to drive two points home: one, we can’t keep living the way we are living. And two, whatever this is, it is surely a collective initiation. We are on this path with others.
An initiation is a trial where we don’t know who we will be on the other side, and arguably, more often, we don’t even know whether there will be another side. I find the Adrienne Rich poem “Prospective Immigrants Please Note” particularly beautiful in terms of the language of initiation, or even test. It’s a High Holy Day poem, with the understanding that it is always the High Holy Days. It’s a poem ostensibly addressed to those who may be immigrating, but really, as all poems are, it’s a poem addressed to each of us, face to face with a door we know we must go through, though we are coming up with reason after reason why we shouldn’t.
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.
The starting point for Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins is the recognition that we are living in a time of endings, or as he puts it later in the book — “to wake up to the world as we find it is to wake into grief.” The sense that we increasingly live amid the ruins (of modernity, planetary health, institutional stability, etc.) is not only a gnawing, existential feeling, but, of course, is also a qualifiable analysis in the face of the different crises of our time. Hine calls it the end of the world as we know it.
The supposition that this time could be characterized as the end of the world as we know it feels at once obvious but also something that we struggle to say out loud because of its implications. On one hand, we don’t want to sound alarmist/pessimistic. On the other hand, we don’t want to be overly dramatic; after all, surely, the world as it is known is perpetually ending for someone, somewhere. But I think most of us would say that there’s something about the scale of looming environmental collapse that gives this statement quantifiable heft.
Hine points out that to use the language of the end of the world as we know it is also to call into question our very ways of knowing. Our primary way of knowing in the modern era has been science. Hine writes that the general understanding of climate change as a solely scientific issue has hampered our capacity to have deeper conversations about the “upstream questions” concerning how we came to be here in the first place. Hine is hardly anti-science; he has moved in the worlds of environmentalism and climate activism for years. He just believes we are asking science to do too much.
In a recent podcast, Hine pointed out that in the modern context, to know something is to accumulate information or theories, whereas previously to know something was to be changed by it. The intention here is to be changed into “people who are capable of participating in a humbler way in what might actually be called for by the trouble around and ahead of us.”
In 2009, Hine and his chief collaborator, Peter Kingsnorth, came out with something called Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, which has grown into a continually unfolding project. Much of what is in this new book has its seeds in that movement, including the refusal to continue to prop up reassuring narratives of hope, “walking away from the stories that our societies like to tell themselves — the stories that prevent us seeing clearly the extent of the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that is now underway,” including the uncritical story of science (Kingsnorth calls it “an ideology posing as a method”). Hine says if we make science the only lens by which we understand our ecological challenges, we find ourselves awaiting a techno-bureaucratic solution that amounts to a kind of messianic postponement. It’s unrealistic to think that we will change our lifestyles, we say; someone will invent something that will save us.
The deeper issue is our way of approaching the world. And that’s a harder series of conversations to have.
Some critics within the environmental movement see his approach as defeatist, but Hine is fond of quoting TS Eliot here: “I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” Maybe there is a hope, but it has to be a hope beyond the existent hope that is still married to the logic of the world that is ending. Some of our work now, according to Hine, is exactly in giving up that particular kind of hope.
Hine shares hitting a point where it was not only clear that the words were failing him but realizing the way he had been responding to the crisis was itself part of the crisis, contributing to the crisis, stuck in same way of thinking/knowing. This is what he means by the provocative statement, “Maybe it’s time to stop talking about climate change.” It reminded me of Mordecai Kaplan responding to critics who suggested that he didn’t believe in God. I do believe in God, Kaplan responded, I’m just interested in new ways of talking about Her. In other words, it’s time to talk about climate change in a different way that — although he doesn’t necessarily use this language — is as much spiritual as it is scientific.
Appropriately enough, we are responding to particular environmental diagnoses by looking for specific scientific solutions. But Hine names it this way: If it wasn’t the ozone layer, it would be something else. Maybe the deeper problem is our way of approaching the world. To put it in Jewish language, if we are stuck in an I-It mentality — a mentality of enthroning profit, uncritically accepting technology, making idols out of our entitlement — one crisis will follow the next.
The deeper issue is our way of approaching the world. And that’s a harder series of conversations to have.
What are examples of ways that we talk about climate change hasn’t been working? On a micro level, At Work in the Ruins shares stories that will be familiar to many of us — Hine witnessing himself in earlier days, climbing over desks to turn off lights that his colleagues had left on at the end of the work day, and generally obsessing about small behaviors in order to help save the Earth.
Under any other circumstance, linking the fate of the planet to the small behaviors of your daily routine would tick a major box on a psychiatrist’s diagnostic questionnaire, yet this is how we are taught to react to the news of climate crisis.
On a macro level, those of us who “trust the science” continue to bring forth the facts and figures, and get furious and despondent that they don’t seem to make a real dent in the larger popular understanding. Perhaps this is because we’re often not speaking enough about the depth of the crises underneath — the growing inequity, the loss of meaning many of us experience, the loss of coherent stories, the loss of a dependable future.
Hine shares stories of individuals reporting from different corners of the globe and bringing news of what they are seeing. A sociologist in Norway writes about climate change playing out in real time at a coastal community there, snow coming two months later, the ski resort flailing, thin ice on the fjords that cause accidents. Yet the community never talked about it, except to joke about it in an offhand way. As British director Chris Goode put it:
My sense is that only seldom is the problem that we “don’t know” — or, at any rate, that we don’t know enough. The real problem is that we don’t have a living-space in which to fully know what we know, in which to confront the knowledge and respond to it emotionally without immediately becoming entrenched in a position of fear, denial, and hopelessness.
I’m put in mind of the teaching that there are two ways to build community: make fences, or build a fire and see who comes. Hine’s book endeavors to be a campfire. He brings forth a collection of conversations, stories heard first or second or third hand, attributing teachings and insights to collaborators, elders, those on the edges of what he calls the big path. It is hard to keep track of everyone he quotes, and so the book doesn’t always feel like it has a center in the way that we are conditioned to expect. And this feels like the point — the prioritizing of non-linear understandings. Maybe part of the problem is that we expect things to have a center.
Hine writes about our death-phobic culture, about our often uncritical embrace of technology, our determination to not fundamentally change the way we live, what it might mean to be a grown-up. What are the maps we’ve been using? Have they been working? What are new maps we might try?
For those of us who work in relationship to religious traditions, it is not a news flash that science alone cannot tell us what is real. This is terrain that those of us who live in relationship to wisdom traditions such as Judaism or other esoteric modes such as Jungian thought can speak to. It could be said that Judaism has also had a head start in terms of seeing the limits of modernity — how not only could it not deliver on its techno-messianic projects, but that worse, it further accelerated the most brutal elements of pre-modernity.
At Work in the Ruins names four, or at least, living in a time of endings: We can salvage the good that can be taken with us, we can mourn the good that cannot be taken with us, we can discern those things that were never as good as we told ourselves they were, and we can look for the dropped threads — the lost moments earlier in the story that might have something to teach us now.
On this last point, I immediately thought of the rabbinic practice of preserving the minority opinion, the halakhic possibility not chosen. We might not rule in this way now, but who knows? Situations will change, and we might rule this way in the future.
This is a difficult book, but ultimately, there’s a creative energy here. Our doomist certainties just echo the modern certainties that to some degree have gotten us into this mess.
As Hine says, we don’t know how this story will end. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (another of Hine’s co-conspirators, author of Hospicing Modernity) calls the horizon we are walking towards “presently unimaginable futures.” We can’t imagine them as we are. We have to be changed in order to imagine them. The supposition embedded in the title is not just to accept the fact of the ruins; it is also to be curious about what it might mean to work. Part of this work involves clearing the way by thinking more critically about our own sense of surety. There’s some fascinating thinking in here about our responses to the onset of Covid that will make some people uncomfortable; there’s a somewhat simplistic metaphor about an Israeli hen vs. a Palestinian hen. Some stories are more cogent than others, but overall, the anecdotes don’t feel as ideological as much as they feel like they lean into the relational.
We are being initiated. And in initiation there is always a sense of shock. At Work in the Ruins does not have a tidy thesis or even a smug sense of a right way to move forward. In another of the recurrent metaphors, Hine speaks of the footpath, as opposed to the big road, and quotes one of his mentors, Ivan Illich: “In a dark age, there is no such road. There are only paths. Paths that have to be discovered and walked along by individuals, by groups of individuals, by groups coming together.” Adrienne Rich’s door may just be imagined as stepping onto such a path.
In a podcast interview, Hine shared the custom of Illich’s circle of always having a candle burning and a place left empty at the table. Sure enough, Illich’s mother was Jewish, and it is notable to me that this Elijah image could be brought forward in this way, expanded from special occasions into every gathering. It’s an anticipating the stranger (Hine says he was a beneficiary of this — stumbling into a gathering and being given that chair precisely) but it’s also an anticipating of a new/old way, a way that might present as strange but might offer a new way forward.
