Of Jerry Brown and Ivan Illich

In case anyone missed it, Jerry Brown has just been elected governor of California. This will be his third term in that office, as he served two terms starting in the mid-1970s. For anyone who’s unaware, we’re here to tell you that Jerry Brown was a good, longtime friend of Ivan Illich.

The two met for the first time in 1976, as Brown has recalled, at a place called Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, still operating just north of San Francisco. After that, their paths crossed a few times, including Brown’s joining others at least twice - at events held at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., and at Penn State, in State College, and perhaps at others we're not aware of - to honor Illich after his death in late 2002.

We attended both of those events, held in March and November, 2004, respectively, and we heard and spoke with Brown both times. He impressed us with his humility and knowledge and sincerity, we must say. We recognize that Brown is first and foremost a politician, and we don’t agree with certain of his political stands and actions, but we did vote for him in the recent election. Let this sketch of his relationship with Illich serve as both our tribute to Brown’s victory and as an introduction to those who might wish to learn more.

By the time they met in 1976, both men were public figures. In 1970, Illich had been profiled in The New Yorker as a radical ex-priest based in Mexico whose calls for the “deschooling” of society were arousing great controversy. Brown had just been elected to his first term as governor, at age 39 the youngest person ever to hold that office. (And at 72, today he'll soon be the oldest.)

At the 2004 symposium at Pitzer College, Barry Sanders, a professor of English there, recalled that it was two years before their face-to-face meeting, however, that Illich and Brown first got mentioned publicly in the same sentence, as it were:

One day, in 1974, the Los Angeles Times carried a picture of Jerry Brown holding quite casually two books, two small paperbacks that packed a huge wallop, he told the Times reporter. Every informed citizen had to read these two books, Brown insisted, for they pointed the way to nothing less than the very survival of the planet. But the article neglected to say exactly what they were. The title of the first one we could make out fine: Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher. To decipher the second, Grace [Sanders’ wife] needed a magnifying glass. Despite its tiny typeface, she could just make out a pair of three-syllable, six-letter words, Energy and Equity, written, it appeared, by some obscure Russian or Slav with the improbable name, Ivan Illich. We speculated why anyone would bother to write a book connecting money--equity--with feeling energetic. We knew it could not be a diet book, or an exercise manual. At any rate, we were right; it was certainly obscure. The library did not own a copy, we could not find it through inter-library loan, and we spent several weeks and lots of searching before we could find one in a used book store.

Almost a decade later, Pitzer College would invite Illich to lecture on his latest book, the highly controversial Gender, and this enabled Sanders to get to know Illich quite well. His witty telling of his first encounter with Illich - in a house throbbing with strobe lights and over-amped recordings of music by Karlheinz Stockhausen - and their subsequent friendship and collaboration - they went on to co-author a book titled ABC, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind - is well worth a read. Called “Illich and Literacy,” it’s available at the Pudel site in Germany as a .PDF download.

Chances are quite good that Brown was introduced to Illich by Stewart Brand, the founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, a figure of some renown in the counterculture, and a regular at Green Gulch. Illich’s call for the disestablishment of schooling and the adoption of what he called convivial tools had struck a strong chord among the back-to-the-land movement and the broad spectrum of alternative thinkers who flocked to the Catalog for inspiration and, to use the Catalog’s own slogan, for “access to tools.” It wasn’t long before Illich was listed up front in the Catalog, right next to biologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson.

Brown was well-attuned to the Whole Earth credo. In 1977, for instance, his administration authorized tax incentives for rooftop solar-energy panels. Brown stood up to the oil industry and he named Bateson, then a professor at the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus, to the state’s Board of Regents. And this bachelor governor, who as a young man had entered a Jesuit seminary, was known - and in some circles, admired - for living a fairly ascetic life: While governor, he lived in an apartment, with a mattress on the floor as his bed, instead of using the official governor’s mansion in Sacramento. Instead of being chauffeured in a limo, Gov. Brown drove himself to work in a Plymouth Satellite. (Which raises an obvious question: Did Brown play the B-52s during this short commute?)

He may not have quoted Illich specifically, we're not sure. But Brown was brave enough to talk to his constituents about an age of "limits," create a state “office of appropriate technology” and publicly Brand as an advisor. Around this same time, Brand was publishing essays by Illich in a spin-off from the Catalog, a widely-regarded, advertising-free journal called Co-Evolution Quarterly (later renamed Whole Earth Review).

Brown left the governor’s job in early 1983, having decided to run not for a third term but instead, for a seat in the U.S. Senate. He lost that race, however, and pretty much drifted away from politics. Among other activities, he studied Buddhism in Japan and visited and even worked with dying patients at Mother Teresa’s operation in Calcutta. In 1992, of course, he made his third run for president, advocating the idea of a “flat tax” on incomes, using various alternative channels to reach voters and raise funds, and winning a good number of early primaries against Bill Clinton.

In 1995, Brown began hosting a call-in radio show, called "We the People," broadcast on Berkeley’s Pacifica station, KPFA, and syndicated nationally. Featuring invited guests, it explored politics, culture, and social issues, often with leftist or alternative bent that hardly seemed to be in Brown’s political interest. Brown is a curious thinker, not afraid to be different from the average pol.

On March 22, 1996, Brown was visited on the air by Illich and Carl Mitcham, then a professor at Penn State. (Mitcham, we believe, is the person responsible for inviting Illich to teach for much of the year at Penn State, which he did for a long period of time beginning in the mid-1980s. During more or less this same period, Illich also spent half the year teaching at the University of Bremen, in Germany.)

A transcript of this conversation, touching on such topics as “the gaze,” the senses, proportionality, and hospitality, is available at We the People’s website along with those of shows featuring Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and others. Brown comes across as a gracious and curious host, more than willing to give Illich all the time he needs to explain himself.

The home page of this same site, features Brown’s tribute to Illich, as originally published - along with tributes by a variety of other individuals, including Brand and Mitcham - in a 2003 issue of Whole Earth Review.

In 1999, Brown was elected mayor of Oakland, an economically struggling city across the bay from San Francisco, and his public relationship with Illich continued to deepen. In 2000 and again in 2001, Brown’s We the People organization hosted Illich as resident scholar for a 6-week series of lectures, all open to the public, called The Oakland Table. Illich and close friends and collaborators such as Lee Hoinacki, David Cayley, John McKnight, and Silja Samerski joined others, including architectural scholar Joseph Rykwert, in reflecting on first, the distinction between place and space, and in 2001, on “the history of hospitality”:

We looked at the recent loss of hospitality for the old, the ill, and the crippled; for children, and for those who waste away or who die. And we examined how the institutional provision of services undermines the sense for hospitality in the home, and facilitates ways of inhabiting spaces unfit for neighborly aid, family care, common mourning and mutual commitment.

Since the middle of the 20th century, experts make their living by convincing people that, due to so-called progress they are no longer capable of taking care of each other in any of the many ways different cultures have been cultivating for centuries. New professionals such as educators, obstetricians, vocational advisors, marriage psychologists and dietary counselors succeeded in transforming citizens into needy clients who become dependent on professional services in ever more areas of their life. For those activities that once took place at home, that once created a place, "needy" clients are now moved to institutions where they consume professional inputs to satisfy their needs. Homes and neighborhoods desiccate; they are transformed into hygienic garaging units where no one is born, is sick or dies anymore.

Pretty heady stuff, no?, for a guy who would soon become Attorney General of California and later, its governor. Detailed notes taken during the lectures and discussions are available here.

At a website run by a certain Dr. Braulio Hornedo Rocha, a remarkable photo is shown of that man - a Mexican critic of education with whom we're not familiar - sitting with Brown and Illich at 2000's Oakland Table gathering. This photo, close to the very bottom of the page, shows Illich about a year before he died. Hornedo is rector of something called Universidad Virtual Alfonsina, which is, we gather, located in Cuernavaca, the city where Illich made his home for many years and where his CIDOC center operated until 1976.

On Dec. 2, 2002, Ivan Illich died. Two days later, the New York Times published a condescending obituary about the “onetime Roman Catholic priest who,

through a steady flow of books and articles preached counterintuitive sociology to a disquieted baby-boom generation.

His intellectual ordnance of anarchist panache, hatred of bureaucracy, Jesuitic argumentation, deep reverence for the past and watered-down Marxism, was applied to many targets, including relations between the sexes. More often than not, his conclusions were startling: he thought life was better for women in pre-modern times.

A few days later, much to our surprise, the paper ran the following:

To the Editor:

Your Dec. 4 obituary of Ivan Illich, the priest, philosopher and historian, failed to capture the essence of this extraordinary man's life -- his profound critique of modern assumptions of scarcity and the dehumanizing effects of technological dependency.

Mr. Illich was a deeply spiritual man who embodied in his way of life a radical Christian simplicity. His understanding of the past and his cheerful embrace of suffering set him apart. He called for asceticism and the art of friendship, not ''watered-down Marxism'' or ''anarchist panache.''

In a world obsessed with longevity and freedom from pain, Mr. Illich studied and practiced the art of suffering. He was a man of rare genius and classic erudition. He was also a wonderful friend.

JERRY BROWN

Mayor

Oakland, Calif.

Dec. 4, 2002

UK blogger catches up with Illich's Samaritan

Blogger Mark Vernon, an ex-priest, philosopher, and author in Britain, has been writing about friendship - today, before, long ago in Ancient Greece, etc. In May, he posted a short essay inspired by Ivan Illich's radical reading of the Parable of the Good Samaritan:

I thought I understood [the parable], and moreover that we are living in a society that could be said to embody its message to a remarkable degree. In the NHS [UK's National Health Service], for example, care is free at the point of need. That surely is what the Samaritan offered the Jew in the ditch, and what the other two [a priest and a Levite] did not. But it was not until I started to think about friendship, and read the rebel Catholic philosopher Ivan Illich, that I saw otherwise. Illich thought that the parable has been subtly misunderstood, and in so doing its meaning has been what he called ‘perverted.’ It’s not about welfarism, he argued. The key detail is the way Luke describes the compassion the Samaritan has for the Jew. The important word is one of those wonderful Greek ones – splankgnizesthi, from Splanknon, the bowels. The Samaritan is moved in his guts. That’s what fundamentally distinguishes him from the priest and the Levite, not that he offers the care.

Illich, as anyone who has read The Rivers North of the Future will understand, reads this parable not as an instruction always to help those in need but rather as a definition of neighbor. It makes the point that one is free - everyone is free - to choose whom they want to relate to as their neighbor. And this complete and absolute freedom to choose, Illich argues, is enormously disruptive to tradition and "normal decency." It means that people are free to ignore traditional tribal boundaries, for instance, and it topples many certainties and unleashes much volatility. And the ramifications of this disruption, Illich argues, are still being worked out by the Western world.

Vernon may be pleased to know that his blog post is, according to Google, the only page on the Web that uses that word, splankgnizesthi. That, or he is misspelling it. Illich reads the word as referring to the part of an ox's gut that one discards during a sacrifice "because there's too much shit in it." Hence the title of Vernon's post: "On being moved in your bowels".

Two characters in John le Carré - a question arises

Is it possible that we are the first ones to notice that John le Carré has used essentially the same name for two different characters in two different books? We sure like to think so, and judging by a quick Google search (at 2pm PDT, Oct. 11, 2010, let it be recorded) we may well be the first.

In his new novel, Our Kind of Traitor, a central character is named Peregrine (Perry) Makepiece. He's an Oxford don who, bored with teaching, goes on vacation to Antigua and soon becomes involved with Russian mobsters, money-laundering, and shifty City of London bankers. (Or so we've been reading in reviews of the book published in the UK and related territories.)

In A Perfect Spy, le Carré names a character Sir Makepeace Watermaster. He's the father-in-law of Rick Pym, the father of the book's protagonist, Magnus Pym. To say the least, Watermaster's not happy about his daughter's having married this charming and always-on-the-run con man.

Of course, one of the great joys of le Carré always has been the names he gives his characters: Jack Brotherhood, Toby Esterhaze, Jonathan Pine, and George Smiley, for instance. Perhaps, as many critics state, only Charles Dickens is better at such naming. And perhaps Makepiece/peace is not as rare as we, situated in America, tend to think. But it certainly isn't a name like Bob or Joe or even George.

In any case, we look forward to reading the new book, which Amazon.com this morning informed us is on its way, slated to arrive at our door on the morning of the official pub date, Oct. 12. Reviews, so far, have been mixed, but that won't stop us from reading it. First, though, there's Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter to finish - a marvelous book. And once we've read Our Kind of Traitor, all that will be left for us to read of le Carré's will be his long-neglected and largely dismissed early novel, The Naive and Sentimental Lover, and his second African intrigue, The Mission Song. Of course, most of his books are worthy of re-reading; even if one already knows how things will turn out, the characters and overall writing are quite superb.

Some "new" images of Ivan Illich

Getty Images, we just discovered while browsing with Google's image-searching service, now has five relatively rare photos of Ivan Illich available - a refreshing sight after seeing the same small handful of Illich photos get used ad nauseum across the Web.

Prices vary depending on the use to which one wants to put a particular image - for a Web page vs. a printed brochure, for instance. Three of the images were made by a Bernard Diederich, shooting for Life magazine in 1976. Another, from 1980, is by Sigfrid Casals and another, showing Illich speaking in Claremont, Calif., in 1975, is by George Rose.

Rather than risk the wrath of Getty by posting its preview versions of these copyrighted images here in this blog, we suggest you go to the Getty site to view the five photos.

The one time we saw Illich in person, when he gave some talks in New York City back in 1985, he discouraged picture-taking, but some people in the audience flashed away anyway. Evidently, when Life magazine was in need of photos, he cooperated.

Illich's Wikipedia Page

Is it a measure of anything particular that Wikipedia's page about Ivan Illich is so barren of information and analysis, especially as compared to the pages devoted to many other philosophers and social critics?

The main body of the Illich page offers a few paragraphs about his "personal life," a paragraph or two about each of three books, and a paragraph each about three "concepts": counterproductivity, radical monopoly, and conviviality. The total word count for this material: 1,500 words. At the bottom, there is a list of Illich's many books, but none gets any more info than its title, year, and ISBN code. (And one of these books doesn't actually exist: no book called 'Blasphemy: A Radical Critique of Our Technological Culture' was ever published - nor was it ever written, as far as we've been able to determine. Evidently, its title continues to linger in the Books in Print directory.)

Perhaps Illich doesn't have that many followers who care to write about him. More likely, we believe, is that Illich's thinking is too radical and intricate to be easily summarized and so far, nobody has come forward who's ready to tackle it in full.

Perhaps we'll take a shot at expanding Wikipedia's page. Stay tuned.

Illich on YouTube

Videos relating to Illich are rare on YouTube, but recently, two interesting items have shown up - not exactly motion pictures, but worth a look, and a listen, nonetheless:

On our way to Illich's "Global Classroom"

Upon reading one of the articles considering technology and schooling in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, we couldn’t help but recall Ivan Illich’s observations about the shift from an epoch of tools to systems, and about his views on the emerging “global classroom.”

Former Wired editor Kevin Kelly writes about how, while homeschooling his son this past year, he made sure to teach his boy how to think about technology. “[A]s technology floods the rest of our lives,” Kelly writes, “one of the chief habits a student needs to acquire is technological literacy - and we made sure it was part of our curriculum.”

This technological literacy, Kelly writes, is different from traditional, book-related literacy. By technological literacy, Kelly means ”proficiency with the larger system of our invented world. It is close to an intuitive sense of how you add up, or parse, the manufactured realm. … we need to be literate in the complexities of technology in general, as if it were a second nature.”

The alphabet and the book, Illich argued, are tools in the traditional sense of the word: They are instruments that one can use to solve a specific problem or perform a specific task. The user of these tools remains in control and maintains a separateness, or “distality,” from the tool in question. One picks up a book, reads it, and puts it down. Only in a metaphysical sense does the reader remain inside a book he or she read an hour or a year ago. Kelly, however, seeks to master technology itself, which he understands as practically another form of nature - an all-encompassing order from which there is no stepping away. People don't use systems, they get incorporated, or subsumed, into systems. Kelly, it appears, welcomes technology as the sea in which we all must swim, a milieu, or realm, from which we cannot escape. Indeed, he admits there’s no way of gaining “expertise with every invention” - with any of the subsystems that make up this systematized technological realm: “that is not only impossible, it’s not very useful.”

Not useful? How so? This technology, he writes, “will change faster than we can teach it.” In other words, our knowledge about this all-encompassing system, this technological cocoon, will inevitably be scarce. There will be no way to master it, or even to grasp a good part of it, because it constantly and endlessly will morph and extend itself in new directions. (Once upon a time, "the computer" referred to mainframes, each one an island unto itself; today, "the computer" usually refers a node on that vast, ever-expanding system called the Internet.)

As part of his article, Kelly proposes a list of lessons to be learned in technological literacy. These two statements caught our eye: “Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete.” And, “Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner. Get good at it.”

What these statements imply is that you’ll always be in need of education. You’ll never be at ease with these tools, or the system, or its component inventions, because they will constantly change and obsolete themselves. And therefore, you will always find that the know-how needed to operate or work with this system as scarce - available only to those with the proper credentials or those will to pay the right price. Which is quite the opposite of the world of convivial tools that Illich envisioned back in 1973. His idea was of a world in which tools were not subject to constant obsolescence and whose users therefore did not require constant re-training. In Kelly’s world - which, like it or not, is pretty much the world we’re all coming to accept as normal - training and education will be a given, a never-ending necessity that we had better just get used to paying for, one way or another. (Training will be another form of what Illich calls shadow work - labor that's required to perform a certain job or task but that doesn't directly contribute to that task.)

Indeed, concluding on a note of pride, Kelly describes his son as having “learned the most critical thing:

how to keep learning. A month ago he entered high school eager to be taught - not facts, or even skills, but a lifelong process that would keep pace with technology’s rapid, ceaseless teaching.”

As we read this sentence, Kelly will be gladl to watch his son submit to a life of constant scarcity. Instead of getting on with living life, Kelly Jr. will, in effect, never get out of school, for there will always be another user-interface, another set of commands, another programming language to learn, simply because yesterday’s interface is no longer available or viable.

In fact, what Kelly's boy will be learning, it seems to us, is how he can best meld himself into "the system." Which isn't to say, of course, that any of us has much say in the matter.

Best Recap of Illich's Intellectual Journey

Ivan Illich, we've read here and there, was fond of telling people who snapped his picture or turned on a tape recorder when he spoke to an audience that, "you can never capture me." We're sure he was smiling when he said this, but he was quite serious. In part, he meant by this that he never stopped in his intellectual inquiries. Yesterday's book or essay was just that, yesterday's, and today, he might have something quite different to say about the very same topic. Or, he might have simply moved onto another field of interest.

One of the best overviews of those always-evolving, always-surprising inquiries, and especially of those Illich undertook in the incredibly fruitful later decades of his life, is a paper by his German collaborator Barbara Duden, entitled 'Ivan Illich, Beyond Medical Nemesis (1976): The Search for Modernity’s Disembodiment of “I” and “You”.' It is available at the Pudel site at the University of Bremen and at several other places around the Web.

For anyone interested in Illich, and especially if they've read his early books such as Deschooling Society or Medical Nemesis, this paper is as indispensable as David Cayley's two books: Ivan Illich in Conversation and The Rivers North of the Future.

Duden wrote this paper - her original text, in German, is also available at the Pudel site - as part of her contributions to a symposium on Illich that was held in Bremen in Feb., 2003, just more than one year after his death.

Her introductory paragraphs offer a good taste of the paper's tone of continuing wonder and heartfelt appreciation:

The many obituaries of Ivan Illich’s life and work had one thing in common: they suggest that by the end of the 1970s his hold on the public imagination had grown faint. It is as if his life and thinking stopped there. Almost all of these posthumous testimonials focus on the period between the 1950s and the late 1970s; they describe the unparalleled challenge that Ivan Illich’s “independent and catalytic thought” in the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) presented to the vision of development nurtured by church and state. They recall Ivan’s studies of the disabling gestalt of modern institutions, his argument - hardly controversial any more - that modern institutions alienate a majority of people from the goals for which they had been planned, created, and financed. With growing intensity they instead place their consumers at an unbridgeable distance from that goal: compulsory schooling had derailed our capacity to think and learn freely; the speed of our cars and the proliferation of traffic and machines had blocked our ability and desire to walk out into the world; medicine itself threatens the health of its patients; planned, standardized housing had made it difficult for us to make homes for ourselves. Occasionally an author takes a cue from Medical Nemesis, the book that secured Illich’s reputation, and lays out the three specific levels on which medicine has become a disabling profession: medical treatment harms the patient (medical iatrogenesis), the medical system has made it almost impossible to give birth, die, or be sick at home (social iatrogenesis), and in particular, through the creed that health is an attainable goal, it has destroyed our capacity for suffering and the art of dying (cultural iatrogenesis). This is how the memorial tributes have described Ivan, as the most important critic of the global development project of the postwar period, as someone who saw and uncovered the underside of that project clearly while all the world still clung to the promise of setting the world right. Finally, these memorialists never fail to mention that while Illich left the priesthood, he did not leave the church. But they did not ask what this meant.

[...]

It is not possible in my short account to lay out a complete map of Ivan’s life in these years, even to guide you fleetingly around all the crucial corners he turned and on to all the paths he traversed. It would also be premature. [...] I spent a long night thinking about how best to characterize the fruit of these years and, in the end, three insights emerged that I would like to comment.

First, the enormously wide range of subjects that he pursued simply astounds me, themes that led him again and again into new terrains. Second, the many memorial tributes summing up his life left me perplexed, for in paying homage to a man they saw as a social critic who went his own way, they left out the most vital thing about him. All of Ivan’s works during these last decades were deeply collaborative projects hewn from long-lasting friendships and from close work with like-minded colleagues. He inspired friends to embark on new research or propelled their projects in new directions; these in turn furnished new material for Ivan’s own thinking, insights that he would weave into his own work. Finally, Ivan, the teacher, scholar, and author, was deeply anchored in the riches of hospitality in these last decades, held fast in the embrace of a long stream of guests and visitors.

I will now turn to some of Ivan’s major intellectual preoccupations, revisiting conversations of his peripathetic "academy" citing some of the friends whose work and ideas he struggled with and fostered. He would have been pleased if I succeed in identifying - amid the long series of subjects that he pursued - the continuous ascending spiral of his insights, the underlying pulse that drove his intellectual quest. One of his favorite metaphors for history was the image of a hemp-rope continually reinforced with new strands, in which the short segments of hemp disappear but the line holds fast and runs through times. The person writing history searches for signs of rupture, breaking points in the rope running through the past. My object here, then, is to hold fast to the twists and turns in Ivan’s thinking against the ruptures of his life and times.

The subheds of Duden's text provide a brief summary of the topics into which she delves as she reviews Illich's ever-evolving thinking:

From a Critique of Development to the “Archaeology of Modern Certainties”

Emblems that Elicit Empathy: “Life” as an Idol

The Mathematization of Speech and Conceptual Frameworks

From “Vernacular Customs” and “the Commons” into the Past as point of departure, orientation and repoussoir

The Waters of Forgetfulness: On the Historicity of “Stuff”

Mumblers in the Vineyard of the Text: A Way Station in the Quest for a History of Sense -Perception

A Call for an "Ascesis of the Gaze": A History From the Seeing Person to the Recording Eye

Beyond Medical Nemesis

Gleanings

Systems for Conviviality? Pt. 1

Over at a blog called Design Dialogues, a post entitled Convivial Design for the American Breakdown argues that the current worldwide economic collapse has opened the door to greater "conviviality" in industrial design. Conviviality, of course, is the term Ivan Illich coined in his book Tools for Conviviality to describe a modern but de-professionalized, non-industrial organization of society.

Today's economic crisis, the piece asserts, looks like the one that nearly 40 years ago Illich saw as both imminent and inevitable. As economic "growth grinds to a halt," Illich is quoted, "people will lose confidence not only in the major institutions but also in the miracle prescriptions of the would-be crisis managers. The ability of present institutions to define values such as education, health, welfare, transportation, or news will suddenly be extinguished because it will be recognized as an illusion."

And so, with the U.S. economy clearly in a shambles right now, writes Peter Jones of Toronto, "there is something different, something truly timely in Illich’s Convivial Tools notion. ... Let's return ... to a process of human-scale cultural design. This means for us to 'invert the present deep structure of tools' in order to 'give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.'

Alas, we see little chance of the current situation, as dire as it is, causing any such inversion or the "true flipping of consciousness" that Illich had looked forward to. "The crisis I have described as imminent is not a crisis within industrial society," he wrote in Tools, "but a crisis of the industrial mode of production itself." Sure, lots of people are starting their own businesses, some of them craft-oriented, and more people are riding bicycles, but there's no widespread disillusionment with or rejection of industrialism. Newly-minted "consultants" still make their living helping industrial corporations, there's barely any protest over the U.S. occupation of Iraq (after all, millions of non-convivial cars need fueling every day), and the debate over "universal health care" concerns only how to divvy up access to industrialized, anonymously delivered medical services, not how to dismantle that system.

Now, we're quite sympathetic to blogger Jones' hope for more conviviality, and pleased to see him bringing that still-important book to people's attention. (And like Jones, we've held on to our stack of Whole Earth Review, aka Co-Evolution Quarterly, magazines all these years.) But Jones is, we have to point out, one of any number of people we've run into who refer to Illich's notion of conviviality as especially inspiring in their work as designers of various products, urban landscapes and, especially, information systems. For the most part, these believers in conviviality are sincere, but they miss the point of Illich's argument. And more important, they are quite unaware of the radical directions that Illich took in his thinking about tools and technology after Tools appeared.

To cut to the chase: By the late 1980s, Illich concluded that after lasting some 800 years, the epoch of "tools" and instrumentality was suddenly drawing to an end. Increasingly and with unexpected rapidity, the world was coming to be perceived and conceptualized primarily in cybernetic terms - as a hierarchy of self-regulating systems, that is. Suddenly, information, feedback loops, inputs, requirements, probabilities, risk factors, and needs were the keywords of the day. And in contrast to working with traditional tools, people don't use systems. If anything, systems use people. Illich understood that once people themselves are conceived of as mere systems, struggling for survival in the larger, global "ecosystem," then people no longer exist. And without people, or humans, in the traditional sense, there can be no "convivial" tools. And there certainly are no convivial systems.




Illich originally defined the term "tool" fairly broadly, including everything from hammers and radios to wheelbarrows and cars to hospitals and schools. The problem was that that in their modern form, many of these tools had become either overly professionalized, thus making them scarce and unavailable to the majority of people, or so over-powered as unavoidably to infringe on the commons and on the freedom and autonomy of others. Most medicines, for instance, were administrable only by highly-trained doctors. Some were quite dangerous, but mostly this restriction stemmed from doctors having erected a set of self-serving laws and regulations that kept those substances - and similarly, most medical procedures - out of the hands of non-doctors. The automobile, meanwhile, tended to exacerbate inequality, rearrange the landscape, pollute the air and ground, and deny people everyday the use of streets and their legs. Convivial alternatives would be teaching paramedics, or perhaps even everyone, how to use certain medicines and procedures, and the bicycle as the main form of transportation. Schools could be convivial tools, too, noted Illich, perhaps their most stinging critic, as long as attendance was not made not compulsory.

Like virtually all thinkers of the time, Illich conceived of tools as being quite distinct from the person wishing to use them. Traditionally, a person can pick up their choice of tool, use it in some way, and then put it down. Illich coined the neologism "distality" to describe this fundamental separation of user and tool.

Systems, in contrast, do not exhibit any such distality. One cannot pick up or put down a system, whether it's a computer system or the medical system. Instead, the system incorporates, or inscribes, each person, turning her into a mere element of the larger entity. Gregory Bateson, a biologist and one of the founding fathers of cybernetics and systems theory, saw a simple but complete system in a blind man walking with his cane down a sidewalk, the three elements connected to each other materially and by informational feedback loops. The cane tapping the pavement creates sounds which the man's ears and brain analyze to determine his position and identify possible obstacles. His mind uses the sounds and echoes to control the muscles that move his feet as well as those in his arm and hand that make the cane tap the sidewalk. Likewise, Bateson said, a lumberjack swinging an ax at a tree trunk can be treated as a system.


It was in his continuing examination of the "medical system" that Illich became aware of how the systems view was starting to eclipse that centered on tools. Here's how his close collaborator Barbara Duden describes it:

When Ivan wrote [Medical] Nemesis in 1975, he had not yet understood [...] that importing terms plucked from information sciences and cybernetics to other disciplinary fields actually undermined his goals. The book, like some of his other early works, was full of categories taken from information technology and its systemic reference system. It was only in the late 1980s that he stopped short and began to feel uneasy about what he had written, thanks to the Greek mathematician Costas Hatzkiriaku. He convinced Ivan that concepts bound up with the computer did not work as metaphors, for their substance and form are indivisible. Using computer terms as such inevitably ends up treating the human being as a programmable component in a system, even if this was not an author’s intention. “When process becomes substance” - this would be the most fitting definition - then concepts tied to the language of programming would inform everything described in this way cybernetically. Our uniqueness as humans would essentially be “deleted.”

The two sides of this watershed can be seen in Illich's discussion of the term "needs." In Tools, he was fairly comfortable in speaking about needs. What he didn't like was that increasingly needs were defined by experts and professionals and this condemned most people to passively consuming industrially-produced goods and services that were, by definition, scarce. Yet, as a term, "needs" still retained a certain humanity, a glimmer of individuality and desire:

Individuals need tools to move and to dwell. They need remedies for their diseases and means to communicate with one another. People cannot make all these things for themselves. They depend on being supplied with objects and services which vary from culture to culture. Some people depend on the supply of food and others on the supply of ball bearings.

People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call “conviviality.” They are degraded to the status of mere consumers.

By the early 1990s, Illich could look back on needs. His chapter in The Development Dictionary (1992, edited by Wolfgang Sachs), was titled Needs but wound up its argument with language like this (p.98):

In the 1970s, experts presented themselves as servants who helped the poor become conscious of their true needs, as a Big Brother to assist them in the formulation of their claims. This dream of bleeding hearts and blue-eyed do-gooders can today be easily dismissed as the nonsense of an age already past. 'Needs', in a vastly more interdependent, complex, polluted, and crowded world, can no longer be identified and quantified, except through intense teamwork and scrutiny by systems specialists. And in this new world, the needs discourse becomes the pre-eminent device for reducing people to individual units with input requirements. [emphasis in original]

When this occurs, homo economicus is rapidly recognized as an obsolete myth - the planet can no longer afford this wasteful luxury - and replaced by homo systemicus. The needs of this latter invention metamorphose from economic wants into system requirements, these being determined by an exclusivist professional hegemony brooking no deviation whatsoever. The fact that many people today already recognize their systemic requirements principally argues the power of professional prestige and pedagogy, and the final loss of personal autonomy. ... people are turned into abstract elements of a mathematical stasis. The latest conceptualization of these abstract elements has been reached recently through the reinterpretation of the common man, who is now seen as a fragile and only provisionally functioning immune system always on the brink of breakdown. ...

to be continued ....

Deschooling and Climate Change

Without a doubt, Ivan Illich’s most widely read and influential book is Deschooling Society, published in 1970. It brought Illich to the attention of a mass audience, its handful of essays - first appearing in Saturday Review and The New York Review of Books - adding much fuel to the then-raging discussion about the “education crisis.”

Illich’s main interest was to warn so-called developing nations in Latin America and elsewhere of the troublesome myths, realities, symbolic fallout, and social effects of compulsory schooling, as evidenced in the modern, industrialized nations. Schools, he argued, tacitly trained people to be consumers and worse, to believe that the only knowledge worth having was knowledge taught by professionals. School confused means and ends and was essentially a big lottery in which everyone was forced to participate but from which only a tiny few actually benefitted. The opportunity still remained, he argued, for non-industrialized, non-consumption-intensive nations, whether run with a socialistic bent or not, to opt out and take a different route than building service-oriented economies. These nations could avoid the social inequities and tremendous costs of the industrialized model.

How Illich and Deschooling were received in Brazil, Columbia, Bolivia or Nicaragua, for instance, we can't say. We were not there and we don't read Spanish, for example. But up North, so to speak, educational activists and theorists found the book tremendously stimulating. Many educational activists relished its radical arguments. And Illich’s book was, and continues to be, a major inspiration for the homeschooling movement, as well as for the closely-related unschooling movement, despite the fact, often overlooked by those familiar only with the book's title, that it doesn’t even mention, much less endorse, either idea. Illich called for a society whose tools were such that compulsory schooling would not be necessary - convivial tools, he called them, the use of which people could learn from each other, with no need for professionals.

As we see it, the issues that Illich raised in this illuminating little book have never demanded more attention and discussion than they do right now. Compulsory schooling, in all its forms, is upon us as never before, and not simply because of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), shrinking school budgets, or rising college tuitions. More troubling, by far, is the escalating intensity and broadening scope of schooling that the response to climate change engendering.

As currently formulated and described by politicians and scientists - the Al Gore crowd, we might call them - solutions to the problem of “global warming” call for people to conceive of themselves in radically new ways: less as persons who live locally and remain rooted in the soil beneath their feet and more as global citizens with global responsibilities. And it’s that change of mind and redefinition of self that will, in turn, require schooling and regimentation on an unprecedented scale. The effort will aim to “educate” not only youngsters as formal students but all persons pretty much all the time - at home, at work, at the doctor’s office, at church.

To see why this will be so, look at how Illich came to think about his own book: As popular and piercing as its critique certainly was, Deschooling did not fully capture the man’s thoughts about education, which continued to evolve. Even as the book neared publication, Illich foresaw that his argument was about to cause “unwanted side effects.” By attacking the assumptions that underlay traditional schooling as harshly as it did, his critique, he saw, would almost certainly cause the educational system to defend and consolidate its power. How? By changing and redefining itself. No longer would schools, as traditionally understood, be the sole provider of education. Now, the whole world would be turned into a professionally-administered classroom. Illich recalled to David Cayley, in the book Ivan Illich in Conversation (p.73), that

... nothing would be worse than to believe that I consider schools the only technique for creating and establishing and anchoring in souls the myth of education. There are many other ways by which we can make the world into a universal classroom.

It was Wolfgang Sachs, then a student of Illich’s in Germany, who Illich says first warned him that as prescient and penetrating as Deschooling’s arguments may have been, Illich was “barking up the wrong tree.” As Illich told Cayley, Sachs and fellow students

claimed that by making so much of the unwanted side effects of compulsory schooling, I had become blind to the fact that the educational function was already emigrating from the schools and that, increasingly, other forms of compulsory learning would be instituted in modern society. It would become compulsory, not by law, but by other tricks like making people believe that they are learning something from TV or compelling people to attend in-service training, or getting people to pay huge amounts of money in order to be taught how to prepare better for intercourse, how to be more sensitive, how to know more about the vitamins which they need, how to play games, and so on.

Sachs was right, of course, as can be seen in the subsequent rise of major industries devoted to such notions as adult education, continuing education, lifelong learning, and on-the-job training. Every activity, from sports to cooking to remaking one’s persona so as to sell more effectively, has been made the subject of “self-help” books, training classes, and electronic courseware authored by self-proclaimed experts. Just look at all the crap, most of it made from unearthly plastic, that’s sold under the rubric of “educational toy.”

And don’t forget the continual bombardment of advisories in the newspapers, monthly magazines, and nightly television programs urging us to submit regularly to a growing list of medical tests - tests whose hidden curriculum, to borrow a key phrase from Deschooling, is to have us conceive of ourselves and our bodies in terms of arcane measurements: pressure levels, chemical ratios, genetic risk factors, and so forth. In short, we are our medical charts, described and understood in terms defined by professionals.

Right now, Planet Earth is coming to be conceived widely in a similarly new way, too - as a self-contained system that must be managed intensively and on an unprecedented, all-encompassing, global scale. “Today’s ecology,” Sachs writes, “is in the business of saving nothing less than the planet. That suggestive globe, suspended in the dark universe, delicately furnished with clouds, oceans, and continents, has become the object of science, planning, and politics.”

And so, too, are the people living on this planet-turned-computer-guided-spaceship objects of planning. The modern, industrialized conception of the human being is as a collection of bodily systems - endocrine, reproductive, digestive, immune, and so forth - that can be monitored, analyzed, tinkered with, and manipulated in the name of health. And this same line of cybernetic thinking leads, as well, to the human being as a whole being understood as merely one form of sub-system struggling for survival in the larger, ultra-competitive ecosystem where scarcity - particularly scarcity of energy - rules. So, as Planet Earth succumbs to management on an unprecedented scale, with enormous computer simulations fed torrents data flowing in from vast webs of sensors on land, in the oceans, and orbiting in space, can there be any question that people - as individuals and as abstract populations - will require intensive management and planning, as well?

The emerging vision of “technocratic environmentalism,” Sachs notes, understands the situation like so: “As a global species we are transforming the planet. It is only as a global species - pooling our knowledge, coordinating our actions and sharing what the planet has to offer - that we may have any prospect for managing the planet’s transformation along the pathways of sustainable development.”

What’s entirely missing in most discussions, however, is any consideration of limiting or even reversing economic growth - the growth that gives rise to climate problems in the first place. Instead, we’re told that the management of the global ecosystem will depend on figuring out how much growth this system can sustain without collapsing. In 1989, the Scientific American boldly explained it in terms that Dr. Strangelove might have uttered to his audience in the War Room:

Two central questions must be addressed: What kind of planet do we want? What kind of planet can we get? How much species diversity should be maintained in the world? Should the size or the growth rate of human population be curtailed? How much climate change is acceptable?

The point being that economic growth and escalating consumption will continue in this managed world, and schools, where people are tacitly taught to consume, will continue as well.

For centuries, notes Sachs, Western society has sought to control Nature. But, just in case anyone missed it, this has led to unpleasant and unpredictable consequences. And so, from now on, “the purpose of global environmental management is nothing less than control of a second order; a higher level of observation and intervention has to be installed, in order to control the consequences of the control over nature. Such a step becomes the more imperative as the drive towards turning the world into a closely interelated and expanding economic society continues unabated.”

In short, economic growth and development, which have historically progressed hand in hand with compulsory schooling, are hardly likely to disappear. And given that this growth and development will need to be managed within a most-demanding set of constraints, won’t the schooling of the people involved need to be more intensive, as well?

Assuming that economic growth proceeds, this will see more of the world’s population join the “developed” world. In turn, more schooling will be required to enable society to reproduce itself, especially as survival and maintaining sustainable growth come to depend on ever-more intensive and technical management of the biosphere. People living at a traditional subsistence level have no need for schooling as Illich saw it, but people living in a market-intensive, industrialized way cannot get by without intensive and compulsory schooling. Economies don’t grow without the people involved being taught to consume and to get with the program.