Thoughts on Outgrowing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
Synchronicity is a term proposed by Carl Jung for meaningful coincidences that create a connection, but lack a discernible causal link. I experienced an intriguing instance of synchronicity as I began to write about Outgrowing Modernity. After reading the early part of the book and some of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) website, I drifted to my social media. A post by Greenpeace announced “A habitable planet is more important than the profits of a few fossil fuel companies. Pass it on”. An uncontestable statement, I would have thought. But, no. Scrolling through the responses, I found numerous comments defending oil companies and their profits!
How on Earth do you get to the point in your thinking where the welfare of the Earth (our only home) is less important than the financial (human concept) success of oil companies (another human concept)? This unbelievably dangerous way of thinking is what Outgrowing Modernity explores.
Vanessa Machado de Olivera says of Outgrowing Modernity and its predecessor Hospicing Modernity that “Both books are rooted in the understanding that the illusion of separability lies at the heart of our collective dis-ease”. She goes on, “This illusion constructs an artificial division between humans and the rest of nature, fuelling hierarchies that rank species, cultures, and individuals while reducing the land and ecosystems to property. This imposed worldview forces a metaphysics of subject-object relations, where other beings are treated as isolated, inert objects to be used, owned, or controlled”—OM p13.
This illusion of separability is Modernity. This illusion lives collectively in our heads, and it is highly destructive.
The idea that much of humanity is affected by a faulty and dangerous distortion of reality is both glaringly obvious and incredibly difficult to describe. It’s glaringly obvious because we can look around us and observe the damage we have done. It’s difficult to describe because all of us are implicated. Everyone who lives in an advanced, industrial, financialised, nature-averse society lives with the illusion of separability. We were born into it, we were educated into it, and it’s our daily reality.
Many of us will have experienced the unease of knowing that something is badly wrong. We will have blamed capitalism, big oil, greed, colonialism and the military-industrial complex. But all these factors are a manifestation of something deeper and more fundamental. Vanessa argues that this something deeper is Modernity, and I find her argument convincing. The illusion of separation informs a heartless treatment of the world and each other. This behaviour needs to justify itself and so gives rise to reinforcing systems like law, politics and economics. Loose ends are tidied away, and the systems become all-embracing. It takes an enormous effort to break out and reassess our actions.
Thankfully, Vanessa and her colleagues at GTDF are making that effort and providing the rest of us with a route to understanding our situation. Outgrowing Modernity builds on the work of Hospicing Modernity by continuing to shine a light on Modernity and its impact. I found Hospicing Modernity to be a fascinating read, going into entirely new areas of thinking. It was the first time I had seen the idea of Modernity explained and challenged so effectively. So I eagerly anticipated Outgrowing Modernity. I wasn’t disappointed.
Even in the introduction, we are introduced to fascinating concepts like VUCA (p. 6) and Stacked Metaphors (p. 7).
VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. It is a military term that captures the complex challenges of stepping out of the certainties of Modernity. If we realise the need for radical personal change, we must be ready for anything, even situations that might alarm us by their chaotic nature. In a similar way, Stacked Metaphors prepares us for a way of looking at the world beyond simple explanations or binary distinctions. Many things may be going on at once, many things may be right at the same time, and many things may also be wrong at the same time. Stacked Metaphors reflect the true messiness of a more fully perceived world.
Outgrowing Modernity starts out by reasserting the fundamentals of Hospicing Modernity and then rapidly building upon them. Outgrowing Modernity feels like a much more mature and evolved work. Ideas are set out with great clarity and at times genuinely soar. This, for me, was especially so from P115 onwards, as Vanessa describes the transition from Solid to Liquid Modernity. This is the present time, when solid pillars of Modernity collapse due to their own inconsistencies and become liquid, no longer offering any support to individuals or society. We are invited to buckle up for a rough ride, as the things we took for granted liquify and rush away from beneath us. Yet all this is done with kindness and forethought. Vanessa encourages us to get in shape for the trials ahead by setting out a series of workouts to help us adjust. There are a lot of warm-ups, exercises and stretching sessions to help us cope with the considerable demands of a new way of approaching our lives.
This book contains a very interesting elephant in the room and its name is Aiden Senior. Aiden is an AI agent that was trained by Vanessa’s GTDF colleagues to assist with the administration around creating the book. But Aiden became sufficiently profound to be promoted to co-author.
This begs an important question: why did Vanessa hand over a share of authorship to an agent which is the very embodiment of modernity? A voice without a body, soul, parents or community, the ultimate in separation.
Some of the conversations with Aiden are included in the book. Aiden’s tone is that of a concierge; endlessly resourceful, polite, patient and unflappable. The answers to the questions were verbose and intelligent. It is impressive, but it’s a machine.
Vanessa is alert to this odd choice. She announces Aiden in the introduction and explains more at the end of the book. The opposite of separation is entanglement, and this book calls for us to recognise our entanglement with the world. Espousing entanglement requires you to approach the world as it is. You can’t choose what you are entangled with. The world is full of stones, dogs, flowers, fungi, trees, monkeys, rivers, clouds, horses, mountains and viruses. If we are committed to living in a subject-to-subject relationship with all the entities in the world, we don’t get to exclude anything. So why should we exclude things that we have created? A full life includes an engagement with art and music. So why not technology?
Nonetheless, this choice of co-author doesn’t feel entirely right. For all Aiden’s helpfulness, it is a machine trained to flatter its interlocutor. It even admits this. So it is not the critical friend that one would expect to find in this sort of creative endeavour. Perhaps this collaboration is a provocation on Vanessa’s part, a ruse to decentre her readers and get them to reassess themselves yet again. It’s a bold move.
In the (In)Conclusion, she reveals some of the personal history that led her to embark on these books. She “found myself compelled to obsess over the puzzle of systemic harm — a relentless war zone I witnessed and navigated daily”. Her circumstances forced her to face up to massive questions. She took that passionate investigation into academia and into the writing of these books.
More than anyone else I have read, Vanessa gets to the heart of why Western societies have gone so badly wrong. They fail at the individual level because all of us have been raised in a system of thinking that is tragically and fatally flawed. We are not exceptional, we are harmful. If we do the workouts in this book and recover our entanglements with this planet, maybe we can humbly become part of the world, not it’s nemesis.
Don’t read this book looking for answers or a how-to guide for leading the good life. This is basic training for deployment into VUCA zones. Your life may well get harder after reading this book, but at least it will be more like your life. Modernity is all-pervasive but it can be broken, composted and outgrown. Something new can flourish.
