"The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport*. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and 
Ivan Illich in Energy and Equity (Chapter: Speed-stunned imagination)
* Illich uses transport as modes of movement which rely on sources of energy that don’t utilize the human metabolic energy.
Kind thanks to G.L. Howe for reminding us of how very far ahead was the great man in his thinking and the ideas he shared with us so many years ago. Time to reread and rethink Illich!
Friday, September 24, 2010
Street Talk: Ivan Illich on Sharing in Transport
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Illich has been a personal polestar for me since I first encountered "Energy and Equity" circa 1973. The passage that Eric excerpted here isn't one of my favorites, but the beauty of Illich or any other profound writer is that each of us finds our own gems.
ReplyDeleteI'll venture that, too often, the rich tapestry of Illich's thought has been reduced to the useful but somewhat overplayed nugget about auto users moving at only 5 mph when the full range of their costs (let alone "external" costs) is counted ... much like the life and work of Martin Luther King -- recently and moving memorialized by Charles M. Blow in the NY Times as "He was smart and brave, steadfast and unmovable. He was a man consumed by conviction and possessed by the magnificent radiance of the earnestly humble." -- has been reduced to "I have a dream." Yes, Illich deserves and needs to be read continually. Thanks, Eric, for reminding us.
Many thanks Eric for posting this from Ivan Illich. It is indeed time to reread Illich.
ReplyDelete-
Sujit
Thanks, Eric. Indeed, all relevant analyses and policy proposals to save our civilization are available for many decades. The only speed we still need is the mental speed to start doing, resp. stop doing.
ReplyDeleteWhat Illich means for mobility, perfectly adds to what E.J Mishan wrote in 1967 "The costs of economic growth" and of course Henry George in 1879 in "Progress and Poverty", to mention just a few great thinkers.
As we now know from recent disaster, the mainstream economic theory has not learned from them and instead further developed the so-called "neo-liberal" manifestation of naked capitalism. This continues in power almost unchanged despite the unanimous call for Sustainable Development and the broadening to 3P in 1987. And despite recent failure, resulting in the Second Depression, neoliberalism continues to be preached in business schools and universities - that can well be considered the madrassas of our western culture, with its imam Alan Greenspan, that educate/indoctrinate our business and political elites.
These madrassas - although Greenspan has admitted that he learned something from the financial crisis - continue to resist independent and thus much more effective supervision of financial markets and even minor improvements like the Tobin or Financial Transaction Tax, carbon tax and land value tax.
It is gives hope, however, that this insight is now attracting more attention, of which your article on Ivan Illich is a very good proof !