What if our cars had actually made us slower? Admittedly, our great-grandfathers never had the chance to move at 80 miles per hour — that is, unless they jumped from a cliff. But maybe ever-faster cars aren’t as time-saving as we think. A commuter wastes in average 42 hours each year in traffic jam. If you combine the time spent in the car, working to pay for the car, for the fuel, the tolls, repairs, and many other little things, the average American devotes 1500 hours a year to his car. That is four hours a day. Which is, all things considered, much more than our great-grandfathers spent travelling, by foot, each day. Faster, you said?
Mobility is a perfect example of what Ivan Illich called threshold effects: when overreaching a certain threshold of complexity, technic becomes counterproductive and. Our tools (Illich here means cars, but also health, education, administrations) become too complex, and fail to serve their original purpose. Instead of being means to help human achievement, they become an end and human become means. Instead of freeing ourselves, our tools are enslaving us, says Illich.
In Tools for Conviviality (1973), the philosopher sought to write an “epilogue to the industrial age”: Ivan Illich was convinced that the industrial society was deadly, and therefore moribund, and that an alternative had to be proposed. Let’s go through his diagnosis first, and I will later expose his offer for an alternative.
Illich postulates that industrial society is doomed to decline because it is incapable of conceiving the idea of limits (remember that the Meadows report, Limits to Growth, had just been published in 1972, questioning economic growth for the first time). Illich tries to highlight that industrialisation encourages us to exceed production thresholds beyond which it becomes harmful:
“When a tool-based activity exceeds a threshold defined by the ad hoc scale, it first turns against its end, then threatens to destroy the entire social body”. “Reaching a certain threshold, the tool, from servant, becomes despot.”
This idea doesn’t only apply to material production: services have the same weakness, Illich argues. Among the examples Illich takes to support this idea, I think the health system is a fairly interesting one, for it made me very uncomfortable the first time I read it. Illich distinguishes two “mutation thresholds” in the health system:
- The first, in 1913, was the time when modern medicine guaranteed that “the patient has more than one chance in two that a qualified doctor would provide effective treatment”. (Illich points that the figure is slightly deceiving, for the dramatic reduction in mortality was mainly due to housing restructuring and better hygiene conditions. He also points out that the health system creates illnesses, putting a name on what wasn’t considered as such before.)
- The second threshold came after the Second World War: from then on, Illich believed that doctors took control of their patients’ lives rather than accompanied them. No longer content to treat illnesses, the health system intends to produce “better health”.
Well, all right, I thought, but if I suddenly break my arm, I will be very glad to benefit from a health system whose doctors have been duly trained. But Illich’s idea is more subtle than that.
Illich points out that this evolution does not lead to a positive overall health balance. Taking the case of the United States, he shows that advanced healthcare is accessible to the very richest, with the result of increasing their life expectancy for a few years. Meanwhile, the poorest no longer have access to basic care — especially since traditional self-medication methods are gradually being eliminated. And to prove that he was dedicated to his ideas, I think it is interesting to note that Illich himself died of a cancer that he refused to treat, believing that it is the kind of disease treated in a counterproductive way, and that the patient dies of being cured. He survived the cancer for twenty years.
His analysis of the health system is based on the idea of the “radical monopoly”. A radical monopoly is the moment when a technology that is more efficient than others makes it impossible for others to exist. For example, cars have been so important in the urbanization of the city of Los Angeles that it is practically impossible to be a pedestrian there. As well, modern drugs are so efficient that we’re perfectly unable to know which curative plants could have helped us to cure the same illness a century ago.
Conviviality
Illich then tries to define a society based on “conviviality” :
“I call a convivial society a society where the modern tool is at the service of the person integrated into the community, and not at the service of a body of specialists. Convivial is the society where man controls the tool”.
According to Illich, “the right tool meets three requirements: it generates efficiency without degrading personal autonomy, it does not create slaves or masters, it widens the scope of personal action”. The threshold beyond which the tool is no longer user-friendly cannot be defined by an oracle of experts, but must be defined by the entire community.
According to him, a convivial society must be built around three cardinal values, each of which has the role of “limiting” the tool in its own way: survival, equity, and creative autonomy.
The industrial society is firmly rooted, since everyone participates in it and benefits from it. The transition to a convivial society will be difficult to implement, and, above all, it will be “accompanied by extreme suffering: famine for some, panic for others. Those who know that the dominant industrial organization is producing even worse suffering under the pretext of relieving it are entitled to wish for this transition”.
But the transition, however painful it may be, is necessary if we wish to avoid the “modernized poverty” of the frustrated man, who cannot satisfy all the needs shaped by the industrial system. To this, Illich opposes a “convivial austerity”.
It is interesting to see that, in France, there has recently been a renewed interest for this idea of “convivial austerity”, with many publications drawing attention on “low-tech” tools (this one being the most interesting, and I’m not only saying that because I contributed to it). Could the development of low-techs pave the way to a convivial society? We seem very far from it, but that still may be the path to follow. Keeping in mind Illich’s warning : such a transition would not be easy.
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