Letting Go of the Future
Rev. Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Penguin, 2021). ISBN 9781623176242.
It’s common enough these days to regard the ideals of enlightenment modernity with scepticism, to point out that the language of its fathers revealed from the start an unconscious dark side to the project that resulted in many perverse outcomes.
Sir Francis Bacon, for example, didn’t quite advocate putting a witch-like nature on the rack, as is often claimed, but he came close. The scientist, he wrote, must, “follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings,” because “nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art than when left to herself.” The objective and rational scientist, unmoved by feeling or belief, is expected to view nature as something to be dominated and forced, moulded and improved. Applying the scientific method, he will be able to “find a way at length into her inner chambers” and gain “the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.”
This attitude led to a sense of superiority over and separation from nature, as well as everything and everyone that was put into that category. Rejecting the subjective, neglecting to include the knower in the known, we entered a phase characterised by an enormous lack of self-awareness. A kind of hubris, it delivered us into the overwhelming and inter-related crises of our time: mass extinction, climate breakdown, endemic pollution, resource wars, spiralling inequality.
It’s belatedly dawning on us that we are not in control, and neither are we separate from nature: we can’t damage a part without damaging the whole; and that whole includes, of course, us. The bright future we dreamed would be ours is not going to happen.
Einstein noted that “you cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” That idea is at the heart of Hospicing Modernity. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change at the University of British Columbia, asks us to see the problem in a new way, one that is not still bound to the sense of unfeeling, rationalising superiority and sense of separation of the past. Rather, we are invited to undergo a process of self-examination, and education in new ideas, that it’s hoped will lead us to find new perspectives on the old familiar and seemingly intractable problems before us.
Rather than saving the modern world and the mind that made it, why not let it go? Is it really worth saving? By clinging to it, are we preventing the birth of something better? Are we able to let go of the future we were promised, in order to allow ourselves to discern the presence of the world we actually need? Are we able to accept our pain and grief at the state of the world, our fear and hope, without allowing it to drive us?
A work of radical pedagogy, Hospicing Modernity bustles with new ideas, workshop-type exercises, surprising new framings, and inspired repositionings that again and again open up space to breathe and throw new light on our situation. It’s a book that insists we pause and engage in a period of convalescence, to realise that we, along with the times, are out of joint. We are unwell, and we have forgotten what wellness might be.
Crucially, Hospicing Modernity is not a book of solutions. There are no easy answers here. Fundamentally, it’s a work committed to imagination. To being open to the possibility of something radically new. The reader is invited to accept a challenge, to be part of a process that slips out of the grip of the mind made by men like Francis Bacon and begins to see a new world. That begins even to activate new senses and intimacies in relation to the radically new framings the book explores. Are we ready to take the first steps into a gentler, kinder world, where we can begin to recognise ourselves made whole, and a part of the whole?
This is a book that wants to change you, to unsettle you, to examine what comforts you rely on; comforts which might well include nihilism and despair. The author acknowledges that not everyone will be ready to explore the kind of changes the book is conjuring. Those willing to play along, however, will find themselves unravelling a variety of inherited assumptions and beliefs, and exploring a radical tenderness towards ourselves, each other and the world that feels full of surprising new potential and opportunity.
Founding editor of MODRON, Kristian Evans is a Welsh working-class writer, poet and editor exploring ecologies and the more-than-human. In 2023, he was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year. He was co-editor of Magma Poetry 79, a special issue on ‘dwelling,’ funded by an Arts Council of England grant. He has published chapbooks with HappenStance, Unleaving, and Broken Sleep, Otherworlds. He co-edited 100 Poems to Save the Earth (Seren) and is author of the column, A Kenfig Journal, for Sustainable Wales.
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