By Joe Mancini
Published in September 2017
We were honoured to have David Cayley as the speaker at our first Fermented Thoughts evening this July. 50 people at the Fermented Thoughts event heard David describe the roots of Illich’s thinking. Earlier in the day David joined us for a roundtable discussion on Illich. This all led up to our second Summer Institute. David offered an outline of how Ivan Illich understood the evolution of institutionalization and how it then moves beyond limits, fostering dependency and reducing native capacity.
David is a retired broadcaster whose work was featured on CBC Radio’s Ideas over three decades. David’s 1991 book Conversations with Illich was instrumental in helping The Working Centre establish our approach that works against bureaucratizing services, that emphasizes reciprocity, hospitality and virtues and creates Community Tools to help build community. We consistently revisit Illich’s ideas as a tool for rethinking our work.
“Illich’s core idea is not that the Church was fallible, wayward and corrupt but that it had lost sight of its own temptations, its temptation to substitute itself for the Kingdom of God.” Illich deplored that an institution that should be self-aware could not see its own temptation. What does this mean for any institution? Certain institutions reach the point of grandiosity, when the institution puts itself on a pedestal and in a sense demands to be worshipped. This to Illich is an example of succumbing to its own temptations.
Cayley then summarized this process. “The point I want to make is how Illich thought of contemporary institutions as a continuation and elaboration of the path taken by the Church. For example, most modern institutions in some ways attempt to overcome the human condition; medicine for example blurs the boundary line between life and death. But for Illich, the institution of schooling is the most obviously Church-like, it is only in the wake of the church’s institutionalized of salvation, Illich says, that it is possible to imagine something like a contemporary school system.
“What we have is a compulsory ritual, that turns knowledge from a means into an end (a mere stepping stone), which confuses what is done for love for what is done for advantage and which concentrates privilege while claiming to increase equality. The ritual character of this institution is what is important to Illich, the repetition of the same steps, gestures, formulas, that generates a myth of progress or what Wendell Berry calls the idea of a better place, that which we want and need is not available here and now, and only as a shining pot of gold at the end of unending curriculum.
“I want to stress these are institutions of a peculiar kind, when they become total, when they have breached their containment, what Illich called ‘paradoxical productivity’ the point and moment at which the institution runs out of control, begins to get in its own way, and frustrates the purpose for which it was established.”
Illich described how people had progressively lost the capacity to think for themselves, to speak for themselves, to act on their own terms, and to stand on their own feet. This is another way in which institutions become total, they gradually eliminate all vestiges of an opposing or complimentary space which can limit their action or penetration until eventually a condition of complete saturation is reached.
Illich sought out a balance, a way to limit institutions and to create community spaces that can complement and counter institutions. Illich warned us about grandiosity and he offered alternatives which take continuous effort to teach and create.
David has made many of his memorable podcasts available at www.davidcayley.com
