The Foresight of Ivan Illich
January 20, 2005
For some reason or other people have been tossing Ivan Illich my way lately, and I have been trawling the web for responses to his life and work. The Times really savaged him, though it received some balancing retorts. Nicer treatment from The Guardian. Wikipedia gives Illich a decent entry, but the best article providing a synopsis is Richard Wall’s at Lew Rockwell’s site.
I had missed this obituary for Ivan Illich in The New Criterion by Anthony Daniels, a MD who has spent time in Africa. Daniels discusses Illich’s explanation of how modern medical institutions make more people sick and considers how Illich would be unsurprised that unhappiness is now routinely classified as depression, to be treated with drugs, rather than an inevitable state for most human beings the causes of which may often be best addressed on the level of moral and spiritual “hygiene.” (Related stuff from today’s “Al’s Morning Meeting” at the Poynter Institute: “Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they’re breaking down in record numbers.”)
Daniels’ essay goes very well with this recent piece in City Journal, “The Frivolity of Evil,” by one Theodore Dalrymple. Dalrymple writes in an attempt to understand the evils of modern social dysfunction where increasing numbers of people voluntarily to horrendous things which the typically admit are horrendous. Dalrymple finds this situation worse than totalitarian regimes which cioerce people into doing evil they would not otherwise do. His native Britain is foremost in his concerns:
In 1921, the year of my mother’s birth, there was one crime recorded for every 370 inhabitants of England and Wales; 80 years later, it was one for every ten inhabitants. There has been a 12-fold increase since 1941 and an even greater increase in crimes of violence.Dalrymple finds the welfare state to be a good part of the problem, yet “the British welfare state is neither the most extensive nor the most generous in the world, and yet our rates of social pathology–public drunkenness, drug-taking, teenage pregnancy, venereal disease, hooliganism, criminality–are the highest in the world. Something more was necessary to produce this result.” That something more is the betrayal of the intellectuals: “There has been a long march not only through the institutions but through the minds of the young. When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as “nonjudgmental.” For them, the highest form of morality is amorality.”
Familiar stuff. A slight novelty–Dalrymple sees the complicity of the left and the right in contemporary social devolution:
There has been an unholy alliance between those on the Left, who believe that man is endowed with rights but no duties, and libertarians on the Right, who believe that consumer choice is the answer to all social questions, an idea eagerly adopted by the Left in precisely those areas where it does not apply. Thus people have a right to bring forth children any way they like, and the children, of course, have the right not to be deprived of anything, at least anything material. How men and women associate and have children is merely a matter of consumer choice, of no more moral consequence than the choice between dark and milk chocolate, and the state must not discriminate among different forms of association and child rearing, even if such non-discrimination has the same effect as British and French neutrality during the Spanish Civil War.
The consequences to the children and to society do not enter into the matter: for in any case it is the function of the state to ameliorate by redistributive taxation the material effects of individual irresponsibility, and to ameliorate the emotional, educational, and spiritual effects by an army of social workers, psychologists, educators, counselors, and the like, who have themselves come to form a powerful vested interest of dependence on the government.It’s not just “libertarians” on the right, however. Few conservatives today have not defaulted to the libertarian ethic that “consumer choice is the answer to all social questions.”
This is The Foresight of Ivan Illich in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Christine Rosen on “The Age of Egocasting” | Next: Southern School Shakeups | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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