Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living

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But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability? Drawing on and moving beyond traditions of radical pedagogy, such as those inspired by Paulo Freire, the author 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. This book is not simply a text, it demands reflection and interaction, providing tools and stories that help each of us understand our relationship with modernity.

Navigating her rigorous work is an exercise in defamiliarizing modernity as the air we breathe, the site of our persistent illnesses, and the earthly thing that can give way to something else. Clear, creative, and cogent, the work offers cutting-edge philosophy at the same time that it furnishes usable guidance for how to cope with the coming perils of colonialism and capitalism. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.The book is about the necessary expansion of our capacity for dealing with difficult and painful things, to sit in complexity and uncertainty, to show up to difficult conversations and to exist differently and, put frankly, to grow up. For fans of adrienne maree brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all. Through a series of thought experiments, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira compels us to truly face the enormity of planetary crises as well as the seemingly benign ways we are complicit in them. The reader (and the world at large) must now make a choice: does our agency lie in tentatively plaiting the gloom we’re in, to make sense of our predicament and to try and grapple with it, or do we default to the brilliant intellect and its offer of comfortable certainty?

She explains how our habits, behaviors, and belief systems hold us back…and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest. This is not an ordinary book and it may not be for everyone: it is a thought experiment that skillfully and creatively creates conditions for us to shed our arrogance and to get our proverbial shit together. Machado de Oliveira breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance–the do-gooder who does “good enough,” then retreats to business as usual; the incognito capitalist who, at first glance, may seem like a radical change-maker–and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. It examines a range of urgent philosophical issues about modernity and its deep contradictions, and the ways in which its inevitable demise might be steered toward more morally and culturally productive futures.

It is a book that is not only thought provoking but also helpful in guiding genuinely worthwhile discussions. Machado de Oliveira breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance--the do-gooder who does "good enough," then retreats to business as usual; the incognito capitalist who, at first glance, may seem like a radical change-maker--and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently.

Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. We certainly need to escape its clutches and discover a kinder, more connected way of living in the world. If you are in Canada, you can purchase the book here (with proceedings going to our Indigenous partners in Brazil). It is the story of separation, of how humans have cut themselves off from the rest of life on planet Earth by believing that we can do precisely as we wish without repercussions.A destabilised climate, pollution, inequality and endless war are all testimony to the failings of modernity. For fans of adrienne maree brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all. It’s a book for the future, yet written to meet us where we are at right now as individuals living with trauma and facing ethical dilemmas about what it means to take meaningful actions under conditions of complexity.