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Intentions

Ivan Illich

“I should like to get a certain number of people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them, to look at how tools shape our mind, how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them. In other words, I’m interested in the symbolic fallout of tools, and how this fallout is reflected in the sacramental tool structure of the world.”
                                            David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation

I should like to bring together an international group of 20-30 ‘deprofessionalised intellectuals’ in Scottish Churches House, Dunblane, for a ten day study visit and conference to take up this challenge of Ivan Illich’s in the context of Scotland. The date might be in 2012 to mark the tenth anniversary of his death, perhaps before then.

The purpose of the project would be to examine how “tools shape our minds”, how society in Scotland, Europe and elsewhere is increasingly and unconsciously directed by technology, rather than the other way around. The aim is to raise questions about size, limits, control; about the relationship between tools and the person, between culture and nature, between technology and different religious and philosophical traditions. It should deal with suffering and conviviality as the parameters of the good life, and the way that tools promote or hinder it.

European society is certainly not monolithic in this domain, though the economic integration, growth and competition fundamental to the European Union divert attention from the “symbolic fallout of tools” – the way technology shapes our being and self-understanding. In this sense the project would seek to probe the meaning and direction of Scottish and European society today. “Where is the Life we have lost in living?” (T.S. Eliot)

Interested persons who know the work of Ivan Illich, please get in touch.

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