by Ivan Illich
IVAN ILLICH
In the Mirror of the Past
Lectures and Addresses
1978–1990
Table of Contents
Title Page
Introduction
PART ONE
The De-linking of Peace and Development
Opening address on the occasion of
the first meeting of the
Asian Peace Research Association
Yokohama, 1st December 1980
The Right to Dignified Silence
Address to ‘People’s Forum: Hope’
Tokyo, 23rd April 1982
I Too Have Decided to Keep Silent
Read and distributed at the
20th Evangelischer Kirchentag.
Hanover, 9th June 1983
Alternatives to Economics: Toward a History of Waste
Address to the annual Human Economy Session at the Eastern Economics Association Conference
Boston, 11th March 1988
Silence is a Commons
Opening remarks at the ‘Asahi Symposium: Science and Man —
The Computer-Managed Society’
Tokyo, 21st March 1982
Dwelling
Address to the Royal Institute of British Architects
York, U.K., July 1984
(Celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects)
The Message of Bapu’s Hut
Inaugural Speech. Sevagram Ashram Pratishthan
Sevagram, Wardha, January 1978
Disvalue
Lecture to the first public meeting of the Entropy Society
Tokyo, Keyo University, 9th November 1986
(Enlarged and combined with ‘Disvaluation: The Secret Capital Accumulation’ and ‘Beauty and the Junkyard’, two unpublished manuscripts completed in March 1987.)
The Three Dimensions of Public Option
Keynote Speech at the 16th General Assembly of the Society for International Development
Colombo, Sri Lanka, 15th August 1979
PART TWO
The Educational Sphere
Fragment from notes for a lecture at Teachers College, Columbia University
New York, Spring 1979
The History of Homo Educandus
Opening Speech at the Plenum of the 5th World Congress of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies
Sorbonne, Paris, July 1984
Taught Mother Tongue
Prepared for a meeting on ‘The Need for New Terminology to Deal with “Mother Tongues”’
held at the Central Institute of Indian Languages.
The lecture was given to honor
Prof. D.P. Pattanayak.
Mysore, India, 1978
PART THREE
H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness
Lecture to the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture
Dallas, May 1984
A Plea for Research on Lay Literacy
Special Guest Lecture at the American Education Research Association General Assembly
San Francisco, August 1986
Mnemosyne: The Mold of Memory
‘The Object of Objects: An Elegy for the Anchored Text’. Concluding Statement at an International Conference on ‘The Socio-semiotics of Objects: The Role of Artifacts in Social Symbolic Processes’
University of Toronto, 24th June 1990
Computer Literacy and the Cybernetic Dream
Lecture given at the Second National Science,
Technology and Society Conference on
‘Technological Literacy’, organized by Science through Science, Technology and Society
Project of the Pennsylvania State University
Washington D.C., February 1987
PART FOUR
Twelve Years after Medical Nemesis: A Plea for Body History
Consultation on ‘Health and Healing in America’
Pennsylvania State University, January 1985
The Institutional Construction of a new Fetish: Human Life
Presented at a ‘Planning Event’ of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
Chicago, 29th March 1990
Medical Ethics: A Call to De-bunk Bio-ethics
Drafted with Dr Robert Mendelsohn, for discussion at the School of Medicine
University of Illinois, Chicago, 20th November 1987
By the Same Author
Copyright
Introduction
* * *
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
PART ONE
The De-linking of Peace
and Development
* * *
Opening address on the occasion of the first meeting of the Asian Peace Research Association Yokohama, 1st December 1980
Professor Yoshikazu Sakamoto. Your invitation to open this series of keynote speeches on the occasion of the foundation of the Asian Peace Research Association both honors and frightens me. I thank you for such trust, but also beg your forbearance for my ignorance of things Japanese. This is the first time that I have given a public speech in a country of whose language I am totally ignorant.
You have invited me to speak on a subject which eludes the modern use of certain English terms. Violence now lurks in many key words of the English language. John F. Kennedy could wage war on poverty; pacifists now plan strategies (literally, war plans) for peace. In this language, currently shaped for aggression, I must talk to you about the recovery of a true sense of peace, while bearing in mind always that I know nothing about your vernacular tongue. Therefore, each word I speak today will remind me of the difficulty of putting peace into words. To me, it seems that each people’s peace is as distinct as each people’s poetry. Hence, the translation of peace is a task as arduous as the translation of poetry.
Peace has a different meaning for each epoch and for each culture area. This is a point on which Professor Takeshi Ishida has written. And, as he reminds us, within each culture area peace means something different both at the center and on the margins. At the center, the emphasis is on ‘peace keeping’; on the margin, people hope to be ‘left in peace.’ During three so-called Development Decades, the latter meaning, people’s peace, has lost out. This is my main thesis: under the cover of ‘development,’ a worldwide war has been waged against people’s peace. In developed areas today, not much is left of the people’s peace. I believe that limits to economic development, originating at the grass roots, are the principal condition for people to recover their peace.
Culture has always given meaning to peace. Each ethnos — people, community, culture — has been mirrored, symbolically expressed and reinforced by its own ethos — myth, law, goddess, ideal — of peace. Peace is as vernacular as speech. In the examples chosen by Professor Ishida, this correspondence between ethnos and ethos appears with great clarity. Take the Jews; look at the Jewish patriarch when he raises his arms in blessing over his family and flock. He invokes shalom, which we translate as peace. He sees shalom as grace, flowing from heaven, ‘like oil dripping through the beard of Aaron the forefather.’ For the Semitic father, peace is the blessing of justice which the one true God pours over the twelve tribes of recently settled shepherds.
To the Jew, the angel announces shalom, not the Roman pax. Roman peace means something utterly different. When the Roman governor raises the ensign of his legion to ram it into the soil of Palestine, he does not look toward heaven. He faces a far-off city; he imposes its law and its order. There is nothing in common between shalom and this pax romana, though both exist in the same place and time.
In our time, both have faded. Shalom has retired into a privatized realm of religion, and pax has invaded the world as ‘peace’ — paix, pace. Through two thousand years of use by governing élites, pax has become a polemical catchall. The term was exploited by Constantine to turn the cross into ideology. Charlemagne utilized it to justify the genocide of the Saxons. Pax was the term employed by Innocent III to subject the sword to the cross. In modern times, leaders manipulate it to put the party in control of the army. Spoken by both St Francis and Clemenceau, pax has now lost the boundaries of its meaning. It has become a sectarian and proselytizing term, whether used by the establishment or by dissidents, whether its legitimacy is claimed by the East or the West.
The idea of pax has a colorful history, in spite of the fact that little research has been done on it. Historians have been more occupied filling library shelves with treatises on war and its techniques. Huo’ping and Shanti seem to have meanings today which are not unlike those of the past. But between them there is a gulf; they are not comparable at all. The Huo’ping of the Chinese means smooth, tranquil harmony within the hierarchy of the heavens, while the Shanti of the Indians refers primarily to intimate, personal, cosmic, non-hierarchic awakening. In short, there is no ‘identity’ in peace.
In its concrete sense, peace places the ‘I’ within the corresponding ‘we’. But in each language area, this correspondence is different. Peace fixes the meaning of the first person plural. By defining the form of the exclusive ‘we’ (the kami of the Malay languages), peace is the base on which the inclusive ‘we’ (the kita) of the Malay languages comes naturally to most speakers around the Pacific. It is a grammatical difference utterly foreign to Europe, and completely lacking in Western pax. Modern Europe’s undifferentiated ‘we’ is semantically aggressive. Therefore, Asian research cannot be too wary of pax, whi
ch has no respect for kita, the Adat. Here in the Far East it should be easier than in the West to base peace research on what ought perhaps to be its fundamental axiom: war tends to make cultures alike whereas peace is that condition under which each culture flowers in its own incomparable way. From this it follows that peace cannot be exported; it is inevitably corrupted by transfer, its attempted export means war. When peace research neglects this ethnological truism, it turns into a technology of peace keeping: either degraded into some kind of moral rearmament, or perverted into the negative polemology (war science) of the high brass and their computer games.
Peace remains unreal, merely an abstraction, unless it stands for an ethno-anthropological reality. But it would remain equally unreal if we did not attend to its historical dimension. Until quite recently, war could not totally destroy peace, could not penetrate all of its levels, because the continuation of war was based on the survival of the subsistence cultures which fed it. Traditional warfare depended on the continuation of people’s peace. Too many historians have neglected this fact; they make history appear as a tale of wars. This is clearly true of classical historians, who tend to report on the rise and fall of the powerful. Unfortunately, it is equally true for many of the newer historians who want to act as reporters from the camps of those who never made it, who want to tell the tales of the vanquished, to evoke the images of those who have disappeared. Too often these new historians are more interested in the violence than the peace of the poor. They primarily chronicle resistance, mutinies, insurgencies, riots of slaves, peasants, minorities, marginals; in more recent times, the class struggles of proletarians and the discrimination battles of women.
In comparison with the historians of power, the new historians of popular culture have a difficult task. Historians of élite cultures, of wars waged by armies, write about the centers of cultural areas. For their documentation they have monuments, decrees engraved in stone, commercial correspondence, the autobiographies of kings and the firm trails made by marching armies. Historians from the losing camp have no evidence of this kind. They report on subjects which often have been erased from the face of the earth, on people whose remains have been stamped out by their enemies, or blown away by the wind. The historians of peasantry and nomads, of village culture and home life, of women and infants, have few traces to examine. They must reconstruct the past from hunches, must be attentive to hints which they find in proverbs, riddles and songs. Often the only verbatim records left behind by the poor, especially women, are the responses made by witches and rogues under torture, statements recorded by the courts. Modern anthropological history (the history of popular cultures, l’histoire des mentalités) has had to develop techniques to make these odd remnants intelligible.
