Transcript
MODERATOR: Welcome to the fourth of the series of L.P. Stone lectures for 1973. These lectures are in a series of five. This evening is the fourth of the five. I'd like to announce that tomorrow evening at the same time -- 7:45 -- in this room will be the last. You've been stimulated so far in this series, which carries the overall title of "The Convivial Society: Contours of Post-Industrialism," and some people have told me that
it is a mind-stretching experience. The things which Dr. Illich has said are not by any means what we normally hear or what we find to be conventional wisdom. Dr. Illich was born in Vienna, studied in Florence, Rome, Munich, and Salzburg. For several years he worked as a priest in the Upper West Side of New York City, then became Vice Chancellor of the Catholic University in Ponce Puerto Rico
. Since 1960, he has lived in Cuernavaca, Mexico where he is the co-founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation -- often known by its acronym CIDOC -- where he has been giving seminars and doing research, first on schooling and de-schooling of society and more recently on limits to growth and the problems
of a steady state society. This evening's lecture has the title "Recovery and Service." The practice has been that Dr. Illich leaves a good bit of time for questions, so we will have perhaps a half hour for that. Everyone will have a chance to ask questions. Dr. Illich.
ILLICH: Thank you so much for your kind presentation. During the last -- at noon, we discussed five dimensions on which what we might want to call "the balance of life" depends. In each of these dimensions I've indicated tendencies which must be kept in an equilibrium to maintain the homeostasis which after all constitutes human life. I've argued that
the control of natural forces is functional only if the use of nature does not make nature useless for man. I've argued that institutions are functional when they promote a delicate balance, namely, the equilibrium between what people can do for themselves and what tools at the service of anonymous institutions can do for them. Formal instruction also depends on a balance. The special arrangements
must never outweigh opportunities for independent learning. An increase in social mobility -- our fourth dimension -- can bring the society more humane, but only if at the same time there is a narrowing of the difference in power which separates the few from the many. And finally, an increase in the rate of innovation is of value only when with it rootedness in tradition,
fullness in meaning, and security -- personal security in the deep sense -- are also strengthened. Any tool can grow out of man's control, first to become his master and finally to become his executioner. Tools can rule men sooner than men expect them to rule. The plough makes a man the lord of a garden, but also the refugee from a Dust Bowl. Nature's
revenge can produce children less fit for life than their fathers and yet born into a world which is less fit for them. Man the Smith -- Homo Faber -- can be turned into a sorcerer's apprentice. Specialization can make his everyday so complicated that it becomes estranged from his activities. Addiction to progress can enslave all men to a race in which none
ever reaches the goal because the goal always moves further out. Now, there are two ranges in the growth of tools. If I had a blackboard here, I would draw a curve in a coordinate system which first mounts and then declines. The first range within which machines or tools are used to extend human capability -- the capability of most people
-- and the second range in which they are used to contract, eliminate, or replace human functions. In the first range, man as an individual can exercise authority on his own behalf and therefore assume responsibility. In the second, the machine takes over, first reducing the range of choice and motivation in both the operator and the client and soon imposing its own
logic and demand on both. I've argued that survival depends on establishing procedures which permit ordinary people to recognize these two ranges and to opt for survival in freedom, to evaluate the structure built into tools and institutions so that they can exclude those tools which by their very structure are destructive and control those which
are useful. Exclusion of the malignant tool and control of the expedient tool are the two major priorities for politics today. Multiple limits to over-efficiency must be expressed in a language that is simple and politically effective. As long as it remains secret language, the limitation of tools will be the result of expert decision
, not of political consensus. This urgent task is faced, however, with three formidable obstacles of which I want to deal this evening: the idolatry of science, the corruption of ordinary language, and the loss of respect for the formal process by which social decisions are made. Let me deal with each at a time. First, the necessity to debunk the idolatry
of science, because above all political discussion is now stunned by a delusion about science. That word is a strange word. A friend of mine has pointed out to me that children 20 years ago painted the scientist as a blonde man with an attractive face, and increasingly the man in the white coat has a ghost's -- a gnome's, a devil's face
. The term "science" has come to mean an institutional enterprise, rather than a personal activity. Science is now used to label a strange, a spectral production agency which turns out better knowledge just as medicine produces better health and schools better education and (inaudible) vehicles better transport. The damage done by this misunderstanding
about the nature of knowledge is even more fundamental than the damage done to the conceptions of health, education, or mobility by their identification with institutional outputs. False expectations of better health, after all, corrupt society, but they do so just in one particular sense. They foster a declining concern with healthful environment, healthy lifestyles, and the competence in the personal care for one's
neighbor. In other words, deceptions about health are circumstantial. The institutionalization of knowledge leads to a more general and degrading delusion. It makes people dependent on having their knowledge produced for them. It leads to a paralysis of the moral and of the political imagination. This cognitive disorder rests on the illusion that there are two kinds of knowledge
: the knowledge of the individual citizen and the knowledge of the expert. The former is but the opinion of individuals. It is merely subjective. It is excluded from policy-making. The latter is objective, defined by science, and promulgated by an expert spokesman. This objective knowledge is viewed as a commodity which can be refined, constantly improved,
and accumulated. A parallel process, which is now called "decision-making," is believed to be the primary consumer of standardized, operationally constantly verified expert knowledge. The new mythology of governance by manipulation of knowledge stock inevitably erodes reliance on government by people. We sometimes forget how quick that changing language happened. I remember when I was appointed
Vice Chancellor of Ponce as you just mentioned, which was after all only 17 years ago. I got an invitation from the Harvard institute for recently appointed top decision makers of universities to workshop. I didn't know my way around the university. I wanted to know who the top decision maker around here was. So I presented this later at the academic senate and said, "Who is a decision maker?" And one young man who has recently come back from studies in the United States explained
what decision makers were. By now we are taking this for granted. We also forget that the world does not contain any information. It is at it is. Information about it is created in the organism through its interaction with the world. To speak about the storage of knowledge or information outside the human body is to fall into semantic trap. Books and
computers are part of the world. They can yield information when they are looked upon. We move the problem of learning and of cognition nicely into a blind spot of our intellectual vision if we confuse vehicles for potential information with information itself, just as we saw earlier when we confuse vehicles for potential speed for vehicles which economize time. We are right again
in a trap led by the misuse of language. We do the same when we confuse the data for potential decision with decisions themselves. The overconfidence in better knowledge becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People first cease to trust their own judgment, and then they want to be told the truth about what they know and therefore become hooked on therapeutic professionals
. Overconfidence in better decision making first hampers people's ability to decide for themselves and then undermines their belief that they can decide at all. The growing impotence of people to decide for themselves affects inevitably the structure of their expectations. People are transformed from contenders for scarce resources into competitors for abundant promises
. I'm just calling to attention how theological this whole issue really should be treated. Adjudication by ordeal -- just think what happens in competition in climbing up an open-ended ladder -- being compelled to do it in school. Adjudication by ordeal is replaced by recourse to secular rituals. The rituals are organized as frenzied consumption of the offerings off some kind of a menu -- a curriculum, a therapy,
a court case. The promise that science will provide affluence for all and for each according to his objectively verified merits or needs deprives personal conflicts of any creative legitimacy. People who have unlearned to decide on their own rights and to do so on their own evidence become pawns in a world game operated in what Mumford calls a "megamachine." No longer can each person make
his or her own contribution to the constant renewal of society, because a monopoly has been established for this renewal on the part of experts. I just saw a book -- a bibliography by [Marins?] from Syracuse about the best books by experts on the future
. Recourse to better knowledge produced by science not only voids personal decision of the power to contribute on ongoing historical and social process; it also destroys the ruse of evidence by which experience is traditionally shared. People who consider themselves knowledge consumers depend on getting packaged programs funneled into them. Such a man finds security in the expectation that
his neighbor and his boss will have seen the same program and read the same column or get the same oracle from the standardized professional. The procedure by which personal certainties are honestly exchanged is eroded in such a society by the increasing recourse to exceptionally qualified knowledge produced by a process called "science," by professionals, and increasingly
also by political parties. It has become (inaudible) -- mothers poison their children on the adamance of the MD's advice. Even in the courtroom and in parliament, scientific hearsay which is well hidden under the veil of expert judgment biases juridical and political decisions. I'm calling attention to the increased recourse in court to testimony which is
clear hearsay but hides under the label of expert testimony. Judges, governments, and voters abdicate their own evidence about the necessity of resolving conflicts in a situation of defined and permanent scarcity and opt for further growth on the basis of data which we admittedly cannot verify or understand. When communities have grown overconfident in science, they leave the expert to set the
upper limit, but we must understand that the expert cannot define what is intolerable. He cannot give us only information on what has happened and make projections of what would happen under certain circumstances. Of course, you can tell me, there were experiments made on what human beings can stand -- for instance those experiments which came to light in the Nuremberg
trials -- but we consider them as criminals. The decision of what populations will endure remains by definition beyond experiment. We can tell what happens to a particular group of people under extreme circumstances -- in prison, on an expedition, in an experiment -- but this is history, this is not
the result of an experiment. Such precedents cannot serve as measures for the privations which a society will tolerate as a result of tools or rules made for society's supposed service. Scientific measurement may suggest that a certain tool threatens to upset one of the major balances, but only the informed judgment of the prudent man who formulates his opinion on the basis of his own everyday
evidence can determine where and when to stop. The first task, therefore, if we want to move into consensual politics about setting up limits, is a demythologization of what science can do in the area. There is a second task which has to be accomplished before we can move into the discussion of the politics of setting limits, and that is the restoration of language.
I've pointed out to you this morning that between 1830 and '50 -- or yesterday evening -- a dozen inventors formulated the Law of the Conservation of Energy -- at least four of them. The four successful ones were engineers, and independently from each other they redefined the floating life force of the universe in terms of work machines could perform. Measurements that could be taken in the laboratory became the scale
by which the mysterious cosmic nexus -- the vis viva -- could be henceforth defined. During the same period during which energy acquired this very strange, very limited, very precise new meaning, industry successfully competed with other modes of production for the first time so that today when we speak about production in a society the principle
analogon is what machines or industries can do. Industrial performance became the scale according to which human effectiveness in the entire economy was now measured. Housework, farming, handicraft, subsistence activities ranging from the making of preserves and self-building of homes began to be viewed as subsidiary and second-rate forms of production. I was, by the way, very much
surprised by an information which came from an MIT study that at the end of World War II 32 percent of all one-family homes in Massachusetts were self-built -- the homes finished that year -- either with people building them from ground -- from bottom to roof or that at least they were their own contractors. The figure has gone down now to eight percent. The industrial mode of production first degraded and later paralyzed the nexus of productive relationships which coexisted in traditional society. This monopoly of one mode of production -- of planned, engineered, staple production -- over all other social relations is much more profound than the competition between firms which overshadows it. We are usually mostly
concerned by looking at the socialist or the capitalist political systems fighting with each other or one industry fighting with another. In the surface competition, the winner is easily recognized. The more capital-intensive factory, the better organized business, the more exploitative and better protected branch of industry, the corporation that sheds diseconomies more unobtrusively,
or the industry which produces for war remains the winner. On a broader scale -- if we look even broader at it -- this competition takes the form of a competition among multinational corporations and even among industrializing nation-states, because after all the modern nation-state, far beyond what Napoleon could imagine, has come to define itself basically
as a supreme holding corporation. But this deadly game among giants diverts attention from the ritual service which this very same game itself renders to the contestants. As the arena of contest between firms or corporations expands, an industrial structure is imposed on world society. We are again back to this strange global
religion. The mode of corporate production establishes a radical monopoly -- not only over resources and tools, but also over the imagination and motivation of structure of people. Political systems compete to baptize the same expanding industrial structure into opposing creeds without recognizing that the structure and the dynamics of the structure known today
is beyond their control. The convergence of corporate monopolies on the deep structural level of society can be called, perhaps -- I propose this world -- "the industrialization of man" -- of his imagination and of the structure of his expectations. It is this trend which must be inverted if people are to be free, but the industrial corruption of language itself
makes this issue terribly difficult to formulate. Language reflects by now the monopoly of the industrial mode of production over people's perceptions and motivations. The terms of industrialized nations identify the fruits of creative work and of human labor with outputs of industry. Not only has it become impossible to distinguish between work, labor,
machine-accompanied labor -- trabajo -- and operation -- infect human activity and the output of industries become identified. In other words, the materialization of consciousness is reflected in Western languages. One of the best examples was called to my attention by Erich Fromm, and I'm still looking for somebody who would want to work at some university, financed to write a thesis
and wants to work on this particular area. I could supply him with many index cards. It is the foremost thing which one can really contribute to a colleague, I guess. The functional shift -- it is namely the functional shift from verb to noun, because it highlights the corresponding impoverishment of activity in the social imagination. People who speak a neo-nominalist language
habitually express proprietary relationships to work, which they say they "have" work or they "hold" work. I had an interesting experience in Cuernavaca. I was gravely attacked by some union people for having made some remarks about unions in Peru and in Venezuela
-- these are Latin American situations -- and having made fun of union people and said that union people belong inevitably -- somebody's unionized in Latin America and effectively unionized, he belongs into the exploiting group. He belongs among those 15 percent, those 20 percent who have at least minimum salaries -- legal minimum salaries -- whose children have a chance -- a more than one in three chance to finish compulsory schooling and probably have access to some medical services
. All of Latin America's employees, where the workers are bureaucrats, say that they "have" work. Peasants say that they "do" it. They say "voy a trabajar," "pero señor, no tengo trabajo." Those of you -- they say, "Yes, indeed. I do my job." In English you can't even say. I don't know.
"Yo voy a trabajar en el campo" -- I go to work in the field. But I don't have work -- I don't "have" it. Those who have been modernized and unionized expect industries to produce not only goods, but also to make work for more people. Not only what men do, but also what men want, is designated by a noun. "Housing" designates a commodity rather than activity
. People acquire knowledge, mobility. They now even can go somewhere to acquire sensitivity or acquire health. They not only "have" work, but in English I think I'm not incorrect if I say they "have" fun, they "get" entertainment, they "have" sex. This shift from verb to noun reflects a transformation
in the idea of ownership. Possessing -- possessio -- holding -- even older in English law, seizing -- no longer describe the relationship people can have even if they wanted to to corporations such as systems of highways or of schools. Possessive statements made about tools come to mean the ability to command their outputs. They have nothing to do
with the traditional sense of seizure. They come to mean to control their outputs, such as interest from capital or merchandise or some kind of prestige connected with the operation of tools. Fully industrialized man calls his own principally what has been made for him. He says "my education," "my transportation," "my entertainment," "my health" about the commodities he gets from school, car, show business, or doctor
. Western languages, but perhaps even more English than other languages, become almost inseparable from industrial production. You might have read in the papers that last week the French government prepared an oukase against Frenglish words. Words taken from English may not be used anymore in the administration, which (inaudible) cause a very great problem in France, but in my
will only lead to a similar corruption becoming rampant in the French language. Why not shift our guilt -- the responsibility to a foreign language? Western men might have to learn from other languages that ownership relations can be reconstructed and can be reconstructed in a convivial way. I was deeply impressed when I read in an old journal of 1913
in a description of Micronesian tongues, because there exist entirely different devices to express the relationship I have to my deeds or to things which I can own. Excuse me, I just find out that this watch has stopped here. And my watch has broken down, so I have to borrow this one, but I have to look at it. It doesn't go with my -- somehow it
got caught. I just that this watch doesn't -- it's technology. Mine broke so I asked somebody for his -- for hers. In Micronesian tongues, you have -- and I checked it then out in several other Malayan tongues, Malayo-Polynesian tongues -- there's a completely different structure for saying "mine" when I speak about
my deeds of yesterday, of which I have to be ashamed and ashamed forever. I can't get rid of them. My nose, which can be cut off; my parents, which are inflicted on me; my canoe, without which I'm not a man, quite differently from my mat, which I don't need. Even my drink. If I intend to incorporate it and I didn't get rid of it
, the "mine" is a different construction than the "my" drink when I offer it to you to take. I'm saying this only in order to suggest what kind of inevitable repossession of our English tongue and development of new possibilities in our English tongue is necessary for us if we want to imagine
how beautifully we could live. In a society whose language has undergone this functional shift from verb to noun and where possessive relationships are thoroughly impoverished, predicates can come to be stated in terms of a commodity and claims in terms of competition for scarce resources. Instead of saying, "I want to learn," restate it by saying, "I want to
get an education." The right to equal learning is reduced to the claim to equal outputs of an educational system. The decision to do something is turned into the demand for a stake in the gamble of schooling. I'm saying "gamble of schooling" because some three or four years ago, before I came to the conclusion that I had to describe school in terms of a world religion, I thought of speaking
about it as a worldwide lottery system. "I want to walk" is restated as "I need transportation." The subject in the first case designates himself as an actor and in the second as a consumer. Linguistic change supports the expansion of the industrial arena. Competition for institutionalized values is reflected in the use of nominal language. This
competition for shares inevitably must take the form of a game. People gamble for what they perceive as nouns. Of course, that competition can be organized, either as a zero-sum game, which means a game in which one wins when another loses, or as a non-zero-sum game in which both competitors get more than if either had lost. An example of the former is compulsory schooling, which
by definition privileges fewer people than it degrades. An example of the second would be -- at least in narrow definition -- the transition from private to public transport. Most people would get faster wherever they want to go. People become completely unaware that competition -- adversary encounters -- can lead also to more freedom for both without
any loss. Conflict does not have to be competition for scarce commodities. It could also manifest disagreement about which conditions would be best to remove restraints on autonomous action. Conflict can lead to the creation of new freedoms for both, but this possibility has been obscured by our addiction to nominalist language
. Conflict can create for both parties the right to do and to do things which by definition are neither commodities nor are scarce. Speaking is not scarce. Caring for each other is not scarce. The ability to house oneself -- thank God -- in most of the world is still not scarce if you take adobe bricks out of your garden. If you need
commodities -- to the degree to which you need commodities it becomes a competition for scarce resources. Conflict which leads to a right to walk, to a right to participate in shaping society, to a right to speak and communicate equally, to live in clean air, or to use convivial tools deprives adversaries of some affluence, but does so for the sake of new liberty. And in my opinion, at least, the two are
not on the same level -- are not comparable with each other -- austerity -- reduction of affluence -- and true new liberty. In some society, the corruption of language has crippled the political fantasy to the point where the difference between a claim to commodities and a right to convivial tools cannot be understood anymore. Limits on
tools practically cannot be discussed publically because of the corruption of language. Public blindness to urgent issues is no new phenomenon. People for a decade, for instance, refused to open their eyes to the urgency of population control. But limits of tools for the sake of freedom and conviviality has now become an issue which cannot be raised. The best example is the reaction I got
three days ago when -- the evening I suggested a worldwide speed limit of 20 miles. The answer was immediately, "You are a dreamer." I think by now you have understood that only by imposing a speed limit of 20 miles, most people most of the time would be able to move at 10 or 15 miles per hour invested. People who are born next to highways
cannot imagine a world without speed, and the peasant in the Andes cannot grasp why anybody should travel so fast. I think I told you that in Mexico we made this study of two states in which for the last 40 years lots of investment were made in improving transportation systems: Guerrero and the area behind -- the state in which San Cristóbal lies, which some of you know. In both areas, we found that less than one percent of the
total population in the year 1970 even once during the year moved in less than one hour over a distance of 15 miles. This kind of study could be repeated among 90 percent of the world's population. A slowdown as the condition for good transportation sounds shocking
. To recommend limits on tools sound as deeply -- in the original sense -- absurdum today as for instance -- I don't know -- the recommendation for greater sexual frankness and freedom as a condition for good marriage laws would have sounded to Victorians. We have, therefore -- before we can face the political discussion of limits, we must unhook ourselves from the idea of the production of high quality and increasingly better
knowledge -- the idolatry of science -- and second, we must become aware to the degree to which our perception of the real world in which we live has been conditioned by our misuse of language and how deeply that affects even those of us who in their poetic use, in their humanistic use, in their own studies concerned with books of the past consider themselves very sensitive critics of language. There is a third area where we need recuperation, and I would call it "the recuperation of legal procedure," of legitimacy -- of the dignity of legal procedure. Support for an ever-expanding productive society has become the overwhelming dominant purpose of the existing structure of politics and law. The procedure
by which people decide what ought to be done has become subservient to the ideology that corporations ought to produce more -- more knowledge and decisions, more goods and services. This perversion constitutes the third obstacle to the transition of the need for a bounded society into an actual social process. Now I'm very much aware that I'm talking today two days after Nixon's
budget message. I'm an American citizen, so I can take positions on American politics. Some people for the wrongest reasons sometimes can point somehow in a correct direction. I just was pointing out -- all I want to say is I do not want to be drawn
into a discussion that to say what I'm saying is dangerous because it seems to support some of Nixon's basic policies, even though this might be true. Political parties, legislatures, and the juridical system have been consistently used to foster and protect the growth of schools, of unions, of hospitals, of road systems, not to speak even of industries.
Gradually, not only the police, but even the courts and the legal system itself have come to be thought of as tools made for the service of an industrial state. Just reread that brilliant man Pound -- the lawyer, the jurist. That the political system sometimes protects individual rights against industrial claims
has become an alibi for the habitual service of legitimizing the further concentration of power. Along with the idolatry of scientific method and the corruption of language, this progressive loss of confidence in political and legal processes is a major obstacle to the retooling of society I propose. People come to understand that an alternative society is possible by
by using a clear language. We can bring it about only by recovering consciousness about the deep structure by which in their society decisions are made. I believe that such a structure exists wherever people form a community. Contradictory decisions can be the outcome of the same process, because the structure can be used to define personal values, but it can also be used
to shore up institutional behavior. But the existence of such conflicting results does not contradict the existence of a consistent structure which generates them. People can decide to get an education in school, even though we have decided that it would be better to learn something on their own. They can let themselves be taken to a hospital, though we have decided to die at home. Just as cognitive dissonance which I've described
is a foundation for dialectics, so the simultaneous acceptance of contradictory norms in decision making proves the existence of a normative procedure. Public confidence in the existence of shared procedures has now been shaken because these procedures -- political and legal -- are constantly misused. They've become tools -- these procedures -- to support unlimited production through converging
arguments that ultimately take moral, political, or legal character. Christian churches preach meekness, charity, and austerity, but finance industrial development programs among the poor. Socialists enforce a Stalinist mode of production, and the common law has come to favor the firm over the individual. If you look at it from the perspective which I'm trying to take, each one of these represent
a clear contradiction. Unless people agree on a process that can be continually and convivially and effectively used to control society's tools, the inversion of the present institutional structure cannot be either enacted or -- what is more important -- precariously maintained. I know that managers will always reemerge to increase institutional productivity and capture
public support for the better service they promise, but we need a procedure by which we constantly debunk their pretense. I propose to use common law -- the formal structure of common law -- as a paradigm in order to describe the underlying structure of decision making in a country like the
United States. Evidently I would not speak in the same terms if I were to speak at this moment in Brazil or in an Indian community, but common law -- and here I have been deeply under the influence of two colleagues who both were pupils of Hans Keilson -- permits me to speak about the paradigm of a strictly --
to provide a paradigm for a strictly formal structure of decision making in which adversary procedures -- opposition of opinion -- is recognized and the composition of a conflict by a layman becomes a precedent for future decisions. Now when I speak in this way, two objections are usually made, especially when I propose law as a paradigm
for the inversion of society. One of them is superficial and says that the law of political procedure cannot be a convivial tool because not everybody can be a lawyer, and so not everybody can operate the law on his own. This of course is true only to some degree and is not of the essence. The other objection is completely relevant and is much more profound
. Persons who now operate the law as a social tool are deeply infected with the myths that pervade a growth society. Their imagination of the possible and of the feasible is determined by the law of industry -- the stories of industry. This fact is of critical importance, because the juristic system -- and I include here the political one -- is not simply a sect
of written laws; it is a continuing process by which these laws are made and then applied to actual situations. The law is used to impose a given mindset on all participants. The resulting content of the law embodies the ideologies of lawmakers and judges. How we experience the ideology inherent in a culture becomes established mythology in the laws which Congress
or juries or courts make and apply. The body of laws that regulate an industrial society inevitably reflects its myths and their supporting ritual. More is always in the common good, and more power to firms, to professions, to professional agencies. Now, while this objection does point to a fundamental difficulty against
the use of lawful procedures in an inversion of society, it also misses the point I want to make. I carefully distinguish between a body of laws and the purely formal structure by which these laws are made, just as I earlier distinguished between the use of slogans by which our institutions operate the use of ordinary, healthy language. And so I will tomorrow distinguish
between policies -- industrial policies -- and formal political process. It is the latter -- the formal structure -- and not the former which are the tools which we need, which we can share, and in which we can obtain the cooperation of everybody. I do believe that the major complimentary features
of the common law make its formal structure particularly applicable as a paradigm to the needs which arise in a profound crisis. These features are: one, the inherent continuity of the system, and the other, it's adversary system. Analogues features can be founded in other law systems, but I here choose the common law system to illustrate what I mean by the recovery of a structure by which
decisions are made. The continuity built in the lawmaking process does in one sense conserve the substance of a body of laws. This is less obvious in the legislative stage, because legislators are free to innovate at their own discretion as long as they stay within the constitutional framework. But they do also have to fit any new law into a context of existing legislation, and this tends to ensure that new legislation will not
vary too widely from the overall tradition of existing law. The case of the courts is much clearer and I don't have to specify it. The continuity of the formal structure used in this process is of a different order from the continuous embodiment of one set of prejudices in a set of laws. Considered in this formal sense, the system of continuities is not designed to
preserve the content of any existing set of laws. It could even be used to preserve the continuous development of a set of laws that fit an inverted society. There is nothing in most constitutions that prevents the passage of laws setting up limits to productivity, to privilege, to professional monopoly, or to efficiency. In principle, the existing process of legislatures and courts can with a reversal of its
focus make and apply such laws. It is for this reason that tomorrow, when I speak about the political inversion of society, I will refer to the necessity of continuity of formal process. Second, the adversary nature of common law is equally important. The common law is not formally concerned with what is ethically or technically good. It is a tool for the understanding
of mutualities that surface in an actual conflict. It leaves to those directly concerned with the social interest the task of insisting on the protection of their rights, of the pursuit of their claims, to what they themselves consider to be good, and this works both in legislation and in jurisprudence. The decision is an act of balancing conflicting interests in a way that is theoretically best for all
. It is obvious that during the last few generations this balance has been wholly distorted in favor of a production-oriented society, but this current misuse of the juristic structure is not a valid argument against its use for precisely the opposite purpose. Interests wholly opposed to such a society, free from the illusion that growth can overcome injustice and concerned with limits, can in
principle use the same tool. It is not of course sufficient that new types of plaintiffs appear. It is equally true that the growth illusions of the legislator must fail and that parties must be brought forward in conflict to represent their interest in an assessment of that which we now take for facts. Most of the present laws and present legislators, most of the present courts and their decisions, most of the claimants and their demands, are now deeply corrupted
by an overarching industrial consensus that more is better and that the corporation serves the public interest better than individual men, but this entrenched consensus does not invalidate my thesis that any revolution which neglects the use of formal legal and political procedure will fail. Any revolution which neglects to recognize a basic preexistent
structure of decision making must fail. Only an active majority in which individuals and groups insist for their own reason each on their own rights and whose members share the same convivial procedure, which is exactly that basic structure to which I appeal, can recover the rights of men against the claims of corporations. The use of procedures for the purpose of hampering, stopping, and inverting our major
institutions will appear to their managers and abbots as a misuse of the law and as a subversion of the only order which we recognize, but the use of new convivial procedures appears corrupt and criminal to the bureaucrat -- even one who calls himself a judge. But that does not mean that we can conceivably invert society without insisting on the preexistence and the conservation
of a structure of decision making. I'm sorry that again I overstepped my time. I have never yet attempted to present in forms of lectures the points on which I've been working for a year and a half, and I was not aware of how much material I wanted to pack into them.
MODERATOR: We have some time for questions?
ILLICH: Certainly. We have still 15 minutes. Again I don't want anybody to feel embarrassed at any time to leave. I should have said that at the very beginning. Let me see who wants to start the conversation. I spoke about the necessity of debunking idolatry of science, about the necessity of recovering
the power of language and becoming aware of the way how language distorts our vision of the possible and the feasible, and the necessity of recovering a legal structure as the only convivial tool which is really available to us for an inversion of society. Yes, sir?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: I'm curious about the second point, that is, the obscuring of the real power of language vis-à-vis the human being. If one concedes that the verb has gone to the noun, which is really the (inaudible) of the active human being going to the (inaudible), how does one go about combatting the influence -- the ongoing, destructive influence of the (inaudible) which television exerts on society, especially the industrial society? How does one go about combatting that?
ILLICH: I have not been in the United States for six months. I'm truly ashamed. Today again I lost an hour and -- not an hour -- three-quarters of an hour looking through rather slick news journals. It's my fault. I have only a very few hours a year at a good library, and I
did get hooked -- I am, even though a non-practicing alcoholic or whatever you call it, a Time-aholic or whatever you call someone addicted to Time Magazine, etcetera. I again went back. I did make up my mind some two years ago that I will never again appear on television, because
I came to a conclusion that television inevitably is a demagogic tribune accessible to a few. It makes really no difference how these few are selected. The difference that makes if the few are well-selected, their opposition provides more credibility of a system than if the few are badly selected or selected only by one party. Do I take up your --
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Yes. I'm just curious, though, what institution really makes effective the restoration of the power of language. It seems to me that (inaudible). But it seems also that there's really no telling the restoration of this -- how can I say this -- "ish" knowledge in language
will be when it's advanced to people who are hooked on the media, which in turn panders to a kind of intellectual candy (inaudible). By the way, I mean nothing until you cite an example: a very popular education program, Sesame Street. Now, in spite of the many things one might say are enhanced by Sesame Street, its
real quality is that of taking ideas and coating them with sugar and throwing them at children in rapid succession with the hope that some of them will stick to the child.
ILLICH: It's much more effective education than school, right?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Yes, it is.
ILLICH: Now do you see what I mean by education?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Sorry?
ILLICH: Do you see what I mean by education? Mission, catechism, universal truth. Universal truth. I'm very much impressed by that fact that we're discussing this matter to my great surprise in a chapel. I mean, you speak about the Word always comes up. "En arche en ho logos, kai o logos en pros ton Theon" --
John 1. I'm not trying to distract from what my colleague says. I'm trying simply to say I think I understand what you say.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Yes. Well, I think perhaps we disagree on this particular issue. You've spoken on the subject, but do you not think that some --
ILLICH: Why do you say we disagree? On what point? Make it clear.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Do you not agree that television contributes demonstrably to this passivity in language?
ILLICH: Of course, it contributes to education.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Do you not agree, though, that in order for us to restore the real strength -- the real gutsiness -- of language, the real sense of humanized education (inaudible).
ILLICH: Let me just say how I reacted physically to what you said. I really -- I felt I would like to lean to your ear and say two or three juicy words which would clearly confirm what we are saying. But one does not do this from a pulpit, and when you do it from a pulpit, you make these healthy, juicy, Rabelaisian
words vulgar. What I suggest is I don't know what television can contribute to the first kind of learning of which I spoke, but people can learn by themselves. Television is by its very -- I'm not speaking of tape recorded video programs (inaudible) --
television by its very nature is an educational tool -- a very powerful one, much more vulgar than a classroom. Regardless, in the broadest sense I fully agree with you. I only want to underline what you said.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Now what do we do with (inaudible)?
ILLICH: Certainly not what some of my very dear and admired colleagues are tempted to do because the Ford Foundation gives them money for it -- produce television programs. Or -- how do you call these -- multimedia or many channel cable television, etcetera. But become
aware of the fact that we are weak human beings. Forgive me again for bringing in my own ideal, but He who was God's son thought that it was enough to talk to a dozen people or perhaps to five dozen. What you are confirming is
that there are limits to the size of tools before we become destructive -- and inevitably destructive, because while it is true that for some specific purposes there are advantages to being able to see -- for seven million people or 100 million people to see simultaneously what some crooner or some politician or somebody says, the disadvantages -- the costs --
are enormously high. And let perhaps here introduce one concept which I haven't had the time yet to explain. Yesterday somebody criticized me -- forgive me for making a parenthesis here in our discussion -- of having so quickly disposed of economics. I said I will not deal with the new economics necessary to identify the laws of currencies in a society in which the parameters of what is
produced are being set by dimensional considerations which have nothing to do with currency. I think this also because we need a concept in our conversation at this moment which in normal economics cannot very well be formulated. Economists speak about marginal costs or marginal values, but somehow economists find it
very difficult to speak about something which I observe all the time, namely, marginal disutilities. They can speak about marginal utilities and marginal costs, but not about marginal disutilities. Now let me explain to you what I mean by "marginal disutility." Any one of us who has experience with drugs -- from himself or from friends -- knows that a point comes at which you spend
increasingly more money and feel compelled to spend increasingly more money for constantly declining satisfaction from what you get for that money. Right? You shoot more and more and you get less and less of a high. This is a rising marginal disutility. This means that
people do not, as classical economics assumes, pay more only if they want to get something more, but people at a certain point are willing to pay more in order to get less. I'm saying something in very simple terms. Let a couple economists get together and figure out how they can put this into language which is not too shocking for them. It's a common experience which we have
. The matter which I discussed about schooling or which I discussed about speed this morning clearly underlines what I'm saying. Now, when I speak about certain institutions or certain tools moving beyond the second watershed, what I'm meaning in simple words is that at a certain point a means cannot be used
by anybody under any circumstances without rising social marginal disutilities. It's not simply costs. It's actual perks. Now, I question very seriously if an instrument which has as its purpose to provide one man with the ability to speak
to millions of others simultaneously can conceivably -- no matter how it is organized -- I used the word "simultaneously" -- not produce much more costs along one of the several parameters which I have suggested than the benefits which it produces. I'm simply trying to underline again.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: It would seem -- and I don't mean to (inaudible) --
ILLICH: No, but it's an important conversation I think --
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: It would seem that according to what you say that this marginal disutility extends even further beyond the paradigm of verb into noun. What I detect going on -- that noun is a mechanization. That is what we see on television so often as a kind of drive to push oneself so far up (inaudible) that learning becomes a particular kind of process, and of course (inaudible).
ILLICH: There's an interesting man -- Klaus something -- at this moment in my seminar in Cuernavaca who tries to point out that it goes logically into an idolatry of mathematics. He's done an interesting paper on that which I just saw in a draft last Thursday. I'm looking very much forward on Monday to read it. He makes exactly the same statement, but instead of using the word "mechanization," he says
"mathematical masturbatory fantasies." There might be other -- yes, sir?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: In your perception have the modern poets resisted this corruption of language?
ILLICH: The modern poets -- I don't know, but I do assume that -- this gives you my terrible prejudice -- that I judge a poet by the degree to which he makes me understand what a fool I am when I alienate language -- when he hits me clearly, when he calls me back to the use of language
. But there were probably poets whom I can't dig, I can't understand, but whom other people admire who probably use this alienated language. I don't know. Do you want to -- yes, sir?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: I wanted to ask you a question about -- push the first question you were asked a little bit further, because (inaudible) I didn't hear that you fully answered it. The question was not can we find a point where (inaudible), but something to about it. And what I'm hearing you say (inaudible). That is, your response to (inaudible) was, "Well, I decided to stop
(inaudible) television."
ILLICH: Or to look at it.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: Is that the answer to his question, namely, our response -- the way we heal this problem is to stop (inaudible) and stop looking at it.
ILLICH: I wished I could go one step further and follow his advice and write a good poem on television and make fun of it and make everybody who looks at television feel a big fool. This can be done compassionately. I do not know what you want me to do -- to shoot it down or to take
control over it in order to have my people appear on television? All I can do is create a sense of consumer resistance. Now, consumer resistance in the service industry is much more effective than in the commodities industry. We see this very clearly in the field of education. Kids always knew that they don't go to school to
learn, but because they have to, then during a certain period in the '50s or '60s people -- young people -- suddenly became aware that they get something from school and they organized in order to get power over what is being taught to them as if it had any importance. And then we are very much surprised if these movements broke down very quickly. I think that our major institutions are basically
vulnerable to consumer resistance, particularly in the service industry. I don't see any other way. I don't see how you can politically organize against television. I don't see it. Yes?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 4: I see what you mean -- that television is a bad thing and don't appear on it, but do you have some sort of dispensation that frees you from the stultifying education process, since you're in the context of some of the greatest educators? I mean, here you are in Miller Chapel at Princeton Theological Seminary, and we supposedly are getting an education.
ILLICH: Well, I was a little bit worried when several people coming in here told me, "Oh, that's wonderful. It's very interesting what you say." I'm worried about that. All I can show you is how little I know -- how much I'm puzzled.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 4: It seems to me that the context (inaudible).
ILLICH: I certainly contribute also -- let me imagine that at least with a little bit of vanity -- to the dignity and importance of Princeton Theological Seminary, but I gladly pay that price for the chance of talking to you. But our time is over. You see, the context of this chapel says "1 hour and 15 minutes."
MODERATOR: Thank you, Dr. Illich. The final lecture in the series is tomorrow evening at 7:45. The title is "Political Inversion," and I assume it deals with political aspects of the convivial society and also questions of transition. Is that right?
ILLICH: Yes. It deals basically -- what I want to do tomorrow is to point -- to answer -- to take mister -- the gentleman's question about what do you do about it serious and point out how only the weakest of means are strong enough to produce an inversion and how we cannot but
count on a breakdown -- at least in the richest societies -- in order to produce this inversion. Basically, I want to answer the two questions he asked -- one this morning and one this evening. What can Americans do, and what can you do at all? I'm trying to deal with this tomorrow.
MODERATOR: Thank you, Dr. Illich.
ILLICH: Thank you very much.