Thank you for taking the time and effort to produce these summaries. The comments on HN are such a useful resource, often exceeding the value of the cited sources!
A touch less related perhaps, but there are many links from The Convivial Society newsletter whose name is taken from Illich’s work: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=convivialsociety
This is a great resource to get into Ivan Illich. The writing refers a lot to Illich's work, and there are a couple of episodes where it is discussed with people close to Illich. Quite related, I'd say!
The name, however, is a play of Illich's "Tools for Conviviality" and Jaques Ellul's "The Technological Society".
Criticizing modern medicine makes a lot of sense if you're a devout Catholic because the afterlife tempers the sadness of death.
For non-believers, though, earthly life is all there is, so reducing suffering, disease, and poverty are much more pressing goals -- goals that might be worth a little alienation.
I would emphasize choice: people can (and do) embrace alternative ways of life, from the Amish to kibbutzim. Similarly, we don't have to drag out our final years: we're free to opt out of medical treatments. You can also opt out of modernity in smaller ways, decisions like not owning a car, not watching TV, and so on.
I would contest the notion that a lack of religiosity must magnify discontent with death. Also it remains rather difficult to "opt out" of a protracted, likely intubated decline, at least in the US. Moreover there is no opting out of modernity writ large. This is the nature of multi-polar traps: choosing not to join an arms race is a local, temporary reprieve.
The optionality modernity seems determined to optimize for is narrow at best. At worst it threatens its own end
>I would contest the notion that a lack of religiosity must magnify discontent with death
It’s the other way around. Lack of religiosity is the default state and with it you get the default discontent with death, but a religion with an afterlife could reduce discontent with death.
Popular or widespread doesn't mean it’s default. Religion is part of culture and that’s something that’s passed down person to person. A blank culture or no culture has no religion. Tabula rasa.
I’m not assuming anything, I’m not pegging the default discontent with death to a particular value, I don’t know what it is and it’s irrelevant. I’m just saying the some religions, with certain concepts of afterlife, like catholicism, would reduce that discontent.
Why do you assume a tabula rasa person would assume that consciousness ceases to continue on death? I don't think there's anything obvious that would suggest this goes one way or the other and that different people could end up settling for different conclusions. An obvious natural guess would be that it'd be similar to sleeping, as in, you would see dreams
Why would you assume that I assume a tabula rasa person assumes that consciousness ceases to continue with on death? I assume that they wouldn’t know what happens and have some baseline level of feelings about death.
isn't it more that people cleave to magical thinking, archaic though it is, because they have trouble dealing with the despair of poor health and final death?
one big support for this is the gradual decline of religiosity in areas of the world where life is improving. conflated, of course, with the hegemonistic aspect of organized religion.
Possibility remains that adverse conditions are not being masked by psychological devices, rather that these conditions are conducive to heightened spirituality (which may be present in varying degree in all humans).
one big support for this is the fact that many saints came from affluent backgrounds and chose the device of asceticism ("harsh life", "corporal despair", "terminal denial of certain pleasures", "dying to earthly life") to heighten their experience of spiritual communion and worship.
One argument is that we simply replaced the archaic (religion-focused) dogma with a modern (consumerist, individualist, hyperpoliticized) one, but their function is the same, to serve as complex death denial rituals.
> Criticizing modern medicine makes a lot of sense if you're a devout Catholic because the afterlife tempers the sadness of death
> Similarly, we don't have to drag out our final years: we're free to opt out of medical treatments
OTOH, Catholicism also is strongly against euthanasia, which is arguably at odds with the sentiment of not having to drag out final years. I think there's plenty of room for a philosophy to "not drag out final years" as a non-believer who doesn't need to rule out certain measures like that.
It isn't at odds, since in both cases (euthanasia and medically-prolonged end-of-life), it is the human person that is trying to control the ultimate outcome of life. The Catholic approach is to say "let God decide".
I guess to me it sounds like it's at best orthogonal to the idea of dragging out life; sometimes it drags out longer than it might otherwise have to, sometimes it ends much earlier than it would otherwise have to. I think my confusion was over mentioning "opt out of medical treatments" right after "we don't have to drag out life" in a way that sounded to me like it was calling them equivalent, and from my perspective, sometimes forgoing medical treatments can itself drag life out longer than someone might want.
Ultimately it sounds like we mostly agree that people can make personal decisions for themselves about their medical care; I just found the way you described it above fairly confusing.
(edit: I apparently missed that the response was from a different person than I originally responded to)
The Catholic approach is economical: it's expensive to keep dying people alive if you need resources to do so, but a religion promising eternal paradise is going to have a real propagation problem if a significant number of adherents commit suicide - and trying to carve out euthanasia exceptions wasn't going to play well to medieval peasants.
This is an odd take considering the Catholic church via the Vatican was one of the most powerful and wealthiest organizations in Europe for many centuries, able to topple monarchs.
The point stands: if your argument were true of the Catholic Church being ruled by money and doing whatever it economically can do to propagate, the Church would behave much differently than it currently does. But, the Church is not doing everything economically possible to propagate today, so there must be some other ruling principle.
"economics" doesn't mean "money", it means the allocation of resources.
You're treating this whole idea as though there's a nefarious organization deliberately managing things (which there is in some cases, but the why is unacknowledged).
But a cell in your body has an energy economy that means it adopts certain strategies based on it's constraints.
Similarly, successful religions have an economy of beliefs that they have to adopt based on constraints. Almost all religions portray an afterlife, so all religions have a problem where they need to stop people short-cutting to get there - otherwise they promptly stop existing. But then they also have followers with limited resources so they also can't preach infinite life-extension since that undermines the afterlife narrative, and is economically unfeasible for followers (particularly since you also need to collect donations to your church to keep the organizational structure running).
A belief is economical if it exists today, and existing beliefs are economical. This tautological line of reasoning doesn't help explain the Catholic approach to anything.
What's tautological? How are the Branch Davidians doing? Heaven's Gate?
I note you keep insisting "they would change beliefs" but you've neglected to ever include what changes you think would obviously disprove this hypothesis.
Doing everything possible to prolong life has consequences beyond the life of the individual: it's a significant cost to the economy and to family members. There's the cost of the medical treatment itself, but people living longer now also have to finance their life with their savings or even keep working instead of retiring, so their kids get a smaller inheritance, and have to compete with their parents in the labour market.
> You can also opt out of modernity in smaller ways, decisions like not owning a car, not watching TV, and so on.
Sure, if you reduce the effects of "modernity" to only your own ability to consume goods and services. One cannot "opt out" of the degeneration of social will, or the increasing demand for control over each part of our lives by unaccountable bureaucracies.
> In his words, “By breaching the limits set on man by nature and history, industrial society engendered disability and suffering in the name of eliminating disability and suffering. … The warming biosphere is making it intolerable to think of industrial growth as progress; now it appears to us as aggression against the human condition.”
I dislike blaming "industrial society" as an impersonal, abstract villain. The fact is that it is humans who may either organise themselves and build a society or fail in the trying. Modern industry and the modern economy have achieved remarkable, good things on a global scale.
Even on the scale of our solar system, if we consider the exploration of other planets.
The fact is that humans have trouble thinking at scale. We had never achieved the scale of activity that we have in our modern world. The individual human has always harboured resentments and been subject to pyschological problems and limitations. We cannot expect to scale human growth without confronting human psychology.
That said, fanaticism and the petrostate kakistocracies are the worst elements of our world today. It's their scale that has become an existential threat.
Although I welcome an intelligent discussion, how we can make the world a better place in a practical way is the constructive mode that I prefer.
> individual mobility turns into collective congestion when everyone has a car
This is a pertinent example to illustrate. The manufacturing is brilliant, the machines are ingenious, but humans fail at scale if they see only selfish interest. We certainly can do better.
> One does not have to embrace Illich’s romanticization of premodern times
This "embrace" would be my fundamental objection to his solutionless critique.
> the modern economy have achieved remarkable, good things on a global scale.
There is no doubt about that. But it has also brought us into a mass extinction (that's happening right now), it brought climate change (it will add to the biodiversity issue), and it relies very heavily on fossil fuels which are not unlimited.
> to his solutionless critique.
I believe that we need to agree on the problem before we can find solutions. I strongly believe that we have an energy problem, and the biodiversity loss and climate problem are consequences of it. In my view, we need to do less with less (a.k.a. degrow). Doesn't mean we "go back to the Middle Age", just that we address different challenges (instead of "how do I get people to buy an iPhone every year?", maybe "how do I get people to keep the benefits of smartphones without overconsumption?).
The thing is that some people seem to believe that on the contrary, we should not care about our survival on Earth and start looking at other solar systems (which is, in my understanding of the current fundamental state of physics, absolutely impossible). Some even seem to believe that surviving on Mars would be better than "having less" on Earth...
Of course we as a species probably won't agree, and therefore we won't really control where it goes: we will just have to deal with whatever happens.
> we should not care about our survival on Earth and start looking at other solar systems
Wacky thinking. Another modern achievement, some very wealthy people literally have more money than neurons. ^_^
> I strongly believe that we have an energy problem
There is no doubt that the challenge is now. But our industrial and technical capabilities can solve the problem... if corrupt petrostate kakistocracies don't destroy civilisation first.
I also agree that "overconsumption" is a clear failure to scale.
I agree. We currently clearly don't have the technical solutions. Just hope that if we put enough people on it we will find some.
As an engineer, I know that every project that is fundamentally new always ends up being harder than expected. Hoping that we will find a technological solution to a problem that will kill us if we fail is a bit irrational to me.
surely it's not just an energy problem - but a resource problem.
I dislike the "overconsumption" mantra (and its degrowth kin). The problem is waste - fast fashion is a great example. just stop making stupid choices - people still need clothes, and we still need lots of people.
> surely it's not just an energy problem - but a resource problem.
It is an energy problem. The modern society is built upon fossil fuels, that's a fact. Remove the fossil fuels, and it collapses. Turns out that "building upon fossil fuels" means "gradually removing them". It's just a question of time, and we are talking decades, not centuries. We will live long enough to see it, most likely.
We need to rethink society to use less energy in general, and that includes consuming less of everything.
> There is no doubt about that. But it has also brought us into a mass extinction (that's happening right now), it brought climate change (it will add to the biodiversity issue), and it relies very heavily on fossil fuels which are not unlimited.
There have been 5 mass extinctions in known history. Probably more. Pre-anthropocene. The universe has no morality, there is no "natural order". Whether or not a mass extinction is happening right now is irrelevant in the universal scope of things: it would happen eventually anyway.
Maybe Yellowstone finally goes in a thousand years - geologically that would be "right now" as far as a future historian is concerned.
A mass extinction is terrible solely because of the impact it may have on humans, on human life. That's it.
> A mass extinction is terrible solely because of the impact it may have on humans, on human life. That's it.
Sure, I agree. But as it happens, I am a human, and I want to live in a society where I as a human don't have to experience a mass extinction.
I don't want to survive in a capsule on Mars, or even in a capsule on Earth once it's impossible to live outside on big parts of the globe. I want to live on Earth, with some amount of biodiversity. And I want to change society to achieve that.
The computer scientist Stephen Kell has made an Illich-like critique of computing and software development practices. I recall Kell mentions that he ran across Illich's work after beginning the critique but was struck by the similarities:
I found Deschooling Society book on my dad's bookshelf about 9 years ago. No idea why he had it. I quit university about 3/4 way through reading it. I'm poorly adapted to the cadence and mechanisms of institutional education and this guy provided an alternative that I have employed since to an effect further than I had imagined was possible.
Anecdotally speaking, the deeply ingrained cultural view around me is that education is attained through educational institutions. One of Illich's core arguments against traditional schooling is that in fact the mechanisms of school are not the major contributor to one's aptitudes. When I traced my most promising or useful aptitudes, I agreed that school was not where these were developed. Having one dissenting and well-reasoned voice was important in being able to follow through with experimenting with a self-driven educational model.
Illich demonstrates real examples in learning Spanish through a dominant institutional approach versus intensive, ad-hoc immersive study groups to claim a growing disconnect between method & goal as well as agency problems arising in institutional education (credentialism, self-justification etc). For me, replacing the learning confirmation and feedback tools with a real-world cause/effect, market-driven approach (job interviews, low stakes freelancing, hobby projects) well aligned my intrinsic motivation with my educational goals.
Retrospectively, an institutional computer-science education would have had its advantages, though I don't think I was ready for it. I do think our dominant educational approaches are very far from optimal for a big subset of students, we haven't ventured far enough into experimenting with alternatives and from a macro lens, I definitely sympathise with the idea that broadly speaking, it begins to look like a grift designed to continue & justify its own existence.
practically: minimised expenses, quit job & university, went to coding meetups in my city 1-2x a week, signed up to a couple mentorship programs as a mentee, read through and completed exercises in books on web fundamentals (via codeacademy, pluralsight etc - microsoft used to give free memberships), C ("the c book"), JS (ydkjs, eloquentjs), Go (straight to the docs), posted all exercises and projects to github, built and deployed an application for a not for profit, took on average ~15hrs freelance work a week, reviewed job boards, requested feedback from recruiters and interviewers and used it to adapt syllabus.
> *But he was blistering in his critique of our medical systems oriented toward postponing the end as long as possible. “We now see that a majority of these medical achievements are deceptive misnomers, actually prolonging the suffering of madmen, cripples, old fools and monsters,” he wrote.*
That one has certainly proved prescient. Medical science has gotten frighteningly good at prolonging life even in cases when it probably shouldn’t because the patient has no quality of life.
Here in the US and many other first world countries the population is getting very old. We'll need to bring in younger people who look different to keep the average age down. This obviously has all sorts of side effects. The other problem is the wealth inequality it creates. Wealth compounds with time plus the older generation grew up in a boom period. Add in the fact that they were able to buy cheap housing which has appreciated by a large amount and are effectively blocking new affordable housing from being created in many areas (NIMBY's) and we have a very interesting predicament.
This is very well written. Thanks for posting. Some time ago I read Neil Postman and if you are interested in culture and technology then Technopoly is a pretty good book to read.
The problems typically arise when someone decides that everything everyone needs is coffee and internet. What is enough for you might not be enough for someone else, particularly people who grew up resenting the fact that they only had a few things.
It is how I want to live, I don't want to impose it on others and don't even do it that well myself.
The early Stoics were influenced by the Cynics, the word Cynic apparently means stray dog in Greek.
Various philosophers, such as the Pythagoreans, had advocated simple living in the centuries preceding the Cynics.
So it is a very old idea.
I have. And I think it is definitely worth it to read it, because he brings a lot of clarity to a lot of things.
Buuuuuut. In the end, I think Illich fail his own test. He claims to analyze systemic impacts, but fail to recognize the systemic impacts of his own solutions.
I always use the "speed" example for this. Illich basically advocate for more or less banning the use of any mean of transportation faster than a bicycle. The arguments do make sense actually, in a lot of ways, and it is important to keep these in mind. But he acknowledge that there are real use case for engine driven vehicules and fast speed, for things like medical or emergency needs. Make sense right?
So from his pov, noone should have engine car, except for ambulance, medical transportation (like transplant), fire engine, etc. Where it becomes a net good.
What he utterly fail to realise is that without the fast transportation and the whole system built to ... actually build and distribute these cars to everyone, then building these emergency vehicules and developing the engineering for them cannot happen.
Not only it is cost prohibitive (because of reuse of means of production, mass production impact on cost, etc) but also it is really hard to actually engineer this stuff without a lot of experiments and needs for it, which do not happen if you restrict the use of these stuff to a limited niche.
Engineering need practical use of the tool to be able to learn about the use to make it more efficient and better to the point that it benefits everyone. That of course does not negate the point that these technologies do have negative impact on society. But thinking that you can wholly separate the positive from the negative, banning the later but getting the former, is not as simple as calling it out. You need to consider the systemic effects and really think through the long term and systemic impact of your action.
Something that Illich seems to only apply to other people actions, but not to his own remedy or analysis.
> Not only it is cost prohibitive (because of reuse of means of production, mass production impact on cost, etc) but also it is really hard to actually engineer this stuff without a lot of experiments and needs for it, which do not happen if you restrict the use of these stuff to a limited niche.
Couldn't one argue that there is not that much engineering needed to keep producing emergency vehicles that we already have? It's not like an ambulance fundamentally changes every year.
Would each unit be more expensive without mass production? Most likely, but... it's not like firefighter trucks are mass-produced for people who use them to go to work, and some of them are adapted for firefighters, right? Still it seems like it's not cost-prohibitive.
Another example is military equipment, where I believe countries try to produce more locally (for obvious security reasons). Military equipment is typically much more expensive than consumer products, but still... it's there.
So it seems like it's not completely impossible, right?
You forgot the road themselves. Note that Illich also refuse train, so you have to build them with all logistic to build them on bicycles cargo.
On top of this, the ambulance we know how to build today are not the one from when we first managed to go faster than a bicycle (average human).
Which means you would be stuck at state of the art engine, car, brakes, etc from the 30s. Or maybe the 10s even, as it was already valuable in first world war.
Same for planes. Trains. Etc
And would we really build the infrastructure for them to actually drive on if it was so limited?
As the other answers point out, this fails to acknowledge the systemic impact of such rules.
My usual test for a lot of critics of current systems that offer something "far better" with nearly no downside compared to the current one is to ask if they could invent, develop and produce MRIs in enough quantities.
It is actually really hard to build systems that would. This is a taller order than you think.
> My usual test for a lot of critics of current systems that offer something "far better" with nearly no downside
The current system absolutely depends on fossil fuels, which are not unlimited. Also it brought us into a mass extinction (we are in it, that's a fact), and it is bringing climate change (which will just be a complication on top of the energy crisis when we pass peak production of fossil fuels - pretty soon).
I don't see that as "no downside"; our system is literally about to collapse.
> Couldn't one argue that there is not that much engineering needed to keep producing emergency vehicles that we already have
And what you would do when the necessary knowledge would be lost? 'It wouldn't be' you want to say? But who would want to spend an entire life for doing things what would be replaced like once in a decade?
> It's not like an ambulance fundamentally changes every year.
Not every year but modern ambulance and the one from 30 years are quite a different things, despite they are both just box on wheels and a stretcher.
> Would each unit be more expensive without mass production? Most likely, but... it's not like firefighter trucks are mass-produced for people who use them to go to work
But ambulances are produced on the chassis of the common (and cheap) designs which are mass-produced for all other markets and sectors. If your idea of firetruck is American behemoths then sure, they are not like firetrucks in other countries which just use... the common chassis from the cargo trucks. Yes, they are deeply overhauled, but the main benefit is what they get that chassis and parts cheap because they are mass-produced. And if they are not - they are no longer cheap.
> Military equipment is typically much more expensive than consumer products, but still... it's there.
And just like American firetrucks they share a lot of parts (and means of production) with their civilian counterparts.
And by the way, ambulances and firetrucks, good. What about delivering a new AC unit to you? It's no longer 40 minutes on the highway from the warehouse. It's a multiday affair and hours and hours of manual labor. Do you expect to still pay $20 for that?
I do agree that dramatically reducing the number of private cars is a challenge. But I strongly believe that we don't have a choice.
I see it this way: our society is built upon abundant energy, which is mostly (and by far) fossil fuels. Yes, renewable grow fast (while still being marginal), but they grow fast in a world of abundant fossil fuels. Cut the fossil fuels entirely today, and we are dead.
The thing is: fossil fuels are not unlimited; in the close future, we will have passed the peak of production for all of them (conventional peak oil was in 2008, Europe feels it since then). So we are going towards a world with less fossil energy, and we don't have a solution to replace it (we can hope for technological breakthroughs, but we just don't have the solution today). Hence it seems pretty reasonable to think that we will have less energy in the future. And therefore, we need to do less, and it will be more costly.
That's not necessarily the end of the world, that's just different (though probably more complicated).
> Do you expect to still pay $20 for that?
No. I expect to have to do less with less. I am not saying that I will necessarily live better, just that my survival depends on my society being able to do it.
> we don't have a solution to replace it (we can hope for technological breakthroughs, but we just don't have the solution today)
Yes, we do: nuclear. The reasons why nuclear energy has not taken hold as widely as it should have are political, not technical. We could be at the point today where no fossil fuels need to be burned anywhere in the world if we had started building nuclear plants on a larger scale back in the 1970s, as soon as it became clear that OPEC was not going to play nice when they thought they could extract more money from their customers by restricting supply.
That's likely wrong, or at least it would be a very risky bet. If we started today to build nuclear plants everywhere, it's not like we would replace fossil fuels tomorrow. It takes time. Then we would need to replace absolutely everything that uses fossil fuel to use electricity.
This is wishful thinking. What's most likely is that we need to start building a lot of nuclear plant today, and we still need to degrow. Because nuclear plants won't compensate fossil fuels, but obviously even with a degrowth we will need some energy. We will have less energy, hence the degrowth.
> If we started today to build nuclear plants everywhere, it's not like we would replace fossil fuels tomorrow. It takes time.
Replacing fossil fuels with anything will take time. That doesn't mean we shouldn't start doing it.
> Then we would need to replace absolutely everything that uses fossil fuel to use electricity.
No, we wouldn't. For applications where electricity is not practical (such as, for example, commercial aviation), we can use electricity to make liquid fuels from the CO2 and water vapor in the air, by reversing the chemical reactions that take place when the fuels are burned.
> nuclear plants won't compensate fossil fuels
They will gradually reduce their usage, eventually to zero. You simply refuse to consider the possbility of gradually shifting energy usage in order to not have to "degrow" and lower people's standard of living. Good luck convincing the rest of the world of that. Particularly when "degrow" for most of the rest of the world translates into "stay in poverty forever". Poverty has negative consequences too.
> Replacing fossil fuels with anything will take time. That doesn't mean we shouldn't start doing it.
Of course we should do it as quickly as possible. But look at the number: most likely we won't replace. We will just compensate for some of the loss.
> we can use electricity to make liquid fuels from the CO2 and water vapor in the air, by reversing the chemical reactions that take place when the fuels are burned.
Because we can does not mean at all that it scales. That's my whole point. Did you ever stop to check how many nuclear plants we would need to replace all fossil fuels? And I mean considering all the very energy-expensive ideas you're considering like "reversing the chemical reactions that take place when the fuels are burned".
You're basically saying that we will replace fossil fuels by producing more energy that will allow us to synthesize fossil fuel-like alternatives. That's a lot of energy, you can't just ignore it.
> You simply refuse to consider the possbility of gradually shifting energy usage in order to not have to "degrow"
And you apparently refuse to consider that maybe fossil fuels are so "great" (in terms of energy) that we don't have a viable alternative. Again: we need to build nuclear plants to compensate for the loss of fossil fuels, but that won't completely replace it.
> lower people's standard of living
That's just about the narrative. If your view of "a good life" is no biodiversity, but a new phone every year and flying every weekend to a different city to listen to the same music in a similar night club", then yes, it will lower your standard of living. But maybe it just means that we need a lot less TikTok-like technology and go back to more essential ideas (like enjoying nature and slow travel to closer places).
Also, from my point of view, anyway we will degrow. It will be forced by the reduction in availability of fossil fuels. It's just that if we don't control it (by organizing society around degrowth), it will be worse.
There is this great French person who says that uncontrolled sobriety is poverty. And I agree with that: I don't want poverty, but I have to face the fact that I will need sobriety.
> look at the number: most likely we won't replace. We will just compensate for some of the loss.
If you are referring to the current political situation, in which nuclear is at a huge disadvantage for irrational reasons, then I would agree that we won't start building serious nuclear capacity unless and until that political situation changes. But that will need to happen for any solution to work.
> Did you ever stop to check how many nuclear plants we would need to replace all fossil fuels?
About as many as we currently have of fossil fuel plants, since the replacement, at least for large base load electrical plants, is more or less one to one. There is no technical reason why we can't build that number of plants; your apparent belief to the contrary is simply uninformed. The obstacles are purely political.
> That's just about the narrative.
No, it isn't, it's about basic facts: poverty kills people. "Poverty" for most of the world does not mean "can't afford the Disney channel" or "can't afford wasteful overconsumption". It means "can't get enough to eat", "can't get basic health care", "can't afford basic control over your life". Telling people that they just have to suck it up and accept that because of your "degrowth" narrative is not going to work. Nor is it necessary.
You and I are posting here in a medium that requires an industrial civilization, and doing that does not imply wasteful overconsumption. I have had the computer I'm writing this post on for ten years. I've had my current phone for three (and it would be more except that my last one broke--I had that one for about seven or eight years). I've had my current car for six, and my wife has had her current car for ten. I think there are many more people living in first world countries who are like us, than who are wastefully overconsuming.
We don't need "degrowth". Nor will it be forced on us by running out of fossil fuels. If it is forced on us, it will be by stupid politics that refuses to adopt an obvious alternative that has been staring us in the face for decades.
> No, it isn't, it's about basic facts: poverty kills people.
Either you misunderstood me, or that's bad faith. I said that we need sobriety: we need to stop consuming too much energy (and increasing the rate at which we consume it).
I also said that if we don't get our act together and control the transition to a world without fossil fuels (and hence with less energy), then it won't be sobriety, it will be poverty. Obviously, nobody wants poverty, and I know we do agree on that. Don't make me say what I haven't.
Now the thing is that you seem to vastly underestimate the power of fossil fuels and the difficulty of nuclear power. Do you even know how one would "reverse the chemical reaction that takes place when fuels are burned"? Sounds to me like you don't have much knowledge in chemistry, do you. Note that I am not a chemist myself, I just had a specialization in environmental chemistry at university. But what's for sure is that reversing a chemical process is not always easy, and this one surely isn't.
You can't just throw ideas out there about "reversing chemical reactions" without having a clue how much energy it takes to do that. Energy is not infinite, it's not that hard to grasp, is it?
It's not only emergency vehicles, it's also stuff like mini-vans and lorries that keep us well-fed. It's about who's going to pay for those highways once the personal cars are gone? How are you going to keep a Western logistics network in place without those highways and roads? No, extending the railway network to its past glory days (like the left-hand map in this photo [1]) won't work and will definitely not happen anymore. Do we really want to go back to stuff like this [2]?
> It's about who's going to pay for those highways
Those who are paying now. And if it's only for emergency vehicles and trucks that bring food to cities (because you are right, cities need them to survive), then don't you think you need less infrastructure? Doesn't seem to me that 6-lanes highways are fully used by emergency vehicles and trucks.
> won't work and will definitely not happen anymore.
It's not black and white, it's a gradient: you can definitely try to move from the right-hand map towards the left-hand one.
> trucks that bring food to cities (because you are right, cities need them to survive), then don't you think you need less infrastructure?
You'll still need the current paved roads to remain pretty much in place. Granted, the highways with 3 or more lanes could lose them (the extra lanes, that is), but we're still going to need 2-lane highways in order to connect the bigger centers of interest.
To say nothing of the fact that less personal cars will also mean much more expensive gasoline/diesel in order to cover up for the last sales (once you get rid of personal cars), lots of economies of scale will vanish over night. The same discourse should be gad regarding the current forced push to electrification.
Note that illich is against cities. In his mind, a more atomised world would emerge from such a ban, more localised and focused on communities in neighborhood, with less dependencies outside.
So the only thing using roads would be emergency. Food would need to be local too or transported slowly by speed of walk or bicycle.
Which means that we would all be taxed pretty high for something rarely used.
A great introduction to his lines of thinking was (to me) "Ivan Illich in Conversation" by David Cayley [0]. Essentially a book-length interview.
While I find him truly interesting, there is an annoyance: he is strongly critical about "traditional" school system, while holding a PhD himself. I've always found this kind of thing somewhat controversial. I wonder if he did consider dropping out during his studies; and if not, then why.
It somewhat feels like first getting the most out of a (by and large still hugely beneficial) system for your own good -- and then stating that actually, this is a remarkably harmful system.
(Side note: I read "Deschooling Society" quite a while ago; might not remember the main ideas all that well, so please correct me if this feedback is too harsh, or superficial.)
In that light, guys like the Finnish ecophilosopher (and fisherman) Pentti Linkola [1] seem more "true". As in, Linkola was heavily critical towards contemporary schooling, but he also dropped out of university at an early stage of his studies already, and (as much as I understand) lived in a cabin in the forest his entire life. It's a different path than first finishing a PhD and then becoming a notable critic of "the system". I don't think Illich would've had the same analytical capabilities and intellectual horizon if he would not have trained his thinking in a doctorate program.
Then again, Pentti Linkola's father was rector of Helsinki University, and also member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters. So I imagine Pentti the son was steeped in sciences and academic thinking at an early age already. Who knows, maybe that's what made him suspicious in the first place (no illusions?). A biography of Linkola is also published in Finland, but haven't read that one.
I will definitely read more of Illich, though. He is really clever and to the point in oh-so-many things.
You can disagree with something, but still do it because your environment expects you to do it. He might not have been able to succeed in his goals if he hadn’t gotten a phd, not because of the phd itself, but how companies and people perceive those with phds. It opens doors, that would otherwise remain shut.
Similar to how no US president would ever say they don’t believe in god, as that would immediately alienate a large part of the voters.
Usually, if you want to win inside a system, it means you have to play by the rules of the system.
I think at the end of the day we want both perspectives. We all benefit from having people from both inside and outside the system critique the system. Certainly, the person who walks the walk and talks the talk deserves more street cred, but from the my layperson’s perspective I’d much rather live in a world where I can read Linkola’s and Illich’s critiques and take the best parts from both of them.
Yeah the tone and style of the text kinda bugged me. Who talks like that?
I'm definitely sympathetic to the kind of ideas he's advocating, but it's dressed up in a language that makes it seem untrue. It's not surprising to me that he has a Ph.D.
Picking something random from the beginning of Tools for Conviviality:
For several years at CIDOC in Cuernavaca we have conducted critical research on the monopoly of the industrial mode of production and have tried to define conceptually alternative modes that would fit a postindustrial age. ...
Alternative devices for the production and marketing of mass education are technically more feasible and ethically less tolerable than compulsory graded schools. Such new educational arrangements are now on the verge of replacing traditional school systems in rich and in poor countries. They are potentially more effective in the conditioning of job−holders and consumers in an industrial economy. They are therefore more attractive for the management of present societies, more seductive for the people, and insidiously destructive of fundamental values.
I think what he's saying is something like:
> Schools use metrics likes grades that are slanted towards the goals of an industrial economy. This isn't the only way of organizing society, or the most ethical way. So let's consider alternatives.
There is an extreme amount of passive voice in his writing (and yes I know passive voice can be useful; it's not used well here.)
e.g. I'm having a lot of trouble parsing this part:
are technically more feasible and ethically less tolerable than compulsory graded schools
Is he actually saying that alternatives to mass education are LESS ethically tolerable than compulsory graded schools?
That feels like the OPPOSITE of what he says elsewhere.
If he actually used the active voice, it would be clear WHO considers it ethically less tolerable.
So yeah my initial impression is this writing is very bad.
> Is he actually saying that alternatives to mass education are LESS ethically tolerable than compulsory graded schools?
Yes, but he's hiding his point in poor phrasing. Compulsory, graded schools are one solution for disseminating mass education. Another solution for disseminating mass education are personalized learning platforms run by algorithms, or video courses that are taught by a teacher far away from the student. These futuristic, alternative solutions are "technically more feasible and ethically less tolerable".
it's old-fashioned, for sure. and therefore less clear to a modern reader.
but it's not that far from the kind of "turgid" prose you find even today in some academic fields (where being difficult to read is desired because a reader may conflate syntactic difficulty with conceptual challenge).
it does come off as performative and thus annoying.
> While I find him truly interesting, there is an annoyance: he is strongly critical about "traditional" school system, while holding a PhD himself.
Isn't it possible that getting a PhD gave him a front row seat to observe the problems of academia? In some sense it lends credibility to his arguments since he's been on the inside.
I've read a handful, and agree that he truly understood the effects of technology and Modernity. It's worth reading the French sociologist/theologian Jacques Ellul, too (they were contemporaries).
I like Ellul unfortunately he is much more cloudy in his statements and analysis, it takes much more energy to decipher (even in French) and make your own what he's saying.
I'd rather recommend reading basics stuff like Guy Debord (Society of Spectacle), André Gorz (Métamorphoses du travail), Schumacher (Small is Beautiful), Kohr (The Breakdown of Nations). A little bit of Bourdieu cannot hurt either
For Lewis Mumford [0] maybe "Myth of the Machine" - with his concept
of "megatechnics" - is more readable than the earlier "Technics and
Civilisation", but his earlier insights seem ever more relevant.
For Neil Postman [1] the standard reader is "Technopoly", but for me
"Amusing Ourselves to Death" is a real treat. It was literally a
description of social media and modern "performance politics" 40 years
too early.
One of the notable things from "Deschooling" is his solution. Illich describes was could be thought of as Meetups using the internet. Hobbyist experts with common interests that can serve as teachers and demonstrators of skills.
One of the big insights is that today you have teachers who are certified in teaching and experts in a particular thing. The two are very rarely present in the same person.
> In deschooled society professionals could no longer claim the trust of their clients on the basis of their curricular pedigree, or ensure their standing by simply referring their clients to other professionals who approved of their schooling. Instead of placing trust in professionals, it should be possible, at any time, for any potential client to consult with other experienced clients of a professional about their satisfaction with him by means of another peer network easily set up by computer, or by a number of other means. Such networks could be seen as public utilities which permitted students to choose their teachers or patients their healers.
It seems like he is talking about influencers, where there is a relationship that is based on abstract metrics like number of followers and unclear success. Here I use abstract and metrics together to convey the idea that the metrics does not give a real meaning. Obviously there are many people who perfectly deserves their "followers" but it is gamed by other people removing real meaning.
I thought of it more like if you went to go hire a doctor, then the best people to review that doctor would not be the university that gave the doctor their credential, or even the doctor’s patients; it would be the doctor’s colleagues who understand the doctor’s strengths and weaknesses best because they are the only ones who have the direct relationship as well as technical skills to compare against.
I think that's incorrect. He wants clients to consult other clients, not professional colleagues.
I like it in principle, but in practice it's too amenable to gaming (witness every review section and spam-fed product listing in my search results) to actually work at scale.
Read 90% of them yeah. It's amazing. If you like the free software movement, Tools for Conviviality is a must read. But my favorite is Deschooling Society
He defines his own terms throughout his bibliography and everything makes so much sense put together (you can apply his logic to the health system, language, knowledge through written books, industrial society, education, gender vs. sex etc.). He didn't tried to make his writing too complex to appear like an advanced intellectual nobody gets, he really tries to make his messages understood, so reading him is also not a pain.
Weirdly, only left wing people read him. But he's actually quite libertarian compatible
>Weirdly, only left wing people read him. But he's actually quite libertarian compatible.
There are quite a few on the Right that read Illich as well. He was, essentially, a communitarian anarchist. Some of his thought is well-received on the Right, particularly his critique of institutionalized education and medicine.
There's a heavily online right-wing presence that admires Ilich; of the people who could be described as "right-wing" I've seen that talk about Ilich, most are either hobby homesteaders or people with advanced CS/engineering degrees that read a lot of "online rationalist" work about a decade ago.
I guess a great starting point would be "Ivan Illich in Conversation" by David Cayley, which is basically an exhaustive interview with Illich that touches on almost every different stage of his ideas.
I have read a few, and - at least when I was a more open-minded young adult - thought they were really insightful. I wouldn't say they're 100% on the money, but there are still many moments in life when something I see really resonates with what he wrote. Definitely worth reading and digesting.
> Illich defined conviviality as “autonomous and creative
> intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons
> with their environment.” He contrasted this to “the
> conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon
> them by others” from above and afar in the name of
> advancing progress.
For someone who claims to criticize "Western" thought, this appears to be quite deeply steeped in a particular Western prejudice, namely that conviviality contrasts with order and obedience. From a Confucian perspective, they are one and the same - the "demands made upon them by others" are the very basis enabling people to engage with society and to therefore realize themselves as moral subjects. Without the demands of productivity (or, equivalently, the demands of effective statecraft), conviviality is therefore impossible, or, at the very least, meaningless.
> “I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value,” he wrote in “Tools for Conviviality.”
He doesn't seem to define conviviality outside of community or to put it another way, community seems to be an important requirement for conviviality. This stands in contrast to modern western individualism.
he's a westerner, clearly; nobody has contested this.
it's interesting how you not see any distinction between an autonomous creative impulse from the self outwards to the community and environment AND the enviroment prompting some person who was taught a conditioned response already to enact certain behavior.
the difference is between "inner impulse from the individual outwards to their environment" and "external environment draws out a conditioned response from within the individual"
but how you say that Confucian (i.e. chinese) thought is different but also not really is ver interesting. considering "freedom with responsability" as the highest value in contrast with "harmony with your surroundings"
> it's interesting how you not see any distinction between an autonomous
> creative impulse from the self outwards to the community and environment AND
> the enviroment prompting some person who was taught a conditioned response
> already to enact certain behavior.
Of course I see it, but, again, understanding this as a meaningful distinction is a cultural prejudice. Besides, in Confucian thought, moral behavior is the result of consciously cultivating moral feelings, in at least partial contrast to following spontaneous impulses. Some Confucian thinkers, like Mencius, do believe that humans have an innately good and moral inclination that precedes conscious learning, but even Mencius does not consider this to be a stable moral foundation to stand on. Van Norden, in his translation of Mencius, comments on a dialogue between Mencius and a student that although impulsive moral
> inclinations manifest themselves spontaneously in everyone to a certain
> degree, cultivation is necessary to fully develop them. Part of this
> cultivation is using one’s heart, whose function (literally, “office”) is
> “reflecting” [...]. What is the “it” the heart will “get” if it reflects?
> Zhu Xi says it is the Pattern of whatever things or affairs one
> encounters; to “get it” is to understand how things are and how they
> should be. [1]
This pattern (the Taiji, in Zhu Xi's parlance) is, of course, highly hierarchical. And it is, as I think becomes clear here, not just the correct and natural order of the cosmos, but also the fundamental requirement to correctly process one's own (social) impulses.
Without this moral cultivation, man is no better than an animal, slave to his own desires. To wit, it's not about "freedom with responsibility", it's about "freedom through responsibility": (consciously) conditioned responses are the very form liberation takes.
As an aside: I deliberately didn't say "Chinese" thought, as Daoism - without a doubt a Chinese philosophy - turns this idea on its head, advocating to free man not through, but from conviviality.
[1]: Van Norden 2008: Mengzi. With Selections from Traditional Commentaries. P. 156.
I'll add in that "we should get rid of all these modern flimflam" is generally a rallying cry by quite well off people who choose not to see the obvious future of poor people getting squelched as resources dry up.
There are a lot of problems faced by modern society, and those problems are uncomfortably complicated. Most people don't understand the details of them. However, the incredible productivity of modern humans is one of several fragile bricks in the wall between us and the unspeakably horrible lifestyles of centuries ago.
People may not like industrial society. It may even kill us all, looking at the gently escalating tensions between nuclear powers. But the fact is it has been far better than all the alternatives on the table. The grass is not greener over there.
>I'll add in that "we should get rid of all these modern flimflam" is generally a rallying cry by quite well off people who choose not to see the obvious future of poor people getting squelched as resources dry up.
Poor people like degrowth just fine. When they let them, that is, and not, e.g. take their land and their forests and their livelihoods.
Also, that the first world pro-growthers care for the "poor people" is hypocrisy of the highest order. If it was a choice between them letting the third world "peasants" die of hunger in exchange for the first world continuing their "way of life" and "progress" they wouldn't even blink.
In fact, it's not even theoritical, this has been a choice the first world consistently made for centuries: milking them, impoverising them, stealing their lands and resources, and even making them downright their subjects for centuries to fuel their own greed and growth.
That is the thing though, you're privileging good intentions above good results. None of the pro-growthers "care" about China, they just like the benefits bring to them personally. Nevertheless, more than a billion people you consider peasants thrive.
The degrowthers literally want them impoverished so that they can score whatever weird points care earns them in their twisted framework. It is a sick philosophy. Hopefully they keep losing battles long enough for Africa to get up on its feet.
> and the unspeakably horrible lifestyles of centuries ago.
That sounds like an over-the-top fairy tale to constructed justify modern society.
I assume by "unspeakably horrible lifestyle" you don't mean something like "lack of color television." That's an assumption I have to state, because there are a surprising number of people who say they consider the lack of modern creature-comforts to be something "unspeakably horrible" and that they'd rather die than be without them.
That said, I'm sure you could cherrypick an "unspeakably horrible lifestyle" out of the history books, just like I can cherrypick an "unspeakably horrible lifestyle" out of the news. I also wouldn't be surprised if the ultimate causes are the same or similar for both. Such cherry-picked examples don't speak to typical experience and don't speak to what's possible.
The vast majority of people alive centuries ago were subsistence farmers. They were malnourished, overworked, underpaid, illiterate, had virtually no access to effective healthcare, and had no civil rights. Also, no color TV. By virtually any measure the quality of life in modern society globally is orders of magnitude better than it was centuries ago.
> the incredible productivity of modern humans is one of several fragile bricks in the wall between us and the unspeakably horrible lifestyles of centuries ago.
I think it's important to have perspective when speaking of history (and understand how difficult and perilous to obtain the correct perspective). I am far from against technology, but in many ways past lives don't seem so uncontroversially horrible to me.
Disclaimer: I am not a historian (or anthropologist)! Some of my claims may contain an innacurate portrayal of history or other people (please correct me if that's the case). However, I wouldn't write it without feeling somewhat confident about my claims.
If you were a peasant or a farmer in the past, that's what you did: farming throughout the day. I believe farmers in general worked fewer hours than we do now, because you were constrained by daylight (and sometimes winter and seasons). Again, I prefer modern life, but you can look at say the Amish, or several surviving pre-industrial societies which include native tribes to get a feel for their lives[1]. The least I can say is: it's not the hell many would naively expect.
Was their life horrible? I don't think so; farming work is very hard but not in a horrible way (some people take up farming as a hobby really); diseases were largely outside people's control. People tend to think Living longer = Linearly better. I have my doubts. The lack of comforts too is something that you get used to: in the end, most things turn into a sort of game. The game we play today is being glued to a screen typing symbols, interpreting data and rules. The game people played was farming, herding, crafting, with the occasional bureaucratic jobs. That's not to say I don't prefer living today. However, someone from back then could see us in some ways in equally dystopic lights: people glued to tiny screens watching videos, depressed in their homes, etc.. We have far higher rates of obesity today.
I think the progress doesn't come from obvious things like health and comfort. Progress is largely afforded by those things. Because we're healthy, or rather, in some sense we can in theory be healthy, there are several activities we can do that simply couldn't be done, say playing games and sports, having a more diverse and balanced life. Living longer affords us to be educated and dive deeply into subjects, and obtain a deep understanding of nature and even our own nature. But we also sacrifice some of those very valuable things in the name of comfort. We (sometimes!) work crazy hours in meaningless jobs; we destroy the environment; we stay at home depressed and glued to addictive devices, addictive substances and compulsive behaviors[1]. Because we believe in silly equations like Comfort = Linearly better, or Money = Linearly better, and so on. This is why we need progress not only in technology but in wisdom too, so we can continually learn how to use our resources well (to genuine improve our lives), and make sure they're sustainable (and not collapse within a short time).
[1] Many of the improvements are surprisingly subtle, although I'm partial to peace and lack of violence: I think violence tends to create a state of constant fear that genuinely sucks (although we are well adapted at dealing with that too, and in some ways we live in more fear from TV and internet blasting bad news). Part of the "technique" of improving our lives comes from lowering the chance of getting robbed or assaulted, part comes from our psychological ability to handle whatever risk exists without sacrificing our lives to cowering in fear.
A fun illustration is that in older times we would adventure in the forest to hunt or from necessity, now we don't have to: instead, we go on hikes :) , with some people choosing to experience those same old ways voluntarily. We forego the comfort of our beds to go on adventures in sleeping bags. We are hobby gardeners and small scale farmers. It's not that is was by itself bad, it's that we can live experiences in a more controlled, selective and sustainable way, with lower risks of ending our lives from the natural risks.
I think understanding this subtle nature of life and experiences is important in attaining wisdom to live a good life. (and also important so that we make the best of our limited resources so we can help everyone have the best lives possible)
If you think growth is growing the GDP then there's nothing wrong with not growing the GDP. You can decrease the GDP and have a better quality of life.
If you think growth is producing more and more stuff, the same here, we can have a better life consuming less.
Degrowth is inevitable. The only choice left is whether it happens relatively peaceably through a shift in values, or through war, exploitation, struggles over dwindling resources, and untold human and environmental destruction.
You are either a degrowther, or you are a fool who doesn't see what's going on (perhaps willfully).
Rather this is a typical HN religous-substituting faith in "progress" (of the non-reflective "just more of everything" variety), and a knew-jerk reaction to any mention of limits to growth and other concerns aside from enlargement.
I think the stance comes from one's position towards the "want for more" attitude in humans.
If you think the thirst for material wealth and welfare can be somehow limited or contained at scale, you will find the concept of de-growth very appealing, because it solves a bunch of big problems we have.
If you don't think such thirst can be limited, which is arguably what modern history might suggest, then the concept is clearly impossible to realize and not worth discussing.
Look at people who are consuming corporate-paid subscription to "Headspace" and alike meditation apps. Ironically these apps are solving the problem created by latest capitalism (or corporatism if you wish): unsatisfaction with ones life. People searching for piece in corporate-sponsored meditation apps is a direct representation described in these lines from the article:
> Illich defined conviviality as “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment.” He contrasted this to “the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others” from above and afar in the name of advancing progress. “I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value,” he wrote in “Tools for Conviviality.” “I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members.”
I know it's trendy, but how is capitalism/corporatism the cause of dissatisfaction with life? people were all satisfied a thousand years ago? honestly curious...
Something that goes without comment by the uncritical author is Illich's vile comment that medical science and its quest to extend life at all costs "extends the suffering of cripples". In other words, he doesn't see the life of disabled people as having value.
Speaking as someone who has teetered on the edge of disability most of my life, so does essentially everyone else. We tie health insurance/access to healthcare to your employer for a few reasons, but I think fundamentally it's because we believe that those who cannot work are undeserving.
To say that disabled people's lives have no value is vile, but that is not what he's saying. It's the unnecessary prolonging of suffering that Ivan Illich speaks against, the pressure to do everything humanly possible to eek out any extra week on one's lifespan, even if that extra week is a miserable one spent in agony. Now that is not to say that we should just jump off a bridge at the mere sight of suffering, but rather discern how our life is meant to be lived while letting go of our need to control everything.
I understand that argument, and respect the choices of people who choose not to be hospitalized at the end of their life but to die at home, but that's not the same thing as claiming that it is wrong to "extend the suffering of cripples". I can kind of excuse the use of the nasty slur "cripples" given that this interview was decades ago, but the strong implication is that he thought that disabled people just sat around suffering and would prefer not to have the medical technology needed to keep them living.
I dislike reading this kind of article, where it feels like the author swallowed a thesaurus and is using every second word to (often unnecessarily) display how clever they are.
Note how actually clever texts (probably including the source texts that this is about!) are rarely written like that.
The vocabulary does not seem extraordinary to me. The only oddball words are actually neologisms of Illich’s (e.g. “pleonexia”) which are quoted and explained.
I doubt someone like, say, Orwell, who complained about the stultifying use of language, would have any objection to this essay.
Pleonexia might be used in some certain way by Illich, but it's not his neologism. Or particularly new either. It's an ancient Greek word meaning greed or literally "apetite for (ever) more", where pleon = more, coming from PIE root for the same meaning.
Average reading level consensus from https://readabilityformulas.com/readability-scoring-system.p... is "college graduate". Most people read well below their theoretical grade level. For example about half of high school graduates read at a grade 8 level or below.
There have been a number of surveys of adult proficiency in reading. For instance the 2013 PIAAC. From that, I would estimate less than 2% of people can read this.
If you're in that number, great! So am I. But the complexity of the language still limits the potential audience.
to me it's always seemed like a smooth gradient, so people have a comfort level mainly reflecting the amount of effort they're willing to put in. in that case, writing in the complex style is really selecting for audience effort. this might be desirable, and might even be efficient.
I usually avoid that style, but mainly because it feels so performative.
Not so much the vocabulary but the excessive use of adjectives and the overall verbosity. It took ten paragraphs for me to understand anything new about who this guy was and what his worldview was.
Perhaps they're just using words that they think every person with a well-rounded (as opposed to exclusively vocational or STEM focused) education and/or interest in humanities would/should be familiar with?
I mean aside from, say, pleonexia (greed) and iatrogenic (harm caused by medical intervention), I don't see anything out of the reach of an average well read person - and English isn't even my first language.
I mean, what would the difficult terms be? Paternalism? Credentialism? Interlocutor? Cascading? Certitudes?
(We want them to take down those "difficult" words, and then we go off lamenting how "Idiocracy was a documentary")
> Illich’s central contention was that persons are relational beings embedded in a matrix of the natural cosmos, convivial community with others and, as a fallen but still faithful priest, God’s grace. As the maverick thinker saw it, Western modernity rent asunder this multidimensional oneness of “Life.”
The whole thing is full of this… sounds like Depak Chopra level word salad trying to hide the obvious behind confusing vocabulary.
Illich's main argument revolved around the idea that individuals are inherently social creatures, connected to the natural world, their communities, and, in his view as a religious person, to God's grace. He believed that Western modernity disrupted this holistic interconnectedness of life.
This both ablates (Illich’s “fallen” status) and distorts (natural cosmos vs. natural world, the latter being “scientific” in exactly the way Illich ordinarily critiques) the original meaning of the sentence.
ChatGPT is a remarkable achievement in machine learning, but this demonstrates exactly why it can’t be used to accurately summarize complex ideas.
I haven’t read Illich, but I like both. Obviously the original from the article is more verbose, and if one doesn’t like that or finds it difficult or distracting, I am by no means going to hold it against them and in fact sympathise.
But there is a certain degree of imagery to the original text that I benefit from and enjoy.
Rending asunder is quite different from “disrupt”; the generality of “relational beings embedded…” is meaningful compared to the somewhat trite “social creatures” … etc.
Generally, many journalistic writers could really benefit from realising they are and probably never will be novelists or poets and that their job is to educate, edify and provide information and insight, which is often impeded by their insistence on exercising their literary rather than communication skills. But also, digging into the expressiveness one can muster with their language can work well for those willing and able to digest it when the topic or mood suits the language.
Personally, I got the feeling that this article falls more in the latter than the former, though I can see the friction some would have with the style.
That's the one I was more familiar with. (Is it the same name in some sense? On the one hand it rather looks like two different transcriptions of the same name; on the other hand Illich's father wasn't Russian and the names seem to be written differently in the Russian Wikipedia: Иллич, Ильич.)
Ильич is a patronym (son of Ilya). Lenin's father's first name was Ilya.
It's not clear whether Иллич (pronounced differently) is related, apparently it's used as a given name in some countries, or it might be an unrelated surname, or it might be a misspelling/mistranscription of the Russian patronym. Who knows!
It was during these times when a significant chunk of American establishment and some members of British royal family were not less fascist leaning than him. I understand that they're also all not vogue now, but it still has to be reminded.
He moved to Switzerland before German fasicsm turned out real bad.
That explains why he wasn't shunned by western society back then, it doesn't explain why putin rehabilitated him recently, and it certainly wouldn't explain promoting his books on hackernews (which was why I was initially confused about this whole thread on hn).
Silence Is a Commons (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28431541 - Sept 2021 (17 comments)
Silence Is a Commons (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26007100 - Feb 2021 (31 comments)
Deschooling Society (1970) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23821855 - July 2020 (195 comments)
Deschooling Society - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21578620 - Nov 2019 (1 comment)
Tools for Conviviality (1973) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21512587 - Nov 2019 (6 comments)
Deschooling Society - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13408250 - Jan 2017 (1 comment)
Silence is a Commons (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5402711 - March 2013 (2 comments)
Deschooling Society - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=285107 - Aug 2008 (45 comments)
A vision of social networking from 1971 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257094 - July 2008 (1 comment)
Edit: a bunch of comments from other threads too - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...