CAYLEY: Throughout your career, you’ve been concerned with what Marshall McLuhan called the fallout from technology. How do you see the question of technology today?
ILLICH: I’ve answered this question many times over the last twenty-five years. I think, from year to year, I’ve answered it differently. The most straightforward answer I could give now would be to say that sometime in the next year I want to take two months to write up a commentary on an early twelfth-century manuscript, De Variis Artibus, by Theophilus Presbyter, an anonym, who lived on the middle Weser River of what is today West Germany.
CAYLEY: How can you call him anonymous if you’ve named him?
ILLICH: Because he calls himself Theophilus Presbyter — the God-loving priest — which is obviously not what his mother called him. If Theophilus is his real name, then he must have been a Greek monk who landed there and who wrote, as far as I know, Western history’s first book on tools in general. There are books in antiquity and the Middle Ages like De Arte Metalica — on metal-working — De Arte Bellica — how to make war — or De Arte Aedificatoria — how to build — but the idea of perceiving tools as something you can intellectually separate from the hands of shoemakers or smiths or journeymen who use them appears with Theophilus in 1128. At the same time in Paris, Hugh of St. Victor, a dear friend of mine, also produces a philosophy of tools in his Epitome Dindimi. This is a discourse he sets up between Dindymus — a guy whom he invents, a Brahmin king, the king of all the gymnosophists, the naked sages — and a pupil. Here also tools are discussed as tools.
Now why do I want to finish this paper, on which I’ve taken notes for the last fifteen years? I first stumbled across a reference to this guy fifteen years ago reading Lessing,135 who had discovered the manuscript of Theophilus Presbyter two hundred years before. I want to do this because I have a suspicion that the concept of the tool and the theological concept of the sacrament are intimately related. In fact, Hugh of St. Victor, the first theoretician of mechanical science in De Sciencia Mechanica, was also the first one who clearly spelled out the idea of the seven sacraments. Out of the hundreds and thousands of carefully formalized blessings and priestly curses of the devil and such things he picked out seven which, he said, did something totally different from other blessings. Less than a hundred years later, at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, it became a dogma of the Church. I believe that there is a relation between the idea of a tool, which does what you want it to do, and a sacrament, which is a sign God allows men to place but which does what God wants to do, more or less independently from the ability, the power, the intention, or even the decency of the priest who administers it. These two concepts are characteristically Western, and it is silly to speak about the perception of the tool as tool in the same way outside of Western history since 1215.
For decades now I’ve been involved in analyzing what tools do to society. I wrote my first book on the subject, Tools for Conviviality, when I was invited to join the deliberations of the Club of Rome. I said, “No, I have something more important to do. You people are concerned with what tool use does to the environment. You are concerned only about material products and their unwanted side effects. I’m obsessed by the idea of what the tools used by the service producers do to society. Let me speak for the moment about schools,” I said to them. “Later on I’ll handle transportation and medicine.” (I then thought also of the law, but I didn’t want to do any more than necessary.) What are the inevitable side products of service-generating tools?
People then began to speak about them as systems, but I stayed with my concept of tools. We have spoken already about schooling, which inevitably degrades more people than it privileges. This is an unwanted side effect, like the unwanted side effects of chemical agriculture, which generates more grain in a given five-year period, with a certain number of workers, in a certain area, but also poisons the earth, leeches the soil, and does many other things.
I first wrote on a general theory of tools in a pamphlet, an essay. I wanted to revive the art of pamphleteering on the intellectual level. I didn’t want to write social criticism or philosophical reflections. From the beginning, I said I wanted to write a pamphlet which would make people discuss the question. So I wrote Tools for Conviviality. I chose the title consciously. The old owner and director of Harper’s squinted with his eyes and said, “Mr. Illich, are you acquainted with American slang?” I said, “Yes, I know how and why I choose my words ...”
CAYLEY: Did he mean that, for most people, convivial means getting tipsy?
ILLICH: That was Silvers, the editor of The New York Review, who said, “This is not a correct use of the word. Convivial means only tipsy joviality.” But the aristocratic American director of Harper’s was of course fully aware that tools — your tools — are between your legs ...
CAYLEY: Ah. But tell me, while you’re interrupted here, why you chose the terms tools and convivial. At first glance, a hospital or a school is not a tool.
ILLICH: It is an engineered device to achieve a purpose, and I needed a simple word anybody would understand. I thought that most people, if they weren’t too prejudiced and made a little bit of effort, would understand smilingly, and say, ah-ha!
Schools lead to schooled society. I remember once when I discussed this in a slum in Chicago at the Urban Training Center, and a little black girl got up and said, “Yeah, yeah, you’re right, we’re all schooled up.” And I answered, “Yeah, we’re all schooled up.” So after lunch, I see all these kids there with buttons, “SCHOOL YOU!”
For thirty years now I’ve tried to figure out how to use ordinary language in that slightly obscene way that makes people see something new without them knowing exactly why. I’ve tried to discover very precise terms that let people say what they want to say. It was with the hope of doing this that, against the advice of all my editors and all my colleagues, I stuck to the word tools for a means to an end which people plan and engineer. It is not just a stick picked up in the street. I call a revolver, a gun, or a sword a tool for aggression. I don’t call every stone which lies around such a tool. There is a poem I like of Robert Lowell’s on this theme.136 I wish I could recite it for you.
Lowell was several times in Cuernavaca, and I had him meet with Francisco Julião. Julião was a peasant leader from the northeast of Brazil who had to flee during the dictatorship. Julião spoke to Lowell and explained to him that the only violence which does not corrupt you is that which you do without tools. The women who stood in front of the prison did not engage in a violence that demeaned them when they picked up the first stones and sticks they found to storm the prison.
I tried to make it clear that there are things we do not use as tools. My claim is that when we really speak to each other, we do not use language, we do not pick from a code, as the professional linguists think that we do. We talk. In Tools for Conviviality, I presented a meditation on how tools, when they grow beyond a certain intensity, inevitably turn from means into ends, and frustrate the possibility of the achievement of an end. I tried to establish the concept of counterproductivity, the fact that a given tool — for instance, a transportation system — when it outgrows a certain intensity, inevitably removes more people from the purpose for which this tool was created than it permits to profit from its advantages. Accelerated traffic, for commuter purposes — that is, compulsory traffic — inevitably increases, for the great majority of society, the time they have to spend every day in going from here to there. And only a few people get the privilege of being almost omnipresent in the world.
I analyzed medicine as a tool, coming to the conclusion that once you medicalize expectations and experience beyond a certain point, medicine inevitably generates more misery, more pain, and more disability than it cures and at the same time decreases people’s ability to engage in the art of suffering or in the art of dying. I’ve analyzed counterproductivity from its various angles. That’s what I did in Tools for Conviviality.
CAYLEY: Was Jacques Ellul an influence?
ILLICH: Certainly, as you suggest, I picked up on Ellul. Jacques Ellul has been, especially then, a very great teacher of mine even though I discovered him only when I was already sitting down to write Tools for Conviviality. People sometimes ask me, “What is your difference?” I always say that he is and remains terribly Calvinist, gloomy. I have no expectations from technology, but I believe in the beauty, in the creativity, in the surprising inventiveness of people, and I continue to hope in them. But Ellul’s thoughts and mine definitely developed more or less along the same lines. Ellul, by the beginning of the 1980s, had come to see technological society as explicable only as a perversion of Christian ideals. This was exactly at the moment when I had begun to realize that conscious engineering — consciousness about means which have the ability to become efficient elements — was the common root of both technology and sacramental theology. Sacraments, according to Christian theology before Catholics and Protestants separated, are efficacious signs. They do, inevitably, what they symbolize.
I became increasingly interested in analyzing not what tools do but what they say to a society and why society accepts what they say as a certainty. If, therefore, I tell you that today I am concerned with a commentary on that twelfth-century text, my main purpose in doing so is to point out that we have come to live in a society where the most important effect which our major tool systems have is to shape our view of reality and to generate in us a set of certainties.
CAYLEY: Can you say more of what you mean by certainties?
ILLICH: Yes, that’s very easy. Two years after having finished Tools for Conviviality, I wanted to develop one dimension of that book somewhat further. So I wrote Energy and Equity. Again, a pamphlet. A pamphlet written because of a request from a friend to contribute on any subject I liked to Le Monde. I called it, from the beginning, Énergie et Équité, and the article began with the statement, “The energy crisis is an illusion.” I met the director of this very venerable Parisian paper on the second of May of that year for lunch,137 after having deposited the manuscript with him the day before on a trip through Paris. The man was very happy. He told me that they would put it on the first page and run it over three days. I agreed with this, and then I said, “You have a great journal — Couldn’t you give me some editorial advice?” “Well, you know how to write,” he said .. . then, finally, “Monsieur, I have one thing to say. Usually, when we begin a journalistic article, we don’t begin it with an expression nobody knows. ‘La crise d’énergie,’ M. Illich. Q’estceque c’est?” What is that, the energy crisis? Well, I said, that word stays there. Seven weeks later, he ran a special issue on the energy crisis! I’m telling you this only as a story to locate for you when this was. This was very far back.
Now, in that book, I analyze what transportation does to a society — inevitably, irremediably — unless you keep it below bicycle speed. If I look back at this book, many years later, I am very much surprised. I really took for granted, for instance, that it is possible to compare a motor and a human being, because there are no motors as energy-efficient as a human being on a bicycle. I based this on White’s paper in which he demonstrated that sturgeons are the most energy-efficient locomotion-producing “engines,” even more effective than people who walk, but people on a bicycle are even more energy-effective.138 I really believed then that it made sense to calculate how much energy people consume when they ride on a bicycle. I completely forgot that people don’t need more energy inputs or more food whether they ride to school or not.
CAYLEY: I’m not sure what you’re saying ...
ILLICH: I’m saying that if I walk or don’t walk, I’m not an energy consumer. As Jean Robert put it last year, “In India, cow shit is not energy. It’s culture, it’s fuel, it’s sacred.”139
CAYLEY:. Oh, I see. You’re talking about certainties you once held and now renounce.
ILLICH: Yes. I was one of the first people who underlined the possibility of calculating the energy efficiency of human beings. It was idiotic. Even more idiotic, if I look back at that book, Energy and Equity, was the fact that I had not understood that locomotion is a very modern concept. People have walked in all societies, but they had no way of moving through a three-dimensional Cartesian space. It didn’t exist. From anthropology we know that most people do not perceive space as three-dimensional. Nor is it possible, until much later, to conceive of walking as moving from one spot described by a Cartesian triplet to another point described by a triplet — establishing a distance over which you move yourself. Conceiving human beings as engaging in locomotion when they walk leads to something quite common in transportation books where one speaks about feet as the instrument for self-locomotion. Well, you immediately see in what a maddening world we live. So my reflection on technology increasingly moves from a study of what it does towards what technology necessarily says.
The prevalence of wheels says that I am engaging in locomotion when I walk and that I’m doing the same thing whether I walk from here to the university with you, reciting poetry, or whether I take a car and drive there. Thinking of myself as engaging in locomotion places me in Cartesian space; and, by placing myself in Cartesian space, I limit my experience, and my sense of reality, to Cartesian space. That’s just one example.
I still stick to the expression — but not to the mood in which it was used — of Jean-Paul Sartre: I will feel forever responsible for what has been done to me, not only by other people but also by the milieu in which I live. It is my duty not to be constrained into three-dimensional space.
What would happen to me there? I would lose the interiority of my heart. I have no co-ordinates — Cartesian co-ordinates — in my heart. But I want it to grow and become comfortable and accommodating for other people. As interesting as the reflections of modern cosmology might be, I understand myself much better when I accept another model, out of which my culture came, the model of contingency in which God holds creation in his hand, as you can see on any Romanesque or Gothic apse.
CAYLEY: Tools for Conviviality is your clearest political statement. It suggests that the political and legal means to achieve your vision of a society which respects a whole series of natural scales are actually at hand. In your subsequent work you have relentlessly criticized the entire vocabulary of contemporary politics. Do you see political possibilities arising from your work today?
ILLICH: What do you mean by politics?
CAYLEY: I mean a way of acting that could be conveyed to a majority.
ILLICH: Let me see if I’ve understood your question. You say that in Tools for Conviviality I came as close as I could to establishing some principles for possible political action around 1972. Do I expect to do better today? No. I then believed in the possibility of a true flipping in consciousness, of which I spoke at the end of Tools for Conviviality. Today I fear that many of the things which made me believe in this have changed.
At that time, I still used such words as in society. I wouldn’t use them anymore. But at the same time, the very concepts I then forged for myself are now hard to grasp. Many of the certainties by which people lived in 1973 are gone. This generates deep cynicism, confusion, and inner void among people who live in an intensely monetarized society, like the urban United States. But it also creates extraordinary opportunities for a new way of existence which I see emerging in Mexico, and in a dozen other places in the world also, places which I know somewhat and can make a judgement about. People can use the so-called benefits of development for their purposes, not for the purposes they were made for. They can cannibalize cars. They can use junk. The educational system in most countries has become so corrupt that they can easily buy certificates and diplomas if they want them for a specific purpose. They don’t have to go to school to learn something.
There are other ways to get certificates, and, increasingly, the system accommodates that because it can’t afford the schools. Or there are ways to cheat at the exams.
People begin to see that it would be stupid to go to a hospital when you are sick. It’s incredible with what speed all the things which Americans call quackery — from homeopaths to osteopaths to herbalists to vegetarian restaurants — have grown up all through Latin America, mainly because they’re cheaper. And as we know from sociology, when people have chosen to buy something, they’ll defend it as superior to what other people have, no matter if others spent much more than they did, unless they are in a highly monetarized society.
When I wrote Tools for Conviviality, I got very deeply disturbed because I foresaw so clearly trends and the convergence of trends which by now are obvious to everybody. But I was lacking in trust in the extraordinary creativity of people and their ability to live in the midst of what frustrates bureaucrats, planners, and observers. Mexico City, for instance, has grown in these fifteen years from a city of four million to a city of twenty million. A city of twenty million should not be governable. But people still come from all over the world to figure out how Mexico City is governed, instead of trying to figure out how come a city like that can survive without government. A city like that should be paralyzed.
People in Mexico, especially during the last three or four years — just ask Gustavo Esteva140 — have decided by the hundred thousands not to seek jobs at a distant place, but to somehow eke out a living close to home in order not to waste their time on transportation.
In 1954, the UNESCO, at its regional meeting in South America, complained that the main obstacle to education was the indifference of parents to sending their children to school. Fifteen years later, they had to notice that the demand for schooling exceeded the number of available classrooms by seven times. But today I know from my own experience that there is widespread cynicism, not among old people — grandparents or great-grandparents — but among people who went through school, and who don’t see any reason why their children should go through the same experience. People can see what scientists and administrators can’t.
CAYLEY: When you wrote Tools for Conviviality, you laid out a political program for inverting the structure of tools, as you put it. And now you’re saying, I think, that it happened, but not in the way you anticipated.
ILLICH: It happened in a way I had not anticipated. In the last words of that book I said that I knew in which direction things would happen but not what would bring them to that point. At that time I believed in some big, symbolic event, in something similar to the Wall Street crash. Instead of that, it is hundreds of millions of people just using their brains and trusting their senses. We now live in a world in which most of those things that industry and government do are misused by people for their own purposes.
CAYLEY: In Tools for Conviviality, you also speculate about what will happen if we don’t take command of our tools, and you issue this rather chilling warning that “engineered obsolescence can break all bridges to a normative past.”141
ILLICH: I’m having a very funny experience in talking to you. I said, yes, I will talk to you, I will expose myself to a conversation between two friends in which one, namely you, takes the initiative and other people listen in. I will do it because you asked me. In the 1960s I trained myself to be interviewed, and to get out of the interview what I wanted. Then in the ‘70s I gave up interviews. I refused to appear on television, I refused any major radio interview — with the exception of a technical thing I did — and also abstained from newspaper interviews. I felt somehow that it was something I didn’t want to do. I know how to write. I know what I want to write about. Let people read me. I don’t want to reach anybody else. This is still my attitude. But you think that you can do something. So I said, let’s do it!
Now when you question me I no longer feel offended by your pretence of pulling out of me things you want to know from me for the benefit of other people. Fifteen years ago, I was offended by such a procedure. I felt it was a cultural offence which one shouldn’t submit to. Now I feel fascinated by your questioning because I see that without submitting to this particular kind of inquisition, I would have no need to go back and see what I wrote in Tools for Conviviality. It is quite painful, but you know that book better than I. I haven’t read it for seventeen years. I remember once or twice having to quote something from it and looking it up.
There was a time in my life when I was taken up by campaigns — a campaign against the arrogance of sending American volunteers to South America, a campaign to make people think about the unwanted side effects of development, and the incredible damage done by establishing what they then called demonstration models for high service consumption in the form of volunteers throughout the Third World. There was a time when I was on a campaign trying to make people reflect on what schools do, on what education implies, on the unhealthy results of the medicalization of society, and so on. This campaigning period of my life extended from, let’s say, 1962 to 1972. And during that time, at a certain moment I came to feel like a jukebox. Arguments I had made a year or two before on a 33 rpm record were now down to a short one, to a 45 rpm. When I arrived in front of my audience, I told them, “Just push the right combination of buttons, I’ll deliver what you called me here to do and then, let’s talk. Let’s get it over with so we can have our discussion.”
Now, as you sit here, after having read my work carefully, and grill me on it, I see that in an examination of what Illich has said and meant, you would pass with flying colors, and I wouldn’t get a passing mark! I feel embarrassed and fascinated when I look at an old book. With a very pointed pencil, I succeeded in saying many things quite well. But the context and my way of saying things have changed. So I close the book and put it away. This is the strange experience that I’m having at this moment. You have asked me about a man who has been. It is I, yes, I take full responsibility. I wrote these books as pamphlets for the moment. It’s amazing, in a certain way, that they should still be around. It’s very lovely. It honors me. But they are dead, written stuff of that time. When I wrote Tools for Conviviality I was in the middle of a political struggle in South America, actually being shot at and beaten up with chains because I ridiculed the Peace Corps and the volunteers the Pope sent down there, and because I questioned the desirability of making the professional state of the art of northern countries into the norm of how schools or hospitals or thinking about health should develop in South America. I was in a different situation, and I saw certain things much more clearly than I see them now.
I then spent several years learning Oriental languages, and getting my feet for long periods on roads which I walked in southeast Asian countries. For a short time I had the dream that what I really should do would be to describe the history of Western ideas in an Oriental language that was far enough away from those languages which I know that I would really get some distance. I thought of Chinese, and found out that I’m too old. I ran into a man, Jean Domenach,142 who told me, “Ivan, if you really want to alienate yourself, really want to look at it from the outside, learn Japanese!” I found out that my brain was already too used up. I couldn’t do it. And, even if I could have done it, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write the stuff I wanted.
I found that northern India — when I finally got enough into the languages and people — wasn’t far enough away, and was already too British to do what I wanted to do, so I moved another step further, into the Middle Ages. I went back to the twelfth century, which I had always loved, to certain authors, like Héloise, like Abelard, like Hugh of St. Victor, all these names whom I have been affectionately acquainted with, and began to teach medieval intellectual history — for almost ten years — in French, and mostly in German. I wanted to figure out what would happen if I described a modern transportation system to a very brilliant and adaptable and sensitive monk of 1135. So I began to play with Latin dialogues in which I explained de transportatione and de educatione in order to get a certain distance and to become a migrant between two space times or, as Einstein says, spimes, our certainties and that other world of certainties. Always, however, I remained mainly concerned with looking at tools because they existed then as now. I couldn’t speak about them in Chinese, even if I knew the language. Needham has shown us why.143 When he speaks about Chinese technology, it’s something other than what we talk about as technology. Just think of his many pages on seminal retention in intercourse as a technique. Astrology is not what we usually think of as technology. A tool is a tool is a tool to a certain degree only.
CAYLEY: You alluded to some incident in which you were attacked with chains?
ILLICH: I take for granted that people know that during the later 1960s and well into the early 1970s, we had — at CIDOC, in Cuernavaca — a lot of violent attempts ...
CAYLEY: I never heard about it.
ILLICH: Well, that’s for historians. Everybody survived it. I always insisted on discipline with my collaborators. We have no idea who hates us. We know who our friends are. Never think about who might want to do something evil to you. If you go under, too bad for you. Nobody went under.
CAYLEY: How did you get this idea of learning first Chinese, then Japanese? You thought that you were too locked into your own certainties?
ILLICH: Exactly. I know how much help it gives me to switch from one European language to another when discussing, for instance, needs. In French it’s besoin, but Spanish doesn’t have such a word for it. I expected that by writing about the history of ideas in Europe in a very foreign language, I would get entirely new perspectives, I would look at it from a different frame. The idea, at the age of forty-seven, that I could imitate Joseph Needham and say, well, I can learn a language like Chinese was, of course, completely wrong. Needham learned it to study Chinese documents. I wanted to learn it in order to write in Chinese about Europe. It couldn’t be done. There have been a few times in my life when I’ve had projects which I had to give up, following my grandfather’s advice, “Never throw good money after bad, good time after bad.”
The Indian experience surprised me because of how easy it was to begin to read, to understand, and to feel somewhat at home there — at home is not really the word but to know how to move there. But I discovered that writing about Western ideas in any of the languages of modern India, or even in an ancient language, made no sense, because the semantic fields of Indian languages were already profoundly Anglicized. That project failed me, so I went back, humbly and happily, to my own Latin. In my studies, for almost ten years, I kept all my notes in Latin — kitchen Latin, medieval Latin.
I enjoy that particular generation of people born around 1100, whose teachers made them read classics, even though they were barely capable of writing a decent Latin sentence. Each one of them by 1120, 1130, 1140, had developed his own personal, beautiful Latin style, in a language into which he had not been born. This has always fascinated me. So I found it very pleasurable to teach the history of pilgrimage to Santiago, or the iconography and architecture of the middle of the twelfth century, to German students who were well equipped to follow me. And I found this move into a totally different world an extremely useful way to gain distance from the present.
CAYLEY: I’d like to return to the question I was asking when you were suddenly struck by the odd situation I had put you in by quoting old texts that are fresher in my mind than in yours. What I was quoting was your prediction that if our society continued on its present track we would in effect cease to be human beings. The way you put it was that we would “break all bridges to a normative past.”
ILLICH: This has happened. Today increasingly people occupy a new dimensionless cybernetic space. It finds a cynical, cold expression in those bright people who say we cannot any longer conceptualize what it means to be human. We can only create icons for it, science-fiction icons. The best way to speak about a modern person is to speak about a cybernetic biological organism, a cyborg. Donna Haraway, a very bright historian of science, makes this point clearly in an article about the modern woman as a cyborg.144
When I wrote the phrase you quote, the break between the contemporary type of modernity — industrial society at the point of becoming a cybernetic society — and the many pasts which have existed in the world, including our own tradition, was already extremely deep. Sometimes I use the mathematician René Thom’s catastrophe theory to illustrate this break. My mathematician colleague, Costas, disapproves because he says you can’t use mathematical terms as metaphors, but if I ignore his threat then there has been a catastrophic break between the early nineteenth century and the century in which I live.145 The mental space in which I live is a different one than that of Goethe or of Schiller. The conceptual and perceptual topology in which I live is noncontinuous with the past. The axioms that spin out the space in which I move are not the same axioms my grandfather still took for granted.
The certainties by which we can talk to each other without ever mentioning them — because they lie, so to speak, beyond the horizon of our attention — are different today than fifty or a hundred years ago. And research on the history of these implicit certainties which tries to pick up the warp and the woof of these percepts will show that these warps, in our perception, run in a new direction. We woof our conversation into a warp that is incomparable to the warp of any other period because it’s made, so to speak, of nylon threads.
CAYLEY: I was also asking whether you think that those who didn’t jump off the bus in 1970 ended up going over a cliff. When you say — in your essay on Epimetheus146 — that Man, capital M, the archetype, himself is at stake or at risk, you’re not just saying that we are entering another epoch-specific mental space, another mental topology among many possible human topologies.
ILLICH: No
CAYLEY: You’re saying there’s a chance that we will leave the human, in any normative sense, behind.
ILLICH: Yes, only in 1988 I wouldn’t any longer be able to speak so easily of man. Not because I would say “he” or “she,” not at all, it’s just that I have become more prudent. I’ve learned a few things. But what you describe is absolutely true and it is now symbolically being enacted in genetic engineering with the dream of creating people.
I have become increasingly silent in public because I have more and more learned to recognize that even very careful and traditional use of words does not allow me to bespeak the percepts my grandfather knew, because they aren’t there anymore. And in a society in which we fantasize — when we speak about genetic engineering — about creating people who look like us but in fact are not descendants of any parents, we go much further than the last generation, who believed that you could have parents without having communities of households.
There is a man called Robert Brungs you might want sometime to interview. He’s extraordinary, an outsider even among his own Jesuits.147 Brungs has a theological argument, which says: I will not accept genetic engineering because I will not accept the existence of people who don’t belong to the human family which was redeemed by God through Jesus. That’s a very theological argument.
Dirk von Boetticher and I will give a seminar at the University of Chicago in November on the social creation of “life” during the last hundred years, the creation of that substantive something which people believe is there when they say “a life,” and on what this does to perception of the human person.148 Doctors now feel responsible for a life, from sperm to worm, or from fertilization to organ harvest, rather than for a suffering person. At the seminar, we will reflect on what happens when “a life” becomes a subject within the state, or a life becomes a citizen. We will discuss what it means when medical management no longer deals with persons but with a manageable construct from before birth to after brain death.
This is just one example of a number of — I don’t know if I should call them concepts — of constructs which are of an epistemologically explosive nature. These are deeply corrupting images that I will not allow to enter into conversation except to exorcise them. When the conversation takes place in front of me, I either ask the people to stop or I leave. I believe that by careful consideration of old texts, I can still bring students out of the world which we take for granted and show them that contemporary English, the English we speak on the street, is no longer able to translate a Latin text of the twelfth century. I try to make them see that they could make such a translation only with an older, now nearly dead English which has at best a marginal existence among us today. This, of course, makes me very unpopular with many creative authors. I do this in order to make these students aware that virtuous behavior today might mean something different than at any previous time in history.
I live with the refusal not only to say certain things but also to use certain words or to permit certain feelings to creep into my heart. I cannot allow myself to meditate on the atomic bomb without going under. Reflection on certain things we take for granted is, in my opinion, acceptance of self-destruction, of burning out your heart. And in addition to these easy-to-speak-about things, which cannot be discussed but only exorcised — such as genetic engineering, such as the atom bomb — there are other things, other realities which, once you accept that there might be intolerable realities, come very close to these destructive devices. Most of what’s going on at this moment in so-called bioethics, for example, belongs, in my opinion, to this area of apocalyptic randiness. I don’t know how else I should speak about it. One hears the triumphant “I have an even more horrible example to tell you! Let’s imagine an even worse situation...”
I think Lifton’s work on the Nazi doctors is important.149 This book is not about horrors. It’s about the extraordinary ability of these particular Nazi doctors to split between effective experimentation and administration of death-dealing poisons to the prisoners, and kindness and affectionate concern with their daughters and wives. If Daniel Berrigan got Lifton right, he wrote that book with the intent of following it by a second book in which he analyzes the same kind of splitting which goes on among contemporary doctors, highly paid and practising in our hospitals.150 I hope that Lifton, who is uniquely competent to do it, will finally write this book. I wanted to do it and didn’t have the ability.
We cannot be careful enough in refusing to act as splitters or in refusing to live a split life in that sense. And yet, in many circumstances, we cannot avoid acting as economic men of our time, performing certain professions and thus maiming our hearts. I look at this isssue in the perspective of the “has been,” the historian, and in that way I avoid the deforming shadow that the future might throw on what I am analyzing.
CAYLEY: When you say that you can’t meditate on the atomic bomb without going under, what do you mean? Do we not have to acknowledge and speak about the things which actually exist in our world?
ILLICH: What can you say about one atomic bomb in the world except ... a shout? When I began to teach in Germany, at the time the Pershing missiles were to be stationed there, I made myself available to the young people, mostly high school students, who wanted to organize protests.151 And I said, we can’t protest in any other way but by standing there silently. We have nothing to say on this issue. We want to testify by our horrified silence. In horrified silence, the Turkish immigrant washerwoman and the university professor can make exactly the same statement, standing next to each other. As soon as you have to explain, opposition becomes again a graded, an elite affair and becomes superficial. I do not want to take part in a conspiracy of gab about peace but claim the privilege of horrified silence, in front of certain things — if I can make my horror visible. And I do understand people who go much further and say, “I can’t do anything else but pour gasoline on myself.” I do understand, but I want to give examples of how you can give testimony to your horrified silence without broaching this — for most people — questionable liturgy.
CAYLEY: Liturgy?
ILLICH: Well, if somebody pours gasoline on himself and puts a match to it, I don’t know what else I should call it. And this I do not consider a diabolic liturgy, a black mass, but precisely the contrary, exactly the contrary.
CAYLEY: This danger, then, that “we will burn out our hearts” as you’ve said ...
ILLICH: Talking about it does burn out hearts. Discussing it, arguing about it, somehow makes genocide an issue of discussion. Can you imagine anybody willing to discuss the possible uses of concentration camps or at least readying concentration camps, extermination camps, in 1943? What would you think of a person who would have been willing to engage in a discussion on principles about keeping concentration camps ready, as a threat? And then we see our major churches saying, Well, we can’t really condemn a country that keeps atom bombs ready.
CAYLEY: I was thinking of those who protest but still try to engage their opponents’ principles.
ILLICH: I would call to their attention the fact that there are words which do not fit ordinary discourse. Jews have a tradition of not using his name, because any sentence in which that name appears wouldn’t be a sentence anymore. Wittgenstein and such people say that it is silly to say that after my death I want this shirt to be yours, because after my death I won’t want anything. Philosophy allows me to clarify, step by step, what it means for a word to have this exceptional epistemic status. I think that genocide and cyborg creation and many other extreme vanities have a similar status as words. Let’s come back to this.