Dear Banjo,

Actually, I was really answering David's post before mine in agreeing that humans have worked out that things seemed to be arranged in hierarchical order - didn't put it well. What I meant was that we have an "idea" of how it works.

I have another quote from Illich which seems to lay out quite clearly the dilemma facing modern man in his ability to feel connected : "Traditional society was more like a set of concentric circles of meaningful structures, while modern man must learn how to find meaning in many structures to which he is only marginally related. In the village, language,and architecture and work and religion and family were consistent with one another,mutually explanatory and reinforcing. To grow into one implied a growth into the others.

Sorry Banjo - didn't read that properly that you were addressing David f....will be interesting to read his response.

Dear Banjo,

A hierarchy is a human construct. Hierarchies are defined by relationships. Humans select the relationships by which to define the hierarchy.

In the example you gave in order of eating you chose to make a hierarchy of who gets served in order of their serving. However, one could as well have chosen to construct the hierarchy by starting with those who get served last or are least powerful.

When Jesus announced that the meek shall inherit the earth or Marx referred to the dictatorship of the proletariat they were defining their relationships on which to base a hierarchy. It was using a relationship different from the way others defined the hierarchy.

Let us consider a simple ecosystem. Grass grows. Rabbits eat the grass. Fox eats the rabbits. We can construct hierarchies on a number of relationships. We can put who eats who at the top. That puts the fox on top as the top predator who eats the rabbit who eats the grass. However we can also rank the chain by which entity is the most independent of the others. Grass can grow without rabbit or fox. Rabbit can eat grass and survive without fox. Fox needs rabbit and grass. In other words the rabbit is a parasite to the grass, and the fox is a parasite on a parasite.

We can look at the same system and create a hierarchy by the criterion of which entity does more to spread the ecosystem. The rabbit in producing waste pellets which distribute seed and fertilise ground is the first in that hierarchy. Next comes the grass.

In nature there are roles that different entities fill. However, humans recognise those roles and form hierarchies based on the relationships implicit in those roles.

That intellectual process forms the hierarchy.

Dear Squeers,

You wrote: "We put on a brave face and try to make the most of our lives, and we kid ourselves we're happy with the shallow and scripted existence we're forced to lead under the capitalist system. But the statistics on suicide, depression, violence and antisocial behaviour etc. tell a different story."

I think you're equating an industrialised mechanised society with a capitalist society. They are not the same thing.

I don't have the statistics for depression, alcoholism, violence, suicide and other indicators of societal malaise, but I doubt that they would be essentially different in an industrialised mechanised non-capitalist society.

The USSR was an attempt to form a non-capitalist society, and it was non-capitalist. When I was at the University of Pennsylvania a group of five or six of us used to meet for lunch once a week. One of us was a Soviet Engineer who was studying management methods and expected to go back after the completion of his course.

One of the problems the management in his factory had to deal with was sabotage. It apparently did not have any organised political agenda behind it but seemed to be due to dissatisfaction of workers with the system. The management tried to cope by changing conditions so as to make life more interesting for the workers. One thing he mentioned that apparently worked for a while was to repaint the cafeteria.

A factory is a factory. An apartment house is an apartment house. A corporation is a corporation whether it is controlled by Rockefeller or the Soviet state. Getting shikkered because you feel life is crap is because your life is crap.

Our world is becoming more and more mechanised. As it does it means there is more division of labor. With more division of labor the average person has a more circumscribed life.

Thoreau said, "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." He was right.

I hope to outlive such crap as rock music and sitcoms, but that is what many people want. One can blame it on capitalism. You do. I don’t.

Dear Poirot,
thanks for the wonderful material you've posted on this thread. I knew of Ivan Illych, but not of Ivan Illich. I've had a look at a little of his thought online. It strikes me that writers like he and Erich Fromm seem idealistic and naive when read in the cynical context of our "end of history", and what Raymond Williams called our "negative freedoms" (freedom from constraint--but with no viable alternative life to be had).

Dear DavidF,
I am not "equating an industrialised mechanised society with a capitalist society", although arguably only under capitalism is commodity fetishism, production and diversification brought to such a pitch that all the world's resources, animal, mineral and vegetable, are manically processed, along with the means of production (who are also harnessed as rabid consumers, like farm animals being fed their own sh!t) to service the God of growth.
One inconsistency between the young and the old Marx is that he had to compromise is ideal of humanity dispersed among its labours according to strengths, and adopt a more realistic view of minimising drudge work and maximising leisure for more congenial activities. Most of us no longer have any idea of such "activities", and so praxis is dismissed as pie in the sky. Anyway, diversions are provided for us in abundance.

Btw, having spent many years in factories, I can assure you that sabotage, go slow production, etc. are common practices.

We will have to disagree; there is no question in my mind but that capitalism is the villain--indeed the grim reaper.

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Dear David F.,

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You raise a question of semantics. I understand "hierarchy" as not just any order but an order of prioritization.

You replied:

"In the example you gave in order of eating you chose to make a hierarchy of who gets served in order of their serving. However, one could as well have chosen to construct the hierarchy by starting with those who get served last or are least powerful".

The hierarchial "order of eating" exists independently of me. I did not lay the table nor did I choose who should eat first. The order of prioritization was determined by nature, not me.

Perhaps (though it remains to be demonstrated) we have an intellectual agility the other biological species do not have, enabling us to memorise the "chain of order" and recite it backwards.

Is it this intellectual agility which you attribute exclusively to human beings ? Are you referring to a theoretical, intellectual hierarchy (or prioritization) which you esteem man alone is capable of inventing ?

From a practical point of view (reality as opposed to intellectualization), I do not see how the hierarchy of "the order of eating" can be modified. How could the ants, as the last to be served, lick the bones of the carcass before the flesh of the slain animal has been removed by all the other members of the biological hierarchy in their respective sequential order of eating ?

When Jesus said: "the last shall be first", I do not think he was referring to the ants. They would have no chance penetrating the hide of wild buffalo. It's lions first, then all sorts of scavangers according to size and ferocity until the way is clear for the ants to lick the bones.

By the same token, simply reciting the hierarchy backwards, starting with "the ants lick the bones", cannot be deemed as changing the hierarchy. The hierarchy is a fixed structure, determined by nature, and remains unchanged.

It is a bit like turning a painting upside down. The painting remains unchanged whichever way we look at it.

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