Miscellaneous Illuminations

...'it appears to me that the age of tools has now given way to the age of systems, exemplified in the conception of the earth as an ecosystem, and the human being as an immune system. I was not aware of this watershed, when I wrote many of my earlier books, and I am at fault...' Quoting Ivan Illich in 'CONTINGENCY, PART 2: THE ORIGIN OF TECHNOLOGY' in The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich' (2005) by David Cayley https://t.me/Miscellaneous_Illuminations/6262

'Now I recognize that dating epochs involves interpretation and perhaps some fuzziness in assigning beginnings and endings; but, nevertheless, it appears to me that the age of tools has now given way to the age of systems, exemplified in the conception of the earth as an ecosystem, and the human being as an immune system. I was not aware of this watershed, when I wrote many of my earlier books, and I am at fault for having persuaded some very good people who read me seriously that it makes sense to talk about a school system as a social tool, or about the medical establishment as a device. Strangely one of these old students, Max Peschek, a man who came late to the university, never finished, and now ekes out a living as a tango teacher in Bremen, has been conducting a seminar among his friends about the fundamental mistake of Ivan Illich. What Illich did not understand, according to Peschek, and he is certainly right, is that when you become the user of a system, you become part of the system. The distinction between the hand and the thing which it holds, which became fundamental for thinking in the thirteenth century, has disappeared.' Quoting Ivan Illich in 'CONTINGENCY, PART 2: THE ORIGIN OF TECHNOLOGY' in The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich' (2005) by David Cayley

'What Illich had sought — the disestablishment of all secular churches and an end to their monopolies — would not occur. He had also begun to realize by the early 1980s that the world was undergoing a surprising change of state with the advent of an age of systems in which people increasingly “occupy a new dimensionless cybernetic space.”[108] The industrial era had still seen technology as something shaped and deployed according to human intentions. Systems incorporate their users — they have no outside, no privileged standpoint from which an independent intention could be formulated. Many have hailed the “everything is connected” aspect of the systems perspective, but for Illich it was pure abstraction, the dissolution of all boundaries, “a night,” as Hegel says, “in which all cows are black.”[109] Its hallmark is disembodiment, the loss of the inhabited and personally experienced body.' Quoting from David Cayley's Introduction to 'The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich' (2005) by David Cayley https://t.me/Miscellaneous_Illuminations/6256

“Every man must have the right fearlessly to think independently and express his opinion about what he knows, what he has personally thought about and experienced, and not merely to express with slightly different variations the opinion which has been inculcated in him.” Mstislav Rostropovich (1927 - 2007)

'Illich, with admitted trepidation, calls this view “apocalyptic.” His hesitancy is understandable, since this word, as it is now used, tends to evoke fundamentalist fantasies of divine vengeance or the gruesome cataclysms that have become a staple of popular cinema. But Illich uses the word in its literal meaning of “uncovering” or “revelation.”' Quoting from David Cayley's Introduction to 'The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich' (2005) by David Cayley

'I think Illich makes a much more convincing evisceration of the myth of the secular when he claims that contemporary Western societies are in no sense post-Christian but rather constitute a perverted form of Christianity. He shows here that a whole constellation of modern notions, most too obvious even to raise a question in most minds, are distortions of Christian originals — from “the citizen” on whose shoulders the state rests to the services which are its raison d’être; from the planetary “life” that right-thinking people want to conserve to the technology that threatens it. And he further claims that these notions would have been unthinkable without their Christian originals. They owe their very existence, in other words, to the ancestry which they distort, deny, and conceal.' Quoting from David Cayley's Introduction to 'The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich' (2005) by David Cayley

'If you should doubt that human creatures are now “derived from information processes” or humanity “constructed on the basis of a few abstract indices,” you have only to think of the discourse of popular genetics, in which notional entities called genes “cause” this or thatcondition, or of risk analysis, in which human beings are asked to identify themselves with statistical figments, or of the myriad other contemporary discourses in which imponderable probabilities are supposed to govern human decisions. This replacement of the dense, concretely situated flesh by an abstract construction was a horror for Illich because, from the perspective of his Incarnational Christianity, it is as a body that the truth confronts us, and only through the body that we come to know it.' Quoting from David Cayley's Introduction to 'The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich' (2005) by David Cayley https://t.me/Miscellaneous_Illuminations/6256

...'I want to say a few words about how deeply and how sensitively he experienced his changing times. By the later 1970s Illich had recognized that the moment had passed when the radical change of direction he had urged would have been possible. The institutions whose counterproductivity he had exposed might have acquired a more ambiguous taste for many of their clients, their priesthoods might have lost some of their prestige, and the rituals of progress become tarnished, but this would only translate into a protective cynicism, and the accommodation of a countercultural element within “the system.” What Illich had sought — the disestablishment of all secular churches and an end to their monopolies — would not occur. He had also begun to realize by the early 1980s that the world was undergoing a surprising change of state with the advent of an age of systems in which people increasingly “occupy a new dimensionless cybernetic space.”[108] The industrial era had still seen technology as something shaped and deployed according to human intentions. Systems incorporate their users — they have no outside, no privileged standpoint from which an independent intention could be formulated. Many have hailed the “everything is connected” aspect of the systems perspective, but for Illich it was pure abstraction, the dissolution of all boundaries, “a night,” as Hegel says, “in which all cows are black.”[109] Its hallmark is disembodiment, the loss of the inhabited and personally experienced body. Let me try to make this clear with a quotation from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, both because it lends support to Illich’s view and because it defines this view so poetically: In the ideology of cybernetics . . . human creatures are derived from a natural information process, itself conceived on the model of human machines. If this kind of thinking were to extend its reign to man and history; if, pretending to ignore what we know of them through our own situations, it were to set out to construct man and history on the basis of a few abstract indices . . . then, since man really becomes the manipulandum he takes himself to be, we enter into a cultural regimen, where there is neither truth nor falsity concerning man and history, into a sleep, or a nightmare, from which there is no awakening. Scientific thinking . . . must return to the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body — not for that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that the actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and my acts.[110]' Quoting from David Cayley's Introduction to 'The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich' (2005) by David Cayley

'A friend of Illich’s, Kostas Chatzikyriakou, tells the story of taking a friend to hear Illich lecture on medicine. Afterwards, his companion turned to him, puzzled, and asked, “What does he want — let people die?” It’s a resonant question, and a common response to Illich’s seemingly implacable radicalism about medicine, schools, or what have you. The obvious answer is, yes, he did want people to be able to meet their own deaths as something other than the inevitable termination of treatment. But on another level, I think Illich is badly misunderstood when one tries to discover what he wanted by simply subtracting the modern institutions he criticized and then trying to imagine the incommodious condition that would result. What Illich wanted to do was to uncover and encourage the abilities, intuitions, and encounters that are smothered by the blanket of professional care.' Quoting from David Cayley's Introduction to 'The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich' (2005) by David Cayley

'Charity for these first Christians was an individual vocation, a personal call. They did not yet think of the other-worldly body of which they were members as a social corporation. But this began to change after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century. A disposition towards faith, hope, and charity became an established religion, bishops were endowed with the powers of magistrates, and the Church began to consolidate its social position by creating charitable institutions. This is the beginning of Illich’s story of the corruption of the best which becomes the worst. The Church had taken the first steps towards becoming a social machine capable of producing mercy on demand. And this horrifies Illich, not because he thinks human beings can get along without institutions but because of what is being institutionalized. Once the Church becomes a social corporation, it commits itself to using power to “ensure the social presence of something which, by its very nature, cannot be anything else but the free choice of individuals who have accepted the invitation to see in everybody — whom they choose — the face of Christ.”' Quoting from David Cayley's Introduction to 'The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich' (2005) by David Cayley