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Conviviality
[Caleb Stegall 03/01 09:36 AM]There hasn’t been a lot of direct talk about technology here, which as I gather is supposed to be one of the subjects for this week. And as I look at the book, I see Rod quoting Eric Brende as saying that the goal is not to get rid of technology, but to ask whether it “enhances a more integrated life” or whether it leads to disintegration and dislocation. Ivan Illich doesn’t show up in the book, but I think of all the critics of technology in the 20th Century, he more than anyone understood the implicit metaphysics that technology imports into our lives and did the best work thinking about and developing criteria for judging technological tools on that basis. In his Tools for Conviviality, Illich develops the concept of “convivial” tools versus “industrial” tools: Individuals need tools to move and to dwell. They need remedies for their diseases and means to communicate with one another. People cannot make all these things for themselves. They depend on being supplied with objects and services which vary from culture to culture. Some people depend on the supply of food and others on the supply of ball bearings.
People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call “conviviality.” They are degraded to the status of mere consumers.
I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members.Illich goes on to describe how convivial tools facilitate free and creative interplay between people, environments, institutions, generations and the memory that binds them all together as an indivisible “community.” Industrial tools, on the other hand, come “pre-packaged.” Their meaning is self-contained and imposed on the user who must acquiesce to the demands of the tool. The difference can be seen, for example, between a text book and a work of literature. The former imposes its meaning on a user; the latter creates meaning by inviting the reader into a participatory community comprised of author, text, and reading community.
Most crucial for Illich is whether a tool gives an outlet for or overrides man’s capacity for responsibility. Convivial tools create a responsibility in the user to participate in a community of meaning; in a tradition. With conviviality comes the development of real joy as opposed to mere pleasure. Industrial tools deny man’s responsibility and his deepest longings because they impose meaning and require only passive acceptance from the user. As Illich says, the user is “degraded to the status of mere consumer.”
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