by Ivan Illich
Only quite recently have we begun to tolerate the definition of persons in terms of their needs. Looking at the second volume of the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement confirms this. Under the entry ‘need, a substantive’, the 1976 Supplement lists a new meaning: ‘Psychol: A state of physiological or psychological want, that consciously or subconsciously motivates behavior toward its satisfaction.’ The first quotation that is given by the dictionary to support this new, modern usage is dated 1929. Now, fifty years later, it would be difficult to use the word ‘need’ and prescind from this connotation. Needs have by now become motivating wants.
Then, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the sixties added words like ‘needs test,’ ‘needs analysis’ and ‘need pattern.’ These neologisms indicate that needs are lacks that can be operationally verified and managed. They now constitute a lack which I recognize in the other, and which may be certified by one of the many specialized experts in needs recognition. Increasingly, my own needs are legitimate if they can also be identified in others.
Since 1960 needing has become a learning goal. Education in needing has become an increasingly prominent task. Physicians no longer confine themselves to defining the needs of a patient. They accept the ‘duty’ of educating the patient. The patient must now recognize as his own the needs which are diagnosed. This is the root meaning of ‘informed consent and compliance to the therapy recommended.’ Equally, social workers are no longer satisfied with the administration of their client’s needs. They are trained to bring these needs to consciousness and to advocate their translation into claims. This management of the formation rather than just the satisfaction of needs is a preparation to move social policy-making beyond mere welfare. Since needs can be managed, no needs shall arise in the coming utopia that cannot realistically be satisfied by collective action. By passing from the mere imputation and management of satisfaction to the felt incarnation of needs, the service professions attempt to give leadership on the route to a Skinnered Eden.
Finally, during the seventies, the term ‘basic needs’ has come into economics. And in this way it became a political keyword. A new breed of economists elaborated policy recommendations based on the ethics of effective need satisfaction. The proponents of this new, ethically based economic order are consistently under attack by hard-nosed economic technicians. However, they are rarely criticized for their methods of imputing needs, or for using needs as measures of potential demand. They are usually labeled socialist, an epithet which designates someone who translates imputed needs into precise entitlements that can be used to measure the obligations incumbent on others.
What is at issue here are not the technical, mathematical ways in which various schools of economists have given expression to something which in ordinary language is now referred to as needs, but the use of this term in ordinary discourse. Not only in political debates, but also in casual conversation, unmet ‘needs’ are increasingly used in the definition of persons. And this began only a few years ago. The birthday of the ‘under-developed’ — the extremely needy — is the 10th of January 1949, when President Harry Truman brought him into existence in the speech with which he launched the Point Four program. Other analogous definitions-by-the-negative have slipped into the language in a more surreptitious way. Illiteracy, as a noun, was first used in Boston in 1982 in the Harvard Educational Review. Since then, statistical entities like the ‘undiagnosed’, ‘the untreated’ and ‘the uninsured’ have jelled into subjects with professionally definable needs and claims.
The use of needs, then, to define the human condition has become axiomatic. The human is perceived as the animal in need. The ultimate consequence of the transmogrification of cultures into economics, of goods into values, is the disembedding of the individual self. It then seems natural to define the person by abstract deficiencies rather than by peculiarity of context.
This perception of the human as a needy being constitutes a radical break with any known tradition. And a similar situation obtains with the meaning currently attributed to equality, a definition based on this ‘miserable’ view. Within the needs discourse, human equality is anchored in the certainty of the identity of all peoples’ basic needs. We are no longer equal because of the intrinsic dignity and worth of each person, but because of the legitimacy of the claim to the recognition of a lack.
The needs-defined discourse also characterizes our alienation from each other. We live among strangers who are no less strangers for the fact that we feel responsibility toward the financing of one another’s care. Needs, translated into demands, mediate our responsibility for the other. But it is just this which exempts us from responsibility to him. An example clarifies the issue:
In Japan, the assumption that people need special care because they have become old, sick or unbalanced was far from general in 1985. During that year, Mrs Hashimoto from the United Nations University contrasted two comparable communities, one in the USA and one in Japan. In Japan 70 percent of the old as against 26 in the USA live with their children, and of these, 66 percent (as against six in the USA) live in three-or four-generation households. This will not surprise anyone acquainted with Japanese family traditions. In Japan, marriage adds a new member to the household and, unlike our tradition, leaves the structure of the household intact. As a consequence, it is not surprising that in Japan formal care targets only exceptional cases of proven needs, while in the USA it targets all the old whose needs and consequent entitlements are assumed as a matter of course. What is startling for me in Hashimoto’s analysis of her interviews is this: in the USA, those few families that do shelter their own after the age of 65 insist that they provide informal ‘care’ to old people in view of those persons’ special needs. In Japan, the old simply live in the household, regardless of any perception of their needs. The old are given something best described as ‘hospitality,’ but they ‘need’ neither formal nor informal hospitalization or care.
Notwithstanding the high levels of modernization in Japan, most parents with children over 35 count on the blessing of old age within the household. Economists can calculate how much is saved by domestic care in comparison with what a bed and upkeep in an old people’s home would cost. However, the language of economics is unfit to express either the boon or the burden experienced daily in the four-generation household by its members. Economic indicators can only measure abstractions, comparing phenomena in Tampa with those in Yokohama. By definition, they miss the joys and sorrows possible in a culture. The consequences of utility choices made by an economic actor under the assumption of scarcity are something quite different from the immediacy of loving this person. The latter experience results in blessings whose range runs from the heights of laughter to the sad bitterness of tears.
The needs discourse uproots grandmother from the household of which she had so far been a part, as much as the urn with an ancestor’s ashes. When she is then turned into a subject within the needs discourse, a new person, a senex œconomicus comes into being. This new person is a stranger who by somebody’s choice is hospitalized in her own bed. The household henceforth is experienced as a center of care. Grandmother from now on receives what she needs as an old woman. She no longer simply receives her due, irrespective of any claim based on an economically definable need.
During the early eighties, the needs discourse disembedded millions of elderly Japanese from the context of experience which up to then had defined both their status and the household. Even the current Japanese economy is unprepared to meet the needs which were created by this reinterpretation of age within an economic rather than a cultural context. Last year a high-level Japanese mission journeyed to Mexico. It came to negotiate an agreement which would allow Japanese enterprises to open one million beds for the disposal of aging Japanese in a tropical climate, and offered in exchange an industrial development package. The elderly, formerly experienced as a boon and a burden within the household, were turned into a disvalue for the economy. Professor Ui
Jun claims that the major contribution since 1970 which poor countries have made to the Japanese economy has been the provision of opportunities for the disposal of waste and other forms of disvalue.
What I have characterized as the transformation of a culture into an economy is usually discussed in terms of the growing monetarization of the society. For a couple of decades I have pleaded that the process be studied in terms of the shadow which spreading economic structures throw over the non-economic cultural context in a developing society. In the shadow of economic growth, cultural boons are disvalued. Cooking for granny is redefined as work in the employ of the household whose contribution to the economy can be measured by one of many methods. Or it is discussed as an undesirable remnant of the past, which ought to be eliminated through further development. In both perspectives, giving grandmother her due has been turned into a disvalue once the activity — in this case, cooking late breakfast — is construed as a value which is produced to satisfy her needs.
Economic value arises and overshadows blessings when and where the cultural context is laid waste. The creation of disvalue is the logical precondition for the appearance of economic concepts and the experiences these concepts induce.
I here choose the term ‘disvalue’ for the same reasons for which, earlier, I chose blessings. With these terms I want to designate respectively loss and boon of a kind that cannot be gauged in economic terms. The economist can price a loss. He can calculate external costs, that is, those losses to others that are caused by a product, and that can be internalized into its price. He can calculate depreciation and risks. He can measure the losses caused by obsolescence. For example, he can calculate the amount of damage that has been caused to millions of clients by the recent switch of IBM to a new model. But with concepts that formalize choices under the assumption of scarcity, he has no means to gauge the experience of a person who loses the effective use of his feet because vehicles have established a radical monopoly over locomotion. What that person is deprived of is not in the domain of scarcity. Now, to get from here to there, that person must purchase passenger miles. The geographic environment now blocks his feet. Space has been turned into an infrastructure for vehicles. It would be misleading to call this the obsolescence of feet. Feet are not ‘rudimentary means of self transportation’, as some traffic engineers would have it. However, since most people are by now ‘economized’ (a condition perhaps similar to being anesthetized), they are blind and indifferent to the loss induced by what I call disvalue.
My meaning becomes more clear when disvalue is contrasted with waste. The latter once meant the abuse that deprives a fertile tract of land of its fruitfulness, in the same way that human geography is now deprived by vehicular traffic of its proportionality to feet. But this is not what waste now means. Since about 1840, waste has meant a new kind of stuff, of which I find no evidence in earlier sources. Peasant societies and earlier towns knew no waste. Even at the onset of industrial production, waste still meant what falls off the workbench. It then comes to be recognized as a stuff produced by industry that is a ‘no-good’ to such a degree that it must be removed at almost any cost. Waste, therefore, became an eminently economic category. It could be used as a measure to recognize when disutilities outgrew utilities. But both these economic terms, utilities and disutilities, acquire their respective values to the degree that the matrix that engenders blessings is being destroyed, that is, disvalued. People only then become dependent on motorized crutches when their feet have been crippled by a new environment.
In this new environment, people can no longer avoid transportation. But even worse: the belief arises that in comparison to an accessible world this new environment is a greater good. Indirectly, good of a lower kind is attributed to a pedestrian world. As a consequence, a decline in transportation is seen as a loss.
I am here to plead among economists for help in establishing a discourse in which — being careful not to reduce these substantively non-economic experiences to economic terms — a decline in economic production raises a new question: is this a condition for the recovery of blessings? In such a discourse the key issue is the limitation of economics, and especially the removal of the shadow thrown by economic structures onto the cultural domain. For this purpose we need to learn how to speak in a disciplined way about public issues, choosing words that do not surreptitiously drag in assumptions of scarcity. Only insofar as values come to be recognized in their subsidiary relationship to what I call ‘blessings’ am I able to speak in a disciplined way about public life after the crash of development. When that happens, we can speak about the renunciation of values as a condition for the good life.
Silence is a Commons
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Opening remarks at the ‘Asahi Symposium: Science and Man — The Computer-Managed Society’ Tokyo, 21st March 1982
Minna-san, gladly I accept the honor of addressing this forum on Science and Man. The theme that Mr Tsuru proposes, ‘The Computer-Managed Society,’ sounds an alarm. Clearly you foresee that machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people’s lives, and that such machines force people to behave like machines. The new electronic devices do indeed have the power to force people to ‘communicate’ with them and with each other on the terms of the machine. Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use.
The machine-like behavior of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.
I congratulate Asahi Shimbun on its efforts to foster a new democratic consensus in Japan, by which your more than seven million readers become aware of the need to limit the encroachment of machines on the style of their own behavior. It is important that it is precisely Japan that initiates such action. Japan is looked upon as the capital of electronics; it would be marvelous if it became for the entire world the model of a new politics of self-limitation in the field of communication which, in my opinion, is henceforth necessary if a people wants to remain self-governing.
Electronic management as a political issue can be approached in several ways. I propose, at the beginning of this public consultation, to approach the issue as one of political ecology. Ecology, during the last ten years, has acquired a new meaning. It is still the name for a branch of professional biology, but the term now increasingly serves as the label under which a broad, politically organized general public analyzes and influences technical decisions. I want to focus on the new electronic management devices as a technical change of the human environment which, to be benign, must remain under political (and not exclusively expert) control. I have chosen this focus for my conversation with those three Japanese colleagues to whom I owe what I know about your country — Professors Yoshikazu Sakamoto, Joshiro Tamanoi and Jun Ui.
In the thirteen minutes still left to me on this rostrum I will clarify a distinction that I consider fundamental to political ecology. I shall distinguish the environment as commons from the environment as resource. On our ability to make this particular distinction depends not only the construction of a sound theoretical ecology, but also — and more importantly — effective ecological jurisprudence.
Minna-san, how I wish, at this point, that I were a pupil trained by your Zen poet, the great Basho. Then perhaps in a bare seventeen syllables I could express the distinction between the commons within which people’s subsistence activities are embedded, and resources that serve for the economic production of those commodities on which modern survival depends. If I were a poet, perhaps I would make this distinction so beautifully and incisively that it would penetrate your hearts and remain unforgettable. Unfortunately I am not a Japanese
poet. I must speak to you in English, a language that during the last hundred years has lost the ability to make this distinction, and — in addition — I must speak through translation. Only because I may count on the translating genius of Mr Muramatsu do I dare to recover old English meanings with a talk in Japan.
‘Commons’ is a Middle English word. According to my Japanese friends, it is quite close to the meaning that iriai still has in Japanese. ‘Commons,’ like iriai, is a word which, in pre-industrial times, was used to designate certain aspects of the environment. People called commons those parts of the environment for which customary law exacted specific forms of community respect. People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households. The customary law which humanized the environment by establishing the commons was usually unwritten. It was unwritten law not only because people did not care to write it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs. The law of the commons regulates the right of way, the right to fish and to hunt, to graze, and to collect wood or medicinal plants in the forest.
An oak tree might be in the commons. Its shade, in summer, is reserved for the shepherd and his flock; its acorns are reserved for the pigs of the neighboring peasants; its dry branches serve as fuel for the widows of the village; some of its fresh twigs in springtime are cut as ornaments for the church — and at sunset it might be the place for the village assembly. When people spoke about commons, iriai, they designated an aspect of the environment that was limited, that was necessary for the community’s survival, that was necessary for different groups in different ways, but which, in a strictly economic sense, was not perceived as scarce.
