Machado de Oliveira, Vanessa. _Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism_. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2021. # Progressive Summary Modernity is a single story of progress. This is an old story that is getting stale, lifeless, devoid of energy. It is like an old person towards the end of their life. If we approach modernity with the spirit of palliative care, we may still receive many gifts from her story. This journey is an embodied one, a somatic experience, and the book offers many practices that help us navigate the many uncomfortable challenges. The author speaks from deeply personal experience, and there is depth and wisdom in the way she handles the complexity of this moment. Each chapter is a different story which helps us understand where we are in this moment. # Key Points ## Theories of change There are three main theories of change that people subscribe to: Soft-reform, Radical-reform, and Beyond-reform, Soft-reform - Modernity is fundamentally sound, we just need to do things better, and to get more people included in the system. We need to do things better. Radical-reform - The game is rigged unfairly, so we need to question who gets to be an authority, who is counted as an expert, and how resources are distributed. We need to improve our ways of knowing. Beyond-reform - Modernity can't be saved by doing or knowing things better. The foundations of modernity were built on conquest and extraction. Whilst the other modes of reform put modernity on life-support, the beyond-reform approach moves it into palliative care. Beyond-reform is unthinkable in most institutions, so the other modes of reform are still important as harm reduction strategies. There is nothing wrong with engaging in the other modes of reform as long as one acknowledges that they are not the endgame. *Hospicing* is an important practice of the Beyond-reform approach. It > recognizes the eventual inevitable end of modernity’s fundamentally unethical and unsustainable institutions, but sees the necessity of enabling a “good” death through which important lessons are processed. These lessons are learned through the accomplishments and mistakes of the dying system, so that they can be applied as we witness and help midwife the birth of something different. This approach also requires that we hospice our own investments in modernity’s promises not as a reactive rejection of modernity and attempt to control the terms of its dissolution, but rather as self-implicated processes of facing up to our own harmful desires and habits of being. At the interface between this death and birth is the imperative to walk steadily into and with the eye of the storm without knowing where it is headed: move either too fast or too slow and one gets swept up and thrown around violently in the vortex of change. --- Before modernity, we did not feel separate from nature. Indigenous cultures use psychotropic plants to strengthen their serotonin neurochemical pathways. Modernity has cut us off from this regular source of serotonin, and compensates for it by increasing our dependence on dopamine (competition, achievement, winning, superior standing in hierarchy), oxytocin (cute cat videos, paternalistic charity campaigns), endorphins (pain numbing addictions to food, call-out culture), and adrenaline (high-risk activities, transgressive behaviour). We have a culture that is dis-eased, and we need to hit rock bottom before we can do collective rehab. # Resonances > We will only be able to imagine something genuinely different if we first become suspicious of what we desire and are able to imagine within modernity. This is the first step toward hospicing modernity. > - Hospicing Modernity > If we can know with encyclopaedic detail the world we want to live in after the present one collapses, extreme caution is advised: that 'new' world is very likely the present one investing in its continuity by infiltrating our imaginations. > – Bayo Akomolafe [[Sometimes imagination alone doesn't go far enough]] # Oppositions # Questions / Comments # Quotes