Speaker 1: Hello. This is my podcast. It's called Cool People Who
Speaker 1: Did Cool Stuff. I'm Martint gil Joy. I'm the host
Speaker 1: of podcast. My guest today is John Darnielle. He writes
Speaker 1: songs and books and if you haven't read the book
Speaker 1: All from Right, then you're missing out. John. How are
Speaker 1: you doing today? In decent? I'm keeping busy, but I'm good.
Speaker 1: And we have Sophie on the call. Who is our producer?
Speaker 1: How are you, Sophie? I'm doing well. Margaret, how are you?
Speaker 1: I'm okay? I think Garrett, I'm not sure if I said.
Speaker 1: If you want to know more about Sophie's job as
Speaker 1: a producer, you should watch the nine seven mel Brooks
Speaker 1: documentary called The Producers. It's all about Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's like they stole my life and put it into
Speaker 1: a documentary called The Producers. Yeah yeah, which is true
Speaker 1: in music production as well. I believe all producers are
Speaker 1: just mel Brooks. Okay. We also have Ian as our
Speaker 1: editor and our theme music is by a woman, and
Speaker 1: you should check out more music by women. So today
Speaker 1: is part two of our two part series on those
Speaker 1: wacky religious radicals of the English Civil War, the Levelers,
Speaker 1: the Diggers and the ranters. And in part one we
Speaker 1: talked about the levelers, who don't really seem all that
Speaker 1: radical by today's standards, but who put their bodies on
Speaker 1: the line for a republic instead of the dictatorship that
Speaker 1: they got. But today I want to talk about people
Speaker 1: who took things a step further, the diggers who wanted
Speaker 1: to abolish private property, and the ranters who didn't believe
Speaker 1: there was such thing as sin, very theologically based. Have
Speaker 1: you ever heard much about the Diggers? Uh? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you're across their name a lot, but I mean
Speaker 1: I never have pursued it that much, in part because
Speaker 1: this is a there's an English movement, right yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So I mean I've heard about it, but I haven't.
Speaker 1: I'm not an English history uh you know, in the
Speaker 1: history expert in any way. So so yeah, so I
Speaker 1: know roughly like what space they occupied politically, but but
Speaker 1: it's about it. Yeah, that makes sense. I I kind
Speaker 1: of had this like distaste for English history and was
Speaker 1: like much more into Irish history and things like that,
Speaker 1: and then, um, honestly, hearing about some of the complexities
Speaker 1: the English Civil War was the first time I was like, oh, right,
Speaker 1: there's actually really interesting stuff going on with all of that.
Speaker 1: It is it's uh, it can be quite arcane, and
Speaker 1: there's so a few points of reasons. And history is
Speaker 1: like history always refers to itself, right, So at the
Speaker 1: time you're by the time your ten in the US,
Speaker 1: whatever country you grow up, and you have some basics
Speaker 1: we can talk about whether or not you know, it's
Speaker 1: basically good. They always bear some interrogation, but you know,
Speaker 1: at the very least the governing myths, right, and so
Speaker 1: whereas uh, most of English history there's no reason really
Speaker 1: for us to learn that less we're curious, right, So yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: And then there's the sort of like it's the land
Speaker 1: of myths, like you know, I kind of I like
Speaker 1: English history and that I liked when I was a kid.
Speaker 1: I liked things of swords in them. You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not actually yeah, um which actually you know actually
Speaker 1: is to deal with the whole world actually has a
Speaker 1: lot of really interesting sword time and stuff. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: but the thing is with a lot of English history,
Speaker 1: if it's pre if it's prior to the modern era,
Speaker 1: it's prior to you know, good documentation. It why it
Speaker 1: turns out to be French history, you know. So yeah, well,
Speaker 1: there's a major theme in my new book is that,
Speaker 1: you know, we think of English castles, but the castle
Speaker 1: is unquestionably a Norman import. You can't you can't find
Speaker 1: a castle prior to the French building castles. But the
Speaker 1: English tradition of the English castle is very much you know,
Speaker 1: that's this English thing and it's probably I think it
Speaker 1: might actually be Saxon eventually. But um, but there was
Speaker 1: a lot of argument about this in the forties, fifties
Speaker 1: and sixties about you know, no, no, the English had
Speaker 1: their own castles. Who don't and there's no was a
Speaker 1: Norman import. So what that does to English prehistory, to
Speaker 1: the stuff that you know, to the myths is as well.
Speaker 1: You know, this is a big thing in Devil House
Speaker 1: in my new book, that King Arthur, King Arthur has
Speaker 1: a castle and the knights of the Round Table lived there, right,
Speaker 1: but King Arthur. Yeah, but no, The thing is there
Speaker 1: probably was a King Arthur, but he was English, right,
Speaker 1: and he reigned in England before there were castles in England, right,
Speaker 1: and before there were kings who ruled England, right, So
Speaker 1: so all all this stuff is maybe not No, he
Speaker 1: would have he would have predated Alfred. So, um, I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm not a king's guy, do you know me speaking?
Speaker 1: But I did a lot of work on this, and like,
Speaker 1: so so what what what A lot of these kings
Speaker 1: turned out to be rather is local things, right th
Speaker 1: h E g N and if you know the term.
Speaker 1: But they're trying to be things, you know, and their
Speaker 1: castle was probably like slightly less modest dwelling than everybody else's.
Speaker 1: You know. It's like this stuff is very interesting to me.
Speaker 1: So yeah, well that's a good pitch. That's actually, Um,
Speaker 1: I've read two of your books. I don't actually remember
Speaker 1: how many novels you have out, um, but I have
Speaker 1: not read Devil House yet. So this is telling me
Speaker 1: that there's castles or lack of castles kind of Well,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of giving you a little bit of a
Speaker 1: spoiler for one of the big reveals there, but it
Speaker 1: won't it won't take anything off the plot. Okay, cool, Okay,
Speaker 1: So the Levelers, they they get called the Levelers by
Speaker 1: people who don't like them very much, right, They get
Speaker 1: compared to the original Levelers fifty years earlier, who had
Speaker 1: been following that guy with a little magic bit of
Speaker 1: green cheese who told them to tear down all the
Speaker 1: fences and kind of got them all killed, Captain pouch. So.
Speaker 1: But then the levelers that we talked about last time,
Speaker 1: they they didn't want to redistribute the lander of the wealth.
Speaker 1: They just wanted political quality, uh, not to overturn the
Speaker 1: economic order. So they didn't really see themselves as leveling,
Speaker 1: which is fair because they weren't leveling today's here, as
Speaker 1: though they sure as hell wanted to do a leveling.
Speaker 1: They they said, and a paraphrase here, those people aren't
Speaker 1: the levelers, were the true levelers. And but it's a
Speaker 1: possible to name your own political movement back then, apparently
Speaker 1: because the levelers who wanted to be called the agitators,
Speaker 1: and the Quakers who wanted to be called the Society
Speaker 1: of Friends, the the the people who wanted to be
Speaker 1: called the true Levelers get called the diggers, and the
Speaker 1: name stuck m hm. And they they first announced themselves
Speaker 1: to the world is after they had started doing some
Speaker 1: of what they'll do, which I've got to with a
Speaker 1: pamphlet called the True Levelers Standard Advanced in this case
Speaker 1: standard meaning flags. So we've moved forward the flag of
Speaker 1: leveling and and you know, so they were like, we
Speaker 1: are the true Levelers. That's our book are Manifesto. It's
Speaker 1: as true Levelers on it, and people are like, but
Speaker 1: it was Britain. So they were like, well, we're gonna
Speaker 1: call you the diggers because I mean, look at that,
Speaker 1: you're digging a hole, So you're the diggers. I think. Also,
Speaker 1: self branding is is usually a fairly failed effort. People
Speaker 1: really try to do it, but but you wind up
Speaker 1: getting getting cold. What what you know, if it's a
Speaker 1: vast movement, the other people in the movement would up
Speaker 1: naming it, yeah, totally, or in this case, a lot
Speaker 1: of the the people who are outside the movement who
Speaker 1: are either looking down on you or or not, you know,
Speaker 1: like the name that the media runs with is going
Speaker 1: to be what lasts in history. And a lot of
Speaker 1: these cases. But they did dig uh. Specifically, they wanted
Speaker 1: to get onto the commons, the land or land that
Speaker 1: they should believe that they believe should be the commons,
Speaker 1: and grow food communally. And I don't know everything about
Speaker 1: what they wanted to plant. I I did look up
Speaker 1: and check that potatoes had been introduced from the New
Speaker 1: World to the old world by this point, so potatoes
Speaker 1: were a possibility, um. But but mostly they planted peas
Speaker 1: and parsnips and carrots and barley and corn, which are
Speaker 1: all perfectly good, fine plants. It's fine. And they got
Speaker 1: their justification for what they were doing from the Bible,
Speaker 1: uh specifically the the verse that they quoted a lot
Speaker 1: was Act for thirty two. And the multitude of them
Speaker 1: that believed were of one heart and of one soul.
Speaker 1: Neither said of any of them that ought of the
Speaker 1: things which he possessed was his own, but that but
Speaker 1: that they had all things in common. And so this
Speaker 1: was there. You know, all of us who believe we
Speaker 1: will share everything, that is what the Bible asks us
Speaker 1: to do. And they also got their justification from the
Speaker 1: fact that food prices were at an all time high
Speaker 1: because of the war, and everyone was hungry, and the
Speaker 1: country was absolutely ravaged by these deep political divisions, which
Speaker 1: is of course totally unfamiliar to listeners today. I mean,
Speaker 1: the thing is, trying to reconcile the Bible with gigantic
Speaker 1: nations is a fool's Errand you know, the Bible is
Speaker 1: a book for for people who are living in a
Speaker 1: much more in smaller communities. Right, So it's like the
Speaker 1: Bible's a book of community, not nations. In my view,
Speaker 1: Oh that makes sense. I like that idea, um. But
Speaker 1: but that hasn't stopped everybody from trying to insist that.
Speaker 1: Like when the word nation whatever it's Hebrew or a
Speaker 1: Sebtulian equivalent, is when it appears like it's supposed to be,
Speaker 1: especially Americans have a constitutionalist reading of everything. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: a nation and they said nation, and now nations are big,
Speaker 1: so it has to apply to us. But none of
Speaker 1: the authors of the Bible would have had any notion
Speaker 1: of a nation having a sort of size and scope
Speaker 1: and power that that even the smallest nations have now
Speaker 1: really um, yeah, so yeah, it's trying trying to trying
Speaker 1: to harmonize stuff in the Bible that seems fairly clear
Speaker 1: isn't often isn't often compatible with modern facts on the ground.
Speaker 1: Now that makes sense. And then there's the kind of this, um,
Speaker 1: you know, the difference between nation and state, right, Um, Nation,
Speaker 1: state and country are all kind of actually different things
Speaker 1: that overlap in a lot of ways. But yeah, and
Speaker 1: there's another thing always worth remembering is like in these
Speaker 1: readings of the Bible that are happening in the US. Uh,
Speaker 1: they tend to disregard that the disciples thought Jesus was
Speaker 1: coming back next week. You know. They didn't think, oh,
Speaker 1: he's gonna go away for a very very long time
Speaker 1: in some future generation we can't conceive of we'll see
Speaker 1: him again. They expected to see him again in their lifetimes,
Speaker 1: you know. So, so when they're talking about sharing and stuff,
Speaker 1: they're talking about sharing going forward until the thing that
Speaker 1: we expect to happen happens. Right, that's my understanding. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now it's interesting. This is absolutely why I wanted you
Speaker 1: to be the guest for this particular episode. But so,
Speaker 1: but this isn't so by the time you get the hundreds,
Speaker 1: you're doing this sort of building a functional public ideology,
Speaker 1: right that's rooted in what was a much more communal faith. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: So there's it's no accident that these these people are
Speaker 1: are ye utilizing Christian concepts and everything, but those concepts
Speaker 1: are very hard to use at scale. Yeah, totally, as
Speaker 1: we have noted. Yep. And so one of my friends
Speaker 1: I was talking to about the Diggers, I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: what why are they so important to you. You know.
Speaker 1: I was looking, I was reading about them, and one
Speaker 1: of my friends was like, I'm so excited about the Diggers.
Speaker 1: I'm excited you're doing an episode about the Diggers. And
Speaker 1: what she said that she particularly liked about them is
Speaker 1: that there's sort of an essential gentleness for them. There's
Speaker 1: they come out of years and years of war and strife,
Speaker 1: and they're these like frustrated, hungry peasants. A lot of
Speaker 1: them had been soldiers in the war and they were like,
Speaker 1: you know what, fuck it, I'm going to go plant
Speaker 1: vegetables and never touch a sword again. And that was
Speaker 1: like a lot of the basic idea of and it's
Speaker 1: the sort of essential gentleness. And a lot of discussion
Speaker 1: about political radicals tends to leave out the the gentle radicals.
Speaker 1: So I think that's why it's one of the things
Speaker 1: I get excited about about the Takers. Yeah. No, I
Speaker 1: mean that's extremely true in radical spaces, and people tend
Speaker 1: to there's a couple of ways, a couple of spaces
Speaker 1: along the growth they get that way. But there's many
Speaker 1: many people who froom gentleness is not an affirmative value, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And they make and they tend to make extremely uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they want to argue about that as a
Speaker 1: general rule. They want to they want to say, you know,
Speaker 1: you're failing to stand up for the people who can't
Speaker 1: afford to be gentle, right, and so is it compelling argument?
Speaker 1: Quite often, you know, But but I'm not sure that
Speaker 1: it's true. I mean, but you know, right now, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of talk about there's been a lot
Speaker 1: of talk about especially like, you know, shouldn't a marginalized
Speaker 1: community arm itself, you know, if if the entire power
Speaker 1: of the state is weaponized against it, super valid point.
Speaker 1: But but I think I think those wind up sort
Speaker 1: of polarizing. Then you said, well, if we're doing that,
Speaker 1: then the values of gentleness aren't part of our deal.
Speaker 1: And it's like you want to be folding in gentleness
Speaker 1: because that's where you want to wind up at the end,
Speaker 1: and you sort of can't you know, table gentleness and
Speaker 1: then come back to it later. Yeah. Well, and actually,
Speaker 1: I mean that's kind of interesting to me because as
Speaker 1: someone who you know, um, I think people have listened
Speaker 1: to the show before now that I'm like, I'm armed.
Speaker 1: I'm a transwoman who lives in the South, and I
Speaker 1: chose to to be armed. But but the idea that
Speaker 1: like being armed in gentleness should be counter to each other,
Speaker 1: it just seems absolutely ludicrous to me. You know. Um,
Speaker 1: and there's I think your possessions have you know, they come,
Speaker 1: they come to define you. You know. It's like I'm
Speaker 1: with I'm glad you're armed, even though I'm an anti
Speaker 1: gun guy. It's like, I don't I would prefer the
Speaker 1: nobody be armed. And so you know, I I support
Speaker 1: really intense legislation about firearms, but but in the absence
Speaker 1: of that legislation, I think it makes also good sense
Speaker 1: for somebody who might find themselves to be a target
Speaker 1: to be armed. You know, I don't like, it doesn't
Speaker 1: do any good to say, well, because I'm against people
Speaker 1: owning firearms, I won't have one. That's not really good position,
Speaker 1: because it's like, you know, it's like I'm also against uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm against people inequably making money. But right now,
Speaker 1: if I can make more money than somebody, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna say, oh, no, you have to pay me less,
Speaker 1: because because it's like that's that's foolish, it's you know,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, but but yeah, it's it's a but but
Speaker 1: I do think you know, it's like the whole weapons
Speaker 1: are in and of themselves not gentle you know that
Speaker 1: that It's like what you want to avoid is is
Speaker 1: thinking about them in certain sorts of ways. You know.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, you want to But then C. S.
Speaker 1: Lewis has a riff about this, how you know, if
Speaker 1: you're going to war you should do it with both
Speaker 1: hands instead of you don't go to war. Good, well,
Speaker 1: I hate to have to kill this guy. It's no,
Speaker 1: you should kill your enemy when you're at war, you know, right,
Speaker 1: But I mean, I mean, it's actually kind of interesting
Speaker 1: to me because that's one of the things that I
Speaker 1: I didn't prepare anything about this at all, but it's
Speaker 1: one of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately,
Speaker 1: is about this, like how do we hold onto Maybe
Speaker 1: there's a tension and holding onto a gentleness as like
Speaker 1: while going armed right or while trying to become more
Speaker 1: capable of expressing self defense or a community defense. But
Speaker 1: you know, I have to think about the C. S.
Speaker 1: Lewis part of it, because part of me is like, well,
Speaker 1: I actually some of the people that I respect the
Speaker 1: most are people who do the hard work of holding
Speaker 1: onto you know, however there they'll view it their their
Speaker 1: humanity or their holiness or their you know, their soul
Speaker 1: or however they want to phrase it. Things. You know,
Speaker 1: there's there's stuff of the bood Gita about this where
Speaker 1: our juna uh on the battlefield, et cetera, and uh
Speaker 1: and the whole bad that kicks off because he says
Speaker 1: to his friend Christia, he doesn't really want to fight,
Speaker 1: and don't the scriptures forbid us from doing this? And Christia,
Speaker 1: who is God and also is his friends, says, oh no, no,
Speaker 1: if your role as soldier, you should be a soldier, right,
Speaker 1: It's like that's that's your that's it's kind of like
Speaker 1: it's it's to me, it's actually labor relay. You should
Speaker 1: do your job and do it wholeheartedly. The only way
Speaker 1: to do any kind of work for the Buda is
Speaker 1: to give it all to God. So when you are cooking,
Speaker 1: you're cooking for God. You're cooking the best you can,
Speaker 1: you know. And when you're fighting, you're you're at war
Speaker 1: for God, you know, whether it's a holy battle or not.
Speaker 1: And that's as it's much bigger than the scope for
Speaker 1: discussion here. But but those are, but they're they're both
Speaker 1: in both traditions. There's a notion that that whichever role
Speaker 1: you're inhabiting, you should inhabit wholeheartedly, rather than rather than
Speaker 1: trying to sort of cut, you know, trying to hedge bets.
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, no, that's interesting and it gets into
Speaker 1: you know, one of the things that we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about a little bit later in the script is that
Speaker 1: the people are also pacifist, right, and that is a
Speaker 1: big part of their their movement. Um, And yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's still love to think about it. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna think about some more of that. Okay. So there's
Speaker 1: this there's this guy who gets called the leader of
Speaker 1: the Diggers. He's not the leader of the diggers. He's
Speaker 1: not the founder of the Diggers. There's no particular evidence
Speaker 1: that he was the leader besides the fact that he
Speaker 1: was the writer. And his name is Gerard Winstanley, and
Speaker 1: and he's kind of he's the guy who showed up
Speaker 1: and saw what was going on and wrote about it
Speaker 1: and spread the word. So in some ways he's a leader,
Speaker 1: but he's not the leader of this particular movement. And
Speaker 1: he was born in sixteen o nine, he was middle class.
Speaker 1: He moved to London became a tailor. In sixty three,
Speaker 1: he goes bankrupt and he didn't like capitalism. Well capitalism
Speaker 1: doesn't really exist yet, but you know, he doesn't like
Speaker 1: this particular system that's developing. And he blames the quote
Speaker 1: cheating sons and the thieving art of buying and selling.
Speaker 1: So he really hates buying and selling, probably because he
Speaker 1: wasn't all that good at it. But and the Civil
Speaker 1: War doesn't help his business either. So he's bankrupt and
Speaker 1: he foxed off to the village of Cobham to get
Speaker 1: a job as a cowherd. And I prefer to imagine
Speaker 1: a cow herd as a cowboy, so I'm going to
Speaker 1: refer as a cowboy. And it's he's like a shepherd,
Speaker 1: I think, so yeah, yeah, no, yeah, he's not actually
Speaker 1: moving cows across the planes or anything like that. He's
Speaker 1: keeping track of them. Okay, fine, the cow shepherd. And
Speaker 1: it's during his time as a cow shepherd that he
Speaker 1: starts turning his thoughts to religion and theology and he's
Speaker 1: looking for answers to what has wrecked his life and
Speaker 1: how he might make it and the lives of other
Speaker 1: people better, and he also winds up a leveler. And
Speaker 1: I like how the levelers basically was this big mass
Speaker 1: of the people who thought things should be better somewhat,
Speaker 1: and then all of these different factions within the levelers
Speaker 1: came out and and did other things and went in
Speaker 1: different actions with that leveling or with being a leveler.
Speaker 1: So when Stanley and the Diggers the true levelers, they
Speaker 1: branch off from the same philosophical starting point as the levelers.
Speaker 1: And when Stanley, during his time you know, pondering all
Speaker 1: this theology or whatever, he believes in a few things.
Speaker 1: First and foremost, he believes in reason. He saw reason
Speaker 1: within each person as the godliness within each individual. Man
Speaker 1: and woman um. And he did explicitly in his earlier
Speaker 1: writings say man and woman um, not just using man
Speaker 1: as a catch all for all people, though he used
Speaker 1: that occasionally. Also later he gets in his post digging works,
Speaker 1: which I don't like as much, he gets um real
Speaker 1: explicit about how man is the head of the household. Um,
Speaker 1: the leveling stops at the door, But why doesn't say it?
Speaker 1: Doesn't phrase it the leveling stops at the door, But
Speaker 1: that's a you know, But he talks about how the
Speaker 1: word God can't sum up the divine and how he
Speaker 1: and so many others were led astray by that word
Speaker 1: think of God as an external thing. So he pretty
Speaker 1: much called God reason. And he said that it was
Speaker 1: chill if everyone came up their own word for God. Yes,
Speaker 1: this is a very nineteenth century English position. Okay, well
Speaker 1: he's he's two centuries ahead of time, three centuries. This
Speaker 1: is when the sixteenth century, this is the seventeenth century,
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds. Wow. So this, yeah, this sort of
Speaker 1: thinking in the nineteenth century becomes pretty I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: American transnittalism goes into that you know, and you and
Speaker 1: you wind up, you know, after the you wind up
Speaker 1: with the twentieth century with you know, the A Creado
Speaker 1: people saying you have something you call a higher power. Right,
Speaker 1: it's it's all that's on a continuum, I think, mm hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've I've actually been interested. I've watched some of my
Speaker 1: friends go into a A and have to learn how
Speaker 1: to work that into how they consider I don't like
Speaker 1: a lot of my like. Right. The thing is in
Speaker 1: a you don't have to believe in God. You just
Speaker 1: have to believe that there's the power greater than yourself, right,
Speaker 1: which seems self evident. But when you are an active addict,
Speaker 1: you may or may not actually believe that you're running
Speaker 1: on ego all the time when you sit down and
Speaker 1: actually look at how you're behaving. So it seems that
Speaker 1: I don't think there are powers greater than myself, you know.
Speaker 1: So so yeah, so like you know, it can be.
Speaker 1: I had one guy explained too points we say we
Speaker 1: can be a chair because I can't change the nature
Speaker 1: of this chair. What you're wanting to, what you're wanting
Speaker 1: to learn is a serenity, for ability to accept the
Speaker 1: things you can't change change things you can, and to
Speaker 1: be smart enough to know the difference beween those two things.
Speaker 1: So when Stanley believes that it's entirely biblically justified, if
Speaker 1: not necessitated, to abolish kings, that there ought to be
Speaker 1: no masters and servants, no aristocracy and commoner, and for
Speaker 1: this he's seen as like generally the father of Christian socialism.
Speaker 1: And although you've already pointed out that you can sort
Speaker 1: of biblically justify a lot of things, and it's all
Speaker 1: based on these different scales and contexts. But um, now, sorry,
Speaker 1: I got lost thinking about how like this was. This
Speaker 1: is like two censers typical about what you're just saying.
Speaker 1: It's like two centuries before a lot of other people
Speaker 1: are saying this, And that's like one of one of
Speaker 1: the things that's so interesting about the Diggers is their
Speaker 1: outsize impact theologically and politically for how small of a
Speaker 1: movement they actually were. So that's kind of interesting that
Speaker 1: I knew about how it influenced some of the like
Speaker 1: the political movements, or prefigured some of the political movements.
Speaker 1: But it's cool to know that also prefigured a lot
Speaker 1: of theological ideas, just thinking yeah, okay, and so he
Speaker 1: he also to prefigure a lot of nineteenth century socialism.
Speaker 1: He said that the enclosure of the commons and the
Speaker 1: creation of private property was essentially an act of theft
Speaker 1: and banditry. It's a way of stealing from everyone else
Speaker 1: and from his a declaration from the poor oppressed people
Speaker 1: of England the name of one of his pamphlets, The
Speaker 1: power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into
Speaker 1: the creation by your ancestors by the sword which first
Speaker 1: did murder their fellow creatures, men and after plunder or
Speaker 1: steal away their land, and left this land successively to
Speaker 1: you their children. And therefore, though you did not kill
Speaker 1: or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your
Speaker 1: hand by the power of the sword, and so you
Speaker 1: justify the wicked deeds of your father's And that sin
Speaker 1: of your father shall be visited upon the head of
Speaker 1: you and your children to the third and fourth generation
Speaker 1: and longer too, so your bloody and thieving power be
Speaker 1: rooted out from the land. And I thought this is
Speaker 1: interesting partly because that's also not a terrible description of
Speaker 1: what it means to live as a white person in
Speaker 1: the United States in terms of like kind of like, well,
Speaker 1: I didn't do the colonizing, you know, and and that's true,
Speaker 1: but then like realizing that like we have inherited what
Speaker 1: has been stolen at the point of the sword. And
Speaker 1: he was also, I believe, the first person in English,
Speaker 1: not the first person overall, but the first person in
Speaker 1: English to espouse Christian universalism in writing, which, as I
Speaker 1: understand it, again not a huge theology. Girl of this
Speaker 1: podcast is turning me into one because it's so tied
Speaker 1: into history that I like um, which is the concept
Speaker 1: that everyone, even the most sinful people eventually get into heaven. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean most people wind up believing that there's a
Speaker 1: great deal to say about that. Uh, And it's not.
Speaker 1: Once you get into the subjects, you sort of can't
Speaker 1: just open the door and and say, well, here's a
Speaker 1: there's thumbnail and we'll move back to the other thing.
Speaker 1: You know. But I mean it's the exact opposite of
Speaker 1: of you know what Calvin John Calvin, and there are
Speaker 1: there's an active Calvinist strain right now. It's like Calvinism
Speaker 1: has actually been Uh there's been a resurgence of Calvinists
Speaker 1: thinking you know, of of and you know, that's predeterminism
Speaker 1: that like you're either getting into heaven or not based
Speaker 1: on how it was already decided when you were born, right, Uh,
Speaker 1: which is like I'm not a Calvinist in any CID.
Speaker 1: So I can't see who having this position why. I mean,
Speaker 1: I can't conceive of it within any understanding of the
Speaker 1: God that I serve um you know, uh, and and
Speaker 1: the guy that I served with lots of faces and
Speaker 1: I consider you know, like I can understand many different
Speaker 1: perspectives on that, but I can't imagine asking anybody to
Speaker 1: behave any kind of way. If if everything is predetermined,
Speaker 1: you know, then then there's no reason for me to
Speaker 1: do anything. And you know, then you have to construct
Speaker 1: all theology around possibly of losing the grace that you
Speaker 1: were born with. Right, Um, and none of that, none
Speaker 1: of this has has scriptural support in my view. But
Speaker 1: but at the same time, it's and this actually has
Speaker 1: to do with with issues of gentleness versus I don't
Speaker 1: know what you'd call the opposite of that ferocity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess, I mean it's you search for for masculine
Speaker 1: feminine archetypal terms, right, you know, for the feminine versus
Speaker 1: the masculine. The feminine receives, the masculine puts out cues, right,
Speaker 1: and all that kind of stuff which we're at present,
Speaker 1: you know, in tearing getting intensely and for the better.
Speaker 1: But um, but when you say everybody's getting in, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, I like this idea, uh, but it also
Speaker 1: becomes harder to ask people to care about any of
Speaker 1: the thought that went into that. Right, And and I
Speaker 1: get that, And this is where I have a conservative
Speaker 1: part of me, like I think, you know, if everybody
Speaker 1: had to spend more time with these ideas if it
Speaker 1: was you know, when when people talk about religionistation in
Speaker 1: the schools, well, obviously I don't want that, right, but
Speaker 1: I think it does almost anybody good to contemplate the
Speaker 1: world's religions. It's like I would if somebody said there
Speaker 1: ought to be an actual course on world religion for
Speaker 1: high school students or junior high students, and then and
Speaker 1: the course had to be mandated, so it really did
Speaker 1: fairly cover you know, all the Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam.
Speaker 1: You know, I'd I'd be in favor of that. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, wrestling with those ideas does a person in
Speaker 1: a society good. And an absence of contact with those ideas,
Speaker 1: direct contact and forny wrestling contact, I think leaves it
Speaker 1: leaves a person wondering, you know, this person missing something.
Speaker 1: You know. I think everybody goes out and does it
Speaker 1: on their own is maybe not the most functional way
Speaker 1: of of of having people on the same page about
Speaker 1: some of the bigger questions than that opens up. Not
Speaker 1: that people don't have their own good thoughts about this stuff.
Speaker 1: They do, right, but but they're huge thoughts, right, And
Speaker 1: it's not really unless the type of person who's naturally
Speaker 1: drawn to them. You're not going to naturally dig deeper
Speaker 1: and have big moral and ethical self searchings about them
Speaker 1: unless that's fun for you, right, so so so so yeah.
Speaker 1: But but as far as universalism goes, I think we
Speaker 1: do wind up. Uh, most most people who aren't kind
Speaker 1: of really reactionary wind up at the type of universalism.
Speaker 1: And in part I think that's because many people don't aren't,
Speaker 1: including me, aren't really convinced that most of the stuff
Speaker 1: they believe is real anyway. And they say and they say, look,
Speaker 1: the most important part of this, that that that that
Speaker 1: not be real for me is the notion that somebody
Speaker 1: can be condemned for you know, I mean older versions
Speaker 1: of before the I don't know when well all the
Speaker 1: Augustine dealt with this, but you know, the notion that
Speaker 1: somebody who never heard the name of Jesus doesn't get
Speaker 1: to see God because they didn't confess it. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's this run's counter to the whole, to the whole
Speaker 1: God that you're supposed to be teaching there. And so
Speaker 1: that's how I lost that's how I lost my faith
Speaker 1: or whatever. When I was very young, as I just
Speaker 1: was like this whole concept of like, I don't know
Speaker 1: if I if I don't follow the following thing, that
Speaker 1: feels very arbitrary. I like spend eternity and damnation that
Speaker 1: it made me kind of throw away the rest of
Speaker 1: it for a very long time. I don't find a
Speaker 1: lot of biblical support for damnation, is the thing I find.
Speaker 1: I think that Jehovah's witnesses have a nice thing on this.
Speaker 1: They also have several things that are really quite out there.
Speaker 1: But but Jeovah's witnesses will tell you there is no
Speaker 1: fiery hell at all that that's not supported by the Bible,
Speaker 1: and it's not right what what they paint is like, Look,
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand people are going to go, uh live
Speaker 1: with God forever. Okay, That's such a tiny number, is
Speaker 1: the thing. It's like it seemed big to them at
Speaker 1: the time, But now we have such a broad view
Speaker 1: of history. I mean that means there's no way there's
Speaker 1: any of those hundred forty four thousand left. You have
Speaker 1: to have already had a right. But but beyond that that,
Speaker 1: the people who don't make it will just die and
Speaker 1: cease to exist, not that they will go and be
Speaker 1: punished because eternal punishment is not compatible with This is
Speaker 1: one of the things I go in on. From the
Speaker 1: very beginning of the Bible to the end, God as
Speaker 1: a father figure is a huge idea. Now, historians of
Speaker 1: religion will tell you this is partly because we were
Speaker 1: coming out of a period in which God was a
Speaker 1: mother figure, and it was very important to the patriarchal
Speaker 1: religions to establish clearly we have a father now and
Speaker 1: not a mother. And then the Catholics have, to me
Speaker 1: the most fun way of of reconciling this and understanding
Speaker 1: that the absence of the maternal energy is a real absence,
Speaker 1: you know. And then we get Marian cultson worship, which
Speaker 1: it is great in my view. But but from the
Speaker 1: beginning of the Bible to the end, God is the father.
Speaker 1: The fatherhood of God is so central, right, it's it's
Speaker 1: such a part of God that we sort of we
Speaker 1: begin with that parent to Adam and Eve, and then
Speaker 1: Adam is the father to the human race. Right, all
Speaker 1: this stuff, Well, what kind of father under any circumstances,
Speaker 1: no matter what their child had done, no matter what
Speaker 1: the most monstrous child in the world. I would say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, what you never get to see me again,
Speaker 1: and you suffer eternally. Yeah, there is literally I have
Speaker 1: two children. There is nothing they could do. I don't
Speaker 1: care what they do, right, I mean, obviously I would
Speaker 1: be I would grieve forever if they become hard people,
Speaker 1: you know, and there's no condemned them to an eternity
Speaker 1: of suffering. That's monstrous and any understanding of God that
Speaker 1: would do that is monstrous in my view. It's like
Speaker 1: and I don't think the Bible supports it either. I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't think I certainly don't think Jesus has to say.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like I think it's a very I
Speaker 1: think it's a keep people in line teaching. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think the same things that you know, the boring
Speaker 1: Satanists think about this is like, you know, but but
Speaker 1: they're right. It's like it's a it's crowd control, right,
Speaker 1: so so you know, and the thing is what they
Speaker 1: would say, this is the Machiavellian view, is that you know, well,
Speaker 1: some people need that kind of crowd control. A lot
Speaker 1: of people do, actually, right, and that is a hard
Speaker 1: you know, that's a hard thing to pars And I
Speaker 1: don't I'm not necessarily an acceptance of it. But it
Speaker 1: feels about right. You know. It's like plenty of people
Speaker 1: are not going to do all the hard work of
Speaker 1: thinking about this stuff, and it will probably be better
Speaker 1: off if they're just told what to do. And there's
Speaker 1: plenty of circumstances in which I am that guy where
Speaker 1: I don't don't don't give me all the complicated stuff
Speaker 1: and let me make my own decision. I'll make a
Speaker 1: poor decision. Tell me what I'm supposed to do, right.
Speaker 1: I think I'm better off that way. You know. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of situations where that's me. So these are
Speaker 1: complicated issues and I forget what they're taking off point
Speaker 1: no sor right. Um. I also don't have a good
Speaker 1: ad segue to go from there, but I have to
Speaker 1: now because of the the constraints of the capitalistic system
Speaker 1: that I live with in well, Friends, Royal pudding, royal
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Speaker 1: fresh milk. Welcome back, to the Cool People Who Did
Speaker 1: Cool Stuff podcast and host John Darneil today. Who are
Speaker 1: we talking About's Croatian literature. It works for me, I think, alright,
Speaker 1: So yeah, no, I think the Christian universalism thing is
Speaker 1: it's really interesting because yeah, like I like, I, like
Speaker 1: I said, I kind of I moved away from thinking
Speaker 1: about a lot of these things because I saw how
Speaker 1: transparently there they were designed to systems of control and
Speaker 1: well no, no, but not designed, its utilized by I mean.
Speaker 1: The thing is we're seeing this in in politics right now,
Speaker 1: in real time, that there's a lot of ideas out
Speaker 1: there that might seem good or bad, and they always
Speaker 1: every idea is available to everybody, and the bad guys
Speaker 1: utilize the ones that are effective, right and so. But
Speaker 1: but the notion that they were constructed for that purpose,
Speaker 1: I don't think that's true very rarely. Like even Augustine.
Speaker 1: You know, Augustine has a lot of loathsome stuff, But
Speaker 1: I don't think Augustine was was was trying to construct, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a method of oppression so much as he
Speaker 1: was passing stuff. The way he thought about it, and
Speaker 1: some of his thoughts are all sucked up. But you know,
Speaker 1: then Augustinian thought can be used to uh, you know,
Speaker 1: deposit this well split between the mind and the body,
Speaker 1: which is another thing right, well, no, I mean like
Speaker 1: and that's why you know, I mean frankly as part
Speaker 1: of why I'm an anarchist, although it, as any other ideology,
Speaker 1: is capable of following into this. But you know, Tolkien's
Speaker 1: whole thing with like you actually must cast the ring
Speaker 1: of power into the fire, you know you can't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's my whole thing. Um. So you know, all
Speaker 1: like nations either you're you, you would envision a world
Speaker 1: in which all the in which we live in smaller communities.
Speaker 1: I would say, like smaller communities that are federated. So
Speaker 1: there's like still organizational systems that are larger, um, but
Speaker 1: the the decision making is more bottom up than top down.
Speaker 1: I'm not like hardline about exactly how I envisioned like
Speaker 1: the entire world living. And so anarchism is like a
Speaker 1: combination of like a way of critiquing power, and then
Speaker 1: it's also a way of thinking about larger societies but
Speaker 1: some of the larger maybe I used to I used
Speaker 1: to idea as an anarchist. I don't know what I
Speaker 1: do now. I think I think anarchism is an extremely
Speaker 1: uh optimistic philosophy. I'm middle aged, and often I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm considering the more optimistic people, you know, But
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that I would trust people with anarchism
Speaker 1: at this point, you know, yeah, fair enough. I mean
Speaker 1: not that I wouldn't trust anarchists. Anarchists are great, right,
Speaker 1: so I share many of their values. But but but
Speaker 1: I know a lot of my a lot of my
Speaker 1: communist friends who believe in, like some some fairly robust
Speaker 1: state systems of control. I take their point in recent
Speaker 1: years that like sometimes you actually tell people what to do.
Speaker 1: So I think it's like a there's like a a
Speaker 1: balance that isn't like a fifty fifty balance, It's not
Speaker 1: like a little listen a little bit of that. I
Speaker 1: think it's a lot of like both. And in terms
Speaker 1: of like like what you're talking about about, um wanting
Speaker 1: to be told what to do by a priest, let's say,
Speaker 1: because because you're not. It's like, there are many times
Speaker 1: that I want to be told what to do because
Speaker 1: that is not where I'm putting my energy. So like,
Speaker 1: on some level there's people who I like would trust
Speaker 1: to develop certain ideas and then be like, Okay, I
Speaker 1: trust you the same as I would trust someone to
Speaker 1: design the wind power that powers the neighborhood I live in.
Speaker 1: Let's say, you know, I there's a this is completely up,
Speaker 1: so we should probably go back to the Diggers. We
Speaker 1: should because all right, let's go to the Diggers. So
Speaker 1: what the Diggers actually did? As far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: the first Digger commune was started by five people, which
Speaker 1: does not include this guy's Gerard win Stanley, but it
Speaker 1: does include a guy named William Everard who had been
Speaker 1: a scout in the Parliamentarian Army, who kept getting arrested
Speaker 1: for various rabble rousing, and at one point, uh, he
Speaker 1: stormed a church to declare various religious truths. This is
Speaker 1: the way to go. You gotta be stormy church. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: A lot of the people that I come up in
Speaker 1: the show storm churches. And he gets called a madman constantly.
Speaker 1: All the different accounts of him are like, oh, he's
Speaker 1: just a crazy guy. But he's the he's probably the
Speaker 1: founder of the Diggers. He didn't write, so we don't
Speaker 1: know as much about him. But in sixte these five folks,
Speaker 1: including this guy head up to a place called St.
Speaker 1: George's Hill in Surrey, which is a county in the
Speaker 1: middle bottom of England, and they found some enclosed land
Speaker 1: that they felt like should not be enclosed, should be
Speaker 1: commons and so they just made it commons again. They
Speaker 1: started tilling the soil and planting their crops. By the
Speaker 1: end of the week, thirty more people joined them, including
Speaker 1: Gerard Now and basically they said, anyone who wants can
Speaker 1: come here and plant and grow and we'll all share.
Speaker 1: But not that many people came. Various accounts of people
Speaker 1: visiting the communist city. They saw like twelve people, twenty people,
Speaker 1: and they loom really large in history. But this was
Speaker 1: not a mass movement, uh, not compared even to the
Speaker 1: thousand people that Captain Pouch had gotten together fifty years
Speaker 1: or so years earlier. And it's possible that the diggers
Speaker 1: weren't even popular with the locals. This part's hard to parse,
Speaker 1: but it's like one account from the time says the
Speaker 1: first crop of barley they planted was ripped up by
Speaker 1: annoyed locals. And I don't know one way or the
Speaker 1: other whether this meant commoners who were like, ah, these
Speaker 1: fucking hippies get out of here, or whether it was
Speaker 1: the Lord of the manner sending like his people to
Speaker 1: go funck this thing up and drive them off. And
Speaker 1: I can really I see it either way, I don't know.
Speaker 1: So they put out a manifesto which is probably the
Speaker 1: reasoning to it all in the first place, and it's
Speaker 1: written by Girard and it's signed by forty six people
Speaker 1: called a Declaration from the Poor Pressed People of England,
Speaker 1: and yeah, um, their their beliefs are throw open the prisons,
Speaker 1: till the land in common, be pacifists and respect The
Speaker 1: quote Earth our Mother, which I hadn't run across this before,
Speaker 1: as like a medieval Christian thing to say, to talk
Speaker 1: about mother Earth. But um, apparently it's completely normal for
Speaker 1: medieval Christians to refer to the Earth as the mother.
Speaker 1: This is one of my old hobby horses. We we
Speaker 1: tend to think anything that we've heard of originates with us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh and yeah, it's like no ideas like that
Speaker 1: are are very old, and uh, yeah it's a I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's But however, it is also I think fairly radical
Speaker 1: at that point to be talking like that, not because
Speaker 1: it's new, but because because it's not because its old,
Speaker 1: because in a lot of ways, yeah very good, Yeah
Speaker 1: that's right, and so um. And they were opposed to
Speaker 1: buying and selling in general, they are opposed to buying
Speaker 1: and selling, but in particular selling the earth or products
Speaker 1: of the earth was like really bad. And because the
Speaker 1: earth is the common treasury that we all share. And
Speaker 1: they said they had no need for laws amongst each
Speaker 1: other and that um, basically, whipping people and locking them
Speaker 1: up doesn't make people into better people. So and at
Speaker 1: this point, I really you know there basically Christian anarchist
Speaker 1: pacifists and Gerard win Stanley sums up their pacifism at
Speaker 1: the time, quote, the way to cast out kingly power
Speaker 1: is not to cast it out by the sword, for
Speaker 1: this doth but set him in more power and removes
Speaker 1: him from a weaker to a stronger hand. The only
Speaker 1: way to cast him out is for the people to
Speaker 1: leave him to himself, forsake fighting and all oppression, and
Speaker 1: to live in love towards one another. The power of
Speaker 1: love is the true savior. And then again later he
Speaker 1: goes on to say, like after he's no longer a digger,
Speaker 1: and he's like writing all these laws he's as a
Speaker 1: totally show for husbands to beat their kids and wives
Speaker 1: with a stick. So well, you know, people change, Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: So right now they're all diggers. The local lords write
Speaker 1: letters to the government and they're like, hey, this weird
Speaker 1: thing is happening. Maybe send Calvary. So Calvalry comes general
Speaker 1: the general, this guy fair Fax. He sends Calvary and
Speaker 1: they show up and they talk with two people present
Speaker 1: themselves as leaders, William the wild rabb arouser and Gerard
Speaker 1: the theologian. Um. The cavalry guy writes back to his
Speaker 1: general and he's like, yeah, Williams a total madman, and says,
Speaker 1: William and Gerardo present yourself to the General. So they
Speaker 1: present themselves to Fairfax and they refuse to take off
Speaker 1: their hats in the presence of the General because all
Speaker 1: people are equal, and this causes a huge stir and
Speaker 1: then they defend their case basically to this revolutionary leader. William.
Speaker 1: He says he's of the Jewish race at this point,
Speaker 1: and I spent a while trying to figure out what
Speaker 1: he means by this. Um. I can't tell whether he's
Speaker 1: saying I am Jewish, like religiously or culturally or if
Speaker 1: he's saying his family converted recently or more likely, I
Speaker 1: think it's some kind of reference to being descended from
Speaker 1: the original Christians. I don't know. Well, man, that's that's
Speaker 1: a This is a giant question for a lot of
Speaker 1: English thinkers, is what's their connection? And uh, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, William Blake thinks about this stuff,
Speaker 1: and so does the Church of Jesus Christ. The latter
Speaker 1: they saying it's right. They their whole teaching is that
Speaker 1: Jesus came to North America. R. Another whole teaching is
Speaker 1: central that after after the Resurrection, he came over here, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is a way that the nations that are Christianized
Speaker 1: grapple with the fact that this is a Sinemitic religion
Speaker 1: from the Middle East, and and well that it becomes
Speaker 1: very powerful religion. So everybody wants it right, but but
Speaker 1: they want to find a way They want to sort
Speaker 1: of claim claiming natively. Yeah, this happens a lot. A
Speaker 1: lot of people are always claiming communities that they may
Speaker 1: may not belong to, right so, but when they see
Speaker 1: that they have some power cultural cachet or something, you
Speaker 1: will often find people say, well, you know, I'm not
Speaker 1: actually one of you, but I'm a lot like you
Speaker 1: can hang you know, and so and and because coalition
Speaker 1: building is powerful, often it's it's in his interest to
Speaker 1: say yeah, yeah, I know, yeah, you're good. Yeah no,
Speaker 1: no that that that that makes sense. Um, And so
Speaker 1: he says, I had a vision that people should go
Speaker 1: up and dig and plant in the earth, and that
Speaker 1: they were peaceful and they wouldn't resist, and they just
Speaker 1: wanted to plant the commons and then everyone would see
Speaker 1: that it's a better way to live. And so Fairfax
Speaker 1: is like, alright, sure, whatever, I'm not dealing with this,
Speaker 1: go away, and Gerard the theologian, uh the writer, He
Speaker 1: goes back to the diggers. But William, the rabble rouser
Speaker 1: whose visions started the whole thing, he kind of just
Speaker 1: wanders off at this point and doesn't go back. He
Speaker 1: starts working in various different fields like like not feels
Speaker 1: like fields of study, but like literal fields where people
Speaker 1: grow things. But one town he shows up in as
Speaker 1: soon as he shows up, people start acting weird, like
Speaker 1: people start walking around in trances and ship as soon
Speaker 1: as he shows up. So he gets accused of witchcraft
Speaker 1: and Eventually he gets thrown in uh Bethleem Royal Hospital,
Speaker 1: which is a psychiatric hospel it's been around for eight
Speaker 1: hundred years, whose reputation is so grim. It's where we
Speaker 1: get the word bedlam. Yeah, and his trail goes dark
Speaker 1: in bedlam. And so the diggers keep digging without their
Speaker 1: their profit. There there visionary founder. But the thing is
Speaker 1: that this land there on, they claim it's commons, but
Speaker 1: someone else claims it's his right. Francis Drake to be specific,
Speaker 1: not the famous slave trader um who also was the
Speaker 1: first person's circum navigate the world in a single trip.
Speaker 1: A different Francis Drake. This guy was not much nicer.
Speaker 1: He sents gangs to go beat everyone up, and when
Speaker 1: that didn't work, he burns one of their houses down.
Speaker 1: And finally the diggers all get arrested and put on
Speaker 1: try and they get accused of being ranters. Who will
Speaker 1: get into it a little bit. They actually had beef
Speaker 1: with so they were kind of annoyed. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like now, if like they arrested communists and we're like,
Speaker 1: you damn anarchists, you know, they'd be like what the hell?
Speaker 1: Like the communists very angry. Yeah, And so the diggers
Speaker 1: got told if you go back to Francis Drake's land,
Speaker 1: the whole army is going to come. So they move
Speaker 1: on to another enclosure on a different lord's land. The
Speaker 1: new lord does the same ship to them. By April
Speaker 1: sixteen fifty, they're driven out from there too, and the
Speaker 1: trail goes dark for these diggers. Um, I don't think
Speaker 1: they ever got a single harvest out of out of
Speaker 1: their work. And and we mostly hear about this particular
Speaker 1: group because that guy when Stanley, hung out with them,
Speaker 1: and he's the wh who wrote all the pamphlets and ship.
Speaker 1: But they weren't the only group of diggers. Colonies cropped
Speaker 1: up in at least six other towns. And I don't
Speaker 1: think history knows the fate of these colonies, or at
Speaker 1: least I wasn't able to determine it. And my my
Speaker 1: guess is it's about the same. They were probably dispersed
Speaker 1: by this sort of one too punch of legal harassment
Speaker 1: and mob violence. I like to imagine that they like
Speaker 1: went on for a long ast time and just kept
Speaker 1: doing their thing, you know, but they probably didn't. After
Speaker 1: the Diggers, when Stanley goes on and he writes his
Speaker 1: utopia called Utopia, where he lays out all of his
Speaker 1: new beliefs and these aren't really the beliefs of the Diggers.
Speaker 1: There this guy's theories. He says there's two types of governments.
Speaker 1: There's monarchies, which are bad, and commonwealth which are good,
Speaker 1: and that if the commonwealth ever starts doing monarchy ship
Speaker 1: it becomes bad. And his commonwealth are this sort of
Speaker 1: strange communism like the Diggers wanted, but with all these
Speaker 1: governmental systems, which is like no longer though, we don't
Speaker 1: need laws amongst ourselves era. And he wrote out all
Speaker 1: of the laws in great detail in his book. And
Speaker 1: I have a feeling that people write utopias are doing
Speaker 1: it because they're really excited about like the like engineering
Speaker 1: they've done, the like this is the laws and this
Speaker 1: is how it all works, you know. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I think it's a big question is is how these
Speaker 1: people it this way and what's really going on with them? Yeah? Totally. Well,
Speaker 1: I think you've got a sense of it because his
Speaker 1: very first law and one of the only capital offenses,
Speaker 1: it's a capital crime to be a lawyer. Yeah, things
Speaker 1: like that. You hear, that's kind of stuff in Shakespeare too.
Speaker 1: It's a it's pretty it's pretty uh entrenchedingda. We also
Speaker 1: always got to remember what they mean by lawyer is
Speaker 1: different what we mean that lawyers. Just like when you
Speaker 1: were mentioned prisons, we do your prison history. Prison is
Speaker 1: madness today also. But but the nature of prisons back
Speaker 1: then pretty chaotic. It was like a building with a
Speaker 1: lock on it, you know, it's about it. So yeah,
Speaker 1: now that's a good point. I don't I don't really
Speaker 1: think the pen opticon is better. But but but it's like,
Speaker 1: at the same time, it's like if it's just me
Speaker 1: in a room with a bunch of other people who
Speaker 1: have been deemed authorities, that I don't like my chances,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough. Yeah, that actually
Speaker 1: comes up some of the times and some of the
Speaker 1: histories I do, where you know, the political radical just
Speaker 1: gets thrown in the cage with all the other people
Speaker 1: and it goes really badly. Um. Yeah, so some of
Speaker 1: the other laws in this utopia, anyone who hurts anyone
Speaker 1: gets hurt in exactly the same way in return by
Speaker 1: an executioner. So the execution doesn't only kill people. Also,
Speaker 1: like you punch someone in the face. The executioner comes
Speaker 1: and punches you in the face, eye for an eye,
Speaker 1: black eye for a black eye, um, except if you
Speaker 1: hit a cop, which he calls overseers. Then you become
Speaker 1: a servant for a year. And the punishment for almost
Speaker 1: everything else is a is servant for a year where
Speaker 1: you are like a slave to the state, and anyone
Speaker 1: who wants can just show up and like the general
Speaker 1: pool of like slaves and borrow you for the day
Speaker 1: and some of the other things that get you sent
Speaker 1: to become a servant for a year. If you refuse
Speaker 1: to grow food, um, if you don't learn a trade,
Speaker 1: if you buy or if you buy yoursell land, you
Speaker 1: get executed. If you if you claim to own land,
Speaker 1: then mean words get written on your forehead. You're sit
Speaker 1: in a stool in front of everyone, and then you
Speaker 1: have a year of servitude hiring people for wages that
Speaker 1: gets you a servitude. Anyone who claims to be holy
Speaker 1: but then trades for possessions of the earth gets put
Speaker 1: to death and as a witch. Yeah, that's just ustopia.
Speaker 1: I don't want to live there. But it's actually probably
Speaker 1: better than Evil England at the time, but it still
Speaker 1: doesn't sound. I mean, he's when guy writes like something
Speaker 1: like this, he sounds to me like he doesn't have
Speaker 1: a lot of interlock euters. Right, it's like most utopias,
Speaker 1: I think Thomas More there's a good job of having
Speaker 1: demonstrated he's been sitting around some tables with some people,
Speaker 1: but most of they don't bear a lot of scrutiny.
Speaker 1: You can ask two or three questions and it starts
Speaker 1: to come apart. Yeah, totally, totally. So after a couple
Speaker 1: of years he so he comes out hard with to
Speaker 1: kill all the lawyers and everyone who buys and sells
Speaker 1: stuff and every wants to share everything. And then a
Speaker 1: couple of years later he does with huge trunk of
Speaker 1: middle class revolutionaries do. He gets given some land by
Speaker 1: his family, his in this case, his father in law,
Speaker 1: and then um settles down to join the own stuff
Speaker 1: for a living class. He he becomes a Quaker, and
Speaker 1: he ends up going on and moves to London and
Speaker 1: becomes a merchant. Again. That's that's that's that guy. But
Speaker 1: the thing that's really interesting me, right is that you've
Speaker 1: got this like it's a couple dozen people who squats
Speaker 1: some land never actually get to harvest it, and then
Speaker 1: four hundred years later people are still talking about them,
Speaker 1: and like a lot of people still talk about them,
Speaker 1: and they they're the ideas and practices they developed, like
Speaker 1: those are what have echoed. And that's what's interesting to me.
Speaker 1: The greater harvest of their work or whatever. And basically
Speaker 1: just that the smallest movements, which don't seem to accomplish
Speaker 1: their goals sometimes actually can be a huge deal is
Speaker 1: really interesting to me. Three years later, in the nineties sixties,
Speaker 1: you get other people called themselves Diggers. This time it's
Speaker 1: an anarchist guerrilla street theater group in San Francisco, and
Speaker 1: they're basically like the Rattis hippies around. They combined the
Speaker 1: underground art scene with the new Left. They're trying to
Speaker 1: create a society without capitalism or money. They perform plays
Speaker 1: for free. They distribute free food every day in Golden
Speaker 1: Gate Park. They opened up free stores stores which everything
Speaker 1: in the store is free. They founded free medical clinics.
Speaker 1: They distributed their papers for free. And the way that
Speaker 1: they printed their papers is that they snuck in in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night to the Students for Democratic
Speaker 1: Society offices and used their printers They put on free
Speaker 1: shows with all the like big sixties artists, Grateful Dead
Speaker 1: Jen It's Droplin, Jimi Hendrix. They offered free housing for
Speaker 1: homeless youth. They popularized hidi um in the hippie scene,
Speaker 1: and they popularized whole wheat bread in America. It's wild, yeah, like,
Speaker 1: and it's funny to be because um, I don't actually
Speaker 1: like whole wheat bread because I don't eat bread because
Speaker 1: I want to be healthy. I eat other food to
Speaker 1: be healthy. M yeah, well, I mean the thing is,
Speaker 1: whole grains are better for you than before, and great
Speaker 1: it's a so so yeah, that's the that's the thing.
Speaker 1: But they also, you know, the diggers in San Francisco
Speaker 1: are very much romanticizing uh if it passed, and they're
Speaker 1: doing a thing where you know that I think is
Speaker 1: not without merit. That says, you know, hey, the more
Speaker 1: process your food is, the less healthy it's likely to be.
Speaker 1: And uh no, it's not absolutely true. It's like it's
Speaker 1: got nutrients, and I thing it's got nutrients. It's fine,
Speaker 1: you know, but but I think your body it sort
Speaker 1: of seems, you know, it self evident that like, you know,
Speaker 1: the food that gives your body the least trouble is
Speaker 1: the one that's going to take give you more energy
Speaker 1: than it takes, you know. Yeah, which is why this
Speaker 1: show is sponsored by whole wheat bread that I don't
Speaker 1: even like. You know, John, I've been thinking about whole
Speaker 1: wheat bread and I've been thinking, I don't even like this,
Speaker 1: but I think I'm going to eat it. Let's see,
Speaker 1: this is what you know I've been I was what
Speaker 1: we're talking about, whole wheat bread. Have you considered the
Speaker 1: Roman meal? Yes, friends, Roman Meal, And we are also
Speaker 1: supported by these other advertisers, and we are back from
Speaker 1: those ads, and I hope all of them are from
Speaker 1: polesome foods and not terrible things, because sometimes terrible things
Speaker 1: ads come through and we only have retroactive control about
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Yep, we live in a hell escape,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly. Um. Yeah, it's it's so interesting to me
Speaker 1: that when I didn't realize that one of the biggest
Speaker 1: influences that the Diggers had was on the American diet,
Speaker 1: you know, and the popularizing whole all foods right, not
Speaker 1: the store, and well that was that. The thing is
Speaker 1: that also had They're not the first you know, Uh,
Speaker 1: what's his name up there, um CTW Post up in
Speaker 1: I think Michigan. Um, they're all there are all these
Speaker 1: movements that trace back to the time of American Transcendentalism
Speaker 1: and to the turn of the twentieth century where and
Speaker 1: they are kind of indivisible from some religious ideas that
Speaker 1: many of these are more universalist ideas. But but uh,
Speaker 1: but yes c W. Post and I feel like there's
Speaker 1: another one in Michigan. But maybe it's all him. And
Speaker 1: so they have some very sound ideas about nutrition, and
Speaker 1: they have some very wacky ideas stuff too, you know,
Speaker 1: because I think some of these people are also into
Speaker 1: like Oregon energy and stuff like like they I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I learned about from you always all right,
Speaker 1: there's a cloud busting is about. I think that guy's
Speaker 1: an Oregon Guy's kid. I actually don't know that. I
Speaker 1: don't know it. Well. I learned about learned about organ
Speaker 1: energy from a band called the Supreme Dicks, rather more
Speaker 1: obscure musicians from western Massachusetts. Okay, So that to keep
Speaker 1: talking about these new diggers, they also coined a bunch
Speaker 1: of radical slogans that have filtered out into the mainstream,
Speaker 1: such as do your own thing and today is the
Speaker 1: first day of the rest of your life. And much
Speaker 1: like how the original Diggers had more than one commune,
Speaker 1: the new Diggers did too. They operate at least one
Speaker 1: other chapter in the Lower Asside of Manhattan. And I
Speaker 1: want to quote from an amazing food historian Ran Awry
Speaker 1: about these East Coast Diggers from article in Blindfield Journal.
Speaker 1: The famous Digger stew, which is made daily in huge
Speaker 1: white enameled pot in a kitchen behind the office, is
Speaker 1: ladled out free of course, to anyone who wants it,
Speaker 1: every afternoon around five o'clock in Tompkins Square Park. Reads
Speaker 1: a New Yorker Talk of the Town article from seven
Speaker 1: about a faction of theater centric anarchist group that made
Speaker 1: the Lower east Side home in the nineteen sixties. When Clyde,
Speaker 1: Susan Diego, and Ritchie asked were asked to explain why
Speaker 1: they are performing these services for the Lower east Side community,
Speaker 1: each repeated the enigmatic Digger motto diggers do. The Diggers
Speaker 1: saw sharing free food as a way to teach people
Speaker 1: about their anti capitalist ideals. Um. And I just really
Speaker 1: like this whole quote because I like, I'd never run
Speaker 1: across this phrase. Diggers do before. But I feel like
Speaker 1: it connects the spirit that connects these two groups. Because
Speaker 1: there's a problem. People don't have food, and there's a solution.
Speaker 1: You get food and you give it to people, And
Speaker 1: so existing impediments like the enclosure of the commons or
Speaker 1: the system that the enclosure led to capitalism should just
Speaker 1: be ignored. Um, which isn't always work, but it's a
Speaker 1: really fucking cool thing to do anyway. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's something I'm always talking about, Like we live
Speaker 1: in a time of incredible abundance. There's no reason for
Speaker 1: anybody to be hungry, you know, and so but the
Speaker 1: thing you the only thing you really do about that
Speaker 1: is giveaway food. You can't systemically unless you Yep, that's
Speaker 1: that's the argument for robot state power is like it's
Speaker 1: hard to conceive of local solutions that result in in,
Speaker 1: uh in feeding all the people who need food, right,
Speaker 1: but I can conceive of a very giant state apparatus
Speaker 1: that sees to it, you know, right, Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, my my my cheap excuse or my my
Speaker 1: my cheap work around is be like, oh well that
Speaker 1: has handled at a federated level where you know, we
Speaker 1: distribute the resources to the local groups that are doing
Speaker 1: that work. Um. But like I don't. I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to be like and that's the structure that everything needs,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, And the new fangled Diggers, at least
Speaker 1: all the history that I found is like, we don't
Speaker 1: know how they funded all of this. But I would
Speaker 1: argue that I have a sense of how they funded it,
Speaker 1: because I'm going to assume they fund it the way
Speaker 1: that modern anarchists fund it, which is some combination of
Speaker 1: crime which is primarily selling of drugs and sex work
Speaker 1: and scams, sympathetic people who have regular jobs, and folks
Speaker 1: who come from generational wealth. I I don't feel like this,
Speaker 1: I would say the I would say the latter quality
Speaker 1: is probably the biggest. Probably you didn't come and hitting
Speaker 1: up people for money fund fundraising essentially, yeah, exactly, Like
Speaker 1: it's to me, it's not this huge mystery. They am like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they did it, like everyone does it, you know. Um.
Speaker 1: And they lasted longer than original Diggers, um, which is
Speaker 1: sort of amazing because the original Diggers huge in history.
Speaker 1: Small thing. But I want to talk about another splinter
Speaker 1: off of the Diggers, or rather, these are the people
Speaker 1: that they got accused of being that they were unhappy
Speaker 1: that they get called of the ranters. If you combine
Speaker 1: the sixteen forties Diggers and the nineteen sixties Diggers, you
Speaker 1: might get the Ranters if if they existed as an
Speaker 1: actual movement and not just a few writers who sparked
Speaker 1: a moral panic. Because it's actually hard to be sure, right.
Speaker 1: One of the writers is this guy named Claxton. He
Speaker 1: was born Lauras Clarkson in sixteen fifteen. But he was
Speaker 1: exactly the kind of cool guy to go by one
Speaker 1: name in this case of variation of his last name,
Speaker 1: and he somehow managed to evade the like I think
Speaker 1: he got to pick his own nickname, which is like
Speaker 1: the only time that happens in today's story. And he's
Speaker 1: an itinerant preacher, and he supported the Levelers in their
Speaker 1: fight for the republic, and he spent some time digging
Speaker 1: with the diggers. In sixteen fifty, thirty five years old,
Speaker 1: he writes a pamphlet called A Single Eye in which
Speaker 1: he claims there's no such thing as sin, specifically, sin
Speaker 1: was quote invented by the ruling class to keep the
Speaker 1: poor in order um, which actually gets to what you
Speaker 1: were saying about like that might not be why they invented,
Speaker 1: you know, like yeah, yeah, I don't think there was
Speaker 1: a meeting. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, the only commandment he
Speaker 1: respected was thou shalt not kill. He's a pacifist as well.
Speaker 1: And the ranters Claxton among others, they caused this moral
Speaker 1: panic and soon how everyone is complaining about how these
Speaker 1: ranters are running naked through the streets, preaching naked to
Speaker 1: naked crowds, and they cuss and they drink and they fuck,
Speaker 1: and they ruined monogamous marriages and they talk about the
Speaker 1: sexual liberation of women and yeah, yeah, no, yeah, they rule. Um,
Speaker 1: it's likely that they formed some kind of free love,
Speaker 1: communitary and counterculture of some size in England in the
Speaker 1: sixteen fifties that believed in the same Christian socialism and
Speaker 1: passipism of the Diggers, just plus sex and fun. Uh.
Speaker 1: They had nude rituals. Some of them were vegetarian. It's
Speaker 1: hard to know just how far it all went, though,
Speaker 1: because moral panics are always applied really broadly, right. There
Speaker 1: might have been thousands of them, There might have been
Speaker 1: dozens of them. There might have been five of them. Um,
Speaker 1: left wing historians want to say it was tons of people.
Speaker 1: Right wing historians like to focus on the possibility that
Speaker 1: it was mostly a media construction and there was only
Speaker 1: the writers. My my best guess is that there was
Speaker 1: at least half a dozen or so of these preachers
Speaker 1: each with the following of a couple dozen to a
Speaker 1: couple hundred people, which probably participated to various degrees in
Speaker 1: the religious de battery. But it was also all played
Speaker 1: up entirely, you know. But they wrote books, and they
Speaker 1: got locked up for writing those books, and those books
Speaker 1: were also burned. And as unpopular as the ranchers were
Speaker 1: the royalists, they were also unpopular with the parliamentarians, despite
Speaker 1: having basically all of them served in the war against
Speaker 1: the king that had just overthrown the king. One of
Speaker 1: the books they burned was called a Fiery Flying Role
Speaker 1: by a bees or cop, And I think role means
Speaker 1: like scroll in this context, so it's like basically like
Speaker 1: a fiery flying book. Yeah. The main message was that
Speaker 1: God was going to come down and level some ship himself,
Speaker 1: specifically cut down the rich and raise up the poor.
Speaker 1: And here's a quote from it that I just liked
Speaker 1: because I like this kind of ship. How how ye nobles,
Speaker 1: how honorable, how ye rich men, for the miseries that
Speaker 1: are coming upon you, for our parts we here that
Speaker 1: here the apostle preach, will also have all things in common.
Speaker 1: Neither will call anything that we have our own. We'll
Speaker 1: eat your bread together in singleness of heart, will break
Speaker 1: bread from house to house. And a beezer had been
Speaker 1: in jail when he had a religious experience that lasted
Speaker 1: four days and four nights, and that turned him into
Speaker 1: a renter. And during this religious experience he heard go
Speaker 1: up to London, to London, the great city, and right
Speaker 1: right right, we had it to London. And he preached
Speaker 1: to the poor on the street. Probably he was clothed,
Speaker 1: probably both him and his audience, And he preached about
Speaker 1: the evils of the rich. And he was known to
Speaker 1: like hug and kiss beggars, men and women on the street.
Speaker 1: And I hope the beggars were comfortable with that um.
Speaker 1: And and they believed that God is in everyone and
Speaker 1: every living thing. They rejected the dualism of heaven and earth,
Speaker 1: since God was an all cre Sure's sex was holy,
Speaker 1: it was communion, it was God making love to God.
Speaker 1: And they said rogues, thieves, horrors, and cut purses are
Speaker 1: every whit as good as the great ones of the earth.
Speaker 1: And the holiest people are those who would clothe and
Speaker 1: feed the wicked, and at least a couple of them
Speaker 1: were gay. Sources at the time complained about a ranter
Speaker 1: who had a quote man wife as well as liaisons
Speaker 1: with women and the man will interesting. Yeah, no, right,
Speaker 1: Like I want to learn more about I've actually learned
Speaker 1: a little bit about uh women husbands, right, but I
Speaker 1: haven't learned as much about man wives. So I'm also
Speaker 1: interested including the wicked. I'm like, that's a you know,
Speaker 1: now where we're at at the moment, and it's hard
Speaker 1: to you know, the wicked, the wicked or not a
Speaker 1: third category from the people who you think are are
Speaker 1: messed up the same people, right, and so so I
Speaker 1: don't have any any concrete or good ideas about this,
Speaker 1: but but I'm interested, Like in these radical movements, you
Speaker 1: often find this tendency to want to um, you know,
Speaker 1: you want to be righteous, as you would put it
Speaker 1: in Christian terms, you know, to what to want, you know,
Speaker 1: to spend time with the sinner, right, with the sinner
Speaker 1: and the wicked. These are abstract, doesn't tell you anything,
Speaker 1: you know, I say, but but I think about you know,
Speaker 1: people who you and I would both consider our enemies.
Speaker 1: Those those are the wicked, right, And then how are
Speaker 1: you supposed to behave to them according to the renters,
Speaker 1: according to Christian what you're supposed to give them your stuff? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's hard to it's hard to square, right, It's it's
Speaker 1: it's hard to do. I'm reading a Nursula like wind
Speaker 1: book right now. It's one of my favorite authors, and
Speaker 1: it's a very pacifist book. It's called The Eye of
Speaker 1: a Heron and it you know, it um you know,
Speaker 1: and it gets that I mean to me, it's like
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, this is why I am influenced by pacifism.
Speaker 1: But I am not a pacifist. I actually think it's
Speaker 1: okay to have enemies. I think what for me, what
Speaker 1: matters is that there's like a an off road that
Speaker 1: someone can no longer be my enemy. Know, Like, it's
Speaker 1: not like hounding someone to the ends of the earth, right,
Speaker 1: it's like stopping this movement that is trying to bring
Speaker 1: fascism to the United States or whatever, like you know,
Speaker 1: Christian nationalism or whatever. These different phrases are right, like,
Speaker 1: like I am interested, I'm okay with presenting them as
Speaker 1: my enemy. Um, these people that I am dedicated to
Speaker 1: trying to stop. And yet there's still the like not
Speaker 1: in not in a dehumanizing way, and not in a
Speaker 1: way that doesn't allow them to like cease being this
Speaker 1: Like it's a it's a set of behaviors rather than
Speaker 1: a rather than a intrinsic quality to a person. Maybe
Speaker 1: is um Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: a big question. Um okay. So the man way, his
Speaker 1: name is John Oregon, and I just had to get
Speaker 1: that out there because that is the best name for
Speaker 1: a seventeenth century gamistic radical that I could possibly think of.
Speaker 1: Pretty good, pretty good. And they don't get to pick
Speaker 1: their own name, right, they didn't pick the ranters. It
Speaker 1: was a media's word for anyone who had wild ideas. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Gan Oregan is totally a stage Yeah, definitely. Um. And
Speaker 1: but one of the one of the pamphlets that they
Speaker 1: put out was called a Justification of the Mad Crew.
Speaker 1: And so at least this guy wanted to be called
Speaker 1: the Mad Crew. Um. And Nigel Smith a modern person,
Speaker 1: not a not a Ranter. In his introduction to a
Speaker 1: collection of Renter texts, he says that the Ranters believed
Speaker 1: that there can be no afterlife save amer emerging through
Speaker 1: decomposition of the dead body with glorious nature, and the
Speaker 1: literally the reason I include this, this is the most
Speaker 1: religious episode I think we've done. But the reason I
Speaker 1: include this is because that's like a core religious belief
Speaker 1: of mine, Like possibly the only thing that I would
Speaker 1: call a religious belief of mine is that um decomposition
Speaker 1: of the dead body with glorious nature is like what
Speaker 1: the afterlife is. And so it's just interesting. I've never
Speaker 1: seen it presented in a Christian context, but I don't know.
Speaker 1: Parliament doesn't like these Ranters much. Right in sixteen fifty
Speaker 1: they pass a Blasphemy Act and an Adultery Act pretty
Speaker 1: much designed to root out the Ranters, which also gets
Speaker 1: applied against the Diggers and anyone Parliament doesn't like. It
Speaker 1: was this whole culture war thing because nothing ever changes. Basically,
Speaker 1: the Blasphemy Act made it illegal to say that God
Speaker 1: quote dwells into creature and nowhere else, and it made
Speaker 1: it illegal to say that swearing and drunkenness aren't sins.
Speaker 1: And the Adultery Act made fornication a capital crime, so
Speaker 1: society picks some group to have a more panic about
Speaker 1: uses it to justify repression on society well wide level.
Speaker 1: A few of the writers get rounded up. One fellow
Speaker 1: had a whole board through his tongue with a hot
Speaker 1: iron for his blasphemy. Some of the ranters said, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, and they got out
Speaker 1: of punishment by you know, repenting or whatever, and a
Speaker 1: few did the whole like, I don't respect this court.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to talk to you. A bees Are
Speaker 1: cop took a differ intact. Whenever people tried to arrest him.
Speaker 1: He just would run the funk away, Like like one
Speaker 1: time they came to his house and he was like, oh,
Speaker 1: I left my coat inside. I'll just run inside and
Speaker 1: get my coat really quick, and they're like okay, and
Speaker 1: then he just runs out the back door and takes off.
Speaker 1: Eventually they catch him and he gets put in court,
Speaker 1: and he interrupts the court by throwing apples and pears
Speaker 1: and nutshells at everyone until like basically trying to prove
Speaker 1: to everyone that he's crazy. He still gets thrown in
Speaker 1: prison until he writes a I'm sorry letter, and then
Speaker 1: he does that. He gets out of prison. He changes
Speaker 1: his name to high Him, which is a Bible reference
Speaker 1: to a line I am what I am, and then
Speaker 1: he keeps preaching everything for everyone. What I have I
Speaker 1: share freely oppressed. He just stays at it under a
Speaker 1: new name. Claxton, for his part, also was a repent
Speaker 1: to get out of jail person, and he used to
Speaker 1: argue with the Diggers um Gerard the Digger was like
Speaker 1: this rancher guy fox too much, and Claxton was like
Speaker 1: this Digg says he wants a religion separate from money,
Speaker 1: but he takes tithes um. And of course while they're
Speaker 1: busy in fighting between the renters and the Diggers, they're
Speaker 1: both getting hauled up in front of court, and all
Speaker 1: these anti ranterer laws are being passed that effect everyone
Speaker 1: um and the persecution of the rancher's works, or at
Speaker 1: least it stops them from publishing. Their actual culture carried
Speaker 1: on for a while behind closed doors, but we lose
Speaker 1: track of it soon, and it's possible it died out
Speaker 1: with so many of its spokespeople and profits having moved
Speaker 1: on or away. UM. I like to imagine that it didn't.
Speaker 1: I like to imagine that just went underground and became
Speaker 1: multigenerational and they all took up digging, and then are
Speaker 1: the same people as the nineteen sixties diggers. And but
Speaker 1: none of that's true. It probably it probably died out.
Speaker 1: One more really short sect to tell you about. Have
Speaker 1: you ever heard of the Muggletonians? Uh words crossed my desk.
Speaker 1: I have no idea who they are? Yeah, no, I
Speaker 1: I had never heard of these people. And I was
Speaker 1: just like, oh, the levelers, the diggers, and then the ranters,
Speaker 1: and then it was like and the Muggletonians. So Claxton
Speaker 1: didn't go Quaker like a lot of the ranters did.
Speaker 1: He went something stranger. At sixteen sixty, he's done being
Speaker 1: a ranter. He becomes a Muggletonian. And they get their
Speaker 1: name from literally the most British named person to have overlived,
Speaker 1: lot of Wick Muggleton Pretty good. Yeah, And it got
Speaker 1: This sect got its start when lot of Wick and
Speaker 1: his cousin John Reeves went around basically around London being like, hey, buddy,
Speaker 1: you want to hear the one holy truth? All the
Speaker 1: others will get you damned to hell fire and they
Speaker 1: were convinced that. Um. They were convicted of denying the
Speaker 1: Holy Trinity, which I guess was a crime at the time,
Speaker 1: and they spent six months in jail. When they got out,
Speaker 1: people had read their pamphlets and they had a following.
Speaker 1: The Muggletonians believed that Heaven is six miles above the earth,
Speaker 1: and that God is somewhere between five and six ft tall,
Speaker 1: and that he does not give a shit about what
Speaker 1: happens on earth because there is no incarnate devil, just
Speaker 1: bad thoughts people have. Um, the diggers are actually on
Speaker 1: this kick to that the devil is the part of
Speaker 1: ourselves that tries to be selfish. The Muggletonians believe that
Speaker 1: the soul dies when the body dies, and both will
Speaker 1: be resurrected in the end times. And they also managed
Speaker 1: to do some pretty cool stuff like they didn't believe
Speaker 1: in the supernatural. So because of that, you couldn't witch
Speaker 1: hunt under their beliefs, right, um, because it's just isn't real,
Speaker 1: So you just there's no such thing as which is,
Speaker 1: so don't fucking burn people or whatever, um, which isn't
Speaker 1: not whatever. They never pointed any leaders, held any conferences
Speaker 1: or organized themselves. They had no public worship or instruction,
Speaker 1: and despite all of that, they lasted three hundred years.
Speaker 1: The Muggletonians, the last Muggletonian died in at least that
Speaker 1: we know of, I mean probably um, and yeah, those
Speaker 1: are this whole time period is overflowing with sex and
Speaker 1: heresies and people trying out both cool and uncool ideas. Uh.
Speaker 1: There was another one called the Fifth Monarchists, who followed
Speaker 1: a parliamentary officer who called himself King Jesus. And it's
Speaker 1: tempted to overthrow Cromwell um, and later trying to over
Speaker 1: attempted to overthrow King Charles the Second. Um. I mean
Speaker 1: you never know how many of these people had bad
Speaker 1: paint in their houses, you know, Yeah, totally totally Um.
Speaker 1: But that's where we're gonna leave it today. We're not
Speaker 1: we're not gonna talk about the Fifth Monarchist. They're just
Speaker 1: a weird random one liner about someone who followed King Jesus. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: them's them was the Diggers there they are may they
Speaker 1: be will Yeah? Yeah. So uh let's see, do you have, um,
Speaker 1: either final thoughts or anything you'd like to plug? Oh
Speaker 1: I don't really do concluding thoughts really really really not
Speaker 1: good at those obviously by by the entire back catalog
Speaker 1: The Mountain Goes to better understand the subject of today's podcast, Uh,
Speaker 1: we haven't we have a new record, but but but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like I always feel like, you know, when you're
Speaker 1: when you're appearing on somebody's thing, that's that you're promotion there. So, however, friends,
Speaker 1: if you're looking for an album that might energize you
Speaker 1: in these hard times, it might restore to you the
Speaker 1: energy you felt was lacking in your daily movements, you
Speaker 1: might try bleed Out by the Mountain Go. It's available
Speaker 1: now on Merge Records and Tapes. Bleed Out the only
Speaker 1: album that encourages you and all your friends to bleed
Speaker 1: out really moving away from your earlier work. I'm excited
Speaker 1: for people to hear the title track, to be honest,
Speaker 1: it's it's one of the uh, it's got, it's got.
Speaker 1: It's sort of a gonzo old old energy to it.
Speaker 1: I mean it's actually it's the one mellow song on
Speaker 1: the record, but but ric lyrically it's pretty old school. Okay,
Speaker 1: I haven't heard it yet, so I'm excited too. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's it's it's coming soon. It's it's later this month.
Speaker 1: So ah well that's why I haven't heard it yet. Okay,
Speaker 1: cool Sophie, you have anything to plug, no, just just
Speaker 1: fall at coles on Media on Twitter and Instagram sees
Speaker 1: see all the shows we have there, um, but including
Speaker 1: this one which is lovely. Yeah. And I have a
Speaker 1: book that's coming out on September called we Won't Be
Speaker 1: Here Tomorrow and its collection of short stories from that
Speaker 1: I've been publishing for the past while, um, some of
Speaker 1: which you might have heard on cool Zone Media on
Speaker 1: the show It Could Happen Here And it's available for
Speaker 1: pre order now and if you preorder it you get
Speaker 1: an art print um of a he's from the book
Speaker 1: cool and good And we'll be back next week on Monday.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, until the heat death of the Earth whatever universe.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. But more podcasts on cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: Visit our website cool zone Media dot com, or check
Speaker 1: us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't Do