Ivan Illich (1926-2002) emerged in the late 1960s as a radical public intellectual. Many of his most radical insights have today become conventional wisdom.

The wonderful essayist George Scialabba once entitled an otherwise generally sympathetic piece on Ivan Illich “Against Everything.” That was surely because Ivan Illich’s critique of modernity runs deeper than that of almost any other thinker of his time. His books attacked the unquestioned sacred cows of the age, including schooling, institutional medicine, cars, and economic development, charging them with “terminal counter-productivity”.

And yet Illich was neither a reactionary nor a Luddite. In the 1960s, his countercultural open seminar in Cuernavaca, Mexico—CIDOC—was partly a seedbed for what became liberation theology (although Illich later found the movement too ideological). His writings about “the war on subsistence,” as he called it, laid the groundwork for today’s global movements around the commons, decentralization, and degrowth.

After his remarkable but controversial Gender appeared in 1982, causing a firestorm around what Illich felt was a misreading of the book by its feminist critics, he pulled back from public speaking and concentrated on less volatile subjects.

In a series of interviews with his friend and biographer David Cayley—who is our guest for this episode—Illich gradually sketched out his somewhat startling theory of modernity as an extension of Church history. The “corruption of Christianity” was the theme he first shared in conversation with Cayley, who went on to transcribe and publish Illich’s account of how so many modern institutions arose out of misplaced ambitions to make Christian charity into permanent institutions of society.

Our conversation in this episode is grounded in Cayley’s Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, a work which not only presents its subject’s ideas but wonderfully extends them, an achievement we surely owe to Cayley’s personal friendship with Illich, especially in his last years.

Some takeaways from our conversation:

The key modern assumption in Illich’s view: that human beings are made up of needs and society is organized to fulfill them. Moreover, modern institutions, as they grow ever larger, tend to defeat their own purposes: they weaken communal self-reliance by creating needs to be serviced by technical professionals; they threaten our ability to enjoy and bear the human condition; and they undermine the arts of suffering and our ability to die our own deaths.

Illich’s idea of subsistence (which is not poverty but simply sustainable living) as the way the global South might continue to avoid the tragedies of industrialization and modernity.

In the mid-1980s, a kind of catastrophic breakdown in the old (tool-based) way of seeing things, replaced by a new dimensionless cybernetic space, discontinuous with the past and the certainties with which people once lived.