A Constitution of Limits?
What if Hannah Arendt, Wendell Berry, Jane Jacobs, and Ivan Illich all sat down together...
The above YouTube video is only one among many on Ivan Illich. But it has wonderful footage of him in his prime, including scenes around the famous CIDOC center in Cuernavaca. What comes through clearly here is the force of his speaking style (in this case, in subtitled German) and his magnetic personality.
My friend, the civic activist Pete Davis, has a theory about why we can no longer vision new worlds together. A diagnosis of our collective dream disorder, you might call it.
He believes that there was something in the air in the mid-century—the1950s and 1960s broadly—that was very valuable and has been forgotten, betrayed and suppressed. As a millennial, Pete thinks it’s a certain attitude about politics and public life that he detects in at least a few aging Boomers. And he think this tone hints at what we need at this dark moment.
I’m one of the Boomers in whose voice Pete can sometimes hear, he tells me, a lost tone of ambitious idealism. According to his theory, it was the combined influences of the Cold War and the later rise of neoliberal attitudes—a kind of intellectual “Ice Age” that set in around the 1980s—which has left us today with privatized social imaginations. (Remember that big ideas can lead to the Gulag, etc.)
Thus Pete and I agreed it was time to thaw out these lost aspirations and ideas, partly in order to rescue them from the cartoonish notions of the 1960s and set the record straight. And, even more, to retrofit these prophetic ideas, if possible, for this nihilistic moment in 2024 which so badly needs new visions.
We’ve been discussing the fascinating synchronicity in the thinking of a number of these thinkers and writers, among them Hannah Arendt, A. J. Heschel, Martin Luther King Jr., Wendell Berry, Jane Jacobs, and Ivan Illich. Of this group, only Berry is alive today and his career really begins in the 1970s. But at least some of his intellectual roots—his friendships with poet Gary Snyder or novelists Ken Kesey and Ernest Gaines—arguably came earlier.
One of the most striking shared themes among these figures—and they are only a partial list—is that of limits, for example. That we might still today occasionally hear phrases like limits to growth or limits on CEO pay or limits to imperial overstretch is largely due to the influence of these figures. In David Cayley’s recent and magisterial biography of Ivan Illich, he cites a string of terms Illich used to express his vision of a humane balance in living: “proportion, threshold, watershed,” in addition to “limit” and even “nemesis.”
To move away from a consumerism-driven economy premised on perpetual scarcity and automatic systems, we must find ways toward genuine, non-extractive abundance in a system which recognizes limits.
To set forth these ideas, we are therefore drafting up a “Constitution of Limits.” Not with a view toward calling a constitutional convention or anything of the sort. Our project is intended simply as a rhetorical device, a shared mental experiment, an imagined document which will draw on the best of these lost dreams.
Let’s say this constitution is for citizens of an “archipelago of conviviality,” to use Illich’s phrase, in which we seek to create a realm of spontaneity and gift, friendship and mutual aid, the unplanned and the ungoverned.
Here are a few notes toward an initial sketch:
This is a community which lives in a dynamic relationship between past and present, between tradition and innovation. Its vision is neither a return to Eden nor a fantasy of techno-topia.
We are grounded in a shared respect for the “givenness” of existence. We seek celebration and the possibility of surprise.
We seek to combine the practice of love with critical habits of thought. In the current undeclared state of emergency, we recognize the need for deliberation and reflection. In the English expression often cited by Hannah Arendt, we must “stop and think.”
We intend to explore ancient understandings of ascesis as a response to our modern condition of surfeit. We understand the search for necessary renunciations as a gateway to abundance and a hopeful future.
We are not in pursuit of greater scientism, more biopolitics, or a larger regime of total visibility: we embody a shared resistance to all such forces.
In response to our shared loss of cultural competence, we view credentialism and most forms of professionalism as legal/constitutional problems.
We ascribe to the importance of human scale. This means an embrace of boundaries as shelters, heterogenous yet overlapping and independent domains, and self-limiting institutions.
Advocacy for the commons and other non-economic spaces, especially as the settings for a revival of an authentic face-to-face politics.
In place of today’s religiously-celebrated ideology of risk awareness, we propose a revaluation of contingency and the allowance of spaces for the vernacular, the homemade, and (often) the local.
Across our imagined archipelago, we know many good souls who are already practicing this kind of citizenship.
What could come next? Watch this space but also—Pete and I welcome your ideas!
See you next time—peace.