Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism
by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
2021 · North Atlantic Books · 305 pages
A thought-provoking guide to facing global pandemics, climate change, and other modern crises with maturity, humility, and integrity.
This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, the work of which this book is based on, present 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.
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?
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 changemaker—and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. She explains how our habits, behaviors, and belief systems hold us back… and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest. Including exercises used with teachers, NGO practitioners, and global changemakers, she offers us thought experiments that ask us to:
• Reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis
• Better assess our surroundings and interact with difference, uncertainty, complexity, and failure
• Expand our capacity to hold personal and collective space for difficult and painful things
• Understand the “5 modern-colonial E’s”: Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism
• Interrupt our satisfaction with modern-colonial desires that cause harm
• Create space for change driven neither by desperate hope nor a fear of desolate hopelessness
Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all. [Text Source: North Atlantic Books]
“The answers are in each one of us, but it is difficult to listen when we are not in balance.”
