Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living

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Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance. We take more than we give; we inoculate ourselves in positive self-regard while continuing to make harmful choices; we wreak irreparable havoc on the ecosystems, habitats, and beings with whom we share our planet. But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability? So yes, it will challenge you, and tries to get you to engage. It’s interesting, I guess you can make what you want of it. I’m not sure how well this format works for a book, probably better off using it as a basis for discussion. The experience of reading it by yourself like you would a normal book is actually quite isolating. But interesting none the less. Western culture “growing up” and the role of ancestral cultures in offering direction rather than detailed instruction Interesting ideas and concepts. It’s certainly provocative and not an easy read. I want to read more of it but finding the authors style tiresome and repetitive - for which, they continuously state “I invite you to sit with these difficult feelings that reading this book may evoke..” etc. Which is itself, tiresome..!

The “exercises” comprise grey boxes with a wall of text of multiple vaguely-related abstract questions, which I guess you’re supposed to think about..? Or write an answer to each one? Feel like one or two well-thought out and targeted questions would work better. It’s pretty overwhelming! Vanessa Andreotti: Exactly. Yes, you said it beautifully. I think that happens quite a lot if you're focused on form because you're also coming from the same desires, right? It's not in the book, this came out of something that happened through the book, but we're trying to think about what is intelligible as subjectivity and in terms of politics within the house of modernity. We mapped five different things that make politics intelligible. 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. Rather, we should recognise that modernity is expiring, that it no longer has anything to offer and that we must move it to the hospice where it can gracefully die. A hospice is a place of kindness, not only for those about to die but also for those who will survive them. The hospice is a place of transition. The dying can prepare for the end and those close to them can prepare for life without their loved one. Modernity is deeply ingrained in all of us who have been brought up in “developed” societies. We may not love it, but we live in intimate proximity to it. We know we must let it go. By allowing modernity to expire gracefully within us, without judgement for its manifest failings, we halt its programme of violence and separation and open the space to reclaim a deeper understanding of what it is to be human. I also believe that this book needs to be read as a collective exercise… and worked through with a group of like-minded people who are interested in doing the hard work that she calls upon us to do. For that reason I am going to propose it to one my book clubs… to embark upon, piece by piece, as a collective endeavour… working out way through one thought experiment, or story, each time we meet over the course of the next year or so.We've been talking a lot about the role of translation, not just the translation of words, but the translation of feelings in cultural context and time in temporality in this conversation. So thinking about Gen Z, the young people that are coming and saying we need decolonization, we need to go beyond inclusion, inclusion is not enough. They are looking at climate change. They're looking at the world and the amount of information we have and the hyper-complexity and volatility of what they're facing and saying, “The promises that were made to the generations before are not promises that can hold for this generation.” They know that this incremental social mobility is not going to happen. 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. Although this politics still exists within some Indigenous groups, other communities are not interested in the same game. So how to exist differently would depend on us actually learning from the existing forms that are not working so that we can make different mistakes and experiment with things that can actually interrupt some of this pattern. But we cannot interrupt something that we still idealize or that we still romanticize, and we need to figure out a way of getting out of the seesaw, a way of relating to the world again, where we either romanticize and idealize or we pathologize and vilify.

There's also endorphins and adrenaline that are mobilized in different ways. But the sense of righteousness is also a desire for that adrenaline, for feeling alive and doing something. So I think there are other possibilities for grounding this yearning for healing and for being together, and a chemistry that has been exiled from modernity and that Indigenous peoples still have practices that remind us that another way of being not only in conceptual terms, but in terms of our neurobiology. Another way of being is possible. We are much more than what we have become. But as we wrap up, what might radical tenderness orient us towards as we ponder more about how we're going to grow up and show up for ourselves and our planet, even with all of the contradictions that modernity might force us to live with or confront. Kamea Chayne: I know you're good friends with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe. So I'm hearing a lot of common threads in what you're saying and what I've been thinking about, especially being affirmed by my conversation with Bayo, is that we're often giving too much weight to our words and language and human-created concepts because we create these concepts essentially based off of reality to try to make sense of the world. and yet a lot of us base our realities on these concepts, rather than remembering that it's the other way around—that we base our reductive concepts off of reality. VA: While talking about things may shift some cognitive or intellectual frames, the nature of intellectual exchange in Western culture often means that things don’t land in the affective space at the heart of things, or in the relational space of the gut. One of the things we’ve learned from education in Indigenous communities, from the communities within the network, is their critique that in Western culture you educate the head first and the body follows. But in Indigenous cultures you educate the gut first, and the gut is relationality, it’s practice. It’s an invitation to relate differently to oneself, to be able to hold space for the complexity of the self before you begin to hold space for the complexity around you. The heart is cleansed and the head follows. That really provided direction for the book. If the gut doesn’t change, if the heart is not cleansed and filled with other effects, nothing changes. You need this to activate the sense of visceral responsibility, to open up to different cognitive references and go beyond cognition. We explore this in the book with artist Dani D’Emilia in the text “Co-Sensing with Radical Tenderness,” as well as through exercises that are very different from talking. In one of Dani’s exercises, you hold a piece of ice between someone else’s skin and your own. This is about actually sensing and activating some of the other sensibilities of the body that Aboriginal people in Australia talk about when they say that we have ninety-five senses, not just five. Part of the job is to open up all the other senses that are beyond words to help us feel entangled and connected with both the beauty and the pain of everything. And that is what would lead to a different relationship with aging well, and living well, and dying well.Beyond a mere critique of modernity, this is a book written for us as people who struggle with the everyday manifestations of modern power. 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. 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.” Vanessa Andreotti: So in our project, we make a distinction, it's a strategic one and it's artificial in many ways: between desires and yearnings. It was just a sense of separation that has been imposed. But I think we are deeply entangled still with the Earth and with each other, and we have now deactivated the capacity to feel each other's pains. Not entirely, though. This is not a book meant to be consumed the typical way we treat books, but more a body of work that you will need to revisit. To me, it is more akin to a guide for collective ego death of Western culture as we know it - if that makes any sense to you.

But we have seen that even for young people, there is a sense that if there are no adults in the room in the world at large, there is a yearning for that connection to happen. Although there's also a lot of anger because they feel shortchanged by the other generations that have created a world that is being inherited that is a mess. There's also the need for some stories to be passed down, especially stories about what went wrong so that they can learn from the mistakes already made and make only different mistakes in the future. From what I interpreted of your message, our maturation calls on us to not just do differently and to not just know differently, but to be differently and to embody differently. So can you illuminate this further for us and share why? Perhaps learning new information and changing what we're doing might not be enough and that there is a deeper deprogramming and reconditioning that we need? You don't get the message of the book and then you are bound to get very angry about what you feel is authorial pretentiousness ('who does she think she is?!');So the first thing is exceptionalism. We are looking for a sense of being special. So exceptionalism would be like if it's not this group, it’s another, it's not the right, it's the left. It's not the rest. If it's not white people, it's going to be BIPOC people. So that sense of exceptionalism, then there is a way that one group of people would be separate from the rest. Right?

He has over 40 years experience working in community development and education. In Coffs Harbour he is a member of a number of community groups, including the Coffs Harbour Writers Group, a men's mentoring group, and the local orienteering club. He is the founder of a bi-monthly poetry evening at a local cafe. 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. So part of this maturity is actually shifting the waste that we've been conditioned to think about, [and] even, what is the work by the house of modernity and within the house of modernity, right? Part of this mode of consumption is also to consume what's pleasurable but to give us a sense of certainty of control, of authority, of autonomy, and a sense of arbitration in the world that is also connected with a sense of righteousness and gratefulness. So this mode of relating to the world is antithetical or is not conducive to us actually sitting with the proverbial shit that we have to compost together. It's not just individual shit that we have to compost, but also collectively, the collective shit that comes from the bad decisions that have been made in the past that has brought us to the mess we are in. Many people want to think about hope and the future as a better space, but this "better space" depends on what we do today, on us building our capacity to compost this shit, which is not necessarily a pleasurable process.And the process will be painful. Throughout the book Andreotti insists that we should be feeling pain, anxiety, self-doubt, and dread. She wants us to criticize ourselves and to get ready to give up some of modernity's benefits. "[T]his book is about expanding our collective capacity to hold space for difficult and painful things [therefore] I cannot sat ‘I hope you enjoy this book.’" (xxi)