Over the past couple of months, believing that Ivan Illich’s thought indeed spoke with renewed urgency to our moment, I’ve revisited two of his earliest and best known books, Tools for Conviviality and Deschooling Society. Three key themes caught my attention this time around and I thought it might be useful to discuss them here, even if only briefly.
Thank you, Michael. Reading through your dispatches kindles a longing for the kind of friendship and conversation which Illich et al. talk about, which I have myself experienced in all its glory, and which now (in middle age) is a rare treat. You have managed somehow to reconstruct this experience through the warmth of these newsletters, which have become, at least for me, a kind of sacramental participation in the convivial society.
Thanks for the great writing! The description of institutions and technology escalating in response to problems they create makes me think about the perception of stakes. Increasing stakes seems to drive a search for more powerful techniques and tools. Mostly, I think about schooling, where the stakes a presented as very high all the time, demanding more powerful techniques (e.g. best practices, more and more fine grained creation and collection of performance data) to produce the necessary outcomes. Illich makes me think about what would happen if schools remained low-stakes.
Perhaps in relation to focusing more on friendship and care would be a lowering of stakes. Are friendship and care work high stakes? If the stakes are lower, we don't search for techniques?
These are different though perhaps related problems. If a war or campaign of any kind escalates, if a technological system or institutional regime grows in scale there may be a corresponding increase in personal risk and costs incurred to the people on the hammer side of the equation. For example, soldiers might be killed at a higher rate, investors might lose greater sums of money, and teachers might need to spend more time and money on their training and in greater competition for jobs while the consequences of their efforts — which are supposed to be beneficial to the people they claim to serve — diminish in their positive returns and increase in their pathogenic qualities.
In the school example, a massively upscaled educational system feeding an industrial and warmaking economy that desires to put everyone on the internet, in debt, and engage us on one side or the other in bombing campaigns, you could say "the stakes have been raised" for the common person, third world peasant farmers, students, etc. Sending in missionaries, doctors, social workers, and care packages is a typical part of the total gift package. How one might focus more on actual friendship and care in such a world as a mitigating force for the victims of scale is not clear to me; the engines running at scale would continue to degrade the situation in a fundamental, structural way.
The example that comes to mind is small, specialized boarding schools that focus on poor, "inner city" youth deemed "at risk." By creating for them a very supportive, interventionist school that in some cases eclipses family and community, a few outcomes can be maximized: university degrees, middle class jobs and status access, subjective claims of happiness and relative health, etc. But these are the very problems Illich wanted to solve by exposing them as false needs we cannot all pursue without destroying the planet! Care and friendship for him come from an interdependence these modern relations and regimes destroy or make impossible. The points about energy and slavery are apt; there is not a single prosperous western economy in the last 500 years (and maybe more) that is not based on exploited resources, including people, at a scale that is murderous.
Thank you, Michael. Reading through your dispatches kindles a longing for the kind of friendship and conversation which Illich et al. talk about, which I have myself experienced in all its glory, and which now (in middle age) is a rare treat. You have managed somehow to reconstruct this experience through the warmth of these newsletters, which have become, at least for me, a kind of sacramental participation in the convivial society.
Alden, thank you. This is a deeply encouraging note. And, in middle age myself, I concur with your assessment. My best to you.
Thanks for the great writing! The description of institutions and technology escalating in response to problems they create makes me think about the perception of stakes. Increasing stakes seems to drive a search for more powerful techniques and tools. Mostly, I think about schooling, where the stakes a presented as very high all the time, demanding more powerful techniques (e.g. best practices, more and more fine grained creation and collection of performance data) to produce the necessary outcomes. Illich makes me think about what would happen if schools remained low-stakes.
Perhaps in relation to focusing more on friendship and care would be a lowering of stakes. Are friendship and care work high stakes? If the stakes are lower, we don't search for techniques?
These are different though perhaps related problems. If a war or campaign of any kind escalates, if a technological system or institutional regime grows in scale there may be a corresponding increase in personal risk and costs incurred to the people on the hammer side of the equation. For example, soldiers might be killed at a higher rate, investors might lose greater sums of money, and teachers might need to spend more time and money on their training and in greater competition for jobs while the consequences of their efforts — which are supposed to be beneficial to the people they claim to serve — diminish in their positive returns and increase in their pathogenic qualities.
In the school example, a massively upscaled educational system feeding an industrial and warmaking economy that desires to put everyone on the internet, in debt, and engage us on one side or the other in bombing campaigns, you could say "the stakes have been raised" for the common person, third world peasant farmers, students, etc. Sending in missionaries, doctors, social workers, and care packages is a typical part of the total gift package. How one might focus more on actual friendship and care in such a world as a mitigating force for the victims of scale is not clear to me; the engines running at scale would continue to degrade the situation in a fundamental, structural way.
The example that comes to mind is small, specialized boarding schools that focus on poor, "inner city" youth deemed "at risk." By creating for them a very supportive, interventionist school that in some cases eclipses family and community, a few outcomes can be maximized: university degrees, middle class jobs and status access, subjective claims of happiness and relative health, etc. But these are the very problems Illich wanted to solve by exposing them as false needs we cannot all pursue without destroying the planet! Care and friendship for him come from an interdependence these modern relations and regimes destroy or make impossible. The points about energy and slavery are apt; there is not a single prosperous western economy in the last 500 years (and maybe more) that is not based on exploited resources, including people, at a scale that is murderous.