Hospicing Modernity

Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism

By: Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

Narrated by: Dougald Hine, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

For fans of Everything Is F*cked and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, a book about facing the multiple crises of modernity - and hospicing modernity - 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 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.

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 change-maker - 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 "five 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.

For fans of Adrienne Maree Brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Charles Eisenstein, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (P)2022 North Atlantic Books

Critic reviews

“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.” (Kyle Whyte, PhD, George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan)

“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.” (Denise 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)

“This book is rude. Like the shaman’s confident cackle. Like the punch of an elder whose eyes shimmer with a secret. Like a trickster’s feverish dance to a drumbeat in a time supposedly passed. And right there - my fellow modern citizen - right there, in the author’s cosmological rudeness, lies her deepest medicine. Her generous gift to the need to upset the terraforming coloniality of White 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. It is time to gather. We can start here, together.” (Bayo Akomolafe, PhD, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences)

Be ready

Not for everyone, but for those willing to make the effort, necessary. Deep gratitude to Vanessa for this work.

Life supporting

I will carry and metabolize this wisdom for many years to come. Thank you for this offering

the most deliciously challenging read

every section was amazing and memorable. i will be referring to this text for quite some time

Critically important to read

Given the impending end of Modernity, this book gives us a way to face it personally and collectively.

life changing

Machado de Oliveira's brilliance is a source of liberation for me. Her premises, principles, and frameworks really allow to shift our colonizers lens to one that can truly serve the world.

Life changing

This book has reoriented much of how I think, look, feel and lean into the world. This is a crucial and very difficult read for a complicit aspiring change maker based in the global north. Incredibly moving. Read it.

Riveting

A very strong and honest look at where we are now as a global society that stimulates thought rather than offering a packaged solution to the dilemma we face on earth