Let's all stop burning witches?

Or: on being very tired of all this shit

Dear friends

This Saturday’s weekly missive is not, you’ll notice, coming to you on a Saturday. The truth is, I badly needed some time away from the computer. I’ve never had a social media habit – I just genuinely don’t get it: I find all social media intensely boring at best and utterly evil at worst – but, when the world seems to be on the edge (and isn’t that always, these days), I do for sure have a news obsession habit. I especially love reading an intelligent and highly diverse range of opinion pieces, but a surfeit of intelligent opinion pieces about all the diverse ways in which the world is breaking can leave you with a very bad case of spiritual indigestion. In such cases, my only method of escape from the looming doom loop is to walk away from the computer or the laptop (the phone never really gets a proper look-in) and do something with my hands: something marvellously distracting, or sometimes even something useful. The house windows have never been cleaner; the pulses section of the larder has never been so very well organised. Lo, even actively colour-coded! All this saves me from the distress and, often, the anger occasioned by the casual viciousness/ vacuousness of people who still don’t understand that they’re not the Good Guys in a world in which everyone with a different perspective is Bad, but that their self-righteous tribalism is precisely the problem that’s messing us all up.

So I’ve donned my imaginary #tiredofthisshit sweatshirt and have spent a lot of time cuddling our most recently rescued ten-year-old collie dog Chase, who has epilepsy and is working through the initially mind-expanding, ataxia-inducing effects of his new medication, in the hope that we can nurture him into something resembling a normal life expectancy. He’s not sure whether he likes the pink elephants or the blue-jacketed white rabbits best (‘Hey – did you see that yellow submarine floating down the river?’), but he’s staggering his way around the house with a big tongue-lolling grin on his face as if he’s finally happened upon the actual, no-shit, elixir of life. Most days right now, I could do with a drop of Chase’s Good Stuff myself.

So the piece I was going to write, with a few more thoughts to share in the context of the conversations we had around the stories we worked with in Myth Summer School, is caught up in a short holding pattern. And instead, I’ve a few thoughts to share about the spirit of the times. Don’t worry: this isn’t going to be a political diatribe; I’m not an especially political person. This perplexes my friends and probably frustrates more than a few of my readers. I have no idea, you see, what sociopolitical box I fit into. Which makes me exceptionally difficult to categorise. I’m more than comfortable with that, but it’s fascinating how uncomfortable it seems to make everyone else. I can’t be pigeonholed as on ‘the left’ or ‘the right’, whatever those labels even mean these days; my passions and perspectives range all the way across the spectrum. In the 1960s, I was raised the equivalent of Blue Labour (for the non-Brits: typical blue-collar working-class values, culturally conservative but economically egalitarian) but because I can’t seem to persuade myself to believe wholeheartedly in any political party’s required creeds and doctrines these days, I’ve always taken the path of least resistance and voted for whoever I think will make the best constituency MP and do some good stuff for my actual living in-the-flesh community, in my actual place outside my actual front door (LibDem last time, if you must know. I wouldn’t do it again).

The truth is, I like being that sort of person. I have an instinctual, visceral horror of dogma; of the performative, self-aggrandising gurus and preacher-men who, as my Great-Aunt Meg used to say, are ‘all mouth and trousers’; of people who are convinced they’ve seen the light and are the faithful perpetrators of The One True Way. Of the witchfinder generals, for sure. It’s why I can’t buy into any one religion, even though I respect quite a lot of bits of quite a lot of them. It’s all too boxed-in. Jesus really doesn’t want me for a sunbeam and I really don’t want to know anyone’s absolute archangel-channelled Truth. I just want to be cooked in The Mystery. I don’t want to preach at people; I want to have conversations with them.

This is how I was educated and raised: at an all-girls grammar school which taught us how to interrogate ideas through passionate and often-challenging conversations, not through knockout but largely cosmetic blows in chest-beating, polemicised, overly heroic, Oxford Union-style, testosterone-laden ‘debates’. The conversation I remember most vividly happened when I was sixteen, and when in French Literature ‘A’ level class we were discussing Guy de Maupassant’s Pierre et Jean. It’s a novel about two brothers. In an oversimplified nutshell, Jean is a happy-go-lucky kind of guy who isn’t the brightest of all possible sparks and never quite understands the essence of any given situation and is often taken for the fool that he is – but he’s an eternal optimist and happy as the proverbial Larry, even when he’s being taken for a fool. His brother Pierre is less nice and very much more of a pessimist. He sees right through to the heart of everything and doesn’t much like it, actually, if anyone even bothered to ask. He doesn’t ever quite manage to be happy. At the end of our reading, our very incisive French teacher, Mrs Edwards, asked us whether we would prefer to be Pierre or Jean. I was one of only two girls in the class of thirty who said that if I had only the two choices, I would rather be Pierre – without the slightest doubt, and with all the passionate instincts of my sixteen-year-old heart. (Beautiful Becky, whose face and smile I can still vividly conjure up as if it were all just yesterday, ended up with mental health challenges, handing out roses on the streets on London where she was at university and, I understand, eventually committing suicide. I seem, in spite of myself, actually to be quite happy.) After that enthusiastic classroom opinion poll, we had a properly illuminating and open conversation which resulted in many jokes about who we all were and what we all believed, and which lasted a very, very long time. See: this shouldn’t be as radical as it now seems. We inhabited the opposite sides of the spectrum on the meaning of life and how to respond to it, but we talked it through and then we laughed at it – and, more importantly, at ourselves. In the end, it just didn’t matter. What mattered was who gave you a hug when your boyfriend dumped you, or who made you laugh when you were bent over double in the loos with period pains.

And isn’t this, in the end, what it’s all about? Although I’m more than capable of passionately held opinions, I love to be challenged in intelligent conversation and to have my mind changed; I find it absolutely thrilling. I’m a person who, as a generality, is filled with curiosity, not conviction. Precisely because I’m curious, and want to understand where people whose ideas sometimes make me uncomfortable are really coming from, I read Substacks from all across the spectrum too. And I’ve been questioned about that. What can I be thinking? I read Carole Cadwalladr AND Mary Harrington?? Am I mad???

But I do have one very strong conviction, and I hope you’re all going to forgive me for feeling I really need to write about it today: all this ‘othering’ bullshit will be the death of us. Our lack of genuine curiosity about people who seem in so many senses to be living the same kind of lives and to want the same things, but who hold different perspectives – perspectives we might instinctively abhor, but don’t we want to understand why? Our growing inability to have any kind of calm conversation with the people who hold such different perspectives. Our inability to interrogate our own instinctive abhorrence. (Oh, and that’s where the proper Shadow-work lies, for sure.) Our moral certainties, our self-righteousnesses. The insistence on dividing everyone into ‘us’ and ‘them’ and no possibility of anything remotely resembling ‘on the one hand, but on the other hand’ in between. All the hate-filled labels: TERF, fascist, snowflake, Karen. I wrote about this, perhaps with a little more subtlety, in a post earlier this year on ‘The Meaning of Hospitality’, subtitled ‘Welcoming in the Other’. Maybe it’s worth quoting a couple of bits of it again:

Take the example of my very favourite fairy-tale mother, who appears in an old German story collected by the Brothers Grimm, among others: ‘Snow-white and Rose-red’. Two girls live with a poor widow in a cottage deep in the forest. The mother teaches them how to take care of themselves, then entrusts them with the freedom to find their own way in the world:

‘If they had stayed too late in the forest, and night came on, they laid themselves down near one another upon the moss, and slept until morning came, and their mother knew this and had no distress on their account.’

She keeps her daughters close, but not too close, and strikes a functional balance between the protective and the permissive. One night, when an enormous, exhausted bear shows up at the door of their tiny cottage, instead of taking fright and slamming the door on him, she takes pity on him, and lets him warm himself by the fire:

‘Poor bear,’ said the mother, ‘lie down by the fire, only take care that you do not burn your coat.’ Then she cried: ‘Snow-white, Rose-red, come out, the bear will do you no harm, he means well.’ So they both came out, and by-and-by the lamb and dove came nearer, and were not afraid of him. The bear said: ‘Here, children, knock the snow out of my coat a little’; so they brought the broom and swept the bear’s hide clean; and he stretched himself by the fire and growled contentedly and comfortably.

In this way, the girls are taught both that hospitality is a sacred duty, and that the wild other is not always to be feared. (The bear turns out, of course, to be a prince who’s under a spell, and at the end of the story, he marries Snow-white. Handily, he happens to have a brother waiting in the wings for Rose-red.)

Hospitality, in a fairy tale, is a duty to the wider community of the world: it’s the act of welcoming and providing for strangers. It’s the act of welcoming in what’s Other. And in fairy tales, whether or not an individual offers hospitality is a test of their character, and this kind of hospitality is always rewarded.

… intolerance of otherness, and refusal of hospitality because of that otherness, is as close as fairy tales ever get to directly approaching the notion of sin. And I believe that we’re going to need to go back to some of those traditional values, to those fairy-tale values, if we’re going to ever get ourselves out of this rapidly metastasising mess we seem to have landed ourselves in.

One of the reasons why I feel so strongly about our need to jolt ourselves out of this insanely black-and-white way of judging each other is that I’ve seen the poison it can introduce, in the writing community of which I’ve long been a part – and in a way that reaches right to the heart of what I write about: place and belonging; myth and folklore. And so I’m still curiously bruised from witnessing at close quarters something that happened to the writer

Paul Kingsnorth

back in 2018. As introduction, I should say that I’ve known Paul (just a very little) since somewhere around 2009, during the earliest days of the Dark Mountain project which he founded. We’ve disagreed over the years more than we’ve agreed, but that’s all okay and perfectly normal because that’s what humans do, and it doesn’t stop me having a great deal of respect for much of his cultural commentary and his writing (very much less keen on the Orthodox Bro thing but hey, I’m still reading him because I’m curious) and am particularly looking forward to his new book, Against the Machine – though I know I’m going to disagree with at least fifty percent of what he says in it and probably more. Anyway. In an article on his Substack, Paul describes what happened to him then:

I was commissioned to write a ‘personal response’ to a new film, Arcadia, which had been put together from old footage from the British Film Institute, which archives film from Britain’s past. Arcadia - which I highly recommend - was a strangely moving film. It spoke to the nostalgia within me for the rural England of my ancestors, an England I never knew or lived in, and which was in reality taken apart long before I was born. Yet though I grew up in suburbs and have lived most of my life in post-industrial towns and cities, it still calls to me as a prelapsarian vision: unreachable, futile, mystical, Romantic, appealing and hard to let go of.

In my ‘personal response’ to the film, I wrote all this down, and I wrote some other things too. I wrote how seeing these images made me feel patriotic, in what I have always considered the true sense of that word: a connection to the country of your birth, to the land and its associated cultures, rather than necessarily to the systems or people that govern it. A localised, complicated but real sense of stubborn loyalty to place, history and nature. I wrote about how this notion of patriotism was unfashionable and increasingly demonised, but that I believed it offered a necessary corrective to the placeless anti-culture that was growing around us.

… A small group of self-appointed policemen and women from the social media ‘nature writing scene’ (apparently there was one) picked up on my piece and began touting it around as a dangerous example of proto-fascist ‘dogwhistling’. They explained that all this stuff about loving the land, dreaming of the past and being patriotic was pure blood-and-soil ‘nativism’. They had had me down, it turned out, as a ‘far right ultra-nationalist’ ever since I voted for Brexit, which all good people knew was a thing that only racists did. Now here was the proof.

What I was really saying in my piece, they explained, was that England only belonged to white people. This was apparently a dangerous example of a ‘tendency’ in nature writing which had existed since the 1920s: to use love of land to call for some kind of pureblood ethnostate. After all, two or three nature writers back then had gone on to become actual fascists. Given that ‘fascism’ was clearly on the rise again (see that Brexit vote) it was important to guard against nature writing being co-opted by the contemporary ‘far right’, which apparently now included me. Never mind that I had never shown any signs of believing anything like this. Never mind that I had written an entire book arguing precisely the opposite. The Internet had spoken.

… Now here I was watching writers who had previously been friendly to me making public denunciations. Here I was watching institutions I had worked with withdrawing invitations, and festivals cancelling my appearances. Here I was watching people who hadn’t heard of me five minutes ago declaring that I was ‘clearly a Nazi’. Here I was reading articles in respected poetry magazines which declared that my real agenda was an England exclusively for ‘blonde-haired, blue eyed Anglo-Saxons’: an agenda that was certainly news to my Anglo-Punjabi wife, let alone my brown-haired and brown-eyed self. Worst of all, here I was watching actual friends, or people I had thought were friends, either joining in with the mob to protect their careers or remaining strategically silent.’

As someone who also made a living writing about the importance of place, belonging and our mythic/folkloric lineage, all this struck horror into my heart. I was seriously outraged, too, and I can promise you that I still remember the names of every single one of those eminent writers and institutions who felt they had the right to act as judge, jury and executioners on something that they didn’t seem to have the imagination or depth of character even to understand. But what I couldn’t work out at the time was why I wasn’t being cancelled, like Paul – because I’d founded and edited a full-colour, print, groundbreaking ‘nature writing’ magazine called EarthLines which introduced the mythic perspective into place and belonging and so focused on precisely these same subjects – until someone helpfully explained to me that it was because I was writing predominantly about Irish places and myth and folklore, and the places and myth and folklore of other Celtic countries. In other words, they said, I was writing about the importance of belonging to places that didn’t happen to be England. So that was all right. Because apparently loving and wanting to belong to your land was only a problem if you were English. (I didn’t have the heart to explain that back in the mists of time, England was just as ‘Celtic’ as the rest of them. Or that, actually, I’m English myself, even though I’m also an Irish national and was living in Ireland at the time.)

Cancellation on this scale has happened to a number of people I know, including the redoubtable writer

Milli Hill

, but I’m quoting Paul’s specific case at length in good part because it was the label of ‘fascist’ that was thrown at him, which is rather … topical … and in good part because what happened to him could so easily have happened to me – and who knows, still someday could, though the times seem to have changed and writing about belonging to place, and the myth and folklore of place, is now all the rage. All the very best people are doing it – and even in England! But the thing is, feeling an affinity for the old myths and folklore of the place you come from, and having the sense that these stories constitute your lineage, doesn’t have to be either aggrandising or excluding. And just because an idea or body of work could be used by bad actors to do bad stuff, or once was (see those fascists again), doesn’t mean that the thing itself is bad. The Nazis used folklore to justify some of their worst excesses, but that doesn’t make all folklore inherently evil. The fact that a bunch of bad men from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries used their messed-up doctrines and insane egos to hang or burn at the stake a bunch of women – and a few good men – that they also considered to be witches, doesn’t mean that the entire Christian experience is inherently demonic. (To use another of those ‘othering’ labels, this time one that’s very much beloved of way too many contemporary Christian polemicists. I’ve written about that at length too, so won’t repeat it here.) This is basic logic. If only we were still educating our kids to understand this; if only we understood it ourselves. If only we were still valuing the act of learning how to actually think.

But I rather suspect I’m digressing a bit; it’s later in the day than usual for me to be writing. The point I feel I have to try to make in this increasingly roundabout way is that we really need to stop buying into this stuff. It’s dangerous. It’s so very easy, and so very lazy, to throw out the label of racist or fascist. Paul Kingsnorth was labelled a fascist for loving his country – or loving both and at the same time a long-lost and a newly imagined dream of his country – and it’s a credit to him that he turned the other cheek (or said ‘Fuck you’), ran off with his family to an Irish bog, and kept on writing intensely thought-provoking books and articles that are still making a real impression on an ever-expanding audience.

But it doesn’t always work like that. Look at what’s happening in the UK right now; think of the 150,000 or so people who gathered in London today, driven into the arms of an actual far-right thug, Tommy Robinson, precisely because they’d been othered half to death and had nowhere else to go to have their voices heard. That’s a LOT of people, and if we imagine that every single one of them is a natural far-right extremist, racist or fascist, we’re just not paying attention. A good few of them, Robinson’s loyal followers, undoubtedly are. But the vast majority will be your average, mostly working-class people who are tired of and angry about being labelled fascists, racists and far-right extremists for the crime of expressing concern about what they believe has happened to the country they love and feel they belong to, and who have been told as a consequence that they’re disgusting and shouldn’t have a voice. Now: we absolutely don’t have to agree with their opinions about or their analysis of why we’re in the mess we’re in, though won’t we surely at least agree that we are in a properly big mess? But if our only response is to turn up our pretty noses, cast those people out (let them eat cake!) and tell them they’re deplorable and have no right to a voice or even to ask questions and expect answers from a government they actually elected, all we’ll achieve is to make them angry. And their anger will radicalise them, and that will only drive them into the arms of proper extremists, because those are the only people who will listen, who will offer them hospitality (and cake). Then we’ve lost them, and almost certainly for good. We’ve sown the seeds of division and there’s no way back again that isn’t drenched in blood. And that’s precisely what’s happening now, so very well done us. Hate and division doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes out of othering.

These days, people are getting killed as a consequence of all this othering, and whether we like those people or not, and whether we agree with their perspectives on the world or not, it’s just not okay. Hospitality – the antithesis of othering – is a sacred duty in European mythology. There are very good reasons for that – pragmatic ones, as well as just plain moral – and it’s more than time, I think, that we remembered it. As ever, myth knows best.

Over and out. Normal and less controversial service will resume shortly. And a reminder that next Saturday, September 20, the next Myth and Fairy Tale Salon for paid subscribers will take place at 16.00 UK time. Watch out for the audio recording of the story and the Zoom link in your email inbox by Thursday.

(A final note: this Substack is not open to hateful comments. Zero tolerance policy. Please feel free to disagree, but please do your disagreeing in the spirit of conversation, hospitality, and non-othering. Comments on this post are restricted to paying subscribers, because that prevents random haters from spewing random bile. Conversation is welcomed, but it’s also earned. I don’t feel obliged to receive hate, and neither should any of you. So this rule is to protect my readers as well as me. I will always try to keep comments sections safe for us all.

Sharon