Conviviality and COVID-19
In his 1971 book, Tools for Conviviality, the philosopher Illich presented a “life style” and “political system” to counter the technology-intensive industrial model of the 1970s. This alternative society would be founded on the principle of conviviality, which he defined as the responsible limit of tools (and which is now the name of a manifesto penned by influential French academics). Tools, from financial markets, debt, and economic growth, to compulsory education, highways, smartphones, and medicine, have the power to help us, but they can also turn against us; moreover, as Illich theorized in 1973’s The Right to Useful Unemployment, they have the propensity to deny us the power to help ourselves. Accordingly, he believed that a better society would be a convivial society—one that gives “priority to the protection, the maximum use, and the enjoyment of the one resource that is almost equally distributed among all people: personal energy under personal control.”
The fact that the pandemic has spurred a run on yeast, flour, fabric and bicycles suggests that more people (mostly those with the privilege to consider such pursuits a novelty) are spending more time satisfying their basic needs with greater independence from industrial production and markets. Forced to slow down, unable to “spend” our allocations of time as we did before, with nowhere really to drive to, many are using more of their personal energy under personal control. We have been thrust into a world where many of us are engaging in convivial practices. This is true both in the narrow sense of Ivan Illich’s definition, insofar as our tools have been limited by the restrictions the pandemic has imposed on our movements, as well as in the broader definition of conviviality in the aforementioned “Convivialist Manifesto”: living together, cooperating, interacting peacefully. That some people are snitching on each other for breaking rules, that there are fights over cans of tuna in the grocery store, that some governments are trying to prevent other governments from buying facemasks—these are the exceptions to a mostly cooperative reaction to the pandemic.
Although industrial production and consumption continue, the contraction of the global economy tells us they have slowed down dramatically; as many industrial processes grind or sputter to a halt, we are presented with the conditions to test Illich’s theory. Working from home, using communication technology to stay in touch with people (rather than mainly to increase and measure our outputs), driving less, doing more basic things for ourselves, do we find our “range of freedom” enhanced? In what ways have we been helped and harmed, during this crisis, by the complicated and vast global supply chains we’ve created because orthodox economics told us it was a good idea? Have we “inverted” our relationship to technologies, imagined broadly, so that they “work” for us rather than the other way around? What can we learn by examining how responses to the pandemic vary by class, gender, geography, and so on?