In Memory of David Cayley

David Cayley – journalist, broadcaster, and public intellectual, associated with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for over 40 years – died on June 10th. Some deaths feel like the falling of an old tree, others like the end of an era, and still others the disappearance of a familiar star or maybe even like the last page of a long novel. Cayley’s death feels different. It feels like the closing of a conversation. It is as though one of the last people capable of sustaining a real conversation has quietly stepped out of the room, leaving the rest of us looking at one another and wondering whether we still remember how to talk to each other

The beauty of the word “conversation” lies in its suggestion that truth is not possessed but approached. Its Latin roots speak of turning together, of dwelling in one another’s company. A conversation is not merely words passing between two or more people; it is two or more lives slowly revolving around a shared center, each life changed by the other’s presence. The finest conversations do not end with victory for the one and defeat for the other. They end with the transformation of both people. Conversation is the opposite of transmission. Transmission moves information from one mind to another. Conversation creates a space in which neither person entirely controls what will emerge. It is not simply communication; it is communion in motion.

I have been circling David Cayley’s work for a long time, long enough that I no longer remember a point at which he was simply “a broadcaster” rather than a teacher, and (I’m humbled to say) even a companion in some ways. In my own essays and recorded conversations on the thought of Ivan Illich, I have often found myself returning to Cayley’s work as a kind of background radiation: not always noticed, but always present. He became part of the intellectual atmosphere in which a certain kind of Illich reception has taken shape. I once referred to him, to his face, as the “Wendell Berry of Canada” only to find I was connecting two points that had already been long joined, as he and “Wendell” had a regular correspondence. I should have known.

To me, his body of work for CBC Radio’s Ideas is the most remarkable sustained achievement in public intellectual life in the last half-century. That judgment only deepens the more one listens. His series on science, Simone Weil, William Blake, Northrop Frye, prison reform, technology, and religion, just to name a few, were not “programs” in any conventional sense. Instead, they were long-form acts of attention. They assumed, without apology, that listeners were capable of entering into sustained intellectual difficulty without needing it simplified into reassurance. In a media environment increasingly structured by interruption, Cayley’s work was governed by duration.

I am not an impartial observer. I own too many of his books. I also own cassette tapes—actual cassette tapes—of his Ideas conversations with Ivan Illich and of his series on Simone Weil. They sit on my shelf like artifacts from a vanished liturgy: analog, slightly fragile, and strangely insistent. Some people collect first editions. I appear to have collected the audio residue of a disappearing public sphere. When I was a campus minister, I’d have students show up just to listen to these tapes in a quiet room, with a candle lit. These were some of the most memorable gatherings I’ve ever been part of, and David Cayley was the host, though not physically present.

But, yes, my main connection with Cayley developed through our mutual appreciation for Ivan Illich. Cayley’s biography of Illich is a masterpiece, and my good friends know that when David told me that my review of his book was one of only two reviews that seemed to really get Illich, it felt like one of my life’s greatest intellectual achievements. There is, in fact, a small informal community of people who have been shaped by this kind of connection—people who came to Illich through Cayley, or to Cayley through Illich, and never quite left either behind. My own life in ministry and in the world of ideas has been, in a sense, an extended attempt to continue a conversation that Cayley helped make audible in the first place. A friend of mine named John, a man I met because of some things I’d recorded or written on Illich, has suggested that Cayley’s corpus might be read as the result of something like what designers call “negative space typography”—the practice of discerning a form by attending to the spaces around it rather than the lines themselves. It struck me immediately as right. David’s subject matter is obvious on the surface, but what he is “about” is less so.

Like Illich, he seems to be pointing toward something that is never quite the object of discussion. Illich wrote about schools, hospitals, transportation, energy, and development—but, as he repeatedly suggested, these were ways of speaking about something else entirely. Not as a hidden agenda, but as an apophatic discipline. He was trying to indicate the Church without turning it into an object; to speak of the historical consequences of the Incarnation without reducing it to a system of propositions. The Church, in this sense, was not an institution among others but the fragile historical reality made possible by the Word becoming flesh. Cayley learned to think in that same key. His interviews, especially with Illich, were not explanatory but exploratory. They did not resolve so much as they opened. One had the sense, while listening to his interviews, that language itself was being tested for its capacity to remain hospitable to reality. They were great because they were completely devoid of jargon, which is exceedingly hard to do when talking about “religion” or “faith.”

This also helps explain Cayley’s long-running engagement with Simone Weil. He admired her deeply, as did Illich, but shared Illich’s quiet reservation: that her attention to the transcendent sometimes came at the expense of historical consequence. Her Christianity, if one may put it this way, risked becoming too weightless, too detached from the irreversible transformations introduced into history by the Incarnation. For Illich—and increasingly for Cayley—that event does not float above history. It reorganizes it.

Late in his life, Cayley’s attention turned with increasing seriousness toward Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, whose work he seemed to have experienced as a confirmation of something he had long intuited. Rosenstock insists that language itself is shaped by the Incarnation, that history is not a neutral container for ideas but a field permanently altered by the advent of the Word.

It is here that the deeper unity of Cayley’s work becomes visible. Whether he is speaking about prisons, education, science, or Covid, the underlying concern is the same: what kind of human life becomes possible—or impossible—once we forget the historical reality that has shaped us?

That concern became especially visible during the Covid period, when Cayley’s essays resisted both panic and polemic. He worried less about specific policy outcomes than about the replacement of judgment with procedure, of neighbors with categories, of moral deliberation with technical management. Similarly, during Canada’s trucker protests, he insisted—again unfashionably—that understanding must precede judgment. Blessed are they that refuse abstraction!

The last time I spoke with David was over Zoom. A small group of friends—thinkers, writers, people drawn together by a shared interest in Illich and the question of how to live otherwise—had gathered to discuss the possibility of recovering something like a contemplative ecclesial imagination in our corner of Western New York. I invited him to give a kind of keynote David appeared on screen without any sense of performance. He listened more than he spoke. When he did speak, it was to refine rather than to dominate. It was, I realized later, an instance of something Illich called conspiratio.

Conspiratio, in its older sense, means “breathing together.” It names the fragile, unprogrammable event in which human beings come into shared presence without being absorbed into a system. It is the opposite of administration. It is what conversation becomes when it ceases to be exchange and becomes attention. David did not theorize this so much as enact it. One left his presence slightly more capable of listening than before. And nobody more than yours truly needs that.

David Cayley was never simply a critic of modernity. He is more accurately described, I think, as a patient witness to what becomes of conversation when it is either accelerated beyond recognition or reduced to information. His work is an extended attempt to preserve the possibility of speaking together in a way that does not immediately collapse into system, groupthink, ideology, or performance. This means attending to particulars, rather than letting our critique of “modernity” become yet another abstraction, or a general antipathy towards “technology.” It means making distinctions. Those cassette tapes, for example, require a kind of commitment to playback that no streaming service demands. They ask for patience. They resist speed. They refuse portability. In that sense, they are not unlike his work itself.

I like to imagine that the conversation has not ended but resumed elsewhere. Illich is there, still refusing easy conclusions. Rosenstock-Huessy is tracing unexpected connections across centuries. Simone Weil is present, the disagreement with Illich somehow transformed into something like clarity. And David, as always, is asking another question—not to interrupt, but to make space.

That is what he was always doing here as well.

May he rest in peace.

Image Credit: The Globe and Mail