The Limited Life: Beyond The Technocratic Norms

Ivan Illich and the Need for A Less Aspirational Existence

What if “making it easier to be good” meant not being more relevant to society, but being limited in our aspirations?

This is a paid-subscriber post, but the first part of several meditations bringing Illich to bear on some current public questions.

I’ve been rereading Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality for a conversation over Illich and education early next month. Illich is a relatively recent discovery to me, and the writer that I credit with pushing me over the edge into doing homeschooling. An Austrian priest, his work hits the sweet spots for me as a theological ethicist: perceptive cultural criticism, big theory, historical perspective, sober radicalism. He’s best known for the work named above, and the one I’ll be discussing soon, Deschooling Society.

Illich’s basic thesis, as I understand it, is something like this:

Our culture has become technophilic to the degree that it has poisoned the way we think about our cultural institutions, our work, and our selves.

He gets at this in various ways: analysis of institutions, theory of education, labor analysis, gender studies—he’s the kind of polymath that makes me grateful that he lived. If you’re looking for analogues, think Jacques Ellul with a better bibliography and Paulo Freiere with a broader palette.

In Tools for Conviviality, the central claim is that most societies have become more managed, and anti- “convivial”.¹ We all live in a societies which have become increasingly technocratic, built on a kind of credentialing process which funnels all available resources toward the most efficient ends. In the process, fewer (and more credentialed) people determine the course of the world for the masses, with all of us condemned as a result to doing work which is less creative and improvisational, and more managerial so that we fit within the technocratic efficiencies of the society.

This affects everything, he writes, from how we think about the purpose of educational systems to the kind of work that we value to the presumptions about whether the world should be globally interconnected. If the point of a society is to be as effective as possible, then it should be as interconnected as possible, as uniformly educated as possible, as culturally homogenous as possible. The result of this, then, is a world which is carefully managed (ensuring maximal production), credentialed (ensuring that approved maximal techniques are infused into job sectors), and culturally homogenous (that the subcultures of a region work as a unified culture, smoothing out deep differences).

If this sounds familiar at all—a world characterized by scientism, technological efficiencies, bureaucratic credentialism, jobs which aren’t creative but managerial, culturally interconnected, with all of this funneled through political and cultural hierarchies—consider that Illich is diagnosing all of this in the early 1970s. For him, these things appear in both free markets and centrally-managed economies, which means that everyone hates him.

The alternative to this? Conviviality. “Conviviality” for Illich means a world which is celebratory, free, “the result of social arrangement that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favor of another member’s equal freedom.” This is less libertarian and more anarchist than it sounds, because it all work, he says, should be defined by three values: survival, justice, and self-defined work. The goal here is a society in which everyone has what they need, freely exchanges goods, innovates, and has access to the tools to build good lives.