Freeing Leisure: Beyond Technocratic Entertainment
A Tale of Two Farms, Two Vacations, and Two Ways of Enjoying the World
This has been the summer of lost vacations. After two years of not going anywhere that wasn’t well-ventilated or an immediate family’s home, we hit the road for extended periods of time to to see All the Things and see All the People. One of the curses of being an ostensible ethicist is that you can’t ever go on vacation well, because you’re always thinking about it. Like Chidi in The Good Place, there’s a persistent question of whether or not the thing you’re enjoying is terrible for you or someone else. It doesn’t mean that I regret doing the things I’ve done this summer—I’ve been grateful to be gone from Texas in the midst of the worst summer in decades—but the questions are part of what you pack in the luggage and try not to bring out too often.
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In the previous email, we looked at the contours of Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, which sketches out the picture of what a convivial society looks like as opposed to a technocratic one. The danger of reading Illich is that once you see the basic contours of his argument, you start to seeing the extensions of the technocratic problem everywhere. For it’s not exactly the problem of technology such as it is the problem, I think, of managing the world: conviviality versus a controlled existence which tries to banish all danger, fear, or wildness from the field of vision. The non-convivial world is one in which, ironically, the world slowly enervates, for the heart of the non-convivial world is management: incremental developments that improve the thing you have, not free use of tools which might produce a better world.
His major target in Deschooling Society, which I’ll be talking about in a few weeks, isn’t schooling so much as it is compulsory schooling. Illich takes to be linked to a technocratic vision about having a people who all know the same bits of information, who have been institutionalized in the same kinds of ways, and who consequently think of their habits, careers, and meaning of life in ways which cohere cleanly to the values of technocracy: efficiency, production, and unthought. Put differently, the convivial society isn’t a society where no one works: it’s a world where work is done, as we talked last time, with freedom, access to tools that people can use, and exchange of the free productions of those tools.
And so, vacations fit within this vision of Illich in this way: the kinds of leisure that we desire fits within the kind of work which we envision as good. If you envision the technocratic society as the best kind, then that will permeate your vision of leisure as well. And so, I’ll illustrate this in the most bougieouse way: I’ll tell you about my summer travels.
The Tale of Two Farms, and of Two Vacations
The difference between the technocratic society and the convivial one is spelled out, Illich writes in one place, in the difference between the amusement park and the public park: the former sets out the parameters for how you engage with it, offering entertainment in a very scripted way, rife with technological aids to facilitate your pleasure, while the latter is by definition open-ended and invites improvisation. Disneyland would take a dim view of an improv soccer game breaking in the midst of Splash Mountain, while it would be totally normal in a park. Likewise, a motorized ride is entirely out of place in a park, an open space designed to be used for any number of games and forms of play. The former is a commercialized space, which teaches you to enjoy things in a scripted way, and the latter a publicly owned space, in which leisure and play are literally what you make it.
I began thinking about this problem this Spring when I went for the weekend to Waco, where my wife and I met and lived for years. I was preaching at a local church, and we wanted to introduce our kids to some of the places that had meant a lot to us before they were in the world. The trip involved going to two places, five miles apart, World Hunger Relief International, and Homestead Heritage. The first, a nonprofit outside town devoted to low-impact agriculture, was where my wife and I met, and where I spent a summer in grad school, milking goats and working in gardens. The latter, a quasi-sectarian-religious community outside of Waco, is known for its crafts and handmade goods, its cuisine, and promotion of traditional craftwork. Sarah and I had been there many times, our fathers had both taken woodworking classes there, and our youngest was enamored with the promise of seeing a real life blacksmith.
Our time visiting WHRI was delightful, and inspiring. They continue to do great work, and a friend of mine now offices out of there doing visionary kind of work in agriculture, ecology, and theology. There are many days that I can easily imagine myself doing writing and teaching out of one of the back rooms, in between feeding chickens and raking the beds. My tomato plants have been the only thing to flourish in our 100+ degree summers, and so WHRI is an inspiration to dig deeper into the craft.
Immediately after that, we went to Homestead Heritage, which, reader, couldn’t have been more different. Gone were the kitschy but endearing signs directing you to the blacksmith or to the grain mill; now, you drive down the main entrance, flanked on one side by the two story gift shop and on the other by the wood-fired pizza restaurant and B&B. The long-promised blacksmith spent the entire time helping tourists stamp their initials into tin spoons for 7$ each. The community now lives in luxury RVs on the backside of the property, while the restaurant now imports all of the ingredients for its homemade meals. It was the simulation of a farm, monetized and streamlined not for crafts or for community, but for consumers.
This difference is seen in the difference between WHRI and Homestead as well: the former invites you to join in, to learn new skills, and to participate in the growing, while the latter cosplays as a craft village in which the crafts are an on-ramp to you buying their services.
Which brings you to our two vacations:
The first, a long-deferred anniversary/birthday celebration/once-in-a-lifetime trip to an all-inclusive, was simultaneously relaxing and the definition of an anti-convivial place. All of your needs were provided for, all of your necessities taken care of, a place of pure consumption. Most of the pools, fitting the theme of the technocratic society, were lazy rivers, circular pools which dragged you along without you having to labor.1 Every dimension of the enjoyment was thought out so that you needed not do anything thinking: menus on a built-in app, nightly stylized entertainments continually from dinner time to after dark to forestall any boredom, food available by delivery at all hours.
The second, family travel to a family wedding in the Pacific Northwest, took us into forest hikes, transforming a family farm into a reception site, and wading into Canadian lakes. Near Lake Cultus, there was, ironically, an amusement park, but I found myself wondering what kind of person would go to a place of such natural wonder only to go spend a lot of money going on tawdry bear-themed rides. It was the kind of vacation that had me thinking about my life choices, and what it would take to relocate to the forest permanently.
The former vacation, one built out of a technocratic world, assumed that our enjoyment was one which must be built for us, and can only be consumed, not participated in. The latter vacation, by contrast, was one which was only possible as an improvised journey: stopping at this park, taking this hike, playing in the backyard and making up games. The latter vacation was one which assumed that only convivial pleasures—free, improvised adventures—were possible, because only the convivial life was one which could be truly enjoyed.
The kind of vacations we envision as good are the extensions of the kind of leisure which we desire regularly: where our heart is, there are vacations are found. If our regular leisure is one driven by platformer games, by proscribed rituals and algorithims, a convivial vacation will be a nightmare, requiring more freedom from us than we are capable of mustering up. If our regular leisure is one driven by free thought, conversations, and open-ended play, the technocratic vacation has nothing to offer, because the lines and disciplines of technocracy have no appeal and only promise boredom.2
The Managing of Creation and the Death of Leisure
For the Christian, this difference is not simply one of prudence, deciding between two equally aesthetically pleasing options. The opening moves of Genesis lay this difference as one of life and death: either we will live in a world of work in which we put ourselves into it, learning to take joy in the cultivation, or we will demand a world in which we can know as God, and in the end, desire to manipulate God for our own ends. Idolatry is here in miniature, but for our purposes, what the early chapters of Genesis show us what it means for us to live freely in a world of limits, or to demand a world which can be conformed to our image, a world which once technocratically managed will manage us.
To unlearn the technocratic world begins in our daily habits, our mundane choices, and yes, in our vacations. For where your vacations are, there will your heart be also.
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Reading: lots of Illich. In addition to the texts named above, I want to put in a plug for the collection The Powerless Church, which draws together his writings specifically on church life. I’ll be looking at some of this work in a future newsletter. Paul Virillo’s The Information Bomb, which amplifies some of what we find here in Illich about the ways in which a technophillic society works according to speed, in detrimental ways. Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is as perplexing a collection as advertised: I think I’ve come to terms with not really being a sci-fi guy.
To Be Aware Of: This is a new section, in which I’ll try to highlight a few articles and issues that I’m tracking, and think you ought to be aware of as well:
The parting of the waters continues after Roe, with new lines of purity being drawn. Liz Breunig is a commentator who I very much enjoy and track with on a number of things, and is on the record (as a Catholic) as being pro-life. The predictible backlash is now occuring: https://judedoyle.medium.com/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-elizabeth-bruenig-ba5a477ef838
Global concerns over monkeypox grow, but amidst disparities of care. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: wealthy countries ignore an issue so long as the concern is in Africa. In my bioethics course next semester, I’ll assign something on this question.
Among the terrible things happening in Ukraine is the forced adoption of Ukranian children by Russians. It’s reminiscent of an infamous case from the 19th century in which children were kidnapped in order to be baptized.
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I enjoyed our time of doing nothing very much and highly recommend doing this once.
take-away: think hard before traveling with an ethicist.