Lecture text: 'Heelster Gowdie Upendings and Hopeful Futures,' Annual Hamish Henderson Lecture 2021
This lecture was live streamed on Saturday 13 November 2021 as part of the Carrying Stream Festival. With Thanks to the festival committee and the Scottish Storytelling Centre. To watch the stream, see here
It’s great to be back here in Edinburgh in the Scottish Storytelling Centre theatre! I am delighted and humbled to have been asked to give this lecture today. I never actually met Hamish Henderson himself, yet his presence has loomed large in my work and life - through the people I have met, the people I have learned from, the people who have carried me along my way. He actually passed away the year before I began my university career, studying in the department that was formerly the School of Scottish Studies, where Henderson was a founding member (a place where I found a home for over 12 years). Through this connection, in some small way, we ethnologists feel like we are inheritors of at least some of Henderson’s legacy. My lecture today will reflect upon the diversity of this legacy: his vision, his activism and the importance of the political traditions - and political potential - his work has come to embody.
For those of you listening who might not know - Henderson was many things: a poet, a folklorist and folk song collector, a scholar, an activist. He was a soldier in World War 2, which would influence his lifelong commitment to anti-fascism. He spent time in Italy where he discovered the work of marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. He is perhaps best known, though, for his involvement with the Scottish Folk Revival and the collection of Scotland’s songs and folk culture. As musician Martyn Bennett reminded us, “If it hadn’t been for Hamish, much of what Scotland is today would be lost” [1]
Henderson’s activism was always political as well as cultural, however. He campaigned with CND and the Peace movement, against apartheid in South Africa and championing the causes of cultural equity, equality and gay rights. As Alison McMorland recalls, recounted in Tim Neat’s biography, Henderson believed that the two most important political developments of his own time were the Womens' movement and the Environmental movement, which is interesting to note [2]. In his writing he imagined a more equitable, decolonised, post-imperial - and therefore post-capitalist - world. To this end, he agitated for a Scottish republic, for the dissolution of the British Empire and for a reckoning with its imperial and colonial legacies. As Corey Gibson has written, his method and means to deploy his ideas rested, in part, on his ability to ‘make a ceilidh of a moment’ [3]. Henderson believed that his own ‘finest work of art’ was his contribution to the People’s Festival, his Gramsci-in-action as he called it, gathering people together in a convivial spirit - an idea I’ll come back to before the end of today[4].
Before going on, I might start with the personal. I remember sitting by the fire in my Granny and Papa’s house watching the TV, and on the screen was a documentary about Henderson. He was explaining about how the words of the song ‘Farewell To Sicily’ came to him: the allied forces were liberating a town, and he recalled seeing the faces of the people getting excited by the skirl of the pipes. ‘Fareweel ye banks o' Sicily / Fare ye weel ye valley and shaw / There's nae Jock will mourn the kyles o' ye / Puir bluidy squaddies are wearie.’ My dad said, “isn’t that amazing?” As a photo of the time appeared on the screen, my Papa piped up and said, “do you know what’s even more amazing? I was there. I’m marching right up the back there! He was a Sergeant in the Catering Corp, a quartermaster, in the Desert campaign in North Africa and Italy. Through my mum’s side of the family I was aware of and involved in the Peace Movement from a young age. She took me on peace marches; we made rainbow warrior cakes; she took me to plant daffodils at Faslane. My grandfather, her father, was a congregationalist minister involved in CND. He would go on to work in TV, and later introduced Henderson to my dad, who also writes poetry, and who gifted me a love of literature, folk culture and traditional music. I’m telling you this now not for vanity or to make any claims, but to deeply acknowledge where I come from, and how my own story connects with that carrying stream that winds from the past on into the future.
Every generation encounters ideas from the past in their own historical context. The carrying stream is a constant flow of exchange, a dialogue between past and present, where understanding is continually re-contextualised and meaning is continually renewed for our own time.
We are living through turbulent and troubling times, and find ourselves at a pivotal moment in human history.
The global pandemic has upended life as we knew it. Normal life became about masks and social distance, learning to smile with our eyes. The pandemic also laid bare the multiple and interconnected crises that we were already living in and through, stripping away the illusion of safety and security, and exposing the fault lines of inequality, discrimination and injustice at home and across the globe. Frustrations with governments’ responses encouraged questioning of political and economic systems, and fuelled calls to address legacies of police brutality, racism and colonialism. The Black Lives Matter movement - now recognised as the largest social movement in global history - cataylsed a great deal of collective learning, acknowledging both the history and legacy of slavery as well as the inequities based on the racial ideology of white supremacy that persist in our society, social structures and institutions today.
The backdrop to all of this is the climate emergency. Code Red for Humanity. As the last IPPC report stated, the alarm bells are deafening and the evidence is irrefutable [5]. Global Climate crisis is inevitable, it is happening now, and we are on the trajectory towards the destruction of the biosphere that supports all life on this planet. I don’t know about you, but it takes a lot for me to talk about this and not just start weeping. Like many of you, I’m sure, in recent years have been cycling through the stages of grief and despair, searching for ways to make sense of it all, and how to respond.
The dust has not yet settled on COP26 (the talks have not yet reached completion). This elite multi-lateral event was billed as the ‘last chance’ to turn things around, the ‘make or break’ moment to put us back on track to avoid the worst effects of climate breakdown. In Glasgow, the voice of the people in protest was loud and clear; yet, as expected, the official event was a PR spectacle dominated by heavy policing, grotesque hypocrisy at times, greewash and deception. Business as usual. It’s too soon to make sense of it all just yet, but it feels like we’re at an impasse.
As Greta Thunberg and fellow young indigenous activists declared in George Square last Saturday, Global leaders will continue to fail to address the climate crisis unless they are prepared to confront its root cause: an unjust economic system, global capitalism, a system that was borne out of and continues to thrive upon Empire and colonialism. Climate change contains within it histories of exploitation as well as colonial systems of power that continue to perpetuate oppression, inequality and injustice across the world today.
As wealth and power becomes further concentrated into the few hands of a smaller and smaller ultra-rich elite, more and more people come under the shadow of death and debilitation. More lives are expendable for the sake of ‘order,’ of power, of wealth and privilege. Climate Justice is social justice is indigenous justice is racial justice is economic justice. It’s a systemic crisis.
The heelstergowdie upending of our lives has revealed what we already knew: our system is broken. We cannot go back to normal. We need to find ways to do things differently. It’s a matter of life and death.
I hope this isn’t too crude a link, but it is difficult to look past Henderson’s song of internal, eternal and elemental conflict, the ‘Flytin o Life and Daith,’ finished in 1963. This is a poetic expression of living with mortality, taking on new meanings and speaking more-than-poetically to our time. Life, as sunshine, claims the world. Death claims it for pain and hunger. Life says that there is plenty for every child. Death offers instead war and pestilence, but life reminds death that every grave is a furrow to be sown again. The song is more commonly known and sung these days to a tune composed by singer Alison McMorland. Lori Watson has recorded a gorgeous version. Henderson said of his own melody that it “resembles the 'urlar' (or 'ground') of a pibroch,” the solo music for pipes.
Let’s have a wee listen to Henderson’s own voice, a clip from online archive resource Tobar an Dualchais.
“Quo life, the warld is mine.
The floo’ers and trees, they’re a’ my ain.
I am the day, and the sunshine
Quo life, the warld is mine.
Quo daith, the warld is mine.
Your lugs are deef, your een are blin
Your floo’ers maun dwine in my bitter win’
Quo daith, the warld is mine.”
Since 2018, I have been part of a collective called Enough! hosting upending conversations, building networks and exploring ideas and action around degrowth, decolonisation and climate justice. We are connected into different forms of activism and social change, but our core message is this: Capitalism is killing us. Growing our economy is costing us our future.
‘Economic growth’ is the defining characteristic of contemporary societies. Governments measure their success on their ability to deliver it through GDP, prioritising wealth maximisation, but at what cost? There is significant evidence to show that economic growth cannot be decoupled from environmental harm, as some would argue, and the notion of ‘green growth’, or ‘sustainable growth’ - or ‘inclusive growth,’ as is currently favoured by our own Scottish government - is a myth [6]. All evidence points to the fact that growth helps the rich get richer, and the rest of us are expected to make social and ecological sacrifices for no reward beyond ‘improved economic indicators.’
Leading Marxist theorist David Harvey calls the idea of compound growth the ‘madness of economic reason’ and ‘the most lethal of capitalism’s contradictions’ [7]. It’s a death cult based on extraction, hyper-consumerism, gross inequality, catastrophic carbon emissions, ecocide, omnicide. Here is a short video, produced by activist collective THE RULES rules.org.
Despite the fact that the IPCC report states that we need pathways to rapid and unprecedented social transformation beginning now, its strategies to mitigate the worst of climate impact continue to assume economic growth, as if there is simply no alternative [8].
But there are compelling and viable alternative economic scenarios.
Degrowth is based on a radically different logic to the market, beginning with the assumption that the purpose of the economy is to provide people with what they need to sustain their livelihoods. It calls for an equitable downscaling of the economy to one that does not exceed planetary limits, leading to a future where we can all live better with less.
There has been little debate about degrowth in Scotland, but the movement has growing momentum in Europe - in Germany, Spain, France, Italy. We can learn from our European friends, especially at a time when, with Brexit, it is vital to nourish and maintain our continental connections. As my colleague Mike reminds us, despite its green aspirations and credentials, Scotland remains a petro-chemical economy being held ransom by a retrograde, hardline and corrupt British State [9].
For mainstream economists, the first connotation of the term ‘degrowth’ is recession. Other critics dismiss it as a form of ‘green austerity.’ Degrowth is not asking people to be poor, it is asking what we need to thrive. It calls for investment in infrastructure and systems that support the flourishing of life. As Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel writes, another contradiction of capitalism, ‘while austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate growth, degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary’ [10]. Degrowth, then, is a call for radical abundance and for human freedom.
In recognition of the enduring coloniality of North-South relations, degrowth critiques are specifically directed at the high levels of energy and resource use in the global North, which are vastly in excess of human need. It calls for resource and wealth redistribution; rapid decarbonisation and the protection of ecosystems and biodiversity; an end to destructive and extractive industries; an end to our tax-payer subsidised fossil fuel industry; the dismantling of the military industrial complex and the surveillance state. It promotes and proposes instead radical and regenerative policies, such as a universal basic income, a 4 day week, active travel and public transport, affordable homes, renewable energy and the decommodification of healthcare, food, culture, education and all that we rely on as essential. Degrowth also calls for a radical reimagining of our conceptions of work and labour, prioritising life-sustaining and care work - child rearing, caring for the elderly or the sick, tending to the neighborhood and the environment. This is the invisible labour, as feminist economists point out, to which we all owe our existence [10].
This is to say that many of the key ideas underpinning degrowth are not new. It has its roots in a range of anti- and alter- capitalist thinking, ecological economics, feminist economics and eco-feminism, post-colonialism, eco-socialism, social ecology and anarchism, anthropology and design as well as traditional and indigenous practices. It also has a foundation in common with many political traditions, struggles and forms of resistance. It is a politics of solidarity, with trade unions, class struggle and workers’ rights; with the intersectional struggles of race, gender and (dis)ability; with migrant, refugee and asylum seeker’s rights as well as environmental activism and climate justice [11].
Degrowth does not impose a universal model, but rather looks for practices that emerge from specific local contexts - a global ‘pluriverse’ of local resistance to the monoculture of global capitalism and Western cultural imperialism [12]. This means that what degrowth looks like in Scotland might look quite different to elsewhere, given its particular historical context challenges. We have, for example, high levels of inequality and one of the most unequal distributions of land ownership in the West.
I was teaching a session for the Centre for Human Ecology learning cooperative a few weeks ago, our ‘Degrowth in Scotland’ online course in collaboration with Enough! [13]. My own field of ethnology is intimately connected with human ecology, a subject that considers the relationships and ruptures between nature, culture, society and economy [14]. A radical human ecology involves a grounded understanding of people and place.
While degrowth discourse and practice is only emerging in a Scottish context, we can also contextualise degrowth in the history of thought and activism in Scotland, the long story and carrying stream of resistance, in both urban and rural, lowland and Gaidhealtachd contexts. From Mairi Mhòr nan Òran to Mary Barbour, John MacLean to Jimmy Reid, Sorley MacLean, Patrick Geddes here in Edinburgh, we are not short of inspiration. In my own classes, Henderson is front and centre in beginning discussions in what we might call a ‘Scottish cultural degrowth’ [15].
His most famous work, the ‘Freedom Come All Ye’ as we know, was dedicated to the Glasgow Peace Marchers in the 1960s, but the values and vision it celebrates transcend any one decade. It speaks to the entire anti-capitalist movement from Marx's time to our own. Henderson himself described the song as ‘expressing my hopes for Scotland, and for the survival of humanity on this beleaguered planet.’ Described as rebel-bardic, it is a song of freedom, justice and peace, imagining all that has to be overcome: the international reconciliation of races and continents, decolonisation and liberation from the excesses and exploitation of human life under late capitalism [16].
The song tells of a roch wind of change blowing through the Great Glen of the world which will upend and unseat those power, sweeping away the troubled histories of imperialism. It acknowledges Scotland’s complicity as a military force in the British Empire, where the Scottish soldier is both imperial cannon-fodder and colonial oppressor. It calls out the extravagances of the ‘rottans’ and rogues in power, who are rich off the back of the poor, the marginalised and the oppressed across the world. ‘All of you who believe in freedom’, it says, ‘never heed the prophets of doom,’ who are imagined as hoodie crows. ‘Capitalism is the only way!’ they croak, with all the deathly cynical pragmatism of those who tell us we have to keep extracting oil to balance the books.
Henderson prefigures a more hopeful future that is liberated from the imperial story it has been defined by, imagining instead a world of global solidarity, ecological harmony, love, dignity, humanity and the flourishing of life in all its forms, where, in the last line, the oppressed brings down the oppressor - ‘And a black lad frae yont Nyanga / dings the fell gallows of the burghers doon.’ The foundations of such profound and vital transformation will come from intimate human connection and collective human will. The Come All-Ye is an incitement to gather, to rise.
The song also contains within it memories of a radical heritage of resistance, including the great hero of Scottish socialism, John MacLean. In his famous ‘Speech from the Dock’ he said: ‘my contention has always been that capitalism is rotten to its foundations, and must give place to a new society...I consider capitalism the most infamous, bloody and evil system that mankind has ever witnessed’ [17].
One of the main aims of decolonial and ecological thinking is to bring forward the many and diverse forms of knowledge and culture that are overshadowed or have been silenced by dominant narratives - of Empire, globalisation, progress. As well as rethinking economics and economic relations, cultural degrowth is also about reclaiming a cultural inheritance - that which might have been lost in the name of such progress. It is also about seeking out those cultural practices and ways of living, working and being that restore life and community, that restore balance. It is important to emphasise here though that this is not about nostalgic return to a romantic, imagined, pre-industrial past, but rather about reclaiming radical, rooted and life-affirming practices in a contemporary context, looking to the future.
Recovering traditional ecological knowledge helps us become more attuned to our local environments. Such knowledge includes, for example, ecological agricultural practices, how to grow food, where and how to make homes, traditional crafts, names and knowledge about local flora and fauna. Research has shown that cultural and biological diversity are intimately linked, and vital in this context too is the importance of culture and language - cultural memory, imagination, myth, meaning, music - those diverse forms of creative expression and collective consciousness that restore and sustain our internal worlds. Archives, of course, can be a repository of this knowledge, and there is much to be found in the School of Scottish Archives, digitised on the online resource Tobar an Dualchais.
The importance of local ecological knowledge and creativity was perhaps first widely popularised by folklorist Alan Lomax in his ‘Appeal for Cultural Equity’ in 1972 [18]. Here he is with Hamish Henderson in Edinburgh’s Old College Squad, possibly after they had been off somewhere doing fieldwork or folklore collecting. At this time, post-War, there was a growing concern that the world's cultural diversity was being diminished by processes of standardisation, economies of scale, the centralisation of education, powerful entertainment industries and global mass communications. Lomax writes,
“With the disappearance of each of these systems, the human species not only loses a way of viewing, thinking, and feeling but also a way of adjusting to some zone on the planet which fits it and makes it liveable; not only that, but we throw away a system of interaction, of fantasy and symbolizing which, in the future, the human race may sorely need.”
Today, these words take on urgent new meanings. The future he speaks of is our today.
Our society has become so cut off, so alienated from the environment, from the cycle of the seasons, from the agricultural year, from the natural world of which we are part and depend upon for life. The degrowth practice of finding, reclaiming, reviving and reinventing traditions embedded in the landscape is one way to begin to mend this relationship.
For example, a few months ago I went along to the Latha Buana or Harvest festival hosted by Fearnag Growers on Farr community allotment, just south of Loch Ness. With help from farmer Colin Gordon and creator-of-lovely things Raghnaid Sandilands, this community has been exploring the growing and harvesting of heritage grain varieties best suited to this Highland climate. This was a joyful day filled with work, food, music and song, the re-pairing of old harvest songs with their original practices. Traditional seasonal community festivals often embody values of cooperation, stewardship, generosity, hospitality, reciprocity. These are all degrowth values. At the heart of it all is a life-giving conviviality.
l’m going to pick up on this word conviviality [19].
“Degrowth looks towards the revitalisation of community, of democracy and ecology, and embodies the vision of a radical transformation towards a just, sustainable, and convivial society. ”
In his editorial introduction to Henderson’s collected essays Alias Macalias, Alec Finlay writes that Henderson’s ‘natural conviviality’ was a ‘cultural force’ [20]. We often use this word to simply mean the joy of coming together socially, of being lively and friendly, which of course it does mean, but it has other, life-affirming dimensions too.
Much of what we value in terms of quality of life is still created outside the spaces of economic exchange, through the voluntary association of friends, neighbours and citizens. The restrictions of the pandemic hugely limited our spaces for conviviality: our libraries, village halls, pubs, local clubs, festivals, public spaces for gathering and assembly. And yet, at the same time, in the face of all the fear and anxiety around Covid-19, and despite physical distance, we witnessed a collective solidarity, a desire for cooperation and working together. New civic and local mutual aid or community support groups blossomed, affirming that that we are and always have been connected in a tangled skein of social relations. We depend on each other.
The International Convivialist Manifesto, translated from the French, defines conviviality as a transformative ‘art of living together’ that would ‘allow humans to take care of each other and of Nature, without denying the legitimacy of conflict, yet by using it as a dynamizing and creativity-sparking force’ [21]. Its ‘Declaration of Interdependence’ argues that a convivial society requires a realignment of the relations between state, economy and civil society to allow the flourishing of forms of self-organisation within communities, through 'reclaiming the commons.’
Discussions of the concept of conviviality often refer back to the works of Ivan Illich. ‘Tools For Conviviality’ is the title of a book which is a classic of social critique and political ecology from the 1970s, exposing the flaws in technology, capitalism and economic growth [22].
To be convivial is to live with, but not just to live, it is to thrive. Social interaction does not have to be the mediated relation of people as things in terms of exchange and use. In such an economic system, every thing, every person and every place is seen simply in terms of resources at hand. This tendency, or pathology even, of our capitalist society - of turning relationships into services, culture into commodity, human into machine - has been described by commons scholar David Bollier as ‘the great invisible tragedy of our time’ [22].
Our local and national governments, cultural institutions, organisations, education system, universities have been largely captured, co-opted and colonised by this ideology, this way of thinking, this new orthodoxy of managerialism, the mode of governance explicitly designed to realise the neoliberal project.
The patterns of capitalism are so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that we sometimes don't even recognise it. The endgame of this process is the enclosure of the mind: the enclosure of our sense of what is possible. The co-option of dissent. To croak for doom. The absolute triumph of this system is demonstrated by the fact that so many of us have lost the ability to even imagine our way out. As Naomi Klein has written, we are ‘locked in, politically, physically and culturally’ to the world that capital has made [23]. Or famously, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism [24].
Coming back to Henderson: one way to illustrate the dynamic of conviviality is to talk about the Scottish tradition of the ceilidh. In Gaelic culture, as we know, the verb cèilidh simply means ‘to visit.’ Traditionally, the taigh ceilidh or ceilidh house was the building block of community through the long winters, with music, song, storytelling, dance if there was space in the kitchen, news and gossip. In more modern times, especially within a Scots context, this word ceilidh has come to mean more of a big social dance. Stan Reeves has written about this, particularly in relation to the educational pedagogy of Paulo Freire and his work with the Adult Learning Project, of which Henderson was a part, which became the Scots Music Group here in Edinburgh [25].
For Ivan Illich, ‘Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision’ [26]. The ceilidh was Henderson’s primary convivial tool, if you like, his ability to ‘make a ceilidh of a moment.’ He celebrated the ceilidh as an organising principle in his activism because it is intuitively democratic, egalitarian, and participatory. Given the right circumstance, and the right kind of host, a community can be created by a disparate group of people in quite a short time.
Henderson championed the ‘lived moment’ of the ceilidh gathering, the creative aliveness of performance and its reception, of shared, embodied, common experience. When it came to the carrying stream of the folk tradition, it wasn’t so much about the songs themselves – although these were of course important – but about the singing of them.
Again in Alias MacAlias, Finlay writes, for Henderson, this lived, shared moment was:
“a moment of resolve, of transformation, of insurrection’ and it could occur whenever a song is shared, for in the sharing, the song is reborn. This moment is a proving ground for all emotional and political truths. It gifts us our common humanity, our insurrectionary awareness that ‘freedom becomes people,’ for as his own song foretells, all the roses and geans will turn tae bloom.”
It is on these occasions that we become aware, if only fleetingly, that we are here, that we are very much alive, that we are connected. Ethnologists and anthropologists might call this experience communitas [27]. You just know it when you feel it! It has been variously described as ‘the sense of sharing felt by a group when their life together takes on deep meaning and collective awareness,’ ‘a moment in and out of time,’ ‘the experience of in-betweenness,’ ‘the gift of togetherness.’ There is something magical about it.
For many people, music, song or dance are particularly potent cultural forms - a kind of fast track to this experience of joyful communitas. But it happens in other contexts too. A shared or common task for example, learning together, a community festival or event. Anthropologist Victor Turner describes communitas as a kind of ‘public liminality’ where social structure and hierarchies are temporarily dissolved [28]. It is a live, temporary, egalitarian space, between a present yet to pass and a future still to come, always-in-the-making. In that moment, there is a kind of liminal possibility; it is a source of creativity, of resolve, transformation and insurrection.
The carrying stream can be understood as a string of these ‘moments’ of conviviality. They embody an ineffable creative power, an organic energy, a life force. These are the spaces where the impulse and catalyst for resistance and change is to be found, the courage to believe in things not yet manifest. Connections are made, enthusiasm and inspiration can be found or renewed. Many of us will be able to bring to mind a moment or experience in our lives like this that has stuck with us.
In an essay on geopoetics, Alastair McIntosh writes, ‘As activists for social, environmental and perhaps other forms of change, ours can be a bardic politics. The politics of a people resourced by their poetry. Our role is not to stand in the mainstream, but to open out fresh conduits of the mind’ [29]. This is drawing very much on Henderson and the idea that ‘poetry becomes people.’ The use of ‘poetry’ here goes beyond the literary form of self-expression. It includes song, of course, but also speaks to a deeper understanding of creativity as poeisis, the poetic act of constantly ‘making the world new.’ For Henderson, who was vociferously anti-fascist, it is a timeless and universal truth that both freedom and creative expression must be continually sought out and reaffirmed. For him, the carrying stream is a constant source available to artists, to activists - to all of us - to ‘remake and renew’ [30].
There are countless initiatives seeking alternative ways of living, working, organising emerging across the world today. People are stepping up to reclaim or invent new systems that function outside of the capitalist mindset for mutual benefit and with respect for the Earth. Many such initiatives have existed for decades in our own communities. That same energy and convivial life force is there in community land trusts, in community gardens and urban growing projects, cooperatives of all kinds, artists’ collectives, community and social enterprises, solidarity syndicates, alternative currencies, local exchange systems such as tool libraries, food sovereignty groups, slow food, mutual aid associations. The beauty of such initiatives is that they meet needs in direct, empowering ways.
A particularly inspiring example in recent days is from Glasgow. A few blocks away from the official action of COP26, on the south side of the Clyde, a ‘Govan Free State’ was declared by GalGael, more than 20 years after Colin Macleod and the Pollok Free State in the 1990s. Standing with indigenous peoples globally and in solidarity with all those left vulnerable by the growing extremities of wealth, weather or other forms of violence, the declaration reads: ‘Every single life lost so far in the name of profit and imperial expansion is a crime. At this precise moment in time, we are now teetering at the edge of the complete devastation of all life on our common home, earth’ [31]
“Centuries of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism have impoverished most of the world, destroyed cultures and ways of being and knowing which have been millennia in the making, devastated ecosystems and biospheres, and led to the genocide of so many human and more-than human beings, that our hearts simply cannot fathom the scale of the loss and the pain. ”
The Free State, evoking the tradition of hospitality and inspired explicitly by thinkers such as Henderson and his ‘Freedom Come-All-Ye’, explores questions of emancipation, independence and international reconciliation through shared space, food, and music and song. It is a defiant declaration of hope, of intent, of solidarity, to counter fatalism and to fire radical imagination. It also began at the same time of year as Samhain, marking the end of the four quarters of the Celtic year, a time of waning light, a time for the death of old systems and new beginnings.
Conviviality here becomes a vital tool and praxis for a radical transformation towards a more just and hopeful future. Creating non-commodified spaces opens up opportunities for people to gather and connect, to learn together, to interrogate our current systems, to imagine and rehearse alternative realities – a catalyst for further action.
To step consciously into the carrying stream is to participate in the endless flow that makes up human history. It is to stand in relation to our being here and now, to our past and to our future. Alasdair McIntosh once told me, ‘in the Carrying Stream, you have to swim for your life, and swim for life’ [32].
My title today is ‘Heelstergowdie Upendings and Hopeful Futures.’ But I’m not suggesting we just keep hoping that the crisis will somehow resolve itself. Hoping that governments or legislation or technology will fix things. They won't. The truth is that things are not going to be ok: they are already not ok, and they’re going to get much worse.
The ‘last chance’ narrative of COP26 completely and intentionally alienates us from the process of change. Waiting for global leaders to act on our behalf and longing for a future condition over which we have no agency means we are essentially powerless. That kind of hope serves the interests of those who have a vested interest in more of the same, in business as usual. They want us to keep hoping; it keeps us blind us to real possibilities for change.
When we reach a point of truly understanding the scale, reality and implications of the climate emergency, when we realise that we will not find solutions in the systems and structures that have caused the crisis, when we realise that our leaders will not live up to their empty words and promises, that our governments will not act in the way we need them to, only then can we be free. Only then can we claim the collective agency we do have for transformation, for resolve, for peaceful insurrection.
I'm drawing on words from friends and colleagues at Enough! here. The climate movement’s most significant task is helping people realise that we all have an active role to play. Collective work and action, coordinated to places of genuine disruption to the workings of capitalism, sustained by the bonds of convivial community, resourced by culture and creativity - this is what has transformative potential. Unlocking this potential - the power of all of us together - is the story of renewal and radical hope we need for these times.
If both freedom and poetry can become people, a more hopeful future can become us all.
To finish, an excerpt from Henderson’s own poetic testament of radical abundance:
“There’s method in my madness!…
Change elegy into hymn, remake it –
Don’t fail again. Like the potent
Sap in these branches, once bare, and now brimming
With routh of green leavery,
Remake it, and renew.
Maker, ye maun sing them…
Tomorrow, songs
Will flow free again, and new voices
Be borne on the carrying stream.”
References:
[1] Martyn Bennett GRIT: The Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aJXNN_D07o&t=416s
[2] Neat, T. (2009) Hamish Henderson: A Biography. Volume 2: Poetry Becomes People, Birlinn. Chapter 10.
[3]Gibson, C. (2019) Hamish Henderson: Collected Poems. Birilinn. p xi
[4] Gibson, C. (2017) The Voice of the People: Hamish Henderson and Scottish Cultural Politics. p
[5] IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
[6] See: https://www.gov.scot/policies/economic-growth/inclusive-growth/
[7]Harvey, David (2017) Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason. Profile Books.
[8] IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
[9] LESS Issue 3: Degrowth and Decolonisation in the Red Zone. Enough! https://www.enough.scot/2021/11/01/degrowth-and-decolonisation-in-the-red-zone/
[11] See: https://commonweal.scot/response-to-its-so-not-about-size/?fbclid=IwAR3lY3wMwP11dJaWtBNmztVVrELeYVWL5RJ5V_N11n6u1_qda3I_jMwd6ds
[12] Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century); Kothari, Salleh, et al (eds).(2019) Pluriverse: A Post–Development Dictionary.
[13] See: https://www.enough.scot/degrowthcourse/ A handbook for the course can be downloaded at https://www.enough.scot/degrowthhandbook/
[14] Devlin, L. (2021) Centre for Human Ecology welcomes COP26 https://www.heraldscotland.com/business_hq/19659822.centre-human-ecology-welcomes-cop26-visitors/
[15] Degrowth in Scotland: Degrowing the Economy, Regrowing Our Lives (2021) See: https://www.enough.scot/degrowthhandbook/
[16] See https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/freedom-come-all-ye/
[17] See https://www.marxists.org/archive/maclean/works/1918-dock.htm
[18]http://www.culturalequity.org/alan-lomax/appeal
[19]. ‘Pandemic as an Opening for a Care-Full Radical Transformation’ Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA). See: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-05-08/collaborative-feminist-degrowth-pandemic-as-an-opening-for-a-care-full-radical-transformation/
20] Finlay, A. (2004) Alias MacAlias: Writings on Songs, Folk and Literature. Polygon
[21] Adloff & Clarke (2014) “Convivialist Manifesto: A Declaration of Interdependence.” See: https://duepublico2.uni-due.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/duepublico_derivate_00039520/Convivialist_Manifesto_2198_0403_GD_3.pdf
[22] Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality. Harper and Row.
[22] See: http://commonstransition.org/commons-transition-p2p-primer/
[23] Klein, N. (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
[24] The origins of this quote are unclear but it has been attributed to Frances Jameson and British cultural theorist Mark Fisher.
[25] Kirkwood & Kirkwood (2011) Living Adult Education: Freire in Scotland. Part of the International Issues in Adult Education book series (ADUL, volume 6).
[26] Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality. Harper and Row.
[27] See Turner. E (2012) Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy. Palgrave MacMillan.
[28] See Turner. V (1969) "Liminality and Communitas," in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure pp. 94-113, 125-30.
[29] McIntosh, A. (2017). ‘Some Contributions of Geopoetics to Modern Scottish Land Consciousness’. Scottish Centre for Geopoetics http://www.geopoetics.org.uk/some-contributions-of-geopoetics-to-modern-scottish-land-consciousness-alastair-mcintosh/
[30] Henderson, H. (2019) ‘Under the earth I go’, in Gibson, C. (ed.) Hamish Henderson: Collected Poems. Edinburgh: Polygon.
[31] See https://www.govanfreestate.scot/declaration
[32] Personal communication.