The Corruption of the Best: On Ivan Illich - American Affairs Journal

Metadata

Author: Geoff Shullenberger
Full Title: The Corruption of the Best: On Ivan Illich - American Affairs Journal
Category: #articles
URL: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/the-corruption-of-the-best-on-ivan-illich

Highlights

ut 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.”
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.
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.
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.
- Note: Tale as old as time. We never look to see if it’s been tried before, and if so how it worked out. Confidence (groundless) in our conclusions obliterates in our minds any possibility that they might be wrong in some way.
Illich’s examination of schooling helped lead him to a broader thesis he called “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.
The school dropout and the commuter stuck in interminable traffic, according to Illich, are not accidental byproducts of insufficiently evolved systems that can be reformed towards greater efficiency. They are the necessary consequence of the paradoxical counterproductivity that afflicts all projects motivated by the modern dream of unlimited progress.
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.
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.” In domains ranging from school to medicine to transportation, as we have seen, Illich observed that “industrial production … exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition.” He saw the so-called developing world, where the subsistence mode remained widespread, as the central arena for reasserting use value and halting the spread of the “radical monopoly” of professionals.
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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.
Like his contemporary Jean Baudrillard, Illich glimpsed the emergence of a world in which—in Cayley’s words—“[m]odel and reality merge, the difference undetectable, as the model grows ever more responsive and ever more attuned, systems grow ever more intelligent, and algorithms persuasively simulate ever more of our behavior.” It’s little wonder that, given the totalizing power of the “age of systems” he confronted in his later years, Illich’s thinking turned apocalyptic. The reformist optimism of his earlier works gave way to a sense that a vast “machinery for suppressing and preventing surprise” was becoming ineluctable.
Illich’s concern with the suppression of surprise by probability calculation was of a piece with his broader critique of the institutionalization of Christian vocation. “Our hope of salvation,” he wrote in his first book, “lies in our being surprised by the Other.” He saw the visitation of Mary and the incarnation of Christ as the paradigmatic illustrations of this surprise, along with the parable of the Good Samaritan. As Cayley explains, “Illich claimed this parable had been persistently misunderstood as a story about how one ought to act.” In his reading, the importance of the Samaritan’s act is that he “loves outside the categories that prescribe his allegiance and obligation” and “stands for this freedom to invent, to respond, to take unpredictable directions.”
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- Note: Similar to misunderstandings about e.g. Thoreau, whose example is something we can ponder and respond to, something that illustrates unseen possibilities, rather than a moral imperative
Instead, our ruling elites conceal their lack of any positive vision whatsoever beneath displays of performative conscience-laundering. This ideological transformation makes sense as a post facto justification of the material reality of secular stagnation. For the custodians of an economy unable to generate much growth beyond the expansion of speculative finance capital enabled by permanent stimulus, the denunciation of progress has become strategic and rational for those in power. Meanwhile, the developmentalist projects Illich saw as a Western imposition on cultures of subsistence have found a new base of operations in the East, motivated by nationalist pursuit of advantage rather than a messianic universalism inherited from Christianity.
The resilience of the institutions Illich saw as destined to wane now derives in part from their capacity to absorb and repurpose critiques resembling his own, as a new mode of paradoxical legitimation. 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.