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Posted December 12, 2002
When news reached me of the great Luddite's death last week, I immediately passed the news along to my friends, via that great technology, email. And as I typed his name, I truncated it, calling him, simply, Ivan I.
This was not out of overt disrespect. It's just that I've long had trouble with his name. Every time I think of the man, I think of Ivan Ilyich, the character in Tolstoy's great story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
It's hard to type Illich
when one thinks Ilyich.
Now that Ivan Illich is dead, however, I have, at last, an excuse to embrace my confusion; I'll compare Ivan Ilyich and Ivan Illich.
Tolstoy's Ivan I. scolded the bulk of humanity for the constant avoidance of the reality and horror of death.
The recently deceased real-world Ivan I. scolded humanity for the constant avoidance of the reality and horror of . . . civilization.
Of course, Ivan Illich wouldn't have expressed it this way. When he warned us of the dangers of technology and institutions, he thought he was defending the best that humanity had to offer against the worst part of itself, an encroaching cancer of inhumane means
that scuttled rather than promoted reasonable human ends.
He was wrong.
The chaotic growth of civilization, with its unpredictable markets and free flow of art and information, why, these enduring features of reality unsettled poor Ivan I. But he had the savvy to direct his heaviest critiques against institutions, for their imperfections understandably vex us all; it was good marketing on his part. If he was more radical than was called for, that was OK — enough people deemed him profound. Enough to gain a following amongst romantic utopians, anyway.
His chief error is easy to identify. Ivan I. thought that means could and should perfectly match a few (and only a few!) carefully chosen ends. Impossible standard. Means and ends only rarely unite to perfection. The world is complex, and to select but one end from many possible options, and then find one ideal means to achieve that one end — not likely. It is rare when it happens, and making it happen uniformly, by some sort of united front, well, that would be disastrous.
There is no way to get from our institutionalized present to Illich's proposed utopia of ideally dovetailing ends and means unless it be by another Pol Pot (this time hiding, it is likely, within the Deep Ecology movement). Thankfully, most people wouldn't put up with an Illichian Revolution, and if Illich's most radical admirers were to obtain the first bit of power, they'd all be hastily rounded up and placed in an institution for the criminally insane*, rather than shot.
Perhaps it is just this kind of eventuality that made him hate institutions all the more. He could easily imagine being placed in one, by those upset by his utopian nonsense. Instead of abandoning the nonsense, he merely increased it into one pretentious, silly career as a radical theorist.
Which has now, finally, ceased.
I wonder not what Ivan Illich would say to this (or my other) rant against his thought, but what (the fictional) Ivan Ilyich might have said. His thoughts on death are far more interesting than any of Illich's thoughts. (Of course, Tolstoy was as big a nut — er, utopian — as Illich was, but that's another story altogether. But at least Tolstoy could write.)
* The readiness with which most people let off
by means of the nuthouse those artistic and smart people who flirt with treason and mass murder is interesting. Most people cannot imagine how a cultivated, educated person like, say, Ezra Pound, could really become an enemy of the freedoms we have. So they call him insane
and sequester him rather than try him for treason. For most people, revolutionary zeal is just too hard to contemplate. It's easier to call those who embrace great evil out of putatively good intentions insane
than it is to stick with a more jaded and realistic perspective. I'm sure Ivan I. had a theory about this, but I'm not going to read his terrible prose or endure his utopian pose to find out what it is. Besides, when confronted with someone as wrong-headed as Illich, I become sympathetic with Everyman, not with the radicalism. I believe that when someone becomes as unhinged as Ivan I., it is important to point out his error before the error becomes widespread (hence my harsh words here and elsewhere). But in Illich's case, his own ideas led him to suffer through a terrible cancerous growth that his hated institutions likely could have easily removed. He thus became his own best argument against his ideas. A walking demonstration of their absurdity, you might say. I am not sure whether to laugh or weep, but I'm pretty sure that Ivan I. would have counselled against laughter. And he would have been sure of his opinion. And he would have been (once again) almost certainly wrong. — postscript: 10/13/03
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