"Look at the Birds of the Air" (Last Week for Signups)
How We Must Unplan Our Lives. (Starts November 4th, 2023 at Parallax)
‘I choose the term ‘conviviality’ to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment […] 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.’-Ivan Illich. Tools for Conviviality
The centipede could walk until the ladybug asked him how he did it; likewise, we knew how to be human until we had to ask how we managed to be human. As discussed in Belonging Again, it was once “given” how we should live our lives, think, and the like, but now we are free, which means we are less vulnerable to mass movements, but that also means we must decide for ourselves how to be human. We’ve often acted like things are still “given,” when they are not, and similarly we’ve applied that “thoughtlessness” to technology, creating a Preplanned world, which Ivan Illich saw threatened our humanity. We must today learn how to be human where it is no longer “given,” and yet nobody thinks they don’t know “how” to be human—that’s part of the problem.
Nobody intends to live bad lives, so why do we?
Nobody intends for tools to control them, so why do they?
Nobody intended to end up in the world Ivan Illich diagnosed, so why did we?
It’s because we don’t know what we don’t know, and we can’t know everything to be human.
Autocannibalism is natural.
Automastery is the goal.
LOOK AT THE BIRDS OF THE AIR (w/ Daniel Garner and Andrew Sweeny)
How did we end up nonhuman when no one intended to end up nonhuman? Subtly. Discreetly. Slowly. And then one day we woke up and the damage was done, which included our inability to tell the damage was done. Ivan Illich saw the fate of humanity tied to our relationship with technology, and he also understood that the very use of it changed how we thought about technology in ways that made us less likely to use technology to “extend humanity.” Rather, technology naturally teaches us to use technology to “replace humanity,” and that lesson has long been in session. Should we become Amish? We wouldn’t need learning for that, nor an invitation to share in a discussion on how we might use technology as “tools of conviviality” versus “means of replacing humanity.” Technology is an art, and thus requires training. We can hurt ourselves cooking if we don’t know what we’re doing, and yet we also must eat. This is a Pro-Human class, and humans require tools. Artificial Intelligence will easily help us be more human, but Illich understand such a possibility required us to pay attention to how we used technology. In Hegel, everything is contingent, and the future is entirely open. There are no guarantees, and so there is hope.
“Convivial” for Illich ‘designate[s] a modern society of responsibly limited tools,’ which for Illich is also needed if people are to stay human and thus communal, friends, and the whole gambit of human activities and forms of community.1 We learn from Alex Ebert that what lacks limit can become cancerous, and Illich would argue that technology now “replaces humanity,” which is evidence of us making this mistake. The movement from the Unplanned to the Preplanned regarding the Christian Church is described by Illich as a movement from ‘Church as she [to] Church as it,’ and we can say that humanity in general has moved into being an “it.”2 So it goes with human beings: where everything is Preplanned, we are each an “it.”
Episode #138: Andrew Sweeny of Parallax on the Magic of Ivan Illich
Since for Illich “progress” today is defined technologically in terms of a movement from the Unplanned to the Preplanned, humanity’s understanding of “progress” has become self-effacing. Illich’s hope was ‘to make the expansion of freedom, rather than the growth of services [and technology] the criterion of social progress’—but to this some may counter and claim technology indeed “increases freedom.”3 To this, Illich might nod and say tools might “expand freedom,” but not in the way that humanity was mostly using them in his day, for technology was being used to move the world from a “she” to an “it.” There is no freedom where there is no humanity, and so tools only expand freedom to the degree they “extend our humanity” versus save us the trouble…
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