CAYLEY: I want to begin today by asking you about some people. The first is Michel Foucault. Did he have any influence on you around the time you wrote Limits to Medicine?
ILLICH: No. Foucault became important for me, for a while, in the late 1970s, when I met him for the first time in Paris. We had a very long conversation at the point at which he had just gotten beyond the first volume of his history of sexuality and had become stuck, trying to find his way into the next volume of this multivolume project.181 I argued that I could not see sexuality in the modern sense of something common to women and men yet with a different plumbing — to use Erich Fromm’s phrase — as something constituted before the penitentiaries of the twelfth century. After this conversation, I went on to read seriously his previous work. At the time of Medical Nemesis, I had taken notice of him, but he had not influenced me.
CAYLEY: That’s interesting, because I assumed that he had ...
ILLICH: You might be right. I let things penetrate me and very often I’m not aware where my ideas come from. It has often happened that I have had an idea which I thought was original and, therefore, needed testing and checking out, and, in the process, I have turned up the source from which I had taken it, even if it was a source I had known only indirectly.
CAYLEY: I wanted to ask as well about a man whom I think you loved very much and learned from, Paul Goodman.182
ILLICH: Yes, I loved Goodman very much, but not from the beginning. In 1951, as a twenty-six-year-old man newly arrived in New York, I went to a public debate. This strange person arrived and fascinated everybody with his way of presenting himself. I was just then having my first experiences of sitting through cold turkey with neighborhood kids from Washington Heights, and this guy carefully phrased his proposal that New York immediately decriminalize all substances you can ingest, because otherwise the city of New York would become an unlivable city within the next few years. He had recently played a major part in getting a law passed which recognized that the state should not interfere with the private activities of consenting adults.
Well, I was shocked! I would not have suspected that within three or four years we would be good friends and that during the last part of his life he would spend considerable time with me in Cuernavaca. I consider Goodman one of the great thinkers I’ve known, and also a tender, touching person.
CAYLEY: Was he at CIDOC a good deal in the late 1960s and early 1970s?
ILLICH: Yes. Did I tell you the story of Goodman in 1969 and the little guy who defined himself as an anarchist? Every day Valentina Borremans, who directed CIDOC, closed down all language teaching and seminar activities for an hour and gave even the employees the time off. Those who wished could gather under a big tree on benches which accommodated three or four hundred people for what we called the daily circus. Goodman had agreed to give four lectures in this forum. I had asked him to state a theme for his talks, and he had chosen the law. On this day, he was to speak about the majesty of the law.
There was a little red-haired, woolly-headed kid who felt that anarchistic testimony was very important. I had caught him stuffing forks down into the toilet. I just looked at him and said, “Come, let’s take them out together,” and didn’t tell anybody about it. But I knew the guy. Well, this guy gets up and says to Goodman, “We had expected something better from a man like you than to talk about the law at a time like this.” He said much nastier things which I can’t remember and won’t repeat. Goodman began to cry. When finally his tears had stopped, he looked at the kid and said, “I guess we have come to the point where you have to be an anarchist to understand the dignity of the law.”
Goodman once said to me, “I have never written a line unless I was sure either that I had said it or would say it as it’s written.” And that impressed me, of course, because I’ve never written a line which I have the feeling I could have said. And people don’t notice the difference between my speaking and my writing. They aren’t aware how much, given my destiny, speaking obliges me to read off internal lines. This conversation with Goodman was one of the reasons why later I got so much concerned about the impact of literacy on the mode of being of our Western culture.
CAYLEY: You mentioned this anarchist. Did it often happen that you were mistaken for a sort of free university?
ILLICH: I never worried for what I was mistaken.
CAYLEY: When and why did CIDOC end?
ILLICH: In 1973 I came to the conclusion that all that I had wished to achieve by having started the center in 1960, and then totally done it over in 1965, all which I had absolutely wanted to do and that could be done, had been done. And because of the funny image created, the physical danger to my collaborators had become something which it was difficult to take responsibility for — you must remember what Latin America was at that moment. I also understood that the place would not be able to save itself from university-like institutionalization. Groups of professors from Stanford, Cornell, and other universities wanted to take over the place. This would have meant that the sixty-three people who, under the leadership of Valentina Borremans, actually ran and made the center, none of whom had a college degree and most of whom had not finished elementary school, would have been replaced by a new bunch of internationals.
And I saw a danger coming, because of the Mexican government’s policy of sustaining the peso. I trusted my inherited financial instinct enough in 1973 to convince myself that the oil boom could not sustain the growth rate projected by the Mexican planning institutions. And I predicted that the support of the peso would lead to a very bad crash and to insolvency. Meanwhile life in Mexico would become increasingly expensive. I have never taken grant money, gift money, except for tiny things — I wouldn’t refuse a cookie. CIDOC’S independence was predicated on the difference in salaries between the U.S. and Mexico. We offered intensive language instruction, five hours a day for four months in groups of three. We paid Mexican high school students salaries they couldn’t have gotten being high school teachers in Cuernavaca, and charged Americans prices which were high for Mexico but extremely low for the U.S. Thus, through economies of scale, we were able to cream off enough to run an institute for advanced studies, and a library.
In 1973 I saw that our ability to do this was threatened. Through this managed peso the difference in incomes between Mexico and the U.S. would become too small to sustain this policy. So in 1973 I asked the administration of CIDOC — I never held any office, I never exercised any power, I never signed anything during these fifteen years in Mexico, I always acted through unquestioned influence, but not through the exercise of managerial power — I asked them to get together and gave them a three-day seminar on international economics. I got assistance at this meeting from two or three outstanding Mexican economists, and convinced the group of sixty-three that it was in their interest to accept my plan that, for the next two years or for as long as it would take, income above expenditure would not be spent on books or airplane tickets but would go into a fund. When the fund reached one and a half times the salary mass of a year, it would be divided into sixty-three equal parts, people would go home, and we would close the institution. We then did it on the tenth anniversary, the first of April, 1976, with a huge fiesta at which hundreds of people from town were also present. Some of the language teachers split up the school into several different ones, the library went as a gift to the most responsible library there, at the Colegio de Mexico, and from one day to another it was over.
CAYLEY: Does a vestigial language school remain?
ILLICH: When I began this, I chose Cuernavaca as a place already so touristy that any damage which outsiders could do to a Mexican town had already been done, so we wouldn’t have to feel guilty about the presence of the Peace Corps types and missionaries whom we would attract there. By 1980, there were seventeen competing language schools in Cuernavaca.
CAYLEY: I also wanted to ask you about another of your associates at CIDOC, Paulo Freire. There was a group of us in Toronto at the end of the 1960s who thought of you and Freire as a kind of one-two punch from Latin America. But there’s a footnote in Gender where you treat, not Freire as a man, but his idea of conscientization quite sharply.183 I wondered, what had happened?
ILLICH: Paulo I met in the early 1960s in Brazil. From 1960 on I had felt that something parallel to the center I got going in Cuernavaca — for the discouragement of volunteering activities — ought to be established in Brazil also. And so I founded a place in Petropolis, near Rio de Janeiro. The now deceased John Vogel, who had been in Brazil for a long time, took the place into his hands. It played a strange, important role before and after the military takeover in Brazil. I myself went there as the first student to learn Portuguese.
Then Helder Camara took me over for a month and a half. He made me read at least one book by a Brazilian author or about a Brazilian author’s work every day — people forget sometimes that he was a demanding reader and intellectual — and then in the evening he sat down with me and that author for hours of conversation right across the spectrum of Brazilian politics, literary genres, mentalities. He then sent me out, mostly by bus, for a two-month trip through what he wanted me to know of Brazil before I opened my big mouth. I’ve never had a tutor like that! And people wouldn’t expect Helder to be a tutor like that.
Well, one of the men I had to meet was Paulo Freire. We hit it off immediately and became good friends. Then, a year and a half later, he was in the military police jail. On the very next day, I went to Teodoro Moscoso, who had been one of the five members of the board of higher education in Puerto Rico, where I served with him. I knew him very well. He was then the administrator of the Alliance for Progress, and asked for two heads, that of Paulo Freire and that of Francisco Julião, the peasant leader. The CIA reported to Moscoso at the Department of State that these two were as dangerous as Castro! I didn’t ask why. With that kind of people, you won’t get very far anyway.
I then brought him to Cuernavaca, and there we edited and published his first book outside of Brazil. We made the first translations of his writings and circulated them throughout the world. I was certainly very much impressed by what I saw Paulo’s teams do. Deschooling Society has a few pages which give testimony to this. But I moved from the criticism of schooling to the criticism of what education does to a society, namely, foster the belief that people have to be helped to gain insights into reality, and have to be helped to prepare for existence or for living. Adult education then tries to push itself and make itself obligatory. This became for me the thing I wanted to analyze very critically. Therefore, despite its good and solid tradition, it was I who moved away from the approach for which Paulo had become the outstanding spokesman during the 1960s and early 1970s not only in Latin America but all over the world.
Our friendship has remained tender and completely untouched. And I think a good biography of Paulo would show that he has remained quite independent from the Marxist Christians at the World Council of Churches who have adopted him as their idol and have manipulated his image. I remember Paulo with immense affection, but also as somebody who more and more wanted to save the credibility of educational activities at a time when my main concern had become a questioning of the conditions which shape education in any form, including conscientizacão or psychoanalysis or whatever it might be.
Now, I hope that nobody interprets such a split in our fields of interest, which at a certain moment began to diverge, in that silly political way in which people are always considered as opposing each other. In the analysis of ritualized and graded school education, Paulo was for me a very solid point of passage and remains a dear friend.
CAYLEY: You spoke a little the other day about this passage in your thought from criticizing schools to analyzing the assumptions that make education in any form possible. Perhaps this would be a good time for you to say a bit more about it.
ILLICH: The simplest way of explaining it would be to speak about Wolfgang Sachs. He’s twenty years younger than I and, I don’t know how, he got interested in my work and did a good, solid critical thesis on Deschooling Society. When that thesis was nearing completion, he came to Cuernavaca to meet me, and was there in my seminar. He invited me, if I were ever to be in Germany, to his mother’s, because she knows how to make a very special apple cake. I liked him. So I went to visit his mother, and she told me that her son was not in München but in Tübingen at that time. I went to Tübingen — this was some years ago — on Pentecost. It was a glorious day, one of those days when Germany is really flowering and you think of Goethe and the German Romantic poets. For a couple of decades I had practically not spoken the language. It was a funny, enjoyable weekend.
From then on a group of people formed. They are now middle-aged and serious, but they were then students, and they took me to task for the damage I had done through Deschooling by identifying what other people call education with that institution. They said that nongraded rituals, rituals which assembled either fewer than fifteen or more than fifty people at one time, rituals which did not require thousands of hours of attendance, were increasingly becoming the modality by which the commodity called education was pushed down people’s throats. Therefore, a criticism had to be mounted of the implicit human costs of destroying informal education and replacing it by adult education and in-service training and so on. I took them seriously. And insofar as I was still interested in education, what I went through in the mid-1970s was an attempt to make people understand that the alternative to schooling, when it becomes adult education, could be more oppressive than schooling itself, that the alternative to schooling through home education by parents might be even more horrible than schooling. This was something John Holt very quickly understood. I could then give up talking about it because he took it over with his newsletter and his association.184 This was a beautifully monomaniacal guy, someone you occasionally went to see, just to touch him, to make certain that he did exist! And there he was with his paperclip on his shirt, strengthening his fingers for playing the cello, which he learned as a man of forty, while you talked with him, a guy who put on a green helmet when he went into the subway so he would not be disturbed and could listen to whatever recording of poetry he wanted to enjoy that day.
So this was an important stage for me. The next stage came when I began to say that it was not the myth-making ritual used to make people believe in education which I wanted to examine, but the milieu, and the set of social assumptions, within which the idea of education can arise. This was the beginning of my interest in writing a history of scarcity. I have never succeeded in doing this under one cover. But I have brought together a couple of dozen collaborators, each one pursuing his own line of inquiry in this field.
I began to speak about education as learning under the assumption that the means for this purpose are scarce. If I had only one desire, it would be to get across to the people who study education, researchers on education, that they should study not what happens in education, but how the very idea of this nonsense could have come into existence.
CAYLEY: Let’s talk about some of these assumptions. For example, there’s a passage in Gender where you talk about how the idea of reform has been misunderstood.
ILLICH: Excuse me, but do you know what this feels like? It has just come to my mind. In the twelfth century, priests began to assist at the deathbed. It hadn’t happened before. People died, but the priest didn’t have anything to do with it. Then, in the twelfth century, the priest comes to the deathbed. By the thirteenth, he has taught the dying how to make their final confession.
I knew that there was something strange in this activity in which we are engaged here. And suddenly I’ve realized that you are making me set out on a life-long confession, a re-evaluation, what the preachers in the last century called the personal judgement, as opposed to the final judgement on the day of the resurrection of the dead ...
CAYLEY: Yes? Now, shall I read you the passage?
ILLICH: Yes.
CAYLEY: You say that ideas like conscience and confession, and the Church’s whole machinery of social control, are a perversion of the original Christian idea of reform, which reflects an attempt to bring about a renewal of the world by means of one’s own personal conversion.
ILLICH: One of the great and overwhelming fortunes of my life has been the teachers I’ve had, and among them, Gerhart Ladner is one of the foremost. He is a professor of medieval history, mainly of the history of images, of iconography, in the Middle Ages, a very learned man who in the early 1960s wrote the first volume of a work which will probably remain unfinished.185 The second, he might finish as a gift to me. For the third, he’s too old now, he’ll die before he writes it. His book deals with the idea of reform. Reform, in Latin, means turning around, like a wheel, revolutio. In this first book, Ladner looks at the end of antiquity, Roman antiquity, and notices that three characteristic types of revolutio, turning around, or reformare, putting back into form, can be conceived. The first is the idea of going back to Paradise, to the moment of the creation of the world — the hope or expectation that we’re moving forward, into a thousand years’ kingdom, which justifies any holocaust or any destructive social development which is necessary to reach it. The examples, of course, are mine, not Ladner’s.
Second, there is another form of renewal, which is periodic, the greening of the world every spring. But then, in late antiquity, Ladner sees a new, fundamental assumption about the possibility of renewal arising, which comes from the Hebrew biblical idea of shub Christianized. This idea animates the practice of the Christian monks, particularly Irish and Scottish monks, who go out to strange desert islands and leave the world without leaving life. They make themselves responsible for turning away from their culture and from its assumptions and towards the kingdom of God, towards something new, for which they are willing to turn themselves inside out. He follows this example of the monks because it is an extreme representation of what early Christianity demanded: self-renewal, the renewal of the person, which God will perform, as the major social task of a Christian community. Ladner as a historian asks the question, How does a historian deal with the sudden appearance of an idea as discontinuous with all previous ideas as this? As a historian, how does he grasp it? It’s not legitimate for him to say, Well, God came and revealed it. That’s not within a historian’s frame of reference. He has to face the fact that a new form of perception and behavior, which is unprecedented, surprising, unexpected, and unexplainable, is simply ... there.
Now I have read and reread that volume of Ladner. During the mid-1960s, when all those well-meaning people from South and North America came to my seminar talking about revolution, I said, “At least read the Introduction and a set of pages of your choice in that book before you come.” When I gave this seminar in Mexico, I examined people and eliminated from the class those who hadn’t done their reading of Ladner to my satisfaction. Many just accepted it as a duty. They couldn’t figure out what this crazy man wanted. It was then, and with regard to this concept of Ladner’s, that I began to reflect on the appearance in the first millennium of Christianity of normative ideas which are radically new, and belong to a new gestalt, different from anything known elsewhere or previously. And I began to wonder if their history could be studied, if it would be possible to follow their historical evolution.
Then, slowly, from another direction, I came to ask myself about these young people who sat in front of me and talked about revolution and about the need for renewal today, to which they were committing themselves. I remember the atmosphere in the mid-1960s. It’s difficult to make people today believe that this was not sentimentalism, not mere fantasy, not mere escapism, not mere anger and hatred. There was a real sense of renewal then. It was not romantic, in the sense of trying to go back to Paradise. It was, for many of the best, not apocalyptic, though of course there were Stalinists around, some among the Students for a Democratic Society. And it was not simply Reich’s Greening of America, or Esalen.
There were people who were searching for renewal. They sought this renewal through giving themselves totally to the possibility of making a new society, right now! I asked myself, Where does this idea come from? And I reflected, within this spirit of renewal, on how one could avoid ending up in the well-known American tradition of utopianism. So I began, for the first time in my reflections on history, to go back from a present experience and ask, What are the antecedents of today’s revolution? of social change today? of the possibility of desiring social change? And I slowly remounted the ladder until I found, in Ladner, this early certainty which had so surprised him, that the most important service to the world and to others consisted in turning around one’s own heart.
Since the 1970s, always growing stronger, this has remained a motive of my research. Powerful and unprecedented ideas, brought through Christianity and through the Gospel into Western history, have been perverted into normative notions of a cruelty, of a horrifying darkness, which no other culture has ever known. The Latin adagium, corruptio optimi pessima — there’s nothing worse than the corruption of the best — became a theme in my reading and reflection. Most of my concern with the Middle Ages is precisely to observe the process of flipping by which a notion which goes beyond what I find in any other culture in bringing out the glory of being you and me is then institutionalized by the Church and becomes something more destructive and worse than anything I can find anywhere else.
That’s the reason why this summer with my young friend Manfred Werner, I took once more in my hand the attempt to write a history of the invention of the marriage bond in the twelfth century as one example of this. In the early twelfth century, the idea appears that a man and a woman are so radically equal, so human, that they can make an absolutely bilateral, symmetrical contract by saying yes to each other. This creates a bond between them, a bond acknowledged by a vow, even though Christians are not to swear, according to the New Testament. And God is called as a witness to transform this sacramentally into a contractual relationship in heaven. This is the sacrament of matrimony! All societies know weddings: “You have a daughter, I am an old man and have a son ... Hey, don’t you think it would be nice to become in-laws, you and I? ... Let’s use these two guys to make our plans . .. Oh, and by the way, I have noticed that they already sleep together . . . Much better ... So we avoid any disaster.” That’s typically what weddings were in all societies. Jack Goody, that marvellous English anthropologist who classified African marriage, family, kinship patterns, came back and said that after twenty years, he realized that there was no precedent for this idea of the marriage contract.186 It would have been unimaginable that two people could go and see a priest, and the next day she could say to him, “Listen, I want you to meet your father-in-law.”
The idea that such a thing can exist is something revolutionary, but also of unspeakable potential destructiveness. I’m concerned with how unprecedented, glorious attempts to discover what you and I can do and be, when institutionalized, can become evil and destructive beyond anything one could imagine.
CAYLEY: I want to follow that one step further. The other day you said, I think in reference to starvation in the Sahel, “I don’t care.” I want to know why you refuse “care,” in that sense.
ILLICH: When we use the term care in modern English, it is extremely difficult to make it mean love without demeaning love. Professional care predominates, medical care, care for the pupil in school, taking care of your car, take care! or, he is so caring. John McKnight quite rightly called care the mask of love, the ugly mask of love.187 Of course, if’s a very good old English word, which has been used for centuries; but, if you examine the literature of this century, you’ll find out that care in the sense of the so-called caring professions is a rather modern phenomenon. These have very effectively, very strongly, changed the everyday usage of care. So I’m suspicious when somebody bases morals on care. Professions who learn how to provide professional care in a very peculiar situation usually have very strong public backing. For example, they can establish what care a blind person needs as a minimum. They can set standards, and then test all those people who have difficulties with sight, and then define who is blind. As was shown twenty years ago, half of all people in the U.S. who can’t see have not been defined as blind and don’t get care for the blind, while half of those who are defined as blind can read the newspaper every day. It’s a fact! My own long-dead mother was one of them. She had a black nose, because The New York Times rubbed off!
So, professionals define what constitutes minimal care, who requires it, and then how it will be given. They decide what universal certificates people have to have before they are allowed to touch a diseased person, or teach this blind person how to walk with a cane. In the setting of care having become very much a commodity, when somebody says “I owe care to this person,” he says, gratuitously, “I’ll generate, I’ll make, I’ll produce the commodity which really a professional ought to give in that case.” So, having become very suspicious of care that is the banner of the caring professions, considering caring professions as intrinsically disabling, I become incensed when somebody as beautiful, as loving, as alive as this friend to whom I made the remark you quoted asks me, “But don’t you care for the bloated-belly children on their stick-legs, for those afflicted with kwashiorkor in the Sahel?” My immediate reaction is, I will do everything I can to eliminate from my heart any sense of care for them. I want to experience horror. I want to really taste this reality about which you report to me. I do not want to escape my sense of helplessness and fall into a pretence that I care and that I do or have done all that is possible of me. I want to live with the inescapable horror of these children, of these persons, in my heart and know that I cannot actively, really, love them. Because to love them — at least the way I am built, after having read the story of the Samaritan — means to leave aside everything which I’m doing at this moment and pick up that person. It means taking whatever I have with me, in my little satchel of golden denarii, and bringing the guy to an inn — which then meant a brothel — as that Palestinian did to the Jew who had fallen into the hands of robbers, and saying, “Please take care of this guy. When I return I hope I’ll have made a little bit more money and I’ll pay you for any extra expenditures.”
I have absolutely no intention, if I’m sincere, of leaving this writing desk, these index cards, these files, or selling that little antique Mexican sculpture which I bought for a dollar but which might be worth $500 if I find the right antiquarian in New York, and taking that money to go to the Sahel and take that child in my arms. I have no intention, because I consider it impossible. Why pretend that I care? Thinking that I care, first, impedes me from remembering what love would be; second, trains me not to be in that sense loving with the person who is waiting outside this door; and, third, stops me from taking the next week off and going and chaining myself to the door of some industry in New York which has a part in the ecological disaster in the Sahel.
CAYLEY: : If you refuse care for those outside of your immediate reach, are you left with anything like what one would normally mean by a politics? Or is this in fact a refusal of politics as we usually understand it?
ILLICH: What an enormous jump you want me to make! The future, in the context in which you now speak, is in the hands of God. The big bang might be now. I can’t let anybody insure either the material or the spiritual future for me. I know I live in a world where the greater our ideals are, the greater the insurance companies will become. This includes the Church. It’s an insurance company, to a large extent, for virtue, Christian virtue, for love . . . surviving. And, in a strange way, it is! Because without it, we wouldn’t have tradition, and we couldn’t go back to the Gospel.
As far as politics goes, I’m not condemning anybody who continues to think that democratic politics can be continued. In the tradition of the Western world I, radically, in my roots, have chosen the politics of impotence. I bear witness to my impotence because I think that, not only for this one guy, there is nothing else left, but also because I could argue that, at this moment, it’s the right thing to do. Today, politics almost inevitably focusses attention on intermediate goals but does not let you see what the things are to which we have to say NO! ... as, for instance, to care.