Podcasts - davidcayley.com

In 1970, when Ivan Illich was enjoying, and suffering a moment of world-wide celebrity, he explained to me what he thought had caused this vogue. His views were so utterly orthodox, he said, and so deeply rooted in the first Christian millennium that he appeared enticingly radical to contemporaries who had completely lost touch with these roots. Perhaps it was this remark that persuaded me to pay attention when I first heard, nearly thirty years later, of a theological movement called Radical Orthodoxy. It began when my friend Lee Hoinacki urged me to read Catherine Pickstock’s book After Writing: On the LIturgical Consummation of Philosophy. From there I was led to John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, the manifesto-like magnum opus that first announced this new tendency, and to an anthology called Radical Orthodoxy in which these two writera and co-conspirator Graham Ward were joined by other thinkers who shared their view that the gateway to the future lies in a reappropriation of a misappropriated past. In 2006, on a visit to England, I was able to interview Pickstock and Milbank and to present the following thumbnail sketch of their thinking. Pickstock had been up with a sick child the night before she met me at her Cambridge college and insisted that she was barely compos mentis, but, in my view, she rose admirably to the occasion. Later, I met John Milbank at his home in Southwell, a old cathedral own in Nottinghamshire that I had known of old because my mother’s family came from nearby Mansfield. Five years later, I interviewed Milbank again, for a more extensive treatment of his thinking. That program can be found on this site in the series called The Myth of the Secular.

This past summer there was a brief flaring of concern about rainforest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon. Panicked headlines portrayed the whole region as on fire, the President of France took the President of Brazil to task, and ‘the lungs of the planet” were said to be risk. Brazil’s Foreign Minister responded by saying that the number of fires were not above average. This was presumably meant as reassurance, as well as defiance, It was, in fact, a tricky claim - there had been past years when there were even more fires, though the number in 2019 was double the number of the year before - but, even if it had been true, it would not have been that reassuring. The Brazilian rainforest has been on fire for a long time, as I think the following series will make clear.For two years in the mid-1960’s I lived near the little town of Sibu in the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo, a vast region of tropical rainforest. By the later 1980’s I was hearing, again and again, of a logging boom there. Not only were valuable tropical hardwoods being sold so cheap that they ended up in shipping pallets and other similarly wasteful uses, but forest peoples were losing their homes and livelihoods. Similar stories were coming from Brazil and elsewhere. I began to investigate, and the result was this five-hour effort, broadcast in 1989. It gathered stories from Sarawak and Brazil - but also from Canada where acid rain was believed responsible for the declining health of maple forests. - and it reflected on forest ecology and forest conservation through the world.Thirty years later, it remains germane, although many details may be out-of-date. It also contains a number of inspiring accounts of resistance from around the world. One caution concerns the conclusion of the fifth and final program in the series that maple decline in Canada was a direct result of acid rain. New scientific evidence, presented in the year after these broadcast, suggested that damage to roots sustained during an unusually harsh winter in the later 1970’s was also playing a key role in maple decline. This theory received some confirmation, when the maple bush began to recover out of proportion with any declines in acid rain. This demonstration that scientific theories are always, more or less, provisional became a lasting lesson to me and seems relevant at a time when the expression “settled science” has become something of an ideological cudgel.A transcript of the series is available on the transcripts page of this site. The lineo-up of speakers was as follows:#1 - José Lutzenberger, Barbara Zimmerman, Tom Lovejoy, Kenton Miller, Adrian Forsyth, Richard Evans Schultes, Susanna Hecht, Dan Janzen#2 - Job Dudley Tausinga, Theodore Panayotou, Bruno Manser, Mat Sylvan, Martin Khor, Randy Hayes, Peggy Hallward, John Seed, Neville Wren, Martin Teni#3 - Simon Dick, Catherine Howard, Susanna Hecht, Peggy Hallward, Darrell Posey, Guujaw#4 - Steve Schwartzman, Susanna Hecht, Robert Kasten, Ted Macdonald, Gary Hartshorn, Theodore Panayotou, Bill Burch, Kenton Miller#5 - Michael Herman, Arch Jones, Dick Klein, Dale Willows, Tom Hutchinson, Robert Bruck, Bernard Ulrich, Don Goltz, Ian MacLachlan

This series was first broadcast in the spring of 2012, my last year at Ideas. Since then these shows have been available through the Ideas website. I learned this week that they no longer are, so I am now making them available here. In my original plan these programs were to form one big series with the seven episodes of The Myth of The Secular which I have already posted. They were broken apart only for convenience in scheduling, and because these five seemed sufficiently similar in theme to be able to stand together on their own.What was on my mind, broadly speaking, at the time they went to air, was the so-called “return of religion” - a figure which I thought described a resurgence of religion in philosophy, as much as in politics. In politics this movement is sometimes traced back to the years around 1980. Fundamentalist Christians played a crucial role in the rise of Ronald Reagan in the United States, producing what political theorist William Connolly called “the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine.” In Iran a theocratic revolution replaced the secular government of the Shah with a regime in which the Ayatollah Khomeini became the Supreme Leader. The prediction of an earlier generation of sociologists that religion would soon drown in a rising tide of secularization had failed - and quite spectacularly. In philosophy, the “linguistic turn” had led to widespread acceptance of the idea that our knowledge has no absolutely secure and unassailable foundation. Faith was suddenly something that philosophy and theology have in common, rather than what sets them apart. Parisian philosophers began writing in praise of the apostle Paul as a paragon of committed knowledge.Religion’s restored prominence produced a backlash from the defenders of science and enlightenment. The so-called “new atheists” appeared. “God is not great,” sputtered Christopher Hitchens. Religion is childish, incoherent nonsense, said biologist Richard Dawkins. I found this response obtuse, but not because I wanted to speak for some unreconstructed revenant called religion. I thought rather that there was new ground to be mapped - a new and perhaps unprecedented religious situation to be investigated. Philosopher Richard Kearney, who leads off this series, had then just published a book called Anatheism: Returning to God after God. His new word, anatheism, gave a name to the condition I was interested in exploring - one that was neither theistic nor atheistic in the older sense of these terms. (The God Who May Be, an earlier series in which I first introduced Kearney on Ideas is also available on this site.) The other thinkers in the series echo Kearney - John Caputo speaks of “religion after religion” in much the same sense as Kearney speaks of “God after God.” James Carse makes the case that “belief” is not definitive of religion. Roger Lundin, adapting a phrase of W.H. Auden’s, speaks of “believing again” as something fundamentally different than naive first belief. William Cavanaugh, who had then just published a collection called Migrations of the Holy, argues that the main site of “religion” in our world is not the church but the state. These five comprise the line-up of the series in the following order:Program One - Richard KearneyProgram Two - John CaputoProgram Three - William CavanaughProgram Four - James CarseProgram Five - Roger Lundin

I first heard of Richard Sennett through a broadcast on Ideas in the later 1970’s. He was discussing his book The Fall of Public Man which had been published in 1974. The book, in very curt summary, argues that public life has been diminished by the idea that the intimate and the personal is always more intensely “real” than the more formal and artificial gestures which inevitably structure the interactions of relative strangers in public. Sennett was reacting, most immediately, to that current of 1960’s thought which had argued that “the personal is political” and that the path to liberation lay in bringing the private out of the shadows and making it public. But he takes his story back to the 18th century when the public world, in his view, still provided a stage on which people could act at a certain remove from the nagging questions of identity - who am I? - which so dominate contemporary discourse. This public realm, he argues, was undermined by the cult of authenticity which began to take hold in the 19th century and now exerts almost total sway. For me Sennett’s book was an aid to reflection on a topic which continues to preoccupy me today: what do we mean by the word public when we speak, for example, of public broadcasting. At the time The Fall of Public Man appeared, and even more today, most people involved in public broadcasting were in full retreat from any appearance of formality in their broadcasting style. The preferred stance is casual, the preferred tone familiar, as if one were addressing an intimate friend and not, as is actually the case, a distant stranger. Sennett helped me to develop a thought that had already begun to occur to me - that this collapse of the distance between broadcaster and listener might be a dangerous and de-politicizing illusion - the substitution of a self-serving mirage for real community.The character of public life has been one of two great subjects that Richard Sennett has pursued during a long career as a sociologist. In books like Flesh and Stone, from which I took the title for this series, he has studied the ways in which city life is embodied and experienced, and the ways in which urban form has fostered or inhibited the encounters that, for him, are the glory of urbanity. His second great subject has been work, and the social classes it defines. His 1973 book, with Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class explored the painful ways in which class is experienced in a society like the United States in which the very existence of social hierarchy is often denied. Later, he studied the new world of precarious and fragmented work in a series of books that began with 1998’s The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, and continued with Respect in a World of Inequality, and The Culture of the New Capitalism, which had just appeared went I went to New York to interview him at his home in Manhattan in 2006. Both subjects are treated in a graceful literary style, in which story-telling takes precedence over the quantitative methods of many of his sociological colleagues. In what follows, Sennett talks about his urbanism in the first episode, and his sociology of work in the second…

In 1988 I broadcast a series of programs called “Literacy: The Medium and the Message”which I have already posted on this site. The series explored the latest scholarship on a theme first broached at the University of Toronto by Harold Innis: how the techniques by which we communicate shape the way we think about the world. It was recorded at a conference organized by two University of Toronto professors, David Olson and Derrick de Kerckhove, and held at the University of Toronto in 1987. Five years later David Olson organized a two-day workshop which posed the topic of modes of thought, or mentalities, in more general terms - looking not just at the cognitive implications of orality and literacy but at all the ways in which our styles and habits of thought are formed. He assembled psychologists, anthropologists, historians and philosopher interested in this question, and, knowing of my continuing interest in the subject, he again invited me to observe and report on the proceeedings. The result was a book called Modes of Thought, edited by David and Nancy Torrance, which was published by Cambridge in 1996, and a series of four radio programs, also called “Modes of Thought” which I broadcast in 1995. Their theme, to say the least, remains current. The participants are as follows: Part One: David Olson, Brian Stock, and Myron TumanPart Two: Jerome Bruner, Carole Feldman, and Keith OatleyPart Three: Geoffrey Lloyd, Paul Thagard, and Deanna KuhnPart Four: Scott Attran and Ian Hacking

Herman Bianchi (1924-2015) In 1992, as a result of an introduction from Ivan Illich, I visited Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie in Oslo and recorded several days of interviews that would be broadcast the following year as “Crime Control as Industry.” This set off an unexpected chain of consequences which kept me for a nearly a decade preoccupied with the question of crime and punishment. A number of series already posted on this site reflect this interest. They include, as well as the aforementioned “Crime Control as Industry,” “Prison and Its Alternatives” (1996), “To Hurt and To Heal,” (2000") and “In Search of Security” (2004). One of the most interesting books I came across during these amateur forays into criminology was Justice as Sanctuary by Dutch criminologist Herman Bianchi. It was first published in English in 1994 and has, happily, been kept in print by Wipf and Stock who republished it in 2010. At the time the book appeared in the English-speaking world, Bianchi was one of many thinkers who were then questioning the cruelty and irrationality of modern criminal justice “systems.” What I found striking in his work was his recuperation of Biblical concepts of justice and mercy, and his pointing out that monolithic conceptions of law are of relatively recent date. William Blackstone, for example, writing in his 18th Century Commentaries on the Laws of England says that ten different bodies of law were then in force in England, each exerting distinct but overlapping jurisdictions. The types of law he mentions range from the “divine law” to the “law merchant.” The right of sanctuary from which Bianchi’s book takes its title is a case in point. Churches afforded sanctuary because within their walls the divine law applied, not the criminal law. From such a sanctuary someone who had committed a wrong could attempt to negotiate restitution and settlement. The contemporary offender stands in the dock without initiative or dignity. The fact that he or she has committed a personal wrong that might in some way be remedied hardly matters - it is “society” and its monolithic law that must be satisfied. I was fascinated by Bianchi’s book, and, in the spring of 1997, I arranged to interview him. He received me, very hospitably, in his snug converted farmhouse in Friesland, a northern province of The Netherlands. There over two days as his guest I recorded the interviews that make up this series. It was broadcast in the fall of that year. Herman Bianchi died in 2015. I never met him again and never really found out what he thought of the programs I made. It seems to me that they remain as interesting and challenging today as they were twenty years ago.

I had not been a reader of C.B. Macpherson up until the time of his death in September of 1987, but I knew enough of his reputation, and the scale of his influence within political science in Canada and around the world to think that Ideas should pay tribute to someone who had clearly been one of the outstanding scholars and thinkers of his generation. One of the pleasures of preparing the series was reading Macpherson - at last - and coming to share the assessment of so many of his contemporaries and students. One of them, Ed Broadbent, then the federal leader of the New Democratic Party, thought of him "one of the great thinkers in the democratic tradition" - not just one of the great Canadian thinkers, Broadbent added, but a contributor to the great tradition of political thought "stretching from Marx and Mill up to the present." Doing the interviews, once I had boned up on my Macpherson, was an equal pleasure. So many people acknowledged and appreciated Macpherson as an interpreter of modern political thought that I easily found enthusiastic interlocutors. Their tributes follow...

In Between Two Ages, the first long series I did for Ideas in early 1981, I began to explore the unique character of our historical moment, and to advance the idea that only a radical change of mind could respond to its demands. Three years later, I got a chance to follow up that initial effort with the present series. Its organizing image or paradigm is the idea of a new age – the way in which I then spoke about my dawning recognition that received social and political forms are quite unable to grasp humanity’s new situation. The intervening thirty-four years have made me more tentative, but, if you take away a certain brash, post-1960's confidence that a reconciliation between men and women, modernity and tradition, humanity and nature was on the horizon, there is much in that way of looking at things that I would still affirm today. Certainly the sparkling cast I managed to assemble makes this series worth revisiting. Among its luminaries are Northrop Frye, Raimundo Panikkar, Robert J. Lifton, Father Thomas Berry and many others, whose names I have listed below.One of the characteristic features of the documentary form, as I’ve observed when re-introducing other old series as well, is that many different points of view are made to align and march, more or less, in the same direction. A few years later, I would have treated the many thinkers represented here separately, and tried to understand what was distinctive in each one’s approach. I don’t mean I have papered over their differences here, or that there was anything promiscuous about the way I assembled these particular people. Each one was, in some way, a teacher to me, and each one’s work bore on the themes that I wanted to develop. I mean only that, once one has interviewed so many people, the challenge of integrating them all into a more or less coherent structure, leaves little room for the contextualization of each speaker, or for consideration of all the ways in which they differ from one another, and from the consenus, however rough, that I was imposing on them by smushing them all together in one program. That said, I still find that these shows make interesting listening. The dramatis personae is as follows: Part One: Dhyane Ywahoo, Northrop Frye, Joseph Brown, Raimundo Panikkar, Derrick de Kerckhove, Thomas Berry, Ewart CousinsPart Two: Dhyani Ywahoo, Joseph Brown, Richard Lee, Ashley Montagu, Stanley Diamond, Joseph CampbellPart Three: Walter Odajnyk, Robert J. Lifton, Ira Progroff, Jean Houston, Richard MossPart Four: David Spangler, Northrop Frye, Raimundo Panikkar, Ewart Cousins, Thomas Berry, Matthew Fox

My old Ideas colleague Max Allen and I would sometimes talk about how much the reputation of a broadcast could depend on its timing. Some programmes, we thought, were sent into the world ahead of their time, others came after their hour had struck, and every now and then there was one was lucky enough to arrive right on time. This series, it seemed to me, arrived on the scene a little before the moment at which it might have received the hearing I would have wished for it. It was made in 2003, and broadcast in early 2004, and seemed to get a little lost in the long shadow of 9/11. A few years later, a critical investigation of topics like policing, national security, risk consciousness and surveillance might have been more welcome.The occasion of the series was a massive conference. called "In Search of Security," which was organized by the Law Society of Canada and held in Montreal in the winter of 2003. The Law Society is now defunct, discontinued by the government of Stephen Harper, but, at that time, it was doing research and trying to stimulate public discussion on the expansion of the private security industry, both in Canada and world-wide. The Montreal conference addressed this subject extensively, but also went beyond it, as the broad title "In Search of Security" suggests. I built on the conference to create this series. The majority of the interviews were with people I encountered there, but I also added a few voices that were not part of the conversation in Montreal and took up some subjects that were not featured as prominently there as they are in my series. Thanks are due to Dennis Cooley, then the Law Commission's Director of Research, for involving me in the Commission's work in the first place, and then assembling the international gathering in Montreal that allowed me to create this series. I have indicated the topic of each programme, and the participants, below. A transcript is available on the Transcripts page of the site. Part One: THE RISE OF PRIVATE SECURITY IN CANADA - Christopher Murphy, Ross McLeod, Domenic Mammoli, Kirk Briscoe, Neil Moran, Robert Buffone, Gaétan Héroux, George Rigakos, Stephen Schneider, Jacques Duschesneau, Dale KinnearPart Two: THE RISE OF PRIVATE SECURITY WORLD-WIDE - Vadim Volkoff, Renata Ferraz, Clifford Shearing, Deborah Avant, Christopher Spearin, Peter Singer, Doug BrooksPart Three: THE THOUGHT OF CLIFFORD SHEARING - Clifford Shearing, Adam Crawford, Marianna ValverdePart Four: POLICE REFORM - Benoit Dupont, Bob Lunney, David Kennedy, Eli Silverman, Marianna ValverdePart Five: THE POWER OF THE POLICE - John Sewell, Bob Lunney, Chris Murphy, Susan Eng, Julian Falconer, Shirley Heafey, Philip StenningPart Six: SECURITY WITHOUT THE STATE - Vince Del Buono, Benoit Dupont, Pamela Leach, Clifford Shearing, Madeleine Jenneker, John CartwrightPart Seven: SECURITY CONSCIOUSNESS - Christopher Murphy, Jonathan Simon, Ian Loader, Willem de Lint, Lucia Zedner, Kate MartinPart Eight: NATIONAL SECURITY IN CANADA - Andrew Mitrovica, Matthew Behrens, Ali Hindy, Sophie Harkat, Barbara Jackman, Michel Juneau-Katsuya, Shirley Heafey, Don StuartPart Nine: RISK - Clifford Shearing, Pat O’Malley, Jonathan Simon, Allen Bonner, Kevin Haggerty, Richard EricsonPart Ten: SURVEILLANCE - Mark Perry, Roch Tassé, Kate Martin, David Lyon, Katherine Lippel

This series, from 1983, gave me a chance to ponder issues, concerning the power and responsibility of journalistic media, that had preoccupied me every since I had begun working for CBC Radio twelve years before. Two "hooks" provided the occasion. The first was the calling of a Royal Commission to consider the problem of growing monopoly in the newspaper business. This was the Kent Commission, after commissioner Tom Kent, which reported in 1981. The second was the publication, in 1980, of the book which gave the series its title, Anthony Smith's The Geo-Politics of Information, a book on the clamour in what was then generally called the Third World for a New World Information Order, so-called, one not totally dominated by Western media. Both of these question are addressed - the history (and myth) of the free press in Part One, the New World Information Order debate in Part Two - but the series also allowed me to go further. Part Three looks at foreign news and draws heavily on the work of Noam Chomsky and Edward Said. Chomsky had recently published, with Edward Herman, a two volume work called The Political Economy of Human Rights, which had had a huge influence in shaping my view of media. In these books Chomsky and Herman show how a nominally free press faithfully reproduces what they call "imperial ideology." Said, for his part, had just brought out Covering Islam, a book in which he brought the thesis of his celebrated Orientalism into the present with a consideration of contemporary news coverage of Islamic countries. The final show of the set focused on the news industry's "mode of production" and the ways in which it shapes its finished product. One notable thing about this series was the number of prominent scholars in the field who agreed to take part. I have mentioned Chomsky and Said, but there was also Stuart Hall, James Curran, Gaye Tuchman, Lewis Lapham, Todd Gitlin and many others. Another was the strength of the interviews I recorded for the series, which led me into my first questioning of the documentary format in which I was then working. Documentaries have narrative requirements which tend to dictate how the component interviews will be edited. Mad Magazine used to joke, in a satire on the New York Times famous slogan, "all the news thats fit to print," that it presented "all the news that fits the print"; and documentaries are the same. The "clips" that will be cut out of the interviews will be those that fit the narrative requirements of the documentary. This generally precludes any sustained attention to the individual character or context of the thinkers who are quoted. Reflection on this issue led to the approach that I generally took in my work for Ideas after 1990 in which my subjects, wherever possible, were presented one-at-a-time and in depth.The participants in the series were as follows:Part One: Paul Rutherford, James Curran, Anthony Smith, Stuart Hall, Lewis Lapham, Carman Cumming, Todd GitlinPart Two: Juan Somavia, Rohan Samarajiva, Herbert Schiller, Anthony Smith, Tom McPhail, Bill Harley, Barry ZwickerPart Three: Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Noam Chomsky, James Aronson, Tom KentPart Four: Stuart Hall, Lewis Lapham, Gaye Tuchman, James Curran,Todd Gitlin, Carman Cumming, Paul Rutherford, Jeremy Wilson, Noam ChomskyA transcript of the series is available on the Transcripts page of the site. 

Despite his his originality and his influence as a thinker, the work of Leopold Kohr remains too little known. His philosophy in a nutshell was contained in his crucial book The Breakdown of Nations, published in 1957, where he wrote: "...there seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness...Whenever something is wrong, something is too big." The idea that everything has its proper size had been developed in the biological sciences by D'arcy Thompson in his 1917 book On Growth and Form, and later by J.B.S. Haldane in his essay "On Being the Right Size," but Kohr was the first, so far as I know, to apply it to the human and social worlds, creating what Ivan lllich called a "social morphology." E. F. Schumacher was Kohr's student, and brought Kohr's idea to wide attention in Small Is Beautiful (1973). Illich, likewise, acknowledged Kohr as his teacher and inspiration in books like Tools for Conviviality and others.I was lucky to meet Kohr in the summer of 1989 when he came to Toronto to lecture at a gathering of his fellow decentralists. He was already in his eightieth year and somewhat deaf, but still a lively and charming speaker and companion. Happily, he had a couple of hours free to sit down and talk with me in the Ideas studio. The following programme was broadcast shortly afterwards. A transcript can be found on the Transcripts page which I have recently added to the site...

This series had its genesis at a meeting of the Royal Society of Canada - in 1985, as I recall, though it may have been the year before. The subject was the relations of religion and science, and several of the people featured in this series were present - among others physicist Iain Stewart, philosopher Albert Shalom, and British scientist James Lovelock, whose "Gaia hypothesis" was then still new and controversial. I had long been interested in the developments in physics and other sciences that were leading some to speak of a "new science," and in the implications of these developments for theology and philosophy, so I took the Royal Society meeting as a starting point for the following programmes. The series came back to mind recently when I read an essay David Bohm had contributed to a festschrift for Owen Barfield back in the 1970's. Bohm, an adventurous philosopher physicist, is one of the featured speakers in the second programme of the series, along with Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel laureate in chemistry for his work on irreversibility, complex systems, and what he called dissipative structures. Also featured are James Lovelock and Rupert Sheldrake, whose then recently published A New Science of Life had so scandalized fellow biologist Sir John Maddox, the editor of the journal Nature, that he had declared it a "candidate for burning." Reading Bohm's essay, it seemed to me it was time to share these still vital and interesting voices.Discussion of religion and science has a long history, but the discussion entered a new phase in the years before these programmes were broadcast in 1985. Among the reasons were recent experimental confirmation of the reality of quantum entanglement, or what Einstein had called "spooky action at a distance"; and the appearance of the sciences of complexity and emergent order, sciences which were then completing the job begun by early 20th century physics in overturning the postulates of classical science. The world according to science was becoming more subtle and mysterious. Rupert Sheldrake suggested that it was time to replace the old metaphor of "laws of nature" with something more provisional like "the habits of nature." David Bohm suggested that mind and matter must have "the same basic order" - two aspects of a single underlying process. Ilya Prigogine dared to "dream...about a more unified culture" in which science no longer posited a universe in which human consciousness is an anomaly. In what follows scientists, philosophers, and theologians discuss the implications of this "new science." More than thirty years have elapsed since these shows were first broadcast, and no doubt details would need to be changed if they were to revised today, but it seems to me that the outlines hold up pretty well. I should also note that the series was honoured by the Canadian Science Writers Association as the year's best radio programme. My work rarely attracted prizes, but this was an exception, and the $1,000 that went with it, I recall, was a welcome addition to a then somewhat strained household budget... The people heard in the series, in order of appearance, are as follows:Part One: James Lovelock, Morris Berman, Rupert Sheldrake, Stephen Toulmin, Albert Shalom, Philip Hefner, Trevor Levere, Ravi Ravindra, Ilya Prigogine, Jacob NeedlemanPart Two: David Bohm, James Lovelock, Rupert Sheldrake, Ilya Prigogine, David PeatPart Three: Stephen Toulmin, Robert Rosen, Iain Stewart, David Bohm, Philip Hefner, Thomas Berry, Jacob Needleman, Ravi Ravindra

"We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and. growth of underdeveloped areas." -U.S. President Harry Truman, Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1949This series is another in the set of programmes I made between 1985 and 1985 on the theme of "development." In this. case, the programmes were an overflow from "The Age of Ecology," an eight hour series broadcast in the spring of 1990, which was already longer than anything one person had presented on Ideas before. (Going back to the 1970's, there had been lots of lengthy Ideas series on big themes like "Rivers" or "Balance and Biosphere" but they always assembled the work of many different programme-makers. I was pushing the limits of what could be done by one writer/broadcaster.). Creating a separate series for the interviews concerned, broadly speaking, with economic development made sense, and "Redefining Development" was the result. These programmes took up many of the same issues as "The Earth is Not an Ecosytem," broadcast a couple of years later. The first considered the question of whether development could be renewed and refocused under the name sustainable development. David Brooks, then with the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, argued for this view. Wolfgang Sachs asserted, to the contrary, that development was a concept, deserving only "an obituary," as he put it in The Development Dictionary, a volume he edited and published two years after this broadcast. The second programme featured Patricia Adams of Toronto's Probe International. She had just published Odious Debts, a study of the debt crisis produced by all the lending and borrowing that had gone on in the name of development. With reference to a doctrine in international law which allows repudiation of debts where the money is misappropriated or the debt is undertaken under fraudulent circumstances, she claimed that many of the debts incurred were "odious," The third broadcast gave the stage to Herman Daly, an American economist who had spent much of his career reflecting on how to get to a no-growth, or steady state economy. And, finally, I presented Robert Swann and Susan Witt of the Schumacher Society in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, pioneers in creating the modallities of a new economics through their work in developing local currencies and community land trusts. The series was broadcast in the fall of 1990... 

In 1966, at the age of twenty, I joined the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), one of the many volunteer organizations that sprang up in the 1960's to promote "international development." Outside of Canada, and often within Canada as well, the easiest way to identify CUSO was as "the Canadian Peace Corps" — after the civilian "army" created by John Kennedy to help nations, as he said, "struggling for economic and social progress." Most industrialized countries had such an organization, and their volunteers often flocked together during those years. At the time I joined CUSO I had little attachment to the idea of development, and little knowledge of it. I was impelled more by a romantic image of India, which had begun when I read Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, and I thought that CUSO might help me to get there. In the event, there was no place for me in India, but I was offered a situation in Sarawak, one of the eastern provinces of Malaysia which lies along the northwestern coast of the Island of Borneo. I accepted and was plunged willy-nilly into the world of development.. Two years later, back in Canada, I began to associate with a group of "returned volunteers" whose experiences had made them, like me, increasingly quizzical about the idea of development. We were not alone. By the end of the 1960's — the "development decade," as the U.N. had proclaimed it — development had begun to appear to a lot of people as a neo-colonial undertaking. Fundamental economic relationships between rich and poor remained unequal and exploitative, and dribs and drabs of"development assistance" seemed more like sugar coating than real justice. More adventurous currents of thought questioned the very idea of development, as a one-size-fits-all blueprint for "modern" societies. Pre-eminent among these more adventurous thinkers, for me, was Ivan Illich, then the presiding spirit of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. In 1968 in Chicago, he lectured to another group of volunteers, the Conference on Inter-American Student Projects, and advised them to come to Latin America as students, if they would, but not as helpers or, in his words, "demonstration models for high service consumption." This lecture spoke to me and, around it, my own nascent criticisms of development began to coalesce — the beginning of a relationship that continues to occupy me to this day, fifteen years after Illich's death. In 1970, my friends and I brought him to Toronto, along with many other critics of the. development crusade, for a big "teach-in" called "Crisis in Development."Eighteen years later I prevailed on Illich to do a series of interviews with me for Ideas. They were broadcast early in 1989 under the name "Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman: Conversations with Ivan Illich", and you can find them on this page under "Illich." The interviews were recorded in State College Pennsylvania, the home of the Pennsylvania State University, where lllich then gave a weekly lecture series during the fall term. When I arrived there, I found him immersed in an on-going consultation with friends and colleagues called, bluntly, "After Development, What?" This meeting was one of several such gatherings that would eventually lead to the publication of The Development Dictionary (Zed Books, 1992). This was an attempt, in the words of its editor Wolfgang Sachs, to write an "obituary" for the "age of development," in the form of a series of essays on keywords in the development discourse. As I got to know Illich better, and was drawn into his world, I would join this attempt to find a way of speaking of livelihood "after development." The result was several radio series, which I now want to present on this site.The first of these, "The Earth is Not an Ecosystem," was broadcast on Ideas in 1992, the year many of the world's leaders gathered with great fanfare in Rio De Janeiro to redefine economic progress as "sustainable development" at the so-called Earth Summit. In the same year, a group of representatives of grass-roots organizations from around world met in Orford, Quebec under the auspices of the Montreal-based InterCulture Institute. The institute's, for me, invaluable journal, also called InterCulture, had for years been a voice for those who challenged the very idea of a monolithic, universally valid process called development and an advocate of what might be called deep pluralism. In Orford, alternatives to development rather than "sustainable development" comprised the agenda. One of InterCulture's main inspiration, the Hindu/Spanish priest and philosopher, Raimon Panikkar, was there. So were several of the people I had first met at the "After Development, What?" meetings in State College in 1988, including, notably, Gustavo Estava from Mexico and Majid Rahnema from Iran. The line-up of the six programmes is as follows:Part One - Raimon Panikkar and Nick Hildyard; Part Two - David Tuchschneider and Tierno Kane; Part Three - Gustavo Estava; Part Four - Smithu Kothari; Part Five - Majid Rahnema; Part Six - Didiji (Swadhayaya), Majid Rahnema, and R.K. Srivastava.The image above is from an altarpiece by the medieval painter Meister Bertrand, now displayed in the Kunsthalle of Hamburg, where I fell under its spell. Its Christian cosmology is just one many possible examples of the ways in which the earth can be imagined as something other than an ecosystem.