 I'm
sure my readers have told me about Ivan Illich before (if I had a way
to search my blog's comments I could thank those who tried). But I need
to thank David Gurteen for telling me at the right time -- when I'm looking for a model to revamp education around critical skills, and for a way to unite progressives and libertarians (who Lakoff believes are at heart conservatives) against the onslaught of the neocons in a Green Movement. Illich has some powerful answers for both these urgent needs.
Illich grew up in a wealthy European family, entered the priesthood in
the 1950s and did missionary work in Latin America before his ideas and
methods, learned on the front lines among some of the most impoverished
and repressed people on the planet, got him expelled in 1969. Until his
death in 2002 he wrote and lectured extensively about the need for
reforms in all human institutions and systems -- education, business,
government, health care, and economics -- to make them more responsive
to universal human needs and our essential nature. His ideas
effectively merge the philosophies of progressives, libertarians and
anarchists, but his opposition to the more doctrinaire positions of all
three movements has resulted in uninformed and unfair criticisms from
all three groups.
I confess I am just starting to read his work, so this article will be just an introduction to him. But I want readers of How to Save the World to read his work, which is substantially available online for free,
dispassionately and tell me if you are as intrigued as I am with his
thinking, and if you think he might have put his finger on why neither
progressives nor libertarians have been able to make a broadly
compelling argument for their political philosophies. Here is how one Illich site sums up his philosophy [my comments in square brackets]:
Institutions create the needs and
control their satisfaction, and, by so doing, turn the human being and
her or his creativity into objects. Illich's anti-institutional
argument can be said to have four aspects:
- A critique of the process of institutionalization.
Modern societies appear to create more and more institutions - and
great swathes of the way we live our lives become institutionalized.
'This process undermines people - it diminishes their confidence in
themselves, and in their capacity to solve problems... It kills
convivial [social, sociable, joyful] relationships. Finally it
colonizes life like a parasite or a cancer that kills creativity.
- A critique of experts and expertise. Ivan Illich's critique of experts and professionalization was set out in Disabling Professions and in his exploration of the expropriation of health in Medical Nemesis.
The medical establishment has become a major threat to health. The case
against expert systems like modern health care is that they can produce
damage which outweigh potential benefits; they obscure the political
conditions that render society unhealthy; and they tend to expropriate
the power of individuals to heal themselves and to shape their
environment. Experts and an expert culture always call for more
experts. Experts also have a tendency to cartel-ize themselves by
creating 'institutional barricades' - for example proclaiming
themselves gatekeepers, as well as self-selecting themselves. Finally,
experts control knowledge production, as they decide what valid and
legitimate knowledge is, and how its acquisition is sanctioned.
- A critique of commodification.
Professionals and the institutions in which they work tend to define an
activity, in this case learning, as a commodity (education), whose
production they monopolize, whose distribution they restrict, and whose
price they raise beyond the purse of ordinary people and nowadays, all
governments. Illich put it this way: "Schooling - the production of
knowledge, the marketing of knowledge, which is what the school amounts
to, draws society into the trap of thinking that knowledge is hygienic,
pure, respectable, deodorized, produced by human heads and amassed in
stock.....By making school compulsory, people are schooled to believe
that the self-taught individual is to be discriminated against; that
learning and the growth of cognitive capacity require a process of
consumption of services presented in an industrial, a planned, a
professional form;... that learning is a thing rather than an activity.
A thing that can be amassed and measured, the possession of which is a
measure of the productivity of the individual within the society. That
is, of his social value... Learning becomes a commodity, and like any
commodity that is marketed, it becomes scarce". Furthermore, echoing
Marx, Illich notes the way in which such scarcity is obscured by the
different forms that education takes. This is a critique of the
tendency in modern industrial societies to orient toward a 'having
mode' - where people focus upon, and organize around the possession of
material objects. They, thus, approach learning as a form of
acquisition. Knowledge becomes a possession to be exploited rather than
an aspect of being in the world.
- The principle of counterproductivity.
Counterproductivity is the means by which a fundamentally beneficial
process or arrangement is turned into a negative one. Once it reaches a
certain threshold, the process of institutionalization becomes
counterproductive. It is an idea that Illich applies to different
contexts. For example, with respect to travel he argues that beyond a
critical speed, "no one can save time without forcing another to lose
it...[and] motorized vehicles create the remoteness which they alone
can shrink".
Illich's writings were founded essentially on intuition, without any
appreciable reference to the results of socio-educational or learning
research. His criticism evolves in a theoretical vacuum. This may
explain the limited acceptance of his theories and proposals.
Here's an excerpt from Illich's 1973 book (available entirely online) Deschooling Society, and a 1971 lead-up article in the New York Review of Books about how to reform the education system:
Many students, especially those
who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They
school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become
blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the
better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is
thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement
with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability
to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service
in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care,
social work for the improvement of community life, police protection
for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for
productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative
endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the
institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is
made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of
hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.
Educational resources are usually labeled according to educators'
curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different
approaches which enable the student to gain access to any educational
resource which may help him to define and achieve his own goals:
- Reference Services to Educational Objects—which facilitate
access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these
things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental
agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; others
can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but made
available to students as apprentices or on off-hours.
- Skill Exchanges—which permit persons to list their skills,
the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for
others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they
can be reached.
- Peer Matching—a communication network which permits persons
to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the
hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.
- Reference Services to Educators-at-large—who can be listed
in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of
professionals, para-professionals, and free-lancers, along with
conditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will see,
could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients.
Fascination with the
environmental crisis has forced the debate about survival to focus on
only one balance threatened by tools. A one-dimensional dispute is
futile. Three trends have indeed been identified, each of them tending
to upset the balance between man and the physical environment. Overpopulation makes more people dependent on limited resources. Affluence and overconsumption compel each person to use more energy. Faulty technology
[he's using this in the broadest sense of the word] degrades energy in
an inefficient way. If these three trends are considered to be the only
significant threats, and the physical environment is considered as the
only fundamental milieu that is threatened, only two central issues
must be discussed: (1) To decide which factor or trend has degraded the
environment most, and which factor will impose the greatest burden on
the environment during the next few years, and (2) To decide which
factor merits most attention because we can in some way reduce or
invert it. One party claims it is easier to do away with people, the
other that it is more feasible to reduce entropy-producing production.
Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit procreation, consumption, and waste,
but equally we must radically reduce our expectations that machines
will do our work for us or that therapists can make us learned or
healthy.
The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of
people that they would be happier if they could work together and care
for each other. Such an inversion of the current world view requires
intellectual courage for it exposes us to the unenlightened yet painful
criticism of being not only antipeople and against economic progress,
but equally against liberal education and scientific and technological
advance. We must face the fact that the imbalance between man and the
environment is just one of several mutually reinforcing stresses, each
distorting the balance of life in a different dimension. In this view,
overpopulation is the result of a distortion in the balance of
learning, dependence on affluence is the result of a radical monopoly
of institutional over personal values, and faulty technology is
inexorably consequent upon a transformation of means into ends. The
one-dimensional debate among proponents of various panaceas for the
ecological imbalance will only inspire the false expectation that
somehow human action can be engineered to fit into the requirements of
the world conceived as a technological totality.
Bureaucratically guaranteed
survival under such circumstances means the expansion of industrial
economics to the point where a centrally planned system of production
and reproduction is identified with the guided evolution of the Earth.
If such an industrially minded solution becomes generally accepted as
the only way of preserving a viable environment, the preservation of
the physical milieu can become the rationale for a bureaucratic
Leviathan at the levers which regulate levels of human reproduction,
expectation, production, and consumption. Such a technological response
to growing population, pollution, and affluence can be founded only on
a further development of the presently prevailing institutionalization of values.
The belief in the possibility of this development is founded on an
erroneous supposition, namely, that, as Marcuse said in The
One-Dimensional Man, "The historical achievement of science and
technology has rendered possible the translation of values into
technical tasks -- the materialization of values. Consequently, what is
at stake is the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements
in technological process. The new ends, as technical ends, would then
operate in the project and in the construction of the machinery, and
not only in its utilization." The
re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of
society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. Otherwise man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit.
Enveloped in a physical, social, and psychological milieu of his own
making, he will be a prisoner in the shell of technology, unable to
find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of
thousands of years. The ecological balance cannot be re-established
unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and that only
persons can work toward them. Machines only operate ruthlessly to
reduce people to the role of impotent allies in their destructive
progress.
Wow! Did this give you the same 'aha' moments it gave me? Is the
problem with most solutions to our current crises that they are
institutionally based, when what is needed instead are
non-institutional, organic solutions? Instead of being obsessed with
'building something better' should we instead be focused on
'deconstruction tools' that liberate us from institutions and
government and business and systems, and allow us to apply them to
self-organized community-based networks? Did you, as I did, initially
misconstrue Illich's anti-technology, anti-modernist bent as 'noble
savage' romanticism? And could Illich's anti-hierarchy philosophy be
the common ground we need to unite progressives, libertarians and even
anarchists against, and unseat, today's powerful and ruinous
neocon/corporatist hegemony?
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