Has anyone read any of his books? What do you think?
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.
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?
[1] https://64.media.tumblr.com/81242bedb09cc3087fc0855deb381f50...
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.
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.
I'm sure he knew that, and I'm a genuine fan of Illich (with all his pluses and minuses), but what he proposes will certainly lead to future famines.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/253081.Ivan_Illich_in_Co...
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'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:
https://co-munity.net/system/files/ILLICH%201973_tools_for_c...
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.
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".
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.
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'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
Of Illich I've only fully read "Tools for Conviviality", which I'd say is a manifesto for Humane Technology of a kind.
And indeed Illich is not anti-tech, he's not a luddite
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 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.
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 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.
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
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.
However it fails to offer a compelling solution. Why? Because it fails to address the complexity of modern day subjects to learn.