I mentioned in a recent post that my mother died at the end of last year. This has imposed a certain amount of emotional and bureaucratic labour on me – one reason why I’ve been a bit less active on this blog of late. But now that she’s with the ancestors, I want to write something about ancestral connection in present times, taking my mother’s life as my starting point.
My mother was the eleventh and youngest child of Mary and James. James spent his working life as a coalminer in South Yorkshire. His great grandfather, John, was born in 1799 and farmed eight acres near Aberdeen – the last of my direct ancestors to my knowledge who worked primarily on the land. Mary’s father died in the Peckfield Colliery Disaster of 1896 when she was a month old. His name was William Sheldon. You can read about him here.
The Wikipedia entry about the disaster doesn’t mention this and I don’t know if it’s true, but a story handed down to me from my mother is that the colliery owners paid off the widows of the dead men up to the point in their shift when they were killed, and then left them to pick up the pieces (though it seems they stumped up 5% of the relief money later collected for the families. Thanks guys).
I often hear it said that we shouldn’t romanticise the vanished rural world of people like my thrice-great grandfather John. It’s true enough. But nor should we romanticise the industrial world of people like my great grandfather William. This is the world most of us still inhabit today.
Perhaps some would argue that deaths like William’s were a price worth paying to build the healthier and wealthier society of present-day Britain. I can’t share this view. Partly because of the way it treats certain people – working-class people in Britain, and in other parts of the world touched by British colonialism, and in the parts of the world today where people do dangerous work to furnish service to British consumers – as dispensable. And also because it seems to me this narrative arc of health and wealth is built on a lie of ever-compounding energy and wellbeing whose dark untruth smokes from the very stuff my great grandfather hewed from the earth, and from accompanying fictions like trickledown economics. I don’t think his and other deaths are a price worth paying for a few generations of high-carbon consumerism.
My mother told me that a pithead siren marked the changing of the shifts in the mining village where she grew up. If there was an accident in the mine, the siren would sound to summon rescuers. When they heard it at these irregular times, children in the local school like my mother knew that their fathers might be injured or dead.
I think my mother carried a certain stress and sadness with her. I wonder if some of it stemmed from such traumas of our present industrial age manifested so viscerally within her family and her environment.
My book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future was published about five months before my mother died. She asked if she could listen to the audiobook version, but I couldn’t find any tech that she could realistically manage by herself to play it. Her mind and memory remained sharp enough to the end, but simple devices like phones and remote controls got harder for her even so, and my visits were increasingly taken up with more pragmatic aspects of her care. I regret I didn’t make a better effort for her to hear my book, but in what proved the last night of her life I had nothing to do except be there with her. She was unresponsive by then, but I picked up the copy of my book I’d given her and read a few pages. I doubt my book will feature in too many deathbed reckonings, but it’s featured in at least one.
The main cause of death noted on her death certificate is a degenerative condition with a fancy-sounding medical name, but ‘Frailty of old age’ is also recorded. The latter will do, I think. She had lost meaningful connection with the world of busy people, and of busy things like smartphones and Bluetooth earbuds. It was as if she’d mentally decided to die, but it took her body a little while to come up with a physical excuse for it. And her fighting spirit wasn’t quite at peace with the decision.
While this was going on in my private life, Saying NO… was trying to make its way in the world of public debate. This brought me into conflict with two high-profile men, one a sometime radical who seems to be moving rapidly if unwittingly towards congruence with neoliberalism, at least in its tamed 21st century “private sector innovation within the matrix of government is saving the planet and helping the poor” styling, the other a conservative once in the thick of the spikier anti-statist neoliberalism of the Thatcher/Reagan moment, who now espouses heavy state regulation to deal with the problems of the present. Both men have said that radical change to the status quo is necessary to address climate change and other challenges. Both men have also taken exception to my argument that once the fossil economies that were built on the labour of people like my maternal ancestors become untenable, deurbanization is the likely result.
In the 1960s, the decade in which my mother became a mother, rural people outnumbered urban people worldwide by nearly two to one. Now there are about four urban dwellers for every three rural ones. It’s a massive change, but a very recent one, and it’s relied on abundant supplies of cheap capital, energy and water that our descendants are unlikely to be able to rely on in their turn.
Those who say that radical changes are necessary to meet the challenges of our times but can only treat with scorn the possibility that part of those changes might involve reversing the breakneck capitalist urbanization of recent decades do not strike me as people who are genuinely wrestling with the enormity of the changes upon us. They strike me as people who are desperately trying to cling to the status quo. In contrast to my mother’s individual death, I think the body of our collective contemporary world political economy is manifestly dying, while its mind in the form of its public culture is largely in denial. But the denial can’t mask the frailty of old age in our political economy. As I’ve argued elsewhere, I believe a major thing that lies behind this is a fear of individual death – an inability to face what becoming an ancestor involves, which means in turn an inability to honour our own ancestors.
I’ve spent too much time fruitlessly arguing against this ecomodernist creed. I want to turn now to better honouring the ancestors so as to be the best ancestor I can be to any future descendants who might have need of me – the kind of work charted in books like Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity. This is painstaking work of long-term cultural renewal that no one person can achieve, and that cannot be framed in terms of quick-fix solutionism or three-point plans for saving modern urban humanity in the final chapter of a book.
A critic of mine has described me as a ‘lost man’. Although I need to care a bit less what people say about me, I find this description quite sweetly engaging, and one I can embrace. Yes, I do feel lost in contemporary modernist culture, in what seem to me its petty concerns, its self-aggrandizing narratives and its telling silences. I’m not the only one who feels lost in it, but currently perhaps we’re in the minority. Patronising as it may sound, I think many who don’t consider themselves to be lost in it look pretty lost to me, the more so as they stridently affirm its bright future and the bold directions they believe it to be taking.
I’m currently reading Noreen Masud’s extraordinary book, A Flat Place. She describes how in Pakistan, the country where she grew up that was created in 1947 as an artefact of British colonialism, people have never found an answer to what it means to be Pakistani. The country, she says, is stuck in a postcolonial drift where “in the absence of concrete answers, modern Pakistan is constructed on acts of exclusion which are both extremely strict and extremely vague” (p.105). I believe this will ultimately be the fate of most countries, with catastrophic consequences, unless their peoples find better ways to connect with their ancestors, and to connect with themselves as ancestors.
‘Better’ does not mean more adoring, more romanticised, more nostalgic or more sacralising. But I’m done with the colonial arrogance of modernist thought in its conviction that lives past and present geared to local material livelihood-making must always and inherently be more miserable and limited than modern urban-industrial lives. It seems unlikely to me that many of the modern-day technological appurtenances so baffling to my mother will count among the gifts that present generations hand on to succeeding ones. And equally unlikely that the pursuit of greater primary energy supplies or more and cheaper food will deliver the gift of increased wellbeing to them – the historical precedents on that score really aren’t that good. What will count among our gifts instead seems to me an increasingly urgent question, to which our civilisation needs to find better answers than its present ones.
So once I have properly buried my dead, honoured what I can honour in contemporary culture and laid to rest in my mind its profound busyness with things that seem to me to have lost meaningful connection with anything that much matters, I will start afresh with some new writing projects, beginning here on this website. Slowly. Scratching for a long-term cultural reckoning with past, present and future, and not trumpeting some brash solution to the problems of modernism conjured from its own ageing box of tricks.
Current reading
Carwyn Graves Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape
Noreen Masud A Flat Place
