Bookbuster Book Review
Deschooling Society
Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution
Tools for Conviviality
All by Ivan Illich
Review By Tim Barton
(Part 2 of 2)
Continued from HIP Issue 124 (click here to read)
The self-taught individual will be discriminated against, and in order to be allowed into the club, he/she must gain a ‘recognised’ quantity of learning via the consumption of services through the industrialised/planned/professional institution. That is, he/she must learn to approach learning as the acquisition of a form of capital, and, as Karl Marx or Erich Fromm would note, conspire in his own alienation/dehumanisation.
All the above points lead inexorably to a position wherein a basically positive and beneficial process is turned into a negative and harmful process. It is clear that, beyond a certain scale, institutions are forced through their own internal logic, in combination with the external straitjacket of the market economy (whether free-market or state capitalist), to cross a threshold past which their action becomes frequently counterproductive. At this point the person, or consumer as he/she has now become, will feel the full force of their disempowerment.
BY DEFINITION ‘RADICAL’ AND DANGEROUS TO BOTH LEFT AND RIGHT
Illich in no way embraces a nihilistic opposition to the existence institutions – rather, he sees it as necessary to seek human-scaled institutions; to learn where the thresholds of scale lie in order to avoid crossing over to counterproductive leviathan institutions such as both welfare states and corporatised states offer. To the extent that Capital is the driving force behind such growth, Illich’s position is by definition ‘radical’ and dangerous to both Left and Right.
As opposed to traditional establishment forms of learning, Illich has promoted a more free-form approach, where it is seen as a positive virtue to be eclectic and knowledgeable across a wide and self-determined field of facts and ideas. This very approach leads to a disinclination to bequeath a monolithic set of ‘answers’ behind. Viable alternatives must be flexible.
This means that Illich’s alternative is less a guidebook saying “and then you go out into the world with this material tool and do this material thing and then you’ll find yourself in utopia” than a set of techniques to approach whatever material circumstances you choose with a rational but open, reflective, and creative mind-set, hopefully backed-up by an affinity group that suits your own free development. Learning would partake of the characteristics of distributed cognition.
“I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which
will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us to make and unmake, produce and consume – a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment.”
– Deschooling Society
EDUCATION, WORK AND SOCIETY SHOULD ALL EVOLVE…IN LINE WITH HUMAN NEEDS
Thus Illich supports the creation of what he calls ‘convivial’ institutions, rather than bureaucratic and manipulative ones. These will be used spontaneously and voluntarily by any and all members of society as required, and will be in service to the community, rather than seeking to make the community cohere to the controlling logic of the institution. Education, work and society should all evolve as a whole in line with human needs, starting with the ‘decommodification’, ‘deinstitutionalisation’, and ‘deprofessionalisation’ of social relations.
“To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognise natural scales and limits. We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom.
Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward, or prison. Only within limits ought politics be concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal inputs of either energy or information. Once these limits are recognised, it becomes possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons, tools, and a new collectivity.
Such a society, in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers, I will call ‘convivial’.”
– Celebration of Awareness
In Illich’s philosophy, a full flowering of the ethical and political concepts in ‘conviviality’ is required. Decommodification must also be sought in order to achieve positive change – a message that is too radical for the free-market politician or industrialist. Not only that, but a recognition of scarcity and the limits to growth is required in order for a convivial and human future to exist.
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