Hospicing Modernity

Discussion

Ernesto van Peborgh:

"There is a phrase that has been moving through certain conversations in recent years — hospicing modernity. It comes most clearly from Vanessa Andreotti and the network around her, and it captures something that ideological collapse-mongers and ideological techno-optimists both tend to miss.

The dying system cannot simply be abandoned. Hundreds of millions of people depend on its hospitals, its grids, its pharmaceutical supply chains, its grain shipments, its diesel pumps. The infrastructure of Horizon One is, for now, the only thing keeping much of humanity alive. To smash it in the name of accelerating Horizon Three would be a form of violence indistinguishable from the violence it claims to oppose. The transition cannot be a revolution in the old sense, because the old sense of revolution assumed there would still be a functioning substrate to inherit on the morning after.

There may not be.

So the work, the strange and uncelebrated work, is to hold two intentions at once. To keep the dying system functional enough to prevent unnecessary suffering, while simultaneously cultivating the emerging system patiently enough that something coherent has time to root. This is not compromise. This is metabolic intelligence. It is what mature forests do, when an older generation of trees begins its long descent and its decay feeds the seedlings rising in the light gaps. Nothing wasted. The whole cycle held within a single field of relationship.

Hospicing is not nostalgia. A good hospice nurse does not pretend the patient is not dying. She also does not hasten the death. She tends to comfort, to dignity, to the conversations that need to happen before the end. She makes space.

The question is whether our institutions, our governments, our financial systems, our universities, our media, our families, are capable of this kind of holding. Whether we can be honest about the dying without lapsing into nihilism. Whether we can be tender with the patient without falsifying the diagnosis.

I do not know the answer. I suspect the answer will vary enormously by place, by culture, by the relational depth that has or has not been preserved in particular communities. Some places will hospice well. Others will not. The geography of the descent will be, in part, a geography of how much love and skill and accumulated wisdom each region brings to the work of letting go."

(https://ernestopvanpeborgh.substack.com/p/the-future-unfolding)