The House of Modernity is a pedagogical metaphor that depicts modernity — the dominant way of being, knowing and organising life — as a single house whose comfort for those inside depends on exploitation and destruction it renders invisible. Developed by Vanessa Andreotti, Sharon Stein and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, and elaborated in Andreotti’s book Hospicing Modernity, it maps how the house is built, who lives on which floor, and what gets swept beyond its walls.
(Hospicing Modernity)
The house rests on a foundation of separability — the assumption that humans are separate from and above the earth, and that some humans are worth more than others. Two carrying walls hold it up: universal reason, grounded in Enlightenment humanism, and the modern nation-state, grounded in liberal rights and justice. The roof is global capital, today’s shareholder financial capitalism.
Inside, occupants are stratified: the north-of-the-north elite on top, aspiring climbers below, and the exploited south-of-the-north in the basement — while the south-of-the-south live outside, their extracted land and labour subsidising the whole structure. The framework makes the externalised costs — extraction, waste, genocide and ecocide — visible, inviting inhabitants to face the house’s unsustainability rather than merely renovate it.
Also see Four Socially Sanctioned Denials and The House That Hayek Built