The Great Humbling: Live at Norwich Arts Centre
The Great Humbling
In February this year, we took The Great Humbling into a new format, a live conversation on stage at Norwich Arts Centre as part of the UK tour that Dougald made to launch his book, . It's taken us rather a long time to get the recording edited, but here it is at last. For this live show, Ed and Dougald were joined by two special guests. Charlotte Du Cann is a writer, editor, teacher and lover of all things rooted in Earth and sky. She works as co-director of the Dark Mountain Project and is the author of After Ithaca and 52 Flowers That Shook My World. She has just launched her Substack, , 'a...
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The Great Humbling S4E8: 'We Need to Talk About George'
The Great Humbling
We reach the end of Season 4 of The Great Humbling, though Ed and Dougald start the show with an invitation to a one-off live recording of a special episode with guests Rupert Read and Charlotte Du Cann for those who can join us . As always, we start off by talking about what we've been reading, listening to, watching, imbibing, or otherwise taking on board in ways that get us thinking. Ed has been reading a book called by someone called Dougald Hine. He's also working his way through Susan Cooper's classic series of fantasy novels, . And he recently rewatched Roy Andersson's black...
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The Great Humbling S4E7: 'The Missing Episode'
The Great Humbling
So, here's what happened – after a long break, we sat down in early October to record the seventh episode of this series, but life got in the way and by the time we got around to editing it six weeks later, the world had changed so much that it felt like a historical document. Britain has (yet) another prime minister, Sweden has a government over which the far-right have an unprecedented influence. But here it is, in any case, 'the missing episode', so you can travel back in time and relive the thoughts that were on our minds earlier this autumn. Some shownotes, then... Firstly, a...
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The Great Humbling S4E6: 'Nice to meet you'
The Great Humbling
After twenty-nine episodes recorded through screens and cameras, Ed and Dougald find themselves meeting for the first time and sit down for a conversation beside the mill pond in Loddon, in the garden of the Mill of Impermanence. We hear the unlikely tale of how Dougald found Ed’s fiftieth birthday present, a copy of Uriah Heep’s fifth album, , while en route to a holiday in Great Yarmouth. A chain of serendipitous events leads to the unavoidable conclusion that Yarmouth is the spiritual home of the Great ‘Umbling. This leads to a discussion of ‘serendipity’, the term...
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The Great Humbling S4E5: 'Belief'
The Great Humbling
Dougald poses a big question for this episode: what do we believe in? Ed responds playfully and paradoxically with ‘self-delusion’, citing Robert Trivers work on self-deceit that includes gay pornography and erection-o-meters. And lasers. Here's . Dougald talks about the formative influence of spending the first two-and-a-bit years of his life in the grounds of a theological college and what happened when he told his Sunday school teacher that he didn't find Hell 'a particularly helpful concept’. Does it matter more what we believe, or what our beliefs make us...
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The Great Humbling S4E4: 'Are we going to talk about Ukraine?'
The Great Humbling
We started this podcast in the early weeks of the pandemic, talking about the stories circling around it. A crisis had come out of the corner of almost everyone's field of vision and became, within weeks, the only thing in the news. Two years on, something similar has happened, so we arrived at this episode wondering whether or not to talk about Ukraine. Dougald remembers Ivan Illich's short text, 'The Right to Dignified Silence' (in ), written in support of West German campaigners who refused to enter into a reasoned argument about nuclear weapons, choosing instead to express...
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The Great Humbling S4E3: "Remapping Lava"
The Great Humbling
We’ve been listening back to , almost two years ago, in the early weeks of the time of Covid. Maybe it’s the influence of revisiting those early episodes, or maybe it has to do with Dougald turning up to our January recording with a glass of bubbly in hand, but we find ourselves ranging freely – and at some length – in this conversation we’re calling ‘Remapping Lava’. Before we get onto the main theme of the discussion, we bring back the tradition of asking each other what we’ve been reading or listening to lately that’s got us thinking. Ed talks about , the new...
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The Great Humbling S4E2: "The Commonplace"
The Great Humbling
Dougald and Ed discuss the idea of 'the commonplace' - that which we hold 'in common'. What can a Scandinavian hotel breakfast 'smorgasbord' tell us about our understanding of the commons beyond resources? Can David Graeber shed light on the role of the commons in human cultural history? And where might we find a new commonplace to have and to hold the conversations, and nurture the ideas and practices that really matter?
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The Great Humbling S4E1: 'Confessions'
The Great Humbling
The Great Humbling is back for a fourth series of conversations between Dougald Hine and Ed Gillespie, now as part of the wider patchwork of Homeward Bound. Our theme for this first episode is confessions, but we start by looking back over the summer that’s gone.
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The Great Humbling S3E8: 'Now...breathe!'
The Great Humbling
We wrap up series 3 with some ruminations and reflections on the breathing space post-lockdown, what becomes visible beyond hope, how the dark forests of the internet are perhaps the place to be, and we explore cancel culture and the literature of white liberalism...
info_outlineHow will they look in hindsight, these times we're living through? Is this a midlife crisis on the road to the Star Trek future, or the point at which that story of the future unravelled and we came to see how much it had left out? What if our current crises are neither an obstacle to be overcome, nor the end of the world, but a necessary humbling? With Covid-19 calling into question the ways we have been living, Ed Gillespie and Dougald Hine set out to explore what it means to be humbled.