reading log: this is not a drill

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@@ -6,6 +6,88 @@ author: Joe Carstairs
 
 ## 2025-04-23
 
+### @{xr-not-a-drill}
+
+A collection of very short essays. Biggest takeaway: false hope is thinking
+everything will turn out alright, real hope means persevering with love in the
+knowledge that things will not turn out alright, at least for a while. Aragorn
+at the Black Gate. Leaves me with a question: does true hope require us to have
+faith that things will turn out alright _eventually_, even if on the other side
+of the catastrophe?
+
+I was mostly struck by the hopefulness. @{kvandal-2025} had led me to expect XR
+folk to have no hope for change, but I never found that. Everyone has hope that
+things can change. Sam Knights, an editor an prominent XR organiser who opened
+with the first essay, said: we did our homework, we organised a civil
+disobedience campaign, we got an audience with politicians, we got Parliament to
+declare a climate crisis. We have demands for politicians. We think if we keep
+fighting we can win. Many contributors, especially in the second half about
+practical action, emphasised the need for joy at protests: bring cake, give
+police flowers, make sure it's a place that young, old and vulnerable people are
+happy to be, serve rice and dal to fellow rebels, play music and dance.
+
+Jim Bendell's essay perhaps shows what kind of 'hopelessness' @{kvandal-2025}
+was referring to. He used to think we could prevent catastrophe, but now
+predicts social breakdown in most countries by 2030, and says he may not grow
+old. He compares the realisation to Dostoevsky's false execution, saying he got
+an intensified experience of the present. He thinks that once we drop false
+hopes, we can live in the present with integrity. ('False hope' refers to belief
+that we can avoid catastrophe.) We should prepare for the inevitable disaster
+that's headed our way. We should not sacrifice our values to do whatever it
+takes to avoid the disaster, because our values are worth keeping and the
+disaster is inevitable anyway. Despair is inevitable, but love is the way
+through despair.
+
+I don't think this is a hopeless narrative. There are things worth keeping,
+which we can keep: love, integrity, experiencing the present. The 'false hope'
+is the belief that things will be alright, which in my view is a shallow kind of
+hope right from the start: real hope means perseverance in the face of
+difficulty, and that's just what Jim advocates for. Seeing that things are in
+fact pretty dreadful, and then resolving to live by what is right anyway, seems
+strikingly similar to the rhetoric of John's Apocalypse. I also thought of
+Aragorn's speech at the Black Gate, after he had seen Frodo's mail shirt and
+been convincingly lied to that Frodo had been captured. It is a stark contrast
+to the kind of 'hope' inspired by some folk who think we can stop the disaster.
+It does also express a lack of faith in the establishment. (Like John…?)
+
+Dougald Hine had a rather different kind of hope, a helpful contrast. He says,
+to survive, the impossible must happen, but we can have hope, because we can see
+signs that we live in times where the impossible happens (Brexit, Trump,
+Corbyn). He also criticised the 'sustainability' discourse behind 'plant 8
+billion trees and then we can carry on as normal', and says that 'carry on as
+normal' is not desirable in 21st-century politics. Tweaking the market, fuel
+duty, not adequate. He complained about the 'disenchantment of politics by
+economics.' His hope is that we can avert disaster by overturning the political
+system. This doesn't have the resigned pessimism to resilience move of Jim, and
+instead it promotes revolution to get change to avoid the catastrophe. It
+strikes me that Jim is much more apocalyptic than Dougald for this reason.
+
+The Apocalypse came up twice. Once, Ted Silverberg, who survived a forest fire
+in California, said of the experience 'it feels like the Apocalypse; black,
+burned and decimated … a devastating emptiness … like a hydrogen bomb … the end
+of the world.' Rowan Williams in his Afterword said that this book is not an
+apocalypse (or a jeremiad) because it expresses conviction that things can
+change. Part of me thinks, has he read the Apocalypse? But I suppose one could
+argue that the rhetoric of the Apocalypse is to get people to endure inevitable
+suffering rather than work to avert suffering, maybe that's his point. (But
+really, has he read Jeremiah?)
+
+Jay Griffiths had some striking mythical language describing a protest: 'Ancient
+values are overtly resurrected in this Easter rebellion in London: the values of
+chivalry and honour, faith in life and being service to Our Lady, Notre Dame,
+Mother Earth, the mother on whom everything else depends.' The police loved
+looking after us in our cells and said 'God bless' to us on the way out.
+Exemplifies how mythical language nests a little context into a bigger context.
+Not entirely intended to be read as 'fictional' I think, with the reference to
+'the mother on whom everything else depends.'
+
+I was struck by how Rowan Williams concluded. In his essay, he emphasised that
+'it might just work', or 'it might not'. Either way, we need to restore an
+intelligent relationship with our world.' Accept the diseased imagination of the
+culture we have created and the death count begins now. Anger, love andjoy may
+be odd bedfellows, but these are the seeds of a future that may offer life --
+not success, but life.
+
 ### @{xr-declaration}
 
 'This is our darkest hour'. 'The science is clear -- we are in the sixth mass