NEW SCARE CITY

Illich on iTunes

2012-02-13T19:56:00.001-05:00

In the USA, anyway, Ivan Illich has made his debut in the iTunes store. Available for downloading as electronic books are two titles by David Cayley: Ivan Illich in Conversation and The Rivers North of the Future. They are priced at $12.99 and $11.99, respectively. The downloads are formatted in Apple's iBooks format and are viewable on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch.

Notably absent from the electronic book listing is Illich's In the Vineyard of the Text. (Amazon doesn't sell this title as an electronic book, either.)

Sitting on the floor

2012-02-07T17:21:00.001-05:00

A 2009 thesis titled “The Separation of Shit and State, Water Sovereignty and the New Commons in Cuernavaca, Mexico," describes an undergraduate's experiences meeting and studying with some of Illich's collaborators.

One of the thesis's more interesting sentences:

It is rumored [Illich] spoke as many as fifteen languages, and never sat in a chair, as he believed they made you less mobile.

Actually, we specifically remember seeing Illich sitting in a chair, the one time we met him, in early 1985, but we also remember being surprised to see him sit on the floor while others were in chairs. It was a remarkable sight, his long legs crossed or stretched out in front of him. How limber he is, we remember thinking, almost child-like, sitting down there like that. ("I'll have two," he said when our host, a minister, offered up a cold six-pack of not-particularly-good beer in cans.)

Barry Sanders recalls seeing Illich sitting cross-legged on a couch. And there are accounts of Illich's university seminars in which he often sat cross-legged on the table around which everyone else was in a chair.

Words as part of the Gross National Product

2012-02-06T19:25:00.001-05:00

In 1980, Ivan Illich published in CoEvolution Quarterly a three-part essay titled "Vernacular Values." Its parts - 'The Three Dimensions of Social Choice,' 'The War Against Subsistence,' and 'The Imposition of Taught Mother Tongue' - made up the heart of a 1981 book, Shadow Work. "Vernacular Values" is available for reading on the Web, complete with Illich's letter explaining to CoEvolution (and Whole Earth Catalog) editor Stewart Brand what he was up to.

But as we've just discovered, a predecessor to that third section of the essay on vernacular values was published in 1978 by John Ohliger, a friend of Illich's and fierce critic of adult, aka lifetime, education. A short piece called "The Waning of the Vernacular" appeared in the first issue of Ohliger's newsletter, called Second Thoughts, revealing some of Illich's thinking as he struggled to develop a history of scarcity. That essay is available online here. Noting its 2004 copyright, we take the liberty of reprinting it here.

THE WANING OF THE VERNACULAR

By IVAN ILLICH

Language has become expensive. A lot of money is spent on it today. It is spent to decide what shall be said, who shall say it, how and when, and on deciding what kind of people should be reached by the speaker or writer. Words are a large but hidden category of the national output measured in the Gross National Product. Most of the words that are designed and pronounced at high cost are meant to be parroted. They are meant to imprint the thought and the speech of vast numbers of people. Tax money and corporate dollars are spent to finance adult education classes and school programs where people are taught to speak and read as they should. We spend money to make the poor speak a little more like the wealthy, the sick a little more like the healthy, the layperson a little more like the professional. We spend more and more on many professional jargony lingos taught in college and adult education programs; just enough to make the students feel dependent on the psychologist, the physician, or other experts. Thus education is to a large extent language instruction but it is not the sole public enterprise that attunes the ears and tongues. For instance, the purveyors of television entertainment and TV commercials, government agency heads and corporate leaders employing large bureaucracies, also work toward these ends.

Energy accounting, barely thought of ten years ago, has now become an established practice. It's relatively easy today to find out how many energy units have gone into growing, harvesting, packaging, transporting, and merchandising one edible calorie of bread. Language accounting is still in the future. The economic analysis of contemporary language would certainly not be possible unless we knew roughly the amount of money that was spent on the speech of each person. Mere per-capita input alone would not, of course, tell us enough. The poor, for instance, might be much more talked to than the rich, who can buy silence. But each paid word addressed to the rich costs much more than that addressed to the poor.

However, even without access to detailed language economics I estimate that the dollars spent for oil imports pale before those spent on American speech. The language of rich nations has absorbed huge investments. In poor countries, of course, people also speak and listen, but their languages haven't yet been capitalized. For the moment I'm restricting my comparison of capital-intensive everyday language and the language on which no money is spent to just one question: Does the structure of language itself change with the rate of investment? I think it does.

Taught everyday language lacks precedent in pre-industrial cultures. The current dependence on paid teachers and "models" for ordinary language is just as much a unique characteristic of industrial economies as is their dependence on fossil fuels. Both language and energy have been recognized for the first time in this generation as world-wide needs. Traditional cultures subsisted mainly on sunshine, captured mostly through agriculture. Equally these cultures subsisted on language absorbed by each individual through his or her roots. The blabbering of infants, literally the speechless, crystallized into the language of concrete persons whom the learner could smell, touch, love, and hate. Colloquial language was never taught; speech comes naturally to human beings.

Language until recently was nowhere the product of a design; it was not paid for and delivered like a commodity - in a word it was "vernacular" - home bred, home spun, home grown, home made.

When I contrast taught language -or the industrial idiom - with vernacular language, I draw a line of demarcation somewhere else than linguists do when they distinguish between the everyday language of the elite and dialects spoken in different regions or by poor people. Elite language is not new; language as a commodity is.

In the case of taught language, as opposed to vernacular language, the key model is the professional speaker - somebody who does not say what he means, but who recites what a script writer was told by the agency head that an executive committee has decided should be said. Taught language is modeled on people paid to declaim with phony convictions texts written by others. The vernacular is engendered by intimate inter- course among people who say things to each other, face-to-face. Vernacular is absorbed by roots that grow from each individual into the environment in which he or she has an "abode." Taught language is fed through screens, pacifiers, and other media constructed by language engineers.

Of course, even in industrialized countries all language isn't completely taught yet. Only machines can communicate without any reference to the vernacular. But a resistance that sometimes becomes as strong as a tabu makes it difficult to recognize the difference between capitalized language and the vernacular or colloquial usages that are still outside the economy. It is the same kind of inhibition that makes it difficult for us to discriminate fundamentally between transportation and locomotion by metabolic power, between a home cooked meal and a TV dinner. Are not the terms used, the distances covered, the calories ingested the same in both cases? Under some circumstances they might be, but this conclusion does not make the two activities comparable beyond the material measures. The difference between vernacular learning, movement, or food and that which is overwhelmingly a commodity goes much deeper. What has made the world modern is the correlation of basic needs to commodities rather than to vernacular activities. What has made technology industrial is the application of scientific progress to commodity production rather than to vernacular competence. What has made life as we know it today is the socialization of work through the administration of inputs and outputs, rather than through small group consensus on satisfaction.

This prevalence of commodity related basic needs is a common factor which underlies the growing dependency in all contemporary societies on lifelong compulsory instruction(language or otherwise). Compulsory instruction, slowly but surely, unless deflected by convivial politics, could turn vital vernacular learning toward the knowledge monopoly of superindustrial inculcation.

I have read an early draft of Second Thoughts and commend it to your attention. I hope all who share a desire for the worthwhile future described in the draft proclamation will join in some of the activities suggested there as a possible first step toward the creation of a truly convivial politics. Perhaps if we all so engage, individually and collectively, ten years from now protection from compulsory adult education will be considered more important than the “right” to more access to instruction in order to guarantee equality for all persons.

But this kind of political inversion is only conceivable if the present monopoly of economics over values can be effectively challenged. The balance of these two dimensions needs to be restored. As my contribution toward that goal I have above shared with the readers of Second Thoughts some of the tentative conclusions of my most recent thinking. I welcome comments and criticisms sent to me c/o Basic Choices, Inc.

Revisiting 'Deschooling Society'

2012-02-02T23:58:00.001-05:00

While browsing eBay for a car stereo recently, we saw for sale a book we'd not been aware of: When Schools are Gone, A projection of the thought of Ivan Illich, written by an Australian named Michael Malkin and published in 1976. A seller in Australia is offering the book for AU $15.90, or about $17 U.S. Over at Amazon in the U.S., four used copies are selling for prices that range from $29 to $103.

Google Books lists this title as one that it has scanned, but it enables only limited searching of the text.

We couldn't resist seeing what else we might find out about Malkin and his book. Not much, as it turned out, but the book's title did bring us to another quite interesting item that also is new to us. It's a paper, "Revisiting the critiques of Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society, by Jon Igelmo Zaldívar, at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. (This institution, Wikipedia reveals, is one of the oldest in the world, its origins dating to 1293.) In 2010, Mr. Zaldívar published a paper in The International Journal of Illich Studies, about Illich's conflict with the Vatican.

Mr. Zaldívar's paper, published last year in the International Journal for Cross-Disciplinary Subjects in Education looks at the "articles, book reviews, books, and unpublished theses written by scholars from the United States, Germany, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Russia, Argentina, and France, which offer various reactions to Deschooling Society." After briefly reviewing Illich's early life and the founding of CIDOC, the paper looks at the publishing history of the essays that make up Deschooling. It then goes on to look at how the book was received, citing numerous. The author finds "a clear division in all these approaches to Illich’s thought … those who were against schools and those who defended educational institutions."

Alchemy and Education

One of the more intriguing items cited in this article is a dissertation presented in 1973 by William Ideson Johnson at Ohio State University. The dissertation is available in PDF format here. As Mr. Zaldívar describes it:

On this research, the author had the support of John Ohlinger [sic], an expert on Illich’s works and his intellectual experience. Ideson developed an interesting approach to the influence of alchemy in Amos Comenius, one of the most important figures of modern pedagogy. The goal of this project was to focus on the influence of alchemy in shaping the modern concept of education. Of particular interest on this research is that Ideson [sic] understood how Illich’s thought had changed throughout his career, as seen in different texts written before and after Deschooling Society.

(The proper spelling is Ohliger. Likewise, the Zaldívar paper gets the name Dana L. Stuchul wrong in the main text, though not in its bibliography.)

He doesn't mention it in Deschooling, but Illich would explain later that he saw a strong parallel between faith in the educational process as a way of deliberately transforming and "developing" the raw, unformed human being into something better and the alchemist's attempts to transmute base elements into gold.

Not mentioned by Mr. Zaldívar are a few items that strike us as relevant to any look at the reception and after-effects of Deschooling. One is a 1976 book (or pamphlet, as Illich would have called its 63 pages), Imprisoned in the Global Classroom, that he wrote with Etienne Verne. It consists of two essays, one by each man. (Verne can be seen on YouTube discussing "la vitesse - propos du Ivan Illich," en français.)

The other is Illich's 1988 paper, "The Educational Enterprise in the Light of the Gospel," which is available as part of David Tinapple's extensive Illich archive. Here, Illich is concerned largely with power. He compares teachers working in the Chicago ghetto to Oskar Schindler working against heavy odds to save his Jewish workers from the Nazis. (In 1988, the Schindler story was known mainly through a somewhat obscure book that Illich summarizes for his audience; the movie Schindler's List was still years in the future.) Illich also discusses Robert Jay Lifton's study of Nazi doctors and of the clownish, anarchistic ways of Jesus. In fact, this paper is one of the most explicitly religious essays of Illich's that we've seen, citing chapter and verse and discussing the Gospel in detail. This may put off some people in education circles, but it does hint at some of the most important thinking of Illich's, thinking that informs all of his work, even if only tacitly.

Anyone interested in learning more about Illich's post-Deschooling thoughts on education would do well to look at Ivan Illich in Conversation and The Rivers North of the Future, both based on interviews conducted by David Cayley. In both, Illich provides useful insights into the thinking that led to the Deschooling essays and how he came to realize that he'd missed some important developments in that book. And, they might also look for a transcript or recording of his 1986 address to the American Educational Research Association's General Assembly, discussed by Ms. Stuchul here. There, Illich pleaded for more research into the history of compulsory schooling and talked about Orwell's analysis of human language getting turned into coded "communications." And more.

"The classroom on demand"

2012-01-09T12:04:00.001-05:00

Even before the actual publication of his book Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich was growing concerned about the educational system's having set out to create a "global classroom." With traditional schooling itself being severely questioned, not only by Illich but by many other critics and activists, the educational system was branching out, working to find other venues and channels with which to create demand for and deliver its services. This was reflected in the rise of terminology such as life-long learning, adult education, and on-the-job training.

Here is a blurb from the website of LearnCapital, "a venture capital firm focused exclusively on funding entrepreneurs with a vision for better and smarter learning":

The future is shaped by the way we teach and learn in the present. We’re in the middle of one of the great revolutions in the history of education. New technology platforms, applications, and services are not only amplifying and augmenting classroom learning, but creating a world in which any Internet-enabled device can become a classroom on demand. (emphasis ours)

What, we wonder, would Illich have made of that idea, the "classroom on demand"? Or of Bridge International Academies, a company funded by LearnCapital that operates "a network of ultra-low cost private primary schools dedicated to making high quality education affordable in the developing world"?

David Levine Draws Illich

2012-01-09T02:37:00.001-05:00

David Levine, the late, great caricaturist for The New York Review of Books, drew Ivan Illich twice, once in 1975, to illustrate a review of Medical Nemesis, and again in 1983, to accompany a review of Gender. The Review is now selling both illustrations - printed and framed to archival standards - for $150 per copy. The images, printed at 7-1/2" x 10-1/2", are these:

This second image is based on the photo of Illich used on Gender's dust jacket.

Funnily enough, NYRB lists these images under the category "Fictional Characters - Novels, Plays, Poems," evidently confusing Illich the social critic and author with Tolstoy's famous character. Illich is joined in the category by Fanny Hill and King Lear.

In fact, Keith Thomas, the reviewer of Gender, makes the Tolstoy connection explicitly. His opening paragraph:

Ivan Illich is the leading contemporary exponent of the romantic anarchist tradition. Like Rousseau, Godwin, or Tolstoy, he inveighs against the coarseness of modern materialism, deplores economic growth, and preaches a return to simplicity and authenticity. As a Catholic priest in the 1950s, he strongly opposed the papacy’s plan to export American-trained missionaries to Latin America. As vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico from 1956 to 1960, he resisted the extension of compulsory schooling to the third world. At Cuernavaca in Mexico in 1962 he founded the Center for Intercultural Documentation, an institution designed to achieve the “de-Yankification” of Latin America. During the last twelve years or so he has issued a relentless series of little books designed to expose what he sees as the most insidious features of contemporary society. Currently, he is teaching medieval history in Germany, an activity more closely related to his political objectives than might at first be apparent.

As far as we know, Thomas' review was the most thorough of those that Illich's controversial and oft-dismissed book received upon being published, at least in English. As Lee Hoinacki later pointed out, part of the book's importance lies in its exploring the kind of complementarity - man and woman, different from but providing definition to each other - that Illich thought about a good deal in later years. If nothing else, Gender's rich set of footnotes are a feast of ideas, an almost breathless report from the frontlines of Illich's research and thinking, as David Cayley puts it in his introduction to The Rivers North of the Future.

Some early papers on education

2012-01-02T19:33:00.001-05:00

Without a doubt, Illich is best known as the author of Deschooling Society, a book published in 1970 that spurred a great deal of discussion and activism. Deschooling did not, however, spring forth from Illich's mind overnight. That book was the result of much thinking and discussion that started during Illich's tenure in the late 1950s on a board overseeing the education system in Puerto Rico. What's more, Deschooling was not his last word on the subject of schooling, either. He was refining his thinking on the matter even as his soon-to-be-notorious book was still in press.

We mention this only to set the scene for a recent online discovery we've made, namely of some early papers by Illich on education. Unfortunately, we don't know where these papers were published, but they appear to have shown up as reprints in a magazine of some sort. We've found a scan of the relevant pages (PDF) at the website of Prof. Dr. Martina Kaller-Dietrich, a professor at the University of Vienna and author of a biography of Illich.

The papers are as follows:

• "The redistribution of educational tasks between schools and other organs of society," delivered at a conference held in 1967 in Puerto Rico.

• "Schooling: the Ritual of Progress," which is the third chapter of Deschooling. Previous to the book's publication, this paper had appeared in the New York Review of Books.

• "Ivan Illich in Australia, Questions and Answers," which is the transcript of Illich's interaction with an audience in Melbourne, at a conference held in 1972. This piece, new to us, provides a wonderful sampling of Illich's remarkable wit and intellect.

Finally, this PDF document includes a piece by another author, W. Senteza Kajubi, who asks, "Is the school an obsolete institution?" Mr. Kajubi is a Ugandan who presented this paper in 1970, at something called the World Conference on Education.

Illich on YouTube, in Spanish and French

2011-12-31T16:56:00.001-05:00

We just came across some fairly new videos about Illich, two in Spanish and one in French. The first two are not particularly interesting, at least not to us as non-Spanish speakers. (We'd be glad to hear from anyone who can provide even a cursory translation, however.)

The first appears to provide a brief biography of Illich. The main focus seems to be on Illich as a critic of the educational system. It's 7:45 long and features the music of Carl Orff, Carmina Burana.

The second video is narrated by a woman.

The video in French is somewhat comical. It's an extract from a 1972 film showing some people - hippies? - trying to figure out if an automobile is a convivial tool, an exercise that involves ripping the machine apart!

Shadow Work in the NYTimes

2011-10-30T23:31:00.001-04:00

In today's Times there appears an essay that references Ivan Illich and his notion of shadow work. We take the liberty of reprinting the entire piece here, but not without a critique: Illich's did not see shadow work a source of jobs, as this person does. He didn't worry that shadow work jobs are disappearing as computers and self-service take over from people. Rather, Illich saw all shadow work as a burden shouldered by people living in modern, industrialized societies. The term, he writes, "designates the consumer's unpaid toil that adds to a commodity an incremental value that is necessary to make this commodity useful to the consuming unit itself." It is a "burdensome loss of time … associated with (and preparatory to) the act of consumption."

And much of this unpaid shadow work, Illich argues, has been thrust onto women. "To a greater extent and in a different manner from men, women were drafted into the economy. They were - and are - deprived of equal access to safe labor only to be bound with even greater inequality to work that did not exist before wage labor came into being." Illich goes onto compare the modern woman, who drives to the market to buy eggs, takes an elevator to her apartment, and turns on a stove to cook the eggs in butter from the fridge, to her grandmother, who went out back, found some eggs in the chicken coop and cooked them in lard on a fire made from wood that comes from the same domicile. "Shadow work could not have come into existence before the household was turned into an apartment set up for the economic function f upgrading value-deficient commodities."

Much education - especially on-the-job training and adult education - is shadow work, too.

With that in mind, read on:

Our Unpaid, Extra Shadow Work

By Craig Lambert, in Cambridge, Mass.

THE other night at the supermarket I saw a partner at a downtown law firm working as a grocery checker, scanning bar codes. I’m sure she earns at least $300,000 per year. Even so, she was scanning and bagging her purchases in the self-service checkout line. For those with small orders, this might save time spent waiting in slower lines. Nonetheless, she was performing the unskilled, entry-level jobs of supermarket checker and bagger free of charge.

This is “shadow work,” a term coined 30 years ago by the Austrian philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich, in his 1981 book of that title. For Dr. Illich, shadow work was all the unpaid labor — including, for example, housework — done in a wage-based economy.

In a subsistence economy, work directly answers the needs of life: gathering food, growing crops, building shelters and fires. But once money comes into play, a whole range of tasks arises that do not address basic needs. Instead, such work may enable one to earn money and buy both necessities and, if possible, luxuries.

To do the work requires extra jobs, like commuting. The commuter often has to own, insure, maintain and fuel a car — and drive it — just to get to work and back. These unpaid activities ancillary to earning one’s wages are examples of shadow work.

In the industrialized world, few of us live in a subsistence mode, so shadow work is ubiquitous: shopping, paying bills, housework. Digital technology — with its spam, e-mail, texting, smartphones and so on — is steadily ramping up the burden of shadow work for all whose lives revolve around its magnetic field.

Science fiction novels of a half-century ago dramatized conflicts between humans and robots, asking if people were controlling their technologies, or if the machines were actually in charge. A few decades later, with the digital revolution in juggernaut mode, the verdict is in. The robots have won. Although the automatons were supposedly going to free people by taking on life’s menial, repetitive tasks, frequently, technological innovation actually offloads such jobs onto human beings.

The conventional wisdom is that America has become a “service economy,” but actually, in many sectors, “service” is disappearing. There was a time when a gas station attendant would routinely fill your tank and even check your oil and clean your windshield and rear window without charge, then settle your bill. Today, all those jobs have been transferred to the customer: we pump our own gas, squeegee our own windshield, and pay our own bill by swiping a credit card. Where customers once received service from the service station, they now provide “self-service” — a synonym for “no service.” Technology enables this sleight of hand, which lets gas stations cut their payrolls, having co-opted their patrons into doing these jobs without pay.

Examples abound, helping drive unemployment rates. Airports now have self-service check-in kiosks that allow travelers to perform the jobs of ticket agents. Travel agents once unearthed, perused and compared fares, deals and hotel rates. Shadow-working travelers now do all of this themselves on their computer screens. Medical patients are now better informed than ever — as a result of hours of online shadow work. In 1998, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that taxpayers spent six billion hours per year on “tax compliance activities.” That’s serious shadow work, the equivalent of three million full-time jobs.

Once upon a time, retail stores had employees who were not cashiers but roamed the floor, assisting customers. Go into a Wal-Mart or Target or Staples and find someone to help you locate and choose a product. Good luck. You’re on your own, left to wander the aisles in search of an unoccupied staff person. (Meanwhile, you might stumble on and purchase some item you hadn’t planned on buying.) Here, it’s not technology, but a business tactic that cuts payroll expenses by trimming the service provided to customers — and prolongs the time those customers spend rambling around inside the store. Regardless, the result is still more shadow work, as customers take on the job that retail salespeople once did.

Shadow work isn’t always unpaid; sometimes it shows up at one’s salaried job in the form of new tasks covertly added to one’s responsibilities. Not long ago, human resources departments kept track of employees’ vacation, personal and sick days. In many organizations, employees now enter their own data into absence management software.

One nostalgic appeal of the “Mad Men” television series is the way it evokes memories of certain amusingly dated aspects of business life, like “support staff,” and even “secretaries.” Support staff is becoming a quaint, antiquarian concept, a historical curiosity like typewriters, stenography and executive washrooms. We all have our own computers, of course, and we type and print our own letters, copy our own reports and mail our own missives. Even those in senior management perform these humdrum jobs.

Of course, these shadow chores never appear in one’s job description, let alone justify any salary increase. Shadow work is just covertly added to our daily duties. As robotic devices replace human workers, end-users like customers and employees are taking on the remnant of the transaction that still requires wetware — a brain. New waves of technology change how things are done, and we docilely adapt — unavoidably so, as there’s usually no alternative. Running a business without e-mail is hardly a viable option, but with e-mail comes spam to be evaluated and deleted — more shadow work.

To be sure, shadow work has its benefits. Bagging one’s own groceries or pumping one’s own gas can save time. Shadow work can increase autonomy and enlarge our repertoire of skills and knowledge. Research on the “Ikea effect,” named for the Swedish furniture manufacturer whose products often require home assembly, indicates that customers value a product more highly when they play a role in constructing it.

Still, doctors routinely observe that one of the most common complaints today is fatigue; a 2007 study pegged its prevalence in the American work force at 38 percent. This should not be surprising. Much of this fatigue may result from the steady, surreptitious accumulation of shadow work in modern life. People are simply doing a huge number of tasks that were once done for them by others.

Doing things for one another is, in fact, an essential characteristic of a human community. Various mundane jobs were once spread around among us, and performing such small services for one another was even an aspect of civility. Those days are over. The robots are in charge now, pushing a thousand routine tasks onto each of our backs.

Craig Lambert is the deputy editor of Harvard Magazine.

Ivan Illich Observed, Up Close

2011-10-28T02:42:00.001-04:00

The all-knowing Google alerted us today to a new document that contains some quite personal, unedited observations of Illich in action. The title: "In Conversation with John Ohliger and Ivan Illich — April 8-10, 1978." The author: Jeff Zacharakis, of Kansas State University.

The paper is available for download in PDF at the Adult Education Research Conference site.

John F. Ohliger (1926-2004) was a friend of Illich's, a prolific writer, and a radical activist. He was perhaps best known as a sharp critic of adult education, whose social functions and myths he analyzed and dissected largely using the insights of Illich's deschooling argument. Ohliger occasionally collaborated with Illich and, long before the Web was available, helped to disseminate his ideas in a newsletter. An official site devoted to Ohliger and his work is here.

The new paper we cite here recounts Ohliger's account, as recorded on the scene, as it happened, of a visit he made to Cuernavaca 2 years after CIDOC closed. He went there to work with Illich and Valentina Borremans on a bibliography of Illich's writings. Zacharakis has listened to Ohliger's tapes, summarizes their contents, and sometimes quotes long, often emotional passages verbatim. The tapes offer a highly personal view of Illich, whom Ohliger finds to be quite intimidating and frustrating. (Ohliger recorded the tapes as an audio diary, kept for the sake of his future wife who stayed back home in Wisconsin.) The author also provides some good background on Ohliger.

A sample, in which Zacharakis quotes Ohliger's talking into his tape recorder:

[This] fatigue leads to depression. It always seems to get to me. I can also say that something that attributes to this is a feeling of inferiority to Ivan and Valentina....they are so adept to making a life. A good life in terms of economics at writing and speaking and I suppose this is something I would like to be able to do. That is just depressing to be around. They are so facile with words, and so mildly aggressive. I guess it is in an OK way. I don’t know. At this point I’m ready again to start walking to the airport in Mexico City. I could take a taxicab or hitchhike...

Another: "Throughout these conversations there is tense intimacy where John wants to finish the annotated bibliography and Illich wants to discuss new ideas, as well as take John to the marketplace and introduce him to other friends. John is the taskmaster while Illich is relaxed and enjoying each minute of the day. Though they are friends with mutual respect, Illich controls the pace and is the dominant partner."

Dr. Henrik Blum on visiting CIDOC and having Illich visit UC Berkeley

2011-10-20T20:37:00.001-04:00

Henrik Blum (1915-2006) was an M.D. and widely-regarded name in the field of public health - "one of the real leaders of the field of comprehensive health planning,” according to a profile in The Lancet.

For many years, it seems, he taught at UC Berkeley, and in 1997, he participated in an oral history project conducted by the university's Bancroft Library. The full transcript is available online, and what follows is an excerpt discussing Blum's encounters with and thoughts about Illich. Blum visited Illich at CIDOC and later was instrumental in having Illich invited to lecture at Berkeley for a semester in 1983. This series of lectures, about the topic of vernacular gender and its loss to economic sex, was controversial, to say the least.

Interviewer: "In 1976, you published Expanding Health Care Horizons. …"

Blum: That book originated as an invitation to present up-to-date
thinking on what health was and what health care might best be.
Each of three authors was given a week in which to present
their views. Ivan Illich presented Medical Nemesis, Rick
Carlson did the End of Medicine, and I presented what health
care should be doing if it were based on our understanding of
what caused good and bad health, something a lot different than
the repair concept of Western medicine.

Roz Lindheim, an architect whose work in health opened many
new avenues in health care, appears in several contexts in this
book because she influenced many of us in many ways, got me
invited to Cuernavaca to CIDOC, Centre Intercultural de
Documentation, which was Ivan Illich's own institute and which
enjoyed the protection of the liberal archbishop of Cuernavaca.
Illich was a priest who came from Yugoslavia, was trained at
the Vatican and was reputed to be a protege of Pope John.

He had written many controversial books, all of which
sounded a strong anti-organization theme, probably built out of
his experience and objections to bureaucratic, authoritarian
organizations like the Catholic Church. As the one-time rector
of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, he had strong
feelings about the limitations of traditional universities and
CIDOC was his own creation.

The institute earned its way by teaching Spanish to well-
off persons needing a rapid and reasonably thorough Spanish
grounding. But its overriding purpose was to piggy-back high-
level discussions of all major social issues, as well as
maintain an elegant library and a place for him to think and
work. His medieval-style university CIDOC was an unlikely
mixture of the ultra-technical reception machinery, and a
freedom to wander, imbibe, and disperse information and ideas
in an almost market-like intellectual setting.

When one arrived, one was set down in front of a suitcase-
sized mechanized monster which took your fifty dollars, took
your picture and a small ticket you had filled out, and turned
out a wallet-sized plastic-encased I.D. card that allowed you
to attend for the rest of the year. That allowed the card
holder to attend any and all presentations, of which there were
a dozen or more going on at any one moment.

It might be medicine one month, a four-hour-a-day series,
with half presentation, half discussion, history of the
Philippines which we attended, or philosophy, whatever.

Illich toured each series at least once a week and gave a
resume of all the courses that were being presented, truly an
unbelievable tour de force. We had attendees in ours from
twenty-three countries, and since presenters were paid
according to the number of attendees (out of their $50.00
fees), we were paid more money than it cost us to travel and to
stay there for a week.

To prepare myself, I put all my ideas into paradigms,
chains of logic, summaries, and presented about a hundred
charts and tables in my week. Given its success with an
international audience, I did what any respectable professor
would do: turned it all into a book, Expanding Health Care
Horizons, a title suggested by a confrere who then denied
vigorously that he had ever named anything, even though he
approved of the book. I obtained a contract from Warner, and
Harry Specht, the dean of the School of Social Work at UC
Berkeley, was the editor for them.

Harry had worked under me as the CEO of the Contra Costa
Health and Welfare Council for the one year I was its
president, and we enjoyed one another. He went on a sabbatical
to Europe, injured his back, and lay on the floor of their
leased van for months while his wife drove, and that was where
he edited my book. He did a magnificent job sharpening and
clarifying, never once ruining what I was getting at.

After all that, Warner was sold, perhaps it became Time-Warner,
it cancelled its contracts, and here I was. I wanted
the book for my classes. Because it laid out the new look for
health care that I wanted to use, a pair of former students,
Helen and Paul Mico, who created a publishing house at that
moment, Third Party Publishing, took it as their first venture.
Since they had so few books, they had no budget for
advertising, so it remained mostly for local consumption. It
brought all my major themes together and from time to time I
get asked to sit in on the founding of a health care venture
based on the premises held forth in that book.

We had a lot of dealings with Illich while we were there,
partly fascinated, partly repulsed by this formidably talented,
educated, and experienced empiricist. Fascinated by the
searching questions he asked, repulsed by the elitist answers
he typically gave.

Wasn't organized education creating a great subclass of
those who never could get any of it, therefore shouldn't we do
away with organized schooling? Similarly for medicine, and so
on. My preface to Expanding Health Care Horizons
responds to that philosophy rather vigorously.

Anyhow, we thought he would be good for Berkeley, got him a
Chancellor's professorship, and he spent a semester in
presenting a formal course on gender [1982-1983] and holding
parallel seminars and soirees on various related issues. I did
all the necessary paperwork and petitioning. Roz was in
Europe, and I sat back to enjoy what could only become an
intellectual fracas.

His class drew 500-700 people for every single lecture.
The large home he rented with his stipend was busy at all hours
with truly intellectual forays. This was old-time intellectual
fare of the highest order. Several UCB women faculty were
truly indignant over what this maybe celibate priest had to say
about gender issues, and proceeded to write heated responses in
book form.

He has been at Heidelburg the last few years and is, by my
standards, becoming more respectable or less controversial.

A profile in Portuguese

2011-10-20T13:13:00.001-04:00

The Web is full of many wondrous things, including a profile of Illich in Portuguese onto which we recently stumbled. We don't read that language, but this caricature of Illich, which it contains, caught our eye:

And on closer examination, we see that the text of this pamphlet is essentially the same as this profile of Illich (PDF), published by UNESCO in 1993. The author, Marcela Gajardo, being Chilean, we imagine she originally wrote this in Spanish. After a brief discussion of Illich's background and CIDOC, it reviews the arguments of Deschooling Society with a somewhat critical eye:

… The radical nature of his denunciation prevented him from constructing a realistic strategy for those educators and researchers who might have associated themselves with his protest. In addition, Illich’s writings were founded essentially on intuitions, without any appreciable reference to the results of socio-educational or learning research. His criticism evolves in a theoretical vacuum, which may explain the limited acceptance his educational theories and proposals find today.

Indeed, Illich is widely accused of being a Utopian thinker and is further criticized for his early withdrawal from the wider educational debate. A deeper involvement and the development of viable strategies for putting his ideas into practice, plus a solid theoretical foundation to sustain them, might have led him along different paths.

Notwithstanding all this, Ivan Illich must be recognized an educational thinkers who helped to give life to the educational debate of the 1970s. ...

Valentina Borremans

2011-10-20T01:54:00.001-04:00

Valentina Borremans, a Belgian deep-sea diver and librarian, has played an important part in the story of Ivan Illich. She helped found CIDOC in Cuernavaca, Mexico, she served as administrator and librarian of that "thinkery," ran its language school, participated in many seminars with Illich, and edited his manuscripts, and to this day, she looks after Illich's library in the village of Ocotepec. If we're not mistaken, he lived in her household there when not in Bremen or other parts of the world.

She also wrote a book. We've just discovered online a scanned microfiche copy of Borremans' Guide to Convivial Tools, published in 1979 by R.R. Bowker. It lists and, in most cases, briefly annotates 858 books and articles about "use-value oriented convivial tools - and their enemies." The materials listed range from books about growing certain hardy agricultural plants to manuals about working with different kinds of alternative energy to collections of articles about composting, bicycles as a mode of transportation, and "science for the people." In short, the guide captures the reading materials and the spirit of the a time - essentially the 1970s - when there was tremendous excitement in the air about creating alternatives to industrial society. The computer had yet to become personal, the Internet was nowhere to be seen, and lots of people shared their newsletters and guides to alternative living by mail. In away, this guide is a more serious, less consumer-oriented form of the Whole Earth Catalog.

In his preface to the guide, Illich notes that "this looks like a book to be used in a library - but the library where it could be used does not yet exist." These were materials that were missing from most research libraries around the world, Illich writes: "This is the champion list of un-listed reference tools; a bibliographic claim to a new kind of territory."

He also describes how Borremans arrived in Mexico from France "to direct a small research library on social change in Latin America." These materials soon became the foundation of CIDOC, which over 12 years, Illich writes, was visited by about 18,000 people. CIDOC also published more than 300 titles of its own. Remarkably, Illich credits Borremans, not himself, as the director and administrator of CIDOC. "I myself conducted all my seminars at CIDOC and felt its most privileged user," he writes.

Our friend Michael Slattery, an American hydrologist living and working in France, has written about Borremans' Guidehere, as part of a website he has devoted to convivial tools.

One of the main collections of materials that Borremans oversaw at CIDOC concerned the history of religiosity in Latin America from around 1830 to 1970. This resulted in some 50,000 fiche pages that she herself created with a portable machine while periodically traveling throughout the continent to visit churches and rummage through their collections of old handbills, posters, bulletins, "serials," and other printed materials. An extensive listing of the materials in this collection is available in several places around the Web, including here, at Rutgers University's Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies. While church-related materials from the colonial period have been preserved and edited, Borremans writes, "the imprints of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that reflect local devotions and syncretist rituals, religious iconography and poetry, and the pastoral campaigns of the various churches and sects, [sic] went uncollected and unnoticed until the early 1960s, when Ivan Illich began to search for them and to collect them in the CIDOC library in Cuernavaca." (In his 1983 paper on the "Social Construction of Energy," Illich talks of "superstitious religiosity" as a "hobby" of his for the previous 30 years.)

A paper written by Borremans, titled "Technique and Women's Toil," can be found online, too. It was published in IFDA Dossier 35, for May/June 1983. It looks at "the tools which purportedly lighten women's toil, toil which extends to death."

Research on women and tools has multiplied during the seventies, but is of two profoundly different kinds. One looks
at tools which lighten women's total lifelong toil. This research is done mostly by women who are themselves helped by the new techniques which they adopt. This inventive vernacular adoption of new techniques by women is rarely called "research"; indeed, it is generally overlooked. Few reporters recognize
the genius who makes an oven out of a gearbox as a researcher.

The other kind of research is that for women. Its primary purpose tends to be the increase of women's productivity. It measures the "improvement" of women's well-being as viewed by the expert."

The two types of research are at odds with one another. Research by women tends to keep them outside the market, and to limit the community's productivity in monetary terms. But it also generally lightens the total burden carried by women.

The second type of research drafts women into development. It is carried out by experts, sometimes in consultation with clients and, as I shall show, increases both women's burden and sexist discrimination.

[…]

Industrialization, however, has no monopoly on the spread of sexism. AT [alternative technology] can do equally well or better. For this reason I strongly recommend research on the dangers of genderless AT. I do so not because I am opposed to genderless AT, I welcome tools that fit the hands of women as well as those of men.
But I call for research on the sexist effects of genderless AT because, even more effectively than industrial machines, AT can transform proud women into handicapped humans of the second sex. Sometimes this cannot be avoided. But I see no reason for blindly promoting it. Only research by women in each village and neighborhood can ensure that the new wrenches and pliers, the new gauges and glues, the new fish tanks and hand mills, or the new breed of goats, above all empower the hands of women. Such research just cannot be done for a village.

Ivan Illich describes the paper in his book Gender so: "Research for women aimed at providing them with new technologies has been part of development-oriented policies and has always increased the total toil of women. Only research by women, conducted by those who themselves use the new tools and techniques, can reduce women's toil, decrease women's dependence on the cash nexus and consequently the severity of sexism". Borremans states in a footnote at the top that she wrote the paper "while I was revising the proofs of Gender." She ends the paper with a copy of Gender's table of contents.

(IFDA was the International Foundation for Development Alternatives, working out of Switzerland and Rome from 1978 to 1991. An archive of all 81 issues of its newsletter are available online, here, hosted by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, in Sweden. Several of them include articles by Illich.)

Speaking of fish tanks and alternative technology, we should point out where we found Borremans' Guide to Convivial Tools. Her guide is one of more than 4,000 such documents, all concerning alternative technologies and the like, that an outfit calling itself Faith And Sustainable Technologies, or F.A.S.T., has put online for downloading at no charge.

This archive is described as "the complete CD3WD library (almost 20GB) for community development from Alex Weir." The CD3WD website, here, reveals Mr. Weir as a Scottish-born software engineer who has spent much of his life working in East Africa. Among other things, he has developed what he describes as a "low-cost tamper-proof electronic voting system" designed specifically for use in the Third World.

The F.A.S.T. organization describes itself: "It is our desire to be an encouragement and information resource for all who come here and especially to those who preach the good news of the gospel of Christ by assisting the poor and underprivileged of this world to experience the life of Christ firsthand by living out biblical principles of good stewardship, wise decisions and hard work." Evidently, the founder and principal of the organization is Travis Hughey.

On the F.A.S.T. site, Hughey offers many photos of a journey he made to Kenya where he showed locals how to construct a hydroponic gardening system out of blue plastic barrels. "Cordless drills are a wonderful thing," he captions one photograph of this project. "I brought a good tool kit to assist in building the system quickly. The locals were amazed at hole saws. They thought they were a very good idea."

Lice, hair, and city space

2011-09-20T16:11:00.001-04:00

In the early 1980s, Ivan Illich accepted an invitation to join a group of thinkers to discuss various topics: "ideas," education, the city, street life, architecture, the economy, and more. This was the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, formed in 1980 and still going strong.

This photo, undated, shows people gathered at the Institute; that's Illich, sixth from the left in the back:

For Illich, one result of this activity was the writing of a short but unusually poetic and wide-ranging book called H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, which the Institute originally published in 1985. The following year, the Institute published an eclectic, 250-page collection of pieces by its members and guests that had appeared in its newsletter, a book called Stirrings of Culture. (The book is still for sale at the Institute's website and, for less money, via Amazon.com.) In addition to Illich, contributors included African-American novelist and essayist Albert Murray, Jungian psychologist James Hillman, city theorist William H. Whyte, architects Robert Venturi and Vincent Scully, and poet-farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry.

We're pleased to share, here, in full, one of the pieces by Illich that appears in this book. (The other two of his are concerned with water and with "Health as Disease." There's also a piece by Barbara Duden, "Women's Illnesses in the 18th Century.") It appears to be the partial transcript of a talk he gave, offering further thoughts about the historicity of city space as first explored in H2O. (We recall reaching for this essay when the youngster in our household brought lice home from grammar school - an increasingly common occurrence, it seems; for a moment, anyway, we enjoyed the spark of suddenly feeling connected to history.)

Hair and the History of the City
by Ivan Illich
The moment I began to think and read on the relationship between hair and the city, so much wealth and strange information began to heap up that all I can do is take a few minutes to introduce some ideas on hair and the city.
When I was a young man, the world was still very much full of bed bugs and lice and fleas. Only well after DDT, bugs became a word for mechanical foul-ups. Lice and fleas and bugs were the regular visitors on the human body. In reading the encounters between doctors and patients in the past, it is clear that people were quite used to living with a festering sore. The doctor couldn’t do anything about it, and it is not that people didn’t mind - they simply didn’t go to the doctor to stop that festering. That is just what the human condition was. But it's always difficult to speak with people about the fact that a festering sore, for example, was something you were stuck with and you had it. That was a pretty common statement until about 1908. Until that time, a patient had about one chance in two that the doctor could do something, anything at all, about the condition which they brought to the doctor. And, certainly in most of the world, it was quite obvious and normal to scratch and itch.

…
Until recently, human beings never lived with their own surface out of contact with animal life. They shared their skin with other animals.
As a historian, I find it very often difficult to explain to a younger generation what was taken for obvious - what could not be changed, what the human condition was like only a couple of generations ago. DDT is interesting because it extended down into the most underdeveloped countries. The poorest people are rich enough in the world now to get effective flea powder.
Living with an uninhabited skin makes us much less aware of our body surface, aware of what hair is - this fuzzy fuzz which we still carry with us, which has always been an extremely important symbol. … There is a very strange gulf between ourselves and the way past people lived.
The gulf between past and present which makes it so hard for us to understand how people have lived, this gulf which makes us separated from ourselves, is a major reason we no longer have in the city a concept of “the commons.” We no longer have commons. Today we have private and public spaces. As far as I know, “private” and “public” are concepts which are simply not applicable to a traditional city. The difference between the opposition of private and public is as a sharp line. That line is like we today imagine our body covering, our skin, a line dividing inside and outside. Hair, inhabited hair, belonging at the same time to inside and outside, makes the division more “fuzzy,” makes our life and animal life more alike; and when there is a commons, our life and the lives of others are experienced in common; life in the city, a gathering around a commons. …
A precise line does not separate me from the rest of the world. Transitions are much more imprecise. In the past, people carried an aura which surrounded them, an aura that had to be washed away, deodorized, to accommodate people in the kind of cities we live in today. … Only sometime after washing became possible, lice and flea killing became effective, and therefore we became even more possessive individuals. Fur became then a symbol for luxury, but not any more for the duplicity of inside and outside which the fur implies. In the fourteenth century, it became so important for a person who had an important aura to carry a fur that trained - for kings and nobles. This royal coat became so large - 140 to 200 square feet, weighing about fifty pounds - that one needed assistants to move around. The royal person wanted to shine in the aura which covered him all around. It is a projection of an animal inside - both an expression of the animal as well as an expression of shame of my fur as it is and therefore have to cover it with clothes. …
I thought as a contribution to this discussion about growth and undergrowth I want to point out that the undergrowth of cities is a place where people are aware that the surface of the city, just like the surface of their bodies, is constantly shared for many purposes. A commons is not a public space. A commons is a space which is established by custom. It cannot be regulated by law. The law would never be able to give sufficient details to regulate a commons. A typical tree on the commons of a village has by custom very different uses for different people. The widows may take the dry branches for burning. The children may collect the twigs, and the pastor gets the flowers when it flowers, and the nuts from it are assigned to the village poor, and the shadow may be for the shepherds who come through, except on Sundays, when the Council is held in the shadow of the tree.
The concept of the commons is not that of a resource; a commons comes from a totally different way of being in the world where it is not production which counts, but bodily, physical use according to rules that are established by custom, which never recognizes equality of all subjects because different people follow different customs. Their differences can be recognized in the way they share the commons. …
Once we really have the experience of uninhabited skin, it is enormously difficult for people to understand that commons in the city are typical, are characteristic of the perception of space in past time, and not the distinction between private and public space.

An appreciation of Illich in light of "climate change"

2011-09-16T19:08:00.001-04:00

A man named Robert Hutchison, a member of the city council in Winchester, U.K., spoke about Ivan Illich in 2009 as part of a series of talks called "Prophets for Our Time." A recording of his talk (in MP3) and the text (PDF) are available for downloading from this page.

Mr. Hutchison's articulate, half-hour talk provides a good overview of Illich's thought and life, from his critique of important institutions to his explorations of how the Church has profoundly shaped Western thought and society.

He summarizes: "To recap on these three of Illich's ideas – and I hope that I am not caricaturing them: the institutionalising of charity has inadvertently resulted in a betrayal of Christian faith. In the last 30 years we've been through a terrifying change – the incorporation of our lives into a world of systems that cannot effectively be controlled – but that friendship is a pre-condition for the search for truth and the search for truth must continue even while recognising our 'radical powerlessness'."

Mr. Hutchison frames his discussion of Illich with the issue of climate change, aka global warming. He is a founder of an outfit called Winchester Action on Climate Change - a "network of local people, businesses and organisations working together to transform Winchester into a low carbon district."

Ivan Illich speaks about water in Dallas, 1984

2011-09-16T16:07:00.001-04:00

We're delighted, today, to have discovered online some 40 minutes of video showing Ivan Illich speaking to an audience in 1984. His topic: the changing metaphors of water - how the ancients saw water as a magical stuff that separates this world from that of the dead and how today, water is merely a solvent that washes dirt and excrement from the city.

Illich spoke as part of a conference on "What Makes a City: Water and Dreams" that was held by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. The Institute had originally approached him to address the issues raised by plans - discussed and debated for many decades - to create an artificial lake in the center of Dallas. Somewhat to his own surprised, Illich accepted the invitation. The result was a series of discussions held in Dallas, this lecture, and a short but wonderfully provocative and poetic book, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, published by the Institute in 1985. In it, Illich discusses how the ancients founded their cities; how city space differed from that of nature; how people experienced city space as much through their noses as their eyes; how urban water and images of the female nude came to be so intertwined; the histories of smells, of sewers and indoor toilets, of soap and, of course, of water itself. The book's subtitle is "Reflections on the Historicity of 'Stuff'."

Perhaps the book's most widely-quoted sentence: "[W]e do not feel free to question the natural beauty of water itself because we know, yet cannot bear to acknowledge, that this "stuff" is recycled toilet flush."

The video is available for downloading from the Internet Archive in two parts, each in a variety of encodings. Part 1 is here, part 2 here. We've embedded both parts for viewing right here, too:

We're not aware of any other such video showing Illich speaking publicly. A good number of audio recordings of him are available, but not video, as far as we know, probably as a result of Illich's well-known aversion to being recorded. ("Modern-day pornography," he testily described the recording of his "conversation" about de-schooling with an evangelical audience in the 1970s.)

Here's Part 2 of the Dallas video:

Illich's water book draws a good deal on the thinking of Gaston Bachelard, who wrote about the "poetics of space," and that of Joseph Rykwert, an architectural historian with whom he worked at the University of Pennsylvania. For anyone interested in the study of cities, as we are, Illich's book provides a very useful bibliography and many detailed footnotes.

Illich in Maine

2011-09-06T20:49:00.001-04:00

In July, 1984, Ivan Illich and friends convened for a week-long conference in Maine. The subject: "The History of Economic Man."

Among those who attended were Eugene J. Burkart, a lawyer practicing in Massachussets who in the early 1970s had visited Illich's CIDOC research center in Mexico. Mr. Burkart has written about that CIDOC visit and the Maine gathering in the essay he contributed to The Challenges of Ivan Illich, a book published shortly before Illich's death in 2002.

Listening to Illich speak at CIDOC, he writes, he found the man "to be brilliant; his intellect was dazzling and formidable, like none I had ever encountered; he was charismatic, too. There was a remarkable presence and aliveness about him."

Despite being impressed with the atmosphere of CIDOC, Mr. Burkart had doubts about how or if the activities taking place there could possibly do anything for the poor of Latin America. "After much thought," Mr. Burkart concluded "that Illich was a phony, someone enmeshed in his own cleverness, a dangerous distraction from the pressing social concerns of the day."

"I felt my anger grow with each word he spoke," he writes. "And then a strange thing happened: [Illich] suddenly turned toward me. To see where I sat he had to turn quite far, but I was not sure whether he saw me because I was on the periphery of his vision; and he did not know me. I wondered, Had he sensed my anger? He continued speaking, all the while looking intensely at me, as if he really wanted me to understand what he was saying. I returned his gaze and although I did not understand a word he said, I felt the confusion of my thoughts and feelings inexplicably lifted from me. In those few moments I had the experience of intimately seeing this person, Ivan Illich, for the first time; I then knew he was someone I could trust. But I would not have a direct conversation with him for many years to come."

That conversation took place, as it turned out, at the conference in Maine. There, Mr. Burkart and Illich became friends. Mr. Burkart went on to meet up many times with Illich at Penn State and at his home down in Mexico. He writes:

"The more I came to know Illich personally, the more I would see that friendship was the very center of his life and work. While he never wrote an essay or treatise explicitly on the subject, friendship is a theme that consistently appears in his writing, a connecting thread through all his books. I eventually concluded that the best way to understand Illich’s work is a detailed study of the myriad and varied barriers to friendship that exist in modern life. The kinds of withdrawal and resistance he encouraged, what he later would call askesis, was a new kind of asceticism, practices that are a necessary condition for friendship to flower in our modern deserts."

Identifying Illich's work as a "detailed study of the myriad and varied barriers to friendship that exist in modern life" strikes us as exactly right.

Also participating in the Maine conference were Susan Hunt, who had worked closely with Illich on his book Gender, and Bill Ellis, a key figure (and founder?) of an organization called TRANET, short for "transnational network about alternative technology." We recall reading about TRANET in the 1970s. Its activities and newsletter (meshing well with Illich's notion of convivial tools) often were mentioned in the Whole Earth Catalog and Co-Evolution Quarterly. (Mr. Ellis works out of Rangeley, Maine, a place we happen to know as the one-time home and final resting place of the controversial psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Reich's house, full of "orgone boxes," "cloudbusters," and other questionable apparatus, is open to visitors.)

Google ("knows all, tells all") reveals another memoir of the Maine Summer Institute conference. "Voices in the Wilderness," written in 1985 by Richard Yanowitz as a contribution to a post-conference volume. Evidently, his experience of the conference was not entirely positive: "All week long at the Institute I felt on the verge of going home, variously infuriated, frustrated, perplexed, exhilarated and intellectually energized."

He recalls Illich as an "aloof, imposing, brilliant, erudite, charismatic figure with superbly polished oratorical skills."

He uses gaunt body, voice and language with precision and authority, and even his unspecific foreign accent lends him an air of distinction and perspicacity. His encyclopedic command of his material combined with his philological dexterity give one that helpless feeling of having neither right nor ability to debate (I almost wrote “compete”) intelligently.

While Illich affects to exchange ideas (rather than engage in loathsome “communication”), I experienced many of his statements as pronouncements. He seemed to go out of his way to irritate newcomers to his personality, summarizing complex ideas in pithy terms that sounded outrageous to the uninitiated. At the same time, disagreement appeared both to vex and perplex him: faced on the one hand with the absolute clarity of his Truths in his own mind and on the other with the inability of many listeners to grasp what he had to say (= to agree with him), he must have been torn between frustration over his own apparent failure at lucid articulation and bemusement at the appalling scarcity of rationality (= sanity) in the people he was addressing.

When Ivan joined a discussion, I was dealing with a personality as well as ideas. My mind had to become an intellectual and emotional centrifuge, whirling to separate out the impact of his persona from both the ideological content of a discussion and my own resistance, in the face of his alienating behavior, to hear his contributions with sympathy. The problem was compounded by the Institute’s being a kind of reunion for Illich acolytes and friends, so that I felt like a court hanger-on with mutually unsavory choices: to insinuate myself into the intellectual aristocracy, or, wallowing in alienation, to turn up my nose at this incestuous coterie.

Also attending the Maine conference, Mr. Yanowitz recalls, was John Ohliger (not Ohlinger, as he spells it), a critic of education and especially the adult-education industry and its promotion of "life-long learning."

Another blog devoted to Ivan Illich

2011-09-06T18:19:00.001-04:00

We've just learned of another person's blog that's devoted to the work and thought of Ivan Illich. It's called Celebration of Awareness, A Collaborative blog inspired by Ivan Illich, and it's here.

There is only a handful of articles posted there, now, but we look forward to exploring it.

The State as Employment Agency

2011-09-02T17:16:00.001-04:00

Ivan Illich, 1983:

The modern state could be interpreted as an employment agency with a gun to protect the fuel pump.

NY Times, today ...

Job Growth Halts, Putting Washington Under Pressure

The nation’s employers failed to add new jobs in August, a strong signal that the economy has stalled and that policy makers can no longer afford inaction.

.

and …

Obama Pulls Back Proposal To Tighten Clean Air Rules

The Obama administration is abandoning its plan to immediately tighten air-quality rules nationwide to reduce emissions of smog-causing chemicals after an intense lobbying campaign by industry… .

The White House announcement that it was overruling the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to adopt a stricter standard for ground-level ozone came just hours after another dismal jobs reports ... The president is planning a major address next week on new measures to stimulate employment […]

Leaders of major business groups — including the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute and the Business Roundtable — met with Ms. Jackson and with top White House officials earlier this summer seeking to moderate, delay or kill the rule. They told William Daley, the White House chief of staff, that the rule would be very costly to industry and would hurt Mr. Obama’s chances for re-election.

Madhu Suri Prakash interviews Javier Sicilia

2011-08-12T14:35:00.001-04:00

Yes! magazine has published a brief interview with Javier Sicilia, the Mexican poet and friend of Ivan Illich's whose 24-year-old son was shot dead by a drug gang early this year. The interview was conducted by Madhu Suri Prakash, another of Illich's friends and a professor at Penn State.

As noted here earlier, Sicilia has emerged as spiritual leader to thousands of Mexican citizens who are demanding that their government radically change how it deals with illegal drugs and the people who are in the business of shipping those drugs into the U.S.A. In this interview, he states:

If from the very beginning drugs were decriminalized, drug lords would be subjected to the iron laws of the market. That would have controlled them. That would have allowed us to discover our drug addicts and offer them our love and our support. That would not have left us with 40,000 dead, 10,000 disappeared and 120,000 displaced...

The war is caused by puritan mentalities: like those of [Mexican President Felipe] Calderón and [former US President George] Bush. In the name of abstractions — the abstraction of saving youth from drug addiction — they have brutally assassinated thousands of young people, while transforming others into delinquents.

Albert Camus spoke a terrible truth. “I know something worse than hate: abstract love.” In the name of abstract love, in the name of God and Country, in the name of saving the youth from the drug, in the name of the proletariat, in the name of abstractions, our politicians and war policy makers have committed the most atrocious crimes on human beings, who are not abstractions, who are bones and flesh. That is what our country is living and suffering today: in the name of an abstract goodness, we are suffering the opposite: the horror of war and violence, of innocents dead, disappeared, and mutilated.

Illich in Turkey

2011-08-06T23:55:00.001-04:00

They are reading Illich in Turkey, too, it appears. Here's a page discussing him, and here, we believe, is the cover of the translated Deschooling Society.

Illich in Poland

2011-08-06T18:56:00.001-04:00

A 96-minute video of a discussion about Illich held by some young Poles has been posted to Vimeo, here. We're unable to understand what's being said, but the focus appears to be on the book Deschooling Society, which recently became available in a new Polish translation. We read about that edition here:

A new Polish translation of Ivan Illich’s book Deschooling Society is released 34 years after the first edition. The book, discussed worldwide by progressive educators, artistic milieus demanding radical changes in culture and cultural education, is an excellent point of reference for the current Polish debate on the future of culture and social life. Deschooling Society was first published in Poland in 1976 in a then microscopic 3000 copies. The new translation features a slightly modified title and an introduction by Piotr Laskowski, Jan Sowa’s conversation with Zbigniew Libera, Hanna Kostyło’s text on the life of Illich, and drawings by Hubert Czerepok.

Instead of another reform of education, Illich postulates society without school, i.e. society that independently establishes educational networks: ephemeral, changeable, dynamic educational groups, somewhat of temporary autonomous spheres. Their creation depends on the needs that ever easier to satisfy in the era of the Internet – unrestricted access to educational resources, possibility of getting across to people who are willing to share desired abilities. But also a change in the structure of knowledge – from the pyramid, or taproot trunk into the rhizome. [Piotr Laskowski, from the introduction: Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Bęc Zmiana, 2010]

Do join us at the debate around Ivan Illich’s book, featuring: Prof Przemysław Czapliński, Piotr Laskowski and Jan Sowa.
Time: 8.12.2010 (Wednesday), 19.30
Venue: Solec, 44 Solec St., Warsaw

Ivan Illich (1926-2002) – Austrian thinker and critic of contemporary society, „humanist radical”, as Erich Fromm put it, one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century.

Przemysław Czapliński (b. 1962) – researcher in Polish culture, essayist, translator. Member of the jury of the Nike Literary Award, co-founder of the Department of Anthropology of Literature at AMU in Poznań, Ordinary Professor since 2002.

Piotr Laskowski (b. 1976) – Egyptologist, ideological historian, teacher. Co-founder and the first director of Jacek Kuroń Multicultural Humanist High School in Warsaw. Assistant Professor at the Jagiellonian university in Cracow. Published Sketches from the History of Anarchism [in Polish].

Janek Sowa (ur. 1976) – Doctor of Sociology, psychologist. Co-founder of Ha!Art Corporation Publishing House. Author and editor of books in psychology, sociology and social ciritque. Lectures at the Institute of Public affairs and Centre for Humanist Studies at the Jagiellonian University. Co-author of the initiative Goldex Poldex / www.goldexpoldex.pl

Cyborgs, All of Us

2011-08-05T16:01:00.001-04:00

If anyone had any doubt about Illich's observation that we moderns have taken to perceiving ourselves in cybernetic terms, look no further than the NY Times for Aug. 3, 2011.

A story appears there - in the "Home & Garden" section, of all places - under the headline "A Dashboard for Your Body."

The Times article reviews a handful of colorful iPod-like gadgets that collect, analyze, and display physiological data: how many steps a person walks during the day, temperature, pulse and heart rate, weight, and blood pressure. Several of these gizmos send their data wirelessly to a computer, or a company website, where the data is collected over time for viewing and comparison with others'. One, called Fitbit, gets special attention:

"Although Fitbit doesn’t explicitly acknowledge this in its marketing materials, the gadget makes you feel bad about yourself. The device ($100) is a super-powered pedometer; it monitors movement while you sleep as well as counts your steps, and it sends all the data back to Fitbit’s Web-based tracking program, which displays your lethargy on the sort of precise charts and graphs that economists use to monitor recessions."

It's only a matter of time, we predict, before people start posting physiological readings to the Web, perhaps even sharing them with each other via Twitter, so that "friends" can view and perhaps even experience each other's bodily functions in "real-time."

Where might Illich have written this?

2011-08-01T21:06:00.001-04:00

Does anyone know where - or even if - Ivan Illich actually wrote the following? It is quoted here and there on the Web, with explicit attribution to Illich, primarily on sites relating to the Slow Food movement, which takes Illich's concept of conviviality as one of its touchstones and the snail - soon to be escargot? - as its mascot:

The snail constructs the delicate architecture of its shell by adding ever increasing spirals one after the other, but then it abruptly stops and winds back in the reverse direction. In fact, just one additional larger spiral would make the shell sixteen times bigger. Instead of being beneficial, it would overload the snail. Any increase in the snail’s productivity would only be used to offset the difficulties created by the enlargement of the shell beyond its preordained limits. Once the limit to increasing spiral size has been reached, the problems of excessive growth multiply exponentially, while the snail’s biological capability, in the best of cases, can only show linear growth and increase arithmetically.

We've looked but we cannot find an authoritative source for this piece of text. It certainly sounds like something Illich might have written, possibly in a discussion of the kinds of topic that he picked up from Leopold Kohr: scale, morphology, proportionality. But where?

[UPDATE: As described in the comments appended to this item, we have the answer: Illich wrote about the snail, in slightly different words, on page 82 of his 1983 book Gender. Thanks so much to those who answered our query!]

Illich's inspiration on Slow Food is noted here, in a 2008 notice of a conference about "the spirituality and sacredness of food":

The moderator was Carlo Petrini and the speakers were Enzo Bianchi, prior of the monastic community of Bose in Piedmont, Italy, and Satish Kumar, friend and disciple of Gandhi, founding director of the Schumacher College in Dartington (UK) and editor of Resurgence magazine.

Bianchi and Kumar were both friends of Ivan Illich, the Austrian philospher, theologist and anarchist social critic who, combining spirituality and social commitment, created the concept of ‘conviviality’ in opposition to productivity.

It's at another Slow Food page that we read Serge Latouche quoting Illich on the snail. Latouche is a contributor to The Development Dictionary - he contributes an essay about the concept of "standard of living" - which we recently wrote about here, and his brief Slow Food piece is quite interesting. It begins:

The idea of an autonomous economical society, implicit in the concept of degrowth, is not something that developed yesterday. But you do not need to go back to the utopias of early socialism or the anarchic traditions of situationism: the idea of degrowth was formulated in a similar form to ours at the end of the 1960s by André Gorz, François Parlant, Cornelius Castoriadis and, in particular, by Ivan Illich. The failure of development in poor countries and feelings of disconnectedness in richer countries led various thinkers to revive debate about the consumer society and its illusions, progress, science and technology. Realization of the developing environmental crisis has brought about a new attitude in which a society based on growth is not only undesirable but not even sustainable. So we have to change, and the sooner the better.

In the degrowth project, autonomy is understood in a strong sense with its etymological meaning (autos–nomos: issuing its own laws), in contrast to the heteronomy of the market’s invisible hand and the dictates of science and technology in our (over)modern society. Criticizing modernity does not imply a pure and simple rejection but aims to evolve beyond it. It is through our emancipation as a result of the Enlightenment and the construction of an autonomous society that we can now denounce the failure of this model, so arrogantly and triumphantly controlled by financial markets. The conviviality that Ivan Illich borrows from the great 18th-century French gastronome, Brillat-Savarin (The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy), aims to recreate the social linkages that have been broken by ‘economic horror’ (Rimbaud). Conviviality reintroduces the spirit of giving to social relations alongside the law of the jungle, and re-establishes philia, Aristotelian friendship. […]

Scarcity reconsidered

2011-08-01T18:54:00.001-04:00

Anyone familiar with the work of Ivan Illich understands the significance he attributed to the notion of scarcity. Education, Illich concluded, was learning under the assumption that valuable knowledge is scarce. High-energy transport, measured in units such as miles-per-hour and miles-per-gallon, assumes that time and space and fuel are scarce. Walking and cycling, in contrast, do not involve space that is scarce. Modern service institutions, he explained, actually create scarcity when clients, as they inevitably seem to do, demand more services than the institutions are able to deliver. (Exhibit No. 1: The current medical care system and the ongoing debate over Medicare and the affordability of health insurance.)

Indeed, scarcity lurks beneath every discussion of "resources," whether that word is used to describe workers in a corporation or fuel as a source of energy to drive the economy or fresh water as something for which global demand seems to be outstripping available supplies.

In short, scarcity is the basis for all economic thought, which Illich contrasted with "the good" and how things fit with each other. In the late 1970s, he proposed writing a "history of scarcity," and many of his subsequent papers worked at developing that theme.

In a world of scarcity-based economics, which historically is quite new, many things suffer. "Where scarcity rules," Illich wrote in "The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr," "ethics is reduced to numbers and utility. Further, the person engaged in the manipulation of mathematical formulas loses his or her ear for ethical nuance; one becomes morally deaf.

"Ethics, in a strong tradition from Aristotle to Mandeville, involved a public controversy about the good to be pursued within a human condition and perhaps grudgingly accepted. Economics, however, demands the evaluation of desirable goals under the assumption of scarcity. It deals in the optimization of values; this leads to the creation of modern economic society, which provides seemingly unlimited fuel for a technological civilization. Such a civilization attempts to transform the human condition rather than debate the nature of the human good."

Late last year, it seems, a book was published under the title The Limits of Scarcity. It's a collection of papers edited by a Lyla Mehta, a sociologist who studies climate change, water, sanitation, and yes, scarcity.

We mention this book not because it is the last word on scarcity - there is no scarcity of thought on scarcity, we're quite sure - but because one of its essays is written by two people in the Illich circle, Jean Robert and Sajay Samuel. Their contribution is titled "Water runs and ought to run freely: reflections on 'scarcity' in economics." What appears to be the full text of this essay, albeit marked up with some alterations that are not entirely self-evident, is available at a site called ECOMUNIDADES, which appears to be based in Mexico. (It's subtitle, translated as best we can: Red Independent Ecological network of the River basin of Mexico. Economic contraction [?] or barbarism!") The Robert-Samuel paper builds on Illich's thoughts about "the good," as formulated by Aristotle and about "needs" and scarcity, and his contrast of commons versus resources, especially as seen in the changing laws regarding the use and diverting of naturally flowing water.

Meanwhile, a review of Ms. Mehta's scarcity book can be read here and the text of her introduction is available here. She describes her book as an attempt to explore the social construction of scarcity, "to question scarcity’s taken-for-granted nature and assumptions. While not denying that scarcities exist for many and that our planet is in peril (not least due to the wanton overexploitation of resources and climate change), our contention is that scarcity is not a constant variable that can be blamed for all our woes. Instead, we need to be aware of the politics of allocation and the ways in which scarcity is politicized, especially to suit the interests of powerful players."

She writes: "Part I discusses why scarcity matters and provides a review of diverse disciplinary understandings of scarcity. It also discusses the profound implications of scarcity politics by drawing on the energy policy and the vast reach of neo-Malthusianism in the USA. Part II engages with diverse perspectives of scarcity within economics. Modern (neo-classical) economics is premised on scarcity in many different ways. The essays in this section ask where this came from, what the impacts are and considers both mainstream and heterodox perspectives of scarcity within economics. Part III turns to empirical concerns and traces scarcity politics in the domains of food, water and energy."

"The Two Lives of Ivan Illich" and their thematic consistency

2011-08-01T16:26:00.001-04:00

A site called Books & Ideas has published an article reviewing the life and thought of Ivan Illich as presented in an issue of the French journal Esprit - an issue we previously noted here. (The article is presented in English translation; the original, in French, is here.)

"The Two Lives of Ivan Illich," by Augustin Fragnière, a PhD candidate at the University of Lausanne, reviews the two period's of Illich's thought. First, M. Fragnière explains, Illich analyzed the counter-productivity of certain modern tools - the car, schools, hospitals, and so forth. This results in "a concrete analysis using technical and economic language." Around 1980, though, Illich turned to examine the symbolic effects of tools, how they give way to systems that disembody their users.

"These reflections naturally signal a break, coming in the form of self-criticism, with his past research, which itself borrowed terms from science and other various institutions. Ivan Illich 'had understood that it was not from technology and institutions that we had to free ourselves but rather from the representations and ways of seeing things that they generate.' … Putting aside criticism of technology and economy, Illich took on the role of historian and linguist, tracking down the convictions that scientific vocabulary generates or the social conditioning which results from the slow modification of everyday objects such as the text."

M. Fragnière continues: "Beneath this break with past methodology and this radicalisation in his criticism of modernity, there lies a thematic consistency that maintains remarkable continuity with the body of his work. There are even parallels which emerge rather clearly between the two periods of his intellectual life. He moves from criticism of school and education, to history of the text and of its transformation from the 13th century up until its technological form on computers; criticism of medicine becomes the history of the body and analysis of concepts of bioethics; criticism of transport becomes the history of technological paradigms, from Hugues de St-Victor (12th century) to today, with commentary on the notion of energy or reflections on the art of living and on the relationship that man has with his territory. Esprit thus brings us on a journey through the erudite universe of the second Illich, a journey where the reader repeatedly and constantly encounters the same figure at the bend in each road, that of the man or woman from the real world, the person made of flesh, whose disappearance under assault from the abstract individual of contemporary institutions Illich so feared. Despite the thematic and methodological eclecticism of the two periods of Ivan Illich‘s life, the one overriding preoccupation with man and his autonomy remained."

Fragnière comments on Illich's paper about the social construction of energy, too. It's "a beautiful text by Illich … on the history of the term ‘energy’ in terms of it being a concept of theoretical physics and a social object. For Illich, the ascendance of the word ‘energy’ in contemporary language, associated with that of ‘work’, marks the birth of a new concept of nature and of the emergence of the modern individual defined by need. From the moment when work and energy are elevated to the rank of fundamental need, there is nothing left to oppose the reign of the ‘ecocrat’ (p. 225) who, not content with organising men and institutions, extends his power to all of nature, which is considered a reserve of energy to be used by man. And once the goal becomes to extract the maximum from our natural energy resources, the loss in autonomy becomes apparent, since human action remains bound to the law of demand and supply, motivated by need. Illich’s contribution, to an era when debate on energy management is ever-present, lies in the fact that he pushes us to question once more the convictions which stem from terms taken as unquestionable evidence."

M. Fragnière, we read, is conducting research on "mechanisms of climate regulation and philosophy of the environment." His PhD dissertation focuses on "the connection between individual liberty and environment protection." That's a topic Illich addressed, if only briefly, in his discussions of "life" and of how systems thinking leads people to consider themselves as merely immune systems and as subsystems struggling to survive as part of the larger "environmental system" called Earth, or Gaia.

The Development Dictionary

2011-07-28T16:08:00.001-04:00

Somebody - but who? - has put online a complete scan of a smart, fascinating 1992 book called The Development Dictionary, ready for reading, searching and, for a fee, downloading in PDF or text format.

The book is available at Scribd, a site that enables the sharing of documents, including complete books, often without necessarily respecting the originals' copyrights. Whether or not Scribd is infringing on the copyright of this book, we cannot determine, but The Development Dictionary is there, for anyone to read or to copy. (see below)

We highly recommend this book to anyone interested in following the thought of Ivan Illich, who wrote one of its essays, titled "Needs." The book's editor is Wolfgang Sachs, an early student of Illich's. He was one of the people whom Illich credits for having informed him, while the book was being prepared for publication, that Deschooling Society had missed the fact that the educational system, under increasing attack in the early 1970s, had already begun to seek additional venues, beyond traditional schools, in which to sell its services. (See p.70, Ivan Illich in Conversation.)

The Development Dictionary calls itself a "guide to knowledge as power," and offers itself as an obituary for the post-war era of Euro-centric socio-economic development. "Development," the book argues, is a "perception that models reality, a myth which comforts societies and a fantasy which unleashes passion."

Writes Sachs, introducing the essays:

… each chapter will dip into the archaeology of the key concept under examination and call attention to its ethnocentric and even violent nature. The chapters identify the shifting role each concept has played in the debate on development over the last 40 years. They demonstrate how each concept filters perception, highlighting certain aspects of reality while excluding others, and they show how this bias is rooted in particular civilizational attitudes adopted during the course of European history. Finally, each chapter attempts to open a window on to other, and different, ways of looking at the world and to get a glimpse of the riches and blessings which survive in non-Western cultures in spite of development. Each chapter will be of worth if, after reading it, experts and citizens alike have to blush, stutter or burst out laughing when they dare to mouth the old word.

Here is the table of contents, showing the book's wide range of inter-related topics. Many of the authors' names ought to be familiar to anyone acquainted with Illich and his work; all of them, Sachs writes, engaged in discussions together that eventually led to the creation of this book:

Introduction - Wolfgang Sachs

Development - Gustavo Esteva

Environment - Wolfgang Sachs

Equality - C. Douglas Lummis

Helping - Marianne Gronemeyer

Market - Gerald Berthoud

Needs - Ivan Illich

One World - Wolfgang Sachs

Participation - Majid Rahnema

Planning - Arturo Escobar

Population - Barbara Duden

Poverty - Majid Rahnema

Production - Jean Robert

Progress - Jose Maria Sbert

Resources - Vandana Shiva

Science - Claude Alvares

Socialism - Harry Cleaver

Standard of Living - Serge Latouche

State - Ashis Nandy

Technology - Otto Ullrich

Illich's essay on "Needs" is available, in slightly different form, at the Pudel site in Bremen.

We must admit, we're not sure of the ethics of this book's being published, as it were, by Scribd - or, for that matter, of our mentioning it as we have. We're pleased to find the book online, if only as evidence of someone's interest in Illich, but is it proper to subvert the usual publishing process this way? Is it right for us to point it out and thereby encourage more people to grab a copy?

This scan of The Development Dictionary happens to be only one instance of the many complete copies of Illich's books that we've seen available on the Web. (And Google Books, of course, provides limited access to many more.) Some of these copies are facsimile scans whose text is not searchable, others are fully searchable in text and PDF formats. Illich himself, we understand from those who knew him, was not upset at seeing the text of books like Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality made available on the Net. But it does strike us as wrong to deny someone like Wolfgang Sachs - not to mention his publisher - any royalties that might come his way from legitimate sales of the book. On Amazon, the first edition sells for $35; a second edition, released in early 2010, is priced at $24 in paperback and $126 in hard cover.

We're happy to say that we bought this book years ago, when it was first published, and we've not downloaded a copy from Scribd. (We admit, we did try to download it, but we balked when asked to subscribe to the entire Scribd site for $9 a month or pay $5 for a 1-day pass. Another, no-charge option also was offered: In exchange for uploading a document of one's own - "give back to the community," the site urges - one can obtain the Sachs book and 24-hour download access to all of Scribd. That's something to consider, but it still doesn't put any money into Sachs' pocket.)

We urge anyone interested in Illich to buy the book in paper form, or find it in a library. Dense with insight and argument, it's one that anyone seriously interested in Illich's thought and its influence on others will want to read closely, as it was intended to be read - on paper, not screen. (No, Amazon doesn't sell it as an e-book.)

Jean Robert and Illich on "energy"

2011-07-27T21:37:00.001-04:00

In a previous post here, we wrote about and attempted to summarize a paper of Ivan Illich's called "The Social Construction of Energy." Originally presented in 1983 at a seminar in Mexico City, the paper was published only in 2009, in a Harvard journal called New Geographies. (It's not available online.)

In the same issue of that journal appeared a closely related piece by Illich's collaborator Jean Robert - a Swiss who lives in Cuernavaca. His paper is titled "Alternatives and the Technogenic Production of Scarcity." (Mr. Robert, we've read, invented a composting toilet that requires no water - a boon, it would seem, in the extremely dry climate of Mexico.)

It has just come to our attention that another energy-related paper by Mr. Robert is available at the website of a Dutch anti-nuclear research and communications outfit called WISE. The paper is called "Genesis and development of a scientific fact: the case of energy," and discusses some of the same topics as those addressed by Illich and Mr. Robert himself in New Geographies, namely how the modern and quite fuzzy and contradictory modern concepts of energy - ie. everything is made of energy yet the stuff is so scarce that we perpetually face an "energy crisis" - have come to be. We look forward to reading it.

Meanwhile, we've noticed another paper that refers extensively to Illich's social construction argument (and to much of his other work, as well): It's called "Environmental History During the Anthropocene" and it's available here, at the website of an organization called Niche, or Network in Canadian History & Environment.

"Life as Idol" - a CBC radio show

2011-07-26T13:11:00.001-04:00

Canadian Broadcasting (CBC) is making available in MP3 format a recording of David Cayley's program, "Life as Idol." It is a 54-minute interview with Ivan Illich, conducted in the late 1980s, that explores the concept of "life."

We highly recommend the program to anyone interested in Illich. He delves into the substantive usage of "life" - how humans have come to be conceived of as "a life" - and how this concept has affected the practice of medicine and Church doctrine (including its views on abortion; Illich criticizes pope-to-be Ratzinger by name) and how the entire planet (the "biosphere") has come to be considered a living system, aka Gaia. And much more. Ultimately, Illich declares himself a hedonist and calls for us all to "live it up" - without wasting the gift that is this world, this life.

CBC is offering the program as part of a series it calls Listener's Choice, here. Its description of the program:

As a young couple, without television or internet, Andrea Wilhelm and her husband were ripped out of their nightly routine, spellbound by a voice full of character, critiquing what society does in the name of "life" and questioning the very concept. The voice was educator, and social critic Ivan Illich and we represent that Ideas interview from 1986.

Sajay Samuel, interviewed about Illich and "the vernacular"

2011-07-22T13:58:00.001-04:00

A group of radical environmentalists in the U.K. called The Dark Mountain Project has published an interview with Sajay Samuel that touches on Ivan Illich and his ideas about "the vernacular." Sajay looks carefully at the charge that Illich was a romantic. The interview is available for listening here and an MP3-based recording of the interview is available for downloading, at no charge, here.

We've always been impressed and intrigued by Sajay. His credentials are in the discipline of business, and he now serves as Clinical Associate Professor of Accounting & STS at Penn State's Smeal College of Business. Yet, he was a member of Illich's inner circle. He also was one of the people that David Cayley interviewed for his series of radio programs, 'How to Think About Science':

"Today it is a commonplace that science requires us to renounce the evidence of our senses if we are to understand the true nature of things. The truth lies behind or beneath the appearances. This loss of the senses has fateful consequences, according to Sajay Samuel, a professor at the Pennsylvania State University. Without common sense, he says, science fills ours entire horizon - leaving us no place to stand outside of science, and no basis on which to judge what science produces."

The 49-minute interview with Sajay was conducted in June, 2011, by Dougald Hine, a fellow Illich admirer. He describes himself as "a speaker, a writer or a creator of organisations, projects and events."

The Dark Mountain Project describes itself so:

This project starts with our sense that civilisation as we have known it is coming to an end; brought down by a rapidly changing climate, a cancerous economic system and the ongoing mass destruction of the non-human world. But it is driven by our belief that this age of collapse – which is already beginning – could also offer a new start, if we are careful in our choices.

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.

Deeper than oil, steel or bullets, a civilisation is built on stories: on the myths that shape it and the tales told of its origins and destiny. We have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we are: the stories of ‘progress’, of the conquest of ‘nature’, of the centrality and supremacy of the human species.

It is time for new stories. The Dark Mountain Project intends to conjure into being new ways of seeing and writing about the world. We call this Uncivilisation.

Searching for Lee Hoinacki

2011-07-08T12:57:00.001-04:00

Lee Hoinacki is one of Illich's closest collaborators, meeting him in 1960 when, as a Dominican priest, he went to CIDOC to learn Spanish. Illich credits him in several of his books as having contributed much to their clarity and substance. Mr. Hoinacki has written three books of his own: El Camino: Walking to Santiago de Compostela, Stumbling Toward Justice, and Dying is Not Death. The last of these includes a lengthy chapter about Illich. He also has published a number of papers relating to Illich, including "Why Philia?", and helped to translate books by others in the Illich circle.

Mr. Hoinacki joined Carl Mitcham in editing The Challenges of Ivan Illich, a collection of essays published in 2002. His opening essay, "Reading Ivan Illich," is available from the publisher's website, here. He writes:

Illich was trained in ecclesiology and was especially intrigued by liturgy. He understood, I would argue, that the most ominous expression of secularization in the West was not the death of nature (although this was related), nor a misnamed materialism, nor sexual “freedom,” but the decline of liturgy, the routinization and emptying out of religious ritual in the churches. As he suggests, this process began with clerical actions to establish various assured institutional responses to God’s calling, later legitimated by a juridical or legal order; men hesitated to rest all hope on gratuitous gifts of grace. Illich captures the dénouement of this lack of faith with the ancient Latin adage corruptio optimi quae est pessima (the corruption of the best turns out to be the worst). He has attempted to show that this apothegm accurately reveals the origins of “normative notions of a cruelty, of a horrifying darkness, which no other culture has ever known.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, portrays institutional mistrust as a demonic temptation in Ivan’s poem, “The Grand Inquisitor,” perhaps literature’s most terrifying image of the betrayal of the freedom graciously given to people by Jesus.

There is a Facebook page for Mr. Hoinacki, but it doesn't provide any information that's not available elsewhere - a short, widely-quoted bio is all. But here, there is a lengthy interview with him, recorded in 2000, in which he discusses his training as a priest, his encountering and working with Illich, his working a subsistence farm with his family in Illinois, and his exchange of letters with Theodore Kaczynski, known as the "Unabomber." And other topics.

Another interview, from 2010, appears at a site called Radio Free School. (This interview is also available as a podcast.) Mr. Hoinacki speaks about his long friendship with Illich, the futon bed he built for Illich, and the latter's thoughts on technology. For example:

Q: Illich's concerns around technology, what it’s doing to society - can we talk a little more about that?

Hoinacki: He was interested first of all in the effects of technology - the actual effects first of all and later the symbolic effects. He would use an example, say a photograph. The photograph was introduced in the 19th century and into history. But this technological artifact changed people’s perception so he thought it was a serious question which people should try to look at, figure out, whether anyone sees anything today. Period.

Recently, we found Mr. Hoinacki listed as part of a loosely-organized consulting organization calling itself New Paradigm Design, which includes architects, writers, artists, and others. Together, they focus on "sustainable solutions." Last we heard, Mr. Hoinacki was living in Philadelphia.

The marketing of 'Medical Nemesis'

2011-07-07T21:14:00.001-04:00

Here is how the paperback edition of Illich's book Medical Nemesis looked in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This is the edition we first bought (in December, 1981) and read - at the big Barnes & Noble store on lower Fifth Ave. in NYC - though our copy is priced at $2.75:

Read it and marvel, indeed. Note the heated language in that subhed. On the rear cover, it says "CAUTION: The medical establishment may be hazordous to your health," with that first word in red. "In this landmark book, one of the most brilliant social critics of our time exposes the many ways modern medicine is robbing us of power, money, dignity - even life itself."

And here, below, is the book as it is sold in paperback today, considerably more serene. This edition contains a new introduction by Illich, which is well worth reading for his reassessment of the book's argument and understanding of how systems-theoretic concepts were moving people to re-conceive their bodies in a radically new and quite flesh-less way. He expresses dismay that then, in 1995, sales of the book were mainly to medical students.

Illich in 1969

2011-06-28T14:09:00.001-04:00

This photograph appeared in the New York Times for Feb. 2, 1969, accompanying the paper's regular "Religion" column. The author was Edward B. Fiske, who also made this photo, and the headline was "Illich Goes His Own Way." The article reported the rift that had occurred between Illich and the Vatican.

Hartmut von Hentig

2011-06-06T19:00:00.001-04:00

In 1972, Mother Earth News Magazine published an interview with Hartmut von Hentig, a German critic of education born in 1925. The interview took place in Cuernavaca, where von Hentig was attending a seminar - "Education for a Global Community of Man" - at CIDOC.

Illich acknowledged von Hentig in Tools for Conviviality and von Hentig wrote the foreword to the German edition of Deschooling Society. Judging by this interview in Mother Earth News, he was not entirely in agreement with Illich about what to do about education and schooling. While Illich argued for radical alternatives to compulsory schooling, von Hentig says the best approach is to work within the system and reform it. He wrote two books about his arguments with Illich over schooling and its reform: In 1971, Cuernavaca oder Alternativen zur Schule?, and two years later, Die Wiederherstellung der Politik - Cuernavaca revisited.

Evidently, this interview is one of the few pieces written in English about von Hentig that's available online. In German, there is a 1974 piece from Der Spiegel that discusses him in relation to Illich.

Some later photos of von Hentig are shown here.

Illich book, and photo

2011-06-06T17:37:00.001-04:00

Here, for the sake of completeness, is a 1973 book by Illich, En América Latina, para qué sirve la escuela, as scanned by and available, in part, at Google libros. We mention it not because we can read its Spanish text - we cannot - but because its cover shows a photo of Illich that we've not seen before.

"Critic of Professionalized Design"

2011-06-06T16:51:00.001-04:00

A 2003 paper in memory of Illich, written by Carl Mitcham, has appeared online, for the first time at no cost to read. Originally published in an MIT journal called Design Issues, the paper officially costs $12 to view.

Evidently, this PDF's text is not searchable, but the paper is certainly worth a look by anyone interested in Illich - and especially in his thoughts on technology, "tools," and the growing influence of experts who seek to design urban spaces and the things people use in their daily lives. Ironically, we've noticed, many design professionals toss around the term "conviviality" seemingly without much knowledge of what Illich originally meant by it. For example, there are many proposals to weave into urban space all sorts of information technologies - more screens, that is, and schemes for "ubiquitous computing" that involve networks of hidden sensors and wireless access points.

Mitcham writes that while at Penn State in the early 1990s, he and Illich started to investigate the "historical archaeology of design." A paper with the working title of "Anti-Design: Notes for a Manifesto on Modern and Postmodern Artifice" was partially completed, its first paragraph reading, at one point:

Contra the widely promoted belief that design is something all human beings do and have done throughout history, but now must do more consciously and thoroughly than ever before, design is something that has had a history. Its beginnings can be traced to the rise of modernity, and it will almost certainly come to an end with the modern project. Indeed, we have an obligation not so much to promote designing as to learn to live without it, to resist its seductions, and to turn away from its pervasive and corrupting influence.

Mitcham and Illich planned to argue that 1) architects and industrial engineers rarely achieve their stated goals of expanding control and reducing unintended consequences, and even if they do so, 2) "experts and professionals ultimately would dehumanize the world." The project's aim, Mitcham recalls, was "to reanimate the moral criticism of designing as a lack of proportionality in ambition and contrivance."

We imagine that much of the thinking Illich brought to this aborted project would have resonated with his earlier thoughts on "research by people," as opposed to "research for people," a topic he wrote about at some length in the book Shadow Work. We also can see him criticizing the design industry as largely a make-work project, much as he viewed compulsory schooling as, in part, simply an employment program for intellectuals. We're pretty sure, too, that he would have been highly critical of the many designers who bestow the "Third World" with their latest gadgets and gizmos. Their stated goal, which strikes many as just a new, albeit thinly-disguised imperialism: "to change the world." In many cases, it appears to us that young, fresh-out-of-school designers use their work in impoverished areas to win publicity for themselves, boost their credibility, and beef up their portfolios, all with the aim of eventually winning big-bucks mainstream projects.

"Too often," Mitcham writes, "design treats the world as an enemy rather than a friend, and calls in experts to manipulate and manage."

Ocotepec

2011-06-06T15:50:00.001-04:00

Anyone familiar with the life of Ivan Illich knows that he spent much of his time in Cuernavaca, a small city located about 50 miles south of Mexico City. Situated at an elevation of about 5,000 feet, Cuernavaca has a pleasant climate and long has been a summer residence for Mexico's elite as well as a popular destination for tourists.

Indeed, it was in an old hotel in Cuernavaca that in 1961, Illich founded CIDOC, a school that sought to train missionaries from North America - to "de-Yankee-fy" them, as Illich put it - before they served elsewhere in Latin America. After CIDOC was shut down in 1976, Illich maintained a home in a village called Ocotepec, just north of Cuernavaca. (We've seen this home described as a simple adobe, which makes sense, but we've not seen any photo of it.)

In a terrible way, Cuernavaca and Illich's presence there have been in the news, lately. Javier Sicilia, a well-known Mexican poet who lives there, has emerged in recent weeks as the leader of a grass-roots movement that's protesting the escalating but seemingly fruitless "war on drugs" that has killed some 40,000 Mexicans in the past 4 years. Among these was, on March 28, Javier's own son, Juan Francisco Sicilia, age 24, who with six other young men was murdered in Cuernavaca. While some of the victims showed signs of torture, no link between them and the drug trade has been established; they were murdered in cold blood.

Sicilia quickly turned his grief into action, speaking out, addressing the Mexican government, and calling for mass protests by Mexicans of all classes. In early May, he led thousands of people in walking silently from Cuernavaca to Mexico City, where they called on President Felipe Calderon to stop the violence and reconsider the current drug war strategy.

In many recent profiles of Javier Sicilia, Illich is cited as one of his major influences and a good friend. As described in this comprehensive report in The Narco News Bulletin by a reporter on the scene in Cuernavaca, Sicilia in 1994 founded a magazine called Ixtus. He used it to develop "his critique of modern society based on the Christian Gospels and the spirituality of personalities like Gandhi, Ivan Illich and Guiseppe Lanza del Vasto, the 'apostle of nonviolence.'" The latter, originally Sicilian, was a disciple of Gandhi who went on to found four ashram-like communities, called Arks, located in France. The Mexican poet visited one of these and with others tried to found a similar community in Mexico. It did not materialize, but it was in the late-stage planning meetings for this Mexican Ark, it's reported, that Sicilia met Jean Robert, a longtime collaborator and friend of Illich's who also lives in Cuernavaca.

And it was Robert's writing in Ixtus that introduced the poet to Illich's thought, and later, he introduced the two: “One day I brought Javier to Ivan’s house and they got along very well. They began an immediate and profound friendship and saw each other until Illich’s dying day,” Robert told Narco News's reporter Al Giordano. According to the Narco News article, Javier went on to translate Illich’s texts into Spanish and, with Valentina Borremans, CIDOC's co-founder and manager and now, the executor of Illich’s literary estate, to edit a two-volume compilation titled Obras Reunidas, or Reunited Works.

In 2009, Sicilia founded a new magazine, called Conspiratio - a name that clearly echoes Illich's call for the cultivation of conspiracy. Reaching far back in Church history, Illich sought to resurrect the notion of conspiratio, describing it as "a commingling of breaths," as the creation of a special "atmosphere" that emerges when committed friends come together, if only around a dinner table lit by candles, to share thoughts, to contemplate, and to seek the truth.

A quick search of the Web finds several relevant items, all written in Spanish - which, we regret to say, we can neither read nor speak. Here, for instance, is a piece from May 30, 2011, called "Ivan Illich y Javier Sicilia – Por Jean Robert." In 2008, a publication called Letras Libres published an article about the new collection of Illich's work, here. The same website offers another article about Illich, posted in March, 2001, by Sicilia and Robert. And yet another piece apparently concerning Illich and the poet, by Robert, is available at a site called SurySur: "La historicidad de las instituciones: sobre Ivan Illich y Javier Sicilia."

Finally, we point readers to a short video clip that our search discovered on YouTube. With narration in Spanish, "La tumba de Iván Illich" shows what appears to be a grave for Ivan Illich in Ocotepec. "¿Ocotepec o Bremen? un misterio que resolver," reads the video's caption - "a mystery to resolve." Ourselves, we believe he's buried in Bremen, beneath a simple wooden cross in the crowded graveyard of a Protestant church in the outlying district of Oberneulander. We've visited this grave, though not, alas, in the warmer months when, we've been told, it bursts with sunflowers.

New Scare City?

2011-05-11T01:01:00.001-04:00

Why New Scare City? Some have wondered if that title is perhaps too dread-ful for writings that celebrate the thought of as peaceful person as Ivan Illich.

Originally, the blog appeared under the title Back Palm. That referred to a certain move in card conjuring, and it's still part of the blog's URL.

As we devoted more time to the blog, though, and as we found ourselves reading Illich more closely than usual, we suddenly remembered a pun we'd come up with years ago. The current title, for those who've not noticed, is a play on the word scarcity, a key topic for Illich. We have no claims to being the first to stumble onto this pun, but we do remember when it came to us, in 1981, while we were living in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We had just discovered Illich's books, we were listening to a good deal of punkish, political music (The Specials, Gang of Four, The Clash, Talking Heads, etc.), and we'd become politicized, even radicalized, by the election of Ronald Reagan. At some point, we even wore a t-shirt we'd emblazoned - using a brush and a dark, blood-red fabric dye - like so:

New Scar City

New Scarcity

New Scare City

Sadly, we moved away from Brooklyn 11 years ago, but the t-shirt still exists, we believe, stashed in one or another box of stuff. Alas, we are, to (mis)use another important term of Illich's, no longer of proper proportion to that garment. But we're glad to recycle its slogan.

Illich in India

2011-05-10T18:12:00.001-04:00

In 1970, we have read, a woman named Dorothy Norman wrote to her friend Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, urging her to read Ivan Illich's new book Deschooling Society. Norman, born into a wealthy family in 1905, was an advocate of social change, a photographer, and the "unofficial keeper" of the legacy of photographer Alfred Stieglitz. (She also was Stieglitz's student and lover.) At least for a time, Norman lived in Cuernavaca, Mexico, the home, also, of Illich and his CIDOC study center. Due largely to Malcolm Lowry's setting his well-received novel Under the Volcano there, Cuernavaca was a mecca for intellectuals (e.g. Erich Fromm), artists, and travelers looking for enlightenment of various kinds.

Upon learning of Illich's book - and who knows, perhaps she actually read it - Gandhi had her education minister invite Illich to come visit. Illich wrote back to say yes, but he also expressed interest in meeting with Jayaprakash Narayan and Vinoba Bhave. The former, often referred to as JP, was a fierce critic of Indira Gandhi. The latter was known as Mahatma Gandhi's spiritual successor.

According to a review in The Hindu newspaper of a book about those years, PMO Diary I - Prelude to the Emergency, "Indira reacted sharply. In her letter of October 4, 1972, to Norman she said Vinoba Bhave has always lacked Gandhiji's vision, breadth of understanding and human sympathy. Jayaprakash is a frustrated person. Later, she told Jayakar that JP 'hated' her; as 'he wanted to be Prime Minister'."

Evidently, Illich took up Gandhi's invitation and travelled to India. Whether or not this was his first visit to the subcontinent, we're not sure. But Illich would return at least once, to pursue an intriguing piece of research. India, and Indians, played an important role in his life's work.

In her biography of theosophist Jiddu Krishnamurti, a noted cultural activist named Pupul Jayakar takes credit for arranging Illich's meeting with Indira Gandhi and describes a meeting with Krishnamurti in 1972. (Krishnamurti, A Biography is still for sale at Amazon.com, for instance, though the full text also is available online for reading at no charge, here and other places.) Jayakar's chapter about Illich begins so:

In the summer of 1971 I was in the United States. After my official work was over, I spent a holiday with my daughter in California. She was to tell me of a very unusual lecture she had heard in Toronto. The speaker was Ivan Illich. He had been ordained into the Jesuit order and had spent several years in South America. Differences had arisen between him and the church in Rome and he had, after great travail, left the Jesuit priesthood and started living in Mexico at Cuernavaca. There, as he was to explain later in India, he established a center, an empty space where people could meet.

His Toronto lecture had been on “Deschooling Society,” and Radhika gave me a copy of the book. Its originality and intensity intrigued me, and on my return to India I gave the book to Indira Gandhi. She read the book, thought it relevant to the Indian situation, and arranged for Illich to be invited to India. He was to tell me later that he hesitated before responding to a government invitation, but ultimately agreed. We had a common friend, Dorothy Norman, and he brought me a letter of introduction from her.

Illich came to dinner at my house in Delhi in the late autumn of 1972. He had a remarkable presence and I responded eagerly to the challenge of his words. Soon we established a rapport and became friends. Indira Gandhi had asked me to help plan his programs and I had suggested that he visit Rajghat and meet Krishnaji.

On November 27, Ivan Illich was in Rajghat. He was staying in the room over the guest house; the river Ganga in all its majesty lay before it. He was having his meals with Krishnaji and the first meeting between the two took place in the afternoon. It was a seminal meeting of two minds; Krishnaji with an observing mind, alive, perceptive, and Ivan Illich, erudite, rational, rooted in the finest traditions of Western thought, yet prepared to listen. The river Ganga listened to the dialogue as it had listened through the centuries to the sound of voices questioning, listening and counterquestioning.

Although the minds of Krishnaji and Illich flowed as two distinct streams, they came together in their shared passion for transformations and the need to free man from illusion.

I introduced Illich to Krishnaji, and spoke of his criticism of modern society and his concern with restructuring society and its tools. Krishnaji and Illich discussed the chaos and corruption of contemporary education in the world. Illich spoke of his concern with liberating the individual from the illusions about what he owed society. Krishnaji had been listening, trying to contact the man behind the words. Sensing that the minds were not meeting, Krishnaji pointed to the river. “There lies the Ganga. It is flowing and all human beings are being driven by the flow of the stream—surely the individual is one who steps out of the stream. The word ‘individual’ means one who is not divisible, who is whole— not fragmented.”

The river was to become the shifting metaphor, around which the dialogue moved; voices coming together and moving apart.

Illich too was trying to establish contact and to feel his way into the new relationship. He said he had spent some hours on the riverbank, watching people bathing, praying, living in the same river, below the burning ghats. He had witnessed people come out of the river to sit quietly on its banks and had felt the resignation that arose within them, an acceptance that the river would carry them away again, one day. He mused on modern technological society to which India was becoming slowly a slave and so losing its touch with life, and the pervading feeling in the world that technology could re-channel the river.

“But the river could not be re-channeled,” said Krishnaji. “Will it not be the same water? There is only one action for the human being to step out of the stream, to never go back or form another stream.” Illich’s response was to quote a poem from Mexico written in the Navajo style, the first line being repeated and meditated upon:

Only for a short time have you loaned us to each other.

Because it is in your drawing us that we take shape
.
It is in your painting us that we get form.

It is in your singing to us that we get voice.

But only for a short while, have you loaned us to each other.

Because even as lines drawn in crystalline obsidian disappear

and as the green color of the Quetzalcoatal feathers fade

and as the waterfall subsides during the summer—so we too disappear.

Only for a short while have you loaned us to each other.

On the banks of the Ganga, Illich had witnessed an affirmation of life which he felt could be recreated in modern terms. He had sensed the weight and depth and rootedness of a civilization of which the river was a symbol. There was a great anguish in Illich for the loss of ancient traditions. Modern man, industrial man, whose values had been institutionalized, felt that he could take people from the old stream and insert them into a new stream. ...

Jayakar's description continues for a few more pages. The two men find some common understanding of spiritual matters but also disagree, she reports:

To Illich, suffering had to be accepted. "Why?" asked Krishnaji, "Should human beings suffer psychologically?"

"Because God accepted it," said Illich.

Krishnaji was merciless in his enquiry. "Why should man suffer?" For man to accept suffering psychologically was the essence of his ignorance. Why should human beings suffer? Because they were ignorant? Because they were in conflict? Because they were contradictory in themselves?

Illich was equally passionate. He said that he believed suffering was the human condition.

In the late 1970s, Illich travelled to southeast Asia and India in an effort to remove himself from Western society and thereby attain a vantage point from which to better analyze and understand that society and its underlying assumptions. The idea was to immerse himself in a language and culture that were so distant from those of the West that his attempts to write about the West in that new language would inevitably present great difficulties. Certain concepts taken for granted in the West would be difficult to describe, but it was those very difficulties that Illich wished to experience, for they would reveal what was peculiar to the West.

As he explained to David Cayley in the book Ivan Illich in Conversation (p.120):

I then spent several years learning Oriental languages, and getting my feet for long periods on roads which I walked in southeast Asian countries. For a short time I had the dream that what I really should do would be to describe the history of Western ideas in an Oriental language that was far enough away from those languages which I know that I would realy get some distance. I thought of Chinese, and found out that I'm too old. I ran into a man, Jean Domenach, who told me, "Ivan, if you really want to alienate yourself, really want to look at it from the outside, learn Japanese!" I found out that my brain was already too used up. I couldn't do it. And, even if I could have done it, I probably wouldn't have been able to write the stuff I wanted.

I found that northern India - when I finally got enough into the languages and people - wasn't far enough away, and was already too British to do what I wanted to do, so I moved another step further, into the Middle Ages. I went back to the twelfth century, which I had always loved, to certain authors, like Héloise, like Abelard, like Hugh of St. Victor, all these names whom I have beeb affectionately acquainted with, and I began to teach medieval intellectual history - for almost ten years - in French, and mostly in German. [...]

The Indian experience surprised me because of how easy it was to begin to read, to understand, and to feel somewhat at home there - at home is not really the word but to know how to move there. But I discovered that writing about Western ideas in many of the languages of modern India, or even in an ancient language, made no sense, because the semantic fields of Indian languages were already profoundly Anglicized. That project failed me, so I went back, humbly and happily, to my own Latin. In my studies, for almost ten years, I kept all my notes in Latin - kitchen Latin, medieval Latin.

In 1978, Illich gave a lecture on "Taught Mother Tongue" in Mysore, India. Given at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, the lecture was in honor of the institute's founder, Prof. Debi Prasanna Pattanayak. It later showed up as the forward to a 1981 book authored by Pattanayak, Multilingualism and Mother Tongue Education, and as one of the essays in Illich's 1992 collection, In the Mirror of the Past. (As of last year, Pattanayak was still alive, in his 80s and telling a gathering of linguists, including speakers of some 320 languages spoken on the subcontinent, that English was threatening not only many tribal languages there but even major ones like Hindi.)

That same year, Illich also gave the inaugural speech at a conference on "Techniques for the Third World Poor," held at Sevagram Ashram, the place where Gandhi resided from 1936 until his assassination in 1948. This speech shows up in Mirror of the Past as "The Message of Bapu's Hut." It picks up some common Illichian themes, including setting limits on tools and technique:

Friends:

Today in the morning while I was sitting in this hut where Mahatma Gandhi lived, I was trying to absorb the spirit of its concept and imbibe in me its message. There are two things about the hut which have impressed me greatly. One is its spiritual aspect and the other is the aspect of his amenities. I was trying to understand Gandhi’s point of view in regard to making the hut. I very much liked its simplicity, beauty and neatness. The hut proclaims the principle of love and equality with everybody. Since the house which has been provided to me in Mexico is in many ways like this hut, I could understand its spirit.

Here I found that the hut has seven kinds of places. As you enter, there is a place where you put down your shoes and prepare yourself physically and mentally to go into hut. Then comes the central room which is big enough to accommodate a big family. Today in the morning at four when I was sitting there for prayer, four people along with me were sitting by supporting themselves to one wall and on the other side also there was place enough for as many people if they sit together. This room is where everybody can go and join others. The third space is where Gandhiji himself sat and worked. There are two more rooms – one for the guest and the for the sick. There is an open verandah and also commodious bath room. All of these places have a very organic relationship.

I feel that if rich people come to this hut they must be making fun of it. When I look from the point of view of a simple Indian, I do not see why there should be a house bigger than this. This house is made of wood and mud. In its making, it is not the machine but the hands of man which have worked. I call it a hut but it is really a home. There is a difference between a house and a home. The house is where man keeps his luggage and furniture. It is meant more for the security and convenience of the furniture, than of the man himself. In Delhi, where I had been put up it was a house where there are many conveniences. The building is constructed from the point of view of these conveniences. It is made of cement and bricks and is like a box where the furniture and other conveniences can fit in well. We must understand that all the furniture and other articles that we go on collecting in our lives will never give us the inner strength. These are, so to say, the crutches of a cripple. The more of such conveniences we have, the more our dependence on them increases and our life gets restrictive. On the contrary, the kind of furniture I find in Gandhiji’s hut, is of a different order as there is very little cause of being dependent on them. A house fitted with all kinds of conveniences shows that we have become weak. The more we lose the power to live, the greater we depend upon the goods we acquire. It is like our depending upon the hospitals for the health of the people and upon the schools for the education of our children. Unfortunately both hospitals and schools are not an index of the health or the intelligence of a nation. Actually, the number of hospitals in indicative of the ill health of the people and schools of their ignorance. Similarly, the multiplicity of the facilities for living minimizes the expression of creativity in human life.

Unfortunately, the paradox of the situation is that those who have more such conveniences are regarded as superior creatures. Will it not be considered an immoral society where illness is given more importance and those who use artificial legs are considered superior. While sitting in Gandhiji’s hut I was grieved to ponder over this perversity. I have come to the conclusion that it is wrong to think of the industrial civilization as a road leading towards development of man. It has been proved that for our economic development, bigger and bigger machines of production and larger and larger number of engineers, doctors and professors are not necessary. I am convinced that such people are poor in mind, body and life-style who would want to have a place bigger than this hut where Gandhi lived. I have pity for them. By doing this they surrender themselves and their animate self to the inanimate structure. In the process they lose the elasticity of their body and vitality of their life, they have little relationship with nature and closeness with their fellow men.

When I ask the planners of the day, why they do not understand this simple approach which Gandhiji taught us, they say that Gandhiji’s way is very difficult and that the people will not be able to follow it. But the reality of the situation is that since Gandhiji’s principles do not tolerate the presence of any middleman or that of a centralized system, the planners and managers and politicians have very little attraction towards it. How is not being understood? Is it because people feel that untruth and violence will take them to the desired objective? No. This is not so. The common man fully understands that right means will take him to the right end. It is only the people who have some vested interest who refuse to understand it. The rich do not want to understand. When I say rich, I mean all those people who have got conveniences of life which are not available to everybody in common. These are in living, eating and going about. Their modes of consumption are such that they have been deprived of the power to understand the truth. It is to these that Gandhi becomes a difficult proposition to understand and assimilate. They are the ones to whom simplicity does not make any sense. Their circumstances unfortunately do not allow them to see the truth. Their lives have become too complicated to enable them to get out of trap they are in. Fortunately, for the largest number of people there is neither so much of wealth that they become immune to the truth of simplicity nor are they in such penury that they lack the capacity to understand. Even if the rich see the truth they refuse to understand it. It is because they have lost their contact with the soul of this country.

It should be very clear that the dignity of man is possible only in a self sufficient society and that it suffers as they move towards progressive industrialization. This hut connotes the pleasures that are possible through being at par with society. Here, self sufficiency is the keynote. We must understand that unnecessary articles and goods that a man possesses reduce his power to imbibe happiness from the surroundings. Therefore, Gandhi repeatedly said that productivity should be kept within the limits of wants. Today’s mode of production is such that it finds no limit and goes on increasing uninhibited. All these we have been tolerating so far but the time has come when man must understand that by depending more and more on machines he is moving towards his own suicide. The civilized world, whether it is China or America has begun to understand that if we want to progress, this is not the way. Man should realize that for the good of the individual as well as of the society, it is best that people keep for themselves only as much as is sufficient for their immediate needs. We have to find a method by which this thinking finds expression in changing the values of today’s world. This change can not be brought about by the pressure of the governments or through centralized institutions. A climate of public opinion has to be created to make people understand that which constitutes the basic society. Today the man with a motor car thinks himself superior to the man with a bicycle though, when we look at it from the point of view of the common norm, it is the bicycle which is the vehicle of the masses. The cycle, therefore, must be given the prime importance and all the planning in roads and transport should be done on the basis of the bicycle, whereas the motor car should get a secondary place. The actual situation, however, is the reverse and all plans are made for the benefit of the motor car giving a second place to the bicycle. Common man’s requirements are thus disregarded in comparison with those of the higher ups.

This hut of Gandhi demonstrates to the world how the dignity of the common man can be brought up. It is also a symbol of happiness which we can derive from practicing the principles of simplicity, service and truthfulness. I hope that in the conference that you are going to hold on Techniques for the Third World Poor, you will try to keep this message before you.

Illich published in 1980, in the much-missed CoEvolution Quarterly, a set of essays under the title "Vernacular Values." In one of them, he writes:

In Trivandrum, South India, I have seen one of the most successful alternatives to a special kind of commodity dependence - to instruction and certification as the privileged forms of learning. One thousand seven hundred villages have installed libraries, each containing at least a thousand titles. This is the minimum equipment they need to be full members of Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad, and they may retain their membership only as long as they loan at least three thousand volumes per year. I was immensely encouraged to see that, at least in South India, village-based and village-financed libraries have turned schools into adjuncts to libraries, while elsewhere libraries during these last ten years have become mere deposits for teaching materials used under the instruction of professional teachers. Also in Bihar, India, Medico International represents a grassroots-based attempt to de-medicalize health care, without falling into the trap of the Chinese barefooted doctor. The latter has been relegated to the lowest level lackey in a national hierarchy of bio-control.

After Illich's death in 2002, several of his friends and colleagues wrote about him in the Whole Earth Review (the renamed Co-Evolution Quarterly.) One of those people was Vijaya Nagarajan, a professor of theology at the University of San Francisco, who writes about meeting and getting to know him over the course of many years. One passage:

In the fall of 1984, while we were visiting Ivan in Claremont [College, in southern California], he looked at me and said, "I want to ask you about something after dinner." That evening, a unique conversation began. He excitedly showed me one of his footnotes on an index card, and said, "Do you know anything about the kolam?" I looked at him with surprise, "Oh, yes, I grew up with this ritual practice, it is just something my mother did every day, and there is really not much to say about it. But I could draw you some rice flour designs tomorrow at the front threshold before sunrise and you could ask me any questions you wish." The next morning, after I had drawn these designs, we sat on the raised plinths of the front threshold of the house, warming up in the rich darkness of that sapphire dawn sky. He barraged me with questions, none of which I could answer. With these initially unanswerable questions, he started me on my own pilgrimage. This trail led me to lecture on the kolam at the Smithsonian's Festival of and onto graduate school in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley emphasizing Tamil Culture, Folklore and Anthropology and Art History.

In December 1992, soon after I passed my oral doctoral examinations, I had a few days before I went off to India for my fieldwork for fourteen months. I told my husband over breakfast one morning, "I wish I could talk to Ivan about my work before setting off to India." The next day we got a phone call from him in Bremen, Germany, saying he was thinking of me all day the day before and wanted to come and see me for a few days. He came to Berkeley and we talked about the kolam and the study of Indian women for three days. I felt renewed and energized about my search for understanding what the kolam was.

When I returned from my long sojourn in India, I felt the strong need to speak to him again. My husband and I went down and stayed near his house in Cuernavaca. We saw him every day for ten days. He said, "I will give you two hours a day to discuss your work. Come with your questions." He pushed me about what I had learned and what I knew and what I did not and could not know. Over this period, he tried to convince me that my most productive work would be as an scholar in religious studies. I was taken aback and not swayed at all. It would be over three years before a series of chance encounters led me to my present work as a full-time professor in that field.

Deschooling, the film?

2011-05-05T13:26:00.001-04:00

We've just learned of a newly-released film that questions severely the idea of compulsory schooling, especially as encouraged and abetted by Western experts operating in non-Western societies. It's called Schooling the World, The White Man's Last Burden, and naturally, it has its own website. There, a trailer and a clip from the film can be viewed along with other information and links to related resources.

Made by a television director and writer named Carol Black, the film takes as its main example schooling in Ladakh, India, but it also reviews the history of schooling in the U.S., particularly as relates to its use in purposely destroying Native American culture and furthering the empire abroad. The film made its debut last fall and, in fact, will be screened this very evening in Los Angeles, at the opening of The 2011 Awareness Film Festival.

Schooling the World has been endorsed by one of Ivan Illich's students and colleagues at Penn State, Dr. Madhu Suri Prakash, Professor of Education Philosophy. A press release for the film quotes here as calling it “challenging, courageous and thought provoking," “a film of profound insights and the quest for hope in the thick of much violence by mainstream cultures against the marginalized and the silenced peoples of the world.” Meanwhile, the film's website offers an essay by Illich, "To Hell with Good Intentions," written in 1968 but as relevant as ever.

We learned of the film at the website of Pat Ferenga, an advocate of deschooling, unschooling, and home-schooling who has continued the work of John Holt, with whom he worked for many years. Mr. Ferenga calls the film fascinating and notes a particular blog entry at the film's website that "summarizes well the critiques of mass education made by Goodman, Holt, and Illich from the sixties forward. Homeschoolers, unschoolers, and anyone interested in knowing more about the debilitating nature of unasked-for, or misguided, help in both education and foreign policy will be rewarded by reading the complete essay."

That essay concerns the scandal that has broken out around a book called Three Cups of Tea, written by a man named Greg Mortenson. The book purports to describe his experiences in building schools, funded by money from Americans and others, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and how those schools have brought peace, harmony, and happiness to local communities. Some 4 million copies of the book have been sold, and it was chosen by the U.S. Army as must-reading for troops on their way to fight in Afghanistan. It turns out, however, that Mortenson may have made up much of what he wrote and that he has not been truthful in his accounts of where he has spent the money donated to his Central Asia Institute. CBS' 60 Minutes news program is credited with having broken the story of this fraud, as described here.

The essay about the book and scandal that Mr. Ferenga refers to is well worth reading. It begins so:

The recent revelation that Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea is based on fictionalized accounts of his experiences in Pakistan and Afghanistan, that his charity’s funds were misspent and its books were cooked, and that there was little or no followup or support for many of his schools once they were built – if they were built at all – has drawn a lot of media attention. But the larger fiction which goes unquestioned is Mortenson’s romanticized portrayal of education as a panacea for all the world’s ills, a silver bullet that in one clean shot can end poverty, terrorism, and the oppression of girls and women around the world.

Don’t get me wrong – I would never deny that there are individuals who benefit when money is spent on education, and I would never want to come between those individuals and that money. If a girl from rural Pakistan wants to go to school and has a knack for academics, she deserves support and I hope she gets it. But the idea that building schools and getting every kid on the planet inside them is a solution to the problem of global poverty, for example, is a real whopper.

Why? Well, for starters – and everybody knows this – a huge percentage of the children in those schools will fail.

Greg Mortenson, like everybody else, loves to tell the touching story of the girl from the village who studies hard, passes her school exams, and goes on to become the proverbial doctor-who-will-come-back-to-the-village-and-reduce-infant-mortality. He raises a lot of money with that story, and a lot of donors go to sleep at night feeling better about the world because they are helping it to happen. But what Greg doesn’t tell us, and what the donors don’t want to think about, is what happens to all the other children. The dirty underside of our system is that schools as we know them today are structurally designed to fail a reliable percentage of kids. Interestingly, they reliably fail a much higher percentage of kids in in low-income areas than they do in affluent areas, and this is true from Detroit to Gilgit-Baltistan. When we put children from traditional rural areas into school, what we’re doing is transitioning them from a non-cash agricultural economy where nobody gets rich but nobody starves into a hierarchical system of success and failure in which some lives may get “better,” but others will get much, much worse. Guess which club has more members? Welcome, boys and girls, to the global economy.

Scarcity and the "Social Construction of Energy"

2011-05-03T19:08:00.001-04:00

We had a good laugh back in 1982 when a friend recounted to us his visit to the opening of Epcot Center, an adjunct to Disneyworld down in Orlando, Fla. Epcot had been conceived as a corporate shrine to technology, and each of its pavilions conveyed a common theme, which our pal intoned for us in mock-TV gravitas:

“Before Kraft, there was no food.”

“Without General Motors, nobody could move anywhere.”

“Only with Sperry Univac computers does information make any sense.”

And so forth.

This moment came back to us recently while reading a paper by Ivan Illich entitled “The Social Construction of Energy.” Written in 1983 but published only in 2009 by New Geographies, a journal out of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Illich’s paper serves as an illuminating follow-on to and rethinking of his provocative and widely-quoted essay, “Energy & Equity,” published in 1974.

What reminded us of the Epcot episode was Illich’s noting in this new essay the proliferation of advertising by utility and oil companies that assured readers of mankind’s enduring need for “energy,” a need that was supposedly evident even in prehistoric times.

The “message is always the same,” Illich writes:

“[E]nergy is something arcane … we all need it … we just cannot but use it … no one ever has done without it … unless the man in the ad does research it will soon run out … and then comes the punch[line]: remember Neanderthal! How he toiled to light fire from a spark; and then look at yourself, you just turn on the light; he carried his water, you switch on the pump … people always needed energy, from Stonehenge to Telsat. … the reader […] is comforted to learn that Australopithecus was just as dependent on energy as today’s Mr. Smith.”

Today, these ads, often running for several pages and serving as a major source of revenue for old-line magazines like Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly, tout research into solar panels and hybrid cars by companies like BP, Exxon-Mobil, and Chevron. But just as Illich observed 30 years ago, these ads still work to obfuscate the fact that “energy” is an invention, and a quite recent one at that.

After all is said and done, the energy that politicians are so concerned with, that Silicon Valley millionaires invest in, that the Pentagon fights to secure, and that environmental activists urge us all to conserve and find “greener” sources of - this “energy” is a social construction. It is a figment of the modern imagination, an entity that did not exist until 150 years ago but since then has become institutionalized and accepted, discussed, worried about, even fought over with nary a pause to wonder at its origins.

As his title implies, Illich sets out in his paper to deconstruct this mythical and mystical entity, to reveal its history and to identify and aggressively question its underlying assumptions. He explains how he came to understand a critical and “embarrassing” mistake he made in the original “Energy & Equity” essay. And he makes some of his most insightful comments about the computer.

This is Illich at his best, relating a colorful historical tale, excavating unexamined assumptions, and expressing himself with a scathing mix of precision, humor, and sarcasm. (Accompanying his paper in New Geographies, we should point out, is an essay by longtime collaborator Jean Robert, entitled “Alternatives and the Technogenic Production of Scarcity.”)

Above all, “The Social Construction of Energy” is a major contribution to Illich’s long-running project to write “the history of scarcity.” How, and why, Illich began wondering in the late 1970s, did the modern world come to be “a cosmos defined by the assumptions of scarcity”? Everywhere he looked, as related in books like Deschooling Society and Medical Nemesis, Illich found modern institutions creating scarcity in the very products and services that they claimed to to be furnishing in abundance. For example, while the school system promotes itself as the best and perhaps only way to educate and socialize the masses, Illich showed that as an institution, schooling actually hampers people's ability to learn. Compulsory schooling makes valuable knowledge scarcer than it would be otherwise. Likewise, he found that modern “health care” burdens people with more illness and suffering than they had to deal with in the past - partly through mistakes in the operating room, for instance, but more importantly, by replacing traditional, culturally-based ways of suffering and dying with professionally-defined services.

In “Energy & Equity,” Illich described how cars and airplanes actually force people to devote more time, more money, and more effort than ever on getting themselves from here to there each day. There would be no “crisis” in energy, he argued, if society chose to adopt speed limits that favored walking and bicycling.

“From the moment its machines could put more than a certain horsepower behind any one passenger,” Illich observed in 1974, “[the transportation] industry has reduced equality among men, restricted their mobility to a system of industrially defined routes, and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity. […] A country can be classified as over-industrialized when its social life is dominated by the transportation industry, which has come to determine its class privileges, to accentuate its time scarcity, and to tie its people more tightly to the tracks it has laid out for them.”

Scarcity is, of course, the foundation of modern economics. Whether socialist or capitalist, “the economy” is engineered and operated with the goal of distributing limited supplies of goods and services to the population in the best way, however the powers that be happen to define “best”.

“What is not scarce cannot be subjected to economic control,” Illich wrote in Shadow Work (1981). Even “the modern family is […] built on the assumption that productive activities are scarce. … The identification of that which is desirable with that which is scarce has deeply shaped our thinking, our feeling, our perception of reality itself.”

Throughout the 1970s, through his books and public talks, Illich had actively sought to question “development” and industrial growth. In this he was quite successful, even if the collapse of industrial society that he predicted in Tools never quite materialized. (Like many others, Illich failed to see that information technology would essentially prop up industrialism for several decades more, at least, by bringing new efficiencies to the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. And now?, we might ask. Does the current economic crisis perhaps mark the end of this extended grace period?) Illich was a major inspiration for the Greens in Europe and for environmental activists and other alternative thinkers - Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog crowd, for instance - in the U.S.

There then came a change in Illich’s orientation, as described particularly well by Barbara Duden, a German historian who began working with him around 1980:

Illich's hope that sharply focused social criticism and carefully honed analysis of current developments could change the course of events gave way to the painful realization that the transformative power of political resistance had been limited, for even the critics had not relinquished a perspective that assumes a world of scarcity. He gradually moved away from assumptions that sparked so much of his writing in the 1950s and 1960s, a vision of salvaging a life worth living for human beings by protecting “communality” and what he called “the commons,” by calling to mind the “tools of conviviality,” by preserving traditional and customary ways of living. Even he was amazed by the breathtakingly rapid disappearance of "traditional" orientations and practices in Third World villages, and he shed his own illusions that the social critic could help protect the fabric of these villages. He had come to realize that progress and development had created an unprecedented “mental topology.”

No book came from Illich’s attempt to explain the assumption of scarcity, but his efforts did yield arguably the most colorful and fascinating work of his long intellectual journey. Illich’s papers and books from the 1980s are his most poetic and engaging - and his most academically correct, as it were - revealing a boundless curiosity about how the modern, Western world has come to be as monstrously different as it is from everything preceding it. Illich delved into a remarkable range of topics: the nature of work; the history of vernacular gender and its eclipse by "economic sex"; the history and use of taught mother-tongue; the history of water, urban space, and other forms of “stuff”; the mythology of science; the history of the gaze; and the history of the body. And, as we will outline here for those not yet able to read the original text, the social construction of energy.

"E" is for "Energy"

Illich starts his essay by stating that the energy that physicists discuss - the ‘E’ that Einstein famously equated with mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light - has barely anything to do with the “energy” that ecologists, politicians, planners, venture capitalists, and windmill designers talk about when discussing the “energy crisis,” “green energy,” or “energy needs.” Einstein’s ‘E’ is a theoretical notion, Illich notes, “meaningful only within a formula,” while “energy is charged with hidden implications: it refers to a subtle something that has the ability to make nature do work. … It is a symbol that fits our age, the symbol of that which is both abundant and scarce.”

“I discover in the emergence of this verbal symbol the means by which nature has been interpreted as a domain governed by the assumption of scarcity, and thus human beings could be redefined as nature’s ever needy clients,” writes Illich. “Once the universe itself is placed under the regime of scarcity, homo is no longer born under the stars but under the axioms of economics.”

Illich then reviews the “core meanings" of "energy” over time. For the ancient Greeks, the word could be translated as “on the make,” with all of its sexual connotations. For Elizabethans, energy meant the vigor of an utterance. By the 17th century, Leibnitz spoke of "a magnitude that remains intact whatever happens, ‘like money when it is changed.'” In 1807, Thomas Young adopted the term energy to describe the force that a rolling ball, for instance, passed along as it collided with a stationary ball. But it was another 40 years before physicists accepted this term, and when they did, they used it to designate not a force but a “something,” as Illich calls it. “Energy is distinguished in modern physics from force as the integral [of] its function.”

Energy was finally understood as the life force of the universe and, as Illich points out, at the same time, nature itself was being systematically denied its vitality - its Lebenskraft - and its traditionally feminine quality, as in “mother nature.” By 1844, nature was perceived as a matrix of forces such as electricity, light, hear, and magnetism, each of them (including light?) able to be measured in units of work. Yet, while midwives had always been the ones to deliver children, by 1820 it was the “bioengineer, the gynecologist, who delivers the child from the matrix, and the child grows up into the work-force,” Illich writes.

Illich now goes on to describe how the thoughts of physicists, such as Mach, and social philosophers, led by Marx, greatly influenced each other, to the extent that a new myth was jointly created. “Physics construed something akin to the division of labor: value equivalents between heat, electricity, and mechanical movements were measured,” he writes. “The search for something like a gold standard in nature thus led to a new kind of experimental metaphysics: to laboratory proofs of entities that cannot be observed. The objective existence of something that just changes its form in ever more precisely observed and measured appearances became itself the scientific mythology.” Likewise, “the womb became the source of life, the universe the source of energy, and the population a source of labour force,” Illich continues. “Through the imputation of energy, nature was recast in the image of the newly constituted human as worker. Nature now understood as the depository and matrix of a work-force called energy mirrored the proletariat, the matrix of available labor force. And the steam engine lurked behind all reality.”

That last thought, of course, refers to the laws of thermodynamics, which to scientists, at least, explain the transfer of heat and the theoretical ability of steam engines and other powered machines to perform work. Previous to the steam engine, Illich points out, the clock was the machine that served as a unifying symbol, its self-regulation reflecting the rational harmony of the monarchy and the state. The steam engine, however, eventually took the stage, precisely because it “symbolizes the age of production, of input and output,” and it unifies a world that deals in “work” and “horsepower” and “labor force.”

And with the advances of physics and of Marx’s analysis of history and economics came the “simultaneous invention of … two distinct ‘potentials for work,’ energy and labor-power,” Illich writes, but to explore that invention “makes it necessary to return to the history of ‘e’ to avoid any confusion of it with ‘energy.’” Illich points to Max Planck as the first person to attempt a history of ‘e’ - at age 26. “It was obvious for Planck that the concept of ‘energy’ … derived all its meaning in physics from the principle of ‘the conservation of energy’ as in the idea that ‘it is impossible to get work done without compensation.’ Planck shows that the idea had been conceived and formulated in the 1840s, and that by the 1860s there was no more doubt about its validity.”

But, writes Illich: “I have not found in this early paper of Max Planck even the slightest suspicion that the language used about the principles of physics was socio-genetic.”

At around this same time, Ernst Mach was writing his own history of energy, focusing on the “principle of conservation,” but not of “energy” but of Arbeit, or work. “For Mach,” writes Illich, “it is inadmissible to postulate something like a work force behind observed phenomena, unless the scientist is able to verify its existence by direct experiment. Mach did not deny the convenience of such a hypothesis; he only requested that the person using it be aware that what he uses is a supposition. The choice of one among several applicable hypotheses, according to Mach, should be made entirely on the grounds of the elegance with which such a concept - as, for instance, ‘energy’ - fits into the formulas that connect observed events.”

Indeed, notes Illich, Mach was critical of H.R. Hertz for not having used “e” in his description of electro-magnetic waves and their movement through space. The use of “e,“ Mach said, would have given Hertz’s statement added elegance.

Einstein, meanwhile, was rigorous in his recognition that entities such as “e” “cannot be derived from experience by logic but must be understood as free creations of the human spirit.”

The Energy Mystics

“To keep as sober as Mach or Einstein was not easy as theoretical modern physics acquired prestige,” however. "People left outside the charmed circle around 'e' looked toward the academic Alchemists as the source of ultimate riches or as initiates into ultimate mystique. Not a few physicists began to pander to the public. Energy was presented as the sold [sic] attribute of ultimate reality.” (We take it that that word sold is a typo, that Illich originally wrote “sole.”) Illich cites German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, winner of a 1909 Nobel Prize and president of something called the World Monist Association, as “present[ing] ‘energy’ as the only real substance.” In the 1950s, with no uncertainty, physicist Werner Heisenberg takes up this banner, stating that “the substance out of which all elementary particles and all things are made … that which causes change, and changes, but is never lost … that which can be transformed into movement, heat, light, tension … that is energy.”

Illich: “As ‘e’ became esoteric, an increasing number of physicists came to act as gurus who popularized its real nature. Once famous physicists had lent their prestige to the interpretation of energy as nature’s ultimate Kapital, the principle of the ‘conservation of energy’ became the cosmological confirmation of the postulate of scarcity. The principle of contradiction was ‘operationalized’; it was restated in the formula that ‘you can’t get a free lunch.’ By a cosmic extension of the assumption of scarcity, the world visible and invisible was turned into a zero-sum game, as if Jehovah, with a big bang, had created das Kapital.”

Illich notes that both 19th-century “energetism” and 20th-century monism, “still with us in the exoteric Heisenberg, ”adhere to the myth that science was a rational undertaking. This changed with Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics (1975). The discovery of energy now reflects an evolution of human consciousness … and the recovery of mystical experience as a superior form of knowledge. … The Alchemists are perhaps turning into theologians. And the theology of ‘energy’ is as alien to my precise concern as the mathematics of ‘e.’” (A few years ago, we heard some people who’d been close to Illich describe an encounter of many years before between him and Capra, on an Austrian television show. The essence of the recollection was that of an indignant Illich ferociously taking Capra apart, publicly declaring him a charlatan. Today, Capra writes books and runs management seminars for business people.)

Spare Time

At this point, Illich pauses to describe briefly a “hobby” of his, namely “superstitious religiosity.” For 30 years, he writes, he has been collecting Latin American superstitions - documents and other artifacts, one assumes. “I learned from [Ruth] Kriss-Rettenbeck to call superstition the popular beliefs and forms of behavior that come into existence under the aegis, the shield, of a church. Therefore they can be studied in contrast to the dogmas taught and the rituals propagated by the organization, the ideologies promoted by the Church. In this narrow sense, superstition is not just any syncretism” - an amalgamation of different religions, such as voodoo, a mix of Roman Catholicism and West African religions - “but the use popular religiosity makes of the Church. This scabrous [ie. rough, indecent] background led me to the history of ‘energy’ as a superstition in modern civic religiosity. The fathers around 1847 revealed it, the Ostwalds preached it and the laity accepted the message of a spiritual awakening to a cosmos defined by the assumptions of scarcity.”

From here, Illich shows how the history of energy as a popular construct and the history of work are inseparable, the destinies of the two keywords “intertwined.” Before Ostwald, energy was an academic term; after him it became “holy,” a “power” that could be tamed. The history of work, however, is more difficult to nail down. At first, Illich states, work meant deed, task, effort, or duty - a concrete action or the result of such action, as in “a good piece of work.” By 1750, work had come to be “recognized as a decisive factor in the creation of wealth.” Thanks to Adam Smith, the idea became acceptable that work “did not just permit the accumulation of wealth but [that it also] could create economic value.” In Smith’s view, “the labor force - work in the abstract - became the true measure of the exchange value of all goods.” And 50 years later, Ricardo “recognized that capital, in the form of machinery, could replace live labor and thus become injurious to the working class. He elaborated a cost theory of value: with the reversible equivalence between the two forms of labor, he remained within the field of the observable. It never occurred to him to connect profit to the expropriation of value that is drawn from a meta-economical sphere.”

Illich moves on to look at the notion of political economy, which “inquires into the matrix from which value flows.” Illich sees a parallel running between the early 19th-century development of ideas about the workings of steam engines and the concurrent analysis of "labor force." Carnot worked out a set of equations that explain how temperature differentials in the steam engine enable it to perform work. Contemporaneously with Carnot, Ricardo defined the value of work as the price paid for a worker’s time. Twenty years later, as Helmholtz was describing how energy is transferred from coal to water to steam to piston to wheel, a young Karl Marx “traced the source of economic value, [developing] a theory that explains how the employer can appropriate the surplus value of labor. For Marx, the economy runs on the positive difference between the total labor time used in production and that part of it that covers the cost of the reproduction of the workforce. For Smith and Ricardo, what the worker sold was his service, his concrete work. In Marx, he sells his labor-power, part of which is expropriated by the capitalist.”

After drawing some additional parallels between physics and economic theory - and a quick comment about how women were redefined around this same moment as destined to reproduce “new life” - Illich states that “political economy soon became as irrelevant to economics as energetics to physics. … just as monist professors of physics preached vulgar energetics, Marxist economists love to pontificate on the labor theory of value.”

The notion of value, of course, is one of the modern notions of which Illich is particularly critical. In his view, the pre-modern world was generally one in pursuit of “the good,” or the right fit between opposites: man and woman, heaven and earth, etc. Today, this search for appropriate fit has given way to assigning values that are seen to flow, that can be traded against each other, that are positive and negative and that therefore imply a zero point. In his thoughtful tribute to Leopold Kohr, Illich states it like this: "Ethics, in a strong tradition from Aristotle to Mandeville, involved a public controversy about the good to be pursued within a human condition and perhaps grudgingly accepted. Economics, however, demands the evaluation of desirable goals under the assumption of scarcity. It deals in the optimization of values; this leads to the creation of modern economic society, which provides seemingly unlimited fuel for a technological civilization. Such a civilization attempts to transform the human condition rather than debate the nature of the human good." Quite simplistically, Illich is about as anti-market as a person can be, not in the current sense of socialism but from a cosmological point of view. Making decisions based on evaluation is radically different from searching for an appropriate fit.

Work and energy, Illich continues in his essay, “became keywords of contemporary language,” each one giving “a moral and social interpretation of the sentence in which they occur.” Phrases such as ”the right to work” and “worker’s republic” each “carry direct and strong ethical connotations,” he states.

“It has been overlooked,” however, “that the word energy functions as a collage of meanings whose persuasiveness is based on the myth that what it expresses is natural. Thus, surreptitiously, our lifestyle could become energy intensive. The right to work and the need for gas could be connected. Jobs and watts could be recognized as basic rights because they were both interpreted as basic needs.”

And this, our favorite line from the entire essay: “The modern state could be interpreted as an employment agency with a gun to protect the fuel pump.”

Work, Jobs, Computers

“Politicians could win by the mere promise of more watts and jobs. Development assistance could carry the ideal of ‘man as an energy guzzling commodity producer’ to the ends of the earth, because progress came to mean the replacement of feet by motorized wheels, the replacement of the kitchen garden by frozen foods, the replacement of adobe by cement, the replacement of the trench by the WC. The radical monopoly of our energy-intensive lifestyle over the landscape, culture, and language has made the ideal of energy dependence into an inescapable reality. … the need for energy - and not only for jobs - became morally obvious: part of that civic religiosity that ... lies far beneath the political oppositions in a modern society.”

Trouble is, he continues, society is running out of work. And at the same time, “the terms most frequently associated with energy are crisis and scarcity or, more ominously, atom or neutron. Whatever remedies to unemployment are being proposed, they do not inspire much confidence: work-time reduction, job sharing, energy saving, defense spending, ecology - they look like palliatives comparable to chemotherapy in cancer; if they do add to the survival of our lifestyle, they will also render it more distressing.”

And here, Illich makes one of his few comments about the computer, which in 1983, in the form of the PC, was causing much excitement. "Many people are turning to the computer as a “panacea,” Illich writes, but “if the computer has an effect on the environment analogous to that of the car, soon you will not be able to do without it: no mail, no tax return, no voting, no purchase without.” Twenty-five years later, of course, this prediction is practically true.

He continues: “An entirely new kind of poverty is on the horizon: the under-informed. While in the sixties poverty could be measured by a low level of wattage, it will soon be measured by low access [to?] or use of the computer. While miserly microprocessors will guard energy-trickles more effectively than cavewomen nurtured the fire, half of the population will teach the other half how to use the computer. The computer is credited with the capacity to create unsuspected amounts of busywork. We are straight on our way toward an energy-obsessed low-energy society in a world that worships work but has nothing to do for people. [sic] We cannot break out as long as our principles remain the laws of thermodynamics.”

In the next section of his paper, Illich calls energy “the ultimate symbol of monist sexism affirming itself within the matrix of the law that says that the male principle cannot be destroyed,” and he lays out what he sees as four obstacles to “recognizing energy as a recent invention.” These are, in his words, “historical energetics, soft ecology, belief in the objectivity of science, and epistemological sexism.”

Historical Energetics

The way we perceive the past is, as we’ve mentioned up top here, shaped by the advertising paid for by energy utility companies, among other forms of institutionalized education. These ads, Illich writes, are effective because they “hit a weak spot. The wider the gap that separates the wattage of their reader from that of an Indian, the more obviously silly his needs, the more he is prone to mirror himself in the behavior of his ancestors. He gloats over pop-science that tells him that Cro-Magnon was as aggressive and sexist as he; he hails Mary Douglas [a British anthropologist who wrote a book called Purity and Danger; she died in 2007] for telling him that he has inherited from old rituals his fear of pollution; he is comforted to learn that Australopithecus was just as dependent on energy as today’s Mr. Smith.”

Soft Ecology

Illich then says he is “embarrassed” for having contributed to “propaganda for the soft path.” In writing “Energy & Equity,” he says, he was happy to “compare the efficiency of a man with that of a motor, both pushing the same bike - to the clear advantage of the man.” He was "delighted to belong to the race that had invented the ball bearing and the tire," especially when he found out that the bike was more “energy efficient” than a sturgeon of his weight.

Anyone familiar with “Energy & Equity” will likely remember Illich’s discussion of the ball bearing, invented around 100 years before:

It reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel—probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions—finally to become useful for self-powered mobility.

Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment.

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.

Indeed, Illich goes on to calculate that the car, once all of its external costs are accounted for (loan payments, fuel, building roads, policing the highways, etc.), moves North Americans at an average speed of only 4 to 5mph, equal to normal walking - a fact quoted widely across the Web, particularly by cycling activists.

But now, a decade later, he realizes that he had not grasped how reductive these comparisons were. “I was not then fully aware that by measuring both forms of locomotion in terms of watts I blinded myself and my readers to the essential difference between the two. People and motors do not move through the same kind of space. Auto-mobile people culturally constitute the commons on which they walk, and stay within the range of their feet at the self-limiting rhythm of their bodies. Vehicles tend to annihilate commons into unlimited thoroughfares. By transforming commons into resources for the production of passenger miles, vehicles take the use-value out of feet. They homogenize the landscape, make it non-transitable and then catapult people from point to point.”

“By imputing energy amounts to the man on his feet, I inevitably play into the hands of the ecologist who blurs this distinction, who makes of commons and spatial resources one amalgam. By using energy amounts to measure the distance covered by medieval peasants and pilgrims, I inevitably conjured up the illusion that their milieu, like our environment, was under the regime of scarcity, that they engaged in energy-efficient self-transportation.”

And “once you accept this amalgam" of resources and commons, he continues, “you foster the appearance of the ecocrat. He replaces the technocrat whose authority was at least limited to the management of people and social machines. The ecocrat’s aims transcend these institutions: his management tools fit nature into their domain. Symbolically, the ecocrat tears down the hedge that separates society from the wild, that boundary that was the traditional seat of the witch. He sees himself as a holist because he encompasses society and its environment as two subsystems of a whole that works.”

Illich touches, here, on what strikes us as one of his most important and stimulating conclusions, namely that the human world - the planet as a whole and even the human being itself - have lately come to be conceived in a startling new way, namely in terms of cybernetics and systems theory. In his late conversations with David Cayley, Illich states that he was quite surprised to see this kind of “watershed” actually get crossed during his own lifetime - during the 1980s, he reckons. Much of his thinking in the last decade of his life was affected by this realization, as explained particularly well by Barbara Duden in her rich, appreciative summary of his thought.

Once the planet is perceived as simply a huge cybernetic system that maintains its homeostasis through the kinds of feedback loops and information flows that James Lovelock describes in his “Gaia thesis,” and once the human being is seen as merely an immune system fighting for survival in this larger planetary system, then, as Illich put it, the human being ceases to exist in its historical form of flesh and blood.

Indeed, the human body gets understood as just another needy subsystem fighting continually with other subsystems for scarce resources, including - you got it - energy. And this new body itself is now conceived of as yet another set of systems: immune, endocrine, reproductive, and so forth. Systems, of course, lend themselves to optimization and management. Systems are understood to pursue certain goals. Systems thinking is horribly reductive, Illich might say, particularly when applied to the glory - is that the right word? - that is the human.

(While getting our eyes examined for reading glasses the other day, we asked the optometrist about the difference between his training and that of an ophthalmologist. Very little, he assured us, emphasizing that he, too, had had to “study all 13 systems.”)

In his energy essay, Illich goes on to point to the computer as the “emblem of the new synthesis,” this brand new view of society and its environment as subsystems: “The computer is pictured as the great economizer and economist who will sugarcoat work by rendering energy and employment more effective, more decentralized, more flexible and complex.” (Telecommuting, anyone?)

Illich sees the computer as making possible a dramatic shift in the organization of work and society, a shift that he admits is very unlikely to take place: Computer-based techniques could be used to manage the production and distribution of a few basic commodities that everyone needs and of which there is enough for everyone. This, in turn, would free most people to “live as much of their life as they chose, unplugged from work, watts, and bits.”

“I am definitely not speaking as a romantic of a return to the woods, or as a Luddite angry with chips,” Illich writes. “What I envisage is a step beyond Karl Polanyi, [who] made me understand the dis-embedding of a formal economy as the process that could not but destroy the commons until social life and economy came largely to coincide. I am suggesting that we now envisage the dis-embedding of a new sphere of freedom in which we have exorcised the miserly critters of quite recent creation from the perception of who we are.” In other words, the kind of convivial society that Illich had previously described, a society in which people would not understand themselves as needy souls who always experience a certain poverty because their demand for scarce goods and services always outstrips the supply, would be freed to flourish.

Illich is not so naïve to think this arrangement will come to pass, not anytime soon, anyway, for “the trivialization of economic values … runs counter to the basic myths on which contemporary science and ethics are built.”

Science and Myth

The “third major obstacle to the recognition of energy as an addicting illusion” that Illich identifies is the general unwillingness to recognize the mythology of science. Physicist James Clerk Maxwell, he notes, recognized the principle of conservation of energy as a law only in the sense that it is a “science producing doctrine.” First, it was recognized as a law of nature and only then was “energy chosen as the expression of its value.”

“Historically and psychologically, the rule that nature, like citizens of the nineteenth century, must live in the matrix of a zero-sum game was prior to the value at stake in this game,” Illich writes. “Only then did that value take the form of a function, namely ‘e,’ or a ‘goody.’

And, he adds, “progress in the social sciences went in the same direction. Social interactions were reduced to exchanges, and subjects to role players between whom these exchanges take place. The perfectly neutral medium of exchange is implied in all science based on conservation, and energy is its paradigm.”

As we’ve noted previously in these columns, Illich in the mid-1980s saw the entire discussion of systems and cybernetics - still very much in vogue, then, inspired largely by figures such as Gregory Bateson, who had even wondered aloud if god might not be explained as a set of infinitely nested systems - as tainted by the assumptions of scarcity that underpin all economic thought. Descriptions of the world - whether people conversing or bees “communicating” about new sources of nectar - that relied on the movement of “information” ultimately rested on the notion that the parties involved were engaging in an exchange of information bits, and that one of these parties thus suffered from a relative scarcity of bits, and so forth.

The Sexist Ideal of the “Human Being”

Illich’s fourth and final obstacle to understanding energy for what it truly is is the widely-held belief that work is genderless - that men and women can and should do the same jobs. Up until about the time of Marx and Helmholtz, he writes, “men did not do what women did, and vice versa. Up that time in each community, tasks and tools were split in two halves and, in each community, the split was a different one. This split was transcended through the constitution of the labor force - in theory and practice. The genderless worker was called for by the matrix of the work-force, as energy by the law of conservation. And this worker - he or she - inhabits a universe in which everything is made of one stuff only: energy.”

Illich concludes by noting a “masterly study” by a certain B. Easely that describes how, during the 17th century, natural philosophers “banished life from the cosmos … and minimized the role of women in conception. Step by step, they succeeded to declare matter pure, inert nature … pure mater, the amorphous mother of things, a pure womb in formless readiness for the conception of paternal powers; a mere framework within which virile force could give rise to all things. Materia/mater in this process became logically unknowable, because amorphous and physically unobservable, nothing but a shapeless presupposition. [sic] The study of this necessary and complementary principle of all existence was thus by definition excluded from science. Science became the knowledge of virile forces and the shapes they take. In the 1840s, their complement reappeared as the matrix and the law that exalts the conservation of virile energy as the first law of the cosmos and the foundation of modern science.”

And thus, the paper ends.

Uncovering myth and exposing religiosity is hardly a new move for Illich. As a man of the Church and even more so, as a highly trained student of liturgy, Illich was keenly aware of how institutions manage to create and maintain myths. In his best-known book, Deschooling Society, Illich saw compulsory schooling as a set of myth-making rituals, a new “world religion.” School, he wrote in one of that book’s more colorful passages,

combines the expectations of the consumer expressed in its claims with the beliefs of the producer expressed in its ritual. It is a liturgical expression of a world-wide "cargo cult," reminiscent of the cults which swept Melanesia in the forties, which injected cultists with the belief that if they but put on a black tie over their naked torsos, Jesus would arrive in a steamer bearing an icebox, a pair of trousers, and a sewing machine for each believer.

Likewise, a major section of Tools for Conviviality concerns the “demythologization of science”:

… political discussion is stunned by a delusion about science. This term has come to mean an institutional enterprise rather than a personal activity, the solving of puzzles rather than the unpredictably creative activity of individual people. Science is now used to label a spectral production agency which turns out better knowledge just as medicine produces better health. The damage done by this misunderstanding about the nature of knowledge is even more fundamental than the damage done to the conceptions of health, education, or mobility by their identification with institutional outputs.

Clearly, "The Social Construction of Energy" is one of Illich's major attempts at demythologizing science. We hope we have helped, here, to make sure it gets the attention it deserves.

"Get going, get going, and do not come back"

2011-04-04T10:47:00.001-04:00

In a recent post here, 'The Brothers Karamazov' came up, and now, we've just stumbled onto yet another connection between Ivan Illich and that dark Russian novel. Time magazine has published online its 1969 story about Illich's having been confronted by Vatican officials and asked to defend himself against a series of charges. This was, of course, the confrontation that led to Illich's voluntarily withdrawing from the priesthood.

The story begins:

From the reception room of the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a waiting monsignor led the visitor to a turn-of-the-century elevator. They rode down several floors, walked through rooms lined with musty, leather-bound volumes, entered yet another gloomy room. Across a heavy wooden table, decorated only with an austere black crucifix, sat a man in a black, violet-trimmed cassock. The visitor presented himself. "I am Illich."

"I know."

"Monsignor, who are you?"

"I am your judge."

Thus began, last June, the Vatican examination of Monsignor Ivan Illich, 42, Vienna-born New York priest, linguist and controversial founder of one of Latin America's most promising experiments in social and cultural education, the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. What began as a quiet investigation has blown into a full-scale and still unresolved controversy in the past few weeks.

The conclusion:

Some dismayed Catholics are hoping that the Vatican's order, not yet fully promulgated worldwide, might still be rescinded. That is doubtful, but there is at least a hint that the Illich affair was more than a little disturbing to Rome. Cardinal Seper's last words to him, Illich recalled with some amazement last week, were: "Get going, get going, and do not come back." They were, Illich noted, remarkably close to the last words spoken by the Grand Inquisitor to his prisoner, Jesus Christ, in the philosophical vignette from The Brothers Karamazov. In Dostoevsky's tale, Christ has returned to earth, and the Inquisitor decides to burn him because his ideas of freedom are too dangerous for the world. After receiving his sentence from the Inquisitor, Christ kisses him. The Grand Inquisitor, shaken, orders him out: "Go, and come no more—come not at all, never, never!"

Some Memories of Illich in New York City

2011-04-02T19:45:00.001-04:00

We recently wrote here about Illich's time as a priest in northern Manhattan. While researching that item, we'd come across a bulletin board devoted to "Personal Memories of Growing Up in the Heights" - Washington Heights, that is, a neighborhood right near the George Washington Bridge. We posted a query on that board, asking if anyone remembered Father Illich. And today, we're pleased to share the first response, which is not only generous but quite interesting. Thank you, Mr. Stafford. (We've taken the liberty of tweaking the original text, here, solely to improve readability.)

Re(1): Rev. John Illich
Posted on April 2, 2011 at 10:22:49 AM by Frederick Stafford
I am pleased to share with you these few memories I have of Father Illych who made such a great impression on me when I attended New York City's Incarnation Grammar School during the mid-1950's.
He was a very young man when he came to Incarnation which he did, I believe, straight from the seminary. Incarnation Parish at that time was primarily Irish with few Hispanics, the Puerto Rican wave of immigration having only recently started (today, of course, even they have moved to Jersey and the parish is now almost entirely Dominican.) The priests themselves were all either from Ireland or of Irish descent except for Father Illych, whom we assumed to be Russian, and who stood out from his colleagues by reason of this difference.
He and another young priest, Father Conlin, were the favorite confessors of us boys as we knew them to be more lenient than their older colleagues, especially one older intemperate father often heard berating abashed sinners within his confessional. We knew we could count on these younger priests to dole out but the mildest of penances for our grievous sins. Father Conlin was popular too as he was not that much older than us and fond of sport, often joining us in games attired in his cassock; his was a sunny disposition whereas Father Illych always seemed to have a cloud of sorrow hanging over him, as though suffering for fallen humanity, much as Christ did.
His brow was always furrowed and his face etched with lines of worry. Once he was compelled by his superiors to administer a solemn oath to the congregation that we forebear attending the movie, Baby Doll, an order apparently much to his distaste but which he executed as if it were but one more burden that he must bear.
Another time he gave a sermon on the correct way to pray, cautioning us against the rote recitations and hastily rattled off prayers so typical of Catholics, at one point startling us all by raising his arms in aloft and crying out in as dramatic a demonstration from the pulpit as I have ever seen, "When you pray you must pray with all your heart! You must throw yourself down on your knees like this (he half-knelt so we could still see him in the raised pulpit) and cry out to God, 'Oh Lord, hear me! hear this prayer of a lowly sinner, I beg of You! Please God, please, please!' And there were tears in his eyes to match the emotion in his voice.
Years later when I read The Brothers Karamazov I imagined the saintly brother Alyosha as resembling Father Illych. I have read that novel numerous times over the years and it is always Father Illych's face that comes to mind when I get to Alyosha. I had assumed Father Illych was Russian and was surprised to learn that he was Austrian. Only once did I witness his short temper and that was exacerbated by my exceedingly lame pronunciation of Latin when he was training us boys to serve at the alter.
I was surprised to hear years later that he had left the priesthood, as I couldn't imagine him in any capacity other than as a man of God, and he never gave any indication of being the consummate scholar he indeed was. I never knew him that well and I doubt if he would ever have remembered me, but he made a great impression on me and many others to whom he represented something of an archetype.

Interestingly, Lee Hoinacki points to this same book, The Brothers Karamazov, in his essay, "Reading Ivan Illich," which serves as one of the introductions to The Challenges of Ivan Illich. "Illich was trained in ecclesiology and was especially intrigued by liturgy," he writes.

He understood, I would argue, that the most ominous expression of secularization in the West was not the death of nature (although this was related), nor a misnamed materialism, nor sexual “freedom,” but the decline of liturgy, the routinization and emptying out of religious ritual in the churches. As he suggests, this process began with clerical actions to establish various assured institutional responses to God’s calling, later legitimated by a juridical or legal order; men hesitated to rest all hope on gratuitous gifts of grace. Illich captures the dénouement of this lack of faith with the ancient Latin adage corruptio optimi quae est pessima (the corruption of the best turns out to be the worst). He has attempted to show that this apothegm accurately reveals the origins of “normative notions of a cruelty, of a horrifying darkness, which no other culture has ever known.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, portrays institutional mistrust as a demonic temptation in Ivan’s poem, “The Grand Inquisitor,” perhaps literature’s most terrifying image of the betrayal of the freedom graciously given to people by Jesus.

Illich video on YouTube

2011-03-25T11:43:00.001-04:00

A video about Illich's life and thought, narrated in Spanish, has appeared on YouTube. We wish we could understand the narrator better.

"The necessity of straining the ear"

2011-03-10T17:08:00.001-05:00

“Just before Christmas, 1952, while sitting in his office on the campus of Rutgers University, in New Jersey, Leopold Kohr uncovered the secret of the universe.

“Just after the Royal Wedding, 1981, while sitting in the Great Hall of City University in London, hundreds of people from about thirty nations gathered to hear Kohr’s explanation.

“Reading the book might have been easier.”

So begins “The Only Problem in the Universe,“ an article that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for May, 1982. Freelance journalist Rory O’Connor goes on to describe what took place at ”an intellectual jamboree” called the First Assembly of the Fourth World. The “center of attraction” at that event, which included a “curious mixture of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural minorities, ranging from Celts and Kurds to Syrians and Scots”: none other than Ivan Illich.

Kohr, of course, is the author of The Breakdown of Nations, in which he argues that many, and perhaps all, social problems are the result of overgrowth - of the body politic growing too large for its own good. Easily the most succinct summation of Kohr’s ideas is the widely-touted phrase, “small is beautiful,” which is attributed to British economist E.F. Schumacher.

In 1994, Illich spoke in honor of his friend Kohr - they met in Puerto Rico - at a meeting of the E.F. Schumacher Society. Illich used that talk, available here, to put forth an engaging description of his own ideas about proportionality, or “fit,“ a key concept in his thinking about the modern world and its differences from the past and one for which he credits Kohr’s ideas about social morphology as a direct inspiration.

Two key words reveal Kohr’s thought, Illich writes:

Verhältnismässigkeit and gewiss. The first means proportionality or, more precisely, the appropriateness of a relationship. The second is translated as "certain," as when one says, "in a certain way." For example, Kohr would say that bicycling is ideally appropriate for one living in a certain place, like Oberndorf. An examination of this statement immediately reveals that “certain,” as used here, is as distant from "certainty" as "appropriate" is from "efficient." "Certain" challenges one to think about the specific meaning that fits, while "appropriate" guides one to knowledge of the Good. Taking both "appropriate" and a "certain place" together allows Kohr to see the human social condition as that ever unique and boundary-making limit within which each community can engage in discussion about what ought to be allowed and what ought to be excluded. To consider what is appropriate or fitting in a certain place leads one directly into reflection on beauty and goodness. The truth of one's resultant judgment will be primarily moral, not economic.

Another passage in this paper is one of our favorite statements by Illich that seems to summarize a key aspect of his thinking:

Ethics, in a strong tradition from Aristotle to Mandeville, involved a public controversy about the good to be pursued within a human condition and perhaps grudgingly accepted. Economics, however, demands the evaluation of desirable goals under the assumption of scarcity. It deals in the optimization of values; this leads to the creation of modern economic society, which provides seemingly unlimited fuel for a technological civilization. Such a civilization attempts to transform the human condition rather than debate the nature of the human good.

O’Connor’s account of Illich’s appearance at the meeting in London is great fun to read. We’re glad we clipped it from the magazine back when we were subscribers and managed to preserve the pages intact because somehow, copyright issues still prevent this period of The Atlantic from being available online.

First, O’Connor explains the irony of a gathering that seemed to have grown too large for its own good. Many of the scheduled forums overflowed with people, and moves were taken to split these meetings into ever-smaller units. Often, panels included representatives from many different parts of the world, not all of whom could speak English. May O’Connor forgive us for quoting him at such length:

“Frustration was high, and everyone looked forward to the next morning’s open plenary session, when the unpredictable Illich was scheduled to chair a panel including Kohr, [poet Jeff] Nuttall, and Mildred Loomis, an American ‘decentralist’ theoretician, among others.”
After listening to the panelists, Illich seized control of the proceedings and commenced an infuriating but brilliant oration in which he tried to summarize everything that had been said. His first step was to reject the use of the microphone, castigating it and those who employ it as anti-democratic. If some people in the room could not hear him, Illich maintained, it was because the group was too large.
The assembly he was addressing, Illich claimed, was precisely the right size. “Fifty percent more, and only somebody with a carefully trained voice, specializing to be a politician, would reach then entire group - would dominate.” Of equal importance, however, was “the necessity of straining the ear. It is the best way I know … to really … find out what the person has to say - instead of just letting him irrigate me with words.”
Soon thereafter Illich became infuriated. The occasion was an offhand remark by Jeff Nuttall about “producing ideas.” Illich was incensed when he heard this, and promptly informed Nuttall: “As soon as I am out of the chair, I will take you apart …. Produce ideas … How far can we go?” Illich demanded caustically. “We are not machines!” Language, it turns out, is at the center of Illich’s current work. “If I have problems with a Fourth World, it is that for me a livable world is a world of vernaculars.”
There followed a spellbinding analysis of the purpose and meaning of the assembly, delivered extemporaneously by Illich. “I do not think that producing thoughts fits into any vernacular,” he began. “To apply the term ‘production’ - forgive me for this precision in speech - means to totally misunderstand what is going on. … The term ‘production’ means that you can distinguish between ‘production’ and consumption - and I have no intention of consuming your ideas.”
Illich meant that anyone who wanted to live in a Fourth World where production was necessary could count him out. He employed a technique he called a “subjective appropriation” of everything he had already heard at the assembly to expand this idea. He then summarized the distinctions contributed by five speakers who concerned themselves with what he called “environmental thinking.”
“The next distinction which I heard,” Illich continued, “was … between taught mother tongue and vernacular … a vernacular movement. People who speak one vernacular know that nobody else understands them ever as well as they themselves speak it, because a vernacular you pick up only by listening to people who really say something to each other.”

“Finally, we had someone speak about meaning, sense, as opposed to what is rational,” Illich concluded. “A vernacular environment is profoundly irrational. The term ‘rational,’ when used in the social sciences … means precisely the destruction of that irrationality on which understanding between vernacular people can happen … It’s in a different order.
“I’ve said all this because I have serious problems when the term ‘environmental thinking,’ or ‘ecological thinking,’ is used. Environment usually is conceived as a new kind of professional’s perception of space, which shall be better than that which we have …”
“This way I summed up what went on in my own mind while I listened in a very subjective way to the other speakers this morning,” Illich added. “Because I am working at this moment on an attempt to describe three major, so-called environmental concerns …
“The first one is concerned with the biological environment. … Environmental managers [are] concerned to maintain biological destruction below that level beyond which the industrial system would break down. … A second concern for which you gave for me a very beautiful summary … [is] that growth in product does not only deplete biological and physical resources, both in production and circulation of those resources, but that any kind of growth takes, beyond a certain level, out of the environment precisely those utilization-values which would make it possible for people to get along without further products.”
The third concern, and one that is crucial to Illich’s current intellectual endeavors, is sexism. “I believe that sexism … is a necessary consequence of the splitting of production from consumption,” Illich remarked. “The moment you say ‘producing thought,’ I think already of an erect penis. And the destruction of the conditions for gendered existence is one more … major, converging concern of the environment.”
At that, the assembly seemed to take a collective deep breath and broke for lunch.
An hour later, it was back to the Great Hall for more debate about the propriety of using a microphone. Illich came under increasing attack. The ruckus began when the towering Nigerian Jimoh Omo Fadaka started to use the microphone to ask a question of Illich.
“Stop!” Illich shouted at him. “I cannot believe that you, a member of the Third World, are trying to use this technology. It is not necessary.”
After a time, however, it became apparent that those in the back of the Great Hall could not possibly understand Fadaka’s thickly African-inflected speech without mechanical assistance, and cries of “We can’t hear you!” wafted toward the front until Fadaka finally decided to ignore Illich’s advice.
“We are not interested in such false disputes,” he began. “We are interested in finding solutions to our problems, and we want you to tell us exactly the mechanics of getting there from here. We may or may not decide to agree with you, but we can at least discuss the mechanics … You seem too interested in theory … Can you please give us an idea as to how to get there?”
“Forgive me for being so precise as to harp on this, too,” Illich answered carefully. “I do not have the slightest idea as to what any one of you should do. I do not know what I should do. I know what I have to abstain from - and I have to abstain from speaking to people who can see me through a microphone. You might tell me this is too simple-minded, right? It’s a tiny little thing … for those of you who feel it, it says two dozen other things. And for those who believe that speaking is a production of messages to communicate, it makes no sense!”
Fadaka began to reply, but was again interrupted. “We can’t hear you!” came the chant from the back of the Great Hall. Grasping the microphone, the African told Illich he could not accept what Illich had to say, because ‘if there are difficult solutions to different problems, then there is no point in coming here to discuss them to each other! We might as well go back to where we came from.”
Illich agreed, at least partially. “There might be less sense in coming together than the ‘meeting industry’ assumes. I myself am very, very happy to be here, and I find that the style … this atmosphere of people talking to each other, freely and without feelings of inferiority, is very beautiful … but when [Anglican priest and prominent Fourth World activist] John Papworth first invited me: ‘No, not a Fourth World jamboree! I won’t come!’ … The airplanes are run for the meeting industry.”
Suddenly a well-dressed Englishman in the back of the hall stood up and asked a question. “Your objection to the use of a microphone … I find very difficult to reconcile with the fact that you are wearing the product of high technology - to wit, a pair of spectacles. … How can you [defend this]?”
“Sir, this question was first placed by Goethe, [who] refused in his presence people who wore spectacles,” Illich responded, “because he felt they should see him as clearly or as fuzzily as their nature allowed. I find this very beautiful …”
“I’m afraid I cannot accept that, whatever Goethe says,” his questioner shot back. “You haven’t answered the question I asked.”
“Forgive, I will try to answer in a less Jewish, less metaphorical way," said Illich, as eyebrows shot up around the room. ”I draw the line in my saying of no to television. … I am not a puritan. I believe in dirty, small, forever-courageous attempts of unplugging myself. I purposely, at a meeting which is concerned with scale, try to eliminate the tool which makes the human voice limitless in its reach, because I do believe that now - we have both very good voices - we are aware of three things when we talk without a loudspeaker. We are both aware how distant we are from each other, we are both aware of the limitations a group can have, and, even more importantly, we are both aware of the relative advantage which our personality gives us over [others].”
The debate over the uses of the microphone marked the high point of the assembly, in a sense. Paradoxically, the large-group gatherings seemed to be working better than the small-group forums, some of which were becoming increasingly torn by strife and others of which were falling apart from lack of either interest or focus. Illich went off to spend the rest of his time at a forum on education, which devolved, by reason of his overwhelming personality, into a lecture about his ideas on the necessity of deschooling society, punctuated by occasional questions from the moderator, Henryk Skolimowski - a lecture that was alternately thought-provoking and incomprehensible. (When one poor soul in the education forum interrupted Illich to inform him that she hadn’t understood a word that he said, he snapped back, “I am not trying to communicate with you!” and continued his previous thought.)

The article goes on to describe how, from there on out, the Fourth World assembly devolved into “something that resembled a Marx Brothers movie more than a solemn conclave on pressing world issues.” Disgruntled attendees stormed out, attempts to call votes came to nothing, some people just sat in a circle, holding hands and chanting ”om.”

“Nothing was decided, nothing was declared, and nothing, in fact, was done,” O’Connor writes.

As we understand it, the Fourth World movement went on to spawn a good deal of thinking and activism, even as the term itself, Fourth World, lost much precision as it got adopted by a widening range of groups and activists. John Papworth’s magazine, Resurgence, continues to publish, for instance. And all the while, a key figure in the U.S.'s nascent fourth World movement has been Kirkpatrick Sale, a writer and a devotee of Kohr who has published a good deal about human-scale technology and communities and who has played a leading role in arousing Vermonters to secede their state from the Union. Mr. Sale's forward to a 1978 reprint of The Breakdown of Nations is well worth a look.

In the early 1980s, we had the fortune of hearing Mr. Sale introduce Leopold Kohr in the auditorium of P.S. 41, a primary school on West 11th St. in Greenwich Village. This, Mr. Sale told the small audience, was Kohr’s “first and only New York appearance.“ Just in from Dover in the U.K., where he’d opened a meeting of the Greens, Kohr told us that he’d been “stone deaf” for 40 years, but he went on for a good hour or so to speak in a lively way - through microphone and loudspeaker - about the “terrible seductiveness of bigness.”

“Smallness,” he said, “is a law of nature. Man is the measure of all things.”

And then, with Mr. Sale serving as his amplifier, Kohr took questions from the floor.

Illich as a young priest in Manhattan

2011-02-21T16:06:00.001-05:00

Ivan Illich left Europe for America in 1951, aiming to pursue post-graduate studies at Princeton University. The plan was to work with a rich collection of materials pertaining to the practice of alchemy in the Middle Ages. One of Illich's earliest and most important teachers, the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, held a post at the Institute for Advanced Studies, just down the road from the university.

Almost immediately upon his arrival in New York City, however, Illich quite literally took a radical turn. Instead of settling in Princeton, 50 miles to the south in central New Jersey, he took the 'A' train to northern Manhattan. And there, for the next 5 years, he would serve as a parish priest, paying most of his attention to the neighborhood's burgeoning population of Puerto Ricans. And it was this ministry, writes Christopher Shannon in a 2004 essay, "The Death and Rebirth of Ivan Illich," appearing in a Web publication called Books & Culture, "that provided the intellectual foundation for all his subsequent writings."

While visiting family friends in New York, he would later tell interviewers, Illich had heard from an African-American maid about mounting tension between the city's blacks and the many newly-arrived Puerto Ricans. Curious, Illich visited a then-thriving Puerto Rican street market in East Harlem and very quickly, these Caribbean immigrants struck him as more fascinating than medieval alchemists. The market was La Marqueta, originally a gathering of Italian-owned pushcarts that eventually consisted of nearly 500 vendors crammed into five buildings situated beneath the elevated railroad tracks running up Park Ave. between East 111th and 116th streets.

[Photos, from top): Bettman/Corbis (1968); http://www.literanista.net; NY State Archives]

Puerto Ricans had moved to the city in large numbers during WW2, many of them to work in jobs previously held by men and women fighting overseas. After the war, many of these new workers stayed on, but in New York City, they didn't fit the typical immigrant mold, as would soon be portrayed so memorably in the Broadway musical West Side Story. From the song "America":

Boys: I think I go back to San Juan

Girls: I know a boat you can get on

Boys: Everyone there will give big cheer

Girls: Everyone there will have moved here

Because New York was only a few hours' flight from the Caribbean, Puerto Ricans didn't necessarily consider the mainland their permanent home, as had most of their European predecessors, whose journey involved many days on a ship. What's more, their ways of living were new to New York. In, Puerto Rico, daily life was spent mainly outside, in a sunny clime and mostly around, not within, small, relatively flimsy homes. (Why build permanently in the face of frequent hurricanes?) But now, their eating, socializing, and playing games, and their children playing so openly out in front of apartment buildings was not always appreciated by their New York neighbors.

Using his connections with the New York diocese under Cardinal Spellman, Illich managed to get himself posted to a church where he might serve these newcomers as well as learn more about their culture. He was named an assistant priest at Incarnation Parish, located on St. Nicholas Ave. at 175th St., practically in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. Here is the church as seen in 1957:

Incarnation had long served a flock of fairly conservative Irish. Washington Heights, as the neighborhood was called, also had become home to a fair number of Germans, many of them Jews who'd fled to America before the world war. (Among them, as we recall, was the family of Henry Kissinger.) Eventually, Illich's mother would move to this neighborhood, too, and spend her last years there. (Interestingly, in light of Illich's enduring interest in the Middle Ages, The Cloisters, a marvelous museum devoted to that era, is in this neighborhood, a few blocks to the north of the bridge on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River.) Like many NYC neighborhoods, Washington Heights saw many of its residents eventually leave, but they took with them many memories, as seen here. (The neighborhood is largely Latino, now, but last we visited, a few Irish bars were still operating and in the park that surrounds The Cloisters, German was still to be heard occasionally.)

Illich's time at Incarnation is recounted with much color by Francine du Plessix Gray in her 1970 book, Divine Disobedience. She recalls how the pastor of Incarnation, a Monsignor Casey, thinking that the name Ivan sounded "Communist," insisted that his new curate call himself John Illich.

John Illich's energy and devotion at Incarnation became legendary, Gray reports. One of his colleagues there told her that "living in the same parish with John Illich was 'like riding a Piper cub with an atom bomb under the seat.' Illich climbed stairs three at a time and never walked through the rectory, but swept through it like a tornado. He rose earlier, questioned more, worked harder for the Puerto Ricans than any man in the diocese. ... The Puerto Ricans idolized him ... he was Mr. Puerto Rico, their Babe Ruth."

In 2003, we came across a memoir of growing up Catholic in Washington Heights in the 1950s, by a Richard O'Prey. (This memoir no longer exists as we found it, but it has been archived in the Wayback Machine, an archive of old websites. Mr. O'Prey also seems to have published it in book form.) He recalled Illich as an erudite priest - though it appears he may have misremembered Illich's story about fleeing pursuers of some sort; if Illich was forced to escape anyone, it was likely the Nazis:

Father Ivan Illich, a fugitive from the Iron Curtain, was the final
member of the staff at Incarnation. Father Illich spoke heavily accented
English, but he was reputed to be an intellectual. In later years, he
would prove that assertion by writing several books on education and
Church reform. In the early 1950s he contented himself in saying Mass
with a piety and deliberation that went far beyond his peers. No one
could accuse him of garbling his Latin or hurrying the rubrics of the
Mass. His account of eluding border guards and escaping the Iron
Curtain, was fascinating. It also humanized the conflict that we heard
about in Europe. For his bravery and audacity, he won our respect and
admiration.

Here is what appears to be the New York Times' first mention of Illich, in March, 1953:

Serving society couples, we imagine, was only a sideline. Illich's main accomplishments were in and on behalf of the Puerto Rican community, which still, if unknowingly, celebrates his remarkable efforts almost 60 years later. Illich was instrumental in bringing that struggling community into the fold of the wealthy, Irish-dominated New York diocese. Caribbean and Latin American Catholics celebrated their religion quite differently from Europeans, singing different songs, interpreting the images and lives of certain saints quite differently, and even understanding the hours of the day in a different way. (Illich understood that it was too much to expect islanders to arrive for Mass "on time" with the same precision that most New Yorkers took for granted.) Unlike many of his fellow churchmen, Illich actually bothered to learn the Spanish language - very well and incredibly quickly, Gray reports. The diocese sent him to a Berlitz course downtown, but Illich breezed through those lessons and found the best language training to be simply mixing with his parishioners out in the streets. (It helped, we imagine, that he already knew Italian.) Equally important, he made a point of getting to know the culture of Puerto Rico, from his parishioners and by spending summer vacations on the island, owning a shack there and traveling its rural byways on horseback and by foot.

It was during one of these visits that he learned of a man who would be tremendously influential. This was sociologist Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, S.J., whom we've written about here recently. As Mr. Shannon tells it in his "Death and Rebirth" article, which reviews a collection of essays published in 2002, The Challenges of Ivan Illich, Fitzpatrick helped greatly to further Illich's education. With a degree from Harvard, Shannon writes,

Fitzpatrick was among the first generation of Catholic priests who saw immersion in secular learning as essential to the task of making the Church relevant to the modern world. [...] Though educated to the highest European standards in history and philosophy, Illich actually knew little of modern social theory; Fitzgerald modestly takes credit for introducing Illich to the works of Durkheim, Weber, and the other great writers of modern sociology. [...] On one of his visits [to P.R.], Illich learned of Fitzgerald as the only other New York-based clergyman to go to Puerto Rico to study the cultural background of the immigrants. Back in New York, Illich and Fitzgerald struck up a friendship and began to collaborate on a variety of innovative pastoral projects.

Shannon sees the Illich-Fitzpatrick partnership working in ways that differed significantly from other Church-led social-reform efforts of the time:

Against the assimilationist ethos of the early civil rights movement and anticipating the Second Vatican Council's endorsement of "inculturation," Illich argued that the Church could best serve the newly arrived Puerto Ricans by helping them to sustain their traditional liturgical and devotional practices in their new environment. Unlike the progressive, "social justice" Catholicism of the late 1960s, Illich saw culture, rather than economic inequality, as the starting point in the pastoral care of the poor. [In Challenges, Illich collaborator Lee] Hoinacki notes Illich's academic training in the history of liturgy, and argues that Illich "understood … that the most ominous expression of secularization in the West was … the decline of liturgy, the routinization and emptying out of religious ritual in the churches." The liturgical lens through which Illich read modernity may account for the difficulty so many secular intellectuals have had in understanding, much less accepting, his social critique.
[...]
At the heart of Illich's pastoral vision lay the conviction that ministering to the poor requires not so much service as presence. Illich sought not to help the poor, but to be poor. Being poor meant many things, from the biblical ideal of the poor in spirit to a more anthropologically informed notion of cultural poverty, or the abdication of one's cultural assumptions in order to immerse oneself in the life of the poor. Fitzgerald and Illich sought to embody this ministry of presence in their first collaborative outreach project, El Cuartito de Maria, or The Little House of Mary. Illich arranged for Incarnation to rent an apartment in one of the tenements heavily populated with Puerto Rican (potential) parishioners. Women from the parish volunteered to watch and play with children so that mothers could work or run errands, but the purpose of the project was neighborly rather than vocational. Illich insisted that establishing personal relationships with the immigrants was a more important ministry than any program of material or spiritual uplift.

"By the standards of 1950s social work," Shannon explains, "El Cuartito de Maria did not do much to improve the lives of the poor, but then that was never Illich's intention. Much to the confusion of his church colleagues, and later his secular interlocutors, Illich rejected not only the idea of improvement, but the very language of doing and making, both of which he saw undermining authentic human relationships in the modern world."

From what we've read, especially in The Rivers North of the Future, where Illich elaborates on the parable of the Good Samaritan, this observation rings quite true. Authenticity in relationships - true friendship, as he might have put it - is precisely what Illich idealized in opposition to the "liberal fantasy" of treating and understanding people as mere instances of a class that experts view as needy of professional therapies and services. The idea of Illich rejecting "the very language of doing and making" is not one we've heard before, but it does seem to resonate with Illich's idea of foregoing power in favor of informed, contemplative, fully aware impotence.

We recently came across Fitzpatrick's side of the story, as related in his own book The stranger is our own: reflections on the journey of Puerto Rican migrants. A good chunk of this book is available via Google Books, and on page 16, we read of the two men's first encounter:

In the spring of 1953, I was sitting in my office in Keating Hall when Father William Lynch, S.J., then editor of Thought, the Fordham University Quarterly, came into my office. He said: "There is a young priest in my office and he would like to meet you. His name is John Illich." ... And so I met the man who was to have a profound influence on me and on the Church during my generation. I walked into Father Lynch's office and I was immediately struck by the appearance of the man: tall, exuding energy and tension, and intense in conversation. "I followed you all over Puerto Rico," he said, "and I read the report you left with Bishop Davis. You are the one person I wanted to meet when I came back." [...] He then described for me his whirlwind month in Puerto Rico. It was far different from mine during which I was accompanied from door-to-door of prominent people, introductions arranged ahead of time. Illich walked over miles of rural roads, took to horseback, visited towns in remote mountains and crowded urban barrios. In his conversation with me, he began to comment on the customs and culture of the people. For a person who was neither an anthropologist nor sociologist, his perception of the culture and lifestyle of the Puerto Ricans was remarkable. I said to myself, "This is a man I want to keep in touch with." We talked for almost two hours, during which I learned many things I had not known about aspects of Puerto Rican life. After he left, Father Lynch asked me, "What is your impression?" I don't know what it was that prompted me to say it; I know nothing at the moment of Illich's background. I replied, "Bill, he reminds me of some of my brilliant Jewish intellectual friends. I wonder if there is something Jewish about him!" Years later, I was to meet his mother and learn that she came from Sephardic Jewish ancestry. She had become a Catholic to marry Illich's father and she remained a devout Catholic until her death.

Fitzpatrick also recalls the creation of what he calls El Cuartito de la Santisima Virgen, or "The Little Room of the Most Holy Virgin": Illich "encouraged a group of the young women to fix up the apartment with pictures and items reminiscent of Puerto Rico, and just be there to allow the children and mothers to come by, to mind the children when mothers went shopping; in brief, to create a familiar, neighborhood place where the people could gather with no formality, but which was carefully organized by the young women. ... It was a remarkable example of receiving the Puerto Ricans as our own, in a situation where they were very much at home among their own. After Illich left Incarnation parish and went to Puerto Rica (November 1956), the interest faded and eventually El Cuartito disappeared."

Fitzpatrick recalls working with Illich on a "slide show" to help migrant workers in New Jersey "in their social and religious life. Illich conceived of an arrangement of slides depicting experiences of the farm workers, and a cassette which would provide an explanation for the workers of the experiences depicted in the slides. We worked very hard on this. I wrote the text for the cassette. ... At the last moment, it never came off. ... It was a brilliant Illich idea which, for some reason, was aborted." (We imagine that Fitzpatrick probably meant simply a tape recorder, not a cassette, for the latter had yet to be invented.)

Illich's real triumph regarding the city's Puerto Ricans - and the New York diocese itself - was the San Juan Fiesta. As Fitzpatrick describes it, this was a celebration in honor of the patron saint of Puerto Rico. It had begun in 1953 and continued for two years in St. Patrick's Cathedral, down on Fifth Ave. "Illich said this was ridiculous and that a fiesta like this should be held outside with processions and civic celebrations." And so, in 1956, the event was moved to the Fordham campus, up in The Bronx, complete with a large procession and Mass celebrated by Cardinal Spellman - a key backer of Illich then and when he had moved on to Mexico - and even a sermon given by Spellman in Spanish. Thanks partly to Illich's touring Puerto Rican neighborhoods with a sound truck, some 30,000 people showed up for this event - a good ten times more than had been predicted by one church official.

This event made Illich nothing less than a hero within the diocese, for he had managed to bring off a rapprochement between the Puerto Rican flock and the Irish-led diocese in way that surprised both sides. In fact, this yearly event continued to be held year after year, every June 24, more or less, and it continues today, more or less. It's now known as the Puerto Rican Day Parade and it's held in June on Fifth Ave. by Central Park.

Illich's triumph led to his being named as vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. And his taking that post, Fitzpatrick recalls, seemed to be appropriate, given South America's increasing importance to the U.S. and the Church and the potential for Puerto Rico to serve as a bridge between the two continents. Here is how the New York Times covered the news:

As anyone who has read much about Illich knows, his time in Puerto Rico was fertile yet stormy. Spellman visited the island and thanks to Illich, was received with thousands cheering his motorcade's entry into San Juan. It was in Puerto Rico, too, that Illich and Fitzpatrick co-wrote (with a William Ferree) a book called Spiritual care of Puerto Rican Migrants, which is available for viewing on Google Books (Google sells this book in electronic form, too, for $10.) It also was in P.R. that Illich had his first close look at - and serious doubts about - compulsory schooling, a line of thinking that eventually led to Deschooling Society. (Someone named Anandita Bajpai did their master's thesis in 2008, at the University of Vienna, about The Catholic Church as an Education Provider in Puerto Rico 1948-1960; it's available online in PDF format. The thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Martina Kaller-Dietrich, the author, in 2008, of a biography of Illich.)

And it was in Puerto Rico, too, that Illich ran afoul of Church authorities when he publicly argued against their plans to start a political party opposed to birth control. Illich believed the Church had no business getting involved in politics, especially at a time when there was so much controversy over a Catholic (John F. Kennedy) running for president of the U.S. The resulting controversy led Illich to leave not only his university post but the island of Puerto Rico itself. Working with Fitzpatrick, he selected Cuernavaca, Mexico, as home for the Center for InterCultural Documentation, or CIDOC, which would remain there until its voluntary closing in 1976.

Interestingly, while Incarnation's own website cites the church's role in the history of Puerto Ricans in New York, it makes no mention at all of either John or Ivan Illich.

Illich in Bali - on art, gender, and education

2011-02-16T15:10:00.001-05:00

"In 1978, I spent a week in a village on the island of Bali. I dropped into a small place, off the beaten track, and arrived there at just the right moment, on the one August moon of the century when the earth is purged of every last dead body. In all the cemeteries men rooted through the soil digging up their ancestors. Some pulled out white bones, while others unearthed still-mouldering corpses. The women stood there to take charge of this prize. They washed the ancestors in firewater, wrapped them into packages of cotton cloth and bound them together with paper streamers. Altogether it was a festive affair.

"I had found a room in the village headman’s second household. We became acquainted and I learned that he truly reigned over the community. During the Indonesian bloodbath of 1967, he had had 217 people shot, ‘enemies’ he called them. Now, twelve years later, he did his duty and financed their appropriate cremation. Proudly he pointed to the bales of cotton and the sacks of sugar that he was donating for the occasion. In Bali it takes many yards of cloth and many pounds of rice cake for a dignified end.

"From the balcony of his secondary wife’s house, I watched the road on which the dead were making their last trip; from the cemetery they were carried to their home for a visit, and after a short stay the heavy catafalque was brought to the river, down where the pyre was ready. During the few days I watched, about three dozen processions danced by. They all moved to the traditional sound of the gamelan. However, the processions were of two very different kinds: only a few were led by living gongs; the rest danced to synthetic music. Two profoundly different things were going on down there, on the road winding through the rice paddies, two things as different as those which the shoptalk of educators confuses under the term, ‘process’. And I find myself unable to use the single term, ‘product’, to designate their respective outcomes. My first task, therefore, is to make the distinction between intransitive life and a transitive process, between the art of living (which always includes the art of suffering and of dying) and art which I can recognize as a product. I know that the distinction is difficult to make in modern languages. Nevertheless, it is an obvious and ominous distinction."

So begins a remarkably journalistic and stylish essay by Ivan Illich, delivered to a gathering of art teachers in 1981, in Rotterdam. We're excited to have just discovered the existence of this paper, which as far as we can tell has evaded Illich's bibliographers. Its title: "Arts Education: Process and Product." Originally published in the Journal of Art & Design Education, it's available from something called Wiley Online Library. (That Illich's work appears in a journal about art education fits a pattern, of sorts. During the early 1980s, we'd often browse New York City's better, more eclectic magazine shops, confident we'd find some new essay of his. He appeared in a short-lived journal called Democracy, for instance, and in The Progressive, and perhaps in others.)

Illich continues: "Down there, coming out of a bamboo grove, half a dozen funerals danced as tradition had always demanded. They came with a big drum, suspended on sticks between the two bearers; they came carrying five gongs, each of a different size, and swinging bells. I could not distinguish the orchestra’s sound from the steps of the dancers, nor from the swinging of the dead body in its catafalque. It was all one event which I watched, making one effect with the art work of the paddies and the gods of Bali, dressed up for the occasion in grey and white chequered aprons. What happened there was one intransitive event. Only the bifocal lenses of a systems analyst could project into this occurrence a distinction of process and product. And the ordinary agglutinative speech of Indonesia is even less fitted than our inflected languages to make such a distinction."

Process and product, it turns out, are the themes of this art teachers conference, which has invited Illich as its keynote speaker. He goes on to explain that as he sees it, the traditional "art of living" involves neither process nor product. And he contrasts that with the modern way of education. "Education is an ERSATZ as much as prostitution or the police," Illich writes. "The less of these a society has, a society needs, the better off it is."

He recalls a week's vacation in Bali - with a friend named Franca - and his search for the "double ikat," a special kind of tie-dyed cloth that had become quite rare by that time and that he sees as "a supreme expression of vernacular art." He goes on to tell his audience about his memories of the art teachers he met years before in Puerto Rico, where he'd helped to run the educational system. "One thing I learned is to have an immense respect for the art teachers," especially those teaching in poorer schools. "Who were they, these strange people? More often than not, they were women. They taught elementary classes, and their pupils looked forward to the art class. These women gave the impression of cultivating their pupils’ art of living rather than teaching them. And in every instance I can remember, the colleagues of such an art teacher looked at her askance, and considered her a nut to be tolerated, if not a criminal whose influence on the children ought to be counterbalanced."

Illich moves to explain that the "art of living never has been a human art. It is not an art which modern man can practice. It has never been a genderless art. The art of living has always been ‘gendered’. ... The art of living and the art of being part of a gender coincide. As the vernacular ikat is woven of warp and weft, so each vernacular language is woven of two kinds of speech: the speech of men and that of women. Only the foreigner hears a common ‘language’. The speech of men is learned by boys, that of women by girls; they are very often quite different from each other."

And this helps to explain why it is that so many art teachers observe, with great sadness, their young students losing their interest in painting, and drawing, and sculpting just as they approach puberty - "a break, a drying up, a loss of confidence, a shrivelling." These children, Illich argues, are dealing with the fact that the initiation ritual that once affirmed the gender line separating men and women has been turned inside out. "What is now called puberty is the inverse of what was formerly an initiation ritual. With puberty, male and female children are both supposed to become equally human. Both are supposed to be equally productive workers, to compete for the same genderless jobs, producing the same genderless commodities to meet the same genderless needs. Puberty means the mere sexual maturity of economic neuters. And all too often the art teacher supports this process." [emphasis in original]

"Education," Illich writes, "could be defined as the process by which young people are trained into genderless competence for genderless work, as the process by which men and women are forced to look at their own reality through the genderless telescopes of their tutors, or considered as the process through which men and women are ‘humanised’, turned into humans, made into people, true men. Therefore, education can be seen as the process whose product is ‘modern man’, even though half the species is and remains, at least vestigially, of the female sex."

Illich on "alienation" - 1973

2011-02-11T16:10:00.001-05:00

We've just found another paper by Ivan Illich that, as far as we can tell, is not listed in any of the more-or-less official bibliographies of his work. From 1973, it's entitled "An expansion on the concept of alienation." The paper appeared in The Journal of Social Philosophy for January of that year (Vol. 4, Issue 1), which Wiley made available online in 2008.

We've not yet seen the paper in its entirety, but it starts off, at least, as a somewhat dismayed reaction by Illich to the reception of his book Deschooling Society. "As the hidden curriculum moves out of the darkness and into the twilight of our awareness, phrases such as the "deschooling of society" and the "disestablishment of schools" become instant slogans," he writes. "I do not think these phrases were used before last year. This year they have become, in some circles, the badge and criterion of the new orthodoxy. Recently I talked by amplified telephone to students in a seminar on deschooling at the Ohio State Ujniversity College of Education. ... "

More from the first page: "The [Marxist] concept of alienation cannot help us understand the present crisis unless it is applied not only to the purposeful and productive use of endeavor, but also to the use made of men as the recipients of professional treatments. ... Schools have alienated man from his learning. He does not enjoy going to school; if he is poor he does not get the reputed benefits; if he does all that is asked of him, he finds his security constantly threatened by more recent graduates; if he is sensitive, he feels deep conflicts between what is and what is supposed to be. He does not trust his own judgement and even if he resents the judgement of the educator, he is condemned to accept it and to believe himself that he cannot change reality. ... Today, it is relatively easy to get wide agreement on the fact that gratuitous, compulsory schooling is contrary to the political self-interest of an enlightened majority. ... Proponents of recorded, filmed and computerized instruction used to court the schoolmen as business prospects; now they are itching to do the job on their own. ...

Here is the facsimile of the opening page that Wiley makes available online:

Speaking of "empty liturgy"

2011-02-09T11:49:00.001-05:00

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times writes today about a new app for the iPhone that's designed to help Catholics prepare for the confession box. The software walks a person through a questionnaire based on "the Ten Commandments, your examination of conscience and any 'custom sins' you might have." Thus, women get asked about abortion, men about masturbation. Once his or her sins have been enumerated, the parishioner can consult these findings during confession and make their time with a priest more efficient.

Writes Dowd: "At least we know now that Nietzsche was wrong. God isn’t dead. His server may be down though."

Illich in Italy

2011-02-09T01:57:00.001-05:00

One of the more intriguing organizations we've come across in our travels around the Web is La Scuola Popolare di Musica Ivan Illich, located in Bologna, Italy. Many musical performances filmed there, many of them featuring fairly free improvisations, can be found on YouTube. On the school's MySpace page, we find this description:

"Since 1992, the Ivan Illich Community School of Music (SPMII) in Bologna has proposed music courses for everybody: children, the youth and the elderly, those who wish to play and to sing together with others, those who have never touched a musical instrument, those who want to become professional musicians, those who want to improvise, those who want to make and listen to music untied by genres and those who want to have a good time learning. In addition to the individual instrument courses, the SPMII offers laboratories of ensemble music, practical workshops, classes for children as well as a choir and an orchestra. It has always paid particular attention to the music of oral tradition and to the music of improvisation and research. Weekly, the school presents lecture-concerts, open meetings of improvisation, films, debates and parties. SPMII and the park of Via Giuriolo 7 are places of musical and social interaction, a self-managed and libertarian space where people meet in a friendly environment. We are waiting for you…"

The school's main website is written in Italian, which we don't read, but look as we might, we can't find any text there that might be an explanation of how this school got its name. We can imagine, though, that Illich's notion of deschooling might have inspired musicians to found an alternative musical school, one aiming to teach anyone who wants to learn how to play music, and not necessarily using the traditional conservatory method or canon. As we've mentioned here, Illich's thoughts on education inspired composer Christopher Small to write a book in the 1970s called Music, Society, Education that in turn inspired people such as Peter Gabriel and David Byrne in their mining and developing the world music scene.

We can only guess at what Illich accomplished in Italy, France, and Germany - not to mention Spain and Mexico - whose languages he spoke fluently and where he was deeply respected. As might be expected, there is an Italian website devoted to him. There, we find a paper by Matthias Rieger, a Bremen friend and musician, entitled "Ascoltare la musica con le orecchie di Ivan Illich." Our computer Englishes this phrase as "To listen to music with the orecchie [ears] of Ivan Illich." (Somehow, we don't think Illich would have liked to see papers like this read in computer-translated form, so we'll refrain and give it our best guess.) The paper seems to have been presented by Mr. Rieger at the inauguration of something called the Centro di Documentazione Interculturale della Scuola per la Pace [Intercultural Documentation Center of the School for Peace?]. What appears to be a set of papers relating to Illich and presented at this forum in 2003 are available on the Web (PDF), in Italian. (A few days later: We've just noticed that some of these papers are available in English at the Pudel site, out of Bremen. There's even a poster for the conference in Bologna.)

Illich himself seems to have delivered at least one lecture in Italy that, as far as we can tell, has yet to appear in English. Barbara Duden refers to such a paper on page 16 of "Ivan Illich, Beyond Medical Nemesis (1976)," her 2003 overview and appreciation of Illich's work during the last two decades of his life. Evidently, Illich delivered a lecture at a Bologna symposium called “Sickness and Health as Social Metaphors." Ms. Duden writes that the paper was published in Le Monde Diplomatique for April 1999 and that an English translation was set "to appear in a collection of essays." Elsewhere, in a comprehensive bibliography of Illich's work, we've seen this citation:

Illich, Ivan (1998I): And do not lead us into diagnosis, but deliver us of the pursuit of health. Bologna, October 24th 1998, English Version of the Opening Lecture of the symposium on "Salute e Malattia". (The 'I' included with the date indicates that the item is written in Italian.)

And another bibliography states this:

Illich, Ivan (1998): "And do not lead us into diagnosis, but deliver us of the pursuit of health."
Bologna, October 24th 1998, English Version of the Opening Lecture of the symposium on 'Salute e Malattia'.
En Francais: "Ne nous laissez pas succomber au diagnostic, mais délivrez-nous des maux de la santé."
'Lezione magistrale' dÍvan Illich au Syposium de Bologne: 'Maladie et santé comme métaphore sociale', 25 au 28 octobre 1998.
In Italiano: "Non indurci in diagnosi, ma liberarci dai mali della salute."
Lezione di Ivan Illich nel Simposio di Bologna il 25. Ottobre 1998.

The Guardian's obit for Illich ends with this paragraph:

He was able to finish a history of pain which will be published in French next year, as will his complete works. His last wish, which was to die surrounded by close collaborators amid the beginnings of a new learning centre he had planned in Bologna, was not realised. (emphasis added)

We've read (in The Challenges of Ivan Illich) that Illich considered the Italian edition of Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis , as published in the 1990s, to be the definitive version of that text.

Meanwhile, we've always wondered what Illich's tastes in music were, if any.

Recalling Illich

2011-02-08T13:05:00.001-05:00

A Canadian website called Philia, A Dialogue of Caring Citizenship, makes available an essay recalling a warm and surprising encounter with Ivan Illich. The author is Sam Sullivan, the mayor of Vancouver until 2008, who visited Illich at the home of Jerry Brown, then mayor of Oakland, Calif. He writes good:

Toward the end of the three days I asked some of [Illich's] devotees if I could ask him for a photo together. Most thought this was a bad idea. One said, “You have seduced the seducer. He loves you and I wouldn’t push that relationship any further.” Another said that perhaps his feelings about technology might be the reason he has rarely been photographed. I was disappointed and it probably showed. As we were saying goodbye, Ivan insisted I tell him what was on my mind. After a moment’s hesitation I blurted out, “Ivan, I really wanted to ask you if it would be too much ... or maybe I shouldn’t ask ... or – really, Ivan, what I really want is, could we have a picture together?”
His eyes brightened and he said, “Of course!” But he wanted a good backdrop. ...

Illich used the old Greek Philia to describe the kind of neighborly friendship and truth-seeking that he advocated as the best antidote to the modern world's disabling professions and disembodying systems. We take it to mean conviviality, as Illich famously used that word, and then some.

"We believe there are countless opportunities to enable people who have been isolated and marginalized to flourish in dignity and take their place as full citizens," the Philia site states. "In fact, we are confident that welcoming their diverse contributions is the principal catalyst for nurturing vibrant communities for all of us.

"We are inspired by a range of thinkers and activists who are examining how changes in society reflect on culture and history. We're collecting stories of a new way of living to provide glimpses of a better future. And we're developing consensus among influential leaders in society about how we can shape more vibrant, hospitable and resilient communities."

Sullivan maintains his own site here.

Charles Taylor on Illich

2011-02-07T16:09:00.001-05:00

We mentioned the other day that a five-part radio program featuring David Cayley in conversation with philosopher Charles Taylor is scheduled for broadcast later this month on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.'s Radio One channel. Mr. Taylor, who wrote the forward for Mr. Cayley's book The Rivers North of the Future, has written about Illich's idea that the modern world and all its needy persons consuming and competing for the scarce outputs of various service institutions (schools, hospitals, etc.) can best be explained as a corrupted working out of the Christian Gospel - namely, in a book called A Secular Age. It has just come to our attention that what appears to be a good part (and possibly all) of the passage in that book that addresses Illich is available on the Web, here. It provides a good summary and interpretation of Illich's analysis of modernity and its roots. (We're not sure, though, what the person who has posted this book excerpt is up to, as he states on the same page that "it is eminently possible to consider Ivan Illich to be a bona fide nutter.")

More from Mr. Cayley

2011-02-04T15:57:00.001-05:00

David Cayley surely is a name familiar to anyone who has taken Illich seriously since the late 1980s. A producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.'s radio program IDEAS, Mr. Cayley has created two 5-hour-long radio shows devoted to Illich (and a lesser-known hour-long tribute to Illich broadcast shortly after his death), and written two books related to those shows. He became a close friend of Illich's and was his main interlocutor in the later years of his life.

At the end of this month (Feb. 28 - March 4), we've just learned, Mr. Cayley will present a 5-part program called The Malaise of Modernity: Charles Taylor in Conversation. Mr. Taylor, of course, contributed the perceptive foreword to The Rivers North of the Future, expressing thanks to Mr. Cayley for bringing forth that final, resounding statement of Illich's thought: "Illich, in his overall vision and in the penetrating historical detail of his arguments, offers a new road map, a way of coming to understand what has been jeopardized in our decentred, objectifying, discarnate way of remaking ourselves, and he does so without simply falling into the clichés of anti-modernism." Mr. Taylor also writes about Illich, at some length, in a recent book, A Secular Age.

CBC describes the upcoming program so:

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is Canada's best known and most widely read contemporary thinker. In books like Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, he has attempted to define the unique character of the modern age. He maps the fault-lines in our modern identity, and points to both the pitfalls and the promise of our condition. Charles Taylor has also been active in politics, having run four times for Parliament during the 1960s. IDEAS producer David Cayley surveys Taylor's thought in a series of extended conversations.

Ideas is broadcast weekdays at 9PM Toronto/Eastern time, on CBC Radio One and at several other times during the day over the Sirius Satellite Radio system. Radio One also broadcasts "live" on the Web, and makes certain of its shows, including many (but perhaps not all) Ideas programs, available for on-demand listening after their original broadcast dates.

In any case, we look forward to listening to these conversations with Mr. Taylor, when they're aired. And we'll likely record them, too. (Shameless but well-deserved product plug: We use Rogue Amoeba's superb Audio Hijack Pro software to record all our Web streams, and other audio, too.) And, if these conversations lead to a book, as has happened with previous interview subjects (Illich and Northrop Frye, for instance), we'll probably read that, too.

Meanwhile, we might point out two previous multi-part radio series of Mr. Cayley's that are still available as podcasts: In 24 parts, there is "How to Think about Science," and in 14 parts, "The Origins of the Modern Public."
The former features hour-long interviews with thinkers who study science itself - what scientists do, what scientific knowledge is and how it's used, the history and philosophy of science, the underlying assumptions of modern scientific thought and procedure, and so forth. We've only recently caught up with this series of programs, in the form of podcasts, but we heartily recommend it. Each program is devoted to one or two thinkers. And as the list of interviews reveals, a number of Mr. Cayley's subjects have worked closely with Illich, though they don't actually speak about him in these interviews: Barbara Duden, Silya Samerski, David Abram, and Sajay Samuel.

These programs may be listened to in streaming format from CBC's website or downloaded as MP3 podcasts from the iTunes store or via this helpful blog.

How to Think About Science

Episode 1 - Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer

Episode 2 - Lorraine Daston

Episode 3 - Margaret Lock

Episode 4 - Ian Hacking and Andrew Pickering

Episode 5 - Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour

Episode 6 - James Lovelock

Episode 7 - Arthur Zajonc

Episode 8 - Wendell Berry

Episode 9 - Rupert Sheldrake

Episode 10 - Brian Wynne

Episode 11 - Sajay Samuel

Episode 12 - David Abram

Episode 13 - Dean Bavington

Episode 14 - Evelyn Fox Keller

Episode 15 - Barbara Duden and Silya Samerski

Episode 16 - Steven Shapin

Episode 17 - Peter Galison

Episode 18 - Richard Lewontin

Episode 19 - Ruth Hubbard

Episode 20 - Michael Gibbons, Peter Scott, & Janet Atkinson Grosjean

Episode 21 - Christopher Norris and Mary Midgely

Episode 22 - Allan Young

Episode 23 - Lee Smolin

Episode 24 - Nicholas Maxwell

Easily our favorite discovery in this series has been Simon Schaffer, a professor in the philosophy of science at Cambridge University. He has both a gift for explaining his topic and a great sense of humor. He points out, for instance, that both Newton and Leibniz, each of whom seem to have invented the calculus independently of the other, both have biscuits named after them. Video and audio of Schaffer speaking about various subjects are well worth looking for: at Cambridge and Stanford University, on YouTube (Mr. Schaffer has anchored some BBC TV shows about science), and on an erudite BBC radio show called In Our Time, hosted by Melvyn Bragg (available as a podcast from BBC or via iTunes.)

The other of Mr. Cayley's programs, about the shaping of the modern public, also is available on the Web and in podcast form. It is essentially a series of interviews with Canadian and American academics involved in a research project overseen by McGill University, in Montreal. "Publicity was once the exclusive property of men of rank," the CBC website states. "They alone, by virtue of their stations, could make things public. During the 18th century it became meaningful to talk about 'public opinion' as something formed outside the state. Today anyone with a Twitter account can make a public. In this series IDEAS producer David Cayley examines how publics were formed in Europe, between 1500 and 1700, and how these early publics grew into the concept of 'the public' that we hold today." We look forward to listening to these programs, as well.
(At first glance, this topic of the "public" brings to mind the idea of the attention economy, which we first heard about in the mid-1980s from Michael H. Goldhaber. Goldhaber points out that while the world is awash in "information," the amount of attention that people can pay to that information is quite limited. Attention is a scarce commodity, as Illich might say. And so, an economy of attention is already underway, with different kinds of attention - mass audiences paying attention to stars and vice-versa, for instance - being traded back and forth. Much of the "PC revolution," Goldhaber points out, has had to do with providing people with ways of gainign attention for themselves: Powerpoint, desktop publishing, bulletin boards and now, Facebook and Twitter. Goldhaber goes so far as to predict that "the attention economy will eventually replace the money-industrial economy, in all variants, including capitalism.")

"CIDOC was a magic place"

2011-02-04T13:07:00.001-05:00

A seemingly complete, 15-page chapter of Dr. Martina Kaller-Dietrich's 2008 biography, Ivan Illich (1926-2002); Sein Leben, sein Denken [his life, his thought], is available on the Web as a PDF download - here. It's written in German, which means that we, as non-speakers, are, alas, unable to make much sense of it. But we have connections, as they say, and we are trying our best to arrange for an informal translation.

Dr. Kaller-Dietrich is a professor at the University of Vienna. She's deputy head of the History Dept. She's also on the editoral board of The International Journal of Ivan Illich Studies.

Here is her book's table of contents, with page numbers:

INDEX

Einleitung 2

Zur Methode 10

Forschungsstand 13

1 berufen– Entwurzelung, Flucht, Gelübde 15

1.1 Kindheit und Jugendjahre in Wien 16

1.2 Ausbildung in Italien 24

1.3 Intermezzo in Salzburg 26

1.4 Seelsorger in New York 29

1.5 Erziehungsreformer in Puerto Rico 36

2 empört – Bekenntnis, Zweifel, Zerwürfnis 42

2.1 Die Allianz für den Fortschritt 43

2.2 Gründung des Centro Intercultural de Documentación in Cuernavaca 49

2.3 Illich vor dem Heiligen Offizium 60

2.4 Schlussstrich unter die Causa Cuernavaca 68

2.5 Pacem in Terris: Medellín und die Rebellion von 1968 70

2.6 „CIDOC was a magic place“ 86

3 berühmt: Entschulung, Expertenherrschaft und Kontraproduktivität 101

3.1 Illich öffentlich 106

3.2 Politik und Freiheit 112

3.3 Illich und die Frauen 121

4 leibhaftig – Lehrer, Freund, Christ 139

4.1 Die Verderbnis des Besten 139

4.2 Sinne und System 144

4.3 Pionier des Un-Sinns 148

5 Illich heute lesen? 153

Literaturverzeichnis 155

Quellen 165

Anhang: Die Schriften am Zentru 166

"Eco-pedagogical dictatorship," or deschooled commons?

2011-02-01T13:22:00.001-05:00

We've recently come across a rarely-seen paper by Ivan Illich, one that's new to us and definitely worth a look by anyone interested in Illich's thought. "Eco-pedagogics and the commons" is from 1983, when he was still working on what he called his "history of scarcity," and it shows him at his penetrating and sarcastic best.

The paper is downloadable in PDF format from the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. It was published as an item in a newsletter put out by the Swiss-based International Foundation for Development Alternatives.

This paper provides a good basis, we'd say, for thinking critically about the situation currently facing the U.S. and other industrialized nations. They are confronted with mounting unemployment, stagnant economic growth, and impending disaster from climate change. They are, in a way, highly-developed nations looking for their own shot of "economic development" medicine, as it were - the kind of medicine they have been hawking to other, less-industrialized nations for the past many decades. For years, they did their best to mold other nations to their way of intensive commodity consumption, but now, as Illich was seeing signs of all those years ago, the counter-productivities of industrial tools and systems are overwhelming all nations, not just the poorer, "less-developed" ones.

In a way, Illich's paper of nearly 30 years ago anticipated President Obama's call last week - a call that by now is heard ad nauseum from politicians of every stripe - for more education and more science and more "innovation" as the way to solve these global-scale problems. Even as public schools fight cutbacks, college tuition skyrockets, and more students give up and drop out, the calls for "more education" gain both volume and frequency. The value of not only high-priced law degrees but even 4-year college degrees are now being seriously questioned, regularly and in high-profile venues. Wasn't it Illich who once wrote that as the cost of education rises, society will eventually reach a point where it can no longer afford to reproduce itself? Arguably, we are seeing signs that we are approaching just that asymptotic limit. Obama was unable even to sketch out how he might fund all the new educational consumption he calls for, but to a technology-mesmerized public, it sounds like a bet that's a sure winner: More education = increased innovation = stronger economy = more jobs = more consumption = more economic growth. What Illich warned of, though, was not only the expense of delivering educational services that get consumed in schoolrooms. In this paper, as elsewhere, he warns of a world where education is everywhere - "designed into the environment," as he puts it, here. Isn't that we see now, what with information and instructions radiating from the Web and its zillion screens and programmed into practically every digital gizmo we encounter, from mobile phones to desktop computers to remotely-controlled signage on the highway? The more virtual the world, the more "education" will need to be consumed and the more widely and continuously that consumption will need to take place.

Illich, in 1983:

… Education I associate with some kind of swimming lesson in which pupils are trained to keep afloat in an ever rising tide of bits, a flood that has long ago lifted them off the ground of personal meanings. As the pupil is taught how to handle, ever more skillfully, the onrush of information, even his desire for grounding in a meaningful system is eroded.
Education, as manpower qualification, is an enterprise by which people are disciplined for competent performance of work which remains meaningless to them. More recently, education, as training for clientage in the service industry, for computer use and for consumption, is an enterprise that teaches people to content themselves with meaningless lives off the job. In both ways education is a means to make people adjuncts to economic growth. But this economic growth will not come and if it comes it will be of an entirely symbolic nature. If the word ‘development’ is to survive, it must now acquire a new meaning. So far it has meant more energy intensive goods and more professional service. Both types of growth have reached their asymptote, not so much because their externalities have become intolerable, but because they have become counterproductive. At this point, development can only mean a change-over from growth to a steady state. However, what steady state shall mean depends entirely on the way in which we interpret the present.

Typical for this moment in Illich's intellectual inquiry, the paper seeks to highlight the differences between a world of markets and economics, all rooted in the assumption of scarcity, and a traditional, vernacular world based on the notion of commons. "The theme of my lecture," Illich writes,

is the bond that constitutes E & D as I shall call education and development when they are considered as a couple. I cannot pursue the origins of this bond back into romanticism and enlightenment, but I can touch on its history since 1945. I am interested in the bond because it is becoming an evil of an unrecognized kind. I am also interested in this bond because I believe that the assumptions which made it possible have now ceased to exist.

I will first deal with two ways to view the non-economic costs of progress: externalities and counter-purposive function, that appear both in education and all other major economic sectors. For simplicity's sake I will usually use transportation as the counterpoint to education. I will then call attention to the assumption of scarcity that is common to both sides. Then only will I deal with the history of our couple [E & D] and the danger it now gives rise to: highly repressive eco-pedagogical policies.

No book ever got published with the title A History of Scarcity, but Illich's project, started in the late 1970s as he began winding down his public activism and turning to a study of the history of modern certainties, yielded many interesting pieces of writing, like this one. Another from that time, "The Social Construction of Energy," was first published - in English, at least - one year ago by a Harvard journal called New Geographies. In this "new" paper, Illich describes yet more social construction:

Education and Development are both social construction enterprises. Each creates that new kind of space which it then furnishes. Education creates the inner psychic void which demands to be outfitted and then monopolizes the production of its scarce furniture. Development redefines the outer world as "the environment" - a word now used to designate the container for scarce resources in which we live. Together E & D are the catalyst which synthesizes the two into that commodity intensive reality within which we think and move.

Illich argues that economic growth has reached its asymptote, thwarted by rising counter-productivity and the computer making many jobs unnecessary. And inevitably, there is a shift among planners to explore and even lay plans for some kind of "steady state" as an alternative. But then, there is a choice to be made: either continuing with the assumption of scarcity in all things including, most insidiously, education and knowledge, or attempting to recover the commons - "the reconquest of the right to live in self-limiting communities that each treasure their own mode of subsistence," as Illich puts it.

We've been working our way through the paper, enjoying its many observations. We imagine the paper will be of particular interest to those interested in transportation. Whether it's miles-per-hour or miles-per-gallon, the entire discussion about transportation assumes a world of scarcity. "Most people now alive have acquired [this assumption] during this generation," Illich writes.

Take as an example, transportation. A large part of all those still alive were born auto-mobile. They had only their feet for moving about. Culture defined their range, but within this range they had almost unlimited access to each other. Getting from here to there did not depend, most of the time, on a resource which was scarce, which you could not get if I got it. This is totally different for us. We have created a world in which we have to be moved, in which we have to consume "passenger miles". And these are always scarce - if I get there, I compete with you for a seat. We belong to the human subspecies of homo transportandus. In the same way we belong to the sub-species of homo educandus. Once everywhere almost everything that people needed for everyday life they learned because it was meaningful to them and had proven useful. Now, we are constantly taught what is meaningful, from a perspective which is not yet ours, and we are taught things that, we are told, one day will be useful to us. And we are taught only as much as we are able to pay for, or society is rich enough to give us. Education as a result of teaching, is always a commodity, a service and as such is scarce."

Ultimately, as it always was, Illich is concerned with the plight of the less powerful - the world's poor, that is, who are getting force-marched into a world of ever-escalating consumption. Increasingly, they cannot afford the scarce commodities that have replaced the commons on which they once depended. These are the people who once collected wood to cook their food but now must buy electricity, those how who used to walk but now must pay for bus tickets - and schedule their activities to the bus's schedule, as well. Illich writes:

We can continue in the illusion that our most basic assumptions about human nature and society are somehow "natural" - that, without knowing it, all cultures share them with us. If we do this, we shall continue to assume that all cultures, in some way, provide education for their young and that everywhere people live off scarce products. In this hypothesis, both education and commodity dependence have always been the condition of man and it makes no sense to transcend them.
If we remain prisoners of this mind-frame, the development of a steady state society will require an unprecedented intensity of education and management. Only a hitherto unimagined degree of sober production, toil in consumption and mutual policing will make survival possible. Only life-long teaching, designed into the environment, can possibly provide that much "education". Re-reading Skinner might prepare us for this scenario of an eco-pedagogical dictatorship.

Grassroots Post-Modernism

2011-01-25T18:46:00.001-05:00

We are glad to point readers to yet another book deeply influenced by the thought of Ivan Illich. Called Grassroots Post-Modernism, Remaking the Soil of Cultures, it's available in print (Zed Books, 1998) and as a text file available online, gratis - albeit with misspellings galore.

Grassroots Post-Modernism is by Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, both closely associated with Illich. They write, " ... the promise and the search for a new era beyond modernity are a matter of life and death, of sheer survival, for these struggling billions [of people] - whom social planners call "the masses," "the people" or "common" men and women. Daily, they are compelled to invent post-modern social realities to escape the "scientific" or even the "lay" clutches of modernity. Modernization has always been for them, and will continue to be, a gulag that means certain destruction for their cultures. ... Gazing at the grassroots epic unfolding before us, we focus upon three modern sacred cows that still remain unchallenged" - namely, "global thinking," "the universality of human rights," and "the myth of the individual self."

They write: "The emerging epic of grassroots initiatives for resisting the oppressiveness of modern minorities represents a clear rupture with some of the most fundamental premises of the modern era. In doing so, it leads the way in radically confronting some modern "sacred cows" (with apologies to the Hindus). Even academic post-modernism has still not dared to dissect or deconstruct them. As evident facts, certainties or moral ideals, they cannot be questioned by modern minds. The post-modern topology of the minds of people at the grassroots liberates them from those 'certainties,' seen as a horizon of intelligibility that is unsustainable and unbearable; one that they do not share."

Illich, a master questioner of certainties, is quoted extensively and his work acknowledged throughout. One quotation that caught our eye:

"The most destructive effect of development is its tendency to distract my eye from your face with the phantom, humanity, that I ought to love."

-- Ivan Illich, in conversation with Majid Rahnema, Bremen, December 13, 1994

Prakash studied with Illich at Penn State and now is a professor of philosophy of education there. She contributed a chapter - "A Letter on Studying with Master Illich" - to the 2002 book The Challenges of Ivan Illich: "Like an overloaded and driven donkey, burdened with all the ethics textbooks I had acquired through years of studying professional philosophy, I had much unloading to do before I could get anywhere with [Illich]. I discarded most of those books in order to learn with Illich the virtues grounded in soil, those learned by swimming across the gulf separating traditional virtues from the contemporary domain of values."

Esteva, born in Mexico in 1936, describes himself as a "deprofessionalized intellectual." As a young man, he worked for IBM, among other companies, and eventually worked for the Mexican government. In 1983, he met Illich and his life changed, he has written. He later became an adviser to the Zapatistas, a radical political movement in Oaxaca. In an essay largely about his encounters with Illich, called "Back from the Future," Esteva writes:

Illich’s work held up for me a brilliantly lit torch in the middle of all the intellectual darkness defining the experts’ reality. Illich stood out from the majority of published voices, illuminating for me what I could not make clear sense of before at the grassroots. His was neither a new theory nor an ideology. In my conversation with peasants or marginals, each time I shared Ivan’s ideas, they showed no surprise. I began to call their comfortable familiarity with Illich’s ideas the “aha effect”. “Aha”, they said, every time I quoted Ivan. Yes, they knew, better yet, understood by the seat of the pants, what he was publishing. No surprise there. But hearing their own experiences and ideas so well articulated in Ivan’s words held up for them a magnificent mirror affirming what they already knew from common sense.

We look forward to reading this book, published by the same company that has just re-published The Development Dictionary, in which Illich presented an essay about "Needs."

Illich buys an island? In Scotland?

2011-01-24T19:31:00.001-05:00

One of the more half-assed assessments of Illich that we've encountered is the obituary published by a newspaper called The Scotsman on Dec. 10, 2002, a week after his death in Bremen. Written by a certain Peter Clarke, it's full of absurdities like this: "He descended into crankiness in many of his publications and speeches. Energy and Equity was a clever book but little more than a manifesto for pro-bicycle policies. Tools for Conviviality was a testing inventory of how to live the rewarding and moral life, but it was often little more than vegetarianism with a hint of the mystic."

As far as we know - and we just looked - there is no mention at all in Tools of either vegetables or mysticism. And morality is hardly Illich's subject, either.

What's most intriguing in this mean-spirited obit is the following paragraph:

Illich loved Scotland, but he learned only late in his visits it was the
Summer Scotland he enjoyed. He tried to buy some Hebridean islands to
create a community of anarchist-libertarian scholars, but when he first
encountered a Scottish winter his sentiments changed. He returned to
Mexico, and never saw Mull again."

That Illich even eyed, much less actually "tried to buy" real-estate in Scotland or anywhere else is something we've not seen mentioned elsewhere, either before or after his death. Which is not to say that it never happened. But in light of this piece's generally nasty tone and wild misrepresentations of Illich - Clarke writes, for instance, that "Illich’s life [was] one long reaction to the Anchluss," the absorption of Austria by Nazi Germany - it's difficult to take his reporting seriously. Besides, why would Illich want to situate himself or a community of fellow scholars in Scotland, of all places? And why would he need more than one island? Illich frequently described himself a "wandering Jew" of few possessions and no fixed abode. And since when did he work closely with anarchists and libertarians? As we understand it, those are categories with which he declined to work, even if many anarchists and libertarians have adopted him as one of their own.

Still, if anyone knows more, do tell.

'Some Theological Perspectives on Pain and Suffering'

2011-01-24T17:02:00.001-05:00

These are remarks made by Ivan Illich at a conference about the "management of pain" conducted in 1987, we believe, by an organization called The Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology. It's located in St. Louis, Mo., and describes itself as focusing "on the many ways that faith and science complement each other in the advancement of human knowledge."

We first happened upon these remarks by Illich in 2002, out on the Web somewhere, and we dutifully stored them away on our hard disk. And then, we promptly forgot about them. Just today, though, they resurfaced, and a quick search with Google reveals that this text is no longer available as we found it. So, as our small contribution to the Illich community, we re-publish it. We've corrected a few misspellings and other typos as best we could.

In this essay, Illich argues that in the West, pain and the experience of the body in pain, have a history, and that this history is deeply informed by Christian thought. He hints, here, at the main thesis he worked on for the rest of his life, namely that the corruption of the best is the worst: "The sub-natural, subhuman horrors, which I consider part of western civilization, cannot be understood, I believe, unless they are seen as the perversion of the above- or super-human vocation which is contained in the history of suffering in the Old and New Testaments."

Originally, these remarks were released along with those of two other speakers at the conference, one an M.D., the other a specialist in social work with experience in drug abuse and treating the pain of cancer patients. A short forward names those gentlemen while introducing the topic at hand:

Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with the "problem of evil" for centuries -- nay, for millenia. From Job until now we have no satisfactory "solution", nor, probably, shall we ever have one. We shall not know "good" until we see God face to face. Then, seeing God, we shall understand evil.

Certainly suffering, and its physical manifestation in pain, is part of the aspect of "evil. We can, at least, generally locate pain in the matrix of a fallen temporality. Our efforts at this Conference have in no way penetrated the mystery, but we can congratulate ourselves for at least throwing some light on several aspects of pain and suffering. John Blaschke, David Joranson and Ivan Illich deserve our thanks for their wisdom and their broadening our horizons and deepening our appreciation of the many aspects constituting our experience of pain and suffering. Pain, as was pointed out several times in the course of the Conference, is an intensely personal and very lonely experience. It is hoped that this set of Proceedings will be a communal help to all of us who hurt and suffer.

SOME THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON PAIN AND SUFFERING

by Ivan Illich

I wish to respond as closely as I can to the spirit I have found here and to the framework already established by Dr. Blaschke and Mr. Joranson. I wish to speak with theological competence, always open to criticism by those with similar competences. I am particularly interested in the revelation of God's mystery not only as we find it in the Old and New Testaments but also in the whole history of the Church. I wish to include in the history of the Church the piety and devotion of the Church's people. Indisputably this is a very important, but mostly neglected, source for our understanding of the content of faith. I shall confine my theological references to that part of church history which is common to all western Christians. I will not include references to eastern Christian theological sources simply because these are a different matter.

In a very deep sense, theology is about suffering. Suffering, which I call living, is the acceptance of things which I do not like. I shall argue that the understanding of suffering has developed over the centuries in the west. It is in the west where I am at home. The western appreciation is different from the bearing of burdens in the traditional world of Taoism in China or in the Hindu or Buddhist world. I shall not speak about the extra-European understanding of pain and suffering. I shall consider suffering as an historical reality which comes into existence and which we learn.

My task at this conference is not to speak about suffering in general. I am, rather, considering the suffering of one particular burden which is called pain. I recommended the reading of a chapter on suffering in Medical Nemesis, a book which I wrote some 20 years ago, where I carefully distinguish suffering from pain in a profoundly different way from Dr. Blaschke's approach last evening. And, let me say, this difference is more than a question of language.

I am taking the liberty of speaking of suffering as the culturally shaped way of dealing with the shadow side of life rather than with its lighted, sunny side. I shall use the term suffering to indicate a particular socially and culturally acquired art of dealing with that shadow side, of bearing burdens which come with living. I'm speaking about the art of suffering. Pain is only one narrow, but very special, kind of condition in which one would properly need the art of suffering.

At this point I want to place my consideration of this topic under the image of that whimpering nun whom Dr. Blaschke said yesterday he held in his arms. Shortly after midnight I was dreaming of her. I got up. This was my first night in a Jesuit retreat house in 25 years. Please, let me stress that what I am about to say is said because I feel at home here and with you. I am in my Father's house here. I am not an outsider, not a guest here. I was here in a retreat cell without a crucifix, in a dining room without a crucifix, in a conference room, where we are discussing pain and technology, without a crucifix. The instrumentum salutis (the instrument of salvation) is not present. Finally I went to the chapel, which by the way reminds me of a tea room at an airport, and there I found a cross. God knows what kind of human respect dictated a cross -- without a corpus. I looked for the one symbol in which physical pain, nociception, can be expressed in western culture, and I could not find it.

Therefore, I decided during the night to center my presentation on the history of suffering on the history of the slow discovery and development of the denudation (I mean this literally) of Christ's body on the cross. I now see my task as one of reflecting on the history of the suffering of pain. I can speak of the history of the crucifix without speaking of the history of the stigmata, but I shall mention the stigmata later, so as to lead into a final topic, the history of Christian torture.

Dr. Blaschke mentioned Elain Scarry's book last evening, that wild, beautiful, crazy, mixed-up book which treats very many important things. It's one of the six or seven important books relating to a history of the perception of pain published last year.

I am not going to speak of medicine or of the medical profession as such. I want to raise a more profound issue about the social framework within which medicine is practiced. I would say much the same about the framework in which a voter for the presidency bestows his or her confidence on one who might, under some set of circumstances, have to seriously consider pressing the button that would start a nuclear war. So, I'm not speaking about any special or particular profession here beyond noting that we are talking about pain and suffering in a world of domineering professions.

In speaking about the history of the crucifix, I speak about the crucifix as a butt of ridicule in early Christian times, as a sign of victory over the power of torture in the first millennium, and as the denudation of the horror of physical pain which thereby also comes into conscious existence together with the notion of the independent self.

But before I look to the history of the crucifix, I think I should make some remarks about suffering as it is dealt with in the Bible. I want to consider the evolution of the idea of suffering in Holy Scripture in order to return later to the fact that I cannot identify in the Book of Job any distinction of nociception -- I take that word from you, Dr. Blaschke -- from other forms of evil. I have thought on this issue for 15 years and it has come as an illumination to me that I have to rank the history of nociception being transformed into the human experience of bodily pain. I was told yesterday that nociception can be studied in experimental animals. I'm interested in the transformation of nociception -- through historical circumstances, through its perception in a human mode, into what ancient philosophers called an actus humanus, a human and humane activity -- into pain.

The Old Testament is very rich in words that express a deep, deep sense of suffering: anguish, fear, bitterness, the experience of being lost, forlorn, beaten up, exposed to the wrath of the Lord. It was only very much, later, during the Christian epoch, that rabbis felt the need to assign a specific word for that which we moderns now call pain. When these same rabbis had to talk about physical pain they used the word that designated punishments which I inflict. The English word pain comes the Latin poena, from being punished. The concept of a physical pain, one specifically physical, comes from the experience of being chastised by another. In our language pain does not come from the inside; it is imposed on us from outside.

When the rabbis in Egypt translated the Old Testament into Greek, they found seven or eight words for these different experiences, general words in Greek for the way one could suffer, but none of them fitted the word-field of the Hebrew experiences which they were trying to render in Greek words. Here, let me simply note that we should not forget, when we speak about the exegesis of the Old Testament, that it was done overwhelmingly by people writing Greek or Latin. The only word in which etymologists believe there is a close correlation between the traditional Hebrew word and the Greek word is that which in German we would call Angst, anguish, pressure, being oppressed.

My knowledge of other semitic languages is practically nil. But I am told that the word "suffering" is almost absent from the texts of Egypt. At least for those Egyptians who for 2000 years wrote in hieroglyphics, anxiety and whatever one has to suffer is transmuted into a huge effort to survive beyond the grave. Say, you go to a museum and see presentations of slaves. You would think how terribly these people were pained. When they were whipped, it hurt. But that is not the sort of thing I'm talking about. Assyriologists tell us that bodily decay, destruction, disaster are experienced as a result of gods who hurl something at people. There is nothing rational involved. It is not experienced as an intimate aggression. The Jews experience pain with a strong communal sense for, as the Jewish authors view it, miseries are the outcome of social infidelity to the covenant.

This (the outcome of social infidelity to the covenant) is what misery is about in the Bible. The Bible is a unique book if you want to view theology as the science which heals by giving meaning to any kind of suffering conceivable because ultimately that suffering is referred to a corpus, The corpus, on the cross. When you read the Bible this way, as a science of the faithful of Yahweh -- and of the faithfulness of Yahweh -- you will discover this. Suffering is the coming true of the retribution with which the Lord promised to sanction disobedience at the moment when he gave his Law at Sinai: a privilege for his chosen.

I said that I would speak as a theologian and as a believer who interprets the word, but I've tried especially in front of my most important collaborator and critic, Lee Hoinacki, to do so under the assumption that everybody here can sympathize with a man who wants to believe in the incarnation of pain, of the pained body. I also, though, want to make sense to someone who would say that "what this man believes is not where I belong." But to the person who might say that, I would add, "Be careful." In a subtle and, perhaps, in a very vindictive way, what I'm saying is incorporated from the culture in which I live, from the horrors to which I shall refer. The sub-natural, subhuman horrors, which I consider part of western civilization, cannot be understood, I believe, unless they are seen as the perversion of the above- or super-human vocation which is contained in the history of suffering in the Old and New Testaments.

The Prophets are prophets precisely because they interpret the burden of misery which is breaking the backs of God's people. They interpret it as something which one day shall be lifted. One simply cannot understand the evolution of a people with the Suffering Servant of Yahweh unless one understands that there is, together with the revelation of the possibility of suffering, the promise. Pain and suffering could not be relieved as a human condition without the promise of God.

As we modern historians go through the biblical books, through the Hebrew library that the Bible is, we see that, century after century, the burden is expressed more clearly as something which becomes intimate, which not just hits the entire people but hits a person. Suffering that was once the debt which the children of Israel had to pay for their fathers who had sinned, slowly came to be understood as a sign of Yahweh's predilection who thus tests his elect. I'll return to this notion later.

Because of the very strong element of communal debt, suffering is not yet experienced as what we are calling nociception. But affiliation turns into temptation when suffering becomes too great. Satan appears in suffering. He raises the question of a power. Can the afflicted turn to the magician, other priest or the gods to reveal, the need for suffering, to shake off the burden which is imposed through covenant and election? Or is the afflicted condemned to the terrible Jewish dilemma either to submit like Job and to ask God, please, to withdraw his hand or to curse him? Just read the Old Testament! Christians have unlearned to curse God in their suffering. As I said, I'm thinking of the Carmelite nun whom you held in your hards [hands?], Dr. Blaschke. As one who is faith-full, curse God, because in the Jewish sense a curse is still a sign of faith.

Let us not forget that within this one tradition of the Middle East suffering always make sense. What makes the life and context of the Jew experientially unique is God's transcendence of all suffering, his transcendence of both good and evil. For those who believe, no further reason for suffering has to be given other than "God's way." This is what it means to have fallen into the hands of the living God.

At the time of Christ the Jewish attitude toward suffering was already well defined in its uniqueness. There is no evil that cannot be placed by the Jew in a context simply of the terrible and horrible wrath of a person. Suffering always carries, therefore, a reference to Yahweh, to Yahweh who punishes the infidelity of his people as friend. In suffering at the hands of a friend lies the acceptance of the vocation which is open only for a Jew, acceptance simultaneously of meaningfulness and of the joy of doing so within a covenant. What a contrast this is to the contemporary Stoic attempt to declare that suffering is something which should not even touch the inside of a wise man, of a friend of god, as the Greek Stoics called themselves. And what an even more startling contrast to the Indian transformation of turning suffering into an illusion! Buddha's search for nirvana goes far beyond the Stoic indifference and insensitivity.

For the Jew there is the life-long wrestling with God. To be Israel means a constant wrestling which is not a pleasant experience. It is the life-long attempt to accept adversity as an occasion to be angry with God, to blame him, to face him before engaging in a life-long affirmation of the frame of transcendence within which whatever happens to me happens at his hand. In this sense, the Buddhist monks' recognition that suffering is illusion is the one root, in my understanding, out of which it is possible to declare that the need for a personal God is irrelevant. I was, therefore, clearly quite impressed when a friend returning from Japan after three months in a Zen Buddhist convent told me he was surrounded mostly by German mother superiors and American Jesuits.

God became man. Clearly he wanted to share the scandal of the bodily experience of evil: Christ, it is said in every Mass, suffering for you, for many. He offered himself to the Father in taking unto himself a body which is ours, which came into being in the history of the west. The apostle Paul grasps this mystery to such an extent that people accuse him of dolorism -- which I guess is why the corpus descended from the crucifix in this retreat center.

Take the Letter to the Colossians: "I find my joy in the suffering I bear for you and add my flesh to what is missing in Christ's tribulation" for his church. There is, therefore, a connection between Paul's suffering and the coming about of the body of Christ which is the church. The body, and more particularly the shared body of the church, for Paul is something which comes into existence by the joyful bearing of suffering. By this he extends, he transcends totally, the Stoic denial that misery ought not grip our inmost being. Further, he also transforms Israel -- the word means a "struggle with El," God -- into the extraordinary creativeness of making church.

Job! When we say Job we generally mean a biblical sufferer. Job is a man who has fallen into the hands of the living God and who knows very well that this is what has happened to him. He is being tested by Satan. He has lost everything that is dear to him, his camel herds, his goats, his servants, his tents, his sons, even his daughters. He is covered with running sores. He is the depth of affliction. He is abandoned by his friends. Even worse, he has lost dignity. He is laughed at by his friends and suffers even worse at the hands of his enemies. The Bible praises him because he interprets all this as a test. In his misery he confesses that the hand of God has touched him. He says that he is hurt by El's arrows, that El has fallen on his neck, that he is the butt of God's blows and of his anger. His misery and his dishonor, his deprivations are so many outward signs of a ruinous encounter with his total person, body and soul, physical and psychological, undistinguishable from each other. Not only he, but also his progeny, have fallen into God's hands. The loss of his skin and the loss of his kin are equally hurtful. This theme is repeated several times in the Book of Job.

All through the Old Testament, sores, leprosy, weakness, madness are presented as synonymous and all are a form of enveloping misery. They are never seen as symptoms of a special autonomous kind of misery which we would call disease rather than grief or misfortune for which something could be done bodily for the relief of the total misery. The Old Testament sufferer resents this painful state because it excludes him from the full participation in public song. His iniquity or his impurity make him an exile from ceremonies. Disarray of the body, the disaggregation from the community, together with the derangement of the mind reveal that he is afflicted, that he is a sinner. He is revealed as being in a special way -- in an inner way but one not acceptable to the majority -- in the hands of God.

In the later books of the Old Testament, the social aspect of this affliction is stressed even more. God touches Tobias as he touched Job because he wants to purity him, to make him an example for his people. In all of this, I think it is most important not to impute the possibility of the search for nociception as a special pain which I can suffer. Look to the Old Testament or to the New Testament or to any century before Descartes! It would be a grave mistake to interpret these biblical passages as suggesting that God strikes the sinner with something which we call disease, a disorder which becomes visible in the world in leprosy or some such, a disorder which does not become visible equally in dishonor, loss of status and defeat. Anthropologists tell me that even today in very many cultures there is no word for physical disease.

A crazy, but to most impressive, example of this can be seen in Normandy. There they say "Monsieur est fatigue." It doesn't mean that he's tired; it means that he is sick. And tres fatigue means that he is in the "atrium of death" a phrase which belongs to Hippocratic medicine but which has been eliminated in our kind of medicine. My anger yesterday evening and this morning is increasing: why is terminal pain a medical problem? I have found a new reason for crusading against this bunch of monopolists.

Now let's jump forward to the 12th century. I would like to show you how I can see that the perception of -- I'm using now a word that is new to me -- nociception takes social and psychological shape by looking at the crucifix. You are all aware of the first crucifix. It is that graffito on the outside of what was probably a brothel. There is a man with a donkey's head nailed to a cross. Beneath that there is a not fully readable name: "Anaxi .... adores his God" This first representation of a crucifix which we have is a mark of ridicule. Soon after Constantine the cross of Christians is golden and studded with jewels. Later, the figure of a fully dressed priest or king, the Savior, stands in front of it. Then in the Ottonian period (~1OOO AD) something happens. Occasionally the suffering body of Jesus is unveiled, but it is stiff. By the 12th century the body becomes touchingly realistic. By 1160 the face is alive but the body is already dead. By 1200 the head also sinks down. It is a dead body which we contemplate -- what we call "the body" The whole idea of the crucifix goes through revolution in that 12th century.

As an aside here, in order to stress the fact that there can be such a thing as body history and body experience, let me mention a few things as they were at the beginning of the 12th century. Mystically the body of the Lord is present on the altar in the bread and wine and the real body's around him. By the end of the century transubstantiation becomes a major issue. The body of Christ in the bread and wine is physically present and the mystical body sits around it. At the beginning of that century, we take a bone. We know it's a relic and we elevate it to the altars -- we perceive the odor of sanctity. By the end of the century the Inquisition is there -- in its original role -- to identify and certify that this bone "is really the skullcap of Mary Magdalen." At the beginning of the century, people who are wedded don't give their bodies to each other. They might do it, but they don't know that they do it. By the end of the 1200's, women are recognized as having as human a body as men. This is an incredible step toward the equality of men and women. And suddenly we can give our bodies to each other - a fabulous invention.

At the beginning of the century, the high-points of the liturgy are still the breaking of the bread and the preceding pax, the oratio pacis, the conspiracy of peace. This pax means a blowing into each other's mouth, an osculum, a mouth to mouth kiss among Christians. By the end of the century, the priest bows to kiss the altar and then kisses a wooden object (osculatorium) and hands it down to the others present.

Now, within this complex of change -- I'm not saying that this changing perception is the cause; I'm saying that this happens at the same time -- compassion is added to mercy, which is the Christian virtue of the first 1000 years. We moderns are certain that no one actually feels the pain of another. The other's pain cannot but be believed, as Dr. Blaschke said. True compassion is the result of an act of faith. I would dare to say faith becomes embodied only when it is compassion.

Francis' stigmata witness to the embodiment of his faith in God whom he adores on the crucifix, the God who took on flesh. The breakthrough of Christ's wounds out of Francis' palms, the soles of his feet as well as his heart and side appear historically during those decades within which what historians call the "individual" jells in Europe. Van den Berg, a Dutch phenomenologist, has written beautifully about the process.

It is much later, only in the 16th century, that we begin to see the intimization [sic] of pain, the discovery of the feeling of pain as an individual separated from the community. Then people perceive the suffering of an individual, as a person, not as "one of us."

It is in the towns of northern Italy in the 13th century that people begin to experience an invisible skin that is constitutive of their own body. Suffering, the contemplation of the crucifix, the desire "nudus nudum Christum sequere" (naked to follow the naked Christ) manifests itself in the stigmata. Don't forget that by the end of that century there are 150 at least historically and medically solidly documented stigmatized people crawling around Europe. Whatever you make of it!

I am not suggesting that Augustine or Hugh or Hildegard loved Jesus less than Francis or believed in his incarnation, passion and death [???] than Francis. I only argue that being a man of the 13th century had endowed Francis with a new kind of organ, a border, a frontier, a shell which separates him from the community. Collin Morris ("The Rise of Individualism: 1050-1200 SCM, London, 1984 -- on the first page he quotes the poem by Auden which begins: "Some thirty inches from my nose. . . ") says that modern man knows that there is a skin around him. Without that perceived skin about him, one does not fit into our contemporary society. A Mexican wetback who arrives straight from his village must acquire this "skin" to fit into the U.S. Once you have acquired that frontier or skin, you will never again fit into the old barrio, as you did earlier in life. One has to break down this cultural immunity to our spirit of individual selfhood before one fits into this society.

Francis acquired that skin already in the 13th century. His seraphic faith in the passion of the incarnate God, like Paul's, adds what is missing in Christ's tribulations. That's what he professes -- to build up the church of Christ. But his love embodies itself in the stigmatour [sic] flesh of one person, not in the mystical or social body of Christ.

I have no other way -- sometimes I wish I had another -- a less theological way to speak about the issue of the social creation of pain. I can't. The enfleshment of faith and the love of Jesus reaches here, with Francis as a type, a new stage and with it the constitution of bodily pain as a separate, special, exquisite form of suffering and of compassion becomes available. I can now have compassion with Christ on the cross and compassion with the sick.

I hope to complete by the end of November a history of the discovery that there is a special class of people who are called the sick. Before, there were no institutions for the sick. There was no sense that there are people who are bodily sick outside. There were people who had something wrong with them and went to a doctor, but that's very far from having a social conception of the class of the sick. And a new class of people were arising rejoicing in hoc saeculo, hoc secularis mentis (in this age, in the mind of "the world"). Whole movements arise in the cities, people who tried not to be monks but to install -- the first evidence I have of this is from 1194 -- the sick, as their Lord and Abbot, into the noscomiam, a hospital in our sense of the word. They wanted to practice compassion. The move from the works of mercy to compassion is an inner ideal. Together with compassion, the mysticism and the mystical-spiritual interpretation of bodily pain as something which relates me in a special way to Christ and, therefore becomes psychologically heightened, stems from this century.

Talking about sickness is something other than compassion. To be more modern, let me call it empathy. I wish I had a different word! Someone said very well that empathy is like a rope, a bridge of words across the abyss that separates me from the skin of another. We cannot share the experience of pain, however, across this bridge of words. The more serious the condition is, the less can cross over this bridge. We can share our intent to find meanings to which we can try to refer that which we call pain. We can try to make it meaningful. But the pain itself is and remains, as Dr. Blaschke pointed out last evening, an object-less state. I would add that it has no possible objective referent, because the body is the percept of the subject, the precise opposite of an object.

I wish we could discuss these matters at greater length. We hear today such statements as: "my body belongs to me"; "my baby is mine"; and so forth. These are philosophically loaded discussions. The fact that they're very common does not make them intellectually legitimate. This is the basic position from which I start.

The utterance which denotes pain is not a word but a scream. The stronger the sense of self and individuality, the greater that sense of that skin, the more the projection of the possibility and the positive transformation into stigmata, then the more pronounced is the social compossibility [sic] of the social constitution of nociception -- the body as pain.

I made myself controversial and I feel that one who is controversial should not be a symbol of unity. That is why I do not want to speak as a theologian. But, as I said earlier there is a connection between the stigmata and torture. This is the final point I want to touch upon.

I'm going into this as the only way in which I can legitimate what the title of this conference -- the management of pain -- says to me. I want to raise an issue which is unspeakable and completely wrong in any ordinary setting.

The management of pain in the 20th century, in the last quarter of the 20th century, is a medical problem, a social control problem. But it almost certainly reflects something much deeper which is embedded in our society. Look at this particular body, the medicalized body, which today's young people call "my system," this post-Cartesian body which is managed. This body in our day requires the management of its pains and of its delights. Mr. Joranson gave an extraordinary example when he was talking about the decriminalization of terminal cancer -- I'm simplifying this enormously. For 4.5 million people suffering from more or less serious or very serious pain, relief could be broadly found with oral morphines. This use corresponds totally to my convictions. I am not making a medical statement.

These things about which I'm speaking are real. They are closely related to the medical issue which you came together to discuss. They comprise a concrete instance. There must be about as many people in that state of suffering or pain, which Mr. Joranson described, immediately south of the U.S. border as there are in the U.S. In South America and in Mexico hospitalization for the dying can be achieved for only 2 or 3 percent. Therefore, hospital control over the administration of these drugs is impossible. Providing people with the drugs, of which Mr. Joranson speaks, can happen in Mexico only by their free sale -- if one wants to avoid horrible repression. Most people in Mexico and in poor countries in general do not get medicines, even dangerous ones, and antibiotics on prescription. They can't get the prescription. And even if they got it, the majority of the doctors would fall into one of the four classifications Mr. Joranson mentioned.

To face the medical management of analgesics -- without reference to the religious repression of "highs" in the United States -- requires either establishing even stronger and probably just as useless controls over the import of morphine from South America or it means denying Mexicans what it is claimed should be given to U.S. citizens. This is an issue which cannot be discussed in a society in which management of pain, the very idea of the management of pain, has been put into a medical framework.

But to my point! Parallel with the embodiment of compassion during the late Middle Ages runs a new social concern with the effective infliction of pain. I speak of increasing use of torture. I am emphatically not suggesting that in some physiological sense the instruments used to inflict poena, pain, become more effective. I am suggesting that the torturers set out to achieve something unprecedented. Juridical torture was not unknown in Rome and Greece. The need for torture was an obvious matter for Cicero and Aristotle. We have their texts. It was not used on people who mattered. It was used on slaves, barbarians or the humiliates in later Roman periods, the "proletariat" who, after all, were more or less like beasts according to classical philosophy. That anthropology demanded that they be managed like animals. They had to be broken and broken in a manner which would be exemplary for the members of their kind. I'm saying, in effect, that the illusion of a relationship between Aristotelean and Platonic democracy and Jeffersonion democracy is just that -- an illusion.

There was no grace left in such people nor status nor property through which they could be afflictedOnly their flesh remained which could be torn from them. Juridical torture as punishment was used through 1800. Probably it subsided when imprisonment became legitimate as an alternative.

Inquisitional torture, about which I wish to speak, is another matter. I'm not speaking about Torquemada nor necessarily about Stalin nor precisely about the Brazilian colonels. Inquisitional torture is a type. It is directed against members of one's own body social. Its prime purpose is neither punishment, be it individual or exemplary, nor is it the discovery of truth by anyone other than the one tortured. Inquisitional torture is not the venting of an angry sovereign's wrath on a disobedient subject and who demands that the executioner put the bloody seal of power on the skin, rending the skin of the subject with power from the outside.

Inquisitional torture is not an adjunct to interrogation but makes interrogation a constitutive element of the pain it inflicts. This is my thesis and it has many points on which you can discuss it. It makes of interrogation a constitutive element of the pain it inflicts. It makes the patient's compliance through confession a constitutive element of the treatment given. To speak with Scarry, this new kind of torture seeks to destroy the world of the victim, to destroy what he defines as his truth. It then seeks to objectify this destruction in a confession. Inquisitional torture presupposes the historically constituted self. I cannot conceive of it before the constitution of the self in the 13th century. In fact it comes into existence at that moment because inquisitional torture aims at the destruction of the sense of self and it happens in front of the crucifix.

When Job is tempted by Satan, his faith in Yahweh is threatened, but not his self. When the Christian martyr is tempted to defection, his allegiance to God's people is threatened but not his personality. The Inquisition in our western medieval tradition increasingly threatens the self itself. The inquisitioner used punishment to undo the self together with the self's world. To make this point I restate an often observed fact: pain can be borne, suffered, endured.

Pain can be borne, it can be suffered, endured only so long as it is something that has come upon me but is not altogether I. I do hurt all over but still, I am in pain. The Jew learned through the prophets that there is no suffering which cannot be referred to the transcendent God. But there are some forms of pain that alienate. We torture people so thoroughly that they can no longer recognize that this thing which grips them is not their "I." At this point such a person cannot stand himself any more, bear himself, be himself any more. It is at this point that through confession, through compliance with the torturer's vision of what he is and who he is, the victim recognizes the power of the instrument of torture to create a new reality, that of the institution at the service of which the torturer acts -- no matter for what reason -- and which has entrapped him as a subject. It is this which I wanted to call to your attention. I call for a social history of the kind of self which, once constituted, can be extinguished through the pain which overwhelms it. This is ultimate "compliance."

I want to call you to look at how the pain perception of the self, which our society and our economy creates, has acquired that bodily nature which beings up the issue which you raise. I'm saying that this issue which you are raising is a modern one.

Thank you for your attention.

The Guardian's Illich Obit

2011-01-11T01:05:00.001-05:00

For our money, The Guardian's obituary for Ivan Illich was the best of those to appear in English: concise, cliche-free, familiar with his life's work, artful. And so, just because we can - and because we think this piece of writing deserves a good audience - we cut and paste it, in its entirety, here. Meanwhile, we think we've finally identified the two authors: Todd, an architect, studied with Illich at Univ. of Pennsylvania; La Cecla is an anthropologist and architect based in Italy.

Ivan Illich

A polymath and polemicist, his greatest contribution was as an archaeologist of ideas, rather than an ideologue

by Andrew Todd and Franco La Cecla

The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2002 02.29 GMT

Ivan Illich, who has died of cancer aged 76, was one of the world's great thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast terrains. He worked in 10 languages; he was a jet-age ascetic with few possessions; he explored Asia and South America on foot; and his obligations to his many collaborators led to a constant criss-crossing of the globe in the last two decades.

Best known for his polemical writings against western institutions from the 1970s, which were easily caricatured by the right and were, equally, disdained by the left for their attacks on the welfare state, in the last 20 years of his life he became an officially forgotten, troublesome figure (like Noam Chomsky today in mainstream America). This position obscures the true importance of his contribution. His critique of modernity was founded on a deep understanding of the birth of institutions in the 13th century, a critical period in church history which enlightened all of his work, whether about gender, reading or materiality. He was far more significant as an archaeologist of ideas, someone who helped us to see the present in a truer and richer perspective, than as an ideologue.

Illich was born in Vienna into a family with Jewish, Dalmatian and Catholic roots. His was an errant life, and he never found a home again after his family had to leave Vienna in 1941. He was educated in that city and then in Florence before reading histology and crystallography at Florence University.

He decided to enter the priesthood and studied theology and philosophy at the Vatican's Gregorian University from 1943 to 1946. He started work as a priest in an Irish and Puerto Rican parish in New York, popularising the church through close contact with the Latino community and respect for their traditions. He applied these same methods on a larger scale when, in 1956, he was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, and later, in 1961, as founder of the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) at Cuernavaca in Mexico, a broad-based research centre which offered courses and briefings for missionaries arriving from North America.

The radicalism of CIDOC attracted many young North American priests, but it became a victim of its own success in a rightwing climate, and was wound up 10 years later by the consent of its members. (Illich said of its director, Valentina Borremans, that "she realised that the soul of this free, independent and powerless thinkery would have been squashed by its rising influence... [a positive] atmosphere invites the institutionalisation which will corrupt it".) By this time Illich had also resigned active duty as a priest, thereby sidestepping a potentially bitter conflict with the conservative Vatican authorities, who now opposed CIDOC.

Illich retained a lifelong base in Cuernavaca, but travelled constantly from this point on. His intellectual activity in the 1970s and 1980s focused on major institutions of the industrialised world. In seven concise, non-academic books he addressed education (Deschooling Society, 1971), technological development (Tools For Conviviality, 1973), energy, transport and economic development (Energy And Equity, 1974), medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1976) and work (The Right To Useful Unemployment And Its Professional Enemies, 1978, and Shadow Work, 1981). He analysed the corruption of institutions which, he said, ended up by performing the opposite of their original purpose. He observed the roots of this process in the institutionalisation of charity in the 13th-century church (he frequently cited the Latin maxim "corruptio optimi pessima", the corruption of the best is the worst).

His 1982 book, Gender, argued that the difference between feminine and masculine domains had been sacrificed to the idea of neutral work, capitalism creating and depending on the simplistic coupling of the male wage labourer and the woman as mother to produce new workers.

The late 1980s and 1990s saw the flowering of his interests. There was the historicity of materials (H2O And The Waters of Forgetfulness, 1985), literacy (ABC, The Alphabetisation Of The Popular Mind, 1988, co-written with Barry Sanders) and the origins of book-learning (In The Vineyard Of The Text, 1993). The latter volume was, he said, an attempt to understand the transition from the book to the computer screen through the prism of the changes in 13th-century reading practice.

In essays, papers and through the work of his collaborators, he addressed themes as diverse as the history of the gaze, friendship, hospitality, bioethics, body history (particularly with his close collaborator, the sociologist Barbara Duden) and space.

Illich lived frugally, but opened his doors to collaborators and drop-ins with great generosity, running a practically non-stop educational process which was always celebratory, open-ended and egalitarian at his final bases in Bremen, Cuernavaca and Pennsylvania.

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 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.

He was able to finish a history of pain which will be published in French next year, as will his complete works. His last wish, which was to die surrounded by close collaborators amid the beginnings of a new learning centre he had planned in Bologna, was not realised.

· Ivan Illich, thinker, born September 4 1926; died December 2 2002

The CIDOC social network, analyzed

2011-01-11T00:25:00.001-05:00

From 1961 to 1976, some of the most fruitful and enduringly influential discussions about modern, technological, industrial society took place in a resort town located up in the mountains south of Mexico City. There, in Cuernavaca, Ivan Illich ran the Center for Intercultural Documentation, or CIDOC, as a sort of anti-university that set out to rigorously question and disrupt the major economic development efforts that the U.S. government and the Catholic Church were focusing on Latin America. Running an intensive Spanish language school to fund its activities, CIDOC conducted wide-ranging research seminars and published pamphlets and other documents that involved leading intellectuals in fields such as theology, economics, philosophy, and politics. Many of these people went on to write important books and play important roles in on-going discussions and research. By all accounts, CIDOC seems to have been an exciting place, and not solely due its central figure, Illich.

We recently came across an attempt to map CIDOC's main participants and show their various connections, all using a technique called social network analysis. By analyzing a selected portion of the nearly-complete collection of CIDOC publications located at the University of Vienna, Elisabeth Lemmerer has produced an intriguing document (PDF) that identifies the people who seem to have worked closest to and interacted most with Illich during the CIDOC years. There may not be any major surprises, here, but Ms. Lemmerer's work would likely be interesting to anyone familiar with CIDOC and/or Illich. Her text is rich in biographical detail, as well. And, surprisingly for a student in Vienna, it's written in English.

She includes this graph, which shows the main players in CIDOC's intellectual activity. That large circle in the middle is Illich, surrounded by many names that will be familiar:

Ms. Lemmerer explains this chart as displaying "the strength of scientific cooperation among network actors. I determined this strength by considering the number of references obtained during my literature search which mention collaboration between two actors. The thicker the line between two dots, the more references, and, consequently, a greater amount of scientific cooperation was established. The weaker the tie, the less detectable cooperation occurred. If there is no tie at all, there was no relation detectable at all."

The document, titled "Examining a Sample of the American-Mexican Scientific Cooperation in the 1960s: A Social Network Analysis of the CIDOC-Network," is Ms. Lemmerer's thesis for her Magistra der Philosophie degree - much the same as a masters degree, we're told. The professor guiding her research was Dr. Martina Kaller-Dietrich, who in 2008 published a biography of Illich (in German, and the only book-length Illich bio we're aware of): Ivan Illich (1926-2002), Sein Leben, sein Denken.

Why analyze Illich's social network? "With the closing of CIDOC’s doors in 1976," Ms. Lemmerer notes,

Illich was deprived of his living. He no longer had constant incomes to rely on. Already in 1968 he had resigned from priesthood, hence, the practice of priestly ministry was no longer an option. After he tramped the roads of Southeast Asia, he made use of something which Illich himself might have termed differently: his social network. As CIDOC’s long-time director, Illich had collaborated with scholars from numerous well-known educational institutions in the US. He now intentionally made use of these acquaintances as they facilitated access to visiting professorships and short-term teaching positions at universities across the US. From the late 1970s onwards, Pennsylvania State University, Fordham University in New York, and the University of California, Berkeley, all played large roles in Illich’s professional and institutional relations in the US. Throughout the remainder of his life, he was an itinerant scholar.

Blogging 'In the Vineyard of the Text'

2011-01-10T14:20:00.001-05:00

A man named Michael Sacasas is reading and commenting on In the Vineyard of the Text over at his blog, named The Frailest Thing.

Peter Schrag on Illich and Jerry Brown

2011-01-10T14:02:00.001-05:00

The Saturday Review for July 19, 1969, featured as its cover story, "Ivan Illich: The Christian as Rebel". The author: Peter Schrag, who quoted Illich as saying that the problem "is not the American way of life lived by a handful of millions . . . but rather the growing awareness that those who live the American way will not tire before the superiority of their quasi-religious persuasion will be accepted by the underdogs."

In today's Sacramento Bee, Mr. Schrag contributes a column arguing that Gov. Jerry Brown is better suited to running California right now than he was back in the 1970s:

At times during those years, [Brown's] talk about an era of limits and the need to lower expectations seemed just a little – well, preachy. Similarly "small is beautiful," the British economist E.F. Schumacher's metaphor for the design of human-scale appropriate technologies that Brown embraced, often seemed almost un-American at a time when "bigger is better" was the rallying cry of national progress.

But limits – whether economic, environmental, political or military – hardly seem so strange now, even if the state, and other states and the nation as a whole, didn't face the monster budgetary crises they now struggle with.

Mr. Schrag, who is the retired editorial page editor at The Bee, goes on to mention Brown's friendship with Illich:

But there's one other major area – beyond the nation's slowly growing awareness of limits – that suits Brown more to this time than to last time around, and that's his deep distrust of large bureaucratic institutions, something he confirmed again in a conversation shortly after his inauguration Monday.

Brown, who like many of his contemporaries once had at least one hesitant foot in the counterculture of the 1960s, was deeply influenced by the anti-institutional ideas of his friend Ivan Illich. Illich, ordained as a priest, later an influential scholar, challenged all conventional ideas of progress – in institutionalized schooling, in modern health care, in technology – as forces that alienated the individual from his own ability to live a confident, self-reliant life.

In his moving tribute after Illich's death in 2002, Brown talked about how Illich took him back to the "Ignatian indifference to secular values of long life, fame and riches," he had learned as a Jesuit seminarian.

Both in his life and his work, Brown said, Illich "bore witness to the destructive power of modern institutions that 'create needs faster than they can create satisfaction, and in the process of trying to meet the needs they generate, they consume the earth.' "

Living in California as we do, we are glad to have Gov. Brown running things. Whether or not he'll be able to draw much from Illich is to be seen. The state's budget is a mess, and as a result so are its schools, for instance. (The previous governor called for all textbooks to be replaced by online courseware.) Californian technology companies are scrambling to develop solar panel technologies and other alternative sources of energy, and the state's environmental laws are some of the most rigorous around. And some remnants of the '70s counterculture still remain. But there won't be any easy way of downscaling things. If nothing else, this state was built up on and around the use of automobiles.
In any case, as we've noted here earlier, it's quite clear to us that Brown is quite sincere in his understanding and appreciation of Illich. The two men were genuinely friends.

Illich on film

2011-01-06T15:39:00.001-05:00

Just for the record, there is an interesting film of Ivan Illich available from a German Web merchant as a paid download. Shot by German documentary maker Gordian Troeller in 1976, it shows Illich at CIDOC and includes much footage of the festival held there as that institution shut itself down. (CIDOC spawned a handful of language-instruction schools, many of which are still operating today.)

There's a lengthy description of the 43-minute film at the site of Download-Film on this page. Beware, though, like the film itself, this page is written in German. Prices range from 5 euros to 20 euros, depending on the quality of video encoding.

Given what we know of Illich's general reluctance to give interviews, it's difficult to imagine him cooperating with any film-maker, but the official Troeller site includes a biography that indicates at least partial sympathy with Illich's thought:

From 1963 to 1998 Troeller made 89 films. The main canon of his work dealt with the subject “development leads only to lesser development” – a credo he maintained throughout his working life. Troeller made a conscious decision against the fiction of the “objective documentary” and opted for the concept of complete “editorial partiality” to describe his works. It is precisely for this reason that his films are particularly suitable for pedagogical purposes, far more so than so called neutral reporting: Troeller’s films are all based on theories, that can be critically assessed. Troeller has a definite point of view and his intentions are clearly stated. This is material which is hugely enjoyable and debatable. For every theory put forward reasons are given and evidence provided. It is precisely because of the fundamental questions that his films raise that these films remain so topical and worth seeing today. His canon of work will endure.

Smiling, in 1974

2011-01-06T15:11:00.001-05:00

Shamelessly, we re-publish this charming photo of Illich, evidently made in 1974 by Gisèle Freund. We found it - using Microsoft's Bing image search service - at a good-looking Mexican site, all in Spanish, called Letras Libres.

(Gisèle Freund, we're pleased to discover, was a German photographer, of socialist bent - born 1908, died 2000. Among other notable episodes, she shot in England for Life magazine during the Depression, shot many top writers and artists in Paris, was a stringer for the Magnum agency, was hounded by the FBI, and in 1981, ended up as François Mitterand's official photographer. We look forward to learning more about her.)