Outgrowing Modernity

Summary

The follow-up to ‘Hospicing Modernity’ from Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (formerly Andreotti) treats colonialism as ‘neurocolonisation’: a rewiring of thought and habit that keeps us in comfortable denial as modernity runs out. Readers are asked to interrupt five ingrained entitlements, among them unaccountable autonomy and moral authority, and to grow four capacities instead: sobriety, maturity, discernment and responsibility.

One of its chapters, ‘The Undergrowth Protocol’, is free to read on its own as a story with a closing exercise, at undergrowth.world.

Rationale

Her ‘hallucinations’ of modernity, framed as embodied habits rather than false ideas, are one source of our picture of deep dispositions as cultural habits that ‘set’ in our nervous systems.

Diagram not reproduced here (rights reserved) — see it at penguinrandomhouse.com ↗

Diagram not reproduced here (rights reserved) — see it at penguinrandomhouse.com ↗