Brave New Biocracy (more Illich)
Life, Death and the Boundaries of the Person
DNA maps and genetic cleansing; embryo cloning and euthanasia; organ transplants and physician-assisted suicide–never before have the traditional boundaries of life and death become so blurred. Never before has science intruded so pervasively into the sanctuary of the person. Where once only angels would tread, the medical establishment now treats. Are we closer to the secret of life, or just farther from God and nearer to the dust? In this symposium NPQ takes an anxious look at the new frontiers of man’s fate.
Life is not SacredBREMEN, GERMANY — Physicians in the Hippocratic tradition were pledged to restore the balance — or “health” — of their patient’s constitution but forbidden to use their skills to deal with death. They had to accept nature’s power to dissolve the healing contract between the patient and his physician.
When the Hippocratic signs indicated to the physician that the patient had entered into agony, the “atrium between life and death,” he had to withdraw from what was now a deathbed. Both quickening — coming alive in the womb — and agony — the personal struggle to die — defined the extreme boundaries between which a subject of medical care could be conceived.
In our world, these boundaries have been obliterated. By the early 20th century, the physician came to be perceived as society’s appointed tutor of any person who, having been placed in a patient role, lost his own competence.
Physicians are taught today to consider themselves responsible for lives from the moment the egg is fertilized through the time of organ harvest. They have become the socially responsible professional manager not of a patient, but of a life from sperm to worm. Physicians have become the bureaucrats of the brave new biocracy that rules from womb to tomb.
In societies confused by the technological prowess that enables us to transgress all traditional boundaries of coming to life and dying, the new discipline of big-ethics has emerged to mediate between pop-science and law. It has sought to create the semblance of a moral discourse that roots personhood in the “scientific ability” of bioethicists to determine who is a person and who is not through qualitative evaluation of the fetish, “a life. ”
What I fear is that the abstract, secular notion of “a life” will be sacralized, thereby making it possible that this spectral entity will progressively replace the notion of a “person” in which the humanism of Western individualism is anchored. “A life” is amenable to management, to improvement and to evaluation in a way which is unthinkable when we speak of “a person.” The transmogrification of a person into “a life” is a lethal operation, as dangerous as reaching out for the tree of life in the time of Adam and Eve.
The churches — one of the most important agencies for defining moral issues in public life — bear a particular responsibility as a lost civilization turns to them for guidance on such issues as abortion, euthanasia, organ transplants, embryo cloning and eugenics.
“A life” is the most powerful idol the church has had to face in the course of its history. More than the ideology of empire or feudal order, more than nationalism or progress, more than gnosticism or Enlightenment, the acceptance of “life” as a God given reality lends itself to a new corruption of the Christian faith.
The Christian West has given birth to a radically other kind of human condition unlike anything before it. Only within the matrix which Jacques Ellul calls the “technological system” has this new type of human condition come to full fruition. A new role opens for mythmaking, moralizing, legitimating institutions, a role which cannot quite be understood in terms of old religions, but which some churches rush in to fill.
The new technological society is singularly incapable of generating myths to which people can form deep and rich attachments. Yet, for its rudimentary maintenance it needs agencies which create and legitimate fetishes to which epistemic sentimentality can attach itself.
We seem to need a Linus blanket, some prestigious fetish that we can drag around to feel like defenders of sacred values. “Life” has become this blanket: it has come to constitute an essential referent in current ecological, medical, legal, political and ethical discourse. Consistently, those who use it forget that the notion has a history. It is a Western notion, ultimately the result of a perversion of the Christian message.
When the Lord announced to Martha “I am Life,” he did not say “I am a Life.” He says “I am Life” tout court. This Life has its historical roots in the revelation that one human person, Jesus, is also God. This one Life is the substance of Martha’s faith. In the Christian tradition, we hope to receive this Life as a gift; and we hope to share it. We know that this Life was given to us on the Cross and we cannot seek it except on the via crucis.
This Life is gratuitous, beyond and above having been born and living. But, as Augustine and Luther constantly stress, it is a gift without which being alive would be dust.
Life in the Christian tradition is personal to the point of being one person, both revealed and promised in John 19. It is something profoundly other than the life which appears as substantive in all the headlines about abortion or euthanasia in American newspapers.
At first sight, the two have nothing in common. On the one side, the Bible says: Emmanuel, Godman, Incarnation. On the other, the term is used to impute substance to a process for which the physician assumes responsibility, which technologies prolong and atomic armaments protect; a substance which has standing in court, can be wrongfully given, and about whose destruction without due process or beyond the needs of national defense or industrial growth the so-called pro-life organizations are incensed.
However, at closer inspection, life as a property, as a value, a national resource, a right, is a Western notion which shares its Christian ancestry with other key verities defining secular society.
The notion of a human life as a distinct entity which can be professionally and legally protected has been torturously constructed through a legal-medical-religious-scientific discourse whose roots go far back into theology.
The emotional and conceptual connotations of life in Hindu, Buddhist or Islamic traditions are utterly distinct from those evident in the current debate on this subject in Western democracies.
In the United States, the politicized pro-life movements are sponsored mainly by Christian denominations.
It is for this reason that it is mainly up to the churches to de-mystify “life.” The Christian churches now face an ugly temptation: to cooperate in the social creation of a fetish which, in a theological perspective, is the perversion of revealed Life into an idol.
The History of a LifeBiblical scholars are well aware of the limited correspondence between the Hebrew word for blood, dam, for breath, ruah, and the Greek term we would render as soul, namely, psyche. Neither comes anywhere near the meaning of the substantive, life. The concept of life does not exist in Greco-Roman antiquity: bios means the course of a destiny and zoe something close to the brilliance of aliveness. In Hebrew, the concept is utterly theocentric, an implication of God’s breath.
Life as a substantive notion appears two thousand years later, along with the science that purports to study it. The term biology was coined early in the 19th century by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. He was reacting to the baroque progress in botany and zoology which tended to reduce these two disciplines to the status of mere classification. By inventing a new term, he also named a new field of study, “the science of life.”
Lamarck’s genius confronted the tradition of distinct vegetable and animal ensoulment, along with the consequent division of nature into three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable and animal. He postulated the existence of life that distinguishes living beings from inorganic matter not by visible structure but by organization. Since Lamarck, biology searches for the “stimulating cause of organization” and its localization in tissue cells, protoplasm, the genetic code or morphogenetic fields.
“What is life?” is, therefore, not a perennial question, but the pop-science counterfoil to scientific research reports on a mixed bag of phenomena such as reproduction, physiology, heredity, organization, evolution and, more recently, feedback and morphogenesis.
Life appears during the Napoleonic wars as a postulate which is meant to lead the new biologists beyond the competing descriptive studies of mechanists, vitalists and materialists. Then, as morphological, physiological and genetic studies became more precise toward the middle of the 19th century, life and its evolution become the hazy and unintended by-products reflecting in ordinary discourse an increasingly abstract and formal kind of scientific terminology.
THE DEATH OF NATURE | A thread which runs back to Anaxagoras (500-428BC) links a number of otherwise profoundly distinct philosophical systems: the theme of nature’s aliveness. This idea of nature’s sensitive responsiveness found its constant expression well into the 16th century in animistic and idealistic, gnostic and hylomorphic versions. In these variations, nature is experienced as the matrix from which all things are born. In the long period between Augustine and Scotus this birthing power of nature was rooted in the world’s being contingent on the incessant creative will of God.
By the 13th century, and especially in the Franciscan school of theology, the world’s being is seen as contingent not merely on God’s creation, but also on the graceful sharing of his own being, his life. Whatever is brought from possibility (de potentia) into the necessity of its own existence thrives by its miraculous sharing of God’s own intimacy, for which there is no better word than — His life.
With the scientific revolution, contingency-rooted thought fades and a mechanistic model comes to dominate perception. Caroline Merchant argues that the resulting “death of nature” has been the most far-reaching event in changing men’s vision and perception of the universe. But it also raised the nagging question: How to explain the existence of living forms in a dead cosmos? The notion of substantive life thus appears not as a direct answer to this question, but as a kind of mindless shibboleth to fill a void.
LIFE AS PROPERTY | The ideology of possessive individualism progressively affected the way life could be talked about as a property. Since the 19th century, the legal construction of society increasingly reflects a new philosophical radicalism in the perception of the self. The result is a break with the ethics which had informed western history since Greek antiquity, clearly expressed by the shift of concern from the good to values. Society is now organized on the utilitarian assumption that man is born needy, and needed values are by definition scarce. It becomes axiomatic that the possession of life is then interpreted as the supreme value. Homo economicus becomes the referent for ethical reflection. Living is equated with a struggle for survival or, more radically, with a competition for life. For over a century now it has become customary to speak about the “conservation of life” as the ultimate motive of human action and social organization.
Today, some bioethicists go even further. While up to now the law implied that a person was alive, they demand that we recognize that . . . there is a deep difference between having a life and merely (sic!) being alive. The proven ability to exercise this act of possession or appropriation is turned into the criterion for personhood and for the existence of a legal subject.
During this same period, homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic “economic” behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.
LIFE AS ECOLOGY | Ecology can mean the study of correlations between living forms and their habitat. The term is also and increasingly used for a philosophical way of correlating all knowable phenomena. It then signifies thinking in terms of a cybernetic system which. in real time is both model and reality: A process which observes and defines, regulates and sustains itself. Within this style of thinking, life comes to be equated with the system: It is the abstract fetish that both overshadows and simultaneously constitutes it.
Epistemic sentimentality has its roots in this conceptual collapse of the borderline between cosmic process and substance, and the mythical embodiment of both in the fetish of life. Being conceived as a system, the cosmos is imagined in analogy to an entity which can be rationally analyzed and managed.
Simultaneously, this very same abstract mechanism is romantically identified with life and spoken about in hushed tones as something mysterious, polymorphic, weak, demanding tender protection.
In a new kind of reading, Genesis now tells how Adam and Eve were entrusted with life and the further improvement of its quality. This new Adam is potter and nurse of the Golem, his artificial creation.
In the sickening manufactured environment we have made for ourselves, health in the Hippocratic tradition has become an impossibility; balance has become hope-less.
The hope once symbolized in the mystery of the unborn has been corrupted; now there is only the legal entity of the fetus monitored on the sonogram. Agony, too, has been corrupted by the medicalization of death.
Dignity will not be found in the universal health care now demanded, but in hygienic autonomy and in a new found art of suffering and dying. In modern sickness I see the occasion for this discovery.
A History of HealthThe concept of health in European modernity represents a break with the Galenic-Hippocratic tradition familiar to the historian. For Greek philosophers, “healthy” was a concept for harmonious mingling, balanced order. a rational interplay of the basic elements. He was healthy who integrated himself into the harmony of the totality of his world according to the time and place he had come into the world.
For Plato, health was a somatic virtue, and spiritual health, too, a virtue. In “healthy human understanding,” the German language — despite critiques by Kant, Hamann, Hegel and Nietzsche — preserved something of this cosmotropic qualification. But since the 17th century, the attempt to master nature displaced the ideal of the health of a people.
This inversion gives the a-cosmic health created in this way the appearance of being engineerable. Under this hypothesis of engineerability, “health as possession” has gained acceptance since the last quarter of the 18th century. In the course of the 19th century, it became common sense to speak of “my body” and “my health.”
In the American Declaration of Independence, the right to happiness is affirmed. The right to health materialized in a parallel way. In the same way as this happiness, modern-day health is the fruit of possessive individualism. There could have been no more brutal and, at the same time, more convincing way to legitimize a society based on self-serving greed. In a similarly parallel way, the concept of responsibility of the individual gained acceptance in formally democratic societies. Responsibility then took on the semblance of ethical power over ever more distant regions of society and ever more specialized forms of “happiness-bringing” service deliveries.
In the 19th and early 20th century, then, health and responsibility were still believable ideals. Today they are elements of a lost past to which there is no return. Health and responsibility are normative concepts which no longer give any direction. When I try to structure my life according to such irrecoverable ideals, they become harmful — I make myself sick.
HEALTH IS A PLASTIC WORD | Health and responsibility have been made largely impossible from a technical point of view. This was not clear to me when I wrote Medical Nemesis, and perhaps was not yet the case at that time. In hindsight, it was a mistake to understand health as the quality of “survival,” and as the “intensity of coping behavior.”
Adaptation to the misanthropic genetic, climatic, chemical and cultural consequences of growth is now described as health. Neither the Galenic-Hippocratic representations of balance, nor the Enlightenment utopia of a right to “health and happiness,” nor any Vedic or Chinese concepts of well-being, have anything to do with survival in a technical system.
“Health” as function, process, mode of communication; health as an orienting behavior which requires management — these belong with those post-industrial conjuring formulas which suggestively connote much, but denote nothing that can be grasped. And as soon as health is addressed, it has already turned into a sense-destroying pathogen, a member of a word family which Uwe Poerksen calls plastic words, word husks which one can wave around, making oneself important, but which can say or do nothing.
The situation is similar with responsibility, although to demonstrate this is much more difficult. In a world which worships an ontology of systems, ethical responsibility is reduced to a legitimizing formality. The poisoning of the world is not the result of an irresponsible decision, but rather of our individual presence, as when traveling by airplane …
Jim:
A year and a half ago I happened by the local high school. I saw a line of a dozen or so 5 to 6 y.o. kids. They were walking along with an adult on either end of the line. I paused. There was something strange in the tableaux; it gnawed for my attention. Then I saw it. There was a rope tied around the wrist of each child and held by the adults.
Resisting the urge to shout ‘Freedom!’ and charge across the street, I watched for a bit. Not understanding the situation, I approached some other adults in the area and politely inquired about the rope. The rope, I was told, is used to keep the children from traffic, predators and other dangers. This occurred in a city of approx 12,000 people.
I spoke with a number of people. A few of the folks I knew, but mostly they were strangers, who appeared an age to have children in the local schools. With no more than two sentences, everyone with children in the school system knew exactly what I was talking about. These were the Head Start kids, and ‘everyones’ initial response was that the rope was necessary, the correct tool for the situation, and served the best interest of the child (to paraphrase a bit).
I would continue the conversation (lasting 5 to 20 minutes). Always I would introduce the idea of the obedient Jews of Hitler’s Europe, stating that obedience is a learned response. Then I would invoke independence, and summon the American spirit into the conversation. Then I would shut-up and listen while they grappled with the conflict. Surprisingly no one refused to engage in the conversation. I say surprising, because no one ultimately thought it was a good idea, but almost all thought something had to be done to protect the children.
I’ve never been introduced to Illich, and have spent only a couple of hours scanning through the works presented here. But with that in mind, this seems a good pragmatic example of confusing service with value.
Although the service is obviously providing the mechanisms of safety, I am puzzled. What value would this subsume?
I finally gained an understanding of when I engaged a Kentucky Fried Chicken employee. She was a single mom, with a high school diploma. She had a kid in the Head Start program. She knew of the rope (although she thought the kids held it). Still she thought it right and proper. We talked for around 5 minutes.
She did not think it right that the rope was tied around the kids’ wrists. Yet she ‘knew’ that something had to be done to keep the kids safe from harm (oh, and protect the keepers from legal repercussions). Using the Jewish example I suggested that some things were more important than physical safety, and that learning often involves a degree of pain; at which she hesitated. Then I said, “If you want to keep a child safe from all harm, then smother it when it is born, and it will only know harm once.”
She did not become angry. Instead she acknowledged the point and the conflict, and, with a thoughtful look on her face, we parted company.
My POV on this has been that the educational institutions teach conformity and obedience, while training people in a Pavlovian fashion to fill their place in society. The Illich commentaries have provided a new insight. Thanks for posting them.
2 February 2009, 12:06 pmBuddhalovesPaine:
I personally had a very hard time following this one. In fact the only thing that i got out of it……..until almost the very end was thad I must be going to heaven because I eat a lot of butter and chocolate. Then at the very end Illich tells me what he wants, and again, it was something that would have made Milton and Murray proud.
5 February 2009, 12:58 pmMaybe I am just not smart enough to follow along. But if it would have been possible to interupt his monologue to tailor his message to me personally I might have gotten more out of it.
James M:
Just wanted to shout-out and let you know I’m enjoying this one, and getting it, and relating it to my own experience … though it’s slow going due to the high compression ratio of ideas-per-sentence. I may not have anything in particular to say in response, or I may and the site may have moved on by the time I get around to saying it, but right now I just wanted to chime in as an appreciative lurker.
5 February 2009, 9:54 pm(Boer) Tom:
To BuddhalovesPaine:
I remember two of my great-grandparents dying, and both were very afraid of death. Renounce your fear of death (Buddha? Surely you must believe in reincarnation, and the only dread you should experience are the somatic pains associated with death, and the horrible immobility once your body has started to die while some level of consciousness still remains – 3-10 minutes?), and it loses its hold on you. With good luck, you’ll die in non-REM sleep, and won’t even notice it.
Renounce your striving after currency wealth and live by agrarian means, and the city has less hold on you (not sure how much Murray would appreciate that, but Milton would be positively appalled – just finished planet of the slums). The Miltonites love making noises about self-discipline, but it would crash their get-rich(er) schemes; of course they like to have Nazis (Milton’s student Pinochet used Walter Rauff and Klaus Barbie, amongst others – feeling Libertarian?) or other thugs handy just in case, but even that is an expensive option – and they’re not invincible either. By renouncing consumption, one regains some measure of independent action – we enslave ourselves.
Renounce the avoidance of (somatic) pain (no more pain-killers), and you’ll generally be healthier – many painkillers rip up your stomache, and few pains that are treated in that fashion are debilitating. Psycho-somatic pains (e.g. headaches) are something else, but you don’t need pain-killers for most of them…
6 February 2009, 3:00 amStan:
Buddah is on indefinite time-out. I just deleted a post from him — not the first — that is pure, offensive vitriol, in which he basically celebrated the suicides of military recruiters. Those people have families. Others read these things, then forward the comments to those families. I’ve seen it. And I won’t allow this site to be any part of that kind of sociopathic macho posturing. Even more fundamentally, that kind of insensitivity — whether berieved families see it or not — is wrong. Buddah will be seeking a different soapbox. This one is off-limits now. I sincerely hope he can get past whatever it is that compels him to engage in this kind of discourse… a form of communication, unfortunately, that the anonymity of disembodied text seems to encourage in many.
6 February 2009, 6:02 amxenia:
i have always disliked most doctors and western European mechanistic medicine understanding, which is based on fragmenting and administering the body. sometimes i’ve gone for years without seeing a doctor. ditto for schools and their notions of state loyalty.
there is much valuable about illich, and there are some strange parallels between his background and mine, places which we’ve visited and so on. as a crazy person who knows the value of self-determination and catharsis, i agree with much, even most matters raised here.
but often when i read him, i sense an unease. i genuinely don’t want to be dependent on any community (religious, neighborly) for my health or schooling, as i’ve always been a misfit.
if there is a larger structure which supports free health care and schooling for all human beings as a matter of absolute principle, they are obliged to treat me and accept me even if they don’t like me.
in a community-based context which is emotional and personal, it is too easy for a weirdo to antagonize those that may make decisions on how to administer health, and it is too easy to become ostracized. in addition, in a community-based health and schooling, the organization is and should be based on reciprocity. but there are times when i don’t feel comfortable, or am unable, to return a favor. i don’t want to make empty promises just to obtain something, or feel good about being part of a group.
illich starts from the position that you have some health care which you can refuse, that you can choose to suffer rather than allow the “experts” to take over your body. i completely agree with this, except that i don’t have health care. so, i cannot make even a negative choice. i cannot pay for an alternative system of treatment that i would prefer, such as acupuncture or ayurveda. with an unconditional system of health care for all, there is a possibility of saying yes or no.
6 February 2009, 3:58 pmxenia:
…just as with a system of public transportation, you can decide to take a bus, a bike or a god-damned car.
6 February 2009, 4:35 pmMichael Anderson:
xenia is right, I feel, about not being “….dependent on any community (religious, neighborly) for my health or schooling”. Too many times the community, such as it is, turns inward on itself and self-regulates in a negative manner, i.e. denying acceptance to whoever the authority figures deem as “undesirable” by virtue of their skin color, gender, religious beliefs, et al. There needs to be a higher authority (human) to make sure this does not happen.
I am apprehensive about some of the aspects of “re-localization” that will be taking place in the near future, as the financial system fails utterly and as a result of the “terminal triangle”. I think this is one aspect where “government” has a leg up on, as Greg Palast put it, “American small-town small-mindedness”, as far as facilitating a degree of acceptance. It’s got to be more than a police force, as the Corpos would have it.
7 February 2009, 9:14 pmVictoria Aufschrei:
I do not find this essay very convincing at all. It is not a program for justice but a program for chaos. It is malarkey but at the same time it is not malarkey. This former Catholic Priest would make it perfectly acceptable for the Christian Scientists not to seek medical treatment for their children when they need to have their appendix removed. This program would provide a platform for the unsupervised consumption of methanphetamine to treat some made up ailment. Yet on the other hand when you have decision making being done on a centralized level and the wrong decision is made then a massive problem is created. A society just can not win even if it wins.
9 February 2009, 8:01 amYet since many heads are better than one, unless that one is a genie off course, then I would feel a bit safer with a more centralized system.
Stan:
What is inevitable is that each and every one of us is inescapably interdependent. That cannot change, because we personhood, our culture, and our ecology for our species is such that we won’t even get through our first years of life without passing through near total dependency on others. We couldn’t have this conversation without common culture, shared language, shared ideas, even shared affective intelligences.
How can anyone not be dependent on some form of community for virtually everything? IN-dependence is an oxymoron for human beings; and inter-dependence is its living antonym (not DE-pendence, which is inescapable at the individual level and therefore axiomatically moot).
A direction I would be happy to see in this conversation is one that begins by moving closer than 10,000 feet above ground level. As Chomsky would say, here, anyone arguing form more authority bears the burden of proof. Give us a specific example so we can test this claim that self-regulation = denial of acceptance. I hear it all the time, but it sounds pretty two-dimensional and linear to me, and it conjures the past as it has been underlined, instead of what measures constitute re-localizaiton as a process right now.
Politics is going to happen, no doubt. But the further up the food chain that politics goes, the less accountable it is at the local level. And I will argue that, historically in fact, the main elements of the mischiefs alluded to above have their most important structural origins in centralization, with the symptoms appearing locally. Scarcity, as a fact and as a basis for etihical decision-making, has been created by the institution of property, of enclosure, and of central-authority expansionism. You cannot isolate the parochial downsides of American small-town culture, eg, from the specific histories of those towns, their founding communities and their histories, or the in-migration/out-migration that changed each of them. You also can’t describe any of them accurately with some cookie-cutter formula or generalizing truism. Their characters have been fundamentally formed by the institution of property (a political decree), of enclosure (a political expropriation of smallholders or the commons), and of central-authority expansionism (which has increased the ocntradictions between urban and rural (and now in-between).
But most specifically, the major deteriminant of any local gestalt that includes this personhood-culture-ecology triad (a limited but useful heuristic way of seeing it) is now the built environment. This cannot be over-emphasized. It is a simple declaration of historical materialism as its most basic.
The telos of the nascent re-localization “movement” is not to “get small,” and it is certainly not independence… though we might use that term for shorthand to discuss pathological (inaddressable) dependencies. The pull-point for re-localization is “accountable interdependency.”
I will argue that the accountability aspect of that term begins to escape us not when we propound the “incorrect” ideas (these are expressions of personhood, individual), but when our social ecology begins to include specialized bodies in an intellectual division of labor that put themselves over-and-above organic community (relations negotiated and maintained by people actually known to one another). Which came first, the chicken of administration-and-management or the egg of division-of-intellectual-labor> Dunno, but there are certainly a lot of chickens and eggs around now.
When this division into administration-and-management happens, there is a decisive split between personhood and ecology (both physical and social). This is a primal instance of alienation.
This tendency of runaway centralization and de-localization is branded “progress” as a cultural justifier; and as we have been for generations now born into a modern, urban (and more and more suburban), built envornment — which consolidates our fundamental dependency on a system in which experts and specialists functions like parts in the Great CPU — we have come to feel that this is our natural environment. It is difficult for us to imagine otherwise.
Xenia has personal experience of community-sectarian warfare iirc, but that warfare was provoked from he outside by great powers, and materialized with hardware that flows through an international arms market. Localization can’t be extracted from that history like a goat, then sent into the wilderness to shrieve the other sins.
I write at a computer, inside a house built from lumber and drywall and various pipes and wires. I live on a street, made from oil by-products, 17 miiles from my job, to which I have to drive if I am going to keep that job. I can’t survive without money, and I have to get money to keep the car to get to the job to get more money to buy food and pay for electricity and gas…. etc etc. The reason I live so far, and the reason these jobs have scattered to the four winds is an outcome of design of built environment. It’s a shitty, unsustainable design, but it is also the design to which everyone is now — at some degree or another — a captive.
Re-localization is not utopianism. It is an initiative — being tried on many fronts and in many ways — to re-design the built environment whenever and wherever possible into something that is more sustainable and more accountable than what we have now (which, btw, is failing very badly and threatening us with a dramatic centralization of authority when the level of suburban anxiety reaches a certain tipping point). This initiative consists of model projects and experiments, or local networks dealing with political issues (there is a policy struggle in Durham right now about whether people may raise laying hens inside the city limits), to regional and inter-regional communications networks who share information and occasionally share work.
Some are coming together on a contingent basis now to try an influence the public discussion of what “green jobs” really means, as the financial crisis drives us ever closer to some federal WPA-like program.
This is not an ideological effort. It’s practical and collaborative and very pragmatic (though everyone I know who is involved with it is also interested in draining the hierarchies out of difference — be that race, gender, or nationality). It’s like, okay, what do we have the capacity and willingness to do for twenty of us to establish a greater degree of “independence” (here is an example of that use) from large-scale, long-distance food production?
For the record, at least in my own experience, the folks who are spearheading these re-localizing efforts are anything but small-town conformists; and the culture that is developing within these efforts is friendly, easy-going, and generally committed to an ethos that values people right wherever they happen to be. It is also a culture of accountability. Nothing’s perfect, but if these gatherings are an indication of anything in the future, it is certainly more encouraging than anything being imagined by our technocratic rulers or our utopian allies.
Relocalization forced on society by systemic collapse will not remain relocalized for long (sorry, Greg Palast). If there are no practical solutions to the basic issues of food, water, and housing, government will not resolve those problems without militarizing the whole society. Barracks socialism and barracks capitalism are still both in the barracks. A network of activist-practitioners, however, can provide the leavening for local consolidations of people to learn redesign and the skills to make redesigns happen.
Here is just one of our local “leavening” outfits.
9 February 2009, 8:48 amRodney Kensington:
When it comes to medical treatment I think that I would feel a bit safer with a decentralized system. One only needs to look around and see that when ever there is a big pot of honey that can be captured by seizing control of a centralized system some people will conspire to do it. The think that makes it possible is pointed out by Illich when he talks about things being designed so that they are so complex that only a specialist can understand it. Such a specialist then has the advantage of being able to leech off others by taking advantage of their relative lack of knowledge about the subject matter. The mechanic cheats the customer and the Mechanics Association cheats society by designing and creating a system that serves them better than a system designed for maximum effeciancy.
9 February 2009, 10:37 amFurthermore when we look at so many countries which are torn by ideological or ethnic strife when one side gains control of the centralized health care system it can manipulate the care which is given to those that it approves of or disapproves of. Gods care for those in the in crowd and who cares for the out crowd. It is just to bad that here in the US we have so many people who need a nanny to protect them from themselves any yet the person that they hire as a nanny is the town child molester.
Mark Lambrecht:
I am not sure that I completely follow how this thread is going but it seems to be discussing all 3 essays by Illich. I only wanted to point out what I think is the stupidest centralized custom in the world. In fact I consider this custom so stupid that there should be a new ism named after it. It would be stupidism. The spell checker says that no such word exists but the spell checker just became outdated. What I am talking about is bottled water. Give me a break!!!! Wrapping WATER FOR GODS SAKE in plastics made from petroleum then shipping it for dozens if not hundreds of miles in trucks which get terrible gas mileage and cause enormous amounts of CO2 pollution for a product that you can have almost for free.
9 February 2009, 12:15 pmSome one is sure to say isnt the same true of a Coke. Is not Water just coke minus the poison? Well when someone says that I will reply, Yes! You know you are right and I had never thought of that before. There out to be a law that it is illegal to transport drinking water for commercial gain, unless granted an exception by government health officials. It should be illegal to transport soft drinks, like Coke or 7up or Dr. Root beer outside of a 25 mile radius. It would not be illegal to transport the syrup for soft drinks outside a 25 mile radius. That would force the manufactures of soft drinks to decentralize. And yes drive up prices. (for a product that we do not need anyways) The same rule of no shipping over 25 miles could be made for beer. This would create not only higher prices for beer but increase employment as new micro breweries would have to be created.
Justin Stewart:
Can something be both centralized and decentralized? Take the proposal of school vouchers for example.
9 February 2009, 1:41 pmIt was an idea that I liked at one time until I read in a book, by Gov. Ventura I believe, about how the move from integrated government schools to parochial religious schools help fuel the ethnic tensions of Kashmir. But vouchers are still an example of schooling or medical care for that matter can be delivered to all in a decentralized fashion.
Some one with an military background should be able to see the benefits of vouchers because it fits the keep it simple stupid parameters. But it does have other draw backs.
Howard:
From the Wikpedia article on Illich: During his later years, he suffered from a cancerous growth on his face that, in accordance with his critique of professionalized medicine, was treated with traditional methods. He regularly smoked opium to deal with the pain caused by this tumor. At an early stage, he consulted a doctor about having the tumor removed, but was told that there was too great a chance of losing his ability to speak, and so he lived with the tumor as best he could. He called it “my mortality.”
9 February 2009, 9:40 pmMichael Anderson:
OK…I stand corrected. (sigh) I forgot what I said on the other post (!). We do what we can, when we can, with who we can. Moving this summer to an area that could be described as economically depressed (it was home a long time ago), have planned for it, but sometimes it’s hard not to let fear get a foothold. Things are different there now (timber is not king anymore), but poorer nonetheless. Probably one thing we all need to remember sometimes is to not let the “old tapes” play in our heads…it certainly lets me know how accustomed I am to the present paradigm (rueful smile). It is much harder to break old habits than to learn new ones.
10 February 2009, 1:03 amDeAnander:
Joe Bageant on the commercial exploitation of misery aka the North American psychiatric/pharma nexus. Irascible as ever, and he makes some good points.
IIRC Illich died of his cancer in the care of good friends in Bremen.
this is one account of his passing.
He left us a series of challenges to industrialism which imho none of its apologists has ever satisfactorily answered; and the dysfunctions which he predicted and described have developed to a scale and at a speed that even he could not have imagined.
12 February 2009, 1:36 pmMichael Anderson:
The recent furor over reforming (if that is even an operative word here) the health system has me wondering about some things. This may be a little clumsy, but here goes: A NYT article this morning had pix of another one of those disruptive “Town Hall” meetings. this one hosted by Arlen Spector. Looking at the pix provided, it seems that the “protesters” were universally white, middle-aged, and (if my sense of appearances is accurate), middle-class—and nary a person of color anywhere in sight.
It has been said that Fascism is a phenomenon of the (disenfranchised) middle class. There are, obviously, enough people willing to be scared (Boo) that are willing to be trucked in for these things.
I am going out on a limb, here and asking—IS the government a better way to work health care? My daughter lives in Australia (as a citizen), and has a condition that requires ongoing medication. She states, frankly, that the system there, while not perfect, is far superior to what we have here. She says it handles basic health care very well—there is also a private system there (for those who have money) and it is, of course better for the expensive stuff, but basic preventative medicine is handled well, for free.
Illich says that “health” is not something that can be managed by a system, but we have a hand in this as individuals, right? I mean, we have a responsibility to our own minds and bodies and not run them down (although that DOES happen), but when sickness occurs that needs a doctor’s help, what’s wrong with this kind of a system? I know that a more “socialized” system also limits the bottom line of all concerned in our present U.S. system—-no mystery there about what’s motivating all this anger and hatred.
Any observations on this, especially from De Clarke in the Great White North?
12 August 2009, 3:03 pm