WINSLOW PASSED AWAY


I wanted to give all you readers and followers of this blog the sad news that Winslow, my husband, passed away last year.....

Illich was one of his biggest passions, and it upset him that he couldn't write as much as he wanted to, as he had thoughts and material, towards the end.


I still can't believe he is gone.
So is this blog.......

Thanks for reading his writing. It meant a lot to him. 

Martina

My email:  martroth@gmx.net

If you use any of his writing from this blog, please, cite John Winslow Verity as the author, so he will be remembered in his writing! Thank you.

Paul Goodman on 'Firing Line'

Amazon's online video service is showing a 1966 episode of 'Firing Line with William F. Buckley, Jr.' featuring radical thinker and Illich associate Paul Goodman. The show's title is "Are Public Schools Necessary?"

Goodman comes off as a fascinating man, brimming with ideas and insights into the nature of education, schooling, youth, and society itself. It's easy to see why Illich thought so highly of him.

Those with an Amazon Prime membership can view the show at no charge while others may pay $0.99 for 7 days' access or $4.99 to buy a copy outright.

Lee Hoinacki, R.I.P.

Sad news: Lee Hoinacki has died, at his daughter's Biodynamic farm located in Oregon.

Born in 1928, in Lincoln, Illinois, Hoinacki met Illich in 1960 and worked closely with him for several decades. In addition to helping Illich compose and edit some of his most important books and essays, Hoinacki authored three books of his own: El Camino: Walking to Santiago de Compostela, Stumbling Toward Justice: Stories of Place, and Dying is not Death. He also co-edited, with Carl Mitcham, The Challenges of Ivan Illich, a collection of essays.

An interview done with Hoinacki in 2000 is available at a website called Works and Conversations. An excerpt:

When I’m in America I don’t go by airplane, I only travel by bus. There are various reasons for that. I meet people I would never ordinarily meet. I would never see these people on this earth if I were not on a bus—so-called poor people, people at the bottom. Some of them are not very pleasant. The poor are not always pleasant people, and I will find myself faced with the question, how can I respect this person? There I find Simone Weil ultimately practical. If I can not see that inclination in that person for good, I can never come to respect that person. If I can’t see that, then I’m lost.

Illich naïve?

We were surprised recently to read a piece in The New Yorker accusing Ivan Illich of “naïveté,” specifically regarding certain ideas put forth in Tools for Conviviality. As we see it, writer Evgeny Morozov’s understanding of that book is just plain wrong, at least as reflected in his article of January 13, “Making It, Pick up a spot welder and join the revolution.”

His somewhat rambling essay offers a critique of what's known as the maker movement, an assortment of hobbyists that includes “3-D-printing enthusiasts who like making their own toys, instruments, and weapons; tinkerers and mechanics who like to customize household objects by outfitting them with sensors and Internet connectivity; and appreciators of craft who prefer to design their own objects and then have them manufactured on demand.” Some of these people talk about “making” as a third industrial revolution, as the “democratization of invention” that promises, for instance, to put the means of production in the hands of workers without the trouble of ditching capitalism for socialism. Morozov eyes all this with suitable skepticism, which we share, but he is quite mistaken when he throws Illich into the same pot.

We’ll say it up front, we’re big fans of Morozov. He’s one of the smartest, most insightful critics of the utopian visions, many of them marked by an intense streak of libertarianism, that grip so many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their venture capital backers these days. These people make no bones about their aim to “change the world,” as the top executives at Google modestly put it, and to use more data and more algorithms to somehow make the world “better,” to tackle seemingly every political and social problem -- including mortality itself -- with large doses of ever-cheaper information technology.

The way they see things, the behavior of both machines and people is ripe for constant monitoring, management, and “optimization.” Every day, it seems, some new scheme is proposed that calls for automatically collecting mountains of data from multitudes of smart phones, physical sensors in sneakers, walls, and highways, from video cameras, Web browsers, and other machines and then, organizing and analyzing those data in search of tell-tale patterns and correlations. Even the human body can be monitored and managed this way, at least according to those involved in the so-called Quantified Self movement.

In fact, by combining this kind of “big data” analysis with the Net’s ability to send messages to people almost instantly, it’s easy to dangle carefully-crafted incentives in front of people to encourage them to change their behavior -- everything from 50 cents off a large latté at the Starbucks just around the corner to a juicy discount on electricity if you run your washing machine in the evening when demand is relatively low. Mr. Morozov sketches out one scheme that proposes, quite seriously, to encourage more recycling at home by making a game of it. Cameras inside each recycling bin would enable a central computer to gauge every household’s recycling activity, pitting neighbors against each other in a scramble for monthly prizes.

One way to understand all this is as an attempt to remake the world into a giant Skinner box, with incentives and punishments rigged to get people to follow some kind of centrally administered program -- an approach whose appeal may well grow in step with the increasing scarcity of material goods and services and the falling price of sensors and telecommunications.

Morozov has coined the term “solutionism” for this kind of “there’s-an-app-for-that” approach, and he does a good job of deflating it. No, he argued in his first book, The Net Delusion, Facebook and Twitter were not as important to the Arab Spring uprisings and other mass political movements as so many geek-activists and talking heads have enthused. Social media was a factor but much more important were years of on-the-ground political organizing and education. Likewise, social media are not necessarily a great fix for the political problems that established democracies are struggling with.

In last year’s To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov argued that as a term, “the Internet” always should take quotation marks. Why? Because there is no such thing as “the Internet,” because those words “can mean just about anything,” he writes, which has led to a great deal of awfully sloppy thinking.

“The Internet,” Morozov makes clear, is not an entirely natural phenomenon, a gift from the gods that sprang into existence in a perfect political vacuum, as many technologists seem to think. And therefore, in his eyes, it’s wrong to champion the Net’s radically decentralized set-up, combining the resources and behaviors of millions of independently operated computers, as a compelling model for re-organizing -- and thus making more “efficient” (a key word in this discourse) -- everything from government to schooling, policing, and democracy itself.

In fact, Morozov states, the Internet and all of its many services are the product of countless political and business decisions made by all sorts of actors -- engineers, corporations, government agencies, hackers, researchers, and entrepreneurs, for instance. And so, “the Internet” we all know and love might well have evolved quite differently than it has, making available a much different menu of services. And equally important, Morozov notes, most if not all of what the Internet is revered for today -- connecting people across large distances, enabling the sharing of knowledge, and so forth -- was accomplished quite well long before the computer and computer networking were a twinkle in anyone’s eye. Think post office, radio, telegraphy. The point being that “the Internet” may not be quite the epochal turning point in civilization that so many solutionistas make it out to be; it may be simply “a shift in order and magnitude,” Morozov writes, that hardly calls for a “complete overthrow of established practices and principles.” (We’ll never forget hearing a man named John Perry Barlow, an early promoter of all things Internet, describing the Net as “the most important invention since fire.”)

In a way, Morozov has put his finger on something that Ivan Illich was onto during the last decades of his life, namely the instrumentalization of seemingly everything, which in turn leads to an intensive systemization. In a world teeming with physical sensors, mobile computers (e.g. smartphones), and wireless networks, all of them connected into a vast array of computers, mass storage systems, and communications links known collectively as “the cloud,” all sorts of objects take on a new role. That car you drive to work each day is no longer merely a vehicle, it’s now also an appendage, a sensor node, feeding into a vast information-processing system -- perhaps harnessed to help monitor traffic flows in a certain region, or to help the manufacturer gauge wear and tear on its products. And in such a world, the kind of systems-theoretic thinking that Illich turned against in his later years becomes difficult to resist.

In Click Here Morozov specifically notes Illich’s “protestations against the highly efficient but dehumanizing systems of professional schooling and medicine.” And later in the book, the author quotes Illich talking about the Penn State student who declined his offer of a second glass of apple cider because, she tells him, “my sugar requirements are met for today. I don’t want to get into a sugar high.” This woman, Illich reckoned, had come to understand herself not as flesh and blood but as a system with needs.

Discussing the fundamental weakness of the “needs discourse” and how it lends itself so easily to quantification, Morozov goes on to note that ”obstacles and barriers create the conditions in which our very humanity can come into existence,” a statement that Illich himself might have made in discussing needs, limits, and one of his favorite themes, renunciation.

Which makes it all the more surprising that Morozov gets Illich so wrong in his New Yorker piece. In the first two-thirds of his article, he surveys the maker movement, viewing it as a new counterculture that resurrects the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century while also inheriting the hacking ethic promoted by Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog in the 1970s. Brand originally aimed to help those seeking to live “off the grid” by providing “access to tools” -- everything from from wood stoves to grain grinders, from tents to farming equipment. But as early as the mid-1970s, Brand was trumpeting the computer as the ultimate tool for social revolution. The cybernetic worldview was a main them of the his Catalog, as espoused by Gregory Bateson and others.

Brand was hardly alone, of course, as Morozov points out. In the 1970s, some politically-minded engineers in Silicon Valley got together to form the Homebrew Computer Club. Their aim was to foster a do-it-yourself culture around personal computers, which were just then becoming feasible to build thanks to a new generation of electronic components. A key member of this scene was one Lee Felsenstein, who went on to lead the development of something called the Computer Memory project. It sought to pepper the city of Berkeley with public-access computer terminals all connected by phone lines to a central computer, thus creating an electronic bulletin board that people would be free to use however they wished -- to sell a car, organize political actions, find jobs, or simply vent their thoughts.

Mr. Felsenstein has spoken about taking inspiration from Tools for Conviviality, particularly its call for tools that non-professionals can use, understand, and repair. This was the way vacuum tube-based radios were, their workings fairly easy to grasp and open to tinkering and modification, so why not computers, as well? Felsenstein was prompted not only to pour his energy into the Homebrew Computer Club and Community Memory but also to come up with a series of computer designs that would have significant impact on the nascent personal computing market. Easily the most successful of his hardware designs was the Osborne 1 computer, a “luggable” PC the size of a small suitcase which sold by the tens of thousands.

Where Morozov goes wrong is in his conflating Felsenstein’s thinking with that of Illich. Morozov takes Felsenstein’s devotion to the computer to be Illich’s, but nowhere -- not in Tools nor in any other of his writings that we're aware of -- does Illich tout the computer as anything special or revolutionary.

Morozov writes:

Felsenstein got his inspiration from reading Ivan Illich’s “Tools for Conviviality,” which called for devices and machines that would be easy to understand, learn, and repair, thus making experts and institutions unnecessary. “Convivial tools rule out certain levels of power, compulsion, and programming, which are precisely those features that now tend to make all governments look more or less alike,” Illich wrote. He had little faith in traditional politics. Whereas Stewart Brand wanted citizens to replace politics with savvy shopping, Illich wanted to “retool” society so that traditional politics, with its penchant for endless talk, becomes unnecessary.

He goes on:

“ … the naïveté of Illich and his followers shouldn’t be underestimated. Seeking salvation through tools alone is no more viable as a political strategy than addressing the ills of capitalism by cultivating a public appreciation of arts and crafts. Society is always in flux, and the designer can’t predict how various political, social, and economic systems will come to blunt, augment, or redirect the power of the tool that is being designed. Instead of deinstitutionalizing society, the radicals would have done better to advocate reinstitutionalizing it: pushing for political and legal reforms to secure the transparency and decentralization of power they associated with their favorite technology.”

Now, from our reading of Tools, there’s no evidence that Illich had lost faith in traditional politics. Indeed, his book is in large part an explicit call for political action, for setting politically-defined limits on tools so as to enable the flourishing of convivial society. With such limits in place, people would certainly be able to adopt new tools and technologies but there’s no place where Illich points to any particular machine, high-tech or otherwise, as key to his vision. For all he cared, society might simply re-emphasize those existing tools that are most appropriate to convivial life. For example, set a limit on the top speed of vehicles at, say, 25mph and people would find the bicycle and perhaps the motorbike more appropriate than high-speed automobiles. Tractors would likely be appropriate, too, and perhaps others types of low-speed vehicles, depending on the local terrain and economy -- vehicles that today are essentially pushed off the roads by high-energy, high-speed traffic that serves only an upper tier of society.

In fact, Illich sought radical change in the political system, but not merely in traditional terms of who owns the means of production: “The transition to socialism cannot be affected without an inversion of our present institutions and the substitution of convivial for industrial tools.”

What’s more, while Felsenstein and many others certainly embraced the computer as “their favorite technology” and worked to change the world with it, that doesn’t mean that Illich’s thinking was necessarily the same. He was too smart, we believe, to latch onto any particular tool or technology as having the ability to single-handedly change society. More important was a deeper awareness of what tools do to society and of how politically-defined limits on tools can foster conviviality. Illich writes:

“I do not want to contribute to an engineering manual for the design of convivial institutions or tools, nor do I want to engage in a sales campaign for what would be obviously a better technology. My purpose is to lay down criteria by which the manipulation of people for the sake of their tools can be immediately recognized, and thus to exclude those artifacts and institutions which inevitably extinguish a convivial life style. [emphasis added]

Yes, in Deschooling Society Illich proposes a computer-based system for matching up individuals interested in discussing a particular book or topic, but contrary to what many advocates of “distance learning” and online courses seem to believe, he did not see or promote the computer as a replacement for face-to-face encounters. Illich was prescient in his idea for using the computer, but this matching of individuals with shared interests could be -- and indeed was -- implemented quite effectively with a simple box of file cards. In general, it’s fair to say, while Illich certainly made good use of computers for his own work, he remained wary of it as a particularly seductive system, especially as the computer and its disembodied, placeless text came to replace the book, with its relatively static and tangible text, as a root metaphor deeply shaping modern thinking.

Another idea worth keeping in mind is that Illich wrote Tools for Conviviality mainly for the sake of those in the “undeveloped world,” that “two-thirds of mankind [that] still can avoid passing through the industrial age, by choosing right now a postindustrial balance in their mode of production which the hyperindustrial nations will be forced to adopt as an alternative to chaos.” Thus, he was less interested in helping the industrialized world to fix itself and much more interested in warning the non-industrialized nations to take another route and thereby avoid the troubles -- environmental pollution, the over-programming of people through compulsory schooling, fast rising costs for medical care, and so forth -- with which the US and other nations in the North already were having to wrestle.

Iatrogenic cancers on the rise: NY Times

Headline in New York Times for Jan. 30: "We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer." Written by two radiologists, the op-ed piece describes how medical imaging, and particularly CT scans, are dosing patients with levels of radiation that are causing tens of thousands of excess cancer cases and deaths.

"Of course," the article states, "early diagnosis thanks to medical imaging can be lifesaving. But there is distressingly little evidence of better health outcomes associated with the current high rate of scans."

CT scans have become routine, with one in ten Americans now undergoing the procedure every year. Trouble is, each of these scans blasts a patient with 100 to 1,000 times more radiation than a conventional X-ray would use, the radiologists report, and that's causing a steep rise in cancer cases and deaths:

"While it is difficult to know how many cancers will result from medical imaging, a 2009 study from the National Cancer Institute estimates that CT scans conducted in 2007 will cause a projected 29,000 excess cancer cases and 14,500 excess deaths over the lifetime of those exposed. Given the many scans performed over the last several years, a reasonable estimate of excess lifetime cancers would be in the hundreds of thousands. According to our calculations, unless we change our current practices, 3 percent to 5 percent of all future cancers may result from exposure to medical imaging."

(It is our understanding that while pregnant with him, Ivan Illich's mother was given an X-ray.)

The News from Italy

Fabio Milana, the Italian historical researcher whose essay we shared here some weeks ago, writes to tell us of two recent books published in Italy. One is a new edition of Ivan Illich's Gender, in Italian, with an introduction written by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben (a friend and collaborator of Illich's) and edited by Fabio himself. Genere, Per una critica storica dell'uguaglianza is the first volume of a planned Collected Works edition of Illich's writings, we're told. More about the book can be seen here, in Italian.

The other book is Ivan Illich e la sua eredità (Ivan Illich and his legacy), which Fabio describes as "both [an] auto/biographical and [a] critical essay on Ivan and his (mis)interpretations in Italy." The author is Franco La Cecla, a Sicilian cultural anthropologist, architectural critic, friend of Illich's, enthusiastic user of Moleskin notebooks, filmmaker, TED speaker, social historian of pizza and pasta, and as we first encountered his name, co-author of what for our money is the best obituary for Illich to have appeared in English. (In The Guardian, written with architect Andrew Todd.)

What appears to be an essay about Illich and Le Cecla's book, written in Italian, shows up at a website called Doppiozero. The book is available for sale here. We wish we could read the book in its original Italian. For now, we'll just have to make do with its charming cover:

We are pleased to present an essay about Ivan Illich written by Fabio Milana, an Italian researcher who has been looking closely at Illich's early years -- from his birth in 1926 to his move to New York City in 1951. He originally wrote this essay to serve as the afterword to the Italian publication of a transcript of The Corruption of Christianity, the CBC broadcast prepared by David Cayley. The transcript was published in 2008. Mr. Milana kindly provided us with an English translation of the essay, written with help from Milena Ibro and Jane Upchurch. Mr. Milana's professional Web page may be viewed here; he is affiliated with the Fondazione per le Science Religiose Giovanni XXIII, located in Bologna. We look forward to seeing the results of his research, which he says will likely be completed this year. (May he excuse us for making some small edits, mainly in the spelling of certain words, and for leaving out the paper's footnotes. A complete copy of the paper is available for downloading from his Web page.)

Ivan Illich, Breaking the Silence

by Fabio Milana

The Corruption of Christianity is the text of the homonymous programme that the Canadian national radio broadcasted, maybe not by chance, in the first few days of the year 2000. Later on, CBC itself put the recordings of the five parts on sale (remarkably, you can find them on the website of a philanthropic organisation) as well as the cerlox-bound transcript, which circulated in Europe as a German translation with parallel text; this Italian one is the first edition of the text as a volume.

It can't be strictly called ‘conversations’, it is more of an assembly of excerpts from the conversations between Ivan Illich and David Cayley (1997 and 1999), connected and organized by the interventions of Cayley himself, in order to create a summary of the huge material he recorded during those sessions. A redactio longior of this same material was authorized by Illich as a consequence of the great interest the radio Corruption aroused, as Cayley relates while publishing it, with the title inspired by Celan’s The Rivers North of the Future (Anansi 2005; the German translation, C.H. Beck 2006, and the French one, Actes Sud 2007, are now available). Not even this latter version is drawn up in ‘conversation’ form, but as themed accounts, given by Illich himself to an interlocutor who withdraws into the paratext: a gesture of implied adhesion, midway between the philosophical interview pattern, the same Cayley used in the large and well-deserving Ivan Illich in Conversation (1992), and the partnership he achieved in this kind of a ‘two voices self-portrait’ which is the Corruption. This confirms the common wavelength gradually reached by the catholic Canadian journalist with a thinker who was programmatically hostile to the mass media.

In any case, a comparison between the two drafts speaks in favour of a kind of effectiveness of our text, which is not just due to the significance of Illich’s ‘own voice’ passages selected here, or to the editor’s qualified interventions, or even to the ‘dramatic’ intensity of the script, resulting from its necessary concision and from the ‘game of roles’ itself. Naturally, Cayley reminds the reader, who has less familiarity with Illich’s intellectual and human story, of its essential parts, which we could recognize in different phases. The first one is the ‘militant’ one, embracing almost three decades from his arrival in New York in 1951 and including his fifteen-year activity in the Centro Intercultural de Formación, later de Documentación (1961-1976), that he founded in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca to support the campaign against the ‘export’ of development to third world countries; during this period, a crisis occurred in his relationship with the Catholic Church, which led to his giving up the sacerdotal functions with their related privileges (1968-1969). The following phase consisted of mainly anthropological-historical studies, taking on a position of critical distance, rooted in his beloved 12th century, in order to reconstruct the origin of modern certainties, the unconscious axioms of a world submitted to an intense and prolonged technological development; this latter period began in 1978 as a consequence of something similar to an ‘existential breakdown’, according to some witnesses very near to him, and ended fifteen years later with texts of a summarizing nature like the essay collection In the mirror of the past (1992), the retrospective Conversation mentioned above, and the last one in his own hand, the comment on Ugo di San Vittore In the vineyard of the text (1993): inside this work, that has an almost elegiac intonation, for the first and last time Illich recognizes himself too, personally and not in a polemic way, as participating in a typically modern adventure, the ‘bookish text’, which is closed between the two watersheds that forever divide it from the lectio divina of monastic tradition and the era of digital screens. About a possible third phase of Illich’s research, our Corruption documents the most important paths in its three central chapters: the survey on the origin of some modern ‘categories of the political’ from the Christian thought and praxis in the late Middle Ages; the study of the experience of the sight inside a project on a ‘history of the body’, aimed at the affirmed contemporary disappearance of the living and sentient flesh; the ethical problem in a world that has lost a substantial notion of limit, and of the ontological order established by it. Here, though not chiefly here, also lies the newness and the interest of our text.

Obamacare in light of Ivan Illich

The cost of medical care continues to escalate, inexorably and, to an outsider, unexplainably. Medical expenses now account for 18 percent -- almost one-fifth! -- of the nation's GNP, or $2.6 trillion. With the new year, our own monthly premium for family health insurance has risen to $2,200 from $1,860. We recently were given a single injection that was billed at $5,000 -- a price, our doctor told us, that is mainly a function of the drug maker's monopoly, not the medicine's actual cost of production. Meanwhile, millions of Americans struggle to make sense of and sign up for coverage under Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act. This is, in a word, a bureaucratic nightmare. Call an insurance company or a state-run insurance agency right now to learn the status of your application for a new health plan and you're likely to be put on hold for 2 hours or more. Accredited insurance agents know very little and have been given no special access to those in the know. Doctors look the other way, telling patients it's not their job. Many families are seeing their insurance premiums rise quite significantly under the new law. And so forth and so on. It's enough to give both big government and big business a bad name.

Obamacare, of course, turns out to be a mere tweaking of a medical system that for many years, now, profit-seeking insurance companies have been running as they see fit. What has been missing from all the discussion and debate about the ever-rising costs of medical care is any consideration of what it means to be healthy and of what limits might be put on the consumption of medical care -- not as a means of simply saving money but more as a way of freeing people to live better, more satisfying lives. Perhaps most detrimental, the current discussion has pretty much avoided the topic of death, of what it might mean for society to consider mortality as something other than simply a problem whose onset medical technology can, and should, postpone at any cost.

Latest issue of Illich journal available

A new issue of The International Journal of Illich Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, is now available on the Web, here. It includes articles by Dana Stuchul, Gene Bazan, Roger C. Shouse, Lakshman Yapa, Sajay Samuel, and Samar Farage. In addition, there is a transcript of a 2003 roundtable at UCLA that commemorated Ivan Illich.

Illich, Girard, and "the detour of production"

This paper was presented at the Illich conference in Oakland, Calif., last summer. It embellishes on the chapter Jean-Pierre Dupuy contributed to The Challenges of Ivan Illich.

The religious underpinnings of Ivan Illich’s thought

by Jean-Pierre Dupuy (École Polytechnique, Paris, and Stanford University)

I won’t talk about the role Christianity played in the formation of Illich’s thought as David Cayley will certainly tackle this complex subject matter, as he has already done in the wonderful book he wrote with Ivan, The Rivers North of the Future. I will broach a more elusive issue, namely the connections between the Illichian critique and the anthropology of religion in general – I will say “the sacred”, since I’d like to bring together René Girard’s and Illich’s thoughts.

1. As we all know here, Illich has given us a powerfully original critique of the industrial mode of production. What defines the latter, according to him, are not the relations of production, as the Marxist characterization of capitalism would have it. Instead, the fundamental trait in his view is the logic of the detour of production. This logic, in turn, is rooted in religion.

Max Weber famously showed that there are close affinities between the spirit of capitalism and the Calvinist ethics grounded in the belief in predestination. In a similar way, Illich brought out the close affinities between capitalism and the philosophical system of Leibniz. The author of the Theodicy is famous for having formulated the thesis that human beings are characterized by their capacity to make detours as a means to better attain their ends. They are able to take a roundabout path if it will allow them to reach their destination faster. They can refrain temporarily from consuming and invest so as to increase their overall consumption. They may refuse a good opportunity in order to take advantage of a better opportunity later. And so on. For ethologists, this capacity defines intelligence; it seems intimately tied to what Max Weber called instrumental rationality.

Economic theory is consistent with this thesis since it holds that acting rationally means maximizing a given value. This principle of maximization must be understood as entailing a global maximization rather than a merely local one. Suppose that we find ourselves atop a peak. A loftier peak is visible in the distance ahead of us. If we are not content with local maximization, then we must be willing to descend before climbing higher. The opposite attitude would amount to committing the "first-step fallacy." If, hoping to go to the moon, you succeed only in reaching the top of a tree, you must resign yourself to coming down to earth before resorting to a more effective technique.

By seeing man as that singular being able to "step back in order to leap forward" ("reculer pour mieux sauter") Leibniz makes him out to be the faithful image of his Creator. In order to realize the best of all possible worlds, God had to allow a dose of evil to subsist, for otherwise the actual world would have been even worse overall. Everything that appears evil from the finite vantage point of the individual monad is, from the vantage point of the totality, a sacrifice necessary for the greater good of the latter. Evil is always sacrificial in this sense, and sacrifice is a detour.

Justification of evil, instrumental rationality, economics: these three forms appear to be closely linked and to constitute the matrix of modern Reason. Economic rationality is in the first place a moral economy: it entails the rational management of sacrifice. Sacrifice is a “production cost”: it is the detour indispensable to the attainment of the maximum of net good.

2. The Illichian critique of industrial society has made it clear that modern Reason in so far as it is rooted in the capacity to make detours can go berserk and become counterproductive to the highest degree. This transmogrification of rationality into folly has itself religious origins.

Anyone who is driven by the spirit of the detour runs the risk of falling into its trap and losing sight of the fact that the detour is, precisely, only a detour. When you step back in order to leap forward, you must keep your eyes fixed on the obstacle to be surmounted. If you step back while looking in the opposite direction, you run the risk of forgetting your objective and, seeing your regression as progress, of taking the means for ends. In that case, rationality turns into counter-productivity; it takes the form of the torture of Tantalus.

Every use value can be produced in two ways or modes of production, the one autonomous and the other heteronomous. Learning, for example, may take place spontaneously in a setting that stimulates the imagination; one may also choose to receive instruction from a teacher who is paid for this purpose. One can keep oneself in good health by leading an active, wholesome style of life; one may also choose to be treated in case of illness by a trained physician. One may have a relationship to the space one inhabits that grows out of the use of low-speed forms of locomotion such as walking or bicycling; one may also choose to have an instrumental relationship to this space, with the aim of passing through it--of being done with it--as quickly as possible, by using motorized transport. One may render service to someone who asks you for assistance; one may also say to this person, there are services that will give you the assistance you seek.

Unlike the products of the heteronomous mode of production, what the autonomous mode produces cannot in general be measured, evaluated, compared with, or added to other values. The contributions of the autonomous mode of production therefore elude the grasp of the economist, which is why they do not figure in reckonings of gross national product. This, of course, is not to say that the heteronomous mode is intrinsically harmful--far from it. But the great question that Illich had the merit of posing has to do with the manner in which the two modes are related to each other. No one denies that heteronomous production can dramatically enhance autonomous capacities for producing use values: schools are indispensable for education, medicine for health, etc. But heteronomy is only a detour, a turning away from autonomy in order to better enhance autonomy. The “positive synergy” between the two modes of production is possible only under a set of very precise conditions. Beyond certain critical thresholds, heteronomous production leads to a complete reorganization of the physical, institutional, and symbolic environment of a society, with the result that autonomous capacities are stymied. This in turn sets in motion a vicious circle, which Illich called counterproductivity. With the paralysis of human autonomy, there arises a powerful demand for heteronomous substitutes that make it possible to endure life in an increasingly alienating world while at the same time reinforcing the conditions that make them necessary. This in turn yields the paradoxical result that, beyond certain critical thresholds, the more widespread heteronomous production becomes, the more it becomes an obstacle to the realization of the very purposes that it is supposed to serve. Thus medicine ruins health, education makes us stupid, transport immobilizes, communication makes us deaf and dumb, information destroys meaning, and fossil fuels, which reactualize the dynamism of a vanished world, threaten to extinguish the possibility of life in the future.

Illich believed, or pretended to believe, that this runaway phenomenon of self- deregulation, this uncontrollable chain reaction, could be apprehended only in religious terms borrowed from Greek mythology — the jealousy of the Gods leading them to punish the humans guilty of hubris by sending them the goddess of vengeance, Nemesis. Did Illich really believe that? Of course not. But he believed that traditional myths set limits to the human condition. The desacralization of society – which Weber called the disenchantment of the world (die Entzauberung der Welt) – inevitably leads to hubris and its punishment, counterproductivity.

As a case in point, let us consider work – I mean the kind of work that corresponds to the heteronomous of production: it constitutes the detour of production par excellence. In principle, work (labor, travail) is a production cost. As such economic calculus aims at minimizing it. However, the spirit of the detour of production has been so thoroughly perverted by industrial society and the extreme division of labor that characterizes it, that it is the detour, its length, the energy spent traversing it, which comes to be sought after as an end in itself. Is work an input, or is it the supreme output? Forms of production that are commonly judged superfluous or even harmful are legitimized by the work that they furnish the population. Planned obsolescence of objects, squandering of non-renewable natural resources, needless energy consumption, and heedless environmental pollution—no one dares do anything about them because they guarantee work. Everything occurs as if the ultimate end sought by industrial society was indeed the production of a detour of production, namely, work in the form of jobs.

According to Illich, then, the heteronomous mode of production and the work that corresponds to it are, like the Greek pharmakon, at the same time poison and remedy.

3. This leads me naturally to bring together Illich and Girard.

At the heart of the Girardian "hypothesis" is the proposition that the sacred is nothing other than the violence of men, expelled, exteriorized, in the form of rituals, myths, and prohibitions. The sacred is fundamentally ambivalent: it uses violence to hold back violence. The sacred is like the Greek pharmakon, at the same time remedy and poison. As Girard puts it, citing the Bible, only “Satan can cast out Satan.” It is a case of what is known in philosophy as self- transcendence(1). The sacred contains violence, in both senses of the word. This is clear in the case of the sacrificial ritual that restores order. It is never other than one more murder, even if it is meant to be the last one. That is equally true of the system of prohibitions and obligations. The social structures that unify the community in normal times are the very same ones that tear it apart in times of crisis. When a prohibition is transgressed, the obligations of solidarity, leaping over the barriers of time and space (as in the mechanism of the vendetta), draw into an ever wider conflict people who were in no way concerned by the original confrontation.

According to Girard, the Passion and Resurrection of the Christ have undermined forever this delicate structure, by revealing the violence inherent in all human institutions. Such is the modern world, described as a "low-gear mimetic crisis," "without catastrophic escalation or resolution of any kind." The question that Dumouchel and I tackled in this framework (2) is the one the "Girardian system" raises, but to which it offers no answer; namely, what gives modern societies the capacity, not only to resist, but even to feed on the growing undifferentiation of the world and the exacerbation of the resulting mimetic phenomena?

We answered: the economy. Not that we claimed that the economy was in any sense another incarnation of the sacred, despite what facile metaphors suggest (the "Almighty dollar," etc.). But, like the sacred before it, the economy is ambivalent in its relationship to violence: it "contains" it, in both senses of the word—thus reconciling Marx (the economy entails exploitation and alienation) and Montesquieu (“le doux commerce”).

Like the sacred before it, the economy today is losing its capacity to produce itself the rules that limit it, in other words its capacity for self-transcendence. Such is the profound meaning of the crisis. If economic rationality, i.e. the moderate management of resources, has turned into the boundlessness of economic growth, it is in the final instance because the economy is no longer able to play the role that the sacred played in traditional societies: keep human violence in check.

Annex

An illustration: transportation. Following up on an idea of Illich's in the early 70’s, I undertook with my research team a series of bizarre but rigorous calculations that led to the following results. The French devoted an average of more than four hours a day to their car, whether entrenched in its cockpit on their way from one point to another, or buffing its chrome with their own hands, or, above all, working in factories or offices in order to obtain the resources necessary to its acquisition, use, and maintenance.

If one divides the average number of miles traveled on all types of trips by the "generalized time" devoted to the car, one obtains something like a "generalized" speed. This speed turns out to be a little more than four miles an hour, somewhat faster than a person walking at an ordinary pace, but considerably slower than a bicycle.

From a purely arithmetical point of view, the meaning of the result obtained is as follows. On average, if the French were deprived of their cars and thus presumably freed of the need to work long hours to pay for them, they would devote less "generalized time" to transportation if they made all of their current trips on a bicycle—and I mean all of their trips, not only their daily commute between home and work, but also the weekend outings to a distant country house and the holiday expedition to the golden shores of a far-off riviera. Now, anybody would judge such an "alternative" scenario intolerable or absurd. And yet, it would economize time, energy, and scarce resources while going easier on the environment. What, then, is the difference that makes the absurdity of the situation patent in one case while allowing it to remain hidden in the other? For, after all, is it any less comical to spend a good part of one's time working to pay for the means of getting to work?

The foregoing calculation assumes an hour of transportation to be the equivalent of an hour of work, each being counted as a mere means in the service of an external end. One may contest it, but it should first be noted that it does no more than take seriously the logic of the detour of production. Neither work nor transportation is an end in itself. The mission of economic calculus is to tally up rigorously human pains and toil so that the sum total may be reduced to a minimum through efficient management. And, as their etymology reveals, both "travel" and travail — the French word for "work" — are sources of pain and torment: the two terms are doublets, each deriving from tripalium — a medieval instrument of torture.

In truth, if the absurdity of a way of life and a structuring of social space-time that leads so many people to devote so much generalized time to getting from place to place with so little average efficiency is hidden, that is because they substitute work time for travel time. Their work is, in principle, that principle we call the detour of production, only a means to obtain faster and more efficient transportation, which, in turn, is only a means to something else again—for example, "bringing nearer those who are close to our heart," to quote from an old automobile advertisement. Faithful to the logic of the detour (the better to reveal its ideological character), our calculation shows that the time spent designing and manufacturing powerful engines meant to help us "save time" more than cancels out the time they actually economize. The hare labors feverishly in the office suites and on the assembly lines, but, as in the fable, it is the tortoise who comes in first. Alas! The tortoise is an endangered species. Economics ought to mean economizing people's pains and toil? What naivety! Who cannot see that everything happens as if the objective were, on the contrary, to occupy them without respite, even at the cost of making them run faster and faster in place?

Footnotes:

(1) - Or, in contemporary American English, a bootstrap.

(2) - Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses. René Girard et la logique de l’économie, Paris, Seuil, 1979. See also Jean-Pierre Dupuy, L’Avenir de l’économie, Paris, Flammarion, 2012; soon to be published by Michigan State University Press under the title Economics and the Crisis of the Future.