The Human-Built World Is Not Built For Humans (Digress)
4 views
Skip to first unread message
Sailor John
Nov 14, 2021, 1:26:32 AM11/14/21
to SeaSafetySouthAsia
The Human-Built World Is Not Built For Humans
The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 19
“I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a life style which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a life style which only allows us 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.”
— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
________________________________
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. It’s been a while since the last installment. I worked on an essay for some time, but ultimately it did not come together quite the way I had hoped. Instead, I’m going to take three ideas in that unwieldy draft and spin them out as a series of relatively brief reflections that I’ll send out in the coming days. This is the first. Also, I’m including some reading recommendations with each of these. I hope you find them helpful.
________________________________
A few days ago, a story was circulating about how the infrastructure bill, which was recently passed by the House of Representatives, included funding for research on beacons to be worn by cyclists and pedestrians to make them legible to autonomous vehicles. A story in Forbes noted that the bill “formalizes the acceptance of so-called ‘vehicle to everything’ (V2X) technology that, on the face of it, promises enhanced safety on the roads for pedestrians and cyclists.”
Each time I’ve read something about how we will all have to wear sensors to survive the envisioned future transportation environment, a particular paragraph from Illich’s Deschooling Society has come to mind: “Contemporary man,” Illich wrote, “attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.”
Illich wrote these words in the early 1970s, long before beacons to keep cyclists and pedestrians safe from autonomous vehicles would become a policy priority. But the pattern was already evident. In the same essay, Illich told the following anecdote:
I know a Mexican village through which not more than a dozen cars drive each day. A Mexican was playing dominoes on the new hard-surface road in front of his house — where he had probably played and sat since his youth. A car sped through and killed him. The tourist who reported the event to me was deeply upset, and yet he said: “The man had it coming to him.”
The assumption in the tourist’s statement is clear and brutal: it is the responsibility of humans to adapt to their technical milieu. For the sake of a development he likely neither needed or desired, this man’s environment was transformed so as to render it hostile to him, but it is somehow his fault for failing to promptly adapt himself to the new reality. As Illich notes, there’s not even an air of the tragic in the tourist’s claim. One can imagine some not-too-distant future when a cyclist is struck and killed by an autonomous vehicle and an observer declares, “Well, she wasn’t even wearing her beacon, so she had it coming to her.”
As I thought about Illich’s anecdote, my own parental anxiety to convey to my children the importance of minding the cars around them at all times appeared in a new light. When one remembers that it has not always been necessary to carefully train a child, with ritualistic precision, just so that they can walk about without fear of mortal injury, then the whole thing takes on a rather absurd and malicious character.
Once you see this dynamic in one set of circumstances, you start to see it again and again. In innumerable ways we bend ourselves to fit the pattern of a techno-economic order that exists for its own sake and not for ours. As another example, consider Illich’s observations in 2000 about what is required of those who would pursue a successful career:
Modern citizens who want to pursue a successful career face a situation that is without clear boundaries or limits, and this prevents them from recognizing an alternative to their self-directed ‘lifelong learning and decision-making.’ Their comings and goings, their progress and well-being, their flourishing and ruination depend on their adaptation to diverse systems. In particular, they have to learn to function and compete in symbiosis with current economic conditions. A tolerant acceptance of these conditions is no longer enough. One has to learn to identify with them. In the mills of the new economy, where positioning is all, the grit is supposed to grind itself so fine that it becomes grease for the gears.
Or consider Shannon Mattern’s observation that “our phones seem to be contrived for circadian contradiction.” A reminder that our own technologically induced patterns of restlessness can be profoundly unhealthy. Our phones, after all, function as an interface between us and a vast network of communication and commerce: in practice, do they principally serve our interests or those of the network?
As the ways that we are schooled for life in a system that in significant ways runs counter to our own interests and well-being become more apparent, then Illich’s more radical claims begin to sound plausible if not altogether sensible.
In Tools for Conviviality, for example, we encounter this stark summation of Illich’s view of industrial society:
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.
Maybe this comes off as rather extreme. After all, Illich is arguing that the modern world, circa 1974 at least, is fundamentally hostile to human well-being and that some of its most vaunted institutions were basically coping and conditioning mechanisms.
Jacques Ellul, with passing reference to learning how to navigate street traffic, argues similarly:
“At the same time, one should not forget the fact that human beings are themselves already modified by the technical phenomenon […] Their whole education is oriented toward adaptation to the conditions of technique (learning how to cross streets at traffic lights) and their instruction is destined to prepare them for entrance into some technical employment. Human beings are psychologically modified by consumption, by technical work, by news, by television, by leisure activities (currently, the proliferation of computer games), etc., all of which are techniques. In other words, it must not be forgotten that it is this very humanity which has been pre-adapted to and modified by technique that is supposed to master and reorient technique. It is obvious that this will not be able to be done with any independence.”
But this is why I read writers like Illich and Ellul, and why I encourage others to do the same: for the sake of a thoroughgoing critique that will make me think more deeply, and uncomfortably, about our situation and my own acquiescence and complicity. I find that my vision tends to be too narrowly focused on surface-level symptoms. And it is too easy to take refuge in the thought that a few tweaks here and a little regulation there will make all things well, or at least significantly better. Meanwhile, nothing quite changes. Then along comes someone like Illich or Ellul claiming that maybe the whole modern techno-social order, whatever its relative merits, is broken and malignant. That the roots of our problems run much deeper than we had assumed. That we are, in truth, doing it all wrong and should revisit some of our most fundamental assumptions. You may not, in the end, agree with their conclusions, but seriously considering their perspectives should at least help us to ask better, more fundamental questions about the human-built world, or, perhaps more importantly, about the beliefs, values, and interests that shape it.
What Illich and Ellul would have us consider is that the human-built world is not, in fact, built for humans. And, of course, this is to say nothing of what the human-built world has meant for the non-human world. What’s more, it may be paradoxically the case that the human-built world will prove finally inhospitable to human beings precisely to the degree that it was built for humans without regard for humanity’s continuity with the other animals and the world we inhabit together.
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-human-built-world-is-not-built
The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 19
“I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a life style which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a life style which only allows us 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.”
— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
________________________________
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. It’s been a while since the last installment. I worked on an essay for some time, but ultimately it did not come together quite the way I had hoped. Instead, I’m going to take three ideas in that unwieldy draft and spin them out as a series of relatively brief reflections that I’ll send out in the coming days. This is the first. Also, I’m including some reading recommendations with each of these. I hope you find them helpful.
________________________________
A few days ago, a story was circulating about how the infrastructure bill, which was recently passed by the House of Representatives, included funding for research on beacons to be worn by cyclists and pedestrians to make them legible to autonomous vehicles. A story in Forbes noted that the bill “formalizes the acceptance of so-called ‘vehicle to everything’ (V2X) technology that, on the face of it, promises enhanced safety on the roads for pedestrians and cyclists.”
Each time I’ve read something about how we will all have to wear sensors to survive the envisioned future transportation environment, a particular paragraph from Illich’s Deschooling Society has come to mind: “Contemporary man,” Illich wrote, “attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.”
Illich wrote these words in the early 1970s, long before beacons to keep cyclists and pedestrians safe from autonomous vehicles would become a policy priority. But the pattern was already evident. In the same essay, Illich told the following anecdote:
I know a Mexican village through which not more than a dozen cars drive each day. A Mexican was playing dominoes on the new hard-surface road in front of his house — where he had probably played and sat since his youth. A car sped through and killed him. The tourist who reported the event to me was deeply upset, and yet he said: “The man had it coming to him.”
The assumption in the tourist’s statement is clear and brutal: it is the responsibility of humans to adapt to their technical milieu. For the sake of a development he likely neither needed or desired, this man’s environment was transformed so as to render it hostile to him, but it is somehow his fault for failing to promptly adapt himself to the new reality. As Illich notes, there’s not even an air of the tragic in the tourist’s claim. One can imagine some not-too-distant future when a cyclist is struck and killed by an autonomous vehicle and an observer declares, “Well, she wasn’t even wearing her beacon, so she had it coming to her.”
As I thought about Illich’s anecdote, my own parental anxiety to convey to my children the importance of minding the cars around them at all times appeared in a new light. When one remembers that it has not always been necessary to carefully train a child, with ritualistic precision, just so that they can walk about without fear of mortal injury, then the whole thing takes on a rather absurd and malicious character.
Once you see this dynamic in one set of circumstances, you start to see it again and again. In innumerable ways we bend ourselves to fit the pattern of a techno-economic order that exists for its own sake and not for ours. As another example, consider Illich’s observations in 2000 about what is required of those who would pursue a successful career:
Modern citizens who want to pursue a successful career face a situation that is without clear boundaries or limits, and this prevents them from recognizing an alternative to their self-directed ‘lifelong learning and decision-making.’ Their comings and goings, their progress and well-being, their flourishing and ruination depend on their adaptation to diverse systems. In particular, they have to learn to function and compete in symbiosis with current economic conditions. A tolerant acceptance of these conditions is no longer enough. One has to learn to identify with them. In the mills of the new economy, where positioning is all, the grit is supposed to grind itself so fine that it becomes grease for the gears.
Or consider Shannon Mattern’s observation that “our phones seem to be contrived for circadian contradiction.” A reminder that our own technologically induced patterns of restlessness can be profoundly unhealthy. Our phones, after all, function as an interface between us and a vast network of communication and commerce: in practice, do they principally serve our interests or those of the network?
As the ways that we are schooled for life in a system that in significant ways runs counter to our own interests and well-being become more apparent, then Illich’s more radical claims begin to sound plausible if not altogether sensible.
In Tools for Conviviality, for example, we encounter this stark summation of Illich’s view of industrial society:
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.
Maybe this comes off as rather extreme. After all, Illich is arguing that the modern world, circa 1974 at least, is fundamentally hostile to human well-being and that some of its most vaunted institutions were basically coping and conditioning mechanisms.
Jacques Ellul, with passing reference to learning how to navigate street traffic, argues similarly:
“At the same time, one should not forget the fact that human beings are themselves already modified by the technical phenomenon […] Their whole education is oriented toward adaptation to the conditions of technique (learning how to cross streets at traffic lights) and their instruction is destined to prepare them for entrance into some technical employment. Human beings are psychologically modified by consumption, by technical work, by news, by television, by leisure activities (currently, the proliferation of computer games), etc., all of which are techniques. In other words, it must not be forgotten that it is this very humanity which has been pre-adapted to and modified by technique that is supposed to master and reorient technique. It is obvious that this will not be able to be done with any independence.”
But this is why I read writers like Illich and Ellul, and why I encourage others to do the same: for the sake of a thoroughgoing critique that will make me think more deeply, and uncomfortably, about our situation and my own acquiescence and complicity. I find that my vision tends to be too narrowly focused on surface-level symptoms. And it is too easy to take refuge in the thought that a few tweaks here and a little regulation there will make all things well, or at least significantly better. Meanwhile, nothing quite changes. Then along comes someone like Illich or Ellul claiming that maybe the whole modern techno-social order, whatever its relative merits, is broken and malignant. That the roots of our problems run much deeper than we had assumed. That we are, in truth, doing it all wrong and should revisit some of our most fundamental assumptions. You may not, in the end, agree with their conclusions, but seriously considering their perspectives should at least help us to ask better, more fundamental questions about the human-built world, or, perhaps more importantly, about the beliefs, values, and interests that shape it.
What Illich and Ellul would have us consider is that the human-built world is not, in fact, built for humans. And, of course, this is to say nothing of what the human-built world has meant for the non-human world. What’s more, it may be paradoxically the case that the human-built world will prove finally inhospitable to human beings precisely to the degree that it was built for humans without regard for humanity’s continuity with the other animals and the world we inhabit together.
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-human-built-world-is-not-built
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages