Traffic report

We were pleased, this morning, to discover from the Blogger dashboard that New Scare City's total page view count has crossed the 15,000 mark. The bulk of our visitors are from the US, followed by Canadians, Britons, and those from Germany, France, and Italy.

Ivan Illich, 10 years later

Ivan Illich died in December, 2002, and now, 10 years on, a number of get-togethers are being planned here and there to celebrate his life and work.

In Paris, Nov. 29 and 30, École Normale Supérieure - Vivre et penser avec Ivan Illich. Dix ans après

Colloque organisé par Martin Fortier, Nicolas Nely et Thierry Paquot dans le cadre du Club de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève


29 novembre
« Une vie en exemple, une pensée en héritage »

30 novembre, 1er décembre
« Devenirs et avenirs de la critique illichienne »


Plus d’informations prochainement

In Mexico, Dec. 13-15 - information here:

And in Croatia, at the University of Rijeke - details are tentative, but probably Dec. 6, according to Iva Rincic (irincic [at] medri [dot] hr), Assistant Professor, Department of Social Sciences and Medical Humanities.

Finally, as we wrote earlier, there will a symposium in Bremen in early December, and here are the details. (The title translates roughly as "Jester in Absurdistan?")

Recent Papers on Illich

We've just learned of some newly-published papers about Ivan Illich. We've not had a chance to read them, but we look forward to doing so. Until then, here's what we know:

In April, 2011, Western New England University's School of Law held an all-day symposium devoted to Ivan Illich. The title: Radical Nemesis: Re-envisioning Ivan Illich's Theories on Social Institutions.

Now, that school's law review has published a set of papers presented at the conference, as follows. All of these are available in PDF format for downloading at no charge:

SYMPOSIUM: RADICAL NEMESIS: RE-ENVISIONING IVAN ILLICH’S THEORIES ON SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS: FOREWORD
Jennifer L. Levi

ILLICH (VIA CAYLEY) ON PRISONS
Giovanna Shay

ILLICH, EDUCATION, AND THE WIRE
Erin E. Buzuvis

“FOR TOMORROW WILL WORRY ABOUT ITSELF": IVAN ILLICH’S DESCHOOLING SOCIETY AND THE REDISCOVERY OF HOPE
Jared Gibbs

EXCHANGE AS A CORNERSTONE OF FAMILIES
Martha M. Ertman

SHADOW WORKS AND SHADOW MARKETS: HOW PRIVATIZATION OF WELFARE SERVICES PRODUCES AN ALTERNATIVE MARKET
Bridgette Baldwin

FROM WISCONSIN TO EGYPT AND BACK AGAIN: A COMMENT ON BRIDGETTE BALDWIN’S ANALYSIS OF THE SHADOW WORK THESIS
Davarian L. Baldwin

DESCHOOLING THE NEWS MEDIA—DEMOCRATIZING CIVIC DISCOURSE
Akilah N. Folami

THE PLACE OF LAW IN IVAN ILLICH’S VISION OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
Bruce K. Miller

Meanwhile, a journal published by Wiley called Educational Theory has published this paper: "Ivan Illich's Late Critique of Deschooling Society: 'I Was Largely Barking Up the Wrong Tree'," by Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar. The Wiley abstract states:

In this article, Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar examine Ivan Illich's own critique of Deschooling Society, and his subsequent revised critique of educational institutions and understanding of education, within the context of both his personal intellectual journey and the general epistemological shift that started to take shape in the early 1980s. Bruno-Jofré and Zaldívar consider how, over time, Illich refocused his quest on examining the roots (origin) of modern certitudes (such as those related to education) and explored how human beings are integrated into the systems generated by those “certainties.” Illich engaged himself in historical analysis rather than providing responses to specific contemporary problems, while maintaining an interest in the relation between the present and the past. Under the metaphors of the word, the page, and the screen, he identified three great mutations in Western social imaginaries and the reconstruction of the individual self. Bruno-Jofré and Zaldívar argue that while his written work, including Deschooling Society, generally had an apophatic character, his critique of education, particularly in the late 1980s and 1990s, is intertwined with his analysis of the parable of the Good Samaritan and his belief that modernity is an outcome of corrupted Christianity.

Iatrogenesis - "retained surgical items"

New York Times - Sept. 24, 2012 - When Surgeons Leave Objects Behind:

On an overnight shift in 2005, Sophia Savage, a nurse in Kentucky, felt a crushing pain in her abdomen and started vomiting.

The next day she underwent a CT scan, which led to a startling diagnosis: A surgical sponge was lodged in her abdomen, left behind, it turned out, by a surgeon who had performed her hysterectomy four years earlier.

Ms. Savage’s doctor ordered immediate surgery to remove the sponge.

“What they found was horrific,” Ms. Savage said. “It had adhered to the bladder and the stomach area, and to the walls of my abdominal cavity.”

The festering sponge had spread an infection, requiring the removal of a large segment of Ms. Savage’s intestine. She sued the hospital where the hysterectomy had taken place, and in 2009 she won $2.5 million in damages. But the award has been appealed, and her life has been in tatters. Suffering from severe bowel issues and unable to work, Ms. Savage, 59, has been racked by anxiety and depression. Most days, she said, she cannot bring herself to leave home.

“I never dreamed something like this would happen to me,” she said.

Every year, an estimated 4,000 cases of “retained surgical items,” as they are known in the medical world, are reported in the United States. These are items left in the patient’s body after surgery, and the vast majority are gauzelike sponges used to soak up blood. During a long operation, doctors may stuff dozens of them inside a patient to control bleeding.

Though no two cases are the same, the core of the problem, experts say, is that surgical teams rely on an old-fashioned method to avoid leaving sponges in patients. In most operating rooms, a nurse keeps a manual count of the sponges a surgeon uses in a procedure. But in that busy and sometimes chaotic environment, miscounts occur, and every so often a sponge ends up on the wrong side of the stitches. ….

After Atheism, a 5-part radio series by David Cayley

Friend and interviewer of Ivan Illich, David Cayley has produced a series of quite interesting radio programs about religion for the CBC. They don't specifically mention Illich, but anyone who has listened to Cayley's The Corruption of Christianity radio program or read the accompanying book, The Rivers North of the Future, will likely appreciate this new program a good deal. We have, anyway.

The program is called After Atheism, and it consists of five interviews with thinkers, some believers, some not, who have been delving into religion and faith from a modern point of view. For instance, John Caputo is an expert in the philosophy of deconstruction, as put forth by Jacques Derrida, and he finds that method of analyzing texts very helpful in understanding Christianity. Indeed, he came to the surprising conclusion that Derrida himself had been thinking along religious lines right from the beginning, a thought that the radical and presumably atheistic philosopher eventually confirmed quite explicitly.

William Cavanaugh, meanwhile, has looked carefully at how religion and state relate to each other. Put simplistically, he finds that in certain ways, the state itself has created religion as a foil, as something whose clutches it can claim to have saved society from and thereby justify itself.

James Carse wonders what religion is and finds that belief actually has little to do with it. Instead, the great religions look to him like never-ending conversations, endlessly fascinating to those involved -- and to those on the outside, too -- because they attempt to answer questions -- could a guy nailed to a cross, for instance, really be god? -- that seem impossible to answer. The intent is not actually to answer these questions conclusively -- that would end the conversation -- but to make sure that the questions remain in play, so to speak. This leads Carse to some interesting thoughts on death, too -- and much more.

We're unable to do Cayley or his interview subjects justice. Anyone interested, however, can download and listen to his program as a set of five podcasts, available (at no charge) through the iTunes store or here on the CBC Ideas podcast page.

We highly recommend these shows, and especially to anyone who, like us, has sought to grapple with the religious aspects of Illich's thought. Like many people, we suspect, we came to Illich through his early books, about tools and schools, about hospitals and cars. There, Christian thought was quite implicit, lurking very far in the background. Only the occasional hint shined through - an intriguing citation of Thomas Aquinas in the introduction to Tools for Conviviality, for instance. It was clear enough to his readers that Illich was a Christian believer, but he made a point of never relying on biblical references, for instance, to buttress his critiques of major institutions. He knew better, he would later admit, than to lose his audience that way. Towards the end of his life, though, and largely in the interviews he gave to a well-informed and deeply appreciative David Cayley, he made his religious beliefs more explicit. And looking back, it's quite clear that those beliefs were always there, informing his thought, shaping his understanding much as we, for one, suspected all along but never were quite able to pin down.

Mother Jerome

A Web page devoted to Mother Jerome, Ivan Illich's friend and collaborator, can be viewed here. She was born Melanie “Muska” von Nagel in 1908, in Germany. She entered the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis, in Hartford, Connecticut in 1958, and died there in 2006. According to this biographical page, which is part of the Abbey's own website, she had quite a life. And the Abbey itself looks to be a lively place.

Illich wrote his paper, "The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze" (available at the Pudel site in Bremen), he states, "after discussions with Barbara Duden, Mother Jerome, O.S.B., and Lee Hoinacki." Matthias Rieger, a collaborator and friend in Bremen, talks at some length about Mother Jerome in his paper, "The disembodiment of the utterance" (also available from the Pudel site). We've always assumed that Illich's 1989 paper, "Posthumous Longevity, An open letter to a cloistered community of Benedictine nuns" (also at Pudel), was addressed to Mother Jerome. "Dear Mother Prioress," it opens. But we may be wrong about that. (Can anyone help?)

Under the name Muska Nagel, she translated the works of Paul Celan, who was possibly Illich's favorite poet.

Medical Nemesis redux

We just saw this in The New York Times, August 27, in a blog called The Well Column, and it made us think of Medical Nemesis:

Overtreatment Is Taking a Harmful Toll

When it comes to medical care, many patients and doctors believe more is better.

But an epidemic of overtreatment — too many scans, too many blood tests, too many procedures — is costing the nation’s health care system at least $210 billion a year, according to the Institute of Medicine, and taking a human toll in pain, emotional suffering, severe complications and even death.

“What people are not realizing is that sometimes the test poses harm,” said Shannon Brownlee, acting director of the health policy program at the New America Foundation and the author of “Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer,” a 2007 book.

“Sometimes the test leads you down a path, a therapeutic cascade, where you start to tumble downstream to more and more testing, and more and more invasive testing, and possibly even treatment for things that should be left well enough alone.”

Have you experienced too much medicine? As part of The New York Times’s online series The Agenda, I asked readers to share their stories. More than 1,000 responded, with examples big and small.

The article continues to examine many instances of overtreatment. More than 140 readers posted comments. Of course, Illich's concern was not so much over-expenditure on medical care but the harm and extra suffering that the medical system causes those in its care.

Eugene J. Burkart, R.I.P.

We're deeply saddened to learn that Gene Burkart, a devoted and articulate reader of Ivan Illich, died this past Saturday. Gene visited CIDOC in the early 1970s and years later got in touch with Illich and his circle at Penn State. He worked as a lawyer in Waltham, Mass., mainly representing immigrants and other have-nots, as he put it. He was hoping, we understand, to see a gathering of the Illich crowd at Penn State this year, the tenth anniversary of Illich's death.

Gene contributed a piece to The Challenges of Ivan Illich with the title, "From the Economy to Friendship: My Years Studying with Ivan Illich." We recommend it as one of the better responses to Illich that one can find, dealing with the essential question: What should I, what can I, do with the knowledge and awareness of the world that I have obtained through Illich's work?

His essay is available for reading here, at the website Scribd. It opens with a quite remarkable anecdote about Gene's first encounter with Illich at CIDOC in 1973. He had gone to CIDOC quite enthusiastically but soon found Illich to be arrogant and hypocritical, a "phony … enmeshed in his own cleverness." But then, while giving a talk to an audience seated on a porch at CIDOC, Illich turned to look at Gene, who was far off to the side: " … he did not know me. I wondered, Had he sensed my anger? He continued speaking, all the while looking intensely at me, as if he really wanted me to understand what he was saying. I returned his gaze and although I did not understand a word he said, I felt the confusion of my thoughts and feelings inexplicably lifted from me. In those few moments I had the experience of intimately seeing this person, Ivan Illich, for the first time; I then knew he was someone I could trust. But I would not have a direct conversation with him for many years to come."

"I found myself in a quandary," he writes further on in the essay. "If all economic activity has a corrosive effect on society, how is one to act ethically? Modern life is tightly bound up by market relations. Illich contrasted the economic with premodern ways of living he called subsistence or the vernacular. He proposed a 'modern subsistence as an alternative to economics as a way to break the cash nexus.' But, I wondered, where were the examples? I knew that many of those who had attempted to live outside the economy in the back-to-the-land movement failed. I admired the success of the Amish but felt no calling to their way; further, I had friends and family I did not want to leave. Also, being married, I could not just force my ideas on my wife. What could I do? Was there no way out?"

"I eventually concluded," Gene writes, "that the best way to understand Illich's work is as a detailed study of the myriad and varied barriers to friendship that exist in modern life."

"Friendship does not lend itself to an accounting, to economics," Gene finishes his essay. "The only way I can hope to show my gratitude [to Illich] is to strive to be for others the kind of friend Ivan Illich has been to me."

Illich on Television

Here is a pair of photos made of Ivan Illich on television. He was appearing with John Holt. The photos appear on a site devoted to Holt's work. (Specifically, here.) We're not sure what year this was, but our best guess is the early to mid 1970s, when both men were in the news for their criticisms of the educational system.

One thing 'Deschooling' missed ...

… is the increasing use of schools as marketing channels for corporations trying to reach new generations of potential customer.

OK, this kind of thing was not going on when Illich wrote his book, so he can't be faulted for "missing" it. But look at what's happening as schooling "goes digital" and turns into a battleground fought over by traditional textbook publishers and now, reports the New York Times, media companies, too:

… And then there is the Walt Disney Company. It is building a chain of language schools in China big enough to enroll more than 150,000 children annually. The schools, which weave Disney characters into the curriculum, are not going to move the profit needle at a company with $41 billion in annual revenue. But they could play a vital role in creating a consumer base as Disney builds a $4.4 billion theme park and resort in Shanghai.

This is from a news story titled, "Media Companies, Seeing Profit Slip, Push Into Education." The story states: "Conventional textbooks for kindergarten through 12th grade are a $3 billion business in the United States, according to the Association of American Publishers, with an additional $4 billion spent on teacher guides, testing resources and reference materials. And almost all that printed material, educators say, will eventually be replaced by digital versions." The fight to capture the spoils is underway.

Using teaching materials as a way to market brands and branded products to young children is nothing new, of course. A few years ago, a textbook was published that taught children to count and do simply arithmetic in terms of Cheerios, a donut-shaped breakfast cereal. Apple and Microsoft have long been slugging it out in the market for school computers, too. Many brochures and textbooks supplied by corporations are used by cash-strapped high schools to teach other subjects, such as personal health. Marketing wisdom has it, of course, that if a brand manages to make a strong impression on people when they are young, they will quite likely to remain loyal to the brand as they grow older. Hence the billions spent on marketing to pre-teens and teens, albeit mostly outside of school.

If nothing else, using branded textbooks and developing branded schools fits into Illich's general observation that school is where children learn to be consumers. And the use of such teaching materials seems inevitable as the pressure for educational reform mounts, school budgets shrink, and society doubles down on education as a way to help "make America more competitive in the global economy." There is a kind of desperation in the air and corporations are more than glad to step in and help out, and to use the situation to their own ends, as well. It helps, too, that there is a growing call to privatize more of public schooling as a way to slash costs and make it more effective.