Doomsday Prepping with Elizabeth Oldfield & David Blower

From PASSIO #14: How do we live in the face of uncertainty, fear, and the end of the world as we've known it?

This post is adapted from our brand new print edition PASSIO — pick up a limited edition copy yourself here.

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There’s a lot of anxiety in this cultural moment. Not so long ago, some social scientists thought we’d reached the ‘end of history’. Today, our certainty and confidence has crumbled. Questions of human extinction wander through common discourse; and even if that sounds rather extreme, the feeling of helplessness amid overlapping crises is difficult to shake.

How do we make sense of it all? Will the stories that we hold dear and live out crumble under the pressure? Or are there, in fact, tools buried in the backyards of our traditions that can help us through this new era?

We invited authors, podcasters (and Substack-ers!) Elizabeth Oldfield and David Benjamin Blower to share a conversation on this apocalyptic age: the stress of uncertainty, the potency of faith, and whether we should stock up on lentils.

Elizabeth Oldfield & David Benjamin Blower — photography by Jude Aytoun

DAVID BLOWER: Have you ever considered yourself a doomsday prepper?

ELIZABETH OLDFIELD: I think so. It’s kind of a joke in my house that I have prepper tendencies. I’m a planner and a problem solver, so when I’m in high anxiety it’s what I go to, to feel in control.

I did have a very long conversation with a man about digging a well at our house, in Peckham. And I will go down Google rabbit holes about which seeds have the longest storage capacities.

A bit of my mind is constantly trying to protect our future selves from the ‘apocalypse’; by which I mean the falling apart of all of the systems that support our lives. And I am, honestly, in quite a lot of tension and confusion about what is a legitimate response to the times we are in, and what is a slightly idolatrous or neurotic anxiety response.

DAVID: Oh, you really are a doomsday Prepper…

ELIZABETH: I don’t follow through on most of it! But I would, left to my own devices, if I didn’t live with some quite sane housemates.

DAVID: I don’t think I am a doomsday prepper. I’m just a doomsday…

ELIZABETH: …Prophet?

DAVID: Well, my approach to an unstable world has been to embrace disaster, almost before it’s happened. So I’m kind of the Eeyore of the religious gloom spectrum.

ELIZABETH: You’re just surfing the waves, surrendering.

DAVID: I don’t want to live in perpetual anxiety about what’s going to happen. It’s like when someone’s got a rubber band cocked and everyone’s wincing. I want to accept that the rubber band is going to ping, and that that’s okay.

ELIZABETH: And that’s why I’m not a full blown prepper. The part of my brain that’s deeply rooted in my tradition knows that this is not humanly controllable. 

Part of what’s got us into this mess is thinking that we can fix everything, and control everything—that by the power of our brains, ability and logistical acumen, we can prevent disasters. 

The process of living with uncertainty, and living in the tension of not knowing what the future holds, is what I need in those moments. I also do buy two large bags of lentils sometimes, but mainly I’m trying to surrender to the not-knowing.

DAVID: It’s an ambiguous space between madness and sanity, because preparing for an unstable future is a very sane thing to do, isn’t it?

ELIZABETH: Yes. I think it’s a mixture of the actual facts of the situation, and a temperamental personality thing: the way I would deal with things is to project into the future, work out the worst case scenario, make a plan of what I would do, and then I can stop thinking about it. 

But am I making a plan for what to do with climate catastrophe? My brain’s not capable of that. We’ve never been able to predict the future, and even less so now. There’s more variables. There’s more chaos in the system. Whenever someone around me predicts 20 years into the future—as if the world will broadly be as it is now—my brain’s going no mate! My level of trust that the current systems and processes in which we function will still be in existence in two decades is very low, and I don’t have a way of knowing how rational or logical that is.

DAVID: I can’t decide if the complexities unraveling are becoming more overwhelmingly complicated every five years, or if I’m just getting older. There’s a voice of reason that comes to me sometimes and says: well, everything’s always changing, and everything’s always on an edge in one way or another. I think that’s true, in a sense. 

“Everything’s always changing.. but then I also think that history goes in complicated webs of gathering anxieties, that reach breaking points.”
[ David Blower ]

I hear the voice of Ecclesiastes: the rain’s always falling, going down the river into the sea and back to the start of the river again. But then I also think that history goes in complicated webs of gathering contradictions and anxieties that do reach breaking points. 

I’ve always been quite drawn to apocalyptic religious texts, which tend to be talking about times that are full of contradictions which are definitely going to break at some point. My religious background was mostly quite middle-of-the-road middle-class evangelical. So quite quietest, and not into that fanciful stuff. But I was quite glad to encounter the people at the charismatic fringes who had a twinkle in their eye: an Aslan’s coming back to Narnia kind of feeling about them. 

ELIZABETH: Interesting. And how do you think that interacted with your temperament?

DAVID: Well, the danger for me is that I’m just looking for it. I need to see the disaster before it’s coming to feel safe. When the disaster comes—even if it destroys everything—I’m alright with it, as long as I saw it coming.

ELIZABETH: We’re so much about expectations, aren’t we? In my head, worrying about the future is a useful activity, because I am grieving all the things that we’re going to lose, in advance. 

I don’t know that that’s actually going to make it any easier. I think it’s just a psychological coping mechanism. I’m pretty clear that the Scriptures do not think that worrying is a useful activity.

DAVID: I love Marshall Mcluhan. He wrote something that stays with me all the time. He says artists are always making Noah’s arks: models of ways into the future, around the kind of the traumas that the present is throwing at us. It makes me feel a little better because it means it’s instinctive and natural to be seeking the ways through.

ELIZABETH: This is part of why we now live in community. I genuinely do think that reimagining how we live together, to disrupt and rebel against some of the systems of ownership and individualism that are driving some of this—and will be of no use to us in times of crisis—is a good thing. 

Sometimes that’s the language we use: not just wanting to build an ark for us and our own family, but to create some blueprints to change what’s imaginable for people, about how we live and what it might mean. To actually relearn some of the things that our ancestors knew, and recover this incredibly bright thread in the tapestry of the Church’s history—about not seeking individual prosperity and comfort and convenience and safety, but coming together to be each other’s safety. That’s where I try to channel the anxiety towards the creative ark-building Marshall McLuhan bit.

DAVID: I want to ask more about your community but before I do, I want to ask about the conversations you have with people on The Sacred. It’s a rare podcast for me, because I’m just as likely to be in staunch disagreement with whoever you’re talking to, as in agreement, because you speak to people from totally different standpoints. I’m wondering, do you see forms of doomsday-prepping coming up in conversations you have with people there? 

ELIZABETH: Interesting. I hadn’t seen it through that frame before. I think what I see is that everyone is anxious about the future in some way, but the stories that people tell us are so different. 

The “end of the world”, or the decline of civilization, for someone who’s really worried about identitarian ways of framing our conversations, or changing understandings of gender, or the decline of the family—they feel threatened and destabilized by those changes and a sense that we’re coming apart, and that the ways that we understand the world and our maps of meaning are being deliberately shredded, and we need to stop it. 

And then a different tribe won’t be focusing on these changes. They won’t go, “Oh, we’ve made all these gains! Isn’t it great? The world is improving!” Instead, they think the other guys are shredding the maps of meaning and ruining the world and taking us back into the “Dark Ages,” and we’re about to be in The Handmaid’s Tale.

It’s a negativity bias in some ways. But it’s really hard for human beings to focus on what we have received. What are the gifts that are already in our hands? Where have we moved towards justice, or moved towards each other in any way?

We scan for threats. Those are the things we’re looking for, and depending on where you’re coming from, the threats are different, but everyone is looking for them, and often the threat is each other. That’s the thing that I’m really trying to surface in The Sacred. It is possible that the threat is not each other, and that we need to decouple our sense of the world going in the wrong direction from people who are different from us, because that is actually accelerating this process.

DAVID: There’s a tendency, when facing possible catastrophes, that we tribalize around the kind of future that we want, and we tribalize against the kind of future that we don’t want, and against the people who represent that. So there’s a crowd mentality which leads us into the kind of culture wars that we’re presently in.

The Sacred is one thing that makes me want to see that as a possible gift. When open hostility happens, then there’s something to try and understand. There’s some side of a story that I’m ignorant of. There’s some experience that’s insensible to me. So, there’s an opportunity to do something: but that opportunity is so rarely taken, and the tools for turning that apocalyptic adversarial tension into something generative are hard to find.

ELIZABETH: Yes… and no. I write about this in my book Fully Alive, especially in the chapter on wrath: the way we have an instinctive preference for people like us. “P.L.M.” John Yates calls it. It’s a constant across cultures. It’s a constant across societies. Humans have a preference for people like themselves, and healthy societies moderate this by common institutions and common life. 

Unhealthy societies, like ours, weaponise this against us for the profits of global corporations. And, for people like us, the syndrome is accelerated hugely by fight or flight. The more anxiety that is circulating in the system, the easier it will be to retreat into our tribes. 

“I think that everyone is anxious about the future in some way, but the stories people tell us are so different.”
[ Elizabeth Oldfield ]

But it’s one of the things that I find most radical and compelling about the Christian nonviolent tradition. I really do think it’s the medicine for this. It works, and it is ridiculously applicable at entry level. We can do these really small practices: changing how we respond to people who are not like us, and noticing when we’re in fight or flight; short-circuiting some of those dynamics. 

You’re right, it’s not a set of habits that lots of people know how to apply, but it is part of our inheritance as the Church. It is something that we have stewarded, and can grow in and embody, as we have done at our best over the centuries. It’s not that I feel hopeful that everyone’s suddenly going to start turning the other cheek. But there have been historical moments of radical change, where people decided to act differently. I do think it’s possible, and it’s one way I try and respond to this doomsday prepper tendency in me, to go: right, here is one thing that I do know helps. How can I be someone who passes it hand to hand?

DAVID: Are there particular examples that you draw on?

ELIZABETH: The ones that people already know, most obviously the civil rights movement. The bare knuckle fight that took place in the center of that movement, between Martin Luther King’s vision—this incredibly radical vision of love, love of enemy—and the people that thought enemy-love was weak and undermining of the cause. I hadn’t really realized how much in question that was, and how hard he and a very small number of people fought for it. 

There’s Gandhi. There’s the anti-apartheid movement. And then there’s all these quieter examples of reconciliation. There’s an example from Turkish politics, of the reaction of a small party against the ideological Erdogan’s party, that responded to violence in the streets with love. 

And then I write about lots of very, very small things; about when I’ve been attacked, and how you can turn that dynamic around really, really fast by just not getting back, and responding with curiosity and empathy instead. They’re ridiculously low budget examples. But I know that it works, because I’ve seen it again and again and again. We can choose to respond differently. 

DAVID: My mind is drawn to a recent crisis here in the UK: the far-Right riots and the counter-demonstrations from August. One of my interpretations of the present moment of collapse would be the end of Modernity’s various structures. The nation State doesn’t really work in the way that it used to. It’s been a basic political unit for hundreds of years. But people and money and information move through borders easily now, and it’s very difficult to police that. You become a tyrant if you try.

I think that creates anxiety in the system. When the structures that used to hold the world together don’t work in the way they once did, it creates fear, especially for people on an economic edge. That kind of fear is easily exploited.

Now there’s the desire to get Far-Right politics off our streets, quite naturally. But also, I’m interested in longer-term questions. You can chase this off the streets, but the discontent is still all there. There’s still 4 million people, I think, who voted for the far-Right Reform party in the last election. Possibly more in the next. You have to start asking the question, well, what do I not know about the lives of people who feel this way? How do I get to know those people?

ELIZABETH: I am currently looking for Sacred guests that will help me understand this: people who are committed to voting for Trump in the next American election, for example. I’m trying to build the trust for people to actually talk to me. Given what I already represent tribally to so many people, it’s a bit of an uphill battle.

DAVID: Let’s talk about your micro-community. Are there other doomsday-preppers?

ELIZABETH: I would say two of us are pretty negative about the future, and the other two: that’s not at the top of their list of concerns or motivations for what we’re doing.

DAVID: Common living becomes a necessity in some ways, doesn’t it…

ELIZABETH: I mean, it’s not a necessity in the real sense. But one of our drivers was that we couldn’t afford to stay in the city that we felt rooted in, and committed to, without doing something more creative. Part of the story that I sometimes tell is that we will all be forced to do this. Let’s learn how to do it well; not in a panic. Let’s create some things that can be passed along, some institutional knowledge. Or, more humbly, let’s recapture all the institutional knowledge that’s already around and make it more accessible.

Elizabeth Oldfield’s garden — photography by Jude Aytoun

DAVID: You have a small blue chapel at the back of the garden. Do you guys have a rhythm of prayer, or a rule of life, or any of those kinds of things?

ELIZABETH: Yeah, both of those things. It’s quite a strong structure. We pray morning prayer on Mondays, and compline on Monday nights. We have these open-table Monday night dinners, every other week. On Wednesdays we have house night, which is relational time for the housemates. On Friday mornings we read the Bible aloud together. 

One Saturday a month we do a creative house day. They go back and forth between being just us, and being more open. It might be a gardening day, or the kids might make a plan. There’s often a lot of baking and films involved. But it’s really about having fun together, because fun is something we want to be baked into our rule of life. 

We eat together every night, if people are in; and one person cooks. Someone else does the shopping. Then on Sunday evenings we have, essentially, a meeting for all the admin questions.

We have collective finances, but not fully; we have our own bank accounts. Honestly, though, fewer and fewer things are coming out of the individual accounts, and more and more things are coming out of the joint one, and the proportion of our money that we’re putting into the joint account is going up.

It all came out of asking: what are the values, and what are the virtues that we want to be growing into together? And how do we structure our time to make those top of the list, and stop them being swept to the side? For us, those things are prayer, hospitality, creativity, and celebration. It is an enormous gift. I love it. I think everyone should have a rule of life.

DAVID: Can you say a bit about the process? Was it difficult to agree on a structure? How did you agree together that you wanted a rule of life? There’s a kind of almost monastic, or pseudo-monastic kind of feeling to what goes on here.

ELIZABETH: We’d all brushed up against the edges of the New Monastic thing from the 90s and 00s. There’s a guy called Francis Chan, who’d influenced our housemates, who has done experiments in something similar. And then two of our housemates had been in Christian community houses before. So we were bringing some experience of different rhythms. 

We spent a year before we moved in together, doing a lot of talking and praying and thinking, and trying to work out if we were aligned, and what the vision was. We visited a bunch of other communities to see how they did things. So we had an idea of what we would want the community to look like before we moved in. 

Then we moved in, and it was the beginning of lockdown number three, and we had four months locked in the house together, seeing no one else, and it was very, very helpful for rapidly iterating what the rule would be, what the rhythms were; what was working, what wasn’t working. It was lots of talking and shaping and adjusting to get to where we are today.

DAVID: I’ve become interested in monastic forms of life and rules of life as a kind of a very long, slow, calm approach to troubled times. I think it does the same thing that Marshall Mcluhan thinks art does: it has its own form that’s kind of independent from the entangling and overwhelming complexity of everything else. That enables it to gently outlast certain things, perhaps.

“What are the virtues that we want to be growing into together? How do we structure our time to stop them being swept to the side?”
[ Elizabeth Oldfield ]

ELIZABETH: One of our inspirations was Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue, which, even in the 1970s reads like the world is falling apart at the seams. All the way through, he goes back to the rule of St. Benedict and looks at the way monastic communities functioned after the fall of the Roman Empire. 

There were multiple things that drove the history of the monastic movement, but one of them was that the systems that had structured society were falling apart. And then we went into the so-called “dark ages,” and these monasteries of religious brothers or religious sisters functioned like arks. They were the places where all the ancient texts were stored. The writings that were then rediscovered in the Renaissance were kept in the libraries of these monasteries. It’s where literacy survived. It’s where medical knowledge survived, in these intentional communities of people who had committed to live in these rigorous, and sometimes corrupted, but continually reforming monastic communities. 

So I feel exactly the same way, and it’s one of the texts we go back to. MacIntyre says we now need a new St. Benedict, because the forms and systems and structures of society that we expected to last are falling away. It relates to Dougald Hines’ question: how do you make good ruins? How will these local forms of solidarity and society help us take what we need from this world into the next world, rather than desperately trying to patch up something that’s falling apart? 

What gives me steadiness and hope is this sense that the tradition I have received is an apocalyptic tradition; that Christians have lived through many ends of the world. And, at our best, we have put our roots down deep into love, and that love is stronger than death, maybe even stronger than the death of this earth.

DAVID: I think that is a good note to land on.

You can find Elizabeth Oldfield on Substack, and hosting the excellent podcast ‘The Sacred’. Her new book ‘Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times’ is out now, available everywhere in print, digital and audio editions. David Blower produces the deeply thoughtful ‘Messianic Folklore’ podcast — and you can find him on Substack too.

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