Friendship Suffices

The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 6

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. At the expense clogging your inbox, I’m writing again this week, briefly, in memory of David Cayley and in praise of the convivial life, which he embodied. Rest in peace, David.

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I was saddened by the news that David Cayley had passed away earlier this month on June 10th. He was 81 years old and died in the company of his family and friends.

Cayley was an accomplished journalist and documentarian. For over thirty years, he found a home at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), where he produced CBC Radio’s Ideas series. During this run, his programs explored the work of Charles Taylor, Simone Weil, Richard Sennet, George Grant, and René Girard among many others. Happily, Cayley created a personal website, where he made an archive of these shows available. There is an education to be had in this archive for those with the time to listen.

But it is likely that Cayley will be chiefly remembered as the great advocate and interpreter of the work of his friend, Ivan Illich. Those of you who have been reading the Convivial Society for some time will know that the name of this newsletter is taken from Illich’s work and that my own thinking and writing has been indelibly shaped by my reading of Illich. So, like many others who have sought to learn from Illich, I am, and will remain, in Cayley’s debt.¹

At the height of the pandemic and early in the life of this newsletter, I invited subscribers to read and discuss some of Ivan Illich’s work together. Around the same time, I also took the then-novel prevalence of videoconferencing as an opportunity to interview some of Illich’s friends and coconspirators—a kind of amateur oral history project. Cayley was among those who agreed to indugle me. You listen to our conversation here: “Remembering Illich: A Conversation with David Cayley.”

As you’ll hear for yourself if you do take a few moments to listen, David was extraordinarily generous, humble, and, near the end of our time, vulnerable in a way that I found deeply moving. That was the first and last time that we talked. I regret that we never had occasion to meet in person, but I will remember our conversation with fondness.

When I shared on Notes about his passing, readers commented with personal anecdotes that testified to Cayley’s hospitality and generosity of spirit. He opened his home and himself to those who came unbidden to his door and to his inbox. Given my own experience, this was hardly surprising. And as I reflected on David’s kindness, I recalled as well the charity and hospitality of every one of Illich’s friends that I had the temerity to contact with the request that they share with me, a stranger to them, the memory of their friend. They all did so with warmth and grace: Carl Mitcham, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Gustavo Esteva. To these I can add Madhu Prakash, Dana Stuchul, Dan Grego, Bill Arney, and Sajay Samuel, whose support and encouragement I’ve deeply valued.

It is said that the legacy of a teacher is often undone by their disciples. It is rather the case, at least in my experience, that Illich’s legacy is enhanced and sweetened by his friends. His insistence on the demanding but indispensable character of hospitality and friendship have been beautifully embodied by those among his friends whom I have had the pleasure of knowing.

“I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied it is hospitality.”

— Ivan Illich

“I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied,” Illich once said, “it is hospitality.” In the same context, he also claimed that “if there is something like a political life to be, to remain for us, in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship.” “Therefore my task,” he explained, “is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships. Mutual friendships always. I and you, and I hope a third one, out of which perhaps community can grow. Because perhaps here we can find what the good is.”

Illich said this in the mid-1990s. It is, in my view, all the more true today. And the remarkable thing about this is how little, from a certain perspective, it requires: “Hospitality requires a table around which you can sit and if people get tired they can sleep.”

Earlier this year, I closed a couple of my talks on AI in an unusual way: by citing a letter written in the 12th century by a German monk. I came across this letter in a footnote in my favorite of Illich’s books, In the Vineyard of the Text. The letter was from Hugh of St. Victor, a theologian whose work Illich highly esteemed. In this letter, Hugh is writing to another monk, who had hosted Hugh during his travels. In it he reflects on charity (or love), hospitality, and friendship.

“To my dear brother Randolph from Hugh, a sinner. Charity never ends. When I first heard this, I knew it was true. But now, dearest brother, I have the personal experience of fully knowing that charity never ends. For I was a foreigner and met you in a strange land. But the land was not really strange for I found friends there. I don’t know whether I first made a friend or was made one. But I found charity there and I loved it; and could not tire of it, for it was sweet to me, and I filled my heart with it, and was sad that my heart could hold so little. I could not take in all there was—but I took as much as I could, and weighed down with this precious gift, I did not feel any burden, because my full heart sustained me. And now having made a long journey, I find my heart still warmed, and none of the gift has been lost: for charity never ends.”

I shared this letter in my talks, and I share it with you now, because it attests, in its eloquence, simplicity, and historical particularity, to the power of hospitality and the grace of friendship. May we likewise find such friendship on our way.

May we also discover, as Illich once put it, that “friendship suffices,” and thus strive to remove “by little acts of foolish renunciation” all obstacles to its cultivation.

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If you are searching for writers who put this vision into practice and have an abundance of wisdom to offer, I commend Dougald Hine, Elizabeth Oldfield, and Sam Pressler to you. For more on Illich and the skill of hospitality, you can read this essay I wrote in 2020.

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1. For CBC Radio’s Ideas, Cayley conducted two lengthy interviews with Illich. These programs in turn became two books, Ivan Illich in Conversation and Rivers North of the Future. Interestingly, I find the former of these to be perhaps the most accessible entry point into Illich’s thinking, while the latter might be his most demanding work. (Incidentally, and of interest to perhaps only a few of you, Rivers North was brought to print at the urging of the philosopher Charles Taylor.) In 2021, Cayley also published what will almost certainly be the definitive work on Illich for many years to come: Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey.