Note: I am republishing this essay—which is my attempt to articulate the importance of Illich in this time and place—in advance of Bonnitta Roy’s course: BONNITTA ROY: THE CONVIVIAL LIFE - CONVERSATIONS WITH IVAN ILLICH & FRIENDS. The course begins Saturday, September 9th and promises to be excellent. For more information, check out the course description here.
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said recently that Ivan Illich has arrived at his ‘hour of legibility.’ In other words, the radical propositions of Ilich — that we need to ‘deschool society’, for instance, or that the present medical paradigm has become a danger to people’s health, make more sense today than they did in the 1960s when Illich was thought of a ‘the new Karl Marx’ or a maverick at the very least.
Today, we can see Illich as a prophet as much as a philosopher — even if he rejected that role. Illich had an uncanny sense of what was just beyond the horizon: for example, he imagined educational ‘decentralised webs’ way back in the 1960s. But the age of prophets was over, Illich told us; what mattered was friendship and conviviality in the present moment rather than utopian projections for the future. Sacred friendship, awareness, and intimacy were the remedy to the counter-productivity of our apocalyptic ‘age of systems’.
Illich critiqued modern institutions, which he believed were corruptions of the Christian congregation; he questioned our universal and quasi-religious belief in the ‘divine rights’ of hospitals, schools, and all modern institutions. Schools have become increasingly counterproductive to learning; furthermore, the medical establishment is counterproductive to health — ‘economic sex roles’ are counterproductive to men and women. Institutionalising human relationships had created a new kind of zombie or cypher and a social madness on a scale that only a new kind of George Orwell could describe.
While Illich’s view of modernity was as damning as it could be, there is an unacknowledged hope he points to. The more and more transparent the corruption of our institutions become, the more we can ‘rediscover the art of living’, to quote the final paragraph of his neglected masterpiece, Gender. And the basis of that art of living is grounded in what Illich called ‘tools for conviviality’. Apocalypse also means a process of revelation of such tools and modes of being.
DESCHOOLING
Many of us involved in the education racket have been watching the educational system crumble for some time while looking for educational possibilities outside of school. As Marshall McLuhan put it way back in 1963, “The movie, radio, and TV: classrooms without walls”. How much more true is this with the internet! Schools have lost their monopoly, gravity, and status as purveyors of knowledge, just as libraries have become ghostly ruins of another era. As we graduate from the age of machines to the age of systems, students surf the internet to watch porn, teach themselves guitar, or get a basis in continental philosophy — instead of daydreaming in class. Obviously, they are doing most of their learning outside of school.
It is easy to see that schools today are outdated and simulacrums of what they once were. Most teachers still work with a 19th-century ‘factory model’ without noticing that the world has entered a whole new paradigm, a ‘watershed’ in Illich’s language. With a characteristic revolutionary gusto, Illich declared that the education system needed to be dismantled. It might be better to say that schools must be ‘repurposed’ today. However, the revolutionary early Illich wrote powerful polemics, and the Deschooling Society was a bit like The Communist Manifesto; in fact, he later referred to the book as a ‘pamphlet ‘, even though it is widely acknowledged as a classic.
‘Deschooling society’ is somewhat misleading as a title: Illich was actually not opposed to education in institutions, only compulsory mass schooling and the commodification of learning. Schooling is usually considered the equivalent of education, which, according to Illich, is a fallacy; schools are founded on various ‘myths of progress’ and corporate agendas rather than wisdom and learning. In the name of economic prosperity, schools create a new kind of underclass and drop-out culture and a slew of novel pathologies. For example, attention deficit syndrome (ADD) is a pathology born in the school system today. Are we surprised that Children made to sit at desks for hours on end without natural light or fresh air get depression or ADD or become gang members?
There is an almost universal belief in the benevolence and ultimate benefit of school, but to Illich, this is unconscious and ideological, an ‘unquestioned certainty’. Modern schooling impoverishes and stigmatises students despite a mask of benevolence and authority; it accelerates the destruction of the educational process. In reality, schools are a pyramid scheme generating illusory merit: ‘A perfect meritocracy would be a perfect hell,’ he put it. Schools cannot really evaluate virtue, wisdom, or character with grades or ranking systems, and many students fall through the cracks. Furthermore, school creates ghettos and ‘shadow economies’ for those unsuited to its speed and machine-like processes.
The move to the more anarchistic internet is a gesture toward the deschooling of society. In a time of maximum cynicism, radical identity politics, ‘cancel culture’, polarised politics, underpaid teachers and overpaid administrators, many people are living ‘outside the law’ or outside the formal academic system that has become inadequate to the 21st Century. Today, people are finding an audience for ideas on blogs, YouTube, and various communities that have emerged with the internet. Some have quit academia, earning their living entirely outside of the school system.
Furthermore, today, getting a degree has become more and more of an empty status symbol; being a wage slave seems like less and less of an attractive option. The title of Illich’s essay, ‘The Right to Useful Unemployment’, is apropos here. The ‘shadow economy’ Illich spoke about seems to be growing — unpaid labour and skilful unemployment are on the rise in the age of automation and where people work for attention instead of wages.
Illich told us that we need to be divested of the various mythologies of progress that schools promote: that learning is not about acquiring technical information but a dialogical and relational process rather than status and competition for ‘grades’. The teacher’s job is not to create adaptable slaves to an economic machine but to provide a space for inspired, convivial living and learning.
GENDER AND MEDICAL NEMESIS
As we have said before, Illich’s earlier thinking was overtly revolutionary. This changed when Illich was ’cancelled’ — characteristically ahead of his time. In the 1980s, he came under attack by Berkley feminists in what he called a ‘witch hunt’ and was subsequently branded as a reactionary; his popularity never recovered. The book in question, Gender — which is actually concerned with how women are disempowered through the collapse of gender — was not understood. Anyone who has actually read it can attest to his concern for women: that they were becoming second-class citizens in a technocratic society, which, despite the claim of equality, remains dominated by men.
David Cayley has suggested that the word gender was put into wide circulation by Ilich and then co-opted. It has come to mean the opposite of what he meant: something socially constructed and arbitrary rather than god-given and complimentary. While some of Illich’s predictions in Gender are dated, the book's import, as David Cayley has said in his new biography, is that Ilich was a philosopher of complementarity. Illich thought that the dance of complementarity between the feminine and the masculine was a scarce and precious resource being destroyed.
To Illich, the end of his role as a popular culture icon was no actual loss; he felt he was becoming a ‘jukebox’ for his ideas. After Gender, and in the anonymity and on the margins of various universities, he took a deep dive into history and his beloved 12th Century; Illich went far deeper into elaborating the origins of institutional corruption in the Christian church and his Catholic tradition.
In the 1990’s conversations with David Cayley, which led to a popular radio program and a series of books, Illich discussed the institutionalisation of care and sin, with reference to ‘The Good Samaritan’ story in The Bible. When the Samaritan saves a jew who is dying in a ditch, he breaks the traditional tribal boundary. According to Illich, the spirit of this act was both the genius of Christianity and its potential corruption; it represented a new kind of freedom and danger beyond tribalism. The danger was the corruption and impersonalization of Christian charity, which he summed up with the following phrase: ‘The corruption of the best is the worst’. (As a priest subject to a near inquisition by the council of Rome in the Vatican earlier in his career, Illich was well acquainted with church corruption.)
Caring for the weak, the poor, and the outsider was the singular focus of Christian charity, and this led to the modern welfare state and all modern institutions, where care is taken out of our own hands and made bureaucratic law. We will no longer lift the stranger out of the ditch; the ‘state’ will do it for us — just as the church forgives us in confession and thereby relieves us of responsibility and atonement. The actual meaning of the Samaritan, however, is not that we should care for everybody indiscriminately: it described a new kind of freedom to care for whom we choose beyond tribal law.
This brings us back to Illich’s book Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, The Expropriation of Health, one of his earlier radical books. In it, he argued that the new wave of medical monopoly was increasingly becoming a danger to people’s health and wellbeing, creating an ‘iatrogenic cascade’ or plague of medically designed illnesses. In the age of Covid, we can easily see how many measures taken to save lives are counterproductive.
One of our modern problems, Illich claimed, is an obsession with the idol we call life. Life has to be saved at all costs, even at the price of a life worth living and dying. The patient is robbed of the ‘art of suffering’ and the natural process of death that everyone must experience. People are kept alive on life support, addicted to endless new medicines that create new dependencies and diseases. Illich’s book was about the profoundly dehumanising state of the medical paradigm, which makes ‘lifelong patients’ never able to escape from ‘post-operative’ illness and drugs.
As David Cayley points out, Illich was a person who exemplified and lived his views. When he got cancer, for instance, he chose not to operate — smoking raw opium for the pain of the tumour on his face. Cayley has said he probably lived longer and better due to this decision; however, he was not a fundamentalist or against medical intervention or surgery — and he did have surgery for a hernia and would seek medical care when needed. Illich’s point was to establish limits to medicine, where the human relationship between patient and doctor was destroyed in a purely technocratic and abstract view of care. He told us that we should do everything we can not to care in this abstract sense. Care loses meaning if there is no choice or freedom involved by the person being cared for.
Illich placed the origin of this impersonalisation and purely technocratic view in the church's history. In the 12th Century, he said, the seed of modern institutional corruption had begun when texts began to be copied and taken from their vernacular and contextual meaning en masse and used as instruments of power and coercion. He thought that the discontents of modern civilisation can be traced to this watershed moment. The church had moved from being a sacred congregation into a secular instrument of power and control. As he put it, the maternal She of the church became an It.
Of course, the subtleties of this argument cannot be done justice to here. It would be best to read and listen to later and neglected works, conversations, and books with David Cayley and others. This later work completes the earlier while presenting a remarkable thesis. If we can face the apocalyptic possibilities that Illich describes and rediscover vernacular realms outside of institutional commodification, we might be able to rediscover the art of living.
Illich’s demythologising of school systems, his description cascade of ‘iatrogenic’ disease brought on by biomedical monopolies, his mourning of the loss of vernacular language and gender, his description of modernity as the corruption of the church, his plea for conviviality and a bit of hedonism as a remedy to the counter-productivity these institutions afford — these and others of his central ideas seem to me to be more audible to us than they were to most of his contemporaries.
Note: I am indebted to David Cayley’s conversations with Illich and his superlative new biography, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey
Check out new courses this fall at Parallax:
Links to Parallax Academy:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Parallax to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.