Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to public intellectual and author Rupert Read. 19/01/2022

Rupert is an associate professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He is author of over a dozen books on philosophy and the climate crisis, and he was previously a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion. As part of that movement, he took part in many mass protests, and he was arrested while protesting climate change denying think tanks.

He speaks about his sacred value of nonviolence, which has inspired many of those actions, the role of philosophy in public conversations, and how he navigates the emotional fallout of thinking a lot about the climate emergency. 

Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about our deepest values, the things that drive us, and how we might get better at listening to and engaging with people we disagree with. Every episode, I try and get behind the positions to the people that hold them, and speak to a complicated human person about their journey, and how they’ve arrived where they are. I speak to people from a range of different positions politically, religiously and professionally. And I’m trying very hard to listen openly, and in a non–combative posture, really seeking to understand them. I’ve learned loads over three years of doing this podcast, the key thing being that most people are more interesting than I think they will be, more complex and more thoughtful. And I’ve also learned that it is much more difficult to dismiss someone as an idiot, or even an enemy, once you’ve listened to them for an hour. Personally, I have been increasingly worried about the rise of division – it feels like we’re in another peak and we’re being formed by our technology and our political climate to dismiss each other or even to hate each other. I feel like many of us are being unconsciously conscripted into the culture wars. And I want to resist that. I have a theological commitment to peacemaking and reconciliation, but I just think building empathy and understanding is good for us all, no matter where you come from on the God question. So this podcast is part of my spiritual practice, I hope that you will find it spiritually enriching as well, and you should, at the very least, find it pretty interesting.

In this episode, you’ll hear a conversation I had with Rupert Read. Rupert is an associate professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He is author of over a dozen books on philosophy and the climate crisis, and he was previously a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion. As part of that movement, he took part in many mass protests, and he was arrested while protesting climate change denying think tanks.

We spoke about his sacred value of nonviolence, which has inspired many of those actions, the role of philosophy and public conversations, and how he navigates the emotional fallout of thinking a lot about the climate emergency. I enjoyed this podcast much more than I was expecting to honestly, because like many of us, thinking about climate change can feel a bit overwhelming and anxiety producing, not massively relaxing. But this conversation with Rupert actually left me feeling quite grounded and quite inspired. And certainly, like I’ve learned a lot about him, I hope you enjoy listening.

Elizabeth
Rupert, we are going straight into the deep end, no chitchat, no warm up. And I’m going to ask you what you hold sacred. And you have had a bit of time, because this is not a kind of…

Rupert
Not a test.

Elizabeth
And I should make clear that guests have taken this in all different directions, you can challenge the premise, it definitely isn’t specifically about religious understanding of the sacred. It’s a way of helping people hopefully have a positive pause to think actually, what is that? What are my deep principles? What are my deep values? What have I tried to live by? And one of the tests in the literature about what we hold sacred, there’s various different frames for it, but one of them is if someone gave you money, offered you money to give up on this thing, you’d be less likely to give it up because you feel offended, that ick factor. Tell me what bubbled up in you.

Rupert
Something which I wouldn’t take any amount of money for would be becoming violent to other human beings. And this partly comes from my background as a Quaker Society of Friends person and as a Buddhist practitioner. And obviously, it partly also fits in with my broader commitments to how to practice effectively and ethically in the world, how to do politics, how to do direct action. So that’s my first answer. But now to go a bit bigger, I would say, I’m going to really go into the deep end, as you put it, I would say, actually, I hold everything sacred. And I seek to be pretty radically non dualist. These days, in my practice, and I have, there are places in my life which I regard as sacred, but it’s as if they are sort of intensifications of the kind of general sacred, that sort of numinously kind of sacredness, that kind of numinously pervades everything. So in particular, there is there is a beach on the North Norfolk coast, which I regard as my sacred place. And then there are other places for which I have a similar attitude, which I get to see less often, such as Loch Coruisk in Skye which I visited when I went to stay with Iain McGilchrist a couple of years ago. But as I say, it’s as if, when I regard those places as sacred, what I don’t want to do is therefore sort of react away from that to say, and therefore other things are kind of dispensable. It’s as if those places to me kind of symbolise nature at large, and ultimately, everything that there is

Elizabeth
I would love to hear more about that, because I read this about you that you hold everything sacred. And my immediate reaction honestly was, well, that’s not the point of the sacred for me. I’ve done this podcast for three years, I still don’t know but that – I think probably it’s because for me, it’s related to a concept of holiness, like a set apartness, a specialness. I’m also a big fan of Gerard Manley Hopkins, this incredible kind of theological poet who really does seem to have this particular in the natural world, but does it extend beyond the natural world, is it – is this mic sacred? Is this microphone sacred? What does that mean?

Rupert
Well you see, I think something which, as human beings, we sometimes forget, especially perhaps in our culture, is that we don’t actually produce anything. All that we do is temporarily change the forms of things. So that mug in 1000 years’ time, it will probably be sand or something like that, you know, it could be part of a beach. And when you start to take a really long view, a kind of process view of creation, then it seems to me that this idea starts to become more plausible. It’s very easy to, to look at, you know, a rubbish tip, for example, and think, well, obviously, that’s not sacred. But then you look a bit more deeply. One of my teachers says, look, you’ve got to really see the interbeing of everything, you’ve got to see the sun and your heart, for example, as kind of two sides of the same coin, as completely interconnected. Like I say, when you start to see this way, when you start to look deeply, when you start to look across a really long duration of time, then even the things that we seem to have completely despoiled or profaned are actually just part of this deeper sacredness.

Elizabeth
It’s lovely. And on the first thing you said about nonviolence – my summary of it. How has that shaped your life decisions? Can you think of a particular fork in the road where the fact that that’s a sacred value to you has changed what you might have done otherwise?

Rupert
Well, there haven’t often been occasions where I’ve been tempted to be violent, if that’s what you’re asking. But I guess one concrete answer I could give is that it contributed significantly to my decision in 2019, to throw in my lot with a then budding – in 2018, the then budding Extinction Rebellion. I’m planning this lecture at Cambridge, which becomes ‘this civilization is finished’, summer of 2018. And three people almost simultaneously tell me Rupert, there’s this group that’s just started to form. They’re called Extinction Rebellion, and they’re saying basically the same kind of stuff as you. But there’s a difference. They’ve got a plan, they got a plan as to what to do about it. So I instantly watched the – because when like three people come to you simultaneously, you know that there’s something to this. I instantly watch the video ‘heading for extinction and what to do about it’. And I was like, Oh, my god, yeah, they’re saying the same thing as me. But they’ve got a plan. And the plan, of course, was mass nonviolent, direct action. And it deeply appealed to me and I instantly saw how it was possible that it could be transformative. I instantly got in touch with Gail Bradbrook, co–founder of XR, and she invited me in to help launch Extinction Rebellion, which I did by helping to coordinate the letter in The Guardian which was XR’s first outing and then to co MC with her the first direct action that we did, which was the blocking of the road outside parliament. This is autumn of 2018 by now and the absolute determination to be nonviolent, no matter what the provocation, this was, for me, a key attraction to Extinction Rebellion, not just because as XR co–founder, Roger Hallam often says, it works. But also because part of the reason why it works is it’s a way of showing what Gandhi called sometimes truth power. It’s a way of, of making nonviolence and a different, more authentic, more ethical way of being in the world. It’s a way of making that real and vivid to people. And one of the most exciting aspects I think, of Extinction Rebellion, was the way that so much of it has been so kind of prefigurative of what a better future society could look like. And it is extraordinary the extent to which under provocation XR has remained absolutely resolutely nonviolent. There’s one miniscule exception, which is in the infamous Canning Town tube incident in October 2019 when one of the protesters was being dragged off the top of a train, he kicked out at one of the people who was dragging him off in self defence, I mean that is that – only tiny moments of which there’s been any violation by XR of nonviolence and I think that is a really splendid record that XR can be proud of.

Elizabeth
Thank you. Well, we will definitely come back to those threads. But first, I want to wind back to get a sense of the ideas in the air in your childhood. Just paint me a picture of it, young Rupert growing up. What was his life like? And was there anything philosophically, religiously or politically that was really formative to the man you are today?

Rupert
Well, thank you – lovely questions. So I was pretty unimpressed with religion as a child. And really, for me, the main thread in my childhood that I see relating to what we’re talking about here today, was the deep love that formed in me at an early age and just grew and grew, for nature, for the wild, in particular for the sea, and in particular, particular for the English Lake District.

Elizabeth
Is that where you grew up?

Rupert
No, not at all. But we spent many of our holidays in Devon at the sea. And most of our holidays in the Lake District, I calculated when I was in my 20s, that I had spent about a year of my life in the Lake District because sometimes we would go there 2,3,4 times in a year. Other times, we would go there for two or three weeks at a time – that adds up. So I got to know the Lakes astonishingly well and felt this kind of deep and growing kind of, you know, more than just an affinity with the landscape, some kind of sense of kind of belonging, and somehow this sort of deep importance of it. And that to me is the kind of key background for the way in which when I started to spiritually awaken in my 20s and then further in my 30s that that spiritual and religious awakening became, sort of gradually at the same time, a deeper ecological awakening as well.

Elizabeth
And philosophy. Where – do you have a memory of when you thought that this might be something for you?

Rupert
Yes, I was quite lucky at school really in that. So my A levels I took a very unusual combination. I took physics, pure maths and history. And my history teacher was quite a visionary man, and his name is David Tennant. Sir David Tennant now. He thought that I should go to Oxford and do politics, philosophy and economics, which one person from our school had done before, and no one else from our school had ever got into Oxbridge in the previous 40 years, so it was quite, it was quite a kind of a break from the norm and I kind of moved from being a large fish in a small pond to being a small fish in a large pond. It was pretty – It was pretty intimidating to go to Oxford. So yeah, I went to Oxford, and I was intending, I was expecting to be most gripped by the politics of PPE, and I was very gripped by it. But actually the thing which made the strongest impression on me and I ended up doing the most and really fell in love with was philosophy.

Elizabeth
What role do you think philosophy plays in public conversations? Full disclosure, I am married to a philosopher, a very analytic philosopher, most of which he works on like I fully cannot comprehend. And so I kind of come with a bias, a backwards ability to influence public conversations. At the same time. I wrote a piece last year about the way ethics in particular was suddenly extremely live when in COVID, because the tensions between individual goods and the common good were very, very painfully present for many of us. I have often, I’ve often been slightly sad that there is not more presence of philosophy. Do you agree?

Rupert
Oh, totally agree. And I completely agree. So I think one contributing factor to that is the bias of Anglo American philosophy towards a narrow interpretation of the analytic method in philosophy. That has changed somewhat in recent years, philosophy in this country has become a little more outward looking. And it’s become a little more open to continental perspectives, to Eastern perspectives, but it’s still a problem. I think the deeper problem though, is our intellectual culture in the UK, or rather, our lack of intellectual culture in the UK. You know, there are other countries such as Germany and France, where philosophy is a much more respected part of the national conversation. And I think we lose out when it isn’t. So you mentioned COVID, I sought to get strongly involved in the national conversation around COVID. In early 2020, I mean, early 2020, starting in January, because having worked with Nassim Taleb for many years, I saw what was coming, I saw what a potential catastrophe it was going to be, and how we absolutely needed to take a precautionary, strong precautionary stance on it, which we didn’t until we’d committed ourselves to many tens of thousands of deaths, tragically. But it wasn’t easy to break into the conversation, there was a kind of expectation that this conversation was going to be dominated by modellers and medical scientists, somewhat similarly with climate. Over the years, obviously, I have found ways of getting involved in the national conversation on that. But again, it hasn’t been that straightforward, because sometimes there is an assumption that the climate issue is owned by climate scientists. But actually, in the climate issue, even more than COVID, it’s a full systems issue. It completely requires thinking deeply about narratives, thinking deeply about our complex and fragile human systems, thinking deeply about the long term and the deep history and so forth. These are the kinds of skills that philosophers have – not just philosophers, other people in the humanities systems thinking, and it is very unfortunate, to the extent to which scientistic thinking, the assumption that a certain kind of narrow scientific specialty should be what is mostly listened to in these matters. It’s very unfortunate the extent to which that is a dominant view in our current civilization, and especially in a country like the UK, which has relatively weak traditions of involving subjects like philosophy in public life.

Elizabeth
You mentioned a spiritual awakening in your 20s and then into your 30s. How did it happen?

Rupert
So how did it happen? It’s a slightly peculiar kind of chancy process, it seems to me kind of looking back on it, but maybe it was always going to unfold in this way, one way or another. One thing I remember is I had a very dear Catholic friend who got me to read Thomas Merton’s ‘Seven Storey Mountain’, which to be honest, I wasn’t very impressed with. But there was one bit in it, which I was quite intrigued by, one really specific, tiny bit, which almost nobody remembers, which basically is – he described the very beginnings of his spiritual and religious awakening, and he said the first thing I did, which seems to me kind of relatively unthreatening and ethical, and sort of manageable, was to go and attend a Quaker meeting. And he said, I was immensely impressed by them. But I knew immediately that it wasn’t for me. And I kind of looked back on that at the end of the book, and I thought, hmm, I know some really impressive people who are Quakers. This guy Merton is obviously a deep person and an important thinker, but I don’t really relate at all, to the way that he’s handling things. Maybe this thing that kind of didn’t work out for him would be the thing for me. So I went to a Quaker meeting. And I was absolutely blown away by it, I just, I was kind of, at first I was in deep shock, I could not understand. I literally sort of could not compute that people could sit in a room for long periods of time, kind of looking at each other or closing their eyes and not saying anything. And just the kind of madness that went on in my head for a while, as I was kind of stuck in that space. And then sort of starting to work through that. And then kind of listening to what these bits of ministry that emerged from the silence, I found it just incredibly powerful. And I thought, wow, this is the first thing – this is indeed, the first thing in the broadly spiritual religious domain that actually means something to me. And that seems to be a method that I can relate to and engage with. So I became an attender of Quaker meetings. This was in the United States for some years, and still never really thought that I would join or get properly involved and sign up. I came back to the UK and moved to Norwich, and was just immensely impressed with the Quaker meeting there. And finally, to my surprise, thought, I’m going to become a member. Yeah, I’m in. So that was that. And that proceeded happily for some years beyond that. Then in the autumn of 2001, that I had a kind of psychological, spiritual emergency kind of breakdown, which started while I was out, in the East, in India and Nepal. While I was out there, I also kind of encountered a Buddhist culture for the first time, and again, was very intrigued and impressed, and very taken with the potentiality in very simple terms of kind of focusing around the sound of a prayer bowl. I came back to Britain, endured this crisis for two or three years. And as I moved through it, became a Buddhist meditator. And that then became an important part of my life.

Elizabeth
How tricky as a philosopher in the UK intellectual climate, which at a high intellectual level is pretty sceptical about religion and spirituality in general – I’m thinking because you’ve written a lot on Wittgenstein who is one of the philosophers who towards the end of his life becomes much more open.

Rupert
Yeah, well, actually, throughout most of his life in one way or another.

Elizabeth
Did that make it easier? Did you find kind of hostility or scepticism amongst your colleagues? Or was it a very private thing that did not impact your professional life as a philosopher?

Rupert
Yeah, a bit of both, but certainly I have been influenced and helped by those philosophers who have really engaged with this. So one example would be Nietzsche, who of course engages in a brilliant and extremely anti–religious way. But actually, it turns out that that’s more complicated than it looks, or at least that’s what I’ve argued in one or two publications that, that Nietzsche’s kind of extreme polemics against Christianity and to some extent against Buddhism and so forth, conceal a kind of admiration for Jesus Christ and the kind of sense of the immense power of religion and spirituality, which he wants, in a certain sense, I think, to transmute. More obviously, I’ve been influenced by Søren Kierkegaard, by Knud Ejler Løgstrup. And most of all, by Wittgenstein, who actually has this attitude of immense respect towards religion, which he distinguishes from what he calls superstition, which he thinks is of a piece with kind of scientistic delusions and so forth.

Elizabeth
You’ve been writing about pantheism?

Rupert
Absolutely, well, one of the dimensions of spirituality and religion, which has become increasingly important to me, is ecology and thinking about ourselves as beings who are present in a universe and in – on a living and fragile planet. And yeah, I’ve argued, and I strongly believe this, that the time that we’re moving into, a time of immense challenge and heartbreak, is going to be a time when people are going to be looking for spiritual resources. It’s a time when we’re already starting to see and this is a wonderful thing, a growing interest in, return to, if you will, indigenous thinking. And indigenous thinking is very often animistic. And this is something which is quite hard for us in the culture that we are in to take seriously, I think. But I think that there’s a sense in which we have to try to see well what would it mean to take it seriously. And a kind of way into that, I think might be the sense of kind of generalised sacredness, which I sort of started out this podcast by mentioning, which is present in pantheism.

Elizabeth
Sorry for interrupting – just define animism for me, because not everyone will know it

Rupert
Yeah, so animism, basically, the idea that everything is alive, that everything is animate, that everything has a kind of a spirit in some sense or another. There’s a fascinating book, which I’m reading right now, by a guy called David Abram. It’s called ‘The spell of the sensuous’ which seeks to understand how this animistic notion needn’t be, as it’s sometimes being thought, to be a sort of superstitious projection of something like human individuality onto every object or other being, but it’s some kind of sense of trying to engage with or appreciate the sense in which certainly, other animals and plants and possibly things that are not alive as well, should be regarded as having, in some sense their own specific identity and nature and aliveness

Elizabeth
So this is all – I find it fascinating, because I’m that kind of nerd, but what does it mean in practice for your day to day life, your kind of emotional, spiritual wellbeing, what does being a Quaker–Buddhist–pantheist mean, how does it show up?

Rupert
Yeah, well, so I think one place to start would be this sense of, Well, if we really start to think that and feel that everything is sacred, or possibly, everything is alive, or everything is worthy of veneration, or even a kind of worship, it does kind of then sit pretty uncomfortably with that to be, at least as it were, on the level of fantasy, destructive of these things. And there is also something more specific, which is that I do – I’m a great lover of rocks and sands and, and all sorts of wonderful features of our Earth. But I do also think there is something profoundly special about life, and about living on the planet, which is the only one in the universe that we know that there has life. All of this is a kind of substrate, for me, to have an attitude of profound reverence for life, for this astonishing, incredibly beautiful, even now, living planet, and for being absolutely determined to play my part in helping to look after it because you know that the only question that our children are going to ask us, the only thing they’re going to be interested in, in 20 to 30 years time is, what did you do to help safeguard this incredible living planet while there was time to really make a difference in doing so? And I hear that kind of in my head or in my heart quite often, I mean, really, quite often. And yeah, all of that helps to kind of keep me on the path of struggling hard at every level, intellectually and politically and, and out there on the streets and so forth. For well, a future.

Elizabeth
I’d love to hear how you navigate that space emotionally. Because I imagine that many listeners will have looked at this episode and thought, oh, do I have to listen to an episode about climate? This morning, I had to sit down and pray. Because I was like God, I am managing my climate anxiety just about by putting my roots down deep into the love of God, by doing what we can to be faithful to the things that we can do, but almost just focusing my intention on what is within my sphere, within my control? And I know a lot of activists and a lot of environmentalists who’ve been through this real despair and real grief. And how do you manage that yourself given that you know, that you say the odds are very much against us at this stage. That doesn’t mean that we should sit down.

Rupert
Yeah, yeah. So that’s a great and rich question that I – let me start out just by a little brief remark about climate, you know, a lot of what we’ve been talking about so far, it’s not just about climate. And I really think it’s helpful to remind ourselves that. It’s much bigger than climate and climate is vast and kind of pervasive. But we’re talking about the whole of life on this planet, and we’re talking about wild nature, and we’re talking about pollution, so on and so forth. And that I think can be helpful, it can be helpful to raise us a bit out of any possible, which is often present, anthropocentrism, human centeredness, and it can be helpful in terms of it being easier, I think, to find the spirit of – well spirits, in life, in biodiversity, in beautiful nature, and so on and so forth. Now, in terms of these difficult emotions, well, yeah, speaking personally, I’ve been on a journey and you sort of said yourself just then Liz that a lot of this tends to come in some kind of set of waves. In the spring of 2020, we had COVID. And I’ll confess to you that like quite a lot of other people, I think the first lockdown for me, was actually quite a joyous time. I actually found myself in the summer of 2020 in a space of really strong psychological health, I felt kind of stronger and more confident in myself than I had done for many, many years. And what happened then was quite interesting. In that condition, what I found was that I was able to face up to Climate reality and ecological reality more resolutely even than I had done over the past several years, which is pretty resolutely already, but what I found was I was just, I was strong enough to look it directly in the face. But then what happened was when I did look it directly in the face, I started to unravel again, I found myself absolutely consumed in the summer of 2020 by climate anxiety and eco grief and it was invading my dreams. And I then entered a period of psychological struggle again. And then in the winter lockdown that became really awful. I mean, that was just a dire time for me, 2020 into 2021. Recovered again since then, and was in very good shape again, I would say by this summer and early autumn, then went to COP, spent a remarkable few weeks at COP, participated in some magnificent, extraordinary things, had the horrendous experience of being in the official Blue Zone at COP which is just a dire place, and came home after the pathetic agreement that they reached in Glasgow and fell into really serious depression for a few days, just thinking, Oh my God, we are so stuffed, we are so, so stuffed. So yeah, that’s a little bit of my personal trajectory. But you know if that sounds a bit tough, what I’ve so, so much found over the years, and this is why it is about waves and not just about getting stuck in something is that I always come out of these difficult periods. And when I come out of them, I am fueled by the emotions that I’ve experienced in them. And this is I think the profound secret of the success of Extinction Rebellion and of Greta Thunberg, that this the radical spirit of truth– telling, and the willingness to put our bodies where our mouths are and to really step up to the plate and do what we say is necessary. The real secret of that comes from these emotions, it comes from being willing to feel the eco grief, and the climate anxiety and the rage. And Greta is an astonishing conduit for these. And while I was in Extinction Rebellion, I found that myself and some colleagues were able to do something really quite similar in the media, in our talks etc. And it was that that was attracting people to us. It was a willingness to even go to places like being depressed or feeling despair. Because, you know, people are terribly afraid of despair. But what my teacher Joanna Macy taught me about despair is despair is nothing to be frightened of, provided you’re willing to feel it and look at it and understand it and be powered by and to move through it. If you get stuck permanently in despair, well, that would be a terrible, obviously a terrible thing. But that’s not what happens, if you will actually allow yourself to face it rather than continually trying to fend it off. And then you realise that the despair and the grief and the anger and the anxiety, they all come from love. That’s what it’s all about, you know, we were angry because we love our children, love these landscapes that have been despoiled. We feel grief, because we love these fellow creatures, we feel fear because we love our children, because we love ourselves. So it’s love that fuels all of it. And then you tap back into the love again. And that gives you an immense power. Again, like I say, I think this is the secret of how XR and the school climate strikers cut through and so many others have not. And the really exciting thing is that I believe we’ve only just started to touch this immense power of truth. And this immense power of emotional authenticity, the incredible energy of the so called negative emotions, which actually all come from the ultimate positive emotion, of love. So, in the darkness of that time, that gives me really immense hope.

Elizabeth
I have been seeing a lot – I feel like I’m balanced in a strange place because lots of my friends who are Christians see congregations, the decline of Christianity in the form that it’s been previously. Because I’m sort of a weird crosser of tribal boundaries and spend more time outside the church than I do inside it, see something really different, which is a real upswing in spiritual hunger and spiritual opening. Yes, a number of people who 10 years never said, like do you want to talk to me about Jesus. That now like, okay, like, it’s good man. Sorry but shit got real. Like, yeah, yeah, we need something deeper and older and more robust. We need structures of meaning and belonging, because the kind of materialist worldview of ‘if we just have enough prosperity and security will be ok’

Rupert
Yeah, that’s dying.

Elizabeth
It turned out it wasn’t existentially satisfying. And now it doesn’t even look like it’s necessarily an option.

Rupert
Yes. And so yes, what else is there?

Elizabeth
Do you see spiritual openness? And what might that mean for congregations, people who are kind of in religious communities? Ability to help, to offer what they have?

Rupert
Yeah. Yeah, super question. So let’s start with nonviolent direct action, again, and the immense importance in the history of that of Martin Luther King and of Gandhi, and the immense importance for them, of their Christian and, and Hindu backgrounds, and of their broader reading and prophetic traditions, and so on and so forth. I think this is going to be an ongoing source of resource for those who are going to be engaged in the nonviolent struggles of the 2020s. Of which there are going to be many of, those are going to grow and there is no question but that the climate movement, broadly speaking, will grow in the 2020s as the emergency deepens. So that’s kind of one place to start. And some of us who have sort of moved on as I have now from formal involvement with Extinction Rebellion, some of us are seeking to ferment what comes next with very much an eye on this kind of inner work and on the profound importance and potentiality of spirituality and of religious traditions in motivating that. I think there is a potentiality for greater relevance to our time to the extent to which Christian denominations pick up on this and pick up on the emergent and insurgent eco spirituality, so I’m thinking, for example, of the Laudato Si by Pope Francis, is strongly advised and helped by one or two of his top cardinals, including Cardinal Turkson. And the Laudato Si, if anyone hasn’t read it, I mean, it is an absolutely magnificent document, a really beautiful testimony to Gaia, richly based in Catholic thought, also richly open and ecumenical, not at all narrow or dogmatic and a beautiful, poetic work. And it’s nice and short, it’s an astonishingly important piece. I’ve been talking with one or two people in the Catholic Church recently, and I’ve been saying to them, why hasn’t the church made more of this because I think it kind of really hasn’t, it hasn’t been kind of very much kind of mainstreamed into what happens with Catholic congregations, it hasn’t been placed as something to really aspire to and make meaningful in the entire kind of institutional and practical life of the church in terms of everything from what do you do with your land or with your estate? To what kind of messages are you putting out at times like COP 26 or on key issues such as human population and reproduction and so forth? And, you know, maybe there are moves like that that could be made elsewhere as well. A group like the Unitarians, for example, who have been struggling with dwindling congregations, perhaps they could go further down this track and establish a greater relevance to our time by doing so. So I think it’s partly a matter of kind of basing ourselves as you say, Liz, in deep history and in the extraordinary resources present in the teachings of the Buddha or of Jesus, and so forth, I think it’s partly about coming a little more recently and looking at people like Gandhi and MLK. And I think it’s partly about coming kind of right into the present and thinking, what do we need now and what is there among people who are alive who have something profound and rich to offer on this. So I think it’s certain that there will be dramatically increasing interest this century in pantheism, and panentheism, also in animism, with the growing interest in what we can learn from indigenous peoples, and I think if we’re talking about Christian denominations, and them asking, what’s our role now, I think part of that needs to be active thinking about alliances and meeting of minds here, can there be, as has been argued, a Christian animism or a Christian pantheism? Is there a way in which the great eco spiritual challenge of our time can be understood through or in alliance with Christian teaching? This is almost like a research agenda really, but a very practical one, which which could be so important to the Christian church and to everyone with any interest in these matters going forward.

Elizabeth
Thank you. I’m gonna finish with a final question, which is about what you’ve learned on crossing divides. And you obviously have been involved in a lot of direct action. You’ve been involved in XR and have more recently been writing about a kind of moderate flank. And appeal to caregivers and parents and grandparents, reflected a lot out loud about what XR got right, and what some of the choices that actually alienated people. Climate is one of the hardest things to talk about where there’s disagreement either about the reality of human driven climate change, which I was astonished recently to realise it’s more robust and still present than I thought it was. As a question mark. And then about the ‘what should we do about it?’ And where are the levers and who’s to blame because there’s so many feelings, there’s so much fear and so much anger and defensiveness. What is the one key thing that you’ve learned that helps bridge these divides, that helped build empathy, enough agreement to get anything done in this space?

Rupert
So my thought is what now needs to happen is not necessarily to keep trying to go more radical like Insulate Britain has done and I think have been, unfortunately quite alienating in the process. But maybe to be more moderate, not old fashionably moderate, not middle of the road, but just more moderate than Extinction Rebellion, not demanding quite as much of people as XR so splendidly did, and to really fill that space, to occupy that space, to find ways of making the move to political agenda deliver for us. So what does that mean? So as you say, I’ve been talking about this in terms of parents, in terms of parents stepping up and thinking, What will I do if I am really serious about taking care of the future of my child, because I cannot do that anymore by just doing things like getting them into a good school, this crisis is going to take everything that we hold dear out within a generation or two, unless it is much more seriously addressed, parents now have to be thinking about this collectively. So I’ve called for a kind of parents’ movement, like the movement of children that we have so splendidly and bravely seen over the past few years. And I’ve called also for this kind of moderate flank thinking in the area of communities, of building resilient communities, of not waiting for our leaders to do that, and to help us to adapt to what is coming, because they’re not going to, or at least they’re not going to enough, or at least they’re not going to enough unless they get shamed into doing so by us doing so. So what I’m imagining here is a sort of transition towns movement for the now. One which is possibly spiritually grounded, certainly not willing to take no for an answer in terms of being determined to do what is necessary to take care of our futures and, and to proof us increasingly, against potential food shortage, against potential flood, against the kind of things that we’re going to be facing the next few years. And then the other area where I’ve spoken about this moderate flank, and the most is in terms of our workplaces. Our workplaces are such an important locus for potential change, so many things, everything from reducing commuting, to what is your product, everything from what are you going to do with your profits to is it possible for employees to engage in climate, etc, protests themselves. So what I’m saying to people is, let’s organise in our workplaces to start to make together the changes happen that we need, that have been called for by Extinction Rebellion, that have not been delivered by governments, that now a much larger number of us need to work together to deliver. So as I say, I think that some of this new mass distributed moderate flank will be explicitly spiritually grounded. But one more point about this, one more area where you can see this moderate flank as a meaningful phenomenon, the area of religious and spiritual organisations themselves, you know, bit like what I was saying five minutes or so ago, what if the Catholic Church, the Unitarians, the Quakers, and on and on, really thought about, what can we do to actually rise to this challenge? So this would be something which I think would be more inviting, more inclusive than XR has managed to be. And it’d be something where the barriers to entry are not as high but it’d be something that could have sufficient seriousness if enough of us do it at scale that it might actually be enough to stop the kind of dark scenarios that we’ve just heard a couple of times in this conversation from happening. So I’m immensely excited about this and yeah, I would urge listeners to think what can I do if I’ve had any thoughts along the lines of well, XR and Greta. Yeah, great, but you know, that’s not quite my thing. If you’ve wanted to do something but not quite found your place yet. Turn to it now in the wake of COP 26. We cannot wait for our leaders to sort this, they are not going to do so. But you know if we actually work seriously as parents in our communities, in our workplaces, in our religious and spiritual organisations, if we actually pull together and take the challenge seriously, I think we can do enough.

Elizabeth
Rupert Read thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.

Well, as I said, in the introduction, I wasn’t really looking forward to this one, I have to limit how much I think and talk about climate change. Because it can feel really scary. But I also think there’s a kind of duty as citizens, as part of the generation who are trying to work out how we live in a world that is rapidly warming, that means that I should think about it. And this was one of the more pleasant ways and gave me a sense actually of agency and a depth of understanding.

I found Rupert talking about nonviolence really inspiring and actually quite a helpful frame for helping me understand Extinction Rebellion, who I have felt quite conflicted about at various points, and nonviolence and the nonviolent tradition is so baked into the kind of history of peacemaking and reconciliation, was such a big part of the civil rights movement in the States. Obviously, it was a framework used by Ghandi, and by Mandela and by many of the heroes of peacemaking and reconciliation, who are name–checked much less often than those three are. And so, Rupert locating Extinction Rebellion kind of within that heritage was really interesting to me and really called out the ways in which I did feel attracted to the movement, still do in some ways, their sense of trying to wake up a society by shocking them, by disrupting what is already happening by, you know, a sit in in a restaurant as the civil rights movement did or by peaceful walks, peaceful protests. And that I think is a really powerful part of what XR and other climate protest groups have done, but Rupert really touched on some of the ways that XR didn’t manage to build an inclusive movement that felt like normal citizens, everyone has a stake and his new commitment to really building a kind of moderate flank of particularly parents or grandparents or people with a commitment, kind of institutional longevity, I guess that more conservative thread really, which I’ve always thought should be present in the climate movement of protecting and nurturing, of stewarding and taking care of what we’ve already received, really trying to draw on some of those themes as well. So I hope that that meets success.

Can everything be sacred? I really struggled with that, as you heard, I don’t think – and this is probably just temperamentally, I’m not a pantheist, I feel there is something about a kind of Christian worldview, which forms me into seeing all of creation and to an extent human activity also, as a gift, as something beautiful to be thankful for, to be grateful for, but not as ultimate, not to be worshipped in itself. But maybe the posture of seeing everything as sacred would be a helpful corrective to the way we treat nature and objects now, but yeah, that was a definite point of difference.

I love what he said about philosophy, I do think that we are put too much emphasis on science as the kind of high priesthood, and evidence and argument and graphs and data as the only key things to be driving our decision making, that actually the kind of storytelling, the analysis, the ethical reasoning of how we balance different goods is the toolkit that philosophers bring, but, frankly, philosophers themselves, because they spend so much time thinking about how to speak accurately and cleanly and carefully, aren’t always that great at communicating, which is why we don’t hear from them that often.

I was really grateful for Rupert actually, just being really honest about his own emotional journey, that he goes through periods of real despair about the future. And then finds himself energised by those periods. And I just thought it was beautiful what he said that if we can help ourselves reframe our fear and despair, if we are people that feel those things, which not everyone will, but if we feel those things that seeing them for what they are, which is from a root of love, can maybe help us welcome them more gently or tolerate them. I have a working theory that I speak about with my spiritual director sometimes that anger and sadness are very biblical emotions, that in Scripture, in the Bible that I read, people and indeed God feel angry and feel sad. You know, Jesus wept, Jesus turned over tables, that those emotions aren’t things that we necessarily need to shy away from. Fear, though, I think, is usually paralysing and destabilising and so I’m interested in how you work out a way through that, how you root yourself in love, in order to become resilient for whatever the future holds for us.

Thank you for listening. I’d love to know how you responded to Rupert, if there were things that you agreed with or disagreed with or were surprised by, that made you cross or sad. That surprised you or encouraged you, do drop us an email or send me a tweet @ESOldfield. We’d really love to hear from you. That’s all for now.

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