Book review: The Corruption of the Best

Book review: The Corruption of the Best - On Ivan Illich

By Dilip - Wednesday, June 01, 2022

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 “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 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....

NB: This is an interesting essay, especially for reminding us of a critique of modern society (and modern education) that cannot be recued to 'conservatism' or 'progressivism'. The only problem is that the author uses the term 'the Left' as if it were a monolith; and an identifiable one at that. Here it functions as a hold-all category, in a manner similar to the much abused term 'the liberals' functions in the vocabulary of extreme ends of the political spectrum. What is 'the Left'? DS

In the fall of 1982, the Austrian-born intellectual and Catholic priest Ivan Illich was invited to deliver the Regents Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley. This prestigious engagement looked like the culmination of a longtime outsider’s acceptance by the mainstream academy. As things turned out, though, it brought that tentative dalliance to an end. The subject Illich chose for his lectures was controversial then, and remains so now: “gender.” His audience included faculty members from Berkeley’s prominent Women’s Studies program—a field Illich hoped to engage in productive dialogue. But his hopes on this front were disappointed. The fallout from the lectures among academic feminists resembled what we now call a cancellation.

Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey; by David Cayley

Reviewed by Geoff Shullenberger

Over the two decades prior to this event, Illich had been broadly aligned with the New Left, and his arrival at Berkeley, one of the epicenters of that movement, might have been an ideological homecoming. But as controversy swirled around the Berkeley lectures, and the book he wrote based on them, Gender, former allies denounced Illich as a reactionary. As David Cayley recounts in his new biography, at this point Illich’s “reputation on the political left suffered, and his audience there mostly fell away.” Then as now, gender and sex were an ideological danger zone. But Illich had never shied away from this sort of trouble. In fact, fourteen years before the Berkeley fracas, he had been subjected to a far older manifestation of “cancel culture”: the Inquisition.

Illich’s lectures infuriated erstwhile allies on the Left because, while he reiterated feminists’ diagnosis of the persistence of sexism in formally egalitarian societies, his conclusions were at odds with their practical aims. “The pursuit of a non-sexist ‘economy,’” as he put it, “is as absurd as a sexist one is abhorrent.” Illich was known as a scathing critic of progress, and perhaps his mordant take on feminist reforms should not have been surprising. The books he wrote prior to Gender had advanced acerbic attacks on other enterprises generally regarded as progressive, such as education and economic development. But none had generated a backlash this severe, which anticipated the excommunication that has lately faced critics of the party line on gender.

Although the larger thrust of Illich’s thinking had remained the same, the controversy was a major inflection point in its public reception. His critiques of progress from the 1970s remained influential in some circles, but Gender and the work he produced after it, though in some ways richer and more systematic than anything he had written previously, found far fewer readers, and never gained comparable traction. Thus, by 2017, the critic George Scialabba, in an otherwise perceptive reconsideration of Illich, treats Gender briefly and his later work not at all.

By the time Illich died in 2002, many obituaries presented him as a relic of the late twentieth-century counterculture, consigned to oblivion like other gurus of the era, such as his longtime friend Paul Goodman. But a slow recuperation of his enduring interventions in various debates and fields seems to be underway. 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.”

If so, David Cayley’s Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey is a crucial contribution to Illich’s rediscovery. Cayley, a former producer of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ideas, is well-positioned to guide us through Illich’s work. He made two radio interview series featuring Illich, and the two men were personally close during the final decades of Illich’s life. Cayley previously compiled The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, a transcript of conversations with Illich in his later years, in which he outlines a set of sweeping historical theses regarding the pervasive influence of Christianity on the secular institutions of the West.

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.

The problem Illich diagnoses is not that the modern world has abandoned Christianity, but that institutionalized Christianity, in the centuries after Christ, initiated destabilizing tendencies that would be radicalized in the modern world. The Christian message, as he saw it, was one of freedom from kinship and ethnic localism that made possible a new form of human community. The “new dimension of love” introduced to the world by Christ, Illich believed, had rendered “community boundaries . . . permeable and therefore vulnerable.” The result was a “temptation to try to manage and, eventually, legislate this new love, to create an institution that will guarantee it. . . . This power is claimed first by the Church and later by the many secular institutions stamped from its mold.” Education, medicine, and NGOs promoting development, he argued, are all the Church’s unrecognized offspring.

Because the influence of these institutions has spread worldwide, Illich told Cayley, we live not in a “post-Christian era” but in, “paradoxically, the most obviously Christian epoch” despite the waning influence of the Church itself. It follows, Cayley writes, that “the gateway to the future may lie in the past, buried under the layers of unexamined religious ideology that secretly fuel our endless pursuit of health, education, safety, and various other phantoms.” By synthesizing the insights of Illich’s multifaceted writings, Cayley’s biography allows us to pass through this gateway. But what sort of future it might lead us to seems more questionable than ever.

A Prince of the Church in Exile

Ivan Illich was born in the cosmopolitan, polyglot milieu of 1926 Vienna to a Croatian father and a German-Jewish mother who had converted to Catholicism. He spent his early years between there and his father’s native Dalmatian coast. The contrast between the two places left a lasting impression. In his father’s ancestral home on the island of Brač, he lived in a haven of preserved premodern life that would deeply inform his sensibility. There, he remarked in a 1982 lecture, “history still flowed slowly, imperceptibly” and daily life “had altered little in 500 years.”

In 1942, his mother relocated him and his brothers to Florence to escape Nazi persecution due to their “non-Aryan” ancestry. He later returned to Austria to complete a PhD in medieval history at the University of Salzburg, but for the rest of his life he would consider himself in permanent exile. “Since I left the old house on the island in Dalmatia,” he told Cayley, “I have never had a place which I called my home.” For the first few decades of his adult life, his only home would be a spiritual and institutional one: the Catholic Church, into which he was ordained as a priest in Rome in 1951. And yet, this was always a complicated sense of belonging, and his conflicted relationship with the Vatican would in many ways define his entire career.

In addition to studying for the priesthood, Illich completed a degree at the Gregorian University in Rome, focusing on ecclesiology, or the study of liturgical ritual and the institutional structures of the Church. He later described this field as the study of “a social phenomenon which is not the state, nor the law,” and in this sense, “the predecessor of sociology but with a tradition about twenty times as long as sociology since Durkheim.” His immersion in this field decisively shaped his later intellectual projects. Many twentieth-century thinkers saw themselves as successors of the Enlightenment and its progeny: Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Illich, although in dialogue with modern thought, always rooted his thinking in the older intellectual traditions of Christianity.

Cayley notes that during his Roman period, “Illich’s obvious abilities and his quite traditional piety marked him out as a potential ‘prince of the Church.’” But instead of pursuing the opportunities open to him in Rome, he crossed the Atlantic and took up a humble position as a parish priest in New York City, in the neighborhood of Washington Heights. Here, he became an influential figure in church debates about how to respond to a huge influx of Puerto Ricans into the city, which was tipping the balance of parishes away from earlier generations of European migrants, by now partly assimilated into American culture, and toward a group who brought with them centuries-old religious traditions of their own as well as a strong communal spirit.

For Illich, this demographic transformation was an opportunity for Catholics to revisit the question of “the relationship between the Gospel and its diverse cultural containers.” From the beginning, as his earlier studies in the history of the church taught him, Christianity had vacillated between two paths in its missionary expansion into cultures where it was an alien presence: adapting to local cultures versus remaking them in its image. As Illich saw it, a more flexible localism in the early Church had been succeeded, starting in the late Middle Ages, by a centralizing, homogenizing agenda. During his time in New York, Illich became a forceful advocate for the older approach, advocating that the American and Puerto Rican Catholics should “understand each other in a way that would enlarge the horizons of both communities.”

Despite Illich’s controversial positions, he found a number of powerful supporters in New York’s Catholic hierarchy, notably the conservative Archbishop Francis Spellman. Eventually, Spellman helped him secure an appointment as Vice Rector of the Catholic University of Ponce, Puerto Rico. He did not last long there, but the experience would furnish the subject matter of his earliest public writing in two ways. First, it made him suspicious of the modernizing development promoted abroad by the United States, and critical of the Church’s role in such projects. Second, it offered a vantage point from which to consider the key role of education in modernization.

Illich’s Puerto Rican sojourn also led to the creation of an institution, the Center for Intercultural Communication, which he later reestablished in Cuernavaca, Mexico. There, Illich’s Center, renamed the Center for Intercultural Documentation (cidoc), continued offering language immersion, but also evolved into something far more ambitious. By the late 1960s, it was a sort of unaccredited university and think tank that hosted many radical intellectuals of the era. Cidoc’s visitors included Paulo Freire, Erich Fromm, Paul Goodman, and Susan Sontag.

It was perhaps unsurprising that, at the height of the Cold War, Illich’s fraternization with Marxists and liberation theologians attracted suspicion from higher-ups in the Church, as well as the CIA. It was at this point that he was obliged to appear before the Holy Office in Rome—previously known as the Inquisition. As a result of this clash, he gave up active duties as a priest. Cidoc held on in a somewhat embattled position until 1976, at which point Illich closed its doors.

A Critic of “Progress”

By the time he left Cuernavaca, Illich had already entered the second phase of his career: that of a public intellectual, writing for and speaking to audiences beyond the Catholic fold. In the early 1970s, as he was in the process of distancing himself from the ecclesiastical institutions that had circumscribed his career up to that point, he became something of an institution himself: one of various itinerant radical gurus, like his friends and collaborators Paul Goodman and Erich Fromm, who were preaching messages of individual and social transformation.

His first book, Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution is a collection of manifestos and polemics that combine a New Left–style attack on the “dehumanization” brought about by advanced technological civilization with an account of the Church’s complicity in these tendencies and a demand for “radical humanism” that charts a new path. According to Cayley, Illich saw in the 1960s “a moment of what Christian tradition has called kairos”—that is, “a propitious moment for decision and action.” He believed “modernity [was] reaching a maximum at which it can and must be transformed.” At such a moment, in Cayley’s phrasing, “great promise and great danger sit side by side.” But the sense of promise, for a time, outweighed the sense of danger in Illich’s thinking. Hence, his second and third books, Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality, were animated by a practical vision of reform that emphasized the possibility of reconfiguring technological modernity within viable limits.

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.”

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.

Paradoxical Counterproductivity

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.

In his subsequent writings from the 1970s, Illich tracked the effects of paradoxical counterproductivity across other domains of modern life. Turning to a realm seemingly distant from schooling, he took on another mainstay of modernization projects being promoted across the developing world: transportation infrastructure. In Energy and Equity, written during the 1973 oil crisis, he outlined the ways that modern technologies of mobility had promised autonomy and freedom but in fact deprived people of both. His darkly humorous account of the perverse effects of the automobile in that book encapsulates much of his larger critique of progress. He calculates that, once you include the extra labor required to pay for a car, its upkeep, fuel, taxes, and so on, “[t]he model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same.”

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. Perhaps his most controversial application of this insight was to the field of medicine in the book Medical Nemesis, later reissued as Limits to Medicine. His subject in this book, the longest of what he called his “pamphlets” of the 1970s, is iatrogenesis, a term typically used in relation to unintentional physician-caused harms inflicted in the course of treatment. As Cayley explains, Illich “applies it much more widely to take in all the ways medicine reshapes the society it ostensibly serves.”

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. The recent pandemic has provided numerous illustrations of this phenomenon. For instance, it was clear from the earliest statistical measures that SARS-CoV-19 affected different demographics differently: severe disease was heavily concentrated among the old and sick. It followed that for wide swathes of society, “health” might well be obtained by experiencing a mild infection and gaining natural immunity to the virus. Yet a barrage of propaganda has obscured these differences, always in service of the notion that health could only be obtained by medical intervention: first via the ad hoc “non-pharmaceutical interventions” rolled out in 2020, later by vaccination. 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.

Illich also took aim at another assumption lately on display: as Cayley puts it, “the idea that suffering and death are unqualified evils and their postponement unqualified goods.” In the past two years, politicians and public health officials have proceeded from the view that an indefinite suspension of the positive goods of civic and familial life is legitimated by the imperative of “saving lives.” As Illich’s counterproductivity thesis anticipates, the result is a stripping down of the lives that are declared in need of saving to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” The reception of Illich’s book anticipated that of Agamben’s criticisms of the “techno-medical despotism” of pandemic emergency rule: he was accused of callous indifference to human life. But even greater controversy would envelop Illich in the next phase of his intellectual career.

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.” 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.

In his later writing from this period, Illich began to refer to the realm he had previously called “subsistence”—that of “autonomous, non-market related actions through which people satisfy everyday needs”—as “the vernacular.” Cayley explains that “Illich’s effort to mark out a vernacular sphere was intended to prevent the conflation of genuinely autonomous activity with what he called ‘shadow work.’” The latter phrase became the title of a 1981 book in which Illich examined “the unpaid work which an industrial society demands as a necessary complement to the production of goods and services.” He was already attuned to this phenomenon in earlier books like Energy and Equity, where he documented the explosion of unremunerated hours spent by commuters idling and performing upkeep. In Shadow Work, he defined this and similar activity as a form of unrecognized labor that had proliferated in industrial societies.

Illich’s examination of shadow work was what led him to take an interest in feminist scholarship. His theorization of the uncompensated work that sustained the money economy overlapped with feminist theorizations of housework and found an echo in the principles of the “Wages for Housework” campaign spearheaded by radical activists such as Silvia Federici in the mid-1970s. They regarded the “caring work” or “reproductive labor” mostly assigned to women as the unacknowledged linchpin of capitalist production. The goal of demanding compensation was to reveal that the economic system was dependent on labor not recognized as such.

Shadow work, as Illich defined it, is all around us today. When he was writing on the subject, pumping your own gas was a recent innovation, and most could see that it entailed the replacement of a task that had corresponded with wage labor with an unremunerated task on the part of the consumer. Now it is so familiar as to go unquestioned. Supermarkets and other retail outlets have followed suit with self-checkout kiosks, where the consumer takes on the job once performed by a cashier. Information technology has expanded shadow work into areas Illich could not anticipate. For instance, the notion of “playbor,” first used in the digital games industry to refer to the uncompensated work of players in improving games, has come to refer to the free “work” internet users perform on platforms that profit from their clicks and eyeballs. Commenting on this phenomenon, in 2014 the artist Laurel Ptak issued a semi-satirical manifesto called “Wages for Facebook,” an invocation of the earlier feminist movement.

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

By the early 1980s, Illich had relinquished the optimism about achievable reforms that had animated his earlier work, and turned away from pamphleteering toward more scholarly projects. He envisioned writing a “history of scarcity” that would trace the tendencies toward the enclosure and commodification of goods across the longue durée of Western history. His appreciative engagement with scholarship in the burgeoning fields of women’s studies and women’s history led him to the concept of “gender,” which he came to see as a pivotal lens for understanding processes that had long preoccupied him: the usurpation of the commons by institutions and professional experts, and the substitution of use value with exchange value.

In the years before Illich took up the subject, “gender,” previously used in grammatical contexts, had come to denote characteristics attached to the sexes in particular sociocultural settings. The terminological distinction between gender and sex played a key role in feminist efforts to denaturalize expectations and stereotypes around women. As the vanguard of gender thinking has shifted its attention to transgender causes in recent years, many activists have gone further than they did in Illich’s time, arguing that, sex, too, is a social, cultural, and linguistic construct. In response, their critics assert the existence of an immutable underlying duality of men and women indifferent to culture and language: most typically, “biological sex.”

Gender, the book Illich developed out of his fateful 1982 Berkeley lectures, would be likely to ruffle feathers on both sides of this debate today - if anyone read it. To an extent, Illich concurs with today’s gender radicals: he not only accepts that gender is socially constructed, but also makes the case that “biological sex” is not a mere neutral fact, but a uniquely modern way of framing the differences between men and women. “Sex,” he claims, gradually supplanted the array of culturally specific iterations of the gender divide that prevailed in premodern societies.

His term for the latter, the same he used in his other writing on domains of subsistence, is “vernacular gender.” His use of the phrase hints at why attempts to alter language have loomed so large in the gender debate. While in an earlier era feminists fought for inclusive language, today’s vanguard of activists aims to decouple gendered language from biology altogether - for example, by replacing “pregnant women” with “pregnant people.” Such language reforms seem invariably to neuter the vernacular of gendered difference. Illich’s account suggests that this process reflects the hollowing out of “vernacular gender” by the modern notion of sex.

Vernacular languages possess distinct grammatical categories and syntactical rules - but all possess some such categories and rules. Analogously, for Illich, “vernacular gender” partitioned societies into distinct spheres of activity associated with men and women. What these spheres consisted of differed dramatically from culture to culture, but what did not vary prior to the rise of industrial capitalism was the structuring role of vernacular gender in determining what physical spaces men and women occupied, what tasks they performed, and what tools they used.

Illich, then, shares the now popular view that the “gender binary” is entirely socially constructed, culturally specific, and malleable, but he also argued that some version of this basic structure, regardless of its specific content, was ubiquitous in premodern societies. But contrary to the widespread notion that this “binary” remains a predominant mode of oppression, Illich claims that this polarity has been attenuated in the modern era by the replacement of vernacular gender with sex—a process that he argues was first and foremost economic in nature.

Vernacular gender circumscribes activities, such that “[o]utside industrial societies, unisex work is the rare exception. Few things can be done by women and also by men.” Whereas “[g]ender is substantive,” Illich asserts, “sex is a secondary attribute, a property of an individual.” The weakening of the vernacular regime of gender-specific spaces, activities, and tools enabled modern societies to recast men and women as performers of abstract labor in exchange for wages. 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.

This is why, for Illich, “[t]he loss of vernacular gender is the decisive condition for the rise of capitalism.” The types of work open to either sex might vary by time and place and might appear stratified along similar lines to gendered work. The difference is that all work is now performed in relation to the cash nexus, which assigns value to labor in terms of the universal equivalent of money. The modern ideal of equality between the sexes, for Illich, derives from and is defined in terms of the economic abstraction of work as a commodity sold on the market. Prior to this, it was impossible to conceive of work in this way, because all work occurred only in gendered spheres of activity. Since men’s and women’s work was not equivalent or transferable, there could be no general category of “work” that could be assigned abstract monetary value.

Illich’s feminist critics regarded Gender as a nostalgic paean to the fixed gender roles of the past, and his own phrasings sometimes encourage that impression. Illich’s explicit aim, however, was to account for the modern failure to achieve economic parity between men and women. “I know of no industrial society where women are the economic equals of men,” he writes. “Of everything that economics measures, women get less.” This is because women are “deprived of equal access to wage labor only to be bound with even greater inequality to work that did not exist before wage labor came into being.” The reference here is, again, to the sorts of shadow work or reproductive labor that fall disproportionately to women, which, in his analysis, differ from women’s work under vernacular gender due to their devaluation by the labor market.

Those who accused Illich of reactionary nostalgia tended not to respond to his most challenging allegation: that, insofar as they are blind to the root causes of modern economic degradation in the suppression of vernacular gender, radicals who demand parity between the sexes (or more recently, the genders) are tacitly endorsing a model of equality grounded in the formal universal equivalence of money; as a result, their proposed reforms can only serve to expand the reach of the cash nexus. Just as some feminist visions of equality may reinforce and provide a new basis for the exploitative model of a unisex homo economicus competing to sell labor, the current notion of “gender identity” as a self-designated, interchangeable attribute turns it into another free-floating commodity to be acquired and discarded like any consumer good.

The implication here is that the contemporary opposition between “gender identity” and “biological sex” is illusory. For Illich, the invention of sex follows the evacuation of the substantive lifeways of vernacular gender and the imposition of abstract equivalence. Hence the reduction of differences between men and women to sex, by disembedding difference from concrete regimes of gender, makes possible the proliferation of abstract, commodified gender.

But Illich gives no sense of how this process might be reversible. He acknowledges at the end of Gender: “I have no strategy to offer. I refuse to speculate on the probabilities of any cure.” Today, his conclusions are likely to be as unpalatable to those who wish to reassert the reality of biological sex as to those who demand the legal recognition of self-proclaimed gender identity.

Cyberculture and Self-Algorithmization

For Illich, the “loss of gender” was a fait accompli. By contrast, another major preoccupation of his later career was with a historical development he believed was still underway: the emergence of the “age of systems.” 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.

In his earlier work, Illich had expressed some enthusiasm for the possibilities of networked computers. For example, in Deschooling Society, he imagined that “learning webs” of long-distance collaborators might enable the pursuit of knowledge to take new forms, outside of institutional structures. As a result of this enthusiasm, he exerted a certain degree of influence on the transition from “counterculture to cyberculture,” as described by Fred Turner in his book of that title. For instance, Lee Felsenstein, a founding member of the influential Homebrew Computer Club who helped pioneer the personal computer, was an outspoken admirer of Illich.

But by the 1980s, as the personal computer was becoming ubiquitous, Illich became concerned with its disembodying, depersonalizing effects. As Cayley puts it, he believed that integration with computers risked turning a “unique, enfleshed, and irreducible person” into “an item of information, a pattern of risks.” The earlier “age of instrumentality,” the effects of which he had also assessed critically, “was characterized by the fundamental distinction . . . between the tool and its user,” which remain fundamentally separate no matter how integrated. Conversely, a system (like networked computers) “incorporates me when I enter it—I become part of that system and change its state.”

Illich was especially concerned with the increasing centrality of risk awareness made possible by the rise of ever more sophisticated technologies of calculation, tracking, and prediction. The “ideology of risk awareness,” he argued, had a disembodying effect: “[i]t is a placing of myself, each time I think of risk, into a base population from which certain events . . . can be calculated. It’s an invitation to intensive self-algorithmization.” He made this statement two decades before either DNA tests claiming to predict the likelihoods of various disorders or wearable digital devices monitoring vital signs were commercially available. Today, the sorts of procedures Illich cautioned against are so integrated into our lives that we barely notice their operation.

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.”

In the late work he undertook in dialogue with Cayley, Illich attempted to trace the “roots of modernity” to “the attempts of the churches to institutionalize, legitimize, and manage Christian vocation”—the thesis he summed up, again, in the motto corruptio optimi pessima. He also described this as “the historical progression in which God’s Incarnation is turned . . . inside out.” The implication of this idea is apocalyptic in the original sense: an unveiling, “a revelation of the ‘mystery of evil,’ the mystery of what happens when God’s ultimate gift is co-opted and put to work, made to generate rules, bear interest, and guide government.” For the late Illich, “the end has come, if the end is taken to refer to a ‘world that has gone about as far as it can go.’”

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,” which also entailed the identification of death as an external enemy against which unremitting war must be waged. As Cayley explains, for Illich, “life represent[ed] the transformation of something that one does in living into something one has”—which becomes something “for which the physician assumes responsibility [and] which technologies prolong.”

The pandemic years have exposed us all to the political consequences of the “idolization of life” Illich warned against. 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.

Illich’s writings contain many uncanny anticipations of the present: the repeated failures of “education reform”; the ever-expanding ambit of risk calculation in personal and political life; the transformation of gender into a free-floating digitalized abstraction. But what he did not fully foresee was that a version of his final apocalyptic vision would be embraced by the professional classes, whose influence he excoriated, as well as the global governing elite. In Illich’s early career, he fought against the power structures that, swelling with hubris amid the rapid growth of the postwar era, had charged a new clerisy of professionals with spreading a false gospel of endless growth. Deluded by such dreams of infinite expansion, he contended, the world had embraced a blasphemous secular fantasy of salvation and lost sight of what was fundamental.

Illich had good reasons for concern, but we now confront a stranger panorama. In recent years, the most powerful people in the world have fawned over a Swedish teenager who castigated them with secular hellfire sermons demanding infinite sacrifice; CEOs have alternated between encomiums to renewable-energy sustainability and grim invocations of the climate threat; and advocates of degrowth have gained prominent positions in the media and academia. The modernist dreams of development that distressed Illich have mostly vanished from the West.

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.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 2 (Summer 2022): 208–24.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/the-corruption-of-the-best-on-ivan-illich/

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