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His charisma, brilliance and spirituality were clear to anyone who encountered him; these qualities sustained him in a heroic level of activity over the last 10 years in the context of terrible suffering caused by a disfiguring cancer. Following the thesis of [his book] Medical Nemesis, he administered his own medication against the advice of doctors, who proposed a largely sedative treatment which would have rendered his work impossible.— From the 2002 obituary of the great historian Ivan Illich
There’s something dystopian about our commitment to the present, our habitual unwillingness to historicize our habits: to place them in the context of the past, and the last the past view — and therefore judge — the present. We live without the past; we administer the present, and all its drugs, like a drug. We have lost the art of mourning transitions; we simply transition as rapidly as possible into new modes of being, applying new techniques of being as fast as they are advertised to us. Epistemic breaks happen faster and faster. New modes of knowledge are created only to be immediately forgotten. We, somewhat giddily, discuss technological adaptations during the time of the pandemic, but we seem disinterested in The Good in the time of the pandemic: in how to maintain living bonds between people, how to maintain the flame of the spirit in a time of profound physical and cognitive alienation.
