Ivan Illich via L.M. Sacassas:
I would like to get … people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them … how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them. In other words, I’m interested in the symbolic fallout of tools, and how this fallout is reflected in the sacramental tool structure of the world.
Today, I want the framework of my consumptive desires visible. I want to denaturalize the compulsion to soothe myself through consumption — make it strange and ridiculous. I want to continually name the script in my head and, in so doing, chip away at its power over me. I want to do all of this without shaming myself or others, because it takes years to unlearn a learned behavior this invasive, this robust. The problem isn’t buying shit, at least not exactly. It’s misidentifying, again and again, the source and character of our sadness.
This from Anne Helen Petersen’s Cultre Study describes the individual, existential game each of us must play with our needs and desires. It connected with something else I heard from Michael Sacasas on The Outsider Theory podcast. He says that we would be well served to “Reconfigure what we think we need.” He says that the historian Ivan Illich worked to catalog a history of needs and pinned a critique on modern institutions generation of neediness that “generates a demand for themselves.” Illich’s books Deschoolong Society and Medical Nemesis offer this perspective on generated needs in education and healthcare. His human-scale countermeasure for how to subvert the modern, neediness project is friendship and hospitality.
Anne Helen Petersen recognized her need for what she names as “community” when she was worn down from over work, travel, and found herself with the impulse to medicate with consumption of goods. She vectors toward a similar cure. I would make a distinction between “community” in general and frienships constituted of hospitality. For this distiction I will channel Illich. Hospitality, he says, is “A free cration between two people.”
Illich arrives at this defenition by his study of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. In his study, he comes back to the importance of the question that initiates Jesus’ telling of the story, “Who is my neighbor?” He explains the grammatical-historical context of the parable and the distinct point that Jesus is making.
This doctrine about the neighbor, which Jesus proposes, is utterly destructive of ordinary decency, of what had, until then, been understood as ethical behavior… In antiquity, hospitable behavior, or full commitment in my action to the other, implies a boundary drawn around those to whom I can behave in this way. The Greeks recognized a duty of hospitality towards xenoi, strangers who spoke a Hellenic language, but not towards barbaroi. Jesus taught the Pharisees that the relationship which he had come to announce to them as most completely human is not one that is expected, required, or owed. It can only be a free creation between two people, and one which cannot happen unless something comes to me through the other, by the other, in his bodily presence. 1
It seems to me that “The source and character of our sadness” that AHP invokes in her astute observation of modern human, consuptive habits, might have something to do with our longing to host in the way that costs us something. What might be more unsettling is the thought that our own hospitality finds its seat at the table of the self-sacraficial love feast God has spread in the manumition from sin and death, the resurrection feast. “…Something comes to me through the other, by the other, in his bodily presence.”
Why has our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics? …The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified.
— Lewis Mumford in “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics” via The Convivial Society
In his recent newsletter, Michael Sacasas re-articulated Marshall McCluhan's argument that new technology/media reconfigure society. Reconfiguration takes place, not by an ex nihilo big bang, but by rearranging the pre-existent material. New media rearranges "the public" culture (Kierkegaard). Sacasas gives the example inviting us to:
consider the effect of digital media on memory. If collective memory is a crucial element of a cohesive, well-functioning society, if, as Ivan Illich has observed, what we call different cultures are merely the manifestations of different means of remembering—then what are the consequences of the radical re-ordering of how we remember occasioned by digital media?
Cultures, as shared-memory communities (Ivan Illich), might be radically disrupted by this media re-arrangement of shared memory. Cultures are shaped by memory and memory is the story of the past. In other words, Media has the power to reshape the stories we tell about our past.
Some examples of media and what they've reshaped:
A follow up:
Another instance of media shaping memory came to mind, when I watched the documentary "13th." The film begins with an extended discussion of the film "Birth of A Nation" and it's shaping of the race imagination in the US. Towards the end of the documentary, after a lengthy and sad discussion of disproportional incarceration, the interviews return to a discussion of how media shapes the telling and remembering of black history.
Remember, "The Danger of A Single Story?"