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- Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Each of the four essays reprinted here was written for a specific occasion and together comprise only the smallest selection from a larger corpus questioning commodity and energy-intensive economies. The essays are presented thematically instead of chronologically to offer a better view of the sweep of Illich's argument. In the first two, "War against Subsistence" and "Shadow Work," Illich reveals both the ruins on which the economy is built and the blindness of economics which cannot but fail to see it. The second two essays, "Energy and Equity" and "The Social Construction of Energy," unearth the nineteenth century invention and subsequent consequences of 'energy' thought of as the unseen cause of all 'work' whether done by steam engines, humans, or trees. The science of ecology relies on this assumption and, as Illich explained, unwittingly fuels the addiction to energy. The close dance of energy consumption and economic growth is characteristic of not just industrially geared societies. After all, energy consumption steadily increases even in so-called post-industrial societies, fueling the fortunes of Google and Apple no less than Wal-Mart.
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Ivan Illich
BEYOND ECONOMICS AND ECOLOGY:
The Radical Thought of Ivan Illich
Preface byJerry Brown Governor of California
Edited and introduced bySajay Samuel
MARION BOYARS London · New York
CONTENTS
PREFACE
by Jerry Brown
IVAN ILLICH is not your standard intellectual. His home was not in the academy and his work forms no part of an approved curriculum. He issued no manifestos and his utterly original writings both confound and clarify as they examine one modern assumption after another. He is radical in the most fundamental sense of that word and therefore not welcome on any usual reading list. The authoritative New York Review of Books last mentioned him thirty years ago, one editor terming him too catastrophic in his thinking. The New York Times, in its 2002 obituary, dismissed his ideas as “watered-down Marxism” and “anarchist panache”. Even in death, he deeply upset the acolytes of modernity.
I knew Ivan Illich and had the pleasure of enjoying many hours at his table in lively conversation with his friends in Cuernavaca, Oakland, State College, and Bremen. His gaze was piercing yet it was warm and totally embracing. His hospitality was unmatched and his aliveness and friendship well embodied his ideas that in print were so provocative – and difficult.
Illich was a radical because he went to the root of things. He questioned the very premises of modern life and traced its many institutional excesses to developments in the early and Medieval Church. In his writings, he strove to open up cracks in the certitudes of our modern worldview. He questioned speed, schools, hospitals, technology, economic growth and unlimited energy – even if derived from the wind or the sun. Yet, he flew constantly across continents and mastered rudimentary programming. He once told me computers were an abomination but many years later used them like a pro. Yes, there were contradictions and as you read these essays, take a step back. Probe for the deeper meaning.
As California’s governor, I am building America’s first high speed rail system and pushing a relentless expansion of renewable energy. Yet, I still reflect on Illich’s ideas about acceleration and transportation and even energy. Illich makes you think. He forces you to question your own deepest assumptions. And as you do, you become a better thinker.
Illich said equity would not come with more economic growth. That’s a hard doctrine. We all want our GDP to grow. Yet look at the growth in inequality these last twenty years. Could he have seen that coming? Illich warned of counter-productivity, the negative consequences of exceeding certain thresholds. Are there tipping points in standardized schooling, medical interventions, transportation, energy consumption and the devices it makes possible? Illich wrote of learning as opposed to being taught in classrooms. Now the internet is opening access to knowledge and making learning possible outside of institutional constraints.
Illich early on warned of the ecological dangers of poisons and pollution generated by modern technologies, but he thought the breakdown in our social and cultural traditions was more pressing and more dangerous.
The way he lived, the simplicity and the caring of one human being for another, illuminates the underlying message of all his writings. He saw in modern life and its pervasive dependence on commodities and the services of professionals a threat to what it is to be human. He cut through the illusions and allurements to better ground us in what it means to be alive. He was joyful but he didn’t turn his gaze from human suffering. He lived and wrote in the fullness of life and confronted – with humor and uncommon clarity – the paradoxes and contradictions, the possibilities and yes, the limitations of being mortal.
These essays will provoke you but they will also shine some light on the wonders of our time, its dangers and accompanying illusions.
Jerry Brown Governor of California May 2013
AFTER ILLICH:an Introduction
by Sajay Samuel
THE ECOLOGICAL and economic crises have passed. The word ‘crisis’ derives from the Greek krisis, which referred to that moment in the course of an illness when it decisively turns towards either health, as when a fever breaks into a sweat, or death, as when the pulse fatally weakens. Crisis marks the moment beyond the fork in the road, when the road not taken fades into the distance.
The economic crisis is behind us because ‘full employment’ is no longer thought to be achievable, whether in advanced or emerging economies. Billions worldwide are unemployed. Millions more are underemployed or belong to the class of the “working poor” whose wages do little to lift them from misery. The ecological crisis is in the past as well in that the physical environment surrounding humans has turned inhospitable to many. Disappeared forests, privatized lands, paved streets, and foul airs are but some of the features of degraded land on which few can subsist.
Even as they dimly recognize it, many react to this state of affairs with a mix of resistance, anger, and fear. From Puerta del Sol in Madrid to Zuccotti Park in New York City, young and old have agitated for work. Hundreds of thousands eagerly seek low wages jobs available only to a tiny fraction. Desperate to obtain employment, many students borrow money to pay for the privilege of working as interns. On Earth Day 2012, although millions of people assembled from Melbourne to Maui to protest intensifying environmental degradation, research funds now pile up for geo-engineering on a planetary scale. Proposed schemes include stirring the oceans to absorb more carbon, as if seawater were simply tea in a giant cup. In towns and counties across central Pennsylvania, citizens accept poisoned aquifers and waterways as necessary consequences of “clean” natural gas.
Forty years ago, Ivan Illich (1926-2002) foresaw the coming crises. He argued that the industrialized societies of the mid-twentieth century, including communist Russia and capitalist USA, were already burdened by too much employment and too much energy. Explaining that habituation to employment frustrates and destroys self-reliance, and that the increasing power of machines deepens dependence on them, Illich warned against those whose misunderstanding of ‘crisis’ would perversely bring on what they sought to avoid. Even though this is precisely what they have wrought, politicians and scientists continue to stubbornly insist that the ‘economic crisis’ is simply a matter of not enough jobs and that the ‘ecological crisis’ is a matter of not enough clean energy. ‘Not enough jobs’ channels attention to creating more employment by expanding the economy, just as ‘not enough clean energy’ confines debate to getting more of it through techniques that reduce carbon emissions. This persistent fixation on more employment and more energy has now found expression in dreams of a so-called ‘green economy’, which in one stroke will somehow wipe out unemployment and renew the environment. It’s a fixation that blinds us, Illich noted decades ago, to recognizing the thresholds beyond which useless humans will be forced to occupy uninhabitable environments.
Doubtless, the fear and anxiety of a jobless life is palpable to the intern who must pay to work in a job. So are the incomprehension and anger of the family who is homeless when displaced by a hurricane. But millions of others, who may be luckier, feel trapped between the pincers of shrinking paychecks and the rising costs of gas, heating oil, and food. For the many who must bear it, however, this feeling of vulnerability and precariousness need not lead to paralyzing despair. Instead, forced by their circumstances to acknowledge that widespread unemployment and a ravaged environment are here to stay, they may, with wisdom and humor, rediscover ways of living well. Precisely because good jobs and clean energy are now thought scarce, it is more than ever possible to begin the task of rethinking our attachments to ‘employment’ and ‘energy’.
Selected from Illich’s many essays, pamphlets and drafts, the four items reprinted here remain vitally important to that task. Though written between 1973 and 1983, they retain an urgent relevance to those who must inhabit a world without secure employment or supportive environments. ‘Employment is good’, ‘economic growth is necessary’, ‘technical innovations liberate’, – these were unquestioned assumptions when Illich was writing these essays. They continue to maintain their grip on the collective imagination, although less tightly. Critical reconsideration becomes all the more difficult when an assumption has been left unquestioned long enough to be taken for a certainty and to even congeal into perception. Unlike many of his time and later, Illich’s thought is radical in the sense of going to the roots of modern perceptions. These unsettling and disturbing pages are therefore likely to be useful now to those who seek to find a way, for whatever reason, beyond economics and ecology.
But the reader must exercise forbearance. First, these essays carry the mark of the confrontations Illich engaged in at the time. During the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Illich spoke to packed houses from San Francisco to Sri Lanka, was feted by politicians such as Indira Gandhi and Pierre Trudeau, engaged intellectually with the likes of Michel Foucault and Erich Fromm, and became a fierce and outspoken, if still obedient critic of the Roman Catholic Church which had once viewed him as a favorite son. Second, his thinking cannot be filtered through the political categories of left/right or progressive/conservative. They are unhelpful to fully appreciate a thinker who critiques both the market economy and the welfare state, who takes issue with the economic presuppositions held by both capitalist and socialist regimes, and who questions the supposed virtues of both ‘family values’ and working women. Third, and perhaps most important, his texts seem easy to read because he wore his considerable learning lightly. Their smooth surfaces belie finely wrought conceptual distinctions that support densely packed arguments. If they are to fully enjoy these sometimes polemical, sometimes humorous, but always sparingly crafted pieces of prose, readers who think they have read a text on skimming it will have to slow down and savor Illich’s words.
Each of the four essays reprinted here was written for a specific occasion and together comprise only the smallest selection from a larger corpus questioning commodity and energy-intensive economies. The essays are presented thematically instead of chronologically to offer a better view of the sweep of Illich’s argument. In the first two, War against Subsistence and Shadow Work, Illich reveals both the ruins on which the economy is built and the blindness of economics which cannot but fail to see it. The second two essays, Energy and Equity and The Social Construction of Energy, unearth the nineteenth century invention and subsequent consequences of ‘energy’ thought of as the unseen cause of all ‘work’ whether done by steam engines, humans, or trees. The science of ecology relies on this assumption and, as Illich explained, unwittingly fuels the addiction to energy. The close dance of energy consumption and economic growth is characteristic of not just industrially geared societies. After all, energy consumption steadily increases even in so-called post-industrial societies, fueling the fortunes of Google and Apple no less than Wal-Mart.
Historians have marked the transition from agrarian to industrial society by that phenomenon called the enclosure of the commons, seen vividly in Great Britain but elsewhere as well. The commons referred to the fields, fens, wastelands and woods to which access was free to all for pasturing livestock, planting crops, foraging for fuel wood, and gleaning leftover grain. Well into the eighteenth century, commoners comprised a substantial proportion of the British population and derived the greater portion of their sustenance from the commons instead of the market. From the mid-seventeenth century, but particularly over the hundred years until 1850, thousands of Enclosure Acts legalized enclosures that forced commoners to become landless peasants with no independent means of subsistence. Now fully dependent on paid work, they became the working class.
Privatizing the commons meant transforming land that was open to general use into an economic resource. Since scarce resources require legal and police protections, Illich insisted on not confusing the commons with public property. The latter no less than private property, is protected by the police, as for example are public parks and ‘free speech zones’. In contrast, mutual aid, custom and customary rights among kin and interdependent households characterized use of the commons. The life in common was not devoid of market relations, as for example when working occasionally or purchasing salt. But as Illich noted in his essay Useful Unemployment and its Professional Enemies, “all through history, the best measure for bad times was the percentage of food eaten that had to be purchased.” Commoning gave those who relied on it a floor against destitution. It is the vital importance given to provisioning over profiteering that accounts for such common customs as limits to the hoarding of grains during times of dearth. As the historians E.P Thompson and J.M. Neeson have explained at length, a moral economy encases and fetters the market economy when dependence on the market is balanced by the independence of self-subsistence.
However, Illich argued, the enclosure of the commons was but one chapter in a longer history of the war against subsistence. Indeed, it may not even be industrial products that best exemplify the separation of people from their ability to subsist. Instead, he suggested, ‘the service economy’ offers a more prototypical example for the separation of what economists call ‘production’ from ‘consumption’. As Illich argued in Vernacular Values, in the same year that Columbus accidentally discovered the New World, Elio Antonio de Nebrija petitioned Queen Isabella of Spain to adopt “a tool to colonize the language spoken by her own subjects …” From Catalonia to Andalusia, the Iberian peninsula of the fifteenth century was home to a profusion of vernaculars forged in the kiln of everyday trade, prayer and love. Columbus, who spoke several languages and wrote in a couple more that he could not speak, is a perfect example of how adept people can be without taught language skills. But Nebrija intended his Castilian grammar book and accompanying dictionary as tools to separate people from their untutored ability to speak. He intended for taught standardized language to discipline peoples’ tongues in the interest of imperial power.
What was for Nebrija a stratagem of empire has by now become a need. In contemporary India, everyday speech is taught speech, whether it is the Hindi spoken at the store, the Tamil chattered at home, or the Boston English used to answer 1-800 help lines on behalf of Citibank. Speech is no longer uttered in the course of daily life but results from the consumption of a scarce commodity acquired from language instructors. For Illich, it is the modern professions that function as the most potent propagandists of human needs, whether for schools or for hospitals. Indeed, in his essay on the Disabling Professions, he argued that the construction of humans as needy beings was one of the most pernicious consequences of economic society. In the guise of experts, professionals discriminate against people by imputing a lack, an inability, or a need. They then mask such discrimination by justifying it as doing a service, prompted by their care. This expertly managed belief that humans are beings in need of services from certified professionals has deep roots beginning in the eighth century. As Illich elaborated in Taught Mother Tongue, it was then that priests became pastors by defining their “own services as needs of human nature” and by linking salvation to the obligatory consumption of those services.
Illich proposed to resuscitate the word “vernacular” in its historical reference to what is “homemade, homegrown and homebred”, as a more fitting term than “subsistence”, “human economies”, or “informal sectors”, to refer to what people do for themselves, whether that is singing, cultivating crops, building homes or playing. In the sense he gives the word, the vernacular denotes non-market activities, those not captured by the logic of exchange, without thereby implying a “privatized activity … a hobby or an irrational and primitive procedure”.
The separation of people from vernacular practices delivers them to a regime of scarcity. A dependence on scarce goods and services can be maintained by force, as with zoning laws prohibiting backyard or rooftop chicken coops. Compulsory schooling, like most other expert and professionally defined services, commands dependence by imputing legally sanctioned needs. But institutionalizing envy can also propel dependence on commodities. As Illich argued in Gender, traditional cultures recognized invidious comparison as destructive of social relations and devised symbolic forms such as the ‘evil eye’ to suppress it. But modern economies are organized to mask envy as a way to better disseminate it. ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ or ‘bettering one’s condition’ are slogans that rhetorically blunt what the pastor Bernard Mandeville in 1714 baldly stated as the formula for economic growth: private vices, public benefits.
Despite the contrary assertion of standard economics textbooks, Illich thus argues that modern economies do not solve the problem of scarcity. Instead, the economy is better understood as a machine for the production of scarcity, whether through force, need, or envy. The destruction of the vernacular is both cause and consequence of the economy, and, the resulting subject of the economy is possessive, invidious and needy. Economic ideologists of all stripes, including socialists and capitalists, are convinced of a human need for education and electricity. Their shared conviction reveals them as agents united in the ongoing war against the vernacular, advertised as the virtuous and uplifting cycle of work and consumption.
Throughout the Middle Ages, wage labor was considered a mark of the miserable and thought to be a fate worse than beggary. By the sixteenth century, labor was ennobled and dignified as work by the likes of Martin Luther and John Calvin. By the seventeenth century, those who stood to profit from it argued that work was a natural cure for poverty, which was seen as being caused by laziness or indolence. Conveniently, the assumption-turned-perception of work as natural overlooks that it is the very dependence on wages that modernizes poverty. As Illich pointed out, the modernized poor are those who are prevented from living outside the economy and yet are forced to occupy its bottom rungs.
