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Diffstat (limited to 'data/pages/en/article')
82 files changed, 492 insertions, 1226 deletions
diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1900-testing/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1900-testing/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..0a1aad6 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1900-testing/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1900-testing/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1900-testing/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1900-testing/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..27c0d73 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1900-testing/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +# Just the title + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _A non procesed title_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_authors@#:** Ivan Illich; Barbara Duden +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1900 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * Peter Canon, “The American Parish,” Integrity, June 1955, 5–16. +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + * This article was originally included as foreword of the book "Deschooling Our Lives" (1995) and was also included in "Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader" (2008). + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1900-testing-en, + author = {Ivan Illich and Barbara Duden}, + title = {Just the title}, + year = {1900}, + date = {1900}, + origdate = {1900}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1900-testing:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1900-testing/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1900-testing/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..88f24d2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1900-testing/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1900-testing/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1900-testing/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1900-testing/text.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..91ed2a4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1900-testing/text.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1900-testing/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..84d6dd2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b823892 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +# Book review of "I Want to See God" and "I am Daughter of the Church" + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Book review of "I Want to See God" and "I am Daughter of the Church"_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1955 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + * Published under the alias of Peter Canon + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {Book review of "I Want to See God" and "I am Daughter of the Church"}, + year = {1955}, + date = {1955}, + origdate = {1955}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>available}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..b6bd937 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/text.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..5ef8984 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/text.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-book_review_of_i_want_to_see_god_and_i_am_daughter_of_the_church/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..a2df422 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..913312d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +# Can a Catholic Get a Divorce? + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Can a Catholic Get a Divorce?_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1955 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * Integrity, vol. 9, n. 7, aprile 1955, pp. 7-10; + * Opere complete. Scritti 1951-1971. 2019 +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {Can a Catholic Get a Divorce?}, + year = {1955}, + date = {1955}, + origdate = {1955}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..3a7a628 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/text.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..532ff17 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/text.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-can_a_catholic_get_a_divorce/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..c416531 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-sacred_virginity/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f676351 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +# Sacred Virginity + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Sacred Virginity_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1955 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * Peter Canon, “Sacred Virginity,” Integrity, October 1955, 32–35. + * "The Powerless Church and Other Selected Writings, 1955–1985", Penn State University Press, 2019 +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1955-sacred_virginity-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {Sacred Virginity}, + year = {1955}, + date = {1955}, + origdate = {1955}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..055aa81 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-sacred_virginity/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity/text.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..9812c91 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-sacred_virginity/text.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-sacred_virginity/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..702a46d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..11f2816 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +# Spiritual care of Puerto Rican migrants: report on the first conferen + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Spiritual care of Puerto Rican migrants: report on the first conference_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1955 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * Spiritual Care of Puerto Rican Migrants (Hispanics in the United States Ser) + * CIDOC Sondeos 74 - Spiritual Care of Puerto Rican Migrants. Report on the First Conference, held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, April 11th to 16th 1955. Ferree, William, Illich, Ivan, Fitzpatrick, Joseph P. (Editors), Cuernavaca 1970 74) +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {Spiritual care of Puerto Rican migrants: report on the first conferen}, + year = {1955}, + date = {1955}, + origdate = {1955}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..9365bb0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/text.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..74fd1ad --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/text.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-spiritual_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..ba65f7e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-the_american_parish/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/index.txt index 8b848ed..91f21f5 100644 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/index.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/index.txt @@ -2,10 +2,24 @@ * **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] * **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _The American Parish_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# * **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1955 * **#@LANG_versions@#:** * Peter Canon, “The American Parish,” Integrity, June 1955, 5–16. + * "The Powerless Church and Other Selected Writings, 1955–1985", Penn State University Press, 2019 * **#@LANG_comments@#:** - * Included in the book "The Powerless Church" (2018) +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1955-the_american_parish-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {The American Parish}, + year = {1955}, + date = {1955}, + origdate = {1955}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1955-the_american_parish:index} +} +``` ~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>available}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..9d96de4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1955-the_american_parish/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/text.txt index b360b1d..0e90c51 100644..120000 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/text.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1955-the_american_parish/text.txt @@ -1,409 +1 @@ -# The American Parish - -In a modern city parish many people do not find what they are looking -for. Many of those who are dissatisfied never voice their disappointment; -many do not even realize they are disappointed. Some put the blame -for their dissatisfaction on the pastor, the bishop or the trustee of the -Church. The pastor again and his assistants, if ever they become conscious of their people’s criticism, put the blame on their parishioners’ -unreasonable requests or ungenerous help. - -Do people look to their parish for things the parish could not offer or -does the modern city parish fundamentally not offer what it should? -More practical inquiries might be directed toward the study of methods. Here we ask the more fundamental “what” should be offered and -leave the “how” to other articles. - -Take Jose, I met him one Sunday when, during the eleven o’clock -high Mass, I went out through the main door of our Church. There I saw -him among five darkaired and bronzekinned people. From far away -you could have guessed their origin, the origin of 37% of the baptized -Catholics in New York City, Puerto Rico. Why had they come to Church -and then remained outside? Had they gone in or were they waiting for -the next Mass? They were all standing in a little group and talking lethargically. I went up to them and said “que tal” which means “Hi,” and slowly -they turned around, looking at me. After a few more words their eyes -began to sparkle. Before they had been completely unrelated to the surroundings: their dresses were almost imperceptibly differently cut from -those of the other parishioners, their language was different and while -the others were in Church they were outside. Now suddenly, through -a few Spanish words they seemed related to their surroundings. They -started to speak: they all came from Moca, a little place in the hills of that -beautiful island; they had arrived here in New York just a few weeks ago. -They had found out where the Church was, and when they looked at it -they would not believe that it was a Catholic Church: a Church had to -be in the middle of a plaza, in the middle of the village, the center of a -community. Here they had found a building with some strange pointed -arches in the middle of two tall houses right on a booming street. -The Church inside was dark, with light strangely colored from -stainedlass windows, instead of the simple, whitewashed structure— -with wide openings for windows to let in as much air as possible—that -they were used to. But they had recognized this as a Catholic church, -because, upon an inspection, they had found the picture of Our Lady -of Perpetual Help on one of the altars; and that much they knew, where -that picture was, there had to be Our Lord. They had discovered the -picture on a weekday evening, and now on Sunday they had come back -to the Church, they had wanted to go to Mass. Now why did they not go -in and follow Mass? I asked them, and got an answer which baffled me. -They said, because of the ushers. They had never been accompanied to -a pew by an usher. Oftentimes they had no pews in Church. Here they -saw parishioners paying their way into Church. They didn’t realize that -these people—or their parents—had built this church by themselves, that -they now felt responsible for its support and maintenance, that it was -not like Puerto Rico where the government had built churches until the -Americans arrived. So they had turned away from Church because of the -ushers, as one of them said; because Mass starts so much on time, the -other said, Our Lady was there, they said—but the warmth and the life -of the people seemed lacking. - -I could not help thinking back to Puerto Rico; my first Sunday there -in a big parish, in the mountains. On Saturday the pastor asked me say -Mass the next day in the mountains, in three different mission chapels -(he had twelve altogether), since he would have to say the Masses in the -main village. If there was a priest around to help out, every four weeks -Mass was said on Sunday in every chapel. The first Mass I said at about -six in the morning, after I had slept all night on the altar steps of the -chapel, then I travelled on, by horseback, to the next chapel. I heard -confessions, said Mass, baptized, married . . . and off I went to the third -chapel, on horseback still, where I arrived after noon. People were sitting -around in Church eating their bananas and chewing cane, and on the -Church steps they had lighted a little fire to cook something. They continued their conversation in Church while I heard confessions; for Mass -everybody was silent and most of them knelt on the crude floor while two -lonely dogs ran around among them, and when I started to baptize the -conversation resumed. In the evening, I was amazed at the answer I got -from the pastor, a Puerto Rican trained in a United States seminary, to my -question as to whether he thought this behavior slightly disrespectful: -Our people believe that God is their Father, and they want to behave in -Church as they behave in their Father’s house. There are no ushers in -Jose’s Father’s house. Dinner does not start on time, probably he has no -watch, he goes to Church when everybody else goes to Church. Mass is an -important happening in the family’s life—a happening which brings him -together with all his neighbors. The Church is the center of his village -even if he seldom goes into it. The rare Sunday when the priest comes to -his chapel, the Mass is a big event, even if he does not attend. He knows -almost everybody whom he meets at Mass. Mass is easily understood as -a family dinner—as the “communion” of the community. - -## Another World - -No wonder that he is confused at this big, clean, Gothic building where -an usher assigns him his place next to some unknown lady, where he -is allowed to go into Church only five minutes before Mass starts, and -has to leave as soon as Mass is over—where hardly anybody is standing -outside the Church after Mass since there is no plaza—and where there -are so many Masses that you cannot see Mass as a family dinner, a house -built around you, to suit you. - -Standing there on that cold winter morning during the eleven o’clock -high Mass, I realized how hard it will be to explain to Jose and his friends -that this is the same Church which, under another climate, appears so -very different from at home. It will be hard for Jose to understand that -he will be known to God alone in Church and hardly anybody else will -recognize him. It will be hard for him to understand that you can go to -Holy Communion every day in a Church where there are several Masses -every day, and hard, too, to understand the English Gospel the priest -reads, but even more difficult than to understand will it be for him to -feel at home in English. I might be able to make him understand some -of the features of parish life—but to understand a world is far from being -at home in it. And how strange that a man should not feel at home in -the house of his Father. How strange to each other two Catholic worlds -can be. It is not always easy to see how beautiful it is that the universal -Church can look so different in different cultures. - -Or think of Maria, Jose’s sister: she came with him to Mass, and with -him was frightened away from the Church. Now she cannot believe that -this is the communion mass of the Children of Mary. Where are their -white veils? Why do they not sing, does nobody here know the song of -Our Lady of Guadalupe? And why do people now start to come out of -Church, and without talking to each other go straight across the busy, -dirty street headed for home? Why do they not hang around and talk to -each other? Jose and his friends cannot well avoid being bewildered. - -## Dissatisfied Children - -This is but one of the many instances into which you run continually, as -a parish priest, of people who do not find in their parish what they came -to look for. Jose’s problem is not from this point of view different from the -bewilderment of the convert, who during instructions has found faith in -the reality of the Mystical Body visible in Christ’s Church—and then finds -himself socially isolated among faithful churchgoers. And it is not different from the problem of the mature layman exposed to years of sermons -taken from Father Murphy’s Three Homilies for Every Sunday Gospel—or of -the young couple recently moved into a new apartment, who had hoped to -find in the parish an atmosphere in which spiritual friendship is fostered, -and found perfect distribution of sacraments, ritual and Catholic school -education, but not the spirit they had hoped for. - -To all these this parish does not give what they expect: to Jose it -does not give the atmosphere of his home, to the convert it does not -give the new human community he thought would be a consequence of -spiritual communion, to the man yearning to grow it does not give the -adult education program he hoped for, but only an endless repetition of -what he has become insensible to through yearly recital in grade school -catechism. It forces the young couple to make their own home a shelter -for friendship without adequate help from the pastor from whom they -expect it. - -All these people come to the parish because there they find what -seems to them most important: Mass, the confessional, and catechism -for their children. Objections are directed not against the things they get, -but rather against the frame within which they get them: Mass remains -the sacrifice even if it is said quickly and adorned with a hasty sermon. -Your sins are forgiven even if the priest is too rushed to give advice—and -most people are so used to a silent confessor that they might be surprised -at an instruction. Catechism remains true even if Sister has sixty children -in her parochial school class. Marriage remains valid even if all the bride -remembers of prenuptial instruction is that an overburdened priest, in -ten minutes, asked her under oath a few strange questions, such as: had -she ever been to a psychiatrist, would she be faithful to her husband, -would she promise to avoid contraception, while at the same time he had -to answer the phone on a sick call and take care of a staggering visitor at -the door. - -Is there something which could be interpreted as a criticism of the -whole system underlying all these objectionable details? Criticism of -detail is directed mostly against the officiating priest, not against the -parish as such, and therefore is not pertinent to this discussion. - -## Criteria for Criticism - -Could it be that there is something fundamentally wrong with the parish -in modern America? And if that be so, may Christians, especially laymen, -criticize their Church, of which the unit most real to them is the parish? -Many are afraid to do so out of a double misunderstanding: they do not -distinguish between criticism and blame—and they do not distinguish -the human from the divine element in the Church. - -We cannot remain forever small children and take our parents for -granted; only after the teens can a mature love for a parent develop. It’s -the same with Mother Church: an understanding of her humanity in -her human weakness will only strengthen, not diminish our love. Those -who blame the Church mostly shrink from the personal responsibility -which grows out of the realization that we are members of the Church. -Blame is a fruit of laziness and perpetuates what is deplorable. Criticism -brings about change, either in him who criticizes or in the Church criticized. It is always the fruit of hard work and prayer. A critical attitude -toward the parish is just one of the areas in which Christian love for the -Church can develop. But since criticism is always an implicit invitation -to change, we have to pass to the second point and see to what degree the -Church, or, concretely, the parish, is subject to change. And there are two -attitudes toward change, equally unChristian, among Christians. One -is the refusal of any development. This has its roots in a deep mistrust -of human nature, as if God had not entrusted men with the power to -make His institutions practicable, as if the mandate given to the apostles -had been withdrawn. This mistrust lies in this error: necessary historical -developments are taken for divine institutions. Manade frames are -taken for divine works of art. This attitude can be remedied by the study -of theology and history. Theology will show us the seed of divine revelation and will teach us what God has done Himself; history will show us -what men have done under God. - -Opposed to the refusal of any development is the attitude of those -who always want to change, who are like children who do not want to live -in the dusty home their family built over centuries, and prefer to live in a -quickly built shack on the edges of the property. If this attitude does not -have its root in the unstable character of its proponents, it is based on an -over estimation of human inventiveness within God’s supernatural plan. -The remedy to this inclination toward inorganic and sudden changes lies -in an education toward humility. Custom always offers an assumption -for wisdom, at least practical wisdom. Criticism of the modern parish -therefore presupposes some knowledge of theology and of history, which -often becomes visible in custom. - -## Follow the Man to His House . . . to the Upper Room - -Unless we know how a country grew, we do not know what it really is -like. Unless we know what the parish was meant to be by God, and what -it looked like when men first made God’s idea visible, we will not have -the basis to judge the parish we have today. How did the parish start? -Certainly not with the apostles. - -Christ did not make the parish. He made priests, and He needed a -roof over His cenacle. (The priesthood is instituted by Christ, not the -boundaries to His priesthood, expressed in modern parish limits.) For -centuries, the Church was expanding—conscious that the end of the -world was nigh. Every bishop grazed his flock, and whenever possible -had a flock small enough that he himself could say Mass for them. The -imagery for pastoral care as well as the relationship between pastor -(the bishop was the only pastor) and his faithful was taken from the -vocabulary of shepherds, Mediterranean shepherds, who have no fixed -home and wander with their sheep from pasture to pasture—from earth -to heaven. Christians considered themselves as strangers in a strange -world, children banned from their country. The word “parish” came from -a Greek verb meaning: to live like a foreigner—to be without a home. - -## The Cenacle Among Nonhristians - -The twelve apostles found it necessary to ordain one man in every community to the fullness of the priesthood. This man, the bishop of the city, -made the rounds and celebrated the sacred mysteries in the houses of -different Christians. In the Stationhurches of Rome we have a remnant -of this usage: the oldest among them carry the names of private families, -and their name expresses nothing but the address at which the Christians -would meet for Mass. In these homes Mass would be said regularly, and -often the room in which Mass was said slowly developed into a chapel— -the family ceased to use it as a dining room and the cenacle grew into a -Church. The number of Christians too, continually was growing. Soon -one pastor, the bishop, was not enough for the community, and so we see -several popes ordaining priests—priests who would say Mass where the -bishop could not go and who would preach whenever the bishop would -not find the time to do so. Often these priests attended one particular -Church in preference to others, but we cannot yet say that they were -pastors. The bishop still was the only pastor in the city, and these priests -were his assistants. Pope Innocent I in 417 tells us that he was in the -habit of breaking his host, when saying Mass, into small fragments and -sending one of these fragments to every priest celebrating in the city of -Rome, that he might let it fall into his chalice and might realize that it -is really one Mass said throughout the city, the Mass of the bishop. The -breaking of the host into three parts today is a remnant of that custom. - -## The Parish as the Heart of the City - -From the beginning, Christianity developed faster in the cities than in -the country. But by the end of the 5th century Christianity had expanded -into new mission territories, and the last strongholds of paganism in the -rural areas of southern Europe were falling by the 7th century. Always -more and more bishops asked their priests to take over independently -the exercise of their ministry. No more was the bishop the only father -and the priest nothing but his helpers; the priests themselves had to take -over under their bishops all three realms of pastoral duties: the administration of the sacraments, the teaching of the Gospel and the guidance -of the people. - -Of old when every city where Christians lived had its own bishop (or -“angel” as St. John calls him in his seven letters to the seven “Churches” -in Asia Minor), dioceses had been multiplied easily and eagerly. This is -the reason why there are so many of them in the countries which came -to the faith before the 6th century. Now the bishop made every one of his -priests responsible for a welletermined part of his people and slowly, -clearly assigned the limits to the territory for which a priest was responsible—boundaries which often on one side remained open toward the -virgin soil never yet touched by Christian preaching. - -The parish as a living cell of the diocese had been brought into existence by the Church. Christ had instituted His priesthood for His people. -In apostolic times the Church found it necessary to assign a given part of -her Mystical Body to a given bishop. He alone is priest in the full sense of -the word, he alone belongs to the teaching Church, he alone is a successor -of the apostles, he alone wears the wedding ring to show that he is married to the Church. And later on the Church found it necessary to allow -the bishop to subdivide his territory and to make his representatives, -other priests, fully responsible for a parish. -This is how the territorial parish was born, to which belong all those -who live in a given territory, and for whom the pastor assumes responsibility: to feed, teach and guide those who are in the Church and to -convert those who are outside. It went so far that in Europe the word -“parish” became the word for “village.” - -Human factors contributed not less than supernatural faith to make -the parish the heart of the community in Catholic countries. The priest -quite often was the most educated person in the village, custom and folklore centered in the Church and civil life was regulated by the progress -of the liturgical year as the life of every individual was deeply connected -with the Church in the middle of the village. Often also—sometimes -unfortunately—the church became a center for political action. Later -a breakdown in these human factors threatened to remove the parish -from its central position in the hearts of the people. And then came the -Reformation, and with it the Catholic community of Europe was broken -down. From then on we can hardly speak of a common development of -the parish in different countries. We cannot make it our objective here -to study the reasons which brought about the “loss of the masses” in -France, or the motives which made the German parish so susceptible to -the “liturgical movement,” or the final juridical organization that Pius X -(the first pastor in a long time to become pope) brought about in 1917. -Our objective is to understand historically only those elements common -to the American parish—and not those minor elements, as important -as they might be, which shaped the characteristic face of this or that -national parish. After all, we are in search of the common denominator— -if there is one—of most criticism voiced by Catholics against the Church -in this country. - -## The Protective Parish - -The American parish—if we can speak about such a thing—was always -established as a center around which a minority rallied: people who used -the parish to defend what they had. The Church always had reasons to -be concerned for the protection, not only of the faith of her children, -but also of their old Christian customs with their strong symbolic power -to evoke occasions for the profession of faith. The Church always had -been made into a bulwark of tradition and continuity. At the moment -of the big migration of Catholics to this country, the Church had reason -to be overoncerned. Poor migrants who left their country to find a -living came into a highly competitive society, heavily influenced by the -Calvinistic faith that the good succeed, and in the joy of its newound -independence, somewhat set against the newcomers. They brought their -priests with them, pastors of a migrating flock, rather than missioners -to a civilization in need. They were more concerned to conserve the -faith of their people than to convert a new nation. Heavy stress was laid -on meetings among “our own,” associations which would foster marriages among Catholics, and education which would equip the child to -remain a Catholic. The Church became a tremendous bulwark for the -Catholic. Never before had the Church had to perform this task, or at -least never before had it succeeded. Small numbers of missioners had -converted whole countries. Some Catholic minorities had withstood the -Reformation—and tiny little groups of Catholics had been able, along -with the language of their homeland, to conserve the faith in the interior of the Balkans and the Middle East. But never before had a group -of immigrants changed their national allegiance and remained faithful -to the Church. And they did it through their schools and parochial societies: which willyilly constituted another chance for Catholics to feel -themselves a minority in an alien culture. Repeated insistence that you -can be a good American and at the same time a good Catholic only contributed toward this feeling. - -## The Budding Parish - -Catholics may belong to a minority, but the Church cannot be a minority. -She is always the leaven: a minority lives in an enclave—the leaven penetrates. To separate the leaven from the flour means uselessness for both. -If Catholics ever lose their concern for those who do not have God, they -lose also their charity. Many a contemporary parish has contributed -towards this separation by preserving an atmosphere which was once -necessary but is no longer so. -In the sheltered atmosphere of a Church which continues the traditions of a geographically isolated Catholic community within a -nonatholic society, the parish has developed into a most efficient center -for the administration of the sacraments and the imparting of religious -instructions. In fact, never has there been a period in Church history -that saw such a high percentage of baptized Catholics so well instructed -and living such an intense sacramental life. Without a knowledge of the -historical background of today’s parish it would be impossible to account -for the one surprising shortcoming of this Church in America: the lack of -influence of Catholics among nonatholics, or, to say it in other words, -their lack of missionary spirit. Only by realizing that this lack is a characteristic left over from a struggle for survival do we understand that it -is not a direct refusal of responsibility—but rather a sign of immaturity. -A century ago, a newly arrived immigrant was often socially confined to his own national group—without denying his background, he -could not associate with “the old American.” That was the time when the -Church had to protect him from contact with nonatholics in fear that -through his “otherness” he might lose his faith; and the immigrant in -turn could not feel responsible for neighbors he did not know. Today it -is rare for a Catholic not to be accepted because of his background. Many -Protestants have become his neighbors, associates and friends. It is often -under the influence of a long past competition that today the Catholic -fails to meet the new missionary challenge. - -It is as if God had allowed a strong seed to mature in the earth during -the winter and now the time has come for it to bud: wellrained Catholics -all over this country are willing to risk responsibility for those outside -and are waiting for specific preparation in their parish. The word “parishioner” should not refer only to the Catholic. The parish must become -and is becoming in the consciousness of the Catholic the spiritual home -of all who live within its boundaries—even if many do not know where -their home is. This is happening all over. The Legion of Mary is growing; -these are laymen who consecrate two evenings a week to the conversion -of their neighbor. The Christian Family Movement, Cana Conferences, -the changing of oldype Church societies, and the lifeong struggle of -many a priest prepare the spirit into which converts, the fruit of various campaigns, can be welcomed. Even the Catholic outsider like Jose -is meeting with a reception on which former Catholic newcomers could -never count. - -Years ago the challenge of a new mass migration of Catholics would -have been met with the establishment of national parishes. The average -American parish had not yet started to be either American or missionary. -Today, very slowly, the way is opening for a newcomer to be a Catholic -in his own way without having to insist on it, without having to “protect” -his human background in order to save his faith. -Special Mass with Spanish Sermon? - -That Sunday when I met Jose and his friends at eleven o’clock on the -Church steps I could not help asking: should we have a special Mass -for him with a Spanish sermon? Might not such a Mass develop into -a Jim Crow meeting? Should we introduce Spanish devotions? Special -Spanish social groups? Should we allow his sister’s friends to wear their -white veils or should we prudently introduce the traditional sign of the -Children of Mary into our established congregation? Or should we hope -that a national church be established for him in our neighborhood with -the danger that his children will reject their faith with their inevitable -rejection of Spanish culture? - -## Understanding and the Future - -These questions about Jose, and many more about others who do not -find in our parishes what they seek, must be answered with some background of history and theology, and with a prudence which judges the -unique living situation. These questions must be asked courageously -and answered always anew. Criticism of the parish will thus become an -examination of conscience for everybody who engages in it: layman, -priest and outsider alike. And if it is not criticism of the clergy or the laity, -but of the institution itself, it will mostly revolve around the idea that the -protective parish is a thing of the past almost everywhere in this country. -During the winter it was good that the seed remained hidden in the -earth, but in spring, if it does not bud it rots. +../../../../../contents/article/1955-the_american_parish/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..30513c1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..28c0f04 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +# Puerto Ricans in New York + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Puerto Ricans in New York_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1956 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * "Celebration of Awareness", 1970 +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {Puerto Ricans in New York}, + year = {1956}, + date = {1956}, + origdate = {1956}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..db74570 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/text.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..36168de --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/text.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1956-puerto_ricans_in_new_york/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..5406840 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9bb2d2f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +# Rehearsal for Death + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Rehearsal for Death_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1956 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * Peter Canon, “Rehearsal for Death,” Integrity, March 1956, 4–10. + * "The Powerless Church and Other Selected Writings, 1955–1985", Penn State University Press, 2019 +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1956-rehearsal_for_death-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {Rehearsal for Death}, + year = {1956}, + date = {1956}, + origdate = {1956}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..cf057b4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/text.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..fc0ae87 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/text.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1956-rehearsal_for_death/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..bb87c1b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1958-missionary_poverty/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a66a275 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +# Missionary Poverty: basic policies for courses of missionary formation + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Missionary Poverty: basic policies for courses of missionary formation_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1958 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * "Missionary Poverty: basic policies for courses of missionary formation", Horizontes, 2 (3) oct. 1958: 58-65. +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** +* There is anotes article with a similar title, from 1961, that is based on this text from 1958. The title [[..:1961-missionary_poverty:index|"Missionary Poverty" and also was published as "Spiritual Poverty and the Missionary Character"]]. + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1958-missionary_poverty-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {Missionary Poverty: basic policies for courses of missionary formation}, + year = {1958}, + date = {1958}, + origdate = {1958}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..03e2632 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1958-missionary_poverty/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty/text.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..b565d85 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1958-missionary_poverty/text.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1958-missionary_poverty/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..7b586ae --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6c942ba --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +# The End of Human Life + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _The End of Human Life_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1958 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * "The End of Human Life", Horizontes 1, no. 2 (1958): 54–68 + * "The Powerless Church and Other Selected Writings, 1955–1985", Penn State University Press, 2019 +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1958-the_end_of_human_life-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {The End of Human Life}, + year = {1958}, + date = {1958}, + origdate = {1958}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..e5c3812 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/text.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..9ed4755 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/text.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1958-the_end_of_human_life/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..ba1dc57 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..004e924 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +# The Pastoral Care of Puerto Rican Migrants in New York + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _The Pastoral Care of Puerto Rican Migrants in New York_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1958 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * Social Compass, vol. 5, nn. 5-6, marzo 1958, pp. 256-260. + * Opere complete. Scritti 1951-1971. 2019 +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {The Pastoral Care of Puerto Rican Migrants in New York}, + year = {1958}, + date = {1958}, + origdate = {1958}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..4c7c7bc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1958-the_pastoral_care_of_puerto_rican_migrants_in_new_york/en.notes
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..6414ce9 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6a46bb7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +# Graduation Speech at the Colegio de Agricultura y Artes Mecénucas + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Discurso de Graduación en el Colegio de Agricultura y Artes Mecénucas_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_es@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1959 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * HORIZONTES; Revista de la Universidad soy ra de Puerto Rico, Ponce, 3(5):58-64, + * CIDOC Sondeos 77, Ensayos sobre la trascendencia +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1959-discurso_de_graduacion-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {Graduation Speech at the Colegio de Agricultura y Artes Mecénucas}, + year = {1959}, + date = {1959}, + origdate = {1959}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..dd0f2e8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/text.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..851c500 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/text.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1959-discurso_de_graduacion/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1960-missionary_silence/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1960-missionary_silence/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3a4fafc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1960-missionary_silence/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +# Missionary Silence + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Missionary Silence_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1960 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * Ivan Illich, “Missionary Silence”, typescript, 1960, + * In: "The Church, Change, and Development", ed. Fred Eychaner, Chicago: Urban Training Center Press, 1970, 120–25. + * "The Powerless Church and Other Selected Writings, 1955–1985", Penn State University Press, 2019 +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>missing}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1961-missionary_poverty/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1961-missionary_poverty/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..e81c5a4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1961-missionary_poverty/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1961-missionary_poverty/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1961-missionary_poverty/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1961-missionary_poverty/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a5ae51e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1961-missionary_poverty/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +# Missionary Poverty + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Missionary Poverty_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1961 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * "Missionary Poverty", The Catholic Messenger, October 19, 1961, 5–6. + * "The Church, Change, and Development", ed. Fred Eychaner, Chicago: Urban Training Center Press, 1970 + * "Spiritual Poverty and the Missionary Character" in the "The Powerless Church and Other Selected Writings, 1955–1985", Penn State University Press, 2019 +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** +* Based on the previous text from 1958, entitled [[..:1958-missionary_poverty:index|"Missionary Poverty: basic policies for courses of missionary formation"]]. + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1961-missionary_poverty-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {Missionary Poverty}, + year = {1961}, + date = {1961}, + origdate = {1961}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1961-missionary_poverty:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>available}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1961-missionary_poverty/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1961-missionary_poverty/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..845e66d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1961-missionary_poverty/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1961-missionary_poverty/en.notes
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..0800690 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/index.txt index 6bc74df..aed730d 100644 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/index.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/index.txt @@ -2,9 +2,23 @@ * **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] * **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _The Redistribution of Educational Tasks between Schools and Other Organs of Society_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# * **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1968 * **#@LANG_comments@#:** - * Included in: CIDOC Cuaderno 10 - CIDOC Informa, “Junio-Diciembre”, Centro intercultural de Documentación, Cuaderno No. 10, Volumen 5, Cuernavaca, 1968. - * This paper was delivered at the Conference on educational planging co-sponsored by the University of Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rico Planning Board in San Juan, July 1967. +* Included in: CIDOC Cuaderno 10 - CIDOC Informa, “Junio-Diciembre”, Centro intercultural de Documentación, Cuaderno No. 10, Volumen 5, Cuernavaca, 1968. +* This paper was delivered at the Conference on educational planging co-sponsored by the University of Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rico Planning Board in San Juan, July 1967. +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {The Redistribution of Educational Tasks between Schools and Other Organs of Society}, + year = {1968}, + date = {1968}, + origdate = {1968}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks:index} +} +``` ~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>available}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..023f4a2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/text.txt index 4733fd6..dc4dda0 100644..120000 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/text.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/text.txt @@ -1,85 +1 @@ -# The redistribution of educational tasks between schools and other organs of society - -The purpose of this paper is not to stimulate discussion on internal change within school systems. I would l1ke to raise a different question: can the purpose of a school system established by any given society be continually and effectively renewed? If so, what are the necessary cond1t1ons for constant renewal? - -Only a limited portion of the total educational process in any given nation is organized under formal bureaucratic control. The remainder is usually left to institutions over which the planner and programmer have little influence. If we look only at that part of the educational process under formal control, we discover that only a part of it is actually performed by institutions which society considers "schools." The rest is left to programs which are not thought of as formal "schooling." This would include everything from in-service training to driver's education or sex education. - -At this moment we are beginning to analyze society's ability to reapportion education and to influence the growth and orientation of "non-school" education. In this discussion I would like to set aside the concrete mechanics of renewal in the schooling process in order to examine the conditions necessary for a constant renewal of the school's goals. - -First, I will identify the school system which I have observed, and with which I am the most familiar. Then I will list a series of conditions which I consider necessary in order for any school system to continually renew itself and by renewal I mean: allowing new levels of humanism in teaching to be reached, revising educational technology, and eventually abandoning previous tasks to "non-schools" so that the "schools" can assume new tasks. - - -## Catholic schools in Latin America - -During the last few years I have spent a great deal of time analyzing the effect of private schools on the over-all educational process in each of the Latin American nations. And in Latin America "private school" means Catholic school. The latter have a double, stated purpose: they were established to inculcate an ideology which is often taken to be the Catholic Faith, and to offer educational services (i.e. alternate schooling, usually custodial child-care) for those whose parents or sponsors are of the moneyed classes. - -The impact of the private school on the over-all scholastic picture in a developing nation can be viewed from several angles. - -1) Private education in Latin America can be understood as an economic contribution to development. Tuition to these schools can be viewed as a self-imposed additional tax by a minority group which frees regular tax funds by relieving the government of the cost of educating from five to 20 per cent of the school age population and this five to 20 percent is by no means chosen at random. Private schooling provides instruction for children whose parents or sponsors would otherwise have the power to demand above average outlays of government funds for the education of their children. It is also interesting to note that these private schools for the already-privileged in Latin America attract voluntary foreign aid in money and manpower which, since 1960, amounts to more than 20 million dollars per year. - -2) The effect of private education on development can also be viewed from a socio-political angle. The private school system is a broad, systematic device which allows the privileged sector to grow at a rate far beyond its natural growth-rate. At the same time, the private school system allows the privileged sector to acquire a new, flexible internal cohesiveness while still maintaining its very obvious aloofness. - -a. Private schools give a modern rationale both to the existence of a new elite, its identification with the old elite and the exclusion of those rejected by both. Superior, separate and ideologically differentiated private schooling in Latin America is thus important for the rich, and those favored by the rich. Private schools often act as social elevators for a special type of individual from the lower classes. It would be most interesting to determine who these people are, since the achievement-oriented character of their parents might prove to be the most important factor in deciding who will receive scholarships to private schools. - -b. It might turn out that in the long run private schools in Latin America are more important as sieves which allow a certain character type from the lower socio-economic groups to join the elite, than as opportunity for the especially imaginative or intelligent student. - - -## The planning of private Schools - -Private schools could be understood as a challenge to public education. They might provide means to develop and test new educational models, an important factor in educational planning and policy-making. This is a point which has been frequently neglected in the past. Educational planning bodies concerned with facilities and, more importantly with policies in Latin America have yet to propose effective and racional penalties and incentives to include private school initiatives in efforts to achieve overall educational goals. To date effective planning of private schools in Latin America has been politically tabu. - -At present traditional (Church) and new (private enterprise) ideologies keep private schools beyond the reach of the educational planners. Yet we can forecast a strong trend in the opposite direction: namely, that specialized instruction will be industrialized, and that public agencies will both license and contract the services of institutions dedicated to such instruction. - - -## The disestablishment of a school System - -Finally, we can consider the Catholic school system in Latin America as a model for the study of the dynamics of other school systems. We have pursued this line of research in Cuernavaca for the past six years. We have been privileged to act as self-appointed observers and promoters of the only case known to us of the disestablishment of an entire school system. Some of our observations might be relevant for other school systems and their eventual, partial disestablishment. - -Church schools are by no means a negligible factor in Latin America. The Church spends from 60 to 80 per cent of her total budget in any country (except Cuba) for the building and maintenance of schools. From five to 20 per cent of the school-age population in any Latin American nation is studying in Catholic-controlled schools. The total enrollment in Latin American Catholic schools is greater than the total public school enrollment in all but three of the Latin American countries. Yet if present trends continue this percentage will have shrunk to almost nothing by 1980. - -These trends are caused by factors beyond the control of Church administrators and constituencies: ever-rising costs, manpower crises, socio—political variables. And just as important in this trend toward the dis-establishment of the Church from schooling is the conviction of a number of key church-men that Catholic schools constitute the major obstacle to the socio-educational relevance of the Church on this continent. - -This surprising process (which I foresee) is of paradigmatic value of an often neglected relationship; namely, the relationship between education al intent and the choice of schools for the implementation of that intent. Since the Conquest the primary social function of the Latin American Church has been education. But now the Church finds herself entangled in her own school system and is trying to remove herself from school administration altogether. This trend will become surprisingly obvious by 1970. But if recognized now, policies can be created which will allow teachers to eventually accept the rethinking of education, the radical re-apportionment of educational functions or the charismatic renewal an already functioning educational system. - - -## Major points - -1) Mechanism can be built into school systems which accelerate their innovative capacity, but pressure for the renewal of a school system will usually come from outside that system. The preceding statement is a corollary of the knowledge that good schools are "teacher proof." That is, we have evidence that teachers advocate more reform of their milieu than almost any other professional group, yet they are the least effective when it comes to actually effecting that reform. This is due to the fact that the teacher's main task is to formulate questions never asked, or even accepted, outside of the classroom. At the same time, he must preside over an academic life which is accepted outside the school only if it carries the academic "label." Indeed, the better a school can function despite its "subversive" teachers who formulate questions not acceptable to non-academic society, the better teachers that school can afford to hire. The exercise of academic freedom can never be the source of the systematic improvement of the system itself. Indeed, the teacher's very job greatly dilutes his ability to change the educational system from within. His ideas will be generally ignored when he voices them beyond the walls of academia. - -2) The school planner is the last person who can make fundamental innovations in the system. His employer has already told him exactly what special educational task the school must perform, and the school planner simply arranges the allocation of resources to accomplish that task. As soon as the school planner raises the question of a totally different apportionment of the task itself he moves out of his limited area of money allocation, and into the broadest type of social planning. - -3) The definition of the school planner's task is ultimately based on -a clear separation of: a) the school system, and b) overall educational planning. - -The planner of the overall educational process, as opposed to the school planner, must decide which specific social tasks should be pe{formed by formal schooling, as differentiated from educational tasks which must be left to the responsibility of others—from mothers in a community to driving instructors. Only if this decision is made outside of the_school system, will the latter avoid becoming a "state within a state" (like the Medieval Church), or a political football. If the school planner would attempt to formulate overall educational policies, he would reduce all education and instruction demanded by clients, economic planners or politicians to a form of formal schooling. On the other hand, if the overall educational planner cannot treat the school system as a service agency to which specific tasks may be assigned, he will never be able to demand effectiveness and efficiency from that system. - -4) The demand for renewal will either take the form of a request to -serve new clients, or will be a reaction to a model tried and proved -successful elsewhere. The clients of a school system may demand that their system produce new results in a new manner which has proved successful elsewhere. '"Schools should produce..." "Schools should serve..." --it is doubtful that such demands will be effective, since good school systems are not only "teacher proof," but they are also vaccinated by constant disillusionment against utopian ideas coming from outside the system itself. Therefore, effective demands for renewal will usually take the form of a request that the system incorporate competitors. "If the teachers there can do it, why can't our teachers do it? If another system can produce these results, why can't ours?" - -5) A model is usually the agent utilized to effect change in a system. Politics aimed at polarizing power for change in educational systems consistently utilize models to create issues. An effective educational model or experiment must have four facets. The model must prove the following: - -a. That something new is now possible, that the present behavior of another can determine our own future. I would expand a bit on Jerome Bruner and say: '"Personal creativity produces an effective surprise concerning a present possibility." ("They did it!") - -b. Something previously untried has proved itself effective, that it has produced education outside of the current school system. An effective educational result has, for the first time, been defined as a scholastic need. This need is a possible result of systematic teaching, and should now be adopted here. ("Our school should do it.") - -c. The experiment raises a question. Can the educational system effectively allow the model to be reproduced? Must the reproduction of the model remain outside of the system? ("Should we do it? Is our system that 'teacher-proof:? Let 'them' organize it. It's none of our business.") - -d. Is the present system willing to pay the price of.adapting to the new process? Can the present system insure the continuation of the model through its institutionalization? ("Maybe we had better let them continue to try it.") - -6) The last characteristic (d) puts the educational experiment into a class by itself. A school system cannot produce teachers, contrary to popular opinion. It can only create more or less ideal situations for teaching. In the strict sense, educational invention is personal and inimitable. Ideally, the individual teacher is a creator with a personal style which cannot be imitated by another. Individual teaching is the "celebration" of an intimate experience which has no precedent: The charismatic and prophetic quality of a new style of teaching distinguishes it from invention of educational technology. - -Since most teachers are uninventive, dull, or worse, the school system tends to make the teacher a part of the program itself in order to guarantee that his presence in the system be worthwhile. He must "follow the teaching program” laid down by his superiors. This kind of thinking should be avoided. New teaching should not be a model for a process which will eventually be institutionalized. On the contrary, it is concrete proof of a possibility which might lead to the adoption and development of a methodological model within a school system.” - -## Summary - -This Principle could very well be restated in a paradox: Nobody should be paid for the privilege of teaching. But effective and efficient instructors should be so well paid that they can have the privilege of becoming true teachers. - -The effectiveness of planned change in a school system depends largely on the rational selection of scholastic goals within the overall educational process, formal and informal, which a society has defined for itself. - -The Latin American public school systems are irrational, comprehensive, ecclectic combinations of educational goals which have sedimented over a period of 150 years and are glued together by an intensely formalized ideology. The levels and branches of these systems, even if they are somewhat updated, are still historical relics which have ceased to be self-contained sub-systems or "careers." Now education is measured by the number of years one has "passed" on successive levels of the "educational supermarket." The student moves from the First Grade "supermarket" to the Second Grade "supermarket," and eventually may move through 15 or 20 different "supermarkets" and receive a university degree. This system will probably have to be replaced by measurement through statistically described sets of typical educational processes resulting from parallel educational services. In each of these processes almost any individual may obtain a qualitatively, narrowly defined "schooling" at almost any moment in his life. - -I propose that for the intent of the present discussion, the suggestions made here be seen against the background of history; in fact I believe that only through the study of history we will be able to gain the sufficient freedom of imagination to envisage radically new re-distribution of educational tasks between formal schooling and other forms of education or celebration. - -For this purpose, I suggest that we analyze the history of religious institutions throughout the centuries. They are the only major formally -educational bodies who, in the past, had to grapple with the issues now faced by major school systems. +../../../../../contents/article/1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks/en.txt
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1972-gradual_change_or_violent_revolution_in_latin_america/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1972-gradual_change_or_violent_revolution_in_latin_america/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9c9acfc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1972-gradual_change_or_violent_revolution_in_latin_america/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +# Gradual Change or Violent Revolution in Latin America? + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Gradual Change or Violent Revolution in Latin America?_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1972 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** + * "Latin America: The dynamics of social change", Stefan A. Halper & John R. Sterling (editors). St Martin Press, New York. 1972 +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1972-gradual_change_or_violent_revolution_in_latin_america-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {Gradual Change or Violent Revolution in Latin America?}, + year = {1972}, + date = {1972}, + origdate = {1972}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1972-gradual_change_or_violent_revolution_in_latin_america:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1972-gradual_change_or_violent_revolution_in_latin_america/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1972-gradual_change_or_violent_revolution_in_latin_america/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..e6512b4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1972-gradual_change_or_violent_revolution_in_latin_america/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1972-gradual_change_or_violent_revolution_in_latin_america/en.notes
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/compare.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/compare.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a34054a..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/compare.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,24 +0,0 @@ -| **El mensaje de la choza de Gandhi** | **The Message of Bapu’s Hut** | -| Esta mañana, al estar en la choza donde vivió Mahatma Gandhi, traté de absorber el espíritu que presidió su concepción y empaparme de su mensaje. Hay dos cosas de este lugar que me impresionaron profundamente. Una es de orden espiritual y otra la que se refiere a sus enseres[^nota1]. Trataba de comprender el punto de vista de Gandhi cuando hizo la choza. Me gustaron muchísimo su sencillez, belleza y orden. La choza proclama el mensaje de amor e igualdad entre todos los seres. Como la casa en la que vivo en México se asemeja en muchas formas a esta choza, pude comprender su espíritu. Encontré que la choza tiene siete tipos de lugares. Al entrar hay uno en el que se colocan los zapatos y se prepara uno, física y mentalmente, para entrar en ella. Luego viene el cuarto central que es lo suficientemente amplio para alojar a una familia numerosa. Hoy, a las 4 de la mañana, mientras rezaba, había cuatro personas sentadas a mi lado, recargadas en una pared y, del otro lado, había suficiente espacio para otras cinco sentadas muy juntas. Éste es el cuarto al que todos pueden acudir para reunirse con los demás. El tercer espacio es donde Gandhi estaba y trabajaba. Hay otros dos cuartos, uno para visitas y el otro para enfermos. Hay una veranda abierta y también un espacioso baño. Todos estos espacios tienen entre ellos una relación intensamente orgánica. | This morning, while I was sitting in this hut where Mahatma Gandhi lived, I was trying to absorb the spirit of its concept and imbibe in me its message. There are two things about the hut which have impressed me greatly. One is its spiritual aspect and the other is the aspect of its amenities. I was trying to understand Gandhi’s point of view in regard to making the hut. I very much liked its simplicity, beauty and neatness. The hut proclaims the principle of love and equality with everybody. Since the house which has been provided for me in Mexico is in many ways like this hut, I could understand its spirit. Here I found that the hut has seven kinds of place. As you enter, there is a place where you put down your shoes and prepare yourself physically and mentally to go into the hut. Then comes the central room which is big enough to accommodate a large family. Today, at four in the morning, when I was sitting there for prayer, four people sat along with me, by supporting themselves on one wall, and on the other side there was also enough room for as many people again, if they sat close together. This room is where everybody can go and join others. The third space is where Gandhi himself sat and worked. There are two more rooms — one for the guests and the other for the sick. There is an open verandah and also a commodious bathroom. All of these places have a very organic relationship. | -| Siento que, si viniera gente rica a la choza, se burlaría de ella. Cuando veo las cosas desde el punto de vista de un indio común, no veo por qué una casa debería ser más grande que ésta. Está hecha de madera y de adobe. En su construcción no fue la máquina la que trabajó, sino las manos del hombre. La llamo “choza”, pero en realidad es un hogar. Hay una diferencia entre casa y hogar. La casa es donde un hombre guarda equipajes y mobiliarios. Se concibe para la seguridad y la conveniencia de los muebles más que para las del hombre mismo. En Delhi la casa donde me alojé tiene lo que se llama comodidad. El edificio está construido desde el punto de vista de lo que se requiere para alojar esos objetos cómodos. Está hecho de cemento y ladrillo y es como una caja en donde caben bien muebles y otros mobiliarios. | I feel that if rich people come to this hut, they might be making fun of it. But from the point of view of a simple Indian, I do not see why there should be a house bigger than this. This house is made of wood and mud. In its making, it is not the machine, but the hands of man which have worked. I call it a hut, but it is really a home. There is a difference between a house and a home. A house is where man keeps his luggage and furniture. It is meant more for the security and convenience of the furniture than of the man himself. In Delhi, where I had been put up, is a house where there are many conveniences. The building is constructed from the point of view of these conveniences. It is made of cement and bricks and is like a box where the furniture and other conveniences can fit in well. | -| Debemos entender que todos lo muebles y demás artículos que colectamos a lo largo de nuestras vidas nunca nos darán una fortaleza interior. Son, por decirlo así, como muletas. Mientras más objetos cómodos tengamos, mayor será nuestra dependencia de ellos y más restringida será nuestra vida. Por el contrario, el tipo de mobiliario que encontré en la choza de Gandhi es de un orden distinto y hay pocas razones para depender de ellos. Una casa instalada con todo tipo de objetos muestra que nuestro vigor nos abandona. En la medida en que perdemos la capacidad de vivir, dependemos más de los bienes que adquirimos. De la misma forma dependemos de los hospitales para conservar nuestra salud y de las escuelas para la educación de nuestros hijos. Desafortunadamente, tanto los hospitales como las escuelas no son un índice para medir el grado de salud ni la inteligencia de una nación. De hecho, el número de hospitales indica la mala salud de la gente y las escuelas hablan de su ignorancia. En forma similar, la multiplicidad de instalaciones de servicio para vivir reduce al mínimo la expresión de la creatividad de la vida del hombre. | We must understand that all furniture and other articles that we go on collecting in our lives will never give us inner strength. These are, so to say, the crutches of a cripple. The more of such conveniences we have, the more our dependence on them increases and our life gets restricted. On the contrary, the kind of furniture I find in Gandhi’s hut is of a different order, and there is very little cause for being dependent on it. A house fitted with all kinds of conveniences shows that we have become weak. The more we lose the power to live, the greater we depend upon the goods we acquire. It is like our depending upon hospitals for the health of people and upon schools for the education of our children. Unfortunately, both hospitals and schools are not an index of the health or the intelligence of a nation. Actually, the number of hospitals is indicative of the ill health of people and schools of their ignorance. Similarly, the multiplicity of facilities in living minimizes the expression of creativity in human life. | -| La triste paradoja de esta situación es que a los que tienen más comodidades se les considera como superiores. ¿No es inmoral la sociedad en la que la enfermedad tiene un estatuto eminente y donde se tiene en alto aprecio la ignorancia? Al estar en la choza de Gandhi sentí tristeza al ponderar esta perversión. He llegado a la conclusión de que nos equivocamos al pensar que la civilización industrial es el camino que conduce a la plenitud del hombre. Se ha demostrado que para el desarrollo económico no es necesario tener más y mayores herramientas para la producción ni tampoco más ingenieros, médicos y profesores; literalmente están en demasía. | Unfortunately, the paradox of the situation is that those who have more such conveniences are regarded as superior. Is it not an immoral society where illness is accorded high status and ignorance more consideration? While sitting in Gandhi’s hut I was grieved to ponder over this perversity. I have come to the conclusion that it is wrong to think of industrial civilization as a road leading toward the development of man. It has been proved that for our economic development, greater and bigger machines of production and larger and larger numbers of engineers, doctors and professors are literally supernumery. | -| Estoy convencido de que son pobres de mente, cuerpo, estilo de vida los seres que desean un espacio más grande que esta choza en la que Gandhi vivió, y siento lástima por ellos. Se rindieron ellos mismos y su yo animado a una estructura inanimada. En el proceso perdieron la elasticidad de su cuerpo y la vitalidad de su existencia. Tienen escasa relación con la naturaleza y escasa cercanía con sus congéneres. | Those who would want to have a place bigger than this hut where Gandhi lived are poor in mind, body and life style. I pity them. They have surrendered themselves and their animate selves to an inanimate structure. In the process they have lost the elasticity of their body and the vitality of their life. They have little relationship with nature and closeness with their fellowmen. | -| Al preguntar a los planificadores de hoy por qué no comprenden el sencillo enfoque que nos enseñó Gandhi, dicen que su camino es muy difícil y que la gente no sería capaz de seguirlo. Pero la realidad es que, en virtud de que los principios de Gandhi no admiten la presencia de ningún intermediario o de un sistema centralizado, los planificadores, los gerentes y los políticos se sienten excluidos. ¿Cómo es que no se entiende ese principio tan sencillo de la verdad y de la no violencia? ¿Es porque la gente siente que la no verdad y la violencia los llevará al objetivo deseado? No, no es así. El hombre común comprende plenamente que los medios correctos lo llevarán al fin correcto. Únicamente quienes tienen intereses creados rehúsan comprenderlo. Es el caso de los ricos. Cuando digo “ricos” me refiero a todos los que tienen “artículos domésticos” en su comunidad, que no son accesibles a todos. Esos son “ricos” por su estilo de vida, su alimentación, sus desplazamientos; su modo de consumo es tal que están ciegos ante la verdad. Para estos ciegos, la enseñanza de Gandhi es una cuestión difícil de entender y de asimilar. La sencillez no tiene sentido alguno para ellos. Su condición no les permite ver la verdad. Sus vidas han llegado a ser demasiado complicadas para permitirse salir de la trampa en la que cayeron. Afortunadamente, la gran mayoría de la gente no tiene una situación tal de fortuna que los haga inmunes a la verdad de la sencillez, ni viven en tal penuria que carezcan de la capacidad de entender. Incluso cuando algunos ricos ven la verdad se niegan a plegarse a ella. Es porque perdieron el contacto con el espíritu de ese país. | When I ask the planners of the day why they do not understand the simple approach Gandhi taught us, they say that Gandhi’s way is very difficult, and that people will not be able to follow it. But the reality of the situation is that since Gandhi’s principles do not tolerate the presence of any middleman or that of a centralized system, the planners and managers and politicians feel left out. How is it that such a simple principle of truth and non-violence is not being understood? Is it because people feel that untruth and violence will take them to the desired objective? No. This is not so. The common man fully understands that right means will take him to the right end. It is only the people who have some vested interest who refuse to understand it. The rich do not want to understand. By ‘rich’ I mean those who have conveniences of life which are not available to everybody in common. There are the ‘rich’ in living, eating, and getting about; and their modes of consumption are such that they have been blinded to truth. It is to the blind that Gandhi becomes a difficult proposition to understand and assimilate. They are the ones to whom simplicity does not make any sense. Their circumstances unfortunately do not allow them to see the truth. Their lives have become too complicated to enable them to get out of the trap they are in. Fortunately, for the largest number of people, there is neither so much of wealth that they become immune to the truth of simplicity, nor are they in such penury that they lack the capacity to understand. Even if the rich see the truth they refuse to abide by it. It is because they have lost contact with the soul of this country. | -| Sin embargo, es muy claro que la dignidad del hombre sólo es posible en una sociedad autosuficiente y que sufre ataques cuando se orienta hacia una industrialización progresiva. Esta choza encarna el gozo que es posible cuando se está a la par con la sociedad. Aquí la autosuficiencia es la regla del juego. Debemos captar que los productos de consumo y los bienes superfluos que posee un ser humano reducen su capacidad de sacar gozo de su entorno. Gandhi dijo en repetidas ocasiones que la productividad debe mantenerse en los límites de las necesidades. El modo de producción en la actualidad es tal que no tiene límites, y continúa aumentando sin freno. Todo esto ha sido tolerado hasta ahora, pero ha llegado el momento en que el hombre debe comprender que al depender más y más de las máquinas está avanzando hacia su propia destrucción. | It should be very clear that the dignity of man is possible only in a self-sufficient society and that it suffers as one moves toward progressive industrialization. This hut connotes the pleasures that are possible through being at par with society. Here, self-sufficiency is the keynote. We must understand that the unnecessary articles and goods which a man possesses reduce his power to imbibe happiness from the surroundings. Therefore, Gandhi repeatedly said that productivity should be kept within the limits of wants. Today’s mode of production is such that it finds no limit and goes on increasing, uninhibited. All these we have been tolerating so far, but the time has come when man must understand that by depending more and more on machines he is moving toward his own destruction. | -| El mundo civilizado, en China o en México, ha empezado a comprender que, si queremos progresar, debemos actuar de otra manera. Los hombres deben captar que, para su bien personal y de la sociedad, es mejor que la gente conserve para sí sólo lo que es suficiente para sus necesidades inmediatas. Tenemos que encontrar un método en que este pensamiento pueda expresarse cambiando los valores del mundo actual. Este cambio no podrá producirse por los gobiernos o a través de instituciones centralizadas. Tiene que crearse una atmósfera de opinión pública que permita a la gente comprender aquello que constituye la sociedad de base. Hoy, el hombre que tiene un automóvil se considera superior al que tiene una bicicleta, pero cuando vemos esto desde el punto de vista de la norma común, la bicicleta es el vehículo de las masas. Por lo tanto, debe considerarse de primordial importancia que toda la planeación de carreteras y de transporte debiera hacerse con base en la bicicleta, mientras que el automóvil debiera ocupar un lugar secundario. | The civilized world, whether it is China or America, has begun to understand that if we want to progress, this is not the way. Man should realize that for the good of the individual as well as of society, it is best that people keep for themselves only as much as is sufficient for their immediate needs. We have to find a method by which this thinking finds expression in changing the values of today’s world. This change cannot be brought about by the pressure of governments or through centralized institutions. A climate of public opinion has to be created to make people understand that which constitutes the basic society. Today the man with a motor car thinks himself superior to the man with a bicycle, though when we look at it from the point of view of the common norm, it is the bicycle which is the vehicle of the masses. The cycle, therefore, must be given the prime importance and all the planning in roads and transport should be done on the basis of the bicycle, whereas the motor car should get secondary place. | -| No obstante, la situación es exactamente la inversa: todos los planes se hacen para beneficio de los automóviles y relegan a la bicicleta a un segundo plano. En esta forma se ignoran los requerimientos del hombre común en comparación con los de las clases superiores. Esta choza de Gandhi muestra al mundo cómo se puede elevar la dignidad del hombre común. También es un símbolo de la felicidad que nos llega cuando aplicamos los principios de sencillez, disponibilidad y autenticidad. Espero que en la conferencia que tendrán sobre las Técnicas para los pobres del Tercer Mundo ustedes conserven en mente este mensaje. | The situation, however, is the reverse and all plans are made for the benefit of the motor car giving second place to the bicycle. Common man’s requirements are thus disregarded in comparison with those of the higher-ups. This hut of Gandhi’s demonstrates to the world how the dignity of the common man can be brought up. It is also a symbol of the happiness that we can derive from practising the principles of simplicity, service and truthfulness. I hope that in the conference that you are going to hold on Techniques for the Third World Poor, you will try to keep this message before you. | - -<html> -<style> -table { - border: 0 !important; -} - td { - padding: 1em !important; - margin: 0; - vertical-align: top; - border: 0 !important; -} -</style> -</html>
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/index.txt index 2c29a93..fee4690 100644 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/index.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/index.txt @@ -2,11 +2,24 @@ * **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] * **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _The Message of Bapu’s Hut_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# * **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1978 * **#@LANG_versions@#:** - * [[:es:article:1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut:text|Spanish]] //[[.:compare|(compare)]]// * **#@LANG_comments@#:** - * Inaugural Speech Sevagram Ashram Pratishthan Sevagram, Wardha. January 1978 - * Included in the book "In the Mirror of the Past" (1992) +* Inaugural Speech Sevagram Ashram Pratishthan Sevagram, Wardha. January 1978 +* Included in the book "In the Mirror of the Past" (1992) +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {The Message of Bapu’s Hut}, + year = {1978}, + date = {1978}, + origdate = {1978}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut:index} +} +``` ~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..77935d7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/text.md b/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/text.md deleted file mode 100644 index e7f1aad..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/text.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,14 +0,0 @@ - ---- -title: "The Message of Bapu’s Hut" -author: "Ivan Illich" -abstract: "https://illich.test/en:article:1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut:text?rev=1633605519" -date: "**1978" -lang: "xt" -titlepage: true -titlepage-color: "FFFFFF" -titlepage-text-color: "000000" -titlepage-rule-color: "CCCCCC" -titlepage-rule-height: 4 ---- - diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/text.txt index f647ce0..3fd0e49 100644..120000 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/text.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/text.txt @@ -1,19 +1 @@ -# The Message of Bapu’s Hut - -This morning, while I was sitting in this hut where Mahatma Gandhi lived, I was trying to absorb the spirit of its concept and imbibe in me its message. There are two things about the hut which have impressed me greatly. One is its spiritual aspect and the other is the aspect of its amenities. I was trying to understand Gandhi’s point of view in regard to making the hut. I very much liked its simplicity, beauty and neatness. The hut proclaims the principle of love and equality with everybody. Since the house which has been provided for me in Mexico is in many ways like this hut, I could understand its spirit. Here I found that the hut has seven kinds of place. As you enter, there is a place where you put down your shoes and prepare yourself physically and mentally to go into the hut. Then comes the central room which is big enough to accommodate a large family. Today, at four in the morning, when I was sitting there for prayer, four people sat along with me, by supporting themselves on one wall, and on the other side there was also enough room for as many people again, if they sat close together. This room is where everybody can go and join others. The third space is where Gandhi himself sat and worked. There are two more rooms — one for the guests and the other for the sick. There is an open verandah and also a commodious bathroom. All of these places have a very organic relationship. - -I feel that if rich people come to this hut, they might be making fun of it. But from the point of view of a simple Indian, I do not see why there should be a house bigger than this. This house is made of wood and mud. In its making, it is not the machine, but the hands of man which have worked. I call it a hut, but it is really a home. There is a difference between a house and a home. A house is where man keeps his luggage and furniture. It is meant more for the security and convenience of the furniture than of the man himself. In Delhi, where I had been put up, is a house where there are many conveniences. The building is constructed from the point of view of these conveniences. It is made of cement and bricks and is like a box where the furniture and other conveniences can fit in well. - -We must understand that all furniture and other articles that we go on collecting in our lives will never give us inner strength. These are, so to say, the crutches of a cripple. The more of such conveniences we have, the more our dependence on them increases and our life gets restricted. On the contrary, the kind of furniture I find in Gandhi’s hut is of a different order, and there is very little cause for being dependent on it. A house fitted with all kinds of conveniences shows that we have become weak. The more we lose the power to live, the greater we depend upon the goods we acquire. It is like our depending upon hospitals for the health of people and upon schools for the education of our children. Unfortunately, both hospitals and schools are not an index of the health or the intelligence of a nation. Actually, the number of hospitals is indicative of the ill health of people and schools of their ignorance. Similarly, the multiplicity of facilities in living minimizes the expression of creativity in human life. - -Unfortunately, the paradox of the situation is that those who have more such conveniences are regarded as superior. Is it not an immoral society where illness is accorded high status and ignorance more consideration? While sitting in Gandhi’s hut I was grieved to ponder over this perversity. I have come to the conclusion that it is wrong to think of industrial civilization as a road leading toward the development of man. It has been proved that for our economic development, greater and bigger machines of production and larger and larger numbers of engineers, doctors and professors are literally supernumery. - -Those who would want to have a place bigger than this hut where Gandhi lived are poor in mind, body and life style. I pity them. They have surrendered themselves and their animate selves to an inanimate structure. In the process they have lost the elasticity of their body and the vitality of their life. They have little relationship with nature and closeness with their fellowmen. - -When I ask the planners of the day why they do not understand the simple approach Gandhi taught us, they say that Gandhi’s way is very difficult, and that people will not be able to follow it. But the reality of the situation is that since Gandhi’s principles do not tolerate the presence of any middleman or that of a centralized system, the planners and managers and politicians feel left out. How is it that such a simple principle of truth and non-violence is not being understood? Is it because people feel that untruth and violence will take them to the desired objective? No. This is not so. The common man fully understands that right means will take him to the right end. It is only the people who have some vested interest who refuse to understand it. The rich do not want to understand. By ‘rich’ I mean those who have conveniences of life which are not available to everybody in common. There are the ‘rich’ in living, eating, and getting about; and their modes of consumption are such that they have been blinded to truth. It is to the blind that Gandhi becomes a difficult proposition to understand and assimilate. They are the ones to whom simplicity does not make any sense. Their circumstances unfortunately do not allow them to see the truth. Their lives have become too complicated to enable them to get out of the trap they are in. Fortunately, for the largest number of people, there is neither so much of wealth that they become immune to the truth of simplicity, nor are they in such penury that they lack the capacity to understand. Even if the rich see the truth they refuse to abide by it. It is because they have lost contact with the soul of this country. - -It should be very clear that the dignity of man is possible only in a self-sufficient society and that it suffers as one moves toward progressive industrialization. This hut connotes the pleasures that are possible through being at par with society. Here, self-sufficiency is the keynote. We must understand that the unnecessary articles and goods which a man possesses reduce his power to imbibe happiness from the surroundings. Therefore, Gandhi repeatedly said that productivity should be kept within the limits of wants. Today’s mode of production is such that it finds no limit and goes on increasing, uninhibited. All these we have been tolerating so far, but the time has come when man must understand that by depending more and more on machines he is moving toward his own destruction. - -The civilized world, whether it is China or America, has begun to understand that if we want to progress, this is not the way. Man should realize that for the good of the individual as well as of society, it is best that people keep for themselves only as much as is sufficient for their immediate needs. We have to find a method by which this thinking finds expression in changing the values of today’s world. This change cannot be brought about by the pressure of governments or through centralized institutions. A climate of public opinion has to be created to make people understand that which constitutes the basic society. Today the man with a motor car thinks himself superior to the man with a bicycle, though when we look at it from the point of view of the common norm, it is the bicycle which is the vehicle of the masses. The cycle, therefore, must be given the prime importance and all the planning in roads and transport should be done on the basis of the bicycle, whereas the motor car should get secondary place. - -The situation, however, is the reverse and all plans are made for the benefit of the motor car giving second place to the bicycle. Common man’s requirements are thus disregarded in comparison with those of the higher-ups. This hut of Gandhi’s demonstrates to the world how the dignity of the common man can be brought up. It is also a symbol of the happiness that we can derive from practising the principles of simplicity, service and truthfulness. I hope that in the conference that you are going to hold on Techniques for the Third World Poor, you will try to keep this message before you. +../../../../../contents/article/1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..85be773 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1986-disvalue/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/index.txt index 9ccb370..19a5ca9 100644 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/index.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/index.txt @@ -2,11 +2,25 @@ * **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] * **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Disvalue_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# * **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1986 * **#@LANG_versions@#:** * _Beauty And The Junkyard_. 1991. In: "Whole earth review". No. 73, pp. 64 * **#@LANG_comments@#:** - * Lecture to the first public meeting of the Entropy Society Tokyo, Keyo University, 9th November 1986 Enlarged and combined with ‘Disvaluation: The Secret Capital Accumulation’ and ‘Beauty and the Junkyard’ two unpublished manuscripts completed in March 1987 - * Included in the book "In the Mirror of the Past. Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990" (1992) +* Lecture to the first public meeting of the Entropy Society Tokyo, Keyo University, 9th November 1986 Enlarged and combined with ‘Disvaluation: The Secret Capital Accumulation’ and ‘Beauty and the Junkyard’ two unpublished manuscripts completed in March 1987 +* Included in the book "In the Mirror of the Past. Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990" (1992) +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1986-disvalue-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {Disvalue}, + year = {1986}, + date = {1986}, + origdate = {1986}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1986-disvalue:index} +} +``` ~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>available}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..543c46b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1986-disvalue/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/text.txt index ff40e51..39ac05d 100644..120000 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/text.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1986-disvalue/text.txt @@ -1,81 +1 @@ -# Disvalue - -## Professor Tamanoy’s Forum - -This first public meeting of the Japanese Entropy Society provides us with an occasion to commemorate Professor Joshiro Tamanoy. Most of us knew him as friends and as pupils. The questions he asked bring together today 600 physicists and biologists, economists and green activists. - -While a Professor of Economics at Tokyo University, he translated Karl Polanyi into Japanese. But in his own teaching and writing he brought a uniquely Japanese flavor to ecological research by relating cultural to physical dimensions. He did so by focusing on the interaction between an epoch’s economic ideology and the corresponding soil-water matrix of social life. He was an active environmental politician and a master teacher. And no one who experienced his friendship will ever forget its delicacy. - -## How to name an evil - -He had few illusions. Courageously he reflected on the causes of modern war, modern ugliness and modern social inequity to the point of facing almost unbearable horror. But no one will forget Tamanoy-sensei’s balance. He never lost his compassion and subtle humor. He introduced me to the world of those who survived with the marks of the Hiroshima bomb, the _hibakusha._ And I think of him as a spiritual _hibakusha._ He lived the ‘examined life’ in the shadow of Hiroshima and Minamata. Under this cloud he forged a terminology to relate historical spaces to physical place. To this purpose he used ‘entropy’ as a _semeion,_ a signal for the impending threat to an exquisitely Japanese perception of locality referred to with terms which seem to have no comparable Western equivalent, like __ _fûdô._ __ And entropy was central to our conversations. In this lecture I want to explore the limits within which the notion of entropy can be usefully applied to social phenomena by comparing it to the notion of waste. I will then propose the notion of ‘disvalue’ in the hope that through it entropy, when used outside of physics and information theory, will be more clearly understood. - -Clausius, a German physicist, first introduced the word. In 1850 he studied the ratio between the heat content and the absolute pressure in a closed system and felt the need for a word to name this function. He was an amateur classicist and picked the Greek word _entropy_ in 1865. Since then it is used for the algorithm that describes a previously unrecognized phenomenon. By choosing _this_ word, Clausius did us a favor. _Entrópeo_ __ in classical Greek means to turn, to twist, to pervert or to humiliate. More than a century after its introduction in physics, the Greek word still seems able to bespeak a previously unknown frustrating twist that perverts our best social energies and moral intentions. - -In a few years the word has become a catchall for a variety of paradoxical twists which have two things in common. They are so new that everyday language has no traditional defined meaning for them and are so maddening that people are happy to avoid mentioning them. To taboo their own implication in non-sustainable consumption of goods and services, people grab at the non-word ‘entropy’ to make social degradation appear as just another instance of a general natural law. - -When people discuss the cultural impoverishment that appears in stupefying schooling, sickening medicine and time-killing acceleration, they are talking about perversions of good intentions, not about instances of energy or information flow. They mean the evil effects of untoward social goals that have none of the innocence of the inexorable determinism we associate with entropy in physics. The degradation of cultural variety through transnational organization of money flow is a result of greed, not a law of nature. The disappearance of subsistence cultures tied to local soils is a historical and dramatic part of the human condition _only_ in recent times. The disappearance of ‘ideologies’ that favor the water-soil matrix is due to human enterprise and endeavor. What late twentieth-century people take for granted is not something which has always been. - -Tamanoy made me understand that it is possible to include soil, water and sun in philosophical anthropology, to speak of a ‘philosophy of soil.’ After my conversations with him I rediscovered Paracelsus, who calls for the same approach. A philosophy of soil starts from the certainty that reason is worthless without a reciprocal shaping of norms and tangible reality; _seeing_ the culturally shaped body cum ‘environment’ as it is in a concrete place and time. And this interaction is formed by esthetic and moral style as much as by the ‘spirits’ which ritual and art evoke from the earthly matrix of a place. The disappearance of corresponding matrices of soil and society is an issue which we cannot examine deeply enough. And for this, comparison between the _wasting_ of cultural variety and the cosmic degradation of energy can be useful, but only under one condition: that we clearly understand the limits within which science can still generate metaphors. As a metaphor, entropy can be an eye opener. As an explanatory analog it cannot but mystify. - -## Entropy as a metaphor versus entropy as a reductive analog - -My last conversation with Dr Tamanoy took place after a long tour of his native island. He took me around Okinawa to meet with his friends, to battlefields, cave-refuges and refineries. From a curve on a mountain road we looked at the Japanese oil reserves and the bay which now lay waste. The shellfish, gardens and village life were gone. Our conversation turned to the danger of extrapolating from a dying tree to global pollution. No doubt, the latter evil is world-wide. But such world-wide despoliation and its tangible evidence ought never to distract us from sadness about this tree, this landscape, this man’s clam bed. Expert talk can easily deaden our speechless anger over _known_ wetlands that have turned into concrete or asphalt. To speak about the destruction of beauty as an instance of entropy is difficult. The metaphor tends to hide the sordid wickedness which we would otherwise deplore, and in which each one who drives or flies is involved. Words made out of technical terms are notoriously unfit for metaphorical use. When technical terms are ferried into an ethical discourse, they almost inevitably extinguish its moral meaning. - -Real _words_ have a nimbus. In contrast, _terms_ are shorn of connotations. A nimbus of connotation surrounds words like a wind chime moved by the voice. Entropy is not such a word, although many try to use it as one. When it is so used, it is delimited in two ways: it both loses the sharp edge it had as a term and it never acquires the overtones of a strong word. In a poem it is a stone and in a political discourse a cudgel. - -The words people use when they want to say something of importance are neither arbitrarily picked from a dead language — like ancient Greek — nor given their meaning only through definition. Each genuine word has its native place; it is rooted like a plant in a meadow. Some words spread like creepers, others are like hardwood. But what they do is under the control of the speaker. Each speaker tries to make his words mean what he wants to say. But there is no clear meaning in entropy when it is not used as the name of a cypher. No one can tell the person who utters this word with his mouth that he uses it wrongly. There is no right way to use a technical term in ordinary conversation. - -When ‘entropy’ is used as part of ordinary speech, it loses the power to name a formula: it fits neither sentence nor system. But it also lacks the kind of connotation that strong words have. The term gives off a halo of evocation that, unlike the meanings of sound words, is vague and arbitrary. When ‘entropy’ appears in a political statement the usage gives the impression of being scientific while in fact it is probably meaningless. If it convinces, it does so not by its own strength but by irrational seduction. It veils a moral perversion from which the speaker would otherwise recoil because it gives the impression that something weighty and scientific is being said. - -What I see, what I cry over, what deeply disturbs me on that degraded island of Okinawa is the result of presumption, aggression and human greed. Entropy powerfully suggests a strict analogy between the realm of human dignity and freedom and cosmic laws. By speaking about aggression, greed and despair within the context of entropy, I excuse crime and carelessness by evoking cosmic necessity. Instead of confessing that I advance an evil through my own lifestyle, I suggest that the elimination of beauty and variety is the unavoidable way of, equally, nature and culture. This is the issue about which Tamanoy spoke out. He defined the ideologically shaped local interaction of man and earth as the center of the cosmos. - -Yet in spite of this ambiguity, entropy remains a valuable word. When used as a suggestive, ever-limping metaphor, rather than as a reductive analogy, it serves to alert some to social degradation, the loss of beauty and variety, growing triviality and squalor. It helps us to recognize random noise; the senseless and meaningless waves that bombard all our inner and outer senses. If I could be sure that its limitations were kept in mind, I would not want to lose it. - -## Disvalue versus entropy - -When taken literally, metaphors produce absurdities. To insist that my child’s brain is a computer expresses nothing more than a trendy paternal vanity. Yet much of a metaphor’s effectiveness comes from the shock evoked in the hearer by an intentional misuse of language. And metaphor works only when the two realms between which this metaferry plies are shores within the reach of the hearer. Now, there could hardly be more distant and obscure realms than those which entropy as metaphor seeks to connect. For the typical listener, the world of science is formidable — by definition, its mathematical language is foreign to the man on the street. On the other hand, the realm in which the metaphor of entropy is supposed to act as a guide — the universe of monitored pollution, apocalyptic security, programmed education, medicalized sickness, computer-managed death and other forms of institutionalized nonsense — is so frightening that I can only face it with the respect due the devil; a constant fear of losing my heart’s sensitivity by becoming accustomed to evil. - -This is the danger associated with using the term ‘entropy’, for the frustrating and pervasive socio-economic twist that morally perverts almost every aspect of postmodern life. And yet the word did us a favor. It forced us to recognize that we are speechless in the face of a social evolution which (falsely) gives the impression of being as natural as the hypothetical chaos resulting from the irreversable run of the universe. - -The word that names this twist ought to be one that includes the historical and moral nature of our sadness, the perfidy and depravity that cause the loss of beauty, of autonomy and of that dignity which makes human labor worthy. Entropy implies that despoliation is a cosmic law, which started with the Big Bang. The social degradation that must be named is not co-equal with the universe, but something which had a beginning in mankind’s history and which, for this reason, might be brought to an end. - -I propose ‘disvalue’ as the appropriate word. Disvalue can be related to the degradation of value as entropy has been related to the degradation of energy. Entropy is a measure of the transformation of energy into a form that can no longer be converted into physical ‘work’. ‘Disvalue’ is a term that bespeaks the wasting of commons and culture with the result that traditional labor is voided of its power to generate subsistence. On this point the analogy between the two concepts is close enough to justify the metaphorical jump from astronomy to modern lifestyles and back. - -I know well that the word ‘disvalue’ is not in the dictionaries. You can devalue something which was formerly held to be precious: stocks can lose their value; old coins can rise in value; critical sociology can take a value-neutral stance; feigned love can be valueless. In all these applications of value the speaker takes ‘value’ for granted. In current usage, then, value can stand for almost anything. Indeed, it can be used to replace the good. It is born from the same mind set which in the third quarter of the last century also brought forth ‘labor force’, ‘waste’, ‘energy’ and ‘entropy’. - -By coining the concept of disvalue both the homologies and the contradictions that exist between social and physical degradation can be shown. While physical ‘work’ tends to increase entropy, the economic productivity of work is based on the previous dis-valuation of cultural labor. Waste and degradation are usually considered as side effects in the production of values. I suggest precisely the opposite. I argue that economic value accumulates only as the result of the previous wasting of culture, which can also be considered as the creation of disvalue. - -## The parable of Mexico’s ‘waste’ - -Mexico City presents the world with a new plague. In this place salmonella and amoebas are now routinely transmitted through the respiratory tract. When you first arrive in the valley of Technochtitlán, surrounded by mountains and 8,000 feet above sea level, you inevitably struggle to breathe the thin air. Half a century ago it was crisp, clean air. What you now draw into your lungs is an atmosphere heavily polluted by a smog containing a high density of solid particles, many of which are pathogenic agents. A specific set of social conditions incubates and disperses the city’s bacteria. Some of these illustrate how cultural breakdown, ideology and university-bred prejudice combine to create disvalue. The evolution of Mexico City during the last three decades is a cautionary tale describing the highly productive manufacture of disvalue. - -In the last four decades, the city grew from one to over twenty million persons. The single experience which most newcomers share before their arrival is nearly unlimited open space. Pre-Columbian agriculture did not use large domestic animals. Cow, horse and donkey were imports from Europe. Animal droppings were at a premium. The dispersal of human excrements was the rule. Most of the recent immigrants come from rural areas. They do not possess inbred toilet habits appropriate for a densely populated habitat. And Mexican notions of defecation have never been shaped by the attention paid to these matters by Hindu, Muslim or Confucian disciplines. No wonder that in Mexico City today between four and five million people lack any proper place to deposit their stool, urine and blood. The ideology of the W.C. paralyzes the cultural urbanization of patterns native to the immigrants. - -Elitist blindness to the cultural nature of excrements, when these are produced in a modern city, is compounded by highly specialized fantasies implanted in the minds of Mexican bureaucrats by international schools of hygiene. The Anglo-Saxon prejudice that physiologically blocks bowel movements unless one sits over water with a roll of paper at hand has become endemic among the Mexican governing élite. As a result, the Mexican leadership is singularly blind to the real issue at hand. Further, this élite was stimulated to megalomanic planning during the oil boom of the early seventies. At that time, huge public works were undertaken which were never completed, and the ruins of unfinished projects are taken as symbols of development which will soon restart. While many of the poor move on, recognizing that the end of development is at hand, the government continues to speak of a temporary economic crisis that has momentarily throttled the flow of dollars and water. Toilet training, combined with the illusion of living in a short-term crisis, blinds the planners and sanitation experts to the evidence that the body excrements of their four million toilet-less neighbors will only continue to remain, rot and atomize in the thin air of the high plateau. - -## The Mexican earthquake - -Then, in September, 1985, an earthquake shook not only the capital but also the complacency of some professionals. Engineers and health planners in countries like Mexico almost inevitably belong to the class who, by definition, use the W.C. But in 1985 many of these had no water at home or at work for several weeks. For the first time, some editorial writers began to question whether hygiene inevitably means the dilution of feces and the generation of black water. What should have been obvious long ago suddenly became evident conclusions for a few: it is beyond the economic power of Mexico to provide water for several million additional toilets. Further, even if there were enough money and stringent rules applied on the use of flush, the generalization of the W.C. would be a serious and disastrous aggression against rural Mexico. The attempt to pump the necessary millions of gallons would devastate the semi-arid farm communities within a radius of more than a hundred miles. It would thus force new millions into the city. Then thousands of acres of fragile soil on the terraces, some built before the Spaniards, if left untended, would wash away. The center of the Meso-American plateau would become a permanent desert. All this loss would be the result of an ideology that treats humans as natural waste producers. Thinking differently, a new political opposition arose and picked up the slogan of composting units for rich and poor. - -It was interesting to observe how this small but potentially influential group reacted in the absence of the toilet ideology. The ideal of _la_ _normalidad,_ which in Spanish means perpendicularity, went to pieces for them. These people, including some professionals but most quite poor, prisoners of the world’s greatest megacity, rejected the symbols of urban life, such as skyscrapers, deep tunnels and monster markets. The ruins of the inner city became for them a sign of hope. Hitherto unexamined certainties about water and excrement became the source of laughter. Economic development became the butt of jokes in the _pulquerias_. Obviously it did not lead to the distribution of accumulated value, but to the generation of a huge turd composed of cement and plastic needing to be tended by professional services. Sewers became the symbol for remedies required in a city set up for the economic toilet training of _homo_ _œ_ _conomicus._ - -## The history of waste - -The social definition of excrements, which in the opinion of those who generate them cannot be turned into compost, has become a cypher for the junking of people. The latter learn that they depend on services even when they act under the urge of the most elementary needs. In this perspective, the W.C. is a device to instill the habit of self-junking or self-disvaluation, which prepares one for dependence on scarce services in other spheres. It brings into existence the body percept of _homo_ the generator of waste. When people grasp that several times a day their physical needs for evacuation produce a degradation of the environment, it is easy to convince them that by their very existence they cannot but contribute to ‘entropy’. - -Waste is not the natural consequence of human existence. Professor Ludolf Kuchenbuch, who is working on a history of waste, has gathered the evidence. A concept that we take for granted does not appear before 1830. Before that date ‘waste’, as a verb and as a noun, is related to devastation, destruction, desertification, degradation. It is not something that can be removed. Professors Tamanoy and Murata have built their theory on a similar assumption: if a culture steadily enhances the interaction of sun, soil and water, its net contribution to the cosmos is positive. Human societies that create waste are those which destroy the soil-water matrix of their locality and become expansive centers for the devastation of those around them. Entropy appears as a result of the destruction of cultures and their commons. - -It is therefore unwarranted to attribute waste management to all cultures. Miasma and taboo are in no way ancestors of modern pollution. They are the symbolic rules that enhance integration and protect subsistence cultures. So-called development is a programmed disvaluation of these protections. - -## Disvalue versus waste - -Disvalue remains invisible as long as two conditions obtain. The first of these consists in the widespread belief that economic categories, whose task it is to measure ‘values’, can be used in statements about communities whose ‘business’ is not values but _the_ _good._ The good is part of a local ‘ideology’ related to the mixture of elements native to a specific place — to speak with Paracelsus or Tamanoy — while values are a measure which fits the abstract ideology of science. The second source of blindness to disvalue is an obsessive certainty about the feasibility of progress. This reduction of conviviality to primitive economics and the abhorrence of tradition, masked as a commitment to the progress of others, together foster the myopic destruction of the past. Tradition comes to be seen as a historical expression of waste, to be discarded with the trash of the past. - -Only a decade ago it still seemed possible to speak of twentieth-century progress with assurance. The economy appeared to be a machine that increases the flow of money. Energy, information and money all seemed to follow the same rules — the laws of entropy were equally applicable to each. The development of productive capacity, multiplication of trained workers and rise in savings were seen as parts of ‘growth’ which, sooner or later, would bring more money to more people. In spite of wider social disintegration due to the increase of money flow, ever more money was proposed as the fundamental requirement to satisfy the basic needs of more people! Entropy then seemed a tempting analog for the social degradation resulting from the pervasive flow. - -In the meantime, a new and radical questioning of economic verities began. As recently as twenty years ago, it was not yet ridiculous to look for a world community based on equal dignity and fairness that could be planned on the thermodynamic model of value flows. This is no longer so in the mid-eighties. Not only the promise of human equality, but even the provision of an equal chance for survival, sounds hollow. On a world scale it is obvious that growth has concentrated economic benefits, simultaneously disvaluing people and places, in such a way that survival has become impossible outside the money economy. More people are more destitute and helpless than ever before. Further, those privileges which only higher income can buy are increasingly valued primarily as an escape from the disvalue which affects the lives of all. - -The ideology of economic progress throws a shadow of disvalue on almost all activities that are culturally shaped outside of money flow. People like the immigrants to Mexico City, and beliefs such as those in local health rules, are de-valued long before effective toilets can be provided. People are forced into a new mental topology in which locations for bowel movements are scarce, even though resources to create these places are beyond the reasonable reach of the new economy in which they find themselves. The ideology of production and consumption under the implied condition of ‘natural’ scarcity takes hold of their minds while neither paid jobs nor money are attainable for them. Self-degradation, self-junking, self-wasting are different ways to name this creation of the necessary conditions for the legitimate growth of a money economy. - -This is where Joshiro Tamanoy comes in. He not only translated but he taught Karl Polanyi. He picked up the distinction between formal and substantive economies that goes back to Polanyi. Forty years after Polanyi, Tamanoy — whom I know only from conversation, since most of his writings are in a language of which I am ignorant — brought this distinction into modern Japan. It can be used to sum up our argument. Entropy is probably an effective metaphor to stress de-valuation in the formal economy. The flow of money or information can in some way be compared to the flow of heat. But it is now obvious that macro-economics tells us nothing about what people consider _good._ Therefore, entropy cannot be relevant to explain the devastation of substantive cultural patterns by which people act outside the formal money economy. This is true because the ‘exchange’ of gifts or movements of goods in the substantive economy are, by their very nature, heterogeneous to the flow-model of values postulated by a formal economy. And, as the thermodynamic flow model spreads, it extinguishes a way of life to which entropy will forever be foreign. +../../../../../contents/article/1986-disvalue/en.txt
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/index.txt index ceedf39..edafdad 100644 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/index.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/index.txt @@ -2,8 +2,22 @@ * **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] * **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Foreword to "Deschooling Our Lives"_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# * **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1995 * **#@LANG_comments@#:** - * This article was originally included as foreword of the book "Deschooling Our Lives" (1995) and was also included in "Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader" (2008). +* This article was originally included as foreword of the book "Deschooling Our Lives" (1995) and was also included in "Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader" (2008). +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {Foreword to "Deschooling Our Lives"}, + year = {1995}, + date = {1995}, + origdate = {1995}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives:index} +} +``` ~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>available}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..a1056e5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/text.txt index b52a199..4e22a7d 100644..120000 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/text.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/text.txt @@ -1,27 +1 @@ - -# Foreword to "Deschooling Our Lives" - -Leafing through the pages of _Deschooling Our Lives_ transports me back to the year 1970 when, together with Everett Reimer at the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, I gathered together some of the more thoughtful critics of education (Paulo Freire, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Joel Spring, George Dennison, and others) to address the futility of schooling — not only in Latin America, which was already obvious — but also in the so-called developed, industrialized world. - -On Wednesday mornings during the spring and summer of that year, I distributed drafts of essays that eventually became chapters of my book, _Deschooling Society_. Looking back over a quarter century, many of the views and criticisms that seemed so radical back in 1970 today seem rather naive. While my criticisms of schooling in that book may have helped some people reflect on the unwanted social side effects of that institution — and perhaps pursue meaningful alternatives to it — I now realize that I was largely barking up the wrong tree. To understand why I feel this way and to get a glimpse of where I am today, I invite readers to accompany me on the journey I took after _Deschooling Society_. - -My travelogue begins twenty-five years ago, when _Deschooling Society_ was about to appear. During the nine months the manuscript was at the publishers, I grew more and more dissatisfied with the text, which, by the way, did not argue for the elimination of schools. This misapprehension I owe to Cass Canfield Sr., Harper’s president, who named the book and in so doing misrepresented my thoughts. The book advocates the disestablishment of schools, in the sense in which the Church has been disestablished in the United States. By disestablishment, I meant, first, not paying public monies and, second, not granting any special social privileges to either church- or school-goers. (I even suggested that instead of financing schools, we should go further than we went with religion and have schools pay taxes, so that schooling would become a luxury object and be recognized as such.) - -I called for the disestablishment of schools for the sake of improving education and here, I noticed, lay my mistake. Much more important than the disestablishment of schools, I began to see, was the reversal of those trends that make of education a pressing need rather than a gift of gratuitous leisure. I began to fear that the disestablishment of the educational church would lead to a fanatical revival of many forms of degraded, all-encompassing education, making the world into a universal classrcom, a global schoolhouse. The more important question became, "Why do so many people—even ardent critics of schooling—become addicted to education, as to a drug?" - -Norman Cousins published my own recantation in the Saturday Review during the very week Deschooling Society came out. In it I argued that the alternative to schooling was not some other type of educational agency, or the design of educational opportunities in every aspect of life, but a society which fosters a different attitude of people toward tools. - -I expanded and generalized this argument in my next book, _Tools for Conviviality_. - -Largely through the help of my friend and colleague Wolfgang Sachs, I came to see that the educational function was already emigrating from the schools and that, increasingly, other forms of compulsory learning would be instituted in modern society. It would become compulsory not by law, but by other tricks, such as making people believe that they are learning something from TV, or compelling people to attend in-service training, or getting people to pay huge amounts of money in order to be taught how to have better sex, how to be more sensitive, how to know more about the vitamins they need, how to play games, and so on. This talk of "lifelong learning" and "learning needs" has thoroughly polluted society, and not just schools, with the stench of education. - -Then came the third stage, in the late seventies and early eighties, when my curiosity and reflections focused on the historical circumstances under which the very idea of educational needs can arise. When I wrote _Deschooling Society_, the social effects, and not the historical substance of education, were still at the core of my interest. I had questioned schooling as a desirable means, but I had not questioned education as a desirable end. I still accepted that, fundamentally, educational needs of some kind were an historical given of human nature. I no longer accept this today. - -As I refocused my attention from schooling to education, from the process toward its orientation, I came to understand education as learning when it takes place under the assumption of scarcity in the means which produce it. The "need" for education from this perspective appears as a result of societal beliefs and arrangements which make the means for so-called socialization scarce. And, from this same perspective, I began to notice that educational rituals reflected, reinforced, and actually created belief in the value of learning pursued under conditions of scarcity. Such beliefs, arrangements, and rituals, I came to see, could easily survive and thrive under the rubrics of deschooling, free schooling, or homeschooling (which, for the most part, are limited to the commendable rejection of authoritarian methods). - -What does scarcity have to do with education? If the means for learning (in general) are abundant, rather than scarce, then education never arises — one does not need to make special arrangements for "learning". If, on the other hand, the means for learning are in scarce supply, or are assumed to be scarce, then educational arrangements crop up to "ensure" that certain, important knowledge, ideas, skills, attitudes, etc., are "transmitted". Education then becomes an economic commodity, which one consumes, or, to use common language, which one "gets". Scarcity emerges both from our perceptions, which are massaged by education professionaals who are in the business of imputing educational needs, and from actual societal arrangements that make access to tools and to skilled, knowledgeable people hard to come by — that is, scarce. - -If there were one thing I could wish for the readers (and some of the writers) of _Deschooling Our Lives_, it would be this: If people are seriously to think about deschooling their lives, and not just escape from the corrosive effects of compulsory schooling, they could do no better than to develop the habit of setting a mental question mark beside all discourse on young people’s “educational needs” or “learning needs,” or about their need for a “preparation for life” I would like them to reflect on the historicity of these very ideas. Such reflection would take the new crop of deschoolers a step further from where the younger and somewhat naive Ivan was situated, back when talk of “deschooling” was born. - - -Bremen, Germany - Summer 1995 +../../../../../contents/article/1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/Illich, Ivan - 1998 Illich-Conspiracy.PDF b/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/Illich, Ivan - 1998 Illich-Conspiracy.PDF Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 7184916..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/Illich, Ivan - 1998 Illich-Conspiracy.PDF +++ /dev/null diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/Illich, Ivan - 1998 Illich-Conspiracy.md b/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/Illich, Ivan - 1998 Illich-Conspiracy.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5764985..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/Illich, Ivan - 1998 Illich-Conspiracy.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,472 +0,0 @@ -Ivan Illich -Kreftingstr. 16 -D - 28203 Bremen - - - - - - - -**The Cultivation of Conspiracy ** - -A translated, edited and expanded version -of an address given by Ivan Illich at the Villa Ichon in Bremen, Germany, -on the occasion of receiving the Culture and Peace Prize of Bremen, March 14, 1998. - - - - - - - - - - - -_Printed:_ 23.06.00 -_Filename and date:_ ICHON-IB.DOC -_Old filename and date_ : Ichon-ib.c22 - - - - -_STATUS:_ -1. _Distribution_ -- no limits - -2. _Copyright_ -- To be published in: Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham, eds., Ivan Illich: What’s He -Said Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Title and date tentative. - - - - -For further information please contact: -Silja Samerski Kreftingstr.16 D - 28203 Bremen -Tel: +49-(0)421-76332 Fax: +49-(0)421-705387 e-mail: piano@uni-bremen.de - - -* * * - -_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_ -2 - - -**THE CULTIVATION OF CONSPIRACY ** - -A translated, edited and expanded version of an address given by Ivan Illich at the Villa Ichon -in Bremen, Germany, on the occasion of receiving the Culture and Peace Prize of Bremen, -March 14, 1998. - - -On November 16, 1996, I arrived at the library auditorium of Bremen University just in time -for my afternoon lecture. For five years now I had commented old texts to trace the long history of -western philia, of friendship. This semester's theme was the loss of the common sense for -proportionality during the lifetimes of Locke, Leibniz and Johann Sebastian Bach. On that day I -wanted to address "common sense" as the sense-organ believed to recognize "the good", the "fit" and -the "fifth". But even before I could start I had to stop: the roughly two hundred auditors had planned -a party instead of a lecture. Two months after the actual day, they had decided to celebrate my -seventieth birthday, so we feasted and laughed and danced until midnight. - -Speeches launched the affair. I was seated behind a bouquet, in the first row, and listened to -seventeen talks. As a sign of recognition, I presented a flower to each encomiast. Most speakers -were over fifty, friends I had made on four continents, a few with reminiscences reaching back to the -1950s in New York. Others were acquaintances made while teaching in Kassel, Berlin, Marburg, -Oldenburg and, since 1991, in Bremen. As I grappled for the expression of gratitude fitting each -speaker, I felt like Hugh of St. Victor, my teacher. This twelfth-century monk in a letter compares -himself to a basket-bearing donkey: not weighed down but lifted by the burden of friendships -gathered on life's pilgrimage. - -From the laudationes at the library we moved across the plaza to the liberal arts building, -whose bleak cement hallways I habitually avoid. A metamorphosis had occurred in its atmosphere. -We found ourselves in a quaint café: some five dozen small tables, each with a lighted candle on a -colored napkin. For the occasion, the university's department of domestic science had squeezed a pot -into the semester's budget, a pot large enough to cook potato soup for a company. The chancellor, -absent on business in Beijing, had hired a Klezmer ensemble. Ludolf Kuchenbuch, dean of -historians at a nearby university and a saxophonist, took charge of the jazz. A couple of clowns -performing on a bicycle entertained us with their parody of my 1972 book, Energy and Equity. - -The mayor-governor of the city state, Bremen, had picked a very old Burgundy from the -treasures of the Ratskeller. The lanky and towering official handed me the precious gift and -expressed his pleasure "that Illich at seventy, in his own words, had found in Bremen 'einen Zipfel -Heimat'," something like "the tail end of an abode." On the lips of the Bürgermeister, my expression - - -* * * - -_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_ -3 -seemed grotesque, but still true. I began to reflect: How could I have been induced to connect the -notion of home with the long dark winters of continual rain, where I walk through the pastures along -the Wümme that are flooded twice a day by the tide from the North Atlantic? I who, as a boy, had -felt exiled in Vienna, because all my senses were longingly attached to the South, to the blue -Adriatic, to the limestone mountains in the Dalmatia of my early childhood. - -Today's ceremony, however, is even more startling than last year's revelry, because your award -makes me feel welcomed by the citizenry rather than just by a city father. Villa Ichon is a -manifestation of Bremen's civility: neither private charity nor public agency. You, who are my hosts -in this place, define yourselves as Hanseatic merchant citizens. On the day Villa Ichon was solemnly -opened, you pointedly refused to let a city official touch the keys to this house, this "houseboat for -the uninsured and vulnerable among us" as Klaus Hübotter has called it. By insisting on your -autonomy you stressed the respectful distance of civil society from the city's government. I am -touched that this annual award, meant to honor a Bremen citizen, should today go to an errant -pilgrim, but to one who knows how to appreciate it. As the eldest son of a merchant family in a free -port city - one that was caught between the contesting powers of Byzantium and Venice - I was born -into a tradition which, in the meantime, has petered out, but not without leaving me sensitive to the -flavor of the Hanseatic hospitality you offer today. - -I first heard of Bremen when I was six, in the stories told me by my drawing teacher, who came -from one of your patrician families, and in Vienna was homesick for the North. I adopted the tiny, -black-dressed lady as Mamma Pfeiffer-Kulenkampf. One summer she came along with us to -Dalmatia, to paint. Her watercolors still grace my brothers study. From her I learned how to mix -different pigments for the contrasting atmospheres of a Mediterranean and an Atlantic shore. - -Now, a long lifetime later, I am at home in her salty gray climate. And not just at home: I now -fancy that my presence has added something to the atmosphere of Bremen university. When Dean -Johannes Beck led me from the aula through the rainy plaza into the makeshift cafe he made a -remark that I accepted as a gift. "Ivan," he said "this feels like an overflow of Barbara Duden's -house." Dean Beck put into words the accomplishment of something I had aimed at for decades \-- -the plethora of the dining-room conviviality inspiring the University Aula; The aura of our -hospitality in the Kreftingstrasse, felt well beyond its threshold. - -Even before my first Bremen semester could start, Barbara Duden got a house in the Ostertor -Viertel, beyond the old moat, just down from the drug-corner, the farmers market and the Turkish -quarter. There Barbara created an ambiance of austere playfulness. The house became a place that -at the drop of a hat accommodates our guests. If \-- after my lecture on Fridays \-- the spaghetti bowl -must feed more than the two dozen who fit around the table made from flooring timber, guests squat -on Mexican blankets in the next room. - - - -* * * - -_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_ -4 -Over the years our "Kreftingstraße" has fostered privileged closeness in respectful, disciplined, -critical intercourse: friendships between old acquaintances who drop in from far away, and new -ones, three, even four decades younger than my oldest companion Ceslaus Hoinacki, who shares his -room with our Encyclopedias. Friendship makes ties unique, but some more than others bear the -burden of the host. Kassandra who lives elsewhere, has a key to the house and brings the flowers -and Matthias, the virtuoso drummer who stays downstairs, in the room that opens on the tiny -garden, belong to the dozen who can equally welcome the newcomer at the threshold, stir the soup, -orient conversation, do the dishes and ... correct my manuscripts as well as those of each other. - -Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is -acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest -for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to -friendship. Therefore I have tried to identify the climate that fosters and the "conditioned air" that -hinders the growth of friendship. - -Of course I can remember the taste of strong atmospheres from other epochs in my life: I have -never doubted that \-- today, more than ever \-- a "monastic" ambience is the prerequisite to the -independence needed for a historically based indictment of society. Only the gratuitous commitment -of friends can enable me to practice the ascetisme required for modern near-paradoxes: as that of -renouncing systems analysis while typing on my Toshiba. - -My early suspicion that atmosphere was a prerequisite for the kind of studium to which I had -dedicated myself became a conviction through my contact with post-Sputnik American universities. -After just one year as vice-chancellor of a university in Puerto Rico, in 1957 I and a few others -wanted to question the development ideology to which Kennedy no less than Castro subscribed. I put -all the money I had - today the equivalent of the prize you just gave me - into the purchase of a one- -room wooden shack in the mountains that overlook the Caribbean. With three friends I wanted a -place of study in which every use of the personal pronoun "nos-otros" would truthfully refer back to -the four of "us", and be accessible to our guests as well; I wanted to practice the rigor that would -keep us far from the "we" that invokes the security found in the shadow of an academic discipline: -we as "sociologists", "economists" and so forth. As one of us, Charlie Rosario, put it: "All -departments smell - of disinfectants, at their best; and poisoned sterilized aura." The "casita" on the -route to Adjuntas soon became so obnoxious that I had to leave the Island. - -This freed me to start a "thinkery" in Mexico that five years later turned into CIDOC. In his -introductory talk for today's celebration congressman Freimut Duve told you about it. In those -distant years Duve was editor at Rowohlt, took care of my German books and several times spent -time with me there, in Cuernavaca. He told you about the spirit prevailing in that place: a climate of -mutually tempered forbearance. It was this aura, this quality or air, through which this ephemeral -venture could become a world crossroads, a meeting place for those who, long before this had - - -* * * - -_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_ -5 -become fashionable, questioned the innocence of "development." Only the mood that Duve hinted at -can explain the disproportionate influence that this small place exerted in challenging the goods of -socio-economic development. - -CIDOC was closed by common accord on April first, ten years to the day after its foundation. -With Mexican music and dancing we celebrated its closing. Duve told you about her, who did it, -Valentina Borremans: she had directed and organized CIDOC from its inception, and he told you -about his admiration for the style in which she closed it by mutual consent of its 63 collaborators. -She knew that the soul of this free, independent and powerless "thinkery" would have been squashed -soon by its rising influence. - -CIDOC shut its doors in the face of criticism by its most serious friends, people too earnest to -grasp the paradox of atmosphere. These were mainly persons for whom the hospitable atmosphere -of CIDOC had provided a unique forum. They thrived in the aura of CIDOC, and outright rejected -our certainty that atmosphere invites institutionalization by which it will be corrupted. You never -know what will nurture the spirit of a philia, while you can be certain what will stifle it. Spirit -emerges by surprise, and it's a miracle when it abides; it is stifled by every attempt to secure it; it's -debauched when you try to use it. - -Few understood this. With Valentina I opened the mayor's bottle of Burgundy in Mexico to -celebrate one of them. We drank the wine to the memory of Alejandro Del Corro, a now deceased -Argentine Jesuit who lived and worked with me since the early sixties. With his Laica he traveled -around South America, collaborating with guerrilleros to save their archives for history. Alejandro -was a master at moderating aura. Wen he presided, his delicate attention to each guest: guerrillero, -US civil servant, trash collector or professor felt at home with each other around the CIDOC table. -Alejandro knew that you cannot lay a claim on aura, he knew about the evanescence of atmosphere. - -I speak of atmosphere, faute de mieux. In Greek, the word is used for the emanation of a star, -or for the constellation that governs a place; alchemists adopted it to speak of the layers around our -planet. Maurice Blondel reflects its much later French usage for bouquet des ésprits, the scent those -present contribute to a meeting. I use the word for something frail and often discounted, the air that -weaves and wafts and evokes memories, like those attached to the Burgundy long after the bottle has -been emptied. - -To sense an aura, you need a nose. The nose, framed by the eyes, runs below the brain. What -the nose inhales ends in the guts; every yogi and hesichast knows this. The nose curves down in the -middle of the face. Pious Jews are conscious of the image because what Christians call "walking in -the sight of God" the Hebrew expresses as "ambling under God's nose and breath." To savor the feel -of a place, you trust your nose; to trust another, you must first smell him. - - - -* * * - -_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_ -6 -In its beginnings, western civic culture wavered between cultivated distrust and sympathetic -trust. Plato believed it would be upsetting for Athenian citizens to allow their bowels to be affected -by the passion of actors in the theater; he wanted the audience to go no further than reflecting on the -words. Aristotle respectfully modified his teacher's opinion. In the Poetics, he asks the spectators to -let gesture and mimicry, the rhythm and melody of breath, reach their very innards. Citizens should -attend the theater, not just to understand, but to be affected by each other. For Aristotle, there could -be no transformation, no purifying catharsis, without such gripping mimesis. Without gut level -experience of the other, without sharing his aura, you can't be saved from yourself. - -Some of that sense of mimesis comes out in an old German adage, "Ich kann Dich gut riechen" -(I can smell you well), which is still used and understood. But it's something you don't say to just -anyone; it's an expression that is permissible only when you feel close, count on trust, and are -willing to be hurt. It presupposes the truth of another German saying, "Ich kann Dich gut leiden" (I -can suffer [put up with] you [well]). You can see that nose words have not altogether disappeared -from ordinary speech, even in the age of daily showers. - -I remember my embarrassment when, after years of ascetical discipline, I realized that I still -had not made the connection between nose and heart, smell and affection. I was in Peru in the mid- -fifties, on my way to meet Jaime, who welcomed me to his modest hut for the third time. But to get -to the shack, I had to cross the Rimac, the open cloaca of Lima. The thought of sleeping for a week -in this miasma almost made me retch. That evening, for some reason I suddenly understood with a -shock what Carlos had been telling me all along, "Ivan, don't kid yourself; don't imagine you can be -friends with people you can't smell." That one jolt unplugged my nose; it enabled me to dip into the -aura of Carlos's house, and allowed me to merge the atmosphere I brought along into the ambience -of his home. - -This discovery of my nose for the scent of the spirit occurred forty years ago, in the time of the -DC-4, belief in development programs, and the apparently benign Peace Corps. It was the time -when DDT was still too expensive for Latin American slum dwellers, when most people had to put -up with fleas and lice on their skins, as they put up with the old, the crippled and idiots in their -homes. It was the time before Xerox, fax and e-mail. But it was also a time before smog and AIDS. -I was then considered a crank because I foresaw the unwanted side effects of development, because I -spoke to unions on technogenic unemployment, and to leftists on the growing polarization between -rich and poor in the wake of expanding commodity dependence. What seemed hysteria then has now -hardened into well documented facts; some of these facts are too horrible to face. They must be -exorcised: bowdlerizing them by research, assigning their management to specialized agencies, and -conjuring them by prevention programs. But while the depletion of life forms, the growing immunity -of pathogens, climate changes, the disappearance of the job culture, and uncontrollable violence now -make up the admitted side effects of economic growth, the menace of modern life for the survival of -atmospheres is hardly recognized as a terrible threat. - - -* * * - -_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_ -7 - -This is the reason I dare to annoy you with the memory of that walk in the dusk with my nose -full of the urine and feces emanating from the Rimac. That landscape no longer exists; cars -now fill a highway hiding the sewage. The skin and scalp of Indians is no longer the habitat of lice; -now the allergies produced by industrial chemicals cause the itch. Makeshift shanties have been -replaced by public housing; each apartment has its plumbing and each family member a separate -bed - the guest knows that he imposes an inconvenience. The miasma of the Rimac has become a -memory in a city asfixiated by industrial smog. I juxtapose then and now because this allows me to -argue that the impending loss of spirit, of soul, of what I call atmosphere, could go unnoticed. - -Only persons who face one another in trust can allow its emergence. The bouquet of friendship -varies with each breath, but when it is there it needs no name. For a long time I believed that there -was no one noun for it, and no verb for its creation. Each time I tried one, I was discouraged; all the -synonyms for it were shanghaied by its synthetic counterfeits: mass-produced fashions and cleverly -marketed moods, chic feelings, swank highs and trendy tastes. Starting in the seventies, group -dynamics retreats and psychic training, all to generate "atmosphere," became major businesses. -Discreet silence about the issue I am raising seemed preferable to creating a misunderstanding. - -Then, thirty years after that evening above the Rimac, I suddenly realized that there is indeed a -very simple word that says what I cherished and tried to nourish, and that word is peace. Peace, -however, not in any of the many ways its cognates are used all over the world, but peace in its post- -classical, European meaning. Peace, in this sense, is the one strong word with which the atmosphere -of friendship created among equals has been appropriately named. But to embrace this, one has to -come to understand the origin of this peace in the conspiratio, a curious ritual behavior almost -forgotten today. - -This is how I chanced upon this insight. In 1986, a few dozen peace research centers in Africa -and Asia were planning to open a common resource center. The founding assembly was held in -Japan, and the leaders were looking for a Third World speaker. However, for reasons of delicacy, -they wanted a person who was neither Asian nor African, and took me for a Latin American; then -they pressured me to come. So I packed my guayabera shirt and departed for the Orient. - -In Yokohama I addressed the group, speaking as a historian. I wanted first to dismantle any -universal notion of peace; I wanted to stress the claim of each ethnos to its own peace, the right of -each community to be left in its peace. It seemed important to make clear that peace is not an -abstract condition, but a very specific spirit to be relished in its particular, incommunicable -uniqueness by each community. - -However, my aim in Yokohama was twofold: I wanted to examine not only the meaning but -also the history and perversion of peace in that appendix to Asia and Africa we call Europe. After - - -* * * - -_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_ -8 -all, most of the world in the twentieth century is suffering from the enthusiastic acceptance of -European ideas, including the European concept of peace. The assembly in Japan gave me a chance -to contrast the unique spirit of peace that was born in Christian Europe with its perversion and -counterfeit when, in international political parlance, an ideological link is created between economic -development and peace. I argued that only by de-linking pax (peace) from development could the -heretofore unsuspected glory hidden in pax be revealed. But to achieve this before a Japanese -audience was difficult. - -The Japanese have an iconogram that stands for something we do not have or say or feel: -foodó. My teacher, Professor Tamanoy, explained foodó to me as, "the inimitable freshness that -arises from the commingling of a particular soil with the appropriate waters." Trusting my learned -pacifist guide, since deceased, I started from the notion of foodó. It was easy to explain that both -Athenian philia and Pax Romana, as different as they are from each other, are incomparable to -foodó. Athenian philia bespeaks the friendship among the free men of a city, and Roman pax -bespeaks the administrative status of a region dominated by the Legion that had planted its insignia -into that soil. Thanks to Professor Tamanoy's assistance, it was easy to elaborate on the -contradictions and differences between these two notions, and get the audience to comment on -similar heteronomies in the cultural meaning of peace within India or between neighboring groups in -Tanzania. The kaleidoscopic incarnations of peace all referred to a particular, highly desirable -atmosphere. So far the conversation was easy. - -However, speaking about pax in the proto-Christan epoch turned out to be a delicate matter, -because around the year 300 pax became a key word in the Christian liturgy. It became the -euphemism for a mouth-to-mouth kiss among the faithful attending services; pax became the -camouflage for the osculum (from os, mouth), or the conspiratio, a commingling of breaths. My -friend felt I was not just courting misunderstanding, but perhaps giving offense, by mentioning such -body-to-body contact in public. The gesture, up to this day, is repugnant to Japanese. - -The Latin osculum is neither very old nor frequent. It is one of three words that can be -translated by the English, "kiss." In comparison with the affectionate basium and the lascivious -suavium, osculum was a latecomer into classical Latin, and was used in only one circumstance as a -ritual gesture: In the second century, it became the sign given by a departing soldier to a woman, -thereby recognizing her expected child as his offspring. - -In the Christian liturgy of the first century, the osculum assumed a new function. It became one -of two high points in the celebration of the Eucharist. Conspiratio, the mount-to-mouth kiss, became -the solemn liturgical gesture by which participants in the cult-action shared their breath or spirit -with one another. It came to signify their union in one Holy Spirit, the community that takes shape -in God's breath. The ecclesia came to be through a public ritual action, the liturgy, and the soul of -this liturgy was the conspiratio. Explicitly, corporeally, the central Christian celebration was - - -* * * - -_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_ -9 -understood as a co-breathing, a con-spiracy, the bringing about of a common atmosphere, a divine -milieu. - -The other eminent moment of the celebration was, of course, the comestio, the communion in -the flesh, the incorporation of the believer in the body of the Incarnate Word, but communio was -theologically linked to the preceding con-spiratio. Conspiratio became the strongest, clearest and -most unambiguously somatic expression for the entirely non-hierarchical creation of a fraternal -spirit in preparation for the unifying meal. Through the act of eating, the fellow conspirators were -transformed into a "we," a gathering which in Greek means ecclesia. Further, they believed that the -"we" is also somebody's "I"; they were nourished by shading into the "I" of the Incarnate Word. The -words and actions of the liturgy are not just mundane words and actions, but events occurring after -the Word, that is, after the Incarnation. Peace as the commingling of soil and waters sounds cute to -my ears; but peace as the result of conspiratio exacts a demanding, today almost unimaginable -intimacy. - -The practice of the osculum did not go unchallenged; documents reveal that the conspiratio -created scandal early on. The rigorist African Church Father, Tertullian, felt that a decent matron -should not be subjected to possible embarrassment by this rite. The practice continued, but not its -name; the ceremony required a euphemism. From the later third century on, the osculum pacis was -referred to simply as pax, and the gesture was often watered down to some slight touch to signify -the mutual spiritual union of the persons present through the creation of a fraternal atmosphere. -Today, the pax before communion, called "the kiss of peace," is still integral to the Roman, -Slavonic, Greek and Syrian Mass, although it is often reduced to a perfunctory handshake. - -I could no more avoid telling the story in Yokohama than today in Bremen. Why? Because the -very idea of peace understood as a hospitality that reaches out to the stranger, and of a free -assembly that arises in the practice of hospitality cannot be understood without reference to the -Christian liturgy in which the community comes into being by the mouth-to-mouth kiss. - -However, jusyt as the antecedents of peace among us cannot be understood without reference to -conspiration, the historical uniqueness of a city's climate, atmosphere or spirit calls for this -reference. The European idea of peace that is synonymous with the somatic incorporation of equals -into a community has no analogue elsewhere. Community in our European tradition is not the -outcome of an act of authoritative foundation, nor a gift from nature or its gods, nor the result of -management, planning and design, but the consequence of a conspiracy, a deliberate, mutual, -somatic and gratuitous gift to each other. The prototype of that conspiracy lies in the celebration of -the early Christian liturgy in which, no matter their origin, men and women, Greeks and Jews, slaves -and citizens, engender a physical reality that transcends them. The shared breath, the con-spiratio -are the "peace" understood as the community that arises from it. - - - -* * * - -_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_ -10 -Historians have often pointed out that the idea of a social contract, which dominates political -thinking in Europe since the 14th century, has its concrete origins in the way founders of medieval -towns conceived urbane civilities. I fully agree with this. However, by focusing on the contractual -aspect of this incorporation attention is distracted from the good that such contracts were meant to -protect, namely, peace resulting from a conspiratio. One can fail to perceive the pretentious -absurdity of attempting a contractual insurance of an atmosphere as fleeting and alive, as tender and -robust, as pax. - -The medieval merchants and craftsmen who settled at the foot of a lord's castle felt the need to -make the conspiracy that united them into a secure and lasting association. To provide for their -general surety, they had recourse to a device, the conjuratio, a mutual promise confirmed by an oath -that uses God as a witness. Most societies know the oath, but the use of God's name to make it stick -first appears as a legal device in the codification of roman law made by the Christian emperor -Theodosius. "Conjuration" or the swearing together by a common oath confirmed by the invocation -of God, just like the liturgical osculum is of Christian origin. Conjuratio which uses God as epoxy -for the social bond presumably assures stability and durability to the atmosphere engendered by the -conspiratio of the citizens. In this linkage between conspiratio and conjuratio, two equally unique -concepts inherited from the first millennium of Christian history are intertwined, but the latter, the -contractual form soon overshadowed the spiritual substance. - -The medieval town of central Europe thus was indeed a profoundly new historical gestalt: the -conjuratio conspirativa, which makes European urbanity distinct from urban modes elsewhere. It -implies a peculiar dynamic strain between the atmosphere of conspiratio and its legal, contractual -constitution. Ideally, the spiritual climate is the source of the city's life that flower into a hierarchy, -like a shell or frame, to protect its order. Insofar as the city is understood to originate in a -conspiratio, it owes its social existence to the pax the breath, shared equally among all. - -This long reflection on the historical precedence to the cultivation of atmosphere in late -twentieth century Bremen seemed necessary to me to defend its intrinsically conspiratorial nature. It -seems necessary to understand why, arguably, independent criticism of the established order of -modern, technogene, information-centered society can grow only out of a milieu of intense -hospitality. - -As a scholar I have been shaped by a monastic traditions and by the interpretation of medieval -texts. Early on I took it for granted that the principal condition for an atmosphere that is propitious -to independent thought is the hospitality cultivated by the host: a hospitality that excludes -condescension as scrupulously as seduction; a hospitality that by its simplicity defeats the fear of -plagiarism as much as that of clientage; a hospitality that by its openness dissolves intimidation as -studiously as servility; a hospitality that exacts from the guests as much generosity as it imposes on -the host. I have been blessed with a large portion of it, with the taste of a relaxed, humorous, - - -* * * - -_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_ -11 -sometimes grotesque fit among mostly ordinary but sometimes outlandish companions who are -patient with one another. More so in Bremen than anywhere else. - - -* * * diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/index.bib b/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..b192824 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1998-conspiracy/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/index.txt index e27fdb4..9ae4c2f 100644 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/index.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/index.txt @@ -2,9 +2,23 @@ * **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] * **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _The Cultivation of Conspiracy_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# * **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1998 * **#@LANG_comments@#:** - * A translated, edited and expanded version of an address given by Ivan Illich at the Villa Ichon in Bremen, Germany, on the occasion of receiving the Culture and Peace Prize of Bremen, March 14, 1998. - * Included in the book "The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection" (2002) +* A translated, edited and expanded version of an address given by Ivan Illich at the Villa Ichon in Bremen, Germany, on the occasion of receiving the Culture and Peace Prize of Bremen, March 14, 1998. +* Included in the book "The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection" (2002) +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1998-conspiracy-en, + author = {Ivan Illich}, + title = {The Cultivation of Conspiracy}, + year = {1998}, + date = {1998}, + origdate = {1998}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/article/1998-conspiracy:index} +} +``` ~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>available}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..041fd2d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/article/1998-conspiracy/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/text.txt b/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/text.txt index 5041131..68cc1fe 100644..120000 --- a/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/text.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/text.txt @@ -1,84 +1 @@ -# The Cultivation of Conspiracy - -On November 16, 1996, I arrived at the library auditorium of Bremen University just in time for my afternoon lecture. For five years now I had commented old texts to trace the long history of western philia, of friendship. This semester's theme was the loss of the common sense for proportionality during the lifetimes of Locke, Leibniz and Johann Sebastian Bach. On that day I wanted to address "common sense" as the sense-organ believed to recognize "the good", the "fit" and the "fifth". But even before I could start I had to stop: the roughly two hundred auditors had planned a party instead of a lecture. Two months after the actual day, they had decided to celebrate my seventieth birthday, so we feasted and laughed and danced until midnight. - -Speeches launched the affair. I was seated behind a bouquet, in the first row, and listened to seventeen talks. As a sign of recognition, I presented a flower to each encomiast. Most speakers were over fifty, friends I had made on four continents, a few with reminiscences reaching back to the 1950s in New York. Others were acquaintances made while teaching in Kassel, Berlin, Marburg, Oldenburg and, since 1991, in Bremen. As I grappled for the expression of gratitude fitting each speaker, I felt like Hugh of St. Victor, my teacher. This twelfth-century monk in a letter compares himself to a basket-bearing donkey: not weighed down but lifted by the burden of friendships gathered on life's pilgrimage. - -From the laudationes at the library we moved across the plaza to the liberal arts building, whose bleak cement hallways I habitually avoid. A metamorphosis had occurred in its atmosphere. We found ourselves in a quaint café: some five dozen small tables, each with a lighted candle on a colored napkin. For the occasion, the university's department of domestic science had squeezed a pot into the semester's budget, a pot large enough to cook potato soup for a company. The chancellor, absent on business in Beijing, had hired a Klezmer ensemble. Ludolf Kuchenbuch, dean of historians at a nearby university and a saxophonist, took charge of the jazz. A couple of clowns performing on a bicycle entertained us with their parody of my 1972 book, Energy and Equity. - -The mayor-governor of the city state, Bremen, had picked a very old Burgundy from the treasures of the Ratskeller. The lanky and towering official handed me the precious gift and expressed his pleasure "that Illich at seventy, in his own words, had found in Bremen 'einen Zipfel Heimat'," something like "the tail end of an abode." On the lips of the Bürgermeister, my expression seemed grotesque, but still true. I began to reflect: How could I have been induced to connect the notion of home with the long dark winters of continual rain, where I walk through the pastures along the Wümme that are flooded twice a day by the tide from the North Atlantic? I who, as a boy, had felt exiled in Vienna, because all my senses were longingly attached to the South, to the blue Adriatic, to the limestone mountains in the Dalmatia of my early childhood. - -Today's ceremony, however, is even more startling than last year's revelry, because your award makes me feel welcomed by the citizenry rather than just by a city father. Villa Ichon is a manifestation of Bremen's civility: neither private charity nor public agency. You, who are my hosts in this place, define yourselves as Hanseatic merchant citizens. On the day Villa Ichon was solemnly opened, you pointedly refused to let a city official touch the keys to this house, this "houseboat for the uninsured and vulnerable among us" as Klaus Hübotter has called it. By insisting on your autonomy you stressed the respectful distance of civil society from the city's government. I am touched that this annual award, meant to honor a Bremen citizen, should today go to an errant pilgrim, but to one who knows how to appreciate it. As the eldest son of a merchant family in a free port city - one that was caught between the contesting powers of Byzantium and Venice - I was born into a tradition which, in the meantime, has petered out, but not without leaving me sensitive to the flavor of the Hanseatic hospitality you offer today. - -I first heard of Bremen when I was six, in the stories told me by my drawing teacher, who came from one of your patrician families, and in Vienna was homesick for the North. I adopted the tiny, black-dressed lady as Mamma Pfeiffer-Kulenkampf. One summer she came along with us to Dalmatia, to paint. Her watercolors still grace my brothers study. From her I learned how to mix different pigments for the contrasting atmospheres of a Mediterranean and an Atlantic shore. - -Now, a long lifetime later, I am at home in her salty gray climate. And not just at home: I now fancy that my presence has added something to the atmosphere of Bremen university. When Dean Johannes Beck led me from the aula through the rainy plaza into the makeshift cafe he made a remark that I accepted as a gift. "Ivan," he said "this feels like an overflow of Barbara Duden's house." Dean Beck put into words the accomplishment of something I had aimed at for decades -- the plethora of the dining-room conviviality inspiring the University Aula; The aura of our hospitality in the Kreftingstrasse, felt well beyond its threshold. - -Even before my first Bremen semester could start, Barbara Duden got a house in the Ostertor Viertel, beyond the old moat, just down from the drug-corner, the farmers market and the Turkish quarter. There Barbara created an ambiance of austere playfulness. The house became a place that at the drop of a hat accommodates our guests. If -- after my lecture on Fridays -- the spaghetti bowl must feed more than the two dozen who fit around the table made from flooring timber, guests squat on Mexican blankets in the next room. - -Over the years our "Kreftingstraße" has fostered privileged closeness in respectful, disciplined, critical intercourse: friendships between old acquaintances who drop in from far away, and new ones, three, even four decades younger than my oldest companion Ceslaus Hoinacki, who shares his room with our Encyclopedias. Friendship makes ties unique, but some more than others bear the burden of the host. Kassandra who lives elsewhere, has a key to the house and brings the flowers and Matthias, the virtuoso drummer who stays downstairs, in the room that opens on the tiny garden, belong to the dozen who can equally welcome the newcomer at the threshold, stir the soup, orient conversation, do the dishes and ... correct my manuscripts as well as those of each other. - -Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship. Therefore I have tried to identify the climate that fosters and the "conditioned air" that hinders the growth of friendship. - -Of course I can remember the taste of strong atmospheres from other epochs in my life: I have never doubted that -- today, more than ever -- a "monastic" ambience is the prerequisite to the independence needed for a historically based indictment of society. Only the gratuitous commitment of friends can enable me to practice the ascetisme required for modern near-paradoxes: as that of renouncing systems analysis while typing on my Toshiba. - -My early suspicion that atmosphere was a prerequisite for the kind of studium to which I had dedicated myself became a conviction through my contact with post-Sputnik American universities. After just one year as vice-chancellor of a university in Puerto Rico, in 1957 I and a few others wanted to question the development ideology to which Kennedy no less than Castro subscribed. I put all the money I had - today the equivalent of the prize you just gave me - into the purchase of a one- room wooden shack in the mountains that overlook the Caribbean. With three friends I wanted a place of study in which every use of the personal pronoun "nos-otros" would truthfully refer back to the four of "us", and be accessible to our guests as well; I wanted to practice the rigor that would keep us far from the "we" that invokes the security found in the shadow of an academic discipline: we as "sociologists", "economists" and so forth. As one of us, Charlie Rosario, put it: "All departments smell - of disinfectants, at their best; and poisoned sterilized aura." The "casita" on the route to Adjuntas soon became so obnoxious that I had to leave the Island. - -This freed me to start a "thinkery" in Mexico that five years later turned into CIDOC. In his introductory talk for today's celebration congressman Freimut Duve told you about it. In those distant years Duve was editor at Rowohlt, took care of my German books and several times spent time with me there, in Cuernavaca. He told you about the spirit prevailing in that place: a climate of mutually tempered forbearance. It was this aura, this quality or air, through which this ephemeral venture could become a world crossroads, a meeting place for those who, long before this had -become fashionable, questioned the innocence of "development." Only the mood that Duve hinted at can explain the disproportionate influence that this small place exerted in challenging the goods of socio-economic development. - -CIDOC was closed by common accord on April first, ten years to the day after its foundation. With Mexican music and dancing we celebrated its closing. Duve told you about her, who did it, Valentina Borremans: she had directed and organized CIDOC from its inception, and he told you about his admiration for the style in which she closed it by mutual consent of its 63 collaborators. She knew that the soul of this free, independent and powerless "thinkery" would have been squashed soon by its rising influence. - -CIDOC shut its doors in the face of criticism by its most serious friends, people too earnest to grasp the paradox of atmosphere. These were mainly persons for whom the hospitable atmosphere of CIDOC had provided a unique forum. They thrived in the aura of CIDOC, and outright rejected our certainty that atmosphere invites institutionalization by which it will be corrupted. You never know what will nurture the spirit of a philia, while you can be certain what will stifle it. Spirit emerges by surprise, and it's a miracle when it abides; it is stifled by every attempt to secure it; it's debauched when you try to use it. - -Few understood this. With Valentina I opened the mayor's bottle of Burgundy in Mexico to celebrate one of them. We drank the wine to the memory of Alejandro Del Corro, a now deceased Argentine Jesuit who lived and worked with me since the early sixties. With his Laica he traveled around South America, collaborating with guerrilleros to save their archives for history. Alejandro was a master at moderating aura. Wen he presided, his delicate attention to each guest: guerrillero, US civil servant, trash collector or professor felt at home with each other around the CIDOC table. Alejandro knew that you cannot lay a claim on aura, he knew about the evanescence of atmosphere. - -I speak of atmosphere, faute de mieux. In Greek, the word is used for the emanation of a star, or for the constellation that governs a place; alchemists adopted it to speak of the layers around our planet. Maurice Blondel reflects its much later French usage for bouquet des ésprits, the scent those present contribute to a meeting. I use the word for something frail and often discounted, the air that weaves and wafts and evokes memories, like those attached to the Burgundy long after the bottle has been emptied. - -To sense an aura, you need a nose. The nose, framed by the eyes, runs below the brain. What the nose inhales ends in the guts; every yogi and hesichast knows this. The nose curves down in the middle of the face. Pious Jews are conscious of the image because what Christians call "walking in the sight of God" the Hebrew expresses as "ambling under God's nose and breath." To savor the feel of a place, you trust your nose; to trust another, you must first smell him. - -In its beginnings, western civic culture wavered between cultivated distrust and sympathetic trust. Plato believed it would be upsetting for Athenian citizens to allow their bowels to be affected by the passion of actors in the theater; he wanted the audience to go no further than reflecting on the words. Aristotle respectfully modified his teacher's opinion. In the Poetics, he asks the spectators to let gesture and mimicry, the rhythm and melody of breath, reach their very innards. Citizens should attend the theater, not just to understand, but to be affected by each other. For Aristotle, there could be no transformation, no purifying catharsis, without such gripping mimesis. Without gut level experience of the other, without sharing his aura, you can't be saved from yourself. - -Some of that sense of mimesis comes out in an old German adage, "Ich kann Dich gut riechen" (I can smell you well), which is still used and understood. But it's something you don't say to just anyone; it's an expression that is permissible only when you feel close, count on trust, and are willing to be hurt. It presupposes the truth of another German saying, "Ich kann Dich gut leiden" (I can suffer [put up with] you [well]). You can see that nose words have not altogether disappeared from ordinary speech, even in the age of daily showers. - -I remember my embarrassment when, after years of ascetical discipline, I realized that I still had not made the connection between nose and heart, smell and affection. I was in Peru in the mid- fifties, on my way to meet Jaime, who welcomed me to his modest hut for the third time. But to get to the shack, I had to cross the Rimac, the open cloaca of Lima. The thought of sleeping for a week in this miasma almost made me retch. That evening, for some reason I suddenly understood with a shock what Carlos had been telling me all along, "Ivan, don't kid yourself; don't imagine you can be friends with people you can't smell." That one jolt unplugged my nose; it enabled me to dip into the aura of Carlos's house, and allowed me to merge the atmosphere I brought along into the ambience of his home. - -This discovery of my nose for the scent of the spirit occurred forty years ago, in the time of the DC-4, belief in development programs, and the apparently benign Peace Corps. It was the time when DDT was still too expensive for Latin American slum dwellers, when most people had to put up with fleas and lice on their skins, as they put up with the old, the crippled and idiots in their homes. It was the time before Xerox, fax and e-mail. But it was also a time before smog and AIDS. I was then considered a crank because I foresaw the unwanted side effects of development, because I spoke to unions on technogenic unemployment, and to leftists on the growing polarization between rich and poor in the wake of expanding commodity dependence. What seemed hysteria then has now hardened into well documented facts; some of these facts are too horrible to face. They must be exorcised: bowdlerizing them by research, assigning their management to specialized agencies, and conjuring them by prevention programs. But while the depletion of life forms, the growing immunity of pathogens, climate changes, the disappearance of the job culture, and uncontrollable violence now make up the admitted side effects of economic growth, the menace of modern life for the survival of atmospheres is hardly recognized as a terrible threat. - -This is the reason I dare to annoy you with the memory of that walk in the dusk with my nose full of the urine and feces emanating from the Rimac. That landscape no longer exists; cars now fill a highway hiding the sewage. The skin and scalp of Indians is no longer the habitat of lice; now the allergies produced by industrial chemicals cause the itch. Makeshift shanties have been replaced by public housing; each apartment has its plumbing and each family member a separate bed - the guest knows that he imposes an inconvenience. The miasma of the Rimac has become a memory in a city asfixiated by industrial smog. I juxtapose then and now because this allows me to argue that the impending loss of spirit, of soul, of what I call atmosphere, could go unnoticed. - -Only persons who face one another in trust can allow its emergence. The bouquet of friendship varies with each breath, but when it is there it needs no name. For a long time I believed that there was no one noun for it, and no verb for its creation. Each time I tried one, I was discouraged; all the synonyms for it were shanghaied by its synthetic counterfeits: mass-produced fashions and cleverly marketed moods, chic feelings, swank highs and trendy tastes. Starting in the seventies, group dynamics retreats and psychic training, all to generate "atmosphere," became major businesses. Discreet silence about the issue I am raising seemed preferable to creating a misunderstanding. - -Then, thirty years after that evening above the Rimac, I suddenly realized that there is indeed a very simple word that says what I cherished and tried to nourish, and that word is peace. Peace, however, not in any of the many ways its cognates are used all over the world, but peace in its post- classical, European meaning. Peace, in this sense, is the one strong word with which the atmosphere of friendship created among equals has been appropriately named. But to embrace this, one has to come to understand the origin of this peace in the conspiratio, a curious ritual behavior almost forgotten today. - -This is how I chanced upon this insight. In 1986, a few dozen peace research centers in Africa and Asia were planning to open a common resource center. The founding assembly was held in Japan, and the leaders were looking for a Third World speaker. However, for reasons of delicacy, they wanted a person who was neither Asian nor African, and took me for a Latin American; then they pressured me to come. So I packed my guayabera shirt and departed for the Orient. - -In Yokohama I addressed the group, speaking as a historian. I wanted first to dismantle any universal notion of peace; I wanted to stress the claim of each ethnos to its own peace, the right of each community to be left in its peace. It seemed important to make clear that peace is not an abstract condition, but a very specific spirit to be relished in its particular, incommunicable uniqueness by each community. - -However, my aim in Yokohama was twofold: I wanted to examine not only the meaning but also the history and perversion of peace in that appendix to Asia and Africa we call Europe. After all, most of the world in the twentieth century is suffering from the enthusiastic acceptance of European ideas, including the European concept of peace. The assembly in Japan gave me a chance to contrast the unique spirit of peace that was born in Christian Europe with its perversion and counterfeit when, in international political parlance, an ideological link is created between economic development and peace. I argued that only by de-linking pax (peace) from development could the heretofore unsuspected glory hidden in pax be revealed. But to achieve this before a Japanese audience was difficult. - -The Japanese have an iconogram that stands for something we do not have or say or feel: foodó. My teacher, Professor Tamanoy, explained foodó to me as, "the inimitable freshness that arises from the commingling of a particular soil with the appropriate waters." Trusting my learned pacifist guide, since deceased, I started from the notion of foodó. It was easy to explain that both Athenian philia and Pax Romana, as different as they are from each other, are incomparable to foodó. Athenian philia bespeaks the friendship among the free men of a city, and Roman pax bespeaks the administrative status of a region dominated by the Legion that had planted its insignia into that soil. Thanks to Professor Tamanoy's assistance, it was easy to elaborate on the contradictions and differences between these two notions, and get the audience to comment on similar heteronomies in the cultural meaning of peace within India or between neighboring groups in Tanzania. The kaleidoscopic incarnations of peace all referred to a particular, highly desirable atmosphere. So far the conversation was easy. - -However, speaking about pax in the proto-Christan epoch turned out to be a delicate matter, because around the year 300 pax became a key word in the Christian liturgy. It became the euphemism for a mouth-to-mouth kiss among the faithful attending services; pax became the camouflage for the osculum (from os, mouth), or the conspiratio, a commingling of breaths. My friend felt I was not just courting misunderstanding, but perhaps giving offense, by mentioning such body-to-body contact in public. The gesture, up to this day, is repugnant to Japanese. - -The Latin osculum is neither very old nor frequent. It is one of three words that can be translated by the English, "kiss." In comparison with the affectionate basium and the lascivious suavium, osculum was a latecomer into classical Latin, and was used in only one circumstance as a ritual gesture: In the second century, it became the sign given by a departing soldier to a woman, thereby recognizing her expected child as his offspring. - -In the Christian liturgy of the first century, the osculum assumed a new function. It became one of two high points in the celebration of the Eucharist. Conspiratio, the mount-to-mouth kiss, became the solemn liturgical gesture by which participants in the cult-action shared their breath or spirit with one another. It came to signify their union in one Holy Spirit, the community that takes shape in God's breath. The ecclesia came to be through a public ritual action, the liturgy, and the soul of this liturgy was the conspiratio. Explicitly, corporeally, the central Christian celebration was understood as a co-breathing, a con-spiracy, the bringing about of a common atmosphere, a divine milieu. - -The other eminent moment of the celebration was, of course, the comestio, the communion in the flesh, the incorporation of the believer in the body of the Incarnate Word, but communio was theologically linked to the preceding con-spiratio. Conspiratio became the strongest, clearest and most unambiguously somatic expression for the entirely non-hierarchical creation of a fraternal spirit in preparation for the unifying meal. Through the act of eating, the fellow conspirators were transformed into a "we," a gathering which in Greek means ecclesia. Further, they believed that the "we" is also somebody's "I"; they were nourished by shading into the "I" of the Incarnate Word. The words and actions of the liturgy are not just mundane words and actions, but events occurring after the Word, that is, after the Incarnation. Peace as the commingling of soil and waters sounds cute to my ears; but peace as the result of conspiratio exacts a demanding, today almost unimaginable intimacy. - -The practice of the osculum did not go unchallenged; documents reveal that the conspiratio created scandal early on. The rigorist African Church Father, Tertullian, felt that a decent matron should not be subjected to possible embarrassment by this rite. The practice continued, but not its name; the ceremony required a euphemism. From the later third century on, the osculum pacis was referred to simply as pax, and the gesture was often watered down to some slight touch to signify the mutual spiritual union of the persons present through the creation of a fraternal atmosphere. Today, the pax before communion, called "the kiss of peace," is still integral to the Roman, Slavonic, Greek and Syrian Mass, although it is often reduced to a perfunctory handshake. - -I could no more avoid telling the story in Yokohama than today in Bremen. Why? Because the very idea of peace understood as a hospitality that reaches out to the stranger, and of a free assembly that arises in the practice of hospitality cannot be understood without reference to the Christian liturgy in which the community comes into being by the mouth-to-mouth kiss. - -However, jusyt as the antecedents of peace among us cannot be understood without reference to conspiration, the historical uniqueness of a city's climate, atmosphere or spirit calls for this reference. The European idea of peace that is synonymous with the somatic incorporation of equals into a community has no analogue elsewhere. Community in our European tradition is not the outcome of an act of authoritative foundation, nor a gift from nature or its gods, nor the result of management, planning and design, but the consequence of a conspiracy, a deliberate, mutual, somatic and gratuitous gift to each other. The prototype of that conspiracy lies in the celebration of the early Christian liturgy in which, no matter their origin, men and women, Greeks and Jews, slaves and citizens, engender a physical reality that transcends them. The shared breath, the con-spiratio are the "peace" understood as the community that arises from it. - -Historians have often pointed out that the idea of a social contract, which dominates political thinking in Europe since the 14th century, has its concrete origins in the way founders of medieval towns conceived urbane civilities. I fully agree with this. However, by focusing on the contractual aspect of this incorporation attention is distracted from the good that such contracts were meant to protect, namely, peace resulting from a conspiratio. One can fail to perceive the pretentious absurdity of attempting a contractual insurance of an atmosphere as fleeting and alive, as tender and robust, as pax. - -The medieval merchants and craftsmen who settled at the foot of a lord's castle felt the need to make the conspiracy that united them into a secure and lasting association. To provide for their general surety, they had recourse to a device, the conjuratio, a mutual promise confirmed by an oath that uses God as a witness. Most societies know the oath, but the use of God's name to make it stick first appears as a legal device in the codification of roman law made by the Christian emperor Theodosius. "Conjuration" or the swearing together by a common oath confirmed by the invocation of God, just like the liturgical osculum is of Christian origin. Conjuratio which uses God as epoxy for the social bond presumably assures stability and durability to the atmosphere engendered by the conspiratio of the citizens. In this linkage between conspiratio and conjuratio, two equally unique concepts inherited from the first millennium of Christian history are intertwined, but the latter, the contractual form soon overshadowed the spiritual substance. - -The medieval town of central Europe thus was indeed a profoundly new historical gestalt: the conjuratio conspirativa, which makes European urbanity distinct from urban modes elsewhere. It implies a peculiar dynamic strain between the atmosphere of conspiratio and its legal, contractual constitution. Ideally, the spiritual climate is the source of the city's life that flower into a hierarchy, like a shell or frame, to protect its order. Insofar as the city is understood to originate in a conspiratio, it owes its social existence to the pax the breath, shared equally among all. - -This long reflection on the historical precedence to the cultivation of atmosphere in late twentieth century Bremen seemed necessary to me to defend its intrinsically conspiratorial nature. It seems necessary to understand why, arguably, independent criticism of the established order of modern, technogene, information-centered society can grow only out of a milieu of intense hospitality. - -As a scholar I have been shaped by a monastic traditions and by the interpretation of medieval texts. Early on I took it for granted that the principal condition for an atmosphere that is propitious to independent thought is the hospitality cultivated by the host: a hospitality that excludes condescension as scrupulously as seduction; a hospitality that by its simplicity defeats the fear of plagiarism as much as that of clientage; a hospitality that by its openness dissolves intimidation as studiously as servility; a hospitality that exacts from the guests as much generosity as it imposes on the host. I have been blessed with a large portion of it, with the taste of a relaxed, humorous, sometimes grotesque fit among mostly ordinary but sometimes outlandish companions who are patient with one another. More so in Bremen than anywhere else. +../../../../../contents/article/1998-conspiracy/en.txt
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