Illich
[Caleb Stegall  03/01 11:16 AM]

For a more in depth and sympathetic view (from a conservative perspective) of Illich, his life and work, see this remembrance by Peter Berger in First Things:

It is easy to see why Illich’s ideas resonated well in the cultural climate of the time. But he disappointed, one by one, most of the groups who first believed him to be one of them. Catholics were irritated when he criticized missionaries in Latin America as cultural imperialists. The counterculture discovered that he found repugnant many if not most of their proclivities, from drugs to promiscuous sex. He upset the left when, after a visit to Cuba, he described the Castro regime as an odious tyranny. And feminists were deeply offended when he argued, some years after “Shadow–Work,” that women had been better off in traditional societies in which they devoted themselves to the life of the family. Illich was a genie who could not be kept in any bottle. Like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, he was a “spirit who ever negates.”

… There are, I think, two threads that run through Illich’s opus from the beginning. There is a radical critique of all aspects of modernity, grounded in a profoundly conservative view of the human condition. And there is a deep respect for what Illich called the “vernacular”—the wisdom of ordinary people and their ways of coping with life.