Thanks for an insightful critique of our recent history. Arendt, abandonment loneliness Illych. Tho you had me at Leonardo Boff.
BKliban had a cartoon of a goofy big legged dancer, called Reckless Abandon. That’s a kind of abandoned I can get behind.Like inflatable unicorns. We cannot always grieve; it translates as quietude and complicity. And it is not far from there to the old anarchist cartoon. OBEY
I just got my vaccine. She told me it was Pfizer. I couldn’t even remember what the other one was, I think started with an M.
This is all very relevant to my thinking as I’ve been slowly making my way through Cayley’s book on Illich’s intellectual journey and life. I appreciate that you put Illich’s idea of iatrogenesis in conversation with our broader social isolation. In rejecting our own suffering, we’ve also rejected that of others.
Looking forward to the next post about place. It seems clear that an inability to bear suffering has led us to abandon our cities, or at least to abandon regular participation in public spaces. Our modern cities in North America are not easy to bear; much easier to move from interior to interior, from car to store to car to work, etc. I’m currently attempting to work out how we might reframe an “urbanist” posture through an ability to suffer the terrible state of our cities, as I think such an ability is badly needed to strengthen social ties. The connection to Illich’s work on medicine provides much food for thought here.
It's interesting to see the various angles at which you explore our unwillingness to grieve. Together, they're painting a rich and painful mural.
Some observations, (appropriately, I suppose) unrelated to one another: (1) I like your "mutual abandonment" a lot more than "loneliness" as a societal diagnosis since the first points to how we treat one another and the second to the result of that treatment. (2) Your point about the correlation between how we die and how we live is well taken. Vine Deloria, Jr. points out that, in our white culture, we're even buried among strangers. (3) Cayley in Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey makes great points about Illich's orthodoxy and radicalism. The first leads to the second in surprising ways, and you touch on that here. Of course, both orthodoxy and radicalism suggest a certain rootedness. (4) Illich's critique of the church for idolizing bare human existence seems much like Arendt's and Agamben's critiques of the West for idolizing the same thing.
Thanks for an insightful critique of our recent history. Arendt, abandonment loneliness Illych. Tho you had me at Leonardo Boff.
BKliban had a cartoon of a goofy big legged dancer, called Reckless Abandon. That’s a kind of abandoned I can get behind.Like inflatable unicorns. We cannot always grieve; it translates as quietude and complicity. And it is not far from there to the old anarchist cartoon. OBEY
I just got my vaccine. She told me it was Pfizer. I couldn’t even remember what the other one was, I think started with an M.
This is all very relevant to my thinking as I’ve been slowly making my way through Cayley’s book on Illich’s intellectual journey and life. I appreciate that you put Illich’s idea of iatrogenesis in conversation with our broader social isolation. In rejecting our own suffering, we’ve also rejected that of others.
Looking forward to the next post about place. It seems clear that an inability to bear suffering has led us to abandon our cities, or at least to abandon regular participation in public spaces. Our modern cities in North America are not easy to bear; much easier to move from interior to interior, from car to store to car to work, etc. I’m currently attempting to work out how we might reframe an “urbanist” posture through an ability to suffer the terrible state of our cities, as I think such an ability is badly needed to strengthen social ties. The connection to Illich’s work on medicine provides much food for thought here.
It's interesting to see the various angles at which you explore our unwillingness to grieve. Together, they're painting a rich and painful mural.
Some observations, (appropriately, I suppose) unrelated to one another: (1) I like your "mutual abandonment" a lot more than "loneliness" as a societal diagnosis since the first points to how we treat one another and the second to the result of that treatment. (2) Your point about the correlation between how we die and how we live is well taken. Vine Deloria, Jr. points out that, in our white culture, we're even buried among strangers. (3) Cayley in Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey makes great points about Illich's orthodoxy and radicalism. The first leads to the second in surprising ways, and you touch on that here. Of course, both orthodoxy and radicalism suggest a certain rootedness. (4) Illich's critique of the church for idolizing bare human existence seems much like Arendt's and Agamben's critiques of the West for idolizing the same thing.