Hospicing Modernity
Modernity is dying within and around us, and we need to face that death with courage and compassion. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, author of Hospicing Modernity, joins us. Highlights include:
How her mixed Indigenous and German heritage in Brazil exposed her to a complex mix of love and violence, deepening her understanding of how socialization and education can perpetuate harmful relationships;
Why the ‘house of modernity’, which is built on a foundation of humanity’s separation from the rest of nature, is structured to ultimately fail;
Why we need to ‘hospice modernity’ both within and around us, without feeling overwhelmed or rushing for quick fixes, while making space for something much larger to emerge;
Why we need to compost the ‘pedestal’ sense of agency from modernity and its elevated sense of certainty and subject-object relationships and embrace a more intersubjective mycelial sense of agency;
Why ‘outgrowing modernity’ will require us to prepare for a ‘well-died death’ and a greater sense of emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and interspecies and intergenerational responsibility.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (00:00):
As the system in decline follows its course, as this collapse - socioeconomic, ecological, and psychological - occurs, it's not a death of something outside of us. It's something inside of us that needs to be composted. So we need to face it and have the stomach trained to be present to it without throwing up on each other, without throwing a tantrum, and without throwing in the towel. So how do we hold space for this moment where we are not the ones birthing anything. We're the ones assisting in the death and in the birth of something that is much bigger than ourselves.
Alan Ware (00:43):
That was educator, scholar, and author, Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti. In this episode of OVERSHOOT, we'll be discussing her groundbreaking book, Hospicing Modernity, a thought-provoking guide that describes the failure of modernity's stories and calls on us to create a more life-affirming future with maturity, humility, and integrity.
Nandita Bajaj (01:12):
Welcome to OVERSHOOT, where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware (01:36):
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests covering a range of topics we examine the forces underlying overshoot - the patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life. And now on to today's guest.
(02:14):
Vanessa de Oliviera Andreotti is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, where she leads transformative conversations about education and complex times. A former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change, and a former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education, Vanessa has more than 100 published articles and has worked extensively across sectors internationally in areas of education related to global justice, global citizenship, critical literacies, indigenous knowledge systems, and the climate and nature emergency. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing Human's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective, and one of the designers of the course, Facing Human Wrongs: Climate Complexity and Relational Accountability, available at the University of Victoria through Continuing Studies. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj (03:19):
Hi Vanessa, welcome to our podcast. It's lovely having you here.
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (03:23):
Thank you for inviting me here.
Nandita Bajaj (03:25):
And Vanessa, we've been following your work with great interest for a number of years and it's wonderful to finally connect. You communicate the predicament of modernity's overshoot in such rich ways, and your use of metaphor and visualization provides a really powerful lens in both describing the failure of modernity's stories and how we might imagine new stories for the future that recognize our connected relatedness to all of life. So thank you again for your incredible work and for joining us today. Vanessa, we'd like to begin by exploring the key messages in your book, Hospicing Moderntiy: Facing Humanity's wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. But before we do that, we understand that your personal journey, including your own upbringing, plays a big part in how you view the predicament of modernity and how we might respond to it. Could you set the stage for this conversation by sharing some of your journey with us?
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (04:31):
Thank you, Nandita. For sure. So I come from a mixed heritage family of both German and Brazilian indigenous ancestry. My mom comes from Guaranian ancestral line and I was born already out of this colonial encounter. So my father's brothers were involved in agrarian expansion in Brazil, which is how indigenous genocide happened there. And he wanted to make a stand against state-sanctioned violence, so he decided to marry an indigenous woman. And my mom on her side associated being indigenous with dispossession and humiliation. So there was a contract of social mobility through genetic enfranchisement, and I was one of the products of that. Me and my brother were brought to being through that contract. And as a child, when you are present to cultures in dissonance, you'll see they are very difficult to navigate because there are many complexities and paradoxes. This is where you can see harm and violence mixed with love and it's very complicated I think for children.
(05:47):
And as a child looking at all of that, I think there was also an unrealistic promise that I made to myself in terms of applying my capacity and skills to figuring out why there was so much cruelty and brutality that I was being exposed to, not just between people and different cultures, but also between people and the rest of nature. So I was very sensitive and neurodivergent and had this idea of fixating on tracing the cultural trajectories of harm, which for a child is not the best or the wisest choice to be made. However, as I grew older and became an educator, those capacities developed very early on really helped me map how our socialization, our systems of education, are all enmeshed in reproducing the cultural traits and relational traits that lead to harm and the reproduction of harm. So the book was written in 2019 and 2020, but it goes back to how I came to know what I feel in my body today. And I was as an educator trying to bring the stories of my own learning to support and scaffold other people in noticing realities very differently. So the stories invite people into a different relationship with language, a different relationship with themselves, and a different relationship with the reality that they are embedded in.
Nandita Bajaj (07:31):
Thank you so much for sharing that. In fact, we deliberately started with this question because we wanted to capture the complexity and nuance that personal stories reveal as yours did, especially with you being caught in between two worlds and how that helped inform the work that you're doing today. And I also recall when I was reading your book about the perspective that you just shared about your mother, what she had toward her own indigeneity, basically associating with precarity and dispossession and aspiring toward whiteness and the social mobility that comes with that identity. I could see so many of those aspects within my own upbringing in India. When I was born, India had already undergone a century of colonial British rule. So that progress narrative of modernity and development was very deeply baked into our education system and our cultural narratives. And I was basically raised to value and desire all of the conveniences and materialism of modernity in the same way as you describe your mother experiencing. It came with a level of shame that there was something wrong with us if we didn't desire that. And with that also came a dismissal of any rural and indigenous communities within India as being backward. They're not progressive, they're not moving with the times and it's taken a lot of unlearning over the last many years, but it's an ongoing process of decolonizing our own minds and our own personal desires.
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (09:18):
Absolutely. What you describe as the subjugation of other knowledges also happened within the family. So my grandmother from my mom's side, indigenous grandmother, I was always compared to her as a kid and the threat was that I was going to die as a nobody in the middle of nowhere as if there are such things. And one of the things that my grandmother did that was very rebellious is that she was against this ladder of social mobility because she said in her words, the house that the white man built was going to fall and this was not very far away. So she was not going to see it, but my mom's generation and mine would. And she said that when the moment came to pass, there would be a lot of pain and a lot of reckoning with what this way of being has done to the Earth, to other species, and the hierarchies created between cultures and peoples. So that was seen as a bad prophecy. And these kinds of prophets are generally not welcome when we really want to invest in something that promises you so much like modernity does. And whenever I was asking too many questions, I was compared to my grandmother in the sense that this needed to be corrected and that I needed to invest my desires in the correct way and the only correct way as well.
Alan Ware (10:55):
Well, we're very glad that you embody a lot of your grandmother in yourself and in your skepticism of modernity. And that leads nicely into discussing your book Hospicing Modernity, which has so many fruitful, complex ideas that we'll really only be able to scratch the surface in this interview. But why don't we start with the idea or concept of modernity itself, and you've got a great visual metaphor comparing modernity to a house. How would you describe that visual metaphor of the house of modernity to us?
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (11:28):
Yeah, so the book has many of these metaphors, but one that is very central is the one that brings different critiques of aspects of modernity together in one single image. And it starts with the image of this house sitting on the planet. And it starts by saying that the house is exceeding the limits of the planet. We start with the overshoot already, so the house is bigger than the planet it's sitting on. And there are certain aspects of the house that are structural. Other aspects will vary according to context, but we talk about the structure of the house as having a foundation of separability, which is the separation of humans from the rest of nature, because we're also nature. So that imposed sense of separation, it's not just a cognitive frame, but also a neurobiological frame. It's relational. It's emotional, and it creates different types of relationships that really create imprints in our neurobiology, which then will end up becoming a limitation in the ways that we can connect, we can relate, and we can feel responsible for.
(12:43):
So the sense of separation that is imposed creates hierarchies between species, between cultures, between individuals, but also it renders the land as property that can be owned and creates a sense in us, fundamentally a sense of worthlessness if we are not producing value according to the economies of modernity. So for us to prove that we are worthy of being alive, we need the external validation that we are producing value. There's no intrinsic value in our being, right? And this is because of that imposition of a sense of separation. That is completely unnatural, let me just say that, because the more you become aware of the metabolism that we are part of, that is the planet and the cosmos, you will see that our understanding of life is very limited if it comes from an anthropocentric or human exceptionalist frame. So that's the foundation. The foundation separates us from the rest of nature.
(13:53):
Then there are two carrying walls. The first carrying wall of the house of modernity is the carrying wall of the modern nation state, which we tend to believe that the nation state is there to protect the people. But if you look deeply into the history of the modern nation state, it was actually created to protect capital and capital ownership and capital owners. So when we think about rights that are dispensed by the state - human rights, labor rights, indigenous rights, civil rights - you'll see that the conditions for the dispensation of rights have only happened when there was interest convergence between the protection of capital and protection of people. So for example, when there was the threat of the Cold War or the threat that the world would lean towards socialism or communism, then the capitalist countries were forced into creating more rights so that there would be a comparative social contract. However, when there is no interest convergence, the state will tend to cancel the rights and protect capital as we see indications of right now.
(15:08):
Then there is another carrying wall of the house of modernity, which is the house of enlightenment humanism, which is a single story of progress, development, and civilization. So in this single story we'll render other stories either illegible, illegitimate, or backward in the hierarchy of progress. So there is a race towards being first and sometimes it's confused with being first world. And then all of those that are not either invested in this race or being able to keep up with the race are perceived to be backwards and dragging humanity. And we know who is projected as the leaders of this and who's projected as the followers. So you can see a lot of that in international relations. And then also another word that is used for how this single story treats other stories is epistemicide.
(16:10):
It kills the possibility of other epistemic propositions being legible or being legitimate. So it tends to subjugate other knowledge systems that might have offered an alternative sometimes very violently. And this violence occurs often through education, right, through us imposing different education systems on other nations. And then the last thing about the house is the roof. The current roof is a roof of global capital that is marked by shareholder, speculative, and algorithmic capitalism. And in this sense there is the fiduciary duty to generate profit for shareholders who are anonymous. So we are all invested actually in that because if we have pensions, then our pensions are invested in that system and betting on that system continuing and growing so that we can have the returns as well. If we have credit cards, we are participating and it's becoming virtually impossible not to participate in the speculative, shareholder, algorithmic, financial system, right?
(17:28):
And states then, who in the past had more control in industrial capitalism, there was much more control and possibility of control of the movement of capital. Today it's virtually impossible also to control how capital operates globally. So this is the first picture of the house. The second picture of the house, as we say, what's invisibilized in the house is how it operates by extracting what we would call resources, but we need to challenge that, anyway, from the planet and putting it in the house. In the house there is overconsumption and then you have the dump of the house, the sewage of the house going back to the planet. And in the planet, for other communities that don't live in the house, this means dispossession, destitution, genocides, and ecocide. So understanding that this house was built and is maintained by violence is one part of it.
(18:26):
Then being able to sit with the unsustainability of expanding the house, the impossibility of expanding the house within a single planet that has already had its limits breached is also a problem. So our idea that we can continue in this way with growth-based economies, with exponential growth and raising the quality of life for everybody so that they are comparable to what happens in the Global North dismisses the fact that infinite growth and consumption cannot exist in a finite planet. So the story of the house also asks us to be thinking about the north of the north, the north of the south, the south of the north and the south of the south, and how the dynamics between those fighting to be in the house or to go up the stairs of social mobility in the house, those at the north of the north and the penthouse of the house, how the dynamics operates, but also how people in the south of the south are trying to fight for a different way of being.
(19:29):
We work very closely with the Huni Kuin people in the Amazon and they are fighting, for example, in the climate debates. They're problematizing how most of our solutions to the climate crisis through adaptation and mitigation are based on the financialization of nature, which is precisely how the separation between humans and nature happens. And they have been sounding the alarm that these are false solutions. We need to actually figure out how to see ourselves as embedded back in the complex metabolism of the whole of nature. And now that the house is falling apart - so we have ecological crisis, mental health crisis, housing crisis, and there's pressure on that roof of global capital for more unequal concentration of wealth. And there's also pressure where populist governments exploit the fear of the loss of the house, but then tap onto that emotion, right? That something very serious is happening and then they weaponize this knowledge into their own agendas.
(20:40):
We have then more mass migration and escalation of armed conflict. So all of this is happening and pushing us to ask - what do we do? Can we fix the house, expand the house, learn to live without the house, find another planet? So there's all these kinds of responses that are out there. And at the same time that this is happening, because of how technology evolved and the exponential exposure to information, making meaning and making meaning in ways that bring us together has never been this difficult. So we have all these echo chambers, but also our relationship with language has already changed and we haven't caught up in terms of how we can dance with language in a way that also creates resonances that brings us together in different ways. And we were trying to do it the way that we did it before. And consensus in the ways that we had when the house was stable is not going to be possible. We will have to figure out another way.
Alan Ware (21:45):
Right, so much in that metaphor, so many ideas, but it did remind me of Alan Weisman's book, The World Without Us, when he talks about if there were no humans on the planet, the first part of the structure to fail would be the roofs. So just like in financial capitalism, those digital wealth, stock market bank account digits can disappear quite quickly as we've seen in the last few weeks. And that the rain starts coming in on that and the south of the south gets flooded in the basement first and you have a great metaphor there to learning how to swim, that people who've been in the water have learned long ago or what is the exact wording of that?
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (22:27):
In Brazil, we have the saying that in a situation of a flood, it's only when the water reaches your bum that it's actually possible for you to swim. Before that you can only walk and wade in the water. So we need to remember that we can swim, our bodies are also water so that we can engage with the disruption and destabilization that is coming from a very different space and prepare ourselves. It's very interesting because up to December, 2024, one of the very common questions I would be asked in podcasts and presentations is, what's the evidence that you have that the house of modernity is falling apart? Sometimes I would be asked too, what's the evidence that you have of the violence? Then we say, oh my God, where do we start? What's the evidence that it's falling apart was a very common question. I have not been asked this question since January.
(23:26):
It's much more visible. What is happening is the sales of the book have also gone up, because I think what the book does is provide some sensemaking to a moment that we are having to meet and it probably supports the nervous system to just adapt more gently to what's coming. We haven't seen yet the gradual cascading of what's happening. And another thing that I find interesting is that before December, people would imagine social and ecological collapse as lack of access to something like could be access to water, access to food or housing or access to fuel or monies. It was lack of access. I don't think people really had in their imagination that it could be a break in the rule of law. I think they still imagined lack of things, but a state behind it protecting them. They did not imagine that the state itself could be the disruptor. And I think that is very important distinction. We were not prepared for that. I don't think many people saw it coming in this way. We imagine it being in another way. We imagine it being probably either market forces collapsing, which might happen sooner or later. The money won't be worth anything. But I didn't think many people saw that the constellation of rights and the impossibility of the rule of law, the order being disrupted to this level.
Alan Ware (25:03):
And as you've talked about in the book, the more individualistic cultures like the US accentuate the fear and uncertainty, feelings of worthlessness, in the house of modernity, which can make us more susceptible to authoritarians, promising greater certainty, greater power, keeping the north of the north at the top of the house and keeping the story of the stairway - that education, training, skills, that there's a meritocratic reason you live on that floor and not some grand luck that you were just born into your family and your country, when you were born. All of those elements that determine where you are live in the house.
Nandita Bajaj (25:42):
Yeah, I also think it's astounding that you were being asked that question, what is the evidence that modernity is declining or collapsing? I wonder to what degree the people asking that question are caught up in a human exceptionalist worldview, because ecocide, species extinction, the mass extinction is all around us. And even the question of what are the current environmental or ecological crises we're facing? And most people really reduce it to just climate change, that that's the only issue. And all of our solutions then go into techno-optimism or techno-solutionism to find some quick fix so we can still sustain this way of being, something we can fix, which also tells you that we haven't totally deeply understood the problem if we're still trying to find a solution to that state. And so to us, it's quite clear that modern global techno-industrial civilization is experiencing a cascading set of ecological and social crises.
(26:53):
And many of our listeners will agree that this system is nearing its end. And as you've captured in your book, decline is built into the system. It's not like somebody has to bring it down. It's implicit. And we know that there are many pathways of modernity ending, some more by design and some more by disaster. And the very title of your book, Hospicing Modernity, conveys this message that we need to give modernity a good death. And as you say in your book, a death with integrity, could you speak a little bit more to what that would look like?
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (27:29):
Absolutely. In my collective, my research and arts collective, we use the word hospicing as offering good palliative care as the system in decline follows its course as this death occurs. But it's not a death of something outside of us. It's something inside of us that needs to be composted. So part of the work that we do actually in education always starts with this basic starting point of inviting people to hold space for what's difficult, what's painful without feeling overwhelmed, demobilized, demanding quick fixes or to be rescued from discomfort. So we have the metaphor of facing the shit to be composted within and around us, both literal and metaphorical, both in conscious and unconscious ways - cognitively, affectively, and relationally. So we need to face it and have the stomach trained to be present to it without throwing up on each other, without throwing a tantrum, and without throwing in the towel.
(28:37):
That is the being present to this hospicing and composting that needs to take place within and around us at the same time that we also hold space for the birth of something new, potentially wiser, but not necessarily, because it depends on how much we have composted and without suffocating the baby with our own projections and idealizations and remembering that this baby is coming from a dying mother. And this baby is a product of rape and has a very violent father. So how do we hold space for this moment where we are not the ones birthing anything. We are the ones assisting in the death and in the birth of something that is much bigger than ourselves. So in that sense, collapse - socioeconomic, ecological, and psychological - if met with this availability for reckoning can become a threshold for a different kind of existence. And what we talk about in terms of this, the death doulas and the birth doulas need to be singing a song for this to happen in a good way or for you to be in right relation with the death and the birth that we are assisting.
(29:57):
And in this song that's where we learn to be in a frequency that holds a note that each of us finds to be in harmony with others. So this is a very different conceptualization of agency. Within modernity agency could be categorized as you're acting from a pedestal. So it's pedestal agency - you know what you're doing, you're certain, you are there to control and to feel good about being agentic and powerful and empowered and have your voice and all of that, which worked within solid modernity. But when modernity is becoming liquid, in liquid modernity, this is Zygmunt Bauman's concept, agency needs to be very different. And if we're going to be reintegrated into the metabolism of the Earth, maybe a better metaphor would be mycelial agency, where you are sensing where you need to go and what you need to do, tethered to the wider web of life and figuring out how to work in core intelligence with other beings that are part of the same metabolism.
(31:10):
So that is the shift from one way of being on a pedestal, then composting this pedestal going back to the ground, becoming mycelium, and then operating, sensing in a very different way and opening up the tethers and the pores and the skin and the bones and the flesh to being interpolated and being entangled by other subjectivities that within modernity have been rendered objects. So in modernity we have subject-object relationships. In the transition we have subject-subject relationships, but once we are mycelial, in mycelial agency, it's core subjectivity. There are questions about where you stop and the other begins.
Nandita Bajaj (31:59):
Yeah, that's a really powerful metaphor, especially what you said about not smothering the baby and recognizing that the baby is metaphorically a child born of rape from a violent father and a dying mother. And to not place all of these expectations with the knowledge and the certainty that are very much key features of modernity. But then what you also said is being comfortable with not knowing and reconnecting with our body awareness and evolutionarily what hundreds of thousands of years have prepared us to respond to our geography and to our climate. We have had that knowledge for a very long time and then it was taken away from us. And you've talked about how our social constructs of the last many generations have untrained us from that way of being, the natural way of being where we would be able to respond from that place of connectivity with the web of life. And that untraining the mind and the body clearly it's going to be a very painful process because it's for most of us alive today, that's a huge part of our identity. It's the only thing we know is being on that pedestal and having that certainty. So I really appreciate what you're calling us to do is holding the space for uncertainty and just watching what unfolds from that and not having any preconceived notions about what that would be.
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (33:36):
The active witnessing and tethering to what's happening is something that from within the house of modernity we cannot even imagine because all the ways to relate to the world gets filtered through this filter of language. So the cultures that have a different relationship with the whole shebang of ecology and reality, they also have a very strong tether to the mystery of life and to death as part of this mystery. They're not running away from it. And in some cases they're running not towards it, but they face it. The invitation is to face it and to walk with death as a companion as Dougald Hine talks about. So without being able to have life and death together like this, as integrated, it's very easy within the house of modernity to believe that we can conquer nature, resolve its complexity and indeterminacy, create all the certainties that we need and use language to fix the world into categories so that we can predict the future or maybe engineer the future.
(34:45):
So those are all kind of lego assumptions that we are in control. Whereas in the communities we work with, for example, when there is more pressure, like the pressure of the pandemic, for example, the first response is to be in contact with that mystery and to actually trust the invisible to the eye, but not to the psyche, to trusting invisible to make the impossible possible. And from the house of modernity, this is just like wishy-washy magical thinking. But once you are in the mycelial agency, tethered and knowing that you are part of a reality that cannot be fixated in language or that is a moving reality and where you understand you cannot understand everything, but you need to still dance with it even if you don't understand. And when you see that subject-subject relationships require that both are indeterminate. So in subject-object, you relate through identity. In subject-subject you relate through indeterminacy.
(35:58):
In co-subjectivity it's the relational field that brings things together. And then intelligence arises from this encounter, right? There's no individuated intelligence. It's always co-intelligence, multiple intelligences working in tandem. So it's very hard, I think to be thinking about birthing something. Generally when we think about this, gatherings about the future, let's just imagine something and then try to create it together from the pedestal in subject-object relationships. That is the suffocating of the baby. That's not a baby coming from the metabolism we're embedded in. It's a baby coming from a very limited imagination that has been limited precisely by the sense of separation between humans and the rest of the web of life. So then we get caught in the circular, we call it the merry-go-round, where a lot of energy then is used to placate the anxiety that we won't be able to convince everybody to come with us.
(37:03):
And then we double down on convincing, which then doubles down on very specific attachments to language and concepts and methodologies. And the merry-go-round goes around. The idea of interrupting the merry-go-round to be on the ground, actually seeing what's happening and present to all the feelings that need to be there and present to the consequences of past choices made by our ancestors and by ourselves and things we're caught in - that always feels like too much. And then either people go into despair and then if they go into despair, they go back to the pedestal and want to do something about it from the pedestal, or they go into numbing and dissociation, and then let's just not talk about it and plan for the future as if nothing's happening. But the invitation to stay with the depth of it, to go deeper into resonance, not only with humans but nonhumans and stay with the pain and the difficulty of it is not easy as a sell, right, like nobody wants to do it.
(38:07):
But I think that with everything that's happening, more and more people are becoming readier to push themselves through that threshold of sensing the pain that we have caused not only to other species or to each other, but to ourselves. And we need to be present to this pain without drowning in it because there's a lot of sadness in it, frustration. There's anger. There's despair, disillusionment, disenchantment. So we need to move that and be present to that at the same time that we ground ourselves in something that can sustain us, something that can sustain the joy that will be necessary as we compost these things that can give us, I'm not going to say hope, because hope is saturated with the meaning of continuity, that people hope really, that this could all go away, but Dougald Hine talks about hope at the other end of despair.
(39:06):
There's a different kind of hope there that is about possibility and it's tethered possibility there that in your body it fires different neurotransmitters, right? So if the naive hope in the continuity of things as they are fires dopamine, the other hope fires serotonin. It's feeling more connected and trusting more that as we repair the web, we have better chances of, and it's not even survival, even if we admit that we are going to go extinct and depending on when we actually don't know. But even if we say it's right around the corner, there are still choices about how we go down, how we die, and then changing the question. The question within the house was, what's a good life and how can we have it? The question beyond the house is how can we have a well-died death? Because if we focus on that, we will be focusing on becoming elders and good ancestors.
(40:14):
And then at the moment of death, the idea is to look back to your life and say, that was a well-lived life, which is different from the good life. A well-lived life is a life where there's, and it's not even growth, it's expansion of responsibility, of love. There's expansion of compassion. There's expansion of generosity. There's expansion of humility. If we can get to that point, look back and say, that's it. That was a well-lived life. We can then have a well-died death. So if we can shift that ontologically in the ways that we relate to death, that's how we relate to life, how we relate to reality we could cross this threshold together into a different way of being. And then it doesn't matter if you were the one who survives or another one who survives, you're already part of the web, right? Even if other species survive, that's you as well, right? You see yourself in everything.
Alan Ware (41:16):
Yeah. I suppose there is some hope from the history of the decline of civilizations where you had all these different belief systems springing up. Christianity spread at the time of the decline of Rome, and there were all these mystery cults during the decline of Rome. And I think you're seeing some of that today and hopefully marrying that with the more belief and interconnectedness of all life, seeing the reality, the complexity of that, that the certainty control of modernity and modern science is such a pittance compared to billions of years of evolved intelligence in all living creatures that we ignore at our peril. Could you give us some of the other tools, approaches, mindsets that you think might be helpful? You've begun talking some about that in Hospicing Modernity - around us with other people and within us.
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (42:05):
So there's another book coming out in August, it's called Outgrowing Modernity, and it sits with a question like if we knew in our bones, not just in our heads, that major destabilization is coming sooner or later, probably sooner than we think, and if what we could respond from a space of emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and interspecies and intergenerational responsibility, and then asking what would people born today, 30 years from now, look back to us now and say, that was helpful. Thank you. So the idea is to get us to the space where we can answer these questions from a space of not being afraid or in dissociation, so not from despair or dissociation to being present to what we need to do right now. A lot of people who read Hospicing Modernity believe that modernity just like, let's just let it die and support the palliative care and just move away.
(43:12):
But in that framing, there is a modernity and not modernity, which is a binary. And this escape from modernity becomes a problem because people escape into moral purity, which is actually a very, very strong trait of modernity. So in that conversation, we talked about the true problem, because the composting involves staying with what's coming through in the death of modernity. And sometimes we are just consuming information as a way of not doing the work because we are so intellectually invested that we will have to know before we start doing anything different that we forget that it is the weaving of the doing in the dance of it that takes us into a different space. It's not the knowing in the head. Your head is already oversaturated and your heart is oversaturated and relationally we are very limited, right?
Alan Ware (44:12):
That kind of points to the mid-wifeing, the need, as you mentioned, the intellectual surrender. As we've been taught in modernity, to use reason, to have grand plans and to have a certain purity of thought, a purity of plan that we can globalize and universalize in all contexts to all people. And if we're moving into a very uncertain influx and definitely a time that needs more embodiment and emotional connection, it'll be as you have reiterated, messy and interconnected in a fungal type of network way. But that intellectual surrender can be very difficult for those who have trained and been grown up in the modernist education system, liking categorization and objectification and grand plans and strategies and control. But it's a useful reminder to us.
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (45:07):
If we go back to the relational way, instead of seeing modernity as a machine, seeing it as an abusive relationship. It's that violent father killing the mother who is pregnant. In that sense, it's a sickness that needs attention from a very different space. You don't want to kill the father either, but we don't want the father near this kid until this father recalibrates. We are not going to let the same happen. As doulas and death doulas and birth doulas we have a responsibility there, but it's a responsibility from a different space than being in the same logic of the father. And sometimes out of a protectionist impulse or reflex, it needs to subjugate, it needs to be in a higher pedestal, it needs to be in control. It needs to have all these certainties that ends up really suffocating the mother and almost suffocating the baby. So figuring out a way to create a buffer until this baby can breathe.
Nandita Bajaj (46:09):
And if I'm hearing it correctly, then this was very much a capacity that our species had to manifest something and it did. And if we are truly to look at ourselves as part of nature, then we took it to its obvious end. And, you've talked about giving modernity a death of integrity. It would mean that we allow it to teach the lessons of its life, the hard ones, as well as the good ones. And I wonder what you see as the good lessons. Are there aspects of modernity such as evidence-based scientific questioning or a healthy form of individualism that you think are worth bringing forward, and how do you see us doing that?
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (46:54):
I think that modernity focused on putting things into boxes, and in that sense, we can sense the depth of the boxes as well, and some boxes are pretty deep and generative. So as long as we understand that it's within the box and it doesn't encompass the whole, we could bring both the successes of modernity and modernity's failures as part of our repertoire of stories that we need moving forward as a species or as just part of the metabolism. But nothing is modernity is an answer in itself. I believe that even the idealism of modernity is problematic because it focuses our attention on arriving somewhere, for example, arriving at a healthy form of individualism. When life is a dance where we are experimenting and experiencing and making mistakes and stumbling and connecting and tethering, that texture of living is incompatible with arriving at an ideal teleology, at an ideal state. So I would say bringing healthy individualism as a story that was placed in a box that we can use and test and play with it, but keep dancing and living absolutely but as is with any other boxes, but embodying the box, putting the box as your head maybe as a clowning exercise, sure. As the purpose of life it's a very limited bet basically, right?
Nandita Bajaj (48:36):
I was thinking even the formulation of the question is coming from that place of the pedestal knowledge of like, well, what exactly are we going to bring and what are we going to leave behind instead of actually what you were calling us to do, which is allow our bodies to feel into our connection with nature and respond in a way that evolutionarily, we know it, that we are able to do it. We just have to get back in touch with that part of ourselves. So I appreciate that response. Well, Vanessa, this seems like a really wonderful place to wrap up this conversation. We want to thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts for joining us today, for doing this incredible work and for expanding our notion of what this death of modernity with integrity could look like. You said something very beautiful about the concept of hope, and it ties in really nicely with a previous episode that we had on falling into the trap of hopium and actually not struggling as you have laid out today with the real struggles of an ecological and societal collapse, and also what could it mean for us to embrace death, personal death, and also societal death in a way that is dignified where we become mature about it and we can become elders rather than acting childishly to avoid death based out of fear. Thank you so much for joining us today. This was spectacular.
Alan Ware (50:16):
Yes. Thank you.
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (50:17):
Thank you for having me and for holding it so beautifully. And at this time, that's what we need. We need to figure out ways where we can collectivize the heart and be able to hold these very difficult things with gentleness and generosity and compassion. Thank you.
Alan Ware (50:35):
That's all for this edition of OVERSHOOT. Visit population balance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without this support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or a recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj (51:03):
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.
