Re: [ba-unrev-talk] virtual book club?
I have been roaming the web looking for ideas to support work I am doing
that aligns with the Engelbart notion of augmenting the collective IQ. I
view Doug's writing from a particular perspective. Doug has spoken deeply
and often about issues related to current human activities; similarly, I
have taken the view that it is (for me) more important to think about
future activities with respect to those who will be involved, today's young
learners. (01)
Today's Web research led me to the works of Ivan Illich. Turns out that
two of his books are on-line. I'll make a deep quotation from the
introduction to one of them -- _Tools for Conviviality_ -- which follows a
previous book _Deschooling Society_. (02)
Tools is found at http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/illich/tools/intro.html
Deschooling is found at http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/illich/deschool/intro.html (03)
Given that Tools represents his views on technology, and OHS is about
technology, perhaps _Tools for Conviviality_ could be considered for
discussion as a group. It strikes me that the tone of the book (I haven't
read it yet) speaks to many of the issues of design that interest Sheldon
Brahms. Certainly, the fabric of his writing supports notions of
constructivist learning environments, and those environments represent
appropriate use cases for OHS/DKR implementations. (04)
If you recall, Ping recently introduced himself and gave a URL
http://lfw.org/ping/criticons/
wherein he illustrates the use of email posts for IBIS-like
discussions. It would not take an archiver to produce what he wants if we
happen to make our Subject lines look something like his suggestion. (05)
Cheers
Jack (06)
********
During the next several years I intend to work on an epilogue to the
industrial age. I want to trace the changes in language, myth, ritual, and
law which took place in the current epoch of pack-aging and of schooling. I
want to describe the fading monopoly of the industrial mode of production
and the vanishing of the industrially generated professions this mode of
production serves.
Above all I want to show that two-thirds of mankind still can avoid passing
through the industrial age, by choosing right now a postindustrial balance
in their mode of production which the hyperindustrial nations will be
forced to adopt as an alternative to chaos. To prepare for this task I
submit this essay for critical comment.
In its present form this book is the result of conversations at CIDOC in
Cuernavaca during the summer of 1972. Participants in my seminar will
recognize their ideas, and often their words. I ask my collaborators to
accept my sincere thanks, especially for their written contributions.
This essay has become too long to appear as an article and too intricate to
be read in several installments. It is a progress report. I respectfully
thank Ruth Nanda Anshen for issuing this tract as a volume, in World
Perspectives, published by Harper & Row.
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. During tine late sixties this research centered on
educational devices. By 1970 we had found that:
1. Universal education through compulsory schooling is not possible.
2. 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.
3. A society committed to high levels of shared learning and critical
personal intercourse must set pedagogical limits on industrial growth.
I have published the results of this research in a previous volume of World
Perspectives, entitled Deschooling Society. I clarified some of the points
left ill defined in that book by writing an article published in the
Saturday Review of April 19, 1971.
Our analysis of schooling has led us to recognize the mass production of
education as a paradigm for other industrial enterprises, each producing a
service commodity, each organized as a public utility, and each defining
its output as a basic necessity. At first our attention was drawn to the
compulsory insurance of professional health care, and to systems of public
transport, which tend to become compulsory once traffic rolls above a
certain speed. We found that the industrialization of any service agency
leads to destructive side effects analogous to the unwanted secondary
results well known from the overproduction of goods. we had to face a set
of limits to growth in the service sector Of any society as inescapable as
the limits inherent in the industrial production of artifacts. we concluded
that a set of limits to industrial growth is well formulated only if these
limits apply both to goods and to services which are produced in an
industrial mode. So we set out to clarify these limits.
I here submit 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 it is possible to identify a
natural scale. 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. These scales must be identified and the
parameters of human endeavors within which human life remains viable must
be explored.
Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the
milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities
of society's members, when it isolates people from each other and locks
them into a man-made shell, when it undermines the texture of community by
promoting extreme social polarization and splintering specialization, or
when cancerous acceleration enforces social change at a rate that rules out
legal, cultural, and political precedents as formal guidelines to present
behavior. Corporate endeavors which thus threaten society cannot be
tolerated. At this point it becomes irrelevant whether an enterprise is
nominally owned by individuals, corporations, or the slate, because no form
of management can make such fundamental destruction serve a social purpose.
Our present ideologies are useful to clarify the contradictions which
appear in a society which relies on the capitalist control of industrial
production; they do not, however, provide the necessary framework for
analyzing the crisis in the industrial mode of
production itself. I hope that one day a general theory of
industrialization will be stated with precision, that it will be formulated
in terms compelling enough to withstand the test of criticism. Its concepts
ought to provide a common language for people in opposing parties who need
to engage in the assessment of social programs or technologies, and who
want to restrain the power of man's tools when they tend to overwhelm man
and his goals. Such a theory should help people invert the present
structure of major institutions. I hope that this essay will enhance the
formulation of such a theory.
It is now difficult to imagine a modern society in which industrial growth
is balanced and kept in check by several complementary, distinct, and
equally scientific modes of production. Our vision of the possible and the
feasible is so restricted by industrial expectations that any alternative
to more mass production sounds like a return to past oppression or like a
Utopian design for noble savages. In fact, however, the vision of new pos-
sibilities requires only the recognition that scientific discoveries can be
useful in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specia- lization
of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power
and turns people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The
second enlarges the range of each person's competence, control, and
initiative, limited only by other individuals' claims to an equal range of
power and freedom.
To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not
dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognize natural scales and
limits. We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the
place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom.
Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment:
beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward, or
prison. Only within limits ought politics to be concerned with the
distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal inputs
of either energy or information. Once these limits are recognized, it
becomes possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons,
tools, and a new collectivity. Such a society, in which modern technologies
serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers, I will
call "convivial."
After many doubts, and against the advice of friends whom I respect, I have
chosen "convivial" as a technical term to designate a modern society of
responsibly limited tools. In part this choice was conditioned by the
desire to continue a discourse which had started with its Spanish cognate.
The French cognate has been given technical meaning (for the kitchen) by
Brillat-Savarin in his Physiology of Taste: Meditations on Transcendental
Gastronomy. This specialized use of the term in French might explain why it
has already proven effective in the unmistakably different and equally
specialized context in which it will appear in this essay. I am aware that
in English "convivial" now seeks the company of tipsy jollyness, which is
distinct from that indicated by the OED and opposite to the austere meaning
of modern "eutrapelia," which I intend. By applying the term "convivial" to
tools rather than to people, I hope to forestall confusion.
"Austerity," which says something about people, has also been degraded and
has acquired a bitter taste, while for Aristotle or
Aquinas it marked the foundation of friendship. In the Summa Theologica,
II, II, in the 186th question, article 5, Thomas deals with disciplined and
creative playfulness. In his third response he defines "austerity" as a
virtue which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which are
distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. For Thomas
"austerity" is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue, which he
calls friendship or joyfulness. It is the fruit of an apprehension that
things or tools could destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia (or graceful
playfulness) in personal relations.* (07)