[jimduk]

Agreed both being very impressed by Illich, but it not being workable. I dimly recall The Alphabetisation of the Popular Mind arguing that possibly you shouldn't teach language. Maybe this has merit (on the lines of Lanier arguing the midi-fication of music is detrimental which is clearer), but is the analogy that musical notation shouldn't happen.

My Illich-worship hit a bump when talking to an Aussie English Phd who was much cleverer than me. After my first sentence she said "the problem with people who like Ivan Illich is they just want to talk about Illich". Touche

But well worth reading, and a convivial life is a good life.

[paganel]

> My Illich-worship hit a bump when talking to an Aussie English Phd who was much cleverer than me. After my first sentence she said "the problem with people who like Ivan Illich is they just want to talk about Illich". Touche

Because he was basically right, and not that many people are right (Rousseau was another one, Hobbes and Machiavelli too) so it's worth talking about those who are. Of course most of what he's saying is not "workable", but we tend to forget that the not being "workable" part is specific to a technological society like ours and thus maybe the "technological society" part is the problem itself.

Yes, if you want to keep nuclear power plants running you need a technocracy [1] that you need to have educated before the fact, but maybe we've been looking at all this the wrong way all the time and we don't actually need nuclear power plants and we don't need super-sonic flights.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fibDNwF8bjs

[bananaface]

The amount of calories we're able to extract from the earth is proportionate to the amount of energy we can produce. If we stop generating large amounts of energy, the population will shrink dramatically. If we keep generating it, the population will eventually grow to exceed carrying capacity.

It's the wrong level of abstraction. There is no answer.