Illich on "alienation" - 1973

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

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

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

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

Speaking of "empty liturgy"

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

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

Illich in Italy

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

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

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

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

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

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

And another bibliography states this:

Illich, Ivan (1998): "And do not lead us into diagnosis, but deliver us of the pursuit of health."

Bologna, October 24th 1998, English Version of the Opening Lecture of the symposium on 'Salute e Malattia'.

En Francais: "Ne nous laissez pas succomber au diagnostic, mais délivrez-nous des maux de la santé."

'Lezione magistrale' dÍvan Illich au Syposium de Bologne: 'Maladie et santé comme métaphore sociale', 25 au 28 octobre 1998.

In Italiano: "Non indurci in diagnosi, ma liberarci dai mali della salute."

Lezione di Ivan Illich nel Simposio di Bologna il 25. Ottobre 1998.

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

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

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

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

Recalling Illich

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

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

His eyes brightened and he said, “Of course!” But he wanted a good backdrop. ...

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

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

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

Sullivan maintains his own site here.

Charles Taylor on Illich

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

More from Mr. Cayley

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

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

CBC describes the upcoming program so:

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

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

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


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

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

How to Think About Science

Episode 1 - Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer


Episode 2 - Lorraine Daston


Episode 3 - Margaret Lock


Episode 4 - Ian Hacking and Andrew Pickering


Episode 5 - Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour


Episode 6 - James Lovelock


Episode 7 - Arthur Zajonc


Episode 8 - Wendell Berry


Episode 9 - Rupert Sheldrake


Episode 10 - Brian Wynne


Episode 11 - Sajay Samuel


Episode 12 - David Abram


Episode 13 - Dean Bavington


Episode 14 - Evelyn Fox Keller


Episode 15 - Barbara Duden and Silya Samerski


Episode 16 - Steven Shapin


Episode 17 - Peter Galison


Episode 18 - Richard Lewontin


Episode 19 - Ruth Hubbard


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


Episode 21 - Christopher Norris and Mary Midgely


Episode 22 - Allan Young


Episode 23 - Lee Smolin


Episode 24 - Nicholas Maxwell

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

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

"CIDOC was a magic place"

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

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

 

 

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

INDEX

Einleitung 2

Zur Methode 10

Forschungsstand 13

 

1 berufen– Entwurzelung, Flucht, Gelübde 15

1.1 Kindheit und Jugendjahre in Wien 16

1.2 Ausbildung in Italien 24

1.3 Intermezzo in Salzburg 26

1.4 Seelsorger in New York 29

1.5 Erziehungsreformer in Puerto Rico 36

 

2 empört – Bekenntnis, Zweifel, Zerwürfnis 42

2.1 Die Allianz für den Fortschritt 43

2.2 Gründung des Centro Intercultural de Documentación in Cuernavaca 49

2.3 Illich vor dem Heiligen Offizium 60

2.4 Schlussstrich unter die Causa Cuernavaca 68

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

2.6 „CIDOC was a magic place“ 86

 

3 berühmt: Entschulung, Expertenherrschaft und Kontraproduktivität 101

3.1 Illich öffentlich 106

3.2 Politik und Freiheit 112

3.3 Illich und die Frauen 121

 

4 leibhaftig – Lehrer, Freund, Christ 139

4.1 Die Verderbnis des Besten 139

4.2 Sinne und System 144

4.3 Pionier des Un-Sinns 148

 

5 Illich heute lesen? 153

Literaturverzeichnis 155

Quellen 165

Anhang: Die Schriften am Zentru 166

"Eco-pedagogical dictatorship," or deschooled commons?

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

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

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

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

Illich, in 1983:

… Education I associate with some kind of swimming lesson in which pupils are trained to keep afloat in an ever rising tide of bits, a flood that has long ago lifted them off the ground of personal meanings. As the pupil is taught how to handle, ever more skillfully, the onrush of information, even his desire for grounding in a meaningful system is eroded.

Education, as manpower qualification, is an enterprise by which people are disciplined for competent performance of work which remains meaningless to them. More recently, education, as training for clientage in the service industry, for computer use and for consumption, is an enterprise that teaches people to content themselves with meaningless lives off the job. In both ways education is a means to make people adjuncts to economic growth. But this economic growth will not come and if it comes it will be of an entirely symbolic nature. If the word ‘development’ is to survive, it must now acquire a new meaning. So far it has meant more energy intensive goods and more professional service. Both types of growth have reached their asymptote, not so much because their externalities have become intolerable, but because they have become counterproductive. At this point, development can only mean a change-over from growth to a steady state. However, what steady state shall mean depends entirely on the way in which we interpret the present.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can continue in the illusion that our most basic assumptions about human nature and society are somehow "natural" - that, without knowing it, all cultures share them with us. If we do this, we shall continue to assume that all cultures, in some way, provide education for their young and that everywhere people live off scarce products. In this hypothesis, both education and commodity dependence have always been the condition of man and it makes no sense to transcend them.

If we remain prisoners of this mind-frame, the development of a steady state society will require an unprecedented intensity of education and management. Only a hitherto unimagined degree of sober production, toil in consumption and mutual policing will make survival possible. Only life-long teaching, designed into the environment, can possibly provide that much "education". Re-reading Skinner might prepare us for this scenario of an eco-pedagogical dictatorship.

Grassroots Post-Modernism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illich buys an island? In Scotland?

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

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

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

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

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

Still, if anyone knows more, do tell.