In Honor of the 2023 Parallax Course: Look at the Birds of the Air (Starts November 4th, 2023)
Essential Thinking for Thinking Life
VI
‘The world comes to be considered as something contingent’ thanks to Christianity, according to Ivan Illich, for the world is made from nothing and thus could have easily not been created at all.⁷⁶ In other words, the cosmos becomes ‘something which does not bear within itself a reason or reason to exist,’ and so being is not “given” but instead ‘pure gift’ (and only “given as gift,” per se).⁷⁷ Once the notion of contingency is born, it then becomes possible to imagine God’s Will as contingent, which then means it is possible to ‘understand[] things without reference to God […] because once God’s will has become totally arbitrary it has also become, in a sense, redundant, and the connection between God and the world can easily be cut.’⁷⁸ Illich notes that ‘[a] contingent nature at its noon is gloriously alive, but it is also uniquely vulnerable to being purified and cleaned of its aliveness [as possible because its contingent] in the sunset of contingency.’⁷⁹ Furthermore, contingency is frightening, and this very anxiety can then drive us to try to avoid it— a possibility which contingency also makes possible.
We need contingency in order for it to be possible to rid ourselves of contingency, and in this way the realization of contingency is also the realization of the possibility of riding ourselves of it through technology, expertise, and the like. “The worst of things is possible in the best of things” for Illich, and we see something similar at play with contingency. It should be noted that contingency was possible in Judaism before Christianity, but there seems to be something about Christianity, the doctrine of grace, the idea that God can choose to do something radically different like send Christ into creation, and the like which brings “contingency” and “possibility” to the forefront of our thinking, and though on the one hand contingency can be seen as making possible experiences of the Unknown, Beauty, and Mystery, on the other hand contingency can be seen as a threat and something we need to “subdue” (to use language from Genesis), and unfortunately there is something about humans which seems to gravitate toward trepidation. With contingency, the possibility of being Unprepared arises, yes, but the very anxiety of this Unpreparedness can drive us into Preplanning — as technology suggests is possible. In this way, by birthing contingency, Christianity birthed the seeds of its own possible corruption with the temptation of Preplanning in response to the possibly-glorious Unplanned.
Illich admits that he is ‘pretty much alone among historians of science in pointing to a world conceived in the spirit of contingency as the origin of the modern conception of tools,’ but he believes he has made the case through his work that Preplanning is our response to an Unplanned cosmos, and in this we come to use tools and technology to control contingency.⁸⁰ Unfortunately, since humanity requires contingency to be human, this means we have invented tools that cause self-effacement, and we must somehow train ourselves to use our tools to “extend humanity” versus “replace humanity.” A theological notion that helps this support is the belief that God “sustains being,” which is to say we are in ‘a universe of continuous creation,’ but this universe ‘[lies] continuously in the hands of God,’ which is to say that there is something God must do for the universe to be sustained.⁸¹ Likewise, there is something we must do to remain human, and Illich places that necessity in our relation to technology.
Along with critiquing “thoughtless uses of technology” (which prove to be RT), throughout all his works, Illich can be seen as critiquing and opposing the ‘fetishism of rules and norms’ in favor of a “Good Samaritan model,” which isn’t merely ‘a stage on the road to a universal morality of rules.’⁸² Illich says that he has ‘chosen […] to write as a historian curious about the undeniable historical consequences of Christian belief,’ and Illich believes that beliefs (say “absorbed” from writing and “ritualistic institutions”) make history.⁸³ ‘Belief refers to what exceeds history,’ Illich says, ‘but it also enters history and changes it forever.’⁸⁴ Belief is not merely a thing we choose but functions as the horizon on which things are defined as themselves, and yet rarely do we think about our beliefs. Illich highlights how this impacts our understanding of the neighbor (and thus the orientation of our moral compass), for today we believe that ‘[m]y neighbor is who I choose, not who I have to choose.’⁸⁵ This changes everything and arguably puts ethics in service of my tribe: ethics nearly becomes anti-ethics. Furthermore, if the neighbor is someone I choose, the neighbor is someone I can plan for, and thus Preplanning defines my relationship to my neighbor, which then makes it possible for institutions and systems to care for my neighbor, which of course seems rational and “effective” to do. ‘By assigning the duty to behave in this way to an institution [though, Church Father John Chrysostom warned that] Christians would lose the habit of reserving a bed and having a piece of bread ready in every home, and their households would cease to be Christian homes.’⁸⁶ Indeed, the State provides. God is good.
We today might think we are beyond rules and norms, but in our rebellion against “oppressive ethics” we simply turn around and create new ones (our age is radically obsessed with “right behavior” in both Conservatism and Liberalism). We say we don’t need rules, and then learn the game of education where we cite authorities and do what the teacher says; we say we want to think for ourselves, and then look for medical professionals to tell us how to live our lives; and so on. And this doesn’t mean institutions and authorities are bad, but it does mean we are constantly in the business of looking beyond ourselves to those who would save us from self-discernment and choice, both of which are necessary for us to stay human. The Preplanned can save us from existential anxiety, while the Unplanned would have us view (for example) our neighbor as ‘[t]he one [we] happen across, stumble across, who is wounded there in the road.’⁸⁷ But what if we’re busy? What if that person is immoral? What if we have a job to do? Then we fail to make room for the Unplanned in our Preplanned life, and in this way risk dehumanization and proving “capturable” (Deleuze). If we are capable though of helping “The One We Stumble Upon” and don’t, would this be an example of the ‘corruption of the best [which] produces a unique evil that only becomes fully intelligible when one gasps its origin?’⁸⁸ Perhaps. Always perhaps.
Illich resisted calling our age ‘post Christian,’ preferring instead to say ‘it is apocalyptic,’ which for him meant “revelatory” and “a time of great decision” versus necessarily a time of destruction and crisis.⁸⁹ This is the choice between “replacing humanity” and “extending humanity,” and Illich sees us as engaging in replacement without even perhaps realizing it. He explores technology, education, healthcare, and writing historically to help awaken us, aware that we are entering an age with even more RTs that will tempt us into Preplanning more than ever before (we will soon be tempted to perpetually ‘consort[] with the seductive nonentities [which] are constantly being conjured up all around [us]’ thanks to VR).⁹⁰ Today, we are experiencing the consequences and dangers of “failing to be human” which results from a forsaking of the Unplanned, but before long we might not even be able to tell that we’ve lost our humanity in loving the Unplanned. After all, we’ll be able to see reason that everything is going according to plan…
VII
‘The hypothesis was that machines [could] replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men. Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a leisure mass can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools.’⁹¹ The implications for this are profound, for it means that a world in which AI and robots take care of our jobs, our manual labor, etc., is a world that is fundamentally wrong: if robots do everything for us, humanity will cease being human (we might become like the rats in the “rat utopia experiment,” as discussed by Samuel Barnes and Owen). As Hegel ironically taught that the slave has a power over the master, so we might make technology master over us in making it our “slaves.” This doesn’t mean technology can’t help us at all, but it does mean that we lose something for everything which technology does for us. Perhaps it’s worth the tradeoff, but the point is that there is a tradeoff: there is no free lunch (and what exactly we trade might not be clear until much later).
‘Individuals need tools to move and to dwell,’ so Illich is not arguing for an abolishment of computers, but rather he is encouraging us to realize that we must consciously use tools to enhance and extend human capacities versus replace them.⁹² Illich believed we are free in the increase of our capacities, and in technologies, systems, etc. being replacements of our capacities externalized from us, there runs the risk of us thinking we have capacity because these “tools” can accomplish our tasks at our demand, thus making us seem to be in power. But in this we are like the master for Hegel, fooled into believing he or she has the power when really the slave is capable. ‘To the degree that [the person] masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning,’ and where we are all “masters,” the world can be meaningless.⁹³ Today, for Illich, in becoming “masters,” ‘[o]ur imaginations have been industrially deformed to conceive only what can be molded into an engineered system of social habits that fit the logic of large-scale production.’⁹⁴ And what do we produce? Machinehood. Machines creating machines. Infinite. ‘People feel joy as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point, increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence.’⁹⁵ And beyond this point, tools which cannot be stopped must develop.⁹⁶
Illich writes:
‘The crisis can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools; if we give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency, thus simultaneously eliminating the need for either slaves or masters and enhancing each person’s range of freedom. People need new tools to work with rather than tools that ‘work’ for them.’⁹⁷
Illich would deconstruct the entire framework of “slave and master” and have us surrender any and all hopes of living with “slaves” who will do everything for us — that “dream” and fantasy is leading to an improper development and design of tools and technology (which, as this dream develops, contributes to us losing the capacity to see the trouble with it). Technology which becomes our “slaves” or “slave-like” removes our powers to be human; we must instead imagine a world where technology enhances our humanity by increasing the opportunities by which we might improve capacity.
In Abyssal Arrows, Carl Hayden Smith discusses the difference between “Hyperhumanism” and “Transhumanism,” and I think Illich would agree with emphasizing Hyperhumanism, which would be an “extension of humanity” versus a replacement. Smith’s work is useful here (I would suggest it), and it leads nicely into more from Illich:
‘People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them in use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call ‘conviviality.’ They are degraded to the status of mere consumers.’⁹⁸
The prisoner might have more than free people, and yet the prisoner is not free. With this, Illich is making the point that we today might be making ourselves prisoners in the act of gaining more than we ever had before (we might be using our technologies to make ourselves prisoners amidst everything we need). Illich notes that ‘[a]s the value of services rose, it became almost impossible for people to care’; likewise, as the things needed for freedom were provided for us, it has become nearly impossible for us to be free (for it has become increasingly difficult for us to increase the capacities needed for freedom without being “nonrational”).⁹⁹ We are prisoners in plentitude. We are rats in utopia. Illich claims that ‘we need procedures to ensure that controls over the tools of society are established and governed by political process rather than by decisions by experts,’ but I don’t think this is possible in a world that lacks the ontoepistemological category of “nonrationality” — hence the work of The True Isn’t the Rational.¹⁰⁰ If that work fails, the hope is that others might do the work better. Illich writes:
‘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.’¹⁰¹
We cannot produce or economically grow into conviviality; in fact, all we can do is grow out of it. Our only hope is a change of metric and orientation which is not given to us “rationally” or from facticity, but must instead be chosen “nonrationality” regardless experience — an act of which we might not even have a category in our minds for thinking.¹⁰² Children of writing, science, systems, institutions, and the like, the very ways according to which we think have been shifted and altered. How might we think what is now beyond the categories of thought? Must we be “shaken out of a dogmatic slumber” by a disaster? Or might beauty awaken us? It’s hard to say, but we must be awake, for ‘[t]ools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as selfdom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user.’¹⁰³ “Chosen by the user” is central, and for Illich we can only so choose if our thinking is not bound to categories beget by technology that we cannot think beyond. To choose technology, we have to think as humans, and saving the human is Illich’s project. This is for us to redeem and save the subject, which brings us to the work of Philosophy Portal by Cadell Last and thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Lacan. In ancient civilization, we were perhaps “autonomously nonrational,” but after the Enlightenment we became more “autonomously rational”: our challenge now is to be “(non)rational.” We are to be Hyperhuman instead of Transhuman if we are to keep the gains of progress. We must learn to be human and know how to be human, and we must do so now. Otherwise, we will not be addressed, and we will not generate for generations.
In closing, 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 (Part I), 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 — and we have not taken up that mantel. 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.
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. Nobody intends to live bad lives, so why do they? Nobody intends for their tools to control them, so why do they? Well, it’s because we don’t know what we don’t know, and we can’t know everything if we want to stay human. (Autocannibalism is natural. Automastery in humanity is the goal.) Ivan Illich saw the fate of humanity tied to our relationship with technology, and he also understand that the very use of technology changed how we thought about tech 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 is long in session. Should we go 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. You can hurt yourself cooking if you don’t know what you’re doing, and yet we also must eat. Illich was Pro-Human, and humans require tools. Artificial Intelligence will easily help us be more human, but Illich understand such a possibility required us to pay attention on how we used technology; if not, all of us could end up “a Thomas More who caved.” In Hegel, everything is contingent, and the future is entirely open. There are no guarantees, and so there is hope.
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Notes
⁷⁶Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 65.
⁷⁷Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 65.
⁷⁸Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 68.
⁷⁹Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 70.
⁸⁰Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 75.
⁸¹Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 74.
⁸²Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: xii.
⁸³Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 48.
⁸⁴Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 48.
⁸⁵Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 51.
⁸⁶Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 54.
⁸⁷Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: xiii.
⁸⁸Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: xvi.
⁸⁹Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 177.
⁹⁰Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 119.
⁹¹Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: 10.
⁹²Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: 11.
⁹³Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: 21.
⁹⁴Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: 14–15.
⁹⁵Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: 20.
⁹⁶But how do we “impose limits on them?” Won’t that reduce productivity? Won’t that stifle growth? Indeed, we might have to act “nonrationality” (the only address for “Nash Equilibria”), which is a category of activity we might not even have in our minds as possible, conflating “nonrational” with “irrational” — but that is a topic discussed throughout The True Isn’t the Rational by O.G. Rose.
⁹⁷Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: 10.
⁹⁸Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: 11.
⁹⁹Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: 3.
¹⁰⁰Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: 12.
¹⁰¹Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: 11.
¹⁰²We could say that a world without conviviality is all causation without creation, but how can this change if we don’t even have in our minds a distinction between “causation” and “creation” (if the terms are similes)?
¹⁰³Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: 22.
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