In 1972, the French broadcaster and leftist Catholic Jean-Marie Domenach interviewed his friend Ivan Illich for a television program. Their 51-minute conversation took place on a Parisian park bench, in front of a neoclassical statue of the goddess Pandora, aptly enough for Illich’s passionate invocation of Greek mythology.
A version of this remarkable video with English subtitles is here.
The video description posted on Vimeo includes the following:
“The conversation ranges over the myth of Pandora, Epimetheus and Prometheus, the replacement of hope with expectation, compulsory schooling as the ‘organ of reproduction’ of knowledge-capitalist societies, the need for a politics of consensually-determined upper limits on the applications of technology... and personal friendship as the bedrock of work in the world.” If you are unfamiliar with Illich, I hope that paragraph alone will draw you into the world of his thought.
Watching Illich’s dazzling style of delivery and expressive manner, it’s easy to imagine why he often cast a spell over his listeners. French was only one of his half-dozen or so languages but he speaks it here with a near-effortless clarity, so far as I can tell.
Who today are the Illichians? They are the advocates of the commons (notably the remarkable David Bollier), of limits to technology, of bodily autonomy, of degrowth.
Given Illich’s Catholic vocation (he never renounced his priesthood but merely asked to be relieved of his priestly duties) and his prefiguring of so many of Pope Francis’ ideas, one might hope the Catholic intellectual community is taking him up again, an idea I recently pondered in this article.
A final recommendation: The royal road into Illich’s thought is now Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, by his friend, the Canadian broadcaster David Cayley. It is much more than a biography and brings Illich’s ideas to bear on many (if not most!) of the issues in our current polycrisis. In fact, it’s one of those books which will shake you to the foundations.
See you next time—peace.