Learning to face into the truth: humbly and bravely
This book aims to unsettle your view of yourself and the world, and it deserves to succeed. ‘Modernity’ is shorthand for the invisible, interlocking values and prejudices that support the privileged, extractive, capitalist system in which we’re all complicit to some degree.
The author, Vanessa Machado De Oliveira, also known as Vanessa Andreotti, embodies the tensions she explores. Born in Brazil to an indigenous mother and a white German father, she has become a university professor, but much of her real learning comes from ongoing deep contact with indigenous people in South America and Canada. So she’s both inside and outside the system.
Her basic assumption is that modernity is unsustainable, is dying, and we need to guide that death, and help to birth whatever comes next. What’s special about this book is the ways it exposes the colonial attitudes and entitlement beliefs which often underlie even liberal attempts to address the climate crisis and social injustice.
For example, she names the six Cs which modernity conditions us to desire: Comfort, Control, Convenience, Certainty, Consumption, Coherence. The system encourages us towards dependence and passivity, and makes it hard to face into painful realities and take responsibility.
This book doesn’t offer ‘solutions’ for how to hospice modernity and birth a successor, in fact she admits that this looks almost impossible, as we are all inside the system and depend on it to some extent. What the book can help us with, is realising our own prejudices, blind spots, limiting habits, and starting to develop clearer ways of seeing and relating.
For example, the pain of disillusionment can help us dethrone the ego and uncouple from our habitual desires and illusions. Closer contact with the land and Nature’s cycles can keep us more grounded. She urges us to live with mess, see our body as a part of Nature, like the land, and listen deeply to their wisdom, not to the monkey mind: “Don’t cast upon everything a blanket of interpretation.”
The book offers a lot of useful frameworks to support this reorientation, and exercises to apply them, which can help us to clarify and work with our own inner confusions and prejudices. Shifting focus from “narcissistic”, “infantilised” individualism to a sense of collective identity is a key part of this. A great way to apply what this book offers would be an in-person group. Vanessa learned a lot from indigenous communities in Peru, and surely part of birthing the new is reinventing community within modernist societies.
Hospicing Modernity is a difficult read. One reason is that it’s a painfully clear, passionate exposing of the privilege and exploitation that I and many others depend on. The other reason is that the writing is sometimes elaborately academic, with lots of long words like hyper-selfreflexity. However, I strongly recommend it.
If you want to dig further into the group Vanessa works with, it’s called Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (www.decolonialfutures.net). The website is challenging, for the same two reasons, but it offers a lot of resources, describes a range of really innovative ‘experiments’, and also four decks of cards which make their approach a bit more accessible, with themes like Radical Tenderness, Towards Relational Accountability, and Towards Eldering. Each deck offers us a range of penetrating questions, which are listed on the website.
Early on, the book offers a scenario for how the world scene unfolds from now to 2047, which is really grim, including human population falling to 3 million. This is the likely context for the hospicing process, and I also recommend reading The Ecotechnic Future (see my summary blog here) which offers a plausible scenario of what kind of society could emerge after the wreckage.
What neither book really addresses is how individuals or communities can navigate many years of high turbulence and decline: how do we shift from our current form of society – a lot of individuals dependent on modernity – to empowered cooperation and practical living skills? In a small way, that’s what my two current projects seek to help with: Community Climate Resilience and the Soul Resilience Network.