The Convivial Society

This summer, as it became evident that the global pandemic was exposing the weaknesses of many of our institutions, it seemed like an auspicious time to revisit the work of Ivan Illich. Of course, if you’ve been following the newsletter for any amount of time at all, you know that I think any time is an auspicious time to be reading Illich.

In any case, I decided to use the newsletter to organize an Illich reading group. As a part of that experiment, I reached out to the philosopher of technology Carl Mitcham to see if he might be willing to talk with me for a bit about Illich and his work. I thought that would be a great way to launch the group. Little did I know that I would soon find myself enveloped by the hospitality of Illich’s friends and collaborators, each person I spoke with offering to connect me with another in worldwide Illich diaspora.

It did not take me too long to realize that I had felicitously stumbled onto a rather unique opportunity to gather together an oral history of Ivan Illich’s life as told by his friends. Thus far I’ve posted my conversations with Carl Mitcham and the scholar and activist Gustavo Esteva, who has brought Illich’s work to bear in his labors with the indigenous people of Oaxaca, Mexico.

I have a few other conversations in the works, which I’ll be posting in the coming weeks and months. But today I’m happy to pass along my conversation with Gov. Jerry Brown.

Gov. Brown, best known, of course, for his four terms (1975-1983 and 2011-2019) as governor of California and his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, was a friend of Illich’s and a careful student of his work as well.

Brown also served as the mayor of Oakland from 1999-2007 and as the Attorney General of California from 2007-2011. Currently, he is a visiting professor at Berkley and chair of the California-China Climate Institute.

I first learned of Gov. Brown’s friendship with Illich a couple of years back when I stumbled upon the transcript of a talk-radio show, We the People, hosted by Brown on which Illich and Carl Mitcham were guests. It’s a wonderful conversation and I encourage you to read through it. The homepage of We the People’s website, which is still live, is a tribute to Illich written by Gov. Brown after Illich’s passing in December of 2002. Brown also wrote a letter to the New York Times taking issue, justly in my view, with the rather dismissive obit the paper ran for Illich.

My thanks to Gov. Brown for taking the time share his recollections of Illich’s life and work and to Evan Westrup for his help in making the conversation happen.

I hope you enjoy listening to the exchange. You can look forward to others like it over the next few months.

Cheers,

Michael

“The substance of the good life must be taken into consideration if radical political reform is to become a live option.”— Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984)

In 1943, Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist who was living in England at the time, was tasked by the Free French government with writing a report exploring how French society might be revitalized after its liberation from Nazi Germany. Despite suffering from debilitating headaches and generally poor health, Weil completed her work during a remarkable burst of activity. She died later that year at the age of 34. The report was published in 1949. The first English translation appeared in 1952 as The Need for Roots: prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind.

I was immediately struck by how Weil began her report. In the midst of a global cataclysm of unprecedented scope and scale, tasked with drawing up plans for the renewal of society, she begins by arguing for the primacy of human obligations rather than human rights. The very first sentence reads: “The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former.” Quite the claim coming from a French thinker, as she is well aware. As Weil sees it, rights are ineffective so long as no one recognizes a corresponding obligation, and obligations are always grounded in our common humanity. “Duty toward the human being as such—that alone is eternal,” she writes.

Our obligations toward our fellow human beings, Weil goes on to argue, “correspond to the list of such human needs as are vital, analogous to hunger.” Some of these needs are physical, of course—housing, clothing, security, etc.—but Weil identified another set of needs, which she described as having to do not with the “physical side” of life but with what she calls its “moral side.” The non-physical needs “form … a necessary condition of our life on this earth.” In her view, if these needs are not satisfied, “we fall little by little into a state more or less resembling death.” And while she acknowledges that these needs are “much more difficult to recognize and to enumerate than are the needs of the body,” she believes “every one recognizes they exist.”

I’m inclined to believe that Weil is right about this. As she suggests, “everyone knows that there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man’s life without injuring his body.” Weil goes on to call for an investigation into what these vital needs might be. They should be enumerated and defined, and she warns that “they must never be confused with desires, whims, fancies and vices.” Finally, she believes that “the lack of any such investigation forces governments, even when their intentions are honest, to act sporadically and at random.”

Naturally, the rest of the work is an attempt to provide just such an enumeration and discussion of these vital needs with the express purpose of supplying a foundation for the rebuilding of French society. She deals briefly with a set fourteen such needs before turning to a longer discussion of “rootedness” and “uprootedness,” which opens with this well-known claim: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

I like to pair this claim with Hannah Arendt’s discussion of loneliness, alienation, and superfluousness, which, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she identifies as ideal conditions for the emergence of totalitarian regimes. “Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances,” Arendt wrote, “we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.”

Combining Weil and Arendt, then, we might say that to the degree that the need for rootedness—which is to say, a sense of belonging in relatively stable communities—goes unfulfilled, to that same degree human beings become vulnerable to destructive political regimes.

My aim here, however, is not to discuss the merits of Weil’s particular enumeration of these vital needs. Rather, it is simply to recommend that we, too, undertake a similar radical analysis, recalling, of course, that our word radical comes to us from radix, the Latin word for roots. While our circumstances in 2020 are certainly not Weil’s in 1943, it does appear to me that we are, nonetheless, in a time of cascading crises and that our most urgent need is to figure out not how to shore up the old order but rather start something anew—perhaps a renewed humanism premised not upon human exceptionalism and self-sufficiency but rather upon human needs, interdependence, and mutual obligations.

Manufactured Neediness

You’ll not be surprised to learn that this talk about needs immediately brings to mind the work of Ivan Illich, who devoted a considerable amount of his intellectual labors to the task of exploring the sources of what we might think of as, from his perspective, our manufactured neediness. It is not, of course, that Illich denied that human beings have needs. It was that from his point of view many of the needs we think we have are, in fact, deliberately cultivated in us by a techno-economic institutional order that excels at nothing so much as the generation of dependent consumers. So, for example, we may very well have a need to learn, but why exactly has that need been transmuted into the need for schooling?

In the opening of Deschooling Society, Illich claims that the “hidden curriculum” of schooling is dependency on the institution of the school. “The pupil,” Illich writes, “is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.” The student’s imagination, Illich continued, “is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.”

Illich then explains how he will “show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery.”

Interestingly, for our purposes, Illich goes on to write about how this process of degradation is “accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or ‘treatments.’”

The line to tuck away, along with Weil’s observations, is the one about nonmaterial needs being transformed into demands for commodities. If Weil is right about the vital importance of what she calls moral needs or the needs of the soul, then what Illich identifies is, of course, a pernicious and perverse hijacking of these needs. Pernicious because of the transmutation of vital non-physical needs into the need for commodities. Perverse because the the nature of the commodification is such that these vital needs are never satisfied. Indeed, having been institutionalized along the lines Illich identifies, they must be forever perpetuated so as to justify the ongoing existence of the institution in question.

Consider for a moment a more concrete and contemporary example. Why does anyone need a Ring camera? Or, better, whose interests are best served by a Ring camera? The most obvious answer is Amazon. If there is a problem that Ring is supposed to solve it is the problem of packages being stolen from people’s front porches, a problem that arises when our consumption is increasingly funneled through Amazon. But, of course, Ring presents itself as more than just the surveillance arm of a multibillion dollar corporation deployed to your front door. It hijacks the human need for security or safety and transmutes it into a need for Ring. It is chiefly the needs of Amazon that are being me…

It was my pleasure back in June to enjoy a conversation with Carl Mitcham about the life and work of Ivan Illich. A couple of weeks ago, I had the similar pleasure of speaking with Gustavo Esteva, an activist and scholar who, despite having earlier rejected Illich as a “reactionary priest,” went on to become Illich’s close friend and collaborator in the early 1980s. Gustavo is also the founder of the Universidad del la Tierra in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico.

My thanks to Dana Stuchul and Madhu Suri Prakash for their encouragement and for introducing me to Gustavo. I’ve been deeply appreciative of the warm support I’ve received from those who knew Illich. I’ve experienced it as a genuine extension of the hospitality that was so central to Illich’s practice.

On a separate but related note, those of you who indicated an interest in a Zoom discussion of In the Vineyard of the Text will be seeing a note from me soon beginning the task of co-ordinating a time that works for everyone. Also, not too late if you wanted to jump in but hadn’t contacted me yet. Please feel free to do so in the next day or two.

“People can change, but only within bounds. In contrast, the present industrial system is dynamically unstable. It is organized for indefinite expansion and the concurrent unlimited creation of new needs, which in an industrial environment soon become basic necessities … Such growth makes the incongruous demand that man seek his satisfaction by submitting to the logic of his tools. The demands made by tools on people become increasingly costly … Increasing manipulation of man becomes necessary to overcome the resistance of his vital equilibrium to the dynamic of growing industries; it takes the form of educational, medical, and administrative therapies. Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. The parallel increase in the cost of the defense of new levels of privilege through military, police, and insurance measures reflects the fact that in a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)

Welcome to another installment of the Convivial Society. This time around some brief reflections on human beings entangled in technological systems.

You may have seen or heard about Elon Musk’s recent Neuralink demonstration involving some pigs, who weren’t altogether cooperative. Neuralink is the four-year-old Musk company working on a computer-brain interface. Musk claims that Neuralink technology will one day cure, among other ailments, blindness, paralysis, and mental illness. Additionally, Musk believes it will dramatically empower human beings by augmenting our mental and even physical capacities. In anticipation of the recent Neuralink event, his Twitter feed alluded to Matrix-like wonders to come. Musk also tends to tout this project as safeguard against the future threat of super-intelligent AI. It’s how we’ll keep pace with the machines. "With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface,” Musk explained, “I think we can go along for the ride and effectively have the option of merging with AI.”

Needless to say, there is every reason to be skeptical about everyone one of those claims. As Antonio Regalado put it in his discussion of the event, it amounted to little more than neuroscience theater. That said, the hopes Musk has expressed are illustrative of a dynamic that has already been playing out in more prosaic everyday contexts. The nature of this dynamic becomes apparent when we ask a hypothetical question concerning computer-brain interfaces: Who is being plugged in to what? Or, to put it another way, who is the dominant partner, the computer or the brain? Are we plugging into a system that will serve our ends, or are we being better fitted to serve the interests of the technological system. I suspect that Musk would say the question misses the point, there is no dominant partner. Rather the relationship would be, as he put it, symbiotic. Clearly, he talks about it as if it will prove to be an enhancement of the human condition and one that will help us survive the threat of AI-induced obsolescence.

But we could just as easily imagine that the human interest will be superseded by the imperatives of the machine, that the person will be bent to the service and logic of the machine. There is ample precedent. When a system becomes sufficiently complex, the human element more often than not becomes a problem to be solved. The solution is to either remove the human element or otherwise re-train the person to conform and recalibrate their behavior to the specifications of the machine. Alternatively, society develops a variety of therapies to sustain the person who must now live within a techno-economic milieu that is hostile to human flourishing.

In other words, the end being served is not human flourishing, it is the functioning of the technological system. Musk’s rationale for Neuralink is just an overhyped case in point of this logic: the answer to the problem posed by technological systems that have grown dangerous is not to reconsider the advisability of building such systems, rather it is to further technologize the human being so as to assure survival in a technological milieu that has grown fundamentally hostile to human well-being. It clearly recalls the instinct to solve a crisis by escalation, which Ivan Illich identified in Tools for Conviviality.

In the same work, Illich wrote,

There are two ranges in the growth of tools: the range within which machines are used to extend human capability and the range in which they are used to contract, eliminate, or replace human functions. In the first, man as an individual can exercise authority on his own behalf and therefore assume responsibility. In the second, the machine takes over—first reducing the range of choice and motivation in both the operator and the client, and second imposing its own logic and demand on both.

Insidiously, these developments are typically packaged as either matters of convenience or liberation. But the promises never materialize, in part, because they veil a greater entanglement in systems and institutions that are ultimately designed to serve their own ends. In part, also, because it is never clear what exactly we are being liberated for other than further consumption of the products/services/goods offered to us by the techno-economic systems. It was a dynamic eloquently described by Lewis Mumford when, in the mid-twentieth century, he asked “Why has our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics?” Here is his answer:

The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified.

The temptation, in other words, has been to assume that the goods we are offered by the current techno-social regime are the goods that we, in fact, need to thrive as the sort of creatures we are. This is why any serious consideration of the questions raised by technology must eventually become a consideration of what it means to be human and what shape a just society should take. These are, of course, political questions of the first order, or at least they used to be until they were superseded by the imperatives of economic growth.

A few years ago, I suggested that there was a tradition of humanist technology criticism worth engaging. I contemplated at one point drawing up a proposal for something like a humanist tech criticism reader. Maybe someday something will come of that. The general idea that holds this tradition of critics together is the conviction that some account of what people are for and of the conditions under which they flourish should inform our evaluation of technology. I recognize now as I did then that this can be contested and contentious territory, but I fear that unless we figure out how to at least raise these questions we will proceed down a path toward de facto post-humanism.

At the end of my reflections a few years back, I sugges…

“There are two ranges in the growth of tools: the range within which machines are used to extend human capability and the range in which they are used to contract, eliminate, or replace human functions. In the first, man as an individual can exercise authority on his own behalf and therefore assume responsibility. In the second, the machine takes over—first reducing the range of choice and motivation in both the operator and the client, and second imposing its own logic and demand on both. Survival depends on establishing procedures which permit ordinary people to recognize these ranges and to opt for survival in freedom, to evaluate the structure built into tools and institutions so they can exclude those which by their structure are destructive, and control those which are useful.”— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)

I recently stumbled upon video of a 2018 seminar on the life and thought of Ivan Illich, which was held at Penn State, where Illich held an appointment as a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy and the STS program from 1986 to 1996. Several of Illich’s friends and collaborators—including Carl Mitcham, whom I had the pleasure of speaking with this summer—were in attendance. In his opening comments, Sajay Samuel spoke about Illich’s work having reached its “hour of legibility.”

The same thought had occurred to me of late, although I had not put it quite so felicitously. I take him to mean that Illich’s work made even better sense and was even more compelling now than when the work was initially published. Two years later, it seems to me that the value of Illich’s work is even more apparent.

Over the past couple of months, believing that Ivan Illich’s thought indeed spoke with renewed urgency to our moment, I’ve revisited two of his earliest and best known books, Tools for Conviviality and Deschooling Society. As always, reading Illich was a bracing experience—refreshing, challenging, and provocative in the best sense.

There were three key themes that especially caught my attention this time around and on which I’ve continued to dwell. I thought it might be useful to discuss them here, even if only briefly.

Thresholds and Limits

Tools for Conviviality opens with a discussion of what Illich called “two watersheds” in medicine. The medical profession would be the subject of a later book, Medical Nemesis now published as The Limits of Medicine, but here, in a few brief pages, Illich anticipates that later argument. In his view, medicine passed through two watersheds in the twentieth century. Through the first lay significantly better outcomes and improved health through relatively basic developments and discoveries. Through the second, gains begin to be reversed by the less obvious social costs of the professionalization of medicine.

Illich opens with this discussion of medicine in order to illustrate a larger pattern he identifies throughout modern society. He observed that there came a point at which a tool or an institution reached a scale such that putative goods were undermined, gains were reversed, and the tool or institution became a threat to society.

In explaining the purpose of Tools for Conviviality, for example, Illich proposed the concept of “a multidimensional balance of human life which can serve as a framework for evaluating man’s relation to his tools.” “In each of several dimensions of this balance,” Illich wrote, “it is possible to identify a natural scale.” He goes on to add that “when an enterprise grows beyond a certain point on this scale, it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself.”

Tools for Conviviality ends up being, in part, Illich’s attempt to lay a foundation for identifying these scales and clarifying the nature of the implied limits. “Present research,” he observed,

is overwhelmingly concentrated in two directions: research and development for breakthroughs to the better production of better wares and general systems analysis concerned with protecting man for further consumption. Future research ought to lead in the opposite direction; let us call it counterfoil research. Counterfoil research also has two major tasks: to provide guidelines for detecting the incipient stages of murderous logic in a tool; and to devise tools and tool systems that optimize the balance of life, thereby maximizing liberty for all.

Likewise, in Deschooling Society, Illich wrote, “We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats.” “We need,” he adds, “counterfoil research to current futurology.”

Harder to get funding for counterfoil research, I suspect. But it is not hard to imagine how useful it might be. At the very least, we would do well to have in our critical toolkit the concept of a threshold beyond which the value of a tool or institution is jeopardized, beyond which, in fact, what had been good and useful becomes counter-productive and destructive.

Illich allows for great deal of latitude in how such an insight might be applied. It would be possible, in his view, for tools or institutions to have what he called “an optimal, a tolerable, and a negative range.” Furthermore, he acknowledged that different societies would have different goals and ends and, thus, different ways of arriving at an appropriate techno-social configuration. “The criteria of conviviality are to be considered as guidelines,” Illich wrote, “to a continuous process by which a society’s members defend their liberty, and not as a set of prescriptions which can be mechanically applied.”

But it was clear to Illich that we must acknowledge that such limits and scales exist. Written in the early 70s, Deschooling Society especially makes frequent use of an analogy to the American war effort in Vietnam. Illich refers to escalation as “the American way of doing things,” and he hardly means it as a compliment.

So, for example, in the closing lines of the first chapter of Tools for Conviviality, Illich writes, “It has become fashionable to say that where science and technology have created problems, it is only more scientific understanding and better technology that can carry us past them.” He goes on: “The pooling of stores of information, the building up of a knowledge stock, the attempt to overwhelm the present problems by the production of more science is the ultimate attempt to solve a crisis by escalation.”

Solving a crisis by escalation seems not to have gone out of fashion. It signals, of course, a failure of imagination, but also an institutional imperative. What can an institution possibly offer you except more of itself? For example, the one remedy for the problems it has unleashed that Facebook cannot contemplate is suspending operations. What is never questioned is the underlying ideology that connection is an unalloyed good and we always need more of it.

What this ignores is the possibility that, as Illich argued, beyond a certain threshold more, bigger, faster simply becomes counter-productive and then destructive. It is a possibility to which we ought to be critically attuned.

Tools to Work With

In Tools for Conviviality, Illich offered a simple proposition: “People need new tools to work with rather than tools that ‘work’ for them.” He goes on to add that people “need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves.”

Underlying this claim was Illich’s belief that western societies made a fundamental mistake in conceiving of machines as providing an alternative to slave labor.

“Between the High Middle Ages and the Enlightenment,” Illich argued,

the alchemic dream misled many otherwise authentic Western humanists. The illusion prevailed that the machine was a laboratory-made homunculus, and that it could do our labor instead o…

“I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume – a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.”— Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (1971)

Programming note: Glad so many of you seem to have found the audio version useful. You are now able to follow the newsletter as a podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher, if by “podcast” we understand simply me reading the main essay in a less than animated manner. Just click “Listen in Podcast app” above. Hope that covers most of you who find that feature useful. And sure, feel free to leave a rating or review if you’re so inclined.

It’s been just about thirty years since sociologist James Hunter published Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. The titular phrase has since become a staple of the public’s discourse about itself, although, as all such phrases tend to do, it has floated free of its native context in Hunter’s argument about the then-novel rifts in American public life.

Lately, I’ve found myself taking recourse to the phrase more than I ordinarily would. I’ve typically avoided it because the phrase itself seemed to encourage what it sought merely to describe. In other words, as an analytical frame, the phrase conditions us to think of cultural dynamics as warfare and thus locks us into the dysfunctions such a view entails. “Metaphors we live by” and what not. Despite my misgivings, however, the phrase is undoubtedly useful shorthand for much of what transpires in the public sphere. So, for example, when someone asks about the face mask fiasco here in the U.S., I’ve simply suggested, perhaps too glibly, that face coverings were regrettably enlisted into the culture wars. But here is another problem to consider. Precisely because it is so useful as shorthand, it may be deterring us from the work of thinking more carefully and more deeply about our situation. Concepts, after all, can both clarify and obscure.

But I’ve also been thinking about the “culture wars” frame because, whatever else we might say about such conflicts, they have not remained static during the nearly three decades since Hunter wrote his book. One key development, of course, is that those thirty years overlap almost exactly with the emergence of the digital public sphere. In fact, several weeks ago what seemed like a useful analogy occurred to me: The advent of digital media has been to the culture wars what the advent of industrialized weaponry was to conventional warfare.

With that thesis in mind, I thought it might be useful to revisit Hunter’s work to see if it can still shed some light on our present situation and, specifically, to explore what difference digital media has made to the conduct of the “culture wars.” For brevity and clarity’s sake, although I’m not sure I’ve succeeded on either front, I’ve chosen to outline a few key points for our consideration. So here we go.

1. The culture wars predate the rise of digital media

This may seem like an obvious point, but it’s worth emphasizing at the outset. One consequence of our immersion in the flow of digital media tends to be a heightened experience of presentism, involving both a foreshortening of our temporal horizons and the presumption that what we are experiencing must be novel or unprecedented. The danger in this case is that we mistake the culture wars for an effect of social media rather than understanding them as a longstanding feature of American public life with a complex, multi-faceted relationship to social media.

In 1991, Hunter, surveying familiar terrain—for example: the family, free speech, the arts, education, the supreme court, and electoral politics—amply documented most if not all of the features we tend to lament about the state of public discourse today: the polarization, the intractable and bitter nature of the debates, the underlying animosities, the absence of civility, the characterization of ideological opponents as enemies to be eradicated, and, notably given present debates, what Hunter called the “specter of intolerance” and the supposed “totalitarian ‘threat’” posed by political opponents.

Describing what he calls the “eclipse of the middle,” he also notes how a need to be “stirred and titillated” means that “public debate that is sensational is more likely to arouse and capture the attention of ordinary people than are methodical and reflective arguments.” “The net effect of loud, sensational clamor,” he adds, “is to mute more quiet and temperate voices.”

Hunter also commented on the high level of suspicion in public discourse: “In today’s climate of apprehension and distrust,” he wrote, “opinions that attempt to be distinctive and ameliorating tend to be classified with all others that do not affirm a loyalty to one’s own cause.” Hunter also offered an incisive analysis of the role media technology played in creating these conditions, but we’ll get to that in another point below.

Finally, while Hunter’s work popularized “culture war” talk, he did not coin the phrase, which, as he notes, dates back to the 1870s. The culture war concept has its origins in the German word Kulturkampf, or “cultural struggle,” which specifically designated a fight between Protestant and Catholic factions for control of the cultural and educational institutions of the newly unified German state.

As Hunter goes on to show, the origins of the American culture wars were also rooted in similar struggles between Protestants and Catholics and later between Christians and Jews in the 19th century. From our perspective, of course, these appear chiefly as intramural squabbles within a larger and decidedly western religious frame of reference. By the late 1980s, however, Hunter perceived an important shift in the nature of these conflicts running through American society and politics. Culture Wars was Hunter’s effort to better understand these developments and map their consequences.

It’s important to remind ourselves that culture war dynamics precede the emergence of social media because we should not fool ourselves into thinking that if only we managed to somehow reign in social media, a temperate and civil public sphere would emerge. Although, as I’ll discuss below, social media is obviously not helping matters.

2. The culture wars are rooted in competing sources of moral authority

It’s useful to recall, as Hunter insists, that the culture wars encompass deep and genuine disagreements about what is good, what is just, and what is beautiful. After opening with a series of dispatches from the front, as it were, Hunter invites us to consider the following: “What if these events are not just flashes of political madness but reveal honest concerns of different communities engaged in a deeply rooted cultural conflict?”

Hunter believed that such was indeed the case. “America,” he claimed, “is in the midst of a culture war that has had and will continue to have reverberations not only within public policy but within the lives of ordinary Americans everywhere.” This has undoubtedly proven to be the case, even as the nature of the culture wars has shifted once again.

Presently, however, we tend to speak of the “culture wars” in a more pejorative or dismissive sense and with more than a little exasperation. I understand the temptation to do so. In fact, I’ve used the term in this way on more than one occasion of late. And, in fact, there’s good reason to do so. Contemporary manifestations of the cultural wars are often characterized by seemingly trivial grievances, regarding, for example, what constit…

We are presently in the midst of another wave of free speech/cancellation discourse, this one prompted by an open letter published in Harper’s warning against a rising tide of illiberal constraints on free expression.

While debates about free speech are as old as the idea of free speech, a case could be made that they have taken on a different character in recent years. This may be a matter of frequency and intensity, but I suspect that the nature of the debate has shifted substantively as well. It seems that more recent clashes have less to do with specific applications of the principle than with the relative merits of the principle itself.

If so, it should not come as a surprise. When the technological infrastructure sustaining public speech is radically altered, so too is the experience and meaning of speech. Because this debate is framed by the conditions of the Database—the superabundant, practically infinite assemblage of data in our externalized collective memory, otherwise known as the internet—it is nearly impossible to navigate through every continuously unfolding aspect of even a seemingly narrow and contained instance like the Harper’s letter. So I won’t even make the attempt. Instead, I’m going to take a path that has been less frequently trod by examining a handful of underlying dynamics driving the controversy.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that I can explain the causes of the debate, they are many and complex. Much less do I aim to settle the debate one way or the other. In fact, if I’m right, the debate can’t properly be settled at all. Rather, I aim to understand the deeper material conditions that generate the context for the debate.

My overarching thesis regarding free speech crisis discourse, including debates about “cancel culture,” can be put this way: this is what you get when the word is re-animated under the conditions of digital re-enchantment.

That’s a pretty jargon-heavy claim, so it obviously needs to be unpacked. I’ll start the process by distinguishing the two key theoretical components: the re-animated word, on the one hand, and digital re-enchantment on the other. These two distinct but related developments together generate the conditions driving our seemingly intractable and increasingly acrimonious free speech skirmishes.

By speaking of the re-animated word, I’m thinking in terms of media ecology and the basic premise is that we experience speech differently depending on the medium that bears it. Speech grounded in the face-to-face encounter is one thing. Speech inscribed in writing is another. And, more to the point for our purposes, print produces an experience of speech distinct from the experience of speech generated by digital media. It is in this difference that we find the root of our present re-litigation of the nature and value of free speech. Our previously regnant ideals regarding freedom of speech arose in the context of print culture and they are now, for better and for worse, floundering in the context of digital media.

In short, writing, and especially print, renders the word seemingly inert and thing-like. It tames the word in a very specific sense: by removing it from the potentially volatile and emotionally laden context of the face-to-face encounter. The difference has less to do with the content of the printed word than with its phenomenology, or how we experience it. It is absolutely true that you can find all manner of vitriolic and combative speech in print, as is evidenced, for example, in the political pamphleteering of the early republic. But, experientially, it is one thing to encounter this content in written form at a temporal and spatial remove from the author, whose very significance becomes dubious, and it is another to encounter these words directly and immediately from the mouth of the speaker, whose personal significance is unavoidable. In other words, even the plausibility of the claim that you should challenge the ideas and not the person, for example, is sustained by the conditions of print.

Let’s reflect on this a bit further. What is a word? This is not a trick question or a sophomoric dorm room provocation. When you think of a word, what do you think of? I’d be willing to bet that if you were asked to think of the word “cat,” for example, you would almost certainly think of the three letters C-A-T (or whatever the equivalent might be in your native tongue). Now ask yourself what would be the answer to that question in the era before writing was invented? Clearly not a set of symbols.

When you think of a word as a set of letters, you’re thinking of the word as an inert, lifeless thing. Before the introduction of writing, the word was not a thing but an event. It was powerful and effected irreversible change. Nothing better illustrates these different attitudes to the word than when modern readers encounter the biblical narrative of Isaac and his two sons, Jacob and Esau. When Jacob deceives his father into conferring his spoken blessing on him rather than Esau, the eldest son, a modern reader is likely to ask, well, why not just take it back, they’re just words. But when the word is an event rather than a thing, you can’t just take them back just as you can’t undo an event.

Not surprisingly, then, modern free speech ideals are historically correlated with emergence and internalization of print culture. Print encourages the notion that the content of ideas can easily be and, indeed, ought to be distinguished from the one who presents them. Print abstracts the act of communication from the lived experience of communicators and thus fosters the sense that words alone can do no harm. The well-known proverb about sticks and stones, for example, is most plausible in the context of print culture (and, in fact, seems to arise precisely in this context). The time and space necessary to the labor of communicating in print itself has a diminishing effect on the felt intensity of communication.

Digital media changes all of this. It places the word back into the heated context of relative immediacy. It is true, of course, that most digital communication still happens at a physical remove, but the temporal remove is collapsed, renewing a measure of immediacy to the act of speaking in public. Moreover, the word is reanimated in the sense that it becomes newly active: active and ephemeral on the screen, enlivened by image and audio, and active in its intensified emotional consequences. To speak into the digital public sphere is to potentially invite an immediate and intense assault not simply upon your ideas but upon you and your livelihood and well-being because, after all, you and your ideas and your words are now more tightly bound together.

There is a paradox here, though, that is worth noting. In one respect, one might just as easily say that digital speech does nothing, transpiring as it does in a hyperreal context. If the word once again takes on the aspect of an event, it is may be more like a pseudo-event. If so, then, this dynamic, too, threatens to escalate and intensify the character of online speech. The more powerless it appears as speech, the greater the temptation to ratchet up its intensity and escalate its hostile character.

So, then, the reanimated word is a different beast than the printed word. Consequently, when we internalize its dynamics, we’re likely to begin with a different set of assumptions about freedom of speech than those fostered by print culture.

The matter of digital re-enchantment is a bit more complex, but I’ll try to keep this relatively brief.

In the sociological tradition, modernity is characterized by the disenchantment of the world. This is a matter of serious debate, which I’ll sidestep here, but, needless to say I think there is a good case that can still be made for the theory. The general idea is that in the modern world, we’re less likely to think the forest is populated by fairies, that magical amulets can ward off disease, that a relic …

In addition to my scribblings here and elsewhere, I occasionally give talks about the role technology plays in our private and social lives. If there’s a Q&A time afterwards, one of the questions I’m most likely to get will be about how parents should regulate their kid’s use of digital devices. Sometimes the underlying anxiety and frustration is palpable.

For a long time, I was hesitant to address these sorts of questions because I wasn’t a parent myself, and I had enough good sense to know that it was best not to opine on how to raise children if you didn’t have some firsthand experience. Having now been a parent for nearly five years, I feel a bit less sheepish about addressing some of these questions, and, of course, the questions have also taken on a more personal and urgent quality.

I don’t think I’ve got this business figured out, of course. Far from it. But I have a few thoughts on the matter that might be helpful. And, honestly, while these will be framed by the question of children and technology, I think you’ll find the underlying principles more broadly applicable.

First, let’s get a few preliminary observations out of the way. Raising children can be a challenging, thankless, anxiety-ridden affair. Most of us are doing our best, often with limited resources and support. The last thing any parent needs is to be made to feel badly about one more ostensible failure or shortcoming on their part. This is especially true during a pandemic, which has radically restructured household arrangements and routines for parents and children both. So, please, do not hear any of what follows as anything more than one parent, given his own circumstances and aspirations, thinking out loud about these questions in the event that it proves helpful to other parents thinking through these same issues.

The following considerations are generally ordered from those claims that I think are pretty solid and broadly useful to those that stem a bit more idiosyncratically from my own perspective. And, no, in case you’re wondering, I don’t live up to these in my own practice as a parent, but I still aspire to their fuller realization as the vagaries of life allow. Finally, these are, for me, certainly not rules to be followed, but ideals to be daily negotiated in the trenches. Comments are open to all, and I’d be happy to read your own thoughts on these matters.

* Resist technocratic models of what it means to raise a childIn my experience, parents are almost always looking for concrete and practical advice to follow, which is the kind I’m least likely to offer. Not because I like to be factitious, but because I think it’s important to recognize how questions about how much screen time is too much, for example, actually hint at a more subtle consequence of the technological framing of the task of raising children. In other words, while we focus on specific devices in our children’s lives, we sometimes miss the technocratic spirit we are tempted to bring to the task of raising children.This spirit was captured rather well a few years back by Alison Gopnick, who distinguished between two kinds of parents: carpenters and gardeners. Gopnick has a rather specific set of anxious middle class parents in view, but the distinction she offers is useful nonetheless. In the carpenter model, parents tend to view raising children as an engineering problem in which the trick is to apply the right techniques in order to achieve the optimal results. In this view, “parenting” is something you do. It is work. And the point of the work is to manufacture a child to certain specifications as if the child herself were simply a bit of raw, unformed material. In the gardening model, parents do not conceive of their children as a lump of clay to be fashioned at will. The focus isn’t on “parenting” as an activity, but on being a parent as a relationship structured by love. While the carpenter by their skill achieves a level of mastery and control over the materials, the gardener recognizes that they cannot ultimately control what the seed will become, that much is given. They can only provide the conditions that will be most conducive to a plant’s flourishing. Of course, any discussion that starts with “There are two kinds of x” will undoubtedly have its limitations, but I think it’s useful to remember that we do not make our children, we receive them as gifts. Naturally, this does not alleviate us of our responsibilities toward them. Far from it. But it does change how we experience those responsibilities, and it does relieve us of a particular set of anxieties that inevitably accompany any project aimed at the mastery of recalcitrant reality. Parents have enough to worry about without also accepting the anxieties that stem from the assumption that we can perfectly control who our children will become by the proper application of a various techniques.

(The Little Prince)

* Resist a reactionary approach to technologyIn this arena, but may be as a general rule, it’s better to let your choices flow from what you are for rather than what you are against. In other words, when thinking about something like children and smartphones, say, it’s better to imagine yourself working toward particular goods you would like to see materialize in your child’s life than simply proscribing the use of smartphones out of some justifiable but murky apprehension. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that there’s no such thing as “too much time on a smartphone,” it’s just that figuring what that means can’t happen in abstraction from a larger vision of what is good. “Too much” implies a relative standard. Relative to what, then? Is there also “too little”? What would “just right” look like? I don’t believe it’s possible to answer those questions, or questions like them, in the abstract. The point is to ask yourself what are the goods you desire for your children and your family. With those clearly in view, you can then think more deliberately about how certain tools and devices move you toward the good or undermine its realization. Of course, implicit in this is the assumption that we will have some fairly clear sense of what we’re for, as well as a decent grasp of how our tools can become morally and intellectually formative (or de-formative). Infants and toddlers won’t be able to deliberate about such matters with you, but my sense is that the sooner you’re able to bring children into some meaningful conversation about this kind of thing the better. Invite them to pursue the good and teach them by example to subject their use of any tool or device to that higher end. In this way we can inoculate them against one of the most pervasive disorders of a technological society, the temptation to make technology an end in itself.

* Resist technologies that erode the space for childhoodI’m a fan of Neil Postman, but I tend to have a few more quibbles than usual with his 1982 book, The Disappearance of Childhood, in which Postman argues that childhood (and adulthood) as it had been imagined in modern western societies was tied to print culture. Consequently, as print culture fades in the face of electronic media, Postman argued its attendant models of childhood (and adulthood) faded, too. Quibbles aside, I think there’s something to the claim that certain techno-social configurations generate different experiences of childhood. It also seems that the experiences of and boundaries separating childhood, adolescence, and adulthood have been in flux. I sometimes talk about this in terms of what I’ve called the professionalization of childhood and the infantilization of adulthood. The professionalization of childhood is related to the technocratic modes of parenting for safety and optimization discussed above. It’s evident in the amount of resources, time, and expertise that, in certain segments of society, is often brought to bear upon every aspect of a child’s life. So we do well to think about the qualities and experiences that constitut…

“Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking. Such terms as oppressors and oppressed, the idea of classes–all that sort of thing is near to losing all meaning, so obvious are the impotence and distress of all men in face of the social machine, which has become a machine for breaking hearts and crushing spirits, a machine for manufacturing irresponsibility, stupidity, corruption, slackness and, above all, dizziness. The reason for this painful state of affairs is perfectly clear. We are living in a world in which nothing is made to man’s measure; there exists a monstrous discrepancy between man’s body, man’s mind and the things which at present time constitute the elements of human existence; everything is in disequilibrium.”— Simone Weil, “Oppression and Liberty” (1955)

Programming note: On the recommendation of a friend, I’m experimenting with Substack’s podcast tool. You’ll note that nothing has changed with regards to the content, except that you now have the option to listen to the main essay should that prove more convenient. If you hit play above you’ll be taken to the webpage for the newsletter from which the audio will play. Nothing fancy, just me reading the text. If you have any thoughts on this, feel free to pass them along.

In the wake of the American failure to contain or manage COVID-19, I’ve begun to encounter the recurring refrain, “We’re going to have to learn how to live with this virus.” The tone may be indignant, exasperated, defiant, but the general point is the same: the virus is with us for the foreseeable future and people need to figure out how best to get on with their lives.

Regrettably, this is probably correct. A web of interconnected failures, stemming from the highest levels of government down to individual citizens, have more or less assured this outcome. We can hope for a vaccine to arrive sooner rather than later. We can hope for better treatment options. We can hope the virus unexpectedly fizzles out, “despite ourselves” as Zeynep Tufekci recently put it. But, as she added, hope is not a plan, and we’re more than likely stuck with COVID for at least another year.

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about here. Rather, I want to begin by discussing how this sentiment, “We’re going to have to learn how to live with this virus,” suddenly struck me as a useful way of framing an approach to the personal, social, and global challenges posed by the present configuration of digital society—challenges to the conduct of our everyday lives, to fabric of our communities, and to political and economic order.

So here’s the thing, we’re going to have to learn how to live with digital technology. We can hope for legislative action and regulation. We can hope for a radical transformation of the industry stemming from a labor insurgency at tech companies. We can hope that a renewed focus on humane technology may bear fruit in the long run. We can hope that digital technology, despite ourselves, doesn’t (further) accelerate the corruption of the political and social order. But hope is not a plan, and we’re more than likely stuck with the existing techno-social configuration of digital technology for the foreseeable future.

Don’t get me wrong. Just as I support efforts to develop a vaccine, discover therapeutic options, or restore governmental leadership to manage COVID-19, so too do I find merit in the various efforts I mentioned above to better navigate the social consequences of digital technology. But in the same way that I cannot simply hope and do nothing with regards to COVID-19, so I cannot simply hope for these various measures regarding digital technology to materialize and do nothing myself in the meantime.

For one thing, I am personally ill-positioned to do very much of consequence with regards to efforts either to develop anti-viral therapies, for example, or to draft legislation to regulate the tech industry. It’s not that I can’t do anything at all, of course. I can donate to organizations supporting vaccine research and I can contact my representative. But, these actions will not help me today or tomorrow or next month.

Over the last few years, I found myself occasionally writing in defense of a multi-faceted response to the challenges of digital technology. Chiefly, this amounted to a defense of individualized efforts to address such challenges from those who insisted that such efforts were unnecessary, on the one hand, and, on the other, from those who believed them to be inadequate and perhaps even counter-productive. I readily granted that individualized action alone was insufficient to the full range and scope of the challenges in view, and I granted, too, that we should resist a consumerist framing of the problem in which better informed, ethical consumption would be the answer to our problems. But I was baffled by those who in their defense of collective and political action seemed bent on discrediting individualized or even localized action.

It now seems to me that COVID-19 presents an opportunity to make an instructive variation of the case I sought to make in these instances. The health threat is collective and it requires all manner of responses in order to be met, and some of those responses materialize at the level of individual or household choices. Precisely because of the interdependent nature of human society, not despite of it, we are urged to act responsibly with a view not only to our own health but to the health of our neighbors and our community. Our membership in a community of mutual inter-dependencies does not diminish the need for personal responsibility, it heightens it.

Consider, too, how the same veiled distribution of consequences plagues our response to the virus and to the various manifestations of digital infrastructure. I must think of the virus not only as a threat to me, which I may be free to discount, but as a threat to others through me. Likewise, I must think of certain digital technologies in light of the unequally distributed consequences to which my personal choices may contribute. Perhaps I have no reason to fear any adverse effects from my adoption of a front proch Ring camera, but I must be able to imagine how the widespread adoption of this technology will have adverse effects for already marginalized members of the community and how it further depletes the fund of communal trust.

So here is the paradox: Certain digital technologies should be resisted not merely for their personal consequences, which may be negligible for certain individuals, but for their collective consequences. But for this reason, I should not simply wait for collective action, I should personally resist these tools in order to mitigate their deleterious consequences locally. Will my resistance alone solve the challenge posed by these tools? Obviously not. Should that keep me from doing what I can to confront the problem? Again, in my view, obviously not. Similarly, will my wearing a mask make the coronavirus disappear? No. Bu should that keep me from wearing one? No, again.

I’m reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s rule for the common citizen seeking to live with integrity in a repressive regime: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” He thought the artist could do more, but this much at least the average person could pledge to do.

Ivan Illich’s discussion of the question of public versus private ownership of industrial technology is also instructive. “It is equally distracting,” Illich wrote in Tools for Conviviality,

to suggest that the present frustration is primarily due to the private ownership of the means of production, and that the public ownership of these same factories under the tutelage of a planning board could protect the interest of the majority and lead society to an equally shared abundance. As long as…

Hello everyone,

First off, that was a great first thread on Tools for Conviviality.

Secondly, for session two, we’ll have our synchronous discussion tomorrow night (Monday, June 29th) at 8 PM (EST). I’ll post another thread that should arrive in your inbox around 7:30 PM.

Thirdly, here is audio of a conversation I was honored to have with Carl Mitcham, a philosopher of technology and close associate of Ivan Illich’s going back to the 1970s. I should note that this is my first venture into podcast-like interview territory, which I readily admit is not exact something I’m naturally gifted for. That said, Carl relates some great anecdotes about Illich and sheds a little light on some questions that arose in the first thread (e.g., Illich was a bit naive and ill-informed in his praise of China in Tools). Carl closes with some reflections on his own experience teaching a semester a year in China.

Anyway, enjoy that. Also, I’m thinking of offering the main newsletter essay in this same audio format with accompanying text, of course. If you have any thoughts on that, let me know!

Looking forward to chatting with all who are able tomorrow evening,

Michael