Scarcity and the "Social Construction of Energy"

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

“Before Kraft, there was no food.”

“Without General Motors, nobody could move anywhere.”

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

And so forth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

"E" is for "Energy"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Energy Mystics

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

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

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

Spare Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work, Jobs, Computers

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

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

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

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

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

 

Historical Energetics

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

 

Soft Ecology

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Science and Myth

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

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

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

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

 

The Sexist Ideal of the “Human Being”

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

 

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

And thus, the paper ends.

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

The story begins:

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

"I know."

"Monsignor, who are you?"

"I am your judge."

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

The conclusion:

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

Some Memories of Illich in New York City

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

Re(1): Rev. John Illich
Posted on April 2, 2011 at 10:22:49 AM by Frederick Stafford

I am pleased to share with you these few memories I have of Father Illych who made such a great impression on me when I attended New York City's Incarnation Grammar School during the mid-1950's.

He was a very young man when he came to Incarnation which he did, I believe, straight from the seminary. Incarnation Parish at that time was primarily Irish with few Hispanics, the Puerto Rican wave of immigration having only recently started (today, of course, even they have moved to Jersey and the parish is now almost entirely Dominican.) The priests themselves were all either from Ireland or of Irish descent except for Father Illych, whom we assumed to be Russian, and who stood out from his colleagues by reason of this difference.

He and another young priest, Father Conlin, were the favorite confessors of us boys as we knew them to be more lenient than their older colleagues, especially one older intemperate father often heard berating abashed sinners within his confessional. We knew we could count on these younger priests to dole out but the mildest of penances for our grievous sins. Father Conlin was popular too as he was not that much older than us and fond of sport, often joining us in games attired in his cassock; his was a sunny disposition whereas Father Illych always seemed to have a cloud of sorrow hanging over him, as though suffering for fallen humanity, much as Christ did.

His brow was always furrowed and his face etched with lines of worry. Once he was compelled by his superiors to administer a solemn oath to the congregation that we forebear attending the movie, Baby Doll, an order apparently much to his distaste but which he executed as if it were but one more burden that he must bear.

Another time he gave a sermon on the correct way to pray, cautioning us against the rote recitations and hastily rattled off prayers so typical of Catholics, at one point startling us all by raising his arms in aloft and crying out in as dramatic a demonstration from the pulpit as I have ever seen, "When you pray you must pray with all your heart! You must throw yourself down on your knees like this (he half-knelt so we could still see him in the raised pulpit) and cry out to God, 'Oh Lord, hear me! hear this prayer of a lowly sinner, I beg of You! Please God, please, please!' And there were tears in his eyes to match the emotion in his voice.

Years later when I read The Brothers Karamazov I imagined the saintly brother Alyosha as resembling Father Illych. I have read that novel numerous times over the years and it is always Father Illych's face that comes to mind when I get to Alyosha. I had assumed Father Illych was Russian and was surprised to learn that he was Austrian. Only once did I witness his short temper and that was exacerbated by my exceedingly lame pronunciation of Latin when he was training us boys to serve at the alter.

I was surprised to hear years later that he had left the priesthood, as I couldn't imagine him in any capacity other than as a man of God, and he never gave any indication of being the consummate scholar he indeed was. I never knew him that well and I doubt if he would ever have remembered me, but he made a great impression on me and many others to whom he represented something of an archetype.

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

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

Illich video on YouTube

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

"The necessity of straining the ear"

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

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

“Reading the book might have been easier.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Frustration was high, and everyone looked forward to the next morning’s open plenary session, when the unpredictable Illich was scheduled to chair a panel including Kohr, [poet Jeff] Nuttall, and Mildred Loomis, an American ‘decentralist’ theoretician, among others.”

After listening to the panelists, Illich seized control of the proceedings and commenced an infuriating but brilliant oration in which he tried to summarize everything that had been said. His first step was to reject the use of the microphone, castigating it and those who employ it as anti-democratic. If some people in the room could not hear him, Illich maintained, it was because the group was too large.

The assembly he was addressing, Illich claimed, was precisely the right size. “Fifty percent more, and only somebody with a carefully trained voice, specializing to be a politician, would reach then entire group - would dominate.” Of equal importance, however, was “the necessity of straining the ear. It is the best way I know … to really … find out what the person has to say - instead of just letting him irrigate me with words.”

Soon thereafter Illich became infuriated. The occasion was an offhand remark by Jeff Nuttall about “producing ideas.” Illich was incensed when he heard this, and promptly informed Nuttall: “As soon as I am out of the chair, I will take you apart …. Produce ideas … How far can we go?” Illich demanded caustically. “We are not machines!” Language, it turns out, is at the center of Illich’s current work. “If I have problems with a Fourth World, it is that for me a livable world is a world of vernaculars.”

There followed a spellbinding analysis of the purpose and meaning of the assembly, delivered extemporaneously by Illich. “I do not think that producing thoughts fits into any vernacular,” he began. “To apply the term ‘production’ - forgive me for this precision in speech - means to totally misunderstand what is going on. … The term ‘production’ means that you can distinguish between ‘production’ and consumption - and I have no intention of consuming your ideas.”

Illich meant that anyone who wanted to live in a Fourth World where production was necessary could count him out. He employed a technique he called a “subjective appropriation” of everything he had already heard at the assembly to expand this idea. He then summarized the distinctions contributed by five speakers who concerned themselves with what he called “environmental thinking.”

“The next distinction which I heard,” Illich continued, “was … between taught mother tongue and vernacular … a vernacular movement. People who speak one vernacular know that nobody else understands them ever as well as they themselves speak it, because a vernacular you pick up only by listening to people who really say something to each other.”

“Finally, we had someone speak about meaning, sense, as opposed to what is rational,” Illich concluded. “A vernacular environment is profoundly irrational. The term ‘rational,’ when used in the social sciences … means precisely the destruction of that irrationality on which understanding between vernacular people can happen … It’s in a different order.

“I’ve said all this because I have serious problems when the term ‘environmental thinking,’ or ‘ecological thinking,’ is used. Environment usually is conceived as a new kind of professional’s perception of space, which shall be better than that which we have …”

“This way I summed up what went on in my own mind while I listened in a very subjective way to the other speakers this morning,” Illich added. “Because I am working at this moment on an attempt to describe three major, so-called environmental concerns …

“The first one is concerned with the biological environment. … Environmental managers [are] concerned to maintain biological destruction below that level beyond which the industrial system would break down. … A second concern for which you gave for me a very beautiful summary … [is] that growth in product does not only deplete biological and physical resources, both in production and circulation of those resources, but that any kind of growth takes, beyond a certain level, out of the environment precisely those utilization-values which would make it possible for people to get along without further products.”

The third concern, and one that is crucial to Illich’s current intellectual endeavors, is sexism. “I believe that sexism … is a necessary consequence of the splitting of production from consumption,” Illich remarked. “The moment you say ‘producing thought,’ I think already of an erect penis. And the destruction of the conditions for gendered existence is one more … major, converging concern of the environment.”

At that, the assembly seemed to take a collective deep breath and broke for lunch.

An hour later, it was back to the Great Hall for more debate about the propriety of using a microphone. Illich came under increasing attack. The ruckus began when the towering Nigerian Jimoh Omo Fadaka started to use the microphone to ask a question of Illich.

“Stop!” Illich shouted at him. “I cannot believe that you, a member of the Third World, are trying to use this technology. It is not necessary.”

After a time, however, it became apparent that those in the back of the Great Hall could not possibly understand Fadaka’s thickly African-inflected speech without mechanical assistance, and cries of “We can’t hear you!” wafted toward the front until Fadaka finally decided to ignore Illich’s advice.

“We are not interested in such false disputes,” he began. “We are interested in finding solutions to our problems, and we want you to tell us exactly the mechanics of getting there from here. We may or may not decide to agree with you, but we can at least discuss the mechanics … You seem too interested in theory … Can you please give us an idea as to how to get there?”

“Forgive me for being so precise as to harp on this, too,” Illich answered carefully. “I do not have the slightest idea as to what any one of you should do. I do not know what I should do. I know what I have to abstain from - and I have to abstain from speaking to people who can see me through a microphone. You might tell me this is too simple-minded, right? It’s a tiny little thing … for those of you who feel it, it says two dozen other things. And for those who believe that speaking is a production of messages to communicate, it makes no sense!”

Fadaka began to reply, but was again interrupted. “We can’t hear you!” came the chant from the back of the Great Hall. Grasping the microphone, the African told Illich he could not accept what Illich had to say, because ‘if there are difficult solutions to different problems, then there is no point in coming here to discuss them to each other! We might as well go back to where we came from.”

Illich agreed, at least partially. “There might be less sense in coming together than the ‘meeting industry’ assumes. I myself am very, very happy to be here, and I find that the style … this atmosphere of people talking to each other, freely and without feelings of inferiority, is very beautiful … but when [Anglican priest and prominent Fourth World activist] John Papworth first invited me: ‘No, not a Fourth World jamboree! I won’t come!’ … The airplanes are run for the meeting industry.”

Suddenly a well-dressed Englishman in the back of the hall stood up and asked a question. “Your objection to the use of a microphone … I find very difficult to reconcile with the fact that you are wearing the product of high technology - to wit, a pair of spectacles. … How can you [defend this]?”

“Sir, this question was first placed by Goethe, [who] refused in his presence people who wore spectacles,” Illich responded, “because he felt they should see him as clearly or as fuzzily as their nature allowed. I find this very beautiful …”

“I’m afraid I cannot accept that, whatever Goethe says,” his questioner shot back. “You haven’t answered the question I asked.”

“Forgive, I will try to answer in a less Jewish, less metaphorical way," said Illich, as eyebrows shot up around the room. ”I draw the line in my saying of no to television. … I am not a puritan. I believe in dirty, small, forever-courageous attempts of unplugging myself. I purposely, at a meeting which is concerned with scale, try to eliminate the tool which makes the human voice limitless in its reach, because I do believe that now - we have both very good voices - we are aware of three things when we talk without a loudspeaker. We are both aware how distant we are from each other, we are both aware of the limitations a group can have, and, even more importantly, we are both aware of the relative advantage which our personality gives us over [others].”

The debate over the uses of the microphone marked the high point of the assembly, in a sense. Paradoxically, the large-group gatherings seemed to be working better than the small-group forums, some of which were becoming increasingly torn by strife and others of which were falling apart from lack of either interest or focus. Illich went off to spend the rest of his time at a forum on education, which devolved, by reason of his overwhelming personality, into a lecture about his ideas on the necessity of deschooling society, punctuated by occasional questions from the moderator, Henryk Skolimowski - a lecture that was alternately thought-provoking and incomprehensible. (When one poor soul in the education forum interrupted Illich to inform him that she hadn’t understood a word that he said, he snapped back, “I am not trying to communicate with you!” and continued his previous thought.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illich as a young priest in Manhattan

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

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

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

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

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

Boys: I think I go back to San Juan

Girls: I know a boat you can get on

Boys: Everyone there will give big cheer

Girls: Everyone there will have moved here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Against the assimilationist ethos of the early civil rights movement and anticipating the Second Vatican Council's endorsement of "inculturation," Illich argued that the Church could best serve the newly arrived Puerto Ricans by helping them to sustain their traditional liturgical and devotional practices in their new environment. Unlike the progressive, "social justice" Catholicism of the late 1960s, Illich saw culture, rather than economic inequality, as the starting point in the pastoral care of the poor. [In Challenges, Illich collaborator Lee] Hoinacki notes Illich's academic training in the history of liturgy, and argues that Illich "understood … that the most ominous expression of secularization in the West was … the decline of liturgy, the routinization and emptying out of religious ritual in the churches." The liturgical lens through which Illich read modernity may account for the difficulty so many secular intellectuals have had in understanding, much less accepting, his social critique.

[...]

At the heart of Illich's pastoral vision lay the conviction that ministering to the poor requires not so much service as presence. Illich sought not to help the poor, but to be poor. Being poor meant many things, from the biblical ideal of the poor in spirit to a more anthropologically informed notion of cultural poverty, or the abdication of one's cultural assumptions in order to immerse oneself in the life of the poor. Fitzgerald and Illich sought to embody this ministry of presence in their first collaborative outreach project, El Cuartito de Maria, or The Little House of Mary. Illich arranged for Incarnation to rent an apartment in one of the tenements heavily populated with Puerto Rican (potential) parishioners. Women from the parish volunteered to watch and play with children so that mothers could work or run errands, but the purpose of the project was neighborly rather than vocational. Illich insisted that establishing personal relationships with the immigrants was a more important ministry than any program of material or spiritual uplift.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illich in Bali - on art, gender, and education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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