O.G. Rose: Look at the Birds of the Air - How We Must Unplan Our Lives
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
‘I choose the term ‘conviviality’ to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment […] I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members.’-Ivan Illich. Tools for Conviviality
The centipede could walk until the ladybug asked him how he did it; likewise, we knew how to be human until we had to ask how we managed to be human. As discussed in Belonging Again, it was once “given” how we should live our lives, think, and the like, but now we are free, which means we are less vulnerable to mass movements, but that also means we must decide for ourselves how to be human. We’ve often acted like things are still “given,” when they are not, and similarly we’ve applied that “thoughtlessness” to technology, creating a Preplanned world, which Ivan Illich saw threatened our humanity. We must today learn how to be human where it is no longer “given,” and yet nobody thinks they don’t know “how” to be human—that’s part of the problem.
Nobody intends to live bad lives, so why do we?
Nobody intends for tools to control them, so why do they?
Nobody intended to end up in the world Ivan Illich diagnosed, so why did we?
It’s because we don’t know what we don’t know, and we can’t know everything to be human.
Autocannibalism is natural.
Automastery is the goal.
How did we end up nonhuman when no one intended to end up nonhuman? Subtly. Discreetly. Slowly. And then one day we woke up and the damage was done, which included our inability to tell the damage was done. Ivan Illich saw the fate of humanity tied to our relationship with technology, and he also understood that the very use of it changed how we thought about technology in ways that made us less likely to use technology to “extend humanity.” Rather, technology naturally teaches us to use technology to “replace humanity,” and that lesson has long been in session. Should we become Amish? We wouldn’t need learning for that, nor an invitation to share in a discussion on how we might use technology as “tools of conviviality” versus “means of replacing humanity.” Technology is an art, and thus requires training. We can hurt ourselves cooking if we don’t know what we’re doing, and yet we also must eat. This is a Pro-Human class, and humans require tools. Artificial Intelligence will easily help us be more human, but Illich understand such a possibility required us to pay attention to how we used technology. In Hegel, everything is contingent, and the future is entirely open. There are no guarantees, and so there is hope.
“Convivial” for Illich ‘designate[s] a modern society of responsibly limited tools,’ which for Illich is also needed if people are to stay human and thus communal, friends, and the whole gambit of human activities and forms of community.1 We learn from Alex Ebert that what lacks limit can become cancerous, and Illich would argue that technology now “replaces humanity,” which is evidence of us making this mistake. The movement from the Unplanned to the Preplanned regarding the Christian Church is described by Illich as a movement from ‘Church as she [to] Church as it,’ and we can say that humanity in general has moved into being an “it.”2 So it goes with human beings: where everything is Preplanned, we are each an “it.”
Since for Illich “progress” today is defined technologically in terms of a movement from the Unplanned to the Preplanned, humanity’s understanding of “progress” has become self-effacing. Illich’s hope was ‘to make the expansion of freedom, rather than the growth of services [and technology] the criterion of social progress’—but to this some may counter and claim technology indeed “increases freedom.”3 To this, Illich might nod and say tools might “expand freedom,” but not in the way that humanity was mostly using them in his day, for technology was being used to move the world from a “she” to an “it.” There is no freedom where there is no humanity, and so tools only expand freedom to the degree they “extend our humanity” versus save us the trouble.
‘People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them in use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call ‘conviviality.’ They are degraded to the status of mere consumers.’4
A prisoner is punished not with poverty but with being a mere consumer: prisoners lose say and control over their lives. Everything is planned for them, and thus they have no agency, which can threaten community and social bonds. Similarly, Illich believed we were all prisoners now, and that was because we ceased being human. But how? This class is based on the idea that nobody intends to cease being human and contribute to Crisis, so why do we? It’s because what leads to these outcomes is much more subtle and hard to identify than we often realize, and we cannot shift away from them unless we can identify what is leading to them from a very individual, phenomenological, and particular level.
Nobody intends to live without meaning, so why do we?
Nobody intends to be controlled by their tools, so why are we?
Nobody tends to lose community and friendship, so why do they slip away?
It’s because we don’t know what we don’t know and lose our humanity when we know everything.
Managing this paradox is the focus of this course.
November 4 • Illich Motivation.
We will focus on what does it mean to “extend humanity” versus “replace humanity,” and why is this such a pressing question in the world today. We will also focus on the concept of “intrinsic motivation” and why Nietzsche and Illich might have a nice discussion.
Relevant Works: Tools for Conviviality, Belonging Again, “The Overman and Allegory of the Cave”
November 11 • Self-Forgetful Education.
How do we cultivate ourselves, raise children, and inspire friends to be “self-turning wheels” who don’t fall into a ditch of either self-centeredness or self-humiliation? We will focus on “being childlike” and why we should think about being vulnerable as a sign of strength.
Relevant Works: The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness by Timothy Keller. Notes from the Pod by Raymond K Hessel.
November 18 • Absolute Choice and Conditioning.
If life has a lot to do with making choices, how do we make better choices, especially seeing as we can’t know for sure which choices are best? We’ll touch on why choice is necessary for “extending humanity,” why the Humanities and Arts have a lot to do with choice, and why phenomenology, metaphysics, and the like can be practical and useful for quality decision-making. Relevant Works: “The Absolute Choice.” “Phenomenological Pragmatism.” “Conditionalism.”
November 25 • Enjoying, Improvising, Automastering, and Unplanning Our Unknowns.
If being human for Illich has a lot to do with not having to control everything, how do we know what to do with ourselves? The answer has a lot to do with learning to enjoy not knowing what’s going to happen next and not knowing what might come out of us. What might a day look like which put the courage this required into practice?
Relevant Works: “The Unknowable and the Unknown.” O.G. Rose Conversation Episode #128
MORE:
If being human requires agency and capacity before the Unplanned, how can we prepare for it without ruining our humanity? How can we tell when we work against our humanity? To address that, this class will orbit what we call “Phenomenological Pragmaticism,” and some relevant macro-topics:
1. Intrinsic Motivation as the most human motivation and natural balancer of technology-use. Without it, we cannot make decisions on limiting technology-use which are not externally imposed, making us vulnerable to “capture,” as Deleuze discusses.
2. Bestow Centrism mustn’t be the prime basis for our lives (which gets us into Nietzsche), which requires courage, “nonrationality,” and the like. Do we look for external validation and external justification for our lives? If so, we are at risk.
3. Self-Forgetfulness as the most human sense of identity.5
4. The Unarmored Test as a test to see if we are able to live Unplanned or if we are stuck in the idolatry of Preplanning. Do we know the etiquette for handling surprise? Could we tell a story on the fly? Can we emotionally handle having nothing between us and others? Can we still convene after so much connvience?6
5. The Absolute Choice as the kind of choice which is necessary for us to be human. To be human, we must make choices that hurt, that leave us unsure. We are not mainly “the rational animal,” but “the choosing animal”—and that makes all the difference. Ultimately, this leads us into the topic of “Quality Decision Making,” which is what the humanities like literature and philosophy are best when in the business of helping us master.
6. Enjoying Our Unknowns, which is to make our minds something to look forward to each day. How do we make the Unknowable something Unknown, our subconscious minds something we look forward to versus something we try to avoid?7
7. Improvisation as the key skill and “mode” of an Unplanned life.
8. Automastery in “being human” is ultimately the goal, but that requires all the topics together. We will consider this the opposite of “autocannablism,” and in the past with sociological “givens” it seemed like we as a humanity had this, but we actually never did. This is the first age when we require “automastery in being human,” and that is our challenge. Without this, we cannot entertain an Unplanned life, only a Preplanned life, and that makes us vulnerable to “capture.”
Beyond these general and wide topics, some other topics and resources we might explore include:
The Phenomenology of the Artist
The Fate of Beauty as the Fate of Us and Basis of Persuasion, Attraction, and Coalition
The Modern-Counter Enlightenment
Philosophy as Wonder, Clearing, Waiting, and Self-Defense
Leisure
“Escape Artist” (Based on Alex Ebert and Net S.46)
Thematic Living (Based on the work of Andrew Luber & Alex Shandelman)
Questions which arise when we take these topics into consideration:
How do we engage in “nonrationality” well?
How do we rationally choose to do something hard?
How do we educate children?
How do we use our free time?
How do we interact with others?
How do we relate to our desires?
Bonnita Roy covered Illich from a perspective that applies him to work, society, education, and the like, while Layman Pascal and Scout Rainer Wiley have taught on the importance of occultism, hermeticism, and magick in regaining the depths of our humanity. This class will focus on “Phenomenological Tests” by which we can tell if we are unintentionally missing Illich’s admonishments. Perhaps we might associate Roy with Praxis, Pascal and Wiley with Practice, while O.G. Rose will focus on Phenmenology.
People who attend our course will also receive digital copies of all published books by O.G. Rose so far:
In conclusion, if we don’t have Intrinsic Motivation, if we can’t be Self-Forgetful, if we can’t pass the Unarmored Test, if we can’t make Absolute Choices—we will cease being human; we will contribute to the Crisis. Ultimately, we can say that “conviviality” is for Illich “being like Jesus,” and that means it is about avoiding the Preplanned in favor of readiness for the Unplanned, for it is only in this that humanity and humanness can be cultivated and earned. Being human is closer to a Hip-Hop artist than an encyclopedia, and those skilled in improvisation and the unexpected can avoid “capture”; furthermore, they can prove “antifragile” and ready to use technology no matter what it throws at them. In an AI world, the ability to be ready for and able to create with the Unplanned is everything, but again nobody thinks they can’t handle the Unplanned—so how can we tell? To best sense and answer that question is the goal of this course. We lose our humanity when we know everything, so humanity is about being ready for the question which marks us.
About your facilitators
A finalist for the UNO Press Lab Prize and Pushcart Nominee, O.G. Rose’s creative works appear at The Write Launch, Allegory Ridge, Ponder Review, Iowa Review online, The William and Mary Review, Assure Press, Toho Journal online, O:JA&L, West Trade Review, Broken Pencil, Burningword, and Poydras Review. While at the University of Virginia, O.G. Rose worked collaboratively with other artists at Eunoia, a creative community Rose helped develop. Rose now lives on a farm with three children, manages a venue named Mead Lake Lodge, and teaches piano using visuals from the DLG Pattern Method. Their published books include The Conflict of Mind (2021), Thoughts (2022), and Belonging Again: Part 1 (2023).
Notes
1 Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: xxiv.
2 Cayley, David and Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2005: 4.
3 Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. New York, NY: First Harrow Edition, 1972: 109.
4 Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1973: 11.
5 Inspired by The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness Timothy Keller.
6 Inspired by Notes from the Pod by Raymond K. Hessel.
7 Inspired by Layman Pascal of The Integral Stage (as also discussed in O.G. Rose Conversation #128).