Comment by ttoinou
5 months ago
Why is Ivan Illich so underrated ?
He predicted and theorized free software 10 years before it happened in Tools for Conviviality, made the most obvious and needed critic of education and hospitals alone against the Zeitgeist, studied step by step a lot of field of society to find patterns to simplify understanding.
He created simple concepts that everyone should know —- counter productivity, vernacular, iaotrogenic, radical monopoly, conviviality, poverty vs. misery etc.
He is much more pragmatic than all his leftists colleagues. He might not go very deep in economics but at least he’s not a basic marxist. He might not go as deep as Jacques Ellul in his critics of technology, but at least he is very understandable, anyone can be inspired by his books. I read most of Illich writings at 19 years old and it stayed with me for years
I suspect it's because he's like most of the more radical writers: if you actual dissect his writing, it really gets to the heard of a lot of what is rotten about modern industrial society. And the rectification of the problems he highlights pretty much necessitates disassembling a lot of modern technological society and getting rid of most of its institutions.
So while he makes sense, no one wants to discuss his work, because then they must also come to a lot of the same conclusions he did, which is: the global society we have today is a lost cause, and a lot of it needs to be torn down. Which of course goes against the status quo.
It's a lot different than the fluffy, weak criticism of many today that recommend making changes that don't change anything. But then at least people reading that stuff can convince themselves that they are doing something, when they are not.
People don't like revolutions, even if they are the one carrying it out. Revolutions are a last resort, mainly because of how uncertain it is what comes out at the end of it. So, an action calling for complete dismantling will never have large support. And everyone kind of knows where to go to. Th difficult thing is knowing how to get there in a piece by piece manner, one area of the social order at a time.
Having said that, his criticism is completely on point. But the people who have reached the same solution are then lost on what to do after it.
> Having said that, his criticism is completely on point. But the people who have reached the same solution are then lost on what to do after it.
True. But as Kaczynski rightly pointed out, you can't have a revolution out of thin air, and the seeds of distrust have to be sufficiently grown first before there is a critical mass of tension that can act as fuel for the fire. So the first step might just be to sow seeds of well-placed distrust against the modern tech oligarchs.
Also his criticism is very specific. Most of contemporary anti-capitalist or marxist thought that gets published is very, very abstract and hence toothless. It's easy to entertain radical ideas as long as they don't pit you against your employer.
You might enjoy a newsletter called The Convivial Society, which is heavily influenced by Illich.
I'm just starting Tools For Conviviality. I suspect that Illich's ideas are underrated because, at least today, most people want more and Illich does not offer that. He offers freedom, I think, in his definition of conviviality... but it seems to be quite clear that offered freedom or comfort, most of us today (I'm not excluding myself from this) prefer comfort.
Tools for Conviviality is insanely relevant today.
When I was reading it I just couldn't believe it was written in 1973. So ahead of its time.
The fact that he's a very eclectic thinker and not very systematic, although that's one of the things that a lot of people admire about him. His religious commitments, as well, I would guess. But also he had some very odd ideas--like refusing to get a tumor removed from his face. He also was not the best at communicating his ideas.
I agree with you. Is it perhaps because of his religious background (he was a Catholic priest)? For much of the last couple decades, there has been an anti-religious streak in the educational mainstream universities.
Could that perhaps be a reaction to an anti-intellectualism streak in the mainstream religious narrative for the last couple decades?
The last couple of millennia, really. Who lynched Hypatia? Who burned the Timbuktu Manuscripts? Who burned Giordano Bruno alive? Who burned the Maya codices?
At the same time, religious institutions have always contained many intellectual traditions, perhaps most of them. When the Christians extirpated knowledge of the hieroglyphs, it was the Egyptian priests they scattered. We don't know what was in the Maya codices, but large parts of the surviving Maya inscriptions are religious in nature. European universities began as seminaries; al-Azhar University is over 1000 years old and initially taught only sharia, fiqh, and the Quran. And everyone knows how Irish monks saved civilization.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that religious people are usually the ones who care about intellectualism, whether in favor or opposed.
5 replies →
yes, certainly
Half agree.
The other half, as a very conservative Catholic, conservative Catholics are neglecting our great teachers like Dorothy Day.
Huuu... he's absolutely not underrated? Quite well-known here in Europe
Well that’s good news then. I don’t see him quoted often though, or his concepts re-used
I like your username ahah.. you might be biased ;)
Poverty vs Misery?
The distinction between lack of wealth/goods/services and lack of access to services that you now mandatory need to get wealthy/goods/others services (because of how society just changed commons into privatisation). Note that I’m not anticapitalist yet I think there are interesting concepts there
Majid RAHNEMA wrote a book about this in french, “Quand la misère chasse la pauvreté” based on similar ideas than Illich
This was a whole cottage industry during the cold war, kind of like it is now that we're in another sort of cold war.
The Soviets would fund anyone applying Marxist thought to this or that. There may be some interesting ideas for those willing to sort out the chaff, but for the most part you know exactly what they're going to say if you're already familiar with the propaganda that came before.
Well, was it wrong what they said?
Yes. In general that's why you resort to propaganda and polemics rather than giving a formal argument that can be disproved.
10 replies →