The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich

David Cayley

House of Anansi

Ivan Illich, the philoso­pher whose voice can still be heard from time to time on Ideas on CBC Radio, bases his cri­tique of west­ern cul­ture in the twelfth cen­tury (not a Dark Age at all, but the peak of the first Industrial Revolution), a time that he seems to have absorbed into his being, and of which he speaks and writes inti­mately; from that momen­tous time he is able to show us today advanc­ing into a dis­em­bod­ied world. Part of his the­sis is that the Church, in insti­tu­tion­al­iz­ing the Gospel (which itself promised to embody us in the flesh), cre­ated the con­di­tions for the expe­ri­ence of mech­a­niza­tion that shaped human sen­si­bil­ity in the West dur­ing the ensu­ing “epoch of instru­men­tal­ity” (cul­mi­nat­ing in the nine­teenth cen­tury) and evolved into the vir­tu­al­iza­tion of present-day cul­ture that teaches us to inhabit immune sys­tems rather than bod­ies — that is, as Illich demon­strates, we have come to inhabit the bod­ies that the Windows oper­at­ing sys­tem requires of us. This is one of those books that demon­strate think­ing in action, and like a great story or a great poem that inspires you to want to write one your­self, it makes you want to think, to do some think­ing your­self. For Illich, like Gilbert Ryle, like Walter Benjamin, think­ing, and think­ing out loud, is a means of embrac­ing real­ity, of min­gling with the world. David Cayley, whose work is often heard on CBC Ideas, has done a great ser­vice in preparing The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (House of Anansi), a text that makes a per­fect com­pan­ion to The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, the works of Walter Benjamin and The Tibetan Book of the Dead.