Modernity is dying. That may be even clearer now than back in 2021 when Hospicing Modernity was first published. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira is an educator and academic, and she credits her family’s mixed-heritage, German and Indigenous, as having provided valuable insight into how modernity’s promise of emancipation has been built on the backs of colonised people, and why it is ultimately doomed.

“We are living”, Machado tells us, “off expired or expiring stories.” One dominant story is that modernity has civilised us through its doctrine of rationalism and human exceptionalism, and that its universal success is attributable to its merits. Machado disagrees, although, in her telling, modernity is not a “corrupt project of the west” in need of reform, but instead something that has colonised us all, “conditioning the ways we experience reality”. Whether we see modernity as a western endeavour to spread universal values, or a colonial project whose imposition has inflicted untold violence both on large parts of humanity and on the planet, we are all under its spell. And because it has colonised our minds – it moves faster than thought, she tells us – the work to liberate ourselves from its grip is immense, and the fear of what could fill its void is very real. But nothing less than this must be our goal.

Readers of Resurgence & Ecologist will not be unfamiliar with these critiques. But it is as an educator that Machado is strongest and most novel, using anecdote and analogy, in particular stories and experiences borrowed from her Indigenous culture, to pierce the facade that modernity has created. Her teachings are a powerful reminder that much of the work being done by those seeking to redress modernity’s ills, be it through protest, politics or self-care, can at best only serve to perpetuate modernity in a revised form. To prop up the facade for just a little longer.

Hospicing, of course, is a verb. The emphasis is that there is work to be done here, plenty of it. If we know, as we surely feel in our bones, that modernity is dying, do we wish to keep it on life support for as long as possible, denying the inevitable because we cannot bear the loss? Or should we be allowing it to pass gracefully, making the space to face bravely whatever may come next? And if we choose the second, Machado asks, what can we be doing now to facilitate its demise, both in the world and in ourselves?

This is an odd book to review, because its intentions are so personal. Machado takes time in the opening chapters to warn that not everyone will be ready for its lessons. By its nature, certain chapters will chime better with where you find yourself. A story given to her by a Cree elder, about the four stages of a human life, spoke powerfully to me as a father of young children, while the chapter ‘Returning Home’ uses a car accident that Machado narrowly survived in her twenties to make a powerful statement about the need to ground oneself in the world. It is a book to be returned to, the exercises worked through, the poems reread, its changes accumulating in an iterative way.

This is not a how-to guide. Its aims are altogether simpler: to observe how modernity has conquered our lives, to see what it has taken from us, to see what we could be without it. The future is unknowable, but what is certain is that we need guides like Machado to get us there.

Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. North Atlantic Books, 2021. ISBN: 9781623176242

Adam Weymouth is a writer. His latest book, Lone Wolf (Penguin), was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2025.