Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living

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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. This is an outstanding book—truly original and profoundly perceptive in its contents and arguments, and multimodal in its pedagogic approach. It examines a range of urgent philosophical issues about modernity and its deep contradictions, and the ways in which its inevitable demise might be steered toward more morally and culturally productive futures. It is a book that is not only thought provoking but also helpful in guiding genuinely worthwhile discussions.”

Just to give an example to our listeners in one reiteration, you say that "radical tenderness is being critical and loving at the same time.” My soul and being resonated really deeply, particularly with this one. And in another iteration, you share that "radical tenderness is assisting with the birth of something new, which is potentially, but not necessarily, wiser...without suffocating it with projections." I just wanted to preface my final question with this to see where you might go with it. bruce hails from Aotearoa (New Zealand) although he has been living in Coffs Harbour (Australia) since 2012. Now "retired" bruce spends his days with the "4 Rs" - reading, running, riding (cycling), and (w)riting.So we have, for example, several bills going through Congress, and even if some of them don't pass, the same text is in the other bills. So they will find a way legally to be able to to do what they want. And we will have to witness this. But this witnessing is something that moves something as well, and that may call us to a much greater level of responsibility. And that's, I think, what we hope for. 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 And the process will be painful. Throughout the book Andreotti insists that we should be feeling pain, anxiety, self-doubt, and dread. She wants us to criticize ourselves and to get ready to give up some of modernity's benefits. "[T]his book is about expanding our collective capacity to hold space for difficult and painful things [therefore] I cannot sat ‘I hope you enjoy this book.’" (xxi) Let go of “the dictionary,” the expectation that meanings will be fixed, universal and stable, open up to the ambivalence, ambiguity, movement, and fluidity of language

Rage….. the greed of the few results in the suffering of many..! Angry that the author is accusing me of violence. How can we not? We have to eat. We have to have heating. Or we’ll freeze and starve! Okay, so the author is not saying we should freeze and starve.. But that we’re implicated in the violence.. So how do we? Because one of the functions of different generations would be to provide to each other some sense of what works and what doesn't work in what context. We not only have lots of time to do that to technology, but we have also lost the practice of documenting this in oral histories or even in written form, what we would like to pass down. It has become much more of a somewhat narcissistic exercise about ourselves rather than what we're going to be leaving to those that come after us.Kamea Chayne: This may speak to the role of the different types of societal conditioning that we receive, but from your talk Beyond Inclusion, you share that different generations have had different ideas of inclusion based on the context in which they grew up. So, for example, earlier generations may view inclusion as assimilation, then later ones might view inclusion as representation. And then even later, ones might view inclusion as basically requiring us to move beyond inclusion, requiring a systemic overhaul. LP: You use the term “hospicing.” Could you speak about what you mean by this, and how it is slightly different from other forms of care, or care work? The first part of the book tries to convince people not to read the book. If people read it from that defensive position—especially without understanding the fact that they’re experiencing these defenses—it will be received in a limited, perhaps even damaging way. What inspired the book was a network of Indigenous communities in the Global South, and also some here in the Global North, who all speak about how we have to start from the problem of the colonization of our unconscious. If our unconscious has been colonized, our imagination is also colonized, to the extent that we don’t even know about the boundaries that are placed on our imagination. That’s why, when we think about hope for example, we generally think about it as something in the future, often as the continuity of something already familiar—rather than the idea of placing hope in the present, in the service of the repairing and weaving of relationships, which is what actually makes a different future.