Left techno-optimism and Illich

or . . . “The Disney Delusion”

When Ivan Illich wrote Gender in 1982, he was abandoned by many on the left. This little booklet was widely misunderstood because it didn’t fit nicely into the prevailing disputes and dogmas around gender issues, but I’m not here to apologize for or critique Illich’s Gender. The point here is what happened to Illich afterwards, i.e., he was declared unclean for his departures in this one publication, and all the work he had done to date was similarly declared unclean. Illich was forgotten. Being unclean in Left World (cancel-culture contagion narratives have been around for a good long while), it was dangerous even to say his name, much less promote or discuss all his prior publications. And so some of his most prophetic work was buried with his reputation.

Illich and the left always had a tense relationship, because Illich had little patience with the idea of The Future. He called it “a man eating idol.” In two key works, Tools for Conviviality and Energy and Equity, he confronted what we’ll call (hat tip to the late Mark Jones) “radical technological optimism.”

I was watching Briahna Joy Gray’s podcast, Bad Faith, two days ago, where she was having a conversation with Slavoj Žižek. They were talking about automation, which I recall being a hot topic fifty years ago. Round and round we go. Gray — former press secretary for the Sanders campaign, Harvard trained lawyer, and contributing editor at Current Affairs — restated one of the main themes I remember in those long past discussions of automation from my youth: Automation — that is, technology — promises a future where machines to all the work, and we can just loaf around and write poetry or drink. I don’t fault her for this Disney-delusion, which is shared by many on the left, because three years before she was even born Illich had published Gender and been summarily cast into the Left’s outer darkness. She didn’t encounter groups of students at Harvard discussing Illich as they had in the seventies.

So I want to make a brief introduction to those who haven’t looked into Illich.

In the epigraph of Energy and Equity, Illich quotes José Antonio Viera-Gallo Quesney, once the Assistant Secretary of Justice for Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile who was overthrown in a US-orchestrated coup d’etat on September 11, 1973. The epigraph reads: “El socialismo puede llegar solo en bicicleta.” Socialism can arrive only on a bicycle.

Energy and Equity begin thus . . .

It has recently become fashionable to insist on an impending energy crisis. This euphemistic term conceals a contradiction and consecrates an illusion. It masks the contradiction implicit in the joint pursuit of equity and industrial growth. It safeguards the illusion that machine power can indefinitely take the place of manpower. To resolve this contradiction and dispel this illusion, it is urgent to clarify the reality that the language of crisis obscures: high quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu.

The advocates of an energy crisis believe in and continue to propagate a peculiar vision of man. According to this notion, man is born into perpetual dependence on slaves which he must painfully learn to master. If he does not employ prisoners, then he needs machines to do most of his work. According to this doctrine, the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command. This belief is common to the conflicting economic ideologies now in vogue. It is threatened by the obvious inequity, harriedness, and impotence that appear everywhere once the voracious hordes of energy slaves outnumber people by a certain proportion. The energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these slaves. I prefer to ask whether free men need them.

The energy policies adopted during the current decade will determine the range and character of social relationships a society will be able to enjoy by the year 2000. A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist.

At this moment, most societies — especially the poor ones — are still free to set their energy policies by any of three guidelines. Well-being can be identified with high amounts of per capita energy use, with high efficiency of energy transformation, or with the least possible use of mechanical energy by the most powerful members of society. The first approach would stress tight management of scarce and destructive fuels on behalf of industry, whereas the second would emphasize the retooling of industry in the interest of thermodynamic thrift. These first two attitudes necessarily imply huge public expenditures and increased social control; both rationalize the emergence of a computerized Leviathan, and both are at present widely discussed.

The possibility of a third option is barely noticed. While people have begun to accept ecological limits on maximum per capita energy use as a condition for physical survival, they do not yet think about the use of minimum feasible power as the foundation of any of various social orders that would be both modern and desirable. Yet only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity. The one option that is at present neglected is the only choice within the reach of all nations. It is also the only strategy by which a political process can be used to set limits on the power of even the most motorized bureaucrat. Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology.

Well! Where did this get lost since 1973?

(Before the woke-scolding cancellations begin, let me note that everyone writing then still used “man” as the term signifying humanity, including Ruth Nanda Anshen, the philosopher who wrote the foreword to E&E. Don’t miss the forest for the trees.)

With that, I’ll leave readers to explore the linked books, then we can have a conversation about the urban, academic, Cartesian, Disney-esque, techno-optimistic leftist delusion of The Fully-Automated World of Woke Robot Slaves.