This volume contains notes that I prepared for my interventions at public meetings held between 1978 and 1990. The manuscripts were selected by Valentina Borremans who also decided upon their sequence. Some have been previously published, others appear here for the first time. Their original purpose explains their style, the occasional duplication of arguments and the absence of references.
From my lecture notes, Valentina Borremans has selected only those which were prepared for meetings held in English and which, in addition, manifest a special concern of mine: each was written as a plea addressed to a different audience and each argues for the historical review of a seemingly trivial notion. In each instance I plead for a historical perspective on precisely those assumptions that are accepted as verities or ‘practical certainties’ as long as their sociogenesis remains unexamined.
In some of these lectures I address professionals. The fact that I was invited by them made me suspect that the fundamental issues that undermine the self-image of the group were on the hidden agenda. In each instance I attempted to call attention to the axioms that generate that epoch-specific mental space within which both everyday and professional reality has come into existence.
My own reading and teaching during the last several years was mainly concerned with mid-twelfth-century imagination, perception, conceptions and fantasy. By interpreting texts of Hugh of Saint-Victor, Heloise, Guibert and Theophilus Presbyter, I tried to grasp the occasional, premature emergence of a kind of assumption whose descendants have become a social reality that we no longer dare wish away. My public lectures were a distraction from these medieval studies and the reader will notice that not infrequently I look at the present as if I had to report on it to the authors of the old texts I try to understand. To each audience I wanted to suggest that only in the mirror of the past does it become possible to recognize the radical otherness of our twentieth-century mental topology and to become aware of its generative axioms that usually remain below the horizon of contemporary attention.
To most of the meetings, for which I prepared these notes, I was invited, often explicitly, as a welcome outsider whose writings, decades ago, had been controversial among the older members of the assembly. I never accepted any invitation unless my host understood that a long route, which could not be compressed into a few introductory remarks of a lecture, separated my current concerns from the books and pamphlets crafted by a much younger man. I showed both prudence and respect for the inviting profession by abstaining from the special language that gave the tone to the particular gathering, be it that of architects, educators, policy makers, medical personnel, Lutheran bishops, or economists. In each case I saw it as my task to fuel controversy on precisely those concepts, sense perceptions or moral convictions that, within the particular circle I was addressing, were probably taboo. On each occasion I lampoon the shibboleths of the year.
The notes from my files are here arranged without regard to their chronological sequence. This obscures the progress of my thought and terminology, but it might make it easier for the reader to grasp the main thread.
In Part One I sketch out what I mean by the ‘commons’, and how I perceive traditional culture as that set of rules which prevented the expansion of scarcity perceptions within a community. I do so first by separating peace from development and then by recognizing the alternative to this de-linkage as something about which I could not speak. Thirdly, I clarify that the alternative to economics cannot be reduced to alternative economics. What is lost when the commons are turned into resources is then exemplified in the notes on silence and dwelling. In the address to the Japanese Entropy Society, I argue that it is the social creation of disvalue which forces us into economic activities and growth. In the last note of this first section, I deal with the dimensions of public option, with a view toward checking the further expansion of disvalue. I search for the politics of renunciation by which, even beyond the ages of culture, desire may flourish and needs decline.
The next chapters in Part Two are addressed to so-called educators. Their common theme is a plea for research on education rather than in education. In different ways, I ask for research on those verities which constitute the common latent assumptions of current educational theories. I argue that the educational sphere is no less a social construct than what was called the sub-lunar sphere, or that of Venus. I suggest that the sociogenesis of homo educandus ought to be studied in the way Louis Dumont studied the emergence of homo oeconomicus. I argue that the assumption of mother tongue or of man’s ‘natural’ destination to begin life as mono-lingual has a recognizable beginning and thus might also come to an end.
At this point my inquiry in Part Three leads into the ‘history of stuff’. What I mean by the ‘stuff’ of modernity appears from a reflection on water turned into H2O. The next chapters are for me reminders of a transitional period which led me from the study of schooling as a mythopoetic liturgy, or ritual, to the transformation of the West under the symbolic impact of the alphabet. I recount my steps and call for research on the symbolic effectiveness of notational systems on the sense perceptions of those who cannot manipulate them. The detachment of the ‘text’ from the manuscript page around the year 1170 generates the new literate stuff that jells into verities and memories. But that stuff too is unstable. What I call ‘lay literacy’ in the twelfth century becomes for me a metaphor for the ‘cybernetic trance’ which the use of computers can induce not only in their operators but in the computer-illiterate as well.
In 1976 I published the third and last version of Medical Nemesis, and spent six weeks arguing about it. Since then I have abstained from all discussions with health professionals. In Part Four I argue that health care is certainly no longer the key issue. I still do not understand how it could have been taken so seriously. The perception of ‘life’ as the ultimate resource and its insidious management are the themes we ought to explore. This is the point for a call to debunk bio-ethics which I drafted in company with Dr Robert Mendelsohn. He died before signing it.
Some of these papers are, in content and form, the result of my longstanding collaboration with Lee Hoinacki. I dedicate this volume to Marion Boyars, the publisher of all my books in English, and a friend whose criticism and encouragement I treasure.
Ivan Illich,
Ocotepec, 1991