Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living

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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. You get the sense that the author is trying to provoke a reaction and wants you to delve into your own knee jerk thoughts and feelings. I did this by taking notes on my ebook copy of the book. Here is an example: The book has an academic and pedagogical tone, which I personally struggled with, but that’s not to say it’s bad. Just not for me. Some terms are explained, such as “epistemologies”. Other terms like “generative/nongenerative” I Googled.. and still don’t really understand. We have a project around that which is called the Pledge of Generations, where we invite people to pledge to work intergenerationally. So the pledge talks about what you would pledge to two generations before you and two generations after you and to the generations right before and after yours, and also to your generation. What would be the mode of relationship and the call to responsibility that you would want to have as a basis for the conversations? It has been very interesting to see how different generations respond to the Pledge of Generations itself. Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

I'm not sure the mix works, but I've been thinking about it for a while, which means it certainly had an impact. Tragically, we were wrong. A destabilised climate, pollution, inequality and endless war are all testimony to the failings of modernity. More chilling still is that modernity is not a philosophical abstract that we can dip into or opt-out of. Generations of modernity as the driving force of the Western world mean that it is everywhere. It is the story we hear whilst growing up and finding our place in the world. It shapes our education and what we do with the things we learn. It reaches deep inside us, filtering our view of the world, deciding what is possible and what is not, severing links with ancient wisdom and the diversity of human experience. It is a restrictive template for how we experience our own lives. How do we move through the fog at the edge of precipices together without throwing ourselves or each oher off the edge?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. 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.

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. LP: One of the strong emotional cores of the book is a story that was transmitted to you by a Cree elder, which is about four mountains, each with an uphill and a downhill element to them, and each corresponding to different phases of life in which we learn, we struggle, and we teach younger generations. Reading through that story while staying in my grandparents’ place made me think very clearly of what Elizabeth Povinelli calls “the ancestral present”—how the people who are no longer there are nevertheless still holding your world in place. I wanted to ask you about birth accompanying death, and also about what role parenting plays in all of this, especially as a parent yourself. What do you feel you might have learned from that experience in relation to the forming of this book? So if we keep up just the mode of relating to knowledge as a form of consumption and self-actualization, we might be missing out on the opportunity to really change this moment of relationship to a mode where we can not only know differently but exist differently together. For that, we would need to tap capacities or reactivate capacities that have been exiled by the house of modernity. Capacities of knowing and capacities of being that are part of our neurobiology and part of our bodies, but that haven't been encouraged within the house that we are conditioned by. 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 Let go of “the ruler,” the desire for feeling right and righteous that gives us a false sense of certainty and self-importance and prevents us from decentering ourselves and being presentSo one of the ways to relate to language differently is to see words as entities of reality itself that do things in the world. If you take that position— which is what I played with in the book—if you take the position that language is an entity that works through you, that plays with you, but it also goes beyond your intentions in your own body in uttering these words, the focus of what you're doing shifts from describing something to moving something in the world.

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? 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.And we could access other forms of existence by, for example, looking at the production and reabsorption of serotonin in our bodies and how different cultures have practices that that work precisely with that. Like when we talk about ayahuasca, for example, or mescaline, or psilocybin, we would be looking at practices that try to open up different ways of experiencing the world with more responsibility, although they are consumed, especially in the West, in a very different way as personal self-care, personal healing. So what are some lessons you think we can learn from this, and how does the work of maturing ourselves and our ways of being tied into this very material and more urgent work of supporting Indigenous communities and landscapes facing threats of destruction right now?

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. The story of the Catalyst Program of UBC: report “Moving with storms” (hospicing and repurposing institutions)

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So looking at how, for example, for societies in the Global North, we've had a bubble of prosperity for people who were born just after the war that were presented with certain promises of progress of incremental social mobility. For them, now in their 70s or late 60s, it's very difficult to understand why people who are in their twenties or late teens want to bring down monuments and statues. They're saying we need something very different. The generations in between are also being asked to do this role of translation and in mediating a little bit of this conversation. VA: In the book, hospicing is about offering palliative care to something that is dying—in this case, modernity—which means that you’re not investing in its futurity. You’re offering care that allows something to die with dignity, integrity, and compassion. You’re not trying to kill modernity, but you’re not trying to keep it alive either. At the same time, you are offering prenatal care to something that is being born out of this death, that is potentially—but not necessarily—wiser, without suffocating this baby through your own projections, nor assuming that this baby is coming through you either. Kamea Chayne: Yeah, you touched on something that stood out to me because I've been thinking about this and I haven't had the proper words to articulate it per se. But this whole idea of rights to me, I don't know if it's indicative that there have been conflicting interests between, say, properties or corporations and people. And we've created conditions where a lot of people have been barred from open and free access to our basic survival needs and therefore the concept of rights in and of itself is even necessary. 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.