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.

"The religious roots of contemporary predicaments"

The following is a paper presented by David Cayley at the Illich conference held last summer in Oakland, California.

POLITICS AND RELIGION IN THE THOUGHT OF IVAN ILLICH

by David Cayley

The heading of today’s session is politics and religion, so I’d like to begin by reflecting on these terms, both of which can be extremely slippery. I know they have practical, everyday meanings – we will usually agree in ordinary talk that what goes on in churches and mosques, synagogues and temples is religion, while what is discussed in legislatures and government offices, is politics – but if we inquire a little more deeply, they become quite difficult to distinguish. One of the hallmarks of the modern age was the distinction between a private sphere in which one was free to cultivate one’s religion, and a public realm governed by the canons of secular reason. This regime began to take shape at the beginning of the modern age, roughly the 16th century, and it’s arguable that before that time there was no such thing as religion in the sense in which the word is used today. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the great Canadian scholar of religion writing in the 1960’s says: “religion as a discrete category of human activity separable from culture, politics and other areas of life is an invention of the modern West.” Before the 16th century - at the earliest - the word can denote a virtue, a disposition, a habit – a practice let’s say - but not the adoption of a set of propositions or beliefs as “my religion.” In fact, Cantwell Smith goes on to say that “the rise of the concept of religion is in some ways correlated with a decline in the practice of religion itself.” (Just as an aside here some of the slipperiness of the word religion can be seen in that quote, in which Smith, having just said that religion is not a transhistorical essence but a modern invention then goes on to speak of “religion itself” as if it were just such an essence. This shows, I think, the difficulty we still have in speaking of these matters.) By the beginning of the eighteenth century, according to the historian of Christianity John Bossy, the idea of religion is well established. “By 1700,” he writes, “the world was full of religions, objective social and moral entities characterized by system, principles and hard edges.” And religion once distinguished from politics became in many ways its scapegoat: the conflicts between the nascent national states of the 16th and 17th centuries, to take just one example, became known as the wars of religion, when they could just as plausibly – more plausibly - have been called the wars of state-making, and taken as illustrating the arbitrary and violent character of state power, rather than the violent and arbitrary character of religious belief.

Photo for sale on eBay

This photograph is up for sale on eBay, priced at $23.88, plus $3.00 shipping. The photo, printed on 8x10-inch paper and dated June 15, 1969, is said to be part of something called the Rogers Photo Archive, "the largest individually owned photo archive in the world." (Indeed, it contains more than 33 million images, according to the archive's website.) The eBay listing describes the photo as a "press photo" issued by CIDOC.

Two things strike us about this image. One is how very lean Illich looks, the other is that he is wearing a watch. We happen to have heard a recording of him being introduced to an audience ca. 1970 and the speaker notes that Illich is known for not wearing a watch.

Letters from the Desert

The following is the foreword that Ivan Illich wrote in 1972 for the English edition of a small but highly popular book called Letters from the Desert, originally published in 1964, in Italian, by Carlo Carretto.

Foreword

My friend Carlo Carretto has asked me to introduce him to the American and English readers of these pages, which were written originally for his European friends. I find it as embarrassing to speak about a friendship which matured in the desert as I find it presumptuous to comment on meditations as personal as these. Allow me therefore to acquit my duty of friendship by telling you how I myself met Carlo.

It was October, 1959, shortly after General Massu had taken command of Algeria. Towards noon I finally reached the market place of Tamanrasset, deep in the Sahara. I was looking for the house of the Little Brothers, the religious community established here fifty years before by Charles de Foucauld. I was unable to speak a word of Arabic, and no French word I tried elicited a reaction: not “La Fraternité” nor “Le Père de Foucauld” nor “Eglise.” So I tried again: “Le Pere Charles de Foucauld?” Immediately a bunch of youngsters began to shout, “Frére Carlo, Frére Carlo” They grabbed my bag, charged across the road and led me to the shoemaker’s shop.

It took some time to realize who it was that earned his living by cutting up old tires and making indestructible sandals. It was Carretto. It was the same Carretto whom I had last known when he held a key post in Italian “Catholic Action,” at a time when this church organization played a frequently sinister role in anti-communist politics under Pius XII.

For years I had tried not to think about Carretto, since I feared that by now he would be even more powerful as one of those lay or clerical churchmen who dominate Christian Democratic politics in Italy.

Indeed, it was Carretto, who had now become Brother Carlo to children and cripples and pilgrims at the tomb of de Foucauld.

Carlo hobbled out of his shop to lead me to the chapel in the adobe fort in which de Foucauld had been murdered: Foucauld the gourmet turned ascetic, the officer turned monk, the monk turned priest and hermit. The French nobleman had wanted to live here as poor and powerless as the least of the natives; he had died here because he had been asked to guard sixteen French rifles. On the way to the chapel Carlo stopped in front of a tombstone put up by the French Army:

Le Vicomte de Foucauld

Frére Charles de Jesus

More pour la France

The words haunted me while I crouched beside Carlo in the deep sand and peace of the chapel. In Algeria, France meant empire, even at the cost of torture. In Algeria, to be a priest meant (with very few exceptions) to be chaplain to French colonials and soldiers. In Algeria, to be a Christian meant either to make the ideology of “peace” a reason for withdrawal or -- for a very, very few -- a reason for joining the underground. And here, in Algeria, I had to read, “He died for France.” Carlo must have noticed what went on in me. When we left the chapel he pointed to the tombstone and simply said, “If you want to live like Jesus you must accept being misunderstood like him.. He too dies for the people -- and it was the High Priest of the Jews who said so.”

I came to know Carlo: this man who was dying to the world of power, the world of good causes, the world of big words and world of political parties. I came to experience the naked simplicity in the statements of his love for the Lord. I came to marvel at his lack of embarrassment at being judged childish when he said something true: his concern when he was judged escapist because he refused to be militant.

I first lived as his guest in Tamanrasset. Later, he installed me in a cave below the peak of Asekrem, two days, as the donkey trots, from his shop. He had furnished the cave with a bed of stone and protected it from the icy winds which blow without cease at several thousand feet in the Ahaggar mountains.

We became friends. When he came to visit me he told me stories. Remembering them I always felt that outside the desert they would sound out of place. The immensity of the desert overwhelms both the power and weakness of men. The Muslim shepherd’s song envelops the Franciscan tenderness of Italian in the austerity of unambiguous faith. The emptiness of the desert makes it possible to learn the almost impossible: the joyful acceptance of our uselessness. I fear that outside this context and not knowing Carlo in person, many readers will have to make a great effort to learn from Carlo what he taught me.

But I do hope that at least some readers of these pages in English will do so on a day of complete silence -- to which they rarely treat themselves -- or, more often, to which they are condemned. I hope they will open this book in an Anglo-American desert: a lonely flat in Watts or Kensington, the ward of a hospital, in an asylum or prison cell, or on a commuter train.

Ivan Illich
Cuernavaca, Mexico

Born in Italy in 1910, Carretto earned his degree in philosophy, but he was confined to Sardinia during the Fascist era. After the war, he served as National President of Catholic Youth in Italy. At the age of 44, he was summoned by a voice: "Leave everything, come with me into the desert. I don't want your action any longer. I want your prayer, your love." Though he did not fully understand this call, he left Italy for North Africa, where he joined the Little Brothers, a religious congregation in the Catholic church that is inspired by the life and writings of Charles de Foucauld. Carretto died in 1988.

Here is an 11-minute video of "l'Ascension de l'Ahaggar" that gives some idea of the remarkable terrain that Illich must have encountered:

LA Times story

The LA Times has just published a piece about Jerry Brown's attendance at the recent Illich event in Oakland, his hometown. Accompanying the piece is this photo, which we've not seen before:

(credit: LA Times)

Ivan Illich and the night watchmen

In 1973, Ivan Illich spoke at the Newman Center on UC Berkeley's campus. His theme was limits to growth and the counter-productivity that tools inevitably display when their usage crosses a certain threshold of intensity. (Much of his talk, of which a recording exists, was close to the text of Tools for Conviviality.) In one passage, he told an amusing story as a way to slow down and help his audience understand a key point:

… Ninety-percent of all medical care provided to patients with terminal illness cannot be scientifically sustained or supported. Furthermore, the net effects of such treatment is usually in the direction of increased pain and suffering and disabilities without resulting in a demonstrable lengthening of time.

There are upper limits to the possibility of investing in medical care. At a certain level, medical bills measure the health of a patient in the same manner in which GNP measures the wealth of a nation. Both add on the same scale the market value of benefits and add to them the defensive expenditures which have become necessary to offset the unwanted side-effects of their production.

When I was writing this sentence, it was 4 o'clock in the morning. I hadn't been able to boil it down better. And Decino (sp?) came along, one of our night watchmen, about who somebody else had told me he was so dumb that they didn't know if they could keep him as a night watchman.

And he said, "Don Ivan, what are you doing there? I can't quite understand. I see you all night long with your lamp on the balcony putting a paper into the typewriter, type something, read it, take the paper, tear it to pieces, and throw it away. What are you writing about?"

I told him, "About waste."

(Audience laughs.)

Then, "What is it what is so difficult?"

So, I read him this sentence: "Both GNP and medical bills measure wealth, or well-being, in the same way. Both add on the same scale the market value of benefits and then, add to these benefits, the defensive expenditures which have become necessary in society to offset the unwanted side-effects of production."

He didn't understand right away. But finally, we took a cup of coffee together. Half an hour later, after great silence, he says to me, "Don Ivan, do I get you right? Economists are people who add onto the same side of the scale -- he said a special word in Spanish which means the scale on which you put animals -- all what the people eat and all what the people shit?"

And this man, they tell me, was stupid!

Another night watchman shows up in Deschooling Society, in the first section, titled "Phenomenology of School":

Since most people today live outside industrial cities, most people today do not experience childhood. In the Andes you till the soil once you have become "useful." Before that, you watch the sheep. If you are well nourished, you should be useful by eleven, and otherwise by twelve. Recently, I was talking to my night watchman, Marcos, about his eleven-year-old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his son was still a "ni–o.” Marcos, surprised, answered with a guileless smile: "Don Ivan, I guess you're right." Realizing that until my remark the father had thought of Marcos primarily as his "son," I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons. Of course if I were to tell the New York slum-dweller that his working son is still a "child," he would show no surprise. He knows quite well that his eleven-year-old son should be allowed childhood, and resents the fact that he is not. The son of Marcos has yet to be afflicted with the yearning for childhood; the New Yorker's son feels deprived.

'The Convivial City'

Silvia Grünig informs us that her PhD. thesis, titled "Ivan Illich (1926-2002): la ville conviviale," is now available for reading on the Web. It's posted at the website of the CNRS-Conseil national de la recherche scientifique. It's written in French, but the English abstract describes it thus:

Ivan Illich (1926-2002) : The Convivial City

In his work, Ivan Illich (1926-2002) makes a radical critique of "institutions" (the Church, schools, hospitals, transport, machines, etc.), alleging that at some stage in their development they become all counterproductive. Can these analyses be transposed to the urban domain? If so, how can they help to make what "shapes " cities intelligible in the age of global urbanisation? This research proposes an Illichian reading of "the business-city" and suggests ways to leave the productivist impasse it is now experiencing. It is structured around two axes: Firstly, in the context of the economic model of scarcity and of the cybernetic model of systems, the City has been replaced by a counterproductive urban business: an anti-city, in which Urbanism becomes iatrogenic. It is " the vast enclosure ". Secondly, Ivan Illich's ideas transposed to the habitable space significantly contribute towards nurturing a new model for leaving industrialism and reconstructing the territory through processes of reduction and reconduction. This is the convivial city.

More on Illich and Jerry Brown

Hakim Bey is described on Wikipedia as "an American anarchist political and cultural writer, essayist, and poet, known for first proposing the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), based, in part, on a historical review of pirate utopias." Born Peter Lamborn Wilson in 1945, Bey traveled extensively in Central Asia in the 1960s and '70s.

In an article called "Media Creed For The Fin De Siecle," which is available at a site called Hermetic.com, Bey describes an encounter with Ivan Illich long ago:

… In 1974, I was seated at a dinner table in Tehran, Iran, at the house of the very hip Canadian ambassador, James George, with Ivan Illich, when a telegram arrived from Governor Brown of California, inviting Illich to fly there at Brown's expense to appear with him on TV and accept a post in the administration. Illich, who is a fairly saintly individual, lost his temper for the first and only time during his stay in Iran, and began cursing Brown. When the Ambassador and I expressed puzzlement at this reaction to a cordial offer of money, fame, and influence, Illich explained that Brown was trying to destroy him. He said he never appeared on television because his entire task was to offer a critique of institutions, not a magic pill to cure humanity's ills. TV was capable of offering only simple answers, not complex questions. He refused to become a guru or media-star, when his real purpose was to inspire people to question authority and think for themselves. Brown wanted the display of Illich's image (charismatic, articulate, unusual-looking, probably very televisual) but not the task of thinking about Illich's critiques of consumer society and political power. Furthermore, said "Don Ivan", he hated to fly, and had only accepted our invitation to Iran because our letter was so full of typing errors!

In fact, for the rest of his life Illich continued to be friends with Brown. Bey continues:

Illich's answer to the question, "Why do you not appear in the media?", was that he refused to disappear in the media. One cannot appear in "the media" in one's true subjectivity (and the political is the personal just as much as the personal is the political); therefore one should refuse the Media any vampiric energy it might derive from the manipulation (or simply the possession) of one's image. I cannot "seize the media" even if I buy it, and to accept publicity from, say, the New York Times, Time magazine, or network TV, would simply amount to the commodification of my subjectivity, whether aesthetic ("feelings", art) or critical ("opinions", agitprop). ...

David Bollier on Illich and the commons

David Bollier has posted to the Web the talk he gave at the recent Illich conference in Oakland. It's here, at Resilience.org, and it's called "The Quiet Realization of Ivan Illich's Ideas in the Contemporary Commons Movement." It begins:

I come here today as an ambassador of the commons movement – a growing international movement of activists, thinkers, project leaders and academics who are attempting to build a new world from the ground up. It’s not just about politics and policy. It’s about social practices and the design of societal institutions that help us live as caring, intelligent human beings in spiritually satisfying ways.

Many Americans have not heard of the commons except in connection with the word “tragedy.” We’ve all heard the famous tragedy of the commons parable. It holds that any shared resource invariably gets over-exploited and ruined. Since the “tragedy meme” appeared in a famous 1968 essay by Garrett Hardin, it has been drummed into the minds of undergraduates in economics, sociology and political science classes. It serves as a secular catechism to propagandize the virtues of private property and so-called free markets.

Thanks to the tragedy smear, most people don’t realize that the commons is in fact a success story – that it is a durable artifact of human history, that it is a way to effectively manage shared resources, and that it lies at the heart of a growing political and cultural movement.

I have been a part of this movement for the past fifteen years, writing books, blogging, organizing conferences, giving talks, writing strategy papers, working with partners and trying to raise money. On this journey, I have discovered that the commons contains vast worlds within worlds, most of which are invisible to the Harvard-trained policy wonks who dominate Washington and the neoliberal economists from the great universities. […]

Friends of Illich meet in Oakland

Some photos we made at the Oakland, Calif., event celebrating Illich last week.

Sajay Samuel

Gustavo Esteva

Trent Schroyer and Jerry Brown, governor of California

Marina Illich, Ivan Illich's niece, talking with David Cayley

Kirsten Vogeler, Lee Swenson, and Jean Robert at lunch in Berkeley

Jean Robert listens to Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who spoke about Illich and René Girard

David Bollier, Trent Schroyer, Gustavo Esteva, and Jean Robert

Wolfgang Palaver making a point

Richard Westheimer

Dan Grego

Carl Mitcham

Ivan Illich and Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) is a thinker who often gets mentioned in the same breath as Ivan Illich. An historian, sociologist, philosopher, Christian theologian, and social critic, Ellul is perhaps best known for a book called The Technological Society. A generation of activists and others concerned with the perils of industrial society viewed this book (published in English in the early 1960s) and Illich's Tools for Conviviality (along with a number of titles by Lewis Mumford) as key texts for understanding the history and nature of technology and its impact, symbolic and otherwise, on society and humanity.

In 1993, in Bordeaux, France (a city that Ellul once served as mayor), Illich gave an address in honor the Frenchman, expressing "my gratitude to a master to whom I owe an orientation that has decisively affected my pilgrimage for forty years." Illich's address is well worth reading, if only for its sly humor in a certain passage concerning the Church and its views on contraception.

We're pleased to have discovered just now that the International Jacques Ellul Society has made available on its website a seemingly complete collection of back issues of its newsletter. We've subscribed to this newsletter off and on for several years, now, but here we find many issues we've missed. And among them are several that feature essays by and about Illich.

The Ellul Studies Forum for January, 1992 (PDF), for instance, offers a collection of seven pieces on "Illich's critique of technology and its theological implications." As guest editor, Carl Mitcham chose to include several pieces by Illich himself, two by Lee Hoinacki, and one by David B. Schwartz. Also included is an interview conducted with Illich in 1990, in Berlin.

The Spring 2003 issue, partially devoted to "remembering Ivan Illich," includes essays by several of his collaborators.

July, 1996's issue offers a review of Illich's In the Vineyard of the Text.

The issue for July, 1994, "In Memory of Jacques Ellul," includes Illich's Bordeaux address.

We look forward to exploring this rich trove of material.