Echoes Underground

Within the frame of materialism, God does not exist, and if you remain within that frame (as our co-host did until the age of 26) then New Atheism is a compelling and comfortable philosophy. If there’s no evidence for it, no scientific backing for it, it’s meaningless because it can’t affect you. But as you grow older you start to recognise that materialism is its own ism. It’s a model that is use...

Our co-host finds himself in the Western Sahara, the disputed and very deserty region to the South of Morocco. He’s there to kitesurf; conditions in Dakhla are perfect. The water’s flat, the wind is up, the people are hospitable, the food is excellent, and barren wilderness extends for hundreds of miles in every direction. Our other co-host challenges his life decisions, and feigns interest in the...

Our intrepid correspondent attended a football match for the first time, and discovered within himself a surprising affinity for hooliganism. It was a women’s football match, the quarter final of the Champion’s League, Chelsea at home against Barcelona and losing 4-1 (8-2 agg). What did he learn? Firstly, you are not anonymous in the crowd at a football match. The people on the pitch can hear you,...

Ibiza is well-placed to set the stage for an Dionysian experience. It’s laced with history and mythology - there’s a Phonecian necropolis, a cave temple to moon goddess Tanit, and 500 year old forts everywhere, including a massive one overlooking the old town. It’s also laced with bohemian cosmopolitanism. Islands in general are more liberal than the mainland, and this one in particular has long b...

Shamanism has been lurking in the background of our discussions since day one, and our “jingle” is just one of us playing a shaman drum. It was high time we had an episode on it. What is a shaman? We follow Manvir Singh in boiling it down to people who 1) enter non-ordinary states and then 2) engage with unseen realities to 3) provide a service to their community. They have long served an importan...

Our co-host just got back from a work trip to Berlin, and his overwhelming impression was one of shiny scar tissue. All the buildings are new and glass and steel and modern, but the city lacks that sense of deep history and organic development that you get in most European cities. He imagined standing there in 1945, surrounded by absolute devastation, and feeling like he was in year zero. It must...

In the last episode we posited that in order to achieve self actualisation, purpose, or peak experience, you have to risk your more basic needs - food, shelter, safety. We further posited that living damages you. You cannot live without taking damage, whether from the various knocks and blows, mental and physical, or through the process of aging. And the flip side of that is that you cannot live w...

Our co-host’s eye was drawn to a weathered tome in an antiquarian bookshop: The White Monk of Timbuctoo , by William Seabrook. It promised (and delivered) the life story of a French defrocked priest living in great luxury in a mud palace in 1930s Timbuktu, all in electric prose and fitting into a long-standing interest in high-agency colonial Frenchmen doing interesting things in liminal spaces. S...

One of us thought we were going to talk about the nature of nature - what is it we’re thinking about when we think about nature ? The other thought we were going to talk about barefoot shoes for strength training. This is our synthesis. Barefoot shoes promise a return to a “natural” way of walking, to the way we evolved to walk. They’re made from “natural” materials. And “natural” is assumed to be...

We return to our occasional series on Terry Pratchett’s work, but with a difference. The fourth Discworld book, Mort, focuses on a personification of death. We therefore use it as a jumping off point to discuss personifications, and the personification of death in particular through history. We probably end up spending more time on the Iliad and the Aeneid than on Mort. The Greeks did not have a p...

What do we learn from a museum? What knowledge is conveyed when you look at an object? Put a bunch of school children in the Egypt room at the British Museum… are they gaining any propositional knowledge about Ancient Egypt? Or are they actually gaining something more valuable, more visceral? Inspired by a recent day out wandering around some of Oxford’s more random museums (Museum of the History...

We read Meditations on Violence by Sgt Rory Miller, a US corrections officer and martial artist, discovered in some Reddit argument on martial arts. We absolutely tore through it, sub 24 hours, on a weekday too, day job in disarray. Miller is one of the men who is sent into a prison riot to sort it out, a member of that class of humans who confront violence every day so the rest of us don’t have t...

Artem, guest extraordinaire, is back. He made us read Martin Heidegger’s essay The Age of the World Picture , and in this episode he achieves the impossible. Under his patient tutelage what had previously been an impenetrable, fastidious German hallucination became clear, meaningful, even actionable Heidegger’s work does not stand alone - he’s building on millennia of philosophical tradition, most...

Is opera the pinnacle of high culture, or a boring anachronism? One of us has enjoyed some excellent recent operas at Covent Garden, the other’s exposure to the artform was a single regrettable unstaged Wagner playthrough at the Albert Hall. Both of us have had a couple of drinks. The problem is that opera is not really an English artform - the Royal Opera House was better known for pantomime unti...

Our co-host has experienced the first stirrings of a desire to become a bird watcher. How did this happen? He looked out of the window, and saw what he now knows to be pied wagtails. They were flitting around the bins, darting around, wagging their tails, and he thought they were very charming and fascinating and lovely. They were quick, their quickness was mesmeric. He looked them up, found that...

Why are neither of us particularly interested in competitive sport? We’re both keen if beginner jiu jitsu white belts, and the sport spends a lot of time pushing you to compete - but neither of us is particularly interested in this. Are we just cowardly and intimidated, afraid of public humiliation, or are we actually in the right? Does competition warp sports and activities away from what’s actua...

Why is Pilate the only normal human being to be mentioned in the Nicean Creed? It’s an interesting selection of detail in a short and technical statement of theological belief to focus on the colonial governor who, under substantial local pressure, sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion. For 1,700 years, Christians the world over have repeated every Sunday the words “crucified under Pontius Pilat...

In Praise of Shadows is an essay on aesthetics by a Japanese man of letters, Junichiro Tanizaki. This was written in 1933 between the Meiji Revolution and the Second World War - the old Japan is still there, with the new Japan growing on top of it but not yet reaching its fiery apotheosis. He starts with the loo, and how great old Japanese lavatories are, wooden and outside, in nature, places of r...

What was it like to live in a culture where blood sacrifice was a part of everyday life? Sacrifice was ubiquitous across all human cultures until very recently, but we have lost that visceral knowledge of how it felt and what it meant and as a result have a gap in our models of how people in the past experienced the world. Why were people in the ancient world cutting the throats of bulls, digging...

This is our 26th episode, and we have not taken a single step to promote this podcast. These things are quite a lot of effort to record, edit and release to the public, we created an entire website and brand pack - why can’t we bring ourselves to tweet about it, or to generally hustle to bring in numbers? What’s going on with that psychologically? We both have an absolute horror at promoting ourse...

How do we know that the fall of Rome in 479 AD was 1,546 years ago? Empires have risen and fallen since then, a dark age took place, historical records are fragmentary, not continuous, and they are often politically motivated or even fabricated. Do we really have any confidence that the Earth has gone round the Sun 1,546 times since Rome fell? Can we really trust the historical timeline? There are...

We have our first guest! Artem is a philosopher of corporate ethics with an academic background in economics, and he’s helping us explore what money is. How do we even go about answering this question? Money is magic, it’s invisible, Marx spoke of the “alchemy of money”. We can trace the history of money, but to do that we already need a theory of what money is so that we can identify it in the hi...

Did life develop on Earth, or did it come from the stars? Is outer space actually teeming with life? One of our hosts spent the week down the Chandra Wickramasinge internet rabbithole and has some Opinions. The idea of panspermia is that life is everywhere across the universe. More specifically, if abiogenesis did happen, it probably happened elsewhere, and there is life on Earth simply because li...

What’s gone wrong with the Church of England? We read a Spectator article by Marcus Walker about the process of becoming a bishop, which has become highly bureaucratic and secular - you are put on a management fast track and then hilariously have to apply for a Bishop job when it comes up. And this is what the Church of England has become - the way it is run is basically nothing to do with Christi...

Why are so many rocks in the Arabian desert covered in ancient graffiti? And why is so much of this graffiti lists of ancestors? We coincidentally both read the same paper by Michael C.A. MacDonald , a complete legend, and it sparked an interesting chain of thought. An oral society is not less sophisticated than a literate one. You lose a lot of value when you switch to literacy. In particular, yo...