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Notes

Corruptio optimi pessima

Shullenberger, G. (2022). The Corruption of the Best: On Ivan Illich. American Affairs, 6(2), https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/the-corruption-of-the-best-on-ivan-illich/

Review of Cayley, D. (2021). Ivan Illich: An intellectual journey. The Pennsylvania State University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271089140

Header image: ﻼF (here)

  • ﻼF ~ via JT, re “enclosure of the commons”
  • His cancelation in 1982
    • The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben—himself recently canceled by the Left for his criticism of pandemic policies—argued in his preface to a new Italian edition of Gender that Illich’s long-neglected work may now be reaching its “hour of legibility.”
  • Over the past two centuries, most critiques of modernity have fallen into one of two camps.
    • The first tends to see the modern age as the spawn of the tragic dissolution of Christian civilization, which had provided stable meaning and order for over a millennium, while the second emphasizes the failures of modernity to fulfill its liberatory ideals.
    • In his mature thought, Illich articulated an alternative to both views, summed up in the phrase corruptio optimi pessima (“the corruption of the best is the worst”). For Illich, secular modernity is not a departure from Christianity, but an extension of profound transformations set in motion by the Church.
  • Deschooling Society was, in Cayley’s words, “an immediate cause célèbre” and “the most widely discussed and debated of all of Illich’s writings.” The project had its beginnings in Puerto Rico, where Illich had initially advocated for free primary schooling for the poor. But as he began to study the observable effects of the expansion of schooling, he noticed its perverse consequences. The result of compulsory mass edu­cation, a relatively new presence in rural Puerto Rico, was not a “level playing field” between rich and poor, but a tendency to “com­pound the native poverty of half the children with a new sense of guilt for not having made it.” [ﻼF – STW]
  • School, Illich came to see, could have the effect of justifying social inequality rather than redressing it. Those better equipped to jump through the educational system’s hoops, usually by virtue of having families that had prepared them, were rewarded as if their academic success was a manifestation of individual merit, while those who could not received the message that their failings were all their own.
    • Just as harmful, he argued, was the school system’s artificial monopolization of learning. The ideology of education tacitly declared that knowledge, which might under other circumstances be acquired through independent study, apprenticeship, and other means, was a scarce commodity only obtainable by passing through prescribed rituals.
  • Illich’s background in ecclesiology and church history informed these lines of criticism. The Gospel message, as he saw it, was a gift of unconditional, unlimited love and fellowship. Yet the history of the Catholic Church was that of the institutionalization of this subversive message. The voluntary fellowship of early Christians, which transcended the traditional boundaries of family and ethnic belonging, evolved into the compulsory rituals imposed by the Church at the height of its power.\
    • Likewise, learning at its best was a spontaneous exercise of curiosity in freely chosen collaboration with others, and school was a perversion of this possibility. Hence, he argued, school should be “disestablished,” as the Church had been in most Western nations.
  • Illich’s optimism about the disestablishment of school proved unfounded. If anything, the salvific vision of education later came to animate policymakers more than ever before. In the United States, as the welfare state was scaled back during the 1980s and 1990s, education was promoted as the “great equalizer” that would enable those in poverty to raise their standard of living through their own efforts, as opposed to falling into dependency on the state. This missionary endeavor culminated in the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act and its Obama-era successors.
    • As Illich would have predicted, the resulting bureaucratization of learning into a regime of testing and evaluation left many chil­dren behind, as inequality continued to skyrocket. But since almost no one questioned the assumptions behind these policies, the solution was always more school.
    • Medicine, in Illich’s account, does for health what education does for learning: it converts a good that people might autonomously cultivate into a scarce commodity only accessible through an institution that monopolizes its distribution…. To admit that unvaccinated young people, particularly those in good physical shape, are at lower risk from Covid-19 than vaccinated older people would be heresy, since it implies that salvation is possible outside the church. [Agamben]

Paradoxical Counterproductivity

This was a dynamic that took hold “whenever the use of an institution paradoxically takes away from society those things the institution was designed to provide.” It is not simply that school fails to impart knowledge; it also degrades and cor­rupts knowledge by enclosing it within the system of self-perpetuating rituals and perverse incentives other social critics have designated “credentialism.”

  • Anyone who has taught will be familiar with the type of student who hasn’t the slightest interest in the subject matter but an intense concern with how to get an A. Whatever their other faults, such students are proceeding from a realistic view of the institution they are operating within, which has replaced learning with artificial signs of it. [e.g. transportation ~ Energy and Equity, written during the 1973 oil crisis;
  • Medical Nemesis, later reissued as Limits to Medicine ~ iatrogenesis: the unintentional causation of an unfavorable health condition (such as disease, injury, infection, or an adverse drug reaction) during the process of providing medical care (such as surgery, drug treatment, hospitalization, or diagnostic testing)

  • The Richness of Subsistence:
    • Throughout his polemical pamphleteering of the 1970s, Illich had inveighed against what he called the “war on subsistence.” By this latter term, Cayley clarifies, Illich did not simply mean “the bare minimum for survival,” but “what is produced for its use value rather than its exchange value” (in Marxian terminology): that is, “what makes its contribution to livelihood rather than to GNP.”
  • Shadow Work….a form of unrecognized labor that had proliferated in industrial societies [pumping gas; self-checkout]
    • For Illich, the shadow work phenomenon was part and parcel of the artificial dispensation he called “scarcity.” Essential human goods, he argued, had once belonged to the commons, but had been subordinated to economic imperatives, to the extent that the mundane activities of daily life were no longer that: they had come to entail incessant production and consumption.
      • Health, once something individuals and communities could cultivate, had become a commodity dispensed by medical providers, just as knowledge had been replaced with the creden­tialist pursuit of institutionally sanctioned prestige in school. Through the notion of shadow work, Illich came to see that mundane daily activities and basic forms of sociability had been absorbed into commodity production—and he did not even live to see social media and dating apps.

Sex, Gender, and Capitalism

  • Industrial capitalism, he argues, thus replaces gendered humans, whose lives play out in the distinct gendered spheres of their particular culture, with a unisex homo economicus

Cyberculture and Self-Algorithmization

  • In his earlier writing, Illich had approached technological tools as Marshall McLuhan had: as “extensions of man.” The “age of instrumentality,” he argued, had begun not with Gutenberg but with medieval developments in the history of the book that had made written texts more legible and accessible, and thereby enabled the expansion of lay literacy. The book had transformed human subjectivity in the subsequent centuries. The rise of computers and network technology, he believed, was bringing about a comparably radical shift.
  • The reformist optimism of his earlier works gave way to a sense that a vast “machinery for suppressing and preventing surprise” was becoming ineluctable. [ﻼF: wonder?]

Secularized Religion amid Secular Stagnation

  • Illich died twenty years ago of a slow-growing tumor he refused to treat—a choice consistent with his rejection of the subjugation of free­dom and surprise to medical risk calculation. “To hell with life!” he exclaimed in a late speech, expressing his disgust at the secular “idolization of life,”
    • In the Covid state of emergency, “saving lives” has offered politicians and public health officials carte blanche for the indefinite suspension of much of what gives living its value. The counterproductivity of such measures, which prohibit living in the name of preserving life, is compounded by their poor record of achieving their stated aims. The self-positioning of “experts” as custodians of life has ratified Illich’s concerns about the excesses of medical power.
  • In the 1970s, “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” might have sounded like a mantra of hope for conviviality, decommodification, and the recovery of use value. Today, it captures an only somewhat hyperbolic anxiety about an emergent global regime of digital feudalism underwritten by secular moralism and ecological doomsaying. The reassessment of Illich’s work Cayley has made possible also demands that we grapple with this ironic legacy.