Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living

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Asking the question ‘What if racism, colonialism, and all other forms of toxic and contagious divisions are preventable social diseases?’, Hospicing Modernity invites its reader to dare and educate themselves by undergoing a process of self-unmaking. Drawing on and moving beyond traditions of radical pedagogy, such as those inspired by Paulo Freire, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira has created a powerful tool for uncovering, undoing, and recovering from the deadly ways in which modernity also lives and dies as humans experience it subjectively.” VA: That’s a wonderful question. I’ll start with a critique that is common amongst the network of Indigenous communities in Brazil, which is that of all the beings, all the other animals on the planet, human beings are the youngest, symbolically speaking. And of all cultures, Western culture is also the youngest. In terms of its life cycle, it’s in its teenage years. Other cultures cannot grow up for Western culture; Western culture needs to grow up for itself. Those other cultures do need to support a process of growing up; you need your uncles, aunts, and all your grandparents to enable this culture to find its pathway, to age well and to die well. But there’s no point of going into Indigenous communities and asking for detailed instructions. They can’t give you that. What they can give you is direction, and that direction is always towards realizing that we’re part of a much larger continuum than the individual self. The main point of all this is responsibility. As you age, you embrace more of this responsibility. It’s a kind of a visceral responsibility; it’s not an intellectual choice or a matter of convenience. It can go against your own self-interest sometimes. Western culture “growing up” and the role of ancestral cultures in offering direction rather than detailed instruction So how do we? Because one of the functions of different generations would be to provide to each other some sense of what works and what doesn't work in what context. We not only have lots of time to do that to technology, but we have also lost the practice of documenting this in oral histories or even in written form, what we would like to pass down. It has become much more of a somewhat narcissistic exercise about ourselves rather than what we're going to be leaving to those that come after us. Notwithstanding that the author makes a clear statement in which she references academic writing as being a ‘restrictive mode of communication’ (p18) and clearly inferring that her own academic writing is something different than this… this is still very clearly parked in ‘academia.’ Thankfully that’s not a barrier for me… but one of my/the privileges I own.

So then, stories, for example, are trying to help things land in the world, for sometimes difficult things to land right for people. So the relationship with language and the relationship with knowledge shift from one based on a specific form of aesthetics to one based on the ethics of moving things and holding space for things, allowing things to synchronize and to work together. It's a process that requires a lot of decentering of the self, in participating in a movement that is not just of your own, that is not about you. It is about what something can do. And I think that's how it would change the way people relate to social change.

It's also associated with oxytocin, which is the sense of a transactional relationship where you have control and you are accepted on your terms, rather than seeing yourself as something much bigger than what your identity can contain, for example, and engaging in the relationship for growing together, growing old together and having the joys of this process of maturity, including the mistakes and failures that are part of it. It’s not just about expanding the forms of relationships that we’ve learned within modernity. It’s about re-manifesting the ways that we can relate. I see a lot of people wanting to connect with the land, connect with the whales, the sea, the stars, the sky, and the flowers—but not with the shit. The shit is part of it too though. So how do we figure out a way to connect with the pain without drowning in this pain? How have other cultures, the aunties and uncles, learned how to process all of this differently?

LP: There’s a beautiful way you articulate this at the beginning of the book, where you write about modernity’s tendency to “word the world”—and the need to shift to “worlding the world.” After reading the book I was left with a very strong feeling of the importance of love and feeling loved—not in the sense of individual love, but in a larger sense of love, one that also encounters death, and passing, and pain, and the shit. Could we close with a few words on love perhaps? We have to figure out a way of getting to zero: where we can see it with the good, the bad, the ugly, the broken, and the messed up, within ourselves and all around us, within humanity, within us, rather than romanticizing idealized humanity. I think that an approach more based on decolonial forms of sobriety, maturity, discernment, and accountability would be about sitting with what it is in the present and with the broken parts, with the messed up parts, the beautiful parts, without trying to select what makes us feel better. That's hard because most people won't want to do that. Vanessa Andreotti: Probably the easiest way to respond to this question is to say that modernity is a ubiquitous story of linear progress, development, evolution, and civilization that is all around us and that informs the ways we think, the ways we imagine things, the ways we hope, the ways we desire. That also informs our neurobiology in many ways: where we source pleasure, what we're afraid of. So modernity is that water for the fish that we're all swimming in. It is a book that you likely will resist, consciously or unconsciously - I definitely did. It is painful and frustrating at times as it won't provide you with solutions, nor give you more of a feelgood experience. It is easy to put this book down - beDenise Ferreira da Silva, PhD, professor at the University of British Columbia Social Justice Institute and author of Toward a Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt Kamea Chayne: Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me here on the show. It's been an honor to have you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers? Carl Mika, PhD, director of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Waikato and author of Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence A more extensive explanation we would talk about, for example, using the metaphor of a house built on Planet Earth, and the house right now is exceeding the limits of the planet. So the foundation of the house is a foundation of separability, of the separation between humans and the land, and then there is the higher accusation of different animals in relationship to each other, with those that can reason being at the top of the scale. Then also within humanity, [there is] the hierarchy between cultures and how they contribute to this single story of progress, development, evolution, and civilization.