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Diffstat (limited to 'data/pages/en')
114 files changed, 582 insertions, 5500 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
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/article/index.txt b/data/pages/en/article/index.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..10bee19 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/article/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../contents/article/index.en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/abc/index.bib b/data/pages/en/book/abc/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..3687c4f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/book/abc/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/book/abc/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/abc/index.txt b/data/pages/en/book/abc/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..be8d38c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/book/abc/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +# ABC - The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _ABC - The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind_ +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1969 +* ** #@LANG_authors@#**: Ivan Illich, Barrie Sanders +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# + + +{{tag>pending}} + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-abc-en, + author = {: Ivan Illich, Barrie Sanders}, + title = {ABC - The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind}, + year = {abc/}, + date = {1969}, + origdate = {1969}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/book/abc:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>pending}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/abc/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/book/abc/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..ef2f8b6 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/book/abc/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/book/abc/en.notes
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/abc/text.txt b/data/pages/en/book/abc/text.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..e92d92d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/book/abc/text.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/book/abc/en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/awareness/en.txt b/data/pages/en/book/awareness/en.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 97e05de..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/awareness/en.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,988 +0,0 @@ -# Celebration of awareness - -## Introduction - -There is no need for an introduction of the following papers or of their author. If, nevertheless, Dr. Illich has honored me by the invitation to write such an introduction, and if I gladly accepted, the reason in both our minds seems to be that this introduction offers an occasion that permits clarifying the nature of a common attitude and faith, in spite of the fact that some of our views differ considerably. Even the author's own views today are not always the same as those he held at the time he wrote these papers, on different occasions, over the course of the years. But he has remained true to himself in the very core of his approach and it is this core that we share. - -It is not easy to find the proper word to describe this core. How can a fundamental approach to life be caught in a concept without distorting and twisting it? Yet since we need to communicate with words, the most adequate —or rather, the least inadequate—term seems to be "humanist radicalism." - -What is meant by radicalism? What does humanist radicalism imply? - -By radicalism I do not refer primarily to a certain set of ideas, but rather to an attitude, to an "approach," as it were. To begin with this approach can be characterized by the motto: de omnibus dubitandum; everything must be doubted, particularly the ideological concepts which are virtually shared by everybody and have consequently assumed the role of indubitable common-sensical axioms. - -To "doubt" in this sense does not imply a psychological state of inability to arrive at decisions or convictions, as is the case in obsessional doubt, but the readiness and capacity for critical questioning of all assumptions and institutions which have become idols under the name of common sense, logic, and what is supposed to be "natural." This radical questioning is possible only if one does not take the concepts of one's own society or even of an entire historical period—like Western culture since the Renaissance—for granted, and furthermore if one enlarges the scope of one's awareness and penetrates into the unconscious aspects of one's thinking. Radical doubt is an act of uncovering and discovering; it is the dawning of the awareness that the Emperor is naked, and that his splendid garments are nothing but the product of one's phantasy. - -Radical doubt means to question; it does not necessarily mean to negate. It is easy to negate by simply positing the opposite of what exists; radical doubt is dialectical inasmuch as it comprehends the process of the unfolding of oppositions and aims at a new synthesis which negates and affirms. - -Radical doubt is a process; a process of liberation from idolatrous thinking; a widening of awareness, of imaginative, creative vision of our possibilities and options. The radical approach does not occur in a vacuum. It does not start from nothing, but it starts from the roots, and the root, as Marx once said, is man. But to say "the root is man" is not meant in a positivistic, descriptive sense. When we speak of man we speak of him not as a thing but as a process; we speak of his potential for developing all his powers; those for greater intensity of being, greater harmony, greater love, greater awareness. We also speak of man with a potential to be corrupted, of his power to act being transformed into the passion for power over others, of his love of life degenerating into the passion to destroy life. - -Humanistic radicalism is radical questioning guided by insight into the dynamics of man's nature; and by concern for man's growth and full unfolding. In contrast to contemporary positivistic thinking it is not "objective," if objectivity means theorizing without a passionately held aim which impels and nourishes the process of thinking. But it is exceedingly objective if it means that every step in the process of thinking is based on critically sifted evidence, and furthermore if it takes a critical attitude toward common-sensical premises. All this means that humanist radicalism questions every idea and every institution from the standpoint of whether it helps or hinders man's capacity for greater aliveness and joy. This is not the place to give lengthy examples for the kind of common-sensical premises that are questioned by humanist radicalism. It is not necessary to do so either, since Dr. Illich's papers deal precisely with such examples as the usefulness of compulsive schooling, or of the present function of priests. Many more could be added, some of which are implied in the author's papers. I want to mention only a few like the modern concept of "progress," which means the principle of ever-increasing production, consumption, timesaving, maximal efficiency and profit, and calculability of all economic activities without regard to their effect on the quality of living and the unfolding of man; or the dogma that increasing consumption makes man happy, that the management of large-scale enterprises must necessarily be bureaucratic and alienated; that the aim of life is having (and using), not being; that reason resides in the intellect and is split from the affective life; that the newer is always better than the older; that radicalism is the negation of tradition; that the opposite of "law and order" is lack of structure. In short, that the ideas and categories that have arisen during the development of modern science and industrialism are superior to those of all former cultures and indispensable for the progress of the human race. - -Humanistic radicalism questions all these premises and is not afraid of arriving at ideas and solutions that may sound absurd. I see the great value in the writings of Dr. Illich precisely in the fact that they represent humanistic radicalism in its fullest and most imaginative aspect. The author is a man of rare courage, great aliveness, extraordinary erudition and brilliance, and fertile imaginativeness, whose whole thinking is based on his concern for man's unfolding—physically, spiritually, and intellectually. The importance of his thoughts in this as well as his other writings lies in the fact that they have a liberating effect on the mind by showing entirely new possibilities; they make the reader more alive because they open the door that leads out of the prison of routinized, sterile, preconceived notions. By the creative shock they communicate —except to those who react only with anger at so much nonsense—they help to stimulate energy and hope for a new beginning. - -Erich Fromm - -## Foreword - -Each chapter in this volume records an effort of mine to question the nature of some certainty. Each therefore deals with deception—the deception embodied in one of our institutions. Institutions create certainties, and taken seriously, certainties deaden the heart and shackle the imagination. It is always my hope that my statements, angry or passionate, artful or innocent, will also provoke a smile, and thus a new freedom—even though the freedom comes at a cost. - -Shortly after original publication most of these papers became notorious. This was not accident. Each essay was written in a different language, addressed to a different group of believers, meant to hit home at a particular crisis of confidence. Each rubbed some well-established bureaucrats the wrong way, at the moment the latter were finding it difficult to rationalize a "business as usual" position. - -These pieces were, therefore, literally written for the moment. The passage of time since some of them appeared has qualified an occasional detail: statistics, or the situation discussed—even my own attitude—may have altered since, in some manner or degree. But I have purposely not, in the journalistic phrase, "updated" the articles for presentation in this book form. They constitute a point of view on a phenomenon of a time, and should stand thus. Their compilation has also inevitably resulted in some repetitive statements of fact and some - -duplications of expressions. These too I leave as stated, for emphasis and for the record—though I would have avoided them had I thought originally that one day I would gather my occasional writings under one cover. - -Ivan D. Illich - -Cuernavaca, Morelos Mexico 1970 - -## A call to celebration - -This "call to celebration" was a manifesto jointly enunciated by and reflecting the mood of a group of friends in 1967, among them Robert Fox and Robert Theobald. It was written at the time of the March on the Pentagon. This call to face facts, rather than deal in illusions—to live change, rather than rely on engineering-is an attempt to re-introduce the word "celebration into ordinary English. - -I and many others known and unknown to me call upon you - -— to celebrate our joint power to provide all human beings with the food, clothing, and shelter they need to delight in living; - -— to discover, together with us, what we must do to use mankind's power to create the humanity, the dignity, and the joyfulness of each one of us; - -— to be responsibly aware of your personal ability to express your true feelings and to gather us together in their expression. - -We can only live these changes: we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, and every group with which we live and work, must become the model of the era which we desire to create. The many models which will develop should give each one of us an environment in which we can celebrate our potential—and discover the way into a more humane world. - -We are challenged to break the obsolete social and economic systems which divide our world between the overprivileged and the underprivileged. All of us, whether governmental leader or protester, businessman or worker, professor or student share a common guilt. We have failed to discover how the necessary changes in our ideals and our social structures can be made. Each of us, therefore, through our ineffectiveness and our lack of responsible awareness, causes the suffering around the world. - -All of us are crippled—some physically, some mentally, some emotionally. We must therefore strive cooperatively to create the new world. There is no time left for destruction, for hatred, for anger. We must build, in hope and joy and celebration. Let us meet the new era of abundance with self-chosen work and freedom to follow the drum of one's own heart. Let us recognize that a striving for self-realization, for poetry and play, is basic to man once his needs for food, clothing, and shelter have been met—that we will choose those areas of activity which will contribute to our own development and will be meaningful to our society. - -But we must also recognize that our thrust toward self-realization is profoundly hampered by outmoded, industrial age structures. We are presently constrained and driven by the impact of man's ever growing powers. Our existing systems force us to develop and accept any weaponry system which may be technologically possible; our present systems force us to develop and accept any improvement in machinery, equipment, materials, and supplies which will increase production and lower costs; our present systems force us to develop and accept advertising and consumer seduction. - -In order to persuade the citizen that he controls his destiny, that morality informs decisions, and that technology is the servant rather than the driving force, it is necessary today to distort information. The ideal of informing the public has given way to trying to convince the public that forced actions are actually desirable actions. - -Miscalculations in these increasingly complex rationalizations and consequent scandal, account for the increasing preoccupation with the honesty of both private and public decision makers. It is therefore tempting to attack those holding roles such as national leader, administrator, manager, executive, labor leader, professor, student, parent. But such attacks on individuals often disguise the real nature of the crisis we confront: the demonic nature of present systems which force man to consent to his own deepening self-destruction. - -We can escape from these dehumanizing systems. The way ahead will be found by those who are unwilling to be constrained by the apparently all-deterrnining forces and structures of the industrial age. Our freedom and power are determined by our willingness to accept responsibility for the future. - -Indeed the future has already broken into the present. We each live in many times. The present of one is the past of another, and the future of yet another. We are called to live, knowing and showing that the future exists and that each one of us can call it in, when we are willing, to redress the balance of the past. - -In the future we must end the use of coercive power and authority: the ability to demand action on the basis of one's hierarchical position. If any one phrase can sum up the nature of the new era, it is the end of privilege and license. - -We must abandon our attempt to solve our problems through shifting power balances or attempting to create more efficient bureaucratic machines. - -We call you to join man's race to maturity, to work with us in inventing the future. We believe that a human adventure is just beginning: that mankind has so far been restricted in developing its innovative and creative powers because it was overwhelmed by toil. Now we are free to be as human as we will. - -The celebration of man's humanity through joining together in the healing expression of one's relationships with others, and one's growing acceptance of one's own nature and needs, will clearly create major confrontations with existing values and systems. The expanding dignity of each man and each human relationship must necessarily challenge existing systems. - -The call is to live the future. Let us join together joyfully to celebrate our awareness that we can make our life today the shape of tomorrow's future. - - -## Violence a mirror for americans - -The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts. - -In early 19681 tried with insistence to make some of my friends understand this image of the American overseas. I was speaking mainly to resisters engaged in organizing the march on the Pentagon. I wanted to share with them a profound fear: the fear that the end of the war in Vietnam would permit hawks and doves to unite in a destructive war on poverty in the Third World. - -The qualified failure of the war on poverty, with its fruits of urban riots, has begun to open the eyes of Americans to the reasons for the failure of the Alliance for Progress, with its fruits of threatened rebellion. Both are related to the failure to win the hearts and minds of the people of Asia by an outpouring of money and human lives that Americans perceive as an expression of heroic generosity, in the defense of South Vietnam. Failure in Harlem, Guatemala, and Vietnam has a common root. All three have miscarried because the United States gospel of massive material achievement lacks credibility for the world's overwhelming majorities. I believe that insight into the meaning of United States good will as perceived by Latin Americans or Asians would enable Americans to perceive the meaning of the problem of their own slums; it could even lead to the perception of a new and more effective policy. - -I have had the opportunity to observe this growing awareness of a common root of failure in my contacts with students at Cuernavaca. There, at the Center of Inter-cultural Documentation, for the past two years we have offered a sequence of workshops to compare the experience of poverty in capital-rich and capital-starved societies. We have witnessed the initial shock in many Americans dedicated to the war against poverty, when they observed and studied Latin America and realized for the first time that there is a link between minority marginality at home and mass marginatum overseas. Their emotional reaction is usually more acute than the intellectual insight that produces it. We have seen more than one man lose his balance as he suddenly lost the faith that for him had previously supported that balance, the faith that says: "The American way is the solution for all." For any good man, whether he is a social worker in Watts or a missioner on his way to Bolivia, it means pain and panic to realize that he is seen by 90 per cent of mankind as the exploiting outsider who shores up his privilege by promoting a delusive belief in the ideals of democracy, equal opportunity, and free enterprise among people who haven't a remote possibility of profiting from them. - -At this stage of the war in Vietnam the violent symptoms are too horrible to permit a lucid analysis of the causes that produce them. It is therefore more important to focus United States attention on the other two programs, the war on poverty and the Alliance for Progress: one, a war conducted by social workers; the other, an alliance that has maintained or swept into power military regimes in two-thirds of the Latin American countries. Both originated in the name of good will; both are now seen as pacification programs; both are pregnant with violence. - -The war on poverty aims at the integration of the so-called underprivileged minorities of the United States into the mainstream of the American way of life; the Alliance for Progress aims at the integration of the so-called underdeveloped countries of Latin America into the community of industrialized nations. Both programs were designed to have the poor join in the American dream. Both programs failed. The poor refused to dream on command. The order to dream and the money they got only made them rambunctious. Huge funds were appropriated to start the United States minorities and the Latin American majorities on the way of integration into a United States-style middle class: the world of college attendance, universal consumer credit, the world of household appliances and insurance, the world of church and movie attendance. An army of generous volunteers swarmed through New York ghettos and Latin American jungle canyons, pushing the persuasion that makes America tick. - -The frustrated social worker and the former Peace Corps volunteer are now among the few who explain to mainline America that the poor are right in rejecting forced conversion to the American gospel. Only seven years after the majority missionary enterprise of the Alliance was launched, riot squads at home, military governments in Latin America, and the army in Vietnam keep asking for more funds. But now it can be seen that the money is needed not for the uplift of the poor, but to protect the frail beachhead into the middle class that has been gained by the few converts who have benefited here or there by the American way of life. - -Comparison of these three theaters of United States missionary effort and war will help bring home a truism: the American society of achievers and consumers, with its two-party system and its universal schooling, perhaps befits those who have got it, but certainly not the rest of the world. A 15 per cent minority at home who earn less than $3,000 a year, and an 80 per cent majority abroad who earn less than $300 a year are prone to react with violence to the schemes by which they are fitted into coexistence with affluence. This is the moment to bring home to the people of the United States the fact that the way of life they have chosen is not viable enough to be shared. Eight years ago I told the late Bishop Manuel Larrain, the president of the Conference of Latin American Bishops, that I was prepared if necessary to dedicate my efforts to stop the coming of missionaries to Latin America. His answer still rings in my ears: "They may be useless to us in Latin America, but they are the only North Americans whom we will have the opportunity to educate. We owe them that much." - -At this moment, when neither the allure of money nor the power of persuasion nor control through weapons can efface the prospect of violence, during the summer in the slums and throughout the year in Guatemala, Bolivia, or Venezuela, we can analyze the analogies in the reactions to United States policy in the three main theaters of its defensive war: the war by which it defends its quasi-religious persuasion in Watts, Latin America, and Vietnam. Fundamentally this is the same war fought on three fronts; it is the war to "preserve the values of the West." Its origin and expression are associated with generous motives and a high ideal to provide a richer life for all men. But as the threatening implications of that ideal begin to emerge, the enterprise grinds down to one compelling purpose: to protect the style of life and the style of death that affluence makes possible for a very few; and since that style cannot be protected without being expanded, the affluent declare it obligatory for all. "That they may have more" begins to be seen in its real perspective: "That I may not have less." - -In all three theaters of war the same strategies are used: money, troopers, teachers. But money can benefit only a few in the ghettos, and a few in Latin America, and a few in Vietnam; and the consequent concentration of imported benefits on a few requires their ever tighter protection against the many. For the majority of marginal people, the economic growth of their surroundings means rising levels of frustration. On all three frontiers of affluence, therefore, the gun becomes important to protect the achiever. Police reinforcements go hand in hand with bands of armed citizens in the United States. In Guatemala the recently murdered military attache of the United States had just admitted that the American Embassy had to assist in arming right-wing goon squads because they are more efficient in maintaining order (and certainly more cruel) than the army. - -Next to money and guns, the United States idealist turns up in every theater of the war; the teacher, the volunteer, the missioner, the community organizer, the economic developer. Such men define their role as service. Actually they frequently wind up numbing the damage done by money and weapons, or seducing the "underdeveloped" to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement. They especially are the ones for whom "ingratitude" is the bitter reward. They are the personifications of Good Old Charlie Brown: "How can you lose when you are so sincere?" - -I submit that, if present trends continue, from now on the violence in Harlem, in Latin America, in Asia, will increasingly be directed against the foreign and native "persuasion pusher" of this kind. Increasingly the "poor" will slam the door in the face of salesmen for the United States system of politics, education, and economics as an answer to their needs. This rejection goes hand in hand with a growing loss of faith in his own tenets on the part of the salesman of United States social consensus. Disaffection, helplessness, and the response of anger at the United States have undermined the thrust of the formerly guileless enthusiast of the American way and American methods. - -I submit that foreign gods (ideals, idols, ideologies, persuasions, values) are more offensive to the "poor" than the military or economic power of the foreigner. It is more irritating to feel seduced to the consumption of overpriced sugar-water called Coca-Cola than to submit helplessly to doing the same job an American does, only at half the pay. It angers a person more to hear a priest preach cleanliness, thrift, resistance to socialism, or obedience to unjust authority, than to accept military rule. If I read present trends correctiy, and I am confident I do, during the next few years violence will break out mostly against symbols of foreign ideas and the attempt to sell these. And I fear that this violence, which is fundamentally a healthy though angry and turbulent rejection of alienating symbols, will be exploited and will harden into hatred and crime. The recent violence in Detroit, Washington, and Cincinnati after the murder of Martin Luther King shows how the impatience of the ghetto dwellers in the United States can erupt into violence and vandalism at the slightest spark. - -Violence, therefore, covers a broad spectrum of experience: from the explosion of frustrated vitality to the fanatical rejection of alienating idols. It is important to stress this distinction. But as United States thinkers are horrified by the heartless slaughter in Vietnam, and fascinated by the inability of a white majority to suppress the life of a people, it is not easy to keep the distinction clear. The emotional involvement of the average United States student with Vietnam and the ghettos is so deep, it is almost taboo to call his attention to the distinction. For this reason we must welcome any educational effort that allows United States students to perceive reactions to the United States way of life in the third theater of the war against poverty: Latin America. - -In the mirror of Latin America, violence in American ghettos and on the borders of China can be seen in its new meaning, as a rejection of American values. From experience of years in Cuernavaca, dealing with United States "idea salesmen," I know this insight is costly to come by. There is no exit from a way of life built on $5,000-plus per year, and there is no possible road leading into this way of life for nine out of ten men in our generation and the next. And for the nine it is revolting to hear a message of economic and social salvation presented by the affluent that, however sincerely expressed, leads the "poor" to believe that it is their fault that they do not fit into God's world as it should be and as it has been decreed that it should be around the North Atlantic. - -It is not the American way of life lived by a handful of millions that sickens the billions, but rather the growing awareness that those who live the American way will not tire until the superiority of their quasi-religious persuasion is accepted by the underdogs. Living violence always breaks out against the demand that a man submit to idols. Planned violence is then promoted as justified by the need to reduce a man or a people to the service of the idol they threaten to reject. Francisco Juliao, the peasant leader from Northeast Brazil who now lives in exile in Cuernavaca, recently made a statement that clarifies these principles. "Never," he said, "but never put weapons into the hands of the people. Whosoever puts weapons into the hands of the people destroys. Weapons put into the hands of the people will always be used against them. Weapons always defeat the poor who receive them. Only the brick and the stick a man picks up in anger will not defile him as a man." - -In this light it is important for the North American citizen to learn from the insight gained these years by Latin American thinkers. Let him look at Colombia where there are bandits who kill for gain, and soldiers and guerrilleros who kill each other for the sake of discipline or in the service of a flag, and there is the angry man who kills in a mob that erupts in riot; and finally there is the witness, like Camilo Torres, who purposefully withdraws to the mountains to demonstrate his ability to survive in the face of an oppressive regime and thus wants to prove its illegitimacy. Soldier and bandit can organize; riots can be incited and their frustrated vitality can go stale or be channeled with deadly rationality into the service of some "ideal." Testimony will always remain a lonely task that ends up on a hill like Calvary. True testimony of profound nonconformity arouses the fiercest violence against it, but I do not see how such witness could ever be organized or institutionalized. - -The study of violence in Latin America deeply touches the life of the United States observer, but—for a moment still—allows him to stay disengaged. It is always easier to see the illusions in one's neighbor's eyes than the delusions in one's own. A critical examination of the effect that intense social change has on the intimacy of the human heart in Latin America is a fruitful way to insight into the intimacy of the human heart in the United States. In the capital-starved economies of Latin America, a great majority live excluded, now and forever, from the benefits of a thriving United States-style elite middle class. In the immensely rich economy of the United States, a small minority clamors that, in the same way, it is excluded from the mass of the middle class. The comparison should enable the United States observer to understand the world-wide growth of two societies, separate and unequal, and to appreciate the dynamics that provoke violence between them. - -## Not foreigners yet foreign - -From 1951 to 1956 I lived as a priest in Incarnation Parish on the West Side of New York's Manhattan. Puerto Ricans were then being crowded into the walk-ups between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway. They were displacing many families who had moved a generation earlier straight from Ireland to this area. I became involved in the inevitable conflict between these peoples and also in the controversy about its meaning. - -As a newcomer to the United States I was surprised to see how New Yorkers, from druggist to mayor, fell back upon ready stereotypes to guide their policy decisions. Whatever was worth understanding about Puerto Ricans, they apparently felt, could be explained in old categorical terms coined for preceding groups of immigrants. That which had served for the Poles or Italians should fit the Puerto Ricans. - -At that time I tried to obtain recognition of the fact that, at least for the Roman Catholic Church, the Puerto Rican immigration represented a phenomenon without precedent. Amazingly, I found an inquisitive listener to my opinion in Cardinal Spellman. - -After the introduction of the quota system in 1924, it seemed that the melting process in New York City was finally about to catch up with the number of people tossed into the pot. Then in the late forties, the city was presented with a novel challenge, an invasion of American-born "foreigners," the Puerto Ricans. In Vito Marcantonio's heyday (1943) there were less than thirty-five thousand Puerto Ricans in New York; at present (1956) there are more than half a million, and indications are that the migration has not yet reached its peak. - -These Puerto Ricans are not foreigners, and yet they are more foreign than most of the immigrants who preceded them. About this seeming paradox the well-meaning should be well-informed, since to be received kindly merely because one is a foreigner is a cold kind of condescension: the chances are that the man who thus receives you is determined never really to know you. - -If on the one hand a man consistently designates you a foreigner, he usually precludes any possibility of appreciating that which is unique to your group—besides the fact that it is not his own. If on the other hand, misunderstanding St. Paul's instruction to make himself Jew with the Jews and Greek with the Greeks, he approaches you with an exegesis such as "We are all Americans," he denies your right, and his, to a heritage, to be human, with roots reaching back in history. - -This fallacy is at the bottom of the attitude of many well-meaning people toward the Puerto Rican immigrants: let them do what the Irish or Italians did, or let them attempt what the Jews attempted; let them grow gradually through their own national parishes, territorial ghettos, and political machines to full "Americanization"; let them vociferously assert that they are as good Americans as the man next door. These attitudes are very common in New York, where the arrival of successive migratory waves is taken for granted. It is too often gratuitously assumed that the future novel about the Puerto Rican journey will be fashioned after either The Last Hurrah or Marjorie Morningstar, or will be a combination of both. - -The welfare investigator who says to Jose Rivera, "My parents went through the same experience," neither lies nor expresses xenophobia—he just misunderstands, like the politician who tries again to use methods which worked when Italian was spoken in Harlem. - -When the Irish and the Germans came here a century ago, New York City was faced with a challenge of a kind never experienced before and of a size never to be duplicated. In 1855 one-third of the city's population (500,000) consisted of immigrants who had arrived in the previous decade; against this proportion the one-fifteenth of the city's population which in 1955 consisted of recently arrived Puerto Ricans (again 500,000) seems insignificant. - -In the days of the heavy influx to America, wave after wave of immigrants arrived, settled, and became accustomed to new patterns of life. The newcomers spoke different languages, worshiped in different churches, came from different climates, wooed in different fashions, ate different dishes, sang different songs. But under these apparent differences they had much in common. They came from the Old Continent and arrived as refugees or settlers to become Americans and to stay for good. They brought their own clergy-rabbi, priest, or minister—and the symbols of past millennia which were their own, Saint Patrick, the Mafia, or Loretto, no less than the Turnverein. They settled in special sections of the city and kept to themselves for years before they ventured to take part in that experience new to all of diem: life in a pluralistic society. They fell into a common pattern, and it is no wonder that those who had been here long enough to consider themselves part of a settled stratum fell into the habit of assuming a priori that each new incoming group would be analogous to theirs. This assumption, in fact, proved to be true until after World War II, with the exception of two groups, the Orientals and the Southern Negroes. - -Then suddenly the Puerto Ricans arrived en masse. New York had never before known such an invasion, an invasion of Americans who came from an older part of the New World into New York, which by the way had been part of the diocese of San Juan long before Henry Hudson discovered Manhattan. And New York had never had to deal with born American citizens who in their schools had learned English as a foreign language. - -These strange Americans were sons of a Catholic country where for centuries slaves had found refuge, where the population of a little over two million is overwhelmingly white but where a difference in the shade of the skin is no impediment, either to success or to marriage. Yet theirs was the first sizable group coming from overseas into New York to be tagged by many as "colored," much less because of the racial heredity of some than for the vaguely sensed great difference between them and former new arrivals. - -This was a new type of immigrant: not a European who had left home for good and strove to become an American, but an American citizen, who could come here for the time between one harvest and another and return home for vacation with a week's salary spent on an air coach ticket. This was not the fugitive from racial or religious persecution in his own country, but the child of "natives" in a Spanish colony or perhaps the descendant of a Spanish official in the colonial service; not a man accustomed to be led by men of his own stock—priest, politician, rebel, or professor—but for four hundred years a subject in a territory administered by foreigners, first Spanish, then American, only recently come into its own. - -The new arrival from Puerto Rico was not the Christian in his own right who received the Faith from the sons of his own neighbors, but the fruit of missionary labor typical of the Spanish Empire. He was a Catholic, born of parents who were also Catholics, yet he received the Sacraments from a foreigner because the government was afraid that to train native priests might be to train political rebels. - -Even the physical configuration of the world from which he came was different. He was a man from an island where nature is provident and a friend, where field labor means much more harvesting than planting. When nature rebels every few decades, he is powerless; in the hurricanes he cannot but see the finger of God. - -Until recently nobody in Puerto Rico built a house with the idea that it should survive the elements or withstand the climate by air conditioning. What a difference from the Pole and the Sicilian, both of whom built houses to withstand nature, climate, and time, both of whom built houses to separate their lives from that of nature. One might have come from the Russian steppe or the ghetto and the other from an olive grove on the coast, but both knew what winter meant; they knew that a house was there to protect them from the cold, a place within which to make a home. It was easy for the Pole and the Sicilian to settle in tenements and to live confined there. But the new immigrant from the tropics knew no winter, and the home he left was a hut in which you slept but around which you lived with your family. The hut was the center of his day's activities, not their limit. To come to a tenement, to need heat, to need glass in your windows, to be frowned on for tending to live beyond your doors—this was all contrary to the Puerto Rican's traditional habits, and as surprising to him as it is for the New Yorker to realize that for any immigrants these basic assumptions of his life should be surprising. - -The new Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rico of 1956, is studded with concrete houses and opens a new factory every day. It is a proving ground for the most advanced forms of community organizations, and it has the fastest-declining rate for illiteracy and the fastest-falling mortality in the world. Yet these facts must not make us think that the traditional outlook of its people has changed or will change tomorrow. These material improvements are the outcome of the first decade of Munoz Marin's administration, but they do not wipe out the Island's past nor are they intended to make of San Juan a suburb of New York. - -The differences between the Puerto Rican migration and the influx of Europeans are fundamental. Indeed, in the shortness of its history Puerto Rico is more foreign to Europe than to America. These differences account for much of the distinctive behavior characteristics of Puerto Ricans in New York, and the lack of knowledge of these differences accounts for many misunderstandings on the part of old New Yorkers. - -Many a Puerto Rican does not leave the Island with a clear plan of settling on the mainland. How can a man who leaves on the spur of the moment, planning to make a fast dollar in New York and be back as soon as he has enough to buy a store, take roots in New York? I remember one woman who was in despair because her husband had disappeared on his way to the cane fields, carrying his machete. She thought, of course, that a rival had grabbed him from her. And then, after a week, she got a money order from Chicago. On the way to the cane field he had run into a hiring gang and decided to try his luck—and that was the reason he neglected to come home for dinner. In a case like this, in which a man "drops in" on New York, with no intentions of staying but of eventually commuting "home," how can the transient have the same effect on his neighborhood in New York as the old immigrant who came to stay? Yet the statistical curve of emigration from the Island is in exact correlation with the curve of employment on the mainland. If employment is scarce, the reflux increases correspondingly. Many, even after years in New York, feel they got stuck there because of money. - -With the arrival of hundreds of thousands from Puerto Rico and the other Central American states (it is estimated that more than one-fourth of New York's Spanish-American population is not Puerto Rican), not only a new language but a new pattern of living has been added to the city. Instead of the strangers speaking only a foreign tongue who formerly arrived exhausted from the long journey, American citizens, all of whom know some basic English, arrive in airplanes within six hours of leaving their tropical island. - -The old immigrants settled in national neighborhoods; the new transatlantic commuter spreads out all over the city; ten years after the beginning of the Puerto Rican mass influx Spanish has already become ubiquitous in New York. Unlike European immigrants, all Puerto Ri-cans know some English, and this helped, but there is another factor that has contributed to Latin Americans spreading to all quarters of the city. In former times when a neighborhood became a center for the newest immigrant group, it was either a slum or tended to become one. And once a neighborhood had deteriorated it hardly ever was redeemed. The great immigration from Puerto Rico started after World War II, due to such factors as cheap air transportation, acquaintance with the mainland acquired by many during service in the army, rising education under the new political order on the island, and, last but not least, the growing pressure of a population which has more than doubled since the beginning of the century. At that same time the city was embarking on its great slum clearance program and the first blocks to be torn down were almost invariably those where the newest and poorest immigrant had just settled. As a result, the Puerto Ricans began to be resettled all around town in new projects and on a non-discriminatory basis. - -Considering this dispersal and the tendency to commute to the Island, it is no wonder that there are hardly any Puerto Rican national neighborhoods in the traditional sense in New York. One result is that it is difficult for Puerto Ricans to develop local grass-roots leadership within their own group; either their concentration per city block is too thin, or the intention to stick to the neighborhood is absent, or the necessity to organize in association with their own is weak because all are citizens who at least understand some English and have official "protection" from the Commonwealth government labor office-the first instance of something like a "Consulate for American Nationals." And there is no doubt that another factor contributing to the relative lack of leadership is caused by hundreds of years of colonial administration. - -Thus Puerto Ricans in New York find it more difficult than groups which came before them to form their own in-group leadership, if they do not find it completely impossible. This fact gives them a very real advantage over former migrations in one sense, because it almost forces them into an active participation in the established community. On the other hand, the sudden challenge of having to participate in a settled New York community proves too arduous for many who might have been able to become leaders in their own cliques. - -A lack of consideration on the part of New York civic leaders for the distinctive character of this new Puerto Rican migration, as compared to previous immigrant experiences, can do real damage to the community by either retarding or injuring the new pattern of assimilation which will have to form. If this lack of understanding should be present in the leaders of the Catholic Church, it can seriously damage souls. - -One-third of the baptized Catholics in Manhattan and the lower Bronx are Spanish-Americans at this moment. The Puerto Ricans are the first group of Catholics with a distinctly non-European tradition of Catholicism to come to the East Coast. The lack of native priests, due to the colonial and imperialistic atmosphere of more than four hundred years of the Island's history, and also the special approaches due to missionary conditions, have profoundly molded the behavior of Puerto Ricans as Catholics. - -Notwithstanding the very recent trend toward rapid urbanization, the majority of Puerto Ricans are dispersed over the steep hills of the interior, living in huts in the midst of small clearings among bananas and flamboyants, with magnificent views, but too far from church to attend Mass every Sunday. Traditionally, they take the Sacraments on those rare occasions when the priest comes to visit them in the chapel in their barrio—but for generations they have had to baptize their own children because the priest came so seldom. Under such circumstances regular attendance at Sunday Mass is not a confirmed element of Catholic practice. Living habits of the tropics, feudal-colonial social organization, and the confluence of Indian, African, and European cultures played their part. The Church's law declaring a marriage between two Catholics valid even when not entered into before a priest, if a priest could not be available in less than a month, made people forget the need for a priest. It had an adverse effect on the frequency of marriages in church, and still has today. - -"Bad habits" like these are not a sign of lack of Catholic spirit, but rather the effects of a peculiar ecclesiastical history. Many United States Catholics are used to a wide variety of national customs in national parishes and a great difference in practices among various ethnic groups; when faced with the lack of "practice" of their faith by Puerto Ricans, they might be tempted to identify them with some other foreign group in whom the effects of a different background show up in similar behavior, or might even deny altogether that Puerto Ricans are Catholic. But for anybody who has ever breathed the atmosphere of the Island there is no doubt that theirs is a Catholic folk-culture: children who might never make their First Communion will regularly ask their parents' blessing before leaving the house; people who might never have been taught the catechism will devotedly invoke the names of Our Lord or the Virgin and plaster their homes with holy pictures and sign themselves with the Cross before leaving home. Even the fact that a man refuses to get married in church sometimes testifies for rather than against his Catholicity; he does not want to bind himself forever by a Church marriage. - -In Puerto Rico God's house extends from the church into the plaza. Not only do the processions or posedas require the out-of-doors as a continuation of the church, but also the church is often too small, and throngs attend Mass by looking through doors and windows. Unless his neighbor on the mainland understands the different meaning "family," "church," or "home" has for a man from the tropics, he will not understand why Jose plays the guitar on his doorstep, or why Maria walks from statue to statue during Mass for a little chat with the saints or perhaps enters church only after service, because she is repelled by the formality of the ushers. - -All of this points toward the need the Puerto Ricans have to win some respect for their background. What they need is not more help but less categorization according to previous schemes, and more understanding. Only thus will they be able to make the unique cultural, political, and economic contribution for which they seem destined: Spanish-Christian tradition, a Catholicism in which is taken for granted an eminently Christian attitude toward the mixing of races, a freshness and simplicity of outlook proper to the tropics, a new pattern of political freedom in association with the United States, a bridge between the hemispheres politically and culturally no less than economically—these are only a few of the assets that the mass migration of Puerto Ricans to the mainland can contribute to New York and the United States. - - -## The eloquence of silence - -Five years on the streets of New York made me aware of the need for some method of bringing native New Yorkers to friendship with Puerto Ricans. Minister, teachers, social workers, all were submerged in a Spanish-speaking crowd. They needed to learn the language, but even more they needed to attune their ears and open their hearts to the anguish of a people who were lonely, frightened, and powerless. - -Quite evidently the mere study of Spanish was not enough. The man who can construct sentences with words and grammar may be much further from reality than he who knows that he does not speak a language. I saw how intensely Puerto Ricans rejected the Americano who studied them for the purpose of "integrating them" in the city. They even refused to answer in Spanish, because behind his benevolence they sensed the condescension, and often the contempt. A program was needed to help native New Yorkers to enter into the spirit of poverty. - -In 1956 I became Vice Rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico and this gave me a chance to prepare people for work in the Spanish ghettos. We offered workshops combining the very intensive study of spoken Spanish with field experience and with the academic study of Puerto Rican poetry, history, songs, and social reality. Many of my students came at great personal sacrifice. More than half were priests, mostly below the age of thirty-five. They had decided to spend their lives among the poor in the inner city. It is now difficult to remember how the Catholic clergy then felt about its duty. It was hard to convince an Irish-American pastor to permit his curate to spend his time on people who never came to church. The Spanish language was a potent tool for curates who wanted to use their time and the resources of the Church for work among the poor. Because—presumably—the Spanish language identified those poor who were born Catholics, and to whom the Church under no circumstances could deny an equal share of its ministry. When seven years later the war on poverty broke out, a substantial number of recognized leaders and critics were these men who had met each other in Puerto Rico. With this group of students I could explore the deeper meaning involved in the learning of a foreign language. In fact, I believe that properly conducted language learning is one of the few occasions in which an adult can go through a deep experience of poverty, of weakness, and of dependence on the good will of another. Every evening we gathered for an hour of silent prayer. At the beginning of the hour one of us would offer points for meditation. The following is one of the sessions recorded by a participant. - -The science of linguistics has brought into view new horizons in the understanding of human communications. An objective study of the ways in which meanings are transmitted has shown that much more is relayed from one man to another through and in silence than in words. Words and sentences are composed of silences more meaningful than the sounds. The pregnant pauses between sounds and utterances become luminous points in an incredible void: as electrons in the atom, as planets in the solar system. Language is as a cord of silence with sounds the knots-as nodes in a Peruvian quipu, in which the empty spaces speak. With Confucius we can see language as a wheel. The spokes centralize, but the empty spaces make the wheel. - -It is thus not so much the other man's words as his silences which we have to learn in order to understand him. It is not so much our sounds which give meaning, but it is through the pauses that we will make ourselves understood. The learning of a language is more the learning of its silences than of its sounds. Only the Christian believes in the Word as coeternal Silence. Among men in time, rhythm is a law through which our conversation becomes a yang-yin of silence and sound. - -To learn a language in a human and mature way, therefore, is to accept the responsibility for its silences and for its sounds. The gift a people gives us in teaching us their language is more a gift of the rhythm, the mode, and the subtleties of its system of silences than of its system of sounds. It is an intimate gift for which we are accountable to the people who have entrusted us with their tongue. A language of which I know only the words and not the pauses is a continuous offense. It is as the caricature of a photographic negative. - -It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missioners, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they "speak with the accent of natives" they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds. - -As words must be learned by listening and by painful attempts at imitation of a native speaker, so silences must be acquired through a delicate openness to them. Silence has its pauses and hesitations, its rhythms and expressions and inflections; its durations and pitches, and times to be and not to be. Just as with our words, there is an analogy between our silence with men and with God. To learn the full meaning of one, we must practice and deepen the other. - -First among the classification of silences is the silence of the pure listener, of womanly passivity; the silence through which the message of the other becomes "he in us," the silence of deep interest. It is threatened by another silence—the silence of indifference, the silence of disinterest which assumes that there is nothing I want or can receive through the communication of the other. This is the ominous silence of the wife who woodenly listens to her husband relating the little things he so earnestly wants to tell her. It is the silence of the Christian who reads the gospel with the attitude that he knows it backward and forward. It is the silence of the stone—dead because it is unrelated to life. It is the silence of the missioner who never understood the miracle of a foreigner whose listening is a greater testimony of love than that of another who speaks. The man who shows us that he knows the rhythm of our silence is much closer to us than one who thinks that he knows how to speak. - -The greater the distance between the two worlds, the more this silence of interest is a sign of love. It is easy for most Americans to listen to chitchat about football; but it is a sign of love for a Midwesterner to listen to the jai alai reports. The silence of the city priest on a bus listening to the report of the sickness of a goat is a gift, truly the fruit of a missionary form of long training in patience. - -There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God. Only when this distance dawns on consciousness can the grateful silence of patient readiness develop. This must have been the silence of the Virgin before the Ave which enabled her to become the eternal model of openness to the Word. Through her deep silence the Word could take Flesh. - -In the prayer of silent listening, and nowhere else, can the Christian acquire the habit of this first silence from which the Word can be born in a foreign culture. This Word conceived in silence is grown in silence too. - -A second great class in the grammar of silence is the silence of the Virgin after she conceived the Word—the silence from which not so much the Fiat as the Magnificat was born. It is the silence which nourishes the Word conceived rather than opening man to conception. It is the silence which closes man in on himself to allow him to prepare the Word for others. It is the silence of syntony; the silence in which we await the proper moment for the Word to be born into the world. - -This silence too is threatened, not only by hurry and by desecration of multiplicity of action, but by the habit of verbal confection and mass production which has no time for it. It is threatened by the silence of cheapness which means that one word is as good as another and that words need no nursing. - -The missioner, or foreigner, who uses words as they are in the dictionary does not know this silence. He is the man who looks up English words in himself when he wants to find a Spanish equivalent, rather than seeking the word which would syntonize; rather than finding the word or gesture or silence which would be understood, even if it has no equivalent in his own language or culture or background; the man who does not give the seed of a new language time to grow on the foreign soil of his soul. This is a silence before words, or between them; the silence within which words live or die. It is the silence of the slow prayer of hesitation; of prayer in which words have the courage to swim in a sea of silence. It is diametrically opposed to other forms of silence before words —the silence of the artificial flower which serves as a remembrance of words which do not grow, the pause in between repetition. It is the silence of the missioner who waits for the dispensation of the next memorized platitude because he has not made the effort to penetrate into the living language of others. The silence before words is also opposed to the silence of brewing aggression which can hardly be called silence—this too an interval used for the preparation of words, but words which divide rather than bring together. This is the silence to which the missioner is tempted who clings to the idea that in Spanish nothing means what he wants to say. It is the silence in which one verbal aggression — even though veiled — prepares the other. - -The next great class in the grammar of silence we will call the silence beyond words. The farther we go, the farther apart does good and bad silence grow in each classification. We now have reached the silence which does not prepare any further talk. It is the silence which has said everything because there is nothing more to say. This is the silence beyond a final yes or a final no. This is the silence of love beyond words, as well as the silence of no, forever; the silence of heaven or of hell. It is the definite attitude of a man who faces the Word which is Silence, or the silence of a man who has obstinately turned away from Him. - -Hell is this silence, deadly silence. Death in this silence is neither the deadness of a stone, indifferent to life, nor the deadness of a pressed flower, memory of life. It is the death after life, a final refusal to live. There can be noise and agitation and many words in this silence. It has only one meaning which is common to the noises it makes and the gaps between them. No. - -There is a way in which this silence of hell threatens missionary existence. In fact with the unusual possibilities of witnessing through silence, unusual ability to destroy through it are open to the man charged with the Word in a world not his own. Missionary silence risks more: it risks becoming a hell on earth. - -Ultimately missionary silence is a gift, a gift of prayer —learned in prayer by one infinitely distant, infinitely foreign and experienced in love for men, much more distant and foreign ever than men at home. The missioner can come to forget that his silence is a gift, a gift in its deepest sense gratuitously given, a gift concretely transmitted to us by those who are willing to teach us their language. If the missioner forgets this and attempts to conquer by his own power that which only others can bestow, then his existence begins to be threatened. The man who tries to buy the language like a suit, the man who tries to conquer the language through grammar so as to speak it "better than the natives around here," the man who forgets the analogy of the silence of God and the silence of others and does not seek its growth in prayer, is a man who tries basically to rape the culture into which he is sent, and he must expect the corresponding reactions. If he is human at all he will realize that he is in a spiritual prison, but he will not admit that he has built it around himself; rather he will accuse others of being his jailers. The wall between himself and those to whom he was sent will become ever more impenetrable. As long as he sees himself as "missioner" he will know that he is frustrated, that he was sent but got nowhere; that he is away from home but has never landed anywhere; that he left his home and never reached another. - -He continues to preach and is ever more aware that he is not understood, because he says what he thinks and speaks in a foreign farce of his own language. He continues to "do things for people" and considers them ungrateful because they understand that he does these things to bolster his ego. His words become a mockery of language, an expression of the silence of death. - -It requires much courage at this point to return to the patient silence of interest or to the delicacy of the silence within which words grow. Out of numbness, muteness has grown. Often out of the fear of facing the difficulty late in life of trying again to learn a language, a habit of despair is born. The silence of hell—a typically missionary version of it has been born in his heart. - -At the pole opposed to despair there is the silence of love, the holding of hands of the lovers. The prayer in which the vagueness before words has given place to the pure emptiness after them. The form of communication which opens the simple depth of the soul. It comes in flashes and it can become a lifetime—in prayer just as much as with people. Perhaps it is the only truly universal aspect of language, the only means of communication which was not touched by the curse of Babel. Perhaps it is the one way of being together with others and with the Word in which we have no more foreign accent. - -There is still another silence beyond words, but the silence of the Pieta. It is not a silence of death but the silence of the mystery of death. It is not the silence of active acceptance of the will of God out of which the Fiat is born nor the silence of manly acceptance of Geth-semane in which obedience has its roots. The silence you as missioners seek to acquire in this Spanish course is the silence beyond bewilderment and questions; it is a silence beyond the possibility of an answer, or even reference to a word which preceded. It is the mysterious silence through which the Lord could descend into the silence of hell, the acceptance without frustration of a life, useless and wasted on Judas, a silence of freely willed powerless-ness through which the world was saved. Born to redeem the world, Mary's Son had died at the hands of His people, abandoned by His friends and betrayed by Judas whom He loved but could not save—silent contemplation of the culminating paradox of the Incarnation which was useless for the redemption of at least one personal friend. The opening of the soul to this ultimate silence of the Pieta is the culmination of the slow maturing of the three previous forms of missionary silence. - -## Seamy side of charity - -In 1960 Pope John XXIII enjoined all United States and Canadian religious superiors to send, within ten years, 10 per cent of their effective strength in priests and nuns to Latin America. This papal request was interpreted by most United States Catholics as a call to help modernize the Latin American Church along the lines of the North American model The continent on which half of all Catholics live had to be saved from "Castro-Communism." - -I was opposed to the execution of this order: I was convinced that it would do serious damage to those sent, to their clients, and to their sponsors back home. I had learned in Puerto Rico that there are only a few people who are not stunted, or wholly destroyed, by lifelong work "for the poor" in a foreign country. The transfer of United States living standards and expectations could only impede the revolutionary changes needed, and the use of the gospel in the service of capitalism or any other ideology was wrong. Finally 1 knew that while the United States needed much information about all aspects of Latin America, "missionaries" would only hamper its collection: the feedback from missionaries is notoriously bizarre. The projected crusade had to be stopped. - -With two friends, Miss Feodora Standoff and Brother Gerry Morris, I set up a center in Cuernavaca. (We chose this spot because of its climate, location, and logistics.) Upon the opening of our center I stated two of the purposes of our undertaking. The first was to help diminish the damage threatened by the papal order. Through our educational program for missionaries we intended to challenge them to face reality and themselves, and either refuse their assignments or-if they accepted-to be a little bit less unprepared. Secondly, we wanted to gather sufficient influence among the decision-making bodies of mission-sponsoring agencies to dissuade them from implementing the plan. - -Throughout the 1960s our experience and reputation in the intensive training of foreign professionals for assignment to South America, and the fact that we continued to be the only center specializing in this type of education, ensured a continuing flow of students through our center—notwithstanding our stated, basically subversive purposes. - -By 1966, instead of the 10 per cent called for in 1960, barely 0.7 per cent of United States and Canadian clergy had moved south. Among the educated groups within the United States Church serious doubts had arisen about the desirability of the entire enterprise. But among bishops and the great majority of uneducated Catholics the lachrymose feedback from Latin America and an intense public relations campaign conducted from Washington continued to raise enthusiasm for the "Help Save Latin America" cause. Under these circumstances public and intensive controversy had to be sponsored, and for that purpose I wrote the following article for the Jesuit magazine America in January 1967. It was deliberate timing: I knew that at the end of that month three thousand churchmen—Catholic and Protestant, from the United States and Latin America—would meet in Boston to give new impetus to their programs, and that Ramparts was about to publish its expose on Central Intelligence Agency help to student movements, especially in Latin America. - -Five years ago, United States Catholics undertook a peculiar alliance for the progress of the Latin American church. By 1970, 10 per cent of more than 225,000 priests, brothers, and sisters would volunteer to be shipped south of the border. In those five years the combined United States male and female "clergy" in South America has increased by only 1,622. Halfway is a good time to determine whether a program launched is still sailing on course, and more importantly, if its destination still seems worth while. Numerically, the program was certainly a flop. Should this fact be a source of disappointment or relief? - -The project relied on an impulse supported by uncritical imagination and sentimental judgment. A pointed finger and a "call for 20,000" convinced many that "Latin America needs You." Nobody dared state clearly why, though the first published propaganda included several references to the "Red danger" in four pages of text. The Latin America Bureau of the National Catholic Welfare Conference attached the word "papal" to the program, the volunteers, and the call itself. - -A campaign for more funds is now being proposed. This is the moment, therefore, at which the call for 20,000 persons and the need for millions of dollars should be re-examined. Both appeals must be submitted to a public debate among United States Catholics, from bishop to widow, since they are the ones asked to supply the personnel and pay the bill. Critical thinking must prevail. Fancy and colorful campaign slogans for another collection, with their appeal to emotion, will only cloud the real issues. Let us coldly examine the American Church's outburst of charitable frenzy which resulted in the creation of "papal" volunteers, student "mission crusades," the annual Catholic Inter-American Cooperation Program mass assemblies, numerous diocesan missions, and new religious communities. - -I will not focus on details. The above programs themselves continually study and revise minutiae. Rather I dare to point out some fundamental facts and implications of the so-called papal plan-part of the many-faceted effort to keep Latin America within the ideologies of the West. Church policy makers in the United States must face up to the sociopolitical consequences involved in their well-intentioned missionary ventures. They must review their vocation as Christian theologians and their actions as Western politicians. - -Men and money sent with missionary motivation carry a foreign Christian image, a foreign pastoral approach, and a foreign political message. They also bear the mark of North American capitalism of the 1950s. Why not, for once, consider the seamy side of charity; weigh the inevitable burdens foreign help imposes on the South American Church; taste the bitterness of the damage done by our sacrifices? If, for example, United States Catholics would simply turn from the dream of "10 per cent," and do some honest thinking about the implication of their help, the awakened awareness of intrinsic fallacies could lead to sober, meaningful generosity. - -But let me be more precise. The unquestionable joys of giving and the fruits of receiving should be treated as two distinctly separate chapters. I propose to delineate only the negative results that foreign money, men, and ideas produce in the South American Church, in order that the future United States program may be tailored accordingly. - -During the past five years, the cost of operating the Church in Latin America has multiplied many times. There is no precedent for a similar rate of increase in Church expenses on a continental scale. Today one Catholic university, mission society, or radio chain may cost more to operate than the whole country's Church a decade ago. Most of the funds for this kind of growth came from outside and flowed from two types of sources. The first is the Church itself, which raised its income in three ways: - -1\. Dollar by dollar, appealing to the generosity of the faithful, as was done in Germany and the Low Countries by Adveniat, Misereor, and Oostpriesterhulp. These contributions reach more than twenty-five million dollars a year. - -2\. Through lump sum contributions, made by individual churchmen-such as Cardinal Cushing, the outstanding example; or by institutions-such as the National Catholic Welfare Conference, transferring one million dollars from the home missions to the Latin America Bureau. - -3\. By assigning priests, religious and laymen, all trained at considerable cost and often backed financially in their apostolic undertakings. - -This kind of foreign generosity has enticed the Latin American Church into becoming a satellite to North Atlantic cultural phenomena and policy. Increased apostolic resources intensified the need for this continued flow and created islands of apostolic well-being, each day further beyond the capacity of local support. The Latin American Church flowers anew by returning to what the Conquest stamped her: a colonial plant that blooms because of foreign cultivation. Instead of learning how to get along with less money or else close up shop, bishops are being trapped into needing more money now and bequeathing an institution impossible to run in the future. Education, the one type of investment that could give long-range returns, is conceived mostly as training for bureaucrats who will maintain the existing apparatus. - -Recently I saw an example of this in a large group of Latin American priests who had been sent to Europe for advanced degrees. In order to relate the Church to the world, nine-tenths of these men were studying teaching methods—catechetics, pastoral theology, or canon law— and thereby not directly advancing their knowledge of either the Church or the world. Only a few studied the Church in its history and sources, or the world as it is. - -It is easy to come by big sums to build a new church in a jungle or a high school in a suburb, and then to staff the plants with new missioners. A patently irrelevant pastoral system is artificially and expensively sustained, while basic research for a new and vital one is considered an extravagant luxury. Scholarships for non-ecclesiastical humanist studies, seed money for imaginative pastoral experimentation, grants for documentation and research to make specific constructive criticism all run the frightening risk of threatening our temporal structures, clerical plants, and "good business" methods. - -Even more surprising than churchly generosity for churchly concern is a second source of money. A decade ago the Church was like an impoverished grande dame trying to keep up an imperial tradition of almsgiving from her reduced income. In the more than a century since Spain lost Latin America, the Church has steadily lost government grants, patrons' gifts, and, finally, the revenue from its former lands. According to the colonial concept of charity, the Church lost its power to help the poor. It came to be considered a historical relic, inevitably the ally of conservative politicians. - -By 1966 almost the contrary seems true—at least, at first sight. The Church has become an agent trusted to run programs aimed at social change. It is committed enough to produce some results. But when it is threatened by real change, it withdraws rather than permit social awareness to spread like wildfire. The smothering of the Brazilian radio schools by a high Church authority is a good example. - -Thus Church discipline assures the donor that his money does twice the job in the hands of a priest. It will not evaporate, nor will it be accepted for what it is: publicity for private enterprise and indoctrination to a way of life that the rich have chosen as suitable for the poor. The receiver inevitably gets the message: the "padre" stands on the side of W. R. Grace and Company, Esso, the Alliance for Progress, democratic government, the AFL-CIO, and whatever is holy in the Western pantheon. - -Opinion is divided, of course, on whether the Church went heavily into social projects because it could thus obtain funds "for the poor," or whether it went after the funds because it could thus contain Castroism and assure its institutional respectability. By becoming an "official" agency of one kind of progress, the Church ceases to speak for the underdog who is outside all agencies but who is an ever growing majority. By accepting the power to help, the Church necessarily must denounce a Camilo Torres, who symbolizes the power of renunciation. - -Money thus builds the Church a "pastoral" structure beyond its means and makes it a political power. - -Superficial emotional involvement obscures rational thinking about American international "assistance." Healthy guilt feelings are repressed by a strangely motivated desire to "help" in Vietnam. Finally, our generation begins to cut through the rhetoric of patriotic "loyalty." We stumblingly recognize the perversity of our power politics and the destructive direction of our warped efforts to impose unilaterally "our way of life" on all. We have not yet begun to face the seamy side of clerical manpower involvement and the Church's complicity in stifling universal awakening too revolutionary to lie quietly within the "Great Society." - -I know that there is no foreign priest or nun so shoddy in his work that through his stay in Latin America he has not enriched some life; and that there is no missioner so incompetent that through him Latin America has not made some small contribution to Europe and North America. But neither our admiration for conspicuous generosity, nor our fear of making bitter enemies out of lukewarm friends, must stop us from facing the facts. Missioners sent to Latin America can make (1) an alien Church more foreign, (2) an overstaffed Church priest-ridden, and (3) bishops into abject beggars. Recent public discord has shattered the unanimity of the national consensus on Vietnam. I hope that public awareness of the repressive and corruptive elements contained in "official" ecclesiastical assistance programs will give rise to a real sense of guilt: guilt for having wasted the lives of young men and women dedicated to the task of evangelization in Latin America. - -Massive, indiscriminate importation of clergy helps the ecclesiastical bureaucracy survive in its own colony, which every day becomes more foreign and comfortable. This immigration helps to transform the old-style hacienda of God (on which the people were only squatters) into the Lord's supermarket, with catechisms, liturgy, and other means of grace heavily in stock. It makes contented consumers out of vegetating peasants, demanding clients out of former devotees. It lines the sacred pockets, providing refuge for men who are frightened by secular responsibility. - -Churchgoers, accustomed to priests, novenas, books, and culture from Spain (quite possibly to Franco's picture in the rectory), now meet a new type of executive, administrative, and financial talent promoting a certain type of democracy as the Christian ideal. The people soon see that the Church is distant, alienated from them—an imported, specialized operation, financed from abroad, which speaks with a holy, because foreign, accent. - -This foreign transfusion—and the hope for more—gave ecclesiastical pusillanimity a new lease on life, another chance to make the archaic and colonial system work. If North America and Europe send enough priests to fill the vacant parishes, there is no need to consider laymen—unpaid for part-time work—to fulfill most evangelical tasks; no need to re-examine the structure of the parish, the function of the priest, the Sunday obligation and clerical sermon; no need to explore the use of the married diaconate, new forms of celebration of the Word and Eucharist, and intimate familial celebrations of conversion to the gospel in the milieu of the home. The promise of more clergy is like a bewitching siren. It makes the chronic surplus of clergy in Latin America invisible and it makes it impossible to diagnose this surplus as the gravest illness of the Church. Today, this pessimistic evaluation is slightly altered by a courageous and imaginative few—non-Latins among them—who see, study, and strive for true reform. - -A large proportion of Latin American Church personnel are presently employed in private institutions that serve the middle and upper classes and frequently produce highly respectable profits; this on a continent where there is a desperate need for teachers, nurses, and social workers in public institutions that serve the poor. A large part of the clergy are engaged in bureaucratic functions, usually related to peddling sacraments, sacramentals, and superstitious "blessings." Most of them live in squalor. The Church, unable to use its personnel in pastorally meaningful tasks, cannot even support its priests and the 670 bishops who govern them. Theology is used to justify this system, canon law to administer it, and foreign clergy to create a world-wide consensus on the necessity of its continuation. - -A healthy sense of values empties the seminaries and the ranks of the clergy much more effectively than does a lack of discipline and generosity. In fact, the new mood of well-being makes the ecclesiastical career more attractive to the self-seeker. Bishops turn servile beggars, become tempted to organize safaris, and hunt out foreign priests and funds for constructing such anomalies as minor seminaries. As long as such expeditions succeed, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to take the emotionally harder road: to ask ourselves honestly if we need such a game. - -Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of sacralizing person and community. - -It is hard to help by refusing to give alms. I remember once having stopped food distribution from sacristies in an area where there was great hunger. I still feel the sting of an accusing voice saying: "Sleep well for the rest of your life with the death of dozens of children on your conscience." Even some doctors prefer aspirins to radical surgery. They feel no guilt having the patient die of cancer, but fear the risk of applying the knife. The courage needed today is that expressed by Daniel Berrigan, S.J., writing of Latin America: "I suggest we stop sending anyone or anything for three years and dig in and face our mistakes and find out how not to canonize them." - -From six years' experience in training hundreds of foreign missioners assigned to Latin America, I know that real volunteers increasingly want to face the truth that puts their faith to the test. Superiors who shift personnel by their administrative decisions but do not have to live with the ensuing deceptions are emotionally handicapped facing these realities. - -The United States Church must face the painful side of generosity: the burden that a life gratuitously offered imposes on the recipient. The men who go to Latin America must humbly accept the possibility that they are useless or even harmful, although they give all they have. They must accept the fact that a limping ecclesiastical assistance program uses them as palliatives to ease the pain of a cancerous structure, the only hope being that the prescription will give the organism enough time and rest to initiate a spontaneous healing. It is far more probable that the pharmacist's pill will both stop the patient from seeking a surgeon's advice and addict him to the drug. - -Foreign missioners increasingly realize that they heeded a call to plug the holes in a sinking ship because the officers did not dare launch the life rafts. Unless this is clearly seen, men who obediently offer the best years of then-lives will find themselves tricked into a useless struggle to keep a doomed liner afloat as it limps through uncharted seas. - -We must acknowledge that missioners can be pawns in a world ideological struggle and that it is blasphemous to use the gospel to prop up any social or political system. When men and money are sent into a society within the framework of a program, they bring ideas that live after them. It has been pointed out, in the case of the Peace Corps, that the cultural mutation catalyzed by a small foreign group might be more effective than all the immediate services it renders. The same can be true of the North American missioner—close to home, having great means at his disposal, frequently on a short-term assignment— who moves into an area of intense United States cultural and economic colonization. He is part of this sphere of influence and, at times, intrigue. Through the United States missioner, the United States shadows and colors the public image of the Church. The influx of United States missioners coincides with the Alliance for Progress, Camelot, and CIA projects and looks like a baptism of all three. The Alliance appears directed by Christian justice and is not seen for what it is: a deception designed to maintain the status quo, albeit variously motivated. During the program's first five years, the net capital leaving Latin America has tripled. The program is too small to permit even the achievement of a threshold of sustained growth. It is a bone thrown to the dog, that he remain quiet in the backyard of the Americas. - -Within these realities, the United States missioner tends to fulfill the traditional role of a colonial power's lackey chaplain. The dangers implicit in Church use of foreign money assume the proportion of caricature when this aid is administered by a "gringo" to keep the "underdeveloped" quiet. It is, of course, too much to ask of most Americans that they make sound, clear, and outspoken criticisms of United States sociopolitical aggression in Latin America, even more difficult that they do so without the bitterness of the expatriate or the opportunism of the turncoat. - -Groups of United States missioners cannot avoid projecting the image of "United States outposts." Only individual Americans mixed in with local men could avoid this distortion. The missioner of necessity is an "undercover" a sent—albeit unconscious—for United States so-cial and political consensus. But, consciously and purposely, he wishes to bring the values of his Church to South America; adaptation and selection seldom reach the level of questioning the values themselves. - -The situation was not so ambiguous ten years ago, when in good conscience mission societies were channels for the flow of traditional United States Church hardware to Latin America. Everything from the Roman collar to parochial schools, from United States catechisms to Catholic universities, was considered salable merchandise in the new Latin American market. Not much salesmanship was needed to convince the Latin bishops to give the "Made in U.S.A." label a try. - -In the meantime, however, the situation has changed considerably. The United States Church is shaking from the first findings of a scientific and massive self-evaluation. Not only methods and institutions, but also the ideologies that they imply, are subject to examination and attack. The self-confidence of the American ecclesiastical salesman is therefore shaky. We see the strange paradox of a man attempting to implant, in a really different culture, structures and programs that are now rejected in the country of their origin. (I recently heard of a Catholic grammar school being planned by United States personnel in a Central American city parish where there are already a dozen public schools.) - -There is an opposite danger, too. Latin America can no longer tolerate being a haven for United States liberals who cannot make their point at home, an outlet for apostles too "apostolic" to find their vocation as competent professionals within their own community. The hardware salesman threatens to dump second-rate imitations of parishes, schools, and catechisms—outmoded even in the United States-all around the continent. The traveling escapist threatens further to confuse a foreign world with his superficial protests, which are not viable even at home. The American Church of the Vietnam generation finds it difficult to engage in foreign aid without exporting either its solutions or its problems. Both are prohibitive luxuries for developing nations. Mexicans, to avoid offending the sender, pay high duties for useless or unasked-for gifts sent them by well-meaning American friends. Gift givers must think not of this moment and of this need, but in terms of a full generation of the future effects. Gift planners must ask if the global value of the gift in men, money, and ideas is worth the price the recipient will ultimately have to pay for it. As Father Berrigan suggests, the rich and powerful can decide not to give; the poor can hardly refuse to accept. Since almsgiving conditions the beggar's mind, the Latin American bishops are not entirely at fault in asking for misdirected and harmful foreign aid. A large measure of the blame lies with the underdeveloped ecclesiology of United States clerics who direct the "sale" of American good intentions. - -The United States Catholic wants to be involved in an ecclesiologically valid program, not in subsidiary political and social programs designed to influence the growth of developing nations according to anybody's social doctrine, be it even described as the Pope's. The heart of the discussion is therefore not how to send more men and money, but rather why they should be sent at all. The Church, in the meantime, is in no critical danger. We are tempted to shore up and salvage structures rather than question their purpose and truth. Hoping to glory in the works of our hands, we feel guilty, frustrated, and angry when part of the building starts to crumble. Instead of believing in the Church, we frantically attempt to construct it according to our own cloudy cultural image. We want to build community, relying on techniques, and are blind to the latent desire for unity that is striving to express itself among men. In fear, we plan our Church with statistics, rather than trustingly search for the living Church which is right among us. - -## The vanishing clergyman - -I drafted this paper in 1959 and published it, at the request of a friend, in The Critic of Chicago, in 1967. - -Great changes must take place in the structure of the Catholic Church if it is to survive. I believe that such changes will come about and, moreover, that they can now be visualized in terms consistent with the most radically traditional theology. Nevertheless, such changes would thoroughly upset the idea of the Catholic Church deeply imbedded in the imagination of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. - -One could have spoken about these changes in abstract terms. 1 preferred to illustrate my general thesis by indicating what, in my opinion, will happen to the "clergyman," to his status, his role, his self-image, his professional standing. 1 wanted to raise a question, clearly and simply. But I had further reasons for making my statement through a concrete example. - -For one, I did not want to say anything theologically new, daring, or controversial. - -Only a spelling-out of the social consequences would make a thesis as orthodox as mine sufficiently controversial to be discussed within the overwhelming conservative majority of the Church. - -A second reason for my decision to focus on the clergy was the attempt to render the discussion relevant to the "Catholic left." Suggestions for a reform of the Catholic priesthood abounded in these quarters in the mid-sixties. The majority of these suggestions seemed neither sufficiently revolutionary to be worth while {a married clergy, priests engaged in social action or revolution) nor sufficiently faithful to fundamental traditional positions—which I would not like to see compromised (such as the value of freely chosen celibacy, the episcopal structure of the Church, the permanence of priestly ordination). - -The Roman Church is the world’s largest non-governmental bureaucracy. It employs 1.8 million full-time workers—priests, brothers, sisters, and laymen. These employees work within a corporate structure which an American business consultant firm rates as among the most efficiently operated organizations in the world. The institutional Church functions on a par with the General Motors Company and the Chase Manhattan Bank. Recognition of this fact is accepted, sometimes, with pride. But to some, the machine-like smoothness itself seems to discredit the Church. Men suspect that it has lost its relevance to the gospel and to the world. Wavering, doubt, and confusion reign among its directors, functionaries, and employees. The giant begins to totter before it collapses. - -Some church personnel react to the breakdown with pain, anguish, and fright. Some make heroic efforts and tragic sacrifices to prevent it. Some, regretfully or joyfully, interpret the phenomenon as a sign of the disappearance of the Roman Church itself. I would like to suggest that we welcome the disappearance of institutional bureaucracy in a spirit of deep joy. In this essay, I shall describe some aspects of what is taking place in the Church, and suggest ways in which the Church could seek a radical reorganization in some of its structures. I am not recommending essential changes in the Church; even less do I suggest its dissolution. The complete disappearance of its visible structure would contradict sociological law and divine mandate. But change does entail much more than drastic amendment or updating reform if the Church is to respond to God’s call and contemporary man. I shall outline certain possible changes, solidly rooted in the origins of the Church, and boldly reaching out to the necessities of tomorrow’s society. Acceptance of this kind of reform will require the Church to live the evangelical poverty of Christ. At the same time, the Church, sensitive to the process of the world’s progressive socialization, will come to have a deep respect for, and joyful acceptance of, this phenomenon. - -The institutional Church is in trouble. The very persons on whose loyalty and obedience the efficiency structure depends increasingly abandon it. Until the early sixties, the “ defections ” were relatively rare. Now they are common. Tomorrow they may be the pattern. After a personal drama played out in the intimacy of conscience, more and more ecclesiastical employees will decide to sacrifice the emotional, spiritual, and financial security which the system benevolently provided for them. I suspect that within this generation these persons will have become a majority of the Church’s personnel. - -The problem lies not with the “spirit” of the world, nor with any failure in generosity among the “defectors,” but rather with the structure itself. This can be taken as an almost aprioristic conclusion, since the present structures developed as a response to past situations vastly different from our own. Further, our world continually accelerates its rapid changes of societal structures , in the context of which the Church must carry out its real functions. To see the situation more clearly, I shall focus my attention on the nature and function of ministry, the complex channel through which the Church touches the world. We can thus gain some insight into the Church of tomorrow. - -It seems evident that basic and accepted concepts of ministry in the Church are clearly inadequate. Quantitatively, for example , the Church really does not need the present number of full-time employees who work in its operational structure. More fundamentally, the situation suggests the need for a deep reappraisal of the elements which make up. the current idea of the priest as the Church’s basic representative in the world—a concept still maintained in the conciliar decrees. Specifically there is need for a re-examination of the relation between sacramental ministry and full-time personnel, between ministry and celibacy, and between ministry and theological education. - -Today it is assumed that most if not all of the Church’s ministerial operations must be carried out by full-time underpaid employees who possess a kind of theological education and who accept an ecclesiastical law of celibacy. In order to begin a search for new directions which are more evangelically and sociologically relevant, I shall discuss separately four aspects of the problem : the radical reduction in the number of persons dependent on the Church for their livelihood; the ordination to sacramental ministry of men independently employed in the world; the special and unique renunciation implied in perpetual celibacy ; the relation between sacramental ministry and theological education. - -### The clergy desire for more and need for less - -The Church’s personnel enjoy remarkable privileges. Every teenager who seeks employment among the clergy is almost automatically guaranteed a status which confers a variety of personal and social benefits, most of which come with advancing age, not because of competence or productivity. His rights to social and economic security are more far-reaching than plans for the guaranteed income. - -Ecclesiastical employees live in comfortable Church-owned housing, are assured preferential treatment in Church-owned and operated health services, are mostly trained in ecclesiastical educational institutions, and are buried in hallowed ground—after which they are prayed for. The habit or collar, not competent productivity, assures one’s status and living. An employment market, more diversified than any existing corporation, caters to the employee, discriminating against laymen who do not share his ritual initiation. Laymen who work in the ecclesiastical structure are recognized as possessing some few “civil rights,” but their careers depend principally on their ability to play the role of Uncle Toms. - -Recently the Roman Church has followed the example of some Protestant churches in shifting more of its employees from parish work to paper pushing. At the same time, the traditional demand for increased personnel at the parish level and the simultaneously burgeoning process of overinflated bureaucratic machinery masks the increasing irrelevance of both these aspects of the structure. Organizational explosion results in a feverish search for more personnel and money. We are urged to beg God to send more employees into the bureaucratic system and to inspire the faithful to pay the cost. Personally, I cannot ask God for these “benefits.” The inherently self-perpetuating expansion of Church personnel operates well enough without additional help, and only serves to make an already overstaffed Church more priest-ridden, thereby debilitating the Church’s mission in today’s world. - -The Vatican itself best illustrates the complex problem. Post-conciliar administrative growth supersedes and supplants the old machinery. Since the end of the Council, the twelve venerable curial congregations have been increased by the addition of numerous intermeshing and overlapping post-conciliar organs—commissions, councils, consultative bodies, committees, assemblies , synods. This bureaucratic maze becomes ungovernable. Good. Perhaps this will help us to see that principles of corporate government are not applicable to the Body of Christ. It is even less appropriate to see His Vicar as the chief executive of a corporation than as a Byzantine king. Clerical technocracy is even further from the gospel than priestly aristocracy. And we may come to recognize that efficiency corrupts Christian testimony more subtly than power. - -At a time when even the Pentagon seeks to reduce its manpower pool by contracting specific jobs in the open market of industry and research, the Vatican launches a drive toward greater self-contained institutional diversification and proliferation . The central administration of this top-heavy organizational giant passes out of the hands of the “venerable congregations” staffed by Italian career priests into those of clerical specialists recruited from all over the world. The Pontifical Curia of the Middle Ages becomes a contemporary corporation’s planning and administrative headquarters. - -One of the paradoxical aspects of today’s structure is that the organization priest is also a member of the aristocracy of the only feudal power left in the Western world—a power whose sovereign status was recognized in the Lateran conventions. Further, this same power increasingly uses a diplomatic structure —one originally developed to represent the Church’s interests vis-à-vis other sovereign states—in order to offer services to the emerging international agencies, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNICEF, UNESCO, and to the United Nations itself. This development demands more and more employees for a wider range of jobs, requiring even more specialized education for the recruits. The hierarchy, accustomed to absolute control over its employees, seeks to staff these positions with captive clergy. But the big push on more intensive recruitment runs head-on into a strong and contrary trend: yearly almost as many trained personnel leave as are recruited. Hence we see the reluctant acceptance of submissive and obedient laymen to fill the gap. - -Some individuals explain clerical “defections” as the elimination of undesirable elements. Others blame the various contemporary mystiques of the world. The institution instinctively attempts to explain this loss and the concomitant vocation “crisis” in terms flattering to itself. Then too one needs strong justification for the enthusiastic and emotional drives for more “ vocations .” Few wish to admit that the collapse of an overextended and disproportionate clerical framework is a clear sign of its irrelevance. Fewer see that the Pope himself would grow in evangelical stature and fidelity in proportion as his power to affect social issues in the world and his administrative command in the Church decline. - -Changes on the institutional periphery are as faithful to “Parkinson’s Law” as changes in Rome: work grows with available personnel. Since the end of the Council, attempts at collegial decentralization have resulted in a wildly uncontrolled growth of bureaucracy reaching to the local level. Latin America offers a grotesque example. A generation ago Latin American bishops traveled to Rome about every ten years to report to the Pope. Their only other contacts with Rome were the stylized petitions for indulgences of dispensations, channeled through the Nuncio, and occasional Curial Visitators. Today a complex Roman Commission for Latin America coordinates subcommissions of European and American bishops in the power balance with the Latin American Bishops’ Assembly. This is organized in a board ( Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano ) and numerous commissions , secretariats, institutes, and delegations. CELAM itself is the crown of sixteen national bishops’ conferences, some of which are even more complex in bureaucratic organization. The entire structure is designed to facilitate occasional consultations among bishops, in order that, returning to their dioceses, they might act with greater independence and originality. The real results are rather different. The bishops develop the bureaucratic mentality necessary to keep up with the merry-go-round character of the increasingly frequent meetings. The newly created organisms absorb large numbers of trained grass-roots personnel into clerical staff and planning services. Restrictive and unimaginative central control replaces creative and fresh approaches in the local churches. - -In the entire Church a clergy survives partly because priestly service at the altar is united with clerical power and privilege. This union helps to maintain the existing structure. Church-employed priests assure a personnel supply to fill places in the corporate structure. Priest-clerics assure the continuance and abundance of career-minded churchmen. The ordination of self-supporting laymen to sacramental functions would eventually destroy the bureaucracy. But men whose mentality and security have been formed and maintained by the system instinctively fear the ordination of persons who remain in secular employment. The diocesan chancellor, the Catholic Charities director, and the pastor feel as much threatened by declericalization as the Catholic university president, the supplier of ecclesiastical finery and furnishings, and such civic leaders as Saul Alinsky. In different ways all are supported by, or depend upon, the power and prestige of the clergy. Nevertheless, the ordination of secularly employed men may be one of the Church’s great advances. - -Today, some clerics begin to see that they are smothered in a scandalous and unnecessary security combined with restrictive and unacceptable controls. A priest, well-trained in theology, is assured life-long support, but it may be as an accountant, and not as a theologian, if he has been caught reading certain “ suspect ” foreign authors. Conversely, a Latin American bishop may send a priest for sociological studies in Europe and then decide to create a diocesan department of research to use the new talent he has acquired. - -Some priests are dissatisfied with their work, either because their freedom to do a good job is curtailed, or because they feel unprepared for the specific task assigned them. In the first instance , better job descriptions are proposed as a remedy; in the second, better education for the jobholder. Both solutions are no more than misguided palliatives. The question must be asked: Should not this job be dropped from Church control, and the cleric either fired or challenged to compete for it—under secular control and conditions? Of course if we continue the present system , we are still stuck with our problem: the dissatisfied cleric. - -Therefore the next five years will see a proliferation of retraining programs for the clergy. The outmoded product of novitiate and seminary needs different skills and attitudes to fit into the “new” Church: a multiplying growth of specialized commissions , bureaus, and secretariats. But it’s going to be a problem, selling the programs. The men themselves are beginning to say: Perhaps I need training to move into the secular world, to support myself as other men in society, to act as an adult in the world. - -Dioceses and religious congregations increasingly use business consultants, whose criteria of success are taken from the American Management Association, and whose premise is that the present structure must be maintained. The resulting clergy in-service training is essentially repressive, ideologically biased, and directed toward efficient Church growth. Present ecclesiastical training improves a man’s ability to operate a more complex machine. A retreat only serves to confirm a man’s per sonal commitment to the structure. An adult formation concept is needed, one which would lead men to search for the right questions. Is this structure rooted in routine or revelations? Should I, a man totally at the service of the Church, stay in the structure in order to subvert it, or leave in order to live the model of the future? The Church needs men seeking this kind of conscious and critical awareness—men deeply faithful to the Church, living a life of insecurity and risk, free from hierarchical control, working for the eventual “disestablishment” of the Church from within. The very few such groups in existence today are branded as disloyal and dangerous by the clerical mentality. - -A good example of such subversive education is provided by the Sister Formation Movement in the United States. This movement acts as a major factor working toward the secularization of the American Church from within. In the mid-fifties, a group of sisters set up a lobby to pressure for advanced professional education of religious. When this had been achieved, and the brothers and sisters returned to their communities with Ph.D.s, they were competent to apply for academic jobs anywhere. They no longer had to rely on preferential treatment traditionally accorded in Church institutions to religious, irrespective of their talent or professional training. - -Many of these trained persons become conscious of ridiculous restrictions imposed upon them and their institutions by the clerical mind and ecclesiastical control. Some saw themselves facing the necessity of leaving their communities in order to live a meaningful and relevant career. Others chose to work for the liberation of their institutions from repressive and destructive Church control. The former were branded as defectors and the latter as subversives. Finally, religious congregations began to allow their members to seek temporary or permanent employment of their own choice in the open market, while remaining members of the community. This will lead to the persons themselves choosing their companions, places of residence, and form of community living. - -Many superiors of religious women have recently begun to understand the signs of the times. Suddenly they see the possibility that the era of religious congregations might be over. Bishops are not yet aware that an analogous movement is at work among the clergy. But this movement is weaker and less sophisticated , because of the retarded nature of the American clergy. For several generations they have been pampered into unquestioning submission by their middle-class comfort and security. - -Today some priests believe that they might be better ministers if they worked at secular jobs that entail real social and economic responsibility. A priest-artist, for example, questions the bishop’s right to employ him as a scribe, or to suspend him if he seeks real work in Greenwich Village. These trends produce a double effect among the clergy. The committed man is moved to renounce his clerical privileges, thereby risking suspension, and the mediocre man is moved to clamor for more fringe benefits and less adult responsibility, thereby settling down more comfortably in his clerical security. - -Seeing the evangelical and social contradictions in the bureaucracy , some courageously face the possible alternatives. I know many who desire full-time jobs in poverty programs, as community organizers, teachers, researchers, professional men. They desire to earn their livings and live as celibate laymen, while exercising their ministerial functions on a part-time basis in the service of the faithful, and under the bishop’s authority. They ask if the system is sensitive enough to the real society to evolve a new form of radical and personal declericalization which would entail neither suspension from orders nor dispensation from celibacy. - -Of course, such radical secularization threatens the existing parochial system. It would encourage the imaginative and generous to strike out on their own and thereby leave the clerical and outdated ecclesiastical structure in the hands of those who choose security and routine. It would frighten both bureaucratic bishops and rebellious DuBays. The bishops desire more clerics, but reject any demands for employee privileges, especially the notion of unionized power. The attitudes of both the bishops and the DuBays necessarily imply the furtherance of the clerical system. - -Men in secular society sometimes recognize a real hypocrisy in this system. Groups founded for social protest and revolutionary action find the clergy suspect. The former, when they act, freely risk their careers for a cause to which their conscience impels them. The priest or nun who suddenly becomes aware that a real world exists and belatedly joins such actions risks a gentle reprimand at most Usually the more enlightened superior is quite pleased and happy with his “courageous” subject. It is much cheaper to permit a few naïve protesters, rather than face the frightening price of Christian institutional testimony to society. - -To begin the task of giving this testimony, may we pray for an increase of priests who choose “radical” secularization? For priests who leave the Church in order to pioneer the church of the future? For priests who, faithfully dedicated to and loving the Church, risk misunderstanding and suspension? For priests, full of hope, capable of such actions without becoming hard and embittered? For extraordinary priests, willing to live today the ordinary life of tomorrow’s priest? - -### The shape of the future ministry - -An adult layman, ordained to the ministry, will preside over the “normal” Christian community of the future. The ministry will be an exercise of leisure rather than a job. The “diaconia” will supplant the parish as the fundamental institutional unit in the church. The periodic meeting of friends will replace the Sunday assembly of strangers. A self-supporting dentist, factory worker, professor, rather than a church-employed scribe or functionary , will preside over the meeting. The minister will be a man mature in Christian wisdom through his lifelong participation in an intimate liturgy, rather than a seminary graduate formed professionally through “theological” formulae. Marriage and the education of growing children, rather than the acceptance of celibacy as a legal condition for ordination, will confer responsible leadership on him. - -I foresee the face-to-face meeting of families around a table, rather than the impersonal attendance of a crowd around an altar. Celebration will sanctify the dining room, rather than consecrated buildings the ceremony. This does not mean that all churches will be converted into theaters or real estate white elephants. For example, the Bishop of Cuernavaca believes that Latin American tradition requires the existence of the cathedral church as a kind of testimony in stone, whose beauty and majesty reflect the splendor of Christian truth. - -Present pastoral structures have been largely determined by ten centuries of a clerical and celibate priesthood. In 1964 the Council took a suggestive step toward changing this pattern when it approved a married diaconate. The decree is ambiguous, since it could lead to a proliferation of second-rate clergy without making any significant change in present structures. But it can also lead to the ordination of adult, self-supporting men. The danger would be in developing a clerical church-supported diaconate, thereby delaying the necessary and inevitable secularization of the ministry. - -The “ordinary” future priest, earning his living outside the church, will preside over a weekly meeting of a dozen deacons in his house. Together they will read the Scripture, then study and comment upon the bishop’s weekly instruction. After the meeting, when it includes Mass, each deacon will take the Sacrament to his own home, where he will keep it with his crucifix and Bible. The priest will visit his various “diaconias” and preside at their occasional Mass. At times a number of the “diaconias” will meet for a more solemn Mass in a rented hall or in a cathedral. - -Freed of present executive and administrative duties, both the bishop and his priests will have time for occasional celebrations . The bishop will be able to prepare and circulate his weekly selection from the Fathers and the outline for discussion. He and his priests will together prepare the home liturgy for the “diaconias.” These changes will require a different attitude toward weekly Mass obligation as well as a re-evaluation of present ritual practices of penance. - -Present canon law provides for the ordination of those whose lifelong livelihood has been guaranteed by the Church, and of those whose own estate is sufficient to support them. To restrict ordination to this kind of economic independence seems anomalous , if not revolting, in today’s society. Today, a man supports himself by working at a job in the world, not by performing a role in a hierarchy. It is certainly not contrary to the purposes of canon law to consider professional ability or earned social security as sufficient sign of independence for ordination. - -The sacramental ministry of ordained laymen will open our eyes to a completely new understanding of the traditional “ opposition ” between pastor and layman in the Church. As we move beyond both these concepts, we shall clearly see their transitory character. The Council, summarizing a historical development of the last hundred years, attempted to define the clerical priest and the unordained layman in two separate documents . But the future will achieve, from the apparent antithesis, a new synthesis which transcends present categories. - -The current ecclesiastical imagination is still inadequate for defining this new function—the lay priest, Sunday priest, part-time or secularized minister, ordained non-cleric. Principally he will be the minister of sacrament and word, not the jack-of- all-trades , superficially responding to a bewildering variety of social and psychological roles. With his emergence the Church will finally free itself from the restrictive system of benefices. More importantly the Church will have abandoned the complex series of services which have resulted in the minister becoming an artificial appendix to established social functions. The ordained layman will make the Catholic parson pastorally superfluous. - -The Church awakens anew in the city. Traditional pastoral analogies become anomalies in the asphalt, steel, and concrete context of city life. Urban renewal and new experiences of community call for another look at older terminology. Kings, crowns, and staffs have lost their meaning. Men are not subjects of sovereigns , and they impatiently question how they can be sheep led by a shepherd. The Church’s community-creating functions break down when supported by symbols whose driving force lies in an authority structure. Sophisticated urban Catholics do not seek authoritative guidance for community action from a pastor. They know that social action is ecumenical and secular in motive, method, and goal. The Protestant minister or the secularist professional can possess better credentials of leadership. - -Theologically literate persons no longer seek moral guidance from a priest. They themselves think. Frequently, they have long ago surpassed the priest in theological formation. Parents with a good liberal education are increasingly skeptical of entrusting their children to the clerical system of “professional” cate-chesis . If children can be evangelized, parents see that they are called to the task, and possess the knowledge and faith to carry it out. - -No thinking Catholic questions accepting the ritual which recognizes that a man has received divine power to moderate a meeting of Christians or preside over the celebration of a sacrament . But men begin to reject the claims of a pastor who, because of his ordination or consecration, feigns competency to deal with any problem of his heterogeneous congregation, be it the parish, the diocese, or the world. - -The reorganization of contemporary life frees men to accept a vocation for part-time ministerial functions. Leisure time increases with reduced working hours, early retirement, and more inclusive social security benefits—time available for the preparation and exercise of Christian ministry in a pluralistic and secular society. - -It is apparent that many objections can be raised. The lay priest or deacon might wish to withdraw from the ministry, he might publicly sin, he or his wife might become divisive factors in the Christian community. Present canon law implicitly contains the solution—let him be “suspended” from his functions. Suspension must become an option for both the man and the community, not just a punishment reserved to the bishop. The ordained minister might feel called to take a controversial position on some secular matter in society, and thereby cease to be a fitting symbol of sacramental unity. He might in conscience feel that he must become a sign of contradiction, not only to the world, but also in the world. Let him or the community freely seek suspension. The community which has recognized his charism and presented him to the bishop, can also respect his liberty of conscience and allow him to act accordingly. He himself , as minister, has no special benefits, income, or status to defend . His daily life has not been determined by his priesthood. Rather, the latter has been characterized by his secular commitment . - -### Ministry and celibacy - -Man finds it difficult to separate what habit or custom has united. The union of the clerical state, holy orders, and celibacy in the life of the Church has confused the understanding of the individual realities involved and prevented us from seeing the possibility of their separation. The clergy have stood on their socioeconomic status and power, defending their exclusive right to the priesthood. We seldom see theological arguments directed against the ordained laymen, except perhaps in reference to the inadequacy of the term itself. Only Catholic clerics who wish to marry, and married Protestant ministers who fear to lose their clerical status, defend the extension of ecclesiastical social security to a married minister. - -The link between celibacy and priestly orders now comes under heavy attack, in spite of authoritative statements defending it Exegetical, pastoral, and social arguments are marshaled against it. By their action, increasing numbers of priests not only deny it, but also abandon both celibacy and the ministry. The problem is admittedly complex, since two realities of faith— sacramental ministry of priesthood and the personal mystery of extraordinary renunciation—meet. Our secular language breaks down in the delicate analysis of their mutual relationships. The formulation and discussion of three separate questions may help us to see the proper distinctions and lead us to understand the nature of the relationships involved. The choice of voluntary celibacy, the institution of religious communities, and the legal prescription of a celibate priesthood must be seen separately. - -At all times in the Church, men and women have freely renounced marriage “for the sake of the kingdom.” Consistent with such an action, they simply “explain” their decision as a personal realization of an intimate vocation from God. This mysterious experience of vocation must be distinguished from the discursive formulation of reasons to “justify” such a decision. To many, such arguments appear meaningless. This conclusion leads men to abandon their commitment to celibacy. The defenders of celibacy frequently interpret this action as manifesting a poor or weak faith among contemporary Catholics. On the contrary, it may just as well be evidence of the purification of their faith. Men now see through the alleged motives—sociological, psychological , and mythological—for celibacy, and recognize their irrelevance to true Christian renunciation. Renunciation of marriage is not economically necessary for service to the poor, nor legally a condition for the ordained ministry, nor significantly convenient for higher studies. Persons who acted on these motives now fail to see their value and relevance. Celibacy can no longer enlist social approval in its defense. - -Psychological motives formerly invoked to justify the superiority of sexual abstinence are hardly acceptable today. Many celibates now see that they initially refused marriage because they were repelled, afraid, unprepared, or simply not attracted. Now they choose marriage, either because of a more mature understanding of themselves, or to prove their original feelings wrong. They no longer see themselves as heroes to their parents, because they are “faithful,” nor as pariahs, because they “defect.” - -Comparative studies in religion reveal many “reasons” for sexual renunciation throughout human history. These may be reduced to ascetical, magical, and mystical motives. Oftentimes they are “religious,” but hardly related to the Christian faith. The ascetic renounces marriage for freedom to pray; the magician, to “save” a Chinese baby through his sacrifice; the mystic, to seek exclusive bridal intimacy with “the All.” Contemporary man knows that sexual renunciation does not make prayer more intimate , love more ardent, or graces received more abundant. - -Today the Christian who renounces marriage and children for the kingdom’s sake seeks no abstract or concrete reason for his decision. His choice is pure risk in faith, the result of the intimate and mysterious experience of his heart. He chooses to live now the absolute poverty every Christian hopes to experience at the hour of death. His life does not prove God’s transcendence ; rather, his whole being expresses faith in it. His decision to renounce a spouse is as intimate and incommunicable as another’s decision to prefer his spouse over all others. - -The Church has evolved two devices to control an evangelical charism: the social and juridical organization of religious communities , and the ritual celebration of vows. Religious orders provide a community structure within which the member is supposed to deepen his baptismal commitment to sanctity, and make himself available for the manpower pool controlled by his superior. This captive personnel force enabled the religious congregations to conduct benevolent and business enterprises. Now it appears that these institutional works will disappear even faster than parish, diocesan, and curial structures, as more and more members leave to fulfill their vocations in the open job market. - -Christians desiring to live evangelical celibacy see fewer reasons for joining the established, juridical communities—even secular institutes—but they do recognize the necessity to band together with others of like mind, temporarily or permanently, to seek mutual support in their common and difficult spiritual adventure. Those established religious communities which remain in existence will maintain houses of intensive prayer, available as retreat houses, spiritual training centers, monasteries, or deserts. To arrive at this kind of Christian poverty and witness , the congregations legislate their impending demise by approving shortened skirts, changing prayer schedules, and experimenting in social action. Perhaps this legislative sniping at superficialities will serve to diminish the pain of those in the dying structure, easing their stay to the bitter end. - -As the traditionally accepted reasons for maintaining the present juridical communities evaporate, other means of making a lifelong vow will be explored. The Church has traditionally accepted the possibility of the private vow. Less and less shall we see this in exclusively legal terms. As living a vow moves from clerical structures to a life of renunciation in the secular world, it seems more appropriate to signify the joyful acceptance of this kind of commitment not through a juridical act creating legal obligations but through a liturgical celebration of a mystical fact. The Church moves in this direction as vows become less public, solemn, and binding. Today any religious receives his dispensation when he states that he does not intend to keep his vow. Formerly vows were treated as public renunciations of rights; now they seem more like public statements of conditional intentions. The religious makes much ado of the fact that he is not married and that he will not marry—unless, of course, he changes his mind. We move from a religious “state” to a religious “stage.” This confusion and pharisaic legalism is a sorry testimony to the world. - -The celebration of a vow should be a rite established by the Church, publicly testifying to belief in the authenticity of a particular Christian vocation and charism. Only exceptional persons, after many years of living their renunciation in secular life, should be admitted to such a liturgical celebration. The Church thereby publicly manifests its willingness to entrust the testimony of a mystery to the fidelity of these new “monks.” Only then shall we return to the real and close analogy between Christian marriage and renunciation. Both sacraments will celebrate the Christian’s full awareness of the depth and totality of a commitment he has established and lived in the real society of men. - -A large segment of the thinking Church questions the tie between celibacy and the priesthood. The Pope insists on their connection. Neither doctrine nor tradition gives definitive support to his position. I believe that the emergence of a new pastoral Church depends largely on compliance with his directive during our generation. His position helps assure the speedy death of the clergy. - -To counteract the trends of declining vocations and clerical dropouts, many solutions are proposed: married clergy, sisters and laymen in pastoral tasks, brighter appeals in vocation campaigns , world-wide distribution of existing clergy. All are simply so many pusillanimous attempts to rejuvenate a dying structure. - -During our generation, at least, there is no need to consider the ordination of married men to the priesthood. We have more than enough unmarried ones. Ordaining married priests would slow up any real pastoral reform. But there is a second, and more delicate, reason for this decision. Thousands of priests now reject celibacy, and present the painful spectacle of men trained for sexual abstinence groping belatedly into big-risk marriage. The Church dispenses them secretly, arbitrarily, and awkwardly . They are forbidden further exercise of their orders. Having chosen marriage, they could still exercise priestly functions, but they would cease to be models—except perhaps to others like themselves. - -The real need here is to clarify and liberalize the process by which the Church allows a priest to marry. Further, all must see that the good of the Church requires the “ex-priest” to abandon both clerical security and ministerial function. This is as difficult for the priest who “wants out” without accepting the concomitant consequences, as it is for the bishop who wants to “hang onto” his priest at all costs. The clerical mass exodus will only last as long as the present clerical system exists. During this time ordination of married men would be a sad mistake. The resulting confusion would only delay needed radical reforms. - -The one institution which has no future in the Church and which is at the same time most impervious to any radical reform, today loses an increasing number of its men because of the legislation of celibacy. The over-all seriousness of the seminary crisis, of itself, forces us to probe much more deeply into the entire question of ministerial education in the Church. - -### Sacramental ministry and theological education - -Since Trent the Church has insisted on forming and educating its ministers in its own professional academies. It hoped that this process would continue through the minister’s personal initiative, within his structured and clerical life. The Church trained its ministers for a life it rigidly controlled. But the further recruitment of young and generous men in order to shape them in the mold of clerical life as it is still described by the Vatican Council will soon border on the immoral. At the moment it seems highly irresponsible to continue the preparation of men for a disappearing profession. - -This does not mean that Christian ministry will require less intellectual formation. But this latter can develop only on the condition of a better and more general Christian education. The problem here is that this term has become confusingly all-inclusive and thereby lost its precise meaning. It must be redefined . Personal maturity, theological precision, contemplative prayer, and heroic charity are not specifically Christian. Atheists can be mature; non-Catholics, theologically precise; Buddhists, mystics, and pagans heroically generous. The specific result of Christian education is the sensus ecclesiae, “the sense of the Church.” The man joined to this is rooted in the living authority of the Church, lives the imaginative inventiveness of the faith, and expresses himself in terms of the gifts of the Spirit. - -This “sense” is the result of reading the sources of authentic Christian tradition, of participation in the prayerful celebration of the liturgy, of a distinct way of life. It is the fruit of experiencing Christ and the measure of prayer’s real depth. It follows upon penetration of the faith’s content through the light of intelligence and the force of will. When choosing an adult for the diaconate or priesthood, we shall look for this “sense” in him, rather than accept theology credits or time spent in retreat from the world. We shall not look for professional competence to teach the public, but prophetic humility to moderate a Christian group. - -I assume that weekly preparation through readings for liturgical celebration is a better formation for the exercise of ministry than specialization in theological studies. In saying this, I do not intend to underrate the importance of rigorous theological study. I only want to put it in its proper place. Ultimately, the function of theology is to clarify a contemporary statement, or verify its fidelity to revealed truth. The contemporary expression of revealed truth is only the result of the Church’s faith. The function of theological science, therefore, is analogous to that of literary criticism. The lectio divina is akin to the savoring of literature itself. Theology verifies our fidelity; spiritual reading nourishes our faith. As the social sciences become more complex and specialized in response to the problems of technological society, so the fidelity of the Christian community increasingly depends on its competence to express the faith in a language new to the Christian, who lives in a situation never before interpreted in the light of the gospel. The Church will grow in the child-like simplicity of its faith and in the intellectual depth of its theology. - -Nearly all of what is now considered theological science will pass out of the exclusive competence of the Church. Already most of the subjects of the seminary curriculum are competently taught in secular universities by men of all faiths. With the closing of the seminary the omnicompetent theological generalist will disappear . The study of theology will become oriented toward specialized research and teaching, rather than toward all-round professional performance. Christian professors who possess this “sense” of the Church will orient students toward a biblical and ecclesial unity in their studies, a task never really accomplished by ecclesiastical curriculums. - -Theological study will also become more widespread. The Christian college graduate, desiring to participate more actively in his weekly small group liturgy, will seek intellectual analysis in systematic theological reading and studies. He will have the time to do so because of the increase of leisure time in our society . Those who will have combined the asceticism leading to sexual renunciation with their years of study and liturgical participation will be uniquely fitted for the episcopacy. The Christian community will not hesitate or err in recognizing their charism. - -Increasingly the Church’s teaching function will cease to express itself in pastoral letters condemning abortion and encyclicals advocating social justice. The Church will discover new faith and power in the revealed word. It will teach through a living and intimate liturgy centered around this word. Small Christian communities will be nourished in its joyful celebration. - -The Spirit, continually re-creating the Church, can be trusted. Creatively present in each Christian celebration, He makes men conscious of the kingdom which lives in them. Whether composed of a few persons around the deacon, or of the Church’s integral presence around the bishop, the Christian celebration renews the whole Church, the whole of humanity. The Church will clearly manifest the Christian faith as the progressively joyful revelation of love’s personal meaning—the same love which all men celebrate. - - -## The powerless church - -In April of 1967 the secretaries for social action of the Anglican church met for a consultation. I was invited to attend. Dozens of social issues were on the table, and on some there was more than one conflicting position. I had the impression that on each issue the assembly made an effort to determine which position could he labeled the Christian one, and if this failed, tried at least to designate one as more Christian than the other. - -One of my contributions to this conference was the address which follows. It concerns the role of the church in social change and development. - -It is my thesis that only the church can “reveal” to us the full meaning of development. To live up to this task the church must recognize that she is growing powerless to orient or produce development. The less efficient she is as a power the more effective she can be as a celebrant of the mystery. - -This statement, if understood, is resented equally by the hier-arch who wants to justify collections by increasing his service to the poor, and by the rebel priest who wants to use his collar as an attractive banner in agitation. Both make a living off the social service the church renders. In my mind both symbolize obstacles to the specific function of the church: the annunciation of the gospel. - -This specific function of the church must be a contribution to development which could not be made by any other institution. I believe that this contribution is faith in Christ. Applied to development faith in Christ means the revelation that the development of humanity tends toward the realization of the kingdom, which is Christ already present in the church. The church interprets to modem man development as a growth into Christ. She introduces him to the contemplation of this mystery in prayer and to its celebration in her liturgy. - -I believe that the specific task of the church in the modern world is the Christian celebration of the experience of change. In order to fulfill this task the church will have to renounce progressively the “power to do good” she now has, and see this power pass into the hands of a new type of institution: the voluntary and ever controversial embodiments of secular religion. - -Later I will explain what I mean by the progressive renunciation of power and the growth of secular religion. Here I wish to explain what I mean by the celebration of change. - -We have ceased to live against a rigid framework. All-enveloping , penetrating change is the fundamental experience of our age, which comes as a shock to those brought up in a different age. - -In the past the same experience was exceptional and had many appearances: exile … migration … imprisonment … overseas assignment … education … hospitalization. All these traditionally represent the sudden loss of the environment which had given form to a man’s feelings and concepts. This experience of change is now faced as a lifelong process by every individual in technological society. - -In Cuernavaca we have set up a center at which we train persons to feel with others what change means to their hearts. What happens to the intimacy of a person when his familiar surroundings suddenly disappear, and with them the symbols he reveres? What happens when the words into which he was taught to pour the stream of his life lose their accustomed meaning? - -What happens to the feelings of a mountain Indian thrown into a factory? What anguish does the Chicago missionary feel when he is suddenly exposed to the mountains of Bolivia, and finds himself used as a cover-up for napalm bombs? What happens to the heart of a nun who leaves the convent? - -These questions are precise and elusive: each must be fitted to the one heart it opens. - -What threat and what challenge does social change represent to this individual or to that social group? How does this heart or that common mood react to a change in setting? We speak about threat and about challenge because the reaction to transition is very ambiguous. It can allow for new insights, can open new perspectives and therefore confront the person with new awareness of choice. In other words, development can be a setting for salvation which leads to resurrection. But also transition can reduce a bewildered individual to a defensive self-centeredness, to dependence and aggression; it can lead into the agony of a lived destruction of life, straight into hell. - -Neither efficiency nor comfort nor affluence is a criterion for the quality of change. Only the reaction of the human heart to change indicates the objective value of that change. All measures of change which disregard the response of the human heart are either evil or naïve. Development is not judged against a rule but against an experience. And this experience is not available through the study of tables but through the celebration of shared experience: dialogue, controversy, play, poetry—in short, self-realization in creative leisure. - -The church teaches us to discover the transcendental meaning of this experience of life. She teaches us in liturgical celebration to recognize the presence of Christ in the growing mutual relatedness which results from the complexity and specialization of development . And she reveals to us the personal responsibility for our sins: our growing dependence, solitude, and cravings which result from our self-alienation in things and systems and heroes. She challenges us to deeper poverty instead of security in achievements; personalization of love (chastity) instead of depersonalization by idolatry; faith in the other rather than prediction. - -Thus the church does not orient change, or teach how to react to it. It opens a new dimension of specific faith to an ecumenical experience of transcendent humanism. All men experience life—the Christian believes he has discovered its meaning. - -What the church contributes through evangelization is like the laughter in the joke. Two hear the same story—but one gets the point. It is like the rhythm in the phrase which only the poet catches. - -The new era of constant development must not only be enjoyed , it must be brought about. What is the task of the church in the gestation of the new world? - -The church can accelerate time by celebrating its advent, but it is not the church’s task to engineer its shape. She must resist that temptation. Otherwise she cannot celebrate the wondrous surprise of the coming, the advent. - -The future has already broken into the present. We each live in many times. The present of one is the past of another, and the future of yet another. We are called to live knowing that the future exists, and that it is shared when it is celebrated. The change which has to be brought about can only be lived. We cannot plan our way to humanity. Each one of us and each of the groups with which we live and work must become a model of the era we desire to create. The many models which will develop should give to each one of us an environment in which we celebrate our creative response to change with others who need us. - -Let the church be courageous enough to lead us in the celebration by highlighting its depth. Let the church discern the spirit of God wherever charismatic gifts call the future into the present and thus create a model to live. - -Let the church be mater et magistra of this play—accentuate its beauty; let her teach us to live change because it is enriching and joyful, and not just produce it because it is useful. - -Awareness of change heightens the sense of personal responsibility to share its benefits. Awareness of change therefore does not only lead to a call to celebration but also to a call to work; to the elimination of obstacles which make it impossible for others to free themselves from toil and illusion. - -Social change always implies a change of social structure, a change of formalized values, and finally a change of social character . These three factors constrain invention and creativity, and action against these constraints becomes a responsibility of those who experience them as shackles. Hence, social change involves a triple reaction: - -* The reorganization of social structure, which is felt as subversion or revolution. -* The attempt to get beyond public illusions which justify structures, which implies the ridicule of ideologies and is felt as ungodliness or as education. -* The emergence of a new “social character,” which is experienced by many with utter confusion and anguish. - -Throughout history the church has participated constantly in the shaping of social change: either as a force of conservation or as a force of social promotion. She has blessed governments and condemned them. She has justified systems and declared them as unholy. She has recommended thrift and bourgeois values and declared them anathema. - -We believe that now the moment has come for the church to withdraw from specific social initiative—taken in the name of church structure. Let us follow the example of the Pope: have the courage to allow churchmen to make statements so ephemeral that they could never be construed as being the church’s teaching. - -This withdrawal is very painful. The reason is precisely that the church still has so much power—which has so often been used for evil. Some now argue that, given the power, it should now be used to make amends. - -If the church at present in Latin America does not use the power she has accumulated for fundamental education, labor organization, cooperative promotion, political orientation, she leaves herself open to criticism—from without, of creating a power vacuum; and from within, in the terms of “if anybody, the church can bear having power, because she is self-critical enough to renounce its abuse!” - -But if the church uses the power basis she has—for example, in the field of education—then she perpetuates her inability to witness to that which is specific in her mission. - -Social innovation is becoming an increasingly complex process. Innovative action must be taken with increasing frequency and sophistication. This requires men who are courageous, dedicated, willing to lose their careers. I believe that this innovative action will increasingly be taken by groups committed to radically humanist ideals, and not gospel authority, and should therefore not be taken by churches. - -The modern humanist does not need the gospel as a norm; the Christian wants to remain free to find through the gospel a dimension of effective surprise beyond and above the humanistic reason which motivated social action. - -The social-action group needs operational freedom: the freedom to let convenience or opportunism dictate the choice of priorities of objectives, tactics, and even strategy. The same social goal might be intended by two opposed groups, one choosing violence as a method, the other non-violence. - -Social action by necessity divides tactical opponents. But if organized around deeply held, radically human, ideological tenets, it also acts as a powerful catalyst for new forms of secular ecumenicism: the ecumenicism of action springing from common radical conviction. - -Ideological tenets generate secular-religious, civic-religious ideas. Social action organized around such ideas, therefore, frees the church from the age-old dilemma of risking its unity in the celebration of faith in favor of its service to controversial charity. - -The Christian response has been deeply affected by the acceleration of time; by change, development, by growth having become normal and permanence the exception. Formerly the king could be at the opposite pole from the priest, the sacred from the profane, the churchly from the secular, and we could speak about the impact which one would have on the other. - -We stand at the end of a century-long struggle to free man from the constraint of ideologies, persuasions, and religions as guiding forces in his life. A non-thematic awareness of the significance of the incarnation emerges: an ability to say one great “Yes” to the experience of life. - -A new polarity emerges: a day-by-day insight into the tension between the manipulation of things and the relationship to persons. - -We become capable of affirming the autonomy of the ludicrous in face of the useful, of the gratuitous as opposed to the purposeful , of the spontaneous as opposed to the rationalized and planned, of creative expression made possible by inventive solution . - -We will need ideological rationalizations for a long time to achieve purposefully planned inventive solutions to social problems . Let consciously secular ideology assume this task. - -I want to celebrate my faith for no purpose at all. - -## The futility of schooling - -To provide every citizen in the United States with a level of schooling now enjoyed by the well-off one-third would require the addition of forty billion dollars per year to the present cost of elementary and secondary education in the United States, which is about thirty-seven billion. This sum exceeds the present expenditure for the war in Vietnam. Evidently the United States is too poor to provide compensatory education on this scale. And yet it is politically inexpedient and intellectually disreputable to question the elusive goal of providing equal educational opportunities for all citizens by giving them access to an equd number of years in school. - -One man ’ s illusions are often best recognized in the light of another man ’ s delusions. My discussion of the futility of schooling in the Third World— published as a magazine article in 1968—may help to demonstrate the general futility of world-wide educational institutions. - -For the past two decades, demographic considerations have colored all discussion about development in Latin America. In 1950 some 200 million people occupied the area extending from Mexico to Chile. Of these, 120 million lived directly or indirectly on primitive agriculture. Assuming both effective population controls and the most favorable possible results from programs aimed at the increase of agriculture, by 1985 forty million people will produce most of the food for a total population of 360 million. The remaining 320 million will be either marginal to the economy or will have to be incorporated somehow into urban living and industrial production. - -During these same past twenty years, both Latin American governments and foreign technical assistance agencies have come to rely increasingly on the capacity of grammar, trade, and high schools to lead the non-rural majority out of its marginality in shanty towns and subsistence farms into the type of factory, market, and public forum which corresponds to modern technology . It was assumed that schooling would eventually produce a broad middle class with values resembling those of highly industrialized nations, despite the economy of continued scarcity. - -Accumulating evidence now indicates that schooling does not and cannot produce the expected results. Some years ago the governments of the Americas joined in an Alliance for Progress, which has, in practice, served mainly the progress of the middle classes in the Latin nations. In most countries the Alliance has encouraged the replacement of a closed, feudal, hereditary elite by one which is supposedly “meritocratic” and open to the few who manage to finish school. Concomitantly, the urban service proletariat has grown at several times the rate of the traditional landless rural mass and has replaced it in importance. The marginal majority and the schooled minority grow ever further apart. One old feudal society has brought forth two classes, separate and unequal. - -This development has led to educational research focused on the improvement of the learning process in schools and on the adaptations of schools themselves to the special circumstances prevailing in underdeveloped societies. But logic would seem to require that we do not stop with an effort to improve schools; rather that we question the assumption on which the school system itself is based. We must not exclude the possibility that the emerging nations cannot be schooled, that schooling is not a viable answer to their need for universal education. Perhaps this type of insight is needed to clear the way for a futuristic scenario in which schools as we know them today would disappear. - -The social distance between the growing urban mass and the new elite is a new phenomenon, unlike the traditional forms of discrimination known in Latin America. This new discrimination is not a transitory thing which can be overcome by schooling . On the contrary: I submit that one of the reasons for the awakening frustration in the majorities is the progressive acceptance of the “liberal myth,” the assumption that schooling is an assurance of social integration. - -The solidarity of all citizens based on their common graduation from school has been an inalienable part of the modern, Western self-image. Colonization has not succeeded in implanting this myth equally in all countries, but everywhere schooling has become the prerequisite for membership in a managerial middle class. The constitutional history of Latin America since its independence has made the masses of this continent particularly susceptible to the conviction that all citizens have a right to enter—and, therefore, have some possibility of entering—their society through the door of a school. - -More than elsewhere, in Latin America the teacher as missionary for the school-gospel has found adherents at the grassroots . Only a few years ago many of us were happy when finally the Latin American school system was singled out as the area of privileged investment for international assistance funds. In fact, during the past years, both national budgets and private investment have been stimulated to increase educational allocations. But a second look reveals that this school system has built a narrow bridge across a widening social gap. As the only legitimate passage to the middle class, the school restricts all unconventional crossings and leaves the underachiever to bear the blame for his marginality. - -This statement is difficult for Americans to understand. In the United States, the nineteenth-century persuasion that free schooling ensures all citizens equality in the economy and effective participation in the society survives. It is by no means certain that the result of schooling ever measured up to this expectation, but the schools certainly played a more prominent role in this process some hundred years ago. - -In the United States of the mid-nineteenth century, six years of schooling frequently made a young man the educational superior of his book. In a society largely dominated by unschooled achievers, the little red schoolhouse was an effective road to social equality. A few years in school for all brought most extremes together. Those who achieved power and money without schooling had to accept a degree of equality with those who achieved literacy and did not strike it rich. Computers, television , and airplanes have changed this. Today in Latin America, in the midst of modern technology, three times as many years of schooling and twenty times as much money as was then spent on grammar schools will not produce the same social result. The dropout from the sixth grade is unable to find a job even as a punch card operator or a railroad hand. - -Contemporary Latin America needs school systems no more than it needs railroad tracks. Both—spanning continents—served to speed the now-rich and established nations into the industrial age. Both, if now handled with care, are harmless heirlooms from the Victorian period. But neither is relevant to countries emerging from primitive agriculture directly into the jet age. Latin America cannot afford to maintain outmoded social institutions amid modern technological processes. - -By “school,” of course, I do not mean all organized formal education. I use the term “school” and “schooling” here to designate a form of child care and a rite de passage which we take for granted. We forget that this institution and the corresponding creed appeared on the scene only with the growth of the industrial state. Comprehensive schooling today involves year-round, obligatory, and universal classroom attendance in small groups for several hours each day. It is imposed on all citizens for a period of ten to eighteen years. School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them. The school is supposed to take the excess population from the street, the family, or the labor force. Teachers are given the power to invent new criteria according to which new segments of the population may be committed to a school. This restraint on healthy, productive, and potentially independent human beings is performed by schools with an economy which only labor camps could rival. - -Schooling also involves a process of accepted ritual certification for all members of a “schooled” society. Schools select those who are bound to succeed and send them on their way with a badge marking them fit. Once universal schooling has been accepted as the hallmark for the in-members of a society, fitness is measured by the amount of time and money spent on formal education in youth rather than ability acquired independently from an “accredited” curriculum. - -A first important step toward radical educational reform in Latin America will be taken when the educational system of the United States is accepted for what it is: a recent, imaginative social invention perfected since World War II and historically rooted in the American frontier. The creation of the all-pervasive school establishment, tied into industry, government, and the military, is an invention no less original than the guild-centered apprenticeship of the Middle Ages, or the doctrina de los índios and the reductión of Spanish missionaries in Mexico and Paraguay , respectively, or the lycée and les grandes écoles in France. Each one of these systems was produced by its society to give stability to an achievement; each has been heavily pervaded by ritual to which society bowed; and each has been rationalized into an all-embracing persuasion, religion, or ideology. The United States is not the first nation that has been willing to pay a high price to have its educational system exported by missionaries to all corners of the world. The colonization of Latin America by the catechism is certainly a noteworthy precedent. - -It is difficult now to challenge the school as a system because we are so used to it. Our industrial categories tend to define results as products of specialized institutions and instruments. Armies produce defense for countries. Churches procure salvation in an afterlife. Binet defined intelligence as that which his tests test. Why not, then, conceive of education as the product of schools? Once this tag has been accepted, unschooled education gives the impression of something spurious, illegitimate, and certainly unaccredited. - -For some generations, education has been based on massive schooling, just as security was based on massive retaliation and, at least in the United States, transportation on the family car. The United States, because it industrialized earlier, is rich enough to afford schools, the Strategic Air Command, and the car—no matter what the toll. Most nations of the world are not that rich; they behave, however, as if they were. The example of nations which “made it” leads Brazilians to pursue the ideal of the family car—just for a few. It compels Peruvians to squander on Mirage bombers—just for a show. And it drives every government in Latin America to spend up to two-fifths of its total budget on schools, and to do so unchallenged. - -Let us insist, for a moment, on this analogy between the school system and the system of transportation based on the family car. Ownership of a car is now rapidly becoming the ideal in Latin America—at least among those who have a voice in formulating national goals. During the past twenty years, roads, parking facilities, and services for private automobiles have been immensely improved. These improvements benefit overwhelmingly those who have their own cars—that is, a tiny percentage. The bias of the budget allocated for transportation thus discriminates against the best transportation for the greatest number—and the huge capital investments in this area ensure that this bias is here to stay. In some countries, articulate minorities now challenge the family car as the fundamental unit of transportation in emerging societies. But everywhere in Latin America it would be political suicide to advocate radical limitations on the multiplication of schools. Opposition parties may challenge at times the need for superhighways or the need for weapons which will see active duty only in a parade. But what man in his right mind would challenge the need to provide every child with a chance to go to high school? - -Before poor nations could reach this point of universal schooling , however, their ability to educate would be exhausted. Even ten or twelve years of schooling are beyond 85 per cent of all men of our century if they happen to live outside the tiny islands where capital accumulates. Nowhere in Latin America do 27 per cent of any age group get beyond the sixth grade, nor do more than 1 per cent graduate from a university. Yet no government spends less than 18 per cent of its budget on schools, and many spend more than 30 per cent. Universal schooling, as this concept has been defined recently in industrial societies, is obviously beyond their means. The annual cost of schooling a United States citizen between the ages of twelve and twenty-four equals as much as most Latin Americans earn in two or three years. - -Schools will stay beyond the means of the developing nations: neither radical population control nor maximum reallocations of government budgets nor unprecedented foreign aid would end the present unfeasibility of school systems aimed at twelve years of schooling for all. Population control needs time to become effective when the total population is as young as that of tropical America. The percentage of the world’s resources invested in schooling cannot be raised beyond certain levels, nor can this budget grow beyond foreseeable maximal rates. Finally, foreign aid would have to increase to 30 per cent of the receiving nation’s national budget to provide effectively for schooling, a goal not to be anticipated. - -Furthermore, the per capita cost of schooling itself is rising everywhere as schools accept those who are difficult to teach, as retention rates rise, and as the quality of schooling itself improves. This rise in cost neutralizes much of the new investments. Schools do not come cheaper by the dozen. - -In view of all these factors, increases in school budgets must usually be defended by arguments which imply default In fact, however, schools are untouchable because they are vital to the status quo. Schools have the effect of tempering the subversive potential of education in an alienated society because, if education is confined to schools, only those who have been schooled into compliance on a lower grade are admitted to its higher reaches. In capital-starved societies not rich enough to purchase unlimited schooling, the majority is schooled not only into compliance but also into subservience. - -Since Latin American constitutions were written with an eye on the United States, the ideal of universal schooling was a creative utopia. It was a condition necessary to create the Latin American nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Without the pretense that every citizen has a right to go to school, the liberal bourgeoisie could never have developed; neither could the middle-class masses of present-day Europe, the United States, and Russia , nor the managerial middle elite of their cultural colonies in South America. But the same school which worked in the last century to overcome feudalism has now become an oppressive idol which protects those who are already schooled. Schools grade and, therefore, they degrade. They make the degraded accept his own submission. Social seniority is bestowed according to the level of schooling achieved. Everywhere in Latin America more money for schools means more privilege for a few at the cost of most, and this patronage of an elite is explained as a political ideal. This ideal is written into laws which state the patently impossible : equal scholastic opportunities for all. - -The number of satisfied clients who graduate from schools every year is much smaller than the number of frustrated dropouts who are conveniently graded by their failure for use in a marginal labor pool. The resulting steep educational pyramid defines a rationale for the corresponding levels of social status. Citizens are “schooled” into their places. This results in politically acceptable forms of discrimination which benefit the relatively few achievers. - -The move from the farm to the city in Latin America still frequently means a move from a world where status is explained as a result of inheritance into a world where it is explained as a result of schooling. Schools allow a head start to be rationalized as an achievement. They give to privilege not only the appearance of equality but also of generosity: should somebody who missed out on early schooling be dissatisfied with the status he holds, he can always be referred to a night or trade school. If he does not take advantage of such recognized remedies, his exclusion from privilege can be explained as his own fault. Schools temper the frustrations they provoke. - -The school system also inculcates its own universal acceptance . Some schooling is not necessarily more education than none, especially in a country where every year a few more people can get all the schooling they want while most people never complete the sixth grade. But much less than six years seems to be sufficient to inculcate in the child the acceptance of the ideology which goes with the school grade. The child learns only about the superior status and unquestioned authority of those who have more schooling than he has. - -Any discussion of radical alternatives to school-centered formal education upsets our notions of society. No matter how inefficient schools are in educating a majority, no matter how effective schools are in limiting the access to the elite, no matter how liberally schools shower their non-educational benefits on the members of this elite, schools do increase the national income. They qualify their graduates for more economic production. In an economy on the lower rungs of development toward United States-type industrialization, a school graduate is enormously more productive than a dropout. Schools are part and parcel of a society in which a minority is on the way to becoming so productive that the majority must be schooled into disciplined consumption . Schooling therefore—under the best of circumstances—helps to divide society into two groups: those so productive that their expectation of annual rise in personal income lies far beyond the national average, and the overwhelming majority whose income also rises, but at a rate clearly below the former’s. These rates, of course, are compounded and lead the two groups further apart. - -Radical innovation in formal education presupposes radical political changes, radical changes in the organization of production , and radical changes in man’s image of himself as an animal which needs school. This is often forgotten when sweeping reforms of the schools are proposed and fail because of the societal framework we accept. For instance, the trade school is sometimes advocated as a cure-all for mass schooling. Yet it is doubtful that the products of trade schools would find employment in a continuously changing, ever more automated economy. Moreover the capital and operating costs of trade schools, as we know them today, are several times as high as those for a standard school of the same grade. Also, trade schools usually take in sixth graders, who, as we have seen, are already the exception. Trade schools pretend to educate by creating a spurious facsimile of the factory within a school building. - -Instead of the trade school, we should think of a subsidized transformation of the industrial plant. It should be possible to obligate factories to serve as training centers during off-hours, for managers to spend part of their time planning and supervising this training, and for the industrial process to be so redesigned that it has educational value. If the expenditures for present schools were partly allocated to sponsor this kind of educational exploitation of existing resources, then the final results—both economic and educational—might be incomparably greater. If, further, such subsidized apprenticeship were offered to all who ask for it, irrespective of age, and not only to those who are destined to be employees in the particular plant, industry would have begun to assume an important role now played by school. We would be on the way to disabuse ourselves of the idea that manpower qualification must precede employment, that schooling must precede productive work. There is no reason for us to continue the medieval tradition in which men are prepared for the “secular world” by incarceration in a sacred precinct, be it monastery , synagogue, or school. - -A second, frequently discussed, remedy for the failure of schools is fundamental, or adult, education. It has been proved by Paulo Freire in Brazil that those adults who can be interested in political issues of their community can be made literate within six weeks of evening classes. The program teaching such reading and writing skills, of course, must be built around the emotion-loaded key words of the adults’ political vocabulary. Understandably this fact has gotten Freire’s program into trouble. It has also been suggested that the dollar-cost of ten separate months of adult education is equal that of one year of early schooling, and can be incomparably more effective than schooling at its best. - -Unfortunately, “adult education” now is conceived principally as a device to give the “underprivileged” a palliative for the schooling he lacks. The situation would have to be reversed if we wanted to conceive of all education as an exercise in adulthood . We should consider a radical reduction of the length of the formal, obligatory school sessions to only two months each year—but spread this type of formal schooling over the first twenty or thirty years of a man’s life. - -While various forms of in-service apprenticeship in factories and programmed math and language teaching could assume a large proportion of what we have previously called “instruction,” two months a year of formal schooling should be considered ample time for what the Greeks meant by scholē—leisure for the pursuit of insight. No wonder we find it nearly impossible to conceive of comprehensive social changes in which the educational functions of schools would thus be redistributed in new patterns among institutions we do not now envisage. We find it equally difficult to indicate concrete ways in which the non-educational functions of a vanishing school system would be redistributed. We do not know what to do with those whom we now label “children” or “students” and commit to school. - -It is difficult to foresee the political consequences of changes as fundamental as those proposed, not to mention the international consequences. How should a school-reared society coexist with one which has gone “off the school standard,” and whose industry, commerce, advertising, and participation in politics is different as a matter of principle? Areas which develop outside the universal school standard would lack the common language and criteria for respectful coexistence with the schooled. Two such worlds, such as China and the United States, might almost have to seal themselves off from each other. - -Rashly, the school-bred mind abhors the educational devices available to these worlds. It is difficult mentally to “accredit” Mao’s party as an educational institution which might prove more effective than the schools are at their best—at least when it comes to inculcating citizenship. Guerrilla warfare in Latin America is another education device much more frequently misused or misunderstood than applied. Che Guevara, for instance, clearly saw it as a last educational resort to teach a people about the illegitimacy of their political system. Especially in unschooled countries, where the transistor radio has come to every village, we must never underrate the educational functions of great charismatic dissidents like Dom Helder Camara in Brazil or Camilo Torres in Colombia. Castro described his early charismatic harangues as “teaching sessions.” - -The schooled mind perceives these processes exclusively as political indoctrination, and their educational purpose eludes its grasp. The legitimation of education by schools tends to render all non-school education an accident, if not an outright misdemeanor . And yet it is surprising with what difficulty the school-bred mind perceives the rigor with which schools inculcate their own presumed necessity, and with it the supposed inevitability of the system they sponsor. Schools indoctrinate the child into the acceptance of the political system his teachers represent, despite the claim that teaching is non-political. - -Ultimately the cult of schooling will lead to violence, as the establishment of any religion has led to it. If the gospel of universal schooling is permitted to spread in Latin America, the military’s ability to repress insurgency must grow. Only force will ultimately control the insurgency inspired by the frustrated expectation that the propagation of the school-myth enkindles. - -The maintenance of the present school system may turn out to be an important step on the way to Latin American fascism. Only fanaticism inspired by idolatry of a system can ultimately rationalize the massive discrimination which will result from another twenty years of grading a capital-starved society by school marks. - -The time has come to recognize the real burden of the schools in the emerging nations, so that we may become free to envisage change in the social structure which now makes schools a necessity . I do not advocate a sweeping utopia like the Chinese commune for Latin America. But I do suggest that we plunge our imagination into the construction of scenarios which would allow a bold reallocation of educational functions among industry, politics, short scholastic retreats, and intensive preparation of parents for providing early childhood education. The cost of schools must be measured not only in economic, social, and educational terms, but in political terms as well. Schools, in an economy of scarcity invaded by automation, accentuate and rationalize the coexistence of two societies, one a colony of the other. - -Once it is understood that the cost of schooling is not inferior to the cost of chaos, we might be on the brink of courageously costly compromise. Today it is as dangerous in Latin America to question the myth of social salvation through schooling as it was three hundred years ago to question the divine rights of the Catholic kings. - -## School the sacred cow - -Only if we understand the school system as the central myth-making ritual of industrial societies can we explain the deep need for it, the complex myth surrounding it, and the inextricable way in which schooling is tied into the self-image of contemporary man. A graduation speech at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras provided me with an opportunity to probe this relationship. - -This is a time of crisis in the institution of the school, a crisis which may mark the end of the “age of schooling” in the Western world. I speak of the “age of schooling” in the sense in which we are accustomed to speak of the “feudal age” or of the “ Christian era.” The “age of schooling” began about two hundred years ago. Gradually the idea grew that schooling was a necessary means of becoming a useful member of society. It is the task of this generation to bury that myth. - -Your own situation is paradoxical. At the end and as a result of your studies, you are enabled to see that the education your children deserve, and will demand, requires a revolution in the school system of which you are a product. - -The graduation rite that we solemnly celebrate today confirms the prerogatives which Puerto Rican society, by means of a costly system of subsidized public schools, confers upon the sons and daughters of its most privileged citizens. You are part of the most privileged 10 per cent of your generation, part of that minuscule group which has completed university studies. Public investment in each of you is fifteen times the educational investment in the average member of the poorest 10 per cent of the population, who drops out of school before completing the fifth grade. - -The certificate you receive today attests to the legitimacy of your competence. It is not available to the self-educated, to those who have acquired competence by means not officially recognized in Puerto Rico. The programs of the University of Puerto Rico are all duly accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. - -The degree which the university today confers upon you implies that over the last sixteen years or more your elders have obliged you to submit yourselves, voluntarily or involuntarily, to the discipline of this complex scholastic rite. You have in fact been daily attendants, five days a week, nine months a year, within the sacred precinct of the school and have continued such attendance year after year, usually without interruption. Governmental and industrial employees and the professional associations have good reasons to believe that you will not subvert the order to which you have faithfully submitted in the course of completing your “rites of initiation.” - -Much of your youth has been spent within the custody of the school. It is expected that you will now go forth to work, to guarantee to future generations the privileges conferred upon you. - -Puerto Rico is the only society in the Western Hemisphere to devote 30 per cent of its governmental budget to education. It is one of six places in the world which devote between 6 and 7 per cent of national income to education. The schools of Puerto Rico cost more and provide more employment than any other public sector. In no other social activity is so large a proportion of the total population of Puerto Rico involved. - -A huge number of people are observing this occasion on television . Its solemnity will, on the one hand, confirm their sense of educational inferiority and, on the other, raise their hopes, largely doomed to disappointment, of one day themselves receiving a university degree. - -Puerto Rico has been schooled. I don’t say educated but, rather, schooled. Puerto Ricans can no longer conceive of life without reference to the school. The desire for education has actually given way to the compulsion of schooling. Puerto Rico has adopted a new religion. Its doctrine is that education is a product of the school, a product which can be defined by numbers. There are the numbers which indicate how many years a student has spent under the tutelage of teachers, and others which represent the proportion of his correct answers in an examination. Upon the receipt of a diploma the educational product acquires a market value. School attendance in itself thus guarantees inclusion in the membership of disciplined consumers of the technocracy —just as in past times church attendance guaranteed membership in the community of saints. From governor to jíbaro, Puerto Rico now accepts the ideology of its teachers as it once accepted the theology of its priests. The school is now identified with education as the church once was with religion. - -Today’s agencies of accreditation are reminiscent of the royal patronage formerly accorded the Church. Federal support of education now parallels yesterday’s royal donations to the Church. The power of the diploma has grown so rapidly in Puerto Rico that the poor blame their misery on precisely the lack of that which assures to you, today’s graduates, participation in society’s privileges and powers. - -Research shows that twice as many high school graduates in Puerto Rico as in the States want to pursue university studies; while the probability of graduating from college for the Puerto Rican high school graduate is much lower than it would be in the States. This widening discrepancy between aspirations and resources can result only in a deepening frustration among the inhabitants of the Island. - -The later a Puerto Rican child drops out of school the more keenly does he feel his failure. Contrary to popular opinion, increasing emphasis on schooling has actually increased class conflict in Puerto Rico, and has also increased the sense of inferiority which Puerto Ricans suffer in relation to the United States. - -Upon your generation falls the obligation of developing for Puerto Rico an educational process radically different from that of the present and independent of the example of other societies. It is yours to question whether Puerto Rico really wants to transform itself irrevocably into a passive product of the teaching profession. It is yours to decide whether you will subject your children to a school that seeks respectability in North American accreditation, its justification in the qualification of the labor force, and its function in permitting the children of the middle class to keep up with the Joneses of Westchester County, New York. - -The real sacred cow in Puerto Rico is the school. Proponents of commonwealth, statehood, and independence all take it for granted. Actually, none of these political alternatives can liberate a Puerto Rico which continues to put its primary faith in schooling. Thus, if this generation wants the true liberation of Puerto Rico, it will have to invent educational alternatives which put an end to the “age of schooling.” This will be a difficult task. Schooling has developed a formidable folklore. The begowned academic professors whom we have witnessed today evoke the ancient procession of clerics and little angels on the day of Corpus Christi. The Church, holy, catholic, apostolic, is rivaled by the school, accredited, compulsory, untouchable, universal . Alma Mater has replaced Mother Church. The power of the school to rescue the denizen of the slum is as the power of the Church to save the Muslim Moor from hell. (Gehenna meant both slum and hell in Hebrew.) The difference between Church and school is mainly that the rites of the school have now become much more rigorous and onerous than were the rites of the Church in the worst days of the Spanish Inquisition. - -The school has become the established church of secular times. The modern school had its origins in the impulse toward universal schooling, which began two centuries ago as an attempt to incorporate everyone into the industrial state. In the industrial metropolis the school was the integrating institution. In the colonies the school inculcated the dominant classes with the values of the imperial power and confirmed in the masses their sense of inferiority to this schooled elite. Neither the nation nor the industry of the precybernetic era can be imagined without universal baptism into the school. The dropout of this era corresponds to the lapsed marrano of eleventh-century Spain. - -We have, I hope, outlived the era of the industrial state. We shall not live long, in any case, if we do not replace the anachronism of national sovereignty, industrial autarchy, and cultural narcissism—which are combined into a stew of leftovers by the schools. Only within their sacred precincts could such old potage be served to young Puerto Ricans. - -I hope that your grandchildren will live in an Island where the majority give as little importance to attending class as is now given to attending the Mass. We are still far from this day and I hope that you will take the responsibility for bringing it to pass without fear of being damned as heretics, subversives, or ungrateful creatures. It may comfort you to know that those who undertake the same responsibility in socialist lands will be similarly denounced. - -Many controversies divide our Puerto Rican society. Natural resources are threatened by industrialization, the cultural heritage is adulterated by commercialization, dignity is subverted by publicity, imagination by the violence which characterizes the mass media. Each of these is a theme for extensive public debate. There are those who want less industry, less English, and less Coca-Cola, and those who want more. All agree that Puerto Rico needs many more schools. - -This is not to say that education is not discussed in Puerto Rico. Quite the contrary. It would be difficult to find a society whose political and industrial leaders are as concerned with education . They all want more education, directed toward the sector which they represent. These controversies merely serve, however , to strengthen public opinion in the scholastic ideology which reduces education to a combination of classrooms, curricula , funds, examinations, and grades. - -I expect that by the end of this century, what we now call school will be a historical relic, developed in the time of the railroad and the private automobile and discarded along with them. I feel sure that it will soon be evident that the school is as marginal to education as the witch doctor is to public health. - -A divorce of education from schooling is, in my opinion, already on the way, speeded by three forces: the Third World, the ghettos, and the universities. Among the nations of the Third World, schooling discriminates against the majority and disqualifies the self-educated. Many members of the “black” ghettos see the schools as a “whitening” agent. Protesting university students tell us that school bores them and stands between them and reality. These are caricatures, no doubt, but the mythology of schooling makes it difficult to perceive the underlying realities. - -The criticism today’s students are making of their teachers is as fundamental as that which their grandfathers made of the clergy. The divorce of education from schooling has its model in the demythologizing of the church. We fight now, in the name of education, against a teaching profession which unwillingly constitutes an economic interest, as in times past the reformers fought against a clergy which was, often unwillingly, a part of the ancient power elite. Participation in a “production system ,” of no matter what kind, has always threatened the prophetic function of the Church as it now threatens the educational function of the school. - -School protest has deeper causes than the pretexts enunciated by its leaders. These, although frequently political, are expressed as demands for various reforms of the system. They would never have gained mass support, however, if students had not lost faith and respect in the institution which nurtured them. Student strikes reflect a profound intuition widely shared among the younger generation: the intuition that schooling has vulgarized education, that the school has become anti-educational and anti-social, as in other epochs the Church has become anti-Christian or Israel idolatrous. This intuition can, I believe, be explicitly and briefly formulated. - -The protest of some students today is analogous to the dissidence of those charismatic leaders without whom the Church would never have been reformed: their prophecies led to martyrdom , their theological insights to their persecutions as heretics, their saintly activity often led to the stake. The prophet is always accused of subversion, the theologian of irreverence, and the saint is written off as crazy. - -The Church has always depended for its vitality upon the sensitivity of its bishops to the appeals of the faithful, who see the rigidity of the ritual as an obstacle to their faith. The churches, incapable of dialogue between their ruling clerics and their dissidents, have become museum pieces, and this could easily happen with the school system of today. It is easier for the university to attribute dissidence to ephemeral causes than to attribute this dissidence to a profound alienation of the students from the school. It is also easier for student leaders to operate with political slogans than to launch basic attacks upon sacred cows. The university that accepts the challenge of its dissident students and helps them to formulate in a rational and coherent manner the anxiety they feel because they are rejecting schooling exposes itself to the danger of being ridiculed for its supposed credulity. The student leader who tries to promote in his companions the consciousness of a profound aversion to their school (not to education itself) finds that he creates a level of anxiety which few of his followers care to face. - -The university has to learn to distinguish between sterile criticism of scholastic authority and a call for the conversion of the school to the educational purposes for which it was founded, between destructive fury and the demand for radically new forms of education—scarcely conceivable by minds formed in the scholastic tradition; between, on the one hand, cynicism which seeks new benefits for the already privileged and, on the other, Socratic sarcasm, which questions the educational efficacy of accepted forms of instruction in which the institution is investing its major resources. It is necessary, in other words, to distinguish between the alienated mob and profound protest based on rejection of the school as a symbol of the status quo. - -In no other place in Latin America has investment in education , demand for education, and information about education, increased so rapidly as in Puerto Rico. There is no place, therefore , in which members of your generation could begin the search for a new style of public education so readily as in Puerto Rico. It is up to you to get us back, recognizing that the generations which preceded you were misled in their efforts to achieve social equality by means of universal compulsory schooling. - -In Puerto Rico three of every ten students drop out of school before finishing the sixth grade. This means that only one of every two children, from families with less than the median income , completes the elementary school. Thus half of all Puerto Rican parents are under a sad illusion if they believe that their children have more than an outside chance of entering the university. - -Public funds for education go directly to the schools, without students having any control of them. The political justification for this practice is that it gives everyone equal access to the classroom. However, the high cost of this type of education, dictated by educators trained largely outside Puerto Rico, makes a public lie of the concept of equal access. Public schools may benefit all of the teachers but benefit mainly the few students who reach the upper levels of the system. It is precisely our insistence on direct financing of the “free school” that causes this concentration of scarce resources on benefits for the children of the few. - -I believe that every Puerto Rican has the right to receive an equal part of the educational budget. This is something very different and much more concrete than the mere promise of a place in the school. I believe, for example, that a young thirteen-year -old who has had only four years of schooling has much more right to the remaining educational resources than students of the same age who have had eight years of schooling. The more “disadvantaged” a citizen is, the more he needs a guarantee of his right. - -If in Puerto Rico it were decided to honor this right, then the free school would immediately have to be abandoned. The annual quota of each person of school age would obviously not support a year of schooling, at present costs. The insufficiency would, of course, be even more dramatic if the total educational budget for all levels were divided among the population from six to twenty-five years of age, the period between kindergarten and graduate studies, to which all Puerto Ricans supposedly have free access. - -These facts leave us three options: leave the system as it is, at the cost of justice and conscience; use the available funds exclusively to assure free schooling to children whose parents earn less than the median income; or use the available public resources to offer to all the education that an equal share of these resources could assure to each. The better-off could, of course, supplement this amount and might continue to offer their children the doubtful privilege of participating in the process which you are completing today. The poor would certainly use their share to acquire an education more efficiently and at lower cost. - -The same choices apply, a fortiori, to other parts of Latin America where frequently not more than $20.00 a year in public funds would be available for each child if the 20 per cent of tax receipts now destined for education were distributed equally to all children who should be in school under existing laws. This amount could never pay for a year of conventional schooling. It would however be enough to provide a good many children and adults with one month of intensive education year after year. It would also be enough to finance the distribution of educational games leading to skills with numbers, letters, and logical symbols . And to sponsor successive periods of intensive apprenticeship . In Northeast Brazil, Paulo Freire (who was forced to leave the country) showed us that with a single investment of this amount he was able to educate 25 per cent of an illiterate population to the point where they could do functional reading. But this, as he made clear, was only possible when his literacy program could focus on the key words that are politically controversial within a community. - -My suggestions may mortify many. But it is from the great positivists and liberals that we inherited the principle of using public funds for the administration of schools directed by professional educators; just as, previously, tithes had been given to the Church to be administered by priests. It remains for you to fight the free public school in the name of true equality of educational opportunity. I admire the courage of those of you willing to enter this fight. - -Youth wants educational institutions that provide them with education. They neither want nor need to be mothered, to be certified, or to be indoctrinated. It is difficult, obviously, to get an education from a school that refuses to educate without requiring that its students submit simultaneously to custodial care, sterile competition, and indoctrination. It is difficult, obviously, to finance a teacher who is at the same time regarded as guardian, umpire, counselor, and curriculum manager. It is uneconomical to combine these functions in one institution. It is precisely the fusion of these four functions, frequently antithetical , which raises the cost of education acquired in school. This is also the source of our chronic shortage of educational resources. It is up to you to create institutions that offer education to all at a cost within the limits of public resources. - -Only when Puerto Rico has psychologically outgrown the school will it be able to finance education for all, and only then will truly efficient, non-scholastic forms of education find acceptance . Meanwhile, these new forms of education will have to be designed as provisional means of compensating for the failures of the schools. In order to create new forms of education, we will have to demonstrate alternatives to the school that offer preferable options to students, teachers, and taxpayers. - -There is no intrinsic reason why the education that schools are now failing to provide could not be acquired more successfully in the setting of the family, of work and communal activity, in new kinds: of libraries and other centers that would provide the means of learning. But the institutional forms that education will take in tomorrow’s society cannot be clearly visualized, either could any of the great reformers anticipate concretely the institutional styles that would result from their reforms. The fear that new institutions will be imperfect, in their turn, does not jusify our servile acceptance of present ones. - -This plea to imagine a Puerto Rico without schools must, for many of you, come as a surprise. It is precisely for surprise that true education prepares us. The purpose of public education should be no less fundamental than the purpose of the Church, although the purpose of the latter is more explicit. The basic purpose of public education should be to create a situation in which society obliges each individual to take stock of himself and his poverty. Education implies a growth of an independent sense of life and a relatedness which go hand in hand with increased access to, and use of, memories stored in the human community. The educational institution provides the focus for this process. This presupposes a place within the society in which each of us is awakened by surprise; a place of encounter in which others surprise me with their liberty and make me aware of my own. The university itself, if it is to be worthy of its traditions , must be an institution whose purposes are identified with the exercise of liberty, whose autonomy is based on public confidence in the use of that liberty. - -My friends, it is your task to surprise yourselves, and us, with the education you succeed in inventing for your children. Our hope of salvation lies in our being surprised by the Other. Let us learn always to receive further surprises. I decided long ago to hope for surprises until the final act of my life—that is to say, in death itself. - -## Sexual power and political potency - -In urban areas of Latin America, at least one of four pregnancies terminates in abortion. In many inner city districts the rate is even higher. At the end of their childbearing age, at least two women in five have braved serious damage to their health, disrepute, and often gruesome guilt to avoid the birth of another child. All this happens in a culture in which common law marriage and illegitimate births approach and even exceed church marriages or legitimate births, and no stigma comparable to that known in the Anglo-Saxon world attaches to either. It also happens in a culture where other people’s abandoned children are easily welcomed for upbringing in one’s own family, without any formality. Evidently a lot of people do not want to have any more children. - -Most of these abortions are performed by midwives, herb-doctors and witches, except in Uruguay and Argentina, where many doctors volunteer their illegal services even to the poor. Abortion is by far the most frequent cause of death among young women. These women need an alternative to the present situation. - -The conditions for increased carnage are favorable. Enough girls have already been born to insure a doubling of women of childbearing age in the very early eighties. Neither development nor revolution can prevent growing misery for an exploding and hungry population, which drifts into abulia and passivity. It would be misleading to tell a woman seeking an abortion that a rosy future is on the horizon for her child. - -But also, where can politicians afford to take a strong, positive stand for either birth control or legal abortion? Only a strong-man could afford simultaneously to dare traditional Catholics who speak about sin, communists who want to out-breed the U.S. imperialists and nationalists who speak about colonizing vast unsettled expanses. - -The major change in public policy must be initiated at the grass roots. Present programs, semi-clandestine, try to gain acceptance for birth control among the common people. I suggest that a major campaign demanding clear population policies should rise from the grass roots. In the following article, I explain why this campaign must be coupled with a major effort leading to critically increased political awareness. This was originally a speech given at a meeting of population experts in 1967. Since it has frequently been quoted, I have left it unchanged, fully aware that my attempt to be compact makes it difficult reading. - -This speech was given some months before publication of the notorious papal encyclical on birth control. I had hoped that the Pope would speak, but wagered that he would keep silent. I lost my wager, and was disappointed. I had hoped that the Pope would speak about the ambiguity of technology, as well as the need for a more intense consciousness and love on the part of men forced by circumstances to use that technology. I had hoped that the Pope would make all men face the fact that lowered infant mortality must be accompanied by equally lowered birth rates, if we wanted to avoid widespread de-humanization, and that we were obligated as Christians to restrain self reproduction. The results of modern hygiene’s fostering physical life must be countered by the the use of modern hygiene to check its cancerous growth. - -Instead the Pope came out with a document written in dead, juridical language, a document into which one can read all this, but one which lacks courage, is in bad taste, and takes the initiative away from Rome in the attempt to lead modern men in Christian humanism. This is sad. - -In Latin America the population is exploding. The citizenry of Mexico is doubled every eighteen years, that of Brazil every seventeen, and that of Peru every twenty. A swelling of the lower age groups is occurring in countries where, even now, two-thirds of youth cannot complete an elementary education. The result of this is not only inferior education for the great majority, but also the growing awareness of the adult masses that they are being excluded from all the key institutions of middle class society. The brief education they receive is, in the long run, an education in dissatisfaction. - -Birth control programs in Latin America generally fail because they stress the fear of poverty rather than the joy of life. An individual may employ contraception as the only defense against imminent misery—or he can choose it as a constructive means for a more human life. But there is nothing constructive in the present message of family planning. It is addressed to the same audience as the TV commercial and billboard advertising: the minority that is moving into the middle class. Today’s clients for consumer goods and contraceptives in Mexico and Brazil form an odd and a marginal lot; they are the very few who will allow their sexual patterns to be affected by an appeal involving constant consumption and material advancement. - -Success in modern schools, in modern jobs, or at modern sex seem related. Such success remains the privilege of a minority in Latin America. Although this minority is drawn from all strata of society, it is selected from those “achievers” who know how to maintain the growth rate of their personal income above the national average. And this class of strivers surges into political power, providing further privilege to those already on their way to affluence. Even if family planning were practiced by this small group, it would have little impact on the over-all population growth. The “others” (which in Latin America means most) remain excluded from an equal opportunity to plan their families. Like the legal provisions for social, educational, and political equality, opportunities for the poor to practice birth control are but a mockery. - -Within the present political and social context, it is impossible to induce the majority of the people to adopt birth control. Neither seduction nor current efforts at education work. To seduce effectively, the marketing of birth control would have to become more aggressive: twenty-five dollars offered for the insertion of each coil, one hundred dollars for each sterilization. To educate effectively, governments would be promoting their own subversion through sudden and widespread adult education. For it is clear that the education that enables adults to formulate their own dissent risks the loss of all constraints on freedom and imagination. - -The double failure of seduction and education is based on a discrepancy between the new message and the style of life common to Latin America’s peasant majorities. For most, the idea that sexual technique can prevent conception is incredible; but even less credible to them is the idea that such techniques will produce personal affluence. Both claims seem to invoke magic. Further, the style by which this magical remedy is pushed has an odious smell. It evokes a rich establishment solicitous of teaching the poor how not to reproduce their like. - -Even the approach to the individual is frequently brash, involving the tragic moment in a woman’s life when, as an alternative to the next abortion, she has become a receptive victim for initiation into the mystery of contraception. Claim, style, and method put the accent on protection against life rather than freedom for it. No wonder they fail. - -To be attractive, family planning would have to be embraced as a way to express a deeper sense of life rather than be used as a mere protection against evil. - -The appeal to magic, myth, and mystery must be dropped by both the proponents and the opponents of contraception. Obviously this is not easy. The vision of increasing world poverty overwhelms the imagination, and the creation of a myth is one way to escape unbearable anguish. The transformation of hungry persons into a mythical corporate enemy is as old as mankind, but so is the illusion that we can manage the myths we have made. - -Once the “poor” have been reduced to a faceless river reaching the high-water mark on a statistical table, birth control campaigns can be credited with magical power and invoked to conjure away further flooding. Such programs give the impression that individuals should recognize themselves as drops in a swelling tide, so that each can do his best to reduce his kind. Not surprisingly, nobody does. - -Only professors can delude themselves into the belief that men can be prodded to take for their personal motives in family planning the possibly valid policy reasons of the economist and the sociologist. One’s vital behavior is always beyond the reach of a decision made by others. - -Populations are mindless: they can be managed but not motivated. Only persons can make up their minds; and the more they make up their minds, the less they can be controlled. People who freely decide to control their own fertility have new motivations or aspirations to political control. It is clear that responsible parenthood cannot be separated from the quest for power in politics. Programs that aim at such goals are unwelcome under the military governments prevailing in South America, and such programs are not the kind usually financed by the United States. - -The development of Latin America as a Western colony requires massive schooling for children, to fit them passively into the acceptance of an ideology that keeps them “democratically” in place. Political order cannot tolerate too much awareness or originality or risk. The kind of education of adults that is analytical and dialectic leads inevitably to a liberation from taboos. Idols cannot be knocked off selectively; the kind of adult education that is aimed at dethroning some idols dethrones them all and is always politically subversive. - -Kindred insights usually reinforce each other. The awareness that sex does not have to lead to unwanted motherhood provokes another concept: the insight that economic survival does not have to breed political exploitation. The freedom of the mate and of the citizen lead over the same road. Each taboo left behind means one obstacle less in the change from the social conditions that make all idols necessary. - -All those who will give birth before 1984 are now in life. For each I ask: Will this child become a passive object, manipulated and sated by a technological milieu that encroaches on his feelings ? Or will this child grow into a man who shares in the responsibility for a set of social trends? Will demographers trim his sex patterns to fit the planned population curve, just as industrial designers fit his job behavior to investment needs? Or will his move from the subsistence farm to a sprawling city increase his conscious control over his own life history? - -In other words, will the city swallow his life? Or will he live with deeper freedom in the city? This is the question for 300 millions. Two-thirds of the 200-odd million inhabitants of America, below the Rio Grande, now are considered “rural.” Yet less than 35 per cent of the 350 millions expected in the next generation will make a living from agriculture. Most of those now alive—or those to be born during the next fifteen years—are existing in a world where mind, mores, and myth are rooted in a rural past. This means they come from a milieu in which personal success depends on the struggle for scarce resources, say, limited land, and where survival of one’s group had to be ensured by massive procreation against high mortality. Peasants value possession , tradition, and multiple fertility. This taste finds expression in their style of language, symbol, ideology, and religion. - -Peasants’ culture provides categories that endow even extreme rural privation with dignity. The individual who moves to the city loses this powerful hereditary tool, and awareness and acceptance of this loss becomes a condition for survival. This requires a change in each man: a change both of behavior and of personal bearings. - -This necessary change in behavior is the sum total of the change in the many strains of conduct that, like the strands of a rope, make up a human life. Each change in a man’s actions (on the job, in the street, or with his girl friend) is the fruit of his personal insight. Either it has freed him for the invention of a new habit, or it has resulted in his deadening submission to the new rhythm of the city. - -Even more revolutionary than change behavior, however, are the new moorings the personality must find in the city. Urbanization for the individual means the search for new bearings in a world that assigns new coordinates to his most intimate feelings and drives. Character forces are given new labels and new slogans, and symbols are attached to them, to fit them into a new ideology. - -The city, like any other engineered product, is sold to the newcomer with a set of instructions for its use. These instructions mystify the non-believer, the man who has not subscribed to the prevailing beliefs. This city creed has many dogmas. It prizes a medically protracted span of life, scholastic performance and certification, continued advancement and achievement on the job. Production and consumption become measuring sticks for most values, including fertility. - -Change in behavior, change in bearings, and change in belief go hand in hand. Only the few capable of this triple change can elbow their way into the tiny islands of affluence. - -Within this context, high consumption combined with high fertility is a luxury that few can afford. These few, quite often, are not the old bourgeois, but couples who by good luck rose quickly and established themselves. For most families the speed of social climb depends upon tight control of family size. - -The lifelong discipline demanded by such control is hard on any adolescent raised in a hut, untrained as he is for silent deference to the humdrum of schooling, or the monotony of an office, or docility toward clock and schedule. A rare combination of character, circumstances, and peers is necessary to teach a peasant the set of disciplines by which he alone can ensure his climb to the upper reaches of city, business, or family life. The city is a much better selector than teacher. - -The personality structure or character that makes for a child’s success in school ensures the passing of those who will also fit the corporate structure in the modern city. Those labeled by a certificate and outfitted with a car are presumably those most suited to take the needed precautions to lower their fertility and raise their insurance. The proven correlation of high schooling and low fertility is usually interpreted as a result of a schooling that renders pupils capable of using technical know-how, such as contraceptives. Actually the contrary is probable: schools select those already inclined toward such technical know-how. This is much more true in countries where grammar schools are selective and by that selection exclude more individuals than they accept. - -Let me explain: the height of a social pyramid in Kansas and Caracas is about the same. What is different, north and south, is its shape. At best, three men out of one hundred in Caracas take the path corresponding to high school graduation, the family car, private health insurance and corresponding hygiene. I suggest that we distinguish between those who were lifted onto this level by birth and privilege and those who climbed there. These latter are much more carefully selected in Caracas than in Kansas. The steeper the pyramid, the more successfully it bars weakly motivated climbers who would barely even amble to the top of a slightly slanted incline. Those who scale the narrow and steep passage to success in Caracas must be sustained by more common drives and aims than those who are pushed up the broad flight of stairs of the United States college. - -We are frequently reminded that family planning was adopted rapidly by certain ethnic groups, for example, Puerto Ricans in New York. Fertility of the entire group declined suddenly as the group moved to the city. This is true of those who made up their minds to go to New York and then “made it” there: those who moved out of Harlem, through school and into jobs that pay more than $7,000 annually. They are the ones who survived the police, drugs, discrimination, and welfare. Indeed, they rose faster than any ethnic group before them, and their fertility, too, fell faster. - -Similar groups of leapfrog immigrants to affluence can be spotted all over Latin America. Their members tend to join the Lions Club, Knights of Columbus, the Christian Family movement , and other clubs that allow them to organize for further privilege for their kind. “The Association for the Protection of the Middle Classes” recently formed by Esso employees in Caracas is a good example of their tactics. But the fact that members of such groups do control their fertility is no proof that contraception is, even partially, a result of a more comfortable life. It means more probably that at present in Latin America only a few can be bewitched by the mirage of affluence. - -It is revealing that fertility among the United States poor, particularly in the black ghetto, remains near Latin American levels. The common element is not some numerical indicator but a mood. In the United States ghetto, economic averages have been reached that are out of sight for our generation in Latin America. Per capita income, years of schooling, expenditure on health, printed pages read per person—all are beyond the healthy aspiration of 80 per cent of all Peruvians or Colombians, for example. But both here and there, political participation is low, power is limited, and the mood bleak. For the United States Negro the signs pointing to integration and affluence have led all too often to a dead-end street. - -During the last two years, the United States public has begun, very rapidly, to sympathize with the Negro sentiment against birth control in the ghetto. It is more shocking that the same public considers the poor overseas less sensitive and more gullible than those at home. More free advice in Brazil is supposed to turn the same trick that failed in the United States ghetto. A rebuff at home is to be taken seriously. That same rebuff overseas can be written off as folly and hysteria. - -Last year in Brazil the Roman Catholic bishops and the communists combined to arouse public indignation against supposed favors extended by the military government to missionaries who import U.S.-produced “serpents” into Amazonia. The serpentinas (coils) were to be “put into women” to render them sterile and to make Amazonia fit for colonization by Negroes imported from the United States, it was said. - -The population expert bred around the North Atlantic easily interprets this as an outburst of sick imagination, rather than a symbolic protest against the United States serpent, soliciting tropical Eve to taste the apple of affluence. The economist, the planner, and the doctor tacitly assume that all men are compulsive consumers and achievers yearning for well-paid jobs and wishing themselves in the shoes of those who have made it with fewer babies and more things. Such reasoning is based on a presumed “law of human nature,” but that presumption is at least as spurious as that preached by the Catholics. Too often missionaries condescendingly see their own idiosyncrasies as other peoples’ natures. - -Current American conversation in English about population unwittingly promotes an “imperialist” bias. I suggest that we awaken to this bias and handle it as an acceptable variable in policy making. But equally I suggest that we beware of joining in the controversy over sin, usually conducted in Latin, or in the conspiracy to outbreed the paleface, which sounds Chinese. - -Only for a minority in Caracas or São Paulo could having a small family pay off immediately in higher living standards. For some 90 per cent, a meaningful improvement of such standards through birth control is beyond even their own temporal horizon. Most “constructive” reasons peddled to this majority for family control, therefore, are deceptive. They usually imply a subtle indoctrination of “middle class values.” Acceptance of these values should forestall revolution against them. He who has learned to see wealth as the key sign of success, and children the major obstacle to growing rich, might now blame his children for his poverty. Few do, of course, because the argument is outrageous and also untrue. - -To obtain the unreasoned assent of the majority all kinds of programs are launched, most of them emphasizing immediate economic gain for the individual: direct rewards for each contraceptive treatment; oblique favors to small families; subtle, persuasive nudges connecting rising levels of expectation with low fertility. None works well enough. Why? - -The fear of unattainable affluence does not intimidate the traditionally poor, just as the appeal to Hell has hardly influenced the sexual behavior of devout Catholics. In any case, it is cynical to expect them to forgo present enjoyment for the sake of a paradise that is open to others but is beyond, and will remain beyond, their reach. Nowhere do people breed according to White House policies or the Pope’s commands. Socioeconomic “reasons” and moral codes are equally ineffective in introducing contraceptives. The use of ideology to push or oppose family planning is always a call to idolatry and, therefore, anti-human. - -Ideology can arouse in some persons regressive forces and lead them to the use of contraceptives. Ideology can justify the desire for money, resentment, envy, unwillingness to share, the fear of risk, or the desire to keep up with whatever Joneses. Ideology can explain these tendencies as contributions to political stability and productivity. But such reasoned sex control works only with a few, and they are strange and sick; their ideological motivations more frequently lead to irresponsible aggression than to discipline. Birth control is sold to the great majority under false pretenses; for them, it is a blind alley to enrichment and there it does not decrease fertility. The use of ideology to motivate individual behavior then is not only inhuman but it is also a fallacious policy. In such private matters, an appeal to patriotism, public spirit, or religion is usually a good excuse—but rarely a good reason. - -For example, let me compare the documented failure of teachers to turn out readers to the failure of welfare agencies to teach contraception. Teachers try to convince Juanito that he should want to read in order to be able to know, and work, and vote. But Juanito wants none of this, and there is no reason why he should. Reading will hardly lead to college unless he gets help from an uncle who is already there. And his vote in Latin America today is certainly less meaningful than ten years ago when the Alliance for Progress began. The one argument that might convince Juanito to stay in school is the need for a certificate that is supposed to open the door to a job—many years later. - -People learn complex skills best if this process of learning affords the learner an opportunity to give clear shape to feelings of images that already exist in his heart. Only he who discovers the help of written words in order to face his fears and make them fade, and the power of words to seize his feelings and give them form, will want to dig deeper into other people’s writing. The mere ability to decipher the written message will only lead indoctrinated masses to submit to instruction by schools and for factories, and at best enable them thereafter to use their leisure time to escape into cheap pulp-reading or make out the dubbed versions of foreign films. - -Health workers tend to proceed very much like the teachers, except that they suggest that a pessary rather than a book will serve as the flying carpet into the better life. The product of the druggist, the stationer and the witch are used in the same style. Therefore, women who just swallow contraception are not better off than those who submit to print, or trust love potions or, superstitiously, Saint Anthony. - -Schools succeed, at high cost, in producing literacy in a few children: only one out of four, in all of Latin America, go beyond the sixth grade. Welfare clinics have equally modest results in teaching adults contraception: only one out of four who seek advice ceases bearing children. Both agencies help to maintain the mold and the fold of the West. An economic comparison of school and clinic speaks for a shift of resources from literacy to birth control. On a short-term basis (let us say over fifteen years) the savings to a nation from one prevented life is much greater than the rise in productivity resulting from one schooled child. - -Classroom and clinic both select better than they teach. If their combined budget were cut, it would probably not very significantly affect over-all fertility. But such a cut in favor of other programs cannot be taken into consideration unless it is understood to what degree the present school and health programs are politically necessary. - -Latin American society is regarded as barren even by some of its utopian dreamers. Even educational reformers speak and act as if teachers on this continent are unable to bring forth something truly new in education. Whenever effective adult education programs are conceived and grow and threaten tradition, they are declared spurious and either aborted or ridiculed. Certainly large-scale programs are never financed, the excuse being that on such a scale the methods proposed for them have never been proven. - -Military governments must fear Socrates: he must be jailed, exiled, ridiculed, or driven underground. Few great, popular, and respected Latin American teachers are employed in their own countries. If such men join the government, the Church, or an international agency, they will be threatened by corruption through compromise. - -There is a profound difference in the character of those who participate in Latin American educational structures, and this difference makes it difficult for North Americans to understand the reasons fundamental education is both more important and more dangerous in South America than it is in the ghetto. In Latin America the political establishment consists of the less than 3 per cent of heads of family who have graduated from secondary school. For this minority, any massive involvement of the unschooled in political argument threatens a profound change. Therefore programs that might ultimately promote such involvement are either written off as self-defeating demagoguery, or quelled, quite understandably, as incitement to riot. Certainly they are not financed. - -The prevailing uneven distribution of schooling is usually considered a major obstacle to the spread of technological know-how and to effective political participation. Huge increases of school budgets for children are recommended as the one way of spreading political power and technological know-how, including contraception. This policy, in my opinion, rests on three erroneous assumptions: an overestimation of the educational efficiency of schools; an unrealistic expectation that a geometric increase of resources for schooling could ever become feasible; and a lack of confidence in the educational value of politically oriented education. - -Paulo Freire, the exiled Brazilian educator, has shown that about 15 per cent of the illiterate adult population of any village can be taught to read and write in six weeks, and at a cost comparable to a fraction of one school year for a child. An additional 15 per cent can learn the same but more slowly. For that purpose he asks his team to prepare in each village a list of words that have the greatest intensity of meaning. Usually these words relate to politics and are, therefore, a focus of controversy. His literacy sessions are organized around the analysis of the chosen words. The persons attracted by this literacy program are mostly those with political potential. We must assume that they are interested in dialogue and that learning to read and write its key words means for them a step to carry their political participation to new levels of intensity and effectiveness. - -Obviously such education is selective. So are our present schools. The difference is that political potential makes the written page the place of encounter for the potentially subversive elements in society, rather than making it a sieve through which to pass those children who prove tolerant to compliance and qualified failure. Freire’s alumni consume a diet that is different from the pulp and trash on which dropouts feed. - -I will never forget an evening with Freire’s pupils, hungry peasants in Sergipe, in early 1964. One man got up, struggled for words and finally put into one utterance the argument I want to make in this article: “I could not sleep last night … because last evening I wrote my name … and I understood that I am I … this means that we are responsible.” - -Responsible citizenship and responsible parenthood go hand in hand. Both are the result of an experienced relatedness of the self to others. The discipline of spontaneous behavior is effective, creative, and sustained only if it is accepted with other people in mind. The decision to act as responsible mate and parent implies participation in political life and acceptance of the discipline this demands. Today in Brazil this means readiness for revolutionary struggle. - -In this perspective, my suggestion to orient large-scale formal educational programs for adults intensively toward family planning implies a commitment in favor of a political education. The struggle for political liberation and popular participation in Latin America can be rooted in new depth and awareness if it will spring from the recognition that, even in the most intimate domains of life, modern man must accept technology as a condition . Conducted in this style, education to modem parenthood could become a powerful form of agitation to help an uprooted mass grow into “people.” - -## Planned poverty the end result of technical assistance - -At the beginning of the second development decade, at the time the “Pearson Report” was presented to Robert McNamara, it seemed important to discuss alternatives to the current notions of development, which, though based on supposedly irrefutable evidence, actually concealed highly questionable presuppositions. - -It is now common to demand that the rich nations convert their war machine into a program for the development of the Third World. The poorer four-fifths of humanity multiply unchecked while their per capita consumption actually declines. This population expansion and decrease of consumption threaten the industrialized nations, who may still, as a result, convert their defense budgets to the economic pacification of poor nations. And this in turn could produce irreversible despair, because the plows of the rich can do as much harm as their swords. United States trucks can do more lasting damage than United States tanks. It is easier to create mass demand for the former than for the latter. Only a minority needs heavy weapons, while a majority can become dependent on unrealistic levels of supply for such productive machines as modern trucks. Once the Third World has become a mass market for the goods, products, and processes which are designed by the rich for themselves, the discrepancy between demand for these Western artifacts and the supply will increase indefinitely. The family car cannot drive the poor into the jet age, nor can a school system provide the poor with education, nor can the family refrigerator ensure healthy food for them. - -It is evident that only one man in a thousand in Latin America can afford a Cadillac, a heart operation, or a Ph.D. This restriction on the goals of development does not make us despair of the fate of the Third World, and the reason is simple. We have not yet come to conceive of a Cadillac as necessary for good transportation , or of a heart operation as normal healthy care, or of a Ph.D. as the prerequisite of an acceptable education. In fact we recognize at once that the importation of Cadillacs should be heavily taxed in Peru, that an organ transplant clinic is a scandalous plaything to justify the concentration of more doctors in Bogotá, and that a betatron is beyond the teaching facilities of the University of São Paulo. - -Unfortunately it is not held to be universally evident that the majority of Latin Americans—not only of our generation, but also of the next and the next again—cannot afford any kind of automobile, or any kind of hospitalization, or for that matter an elementary school education. We suppress our consciousness of this obvious reality because we hate to recognize the corner into which our imagination has been pushed. So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences, but actually our sense of possibilities. We have forgotten how to speak about modern transportation that does not rely on automobiles and airplanes. Our conceptions of modern health care emphasize our ability to prolong the lives of the desperately ill. We have become unable to think of better education except in terms of more complex schools and of teachers trained for ever longer periods. Huge institutions producing costly services dominate the horizons of our inventiveness. - -We have embodied our world view into our institutions and are now their prisoners. Factories, news media, hospitals, governments , and schools produce goods and services packaged to contain our view of the world. We—the rich—conceive of progress as the expansion of these establishments. We conceive of heightened mobility as luxury and safety packaged by General Motors or Boeing. We conceive of improving the general well-being as increasing the supply of doctors and hospitals, which package health along with protracted suffering. We have come to identify our need for further learning with the demand for ever longer confinement to classrooms. In other words, we have packaged education with custodial care, certification for jobs, and the right to vote, and wrapped them all together with indoctrination in the Christian, liberal, or communist virtues. - -In less than a hundred years industrial society has molded patent solutions to basic human needs and converted us to the belief that man’s needs were shaped by the Creator as demands for the products we have invented. This is as true for Russia and Japan as for the North Atlantic community. The consumer is trained for obsolescence, which means continuing loyalty toward the same producers who will give him the same basic packages in different quality or new wrappings. - -Industrialized societies can provide such packages for personal consumption for most of their citizens, but this is no proof that these societies are sane, or economical, or that they promote life. The contrary is true. The more the citizen is trained in the consumption of packaged goods and services, the less effective he seems to become in shaping his environment. His energies and finances are consumed in procuring ever new models of his staples, and the environment becomes a by-product of his own consumption habits. - -The design of the “package deals” of which I speak is the main cause of the high cost of satisfying basic needs. So long as every man “needs” his car, our cities must endure longer traffic jams and absurdly expensive remedies to relieve them. So long as health means maximum length of survival, our sick will get ever more extraordinary surgical interventions and the drugs required to deaden their consequent pain. So long as we want to use school to get children out of their parents’ hair or to keep them off the street and out of the labor force, our young will be retained in endless schooling and will need ever increasing incentives to endure the ordeal. - -Rich nations now benevolently impose a strait jacket of traffic jams, hospital confinements, and classrooms on the poor nations, and by international agreement call this “development.” The rich and schooled and old of the world try to share their dubious blessings by foisting their prepackaged solutions onto the Third World. Traffic jams develop in São Paulo while almost a million northeastern Brazilians flee the drought by walking five hundred miles. Latin American doctors get training at The Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, which they apply to only a few, while amoebic dysentery remains endemic in slums where 90 per cent of the population live. A tiny minority gets advanced education in basic science in North America—not infrequently paid for by their own governments. If they return at all to Bolivia, they become second-rate teachers of pretentious subjects at La Paz or Cochabamba. The rich export outdated versions of their standard models. - -The Alliance for Progress is a good example of benevolent production for underdevelopment. Contrary to its slogans, it did succeed—as an alliance for the progress of the consuming classes, and for the domestication of the Latin American masses. The Alliance has been a major step in modernizing the consumption patterns of the middle classes in South America by integrating them with the dominant culture of the North American metropolis . At the same time, the Alliance has modernized the aspirations of the majority of citizens and fixed their demands on unavailable products. - -Each car which Brazil puts on the road denies fifty people good transportation by bus. Each merchandised refrigerator reduces the chance of building a community freezer. Every dollar spent in Latin America on doctors and hospitals costs a hundred lives, to adopt a phrase of Jorge de Ahumada, the brilliant Chilean economist. Had each dollar been spent on providing safe drinking water, a hundred lives could have been saved. Each dollar spent on schooling means more privileges for the few at the cost of the many; at best it increases the number of those who, before dropping out, have been taught that those who stay longer have earned the right to more power, wealth, and prestige. What such schooling does is to teach the schooled the superiority of the better schooled. - -All Latin American countries are frantically intent on expanding their school systems. No country now spends less than the equivalent of 18 per cent of tax-derived public income on education —which means schooling—and many countries spend almost double that. But even with these huge investments, no country yet succeeds in giving five full years of education to more than one-third of its population; supply and demand for schooling grow geometrically apart. And what is true about schooling is equally true about the products of most institutions in the process of modernization in the Third World. - -Continued technological refinements of products which are already established on the market frequently benefit the producer far more than the consumer. The more complex production processes tend to enable only the largest producer to replace outmoded models continually, and to focus the demand of the consumer on the marginal improvement of what he buys, no matter what the concomitant side effects: higher prices, diminished life span, less general usefulness, higher cost of repairs. Think of the multiple uses for a simple can opener, whereas an electric one, if it works at all, opens only some kinds of cans, and costs one hundred times as much. - -This is equally true for a piece of agricultural machinery and for an academic degree. The midwestern farmer can become convinced of his need for a four-axle vehicle which can go 70 mph on the highways, has an electric windshield wiper and upholstered seats, and can be turned in for a new one within a year or two. Most of the world’s farmers don’t need such speed, nor have they ever met with such comfort, nor are they interested in obsolescence. They need low-priced transport, in a world where time is not money, where manual wipers suffice, and where a piece of heavy equipment should outlast a generation. Such a mechanical donkey requires entirely different engineering and design than one produced for the United States market. This vehicle is not in production. - -Most of South America needs paramedical workers who can function for indefinite periods without the supervision of an M.D. Instead of establishing a process to train midwives and visiting healers who know how to use a very limited arsenal of medicines while working independently, Latin American universities establish every year a new school of specialized nursing or nursing administration to prepare professionals who can function only in a hospital, and pharmacists who know how to sell increasingly more dangerous drugs. - -The world is reaching an impasse where two processes converge : ever more men have fewer basic choices. The increase in population is widely publicized and creates panic. The decrease in fundamental choice causes anguish and is consistently overlooked . The population explosion overwhelms the imagination, but the progressive atrophy of social imagination is rationalized as an increase of choice between brands. The two processes converge in a dead end: the population explosion provides more consumers for everything from food to contraceptives, while our shrinking imagination can conceive of no other ways of satisfying their demands except through the packages now on sale in the admired societies. - -I will focus successively on these two factors, since, in my opinion, they form the two coordinates which together permit us to define underdevelopment. - -In most Third World countries, the population grows, and so does the middle class. Income, consumption, and the well-being of the middle class are all growing while the gap between this class and the mass of people widens. Even where per capita consumption is rising, the majority of men have less food now than in 1945, less actual care in sickness, less meaningful work, less protection. This is partly a consequence of polarized consumption and partly caused by the breakdown of traditional family and culture. More people suffer from hunger, pain, and exposure in 1969 than they did at the end of World War II, not only numerically, but also as a percentage of the world population . - -These concrete consequences of underdevelopment are rampant ; but underdevelopment is also a state of mind, and understanding it as a state of mind, or as a form of consciousness, is the critical problem. Underdevelopment as a state of mind occurs when mass needs are converted to the demand for new brands of packaged solutions which are forever beyond the reach of the majority. Underdevelopment in this sense is rising rapidly even in countries where the supply of classrooms, calories, cars, and clinics is also rising. The ruling groups in these countries build up services which have been designed for an affluent culture; once they have monopolized demand in this way, they can never satisfy majority needs. - -Underdevelopment as a form of consciousness is an extreme result of what we can call in the language of both Marx and Freud Verdinglichung, or reification. By reification I mean the hardening of the perception of real needs into the demand for mass manufactured products. I mean the translation of thirst into the need for a Coke. This kind of reification occurs in the manipulation of primary human needs by vast bureaucratic organizations which have succeeded in dominating the imagination of potential consumers. - -Let me return to my example taken from the field of education . The intense promotion of schooling leads to so close an identification of school attendance and education that in everyday language the two terms are interchangeable. Once the imagination of an entire population has been “schooled,” or indoctrinated to believe that school has a monopoly on formal education, then the illiterate can be taxed to provide free high school and university education for the children of the rich. - -Underdevelopment is the result of rising levels of aspiration achieved through the intensive marketing of “patent” products. In this sense, the dynamic underdevelopment that is now taking place is the exact opposite of what I believe education to be: namely, the awakening awareness of new levels of human potential and the use of one’s creative powers to foster human life. Underdevelopment, however, implies the surrender of social consciousness to prepackaged solutions. - -The process by which the marketing of “foreign” products increases underdevelopment is frequently understood in the most superficial ways. The same man who feels indignation at the sight of a Coca-Cola plant in a Latin American slum often feels pride at the sight of a new normal school growing up alongside. He resents the evidence of a foreign “license” attached to a soft drink which he would like to see replaced by “Cola-Mex.” But the same man is willing to impose schooling—at all costs—on his fellow citizens, and is unaware of the invisible license by which this institution is deeply enmeshed in the world market. - -Some years ago I watched workmen putting up a sixty-foot Coca-Cola sign on a desert plain in the Mexquital. A serious drought and famine had just swept over the Mexican highland. My host, a poor Indian in Ixmiquilpan, had just offered his visitors a tiny tequila glass of the costly black sugar-water. When I recall this scene I still feel anger; but I feel much more incensed when I remember UNESCO meetings at which well-meaning and well-paid bureaucrats seriously discussed Latin American school curricula, and when I think of the speeches of enthusiastic liberals advocating the need for more schools. - -The fraud perpetrated by the salesmen of schools is less obvious but much more fundamental than the self-satisfied salesmanship of the Coca-Cola or Ford representative, because the schoolman hooks his people on a much more demanding drug. Elementary school attendance is not a harmless luxury, but more like the coca chewing of the Andean Indian, which harnesses the worker to the boss. - -The higher the dose of schooling an individual has received, the more depressing his experience of withdrawal. The seventh grade dropout feels his inferiority much more acutely than the dropout from the third grade. The schools of the Third World administer their opium with much more effect than the churches of other epochs. As the mind of a society is progressively schooled, step by step its individuals lose their sense that it might be possible to live without being inferior to others. As the majority shifts from the land into the city, the hereditary inferiority of the peon is replaced by the inferiority of the school dropout who is held personally responsible for his failure. Schools rationalize the divine origin of social stratification with much more rigor than churches have ever done. - -Until this day no Latin American country has declared youthful underconsumers of Coca-Cola or cars as lawbreakers, while all Latin American countries have passed laws which define the early dropout as a citizen who has not fulfilled his legal obligations . The Brazilian government recently almost doubled the number of years during which schooling is legally compulsory and free. From now on any Brazilian dropout under the age of sixteen will be faced during his lifetime with the reproach that he did not take advantage of a legally obligatory privilege. This law was passed in a country where not even the most optimistic could foresee the day when such levels of schooling would be provided for only 25 per cent of the young. The adoption of international standards of schooling forever condemns most Latin Americans to marginality or exclusion from social life—in a word, underdevelopment. - -The translation of social goals into levels of consumption is not limited to only a few countries. Across all frontiers of culture , ideology, and geography today, nations are moving toward the establishment of their own car factories, their own medical and normal schools—and most of these are, at best, poor imitations of foreign and largely North American models. - -The Third World is in need of a profound revolution of its institutions. The revolutions of the last generation were overwhelmingly political. A new group of men with a new set of ideological justifications assumed power to administer fundamentally the same scholastic, medical, and market institutions in the interest of a new group of clients. Since the institutions have not radically changed, the new group of clients remains approximately the same size as that previously served. This appears clearly in the case of education. Per pupil costs of schooling are today comparable everywhere since the standards used to evaluate the quality of schooling tend to be internationally shared. Access to publicly financed education, considered as access to school, everywhere depends on per capita income. (Places like China and North Vietnam might be meaningful exceptions.) - -Everywhere in the Third World modern institutions are grossly unproductive, with respect to the egalitarian purposes for which they are being reproduced. But so long as the social imagination of the majority has not been destroyed by its fixation on these institutions, there is more hope of planning an institutional revolution in the Third World than among the rich. Hence the urgency of the task of developing workable alternatives to “modern” solutions. - -Underdevelopment is at the point of becoming chronic in many countries. The revolution of which I speak must begin to take place before this happens. Education again offers a good example: chronic educational underdevelopment occurs when the demand for schooling becomes so widespread that the total concentration of educational resources on the school system becomes a unanimous political demand. At this point the separation of education from schooling becomes impossible. - -The only feasible answer to ever increasing underdevelopment is a response to basic needs that is planned as a long-range goal for areas which will always have a different capital structure. It is easier to speak about alternatives to existing institutions, services, and products than to define them with precision. It is not my purpose either to paint a Utopia or to engage in scripting scenarios for an alternate future. We must be satisfied with examples indicating simple directions that research should take. - -Some such examples have already been given. Buses are alternatives to a multitude of private cars. Vehicles designed for slow transportation on rough terrain are alternatives to standard trucks. Safe water is an alternative to high-priced surgery. Medical workers are an alternative to doctors and nurses. Community food storage is an alternative to expensive kitchen equipment. Other alternatives could be discussed by the dozen. Why not, for example, consider walking as a long-range alternative for locomotion by machine, and explore the demands which this would impose on the city planner? And why can’t the building of shelters be standardized, elements be precast, and each citizen be obliged to learn in a year of public service how to construct his own sanitary housing? - -It is harder to speak about alternatives in education, partly because schools have recently so completely preempted the available educational resources of good will, imagination, and money. But even here we can indicate the direction in which research must be conducted. - -At present, schooling is conceived as graded, curricular, class attendance by children, for about one thousand hours yearly during an uninterrupted succession of years. On the average, Latin American countries can provide each citizen with between eight and thirty months of this service. Why not, instead, make one or two months a year obligatory for all citizens below the age of thirty? - -Money is now spent largely on children, but an adult can be taught to read in one-tenth the time and for one-tenth the cost it takes to teach a child. In the case of the adult there is an immediate return on the investment, whether the main importance of his learning is seen in his new insight, political awareness, and willingness to assume responsibility for his family’s size and future, or whether the emphasis is placed on increased productivity . There is a double return in the case of the adult, because not only can he contribute to the education of his children, but to that of other adults as well. In spite of these advantages, basic literacy programs have little or no support in Latin America, where schools have a first call on all public resources. Worse, these programs are actually ruthlessly suppressed in Brazil and elsewhere, where military support of the feudal or industrial oligarchy has thrown off its former benevolent disguise. - -Another possibility is harder to define, because there is as yet no example to point to. We must therefore imagine the use of public resources for education distributed in such a way as to give every citizen a minimum chance. Education will become a political concern of the majority of voters only when each individual has a precise sense of the educational resources that are owing to him—and some idea of how to sue for them. Something like a universal GI Bill of Rights could be imagined, dividing the public resources assigned to education by the number of children who are legally of school age, and making sure that a child who did not take advantage of his credit at the age of seven, eight, or nine would have the accumulated benefits at his disposal at age ten. - -What would the pitiful education credit which a Latin American republic could offer to its children provide? Almost all of the basic supply of books, pictures, blocks, games, and toys that are totally absent from the homes of the really poor, but enable a middle class child to learn the alphabet, the colors, shapes and other classes of objects and experiences which ensure his educational progress. The choice between these things and schools is obvious. Unfortunately, the poor, for whom alone the choice is real, never get to exercise this choice. - -Defining alternatives to the products and institutions which now preempt the field is difficult, not only, as I have been trying to show, because these products and institutions shape our conception of reality itself, but also because the construction of new possibilities requires a concentration of will and intelligence in a higher degree than ordinarily occurs by chance. This concentration of will and intelligence on the solution of particular problems regardless of their nature we have become accustomed over the last century to call research. - -I must make clear, however, what kind of research I am talking about. I am not talking about basic research either in physics, engineering, genetics, medicine, or learning. The work of such men as F. H. C. Crick, Jean Piaget, and Murray Gell-Mann must continue to enlarge our horizons in other fields of science. The labs and libraries and specially trained collaborators these men need cause them to congregate in the few research capitals of the world. Their research can provide the basis for new work on practically any product. - -I am not speaking here of the billions of dollars annually spent on applied research, for this money is largely spent by existing institutions on the perfection and marketing of their own products . Applied research is money spent on making planes faster and airports safer; on making medicines more specific and powerful and doctors capable of handling their deadly side effects; on packaging more learning into classrooms; on methods to administer large bureaucracies. This is the kind of research for which some kind of counterfoil must somehow be developed if we are to have any chance to come up with basic alternatives to the automobile, the hospital, and the school, and any of the many other so-called “evidently necessary implements for modern life.” - -I have in mind a different, and peculiarly difficult, kind of research, which has been largely neglected up to now, for obvious reasons. I am calling for research on alternatives to the products which now dominate the market; to hospitals and the profession dedicated to keeping the sick alive; to schools and the packaging process which refuses education to those who are not of the right age, who have not gone through the right curriculum , who have not sat in a classroom a sufficient number of successive hours, who will not pay for their learning with submission to custodial care, screening, and certification or with indoctrination in the values of the dominant elite. - -This counterresearch on fundamental alternatives to current prepackaged solutions is the element most critically needed if the poor nations are to have a livable future. Such counter-research is distinct from most of the work done in the name of the “year 2000,” because most of that work seeks radical changes in social patterns through adjustments in the organization of an already advanced technology. The counterresearch of which I speak must take as one of its assumptions the continued lack of capital in the Third World. - -The difficulties of such research are obvious. The researcher must first of all doubt what is obvious to every eye. Second, he must persuade those who have the power of decision to act against their own short-run interests or bring pressure on them to do so. And, finally, he must survive as an individual in a world he is attempting to change fundamentally so that his fellows among the privileged minority see him as a destroyer of the very ground on which all of us stand. He knows that if he should succeed in the interest of the poor, technologically advanced societies still might envy the “poor” who adopt this vision. - -There is a normal course for those who make development policies, whether they live in North or South America, in Russia or Israel. It is to define development and to set its goals in ways with which they are familiar, which they are accustomed to use in order to satisfy their own needs, and which permit them to work through the institutions over which they have power or control. This formula has failed, and must fail. There is not enough money in the world for development to succeed along these lines, not even in the combined arms and space budgets of the superpowers. - -An analogous course is followed by those who are trying to make political revolutions, especially in the Third World. Usually they promise to make the familiar privileges of the present elites, such as schooling, hospital care, etc., accessible to all citizens ; and they base this vain promise on the belief that a change in political regime will permit them to sufficiently enlarge the institutions which produce these privileges. The promise and appeal of the revolutionary are therefore just as threatened by the counterresearch I propose as is the market of the now dominant producers. - -In Vietnam a people on bicycles and armed with sharpened bamboo sticks have brought to a standstill the most advanced machinery for research and production ever devised. We must seek survival in a Third World in which human ingenuity can peacefully outwit machined might. The only way to reverse the disastrous trend to increasing underdevelopment, hard as it is, is to learn to laugh at accepted solutions in order to change the demands which make them necessary. Only free men can change their minds and be surprised; and while no men are completely free, some are freer than others. - -## A constitution for cultural revolution - -At the invitation of the publishers of the annual Great Ideas volume I wrote the article which follows, and which I feel is an appropriate conclusion to this book. Its purpose was to initiate discussion about the need of constitutional principles which would guarantee an ongoing cultural revolution in a technological society. The article originally appeared in Great Ideas Today 1970, published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. - -During the decade just past we have gotten used to seeing the world divided into two parts: the developed and the underdeveloped . People in the development business may prefer to speak of the developed nations and the less developed or developing nations. This terminology suggests that development is both good and inevitable. Others, especially protagonists of revolutionary change, speak of the “Third World” and wait for the day when the wretched of the earth will rise in armed revolt against the imperialist powers and shift control over existing institutions from North to South, from White to Black, from metropolis to colony. - -A vulgar example of the first assumption is the Rockefeller Report on the Americas. Its doctrine is aptly summed up by President Nixon: “This I pledge to you tonight: the nation that went to the moon in peace for all mankind is ready to share its technology in peace with its nearest neighbors.” The governor, in turn, proposes that keeping the pledge might require a lot of additional weaponry in South America. - -The Pearson Report on partnership in development is a much more sophisticated example of the development mentality. It outlines policies which will permit a few more countries to join the charmed circle of the consumer nations but which will actually increase the poverty of the poor half in these same countries : because the strategies proposed will sell them ever more thoroughly on goods and services ever more expensive and out of their reach. The policy goals of most revolutionary movements and governments I know—and I do not know Mao’s China—reflect another type of cynicism. Their leaders make futile promises that—once in power for a sufficient length of time—more of everything which the masses have learned to know and to envy as privileges of the rich will be produced and distributed . Both the purveyors of development and the preachers of revolution advocate more of the same. They define more education as more schooling, better health as more doctors, higher mobility as more high-speed vehicles. The salesmen for United States industry, the experts for the World Bank, and ideologues of power for the poor seem to forget that heart surgery and college degrees remain beyond the reach of the majority for generations. - -The goals of development are always and everywhere stated in terms of consumer value packages standardized around the North Atlantic—and therefore always and everywhere imply more privileges for a few. Political reorganization cannot change this fact; it can only rationalize it. Different ideologies create different minorities of privileged consumers, but heart surgery or a university education is always priced out of range for all but a few: be they the rich, the orthodox, or the most fascinating subjects for experiments by surgeons or pedagogues. - -Underdevelopment is the result of a state of mind common to both socialist and capitalist countries. Present development goals are neither desirable nor reasonable. Unfortunately anti-imperialism is no antidote. Although exploitation of poor countries is an undeniable reality, current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of colonial elites to repeat history and follow the road traveled by the rich toward the universal consumption of internationally marketed packages, a road which can ultimately lead only to universal pollution and universal frustration. - -The central issue of our time remains the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. This hard fact is often obscured by another apparently contradictory fact. In the rich countries the poor expect a quantity and quality of commodities beyond the dreams of Louis XIV, while many of the so-called developing countries enjoy much higher economic growth rates than those of industrialized countries at a similar stage of their own histories. From icebox to toilet and from antibiotic to television , conveniences are found necessary in Harlem which Washington could not have imagined at Mount Vernon, just as Bolívar could not have foreseen the social polarization now inevitable in Caracas. But neither rising levels of minimum consumption in the rich countries nor of urban consumption in the poor countries can close the gap between rich and poor nations or between the rich and poor of any one nation. Modern poverty is a by-product of a world market catering to the ideologies of an industrial middle class. Modern poverty is built into an international community where demand is engineered through publicity to stimulate the production of standard commodities. In such a market, expectations are standardized and must always outrace marketable resources. - -In the United States, for all its gargantuan prosperity, real poverty levels rise faster than the median income. In the capital-starved countries, median incomes move rapidly away from rising averages. Most goods now produced for rich and poor alike in the United States are beyond the reach of all but a few in other areas. In both rich and poor nations consumption is polarized while expectation is equalized. - -During the decade now beginning we must learn a new language , a language that speaks not of development and under-development but of true and false ideas about man, his needs, and his potential. Development programs all over the world progressively lead to violence, either in the form of repression or of rebellion. This is neither due to the evil intentions of capitalists nor to the ideological rigidity of communists, but to the radical inability of men to tolerate the by-products of industrial and welfare institutions developed in the early industrial age. In the late sixties attention has suddenly been drawn to the inability of man to survive his industry. During the late sixties it has become evident that less than 10 per cent of the human race consumes more than 50 per cent of the world’s resources, and produces 90 per cent of the physical pollution which threatens to extinguish the biosphere. But this is only one aspect of the paradox of present development. During the early seventies it will become equally clear that welfare institutions have an analogous regressive effect. The international institutionalization of social service, medicine, and education which is generally identified with development has equally overwhelming destructive by-products. - -We need an alternative program, an alternative both to development and to merely political revolution. Let me call this alternative program either institutional or cultural revolution, because its aim is the transformation of both public and personal reality. The political revolutionary wants to improve existing institutions —their productivity and the quality and distribution of their products. His vision of what is desirable and possible is based on consumption habits developed during the last hundred years. The cultural revolutionary believes that these habits have radically distorted our view of what human beings can have and want. He questions the reality that others take for granted, a reality that, in his view, is the artificial by-product of contemporary institutions, created and reinforced by them in pursuit of their short-term ends. The political revolutionary concentrates on schooling and tooling for the environment that the rich countries , socialist or capitalist, have engineered. The cultural revolutionary risks the future on the educability of man. - -The cultural revolutionary must not only be distinguished from the political magician but also from both the neo-Luddite and the promoter of intermediary technology. The former behaves as if the noble savage could either be restored to the throne or the Third World transformed into a reservation for him. He opposes the internal combustion engine rather than opposing its packaging into a product designed for exclusive use by the man who owns it. Thus the Luddite blames the producer; the institutional revolutionary tries to reshape the design and distribution of the product. The Luddite blames the machine; the cultural revolutionary heightens awareness that it produces needless demands. The cultural revolutionary must also be distinguished from the promoter of intermediary technology who is frequently merely a superior tactician paving the road to totally manipulated consumption. - -Let me illustrate what I mean by a cultural revolution within one major international institution, by taking as an example the institution which currently produces education. I mean, of course, obligatory schooling: full-time attendance of age-specific groups at a graded curriculum. - -Latin America has decided to school itself into development. This decision results in the production of homemade inferiority. With every school that is built, another seed of institutional corruption is planted, and this is in the name of growth. - -Schools affect individuals and characterize nations. Individuals merely get a bad deal; nations are irreversibly degraded when they build schools to help their citizens play at international competition. For the individual, school is always a gamble. The chances may be very slim, but everyone shoots for the same jackpot. Of course, as any professional gambler knows, it is the rich who win in the end and the poor who get hooked. And if the poor man manages to stay in the game for a while, he will feel the pain even more sharply when he does lose, as he almost inevitably must. Primary school dropouts in a Latin American city find it increasingly difficult to get industrial jobs. - -But no matter how high the odds, everyone plays the game, for, after all, there is only one game in town. A scholarship may be a long shot, but it is a chance to become equal to the world’s best-trained bureaucrats. And the student who fails can console himself with the knowledge that the cards were stacked against him from the outset. - -More and more, men begin to believe that, in the schooling game, the loser gets only what he deserves. The belief in the ability of schools to label people correctly is already so strong that people accept their vocational and marital fate with a gambler’s resignation. In cities, this faith in school-slotting is on the way to sprouting a more creditable meritocracy—a state of mind in which each citizen believes that he deserves the place assigned to him by school. A perfect meritocracy, in which there would be no excuses, is not yet upon us, and I believe it can be avoided. It must be avoided, since a perfect meritocracy would not only be hellish, it would be hell. - -Educators appeal to the gambling instinct of the entire population when they raise money for schools. They advertise the jackpot without mentioning the odds. And those odds are high indeed for someone who is born brown, poor, or in the pampa. In Latin America, no country is prouder of its legally obligatory admission-free school system than Argentina. Yet only one Argentinian of five thousand born into the lower half of the population gets as far as the university. - -What is only a wheel of fortune for an individual is a spinning wheel of irreversible underdevelopment for a nation. The high cost of schooling turns education into a scarce resource, as poor countries accept that a certain number of years in school makes an educated man. More money gets spent on fewer people. In poor countries, the school pyramid of the rich countries takes on the shape of an obelisk, or a rocket. School inevitably gives individuals who attend it and then drop out, as well as those who don’t make it at all, a rationale for their own inferiority. But for poor nations, obligatory schooling is a monument to self-inflicted inferiority. To buy the schooling hoax is to purchase a ticket for the back seat in a bus headed nowhere. - -Schooling encrusts the poorest nations at the bottom of the educational bucket. The school systems of Latin America are fossilized deposits of a dream begun a century ago. The school pyramid is a-building from top to bottom throughout Latin America. All countries spend more than 20 per cent of their national budget and nearly 5 per cent of their gross national product on its construction. Teachers constitute the largest profession and their children are frequently the largest group of students in the upper grades. Fundamental education is either redefined as the foundation for schooling, and therefore placed beyond the reach of the unschooled and the early dropout, or is defined as a remedy for the unschooled, which will only frustrate him into accepting inferiority. Even the poorest countries continue to spend disproportionate sums on graduate schools—gardens which ornament the penthouses of skyscrapers built in a slum. - -Bolivia is well on the way to suicide by an overdose of schooling. This impoverished, landlocked country creates papier-mâché bridges to prosperity by spending more than a third of its entire budget on public education and half as much again on private schools. A full half of this educational misspending is consumed by 1 per cent of the school-age population. In Bolivia, the university student’s share of public funds is a thousand times greater than that of his fellow citizen of median income . Most Bolivian people live outside the city, yet only 2 per cent of the rural population makes it to the fifth grade. This discrimination was legally sanctioned in 1967 by declaring grade school obligatory for all—a law that made most people criminal by fiat and the rest immoral exploiters by decree. In 1970, the university entrance examinations were abolished with a flourish of egalitarian rhetoric. At first glance, it does seem a libertarian advance to legislate that all high school graduates have a right to enter the university—until you realize that less than 2 per cent of Bolivians finish high school. - -Bolivia may be an extreme example of schooling in Latin America. But on an international scale, Bolivia is typical. Few African or Asian countries have attained the progress now taken for granted there. - -Cuba is perhaps an example of the other extreme. Fidel Castro has tried to create a major cultural revolution. He has reshaped the academic pyramid, and promised that by 1980 the universities can be closed, since all of Cuba will be one big university with higher learning going on at work and leisure. Yet the Cuban pyramid is still a pyramid. There is no doubt that the redistribution of privilege, the redefinition of social goals, and the popular participation in the achievement of these goals have reached spectacular heights in Cuba since the revolution. For the moment, however, Cuba is showing only that, under exceptional political conditions, the base of the present school system can be expanded exceptionally. But there are built-in limits to the elasticity of present institutions, and Cuba is at the point of reaching them. The Cuban revolution will work—within these limits. Which means only that Dr. Castro will have masterminded a faster road to a bourgeois meritocracy than those previously taken by capitalists or bolsheviks. Sometimes, when he is not promising schools for all, Fidel hints at a policy of deschooling for all, and the Isle of Pines seems to be a laboratory for redistribution of educational functions to other social institutions. But unless Cuban educators admit that work-education which is effective in a rural economy can be even more effective in an urban one, Cuba’s institutional revolution will not begin. No cultural revolution can be built on the denial of reality. - -As long as communist Cuba continues to promise obligatory high school completion by the end of this decade, it is, in this regard, institutionally no more promising than fascist Brazil, which has made a similar promise. In both Brazil and Cuba, enough girls have already been born to double the number of potential mothers in the 1980s. Per capita resources available for education can hardly be expected to double in either country, and even if they could, no progress would have been made at all. In development-mad Brazil and in humanist Cuba, waiting for Godot is equally futile. Without a radical change in their institutional goals, both “revolutions” must make fools of themselves. Unfortunately, both seem headed for manifest foolishness, albeit by different routes. The Cubans allow work, party, and community involvement to nibble away at the school year, and call this radical education, while the Brazilians let United States experts peddle teaching devices that only raise the per capita cost of classroom attendance. - -The production of inferiority through schooling is more evident in poor countries and perhaps more painful in rich countries. The 10 per cent in the United States with the highest incomes can provide most of the education for their children through private institutions. Yet they also succeed in obtaining ten times more of the public resources devoted to education than the poorest 10 per cent of the population. In Soviet Russia a more puritanical belief in meritocracy makes the concentration of schooling privileges on the children of urban professionals even more painful. - -In the shadow of each national school-pyramid, an international caste system is wedded to an international class structure. Countries are ranged like castes, whose educational dignity is determined by the average years of schooling of its citizens. Individual citizens of all countries achieve a symbolic mobility through a class system which makes each man accept the place he believes to have merited. - -The political revolutionary strengthens the demand for schooling by futilely promising that under his administration more learning and increased earning will become available to all through more schooling. He contributes to the modernization of a world class structure and a modernization of poverty. It remains the task of the cultural revolutionary to overcome the delusions on which the support of school is based and to outline policies for the radical deschooling of society. - -The basic reason for all this is that schooling comes in quanta. Less than so much is no good and the minimum quantum carries a minimum price. It is obvious that with schools of equal quality a poor child can never catch up with a rich one, nor a poor country with a rich country. It is equally obvious that poor children and poor countries never have equal schools but always poorer ones, and thus fall ever further behind, so long as they depend on schools for their education. - -Another illusion is that most learning is a result of teaching. Teaching may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. The strongly motivated student faced with the task of learning a new code may benefit greatly from the discipline we now associate mostly with the old-fashioned schoolmaster . But most people acquire most of their insight, knowledge, and skill outside of school—and in school only insofar as school in a few rich countries becomes their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives. The radical deschooling of society begins, therefore, with the unmasking by cultural revolutionaries of the myth of schooling. It continues with the struggle to liberate other men’s minds from the false ideology of schooling—an ideology which makes domestication by schooling inevitable. In its final and positive stage it is the struggle for the right to educational freedom. - -A cultural revolutionary must fight for legal protection from the imposition of any obligatory graded curriculum. The first article of a bill of rights for a modern and humanist society corresponds to the first amendment of the United States Constitution . The state shall make no law with respect to an establishment of education. There shall be no graded curriculum, obligatory for all. To make this disestablishment effective, we need a law forbidding discrimination in hiring, voting, or admission to centers of learning based on previous attendance at some curriculum. This guarantee would not exclude specific tests of competence, but would remove the present absurd discrimination in favor of the person who learns a given skill with the largest expenditure of public funds. A third legal reform would guarantee the right of each citizen to an equal share of public educational resources, the right to verify his share of these resources, and the right to sue for them if they are denied. A generalized GI bill, or an edu-credit card in the hand of every citizen, would effectively implement this third guarantee. - -Abolition of obligatory schooling, abolition of job discrimination in favor of persons who have acquired their learning at a higher cost, plus establishment of edu-credit, would permit the development of a free exchange for educational services. According to present political ideology, this exchange could be influenced by various devices: premiums paid to those who acquire certain needed skills, interest-bearing edu-credit to increase the privileges of those who use it later in life, advantages for industries that incorporate additional formal training into the work routine. - -A fourth guarantee to protect the consumer against the monopoly of the educational market would be analogous to antitrust laws. - -I have shown in the case of education that a cultural or institutional revolution depends upon the clarification of reality. Development as now conceived is just the contrary: management of the environment and the tooling of man to fit into it. Cultural revolution is a review of the reality of man and a redefinition of the world in terms which support this reality. Development is the attempt to create an environment and then educate at great cost to pay for it. - -A bill of rights for modern man cannot produce cultural revolution . It is merely a manifesto. I have outlined the principles of an educational bill of rights. These principles can be generalized. - -The disestablishment of schooling can be generalized to freedom from monopoly in the satisfaction of any basic need. Discrimination on the basis of prior schooling can be generalized to discrimination in any institution because of underconsumption or underprivilege in another. A guarantee of equal education resources is a guarantee against regressive taxation. An educational antitrust law is obviously merely a special case of antitrust laws in general, which in turn are statutory implementations of constitutional guarantees against monopoly. - -The social and psychological destruction inherent in obligatory schooling is merely an illustration of the destruction implicit in all international institutions which now dictate the kinds of goods, services, and welfare available to satisfy basic human needs. Only a cultural and institutional revolution which reestablishes man’s control over his environment can arrest the violence by which development of institutions is now imposed by a few for their own interest. Maybe Marx has said it better, criticizing Ricardo and his school: “They want production to be limited to ‘useful things,’ but they forget that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.” diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/awareness/es.txt b/data/pages/en/book/awareness/es.txt deleted file mode 120000 index 74b4892..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/awareness/es.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -../../../es/book/awareness/es.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/awareness/index.txt b/data/pages/en/book/awareness/index.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a679da5..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/awareness/index.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ -# Celebration of Awarenness - -* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:en|Online]] -* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Alternativas_ -* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1969 -* **#@LANG_comments@#:** ... - - -~~NOTOC~~ diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/conviviality/en.txt b/data/pages/en/book/conviviality/en.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a7b0216..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/conviviality/en.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,666 +0,0 @@ -# Tools for Conviviality - -## Acknowledgments - -The multidimensional analysis of ceilings for industrial growth was first formulated in a Spanish document co-authored by Valentina Borremans and myself and submitted as a guideline for a meeting of two dozen Chilean socialists and other Latin Americans at CIDOC (the Center for Intercultural Documentation) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The next version was presented at the Zeno Symposium organized by Professor Richard Wollheim in Cyprus. It was published in Esprit , Paris, March 1972, with criticisms by Th. Adam, Pierre Caussat, J. P. Chevenement, Paul Fraisse, Yves Goussault, Pierre Kende, J. W. Lapierre, Michel Panoff, Henri Pequignot, Jean Marie Domenach, and Paul Thibaud. A third version served me and my deceased friend Greer Taylor as the basis for our participation in the Canadian Conference on the Law in January 1972 in Ottawa. Comments by David Weisstub , Nils Christie, Allen M. Linden, J. G. Castel, H. W. Arthurs, José Antonio Viera-Gallo, J. C. Smith, and Bonaventura de Sousa Santos, and other critical papers by jurists, will be published in mid-1973 in Toronto. During the summer of 1972, participants in my CIDOC seminar contributed very helpful papers. I’m especially grateful for the assistance of John Bradley, John Brewer, José Maria and Veronica Bulnes, Martin Cohen, Irene Curbelo de Diaz, Dennis Detzel, Joseph Fitzpatrick, Amnon Goldworth, Conrad Johnson, Hartmut von Hentig, John MacKnight, Michael Maccoby, Leslie Marcus, Francisco Miró Quesada, Marie-Noëlle Monteil, William Ophuls, Marta H. Reed, Everett Reimer, Francisco Varela, Etienne Verne, Jacques Vidal and German Zabala. Dennis Sullivan has patiently and critically assisted me in editing the final version. After I had delivered this manuscript to the publisher, I received valuable suggestions from J. P. Naik and his friends in India. These have seeped into the text to the extent this can happen in the correction of proofs. Second only to Valentina Borremans and Greer Taylor, Heinz von Foerster, Erich Fromm, Hermann Schwember and Abrahán Diaz Gonzales have exerted the most decisive influence on the formulation of my ideas. - -## Introduction - -During the next several years I intend to work on an epilogue to the industrial age. I want to trace the changes in language, myth, ritual, and law which took place in the current epoch of packaging and of schooling. I want to describe the fading monopoly of the industrial mode of production and the vanishing of the industrially generated professions this mode of production serves. - -Above all I want to show that two-thirds of mankind still can avoid passing through the industrial age, by choosing right now a postindustrial balance in their mode of production which the hyperindustrial nations will be forced to adopt as an alternative to chaos. To prepare for this task I submit this essay for critical comment. - -In its present form this book is the result of conversations at CIDOC in Cuernavaca during the summer of 1972. Participants in my seminar will recognize their ideas, and often their words. I ask my collaborators to accept my sincere thanks, especially for their written contributions. - -This essay has become too long to appear as an article and too intricate to be read in several installments. It is a progress report. I respectfully thank Ruth Nanda Anshen for issuing this tract as a volume, in World Perspectives , published by Harper & Row. - -For several years at CIDOC in Cuernavaca we have conducted critical research on the monopoly of the industrial mode of production and have tried to define conceptually alternative modes that would fit a postindustrial age. During the late sixties this research centered on educational devices. By 1970 we had found that: - -Universal education through compulsory schooling is not possible. - -Alternative devices for the production and marketing of mass education are technically more feasible and ethically less tolerable than compulsory graded schools. Such new educational arrangements are now on the verge of replacing traditional school systems in rich and in poor countries. They are potentially more effective in the conditioning of job-holders and consumers in an industrial economy. They are therefore more attractive for the management of present societies, more seductive for the people, and insidiously destructive of fundamental values. - -A society committed to high levels of shared learning and critical personal intercourse must set pedagogical limits on industrial growth. - -I have published the results of this research in a previous volume of World Perspectives, entitled Deschooling Society. I clarified some of the points left ill defined in that book by writing an article published in the Saturday Review of April 19, 1971. - -Our analysis of schooling has led us to recognize the mass production of education as a paradigm for other industrial enterprises , each producing a service commodity, each organized as a public utility, and each defining its output as a basic necessity. At first our attention was drawn to the compulsory insurance of professional health care, and to systems of public transport, which tend to become compulsory once traffic rolls above a certain speed. We found that the industrialization of any service agency leads to destructive side effects analogous to the unwanted secondary results well known from the overproduction of goods. We had to face a set of limits to growth in the service sector of any society as inescapable as the limits inherent in the industrial production of artifacts. We concluded that a set of limits to industrial growth is well formulated only if these limits apply both to goods and to services which are produced in an industrial mode. So we set out to clarify these limits. - -I here submit the concept of a multidimensional balance of human life which can serve as a framework for evaluating man’s relation to his tools. In each of several dimensions of this balance it is possible to identify a natural scale. When an enterprise grows beyond a certain point on this scale, it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself. These scales must be identified and the parameters of human endeavors within which human life remains viable must be explored. - -Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of society’s members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell, when it undermines the texture of community by promoting extreme social polarization and splintering specialization, or when cancerous acceleration enforces social change at a rate that rules out legal, cultural, and political precedents as formal guidelines to present behavior. Corporate endeavors which thus threaten society cannot be tolerated. At this point it becomes irrelevant whether an enterprise is nominally owned by individuals, corporations , or the state, because no form of management can make such fundamental destruction serve a social purpose. - -Our present ideologies are useful to clarify the contradictions which appear in a society which relies on the capitalist control of industrial production; they do not, however, provide the necessary framework for analyzing the crisis in the industrial mode of production itself. I hope that one day a general theory of industrialization will be stated with precision, that it will be formulated in terms compelling enough to withstand the test of criticism. Its concepts ought to provide a common language for people in opposing parties who need to engage in the assessment of social programs or technologies, and who want to restrain the power of man’s tools when they tend to overwhelm man and his goals. Such a theory should help people invert the present structure of major institutions. I hope that this essay will enhance the formulation of such a theory. - -It is now difficult to imagine a modern society in which industrial growth is balanced and kept in check by several complementary , distinct, and equally scientific modes of production. Our vision of the possible and the feasible is so restricted by industrial expectations that any alternative to more mass production sounds like a return to past oppression or like a Utopian design for noble savages. In fact, however, the vision of new possibilities requires only the recognition that scientific discoveries can be used in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power and turns people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The second enlarges the range of each person ’s competence, control, and initiative, limited only by other individuals’ claims to an equal range of power and freedom. - -To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognize natural scales and limits. We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward, or prison. Only within limits ought politics to be concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal inputs of either energy or information. Once these limits are recognized, it becomes possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons, tools, and a new collectivity. Such a society, in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated in dividuals rather than managers, I will call “convivial.” - -After many doubts, and against the advice of friends whom I respect, I have chosen “convivial” as a technical term to designate a modern society of responsibly limited tools. In part this choice was conditioned by the desire to continue a discourse which had started with its Spanish cognate. The French cognate has been given technical meaning (for the kitchen) by Brillat-Savarin in his Physiology of Taste: Meditations on Transcendental Gastron omy . This specialized use of the term in French might explain why it has already proven effective in the unmistakably different and equally specialized context in which it will appear in this essay. I am aware that in English “convivial” now seeks the company of tipsy jollyness, which is distinct from that indicated by the OED and opposite to the austere meaning of modern “ eutra pelia ,” which I intend. By applying the term “convivial” to tools rather than to people, I hope to forestall confusion. - -“Austerity,” which says something about people, has also been degraded and has acquired a bitter taste, while for Aristotle or Aquinas it marked the foundation of friendship. In the Summa Theologica , II, II, in the 186th question, article 5, Thomas deals with disciplined and creative playfulness. In his third response he defines “austerity” as a virtue which does not exclude all enjoyments , but only those which are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. For Thomas “austerity” is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue, which he calls friendship or joyfulness. It is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia (or graceful playfulness) in personal relations[^n01]. - -## Two Watersheds - -The year 1913 marks a watershed in the history of modern medicine . Around that year a patient began to have more than a fifty-fifty chance that a graduate of a medical school would provide him with a specifically effective treatment (if, of course, he was suffering from one of the standard diseases recognized by the medical science of the time). Many shamans and herb doctors familiar with local diseases and remedies and trusted by their clients had always had equal or better results. - -Since then medicine has gone on to define what constitutes disease and its treatment. The Westernized public learned to demand effective medical practice as defined by the progress of medical science. For the first time in history doctors could measure their efficiency against scales which they themselves had devised . This progress was due to a new perspective of the origins of some ancient scourges; water could be purified and infant mortality lowered; rat control could disarm the plague; treponemas could be made visible under the microscope and Salvarsan could eliminate them with statistically defined risks of poisoning the patient; syphilis could be avoided, or recognized and cured by rather simple procedures; diabetes could be diagnosed and self-treatment with insulin could prolong the life of the patient. Paradoxically, the simpler the tools became, the more the medical profession insisted on a monopoly of their application, the longer became the training demanded before a medicine man was initiated into the legitimate use of the simplest tool, and the more the entire population felt dependent on the doctor. Hygiene turned from being a virtue into a professionally organized ritual at the altar of a science. - -Infant mortality was lowered, common forms of infection were prevented or treated, some forms of crisis intervention became quite effective. The spectacular decline in mortality and morbidity was due to changes in sanitation, agriculture, marketing, and general attitudes toward life. But though these changes were sometimes influenced by the attention that engineers paid to new facts discovered by medical science, they could only occasionally be ascribed to the intervention of doctors. - -Indirectly, industrialization profited from the new effectiveness attributed to medicine; work attendance was raised, and with it the claim to efficiency on the job. The destructiveness of new tools was hidden from public view by new techniques of providing spectacular treatments for those who fell victims to industrial violence such as the speed of cars, tension on the job, and poisons in the environment. - -The sickening side effects of modern medicine became obvious after World War II, but doctors needed time to diagnose drug-resistant microbes or genetic damage caused by prenatal X-rays as new epidemics. The claim made by George Bernard Shaw a generation earlier, that doctors had ceased to be healers and were assuming control over the patient’s entire life, could still be regarded as a caricature. Only in the mid-fifties did it become evident that medicine had passed a second watershed and had itself created new kinds of disease. - -Foremost among iatrogenic (doctor-induced) diseases was the pretense of doctors that they provided their clients with superior health. First, social planners and doctors became its victims. Soon this epidemic aberration spread to society at large. Then, during the last fifteen years, professional medicine became a major threat to health. Huge amounts of money were spent to stem immeasurable damage caused by medical treatments. The cost of healing was dwarfed by the cost of extending sick life; more people survived longer months with their lives hanging on a plastic tube, imprisoned in iron lungs, or hooked onto kidney machines. New sickness was defined and institutionalized; the cost of enabling people to survive in unhealthy cities and in sickening jobs skyrocketed . The monopoly of the medical profession was extended over an increasing range of everyday occurrences in every man’s life. - -The exclusion of mothers, aunts, and other nonprofessionals from the care of their pregnant, abnormal, hurt, sick, or dying relatives and friends resulted in new demands for medical services at a much faster rate than the medical establishment could deliver . As the value of services rose, it became almost impossible for people to care. Simultaneously, more conditions were defined as needing treatment by creating new specializations or paraprofessions to keep the tools under the control of the guild. - -At the time of the second watershed, preservation of the sick life of medically dependent people in an unhealthy environment became the principal business of the medical profession. Costly prevention and costly treatment became increasingly the privilege of those individuals who through previous consumption of medical services had established a claim to more of it. Access to specialists , prestige hospitals, and life-machines goes preferentially to those people who live in large cities, where the cost of basic disease prevention, as of water treatment and pollution control, is already exceptionally high. The higher the per capita cost of prevention , the higher, paradoxically, became the per capita cost of treatment. The prior consumption of costly prevention and treatment establishes a claim for even more extraordinary care. Like the modern school system, hospital-based health care fits the principle that those who have will receive even more and those who have not will be taken for the little that they have. In schooling this means that high consumers of education will get postdoctoral grants, while dropouts learn that they have failed. In medicine the same principle assures that suffering will increase with increased medical care; the rich will be given more treatment for iatrogenic diseases and the poor will just suffer from them. - -After this second turning point, the unwanted hygienic by-products of medicine began to affect entire populations rather than just individual men. In rich countries medicine began to sustain the middle-aged until they became decrepit and needed more doctors and increasingly complex medical tools. In poor countries, thanks to modern medicine, a larger percentage of children began to survive into adolescence and more women survived more pregnancies. Populations increased beyond the capacities of their environments and the restraints and efficiencies of their cultures to nurture them. Western doctors abused drugs for the treatment of diseases with which native populations had learned to live. As a result they bred new strains of disease with which modern treatment, natural immunity, and traditional culture could not cope. On a world-wide scale, but particularly in the U.S.A., medical care concentrated on breeding a human stock that was fit only for domesticated life within an increasingly more costly, man-made, scientifically controlled environment. One of the main speakers at the 1970 AMA convention exhorted her pediatric colleagues to consider each newborn baby as a patient until the child could be certified as healthy. Hospital-born, formula -fed, antibiotic-stuffed children thus grow into adults who can breathe the air, eat the food, and survive the lifelessness of a modern city, who will breed and raise at almost any cost a generation even more dependent on medicine. - -Bureaucratic medicine spread over the entire world. In 1968, after twenty years of Mao’s regime, the Medical College of Shanghai had to conclude that it was engaged in the training of “ so-called first-rate doctors … who ignore five million peasants and serve only minorities in cities…. They create large expenses for routine laboratory examinations … prescribe huge amounts of antibiotics unnecessarily … and in the absence of hospital or laboratory facilities have to limit themselves to explaining the mechanisms of the disease to people for whom they cannot do anything, and to whom this explanation is irrelevant.” In China this recognition led to a major institutional inversion. Today, the same college reports that one million health workers have reached acceptable levels of competence. These health workers are laymen who in periods of low agricultural manpower needs have attended short courses, starting with the dissection of pigs, gone on to the performance of routine lab tests, the study of the elements of bacteriology, pathology, clinical medicine, hygiene, and acupuncture, and continued in apprenticeship with doctors or previously trained colleagues. These “barefoot doctors” remain at their work places but are excused occasionally when fellow workers require their assistance. They have responsibility for environmental sanitation, for health education, immunization , first aid, primary medical care, postillness follow-up, as well as for gynecological assistance, birth control, and abortion education . Ten years after the second watershed of Western medicine had been acknowledged, China intends to have one fully competent health worker for every hundred people. China has proved that a sudden inversion of a major institution is possible. It remains to be seen if this deprofessionalization can be sustained against the overweening ideology of unlimited progress and pressures from classical doctors to incorporate their barefoot homonym as part-time professionals on the bottom rung of a medical hierarchy. - -In the West during the sixties dissatisfaction with medicine grew in proportion to its cost, reaching the greatest intensity in the U.S.A. Rich foreigners flocked to the medical centers of Boston , Houston, and Denver to seek exotic repair jobs, while the infant mortality of the U.S. poor remained comparable to that in some tropical countries of Africa and Asia. Only the very rich in the United States can now afford what all people in poor countries have: personal attention around the deathbed. An American can now spend in two days of private nursing the median yearly cash income of the world’s population. - -Instead of exposing the systemic disorder, however, only the symptoms of “sick” medicine are now publicly indicted in the United States. Spokesmen for the poor object to the capitalist prejudices of the AMA and the income of doctors. Community leaders object to the lack of community control over the delivery systems of professional health maintenance or of sick care, believing that laymen on hospital boards can harness professional medics. Black spokesmen object to the concentration of research grants on the types of disease which tend to strike the white, elderly, overfed foundation official who approves them. They ask for research on sickle-cell anemia, which strikes only the black. The general voter hopes that the end of the war in Vietnam will make more funds available for an increase of medical production. This general concern with symptoms, however, distracts attention from the malignant expansion of institutional health care which is at the root of the rising costs and demands and the decline in well-being . - -The crisis of medicine lies on a much deeper level than its symptoms reveal and is consistent with the present crisis of all industrial institutions. It results from the development of a professional complex supported and exhorted by society to provide increasingly “better” health, and from the willingness of clients to serve as guinea pigs in this vain experiment. People have lost the right to declare themselves sick; society now accepts their claims to sickness only after certification by medical bureaucrats. - -It is not strictly necessary to this argument to accept 1913 and 1955 as the two watershed years in order to understand that early in the century medical practice emerged into an era of scientific verification of its results. And later medical science itself became an alibi for the obvious damage caused by the medical professional . At the first watershed the desirable effects of new scientific discoveries were easily measured and verified. Germ-free water reduced infant mortality related to diarrhea, aspirin reduced the pain of rheumatism, and malaria could be controlled by quinine. Some traditional cures were recognized as quackery, but, more importantly, the use of some simple habits and tools spread widely. People began to understand the relationship between health and a balanced diet, fresh air, calisthenics, pure water and soap. New devices ranging from toothbrushes to Band-Aids and condoms became widely available. The positive contribution of modern medicine to individual health during the early part of the twentieth century can hardly be questioned. - -But then medicine began to approach the second watershed. Every year medical science reported a new breakthrough. Practitioners of new specialties rehabilitated some individuals suffering from rare diseases. The practice of medicine became centered on the performance of hospital-based staffs. Trust in miracle cures obliterated good sense and traditional wisdom on healing and health care. The irresponsible use of drugs spread from doctors to the general public. The second watershed was approached when the marginal utility of further professionalization declined, at least insofar as it can be expressed in terms of the physical well-being of the largest number of people. The second watershed was superseded when the marginal dis utility increased as further monopoly by the medical establishment became an indicator of more suffering for larger numbers of people. After the passage of this second watershed, medicine still claimed continued progress, as measured by the new landmarks doctors set for themselves and then reached: both predictable discoveries and costs. For instance, a few patients survived longer with transplants of various organs. On the other hand, the total social cost exacted by medicine ceased to be measurable in conventional terms. Society can have no quantitative standards by which to add up the negative value of illusion, social control, prolonged suffering, loneliness, genetic deterioration, and frustration produced by medical treatment. - -Other industrial institutions have passed through the same two watersheds. This is certainly true for the major social agencies that have been reorganized according to scientific criteria during the last 150 years. Education, the mails, social work, transportation , and even civil engineering have followed this evolution. At first, new knowledge is applied to the solution of a clearly stated problem and scientific measuring sticks are applied to account for the new efficiency. But at a second point, the progress demonstrated in a previous achievement is used as a rationale for the exploitation of society as a whole in the service of a value which is determined and constantly revised by an element of society , by one of its self-certifying professional élites. - -In the case of transportation it has taken almost a century to pass from an era served by motorized vehicles to the era in which society has been reduced to virtual enslavement to the car. During the American Civil War steam power on wheels became effective. The new economy in transportation enabled many people to travel by rail at the speed of a royal coach, and to do so with a comfort kings had not dared dream of. Gradually, desirable locomotion was associated and finally identified with high vehicular speeds. But when transportation had passed through its second watershed, vehicles had created more distances than they helped to bridge; more time was used by the entire society for the sake of traffic than was “saved.” - -It is sufficient to recognize the existence of these two watersheds in order to gain a fresh perspective on our present social crisis. In one decade several major institutions have moved jointly over their second watershed. Schools are losing their claim to be effective tools to provide education; cars have ceased to be effective tools for mass transportation; the assembly line has ceased to be an acceptable mode of production. - -The characteristic reaction of the sixties to the growing frustration was further technological and bureaucratic escalation. Self-defeating escalation of power became the core-ritual practiced in highly industrialized nations. In this context the Vietnam war is both revealing and concealing. It makes this ritual visible for the entire world in a narrow theater of war, yet it also distracts attention from the same ritual being played out in many so-called peaceful arenas. The conduct of the war proves that a convivial army limited to bicycle speeds is served by the opponent’s escalation of anonymous power. And yet many Americans argue that the resources squandered on the war in the Far East could be used effectively to overwhelm poverty at home. Others are anxious to use the $20 billion the war now costs for increasing international development assistance from its present low of $2 billion. They fail to grasp the underlying institutional structure common to a peaceful war on poverty and a bloody war on dissidence. Both escalate what they are meant to eliminate. - -While evidence shows that more of the same leads to utter defeat, nothing less than more and more seems worthwhile in a society infected by the growth mania. The desperate plea is not only for more bombs and more police, more medical examinations and more teachers, but also for more information and research . The editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists claims that most of our present problems are the result of recently acquired knowledge badly applied, and concludes that the only remedy for the mess created by this information is more of it. It has become fashionable to say that where science and technology have created problems, it is only more scientific understanding and better technology that can carry us past them. The cure for bad management is more management. The cure for specialized research is more costly interdisciplinary research, just as the cure for polluted rivers is more costly nonpolluting detergents . The pooling of stores of information, the building up of a knowledge stock, the attempt to overwhelm present problems by the production of more science is the ultimate attempt to solve a crisis by escalation. - -## Convivial Reconstruction - -The symptoms of accelerated crisis are widely recognized. Multiple attempts have been made to explain them. I believe that this crisis is rooted in a major twofold experiment which has failed, and I claim that the resolution of the crisis begins with a recognition of the failure. For a hundred years we have tried to make machines work for men and to school men for life in their service. Now it turns out that machines do not “work” and that people cannot be schooled for a life at the service of machines. The hypothesis on which the experiment was built must now be discarded. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men. Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a leisure mass can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools. - -The crisis can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools; if we give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency, thus simultaneously eliminating the need for either slaves or masters and enhancing each person’s range of freedom. People need new tools to work with rather than tools that “work” for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves. - -I believe that society must be reconstructed to enlarge the contribution of autonomous individuals and primary groups to the total effectiveness of a new system of production designed to satisfy the human needs which it also determines. In fact, the institutions of industrial society do just the opposite. As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers. - -Individuals need tools to move and to dwell. They need remedies for their diseases and means to communicate with one another . People cannot make all these things for themselves. They depend on being supplied with objects and services which vary from culture to culture. Some people depend on the supply of food and others on the supply of ball bearings. - -People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call “conviviality.” They are degraded to the status of mere consumers. - -I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members. - -Present institutional purposes, which hallow industrial productivity at the expense of convivial effectiveness, are a major factor in the amorphousness and meaninglessness that plague contemporary society. The increasing demand for products has come to define society’s process. I will suggest how this present trend can be reversed and how modern science and technology can be used to endow human activity with unprecedented effectiveness. This reversal would permit the evolution of a life style and of a political system which give priority to the protection, the maximum use, and the enjoyment of the one resource that is almost equally distributed among all people: personal energy under personal control. I will argue that we can no longer live and work effectively without public controls over tools and institutions that curtail or negate any person’s right to the creative use of his or her energy. For this purpose we need procedures to ensure that controls over the tools of society are established and governed by political process rather than by decisions by experts. - -The transition to socialism cannot be effected without an inversion of our present institutions and the substitution of convivial for industrial tools. At the same time, the retooling of society will remain a pious dream unless the ideals of socialist justice prevail. I believe that the present crisis of our major institutions ought to be welcomed as a crisis of revolutionary liberation because our present institutions abridge basic human freedom for the sake of providing people with more institutional outputs. This world-wide crisis of world-wide institutions can lead to a new consciousness about the nature of tools and to majority action for their control. If tools are not controlled politically , they will be managed in a belated technocratic response to disaster. Freedom and dignity will continue to dissolve into an unprecedented enslavement of man to his tools. - -As an alternative to technocratic disaster, I propose the vision of a convivial society. A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favor of another member’s equal freedom. - -At present people tend to relinquish the task of envisaging the future to a professional élite. They transfer power to politicians who promise to build up the machinery to deliver this future. They accept a growing range of power levels in society when inequality is needed to maintain high outputs. Political institutions themselves become draft mechanisms to press people into complicity with output goals. What is right comes to be subordinated to what is good for institutions. Justice is debased to mean the equal distribution of institutional wares. - -The individual’s autonomy is intolerably reduced by a society that defines the maximum satisfaction of the maximum number as the largest consumption of industrial goods. Alternate political arrangements would have the purpose of permitting all people to define the images of their own future. New politics would aim principally to exclude the design of artifacts and rules that are obstacles to the exercise of this personal freedom. Such politics would limit the scope of tools as demanded by the protection of three values: survival, justice, and self-defined work. I take these values to be fundamental to any convivial society, however different one such society might be from another in practice, institutions , or rationale. - -Each of these three values imposes its own limits on tools. The conditions for survival are necessary but not sufficient to ensure justice; people can survive in prison. The conditions for the just distribution of industrial outputs are necessary, but not sufficient to promote convivial production. People can be equally enslaved by their tools. The conditions for convivial work are structural arrangements that make possible the just distribution of unprecedented power. A postindustrial society must and can be so constructed that no one person’s ability to express him-or herself in work will require as a condition the enforced labor or the enforced learning or the enforced consumption of another. - -In an age of scientific technology, the convivial structure of tools is a necessity for survival in full justice which is both distributive and participatory. This is so because science has opened new energy sources. Competition for inputs must lead to destruction , while their central control in the hands of a Leviathan would sacrifice equal control over inputs to the semblance of an equal distribution of outputs. Rationally designed convivial tools have become the basis for participatory justice. - -But this does not mean that the transition from our present to a convivial mode of production can be accomplished without serious threats to the survival of many people. At present the relationship between people and their tools is suicidally distorted. The survival of Pakistanis depends on Canadian grain, and the survival of New Yorkers on world-wide exploitation of natural resources. The birth pangs of a convivial world society will inevitably be violently painful for hungry Indians and for helpless New Yorkers . I will later argue that the transition from the present mode of production, which is overwhelmingly industrial, toward conviviality may start suddenly. But for the sake of the survival of many people it will be desirable that the transition does not happen all at once. I argue that survival in justice is possible only at the cost of those sacrifices implicit in the adoption of a convivial mode of production and the universal renunciation of unlimited progeny, affluence, and power on the part of both individuals and groups. This price cannot be extorted by some despotic Leviathan, nor elicited by social engineering. People will rediscover the value of joyful sobriety and liberating austerity only if they relearn to depend on each other rather than on energy slaves. The price for a convivial society will be paid only as the result of a political process which reflects and promotes the society-wide inversion of present industrial consciousness. This political process will find its concrete expression not in some taboo, but in a series of temporary agreements on one or the other concrete limitation of means, constantly adjusted under the pressure of conflicting insights and interests. - -In this volume I want to offer a methodology by which to recognize means which have turned into ends. My subject is tools and not intentions. The choice of this subject makes it impossible to undertake several related, relevant, and tempting tasks because: - -1. It would not serve my purpose to describe in detail any fictional community of the future. I want to provide guidelines for action, not for fantasy. A modern society, bounded for convivial living, could generate a new flowering of surprises far beyond anyone’s imagination and hope. I am not proposing a Utopia, but a procedure that provides each community with the choice of its unique social arrangements. - -2. I do not want to contribute to an engineering manual for the design of convivial institutions or tools, nor do I want to engage in a sales campaign for what would be obviously a better technology. My purpose is to lay down criteria by which the manipulation of people for the sake of their tools can be immediately recognized, and thus to exclude those artifacts and institutions which inevitably extinguish a convivial life style. Paradoxically, a society of simple tools that allows men to achieve purposes with energy fully under their own control is now difficult to imagine. Our imaginations have been industrially deformed to conceive only what can be molded into an engineered system of social habits that fit the logic of large-scale production. We have almost lost the ability to frame in fancy a world in which sound and shared reasoning sets limits to everybody’s power to interfere with anybody’s equal power to shape the world. - -The present world is divided into those who do not have enough and those who have more than enough, those who are pushed off the road by cars and those who drive them. The have-nots are miserable and the rich anxious to get more. A society whose members know what is enough might be poor, but its members would be equally free. Men with industrially distorted minds cannot grasp the rich texture of personal accomplishments within the range of modern though limited tools. There is no room in their imaginations for the qualitative change that the acceptance of a stable-state industry would mean; a society in which members are free from most of the multiple restraints of schedules and therapies now imposed for the sake of growing tools. Much less do most of our contemporaries experience the sober joy of life in this voluntary though relative poverty which lies within our grasp. - -3. I will focus on the structure of tools, not on the character structure of their users. The use of industrial tools stamps in an identical way the landscape of cities each having its own history and culture. Highways, hospital wards, classrooms, office buildings , apartments, and stores look everywhere the same. Identical tools also promote the development of the same character types. Policemen in patrol cars or accountants at computers look and act alike all over the world, while their poor cousins using nightstick or pen are different from region to region. The progressive homogenization of personalities and personal relationships cannot be stemmed without a retooling of society. Research on the social character traits that make retooling difficult or doubtful is complementary to what I propose. But I am not postulating the creation of a new man as a condition for a new society, nor am I pretending to know how either social character or cultures will change. A pluralism of limited tools and of convivial commonweals would of necessity encourage a diversity of life styles. - -4. It would distract from the core of my argument if I were to deal with political strategies or tactics. With the possible exception of China under Mao, no present government could restructure society along convivial lines. The managers of our major tools–nations, corporations, parties, structured movements, professions–hold power. This power is vested in the maintenance of the growth-oriented structures which they manipulate. These managers have the power to make major decisions; they can generate new demands for the output of their tools and enforce the creation of new social labels to fit them. They can even go so far as to limit the output of tools in the interest of maximizing benefits. But they have no power to reverse the basic structure of the institutional arrangements which they manage. - -The major institutions now optimize the output of large tools for lifeless people. Their inversion implies institutions that would foster the use of individually accessible tools to support the meaningful and responsible deeds of fully awake people. Turning basic institutions upside down and inside out is what the adoption of a convivial mode of production would require. Such an inversion of society is beyond the managers of present institutions . - -Today’s managers form a new class of men, selected for their character, competence, and interest–which enable them to both expand the productive society and promote the further operant conditioning of their clients. They hold and manage power no matter who lives in the illusion that he owns the tools. This class of power-holders must be eliminated, but this cannot be done by mass slaughter or replacement. The new élite would only claim more legitimacy in the manipulation of the inherited structured power. Management can be done away with only by eliminating the machinery that makes it necessary and, therefore, the demands for output that give it sway. In a convivial society there is little need for replacing the chairman of the board. - -In a society in which power–both political and physical–is bounded and spread by political decision there is place not only for a new flowering of products and characters, but also for a variety in forms of governance. Certainly, new tools would provide new options. Convivial tools rule out certain levels of power, compulsion, and programming, which are precisely those features that now tend to make all governments look more or less alike. But the adoption of a convivial mode of production does not of itself mean that one specific form of government would be more fitting than another, nor does it rule out a world federation, or agreements between nation-states, or communes, or many of the most traditional forms of governance. I restrict myself to the description of basic structural criteria within which the retooling of society can be achieved. - -5. A methodology by which to recognize when corporate tools become destructive of society itself requires the recognition of the value of distributory and participatory justice. I believe that my succinct statement will be sufficient to identify necessary restraints on tools, but it will also preclude that in this essay I reach any conclusion about a desirable degree of subordination of means to ends. - -6. The economics applicable to a postindustrial and convivial society can neither be ignored nor taken for granted. In a society that accepts politically defined limits on all types of industrial growth, many accepted terms will have to be redefined, but it is certain that in such a society inequality will not be excluded. In fact, each individual’s power to make effective changes would be greater than in preindustrial or in industrial times. Though they would be bounded, common tools would be incomparably more efficient than primitive, and more widely distributed than industrial, devices. Their products would accrue more to some than to others. The task of keeping net transfer of power within bounds requires the use of traditional as well as new economic devices. It will be argued that the limitation of tools cannot be effected before a corresponding new economic theory has been elaborated and has become operational. This is correct. I do propose that we use a dimensional analysis to obtain information about the major variables which can upset the balance of life, and that we rely on political process to identify the significant dimensions which man can control. I therefore propose an approach to the relationship between man’s ends and his means in which the key units of economics come to signify a dimensionless set of factors. Economics useful for the inversion of our present institutional structure starts out from politically defined limiting criteria. It is on these negative design criteria for technological devices that I want to focus attention. - -A methodology, by which to recognize the public perversion of tools into purposes, encounters resistance on the part of people who are used to measuring what is good in terms of dollars. Plato knew that the bad statesman is he who believes that the art of measurement is universal, and who jumbles together what is greater or smaller and what is more fit to the purpose. Our present attitudes toward production have been formed over the centuries. Increasingly, institutions have not only shaped our demands but also in the most literal sense our logic, or sense of proportion. Having come to demand what institutions can produce, we soon believe that we cannot do without it. - -The invention of education is an example of what I mean. We often forget that education acquired its present sense only recently. It was unknown before the Reformation, except as that part of early upbringing which is common to piglets, ducks, and men. It was clearly distinguished from the instruction needed by the young, and from the study in which some engaged later on in life and for which a teacher was needed. Voltaire still called it a presumptuous neologism, used only by pretentious schoolmasters. - -The endeavor to put all men through successive stages of enlightenment is rooted deeply in alchemy, the Great Art of the waning Middle Ages. John Amos Comenius, a Moravian bishop of the seventeenth century, a self-styled pansophist and pedagogue , is rightly considered one of the founders of the modern school. He was among the first to propose seven or twelve grades of compulsory learning. In his Magna Didactica he described schools as devices to “teach everybody everything” and outlined a blueprint for the assembly-line production of knowledge, which according to his method would make education cheaper and better and make growth into full humanity possible for all. But Comenius was not only an early theoretician of mass production, he was an alchemist who adapted the technical language of his craft to describe the art of rearing children. The alchemist sought to refine base elements by graduating their spirits through twelve stages of successive enlightenment, so that for their own and all the world’s benefit they might be transformed into gold. Of course, alchemists failed no matter how often they tried, but each time their “science” yielded new reasons for their failure, and they tried again. - -The industrial mode of production was first fully rationalized in the manufacture of a new invisible commodity, called “ education .” Pedagogy opened a new chapter in the history of the Ars Magna. Education became the search for an alchemic process that would bring forth a new type of man who would fit into an environment created by scientific magic. But no matter how much each generation spent on its schools, it always turned out that the majority of people were certified as unfit for higher grades of enlightenment and had to be discarded as unprepared for the good life in a man-made world. - -Not only has the redefinition of learning as schooling made schools seem necessary, it has also compounded the poverty of the unschooled with discrimination against the uneducated. People who have climbed up the ladder of schooling know where they dropped out and how uneducated they are. Once they accept the authority of an agency to define and measure their level of knowledge, they easily go on to accept the authority of other agencies to define for them their level of appropriate health or mobility. It is difficult for them to identify the structural corruption of our major institutions. Just as they come to believe in the value of the “knowledge stock” they acquired in school, so they come to believe that higher speeds save time and that income levels define well-being or, as an alternative, that the production of more services rather than more goods increases the quality of life. - -The commodity called “education” and the institution called “school” make each other necessary. The circle can be broken only by a widely shared insight that the institution has come to define the purpose. Values abstractly stated are reduced to mechanical processes that enslave men. This serfdom can be broken only by the joyful self-recognition of the fool who assumes personal responsibility for his folly. - -The institutional definition of values has made it difficult to focus our attention on the deep structure of social means. It is hard to imagine that the division of sciences, of labor, and of professions has gone too far. It is difficult to conceive of higher social effectiveness with lower industrial efficiency. To recognize the nature of desirable limits to specialization and output, we must focus our attention on the industrially determined shape of our expectations. Only then can we recognize that the emergence of a convivial and pluralist mode of production will follow the limitation of industrial institutions. - -In the past, convivial life for some inevitably demanded the servitude of others. Labor efficiency was low before the steel ax, the pump, the bicycle, and the nylon fishing line. Between the High Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, the alchemic dream misled many otherwise authentic Western humanists. The illusion prevailed that the machine was a laboratory-made homunculus , and that it could do our labor instead of slaves. It is now time to correct this mistake and shake off the illusion that men are born to be slaveholders and that the only thing wrong in the past was that not all men could be equally so. By reducing our expectations of machines, however, we must guard against falling into the equally damaging rejection of all machines as if they were works of the devil. - -A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation , and impotence. I use the term “tool” broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible commodities such as those which produce “education,” “health,” “knowledge,” or “decisions.” I use this term because it allows me to subsume into one category all rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators, and to distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other things such as basic food or implements, which in a given culture are not deemed to be subject to rationalization. School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped social devices than road networks. - -Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion. - -Hand tools are those which adapt man’s metabolic energy to a specific task. They can be multipurpose, like some primitive hammers or good modern pocket knives, or again they can be highly specific in design such as spindles, looms, or pedal-driven sewing machines, and dentists’ drills. They can also be complex such as a transportation system built to get the most in mobility out of human energy–for instance, a bicycle system composed of a series of man-powered vehicles, such as pushcarts and three-wheel rickshas , with a corresponding road system equipped with repair stations and perhaps even covered roadways. Hand tools are mere transducers of the energy generated by man’s extremities and fed by the intake of air and of nourishment. - -Power tools are moved, at least partially, by energy converted outside the human body. Some of them act as amplifiers of human energy: the oxen pull the plow, but man works with the oxen–the result is obtained by pooling the powers of beast and man. Power saws and motor pulleys are used in the same fashion. On the other hand, the energy used to steer a jet plane has ceased to be a significant fraction of its power output. The pilot is reduced to a mere operator guided by data which a computer digests for him. The machine needs him for lack of a better computer; or he is in the cockpit because the social control of unions over airplanes imposes his presence. - -Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action. - -Some institutions are structurally convivial tools. The telephone is an example. Anybody can dial the person of his choice if he can afford a coin. If untiring computers keep the lines occupied and thereby restrict the number of personal conversations, this is a misuse by the company of a license given so that persons can speak. The telephone lets anybody say what he wants to the person of his choice; he can conduct business, express love, or pick a quarrel. It is impossible for bureaucrats to define what people say to each other on the phone, even though they can interfere with–or protect–the privacy of their exchange. - -Most hand tools lend themselves to convivial use unless they are artificially restricted through some institutional arrangements. They can be restricted by becoming the monopoly of one profession , as happens with dentist drills through the requirement of a license and with libraries or laboratories by placing them within schools. Also, tools can be purposely limited when simple pliers and screwdrivers are insufficient to repair modern cars. This institutional monopoly or manipulation usually constitutes an abuse and changes the nature of the tool as little as the nature of the knife is changed by its abuse for murder. - -In principle the distinction between convivial and manipulatory tools is independent of the level of technology of the tool. What has been said of the telephone could be repeated point by point for the mails or for a typical Mexican market. Each is an institutional arrangement that maximizes liberty, even though in a broader context it can be abused for purposes of manipulation and control. The telephone is the result of advanced engineering; the mails require in principle little technology and considerable organization and scheduling; the Mexican market runs with minimum planning along customary patterns. - -Any institution that moves toward its second watershed tends to become highly manipulative. For instance, it costs more to make teaching possible than to teach. The cost of roles exceeds the cost of production. Increasingly, components intended for the accomplishment of institutional purposes are redesigned so that they cannot be used independently. People without cars have no access to planes, and people without plane tickets have no access to convention hotels. Alternate tools which are fit to accomplish the same purposes with fewer claims are pushed off the market. For instance, civilized correspondence becomes a lost art. During the last several years this barring of alternatives has usually coincided with the increased power of the tool and the development of more complex tool systems. - -It is possible that not every means of desirable production in a postindustrial society would fit the criteria of conviviality. It is probable that even in an overwhelmingly convivial world some communities would choose greater affluence at the cost of some restrictions on creativity. It is almost certain that in a period of transition from the present to the future mode of production in certain countries electricity would not commonly be produced in the backyard. It is also true that trains must run on tracks and stop on schedule at a limited number of points. Oceangoing vessels are built for one purpose; if they were sailing clippers, they might be even more specialized for one route than are present tankers. Telephone systems are highly determined for the transmission of messages of a certain band width and must be centrally administered even if they are limited to the service of only one area. It is a mistake to believe that all large tools and all centralized production would have to be excluded from a convivial society . It would equally be a mistake to demand that for the sake of conviviality the distribution of industrial goods and services be reduced to the minimum consistent with survival in order to protect the maximum equal right to self-determined participation . Different balances between distributive justice and participatory justice can prevail in societies equally striving for postindustrial conviviality, depending on the history, political ideals, and physical resources of a community. - -What is fundamental to a convivial society is not the total absence of manipulative institutions and addictive goods and services, but the balance between those tools which create the specific demands they are specialized to satisfy and those complementary , enabling tools which foster self-realization. The first set of tools produces according to abstract plans for men in general ; the other set enhances the ability of people to pursue their own goals in their unique way. - -The criteria by which anticonvivial or manipulative tools are recognized cannot be used to exclude every tool that meets them. These criteria, however, can be applied as guidelines for structuring the totality of tools by which a society desires to define the style and level of its conviviality. A convivial society does not exclude all schools. It does exclude a school system which has been perverted into a compulsory tool, denying privileges to the dropout . A convivial society does not exclude some high-speed intercity transport, as long as its layout does not in fact impose equally high speeds on all other routes. Not even television must be ruled out–although it permits very few programmers and speakers to define what their viewers may see–as long as the over-all structure of society does not favor the degradation of everyone into a compulsory voyeur. The criteria of conviviality are to be considered as guidelines to the continuous process by which a society’s members defend their liberty, and not as a set of prescriptions which can be mechanically applied. - -At present the reverse guideline prevails, even in societies where the producer is told that he is in the saddle. The socialist planner competes with the free-market advocate in claiming that a society run on his principles is more productive. In 1931 Stalin translated “control over the means of production” to mean the increase of productivity by new methods used to control the producer. In the midst of the U.S. Depression he launched Russia on an industrial race. Since then a socialist policy has been considered one which serves the industrially organized productivity of a socialist country. Stalin’s reinterpretation of Marxism has since then served as a form of blackmail against socialists and the left. It remains to be seen if after Mao’s death China will also trade productive conviviality for institutional productivity. The Stalinist interpretation of socialism has made it possible for socialists and capitalists alike to agree on how to measure the level of development a society has achieved. Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called “ underdeveloped ,” while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called “advanced.” Stalinism makes it possible to interpret as revolutionary whatever increases the amount of schooling, expands the road systems, or increases the productivity of extraction and manufacture. To be revolutionary has come to mean either to champion the nation that lags in production and to make its members keenly aware of the lag, or to inflame the frantic and frustrated attempts of underconsuming minorities in rich countries to catch up. - -Every aspect of industrial societies has become part of a larval system for escalating production and increasing the demand necessary to justify the total social cost. For this reason, criticism of bad management, official dishonesty, insufficient research, or technological lag distracts public attention from the one issue that counts: careful analysis of the basic structure of tools as means. It is equally distracting to suggest that the present frustration is primarily due to the private ownership of the means of production , and that the public ownership of these same factories under the tutelage of a planning board could protect the interest of the majority and lead society to an equally shared abundance. As long as Ford Motor Company can be condemned simply because it makes Ford rich, the illusion is bolstered that the same factory could make the public rich. As long as people believe that the public can profit from cars, they will not condemn Ford for making cars. The issue at hand is not the juridical ownership of tools, but rather the discovery of the characteristic of some tools which make it impossible for anybody to “own” them. The concept of ownership cannot be applied to a tool that cannot be controlled. The issue at hand, therefore, is what tools can be controlled in the public interest. Only secondarily does the question arise whether private control of a potentially useful tool is in the public interest. - -Certain tools are destructive no matter who owns them, whether it be the Mafia, stockholders, a foreign company, the state, or even a workers’ commune. Networks of multilane highways, long-range , wide-band-width transmitters, strip mines, or compulsory school systems are such tools. Destructive tools must inevitably increase regimentation, dependence, exploitation, or impotence, and rob not only the rich but also the poor of conviviality, which is the primary treasure in many so-called “underdeveloped” areas. - -It has become difficult for contemporary man to imagine development and modernization in terms of lower rather than higher energy use. High technology has been mistakenly identified with powerful intervention in physical, psychological, and social processes. The illusion that a high culture is one that uses the highest possible quantities of energy must be overcome if we are to get tools into focus. In classical societies power sources were very equally distributed. Each man was born with the potential to use most of the power he would need in a lifetime if his organism was properly maintained. Control over larger amounts of physical energy was the result of psychic manipulation or of political domination. - -Men did not need power tools to build the Mexican pyramids of Teotihuacán or the Philippine rice terraces of Ibagué. Their muscles provided the force to raise St. Peter’s and to dig the channels of Angkor Vat. Runners carried the messages between Caesar’s generals and between village chiefs and Inca planners. Hands and feet moved the spindle and the loom, the pottery wheel and the saw. Human metabolism provided the energy that powered classical agriculture, manufacture, and war. Individual skills were the controls that shaped animal energy into socially defined work. The energy that rulers could control was the sum of the performance their subjects voluntarily or involuntarily conceded. - -I do not claim that human metabolism provided all useful power, but I do claim that in most cultures it was the main source of power. Men knew how to harness some of the forces of the environment. They steered barges down the Nile; they gentled beasts to draw the plow; they caught the wind in their sails; they became experts in the construction of simple machines which combined the power of men and of rain and of gravity. They also tamed fire in the forge and the kitchen, but the total output of these sources remained secondary. Even Mongols who lived on their mounts provided more energy with their muscles than with their horsepower. All the energy tapped from the environment to build Athens and Florence did not contribute as much controlled power to these classical societies as did their men. Only when man lit fires to turn cities into ruins or jungles into swiddens did he release–but certainly not control–energies that overwhelmed the power of the people who used them. - -The amount of physical power available to old societies can be estimated. It can be expressed in multiples of the average man’s working time and metabolic energy. He can burn 2,500 calories a day, four-fifths of them just to stay alive. They go into making his heart beat and his brain pulse. The remainder can be externalized , but this does not mean that all of it can be transformed into work. A large portion of the lifetime capacity of a man to act on his physical and social environment is burnt running around while he grows up. More is spent for chores that lie beyond his personal choice–but also beyond other men’s reach. He consumes energy in getting up, in preparing food, in seeking protection from the cold, or in avoiding the slavedriver’s whip. If man is deprived of the use of this power, he becomes useless for work. Society can give shape to these personal activities, but it cannot appropriate the energy used on them for other tasks. Custom, language, and law can determine the form of the slave’s pottery, but the master cannot take the last pots or the roof away from his slaves, not if he wants them to go on slaving for him. A small energy parcel from each man was the major source of physical power with which temples were built, mountains were moved, cloth was woven, wars were waged, and kings were carried around or amused. - -Power was limited. It was proportional to the population. Its major source was the muscles of individual men. Its efficient use depended on the stage of development which hand tools had reached and the distribution of necessary tools throughout the population. Tools all matched the impedance of manpower to the task. Except by redirecting the forces of gravity and wind they did not and could not act as amplifiers of this power. To control more power than others in his society, a man had to lord it over his fellows. If a ruler could draw power from sources other than men, his control over this power still depended on his control over men. Each pair of oxen required a man to lead them. Even the forge needed a boy to blow into the fire. Political control coincided with the control over physical power, and the control of power depended entirely on authority. - -Equal power and equal direct control of power were both features of preindustrial societies, but this did not guarantee an equal autonomy in the exercise of this control. On a very primitive level the physical predominance of one person made him into the lord of others. A slight advantage in organization or weaponry made one people the master of another. The appropriation of resources and tools created the basis of class societies and fostered the rituals and myths that shaped men to fit into the class to which they were assigned. - -In a preindustrial society political control could extend only over the excess power that people could produce. As soon as a population became efficient enough to produce more power than was required to maintain it, people could be deprived of control over this energy. They could be compelled to cede their power to the decisions of others. They could be either taxed or enslaved. Part of what they produced on their own could be taken from them, or they could be put to work for the king or the village. Ideology, economic structure, and life style tended to favor this concentration of excess energy under the control of a few. - -The degree to which this concentration of control polarized social benefits varied from one culture to another. At best it improved the range within which most members of society could employ their remaining energies. High peasant cultures offer good examples. While all shared in the tasks of defending their land from enemies or floods, each was also better dressed, housed, and fed. At worst, the concentration of decisions over power led to the establishment of empires which were expanded by mercenaries and fed from plantations worked by slaves. - -The total energy available to society increased rapidly toward the end of the Iron Age, that is, between the time of Agrippa and the time of Watt. Most of the radical technical mutations that came into existence before the scientific discoveries in the field of electricity in fact came about early in the Middle Ages. Because they used windpower far more effectively than any previous invention , three-masted sailing ships made world-wide transportation possible. Speedy transportation with regular deliveries was made possible by the building of canals in Europe, a millennium after the same discovery was implemented in Southeast Asia. A vastly increased application of nonhuman energy to industries like brewing, dyeing, pottery-making, brick-making, sugar-refining, salt manufacture, and transportation went parallel with the construction of vastly improved water wheels and windmills . - -From the High Middle Ages to the late Renaissance, new social tools developed that ensured the protection of the worker’s self-image and dignity, although he was now sometimes dwarfed by the size of machines. The guild system did indeed give the worker a new claim to the monopoly over tools specific to his trade. But the mill had not yet grown out of proportion to the miller. His monopoly over grain-processing protected the guildsman, provided him with extra holidays, and still maximized the services that he could render to his town. Guilds were neither unions nor professional associations. - -Lewis Mumford in his The Myth of the Machine: The Penta gon of Power points out that one particular enterprise, namely mining, - -set the pattern for later modes of mechanization by its callous disregard for human factors, by its indifference to the pollution and destruction of the neighboring environment, by its concentration upon the physicochemical process for obtaining the desired metal or fuel, and above all by its topographic and mental isolation from the organic world of the farmer and the craftsman, and the spiritual world of the Church, the University and the City. In its destruction of the environment and its indifference to the risks to human life, mining closely resembles warfare –though likewise it often, through its confrontation of danger and death, brings into existence a tough, self-respecting personality … the soldier at his best. But the destructive animus of mining and its punishing routine of work, along with its environmental poverty and disorder were passed on to the new industries that used its products. These negative social results offset the mechanical gains. - -This new attitude toward gainful activity is well reflected in the introduction of a new term to designate it. Tripaliare meant to torture on the trepalium , which was first mentioned in the sixth century as an instrument of impalement made out of three wooden sticks. By the twelfth century the word in both French and Spanish expressed a painful experience to which man is subjected ; only in the sixteenth century did it become possible to use the verb trabajar interchangeably with laborar and sudar on the job. Equally significant is what happened in the English language. Things began to work –first medicines (1600) and then physical tools (1650), even though these were not yet tools driven by any outside power. The alchemist’s dream of making a homunculus in the test tube slowly took the shape of creating robots to work for man, and to educate men to work alongside them. The ideology of an industrial organization of tools and a capitalist organization of the economy preceded by many centuries what is usually called the Industrial Revolution. On Baconian premises Europeans began, according to Mumford, to save time, shrink space, augment power, multiply goods, overthrow organic norms and displace real organisms with mechanisms that stimulated them or vastly magnified some single function they performed. All these imperatives, which have become the groundwork of science as technology in our present society, seem axiomatic and absolute only because they remain unexamined . The same change of mind appears also in a transfer from ritual regularity to mechanical regularity with an emphasis on time-keeping, space-measuring, account-keeping, thus translating concrete objects and complex events into abstract quantities. According to Mumford, it was this capitalistic devotion to repetitive order that helped undermine the unmeasurable personal balance between the workman and his tools. - -New power meant a new relation to time. The lending of money against interest was considered “against nature” by the Church: money naturally was a means of exchange to buy necessities , not a capital that could work or bear fruits. During the seventeenth century even the Church abandoned this view–though reluctantly–to accept the fact that Christians had become capitalist merchants. Time became like money: I now can have a few hours before lunch; how shall I spend time? … I am short of time so I can’t afford to spend that much time on a committee; it’s not worth the time! … It would be a waste of time; I’d rather save an hour. - -Scientists began to consider man as a power source. They sought to measure the maximum daily exertion that might be expected from a man and compare both his maintenance and his power to those of a horse. Man was reinvented as a source of mechanical power. Prisoners condemned to the galleys were not much use most of the time, since galleys were most of the time in port. Prisoners condemned to the treadmills produced rotary power to which any of the new machines could be hooked. Up to the early nineteenth century men in English prisons actually labored on the treadmills to make machines work. - -The new attitude of man to his tools during the Industrial Revolution, which began as capitalism did in the fifteenth century , finally called for the invention of new sources of power. The steam engine was a product of the Industrial Revolution rather than the cause of it. Power plants soon became mobile, and with the railroad the Iron Age and the Industrial Revolution came to an end. Industrial ways became the status quo. - -Immense new sources of power were tapped during the twentieth century, and much of this power became self-governing. Man has now been almost replaced by machines and reduced to being their operator. Fewer men are needed as gang workers in the fields: slavery has become uneconomical. But also fewer men are needed on the assembly line, as engineers have designed machines to perform the tasks that mass production and industrialization had created in the centuries before the steam engine. More power has become available, so more power is used. The human slaveowner is replaced by the operant conditioning of men in the mega-machine. - -We have all grown up as children of our time, and therefore it is extremely difficult to envisage a postindustrial yet human type of “work.” To reduce industrial tools seems equivalent to a return to the tortured labor of the mine and the factory, or to the labor of the U.S. farm hand who has to compete with his mechanical neighbor. The worker who had to dip a heavy tire into a solution of hot sulfur each time the machine asked for it was literally hooked onto his apparatus. Agricultural labor also ceased to be what it was for a slave or a farmer. For the slave it was labor at the service and behest of a master; for the peasant it was his own work which he could organize and shape in accordance with the demands of growing plants, hungry animals, and unpredictable weather. The modern farmhand in the United States today who is deprived of power tools is under a double pressure quite different from that of the classical slave: he must measure up to performance standards set by farm hands elsewhere who use machines, and he is constantly aware that he is underprivileged , exploited, and abused because in an age of the mega-machine he feels that he is used like a component. The prospect that moving toward a convivial society might imply a society with low power tools would seem to him like a return to the exploitation of manpower by inefficient industrial machines in the early periods of steam. - -I have described three types of institutional arrangements within which tools can be used. Certain tools can be used effectively within only one of these arrangements. There are tools which can be used normally for fully satisfying, imaginative, and independent work ; others tend to be used primarily in activities best labeled as labor ; and, finally, certain machines can only be operated. The same can be said about physical artifacts and about the set of rules that define formal institutional arrangements . Cars are machines that call for highways, and highways pretend to be public utilities while in fact they are discriminatory devices. Compulsory schools constitute a huge bureaucratic system ; no matter how convivially a teacher tries to conduct his class, his pupils learn through him to which class they belong. Cars operate on highways as teachers operate in schools. Only in a very limited sense can what the truck driver and the teacher do be called labor. Only exceptionally will a teacher feel that his operations within the school system do not directly interfere with his work. - -The market characteristics of these three types of human activity help to clarify the distinction among them. Labor can be purchased or sold in the marketplace. Not work as an activity, but only the result of convivial work can be marketed. Finally, the right to operate machines and to obtain the scarce privileges that go with employment must be earned through the previous consumption of certified treatments, which take the form of a curriculum of schooling and testing along with successive jobs. - -Tools for a convivial and yet efficient society could not have been designed at an earlier stage of history. We now can design the machinery for eliminating slavery without enslaving man to the machine. Science and technology are not bound to the peculiar notion, seemingly characteristic of the last 150 years of their application to production, that new knowledge of nature’s laws has to be locked into increasingly more specialized and highly capitalized preparation of men to use them. The sciences, which specialized out of philosophy, have become the rationale for an increasing division of operations. The division of labor has finally led to the labor- saving division of tools. New technology is now used to amplify supply funnels for commodities. Public utilities are turned from facilities for persons into arenas for the owners of expensive tools. The use of science and technology constantly supports the industrial mode of production, and thereby crowds off the scene all tool shops for independent enterprise . But this is not the necessary result of new scientific discoveries or of their useful application. It is rather the result of a total prejudice in favor of the future expansion of an industrial mode of production. Research teams are organized to remedy minor inefficiencies that hold up the further growth of a specific production process. These planned discoveries are then heralded as costly breakthroughs in the interest of further public service. Research is now mostly oriented toward industrial development. - -This unqualified identification of scientific advance with the replacement of human initiative by programmed tools springs from an ideological prejudice and is not the result of scientific analysis. Science could be applied for precisely the opposite purpose . Advanced or “high” technology could become identified with labor-sparing, work-intensive decentralized productivity. Natural and social science can be used for the creation of tools, utilities, and rules available to everyone, permitting individuals and transient associations to constantly recreate their mutual relationships and their environment with unenvisaged freedom and self-expression. - -New understanding of nature can now be applied to our tools either for the purpose of propelling us into a hyperindustrial age of electronic cybernetics or to help us develop a wide range of truly modern and yet convivial tools. Limited resources can be used to provide millions of viewers with the color image of one performer or to provide many people with free access to the records of their choice. In the first case, technology will be used for the further promotion of the specialized worker, be he a plumber, surgeon, or TV performer. More and more bureaucrats will study the market, consult their balance sheets, and decide for more people on more occasions about the range of products among which they may choose. There will be a further increase of useful things for useless people. But science can also be used to simplify tools and to enable the layman to shape his immediate environment to his taste. The time has come to take the syringe out of the hand of the doctor, as the pen was taken out of the hand of the scribe during the Reformation in Europe. - -Most curable sickness can now be diagnosed and treated by laymen. People find it so difficult to accept this statement because the complexity of medical ritual has hidden from them the simplicity of its basic procedures. It took the example of the barefoot doctor in China to show how modern practice by simple workers in their spare time could, in three years, catapult health care in China to levels unparalleled elsewhere. In most other countries health care by laymen is considered a crime. A seventeen-year-old friend of mine was recently tried for having treated some 130 of her high-school colleagues for VD. She was acquitted on a technicality by the judge when expert counsel compared her performance with that of the U.S. Health Service. Nowhere in the U.S.A. can her achievement be considered “standard,” because she succeeded in making retests on all her patients six weeks after their first treatment. Progress should mean growing competence in self-care rather than growing dependence. - -The possibilities of lay therapy also run up against our commitment to “better” health, and have blinded us to the distinction between curable and incurable sickness. This is a crucial distinction because as soon as a doctor treats incurable sickness, he perverts his craft from a means to an end. He becomes a charlatan set on providing scientific consolation in a ceremony in which the doctor takes on the patient’s struggle against death. The patient becomes the object of his ministrations instead of a sick subject who can be helped in the process of healing or dying. Medicine ceases to be a legitimate profession when it cannot provide each man or his next of kin with the tool to make this one crucial differential diagnosis for himself. - -New opportunities for the progressive expansion of lay therapy and the parallel progressive reduction of professional medicine are rejected because life in an industrial society has made us place such exaggerated value on standard products, uniformity, and certified quality. Industrialized expectations have blurred the distinction between personal vocation and standard profession. Of course, any layman can grow up to become a general healer, but this does not mean that every layman must be taught how to heal. It simply means that in a society in which people can and must take care of their neighbors and do so on their own, some people will excel at using the best available tools. In a society in which people can once again be born in their homes and die in their homes and in which there is a place for cripples and idiots in the street, and where a distinction is made between plumbing and healing, quite a few people would grow up capable of assisting others to heal, to suffer, or to die. - -Just as with proper social arrangements most people would grow up as readers without having to be schooled and without having to recreate the pre-Gutenberg profession of the scribe, so a sufficient number would grow up competent with medical tools. This would make healing so plentiful that it would be difficult to turn this competence into a monopoly or to sell it as a commodity . Deprofessionalization means a renewed distinction between the freedom of vocation and the occasional boost sick people derive from the quasi-religious authority of the certified doctor. - -Of course the deprofessionalization of most ordinary medicine could sometimes substitute a quack for today’s impostor, but the threat of quackery becomes less convincing as professionally caused damage grows. There just is no substitute for the self- correcting judgment of the layman in socializing the tools invented or used by the professional. Lifelong familiarity with the specific dangers of a specific remedy is the best preparation for accepting or rejecting it in time of crisis. - -Take another tool–transportation–as an example. Under President Cárdenas in the early thirties, Mexico developed a modern system of transportation. Within a few years about 80 percent of the population had gained access to the advantages of the automobile. Most important, villages had been connected by dirt roads or tracks. Heavy, simple, and tough trucks traveled over them every now and then, moving at speeds far below twenty miles per hour. People were crowded together on rows of wooden benches nailed to the floor to make place for merchandise loaded in the back and on the roof. Over short distances the vehicle could not compete with people, who had been used to walking and to carrying their merchandise, but long-distance travel had become possible for all. Instead of a man driving his pig to market , man and pig could go together in a truck. Any Mexican could now reach any point in his country in a few days. - -Since 1945 the money spent on roads has increased every year. It has been used to build highways between a few major centers. Fragile cars now move at high speeds over smooth roads. Large, specialized trucks connect factories. The old, all-purpose tramp truck has been pushed back into the mountains or swamps. In most areas either the peasant must take a bus to go to the market to buy industrially packaged commodities, or he sells his pig to the trucker in the employ of the meat merchant. He can no longer go to town with his pig. He pays taxes for the roads which serve the owners of various specialized monopolies and does so under the illusion that the benefits will ultimately spread to him. - -In exchange for an occasional ride on an upholstered seat in an air-conditioned bus, the common man has lost much of the mobility the old system gave him, without gaining any new freedom. Research done in two typical large states of Mexico–one dominated by deserts, the other by mountains and lush growth– confirms this conclusion. Less than one percent of the population in either state traveled a distance of over fifteen miles in any one hour during 1970. More appropriate pushcarts and bicycles, both motorized when needed, would have presented a technologically much more efficient solution for 99 percent of the population than the vaunted highway development. Such pushcarts could have been built and maintained by people trained on the job, and operated on roadbeds built to Inca standards, yet covered to diminish drag. The usual rationale given for the investment in standard roads and cars is that it is a condition for development and that without it a region cannot be integrated into the world market. Both claims are true, but can be considered as desirable only if monetary integration is the goal of development. - -During the last few years the promoters of development have come to admit that cars, as operated now, are inefficient. This inefficiency is blamed on the fact that modern vehicles are designed for private ownership, not for the public good. In fact, modern personnel transport is inefficient not because an individual capsule rather than a cabin is the model for the largest number of vehicles, or because these vehicles are now owned by their drivers. It is inefficient because of the obsessive identification of higher speed with better transport. Just as the demand for better health at all costs is a form of mental sickness, so is the pretense of higher speed. - -The railroads reflected the class societies they served simply by putting different fares on the same speed. But when a society commits itself to higher speeds, the speedometer becomes an indicator of social class. Any peasant could accompany Lázaro Cárdenas on horseback. Today only his personal staff can accompany a modern governor in his private helicopter. In capitalist countries how often you can cover great distances is determined by what you can pay. In socialist countries your velocity depends on the social importance the bureaucracy attaches to you. In both cases the particular speed at which you travel puts you into your class and company. Speed is one of the means by which an efficiency-oriented society is stratified. - -Fostered addiction to speed is also a means of social control. Transportation in its various forms now swallows 23 percent of the U.S. gross expenditures. The United States may be rich enough to allocate one-fourth of its energy resources and human time to the enterprise of getting somewhere. Under Khufu, Egyptians might have spent that much during a few years to build the Great Pyramid and to get their ruler to the underworld. Unfortunately , however, transportation exacts an ever higher percentage of the cash spent in a given year within many a Latin-American municipality. The road degrades the subsistence farmer and artisan, integrates the village into the money economy, and swallows much of the available cash. It is true that modern transportation does incorporate a region into the world market. It also trains the inhabitants for the consumption of foreign goods and the acceptance of foreign values. For example, throughout history Thailand was known for its klongs. These canals crisscrossed the country; people, rice, and tax collectors all moved easily along them. Some villages were cut off during the dry season, but their seasonal rhythm of life turned this periodic isolation into an occasion for meditation and festivities. A society that can afford long holidays and fill them with activities is certainly not poor. During the last half-decade major klongs were filled in to build roads. Since bus drivers are paid by the number of miles they can cover in a day, and since cars are still few, the Thais for a short while will be able to circulate in their country at world-record bus speeds. They will pay with the destruction of waterways that took millennia to build. The economists argue that buses and trucks pump more money per year through the economy. They do, but at the cost of depriving most Thais of the independence which their sleek rice boats once granted each family. Of course, car owners could never have competed with rice boats unless the World Bank had financed roads for them and the Thai government had made new laws that permitted them to profane the klongs. - -The building trades are another example of an industry that modern nation-states impose on their societies, thereby modernizing the poverty of their citizens. The legal protection and financial support granted the industry reduces and cancels opportunities for the otherwise much more efficient self-builder. Quite recently Mexico launched a major program with the aim of providing all workers with proper housing. As a first step, new standards were set for the construction of dwelling units. These standards were intended to protect the little man who purchases a house from exploitation by the industry producing it. Paradoxically , these same standards deprived many more people of the traditional opportunity to house themselves. The code specifies minimum requirements that a man who builds his own house in his spare time cannot meet. Besides that, the real rent for industrially built quarters is more than the total income of 80 percent of the people. “Better housing,” then, can be occupied only by those who are well-off or by those on whom the law bestows direct rent subsidies. - -Once dwellings that fall below industrial standards are defined as improper, public funds are denied to the overwhelming majority of people who cannot buy housing but could “house” themselves. The tax funds meant to improve the living quarters of the poor are monopolized for the building of new towns next to the provincial and regional capitals where government employees , unionized workers, and people with good connections can live. These are all people who are employed in the modern sector of the economy, that is, people who hold jobs. They can be easily distinguished from other Mexicans because they have learned to speak about their trabajo as a noun, while the unemployed or the occasionally employed or those who live near the subsistence level do not use the noun form when they go to work. - -These people, who have work, not only get subsidies for the building of their homes; the entire public-service sector is rearranged and developed to serve them. In Mexico City it has been estimated that 10 percent of the people use 50 percent of the household water, and on the high plain water is very scarce indeed . The building code has standards far below those of rich countries, but by prescribing certain ways in which houses must be built, it creates a rising scarcity of housing. The pretense of a society to provide ever better housing is the same kind of abberation we have met in the pretense of doctors to provide better health and of engineers to provide higher speeds. The setting of abstract impossible goals turns the means by which these are to be achieved into ends. - -What happened in Mexico happened all over Latin America during the decade of the Alliance for Progress, including Cuba under Castro. It also happened in Massachusetts. In 1945, 32 percent of all one-family housing units in Massachusetts were still self-built: either built by their owners from foundation to roof or constructed under the full responsibility of the owner. By 1970 the proportion had gone down to 11 percent. Meanwhile, hous ing had been discovered as a major problem. The technological capability to produce tools and materials that favor self-building had increased in the intervening decades, but social arrangements–like unions, codes, mortgage rules, and markets–had turned against this choice. - -Most people do not feel at home unless a significant proportion of the value of their houses is the result of the input of their own labor. Convivial policies would define what people who want to house themselves cannot get, and thereby make sure that all can get access to some minimum of physical space, to water, some basic building elements, some convivial tools ranging from power drills to mechanized pushcarts, and, probably, to some limited credit. Such an inversion of the present policy could give a postindustrial society modern homes almost as desirable for its members as those which were standard for the old Mayas and are still the rule in Yucatán. - -Our present tools are engineered to deliver professional energies . Such energies come in quanta. Less than a quantum cannot be delivered. Less than four years of schooling is worse than none. It only defines the former pupil as a dropout. This is equally true in medicine, transportation, and housing, as in agriculture and in the administration of justice. Mechanical transportation is worthwhile only at certain speeds. Conflict resolution is effective only when the issue is of sufficient weight to justify the costs of court action. The planting of new grains is productive only if the acreage and capital of the farmer are beyond a certain size. Powerful tools created to achieve abstractly conceived social goals inevitably deliver their output in quanta that are beyond the reach of a majority. What is more, these tools are integrated. Access to key positions in government or industry is reserved to those who are certified consumers of high quanta of schooling. They are the individuals chosen to run the plantation of mutant rubber trees, and they need a car to rush from meeting to meeting. Productivity demands the output of packaged quanta of institutionally defined values, and productive management demands the access of an individual to all these packages at once. - -Professional goal-setting produces goods for an environment produced by other professions. Life that depends on high speed and apartment houses makes hospitals inevitable. By definition all these are scarce, and get even scarcer as they approach the standards set more recently by an ever-evolving profession; thereby each unit or quantum appearing on the market frustrates more people than it satisfies. - -A just society would be one in which liberty for one person is constrained only by the demands created by equal liberty for another . Such a society requires as a precondition an agreement excluding tools that by their very nature prevent such liberty. This is true for tools that are fundamentally purely social arrangements , such as the school system, as well as for tools that are physical machines. In a convivial society compulsory and open-ended schooling would have to be excluded for the sake of justice. Age-specific, compulsory competition on an unending ladder for lifelong privileges cannot increase equality but must favor those who start earlier, or who are healthier, or who are better equipped outside the classroom. Inevitably, it organizes society into many layers of failure, with each layer inhabited by dropouts schooled to believe that those who have consumed more education deserve more privilege because they are more valuable assets to society as a whole. A society constructed so that education by means of schools is a necessity for its functioning cannot be a just society. Power tools having certain structural characteristics are inevitably manipulative and must also be eliminated for the sake of justice. In a modern society, energy inputs represent one of the major new liberties. Each man’s ability to produce change depends on his ability to control low-entropy energy. On this control of energy depends his right to give his meaning to the physical environment . His ability to act toward the future he chooses depends on his control of the energy that gives shape to that future. Equal freedom in a society that uses large amounts of environmental energy means equal control over the transformation of that energy and not just an equal claim to what has been done with it. - -Most of the power tools now in use favor centralization of control. Industrial plants with their highly specialized tools give neither the worker nor most engineers a choice over what use will be made of the energy they manage. This is equally true, though less evident, of the high-powered consumer tools that dominate our society. Most of them, such as cars and air conditioners , are too costly to be available on an equal basis outside a few superrich societies. Others, such as mechanical household devices , are so specialized in nature that they in no way offer more freedom than much simpler hand tools. The monopoly of industrial production deprives even privileged clients of control over what they may get. Few people get the cars that most people want, and GM designers can only build vehicles to fit the existing roads. - -Nations and multinational corporations have become means for the spreading empire of international professions. Professional imperialism triumphs even where political and economic domination has been broken. Schools everywhere are governed by pedagogues who read the same books on learning theory and curriculum -planning. In a given year, schools produce more or less the same model of pupils in every nation. Nineteen-fifty graduates are as obsolete in Dakar as they are in Paris. The same iatrogenic sicknesses are produced all over the world by doctors who administer chloromycin or steroid pills. Every country tends to select those productive processes which are more capital-intensive and promise greater cost-benefit ratios, so that the same kind of technological unemployment is produced everywhere. Basic needs are defined as those that international professions can meet. Since the local production of these wares is to the advantage of highly schooled national élites, a country’s doctors, teachers, and engineers will defend it as an antidote to foreign domination. The knowledge-capitalism of professional imperialism subjugates people more imperceptibly than and as effectively as international finance or weaponry. - -The principal source of injustice in our epoch is political approval for the existence of tools that by their very nature restrict to a very few the liberty to use them in an autonomous way. The pompous rituals by which each man is given a vote to choose between factions only cover up the fact that the imperialism of industrial tools is both arbitrary and growing. Statistics which prove increased outputs and high per capita consumption of professionally defined quanta only veil the enormously high invisible costs. People get better education, better health, better transportation, better entertainment, and often even better nourishment only if the experts’ goals are taken as the measurement of what “better” means. The possibility of a convivial society depends therefore on a new consensus about the destructiveness of imperialism on three levels: the pernicious spread of one nation beyond its boundaries; the omnipresent influence of multinational corporations; and the mushrooming of professional monopolies over production. Politics for convivial reconstruction of society must especially face imperialism on this third level, where it takes the form of professionalism. The public ownership of resources and of the means of production, and public control over the market and over net transfers of power, must be complemented by a public determination of the tolerable basic structure of modern tools. This means that politics in a postindustrial society must be mainly concerned with the development of design criteria for tools rather than as now with the choice of production goals. These politics would mean a structural inversion of the institutions now providing and defining new man-made essentials. - -To invert politics, it will not be enough to show that a convivial life style is possible, or even to demonstrate that it is more attractive than life in a society ruled by industrial productivity. We cannot rest with the claim that this inversion would bring society closer to meeting the goals now stated as those of our major institutions . It is not even enough to show that a just or socially equal order can become a reality only through a convivial reconstruction of tools and the consequent redefinition of ownership and power. We need a way to recognize that the inversion of present political purpose is necessary for the survival of all people. - -Most people have staked their self-images in the present structure and are unwilling to lose their ground. They have found security in one of the several ideologies that support further industrialization . They feel compelled to push the illusion of progress on which they are hooked. They long for and expect increased satisfaction, with less input of human energy and with more division of competence. They value handicraft and personal care as luxuries, but the ideal of a more labor-intensive, yet modern, production process seems to them quixotic and anachronistic . - -It seems absurd to prepare politicians who have pledged themselves to increased outputs and better distribution of goods and services among their constituents for the day when a majority of voters will choose limits for all rather than promises of equal consumption. It appears equally hopeless to expect inverse insight from humanitarian liberals who have come to feel that feeding the starving millions is their vocation. They forget that people eat , and that people die when they are fed. These self- appointed keepers of their brothers make other people’s survival depend on their own growing efficiency. By shifting from the production of guns to the production of grains they reduce their sense of guilt and increase their sense of power. They are blind to the convergence of population growth and the failure of the green revolution, which guarantees that feeding people now will escalate starvation by 1985. Their hubris distracts them from understanding that only the renunciation of industrial expansion can bring food and population into a balance in the so-called backward countries. The attempt to feed people and to control their increase are two mutually reinforcing, and very dangerous, illusions. Nor can economists foresee institutional inversion when for them all institutions must be evaluated according to the increase in their planned output and their ability to externalize internal diseconomies in an unobtrusive way. The terms and frameworks of economics have been shaped by the ideology of an irresistible institutionalization of values that overarches otherwise opposed economic creeds. - -To translate the theoretical possibility of a postindustrial convivial life style into a political program for new tools, it must soon be shown that the prevailing fundamental structure of our present tools menaces the survival of mankind. It must be shown that this menace is imminent and that the effects of compulsive efficiency do more damage than good to most people in our generation . For this purpose we must identify the range within which our present institutions have become frustrating, and we must recognize another range within which our tools become destructive of society as a whole. - - - -## The Multiple Balance - -The human equilibrium is open. It is capable of shifting within flexible but finite parameters. People can change, but only within bounds. In contrast, the present industrial system is dynamically unstable. It is organized for indefinite expansion and the concurrent unlimited creation of new needs, which in an industrial environment soon become basic necessities. - -Once the industrial mode of production has become dominant in a society, it may still admit shifts from one type of output to another, but it does not admit limits to the further institutionalization of values. Such growth makes the incongruous demand that man seek his satisfaction by submitting to the logic of his tools. - -The demands made by tools on people become increasingly costly. This rising cost of fitting man to the service of his tools is reflected in the ongoing shift from goods to services in over-all production. Increasing manipulation of man becomes necessary to overcome the resistance of his vital equilibrium to the dynamic of growing industries; it takes the form of educational, medical, and administrative therapies. Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. The parallel increase in the cost of the defense of new levels of privilege through: military, police, and insurance measures reflects the fact that in a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. - -Political debate must now be focused on the various ways in which unlimited production threatens human life. This political debate will be misled by those who insist on prescribing palliatives which only disguise the deep reasons why the systems of health, transport, education, housing, and even politics and law are not working. The environmental crisis, for example, is rendered superficial if it is not pointed out that antipollution devices can only be effective if the total output of production decreases. Otherwise they tend to shift garbage out of sight, push it into the future, or dump it onto the poor. The total removal of the pollution created locally by a large-scale industry requires equipment, material, and energy that can create several times the damage elsewhere. Making antipollution devices compulsory only increases the unit cost of the product. This may conserve some fresh air for all, because fewer people can afford to drive cars or sleep in air-conditioned homes or fly to a fishing ground on the weekend, but it replaces damage to the physical environment with further social disintegration. To shift from coal to atomic power replaces smog now with higher radiation levels tomorrow. To relocate refineries overseas, where pollution controls are less stringent, preserves Americans–not Venezuelans–from unpleasant odors at the cost of higher levels of world-wide poisoning. - -The overgrowth of tools threatens persons in ways which are profoundly new, though they are also analogous to traditional forms of nuisance and tort. These threats are of a new kind, because their perpetrators and victims are the same people: both operators and clients of inexorably destructive tools. Though some people may cash in on the game at first, ultimately all lose everything they have. - -I will identify six ways in which all people of the world are threatened by industrial development after passage through the second watershed: (1) Overgrowth threatens the right to the fundamental physical structure of the environment with which man has evolved. (2) Industrialization threatens the right to convivial work. (3) The overprogramming of man for the new environment deadens his creative imagination. (4) New levels of productivity threaten the right to participatory politics. (5) Enforced obsolescence threatens the right to tradition: the recourse to precedent in language, myth, morals, and judgment. I will describe these five threats as distinct though interrelated categories all having in common a destructive inversion of means into ends. (6) Pervasive frustration by means of compulsory though engineered satisfaction constitutes a sixth and more subtle threat. - -I am typifying the hazards created by the overgrowth of tools in six categories chosen so the damages can be recognized in traditional terms. That impersonal tools placed at the service of the injured party should inevitably inflict the injury is new, but the damage which threatens each person is not. These six categories can serve in the recovery of procedural principles by which people can expose and redress the present imbalance in the functioning of tools. These underlying principles of moral, political, and juridical procedure I assume to be three: recognition of the legitimacy of personal conflict, the dialectic authority of history over present procedures, and the recourse to laymen or peers for binding policy decisions. The radical functional inversion of our major institutions constitutes a revolution much more profound than the shifts in ownership or power usually proposed. It can be neither envisaged nor enacted unless a basic structure of procedure is recovered and clearly agreed upon. This structure can even now be discussed in concrete terms. I will therefore refer to formal juristic concepts in illustrating my argument. - -### Biological Degradation - -The precarious balance between man and the biosphere has been recognized and has suddenly begun to worry many people. The degradation of the environment is dramatic and highly visible . For years car traffic in Mexico City increased steadily under a sparkling sky. Then, within a couple of years, smog descended and soon became worse than in Los Angeles. This phenomenon can be easily discussed and appreciated by people who have never studied science. Poisons of unknown potency are discharged into the biotic system of the earth. There is no way to retrieve some of them, nor any means to predict how some of them may suddenly combine their action so that the whole earth, like Lake Erie or Baikal, will die. Man has evolved to fit into one niche in the universe. The earth is his home. This home is now threatened by the impact of man. - -Overpopulation, excessive affluence, and faulty technology are usually identified as the three trends which combine and threaten to break the environmental balance. Paul Ehrlich points out that to face honestly the need for population control and stabilized consumption may “expose one to the painful criticism of being both anti-people and anti-poor,” but he also emphasizes that “these unpopular measures offer mankind’s only hope for averting unprecedented misery.” Ehrlich wants to implement birth control with industrial efficiency. Barry Commoner insists that faulty technology, the third element in the equation, accounts for most of the recent deterioration in the quality of the environment. He exposes himself to the criticism of being an antitechnological demagogue. Commoner wants to retool industry rather than invert the basic structure of our tools. - -Fascination with the environmental crisis has forced the debate about survival to focus on only one balance threatened by tools. A one-dimensional dispute is futile. Three trends have indeed been identified, each of them tending to upset the balance between man and the physical environment. Overpopulation makes more people dependent on limited resources. Affluence compels each person to use more energy. Faulty technology degrades energy in an inefficient way. - -If these three trends are considered to be the only significant threats, and the physical environment is considered as the only fundamental milieu that is threatened, only two central issues must be discussed: (1) To decide which factor or trend has degraded the environment most, and which factor will impose the greatest burden on the environment during the next few years. (2) To decide which factor merits most attention because we can in some way reduce or invert it. One party claims it is easier to do away with people, the other that it is more feasible to reduce entropy-producing production. - -Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit procreation, consumption, and waste, but equally we must radically reduce our expectations that machines will do our work for us or that therapists can make us learned or healthy. The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they could work together and care for each other. Such an inversion of the current world view requires intellectual courage for it exposes us to the unenlightened yet painful criticism of being not only antipeople and against economic progress, but equally against liberal education and scientific and technological advance. We must face the fact that the imbalance between man and the environment is just one of several mutually reinforcing stresses, each distorting the balance of life in a different dimension. In this view, overpopulation is the result of a distortion in the balance of learning, dependence on affluence is the result of a radical monopoly of institutional over personal values, and faulty technology is inexorably consequent upon a transformation of means into ends. - -The one-dimensional debate among proponents of various panaceas for the ecological imbalance will only inspire the false expectation that somehow human action can be engineered to fit into the requirements of the world conceived as a technological totality. Bureaucratically guaranteed survival under such circumstances means the expansion of industrial economics to the point where a centrally planned system of production and reproduction is identified with the guided evolution of the Earth. If such an industrially minded solution becomes generally accepted as the only way of preserving a viable environment, the preservation of the physical milieu can become the rationale for a bureaucratic Leviathan at the levers which regulate levels of human reproduction , expectation, production, and consumption. Such a technological response to growing population, pollution, and affluence can be founded only on a further development of the presently prevailing institutionalization of values. The belief in the possibility of this development is founded on an erroneous supposition , namely, that “The historical achievement of science and technology has rendered possible the translation of values into technical tasks –the materialization of values. Consequently, what is at stake is the redefinition of values in technical terms , as elements in technological process. The new ends, as technical ends, would then operate in the project and in the construction of the machinery, and not only in its utilization.”[^n02] - -The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. Otherwise man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit. Enveloped in a physical, social , and psychological milieu of his own making, he will be a prisoner in the shell of technology, unable to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and that only persons can work toward them. Machines only operate ruthlessly to reduce people to the role of impotent allies in their destructive progress. - -### Radical Monopoly - -When overefficient tools are applied to facilitate man’s relations with the physical environment, they can destroy the balance between man and nature. Overefficient tools corrupt the environment . But tools can also be made overefficient in quite a different way. They can upset the relationship between what people need to do by themselves and what they need to obtain ready-made. In this second dimension overefficient production results in radical monopoly. - -By radical monopoly I mean a kind of dominance by one product that goes far beyond what the concept of monopoly usually implies. Generally we mean by “monopoly” the exclusive control by one corporation over the means of producing (or selling) a commodity or service. Coca-Cola can create a monopoly over the soft-drink market in Nicaragua by being the only maker of soft drinks which advertises with modern means. Nestlé might impose its brand of cocoa by controlling the raw material, some car maker by restricting imports of other makes, a television channel by licensing. Monopolies of this kind have been recognized for a century as dangerous by-products of industrial expansion , and legal devices have been developed in a largely futile attempt to control them. Monopolies of this kind restrict the choices open to the consumer. They might even compel him to buy one product on the market, but they seldom simultaneously abridge his liberties in other domains. A thirsty man might desire a cold, gaseous, and sweet drink and find himself restricted to the choice of just one brand. He still remains free to quench his thirst with beer or water. Only if and when his thirst is translated without meaningful alternatives into the need for a Coke would the monopoly become radical. By “radical monopoly” I mean the dominance of one type of product rather than the dominance of one brand. I speak about radical monopoly when one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition. - -Cars can thus monopolize traffic. They can shape a city into their image–practically ruling out locomotion on foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles. They can eliminate river traffic in Thailand . That motor traffic curtails the right to walk, not that more people drive Chevies than Fords, constitutes radical monopoly. What cars do to people by virtue of this radical monopoly is quite distinct from and independent of what they do by burning gasoline that could be transformed into food in a crowded world. It is also distinct from automotive manslaughter. Of course cars burn gasoline that could be used to make food. Of course they are dangerous and costly. But the radical monopoly cars establish is destructive in a special way. Cars create distance. Speedy vehicles of all kinds render space scarce. They drive wedges of highways into populated areas, and then extort tolls on the bridge over the remoteness between people that was manufactured for their sake. This monopoly over land turns space into car fodder. It destroys the environment for feet and bicycles. Even if planes and buses could run as nonpolluting, nondepleting public services, their inhuman velocities would degrade man’s innate mobility and force him to spend more time for the sake of travel. - -Schools tried to extend a radical monopoly on learning by redefining it as education. As long as people accepted the teacher’s definition of reality, those who learned outside school were officially stamped “uneducated.” Modern medicine deprives the ailing of care not prescribed by doctors. Radical monopoly exists where a major tool rules out natural competence. Radical monopoly imposes compulsory consumption and thereby restricts personal autonomy. It constitutes a special kind of social control because it is enforced by means of the imposed consumption of a standard product that only large institutions can provide. - -The control of undertakers over burial shows how radical monopoly functions and how it differs from other forms of culturally defined behavior. A generation ago, in Mexico, only the opening of the grave and the blessing of the dead body were performed by professionals: the gravedigger and the priest. A death in the family created various demands, all of which could be taken care of within the family. The wake, the funeral, and the dinner served to compose quarrels, to vent grief, and to remind each participant of the fatality of death and the value of life. Most of these were of a ritual nature and carefully prescribed–different from region to region. Recently, funeral homes were established in the major cities. At first undertakers had difficulty finding clients because even in large cities people still knew how to bury their dead. During the sixties the funeral homes obtained control over new cemeteries and began offering package deals, including the casket, church service, and embalming. Now legislation is being passed to make the mortician’s ministrations compulsory. Once he gets hold of the body, the funeral director will have established a radical monopoly over burial, as medicine is at the point of establishing one over dying. - -The current debate over health-care delivery in the United States clearly illustrates the entrenchment of a radical monopoly. Each political party in the debate makes sick-care a burning public issue and thereby relegates health care to an area about which politics has nothing important to say. Each party promises more funds to doctors, hospitals, and drugstores. Such promises are not in the interest of the majority. They only serve to increase the power of a minority of professionals to prescribe the tools men are to use in maintaining health, healing sickness, and repressing death. More funds will strengthen the hold of the health industry over public resources and heighten its prestige and arbitrary power. Such power in the hands of a minority will produce only an increase in suffering and a decrease in personal self- reliance . More money will be invested in tools that only postpone unavoidable death and in services that abridge even further the civil rights of those who want to heal each other. More money spent under the control of the health profession means that more people are operationally conditioned into playing the role of the sick, a role they are not allowed to interpret for themselves. Once they accept this role, their most trivial needs can be satisfied only through commodities that are scarce by professional definition . - -People have a native capacity for healing, consoling, moving, learning, building their houses, and burying their dead. Each of these capacities meets a need. The means for the satisfaction of these needs are abundant so long as they depend primarily on what people can do for themselves, with only marginal dependence on commodities. These activities have use-value without having been given exchange-value. Their exercise at the service of man is not considered labor. - -These basic satisfactions become scarce when the social environment is transformed in such a manner that basic needs can no longer be met by abundant competence. The establishment of radical monopoly happens when people give up their native ability to do what they can do for themselves and for each other, in exchange for something “better” that can be done for them only by a major tool. Radical monopoly reflects the industrial institutionalization of values. It substitutes the standard package for the personal response. It introduces new classes of scarcity and a new device to classify people according to the level of their consumption . This redefinition raises the unit cost of valuable service, differentially rations privilege, restricts access to resources, and makes people dependent. Above all, by depriving people of the ability to satisfy personal needs in a personal manner, radical monopoly creates radical scarcity of personal–as opposed to institutional–service. - -Against this radical monopoly people need protection. They need this protection whether consumption is imposed by the private interests of undertakers, by the government for the sake of hygiene, or by the self-destructive collusion between the mortician and the survivors, who want to do the best thing for their dear departed. They need this protection even if the majority is now sold on the professional’s services. Unless the need for protection from radical monopoly is recognized, its multiple implementation can break the tolerance of man for enforced inactivity and passivity. - -It is not always easy to determine what constitutes compulsory consumption. The monopoly held by schools is not established primarily by a law that threatens punishment to parent or child for truancy. Such laws exist, but school is established by other tactics: by discrimination against the unschooled, by centralizing learning tools under the control of teachers, by restricting public funds earmarked for baby-sitting to salaries for graduates from normal schools. Protection against laws that impose education, vaccination, or life prolongation is important, but it is not sufficient. Procedures must be used that permit any party who feels threatened by compulsory consumption to claim protection, whatever form the imposition takes. Like intolerable pollution, intolerable monopoly cannot be defined in advance. The threat can be anticipated, but the definition of its precise nature can result only from people’s participation in deciding what may not be produced. - -Protection against this general monopoly is as difficult as protection against pollution. People will face a danger that threatens their own self-interest but not one that threatens society as a whole. Many more people are against cars than are against driving them. They are against cars because they pollute and because they monopolize traffic. They drive cars because they consider the pollution created by one car insignificant, and because they do not feel personally deprived of freedom when they drive. It is also difficult to be protected against monopoly when a society is already littered with roads, schools, or hospitals, when independent action has been paralyzed for so long that the ability for it seems to have atrophied, and when simple alternatives seem beyond the reach of the imagination. Monopoly is hard to get rid of when it has frozen not only the shape of the physical world but also the range of behavior and of imagination. Radical monopoly is generally discovered only when it is too late. - -Commercial monopoly is broken at the cost of the few who profit from it. Usually, these few manage to evade controls. The cost of radical monopoly is already borne by the public and will be broken only if the public realizes that it would be better off paying the costs of ending the monopoly than by continuing to pay for its maintenance. But the price will not be paid unless the public learns to value the potential of a convivial society over the illusion of progress. It will not be paid voluntarily by those who confuse conviviality with intolerable poverty. - -Some of the symptoms of radical monopoly are reaching public awareness, above all the degree to which frustration grows faster than output in even the most highly developed countries and under whatever political regime. Policies aimed to ease this frustration may easily distract attention from the general nature of the monopoly at its roots, however. The more these reforms succeed in correcting superficial abuses, the better they serve to bolster the monopoly I am trying to describe. - -The first palliative is consumer protection. Consumers cannot do without cars. They buy different makes. They discover that most cars are unsafe at any speed. So they organize to get safer, better, and more durable cars and to get more as well as wider and safer roads. Yet when consumers gain more confidence in cars, the victory only increases society’s dependence on high-powered vehicles–public or private–and frustrates even more those who have to, or would prefer to, walk. - -While the organized self-protection of the addict-consumer immediately raises the quality of the dope and the power of the peddler, it also may lead ultimately to limits on growth. Cars may finally become too expensive to purchase and medicines too expensive to test. By exacerbating the contradictions inherent in this institutionalization of values, majorities can more easily become aware of them. Discerning consumers who are discriminatory in their purchasing habits may finally discover that they can do better by doing things for themselves. - -The second palliative proposed to cure growing frustration with growing output is planning. The illusion is common that planners with socialist ideals might somehow create a socialist society in which industrial workers constitute a majority. The proponents of this idea overlook the fact that anticonvivial and manipulative tools can fit into a socialist society in only a very limited measure. Once transportation, education, or medicine is offered by a government free of cost, its use can be enforced by moral guardians. The underconsumer can be blamed for sabotage of the national effort. In a market economy, someone who wants to cure his flu by staying in bed will be penalized only through loss of income. In a society that appeals to the “people” to meet centrally determined production goals, resistance to the consumption of medicine becomes an act of public immorality. Protection against radical monopoly depends on a political consensus opposed to growth. Such a consensus is diametrically opposed to the issues now raised by political oppositions, since these converge in the demand to increase growth and to provide more and better things for more completely disabled people. - -Both the balance that defines man’s need for a hospitable environment and the balance that defines everyone’s need for authentic activity are now close to the breaking point. And still this danger does not concern most people. It must now be explained why most people are either blind to this threat or feel helpless to correct it. I believe that the blindness is due to the decline in a third balance–the balance of learning–and that the impotence people experience is the result of yet a fourth upset in what I call the balance of power. - -### Overprogramming - -The balance of learning is determined by the ratio of two kinds of knowledge in a society. The first is a result of the creative action of people on their environment, and the second represents the result of man’s “trivialization” by his manufactured milieu. Their first kind of knowledge is derived from the primary involvement of people with each other and from their use of convivial tools; the second accrues to them as a result of purposeful and programmed training to which they are subjected. Speaking the mother tongue is learned in the first way, while some pupils learn mathematics in the second. No sane person would say that speaking or walking or nursing a child is primarily the result of education, while competence in mathematics, ballet dancing, or painting usually is. - -The relation between what can be learned from ordinary living and what must be learned as a result of intentional teaching differs widely with place and time. It depends very much on rituals. All Muslims learn some Arabic as the result of prayer. This learning evolves from interaction in a context bounded by tradition. In much the same manner, peasants pick up the folklore of their region. Class and caste also generate opportunities to learn. The rich acquire “proper” table manners or accents and insist that these cannot be taught. The poor learn to fend in dignity where no education could teach the rich to survive. - -Crucial to how much anyone can learn on his own is the structure of his tools: the less they are convivial, the more they foster teaching. In limited and well-integrated tribes, knowledge is shared quite equally among most members. All people know most of what everybody knows. On a higher level of civilization, new tools are introduced; more people know more things, but not all know how to execute them equally well. Mastery of skill does not yet imply a monopoly of understanding. One can understand fully what a goldsmith does without being one oneself. Men do not have to be cooks to know how to prepare food. This combination of widely shared information and competence for using it is characteristic of a society in which convivial tools prevail. The techniques used are easily understood by observing the artisan at work, but the skills employed are complex and usually can be acquired only through lengthy and programmed apprenticeship. Total learning expands when the range of spontaneous learning widens along with access to an increasing number of taught skills and both liberty and discipline flower. This expansion of the balance of learning cannot go on forever; it is self-limiting. It can be optimized, but it cannot be forcibly extended. One reason is that man’s life span is limited. Another–just as inexorable–is that the specialization of tools and the division of labor reinforce each other. When centralization and specialization grow beyond a certain point, they require highly programmed operators and clients. More of what each man must know is due to what another man has designed and has the power to force on him. - -The city child is born into an environment made up of systems that have a different meaning for their designers than for their clients. The inhabitant of the city is in touch with thousands of systems, but only peripherally with each. He knows how to operate the TV or the telephone, but their workings are hidden from him. Learning by primary experience is restricted to self-adjustment in the midst of packaged commodities. He feels less and less secure in doing his own thing. Cooking, courtesy, and sex become subject matters in which instruction is required. The balance of learning deteriorates: it is skewed in favor of “ education .” People know what they have been taught, but learn little from their own doing. People come to feel that they need “ education .” - -Learning thus becomes a commodity, and, like any commodity that is marketed, it becomes scarce. The nature of this scarcity is hidden–at a high cost–by the many forms education takes. Education can be programmed preparation for life in the future in the form of packaged, serial instructions produced by schools, or it can be constant communication about ongoing life through the output of the media and through the instructions built into consumer goods. Sometimes these instructions are attached to the item and must be read. In more thoroughly designed goods, the shape, color, and provoked associations speak to the user about the way the item must be handled. Education can also become a periodic remedy for workers whose original training gets left behind by industrial innovation. When people become obsolete and need constantly to renew their educational security, when the accountant must be reprogrammed for each new generation of computers, then learning has indeed become scarce. Educator becomes the most vulnerable and confusing issue in the society. - -Everywhere the direct cost of training rises faster than the total output. This has been interpreted in either of two ways. One interpretation assumes that education is a means to a social end. From this perspective the capitalization of man through knowledge inputs is a necessary requirement for higher productivity. The disproportionate growth rate of the educational sector means total production is nearing an asymptote. To avoid this, ways must be found to increase the cost-benefit ratio in education. Schools will be the first victims of a drive for rationalization in the production of knowledge capital. In my opinion, this is unfortunate. Although the school is destructive and quite inefficient, its traditional character protects at least some rights of the pupil. Educators freed from the restraint of schools could be much more effective and deadly conditioners. - -The second interpretation starts from the opposite assumption. According to this view, education is the most valuable output of institutional growth. The transition to a stationary state in the production of goods and perhaps even of energy will usher in an explosive growth in the production of invisible commodities such as information, education, and fun. In this argument the marginal utility of education also decreases, but this is no reason to limit its production. Some economists go even further. In the name of a misnamed quality of life they want to put the breaks on the manufacturing sector when it interferes with the growth of the service sector, seemingly unaware of the stultifying effects of escalating treatments. In neither of these two views is a distinction made between learning by the use of convivial tools and learning through manipulation. Both views skew the balance of learning by increasing manipulative teaching and crushing autonomous questions. Those who treat education as a means for production and those who treat education as the supreme luxury product agree on the need for more education. They upset the balance of learning in favor of more teaching. They assume that a modern world is inevitably so alien that it has passed beyond the reach of people and can be known only by mystagogues and disciples. - -The transformation of learning into education paralyzes man’s poetic ability, his power to endow the world with his personal meaning. Man will wither away just as much if he is deprived of nature, of his own work, or of his deep need to learn what he wants and not what others have planned that he should learn. The overdetermination of the physical environment renders it hostile. Radical monopoly makes people prisoners of welfare. Men overwhelmed by commodities are rendered impotent and in their rage either kill or die. The corruption of the balance of learning makes people into puppets of their tools. - -Poets and clowns have always risen up against the oppression of creative thought by dogma. They expose literal-mindedness with metaphor. They demonstrate the follies of seriousness in a framework of humor. Their intimate wonder dissolves certainties, banishes fears, and undoes paralysis. The prophet can denounce creeds and expose superstitions and mobilize persons to use their lights and wits. Poetry, intuition, and theory can offer intimations of the advance of dogma against wit that may lead to a revolution in awareness. Only the separation of Church and State, of compulsory knowledge from political action, can redress the balance of learning. The law has been used, and can be used again, to this purpose. The law has protected societies against the exaggerated claims of its priests, and can protect it against the claims of educators. Compulsory school attendance or other compulsory treatment is analogous to compulsory attendance at a religious ritual. The law can disestablish it. The law can be used against the rising cost of education, and against the use of education in the reproduction of a class society. - -To understand the rising cost of education, we must recognize two facts: first, that nonconvivial tools create educational side effects which at some point become intolerable and, second, that education which employs nonconvivial tools is economically unfeasible . The first recognition opens our eyes to the possibility of a society where work and leisure and politics would favor learning and that could function with less formal education; the second recognition permits us to set up educational arrangements that favor self-initiated, self-chosen learning, and that relegate programmed teaching to limited, clearly specified occasions. - -Throughout the world, highly capitalized tools require highly capitalized men. Following the Second World War, economic development penetrated even “backward” areas. Spot industrialization created an intense demand for schools to program people not only to operate but also to live with their new tools. The establishment of more schools in Malaysia or Brazil teaches people the accountant’s view of the value of time, the bureaucrat’s view of the value of promotion, the salesman’s view of the value of increased consumption, and the union leader’s view of the purpose of work. People are taught all this not by the teacher but by the curriculum hidden in the structure of school. It does not matter what the teacher teaches so long as the pupil has to attend hundreds of hours of age-specific assemblies to engage in a routine decreed by the curriculum and is graded according to his ability to submit to it. People learn that they acquire more value in the market if they spend more hours in class. They learn to value progressive consumption of curricula. They learn that whatever a major institution produces has value, even invisible things such as education or health. They learn to value grade advancement, passive submission, and even the standard misbehavior that teachers like to interpret as a sign of creativity. They learn disciplined competition for the favor of the bureaucrat who presides over their daily sessions, who is called their teacher as long as they are in class and their boss when they go to work. They learn to define themselves as holders of knowledge stock in the specialty in which they have made investments of their time. They learn to accept their place in society precisely in the class and career corresponding to the level at which they leave school and to the field of their academic specialization. - -Industrial jobs are arranged so that the better-schooled fit into the scarcer slots. Scarce jobs are defined as more productive, so people with less schooling are barred from access to the more desirable goods produced in the new industries. Industrially produced shoes, bags, clothes, frozen foods, and soft drinks drive off the market equivalent goods that had been convivially produced . As production becomes more centralized and more capital-intensive , the screening process performed by tax-supported schools not only costs more for those who get through it, but double-charges those who do not. - -Education becomes necessary not only to grade people for jobs but to upgrade them for consumption. As industrial output rises, it pushes the education system to exercise the social control necessary for its efficient use. The housing industry in Latin-American countries is a good example of the educational diseconomies produced by architects. All the major cities in such countries are surrounded by vast tracts of self-built favelas, barriadas, or pobla ciones . Components for new houses and utilities could be made very cheaply and designed for self-assembly. People could build more durable, more comfortable, and more sanitary dwellings, as well as learn about new materials and systems. But instead of supporting the ability of people to shape their own environment , the government deposits in these shantytowns public utilities designed for people who live in standard modern houses. The presence of a new school, a paved road, and a glass-and-steel police station defines the professionally built house as the functional unit, and stamps the self-built home a shanty. The law establishes this definition by refusing a building permit to people who cannot submit a plan signed by an architect. People are deprived of their ability to invest their own time with the power to produce use-value, and are compelled to work for wages and to exchange their earnings for industrially defined rented space. They are deprived also of the opportunity to learn while building . - -Industrial society demands that some people be taught before they can drive a truck and that other people be taught before they can build a house. Others must be taught how to live in apartment buildings. Teachers, social workers, and policemen cooperate to keep people who have low-paying or occasional jobs in houses they may not build or change. To accommodate more people on less land, Venezuela and Brazil experimented with high-rise tenements. First, the police had to dislodge people from their “slums” and resettle them in apartments. Then the social workers had to socialize tenants who lacked sufficient schooling to understand that pigs may not be raised on eleventh-floor balconies nor beans cultivated in their bathtubs. - -In New York people with less than twelve years of schooling are treated like cripples: they tend to be unemployable, and are controlled by social workers who decide for them how to live. The radical monopoly of overefficient tools exacts from society the increasing and costly conditioning of clients. Ford produces cars that can be repaired only by trained mechanics. Agriculture departments turn out high-yield crops that can be used only with the assistance of farm managers who have survived an expensive school race. The production of better health, higher speeds, or greater yields depends on more disciplined recipients. The real cost of these doubtful benefits is hidden by unloading much of them on the schools that produce social control. - -Pressure for more and better conditioning of people in the name of education has led schools over their second watershed. Planners make programs more varied and complex, but their marginal utility thereby declines. Compulsory attendance has been extended to the point that it now can be defined by teachers as independent study on the city streets, or as a field project supervised by the weavers of Teotitlán del Valle. - -Parallel with the growing pretensions of school, other agencies discovered their educational mission. Newspapers, television, and radio were no longer just media of communication. They were pressed into the service of socialization. Periodicals expanded to accommodate all fit news, which meant that a few professional journalists got vast readerships, while the majority was reduced to token representation in the “Letters to the Editor” section. - -The industrial manufacture and marketing of knowledge reduce the access of people to convivial tools for self-initiated learning . Witness the fate of the book. The book is the result of two major inventions that enormously extended the balance of learning : the alphabet and the printing press. Both techniques are almost ideally convivial. Almost anybody can learn to use them, and for his own purpose. They use cheap materials. People can take them or leave them as they wish. They are not easily controlled by third parties. Even the Soviet government cannot stop the samizdat circulation of subversive typescripts. - -The alphabet and the printing press have in principle deprofessionalized the recorded word. With the alphabet the merchant broke the monopoly of the priest over hieroglyphs. With cheap paper and pencil, and later with the typewriter and modern copying devices, a set of new techniques had in principle opened the era of nonprofessional, truly convivial, communication by record. The tape recorder and camera added new media to fully interactive communication. Yet the manipulative nature of institutions and schooling for the acceptance of manipulation have put these ideally convivial tools at the service of more one-way teaching. Schools train people in the use of constantly revised textbooks. They produce readers of instructions and of news. The per capita purchase of nontechnical books by high-school graduates declines with the increased percentage of people who finish high school. More books are written for the school-trained specialist , and the self-initiated reading of books declines. More people spend more time hooked on the curriculum defined by new principals: the publisher, the producer, and the program director. Every week they wait for Time. - -Even the library has become a component of a schooled world. As the library got “better,” the book was further withdrawn from the handy bookshelf. The reference librarian placed himself between people and shelves; now he is being replaced by the computer . Putting the book into huge deposits and into the hands of computers, the New York Public Library has become so expensive to operate that it now opens only from ten to six weekdays and is open only partially on Saturdays. This means that its books have become the specialized tool of readers who live on a grant to stay away from work and school. - -At its best the library is the prototype of a convivial tool. Repositories for other learning tools can be organized on its model, expanding access to tapes, pictures, records, and very simple labs filled with the same scientific instruments with which most of the major breakthroughs of the last century were made. - -Manipulative teaching tools raise the cost of learning. Now we only ask what people have to learn and then invest in a means to teach them. We should learn to ask first what people need if they want to learn and provide these tools for them. Professional teachers laugh at the idea that people would learn more from random access to learning resources than they can be taught. In fact, they frequently cite as proof for their skepticism the declining use of libraries. They overlook the fact that libraries are little used because they have been organized as formidable teaching devices. Libraries are not used because people have been trained to demand that they be taught. Neither are contraceptives, and for analogous reasons we have to explore. - -People must learn to live within bounds. This cannot be taught. Survival depends on people learning fast what they can not do. They must learn to abstain from unlimited progeny, consumption , and use. It is impossible to educate people for voluntary poverty or to manipulate them into self-control. It is impossible to teach joyful renunciation in a world totally structured for higher output and the illusion of declining costs. - -People must learn why and how to practice contraception. The reason is clear. Man has evolved in a small corner of the universe. His world is bounded by the resources of the ecosphere, and can accommodate only a limited number of people. Technology has transformed the characteristics of this niche. The ecosphere now accommodates a larger number of people, each less vitally adapted to the environment–each on the average having less space, less freedom to survive with simple means, fewer roots in tradition. The attempt to make a better environment has turned out to be as presumptuous as the attempt to create better health, education, or communication. As a result there are now more people, most of them less at home in the world. This large population can survive because of new tools. In turn, it spurs the search for even more powerful tools, and thereby demands more radical monopoly; this monopoly, in its turn, calls for more and more education. But, paradoxically, what people most need to learn, they cannot be taught or educated to do. If they are voluntarily to keep their numbers and consumption within bounds, they must learn to do so by living active and responsible lives, or they will perish–passive though well informed, frustrated yet resigned. Voluntary and therefore effective population control is impossible under conditions of radical monopoly and overprogramming. An efficient, specialized birth control program must fail in the same way that schools and hospitals fail. It can start with a futile attempt at effective seduction. It will logically escalate to enforced sterilization and abortion. Finally, it will provide a rationale for mega-deaths. - -Voluntary and effective contraception is now absolutely necessary . If such contraception is not practiced in the very near future , humanity is in danger of being crushed by its own size rather than by the power of its tools. But this universal practice cannot possibly be the result of some miracle tool. A new practice, inverse to the present, can only be the result of a new relationship between people and their tools. The universal practice of effective contraception is a necessary premise for the limitation of tools which I advocate. But equally, the psychological inversion that will accompany a limitation of tools is a premise for the convivial psychological pressure necessary for effective contraception. - -The devices needed for birth control are a paradigm for modern convivial tools. They incorporate science in instruments that can be handled by any reasonably prudent and well-apprenticed person. They provide new ways to engage in the millenary practice of contraception, sterilization, and abortion. They are cheap enough to be made universally available. They are made to fit alternate tasks, beliefs, and situations. They are obviously tools that structure the bodily relationship of each individual to himself and to others. To be effective, some must be used by every adult, and many of them must be used every day. Birth control is an immense task. It must be accomplished within one decade. It can be accomplished only in a convivial manner. It is ridiculous to try to control populations with tools which by their nature are convivial while conditioning the population by formal education to fit more effectively into an industrial and professional world. It is absurd to expect that Brazilian peasants can be taught to depend on doctors for injections and prescriptions, on lawyers for conflict resolution, and on teachers for learning to read, while asking them to use the condom on their own. But it is equally fanciful to expect that Indian doctors will allow illiterate but well-trained hospital assistants to compete with them in the performance of sterilizations. If the public realized that this delicate intervention could be equally or even more carefully performed by a layman whose attention, dexterity, and programming skills were refined in the weaving of saris, doctors would lose their monopoly on all interventions which are economically feasible for any majority of people. Professional taboos and industrial tools stand and fall together once truly rational, postindustrial tools are available. Only the convergent use of convivial tools in all significant areas of need-satisfaction can render their use in each sector truly effective. Only among convivially structured tools can people learn to use the new levels of power that modern technology can incorporate in them. - -### Polarization - -The present organization of tools impels societies to grow both in population and in levels of affluence. This growth takes place at the opposite ends of the privilege spectrum. The underprivileged grow in number, while the already privileged grow in affluence. The underprivileged thus strengthen their frustrating claims, while the rich defend their presumed rights and needs. Hunger and impotence lead the poor to demand rapid industrialization , and the defense of growing luxuries pushes the rich into more frantic production. Power is polarized, frustration is generalized, and the alternative of greater happiness at lower affluence is pushed into the blind spot of social vision. - -This blindness is a result of the broken balance of learning. People who are hooked on teaching are conditioned to be customers for everything else. They see their own personal growth as an accumulation of institutional outputs, and prefer what institutions make over what they themselves can do. They repress the ability to discover reality by their own lights. The skewed balance of learning explains why the radical monopoly of commodities has become imperceptible. It does not explain why people feel impotent to correct those profound disorders which they do perceive. - -This helplessness is the result of a fourth disruption: the growing polarization of power. Under the pressure of an expanding mega-machine, power is concentrated in a few hands, and the majority becomes dependent on handouts. New levels of luxuriant overproduction grow faster than the output of commodities which this wanton production imposes. - -A 3 percent increase in the standard of living of the U.S. population costs twenty-five times as much as a similar increase in the living standard of India, despite the greater size and more rapid growth of the Indian population. Significant benefits for the poor demand a reduction of the resources used by the rich, while significant benefits for the rich make murderous demands on the resources of the poor. Yet the rich pretend that by exploiting the poor nations they will become rich enough to create a hyperindustrial abundance for all. The élites of poor countries share this fantasy. - -The rich will get richer and many more of the poor will become destitute during the next ten years. But anguish about the hungry should not prevent us from understanding the structural problem of power distribution that constitutes the fourth dimension of destructive overgrowth. Unchecked industrialization modernizes poverty. Poverty levels rise and the gap between rich and poor widens. These two aspects must be seen together or the nature of destructive polarization will be missed. - -Poverty levels rise because industrial staples are turned into basic necessities and have a unit cost beyond what a majority could ever pay. The radical monopoly of industries has created new types of demeaning poverty in societies of sometimes profligate affluence. The former subsistence farmer is put out of business by the green revolution. He earns more as a laborer, but he cannot give his children their former diet. More importantly, the U.S. citizen with ten times his income is also desperately poor. Both get increasingly less at greater cost. - -The other side of modernized poverty is related but distinct. The power gap widens because control over production is centralized to make the most goods for the greatest number. Whereas rising poverty levels are due to the structure of industrial outputs, the gaping power lag is due to the structure of inputs. To seek remedies for the former without simultaneously dealing with the latter would only postpone and aggravate the world-wide modernization of poverty. - -The surface effects of industrially concentrated power can be obviated by income equalization. Progressive taxes without loopholes can be supplemented by social security, income supports, and equal welfare benefits for all. Confiscation of private capital beyond a certain limit can be attempted. Keeping maximum close to minimum income is an even tougher way to stem personal enrichment through the management of corporate power. But such curbs on personal income will be effective only in regulating private consumption. It has no effect on equalizing the privileges that really count in a society where the job has become more important than the home. As long as workers are graded by the amount of manpower capital they represent, those who hold high denominations of knowledge stock will be certified for the use of all kinds of timesaving privileges. The concentration of privileges on a few is in the nature of industrial dominance. - -With the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry, patriarchal government and some centralization of power became feasible . At this stage political means could be used to get the power of many slaves under one man’s control. One man could transform a multitude into a tool for the realization of his design. Religion, ideology, and the whip were the principal means of control. But the amount of power controlled was small. The centralization of power which now seems normal could not have been imagined even a century ago. - -In modern society, energy conversion enormously exceeds the body power of all men. Manpower stands to mechanical power in a ratio of 1:15 in China and 1:300 in the U.S.A. Switches concentrate the control over this power more effectively than whips ever could. The social distribution of control over power inputs has been radically changed. If capital means the power to make effective change, power inflation has reduced most people to paupers. - -As tools get bigger, the number of potential operators declines. There are always fewer operators of cranes than of wheelbarrows. As tools become more efficient, more scarce resources are put at the service of the operator. On a Guatemalan construction site, only the engineer gets air conditioning in his trailer. He is also the only one whose time is deemed so precious that he must be flown to the capital, and whose decisions seem so important that they are transmitted by shortwave radio. He has of course earned his privileges by cornering the largest amount of tax money and using it to acquire a university degree. The Indio who works on the gang does not notice the relative increase in privilege between him and his Ladino gang boss, but the geometricians and draftsmen who also went to school, but did not graduate, feel the heat and the distance from their families in a new and acute way. Their relative poverty has been aggravated by their bosses’ claim to greater efficiency. - -Never before have tools approached present power. Never before have they been so integrated at the service of a small élite. Kings could not claim divine right with as little challenge as executives claim services for the sake of greater production. The Russians justify supersonic transport by saying it will economize the time of their scientists. High-speed transportation, broad band-width communication, special health maintenance, and unlimited bureaucratic assistance are all explained as requirements to get the most out of the most highly capitalized people. - -A society with very large tools must rely on multiple devices to keep the majority from claiming the most expensive packages of privilege. These must be reserved for the most productive individuals . The most prestigious way to measure a person’s productivity is by the price tag on his education consumption. The higher a person’s knowledge capital, the greater the social value placed on the decisions he “makes” and the more legitimate is his claim to high-level packages of industrial outputs. - -When the legitimacy of educational certification breaks down, other more primitive forms of discrimination are bound to assume renewed importance. People are judged to be less valuable manpower because they are born in the Third World, because they are black, because they are women, because they belong to the wrong group or party, or because they cannot pass the right battery of tests. The scene is set for the multiplication of minority movements, each one claiming its share, and each one destined to be foiled by its own intent. - -Hierarchies must rise and conglomerate as they extend over fewer and larger corporations. A seat in a high-rise job is the most coveted and contested product of expanding industry. The lack of schooling, compounded with sex, color, and peculiar persuasions , now keeps most people down. Minorities organized by women, or blacks, or the unorthodox succeed at best in getting some of their members through school and into an expensive job. They claim victory when they get equal pay for equal rank. Paradoxically, these movements strengthen the idea that unequal graded work is necessary and that high-rise hierarchies are necessary to produce what an egalitarian society needs. If properly schooled, the black porter will blame himself for not being a black lawyer. At the same time, schooling generates a new intensity of frustration which ultimately can act as social dynamite. - -It does not matter for what specific purpose minorities now organize if they seek an equal share in consumption, an equal place on the pyramid of production, or equal nominal power in the government of ungovernable tools. As long as a minority acts to increase its share within a growth-oriented society, the final result will be a keener sense of inferiority for most of its members. - -Movements that seek control over existing institutions give them a new legitimacy, and also render their contradictions more acute. Changes in management are not revolutions. The shared control of workers and women, or blacks and the young, does not constitute a social reconstruction if what they claim to control are industrial corporations. Such changes are at best new ways to administer an industrial mode of production which, thanks to these shifts, continues unchallenged. More commonly, these changes are professional insurgencies against the status quo. They expand management, and, at an even faster rate, they degrade labor. A new desk usually means more capital-intensive production in one firm and a new guarantee of so-called underemployment somewhere else in society. A majority loses further productive ability, and a minority is forced to seek new reasons and weapons to protect its privilege. - -New classes of underconsumers and of underemployed are one of the inevitable by-products of industrial progress. Organization makes them aware of their common plight. At present articulate minorities–often claiming the leadership of majorities–seek equal treatment. If one day they were to seek equal work rather than equal pay–equal inputs rather than equal outputs–they could be the pivot of social reconstruction. Industrial society could not possibly resist a strong women’s movement, for example, which would lead to the demand that all people, without distinction, do equal work. Women are integrated into all classes and races. Most of their daily activities are performed in nonindustrial ways. Industrial societies remain viable precisely because women are there to perform those daily tasks which resist industrialization. It is easier to imagine that the North American continent would cease to exploit the underindustrialization of South America than that it would cease to use its women for industry-resistant chores. In a society ruled by the standards of industrial efficiency, housework is rendered inhuman and devalued. It would be rendered even less tolerable if it were given pro-forma industrial status. The further expansion of industry would be brought to a halt if women forced upon us the recognition that society is no longer viable if a single mode of production prevails. The effective recognition that not two but several equally valuable, dignified , and important modes of production must coexist within any viable society would bring industrial expansion under control . Growth would stop if women obtained equally creative work for all, instead of demanding equal rights over the gigantic and expanding tools now appropriated by men. - -### Obsolescence - -Convivial reconstruction demands the disruption of the present monopoly of industry, but not the abolition of all industrial production. It does imply the adoption of labor-intensive tools, but not the regression to inefficient tools. It requires a considerable reduction of all kinds of now compulsory therapy, but not the elimination of teaching, guidance, or healing for which individuals take personal responsibility. Neither must a convivial society be stagnant. Its dynamics depend on wide distribution of the power to make effective change. In the present scheme of large-scale obsolescence a few corporate centers of decision- making impose compulsory innovation on the entire society. Continued convivial reconstruction depends on the degree to which society protects the power of individuals and of communities to choose their own styles of life through effective, small-scale renewal . - -I have shown that social polarization is the result of two complementary factors: the excessive cost of industrially produced and advertised products, and the excessive rarity of jobs that are considered highly productive. Obsolescence, on the other hand, produces devaluation–which is the result not of a certain general rate of change but of change in those products which exercise a radical monopoly. Social polarization depends on the fact that industrial inputs and outputs come in units so large that most people are excluded from them. Obsolescence, on the other hand, can become intolerable even when people are not directly priced out of the market. Product elaboration and obsolescence are two distinct dimensions of overefficiency, both of which underpin a society of hierarchically layered privilege. - -It does not really matter if forced obsolescence becomes destructive of old models or of old functions, if Ford discontinues the distribution of spare parts for its 1955 model, or if the police rule old cars off the road because they lack features that safety lobbyists have made standard. Renewal is intrinsic to the industrial mode of production coupled to the ideology of progress. Products cannot be improved unless huge machines are retooled –and in the technical sense engineers have given this word. To make this pay, huge markets must be created for the new model. The most effective way to open a market is to identify the use of what is new as an important privilege. If this identification succeeds, the old model is devalued and the self-interest of the consumer is wedded to the ideology of never-ending and progressive consumption . Individuals are socially graded according to the number of years their bill of goods is out of date. Some people can afford to keep up with the Joneses who buy the latest model, while others still use cars, stoves, and radios that are five to ten years old–and probably spend their vacations in places that are just as many years out of style. They know where they fit on the social ladder. - -The social grading of individuals by the age of the things they use is not just a capitalist practice. Wherever the economy is built around the large-scale production of elaborate and obsolescent packages of staples, it is only the privileged who have access to the newest model of services and goods. Only a few nurses get the most recent course in anesthesiological nursing, and only a few functionaries get the new model of a “people’s car.” The members of this minority within a minority recognize each other by the recent date at which the products they use came onto the market, and it makes little difference whether they use them at home or at work. - -Industrial innovations are costly, and managers must justify their high cost by producing measurable proof of their superiority . Under the rule of industrial socialism, pseudo science will have to provide the alibi, while in market economies, appeal can be made to a survey of consumer opinion. In any case, periodic innovations in goods or tools foster the belief that anything new will be proven better. This belief has become an integral part of the modern world view. It is forgotten that whenever a society lives by this delusion, each marketed unit generates more wants than it satisfies. If new things are made because they are better, then the things most people use are not quite good. New models constantly renovate poverty. The consumer feels the lag between what he has and what he ought to get. He believes that products can be made measurably more valuable and allows himself to be constantly re-educated for their consumption. The “better” replaces the “good” as the fundamental normative concept. - -In a society caught up in the race for the better, limits on change are experienced as a threat. The commitment to the better at any cost makes the good impossible at all costs. Failure to renew the bill of goods frustrates the expectation of what is possible , while renewal of the bill of goods intensifies the expectations of unattainable progress. What people have and what they are about to get are equally exasperating to them. Accelerating change has become both addictive and intolerable. At this point the balance among stability, change, and tradition has been upset; society has lost both its roots in shared memories and its bearings for innovation. Judgment on precedents has lost its value. - -One of the major objections against a stationary-state economy is the fear that the production of a limited and durable number of goods would set intolerable limits on the freedom of innovation and of scientific exploration. This would be justified if I were discussing the transition from the present industrial society to its next model: clean and limited production of goods and unlimited growth in the service sector. I am not, however, discussing the evolution of industrial society, but the transition to a new mixed mode of production. - -Industrial innovations are planned, trivial, and conservative. The renewal of convivial tools would be as unpredictable, creative , and lively as the people who use them. Scientific progress is also dulled by the present identification of research with industrial development. Most of the cost of research derives from its competitive nature and pressure; most of its tools are restricted to people who have been carefully programmed to look at the world through the prisms of profit and power; most of its goals are set by the need for more power and efficiency. Leisurely scientific research does not exclude a bevatron or some ultracentrifuges ; removal of access restrictions now created by schools would again admit the curious, rather than the orthodox, to the alchemist’s vault; and study for its own sake would produce more surprises than team research on how to eliminate production snags. - -A changeless society would be as intolerable for people as the present society of constant change. Convivial reconstruction requires limits on the rate of compulsory change. An unlimited rate of change makes lawful community meaningless. Law is based on the retrospective judgment of peers about circumstances that occur ordinarily and are likely to occur again. If the rate of change which affects all circumstances accelerates beyond some point, such judgments cease to be valid. Lawful society breaks down. Social control does not accommodate community participation and becomes the function of experts. Educators define how people are to be trained and retrained throughout their lives–shaped and reshaped until they fit the demands of industry and are attracted by its profits. Ideologues define what is right or wrong. The tooling of man for the milieu becomes the major industry when this milieu changes beyond a certain rate; then man’s need for language and law, for memories and myths, imposes limits to the change of tools. - -### Frustration - -I have identified five realms in each of which the efficiency of tools can upset the balance of life. Faulty technology can render the environment uninhabitable. Radical monopoly can force the demand for affluence to the point of paralyzing the ability to work. Overprogramming can transform the world into a treatment ward in which people are constantly taught, socialized, normalized, tested, and reformed. Centralization and packaging of institutionally produced values can polarize society into irreversible structural despotism. And, finally, engineered obsolescence can break all bridges to a normative past. In each or several of these dimensions a tool can threaten survival by making it unfeasible for most people to relate themselves in action to one of the great dimensions of their environment. - -In the assessment of society it is not sufficient to select just one of these realms. Each one of these balances must be preserved. Even clean and equally distributed electricity could lead to intolerable radical monopoly of power tools over man’s personal energy. Not only compulsory schools but pervasive teaching media can be used to upset the balance of learning or to polarize society into an oppressive meritocracy. Any form of engineering can lead to unendurable obsolescence. It is true that man’s physical niche is threatened; but just as he evolved within one particular physiological environment, so he also evolved within a social, political and psychological environment which can also be irreversibly destroyed. Mankind may wither and disappear because he is deprived of basic structures of language, law, and myth, just as much as he can be smothered by smog. Future shock can destroy what is human just as much as radical monopoly or social polarization . - -I have argued that in each of five realms conceptual criteria can be used to recognize escalating imbalance. These criteria serve as guidelines for political processes by which the members of a technological society can develop constitutive boundaries within which tools must be kept. Such boundaries circumscribe the kind of power structures that can be kept under the control of people. By growing beyond this range, tools escape political control. Man’s ability to claim his rights is extinguished by his bondage to processes over which he has no say. Biological functions, work, meaning, freedom, and roots–insofar as he can still enjoy them–are reduced to concessions, which optimize the logic of tools. Man is reduced to an indefinitely malleable resource of a corporate state. Without constitutive limits translated into constitutional provisions survival in dignity and freedom is squelched. - -Present research is overwhelmingly concentrated in two directions : research and development for breakthroughs to the better production of better wares and general systems analysis concerned with protecting man for further consumption. Future research ought to lead in the opposite direction; let us call it counterfoil research. Counterfoil research also has two major tasks: to provide guidelines for detecting the incipient stages of murderous logic in a tool; and to devise tools and tool systems that optimize the balance of life, thereby maximizing liberty for all. - -Counterfoil research is not a new branch of science, nor is it some interdisciplinary project. It is the dimensional analysis of the relationship of man to his tools. It seems obvious that each person lives in several concentric social environments. To each social environment there corresponds a set of natural scales. This is true for the primary group, for the production unit, for the city, the state, and the organization of men on the globe. To each of these social environments there correspond certain characteristic distances, periods, populations, energy sources, and energy sinks. In each of these dimensions tools that require time periods or spaces or energies much beyond the order of corresponding natural scales are dysfunctional. They upset the homeostasis which renders the particular environment viable. At present we tend to define human needs in terms of abstract goals and treat these as problems to which technocrats can apply escalating solutions. What we need is rational research on the dimensions within which technology can be used by concrete communities to implement their aspirations without frustrating equivalent aspirations by others. - -The barriers beyond which destruction looms are of a different nature from the boundaries within which a society freely constrains its tools. The former establish the realm of possible survival ; the latter determine the shape of a culturally preferred environment . The former define the conditions for uniform regimentation ; the latter set the conditions of convivial justice. The boundaries of doom are constitutive requirements common to all postindustrial societies. Statutory characteristics setting more narrow bounds than those absolutely necessary are the result of joint options made in a commonweal, as a result of its members’ defining their life style and their level of liberty. - -Supersonic transports could be easily ruled out to protect the environment, air transport to avoid social polarization, cars to protect against radical monopoly. The balance of purpose I want to highlight at this point provides a further criterion by which to select desirable tools. In view of this balance it might even be possible to exclude public transportation moving at high velocity. - -There is a form of malfunction in which growth does not yet tend toward the destruction of life, yet renders a tool antagonistic to its specific aims. Tools, in other words, have an optimal, a tolerable, and a negative range. Tolerable overefficiency also disturbs a balance, but a balance of a subtler and more subjective kind than those discussed before. The balance here threatened is that between personal cost and return. It can be expressed more generally as the perception of the balance between means and ends. When ends become subservient to the tools choosen for their sake, the user first feels frustration and finally either abstains from their use or goes mad. Compulsory maddening behavior in Hades was considered the ultimate punishment reserved for blasphemy . Sisyphus was forced to keep rolling a stone uphill, only to see it roll back down. When maddening behavior becomes the standard of a society, people learn to compete for the right to engage in it. Envy blinds people and makes them compete for addiction. - -Wherever the maximum velocity of any one type of commuter vehicle grows beyond a certain mph, the travel time and the cost of transportation for the median commuter is increased. If the maximum velocity at any one point of a commuter system goes beyond a certain mph, most people are obliged to spend more time in traffic jams, or waiting for connections, or recovering from accidents. They will also have to spend more time paying for the transportation system they are compelled to use. - -The critical velocity depends to a certain extent on a variety of factors: geography, culture, market controls, level of technology, and money flow. With so many variables affecting a quantity, it would seem that its value could fluctuate over a very wide range. Just the contrary is true. Once it is understood that we refer to any vehicular velocity in the transportation of people within a community, we find that the range within which the critical velocity can vary is very narrow. It is, in fact, so narrow and so low that it seems improbable and not worth the time of most traffic engineers to worry about. - -Commuter transportation leads to negative returns when it admits, anywhere in the system, speeds much above those reached on a bicycle. Once the barrier of bicycle velocity is broken at any point in the system, the total per capita monthly time spent at the service of the travel industry increases. - -High output leads to time lack. Time becomes scarce, partly because it takes time to consume goods and to undergo therapies, and partly because dependence on production makes abstention from it more costly. The richer we get in a consumer society, the more acutely we become aware of how many grades of value–of both leisure and labor–we have climbed. The higher we are on the pyramid, the less likely we are to give up time to simple idleness and to apparently nonproductive pursuits. The joy of listening to the neighborhood finch is easily overshadowed by stereophonic recordings of “Bird Songs of the World,” the walk through the park downgraded by preparations for a packaged bird-watching tour into the jungle. It becomes difficult to economize time when all commitments are for the long run. Staffan Linder points out that there is a strong tendency for us to overcommit the future, so that when the future becomes present, we seem to be conscious all the time of having an acute scarcity, simply because we have committed ourselves to about thirty hours a day instead of twenty-four. In addition to the mere fact that time has competitive uses and high marginal utility in an affluent society, this overcommitment creates a sense of pressure and harriedness. - -Life in a society where speedy transportation is taken for granted renders time scarce in both of these ways. Activities related to the use of speedy vehicles by many people in a society occupy an increasing percentage of the time budget of most members of that society, as the speed of the vehicles increases beyond a certain point. Beyond this point the competition of transportation activities with stationary activities becomes fierce, especially competition for the allocation of limited real estate and available energy. This competition seems to grow exponentially with the rise of speed. The time reserved for commuting displaces both work and leisure time. Hence, the speedier vehicles are, the more it becomes important to keep them filled at all times. If they are individual capsules, they tend to become disproportionately costly and scarce. If they are public vehicles, they tend to be large, and run at infrequent intervals or along only a few routes. - -As speed increases, the adaptation of life patterns to vehicles becomes more tyrannical. It becomes necessary to make constant corrections and amendments to the allocation of shorter periods. It becomes necessary to make appointments and commitments months or even years ahead. Since some of these commitments, which have been made at great cost, cannot be kept, there is a sense of constant failure which produces a sense of constant tension . Man has only a limited ability to submit to programming. When speed increases beyond a certain point, the transportation system vies with other systems in exhausting human tolerance for social controls. - -Machines turn against men at a much lower level of power than would be ruled out by the first five criteria. But while these criteria identify necessary safeguards for life and liberty, the balance of purpose depends on a different kind of value. Conceptual rather than empirical criteria can be set for the constitutional limitation of power. It ought to be relatively easy for a majority to rule what abuse it will take from any minority, or what damage it will not expose its offspring to. The recognition of the most socially desirable power of a tool is of a different nature; it can only be the outcome of political procedure. The value obtained for time wasted on speed transportation is conditioned by the consensus in a community about the level of its freedom as a concrete option of its civilization. - -Transportation beyond bicycle speeds demands power inputs from the environment. Velocity translates directly into power, and soon power needs increase exponentially. In the United States, 22 percent of the energy converted drives vehicles, and another 10 percent keeps roads open for them. The amount of energy is comparable to the total energy–except for domestic heating–required for the combined economies of India and China. The energy used up in the United States for the sole purpose of driving vehicles built to accelerate beyond bicycle speed would suffice to add auxiliary motors to about twenty times that many vehicles for people all over the world who want to move at bicycle speeds and do not or cannot push the pedals because they are sick or old, or because they want to transport a heavy load or move over a great distance, or because they just want to relax. Simply on the basis of equal distribution on a world-wide scale, speeds above those attained by bicycles could be ruled out. It is of course mere fantasy to assume an egalitarian consensus sufficiently strong to accept such a proposal. At closer inspection though, many communities will find that the very same speed limit necessary for equal distribution of mobility is also very close to the optimum velocity giving maximum value to community life. At 20 mph constant speed Phileas Fogg could have made his trip around the world in half of eighty days. Simulation studies would be useful for exploring imaginative policies that seek optimal liberty with convivial power tools. To whose advantage would Calcutta’s traffic flow stabilize if speeds were limited to 10 mph? What price would Peru’s military pay for limiting the nation’s speed to 20 mph? What gains in equality, activity, health, and freedom would result from limiting all other vehicles to the speed of bicycles and sailing ships? - -Negative returns are not unique to transportation. Ninety percent of all medical care for patients with terminal diseases is unrelated to their health; such treatment tends to increase suffering and disability without demonstrably lengthening life. The maximum feasibility of service for the optimum care of an individual patient lies within a certain range. Beyond this range medical bills measure the health of a patient in the same way that GNP measures the wealth of a nation. Both add on the same scale the market value of benefits and the defensive expenditures which become necessary to offset the unwanted side effects of their production . The technological escalation of medicine first ceases to serve healing and then ceases to prolong life. It turns into a death-denying ritual of terminal care: a final race in which the personality best fitted to machines turns in the most spectacular performance . - -Counterfoil research is concerned first with an analysis of increasing marginal disutility and the menace of growth. It is then concerned with the discovery of general systems of institutional structure which optimize convivial production. This kind of research meets psychological resistance. Growth has become addictive . Like heroin addiction, the habit distorts basic value judgments . Addicts of any kind are willing to pay increasing amounts for declining satisfactions. They have become tolerant to escalating marginal disutility. They are blind to deeper frustration because they are absorbed in playing for always mounting stakes. Minds accustomed to thinking that transportation ought to provide speedy motion rather than reduction of the time and effort spent moving are boggled by this contrary hypothesis. Man is inherently mobile, and speeds higher than those he can achieve by the use of his limbs must be proven to be of great social value to warrant support by public sacrifice. - -Counterfoil research must clarify and dramatize the relationship of people to their tools. It ought to hold constantly before the public the resources that are available and the consequences of their use in various ways. It should impress on people the existence of any trend that threatens one of the major balances on which life depends. Counterfoil research leads to the identification of those classes of people most immediately hurt by such trends and helps people to identify themselves as members of such classes. It points out how a particular freedom can be jeopardized for the members of various groups which have otherwise conflicting interests. Counterfoil research involves the public by showing that the demands for freedom of any group or alliance can be identified with the implicit interest of all. - -Withdrawal from growth mania will be painful, but mostly for members of the generation which has to experience the transition and above all for those most disabled by consumption. If their plight could be vividly remembered, it might help the next generation avoid what they know would enslave them. - - -## Recovery - -I have discussed five dimensions on which the balance of life depends. In each I have indicated tendencies that must be kept in equilibrium to maintain the homeostasis which constitutes human life. I have argued that the control of natural forces is functional only if the use of nature does not make nature useless for man. I have argued that institutions are functional when they promote a delicate balance between what people can do for themselves and what tools at the service of anonymous institutions can do for them. Formal instruction also depends on a balance. Special arrangements must never outweigh opportunities for independent learning. An increase in social mobility can render society more human, but only if at the same time there is a narrowing of the difference in power which separates the few from the many. Finally , an increase in the rate of innovation is of value only when with it rootedness in tradition, fullness of meaning, and security are also strengthened. - -A tool can grow out of man’s control, first to become his master and finally to become his executioner. Tools can rule men sooner than they expect: the plow makes man the lord of a garden but also the refugee from a dust bowl. Nature’s revenge can produce children less fit for life than their fathers, and born into a world less fit for them. Homo faber can be turned into a sorcerer’s apprentice . Specialization can make his every day so complicated that it becomes estranged from his activity. Addiction to progress can enslave all men to a race in which none ever reaches the goal. - -There are two ranges in the growth of tools: the range within which machines are used to extend human capability and the range in which they are used to contract, eliminate, or replace human functions. In the first, man as an individual can exercise authority on his own behalf and therefore assume responsibility. In the second, the machine takes over–first reducing the range of choice and motivation in both the operator and the client, and second imposing its own logic and demand on both. Survival depends on establishing procedures which permit ordinary people to recognize these ranges and to opt for survival in freedom, to evaluate the structure built into tools and institutions so they can exclude those which by their structure are destructive, and control those which are useful. Exclusion of the malignant tool and control of the expedient tool are the two major priorities for politics today. Multiple limits to overefficiency must be expressed in language that is simple and politically effective. This urgent task is faced, however, with three formidable obstacles: the idolatry of science, the corruption of ordinary language, and loss of respect for the formal process by which social decisions are made. - -### The Demythologization of Science - -Above all, political discussion is stunned by a delusion about science. This term has come to mean an institutional enterprise rather than a personal activity, the solving of puzzles rather than the unpredictably creative activity of individual people. Science is now used to label a spectral production agency which turns out better knowledge just as medicine produces better health. The damage done by this misunderstanding about the nature of knowledge is even more fundamental than the damage done to the conceptions of health, education, or mobility by their identification with institutional outputs. False expectations of better health corrupt society, but they do so in only one particular sense. They foster a declining concern with healthful environments, healthy life styles, and competence in the personal care of one’s neighbor. Deceptions about health are circumstantial. The institutionalization of knowledge leads to a more general and degrading delusion. It makes people dependent on having their knowledge produced for them. It leads to a paralysis of the moral and political imagination. - -This cognitive disorder rests on the illusion that the knowledge of the individual citizen is of less value than the “knowledge” of science. The former is the opinion of individuals. It is merely subjective and is excluded from policies. The latter is “objective”–defined by science and promulgated by expert spokesmen. This objective knowledge is viewed as a commodity which can be refined , constantly improved, accumulated and fed into a process, now called “decision-making.” This new mythology of governance by the manipulation of knowledge-stock inevitably erodes reliance on government by people. - -The world does not contain any information. It is as it is. Information about it is created in the organism through its interaction with the world. To speak about storage of information outside the human body is to fall into a semantic trap. Books or computers are part of the world. They can yield information when they are looked upon. We move the problem of learning and of cognition nicely into the blind spot of our intellectual vision if we confuse vehicles for potential information with information itself. We do the same when we confuse data for potential decision with decision itself. - -Overconfidence in “better knowledge” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People first cease to trust their own judgment and then want to be told the truth about what they know. Overconfidence in “better decision-making” first hampers people’s ability to decide for themselves and then undermines their belief that they can decide. - -The growing impotence of people to decide for themselves affects the structure of their expectations. People are transformed from contenders for scarce resources into competitors for abundant promises. Adjudication by ordeal is replaced by recourse to secular rituals. These rituals are organized as frenzied consumption of the offerings of some menu: a curriculum, a therapy, or a court case. The promise that science will provide affluence for all and for each according to his objectively verified merits deprives personal conflict of its creative legitimacy. People who have unlearned how to decide about their own rights on their own evidence become pawns in a world game operated by mega-machines . No longer can each person make his or her own contribution to the constant renewal of society. Recourse to better knowledge produced by science not only voids personal decisions of the power to contribute to an ongoing historical and social process, it also destroys the rules of evidence by which experience is traditionally shared. The knowledge-consumer depends on getting packaged programs funneled into him. He finds security in the expectation that his neighbor and his boss have seen the same programs and read the same columns. The procedure by which personal certainties are honestly exchanged is eroded by the increasing recourse to exceptionally qualified knowledge produced by a science, profession, or political party. Mothers poison their children on the adman’s or the M.D.’s advice. Even in the courtroom and in parliament, scientific hearsay–well hidden under the veil of expert testimony–biases juridical and political decisions. Judges, governments, and voters abdicate their own evidence about the necessity of resolving conflicts in a situation of defined and permanent scarcity and opt for further growth on the basis of data which they admittedly cannot fully understand . - -When communities have grown overconfident in science, they leave it to experts to set the upper limits on growth. This man-date rests on a fallacy. Experts can define standards at levels slightly below those at which people complain with too much force. They can keep the public sullen and forestall mutiny. But closed peer groups cannot be entrusted with self-restraint in furthering their expert knowledge. Nor can we expect them to be representative of the common man. Scientific expertise cannot define what people will tolerate. No person can abdicate the right to decide on this for himself. It is, of course, possible to experiment on humans. Nazi doctors explored what the organism can endure. They found out how long the average person can survive torture, but this did not tell them anything about what someone can tolerate. These doctors were condemned under a statute signed in Nuremberg two days after Hiroshima and the day before the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. - -What a population will endure remains beyond experiment. We can tell what happens to particular groups of people under extreme circumstances–in prison, on an expedition, or in an experiment. Such precedents cannot serve as measures for the privations which a society will tolerate as a result of tools or rules made for its service. Scientific measurements may suggest that a certain endeavor threatens a major balance of life. Only the informed judgment of a majority of prudent men who act on the much more complex basis of everyday evidence can determine how to limit individual and social goals. Science can clarify the dimensions of man’s realm in the universe. Only a political community can dialectically choose the dimensions of the roof under which its members will live. - -### The Rediscovery of Language - -Between 1830 and 1850 a dozen inventors formulated the law of the conservation of energy. Most of them were engineers, and independently from each other they redefined the floating life force of the universe in terms of work machines could perform. Measurements that could be taken in the laboratory became the scale by which the mysterious cosmic nexus–called vis viva for centuries–could henceforth be defined. - -During the same period industry successfully competed with other modes of production for the first time. Industrial performance became the scale according to which human effectiveness in the entire economy was now measured. Housework, farming , handicraft, and subsistence activities ranging from the making of preserves to the self-building of a home began to be viewed as subsidiary or second-rate forms of production. The industrial mode first degraded and later paralyzed the nexus of productive relationships which coexisted in society. - -This monopoly of one mode of production over all social relations is much more profound than the competition of firms which overshadows it. In the surface competition the winner is easily recognized as the more capital-intensive factory, the better- organized business, the more exploitative and better-protected branch of industry, the corporation that sheds diseconomies the most unobtrusively or produces for war. On a broad scale this race takes the form of a competition among multinational corporations and industrializing nation-states. But this deadly game among giants diverts attention from the ritual service which the game itself renders to the contestants. As the arena of the contest expands, an industrial structure is imposed on world society. The mode of corporate production establishes a radical monopoly not only over resources and tools but also over the imagination and motivational structure of people. Political systems compete to baptize the same expanding industrial structure into opposing creeds, without recognizing that it is beyond their control. The convergence of corporate monopolies on the deep structural level of society can be called the industrialization of man. This trend must be inverted if people are to be free. But the industrial corruption of language itself makes this issue terribly difficult to formulate. - -Language reflects the monopoly of the industrial mode of production over perception and motivation. The tongues of industrial nations identify the fruits of creative work and of human labor with the outputs of industry. The materialization of consciousness is reflected in Western languages. Schools operate by the slogan “education!” while ordinary language asks what children “learn.” The functional shift from verb to noun highlights the corresponding impoverishment of the social imagination. People who speak a nominalist language habitually express proprietary relationships to work which they have. All over Latin America only the salaried employees, whether workers or bureaucrats, say that they have work; peasants say that they do it: “ Van a trabajar, pero no tienen trabajo .” Those who have been modernized and unionized expect industries to produce not only more goods but also more work for more people. Not only what men do but also what men want is designated by a noun. “Housing” designates a commodity rather than an activity. People acquire knowledge, mobility, even sensitivity or health. They have not only work or fun but even sex. - -This shift from verb to noun reflects a transformation in the idea of ownership. “Possessing,” “holding,” and “seizing” no longer describe the relationships people can have to corporations, such as systems of schools or highways. Possessive statements made about tools come to mean the ability to command their outputs, interest from capital, or merchandise, or some kind of prestige connected with their operation. Fully industrialized man calls his own principally what has been made for him. He says “my education ,” “my transportation,” “my entertainment,” “my health” about the commodities he gets from school, car, show business, or doctor. Western languages, and above all English, become almost inseparable from industrial production. Western men might have to learn from other languages that ownership relations can be restructured in a convivial way. For instance, in Micronesian tongues there exist entirely distinct devices to express the relationship I have to my acts (which can no longer be separated from me), to my nose (which can be cut off), to my relatives (who were inflicted on me), to my canoe (without which I could not be a full man), to a drink (which I serve you), or to the same drink (which I intend to swallow). - -In a society whose language has undergone this shift, predicates come to be stated in terms of a commodity and claims in terms of competition for a scarce resource. “I want to learn” is translated into “I want to get an education.” The decision to do something is turned into the demand for a stake in the gamble of schooling. “I want to walk” is restated as “I need transportation.” The subject in the first case designates himself as an actor, and in the second as a consumer. Linguistic change supports the expansion of the industrial arena: competition for institutionalized values is reflected in the use of nominal language. This competition for shares inevitably takes the form of a game. People gamble for what they perceive as nouns. Of course, that competition can be organized either as a zero-sum game, in which one wins when another loses, or as a non-zero-sum game, in which both competitors get more than if either had lost. Compulsory school could be construed as an example of a zero-sum game: there are only winners and losers; by definition school bestows privilege on fewer people than it degrades. An example of the second would be the transition from private to public transport: at least for the time being, more commuters could get faster wherever they want to go. - -Conflict does not have to be a competition for scarce commodities. It could also manifest disagreement about which conditions would best remove restraints on autonomous action. Conflict can lead to the creation of new freedom; but this possibility has been obscured by nominalist language. It can create for both parties the right to do, and to do things which by definition are neither commodities nor scarce. Conflict which leads to the right to walk, to participate in shaping society, to speak and communicate equally, to live in clean air or to use convivial tools deprives both adversaries of some affluence for the sake of an incommensurable gain–new liberty. - -In some societies the corruption of language has crippled the political fantasy to the point where the difference between a claim to commodities and a right to convivial tools cannot be understood . Limits on tools cannot be publicly discussed. Public blindness to urgent issues is not a new phenomenon. People for decades refused to open their eyes to the urgency of population control, for example. Limiting tools for the sake of freedom and conviviality is now such an issue that cannot be raised. A limit on vehicular velocity as a major election issue seems an implausible idea to the rich and an irrelevant idea to the poor. People who are born next to highways cannot imagine a world without speed, and the peasant in the Andes cannot grasp why anyone should travel that fast. A slowdown as the condition for good transportation sounds shocking. To recommend limits on tools sounds as deeply obscene today as the recommendation for greater sexual frankness and freedom as a condition for a good marriage law would have sounded a generation ago. - -The operating code of industrial tools encroaches on everyday language and reduces the poetic self-affirmation of men to a barely tolerated and marginal protest. The consequent industrialization of man can be inverted only if the convivial function of language is recuperated, but with a new level of consciousness. Language which is used by a people jointly claiming and asserting each person’s right to share in the shaping of the community becomes , so to speak, a second-order tool to clarify the relationships of a people to engineered instrumentalities. - -### The Recovery of Legal Procedure - -Support of an ever-expanding productive society has become the overwhelmingly dominant purpose of the existing structure of politics and law. The procedure by which people decide what ought to be done has become subservient to the ideology that corporations ought to produce more: more knowledge and decisions, more goods and services. This perversion constitutes the third obstacle to the translation of the need for a bounded society into actual social process. - -Political parties, legislatures, and the juridical system have been consistently used to foster and protect the growth of schools, unions, hospitals, and road systems, not to speak of industries. Gradually, not only the police but even the courts and the legal system itself have come to be thought of as tools made for the service of an industrial state. That they sometimes protect individuals against industrial claims has become an alibi for their habitual service of legitimizing the further concentration of power. Along with the idolatry of scientific method and the corruption of language, this progressive loss of confidence in political and legal processes is a major obstacle to retooling society. - -People come to understand that an alternative society is possible by using clear language. They can bring it about by recovering consciousness of the deep structure by which, in their society, decisions are made. Such a structure exists wherever people form a community. Contradictory decisions can be the outcome of the same process because the structure can be used to define personal values and also to shore up institutional behavior. But the existence of such conflicting results does not contradict the existence of a consistent structure which generates them. People can decide to get an education in school even though they have decided that it would be better to learn something on their own. They can let themselves be taken to a hospital, though they have decided to die at home. Just as cognitive dissonance is a foundation for dialectics, so the simultaneous acceptance of contradictory norms proves the existence of normative procedures. - -Public confidence in the existence of shared procedures has been shaken because these procedures are constantly misused. They have become tools to support unlimited production through converging arguments that alternately take a moral, a political, or a legal character. Christian churches preach meekness, charity, and austerity but finance industrial programs; socialists enforce a Stalinist mode of production, and the common law has come to favor the firm over the individual. Soon the computer will be used to define at every juncture what should be done for the growth of tools, unless people rediscover that they share a deep commitment to formal procedures by which they can decide how their present major institutions ought to be turned around. - -Unless people agree on a process that can be continuously, convivially , and effectively used to control society’s tools, the inversion of the present institutional structure cannot be either enacted or, what is more important, precariously maintained. Managers will always re-emerge to increase institutional productivity and capture public support for the better service they promise. - -Three objections are usually made whenever law is proposed as a tool for the inversion of society. One of them is rather superficial: not everybody can be a lawyer, and so not everybody can operate the law on his own. This, of course, is true only to some degree. Parajuridical systems could be set up in particular communities and incorporated into the over-all structure. Much wider scope could be given to alternative mechanisms to allow for greater participation by the nonprofessional, such as mediation , conciliation, and arbitration. But insofar as this objection is valid, it is also irrelevant to my point. The law, as it deals with the regulation of large-scale production agencies, can surely be decentralized , demystified and debureaucratized. But even then some social concerns are, and could for a long time remain, complex and of vast range, demanding corresponding legal tools. Precisely if it is to be used for the negotiating of world-wide proscriptions among large communities, each with its own centuries-old traditions, the law as the process enabling us to regulate these concerns is and will remain a tool requiring some experts to operate it. But this does not mean that such experts have to be graduates of a law school, or that they must be members of a closed profession. - -The second objection is completely relevant and much more profound: persons who now operate the law as a social tool are deeply infected with the myths that pervade a growth society. Their imagination of the possible and of the feasible is determined by the lore of industry. It would be folly to expect the present corporations of social enigneers of a utilitarian society to turn into the guardians of a convivial one. The critical importance of this observation is complemented and underlined by a third objection. The juristic system is not simply a set of written laws; it is a continuing process by which those laws are made and then applied to actual situations. The law is used to impose a given mind-set on all participants. The resulting content of the law embodies the ideologies of lawmakers and judges. How they experience the ideology inherent in a culture becomes established mythology in the laws they make and apply. The body of laws that regulates an industrial society inevitably reflects and reinforces its ideology, social character, and class structure. “More” is always in the common good–more power to firms, professions, and parties. - -While this objection does indicate a fundamental difficulty against the use of law in an inversion of society, it also misses the point. I carefully distinguish between a body of laws and the purely formal structure by which it is made, just as I have distinguished the use of slogans by which our institutions operate from the use of ordinary language, and as I will later distinguish between policies and formal political process. It is the latter and not the former which are the second order of tools we need, can share, and have to use. - -It is almost impossible to insist strongly enough on the distinction between means and ends in an epoch in which purposes have been reduced to operations, in an epoch in which people “raise” consciousness, movements pretend to provide “liberation,” languages rather than persons are said to “speak,” and politicians “make” revolutions. The law can again serve to highlight the general difference between substance and what might be called not “due process” but rather “due procedure.” - -Two major complementary features of the common law make its formal structure particularly applicable to the needs which arise in a profound crisis. One is the inherent continuity of the system, and the other is its adversary nature. Analogous features can be found in other law systems; I here choose the Anglo- American system of law as an illustration of my more general point. - -The continuity built into the lawmaking process does in one sense conserve the substance of a body of laws. This is less obvious in the legislative stage. Legislators are free to innovate at their own discretion, as long as they stay within a constitutional framework . But they do also have to fit any new law into the context of existing legislation, and this tends to ensure that new legislation will not vary too widely from the over-all tradition of existing law. - -The function of the courts in providing continuity to the substance of the law is more obvious. A court applies existing law to actual situations. Like cases are decided alike, or the facts are found to be of a different significance today. The law represents the sovereign authority of the past over the present controversy, the continuity of a dialectic process. The court recognizes the controversy as a social concern and incorporates its resolutions into the body of the law. In the process the social experience of the past is readapted to present needs. The present decision will in turn serve as reference in future cases. - -The continuity of the formal structure used in this process is of a different order from the continuous embodiment of one set of prejudices in a set of laws. Considered in this formal sense, the system of continuity is not designed to preserve the content of any existing set of laws. It could even be used to preserve the continuous development of a set of laws that fit an inverted society . There is nothing in most constitutions that prevents the passage of laws setting upper limits to productivity, privilege, professional monopoly, or efficiency. In principle, the existing process of legislatures and courts can, with a reversal of its focus, make and apply such law. - -The adversary nature of the common law is equally important. The common law is not formally concerned with what is ethically or technically good. It is a tool for the understanding of mutualities that surface as actual conflicts. It leaves to those directly concerned with a social interest the task of insisting on the protection of their rights or the pursuit of their claims to what they consider to be good. This works in both legislation and jurisprudence; the decision is an act of balancing conflicting interests in a way that is theoretically best for all. - -It is obvious that during the last few generations this balance has been wholly distorted in favor of a production-oriented society . But the current misuse of the juristic structure is not a valid argument against its use for precisely the opposite purpose. Interests wholly opposed to such a society, free from the illusion that growth can overcome injustice, and concerned with limits, can in principle use the same tool. It is not, of course, sufficient that new types of plaintiffs appear; it is equally true that the growth illusions of legislators must fade, and that parties must be brought forward to represent their interest in a reassessment of what are now taken as facts. - -Not only the legislative but also the juridical process depends on the presentation of conflicting social interests by interested parties for settlement by disinterested tribunals. These tribunals operate in a continuous way. Ideally, judges are ordinary, prudent men or women indifferent to the substance of the issue they are expected to reconcile, and experts in the application of process. In practice, however, tribunals have also come to serve the concentration of power and the increase of industrial production. Not only do judges, like legislators, perceive that a conflict is best balanced when the balance is tipped in favor of the over-all interest of corporations, but society has also conditioned the plaintiffs always to demand more. A larger share of institutional output constitutes the substance of a claim much more frequently than protection against an institution which limits a person’s freedom to do something on his own. But this abuse of the formal structure of common law does not corrupt the structure itself. - -An objection is frequently raised when adversary procedures are presented as a major tool to oppose industrial growth. Society already heavily relies on such proceedings. Their extension to new areas is continually recommended. Legal reformers tend to provide new weapons to all classes of disadvantaged: blacks, Indians, women, employees, cripples. As a result proceedings have become cumbersome, costly, and only a few of the interested parties can come forward. Decisions are often delayed until they have lost their relevance. Role-playing is encouraged, and this often creates new tensions between artificial groups. In going out of the way to create structures so that adversary processes may be used, decisions are made scarce. - -This objection is very relevant if it opposes the proliferation of adversary proceedings in the resolution of conflicts between people . But neither the conflict between individuals nor the competition between groups is the substance of our issue. The fundamental conflict in society is about acts, facts, and things on which people are opposed to corporations. Formal adversary procedure is the paradigmatic tool for citizens to oppose the threat of industry to their basic liberties. This is the process suited to the opposition of two partners whom the law has rendered equal, in which the aggrieved party is interested in disputing one fact or a relevant law or principle, and considers this issue the only continuing interest he has in common with the other. A group of citizens interested in retooling society is not concerned with negotiations or mediation but with direct opposition to the industrial mode of production and its undue expansion in a specific instance. - -Like ordinary English, formal process is a convivial tool. Undoubtedly , industrial institutions have entrenched themselves by corrupting the habitual use of these tools by individuals and communities . Yet language and formal process remain intrinsically distinct from the purposes for which they are used. People can defend language and legal procedure as inherently theirs; they can find in their inalienable natures the confidence to use their unchanged formal structures to express contents entirely opposed to those for which they were taught to use them in their childhood . The formal structure of law still offers a process by which the ordinary citizen can present to society his own practical interest in conflict with the interest of a corporation, even when this corporation is an agency of the state, and even if this interest favors or opposes any functioning or proposed program. - -It would be absurd to expect that professionals who are experts in the corrupt use of language or of law could suddenly think clearly and proceed rightly. Educators who are aware of the breakdown of schools usually engage in a frantic search for advice that permits them to teach more people about more things. Doctors tend to believe that at least some of the generally useful knowledge they hold cannot be expressed outside their hieratic code. It is useless to expect the American Medical Association, the National Education Association, or the association of traffic engineers to explain in ordinary language the professional gangsterism of their colleagues. It would be equally fruitless to count on present legislators, lawyers, and judges to recognize the independence of what is right from the preconceived good, which for them is identical with the higher output of goods by corporations . They are trained to adjust any conflict in favor of over-all industrial growth. But just as an exceptional doctor here and there helps people live responsibly, to suffer as a matter of fact, and to face death, so an exceptional lawyer can help people use the formal structure of the law to represent their interest in a convivial society. Even though he will probably be frustrated in his claims, he can use the courtroom drama to make his point. - -Legal procedure applied to a society filled by optimism about its expanding tools has turned into the most effective instrument for the social control of people at the service of these tools. To advance an industrial society, the law is systematically used for social engineering and the continually more complete and effective elimination of waste and friction in the mega-machine. Anglo-American industry has consistently been more successful, in the long run, than the industry of socialist countries. Law is more effective than centralized planning in bringing and keeping people under the rule of machines. Yet the current misuse of the juristic structure is not a valid argument against its use for precisely the opposite purpose, though it suggests caution against overly optimistic hopes for such an inverted use. - -Most of the present laws and present legislators, most of the present courts and their decisions, most of the claimants and their demands are deeply corrupted by an overarching industrial consensus: that more is better, and that corporations serve the public interest better than men. But this entrenched consensus does not invalidate my thesis that any revolution which neglects the use of formal legal and political procedures will fail. Only an active majority in which all individuals and groups insist for their own reasons on their own rights, and whose members share the same convivial procedure, can recover the rights of men against corporations. - -The use of procedure for the purpose of hampering, stopping, and inverting our major institutions will appear to their managers and addicts as a misuse of the law and as subversion of the only order which they recognize. The use of due convivial procedure appears corrupt and criminal to the bureaucrat, even one who calls himself a judge. - - - -## Political Inversion - -If within the very near future man cannot set limits to the interference of his tools with the environment and practice effective birth control, the next generations will experience the gruesome apocalypse predicted by many ecologists. Faced with these impending disasters, society can stand in wait of survival within limits set and enforced by bureaucratic dictatorship. Or it can engage in a political process by the use of legal and political procedures. Ideologically biased interpretations of the past have made the recognition of political process increasingly difficult. Liberty has been interpreted as a right to power tools, a right claimed without reasonable limitation by individuals and private associations in capitalist countries and by the state in socialist societies. Recovery becomes feasible only if the fundamental structure of Western societies is clearly recognized and reclaimed. Analogous efforts to recover entirely different formal structures will become necessary when former political or cultural colonies shake off the Western mode of production. - -The bureaucratic management of human survival is unacceptable on both ethical and political grounds. It would also be as futile as former attempts at mass therapy. This does not, of course, mean that a majority might not at first submit to it. People could be so frightened by the increasing evidence of growing population and dwindling resources that they would voluntarily put their destiny into the hands of Big Brothers. Technocratic caretakers could be mandated to set limits on growth in every dimension , and to set them just at the point beyond which further production would mean utter destruction. Such a kakotopia could maintain the industrial age at the highest endurable level of output. - -Man would live in a plastic bubble that would protect his survival and make it increasingly worthless. Since man’s tolerance would become the most serious limitation to growth, the alchemist ’s endeavor would be renewed in the attempt to produce a monstrous type of man fit to live among reason’s dreams. A major function of engineering would become the psychogenetic tooling of man himself as a condition for further growth. People would be confined from birth to death in a world-wide schoolhouse , treated in a world-wide hospital, surrounded by television screens, and the man-made environment would be distinguishable in name only from a world-wide prison. - -The alternative to managerial fascism is a political process by which people decide how much of any scarce resource is the most any member of society can claim; a process in which they agree to keep limits relatively stationary over a long time, and by which they set a premium on the constant search for new ways to have an ever larger percentage of the population join in doing ever more with ever less. Such a political choice of a frugal society remains a pious dream unless it can be shown that it is not only necessary but also possible: (1) to define concrete procedures by which more people are enlightened about the nature of our present crisis and will come to understand that limits are necessary and a convivial life style desirable; (2) to bring the largest number of people into now suppressed organizations which claim their right to a frugal life style and keep them satisfied and therefore committed to convivial life; and (3) to discover and revalue the political or legal tools that are accepted within a society and learn how to use them to establish and protect convivial life where it emerges. Such procedures may sound idealistic at the present moment. This is not proof that they cannot become effective as the present crisis deepens. - -### Myths and Majorities - -The ultimate obstacle to the restructuring of society is not the lack of information about which limits are needed, nor the lack of people who would accept them if they became inevitable, but the power of political myths. - -Almost everyone in rich societies is a destructive consumer. Almost everyone is, in some way, engaged in aggression against the milieu. Destructive consumers constitute a numerical majority. Myth transforms them into a political one. Numerical majorities come to form a mythical voting bloc on a nonexistent issue; “they” are invoked as the unbeatable guardians of vested interest in growth. This mythical majority paralyzes political action. At closer inspection, “they” are a number of reasonable individuals. One is an ecologist who takes a jet plane to a conference on protecting the environment from further pollution. Another is an economist who knows that growing efficiency renders work increasingly scarce; he tries to create new sources of employment. Neither of them has the same interests as the slum-dweller in Detroit who purchases his color TV on time. The three belong no more to a voting bloc that will defend growth than clerks, repairmen, and salesmen are somehow politically homogenized because each fears for his job, needs a car, and wants medicine for his children. - -There can be no such thing as a majority opposed to an issue that has not arisen. A majority agitating for limits to growth is as ludicrous a concept as one demanding growth at all cost. Majorities are not created by shared ideologies. They develop out of enlightened self-interest. The most that even the best of ideologies can do is interpret this interest. The stance each man or woman takes when a social problem becomes an overwhelming threat depends on two factors: the first is how a smoldering conflict erupts into a political issue demanding attention and partisan action; the second is the existence of new élites which can provide an interpretative framework for new–and hitherto unexpected–alignments of interest. - -### From Breakdown to Chaos - -I can only conjecture on how the breakdown of industrial society will ultimately become a critical issue. But I can make rather firm statements about the qualifications for providing guidance within the coming crisis. I believe that growth will grind to a halt. The total collapse of the industrial monopoly on production will be the result of synergy in the failure of the multiple systems that fed its expansion. This expansion is maintained by the illusion that careful systems engineering can stabilize and harmonize present growth, while in fact it pushes all institutions simultaneously toward their second watershed. Almost overnight people will lose confidence not only in the major institutions but also in the miracle prescriptions of the would-be crisis managers. The ability of present institutions to define values such as education, health, welfare, transportation, or news will suddenly be extinguished because it will be recognized as an illusion . - -This crisis may be triggered by an unforeseen event, as the Great Depression was touched off by the Wall Street Crash. Some fortuitous coincidence will render publicly obvious the structural contradictions between stated purposes and effective results in our major institutions. People will suddenly find obvious what is now evident to only a few: that the organization of the entire economy toward the “better” life has become the major enemy of the good life. Like other widely shared insights, this one will have the potential of turning public imagination inside out. Large institutions can quite suddenly lose their respectability, their legitimacy, and their reputation for serving the public good. It happened to the Roman Church in the Reformation, to Royalty in the Revolution. The unthinkable became obvious overnight: that people could and would behead their rulers. - -Sudden change is of a different order than feedback or evolution . Observe the whirlpools below a waterfall. For many seasons the eddies stay in the same place no matter whether the water is high or low. Then, suddenly, one more stone falls into the basin, the entire array changes, and the old can never be reconstructed. People who invoke the specter of a hopelessly growth-oriented majority seem incapable of envisaging political behavior in a crash. Business ceases to be as usual when the populace loses confidence in industrial productivity, and not just in paper currency . - -It is still possible to face the breakdown of each of our various systems in a separate perspective. No remedy seems to work, but we can still find resources to support every remedy proposed. Governments think they can deal with the breakdown of utilities, the disruption of the educational system, intolerable transportation , the chaos of the judicial process, the violent disaffection of the young. Each is dealt with as a separate phenomenon, each is explained by a different report, each calls for a new tax and a new program. Squabbles about alternative remedies give credibility to both: free schools vs. public schools double the demand for education; satellite cities vs. monorails for commuters make the growth of cities seem inexorable; higher professional standards in medicine vs. more paramedical professions further aggrandize the health professions. Since each of the proposed remedies appeals to some, the usual solution is an attempt to try both. The result is a further effort to make the pie grow, and to forget that it is pie in the sky. - -The Coolidge approach to the warnings of the Depression is now applied to the signs of a much more radical crisis. General systems analysis is trusted to relate the institutional breakdowns to each other, which only leads to more planning, centralization, and bureaucracy in order to achieve control over population, affluence, and inefficient industry. Unemployment in the manufacturing sector is supposed to be compensated for by growth in the output of decisions, controls, and therapies. Fascination with industry and mechanical production still blinds people to the possibility of a postindustrial society in which several distinct modes of production would complement each other. Trying to bring about an era which is both hyperindustrial and ecologically feasible, they accelerate the breakdown of several other non-physical and equally fundamental dimensions of the balance of life. - -It would be a mere exercise in geomancy to predict which series of events will play the role of the Wall Street Crash as catalyst of the first crisis of, not just in, industrial society. But it would be folly not to expect in the very near future an event whose effects will jam the growth of tools. When this happens, the noise that accompanies the crash will distract attention from seeing it in proper perspective. - -We still have a chance to understand the causes of the coming crisis, and to prepare for it. If we are to anticipate its effects, we must investigate how sudden change can bring about the emergence into power of previously submerged social groups. It is not calamity as such that creates these groups; it is much less calamity that brings about their emergence; but calamity weakens the prevailing powers which have excluded the submerged from participation in the social process. It is the power of surprise that weakens control, that shakes up the established controllers, and brings to the top those people who have not lost their bearings . - -When controls are weakened, those accustomed to control must seek new allies. In the weakened economic-industrial state of the Great Depression, the establishment could not do without organized labor, so organized labor got its share of power within the structure. In the weakened labor market during the Second World War, industry could not do without black labor. The blacks began to assert their power. - -### Insight into Crisis - -Forces tending to limit production are already at work within society. Public, counterfoil research can significantly help these individuals become more cohesive and self-conscious in their indictment of growth they consider destructive. We can anticipate that their voices will acquire new resonance when the crisis of overproductive society becomes acute. They form no constituency, but they are spokesmen for a majority of which everyone is a potential member. The more unexpectedly the crisis comes, the more suddenly their velleities can turn into a program. But the ability to direct events at that moment depends on how well these minorities grasp the profound nature of the crisis, and know how to state it in effective language: to declare what they want, what they can do, and what they do not need. The critical use of ordinary language is the first pivot in a political inversion. A second pivot is needed. - -Further growth must lead to a multiple catastrophe. That people would accept multiple limits to growth without catastrophe seems highly improbable. The inevitable catastrophic event could be either a crisis in civilization or its end: end by annihilation or end in B. F. Skinner’s world-wide concentration camp run by a T. E. Frazier. The foreseeable catastrophe will be a true crisis–that is, the occasion for a choice–only if at the moment it strikes the necessary social demands can be effectively expressed. They must be represented by people who can demonstrate that the breakdown of the current industrial illusion is for them a condition for choosing an effective and convivial mode of production . The preparation of such groups is the key task of new politics at the present moment. - -I have already argued that these groups must be prepared to provide a logically coherent analysis of the catastrophic event and to communicate it in ordinary language. I have argued that they must be prepared to propose the necessity for a bounded society in practical terms that have general appeal. Sacrifice must be shown as the inevitable price for different groups of people to get what they want–or at least to be liberated from what has become intolerable. But beyond using words to describe the limits as both necessary and appealing, the leadership of these groups must be prepared to use a social tool that is fit to ordain what is good enough for all. It must be a tool which, like language, is respected by all; a tool which, like language, does not lose its power because of the purpose to which it has been put in recent history; a tool which, like language, possesses a fundamental structure that misuse cannot totally corrupt. - -I have already argued that such a tool can only be the formal structure of politics and law. At the moment of the crash which is industrial rather than simply financial, the transformation of catastrophe into crisis depends on the confidence an emerging group of clear-thinking and feeling people can inspire in their peers. They must then argue that the transition to a convivial society can be, and must be, the result of conscious use of disciplined procedure that recognizes the legitimacy of conflicting interests , the historical precedent out of which the conflict arose, and the necessity of abiding by the decision of peers. Convivially used procedure guarantees that an institutional revolution will remain a tool whose goals emerge as they are enacted; the conscious use of procedure in a continually antibureaucratic sense is the only possible protection against the revolution itself becoming an institution. Whether the application of this procedure to the inversion of all major institutions of society is then called a cultural revolution, or the recuperation of the formal structure of law, or participatory socialism or a return to the spirit of the Fueros de España, is merely a matter of labeling. - -### Sudden Change - -When I speak about emerging interest groups and their preparation , I am not speaking of action groups, or of a church, or of new kinds of experts. I am above all not speaking about one political party which could assume power at a moment of crisis. Management of the crisis would make catastrophe irreversible. A well-knit, well-trained party can establish its power at the moment of a crisis in which the choice to be made is one within an over-all system. Such was the Great Depression. What was at issue was control over the tools of production. Such were the events which brought the Marxists to power in Eastern Europe. But the crisis I have described as imminent is not a crisis within industrial society, but a crisis of the industrial mode of production itself. The crisis I have described confronts people with a choice between convivial tools and being crushed by machines. The only response to this crisis is a full recognition of its depth and an acceptance of inevitable self-limitations. The more varied the perspectives from which this insight is shared by interest groups and the more disparate the interests that may be protected only by a reduction of power within society, the greater the probability that the inevitable will be recognized as such. - -I am also not speaking about a majority opposed to growth on some abstract principles. Such a majority is unfeasible. A well-organized élite, vocally promulgating an antigrowth orthodoxy, is indeed conceivable. It is probably now forming. But such a programmatic antigrowth élite would be highly undesirable. By pushing people to accept limits to industrial output without questioning the basic industrial structure of modern society, it would inevitably provide more power to the growth-optimizing bureaucrats and become their pawn. One of the first results of transition toward a stable-state industrial economy would be the development of a labor-intensive, highly disciplined, and growing subsector of production that would control people by giving them jobs. Such a stabilized production of highly rationalized and standardized goods and services would be–if this were possible–even further away from convivial production than the industrial-growth society we have now. - -The proponents of a bounded society have no need to put together some kind of majority. A voting majority in a democracy is not motivated by the explicit commitment of all its members to some specific ideology or to some particular value. A voting majority in favor of a specific institutional limitation would have to be composed of very disparate elements: those seriously aggrieved by some aspect of overproduction, those who do not profit from it, and those who may have objections to the over-all organization of society–but not directly to the specific limit being set. How this functions in times of normal politics can be well illustrated by the example of school. Some people are childless and resent the school tax. Others feel they are taxed more heavily and served less well than their peers in another district. Others object to tax support of schools since they want to send their children to parochial schools. Others object to compulsory schooling as such: some because it does harm to the young and others because it fosters discrimination. All these people could form a voting majority, but not a party or a sect. Under present circumstances they might succeed in cutting school down to size, but thereby they would merely assure its more legitimate survival. A majority vote to limit one major institution tends to be conservative when business is as usual. - -But a majority can have the contrary effect in a crisis which affects society on a deeper level. The joint arrival of several institutions at their second watershed is the beginning of such a crisis. The crash that will follow must make it clear that industrial society as such–and not just its separate institutions–has outgrown the range of its effectiveness. - -The nation-state has become so powerful that it cannot perform its stated functions. Just as General Vo Nguyen Giap could use the U.S. military machine to win his war, so the multinational corporations and professions can now use the law and the two-party system to establish their empire. But while democracy in the United States can survive a victory by Giap, it cannot survive one by ITT and its like. As a total crisis approaches, it becomes more obvious that the nation-state has grown into the holding corporation for a multiplicity of self-serving tools, and the political party into an instrument to organize stockholders for the occasional election of boards and presidents. In this situation, parties support each voter’s right to claim higher levels of individual consumption and to enforce thereby higher levels of industrial consumption. People can claim cars, but the appropriation of society’s over-all resources by a transportation system which determines that cars are useful is left to the decision of experts. Such parties support a state whose only purpose is the support of an increasing GNP, and they are obviously useless at the moment of a general crash. - -When business is normal, the procedural opposition between corporations and clients usually heightens the legitimacy of the latter’s dependence. But at the moment of a structural crisis not even the voluntary reduction of overefficiency on the part of major institutions will keep any of them functioning. A general crisis opens the way to social reconstruction. The loss of legitimacy of the state as a holding corporation does not destroy, but reasserts, the need for constitutional procedure. The loss of confidence in parties that have become stockholders’ factions brings out the importance of adversary procedures in politics. A loss of credibility of opposing claims for more individual consumption only highlights the importance of the use of adversary procedures when the issue to be decided upon is the reconciliation of opposing sets of society-wide limitations. The same general crisis that could easily lead to one-man rule, expert government, and ideological orthodoxy is also the great opportunity to reconstruct a political process in which all participate. - -The structures of political and legal procedures are integral to one another. Both shape and express the structure of freedom in history. If this is recognized, the framework of due procedure can be used as the most dramatic, symbolic, and convivial tool in the political area. The appeal to law remains powerful even where society makes access to legal machinery a privilege, or where it systematically denies justice, or where it cloaks despotism in the mantle of show tribunals. Even when he who upholds the formal structure of ordinary language and procedure earns the scorn, ridicule , and persecution of his fellow revolutionaries, the appeal of an individual to the formal structure embedded in a people’s history remains the most powerful instrument to say the truth and denounce the cancerous domination of the industrial dominance over production as the ultimate form of idolatry. I feel almost unbearable anguish when faced by the fact that only the word recovered from history should be left to us as the power for stemming disaster. Yet only the word in its weakness can associate the majority of people in the revolutionary inversion of inevitable violence into convivial reconstruction. - -Reconstruction for poor countries means adopting a set of negative design criteria within which their tools are kept, in order to advance directly into a postindustrial era of conviviality. The limits to choose are of the same order as those which hyperindustrialized countries will have to adopt for the sake of survival and at the cost of their vested interest. Such social reconstruction cannot be supported by a high-powered army, both because the maintenance of such an army would foil reconstruction and because no such army would be powerful enough. Defense of conviviality is possible only if undertaken by the people with tools they control. Imperalist mercenaries can poison or maim but never conquer a people who have chosen to set boundaries to their tools for the sake of conviviality. - -[^n01:]Hugo v. Rahner, Man at Play , New York, 1972.] - -[^n02:]Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man , Boston, 1970.] diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/conviviality/es.txt b/data/pages/en/book/conviviality/es.txt deleted file mode 120000 index 61e2428..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/conviviality/es.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -../../../es/book/conviviality/es.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/conviviality/fr.txt b/data/pages/en/book/conviviality/fr.txt deleted file mode 120000 index 43441b9..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/conviviality/fr.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -../../../fr/book/conviviality/fr.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/conviviality/index.txt b/data/pages/en/book/conviviality/index.txt deleted file mode 100644 index f2cf999..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/conviviality/index.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8 +0,0 @@ -# Tools for Conviviality - -* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:es|Online]] -* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Tools for Conviviality_ -* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1973 -* **#@LANG_comments@#:** ... - -~~NOTOC~~ diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/deschooling/en.txt b/data/pages/en/book/deschooling/en.txt deleted file mode 100644 index d0dbddf..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/deschooling/en.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,835 +0,0 @@ -# Deschooling Society - -## Introduction - -I owe my interest in public education to Everett Reimer. Until we first met in Puerto Rico in 1958, I had never questioned the value of extending obligatory schooling to all people. Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school. The essays given at CIDOC and gathered in this book grew out of memoranda which I submitted to him, and which we discussed during 1970, the thirteenth year of our dialogue. The last chapter contains my afterthoughts on a conversation with Erich Fromm on Bachofen's Mutterrecht. - -Since 1967 Reimer and I have met regularly at the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Valentine Borremans, the director of the Center, also joined our dialogue, and constantly urged me to test our thinking against the realities of Latin America and Africa. This book reflects her conviction that the ethos, not just the institutions, of society ought to be "deschooled". - -Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education--and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries. - -On Wednesday mornings, during the spring and summer of 1970, I submitted the various parts of this book to the participants in our CIDOC programs in Cuernavaca. Dozens of them made suggestions or provided criticisms. Many will recognize their ideas in these pages, especially Paulo Freire, Peter Berger, and Jos? Maria Bulnes, as well as Joseph Fitzpatrick, John Holt, Angel Quintero, Layman Allen, Fred Goodman, Gerhard Ladner, Didier Piveteau, Joel Spring, Augusto Salazar Bondy, and Dennis Sullivan. Among my critics, Paul Goodman most radically obliged me to revise my thinking. Robert Silvers provided me with brilliant editorial assistance on Chapters 1, 3, and 6, which have appeared in The New York Review of Books. - -Reimer and I have decided to publish separate views of our joint research. He is working on a comprehensive and documented exposition, which will be subjected to several months of further critical appraisal and be published late in 1971 by Doubleday & Company. Dennis Sullivan, who acted as secretary at the meetings between Reimer and myself, is preparing a book for publication in the spring of 1972 which will place my argument in the context of current debate about public schooling in the United States. I offer this volume of essays now in the hope that it will provoke additional critical contributions to the sessions of a seminar on "Alternatives in Education" planned at CIDOC in Cuernavaca for 1972 and 1973. - -I intend to discuss some perplexing issues which are raised once we embrace the hypothesis that society can be deschooled; to search for criteria which may help us distinguish institutions which merit development because they support learning in a deschooled milieu; and to clarify those personal goals which would foster the advent of an Age of Leisure (schole) as opposed to an economy dominated by service industries. - -IVAN ILLICH - -CIDOC Cuernavaca, Mexico November, 1970 - -## Why We Must Disestablish School - -Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question. - -In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery. I will explain how this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or "treatments". I do this because I believe that most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the contrary to happen. We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats. We need counterfoil research to current futurology. - -I want to raise the general question of the mutual definition of man's nature and the nature of modern institutions which characterizes our world view and language. To do so, I have chosen the school as my paradigm, and I therefore deal only indirectly with other bureaucratic agencies of the corporate state: the consumer-family, the party, the army, the church, the media. My analysis of the hidden curriculum of school should make it evident that public education would profit from the deschooling of society, just as family life, politics, security, faith, and communication would profit from an analogous process. - -I begin my analysis, in this first essay, by trying to convey what the deschooling of a schooled society might mean. In this context, it should be easier to understand my choice of the five specific aspects relevant to this process with which I deal in the subsequent chapters. - -Not only education but social reality itself has become schooled. It costs roughly the same to school both rich and poor in the same dependency. The yearly expenditure per pupil in the slums and in the rich suburbs of any one of twenty U.S. cities lies in the same range-and sometimes is favorable to the poor[^n00]. Rich and poor alike depend on schools and hospitals which guide their lives, form their world view, and define for them what is legitimate and what is not. Both view doctoring oneself as irresponsible, learning on one's own as unreliable, and community organization, when not paid for by those in authority, as a form of aggression or subversion. For both groups the reliance on institutional treatment renders independent accomplishment suspect. The progressive underdevelopment of self- and community-reliance is even more typical in Westchester than it is in the northeast of Brazil. Everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs "deschooling". - -Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and to die in one's own home and to be buried by one's friends. Only the soul's needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin and end life at home become signs either of poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under the institutional management of doctors and undertakers. - -Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect. In Mexico the poor are those who lack three years of schooling, and in New York they are those who lack twelve. - -The poor have always been socially powerless. The increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to their helplessness: psychological impotence, the inability to fend for themselves. Peasants on the high plateau of the Andes are exploited by the landlord and the merchant-once they settle in Lima they are, in addition, dependent on political bosses, and disabled by their lack of schooling. Modernized poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency. This modernization of poverty is a world-wide phenomenon, and lies at the root of contemporary underdevelopment. Of course it appears under different guises in rich and in poor countries. - -It is probably most intensely felt in U.S. cities. Nowhere else is poverty treated at greater cost. Nowhere else does the treatment of poverty produce so much dependence, anger, frustration, and further demands. And nowhere else should it be so evident that poverty-once it has become modernized-has become resistant to treatment with dollars alone and requires an institutional revolution. - -Today in the United States the black and even the migrant can aspire to a level of professional treatment which would have been unthinkable two generations ago, and which seems grotesque to most people in the Third World. For instance, the U.S. poor can count on a truant officer to return their children to school until they reach seventeen, or on a doctor to assign them to a hospital bed which costs sixty dollars per day-the equivalent of three months' income for a majority of the people in the world. But such care only makes them dependent on more treatment, and renders them increasingly incapable of organizing their own lives around their own experiences and resources within their own communities. - -The poor in the United States are in a unique position to speak about the predicament which threatens all the poor in a modernizing world. They are making the discovery that no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness of welfare institutions, once the professional hierarchies of these institutions have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary. The poor in the U.S. inner city can demonstrate from their own experience the fallacy on which social legislation in a "schooled" society is built. - -Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas observed that "the only way to establish an institution is to finance it". The corollary is also true. Only by channeling dollars away from the institutions which now treat health, education, and welfare can the further impoverishment resulting from their disabling side effects be stopped. - -This must be kept in mind when we evaluate federal aid pro-grams. As a case in point, between 1965 and 1968 over three billion dollars were spent in U.S. schools to offset the disadvantages of about six million children. The program is known as Title One. It is the most expensive compensatory program ever attempted anywhere in education, yet no significant improvement can be detected in the learning of these "disadvantaged" children. Compared with their classmates from middle income homes, they have fallen further behind. Moreover, in the course of this program, professionals discovered an additional ten million children laboring under economic and educational handicaps. More reasons for claiming more federal funds are now at hand. - -This total failure to improve the education of the poor despite more costly treatment can be explained in three ways: - -_1._ Three billion dollars are insufficient to improve the performance of six million children by a measurable amount; or - -_2._ The money was incompetently spent: different curricula, better administration, further concentration of the funds on the poor child, and more research are needed and would do the trick; or - -_3._ Educational disadvantage cannot be cured by relying on education within the school. - -The first is certainly true so long as the money has been spent through the school budget. The money indeed went to the schools which contained most of the disadvantaged children, but it was not spent on the poor children themselves. These children for whom the money was intended comprised only about half of those who were attending the schools that added the federal subsidies to their budgets. Thus the money was spent for custodial care, indoctrination and the selection of social roles, as well as education, all of which functions are inextricably mingled in the physical plants, curricula, teachers, administrators, and other key components of these schools, and, therefore, in their budgets. - -The added funds enabled schools to cater disproportionately to the satisfaction of the relatively richer children who were "disadvantaged" by having to attend school in the company of the poor. At best a small fraction of each dollar intended to remedy a poor child's disadvantages in learning could reach the child through the school budget. - -It might be equally true that the money was incompetently spent. But even unusual incompetence cannot beat that of the school system. Schools by their very structure resist the concentration of privilege on those otherwise disadvantaged. Special curricula, separate classes, or longer hours only constitute more discrimination at a higher cost. - -Taxpayers are not yet accustomed to permitting three billion dollars to vanish from HEW as if it were the Pentagon. The present Administration may believe that it can afford the wrath of educators. Middle-class Americans have nothing to lose if the program is cut. Poor parents think they do, but, even more, they are demanding control of the funds meant for their children. A logical way of cutting the budget and, one hopes, of increasing benefits is a system of tuition grants such as that proposed by Milton Friedman and others. Funds would be channeled to the beneficiary, enabling him to buy his share of the schooling of his choice. If such credit were limited to purchases which fit into a school curriculum, it would tend to provide greater equality of treatment, but would not thereby increase the equality of social claims. - -It should be obvious that even with schools of equal quality a poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one. Even if they attend equal schools and begin at the same age, poor children lack most of the educational opportunities which are casually available to the middle-class child. These advantages range from conversation and books in the home to vacation travel and a different sense of oneself, and apply, for the child who enjoys them, both in and out of school. So the poorer student will generally fall behind so long as he depends on school for advancement or learning. The poor need funds to enable them to learn, not to get certified for the treatment of their alleged disproportionate deficiencies. - -All this is true in poor nations as well as in rich ones, but there it appears under a different guise. Modernized poverty in poor nations affects more people more visibly but also-for the moment-more superficially. Two-thirds of all children in Latin America leave school before finishing the fifth grade, but these "desertores" are not therefore as badly off as they would be in the United States. - -Few countries today remain victims of classical poverty, which was stable and less disabling. Most countries in Latin America have reached the "take-off" point toward economic development and competitive consumption, and thereby toward modernized poverty: their citizens have learned to think rich and live poor. Their laws make six to ten years of school obligatory. Not only in Argentina but also in Mexico or Brazil the average citizen defines an adequate education by North American standards, even though the chance of getting such prolonged schooling is limited to a tiny minority. In these countries the majority is already hooked on school, that is, they are schooled in a sense of inferiority toward the better-schooled. Their fanaticism in favor of school makes it possible to exploit them doubly: it permits increasing allocation of public funds for the education of a few and increasing acceptance of social control by the many. - -Paradoxically, the belief that universal schooling is absolutely necessary is most firmly held in those countries where the fewest people have been-and will be-served by schools. Yet in Latin America different paths toward education could still be taken by the majority of parents and children. Proportionately, national savings invested in schools and teachers might be higher than in rich countries, but these investments are totally insufficient to serve the majority by making even four years of school attendance possible. Fidel Castro talks as if he wanted to go in the direction of deschooling when he promises that by 1980 Cuba will be able to dissolve its university since all of life in Cuba will be an educational experience. At the grammarschool and high-school level, however, Cuba, like all other Latin-American countries, acts as though passage through a period defined as the "school age" were an unquestionable goal for all, delayed merely by a temporary shortage of resources. - -The twin deceptions of increased treatment, as actually provided in the United States and as merely promised in Latin America complement each other. The Northern poor are being disabled by the same twelve-year treatment whose lack brands the Southern poor as hopelessly backward. Neither in North America nor in Latin America do the poor get equality from obligatory schools. But in both places the mere existence of school discourages and disables the poor from taking control of their own learning. All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on society: school is recognized as the institution which specializes in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as a proof that education is a very costly, very complex, always arcane, and frequently almost impossible task. - -School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education. Simultaneously both schools and the other institutions which depend on them are priced out of the market. - -In the United States the per capita costs of schooling have risen almost as fast as the cost of medical treatment. But increased treatment by both doctors and teachers has shown steadily declining results. Medical expenses concentrated on those above forty-five have doubled several times over a period of forty years with a resulting 3 percent increase in life expectancy in men. The increase in educational expenditures has produced even stranger results; otherwise President Nixon could not have been moved this spring to promise that every child shall soon have the "Right to Read" before leaving school. - -In the United States it would take eighty billion dollars per year to provide what educators regard as equal treatment for all in grammar and high school. This is well over twice the $36 billion now being spent. Independent cost projections prepared at HEW and the University of Florida indicate that by 1974 the comparable figures will be $107 billion as against the $45 billion now projected, and these figures wholly omit the enormous costs of what is called "higher education," for which demand is growing even faster. The United States, which spent nearly eighty billion dollars in 1969 for "defense" including its deployment in Vietnam, is obviously too poor to provide equal schooling. The President's committee for the study of school finance should ask not how to support or how to trim such increasing costs, but how they can be avoided. - -Equal obligatory schooling must be recognized as at least economically unfeasible. In Latin America the amount of public money spent on each graduate student is between 350 and 1,500 times the amount spent on the median citizen (that is, the citizen who holds the middle ground between the poorest and the richest). In the United States the discrepancy is smaller, but the discrimination is keener. The richest parents, some 10 percent, can afford private education for their children and help them to benefit from foundation grants. But in addition they obtain ten times the per capita amount of public funds if this is compared with the per capita expenditure made on the children of the 10 percent who are poorest. The principal reasons for this are that rich children stay longer in school, that a year in a university is disproportionately more expensive than a year in high school, and that most private universities depend-at least indirectly-on tax-derived finances. - -Obligatory schooling inevitably polarizes a society; it also grades the nations of the world according to an international caste system. Countries are rated like castes whose educational dignity is determined by the average years of schooling of its citizens, a rating which is closely related to per capita gross national product, and much more painful. - -The paradox of the schools is evident: increased expenditure escalates their destructiveness at home and abroad. This paradox must be made a public issue. It is now generally accepted that the physical environment will soon be destroyed by biochemical pollution unless we reverse current trends in the production of physical goods. It should also be recognized that social and personal life is threatened equally by HEW pollution, the inevitable byproduct of obligatory and competitive consumption of welfare. - -The escalation of the schools is as destructive as the escalation of weapons but less visibly so. Everywhere in the world school costs have risen faster than enrollments and faster than the GNP; everywhere expenditures on school fall even further behind the expectations of parents, teachers, and pupils. Everywhere this situation discourages both the motivation and the financing for large-scale planning for non-schooled learning. The United States is proving to the world that no country can be rich enough to afford a school system that meets the demands this same system creates simply by existing, because a successful school system schools parents and pupils to the supreme value of a larger school system, the cost of which increases disproportionately as higher grades are in demand and become scarce. - -Rather than calling equal schooling temporarily unfeasible, we must recognize that it is, in principle, economically absurd, and that to attempt it is intellectually emasculating, socially polarizing, and destructive of the credibility of the political system which promotes it. The ideology of obligatory schooling admits of no logical limits. The White House recently provided a good example. Dr. Hutschnecker, the "psychiatrist" who treated Mr. Nixon before he was qualified as a candidate, recommended to the President that all children between six and eight be professionally examined to ferret out those who have destructive tendencies, and that obligatory treatment be provided for them. If necessary, their re-education in special institutions should be required. This memorandum from his doctor the President sent for evaluation to HEW. Indeed, preventive concentration camps for predelinquents would be a logical improvement over the school system. - -Equal educational opportunity is, indeed, both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligator;' schooling is to confuse salvation with the Church. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition. - -Two centuries ago the United States led the world in a movement to disestablish the monopoly of a single church. Now we need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoly of the school, and thereby of a system which legally combines prejudice with discrimination. The first article of a bill of rights for a modern, humanist society would correspond to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education". There shall be no ritual obligatory for all. - -To make this disestablishment effective, we need a law forbidding discrimination in hiring, voting, or admission to centers of learning based on previous attendance at some curriculum. This guarantee would not exclude performance tests of competence for a function or role, but would remove the present absurd discrimination in favor of the person who learns a given skill with the largest expenditure of public funds or what is equally likely has been able to obtain a diploma which has no relation to any useful skill or job. Only by protecting the citizen from being disqualified by anything in his career in school can a constitutional disestablishment of school become psychologically effective. - -Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification. Learning and the assignment of social roles are melted into schooling. Yet to learn means to acquire a new skill or insight, while promotion depends on an opinion which others have formed. Learning frequently is the result of instruction, but selection for a role or category in the job market increasingly depends on mere length of attendance. - -Instruction is the choice of circumstances which facilitate learning. Roles are assigned by setting a curriculum of conditions which the candidate must meet if he is to make the grade. School links instruction but not learning to these roles. This is neither reasonable nor liberating. It is not reasonable because it does not link relevant qualities or competences to roles, but rather the process by which such qualities are supposed to be acquired. It is not liberating or educational because school reserves instruction to those whose every step in learning fits previously approved measures of social control. Curriculum has always been used to assign social rank. At times it could be prenatal: karma ascribes you to a caste and lineage to the aristocracy. - -Curriculum could take the form of a ritual, of sequential sacred ordinations, or it could consist of a succession of feats in war or hunting, or further advancement could be made to depend on a series of previous princely favors. Universal schooling was meant to detach role assignment from personal life history: it was meant to give everybody an equal chance to any office. Even now many people wrongly believe that school ensures the dependence of public trust on relevant learning achievements. However, instead of equalizing chances, the school system has monopolized their distribution. - -To detach competence from curriculum, inquiries into a man's learning history must be made taboo, like inquiries into his political affiliation, church attendance, lineage, sex habits, or racial background. Laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of prior schooling must be enacted. Laws, of course, cannot stop prejudice against the unschooled-nor are they meant to force anyone to intermarry with an autodidact but they can discourage unjustified discrimination. - -A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives. - -Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction. Normal children learn their first language casually, although faster if their parents pay attention to them. Most people who learn a second language well do so as a result of odd circumstances and not of sequential teaching. They go to live with their grandparents, they travel, or they fall in love with a foreigner. Fluency in reading is also more often than not a result of such extracurricular activities. Most people who read widely, and with pleasure, merely believe that they learned to do so in school; when challenged, they easily discard this illusion. - -But the fact that a great deal of learning even now seems to happen casually and as a by-product of some other activity defined as work or leisure does not mean that planned learning does not benefit from planned instruction and that both do not stand in need of improvement. The strongly motivated student who is faced with the task of acquiring a new and complex skill may benefit greatly from the discipline now associated with the old-fashioned schoolmaster who taught reading, Hebrew, catechism, or multiplication by rote. School has now made this kind of drill teaching rare and disreputable, yet there are many skills which a motivated student with normal aptitude can master in a matter of a few months if taught in this traditional way. This is as true of codes as of their encipherment; of second and third languages as of reading and writing; and equally of special languages such as algebra, computer programming, chemical analysis, or of manual skills like typing, watchmaking, plumbing, wiring, TV repair; or for that matter dancing, driving, and diving. - -In certain cases acceptance into a learning program aimed at a specific skill might presuppose competence in some other skill, but it should certainly not be made to depend upon the process by which such prerequisite skills were acquired. TV repair presupposes literacy and some math; diving, good swimming; and driving, very little of either. - -Progress in learning skills is measurable. The optimum resources in time and materials needed by an average motivated adult can be easily estimated. The cost of teaching a second Western European language to a high level of fluency ranges between four and six hundred dollars in the United States, and for an Oriental tongue the time needed for instruction might be doubled. This would still be very little compared with the cost of twelve years of schooling in New York City (a condition for acceptance of a worker into the Sanitation Department) almost fifteen thousand dollars. No doubt not only the teacher but also the printer and the pharmacist protect their trades through the public illusion that training for them is very expensive. - -At present schools preempt most educational funds. Drill instruction which costs less than comparable schooling is now a privilege of those rich enough to bypass the schools, and those whom either the army or big business sends through in-service training. In a program of progressive deschooling of U.S. education, at first the resources available for drill training would be limited. But ultimately there should be no obstacle for anyone at any time of his life to be able to choose instruction among hundreds of definable skills at public expense. - -Right now educational credit good at any skill center could be provided in limited amounts for people of all ages, and not just to the poor. I envisage such credit in the form of an educational passport or an "edu-credit card" provided to each citizen at birth. In order to favor the poor, who probably would not use their yearly grants early in life, a provision could be made that interest accrued to later users of cumulated "entitlements". Such credits would permit most people to acquire the skills most in demand, at their convenience, better, faster, cheaper, and with fewer undesirable side effects than in school. - -Potential skill teachers are never scarce for long because, on the one hand, demand for a skill grows only with its performance within a community and, on the other, a man exercising a skill could also teach it. But, at present, those using skills which are in demand and do require a human teacher are discouraged from sharing these skills with others. This is done either by teachers who monopolize the licenses or by unions which protect their trade interests. Skill centers which would be judged by customers on their results, and not on the personnel they employ or the process they use, would open unsuspected working opportunities, frequently even for those who are now considered unemployable. Indeed, there is no reason why such skill centers should not be at the work place itself, with the employer and his work force supplying instruction as well as jobs to those who choose to use their educational credits in this way. - -In 1956 there arose a need to teach Spanish quickly to several hundred teachers, social workers, and ministers from the New York Archdiocese so that they could communicate with Puerto Ricans. My friend Gerry Morris announced over a Spanish radio station that he needed native speakers from Harlem. Next day some two hundred teenagers lined up in front of his office, and he selected four dozen of them-many of them school dropouts. He trained them in the use of the U.S. Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Spanish manual, designed for use by linguists with graduate training, and within a week his teachers were on their own-each in charge of four New Yorkers who wanted to speak the language. Within six months the mission was accomplished. Cardinal Spellman could claim that he had 127 parishes in which at least three staff members could communicate in Spanish. No school program could have matched these results. - -Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of licenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind. Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmen and tradesmen. Most high-school teachers of Spanish or French do not speak the language as correctly as their pupils might after half a year of competent drills. Experiments conducted by Angel Quintero in Puerto Rico suggest that many young teenagers, if given the proper incentives, programs, and access to tools, are better than most schoolteachers at introducing their peers to the scientific exploration of plants, stars, and matter, and to the discovery of how and why a motor or a radio functions. - -Opportunities for skill-learning can be vastly multiplied if we open the "market". This depends on matching the right teacher with the right student when he is highly motivated in an intelligent program, without the constraint of curriculum. Free and competing drill instruction is a subversive blasphemy to the orthodox educator. It dissociates the acquisition of skills from "humane" education, which schools package together, and thus it promotes unlicensed learning no less than unlicensed teaching for unpredictable purposes. - -There is currently a proposal on record which seems at first to make a great deal of sense. It has been prepared by Christopher Jencks of the Center for the Study of Public Policy and is sponsored by the Office of Economic Opportunity. It proposes to put educational "entitlements" or tuition grants into the hands of parents and students for expenditure in the schools of their choice. Such individual entitlements could indeed be an important step in the right direction. We need a guarantee of the right of each citizen to an equal share of tax-derived educational resources, the right to verify this share, and the right to sue for it if denied. It is one form of a guarantee against regressive taxation. - -The Jencks proposal, however, begins with the ominous statement that "conservatives, liberals, and radicals have all complained at one time or another that the American educational system gives professional educators too little incentive to provide high quality education to most children". The proposal condemns itself by proposing tuition grants which would have to be spent on schooling. - -This is like giving a lame man a pair of crutches and stipulating that he use them only if the ends are tied together. As the proposal for tuition grants now stands, it plays into the hands not only of the professional educators but of racists, promoters of religious schools, and others whose interests are socially divisive. Above all, educational entitlements restricted to use within schools play into the hands of all those who want to continue to live in a society in which social advancement is tied not to proven knowledge but to the learning pedigree by which it is supposedly acquired. This discrimination in favor of schools which dominates Jencks's discussion on refinancing education could discredit one of the most critically needed principles for educational reform: the return of initiative and accountability for learning to the learner or his most immediate tutor. The deschooling of society implies a recognition of the two-faced nature of learning. An insistence on skill drill alone could be a disaster; equal emphasis must be placed on other kinds of learning. But if schools are the wrong places for learning a skill, they are even worse places for getting an education. School does both tasks badly, partly because it does not distinguish between them. School is inefficient in skill instruction especially because it is curricular. In most schools a program which is meant to improve one skill is chained always to another irrelevant task. History is tied to advancement in math, and class attendance to the right to use the playground. - -Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term "liberal education". The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learning and education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature. - -Most skills can be acquired and improved by drills, because skill implies the mastery of definable and predictable behavior. Skill instruction can rely, therefore, on the simulation of circumstances in which the skill will be used. Education in the exploratory and creative use of skills, however, cannot rely on drills. Education can be the outcome of instruction, though instruction of a kind fundamentally opposed to drill. It relies on the relationship between partners who already have some of the keys which give access to memories stored in and by the community. It relies on the critical intent of all those who use memories creatively. It relies on the surprise of the unexpected question which opens new doors for the inquirer and his partner. - -The skill instructor relies on the arrangement of set circumstances which permit the learner to develop standard responses. The educational guide or master is concerned with helping matching partners to meet so that learning can take place. He matches individuals starting from their own, unresolved questions. At the most he helps the pupil to formulate his puzzlement since only a clear statement will give him the power to find his match, moved like him, at the moment, to explore the same issue in the same context. - -Matching partners for educational purposes initially seems more difficult to imagine than finding skill instructors and partners for a game. One reason is the deep fear which school has implanted in us, a fear which makes us censorious. The unlicensed exchange of skills-even undesirable skills-is more predictable and therefore seems less dangerous than the unlimited opportunity for meeting among people who share an issue which for them, at the moment, is socially, intellectually, and emotionally important. - -The Brazilian teacher Paulo Freire knows this from experience. He discovered that any adult can begin to read in a matter of forty hours if the first words he deciphers are charged with political meaning. Freire trains his teachers to move into a village and to discover the words which designate current important issues, such as the access to a well or the compound interest on the debts owed to the patron. In the evening the villagers meet for the discussion of these key words. They begin to realize that each word stays on the blackboard even after its sound has faded. The letters continue to unlock reality and to make it manageable as a problem. I have frequently witnessed how discussants grow in social awareness and how they are impelled to take political action as fast as they learn to read. They seem to take reality into their hands as they write it down. - -I remember the man who complained about the weight of pencils: they were difficult to handle because they did not weigh as much as a shovel; and I remember another who on his way to work stopped with his Companions and wrote the word they were discussing with his hoe on the ground: "agua". Since 1962 my friend Freire has moved from exile to exile, mainly because he refuses to conduct his sessions around words which are preselected by approved educators, rather than those which his discussants bring to the class. The educational matchmaking among people who have been successfully schooled is a different task. Those who do not need such assistance are a minority, even among the readers of serious journals. The majority cannot and should not be rallied for discussion around a slogan, a word, or a picture. But the idea remains the same: they should be able to meet around a problem chosen and defined by their own initiative. Creative, exploratory learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems. Large universities make the futile attempt to match them by multiplying their courses, and they generally fail since they are bound to curriculum, course structure, and bureaucratic administration. In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up predetermined problems in a ritually defined setting. The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern. - -Let me give, as an example of what I mean, a description of how an intellectual match might work in New York City. Each man, at any given moment and at a minimum price, could identify himself to a computer with his address and telephone number, indicating the book, article, film, or recording on which he seeks a partner for discussion. Within days he could receive by mail the list of others who recently had taken the same initiative. This list would enable him by telephone to arrange for a meeting with persons who initially would be known exclusively by the fact that they requested a dialogue about the same subject. - -Matching people according to their interest in a particular title is radically simple. It permits identification only on the basis of a mutual desire to discuss a statement recorded by a third person, and it leaves the initiative of arranging the meeting to the individual. Three objections are usually raised against this skeletal purity. I take them up not only to clarify the theory that I want to illustrate by my proposal for they highlight the deep-seated resistance to deschooling education, to separating learning from social control but also because they may help to suggest existing resources which are not now used for learning purposes. - -The first objection is: Why cannot self-identification be based also on an idea or an issue? Certainly such subjective terms could also be used in a computer system. Political parties, churches, unions, clubs, neighborhood centers, and professional societies already organize their educational activities in this way and in effect they act as schools. They all match people in order to explore certain "themes"; and these are dealt with in courses, seminars, and curricula in which presumed "common interests" are prepackaged. Such theme-matching is by definition teacher-centered: it requires an authoritarian presence to define for the participants the starting point for their discussion. - -By contrast, matching by the title of a book, film, etc., in its pure form leaves it to the author to define the special language, the terms, and the framework within which a given problem or fact is stated; and it enables those who accept this starting point to identify themselves to one another. For instance, matching people around the idea of "cultural revolution" usually leads either to confusion or to demagoguery. On the other hand, matching those interested in helping each other understand a specific article by Mao, Marcuse, Freud, or Goodman stands in the great tradition of liberal learning from Plato's Dialogues, which are built around presumed statements by Socrates, to Aquinas's commentaries on Peter the Lombard. The idea of matching by title is thus radically different from the theory on which the "Great Books" clubs, for example, were built: instead of relying on the selection by some Chicago professors, any two partners can choose any book for further analysis. - -The second objection asks: Why not let the identification of match seekers include information on age, background, world view, competence, experience, or other defining characteristics? Again, there is no reason why such discriminatory restrictions could not and should not be built into some of the many universities-with or without walls-which could use title-matching as their basic organizational device. I could conceive of a system designed to encourage meetings of interested persons at which the author of the book chosen would be present or represented; or a system which guaranteed the presence of a competent adviser; or one to which only students registered in a department or school had access; or one which permitted meetings only between people who defined their special approach to the title under discussion. Advantages for achieving specific goals of learning could be found for each of these restrictions. But I fear that, more often than not, the real reason for proposing such restrictions is contempt arising from the presumption that people are ignorant: educators want to avoid the ignorant meeting the ignorant around a text which they may not understand and which they read only because they are interested in it. - -The third objection: Why not provide match seekers with incidental assistance that will facilitate their meetings-with space, schedules, screening, and protection? This is now done by schools with all the inefficiency characterizing large bureaucracies. If we left the initiative for meetings to the match seekers themselves, organizations which nobody now classifies as educational would probably do the job much better. I think of restaurant owners, publishers, telephone-answering services, department store managers, and even commuter train executives who could promote their services by rendering them attractive for educational meetings. - -At a first meeting in a coffee shop, say, the partners might establish their identities by placing the book under discussion next to their cups. People who took the initiative to arrange for such meetings would soon learn what items to quote to meet the people they sought. The risk that the self-chosen discussion with one or several strangers might lead to a loss of time, disappointment, or even unpleasantness is certainly smaller than the same risk taken by a college applicant. A computer arranged meeting to discuss an article in a national magazine, held in a coffee shop off Fourth Avenue, would obligate none of the participants to stay in the company of his new acquaintances for longer than it took to drink a cup of coffee, nor would he have to meet any of them ever again. The chance that it would help to pierce the opaqueness of life in a modern city and further new friendship, selfchosen work, and critical reading is high. (The fact that a record of personal readings and meetings could be obtained thus by the FBI is undeniable; that this should still worry anybody in 1970 is only amusing to a free man, who willynilly contributes his share in order to drown snoopers in the irrelevancies they gather.) - -Both the exchange of skills and matching of partners are based on the assumption that education for all means education by all. Not the draft into a specialized institution but only the mobilization of the whole population can lead to popular culture. The equal right of each man to exercise his competence to learn and to instruct is now pre-empted by certified teachers. The teachers' competence, in turn, is restricted to what may be done in school. And, further, work and leisure are alienated from each other as a result: the spectator and the worker alike are supposed to arrive at the work place all ready to fit into a routine prepared for them. Adaptation in the form of a product's design, instruction, and publicity shapes them for their role as much as formal education by schooling. A radical alternative to a schooled society requires not only new formal mechanisms for the formal acquisition of skills and their educational use. A deschooled society implies a new approach to incidental or informal education. - -Incidental education cannot any longer return to the forms which learning took in the village or the medieval town. Traditional society was more like a set of concentric circles of meaningful structures, while modern man must learn how to find meaning in many structures to which he is only marginally related. In the village, language and architecture and work and religion and family customs were consistent with one another, mutually explanatory and reinforcing. To grow into one implied a growth into the others. Even specialized apprenticeship was a by-product of specialized activities, such as shoemaking or the singing of psalms. If an apprentice never became a master or a scholar, he still contributed to making shoes or to making church services solemn. Education did not compete for time with either work or leisure. Almost all education was complex, lifelong, and unplanned. - -Contemporary society is the result of conscious designs, and educational opportunities must be designed into them. Our reliance on specialized, full-time instruction through school will now decrease, and we must find more ways to learn and teach: the educational quality of all institutions must increase again. But this is a very ambiguous forecast. - -It could mean that men in the modern city will be increasingly the victims of an effective process of total instruction and manipulation once they are deprived of even the tenuous pretense of critical independence which liberal schools now provide for at least some of their pupils. It could also mean that men will shield themselves less behind certificates acquired in school and thus gain in courage to "talk back" and thereby control and instruct the institutions in which they participate. To ensure the latter we must learn to estimate the social value of work and leisure by the educational give-and. take for which they offer opportunity. Effective participation in the politics of a street, a work place, the library, a news program, or a hospital is therefore the best measuring stick to evaluate their level as educational institutions. - -I recently spoke to a group of junior-high-school students in the process of organizing a resistance movement to their obligatory draft into the next class. Their slogan was "participation not simulation". They were disappointed that this was understood as a demand for less rather than for more education, and reminded me of the resistance which Karl Marx put up against a passage in the Gotha program which-one hundred years ago wanted to outlaw child labor. He opposed the proposal in the interest of the education of the young, which could happen only at work. If the greatest fruit of man's labor should be the education he receives from it and the opportunity which work gives him to initiate the education of others, then the alienation of modern society in a pedagogical sense is even worse than its economic alienation. - -The major obstacle on the way to a society that truly educates was well defined by a black friend of mine in Chicago, who told me that our imagination was "all schooled up". We permit the state to ascertain the universal educational deficiencies of its citizens and establish one specialized agency to treat them. We thus share in the delusion that we can distinguish between what is necessary education for others and what is not, just as former generations established laws which defined what was sacred and what was profane. - -Durkheim recognized that this ability to divide social reality into two realms was the very essence of formal religion. There are, he reasoned, religions without the supernatural and without gods, but none which does not subdivide the world into things and persons that are sacred and others that as a consequence are profane. Durkheim's insight can be applied to the sociology of education, for school is radically divisive in a similar way. - -The very existence of obligatory schools divides any society into two realms: some time spans and processes and treatments and professions are "academic" or "pedagogic," and others are not. The power of school thus to divide social reality has no boundaries: education becomes unworldly and the world becomes noneducational. - -Since Bonhoeffer contemporary theologians have pointed to the confusions now reigning between the Biblical message and institutionalized religion. They point to the experience that Christian freedom and faith usually gain from secularization. Inevitably their statements sound blasphemous to many churchmen. Unquestionably, the educational process will gain from the deschooling of society even though this demand sounds to many schoolmen like treason to the enlightenment. But it is enlightenment itself that is now being snuffed out in the schools. - -The secularization fo the Christian faith depends on the dedication to it on the part of Christians rooted in the Church. In much the same way, the deschooling of education depend son the leadership of those brought up in the schools. Their curriculum cannot serve them as an aliby for the task: each of us remains responsible for what has been made of him, even though he may be able to do no more than accept this responsibility and serve as a warning to others. - - -## Phenomenology of School - -Some words become so flexible that they cease to be useful "School" and "teaching" are such terms. Like an amoeba they fit into almost any interstice of the language. ABM will teach the Russians, IBM will teach Negro children, and the army can become the school of a nation. - -The search for alternatives in education must therefore start with an agreement on what it is we mean by "school". This might be done in several ways. We could begin by listing the latent functions performed by modern school systems, such as custodial care, selection, indoctrination, and learning. We could make a client analysis and verify which of these latent functions render a service or a disservice to teachers, employers, children, parents, or the professions. We could survey the history of Western culture and the information gathered by anthropology in order to find institutions which played a role like that now performed by schooling. We could, finally, recall the many normative statements which have been made since the time of Comenius, or even since Quintilian, and discover which of these the modern school system most closely approaches. But any of these approaches would oblige us to start with certain assumptions about a relationship between school and education. To develop a language in which we can speak about school without such constant recourse to education, I have chosen to begin with something that might be called a phenomenology of public school. For this purpose I shall define "school" as the age-specific, teacher related process requiring full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum. - -_1._ Age School groups people according to age. This grouping rests on three unquestioned premises. Children belong in school. - -Children learn in school. Children can be taught only in school. I think these unexamined premises deserve serious questioning. We have grown accustomed to children. We have decided that they should go to school, do as they are told, and have neither income nor families of their own. We expect them to know their place and behave like children. We remember, whether nostalgically or bitterly, a time when we were children, too. We are expected to tolerate the childish behavior of children. Man-kind, for us, is a species both afflicted and blessed with the task of caring for children. We forget, however, that our present concept of "childhood" developed only recently in Western Europe and more recently still in the Americas.* (For parallel histories of modern capitalism and modern childhood see Philippe Aries, Centuries 0f Childhood, Knopf, 1962.) - -Childhood as distinct from infancy, adolescence, or youth was unknown to most historical periods. Some Christian centuries did not even have an eye for its bodily proportions. Artists depicted the infant as a miniature adult seated on his mother's arm. Children appeared in Europe along with the pocket watch and the Christian moneylenders of the Renaissance. Before our century neither the poor nor the rich knew of children's dress, children's games, or the child's immunity from the law. Childhood belonged to the bourgeoisie. The worker's child, the peasant's child, and the nobleman's child all dressed the way their fathers dressed, played the way their fathers played, and were hanged by the neck as were their fathers. After the discovery of "childhood" by the bourgeoisie all this changed. Only some churches continued to respect for some time the dignity and maturity of the young. Until the Second Vatican Council, each child was instructed that a Christian reaches moral discernment and freedom at the age of seven, and from then on is capable of committing sins for which he may be punished by an eternity in Hell. Toward the middle of this century, middle-class parents began to try to spare their children the impact of this doctrine, and their thinking about children now prevails in the practice of the Church. - -Until the last century, "children" of middle-class parents were made at home with the help of preceptors and private schools. Only with the advent of industrial society did the mass production of "childhood" become feasible and come within the reach of the masses. The school system is a modern phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces. - -Since most people today live outside industrial cities, most people today do not experience childhood. In the Andes you till the soil once you have become "useful". Before that, you watch the sheep. If you are well nourished, you should be useful by eleven, and otherwise by twelve. Recently, I was talking to my night watchman, Marcos, about his eleven-year-old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his son was still a "ni-o,” Marcos, surprised, answered with a guileless smile: "Don Ivan, I guess you're right". Realizing that until my remark the father had thought of Marcos primarily as his "son," I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons. Of course if I were to tell the New York slum-dweller that his working son is still a "child," he would show no surprise. He knows quite well that his eleven-year-old son should be allowed childhood, and resents the fact that he is not. The son of Marcos has yet to be afflicted with the yearning for childhood; the New Yorker's son feels deprived. - -Most people around the world, then, either do not want or cannot get modern childhood for their offspring. But it also seems that childhood is a burden to a good number of those few who are allowed it. Many of them are simply forced to go through it and are not at all happy playing the child's role. Growing up through childhood means being condemned to a process of in-human conflict between self awareness and the role imposed by a society going through its own school age. Neither Stephen Daedalus nor Alexander Portnoy enjoyed childhood, and neither, I suspect, did many of us like to be treated as children. If there were no age-specific and obligatory learning institution, "childhood" would go out of production. The youth of rich nations would be liberated from its destructiveness, and poor nations would cease attempting to rival the childishness of the rich. If society were to outgrow its age of childhood, it would have to become livable for the young. The present disjunction between an adult society which pretends to be humane and a school environment which mocks reality could no longer be maintained. - -The disestablishment of schools could also end the present discrimination against infants, adults, and the old in favor of children throughout their adolescence and youth. The social decision to allocate educational resources preferably to those citizens who have outgrown the extraordinary learning capacity of their first four years and have not arrived at the height of their self-motivated learning will, in retrospect, probably appear as bizarre. - -Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher. - -_2._ Teachers and Pupils By definition, children are pupils. The demand for the milieu of childhood creates an unlimited market for accredited teachers. School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. - -We have all learned most of what we know outside school. Pupils do most of their learning without, and often despite, their teachers. Most tragically, the majority of men are taught their lesson by schools, even though they never go to school. - -Everyone learns how to live outside school. We learn to speak, to think, to love, to feel, to play, to curse, to politick, and to work without interference from a teacher. Even children who are under a teacher's care day and night are no exception to the rule. Orphans, idiots, and schoolteachers' sons learn most of what they learn outside the "educational" process planned for them. Teachers have made a poor showing in their attempts at increasing learning among the poor. Poor parents who want their children to go to school are less concerned about what they will learn than about the certificate and money they will earn. And middle-class parents commit their children to a teacher's care to keep them from learning what the poor learn on the streets. Increasingly educational research demonstrates that children learn most of what teachers pretend to teach them from peer groups, from comics, from chance observations, and above all from mere participation in the ritual of school. Teachers, more often than not, obstruct such learning of subject matters as goes on in school. - -Half of the people in our world never set foot in school. They have no contact with teachers, and they are deprived of the privilege of becoming dropouts. Yet they learn quite effectively the message which school teaches: that they should have school, and more and more of it. School instructs them in their own inferiority through the tax collector who makes them pay for it, or through the demagogue who raises their expectations of it, or through their children once the latter are hooked on it. So the poor are robbed of their self-respect by subscribing to a creed that grants salvation only through the school. At least the Church gave them a chance to repent at the hour of death. School leaves them with the expectation (a counterfeit hope) that their grandchildren will make it. That expectation is of course still more learning which comes from school but not from teachers. - -Pupils have never credited teachers for most of their learning. Bright and dull alike have always relied on rote, reading, and wit to pass their exams, motivated by the stick or by the carrot of a desired career. Adults tend to romanticize their schooling. In retrospect, they attribute their learning to the teacher whose patience they learned to admire. But the same adults would worry about the mental health of a child who rushed home to tell them what he learned from his every teacher. Schools create jobs for schoolteachers, no matter what their pupils learn from them. 3\. Full-Time Attendance Every month I see another list of proposals made by some U.S. industry to AID, suggesting the replacement of Latin-American "classroom practitioners" either by disciplined systems administrators or just by TV. In the United States teaching as a team enterprise of educational researchers, designers, and technicians is gaining acceptance. But, no matter whether the teacher is a schoolmarm or a team of men in white coats, and no matter whether they succeed in teaching the subject matter listed in the catalogue or whether they fail, the professional teacher creates a sacred milieu. - -Uncertainty about the future of professional teaching puts the classroom into jeopardy. Were educational professionals to specialize in promoting learning, they would have to abandon a system which calls for between 750 and 1,000 gatherings a year. But of course teachers do a lot more. The institutional wisdom of schools tells parents, pupils, and educators that the teacher, if he is to teach, must exercise his authority in a sacred precinct. This is true even for teachers whose pupils spend most of their school time in a classroom without walls. School, by its very nature, tends to make a total claim on the time and energies of its participants. This, in turn, makes the teacher into custodian, preacher, and therapist. - -In each of these three roles the teacher bases his authority on a different claim. The teacher-as-custodian acts as a master of ceremonies, who guides his pupils through a drawn-out labyrinthine ritual. He arbitrates the observance of rules and administers the intricate rubrics of initiation to life. At his best, he sets the stage for the acquisition of some skill as schoolmasters always have. Without illusions of producing any profound learning, he drills his pupils in some basic routines. - -The teacher-as-moralist substitutes for parents, God, or the state. He indoctrinates the pupil about what is right or wrong, not only in school but also in society at large. He stands in loco parentis for each one and thus ensures that all feel themselves children of the same state. - -The teacher-as-therapist feels authorized to delve into the personal life of his pupil in order to help him grow as a person. When this function is exercised by a custodian and preacher, it usually means that he persuades the pupil to submit to a domestication of his vision of truth and his sense of what is right. - -The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life. A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode. - -Teachers are by no means the only professionals who offer therapy. Psychiatrists, guidance counselors, and job counselors, even lawyers, help their clients to decide, to develop their personalities, and to learn. Yet common sense tells the client that such professionals should abstain from imposing their opinion of what is right or wrong, or from forcing anyone to follow their advice. Schoolteachers and ministers are the only professionals who feel entitled to pry into the private affairs of their clients at the same time as they preach to a captive audience. - -Children are protected by neither the First nor the Fifth Amendment when they stand before that secular priest, the teacher. The child must confront a man who wears an invisible triple crown, like the papal tiara, the symbol of triple authority combined in one person. For the child, the teacher pontificates as pastor, prophet, and priest-he is at once guide, teacher, and administrator of a sacred ritual. He combines the claims of medieval popes in a society constituted under the guarantee that these claims shall never be exercised together by one established and obligatory institution--church or state. - -Defining children as full-time pupils permits the teacher to exercise a kind of power over their persons which is much less limited by constitutional and consuetudinal restrictions than the power wielded by the guardians of other social enclaves. Their chronological age disqualifies children from safeguards which are routine for adults in a modern asylum-madhouse, monastery, or jail. - -Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several orders of value collapse into one. The distinctions between morality, legal. ity, and personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated. Each transgression is made to be felt as a multiple offense. The offender is expected to feel that he has broken a rule, that he has behaved immorally, and that he has let himself down. A pupil who adroitly obtains assistance on an exam is told that he is an outlaw, morally corrupt, and personally worthless. - -Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious. School could not create such an enclave within which the rules of ordinary reality are suspended, unless it physically incarcerated the young during many successive years on sacred territory. The attendance rule makes it possible for the schoolroom to serve as a magic womb, from which the child is delivered periodically at the school days and school year's completion until he is finally expelled into adult life. Neither universal extended childhood nor the smothering atmosphere of the classroom could exist without schools. Yet schools, as compulsory channels for learning, could exist without either and be more repressive and destructive than anything we have come to know. To understand what it means to deschool society, and not just to reform the educational establishment, we must now focus on the hidden curriculum of schooling. We are not concerned here, directly, with the hidden curriculum of the ghetto streets which brands the poor or with the hidden curriculum of the drawing room which benefits the rich. We are rather concerned to call attention to the fact that the ceremonial or ritual of schooling itself constitutes such a hidden curriculum. Even the best of teachers cannot entirely protect his pupils from it. Inevitably, this hidden curriculum of schooling adds prejudice and guilt to the discrimination which a society practices against some of its members and compounds the privilege of others with a new title to condescend to the majority. Just as inevitably, this hidden curriculum serves as a ritual of initiation into a growth oriented consumer society for rich and poor alike. - - -## Ritualization of Progress - -The university graduate has been schooled for selective service among the rich of the world. Whatever his or her claims of solidarity with the Third World, each American college graduate has had an education costing an amount five times greater than the median life income of half of humanity. A Latin American student is introduced to this exclusive fraternity by having at least 350 times as much public money spent on his education as on that of his fellow citizens of median income. With very rare exceptions, the university graduate from a poor country feels more comfortable with his North American and European colleagues than with his non-schooled compatriots, and all students are academically processed to be happy only in the company of fellow consumers of the products of the educational machine. - -The modern university confers the privilege of dissent on those who have been tested and classified as potential money-makers or power-holders. No one is given tax funds for the leisure in which to educate himself or the right to educate others unless at the same time he can also be certified for achievement. Schools select for each successive level those who have, at earlier stages in the game, proved themselves good risks for the established order. Having a monopoly on both the resources for learning and the investiture of social roles, the university coopts the discoverer and the potential dissenter. A degree always leaves its indelible price tag on the curriculum of its consumer. Certified college graduates fit only into a world which puts a price tag on their heads, thereby giving them the power to define the level of expectations in their society. In each country the amount of consumption by the college graduate sets the standard for all others; if they would be civilized people on or off the job, they will aspire to the style of life of college graduates. - -The university thus has the effect of imposing consumer standards at work and at home, and it does so in every part of the world and under every political system. The fewer university graduates there are in a country, the more their cultivated demands are taken as models by the rest of the population. The gap between the consumption of the university graduate and that of the average citizen is even wider in Russia, China, and Algeria than in the United States. Cars, airplane trips, and tape recorders confer more visible distinction in a socialist country, where only a degree, and not just money, can procure them. - -The ability of the university to fix consumer goals is something new. In many countries the university acquired this power only in the sixties, as the delusion of equal access to public education began to spread. Before that the university protected an individual's freedom of speech, but did not automatically convert his knowledge into wealth. To be a scholar in the Middle Ages meant to be poor, even a beggar. By virtue of his calling, the medieval scholar learned Latin, became an outsider worthy of the scorn as well as the esteem of peasant and prince, burgher and cleric. To get ahead in the world, the scholastic first had to enter it by joining the civil service, preferably that of the Church. The old university was a liberated zone for discovery and the discussion of ideas both new and old. Masters and students gathered to read the texts of other masters, now long dead, and the living words of the dead masters gave new perspective to the fallacies of the present day. The university was then a community of academic quest and endemic unrest. - -In the modern multiversity this community has fled to the fringes, where it meets in a pad, a professor's office, or the chaplain's quarters. The structural purpose of the modern university has little to do with the traditional quest. Since Gutenberg, the exchange of disciplined, critical inquiry has, for the most part, moved from the "chair" into print. The modern university has forfeited its chance to provide a simple setting for encounters which are both autonomous and anarchic, focused yet unplanned and ebullient, and has chosen instead to manage the process by which so-called research and instruction are produced. - -The American university, since Sputnik, has been trying to catch up with the body count of Soviet graduates. Now the Germans are abandoning their academic tradition and are building "campuses" in order to catch up with the Americans. During the present decade they want to increase their expenditure for grammar and high schools from 14 to 59 billion DM, and more than triple expenditures for higher learning. The French propose by 1980 to raise to 10 percent of their GNP the amount spent on schools, and the Ford Foundation has been pushing poor countries in Latin America to raise per capita expenses for "respect-able" graduates toward North American levels. Students see their studies as the investment with the highest monetary return, and nations see them as a key factor in development. - -For the majority who primarily seek a college degree, the university has lost no prestige, but since 1968 it has visibly lost standing among its believers. Students refuse to prepare for war, pollution, and the perpetuation of prejudice. Teachers assist them in their challenge to the legitimacy of the government, its foreign policy, education, and the American way of life. More than a few reject degrees and prepare for a life in a counterculture, outside the certified society. They seem to choose the way of medieval Fraticelli and Alumbrados of the Reformation, the hippies and dropouts of their day. Others recognize the monopoly of the schools over the resources which they need to build a counter society. They seek support from each other to live with integrity while submitting to the academic ritual. They form, so to speak, hotbeds of heresy right within the hierarchy. - -Large parts of the general population, however, regard the modern mystic and the modern heresiarch with alarm. They threaten the consumer economy, democratic privilege, and the self-image of America. But they cannot be wished away. Fewer and fewer can be reconverted by patience or coopted by subtlety for instance, by appointing them to teach their heresy. Hence the search for means which would make it possible either to get rid of dissident individuals or to reduce the importance of the university which serves them as a base for protest. - -The students and faculty who question the legitimacy of the university, and do so at high personal cost, certainly do not feel that they are setting consumer standards or abetting a production system. Those who have founded such groups as the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars and the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) have been among the most effective in changing radically the perceptions of the realities of foreign countries for millions of young people. Still others have tried to formulate Marxian interpretations of American society or have been among those responsible for the flowering of communes. Their achievements add new strength to the argument that the existence of the university is necessary to guarantee continued social criticism. - -There is no question that at present the university offers a unique combination of circumstances which allows some of its members to criticize the whole of society. It provides time, mobility, access to peers and information, and a certain impunity-privileges not equally available to other segments of the population. But the university provides this freedom only to those who have already been deeply initiated into the consumer society and into the need for some kind of obligatory public schooling. - -The school system today performs the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of society's myth, the institutionalization of that myth's contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality. Today the school system, and especially the university, provides ample opportunity for criticism of the myth and for rebellion against its institutional perversions. But the ritual which demands tolerance of the fundamental contradictions between myth and institution still goes largely unchallenged, for neither ideological criticism nor social action can bring about a new society. Only disenchantment with and detachment from the central social ritual and reform of that ritual can bring about radical change. - -The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them. - -The project of demythologizing which I propose cannot be limited to the university alone. Any attempt to reform the university without attending to the system of which it is an integral part is like trying to do urban renewal in New York City from the twelfth story up. Most current college-level reform looks like the building of high-rise slums. Only a generation which grows up without obligatory schools will be able to recreate the university. - -### The Myth of Institutionalized Values - -School initiates, too, the Myth of Unending Consumption. This modern myth is grounded in the belief that process inevitably produces something of value and, therefore, production necessarily produces demand. School teaches us that instruction produces learning. The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect. In school we are taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; that the value of learning increases with the amount of input; and, finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates. - -In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation. - -Once a man or woman has accepted the need for school, he or she is easy prey for other institutions. Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort. "Instruction" smothers the horizon of their imaginations. They cannot be betrayed, but only short-changed, because they have been taught to substitute expectations for hope. They will no longer be surprised, for good or ill, by other people, because they have been taught what to expect from every other person who has been taught as they were. This is true in the case of another person or in the case of a machine. - -This transfer of responsibility from self to institution guarantees social regression, especially once it has been accepted as an obligation. So rebels against Alma Mater often "make it" into her faculty instead of growing into the courage to infect others with their personal teaching and to assume responsibility for the results. This suggests the possibility of a new Oedipus story-Oedipus the Teacher, who "makes" his mother in order to engender children with her. The man addicted to being taught seeks his security in compulsive teaching. The woman who experiences her knowledge as the result of a process wants to reproduce it in others. - -### The Myth of Measurement of Values - -The institutionalized values school instills are quantified ones. School initiates young people into a world where everything can be measured, including their imaginations, and, indeed, man himself. - -But personal growth is not a measurable entity. It is growth in disciplined dissidence, which cannot be measured against any rod, or any curriculum, nor compared to someone else's achievement. In such learning one can emulate others only in imaginative endeavor, and follow in their footsteps rather than mimic their gait. The learning I prize is immeasurable re-creation. - -School pretends to break learning up into subject "matters," to build into the pupil a curriculum made of these prefabricated blocks, and to gauge the result on an international scale. People who submit to the standard of others for the measure of their own personal growth soon apply the same ruler to themselves. They no longer have to be put in their place, but put themselves into their assigned slots, squeeze themselves into the niche which they have been taught to seek,and, in the very process, put their fellows into their places, too, until everybody and everything fits. - -People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience slip out of their hands. To them, what cannot be measured becomes secondary, threatening. They do not have to be robbed of their creativity. Under instruction, they have unlearned to "do" their thing or "be" themselves, and value only what has been made or could be made. - -Once people have the idea schooled into them that values can be produced and measured, they tend to accept all kinds of rank' ings. There is a scale for the development of nations, another for the intelligence of babies, and even progress toward peace can be calculated according to body count. In a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer's index. - -### The Myth of Packaging Values - -School sells curriculum--a bundle of goods made according to the same process and having the same structure as other merchandise. Curriculum production for most schools begins with allegedly scientific research, on whose basis educational engineers predict future demand and tools for the assembly line, within the limits set by budgets and taboos. The distributor-teacher delivers the finished product to the consumer pupil, whose reactions are carefully studied and charted to provide research data for the preparation of the next model, which may be "ungraded," "student-designed," "team-taught," "visually-aided," or "issue-centered". - -The result of the curriculum production process looks like any other modern staple. It is a bundle of planned meanings, a package of values, a commodity whose "balanced appeal" makes it marketable to a sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production. Consumer pupils are taught to make their desires conform to marketable values. Thus they are made to feel guilty if they do not behave according to the predictions of consumer research by getting the grades and certificates that will place them in the job category they have been led to expect. - -Educators can justify more expensive curricula on the basis of their observation that learning difficulties rise proportionately with the cost of the curriculum. This is an application of Parkinson's Law that work expands with the resources available to do it. This law can be verified on all levels of school: for instance, reading difficulties have been a major issue in French schools only since their per capita expenditures have approached U.S. levels of 1950-when reading difficulties became a major issue in U.S. schools. In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea that one person's judgment should determine what and when another person must learn. - -### The Myth of Self-Perpetuating Progress - -Even when accompanied by declining returns in learning, paradoxically, rising per capita instructional costs increase the value of the pupil in his or her own eyes and on the market. At almost any cost, school pushes the pupil up to the level of competitive curricular consumption, into progress to ever higher levels. Expenditures to motivate the student to stay on in school skyrocket as he climbs the pyramid. On higher levels they are disguised as new football stadiums, chapels, or programs called International Education. If it teaches nothing else, school teaches the value of escalation: the value of the American way of doing things. - -The Vietnam war fits the logic of the moment. Its success has been measured by the numbers of persons effectively treated by cheap bullets delivered at immense cost, and this brutal calculus is unashamedly called "body count". Just as business is business, the never-ending accumulation of money, so war is killing, the never-ending accumulation of dead bodies. In like manner, education is schooling, and this open-ended process is counted in pupil-hours. The various processes are irreversible and self-justifying. By economic standards the country gets richer and richer. By death-accounting standards the nation goes on winning its war forever. And by school standards the population becomes increasingly educated. - -School programs hunger for progressive intake of instruction, but even if the hunger leads to steady absorption, it never yields the joy of knowing something to one's satisfaction. Each subject comes packaged with the instruction to go on consuming one "offering" after another, and last year's wrapping is always obsolete for this year's consumer. The textbook racket builds on this demand. Educational reformers promise each new generation the latest and the best, and the public is schooled into demanding what they offer. Both the dropout who is forever reminded of what he missed and the graduate who is made to feel inferior to the new breed of student know exactly where they stand in the ritual of rising deceptions and continue to support a society which euphemistically calls the widening frustration gap a "revolution of rising expectations". - -But growth conceived as open-ended consumption-eternal progress-can never lead to maturity. Commitment to unlimited quantitative increase vitiates the possibility of organic development. - -### Ritual Game and the New World Religion - -The school leaving age in developed nations outpaces the rise in life expectancy. The two curves will intersect in a decade and create a problem for Jessica Mitford and professionals concerned with "terminal education". I am reminded of the late Middle Ages, when the demand for Church services outgrew a lifetime, and "Purgatory" was created to purify souls under the pope's control before they could enter eternal peace. Logically, this led first to a trade in indulgences and then to an attempt at Reformation. The Myth of Unending Consumption now takes the place of belief in life everlasting. - -Arnold Toynbee has pointed out that the decadence of a great culture is usually accompanied by the rise of a new World Church which extends hope to the domestic proletariat while serving the needs of a new warrior class. School seems eminently suited to be the World Church of our decaying culture. No institution could better veil from its participants the deep discrepancy between social principles and social reality in today's world. Secular, scientific, and death-denying, it is of a piece with the modern mood. Its classical, critical veneer makes it appear pluralist if not antireligious. Its curriculum both defines science and is itself defined by so-called scientific research. No one completes school--yet. It never closes its doors on anyone without first offering him one more chance: at remedial, adult, and continuing education. - -School serves as an effective creator and sustainer of social myth because of its structure as a ritual game of graded promotions. Introduction into this gambling ritual is much more important than what or how something is taught. It is the game itself that schools, that gets into the blood and becomes a habit. A whole society is initiated into the Myth of Unending Consumption of services. This happens to the degree that token participation in the open-ended ritual is made compulsory and compulsive everywhere. School directs ritual rivalry into an international game which obliges competitors to blame the world's ills on those who cannot or will not play. School is a ritual of initiation which introduces the neophyte to the sacred race of progressive consumption, a ritual of propitiation whose academic priests mediate between the faithful and the gods of privilege and power, a ritual of expiation which sacrifices its dropouts, branding them as scapegoats of underdevelopment. - -Even those who spend at best a few years in school-and this is the overwhelming majority in Latin America, Asia, and Africa-learn to feel guilty because of their underconsumption of schooling. In Mexico six grades of school are legally obligatory. Children born into the lower economic third have only two chances in three to make it into the first grade. If they make it, they have four chances in one hundred to finish obligatory schooling by the sixth grade. If they are born into the middle third group, their chances increase to twelve out of a hundred. With these rules, Mexico is more successful than most of the other twenty-five Latin American republics in providing public education. - -Everywhere, all children know that they were given a chance, albeit an unequal one, in an obligatory lottery, and the presumed equality of the international standard now compounds their original poverty with the self-inflicted discrimination accepted by the dropout. They have been schooled to the belief in rising expectations and can now rationalize their growing frustration outside school by accepting their rejection from scholastic grace. They are excluded from Heaven because, once baptized, they did not go to church. Born in original sin, they are baptized into first grade, but go to Gehenna (which in Hebrew means "slum") because of their personal faults. As Max Weber traced the social effects of the belief that salvation belonged to those who accumulated wealth, we can now observe that grace is reserved for those who accumulate years in school. - -### The Coming Kingdom: The Universalization of Expectations - -School combines the expectations of the consumer expressed in its claims with the beliefs of the producer expressed in its ritual, It is a liturgical expression of a world-wide "cargo cult," reminiscent of the cults which swept Melanesia in the forties, which injected cultists with the belief that if they but put on a black tie over their naked torsos, Jesus would arrive in a steamer bearing an icebox, a pair of trousers, and a sewing machine for each believer. - -School fuses the growth in humiliating dependence on a master with the growth in the futile sense of omnipotence that is so typical of the pupil who wants to go out and teach all nations to save themselves. The ritual is tailored to the stern work habits of the hardhats, and its purpose is to celebrate the myth of an earthly paradise of never-ending consumption, which is the only hope for the wretched and dispossessed. - -Epidemics of insatiable this-worldly expectations have occurred throughout history, especially among colonized and marginal groups in all cultures. Jews in the Roman Empire had their Essenes and Jewish messiahs, serfs in the Reformation their Thomas Müntzer, dispossessed Indians from Paraguay to Dakota their infectious dancers. These sects were always led by a prophet, and limited their promises to a chosen few. The school-induced expectation of the kingdom, on the other hand, is impersonal rather than prophetic, and universal rather than local. Man has become the engineer of his own messiah and promises the unlimited rewards of science to those who submit to progressive engineering for his reign. - -### The New Alienation - -School is not only the New World Religion. It is also the world's fastest-growing labor market. The engineering of consumers has become the economy's principal growth sector. As production costs decrease in rich nations, there is an increasing concentration of both capital and labor in the vast enterprise of equipping man for disciplined consumption. During the past decade capital investments directly related to the school system rose even faster than expenditures for defense. Disarmament would only accelerate the process by which the learning industry moves to the center of the national economy. School gives unlimited opportunity for legitimated waste, so long as its destructiveness goes unrecognized and the cost of palliatives goes up. - -If we add those engaged in full-time teaching to those in full-time attendance, we realize that this so-called superstructure has become society's major employer. In the United States sixty-two million people are in school and eighty million at work elsewhere. This is often forgotten by neo-Marxist analysts who say that the process of deschooling must be postponed or bracketed until other disorders, traditionally understood as more fundamental, are corrected by an economic and political revolution. Only if school is understood as an industry can revolutionary strategy be planned realistically. For Marx, the cost of producing demands for commodities was barely significant. Today most human labor is engaged in the production of demands that can be satisfied by industry which makes intensive use of capital. Most of this is done in school. - -Alienation, in the traditional scheme, was a direct consequence of work's becoming wage-labor which deprived man of the opportunity to create and be recreated. Now young people are prealienated by schools that isolate them while they pretend to be both producers and consumers of their own knowledge, which is conceived of as a commodity put on the market in school. School makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and work of creativity. School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition. And school directly or indirectly employs a major portion of the population. School either keeps people for life or makes sure that they will fit into some institution. - -The New World Church is the knowledge industry, both purveyor of opium and the workbench during an increasing number of the years of an individual's life. Deschooling is, therefore, at the root of any movement for human liberation. - -### The Revolutionary Potential of Deschooling - -Of course, school is not, by any means, the only modern institution which has as its primary purpose the shaping of man's vision of reality. The hidden curriculum of family life, draft, health care, so-called professionalism, or of the media play an important part in the institutional manipulation of man's world-vision, language, and demands. But school enslaves more profoundly and more systematically, since only school is credited with the principal function of forming critical judgment, and, paradoxically, tries to do so by making learning about oneself, about others, and about nature depend on a prepackaged process. School touches us so intimately that none of us can expect to be liberated from it by something else. - -Many self-styled revolutionaries are victims of school. They see even "liberation" as the product of an institutional process. Only liberating oneself from school will dispel such illusions. The discovery that most learning requires no teaching can be neither manipulated nor planned. Each of us is personally responsible for his or her own deschooling, and only we have the power to do it. No one can be excused if he fails to liberate himself from schooling. People could not free themselves from the Crown until at least some of them had freed themselves from the established Church. They cannot free themselves from progressive consumption until they free themselves from obligatory school. - -We are all involved in schooling, from both the side of production and that of consumption. We are superstitiously convinced that good learning can and should be produced in us-and that we can produce it in others. Our attempt to withdraw from the concept of school will reveal the resistance we find in ourselves when we try to renounce limitless consumption and the pervasive presumption that others can be manipulated for their own good. No one is fully exempt from the exploitation of others in the schooling process. - -School is both the largest and the most anonymous employer of all. Indeed, the school is the best example of a new kind of enterprise, succeeding the guild, the factory, and the corporation. The multinational corporations which have dominated the economy are now being complemented, and may one day be replaced, by super nationally planned service agencies. These enterprises present their services in ways that make all men feel obliged to consume them. They are internationally standardized, redefining the value of their services periodically and everywhere at approximately the same rhythm. - -"Transportation" relying on new cars and superhighways serves the same institutionally packaged need for comfort, prestige, speed, and gadgetry, whether its components are produced by the state or not. The apparatus of "medical care" defines a peculiar kind of health, whether the service is paid for by the state or by the individual. Graded promotion in order to obtain diplomas fits the student for a place on the same international pyramid of qualified manpower, no matter who directs the school. - -In all these cases employment is a hidden benefit: the driver of a private automobile, the patient who submits to hospitalization, or the pupil in the schoolroom must now be seen as part of a new class of "employees". A liberation movement which starts in school, and yet is grounded in the awareness of teachers and pupils as simultaneously exploiters and exploited, could foreshadow the revolutionary strategies of the future; for a radical program of deschooling could train youth in the new style of revolution needed to challenge a social system featuring obligatory "health," "wealth," and "security". - -The risks of a revolt against school are unforeseeable, but they are not as horrible as those of a revolution starting in any other major institution. School is not yet organized for self-protection as effectively as a nation-state, or even a large corporation. Liberation from the grip of schools could be bloodless. The weapons of the truant officer and his allies in the courts and employment agencies might take very cruel measures against the individual offender, especially if he or she were poor, but they might turn out to be powerless against the surge of a mass movement. - -School has become a social problem; it is being attacked on all sides, and citizens and their governments sponsor unconventional experiments all over the world. They resort to unusual statistical devices in order to keep faith and save face. The mood among some educators is much like the mood among Catholic bishops after the Vatican Council. The curricula of so-called "free schools" resemble the liturgies of folk and rock masses. The demands of highschool students to have a say in choosing their teachers are as strident as those of parishioners demanding to select their pastors. But the stakes for society are much higher if a significant minority loses its faith in schooling. This would endanger the survival not only of the economic order built on the coproduction of goods and demands, but equally of the political order built on thenation-state into which students are delivered by the school. - -Our options are clear enough. Either we continue to believe that institutionalized learning is a product which justifies unlimited investment or we rediscover that legislation and planning and investment, if they have any place in formal education, should be used mostly to tear down the barriers that now impede opportunities for learning, which can only be a personal activity. - -If we do not challenge the assumption that valuable knowledge is a commodity which under certain circumstances may be forced into the consumer, society will be increasingly dominated by sinister pseudo schools and totalitarian managers of information. Pedagogical therapists will drug their pupils more in order to teach them better, and students will drug themselves more to gain relief from the pressures of teachers and the race for certificates. Increasingly larger numbers of bureaucrats will presume to pose as teachers. The language of the schoolman has already been coopted by the adman. Now the general and the policeman try to dignify their professions by masquerading as educators. In a schooled society, warmaking and civil repression find an educational rationale. Pedagogical warfare in the style of Vietnam will be increasingly justified as the only way of teaching people the superior value of unending progress. - -Repression will be seen as a missionary effort to hasten the coming of the mechanical Messiah. More and more countries will resort to the pedagogical torture already implemented in Brazil and Greece. This pedagogical torture is not used to extract information or to satisfy the psychic needs of sadists. It relies on random terror to break the integrity of an entire population and make it plastic material for the teachings invented by technocrats. The totally destructive and constantly progressive nature of obligatory instruction will fulfill its ultimate logic unless we begin to liberate ourselves right now from our pedagogical hubris, our belief that man can do what God cannot, namely, manipulate others for their own salvation. - -Many people are just awakening to the inexorable destruction which present production trends imply for the environment, but individuals have only very limited power to change these trends. The manipulation of men and women begun in school has also reached a point of no return, and most people are still unaware of it. They still encourage school reform, as Henry Ford II proposes less poisonous automobiles. - -Daniel Bell says that our epoch is characterized by an extreme disjunction between cultural and social structures, the one being devoted to apocalyptic attitudes, the other to technocratic decision-making. This is certainly true for many educational reformers, who feel impelled to condemn almost everything which characterizes modern schools-and at the same time propose new schools. - -In his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that such dissonance inevitably precedes the emergence of a new cognitive paradigm. The facts reported by those who observed free fall, by those who returned from the other side of the earth, and by those who used the new telescope did not fit the Ptolemaic world view. Quite suddenly, the Newtonian paradigm was accepted. The dissonance which characterizes many of the young today is not so much cognitive as a matter of attitudes--a feeling about what a tolerable society cannot be like. What is surprising about this dissonance is the ability of a very large number of people to tolerate it. - -The capacity to pursue incongruous goals requires an explanation. According to Max Gluckman, all societies have procedures to hide such dissonances from their members. He suggests that this is the purpose of ritual. Rituals can hide from their participants even discrepancies and conflicts between social principle and social organization. As long as an individual is not explicitly conscious of the ritual character of the process through which he was initiated to the forces which shape his cosmos, he cannot break the spell and shape a new cosmos. As long as we are not aware of the ritual through which school shapes the progressive consumer--the economy's major resource--we cannot break the spell of this economy and shape a new one. - - -## Institutional Spectrum - -Most utopian schemes and futuristic scenarios call for new and costly technologies, which would have to be sold to rich and poor nations alike. Herman Kahn has found pupils in Venezuela, Argentina, and Colombia. The pipe dreams of Sergio Bernardes for his Brazil of the year 2000 sparkle with more new machinery than is now possessed by the United States, which by then will be weighted down with the antiquated missile sites, jetports, and cities of the sixties and seventies. Futurists inspired by Buckminster Fuller would depend on cheaper and more exotic devices. They count on the acceptance of a new but possible technology that would apparently allow us to make more with less lightweight monorails rather than supersonic transport; vertical living rather than horizontal sprawling. All of today's futuristic planners seek to make economically feasible what is technically possible while refusing to face the inevitable social consequence: the increased craving of all men for goods and services that will remain the privilege of a few. - -I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a life style which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a life style which only allows us to make and unmake, produce and consume-a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies. We need a set of criteria which will permit us to recognize those institutions which support personal growth rather than addiction, as well as the will to invest our techno-logical resources preferentially in such institutions of growth. - -The choice is between two radically opposed institutional types, both of which are exemplified in certain existing institutions, although one type so characterizes the contemporary period. as to almost define it. This dominant type I would propose to call the manipulative institution. The other type also exists, but only precariously. The institutions which fit it are humbler and less noticeable; yet I take them as models for a more desirable future. I call them "convivial" and suggest placing them at the left of an institutional spectrum, both to show that there are institutions which fall between the extremes and to illustrate how historical institutions can change color as they shift from facilitating activity to organizing production. - -Generally, such a spectrum, moving from left to right, has been used to characterize men and their ideologies, not our social institutions and their styles. This categorization of men, whether as individuals or in groups, often generates more heat than light. Weighty objections can be raised against using an ordinary convention in an unusual fashion, but by doing so I hope to shift the terms of the discussion from a sterile to a fertile plane. It will become evident that men of the left are not always characterized by their opposition to the manipulative institutions, which I locate to the right on the spectrum. - -The most influential modern institutions crowd up at the right of the spectrum. Law enforcement has moved there, as it has shifted from the hands of the sheriff to those of the FBI and the Pentagon. Modern warfare has become a highly professional enterprise whose business is killing. It has reached the point where its efficiency is measured in body counts. Its peace-keeping potential depends on its ability to convince friend and foe of the nation's unlimited death-dealing power. Modern bullets and chemicals are so effective that a few cents' worth, properly delivered to the intended "client," unfailingly kill or maim. But delivery costs rise vertiginously; the cost of a dead Vietnamese went from $360,000 in 1967 to $450,000 in 1969. Only economies on a scale approaching race suicide would render modern warfare economically efficient. The boomerang effect in war is becoming more obvious: the higher the body count of dead Vietnamese, the more enemies the United States acquires around the world; likewise, the more the United States must spend to create another manipulative institution--cynically dubbed "pacification" in a futile effort to absorb the side effects of war. - -At this same extreme on the spectrum we also find social agencies which specialize in the manipulation of their clients. Like the military, they tend to develop effects contrary to their aims as the scope of their operations increases. These social institutions are equally counterproductive, but less obviously so. Many assume a therapeutic and compassionate image to mask this paradoxical effect. For example, jails, up until two centuries ago, served as a means of detaining men until they were sentenced, maimed, killed, or exiled, and were sometimes deliberately used as a form of torture. Only recently have we begun to claim that locking people up in cages will have a beneficial effect on their character and behavior. Now quite a few people are beginning to understand that jail increases both the quality and the quantity of criminals, that, in fact, it often creates them out of mere nonconformists. Far fewer people, however, seem to understand that mental hospitals, nursing homes, and orphan asylums do much the same thing. These institutions provide their clients with the destructive self-image of the psychotic, the overaged, or the waif, and provide a rationale for the existence of entire professions, just as jails produce income for wardens. Membership in the institutions found at this extreme of the spectrum is achieved in two ways, both coercive: by forced commitment or by selective service. - -At the opposite extreme of the spectrum lie institutions distinguished by spontaneous use-the "convivial" institutions. Telephone link-ups, subway lines, mail routes, public markets and exchanges do not require hard or soft sells to induce their clients to use them. Sewage systems, drinking water, parks, and sidewalks are institutions men use without having to be institutionally convinced that it is to their advantage to do so. Of course, all institutions require some regulation. But the operation of institutions which exist to be used rather than to produce something requires rules of an entirely different nature from those required by treatment-institutions, which are manipulative. The rules which govern institutions for use have mainly the purpose of avoiding abuses which would frustrate their general accessibility. Sidewalks must be kept free of obstructions, the industrial use of drinking water must be held within limits, and ball playing must be restricted to special areas within a park. At present we need legislation to limit the abuse of our telephone lines by computers, the abuse of mail service by advertisers, and the pollution of our sewage systems by industrial wastes. The regulation of convivial institutions sets limits to their use; as one moves from the convivial to the manipulative end of the spectrum, the rules progressively call for unwilling consumption or participation. The different cost of acquiring clients is just one of the characteristics which distinguish convivial from manipulative institutions. - -At both extremes of the spectrum we find service institutions, but on the right the service is imposed manipulation, and the client is made the victim of advertising, aggression, indoctrination, imprisonment, or electroshock. On the left the service is amplified opportunity within formally defined limits, while the client remains a free agent. Right-wing institutions tend to be highly complex and costly production processes in which much of the elaboration and expense is concerned with convincing consumers that they cannot live without the product or the treatment offered by the institution. Leftwing institutions tend to be networks which facilitate client-initiated communication or cooperation. - -The manipulative institutions of the right are either socially or psychologically "addictive". Social addiction, or escalation, consists in the tendency to prescribe increased treatment if smaller quantities have not yielded the desired results. Psycho-logical addiction, or habituation, results when consumers become hooked on the need for more and more of the process or product. The self-activated institutions of the left tend to be self-limiting. Unlike production processes which identify satisfaction with the mere act of consumption, these networks serve a purpose beyond their own repeated use. An individual picks up the telephone when he wants to say something to someone else, and hangs up when the desired communication is over. He does not, teen-agers excepted, use the telephone for the sheer pleasure of talking into the receiver. If the telephone is not the best way to get in touch, people will write a letter or take a trip. Right-wing institutions, as we can see clearly in the case of schools, both invite compulsively repetitive use and frustrate alternative ways of achieving similar results. - -Toward, but not at, the left on the institutional spectrum, we can locate enterprises which compete with others in their own field, but have not begun notably to engage in advertising. Here we find hand laundries, small bakeries, hairdressers, and-to speak of professionals-some lawyers and music teachers. Characteristically left of center, then, are self-employed persons who have institutionalized their services but not their publicity. They acquire clients through their personal touch and the comparative quality of their services. - -Hotels and cafeterias are somewhat closer to the center. The big chains like Hilton-which spend huge amounts on selling their image-often behave as if they were running institutions of the right. Yet Hilton and Sheraton enterprises do not usually offer anything more-in fact, they often give less-than similarly priced, independently managed lodgings. Essentially, a hotel sign beckons to a traveler in the manner of a road sign. It says, "Stop, here is a bed for you," rather than, "You should prefer a hotel bed to a park bench!" - -The producers of staples and most perishable consumer goods belong in the middle of our spectrum. They fill generic demands and add to the cost of production and distribution whatever the market will bear in advertising costs for publicity and special packaging. The more basic the product-be it goods or services-the more does competition tend to limit the sales cost of the item. - -Most manufacturers of consumer goods have moved much further to the right. Both directly and indirectly, they produce demands for accessories which boost real purchase price far beyond production cost. General Motors and Ford produce means of transportation, but they also, and more importantly, manipulate public taste in such a way that the need for transportation is expressed as a demand for private cars rather than public buses. They sell the desire to control a machine, to race at high speeds in luxurious comfort, while also offering the fantasy at the end of the road. What they sell, however, is not just a matter of uselessly big motors, superfluous gadgetry, or the new extras forced on the manufacturers by Ralph Nader and the clean-air lobbyists. The list price includes souped-up engines, airconditioning, safety belts, and exhaust controls; but other costs not openly declared to the driver are also involved: the corporation's advertising and sales expenses, fuel, maintenance and parts, insurance, interest on credit, as well as less tangible costs like loss of time, temper, and breathable air in our traffic-congested cities. - -An especially interesting corollary to our discussion of socially useful institutions is the system of "public" highways. This major element of the total cost of automobiles deserves lengthier treatment, since it leads directly to the rightist institution in which I am most interested, namely, the school. - -### False Public Utilities - -The highway system is a network for locomotion across relatively large distances. As a network, it appears to belong on the left of the institutional spectrum. But here we must make a distinction which will clarify both the nature of highways and the nature of true public utilities. Genuinely all-purpose roads are true public utilities. Superhighways are private preserves, the cost of which has been partially foisted upon the public. - -Telephone, postal, and highway systems are all networks, and none of them is free. Access to the telephone network is limited by time charges on each call. These rates are relatively small and could be reduced without changing the nature of the system. Use of the telephone system is not in the least limited by what is transmitted, although it is best used by those who can speak coherent sentences in the language of the other party-an ability universally possessed by those who wish to use the network. Postage is usually cheap. Use of the postal system is slightly limited by the price of pen and paper, and somewhat more by the ability to write. Still, when someone who does not know how to write has a relative or friend to whom he can dictate a letter, the postal system is at his service, as it is if he wants to ship a recorded tape. - -The highway system does not similarly become available to someone who merely learns to drive. The telephone and postal networks exist to serve those who wish to use them, while the highway system mainly serves as an accessory to the private automobile. The former are true public utilities, whereas the latter is a public service to the owners of cars, trucks, and buses. Public utilities exist for the sake of communication among men; highways, like other institutions of the right, exist for the sake of a product. Auto manufacturers, we have already observed, produce simultaneously both cars and the demand for cars. They also produce the demand for multilane highways, bridges, and oilfields. The private car is the focus of a cluster of right-wing institutions. The high cost of each element is dictated by elaboration of the basic product, and to sell the basic product is to hook society on the entire package. - -To plan a highway system as a true public utility would discriminate against those for whom velocity and individualized comfort are the primary transportation values, in favor of those who value fluidity and destination. It is the difference between a far-flung network with maximum access for travelers and one which offers only privileged access to restricted areas. - -Transferring a modern institution to the developing nations provides the acid test of its quality. In very poor countries roads are usually just good enough to permit transit by special, high-axle trucks loaded with groceries, livestock, or people. This kind of country should use its limited resources to build a spiderweb of trails extending to every region and should restrict imports to two or three different models of highly durable vehicles which can manage all trails at low speed. This would simplify maintenance and the stocking of spare parts, permit the operation of these vehicles around the clock, and provide maximum fluidity and choice of destination to all citizens. This would require the engineering of all-purpose vehicles with the simplicity of the Model T, making use of the most modern alloys to guarantee durability, with a built-in speed limit of not more than fifteen miles per hour, and strong enough to run on the roughest terrain. Such vehicles are not on the market because there is no demand for them. As a matter of fact, such a demand would have to be cultivated, quite possibly under the protection of strict legislation. At present, whenever such a demand is even slightly felt, it is quickly snuffed out by counterpublicity aimed at universal sales of the machines which currently extract from U.S. taxpayers the money needed for building superhighways. - -In order to "improve" transportation, all countries-even the poorest-now plan highway systems designed for the passenger cars and high-speed trailers which fit the velocity-conscious minority of producers and consumers in the elite classes. This approach is frequently rationalized as a saving of the most precious resource of a poor country: the time of the doctor, the school inspector, or the public administrator. These men, of course, serve almost exclusively the same people who have, or hope one day to have, a car. Local taxes and scarce international exchange are wasted on false public utilities. - -"Modern" technology transferred to poor countries falls into three large categories: goods, factories which make them, and service institutions -principally schools- which make men into modern producers and consumers. Most countries spend by far the largest proportion of their budget on schools. The school-made graduates then create a demand for other conspicuous utilities, such as industrial power, paved highways, modern hospitals, and airports, and these in turn create a market for the goods made for rich countries and, after a while, the tendency to import obsolescent factories to produce them. - -Of all "false utilities," school is the most insidious. Highway systems produce only a demand for cars. Schools create a demand for the entire set of modern institutions which crowd the right end of the spectrum. A man who questioned the need for high. ways would be written off as a romantic; the man who questions the need for school is immediately attacked as either heartless or imperialist. - -### Schools as False Public Utilities - -Like highways, schools, at first glance, give the impression of being equally open to all comers. They are, in fact, open only to those who consistently renew their credentials. Just as highways create the impression that their present level of cost per year is necessary if people are to move, so schools are presumed essential for attaining the competence required by a society which uses modern technology. We have exposed speedways as spurious public utilities by noting their dependence on private automobiles. Schools are based upon the equally spurious hypothesis that learning is the result of curricular teaching. - -Highways result from a perversion of the desire and need for mobility into the demand for a private car. Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction. Demand for manufactured maturity is a far greater abnegation of self-initiated activity than the demand for manufactured goods. Schools are not only to the right of highways and cars; they belong near the extreme of the institutional spectrum occupied by total asylums. Even the producers of body counts kill only bodies. By making men abdicate the responsibility for their own growth, school leads many to a kind of spiritual suicide. - -Highways are paid for in part by those who use them, since tolls and gasoline taxes are extracted only from drivers. School, on the other hand, is a perfect system of regressive taxation, where the privileged graduates ride on the back of the entire paying public. School puts a head tax on promotion. The under consumption of highway mileage is not nearly so costly as the under consumption of schooling. The man who does not own a car in Los Angeles may be almost immobilized, but if he can somehow manage to reach a work place, he can get and hold a job. The school dropout has no alternative route. The suburbanite with his new Lincoln and his country cousin who drives a beat-up jalopy get essentially the same use out of the highway, even though one man's car costs thirty times more than the other's. The value of a man's schooling is a function of the number of years he has completed and of the costliness of the schools he has attended. The law compels no one to drive, whereas it obliges everyone to go to school. - -The analysis of institutions according to their present placement on a left-right continuum enables me to clarify my belief that fundamental social change must begin with a change of consciousness about institutions and to explain why the dimension of a viable future turns on the rejuvenation of institutional style. - -During the sixties institutions born in different decades since the French Revolution simultaneously reached old age; public school systems founded in the time of Jefferson or of Atatürk, along with others which started after World War II,all became bureaucratic, self-justifying, and manipulative. The same thing happened to systems of social security, to labor unions, major churches and diplomacies, the care of the aged, and the disposal of the dead. - -Today, for instance, the school systems of Colombia, Britain, the U.S.S.R., and the U.S. resemble each other more closely than U.S. schools of the late 1890's resembled either today's or their contemporaries in Russia. Today all schools are obligatory, open-ended, and competitive. The same convergence in institutional style affects health care, merchandising, personnel administration, and political life. All these institutional processes tend to pile up at the manipulative end of the spectrum. - -A merger of world bureaucracies results from this convergence of institutions. The style, the ranking systems, and the paraphernalia (from textbook to computer) are standardized on the planning boards of Costa Rica or Afghanistan after the model of Western Europe. - -Everywhere these bureaucracies seem to focus on the same task: promoting the growth of institutions of the right. They are concerned with the making of things, the making of ritual rules, and the making-and reshaping--of "executive truth," the ideology or fiat which establishes the current value which should be attributed to their product. - -Technology provides these bureaucracies with increasing power on the right hand of society. The left hand of society seems to wither, not because technology is less capable of increasing the range of human action, and providing time for the play of individual imagination and personal creativity, but because such use of technology does not increase the power of an elite which administers it. The postmaster has no control over the substantive use of the mails, the switchboard operator or Bell Telephone executive has no power to stop adultery, murder, or subversion from being planned over his network. - -At stake in the choice between the institutional right and left is the very nature of human life. Man must choose whether tobe rich in things or in the freedom to use them. He must choose between alternate styles of life and related production schedules. - -Aristotle had already discovered that "making and acting" are different, so different, in fact, that one never includes the other. "For neither is acting a way of making-nor making a way of truly acting. Architecture _techne_ is a way of making - - - of bringing something into being whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing. Making has always an end other than itself, action not; for good action itself is its end. Perfection in making is an art, perfection in acting is a virtue".[^n01] The word which Aristotle employed for making was "poesis," and the word he employed for doing, "praxis". A move to the right implies that an institution is being restructured to increase its ability to "make," while as it moves to the left, it is being restructured to allow increased "doing" or "praxis". Modern technology has increased the ability of man to relinquish the "making" of things to machines, and his potential time for "acting"" has increased. - -"Making" the necessities of life has ceased to take up his time. Unemployment is the result of this modernization: it is the idleness of a man for whom there is nothing to "make" and who does not know what to "do"--that is, how to "act". Unemployment is the sad idleness of a man who, contrary to Aristotle, believes that making things, or working, is virtuous and that idleness is bad. Unemployment is the experience of the man who has succumbed to the Protestant ethic. Leisure, according to Weber, is necessary for man to be able to work. For Aristotle, work is necessary for man to have leisure. - -Technology provides man with discretionary time he can fill either with making or with doing. The choice between sad unemployment and joyful leisure is now open for the entire culture. It depends on the institutional style the culture chooses. This choice would have been unthinkable in an ancient culture built either on peasant agriculture or on slavery. It has become inevitable for postindustrial man. - -One way to fill available time is to stimulate increased demands for the consumption of goods and, simultaneously, for the production of services. The former implies an economy which provides an ever-growing array of ever newer things which can be made, consumed, wasted, and recycled. The latter implies the futile attempt to "make" virtuous actions into the products of "service" institutions. This leads to the identification of schooling and education, of medical service and health, of program watching and entertainment, of speed and effective locomotion. This first option now goes under the name of development. - -The radically alternative way to fill available time is a limited range of more durable goods and to provide access to institutions which can increase the opportunity and desirability of human interaction. - -A durable-goods economy is precisely the contrary of an economy based on planned obsolescence. A durable-goods economy means a constraint on the bill of goods. Goods would have to be such that they provided the maximum opportunity to "do" something with them: items made for self-assembly, self-help, reuse, and repair. - -The complement to a durable, repairable, and reusable bill of goods is not an increase of institutionally produced services, but rather an institutional framework which constantly educates to action, participation, and self-help. The movement of our society from the present--in which all institutions gravitate toward post-industrial bureaucracy--to a future of postindustrial conviviality--in which the intensity of action would prevail over production--must begin with a renewal of style in the service institutions--and, first of all, with a renewal of education. A future which is desirable and feasible depends on our willingness to invest our technological know-how into the growth of convivial institutions. In the field of educational research, this amounts to the request for a reversal of present trends. - - -## Irrational Consistencies - -[^n02] I believe that the contemporary crisis of education demands that we review the very idea of publicly prescribed learning, rather than the methods used in its enforcement. The dropout rate--especially of junior-high-school students and elementary-school teachers--points to a grass-roots demand for a completely fresh look. The "classroom practitioner" who considers himself a liberal teacher is increasingly attacked from all sides. The free-school movement, confusing discipline with indoctrination, has painted him into the role of a destructive authoritarian. The educational technologist consistently demonstrates the teacher's inferiority at measuring and modifying behavior. And the school administration for which he works forces him to bow to both Summerhill and Skinner, making it obvious that compulsory learning cannot be a liberal enterprise. No wonder that the desertion rate of teachers is overtaking that of their students. - -America's commitment to the compulsory education of its young now reveals itself to be as futile as the pretended American commitment to compulsory democratization of the Vietnamese. Conventional schools obviously cannot do it. The free-school movement entices unconventional educators, but ultimately does so in support of the conventional ideology of schooling. And the promises of educational technologists, that their research and development--if adequately funded--can offer some kind of final solution to the resistance of youth to compulsory learning, sound as confident and prove as fatuous as the analogous promises made by the military technologists. - -The criticism directed at the American school system by the behaviorists and that coming from the new breed of radical educators seem radically opposed. The behaviorists apply educational research to the "induction of autotelic instruction through individualized learning packages". Their style clashes with the nondirective cooption of youth into liberated communes established under the supervision of adults. Yet, in historical perspective, these two are just contemporary manifestations of the seemingly contradictory yet really complementary goals of the public school system. From the beginning of this century, the schools have been protagonists of social control on the one hand and free cooperation on the other, both placed at the service of the "good society," conceived of as a highly organized and smoothly working corporate structure. Under the impact of intense urbanization, children became a natural resource to be molded by the schools and fed into the industrial machine. Progressive politics and the cult of efficiency converged in the growth of the U.S. public school.* (See Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, Cuaderno No. 50. Centro Intercultural de Documentaci6n, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1971) Vocational guidance and the junior high school were two important results of this kind of thinking. - -It appears, therefore, that the attempt to produce specified behavioral changes which can be measured and for which the processor can be held accountable is just one side of a coin, whose other side is the pacification of the new generation within specially engineered enclaves which will seduce them into the dream world of their elders. These pacified in society are well described by Dewey, who wants us to "make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society, and permeate it with the spirit of art, history and science". In this historical perspective, it would be a grave mistake to interpret the current three-cornered controversy between the school establishment, the educational technologists and the free schools as the prelude to a revolution in education. This controversy reflects rather a stage of an attempt to escalate an old dream into fact, and to finally make all valuable learning the result of professional teaching. Most educational alternatives proposed converge toward goals which are immanent in the production of the cooperative man whose individual needs are met by means of his specialization in the American system: They are oriented toward the improvement of what--for lack of a better phrase--I call the schooled society. Even the seemingly radical critics of the school system are not willing to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young, especially to the poor, an obligation to process them, whether by love or by fear, into a society which needs disciplined specialization as much from its producers as from its consumers and also their full commitment to the ideology which puts economic growth first. - -Dissent veils the contradictions inherent in the very idea of school. The established teachers unions, the technological wizards, and the educational liberation movement reinforce the commitment of the entire society to the fundamental axioms of a schooled world, somewhat in the manner in which many peace and protest movements reinforce the commitments of their members--be they black, female, young, or poor--to seek justice through the growth of the gross national income. - -Some of the tenets which now go unchallenged are easy to list. There is, first, the shared belief that behavior which has been acquired in the sight of a pedagogue is of special value to the pupil and of special benefit to society. This is related to the assumption that social man is born only in adolescence, and properly born only if he matures in the school-womb, which some want to gentle by permissiveness, others to stuff with gadgets, and still others to varnish with a liberal tradition. And there is, finally, a shared view of youth which is psychologically romantic and politically conservative. According to this view, changes in society must be brought about by burdening the young with the responsibility of transforming it-but only after their eventual release from school. It is easy for a society founded on such tenets to build up a sense of its responsibility for the education of the new generation, and this inevitably means that some men may set, specify, and evaluate the personal goals of others. In a "passage from an imaginary Chinese encyclopedia," Jorge Luis Borges tries to evoke the sense of giddiness such an attempt must produce. He tells us that animals are divided into the following classes: "(a) those belonging to the emperor, (b) those that are embalmed, (c) those that are domesticated, (d) the suckling pigs, (e) the sirens, (f) fabulous ones, (g) the roaming dogs, (h) those included in the present classification, (i) those that drive themselves crazy, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those painted with a very fine brush of camel hair, (1) etcetera, (m) those who have just broken the jug, (n) those who resemble flies from afar". Now, such a taxonomy does not come into being unless somebody feels it can serve his purpose: in this case, I suppose, that somebody was a tax collector. For him, at least, this taxonomy of beasts must have made sense, the same way in which the taxonomy of educational objectives makes sense to scientific authors. - -In the peasant, the vision of men with such inscrutable logic, empowered to assess his cattle, must have induced a chilling sense of impotence. Students, for analogous reasons, tend to feel paranoiac when they seriously submit to a curriculum. Inevitably they are even more frightened than my imaginary Chinese peasant, because it is their life goals rather than their life-stock which is being branded with an inscrutable sign. - -This passage of Borges is fascinating, because it evokes the logic of irrational consistency which makes Kafka's and Koestler's bureaucracies so sinister yet so evocative of everyday life. Irrational consistency mesmerizes accomplices who are engaged in mutually expedient and disciplined exploitation. It is the logic generated by bureaucratic behavior. And it becomes the logic of a society which demands that the managers of its educational institutions be held publicly accountable for the behavioral modification they produce in their clients. Students who can be motivated to value the educational packages which their teachers obligate them to consume are comparable to Chinese peasants who can fit their flocks into the tax form provided by Borges. - -At some time during the last two generations a commitment to therapy triumphed in American culture, and teachers came to be regarded as the therapists whose ministrations all men need, if they wish to enjoy the equality and freedom with which, according to the Constitution, they are born. Now the teacher-therapists go on to propose lifelong educational treatment as the next step. The style of this treatment is under discussion: Should it take the form of continued adult classroom attendance? Electronic ecstasy? Or periodic sensitivity sessions? All educators are ready to conspire to push out the walls of the classroom, with the goal of transforming the entire culture into a school. - -The American controversy over the future of education, behind its rhetoric and noise, is more conservative than the discourse in other areas of public policy. On foreign affairs, at least, an organized minority constantly reminds us that the United States must renounce its role as the world's policeman. Radical economists, and now even their less radical teachers, question aggregate growth as a desirable goal. There are lobbies for prevention over cure in medicine and others in favor of fluidity over speed in transportation. Only in the field of education do the articulate voices demanding a radical deschooling of society remain so dispersed. There is a lack of cogent argument and of mature leadership aiming at the disestablishment of any and all institutions which serve the purpose of compulsory learning. For the moment, the radical deschooling of society is still a cause without a party. This is especially surprising in a time of growing, though chaotic, resistance to all forms of institutionally planned instruction on the part of those aged twelve to seventeen. - -Educational innovators still assume that educational institutions function like funnels for the programs they package. For my argument it is irrelevant whether these funnels take the form of a classroom, a TV transmitter, or a "liberated zone". It is equally irrelevant whether the packages purveyed are rich or poor, hot or cold, hard and measurable (like Math III), or impossible to assess (like sensitivity). What counts is that education is assumed to be the result of an institutional process managed by the educator. As long as the relations continue to be those between a supplier and a consumer, educational research will remain a circular process. It will amass scientific evidence in support of the need for more educational packages and for their more deadly accurate delivery to the individual customer, just as a certain brand of social science can prove the need for the delivery of more military treatment. - -An educational revolution depends on a twofold inversion: a new orientation for research and a new understanding of the educational style of an emerging counterculture. - -Operational research now seeks to optimize the efficiency of an inherited framework--a framework which is itself never questioned. This framework has the syntactic structure of a funnel for teaching packages. The syntactic alternative to it is an educational network or web for the autonomous assembly of resources under the personal control of each learner. This alternative structure of an educational institution now lies within the conceptual blind spot of our operational research. If research were to focus on it, this would constitute a true scientific revolution. - -The blind spot of educational research reflects the cultural bias of a society in which technological growth has been confused with technocratic control. For the technocrat the value of an environment increases as more contacts between each man and his milieu can be programmed. In this world the choices which are manageable for the observer or planner converge with the choices possible for the observed so-called beneficiary. Freedom is reduced to a selection among packaged commodities. - -The emerging counterculture reaffirms the values of semantic content above the efficiency of increased and more rigid syntax. It values the wealth of connotation above the power of syntax to produce wealth. It values the unpredictable outcome of self-chosen personal encounter above the certified quality of professional instruction. This reorientation toward personal surprise rather than institutionally engineered values will be disruptive of the established order until we dissociate the increasing availability of technological tools which facilitate encounter from the increasing control of the technocrat of what happens when people meet. - -Our present educational institutions are at the service of the teacher's goals. The relational structures we need are those which will enable each man to define himself by learning and by contributing to the learning of others. - - -## Learning Webs - -In a previous chapter I discussed what is becoming a common complaint about schools, one that is reflected, for example, in the recent report of the Carnegie Commission: In school registered students submit to certified teachers in order to obtain certificates of their own; both are frustrated and both blame insufficient resources--money, time, or buildings--for their mutual frustration. - -Such criticism leads many people to ask whether it is possible to conceive of a different style of learning. The same people, paradoxically, when pressed to specify how they acquired what they know and value, will readily admit that they learned it more often outside than inside school. Their knowledge of facts, their understanding of life and work came to them from friendship or love, while viewing TV, or while reading, from examples of peers or the challenge of a street encounter. Or they may have learned what they know through the apprenticeship ritual for admission to a street gang or the initiation to a hospital, newspaper city room, plumber's shop, or insurance office. The alternative to dependence on schools is not the use of public resources for some new device which "makes" people learn; rather it is the creation of a new style of educational relationship between man and his environment. To foster this style, attitudes toward growing up, the tools available for learning, and the quality and structure of daily life will have to change concurrently. - -Attitudes are already changing. The proud dependence on school is gone. Consumer resistance increases in the knowledge industry. Many teachers and pupils, taxpayers and employers, economists and policemen would prefer not to depend any longer on schools. What prevents their frustration from shaping new institutions is a lack not only of imagination but frequently also of appropriate language and of enlightened self-interest. They cannot visualize either a deschooled society or educational institutions in a society which has disestablished school. - -In this chapter I intend to show that the inverse of school is possible: that we can depend on self-motivated learning instead of employing teachers to bribe or compel the student to find the time and the will to learn; that we can provide the learner with new links to the world instead of continuing to funnel all educational programs through the teacher. I shall discuss some of the general characteristics which distinguish schooling from learning and outline four major categories of educational institutions which should appeal not only to many individuals but also to many existing interest groups. An Objection: Who Can Be Served by Bridges to Nowhere? - -We are used to considering schools as a variable, dependent on the political and economic structure. If we can change the style of political leadership, or promote the interests of one class or another, or switch from private to public ownership of the means of production, we assume the school system will change as well. The educational institutions I will propose, however, are meant to serve a society which does not now exist, although the current frustration with schools is itself potentially a major force to set in motion change toward new social arrangements. An obvious objection has been raised to this approach: Why channel energy to build bridges to nowhere, instead of marshaling it first to change not the schools but the political and economic system? - -This objection, however, underestimates the fundamental political and economic nature of the school system itself, as well as the political potential inherent in any effective challenge to it. - -In a basic sense, schools have ceased to be dependent on the ideology professed by any government or market organization. Other basic institutions might differ from one country to another: family, party, church, or press. But everywhere the school system has the same structure, and everywhere its hidden curriculum has the same effect. Invariably, it shapes the consumer who values institutional commodities above the nonprofessional ministration of a neighbor. - -Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will"" provide a better life. And everywhere it develops the habit of self-defeating consumption of services and alienating production, the tolerance for institutional dependence, and the recognition of institutional rankings. The hidden curriculum of school does all this in spite of contrary efforts undertaken by teachers and no matter what ideology prevails. - -In other words, schools are fundamentally alike in all countries, be they fascist, democratic or socialist, big or small, rich or poor. This identity of the school system forces us to recognize the profound world-wide identity of myth, mode of production, and method of social control, despite the great variety of mythologies in which the myth finds expression. - -In view of this identity, it is illusory to claim that schools are, in any profound sense, dependent variables. This means that to hope for fundamental change in the school system as an effect of conventionally conceived social or economic change is also an illusion. Moreover, this illusion grants the school -the reproductive organ of a consumer society- almost unquestioned immunity. - -It is at this point that the example of China becomes important. For three millennia, China protected higher learning through a total divorce between the process of learning and the privilege conferred by mandarin examinations. To become a world power and a modern nation-state, China had to adopt the international style of schooling. Only hindsight will allow us to discover if the Great Cultural Revolution will turn out to have been the first successful attempt at deschooling the institutions of society. - -Even the piecemeal creation of new educational agencies which were the inverse of school would be an attack on the most sensitive link of a pervasive phenomenon, which is organized by the state in all countries. A political program which does not explicitly recognize the need for deschooling is not revolutionary; it is demagoguery calling for more of the same. Any major political program of the seventies should be evaluated by this measure: How clearly does it state the need for deschooling -and how clearly does it provide guidelines for the educational quality of the society for which it aims? - -The struggle against domination by the world market and big-power politics might be beyond some poor communities or countries, but this weakness is an added reason for emphasizing the importance of liberating each society through a reversal of its educational structure, a change which is not beyond any society's means. - -### General Characteristics of New Formal Educational Institutions - -A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public's chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational. - -Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree- public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon would become available. - -I believe that no more than four -possibly even three- distinct "channels" or learning exchanges could contain all the resources needed for real learning. The child grows up in a world of things, surrounded by people who serve as models for skills and values. He finds peers who challenge him to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and to understand; and if the child is lucky, he is exposed to confrontation or criticism by an experienced elder who really cares. Things, models, peers, and elders are four resources each of which requires a different type of arrangement to ensure that everybody has ample access to it. - -I will use the words "opportunity web" for "network" to designate specific ways to provide access to each of four sets of resources. "Network" is often used, unfortunately, to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment. But it can also be used for the telephone or the postal service, which are primarily accessible to individuals who want to send messages to one another. I wish we had another word to designate such reticular structures for mutual access, a word less evocative of entrapment, less degraded by current usage and more suggestive of the fact that any such arrangement includes legal, organizational, and technical aspects. Not having found such a term, I will try to redeem the one which is available, using it as a synonym of "educational web". - -What are needed are new networks, readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching. To give an example: The same level of technology is used in TV and in tape recorders. All Latin-American countries now have introduced TV: in Bolivia the government has financed a TV station, which was built six years ago, and there are no more than seven thousand TV sets for four million citizens. The money now tied up in TV installations throughout Latin America could have provided every fifth adult with a tape recorder. In addition, the money would have sufficed to provide an almost unlimited library of prerecorded tapes, with outlets even in remote villages, as well as an ample supply of empty tapes. - -This network of tape recorders, of course, would be radically different from the present network of TV. It would provideopportunity for free expression: literate and illiterate alike could record, preserve, disseminate, and repeat their opinions. The present investment in TV, instead, provides bureaucrats, whether politicians or educators, with the power to sprinkle the continent with institutionally produced programs which they-or their sponsors--decide are good for or in demand by the people. - -Technology is available to develop either independence and learning or bureaucracy and teaching. - -### Four Networks - -The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president, or with the teaching goals of a professional educator, or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the question, "What should someone learn?" but with the question, "What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?" - -Someone who wants to learn knows that he needs both information and critical response to its use from somebody else. Information can be stored in things and in persons. In a good educational system access to things ought to be available at the sole bidding of the learner, while access to informants requires, in addition, others' consent. Criticism can also come from two directions: from peers or from elders, that is, from fellow learners whose immediate interests match mine, or from those who will grant me a share in their superior experience. Peers can be colleagues with whom to raise a question, companions for playful and enjoyable (or arduous) reading or walking, challengers at any type of game. Elders can be consultants on which skill to learn, which method to use, what company to seek at a given moment. They can be guides to the right questions to be raised among peers and to the deficiency of the answers they arrive at. Most of these resources are plentiful. But they are neither conventionally perceived as educational resources, nor is access to them for learning purposes easy, especially for the poor. We must conceive of new relational structures which are deliberately set up to facilitate access to these resources for the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his education. Administrative, technological, and especially legal arrangements are required to set up such web-like structures. - -Educational resources are usually labeled according to educators' curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own goals: - -_1._ Reference Services to Educational Objects-which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; others can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off hours. - -_2._ Skill Exchanges--which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached. - -_3._ Peer-Matching--a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry. - -_4._ Reference Services to Educators-at-Large--who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals, and freelancers, along with conditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will see, could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients. - -### Reference Services to Educational Objects - -Things are basic resources for learning. The quality of the environment and the relationship of a person to it will determine how much he learns incidentally. Formal learning requires special access to ordinary things, on the one hand, or, on the other, easy and dependable access to special things made for educational purposes. An example of the former is the special right to operate or dismantle a machine in a garage. An example of the latter is the general right to use an abacus, a computer, a book, a botanical garden, or a machine withdrawn from production and placed at the full disposal of students. - -At present, attention is focused on the disparity between rich and poor children in their access to things and in the manner in which they can learn from them. OEO and other agencies, following this approach, concentrate on equalizing chances, by trying to provide more educational equipment for the poor. A more radical point of departure would be to recognize that in the city rich and poor alike are artificially kept away from most of the things that surround them. Children born into the age of plastics and efficiency experts must penetrate two barriers which obstruct their understanding: one built into things and the other around institutions. Industrial design creates a world of things that resist insight into their nature, and schools shut the learner out of the world of things in their meaningful setting. - -After a short visit to New York, a woman from a Mexican village told me she was impressed by the fact that stores sold only wares heavily made up with cosmetics". I understood her to mean that industrial products "speak" to their customers about their allurements and not about their nature. Industry has surrounded people with artifacts whose inner workings only specialists are allowed to understand. The nonspecialist is discouraged from figuring out what makes a watch tick, or a tele-phone ring, or an electric typewriter work, by being warned that it will break if he tries. He can be told what makes a transistor radio work, but he cannot find out for himself. This type of design tends to reinforce a noninventive society in which the experts find it progressively easier to hide behind their expertise and beyond evaluation. - -The man-made environment has become as inscrutable as nature is for the primitive. At the same time, educational materials have been monopolized by school. Simple educational objects have been expensively packaged by the knowledge industry. They have become specialized tools for professional educators, and their cost has been inflated by forcing them to stimulate either environments or teachers. - -The teacher is jealous of the textbook he defines as his professional implement. The student may come to hate the lab because he associates it with schoolwork. The administrator rationalizes his protective attitude toward the library as a defense of costly public equipment against those who would play with it rather than learn. In this atmosphere the student too often uses the map, the lab, the encyclopedia, or the microscope only at the rare moments when the curriculum tells him to do so. Even the great classics become part of "sophomore year" instead of marking a new turn in a person's life. School removes things from everyday use by labeling them educational tools. - -If we are to deschool, both tendencies must be reversed. The general physical environment must be made accessible, and those physical learning resources which have been reduced to teaching instruments must become generally available for self-directed learning. Using things only as part of a curriculum can have an even worse effect than just removing them from the general environment. It can corrupt the attitudes of pupils. - -Games are a case in point. I do not mean the "games" of the physical education department (such as football and basketball), which the schools use to raise income and prestige and in which they have made a substantial capital investment. As the athletes themselves are well aware, these enterprises, which take the form of warlike tournaments, have undermined the playfulness of sports and are used to reinforce the competitive nature of schools. Rather I have in mind the educational games which can provide a unique way to penetrate formal systems. Set theory, linguistics, propositional logic, geometry, physics, and even chemistry reveal themselves with little effort to certain persons who play these games. A friend of mine went to a Mexican market with a game called "'Wff 'n Proof," which consists of some dice on which twelve logical symbols are imprinted. He showed children which two or three combinations constituted a well-formed sentence, and inductively within the first hour some onlookers also grasped the principle. Within a few hours of playfully conducting formal logical proofs, some children are capable of introducing others to the fundamental proofs of propositional logic. The others just walk away. - -In fact, for some children such games are a special form of liberating education, since they heighten their awareness of the fact that formal systems are built on changeable axioms and that conceptual operations have a gamelike nature. They are also simple, cheap, and -to a large extent- can be organized by the players themselves. Used outside the curriculum such games provide an opportunity for identifying and developing unusual talent, while the school psychologist will often identify those who have such talent as in danger of becoming antisocial, sick, or unbalanced. Within school, when used in the form of tournaments, games are not only removed from the sphere of leisure; they often become tools used to translate playfulness into competition, a lack of abstract reasoning into a sign of inferiority. An exercise which is liberating for some character types becomes a straitjacket for others. - -The control of school over educational equipment has still another effect. It increases enormously the cost of such cheap materials. Once their use is restricted to scheduled hours, professionals are paid to supervise their acquisition, storage, and use. Then students vent their anger against the school on the equipment, which must be purchased once again. - -Paralleling the untouchability of teaching tools is the impenetrability of modern junk. In the thirties any self respecting boy knew how to repair an automobile, but now car makers multiply wires and withhold manuals from everyone except specialized mechanics. In a former era an old radio contained enough coils and condensers to build a transmitter that would make all the neighborhood radios scream in feedback. Transistor radios are more portable, but nobody dares to take them apart. To change this in the highly industrialized countries will be immensely difficult; but at least in the Third World we must insist on built-in educational qualities. - -To illustrate my point, let me present a model: By spending ten million dollars it would be possible to connect forty thousand hamlets in a country like Peru with a spiderweb of six-foot-wide trails and maintain these, and, in addition, provide the country with 200,000 three-wheeled mechanical donkeys -five on the average for each hamlet. Few poor countries of this size spend less than this yearly on cars and roads, both of which are now restricted mainly to the rich and their employees, while poor people remain trapped in their villages. Each of these simple but durable little vehicles would cost $l25 - half of which would pay for transmission and a six-horsepower motor. A "donkey" could make 15 mph, and it can carry loads of 850 pounds (that is, most things besides tree trunks and steel beams which are ordinarily moved). - -The political appeal of such a transportation system to a peasantry is obvious. Equally obvious is the reason why those who hold power--and thereby automatically have a car--are not interested in spending money on trails and in clogging roads with engine-driven donkeys. The universal donkey could work only if a country's leaders were willing to impose a national speed limit of, say, twenty-five miles an hour and adapt its public institutions to this. The model could not work if conceived only as a stopgap. - -This is not the place to elaborate on the political, social, economic, financial, and technical feasibility of this model. I wish only to indicate that educational considerations may be of prime importance when choosing such an alternative to capital. intensive transport. By raising the unit cost per donkey by some 20 percent it would become possible to plan the production of all its parts in such a manner that, as far as possible, each future owner would spend a month or two making and understanding his machine and would be able to repair it. With this additional cost it would also be possible to decentralize production into dispersed plants. - -The added benefits would result not only from including educational costs in the construction process. Even more significantly, a durable motor which practically anyone could learn to repair and which could be used as a plow and pump by somebody who understood it would provide much higher educational benefits than the inscrutable engines of the advanced countries. - -Not only the junk but also the supposedly public places of the modern city have become impenetrable. In American society, children are excluded from most things and places on the grounds that they are private. But even in societies which have declared an end to private property children are kept away from the same places and things because they are considered the special domain of professionals and dangerous to the uninitiated. Since the last generation the railroad yard has become as inaccessible as the fire station. Yet with a little ingenuity it should not be difficult to provide for safety in such places. To deschool the artifacts of education will require making the artifacts and processes available--and recognizing their educational value. Certainly, some workers would find it inconvenient to be accessible to learners; but this inconvenience must be balanced against the educational gains. - -Private cars could be banned from Manhattan. Five years ago it was unthinkable. Now certain New York streets are closed off at odd hours, and this trend will probably continue. Indeed, most cross-streets should be closed to automotive traffic and parking should be forbidden everywhere. In a city opened up to people, teaching materials which are now locked up in store-rooms and laboratories could be dispersed into independently operated storefront depots which children and adults could visit without the danger of being run over. - -If the goals of learning were no longer dominated by schools and schoolteachers, the market for learners would be much more various and the definition of "educational artifacts" would be less restrictive. There could be tool shops, libraries, laboratories, and gaming rooms. Photo labs and offset presses would allow neighborhood newspapers to flourish. Some storefront learning centers could contain viewing booths for closed-circuit television, others could feature office equipment for use and for repair. The jukebox or the record player would be commonplace, with some specializing in classical music, others in international folk tunes, others in jazz. Film clubs would compete with each other and with commercial television. Museum outlets could be networks for circulating exhibits of works of art, both old and new, originals and reproductions, perhaps administered by the various metropolitan museums. - -The professional personnel needed for this network would be much more like custodians, museum guides, or reference librarians than like teachers. From the corner biology store, they could refer their clients to the shell collection in the museum or indicate the next showing of biology videotapes in a certain viewing booth. They could furnish guides for pest control, diet, and other kinds of preventive medicine. They could refer those who needed advice to "elders" who could provide it. - -Two distinct approaches can be taken to financing a network of "learning objects". A community could determine a maximum budget for this purpose and arrange for all parts of the network to be open to all visitors at reasonable hours. Or the community could decide to provide citizens with limited entitlements, according to their age group, which would give them special access to certain materials which are both costly and scarce, while leaving other, simpler materials available to everyone. - -Finding resources for materials made specifically for education is only one--and perhaps the least costly--aspect of building an educational world. The money now spent on the sacred paraphernalia of the school ritual could be freed to provide all citizens with greater access to the real life of the city. Special tax incentives could be granted to those who employed children between the ages of eight and fourteen for a couple of hours each day if the conditions of employment were humane ones. We should return to the tradition of the bar mitzvah or confirmation. By this I mean we should first restrict, and later eliminate, the disenfranchisement of the young and permit a boy of twelve to become a man fully responsible for his participation in the life of the community. Many "schoolage" people know more about their neighborhood than social workers or councilmen. Of course, they also ask more embarrassing questions and propose solutions which threaten the bureaucracy. They should be allowed to come of age so that they could put their knowledge and fact finding ability to work in the service of a popular government. - -Until recently the dangers of school were easily underestimated in comparison with the dangers of an apprenticeship in the police force, the fire department, or the entertainment industry. It was easy to justify schools at least as a means to protect youth. Often this argument no longer holds. I recently visited a Methodist church in Harlem occupied by a group of armed Young Lords in protest against the death of Julio Rodan, a Puerto Rican youth found hanged in his prison cell. I knew the leaders of the group, who had spent a semester in Cuernavaca. When I wondered why one of them, Juan, was not among them, I was told that he had "gone back on heroin and to the State University". - -Planning, incentives, and legislation can be used to unlock the educational potential within our society's huge investment in plants and equipment. Full access to educational objects will not exist so long as business firms are allowed to combine the legal protections which the Bill of Rights reserves to the privacy of individuals with the economic power conferred upon them by their millions of customers and thousands of employees, stockholders, and suppliers. Much of the world's know-how and most of its productive processes and equipment are locked within the walls of business firms, away from their customers, employees, and stockholders, as well as from the general public, whose laws and facilities allow them to function. Money now spent on advertising in capitalist countries could be redirected toward education in and by General Electric, NBC-TV, or Budweiser beer. That is, the plants and offices should be reorganized so that their daily operations could be more accessible to the public in ways that would make learning possible; and, indeed, ways might be found to pay the companies for the learning people acquired from them. - -An even more valuable body of scientific objects and data may be withheld from general access--and even from qualified scientists -under the guise of national security. Until recently science was the one forum which functioned like an anarchist's dream. Each man capable of doing research had more or less the same opportunity of access to its tools and to a hearing by the community of peers. Now bureaucratization and organization have placed much of science beyond public reach. Indeed, what used to be an international network of scientific information has been splintered into an arena of competing teams. The members as well as the artifacts of the scientific community have been locked into national and corporate programs oriented toward practical achievement, to the radical impoverishment of the men who support these nations and corporations. - -In a world which is controlled and owned by nations and corporations, only limited access to educational objects will ever be possible. But increased access to those objects which can be shared for educational purposes may enlighten us enough to help us to break through these ultimate political barriers. Public schools transfer control over the educational uses of objects from private to professional hands. The institutional inversion of schools could empower the individual to reclaim the right to use them for education. A truly public kind of ownership might begin to emerge if private or corporate control over the educational aspect of "things" were brought to the vanishing point. - -### Skill Exchanges - -A guitar teacher, unlike a guitar, can be neither classified in a museum nor owned by the public nor rented from an educational warehouse. Teachers of skills belong to a different class of resources from objects needed to learn a skill. This is not to say that they are indispensable in every case. I can rent not only a guitar but also taped guitar lessons and illustrated chord charts, and with these things I can teach myself to play the guitar. Indeed, this arrangement may have advantages--if the available tapes are better than the available teachers, or if the only time I have for learning the guitar is late at night, or if the tunes I wish to play are unknown in my country, or if I am shy and prefer to fumble along in privacy. - -Skill teachers must be listed and contacted through a different kind of channel from that of things. A thing is available at the bidding of the user -or could be- whereas a person formally becomes a skill resource only when he consents to do so, and he can also restrict time, place, and method as he chooses. - -Skill teachers must be also distinguished from peers from whom one would learn. Peers who wish to pursue a common inquiry must start from common interests and abilities; they get together to exercise or improve a skill they share: basketball, dancing, constructing a camp site, or discussing the next election. The first transmission of a skill, on the other hand, involves bringing together someone who has the skill and someone who does not have it and wants to acquire it. - -A "skill model" is a person who possesses a skill and is willing to demonstrate its practice. A demonstration of this kind is frequently a necessary resource for a potential learner. Modern inventions permit us to incorporate demonstration into tape, film, or chart; yet one would hope personal demonstration will remain in wide demand, especially in communication skills. Some ten thousand adults have learned Spanish at our Center at Cuernavaca -mostly highly motivated persons who wanted to acquire near-native fluency in a second language. When they are faced with a choice between carefully programmed instruction in a lab or drill sessions with two other students and a native speaker following a rigid routine, most choose the second. For most widely shared skills, a person who demonstrates the skill is the only human resource we ever need or get. Whether in speaking or driving, in cooking or in the use of communication equipment, we are often barely conscious of formal instruction and learning, especially after our first experience of the materials in question. I see no reason why other complex skills, such as the mechanical aspects of surgery and playing the fiddle, of reading or the use of directories and catalogues, could not be learned in the same way. - -A well-motivated student who does not labor under a specific handicap often needs no further human assistance than can be provided by someone who can demonstrate on demand how to do what the learner wants to learn to do. The demand made of skilled people that before demonstrating their skill they be certified as pedagogues is a result of the insistence either that people learn what they do not want to know or that all people-even those with a special handicap--learn certain things, at a given moment in their lives, and preferably under specified circumstances. - -What makes skills scarce on the present educational market is the institutional requirement that those who can demonstrate them may not do so unless they are given public trust, through a certificate. We insist that those who help others acquire a skill should also know how to diagnose learning difficulties and be able to motivate people to aspire to learn skills. In short, we demand that they be pedagogues. People who can demonstrate skills will be plentiful as soon as we learn to recognize them outside the teaching profession. - -Where princelings are being taught, the parents' insistence that the teacher and the person with skills be combined in one person is understandable, if no longer defensible. But for all parents to aspire to have Aristotle for their Alexander is obviously self-defeating. The person who can both inspire students and demonstrate a technique is so rare, and so hard to recognize, that even princelings more often get a sophist than a true philosopher. - -A demand for scarce skills can be quickly filled even if there are only small numbers of people to demonstrate them; but such people must be easily available. During the forties radio repairmen, most of them with no schooling in their work, were no more than two years behind radios in penetrating the interior of Latin America. There they stayed until transistor radios, which are cheap to purchase and impossible to repair, put them out of business. Technical schools now fail to accomplish what repair. men of equally useful, more durable radios could do as a matter of course. - -Converging self-interests now conspire to stop a man from sharing his skill. The man who has the skill profits from its scarcity and not from its reproduction. The teacher who specializes in transmitting the skill profits from the artisan's unwillingness to launch his own apprentice into the field. The public is indoctrinated to believe that skills are valuable and reliable only if they are the result of formal schooling. The job market depends on making skills scarce and on keeping them scarce, either by proscribing their unauthorized use and transmission or by making things which can be operated and repaired only by those who have access to tools or information which are kept scarce. - -Schools thus produce shortages of skilled persons. A good example is the diminishing number of nurses in the United States, owing to the rapid increase of four-year B.S. programs in nursing. Women from poorer families, who would formerly have enrolled in a two- or three-year program, now stay out of the nursing profession altogether. - -Insisting on the certification of teachers is another way of keeping skills scarce. If nurses were encouraged to train nurses, and if nurses were employed on the basis of their proven skill at giving injections, filling out charts, and giving medicine, there would soon be no the lack of trained nurses. Certification now tends to abridge the freedom of education by converting the civil right to share one's knowledge into the privilege of academic freedom, now conferred only on the employees of a school. To guarantee access to an effective exchange of skills, we need legislation which generalizes academic freedom. The right to teach any skill should come under the protection of freedom of speech. Once restrictions on teaching are removed, they will quickly be removed from learning as well. - -The teacher of skills needs some inducement to grant his services to a pupil. There are at least two simple ways to begin to channel public funds to noncertified teachers. One way would be to institutionalize the skill exchange by creating free skill centers open to the public. Such centers could and should be established in industrialized areas, at least for those skills which are fundamental prerequisites for entering certain apprenticeships--such skills as reading, typing, keeping accounts, foreign languages, computer programming and number manipulation, reading special languages such as that of electrical circuits, manipulation of certain machinery, etc. Another approach would be to give certain groups within the population educational currency good for attendance at skill centers where other clients would have to pay commercial rates. - -A much more radical approach would be to create a "bank" for skill exchange. Each citizen would be given a basic credit with which to acquire fundamental skills. Beyond that minimum, further credits would go to those who earned them by teaching, whether they served as models in organized skill centers or did so privately at home or on the playground. Only those who had taught others for an equivalent amount of time would have a claim on the time of more advanced teachers. An entirely new elite would be promoted, an elite of those who earned their education by sharing it. - -Should parents have the right to earn skill credit for their children? Since such an arrangement would give further advantage to the privileged classes, it might be offset by granting a larger credit to the underprivileged. The operation of a skill exchange would depend on the existence of agencies which would facilitate the development of directory information and assure its free and inexpensive use. Such an agency might also provide supplementary services of testing and certification and might help to enforce the legislation required to break up and prevent monopolistic practices. - -Fundamentally, the freedom of a universal skill exchange must be guaranteed by laws which permit discrimination only on the basis of tested skills and not on the basis of educational pedigree. Such a guarantee inevitably requires public control over tests which may be used to qualify persons for the job market. Otherwise, it would be possible to surreptitiously reintroduce complex batteries of tests at the work place itself which would serve for social selection. Much could be done to make skill-testing objective, e.g., allowing only the operation of specific machines or systems to be tested. Tests of typing (measured according to speed, number of errors, and whether or not the typist can work from dictation), operation of an accounting system or of a hydraulic crane, driving, coding into COBOL, etc., can easily be made objective. - -In fact, many of the true skills which are of practical importance can be so tested. And for the purposes of manpower management a test of a current skill level is much more useful than the information that twenty years ago a person satisfied his teacher in a curriculum in which typing, stenography, and accounting were taught. The very need for official skill-testing can, of course, be questioned: I personally believe that freedom from undue hurt to a man's reputation through labeling is better guaranteed by restricting than by forbidding tests of competence. - -### Peer-Matching - -At their worst, schools gather classmates into the same room and subject them to the same sequence of treatment in math, citizenship, and spelling. At their best, they permit each student to choose one of a limited number of courses. In any case, groups of peers form around the goals of teachers. A desirable educational system would let each person specify the activity for which he sought a peer. - -School does offer children an opportunity to escape their homes and meet new friends. But, at the same time, this process indoctrinates children with the idea that they should select their friends from among those with whom they are put together. Providing the young from their earliest age with invitations to meet, evaluate, and seek out others would prepare them for a lifelong interest in seeking new partners for new endeavors. - -A good chess player is always glad to find a close match, and one novice to find another. Clubs serve their purpose. People who want to discuss specific books or articles would probably pay to find discussion partners. People who want to play games, go on excursions, build fish tanks, or motorize bicycles will go to considerable lengths to find peers. The reward for their efforts is finding those peers. Good schools try to bring out the common interests of their students registered in the same program. The inverse of school would be an institution which increased the chances that persons who at a given moment shared the same specific interest could meet--no matter what else they had in common. - -Skill-teaching does not provide equal benefits for both parties, as does the matching of peers. The teacher of skills, as I have pointed out, must usually be offered some incentive beyond the rewards of teaching. Skill-teaching is a matter of repeating drills over and over and is, in fact, all the more dreary for those pupils who need it most. A skill exchange needs currency or credits or other tangible incentives in order to operate, even if the exchange itself were to generate a currency of its own. A peer-match. ing system requires no such incentives, but only a communications network. - -Tapes, retrieval systems, programmed instruction, and reproduction of shapes and sounds tend to reduce the need for recourse to human teachers of many skills; they increase the efficiency of teachers and the number of skills one can pick up in a lifetime. Parallel to this runs an increased need to meet people interested in enjoying the newly acquired skill. A student who has picked up Greek before her vacation would like to discuss in Greek Cretan politics when she returns. A Mexican in New York wants to find other readers of the paper Siempre---or of "Los Agachados,” the most popular comic book. Somebody else wants to meet peers who, like himself, would like to increase their interest in the work of James Baldwin or of Bolivar. - -The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity. - -In its most rudimentary form, communication between client and computer could be established by return mail. In big cities typewriter terminals could provide instantaneous responses. The only way to retrieve a name and address from the computer would be to list an activity for which a peer was sought. People using the system would become known only to their potential peers. - -A complement to the computer could be a network of bulletin boards and classified newspaper ads, listing the activities for which the computer could not produce a match. No names would have to be given. Interested readers would then introduce their names into the system. A publicly supported peer-match network might be the only way to guarantee the right of free assembly and to train people in the exercise of this most fundamental civic activity. - -The right of free assembly has been politically recognized and culturally accepted. We should now understand that this right is curtailed by laws that make some forms of assembly obligatory. This is especially the case with institutions which conscript according to age group, class, or sex, and which are very time-consuming. The army is one example. School is an even more outrageous one. - -To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another person to attend a meeting. It also means recognizing the right of any person, of any age or sex, to call a meeting. This right has been drastically diminished by the institutionalization of meetings. "Meeting" originally referred to the result of an individual's act of gathering. Now it refers to the institutional product of some agency. - -The ability of service institutions to acquire clients has far outgrown the ability of individuals to be heard independently of institutional media, which respond to individuals only if they are salable news. Peer-matching facilities should be available for individuals who want to bring people together as easily as the village bell called the villagers to council. School buildings--of doubtful value for conversion to other uses--could often serve this purpose. - -The school system, in fact, may soon face a problem which churches have faced before: what to do with surplus space emptied by the defection of the faithful. Schools are as difficult to sell as temples. One way to provide for their continued use would be to give over the space to people from the neighborhood. Each could state what he would do in the classroom and when, and a bulletin board would bring the available programs to the attention of the inquirers. Access to "class" would be free--or purchased with educational vouchers. The "teacher" could even be paid according to the number of pupils he could attract for any full two-hour period. I can imagine that very young leaders and great educators would be the two types most prominent in such a system. The same approach could be taken toward higher education. Students could be furnished with educational vouchers which entitled them to ten hours' yearly private consultation with the teacher of their choice--and, for the rest of their learning, depend on the library, the peer-matching network, and apprenticeships. - -We must, of course, recognize the probability that such public matching devices would be abused for exploitative and immoral purposes, just as the telephone and the mails have been so abused. As with those networks, there must be some protection. I have proposed elsewhere a matching system which would allow only pertinent printed information, plus the name and address of the inquirer, to be used. Such a system would be virtually foolproof against abuse. Other arrangements could allow the addition of any book, film, TV program, or other item quoted from a special catalogue. Concern about the dangers of the system should not make us lose sight of its far greater benefits. - -Some who share my concern for free speech and assembly will argue that peer-matching is an artificial means of bringing people together and would not be used by the poor -who need it most. Some people become genuinely agitated when one suggests the setting up of ad hoc encounters which are not rooted in the life of a local community. Others react when one suggests using a computer to sort and match client-identified interests. People cannot be drawn together in such an impersonal manner, they say. Common inquiry must be rooted in a history of shared experience at many levels, and must grow out of this experience-the development of neighborhood institutions, for example. - -I sympathize with these objections, but I think they miss my point as well as their own. In the first place, the return to neighborhood life as the primary center of creative expression might actually work against the reestablishment of neighborhoods as political units. Centering demands on the neighborhood may, in fact, neglect an important liberating aspect of urban life -the ability of a person to participate simultaneously in several peer groups. Also, there is an important sense in which people who have never lived together in a physical community, may occasionally have far more experiences to share than those who have known each other from childhood. The great religions have always recognized the importance of far-off encounters, and the faithful have always found freedom through them; pilgrimage, monasticism, the mutual support of temples and sanctuaries reflect this awareness. Peer-matching could significantly help in making explicit the many potential but suppressed communities of the city. - -Local communities are valuable. They are also a vanishing reality as men progressively let service institutions define their circles of social relationship. Milton Kotler in his recent book has shown that the imperialism of "downtown" deprives the neighborhood of its political significance. The protectionist attempt to resurrect the neighborhood as a cultural unit only supports this bureaucratic imperialism. Far from artificially removing men from their local contexts to join abstract groupings, peer-matching should encourage the restoration of local life to cities from which it is now disappearing. A man who recovers his initiative to call his fellows into meaningful conversation may cease to settle for being separated from them by office protocol or suburban etiquette. Having once seen that doing things together depends on deciding to do so, men may even insist that their local communities become more open to creative political exchange. - -We must recognize that city life tends to become immensely costly as city-dwellers must be taught to rely for every one of their needs on complex institutional services. It is extremely expensive to keep it even minimally livable. Peer-matching in the city could be a first step toward breaking down the dependence of citizens on bureaucratic civic services. - -It would also be an essential step to providing new means of establishing public trust. In a schooled society we have come to rely more and more on the professional judgment of educators on the effect of their own work in order to decide whom we can or cannot trust: we go to the doctor, lawyer, or psychologist because we trust that anybody with the required amount of specialized educational treatment by other colleagues deserves our confidence. - -In a deschooled society professionals could no longer claim the trust of their clients on the basis of their curricular pedigree, or ensure their standing by simply referring their clients to other professionals who approved of their schooling. Instead of placing trust in professionals, it should be possible, at any time, for any potential client to consult with other experienced clients of a professional about their satisfaction with him by means of another peer network easily set up by computer, or by a number of other means. Such networks could be seen as public utilities which permitted students to choose their teachers or patients their healers. - -### Professional Educators - -As citizens have new choices, new chances for learning, their willingness to seek leadership should increase. We may expect that they will experience more deeply both their own independence and their need for guidance. As they are liberated from manipulation by others, they should learn to profit from the discipline others have acquired in a lifetime. Deschooling education should increase--rather than stifle--the search for men with practical wisdom who would be willing to sustain the newcomer in his educational adventure. As masters of their art abandon the claim to be superior informants or skill models, their claim to superior wisdom will begin to ring true. - -With an increasing demand for masters, their supply should also increase. As the schoolmaster vanishes, conditions will arise which should bring forth the vocation of the independent educator. This may seem almost a contradiction in terms, so thoroughly have schools and teachers become complementary. Yet this is exactly what the development of the first three educational exchanges would tend to result in -and what would be required to permit their full exploitation- for parents and other '"natural educators" need guidance, individual learners need assistance, and the networks need people to operate them. - -Parents need guidance in directing their children on the road that leads to responsible educational independence. Learners need experienced leadership when they encounter rough terrain. These two needs are quite distinct: the first is a need for pedagogy, the second for intellectual leadership in all other fields of knowledge. The first calls for knowledge of human learning and of educational resources, the second for wisdom based on experience in any kind of exploration. Both kinds of experience are indispensable for effective educational endeavor. Schools package these functions into one role--and render the independent exercise of any of them if not disreputable at least suspect. - -Three types of special educational competence should, in fact, be distinguished: one to create and operate the kinds of educational exchanges or networks outlined here; another to guide students and parents in the use of these networks; and a third to act as primus inter pares in undertaking difficult intellectual exploratory journeys. Only the former two can be conceived of as branches of an independent profession: educational administrators and pedagogical counselors. To design and operate the networks I have been describing would not require many people, but it would require people with the most profound understanding of education and administration, in a perspective quite different from and even opposed to that of schools. - -While an independent educational profession of this kind would welcome many people whom the schools exclude, it would also exclude many whom the schools qualify. The establishment and operation of educational networks would require some designers and administrators, but not in the numbers or of the type required by the administration of schools. Student discipline, public relations, hiring, supervising, and firing teachers would have neither place nor counterpart in the networks I have been describing. Neither would curriculum-making, textbook-purchasing, the maintenance of grounds and facilities, or the supervision of interscholastic athletic competition. Nor would child custody, lesson-planning, and record-keeping, which now take up so much of the time of teachers, figure in the operation of educational networks. Instead, the operation of learning webs would require some of the skills and attitudes now expected from the staff of a museum, a library, an executive employment agency, or a maître d'hôtel. - -Today's educational administrators are concerned with controlling teachers and students to the satisfaction of others-trustees, legislatures, and corporate executives. Network builders and administrators would have to demonstrate genius at keeping themselves, and others, out of people's way, at facilitating en-counters among students, skill models, educational leaders, and educational objects. Many persons now attracted to teaching are profoundly authoritarian and would not be able to assume this task: building educational exchanges would mean making it easy for people--especially the young--to pursue goals which might contradict the ideals of the traffic manager who makes the pursuit possible. - -If the networks I have described could emerge, the educational path of each student would be his own to follow, and only in retrospect would it take on the features of a recognizable program. The wise student would periodically seek professional advice: assistance to set a new goal, insight into difficulties encountered, choice between possible methods. Even now, most persons would admit that the important services their teachers have rendered them are such advice or counsel, given at a chance meeting or in a tutorial. Pedagogues, in an unschooled world, would also come into their own, and be able to do what frustrated teachers pretend to pursue today. - -While network administrators would concentrate primarily on the building and maintenance of roads providing access to resources, the pedagogue would help the student to find the path which for him could lead fastest to his goal. If a student wanted to learn spoken Cantonese from a Chinese neighbor, the pedagogue would be available to judge their proficiency, and to help them select the textbook and methods most suitable to their talents, character, and the time available for study. He could counsel the would-be airplane mechanic on finding the best places for apprenticeship. He could recommend books to somebody who wanted to find challenging peers to discuss African history. Like the network administrator, the pedagogical counselor would conceive of himself as a professional educator. Access to either could be gained by individuals through the use of educational vouchers. - -The role of the educational initiator or leader, the master or "true" leader, is somewhat more elusive than that of the professional administrator or the pedagogue. This is so because leadership is itself hard to define. In practice, an individual is a leader if people follow his initiative and become apprentices in his progressive discoveries. Frequently, this involves a prophetic vision of entirely new standards -quite understandable today- in which present "wrong" will turn out to be "right". In a society which would honor the right to call assemblies through peermatching, the ability to take educational initiative on a specific subject would be as wide as access to learning itself. But, of course, there is a vast difference between the initiative taken by someone to call a fruitful meeting to discuss this essay and the ability of someone to provide leadership in the systematic exploration of its implications. - -Leadership also does not depend on being right. As Thomas Kuhn points out, in a period of constantly changing paradigms most of the very distinguished leaders are bound to be proven wrong by the test of hindsight. Intellectual leadership does depend on superior intellectual discipline and imagination and the willingness to associate with others in their exercise. A learner, for example, may think that there is an analogy between the U.S. antislavery movement or the Cuban Revolution and what is happening in Harlem. The educator who is himself a historian can show him how to appreciate the flaws in such an analogy. He may retrace his own steps as a historian. He may invite the learner to participate in his own research. In both cases he will apprentice his pupil in a critical art--which is rare in school--and which money or other favors cannot buy. - -The relationship of master and disciple is not restricted to intellectual discipline. It has its counterpart in the arts, in physics, in religion, in psychoanalysis, and in pedagogy. It fits mountain-climbing, silverworking and politics, cabinetmaking and personnel administration. What is common to all true master-pupil relationships is the awareness both share that their relationship is literally priceless and in very different ways a privilege for both. - -Charlatans, demagogues, proselytizers, corrupt masters, and simoniacal priests, tricksters, miracle workers, and messiahs have proven capable of assuming leadership roles and thus show the dangers of any dependence of a disciple on the master. Different societies have taken different measures to defend themselves against these counterfeit teachers. Indians relied on caste-lineage, Eastern Jews on the spiritual discipleship of rabbis, high periods of Christianity on an exemplary life of monastic virtue, other periods on hierarchical orders. Our society relies on certification by schools. It is doubtful that this procedure provides a better screening, but if it should be claimed that it does, then the counterclaim can be made that it does so at the cost of making personal discipleship almost vanish. - -In practice, there will always be a fuzzy line between the teacher of skills and the educational leaders identified above, and there are no practical reasons why access to some leaders could not be gained by discovering the "master" in the drill teacher who introduces students to his discipline. - -On the other hand, what characterizes the true master disciple relationship is its priceless character. Aristotle speaks of it as a "moral type of friendship, which is not on fixed terms: it makes a gift, or does whatever it does, as to a friend". Thomas Aquinas says of this kind of teaching that inevitably it is an act of love and mercy. This kind of teaching is always a luxury for the teacher and a form of leisure (in Greek, "schole") for him and his pupil: an activity meaningful for both, having no ulterior purpose. - -To rely for true intellectual leadership on the desire of gifted people to provide it is obviously necessary even in our society, but it could not be made into a policy now. We must first construct a society in which personal acts themselves reacquire a value higher than that of making things and manipulating people. In such a society exploratory, inventive, creative teaching would logically be counted among the most desirable forms of leisurely "unemployment". But we do not have to wait until the advent of utopia. Even now one of the most important consequences of deschooling and the establishment of peer-matching facilities would be the initiative which "masters" could take to assemble congenial disciples. It would also, as we have seen, provide ample opportunity for potential disciples to share information or to select a master. - -Schools are not the only institutions which pervert professions by packaging roles. Hospitals render home care increasingly impossible--and then justify hospitalization as a benefit to the sick. At the same time, the doctor's legitimacy and ability to work come increasingly to depend on his association with a hospital, even though he is still less totally dependent on it than are teachers on schools. The same could be said about courts, which overcrowd their calendars as new transactions acquire legal solemnity, and thus delay justice. Or it could be said about churches, which succeed in making a captive profession out of a free vocation. The result in each case is scarce service at higher cost, and greater income to the less competent members of the profession. - -So long as the older professions monopolize superior income and prestige it is difficult to reform them. The profession of the schoolteacher should be easier to reform, and not only because it is of more recent origin. The educational profession now claims a comprehensive monopoly; it claims the exclusive competence to apprentice not only its own novices but those of other professions as well. This overexpansion renders it vulnerable to any profession which would reclaim the right to teach its own apprentices. Schoolteachers are overwhelmingly badly paid and frustrated by the tight control of the school system. The most enterprising and gifted among them would probably find more congenial work, more independence, and even higher incomes by specializing as skill models, network administrators, or guidance specialists. - -Finally, the dependence of the registered student on the certified teacher can be broken more easily than his dependence on other professionals--for instance, that of a hospitalized patient on his doctor. If schools ceased to be compulsory, teachers who find their satisfaction in the exercise of pedagogical authority in the classroom would be left only with pupils who were attracted by their style. The disestablishment of our present professional structure could begin with the dropping out of the schoolteacher. - -The disestablishment of schools will inevitably happen- and it will happen surprisingly fast. It cannot be retarded very much longer, and it is hardly necessary to promote it vigorously, for this is being done now. What is worthwhile is to try to orient it in a hopeful direction, for it could take place in either of two diametrically opposed ways. - -The first would be the expansion of the mandate of the pedagogue and his increasing control over society even outside school. With the best of intentions and simply by expanding the rhetoric now used in school, the present crisis in the schools could provide educators with an excuse to use all the networks of contemporary society to funnel their messages to us--for our own good. Deschooling, which we cannot stop, could mean the advent of a ""brave new world" dominated by well-intentioned administrators of programmed instruction. - -On the other hand, the growing awareness on the part of governments, as well as of employers, taxpayers, enlightened pedagogues, and school administrators, that graded curricular teaching for certification has become harmful could offer large masses of people an extraordinary opportunity: that of preserving the right of equal access to the tools both of learning and of sharing with others what they know or believe. But this would require that the educational revolution be guided by certain goals: - -_1._ To liberate access to things by abolishing the control which persons and institutions now exercise over their educational values. - -_2._ To liberate the sharing of skills by guaranteeing freedom to teach or exercise them on request. - -_3._ To liberate the critical and creative resources of people by returning to individual persons the ability to call and hold meetings--an ability now increasingly monopolized by institutions which claim to speak for the people. - -_4._ To liberate the individual from the obligation to shape his expectations to the services offered by any established profession--by providing him with the opportunity to draw on the experience of his peers and to entrust himself to the teacher, guide, adviser, or healer of his choice. Inevitably the deschooling of society will blur the distinctions between economics, education, and politics on which the stability of the present world order and the stability of nations now rest. - -Our review of educational institutions leads us to a review of our image of man. The creature whom schools need as a client has neither the autonomy nor the motivation to grow on his own. We can recognize universal schooling as the culmination of a Promethean enterprise, and speak about the alternative as a world fit to live in for Epimethean man. While we can specify that the alternative to scholastic funnels is a world made transparent by true communication webs, and while we can specify very concretely how these could function, we can only expect the Epimethean nature of man to re-emerge; we can neither plan nor produce it. - - -## Rebirth of Epimethean Man - -Our society resembles the ultimate machine which I once saw in a New York toy shop. It was a metal casket which, when you touched a switch, snapped open to reveal a mechanical hand. Chromed fingers reached out for the lid, pulled it down, and locked it from the inside. It was a box; you expected to be able to take something out of it; yet all it contained was a mechanism for closing the cover. This contraption is the opposite of Pandora's "box". - -The original Pandora, the All-Giver, was an Earth goddess in prehistoric matriarchal Greece. She let all ills escape from her amphora (pythos). But she closed the lid before Hope could escape. The history of modern man begins with the degradation of Pandora's myth and comes to an end in the self-sealing casket. It is the history of the Promethean endeavor to forge institutions in order to corral each of the rampant ills. It is the history of fading hope and rising expectations. - -To understand what this means we must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation. Hope, in its strong sense, means trusting faith in the goodness of nature, while expectation, as I will use it here, means reliance on results which are planned and controlled by man. Hope centers desire on a person from whom we await a gift. Expectation looks forward to satisfaction from a predictable process which will produce what we have the right to claim. The Promethean ethos has now eclipsed hope. Survival of the human race depends on its rediscovery as a social force. - -The original Pandora was sent to Earth with a jar which contained all ills; of good things, it contained only hope. Primitive man lived in this world of hope. He relied on the munificence of nature, on the handouts of gods, and on the instincts of his tribe to enable him to subsist. Classical Greeks began to replace hope with expectations. In their version of Pandora she released both evils and goods. They remembered her mainly for the ills she had unleashed. And, most significantly, they forgot that the All-Giver was also the keeper of hope. - -The Greeks told the story of two brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus. The former warned the latter to leave Pandora alone. Instead, he married her. In classical Greece the name "Epimetheus," which means "hindsight," was interpreted to mean "dull" or "dumb". By the time Hesiod retold the story in its classical form, the Greeks had become moral and misogynous patriarchs who panicked at the thought of the first woman. They built a rational and authoritarian society. - -Men engineered institutions through which they planned to cope with the rampant ills. They became conscious of their power to fashion the world and make it produce services they also learned to expect. They wanted their own needs and the future demands of their children to be shaped by their artifacts. They became lawgivers, architects, and authors, the makers of constitutions, cities, and works of art to serve as examples for their offspring. Primitive man had relied on mythical participation in sacred rites to initiate individuals into the lore of society, but the classical Greeks recognized as true men only those citizens who let themselves be fitted by paideIa (education) into the institutions their elders had planned. - -The developing myth reflects the transition from a world in which dreams were interpreted to a world in which oracles were made. From immemorial time, the Earth Goddess had been worshipped on the slope of Mount Parnassus, which was the center and navel of the Earth. There, at Delphi (from deiphys, the womb), slept Gaia, the sister of Chaos and Eros. Her son, Python the dragon, guarded her moonlit and dewy dreams, until Apollo the Sun God, the architect of Troy, rose from the east, slew the dragon, and became the owner of Gaia's cave. His priests took over her temple. They employed a local maiden, sat her on a tripod over Earth's smoking navel, and made her drowsy with fumes. They then rhymed her ecstatic utterances into hexameters of self-fulfilling prophecies. From all over the Peloponnesus men brought their problems to Apollo's sanctuary. The oracle was consulted on social options, such as measures to be taken to stop a plague or a famine, to choose the right constitution for Sparta or the propitious sites for cities which later became Byzantium and Chalcedon. The never-erring arrow became Apollo's symbol. Everything about him became purposeful and useful. - -In the Republic, describing the ideal state, Plato already excludes popular music. Only the harp and Apollo's lyre would be permitted in towns because their harmony alone creates "the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage and the strain of temperance which befit the citizen". City-dwellers panicked before Pan's flute and its power to awaken the instincts. Only "the shepherds may play Pan's pipes and they only in the country". - -Man assumed responsibility for the laws under which he wanted to live and for the casting of the environment into his own image. Primitive initiation by Mother Earth into mythical life was transformed into the education (paideia) of the citizen who would feel at home in the forum. - -To the primitive the world was governed by fate, fact, and necessity. By stealing fire from the gods, Prometheus turned facts into problems, called necessity into question, and defied fate. Classical man framed a civilized context for human perspective. He was aware that he could defy fate-nature-environment, but only at his own risk. Contemporary man goes further; he attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it. We now must face the fact that man himself is at stake. - -Life today in New York produces a very peculiar vision of what is and what can be, and without this vision life in New York is impossible. A child on the streets of New York never touches anything which has not been scientifically developed, engineered, planned, and sold to someone. Even the trees are there because the Parks Department decided to put them there. The jokes the child hears on television have been programmed at a high cost. The refuse with which he plays in the streets of Harlem is made of broken packages planned for somebody else. Even desires and fears are institutionally shaped. Power and violence are organized and managed: the gangs versus the police. Learning itself is defined as the consumption of subject matter, which is the result of researched, planned, and promoted programs. Whatever good there is, is the product of some specialized institution. It would be foolish to demand something which some institution cannot produce. The child of the city cannot expect anything which lies outside the possible development of institutional process. Even his fantasy is prompted to produce science fiction. He can experience the poetic surprise of the unplanned only through his encounter with "dirt," blunder, or failure: the orange peel in the gutter, the puddle in the street, the breakdown of order, program, or machine are the only take-offs for creative fancy. "Goofing off" becomes the only poetry at hand. - -Since there is nothing desirable which has not been planned, the city child soon concludes that we will always be able to design an institution for our every want. He takes for granted the power of process to create value. Whether the goal is meeting a mate, integrating a neighborhood, or acquiring reading skills, it will be defined in such a way that its achievement can be engineered. The man who knows that nothing in demand is out of production soon expects that nothing produced can be out of demand. If a moon vehicle can be designed, so can the demand to go to the moon. Not to go where one can go would be subversive. It would unmask as folly the assumption that every satisfied demand entails the discovery of an even greater unsatisfied one. Such insight would stop progress. Not to produce what is possible would expose the law of "rising expectations" as a euphemism for a growing frustration gap, which is the motor of a society built on the coproduction of services and increased demand. - -The state of mind of the modern city-dweller appears in the mythical tradition only under the image of Hell: Sisyphus, who for a while had chained Thanatos (death), must roll a heavy stone up the hill to the pinnacle of Hell, and the stone always slips from his grip just when he is about to reach the top. Tantalus, who was invited by the gods to share their meal, and on that occasion stole their secret of how to prepare all-healing ambrosia, which bestowed immortality, suffers eternal hunger and thirst standing in a river of receding waters, overshadowed by fruit trees with receding branches. A world of ever-rising demands is not just evil-it can be spoken of only as Hell. - -Man has developed the frustrating power to demand anything because he cannot visualize anything which an institution cannot do for him. Surrounded by all-powerful tools, man is reduced to a tool of his tools. Each of the institutions meant to exorcise one of the primeval evils has become a fail-safe, self-sealing coffin for man. Man is trapped in the boxes he makes to contain the ills Pandora allowed to escape. The blackout of reality in the smog produced by our tools has enveloped us. Quite suddenly we find ourselves in the darkness of our own trap. - -Reality itself has become dependent on human decision. The same President who ordered the ineffective invasion of Cambodia could equally well order the effective use of the atom. The "Hiroshima switch" now can cut the navel of the Earth. Man has acquired the power to make Chaos overwhelm both Eros and Gaia. This new power of man to cut the navel of the Earth is a constant reminder that our institutions not only create their own ends, but also have the power to put an end to themselves and to us. The absurdity of modern institutions is evident in the case of the military. Modern weapons can defend freedom, civilization, and life only by annihilating them. Security in military language means the ability to do away with the Earth. - -The absurdity that underlies nonmilitary institutions is no less manifest. There is no switch in them to activate their destructive power, but neither do they need a switch. Their grip is already fastened to the lid of the world. They create needs faster than they can create satisfaction, and in the process of trying to meet the needs they generate, they consume the Earth. This is true for agriculture and manufacturing, and no less for medicine and education. Modern agriculture poisons and exhausts the soil. The "green revolution" can, by means of new seeds, triple the output of an acre--but only with an even greater proportional increase of fertilizers, insecticides, water, and power. Manufacturing of these, as of all other goods, pollutes the oceans and the atmosphere and degrades irreplaceable resources. If combustion continues to increase at present rates, we will soon consume the oxygen of the atmosphere faster than it can be replaced. We have no reason to believe that fission or fusion can replace combustion without equal or higher hazards. Medicine men replace midwives and promise to make man into something else: genetically planned, pharmacologically sweetened, and capable of more protracted sickness. The contemporary ideal is a pan-hygienic world: a world in which all contacts between men, and between men and their world, are the result of foresight and manipulation. School has become the planned process which tools man for a planned world, the principal tool to trap man in man s trap. It is sup-posed to shape each man to an adequate level for playing a part in this world game. Inexorably we cultivate, treat, produce, and school the world out of existence. - -The military institution is evidently absurd. The absurdity of nonmilitary institutions is more difficult to face. It is even more frightening, precisely because it operates inexorably. We know which switch must stay open to avoid an atomic holocaust. No switch detains an ecological Armageddon. - -In classical antiquity, man had discovered that the world could be made according to man's plans, and with this insight he perceived that it was inherently precarious, dramatic and comical. Democratic institutions evolved and man was presumed worthy of trust within their framework. Expectations from due process and confidence in human nature kept each other in balance. The traditional professions developed and with them the institutions needed for their exercise. - -Surreptitiously, reliance on institutional process has replaced dependence on personal good will. The world has lost its humane dimension and reacquired the factual necessity and fatefulness which were characteristic of primitive times. But while the chaos of the barbarian was constantly ordered in the name of mysterious, anthropomorphic gods, today only man's planning can be given as a reason for the world being as it, is. Man has become the plaything of scientists, engineers, and planners. - -We see this logic at work in ourselves and in others. I know a Mexican village through which not more than a dozen cars drive each day. A Mexican was playing dominoes on the new hard-surface road in front of his house--where he had probably played and sat since his youth. A car sped through and killed him. The tourist who reported the event to me was deeply upset, and yet he said: "The man had it coming to him". - -At first sight, the tourist's remark is no different from the statement of some primitive bushman reporting the death of a fellow who had collided with a taboo and had therefore died. But the two statements carry opposite meanings. The primitive can blame some tremendous and dumb transcendence, while the tourist is in awe of the inexorable logic of the machine. The primitive does not sense responsibility; the tourist senses it, but denies it. In both the primitive and the tourist the classical mode of drama, the style of tragedy, the logic of personal endeavor and rebellion is absent. The primitive man has not become conscious of it, and the tourist has lost it. The myth of the Bushman and the myth of the American are made of inert, inhuman forces. Neither experiences tragic rebellion. For the Bushman, the event follows the laws of magic; for the American, it follows the laws of science. The event puts him under the spell of the laws of mechanics, which for him govern physical, social, and psychological events. - -The mood of 1971 is propitious for a major change of direction in search of a hopeful future. Institutional goals continuously contradict institutional products. The poverty program produces more poor, the war in Asia more Vietcong, technical assistance more underdevelopment. Birth control clinics increase survival rates and boost the population; schools produce more dropouts; and the curb on one kind of pollution usually increases another. - -Consumers are faced with the realization that the more they can buy, the more deceptions they must swallow. Until recently it seemed logical that the blame for this pandemic inflation of dysfunctions could be laid either on the limping of scientific discovery behind the technological demands or on the perversity of ethnic, ideological, or class enemies. Both the expectations of a scientific millennium and of a war to end all wars have declined. - -For the experienced consumer, there is no way back to a naïve reliance on magical technologies. Too many people have had bad experiences with neurotic computers, hospital-bred infections, and jams wherever there is traffic on the road, in the air, or on the phone. Only ten years ago conventional wisdom anticipated a better life based on an increase in scientific discovery. Now scientists frighten children. The moon shots provide a fascinating demonstration that human failure can be almost eliminated among the operators of complex systems-yet this does not allay our fears that the human failure to consume according to instruction might spread out of control. - -For the social reformer there is no way back, either, to the assumptions of the forties. The hope has vanished that the problem of justly distributing goods can be sidetracked by creating an abundance of them. The cost of the minimum package capable of satisfying modern tastes has skyrocketed, and what makes tastes modern is their obsolescence prior even to satisfaction. - -The limits of the Earth's resources have become evident. No breakthrough in science or technology could provide every man in the world with the commodities and services which are now available to the poor of rich countries. For instance, it would take the extraction of one hundred times the present amounts of iron, tin, copper, and lead to achieve such a goal, with even the "lightest" alternative technology. - -Finally, teachers, doctors, and social workers realize that their distinct professional ministrations have one aspect-at least-in common. They create further demands for the institutional treatments they provide, faster than they can provide service institutions. - -Not just some part, but the very logic, of conventional wisdom is becoming suspect. Even the laws of economy seem unconvincing outside the narrow parameters which apply to the social, geographic area where most of the money is concentrated. Money is, indeed, the cheapest currency, but only in an economy geared to efficiency measured in monetary terms. Both capitalist and Communist countries in their various forms are committed to measuring efficiency in cost-benefit ratios expressed in dollars. Capitalism flaunts a higher standard of living as its claim to superiority. Communism boasts of a higher growth rate as an index of its ultimate triumph. But under either ideology the total cost of increasing efficiency increases geometrically. The largest institutions compete most fiercely for resources which are not listed in any inventory: the air, the ocean, silence, sunlight, and health. They bring the scarcity of these resources to public attention only when they are almost irremediably degraded. Everywhere nature becomes poisonous, society inhumane, and the inner life is invaded and personal vocation smothered. - -A society committed to the institutionalization of values identifies the production of goods and services with the demand for such. Education which makes you need the product is included in the price of the product. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is. In such a society marginal value has become constantly self-transcendent. It forces the few largest consumers to compete for the power to deplete the earth, to fill their own swelling bellies, to discipline smaller consumers, and to deactivate those who still find satisfaction in making do with what they have. The ethos of nonsatiety is thus at the root of physical depredation, social polarization, and psychological passivity. - -When values have been institutionalized in planned and engineered processes, members of modern society believe that the good life consists in having institutions which define the values that both they and their society believe they need. Institutional value can be defined as the level of output of an institution. The corresponding value of man is measured by his ability to consume and degrade these institutional outputs, and thus create a new-even higher demand. The value of institutionalized man depends on his capacity as an incinerator. To use an image--he has become the idol of his handiworks. Man now defines himself as the fur-nace which burns up the values produced by his tools. And there is no limit to his capacity. His is the act of Prometheus carried to an extreme. - -The exhaustion and pollution of the earth's resources is, above all, the result of a corruption in man's self-image, of a regression in his consciousness. Some would like to speak about a mutation of collective consciousness which leads to a conception of man as an organism dependent not on nature and individuals, but rather on institutions. This institutionalization of substantive values, this belief that a planned process of treatment ultimately gives results desired by the recipient, this consumer ethos, is at the heart of the Promethean fallacy. - -### Efforts to find a new balance in the global milieu depend on the deinstitutionalization of values - -The suspicion that something is structurally wrong with the vision of _homo faber_ is common to a growing minority in capitalist, Communist, and "underdeveloped" countries alike. This suspicion is the shared characteristic of a new elite. To it belong people of all classes, incomes, faiths, and civilizations. They have 'become wary of the myths of the majority: of scientific utopias, of ideological diabolism, and of the expectation of the distribution of goods and services with some degree of equality. They share with the majority the sense of being trapped. They share with the majority the awareness that most new policies adopted by broad consensus consistently lead to results which are glaringly opposed to their stated aims. Yet whereas the Promethean majority of would-be spacemen still evades the structural issue, the emergent minority is critical of the scientific _deus ex machina_, the ideological panacea, and the hunt for devils and witches. This minority begins to formulate its suspicion that our constant deceptions tie us to contemporary institutions as the chains bound Prometheus to his rock. Hopeful trust and classical irony (eironeia) must conspire to expose the Promethean fallacy. - -Prometheus is usually thought to mean "foresight," or sometimes even "he who makes the North Star progress". He tricked the gods out of their monopoly of fire, taught men to use it in the forging of iron, became the god of technologists, and wound up in iron chains. - -The Pythia of Delphi has now been replaced by a computer which hovers above panels and punch cards. The hexameters of the oracle have given way to sixteen-bit codes of instructions. Man the helmsman has turned the rudder over to the cybernetic machine. The ultimate machine emerges to direct our destinies. Children phantasize flying their spacecrafts away from a crepuscular earth. - -From the perspectives of the Man on the Moon, Prometheus could recognize sparkling blue Gaia as the planet of Hope and as the Arc of Mankind. A new sense of the finiteness of the Earth and a new nostalgia now can open man's eyes to the choice of his brother Epimetheus to wed the Earth with Pandora. - -At this point the Greek myth turns into hopeful prophecy because it tells us that the son of Prometheus was Deucalion, the Helmsman of the Ark who like Noah outrode the Flood to become the father of a new mankind which he made from the earth with Pyrrha, the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. We are gaining insight into the meaning of the Pythos which Pandora brought from the gods as being the inverse of the Box: our Vessel and Ark. - -We now need a name for those who value hope above expectations. We need a name for those who love people more than products, those who believe that - -``` -No people are uninteresting. -Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. - -Nothing in them is not particular, -and planet is dissimilar from planet. -``` - -We need a name for those who love the earth on which each can meet the other, - -``` -And if a man lived in obscurity -making his friends in that obscurity, -obscurity is not uninteresting. -``` - -We need a name for those who collaborate with their Promethean brother in the lighting of the fire and the shaping of iron, but who do so to enhance their ability to tend and care and wait upon the other, knowing that - -``` -to each his world is private, -and in that world one excellent minute. -And in that world one tragic minute. -These are private. -``` - -[^n03] I suggest that these hopeful brothers and sisters be called Epimethean men. - - -[^n00:] Penrose B. Jackson, _Trends in Elementary and Secondary Education Expenditures: Central City and Suburban Comparisons 1965 to 1968_, U.S. Office of Education, Office of Program and Planning Evaluation, June 1969. ] - -[^n01:] "Nichomachean Ethics", 1 140. ] - -[^n02:] This chapter was presented originally at a meeting of the American Educational Research Association, in New York City, February 6, 1971.) ] - -[^n03:] The three quotations are from "People" from the book Selected Poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Translated and with Introduction by Robin Milner Gulland and Peter Levi. Published by E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1962, and reprinted with their permission. ]
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/deschooling/es.txt b/data/pages/en/book/deschooling/es.txt deleted file mode 120000 index e526e1b..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/deschooling/es.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -../../../es/book/deschooling/es.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/deschooling/index.txt b/data/pages/en/book/deschooling/index.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 875b378..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/deschooling/index.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ -# Deschooling society - -* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:es|Online]] -* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Deschooling society_ -* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1970 -* **#@LANG_comments@#:** ... - - -~~NOTOC~~ diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/energy/en.txt b/data/pages/en/book/energy/en.txt deleted file mode 100644 index b63f167..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/energy/en.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,415 +0,0 @@ -# Energy and equity - -## Foreword - -This essay is my summary of the discussions which took place in the course of two sessions--one in English, the other in Spanish--of a seminar that met at the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I am grateful to my colleagues who contributed ideas, facts and criticism. Copies of the working papers of our ongoing seminar on the history of thermodynamics as applied to transportation can be obtained from Isaac Rogel, CIDOC Librarian, Apdo. 479, Cuernavaca, Mor., Mexico. I owe special thanks to Dennis Sullivan for his editorial assistance on this essay. - -The seminar on traffic was one of the preparatory meetings for a consultation which Valentina Borremans is now organizing at CIDOC for 1975-76\. The consultation will focus on the interlocking structure by which medical, legal, educational and energy-intensive agencies (such as those which produce transportation and housing) impose their paralysing monopoly on contemporary society. Although the context of our discussion is Latin America, its theme is pertinent to other regions. - -During the next thirty months, the consultation ought to generate several more short working papers which are of general interest even though they are only vulnerable ideas in progress and in search of critique. Such essays cannot await the permanence of the book. They do not belong in the learned journal. They resist packaging in periodicals. The monopoly of publishers over the printed word too often pushes the tract into the mimeograph’s limbo or seduces the author to reshape his text to fit the available vehicles. To break this monopoly Marion Boyars has shaped the format of this series, and Dennis Sullivan has offered to edit and submit to her what our consultation might produce. - -> El socialismo puede llegar solo en bicicleta - -José Antonio Viera-Gallo, Assistant Secretary of Justice in the Government of Salvador Allende - -## The energy crisis - -It has recently become fashionable to insist on an impending energy crisis. This euphemistic term conceals a contradiction and consecrates an illusion. It masks the contradiction implicit in the joint pursuit of equity and industrial growth. It safeguards the illusion that machine power can indefinitely take the place of manpower. To face this contradiction and betray this illusion, it is urgent to clarify the reality that the language of crisis obscures: high quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu. - -The proponents of an energy crisis confirm and continue to propagate a peculiar vision of man. According to this notion, man is born into prolonged dependence on slaves which he must painfully learn to master. If he does not employ prisoners, then he needs motors to do most of his work. According to this doctrine, the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command. This belief is common to the conflicting economic ideologies now in vogue. It is threatened by the obvious inequity, harriedness and impotence that appear everywhere once the voracious hordes of energy slaves outnumber people by a certain proportion. The energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these slaves. I prefer to ask whether free men need them. - -The energy policies adopted during the current decade will determine the range of social relationships a society will be able to enjoy by the year 2000. A low energy policy allows for a wide choice of life styles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally distasteful whether labelled capitalist or socialist. - -At this moment, most societies--especially the poor ones--are still free to set their energy policies by any of three guidelines. Well-being can be identified with high amounts of per capita energy use, with high efficiency of energy transformation, or with the least possible use of mechanical energy by the most powerful member of society. The first approach would stress tight management of scarce and destructive fuels on behalf of industry, whereas the second would emphasize the retooling of industry in the interest of thermodynamic thrift. Both attitudes necessarily imply huge public expenditures and increased social control; both rationalize the emergence of a computerized Leviathan, and both are at present widely discussed. - -The possibility of a third option is barely noticed. While people have begun to accept ecological limits on maximum per capita energy use as a condition for physical survival, they do not yet think about the use of minimum feasible power as the foundation of any of various social orders that would be both modern and desirable. Yet only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity. The one option that is presently neglected is the only choice within the reach of all nations. It is also the only strategy by which a political process can be used to set limits on the power of even the most motorized bureaucrat. Participatory democracy postulates low energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology. - -What is generally overlooked is that equity and energy can grow concurrently only to a point. Below a threshold of per capita wattage, motors improve the conditions for social progress. Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy. - -The widespread belief that clean and abundant energy is the panacea for social ills is due to a political fallacy, according to which equity and energy consumption can be indefinitely correlated, at least under some ideal political conditions. Labouring under this illusion, we tend to discount any social limit on the growth of energy consumption. But if ecologists are right to assert that non-metabolic power pollutes, it is in fact just as inevitable that, beyond a certain threshold, mechanical power corrupts. The threshold of social disintegration by high energy quanta is independent from the threshold at which energy conversion produces physical destruction. Expressed in horsepower, it is undoubtedly lower. This is the fact which must be theoretically recognized before a political issue can be made of the per capita wattage to which a society will limit its members. - -Even if non-polluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and ‘cold turkey’--between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps--but no society can have a population that is at once autonomously active and hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves. - -In previous discussions, I have shown that, beyond a certain level of GNP, the cost of social control must rise faster than total output and become the major institutional activity within an economy. Therapy administered by educators, psychiatrists and social workers must converge with the designs of planners, managers and salesmen, and complement the services of security agencies, the military and the police. I now want to indicate one reason why increased affluence requires increased control over personnel. I argue that beyond a certain median per capita energy level, the political system and cultural context of any society must decay. Once the critical quantum of per capita energy is surpassed, education for the abstract goals of a bureaucracy must supplant the legal guarantees of personal and concrete initiative. This quantum is the limit of social order. - -I will argue here that technocracy must prevail as soon as the ratio of mechanical power and metabolic energy oversteps a definite, identifiable threshold. The order of magnitude within which this threshold lies is largely independent from the level of technology applied, yet its very existence has slipped into the blindspot of social imagination in both rich and medium rich countries. Both the United States and Mexico have passed the critical divide. In both countries, further energy inputs increase inequality, inefficiency and personal impotence. Although one country has a per capita income of $500 and the other of nearly $5,000, huge vested interest in an industrial infrastructure prods both of them to further escalate the use of energy. As a result, both North American and Mexican ideologues put the label of ‘energy crisis’ on their frustration, and both countries are blinded to the fact that the threat of social breakdown is due neither to a shortage of fuel, nor to the wasteful, polluting and irrational use of available wattage, but to the attempt of industries to gorge society with energy quanta that inevitably degrade, deprive and frustrate most people. - -A people can be just as dangerously overpowered by the wattage of its tools as by the caloric content of its foods, but it is much harder to confess to a national overindulgence in wattage than to a sickening diet. The per capita wattage that is critical for social well-being lies within an order of magnitude which is far above the horsepower known to four-fifths of humanity and far below the power commanded by any Volkswagen driver. It eludes the underconsumer and the overconsumer alike. Neither is willing to face the facts. For the primitive, the elimination of slavery and drudgery depends on the introduction of appropriate modern technology, and for the rich, the avoidance of an even more horrible degradation depends on the effective recognition of a threshold in energy consumption beyond which technical processes begin to dictate social relations. Calories are both biologically and socially healthy only as long as they stay within the narrow range that separates enough from too much. - -The so-called energy crisis is, then, a politically ambiguous issue. Public interest in the quantity of power and in the distribution of controls over the use of energy can lead in two opposite directions. On the one hand, questions can be posed that would open the way to political reconstruction by unblocking the search for a post-industrial, labour-intensive, low energy and high equity economy. On the other hand, hysterical concern with machine fodder can reinforce the present escalation of capital-intensive institutional growth, and carry us past the last turnoff from a hyper-industrial Armageddon. Political reconstruction presupposes the recognition of the fact that there exist _critical_ _per_ _capita_ _quanta_ beyond which energy can no longer be controlled by political process. Social breakdown will be the inevitable outcome of ecological restraints on _total_ _energy_ _use_ imposed by industrially-minded planners bent on keeping industrial production at some hypothetical maximum. - -Rich countries like the United States, Japan or France might never reach the point of choking in their own waste, but only because their societies will have already collapsed into a socio-cultural energy coma. Countries like India, Burma and, for another short while at least, China, are in the inverse position of being still muscle-powered enough to stop short of an energy stroke. They could choose, right now, to stay within those limits to which the rich will be forced back at an enormous loss in their vested interest. - -The choice of a minimum energy economy compels the poor to abandon distant expectations and the rich to recognize their vested interest as a ghastly liability. Both must reject the fatal image of man the slaveholder currently promoted by an ideologically stimulated hunger for more energy. In countries that were made affluent by industrial development, the energy crisis serves as a whip to raise the taxes which will be needed to substitute new, more sober and socially more deadly industrial processes for those that have been rendered obsolete by inefficient overexpansion. For the leaders of people who have been disowned by the same process of industrialization, the energy crisis serves as an alibi to centralize production, pollution and its control in a last-ditch effort to catch up with the more highly powered. By exporting their crisis and by preaching the new gospel of Puritan energy worship, the rich do even more damage to the poor than they did by selling them the products of now outdated factories. As soon as a poor country accepts the doctrine that more energy more carefully managed will always yield more goods for more people, that country is hooked into the race for enslavement to maximum industrial outputs. Inevitably the poor abandon the option for rational technology when they choose to modernize their poverty by increasing their dependence on energy. Inevitably the poor reject the possibility of liberating technology and participatory politics when, together with maximum feasible energy use, they accept maximum feasible social control. - -The energy crisis cannot be overwhelmed by more energy inputs. It can only be dissolved, along with the illusion that well-being depends on the number of energy slaves a man has at his command. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the thresholds beyond which power corrupts, and to do so by a political process that associates the community in the search for limits. Because this kind of research runs counter to that now done by experts and for institutions, I shall call it counterfoil research. It has three steps. First, the need for limits on the per capita use of energy must be theoretically recognized as a social imperative. Then, the range must be located wherein the critical magnitude might be found. Finally, each community has to identify the levels of inequity, harrying and operant conditioning that its members are willing to accept in exchange for the satisfaction that comes of idolizing powerful devices and joining in rituals directed by the professionals who control their operation. - -The need for political research on socially optimal energy quanta can be clearly and concisely illustrated by an examination of modern traffic. The United States puts 45 per cent of its total energy into vehicles: to make them, run them and clear a right of way for them when they roll, when they fly and when they park. Most of this energy is to move people who have been strapped into place. For the sole purpose of transporting people, 250 million Americans allocate more fuel than is used by 1,300 million Chinese and Indians for all purposes. Almost all of this fuel is burnt in a rain dance of time-consuming acceleration. Poor countries spend less energy per person, but the percentage of total energy devoted to traffic in Mexico or in Peru is greater than in the USA, and it benefits a smaller percentage of the population. The size of this enterprise makes it both easy and significant to demonstrate the existence of socially critical energy quanta by the example of personal carriage. - -In traffic, energy used over a specific period of time (power) translates into speed. In this case, the critical quantum will appear as a speed limit. Wherever this limit has been passed, the basic pattern of social degradation by high energy quanta has emerged. Once some public utility went faster than ± 15 mph, equity declined and the scarcity of both time and space increased. Motorized transportation monopolized traffic and blocked self-powered transit. In every Western country, passenger mileage on all types of conveyance increased by a factor of a hundred within fifty years of building the first railroad. When the ratio of their respective power outputs passed beyond a certain value, mechanical transformers of mineral fuels excluded people from the use of their metabolic energy and forced them to become captive consumers of conveyance. This effect of speed on the autonomy of people is only marginally affected by the technological characteristics of the motorized vehicles employed or by the persons or entities who hold the legal titles to airlines, buses, railroads or cars. High speed is the critical factor which makes transportation socially destructive. A true choice among political systems and of desirable social relations is possible only where speed is restrained. Participatory democracy demands low energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle.* - -* I speak about traffic for the purpose of illustrating the more general point of socially optimal energy use, and I restrict myself to the locomotion of persons, including their personal baggage and the fuel, materials and equipment used for the vehicle and the road. I purposely abstain from the discussion of two other types of traffic: merchandise and messages. A parallel argument can be made for both, but this would require a different line of reasoning, and I leave it for another occasion. - -## The industrialization of traffic - -The discussion of how energy is used to move people requires a formal distinction between transport and transit as the two components of traffic. By _traffic_ I mean any movement of people from one place to another when they are outside of their homes. By _transit_ I mean those movements that put human metabolic energy to use, and by _transport_ that mode of movement which relies on other sources of energy. These energy sources will henceforth be mostly motors, since animals compete fiercely with men for their food in an over-populated world, unless they are thistle eaters like donkeys and camels. - -As soon as people become tributaries of transport, not only when they travel for several days, but also on their daily trips, the contradictions between social justice and motorized power, between effective movement and higher speed, between personal freedom and engineered routing, become poignantly-clear. Enforced dependence on auto-mobile machines then denies a community of self-propelled people just those values supposedly procured by improved transportation. - -People move well on their feet. This primitive means of getting around will, on closer analysis, appear quite effective when compared with the lot of people in modern cities or on industrialized farms. It will appear particularly attractive once it has been understood that modern Americans walk, on the average, as many miles as their ancestors--most of them through tunnels, corridors, parking lots and stores. - -People on their feet are more or less equal. People solely dependent on their feet move on the spur of the moment, at three to four miles per hour, in any direction and to any place from which they are not legally or physically barred. An improvement on this native degree of mobility by new transport technology should be expected to safeguard these values and to add some new ones, such as greater range, time economies, comfort, or more opportunities for the disabled. So far this is not what has happened. Instead, the growth of the transportation industry has everywhere had the reverse effects. From the moment its machines could put more than a certain horsepower behind any one passenger, this industry has reduced equality among men, restricted their mobility to a system of industrially defined routes and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity. As the speed of their vehicles crosses a threshold, citizens become transportation consumers on the daily loop that brings them back to their home, a circuit which the United States Department of Commerce calls a ‘trip’ as opposed to the ‘travel’ for which Americans leave home equipped with a toothbrush. - -More energy fed into the transportation system means that more people move faster over a greater range in the course of every day. Everybody’s daily radius expands at the expense of being able to drop in on an acquaintance or walk through the park on the way to work. Extremes of privilege are created at the cost of universal enslavement. An elite packs unlimited distance into a lifetime of pampered travel, while the majority spend a bigger slice of their existence on unwanted trips. The few mount their magic carpets to travel between distant points that their ephemeral presence renders both scarce and seductive, while the many are compelled to trip further and faster and to spend more time preparing for and recovering from their trips. - -In the United States, four-fifths of all man-hours on the road are those of commuters and shoppers who hardly ever get into a plane, while four-fifths of the mileage flown to conventions and resorts is covered year after year by the same one and a half per cent of the population, usually those who are either well-to-do or professionally trained to do good. The speedier the vehicle, the larger the subsidy it gets from regressive taxation. Barely 0·2 per cent of the entire US population can engage in self-chosen air travel more than once a year, and few other countries can support a jet set which is that large. - -The captive tripper and the reckless traveller become equally dependent on transport. Neither can do without it. Occasional spurts to Acapulco or to a Party Congress dupe the ordinary passenger into believing that he has made it into the shrunk world of the powerfully rushed. The occasional chance to spend a few hours strapped into a high-powered seat makes him an accomplice in the distortion of human space, and prompts him to consent to the design of his country’s geography around vehicles rather than around people. Man has evolved physically and culturally together with his cosmic niche. What for animals is their environment he has learned to make into his home. His self-image requires as its complement a life-space and a life-time integrated by the pace at which he moves. If that relationship is determined by the velocity of vehicles rather than by the movement of people, man the architect is reduced to the status of a mere commuter. - -The typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly instalments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only three to eight per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry. - -## Speed stunned imagination - -PAST a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space. Motorways expand, driving wedges between neighbours and removing fields beyond the distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few miles a sick child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to the house, because vehicles have made the hospital into the right place to be sick. Once heavy lorries reach a village high in the Andes, part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school arrives at the plaza along with the paved highway, more and more of the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down on the coast. - -Equal speeds have equally distorting effects on the perception of space, time and personal potency in rich and in poor countries, however different the surface appearances might be. Everywhere, the transportation industry shapes a new kind of man to fit the new geography and the new schedules of its making. The major difference between Guatemala and Kansas is that in Central America some people are still exempt from all contact with vehicles and are, therefore, still not degraded by their dependence on them. - -The product of the transportation industry is the habitual passenger. He has been boosted out of the world in which people still move on their own, and he has lost the sense that he stands at the centre of his world. The habitual passenger is conscious of the exasperating time scarcity that results from daily recourse to the cars, trains, buses, undergrounds and lifts that force him to cover an average of twenty miles each day, frequently crossing his path within a radius of less than five miles. He has been lifted off his feet. No matter if he goes by underground or jetplane he feels slower and poorer than someone else and resents the shortcuts taken by the priviledged few who can escape the frustrations of traffic. If he is cramped by the timetable of his commuter train, he dreams of a car. If he is exhausted by the rush hour, he envies the speed capitalist who drives against the traffic. If he must pay for his car out of his own pocket, he knows full well that the commanders of corporate fleets send the fuel bill to the company and write off the rented car as a business expense. The habitual passenger is caught at the wrong end of growing inequality, time scarcity and personal impotence, but he can see no way out of this bind except to demand more of the same: more traffic by transport. He stands in wait of technical changes in the design of vehicles, roads and schedules; or else he expects a revolution to produce mass rapid transport under public control. In neither case does he calculate the price of being hauled into a better future. He forgets that he is the one who will pay the bill, either in fares or in taxes. He overlooks the hidden costs of replacing private cars with equally rapid public transport. - -The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside of the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social and psychic powers that reside in man’s feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost confidence in his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them. He can no longer face the remote by himself. Left on his own, he feels immobile. - -The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To ‘gather’ for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He comes to believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence is the result of access to the television screen. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one’s claim on propulsion. He believes that the level of democratic process correlates to the power of transportation and communications systems. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure and autonomy. - -## Net transfer of lifetime - -UNCHECKED speed is expensive and progressively fewer can afford it. Each increment in the velocity of a vehicle results in an increase in the cost of propulsion, track-construction and--most dramatically--in the space the vehicle devours while it is on the move. Past a certain threshold of energy consumption for the fastest passenger, a worldwide class structure of speed capitalists is created. The exchange value of time becomes dominant, and this is reflected in language: time is spent, saved, invested, wasted and employed. As societies put price tags on time, equity and vehicular speed correlate inversely. - -High speed capitalizes a few people’s time at an enormous rate but, paradoxically, it does this at a high cost in time for all. In Bombay, only a very few people own cars. They can reach a provincial capital in one morning and make the trip once a week. Two generations ago, this would have been a week-long trek once a year. They now spend more time on more trips. But these same few also disrupt, with their cars, the traffic flow of thousands of bicycles and pedicabs that move through downtown Bombay at a rate of effective locomotion superior to that of downtown Paris, London or New York. The compounded, transport-related time expenditure within a society grows much faster than the time economies made by a few people on their speedy excursions. Traffic grows indefinitely with the availability of transports. Beyond a critical threshold, the output of the industrial complex established to move people costs a society more time than it saves. The marginal utility of an increment in the speed of a small number of people has for its price the growing marginal disutility of this acceleration for the great majority. - -Beyond a critical speed, no one can save time without forcing another to lose it. The man who claims a seat in a faster vehicle insists that his time is worth more than that of the passenger in a slower one. Beyond a certain velocity, passengers become consumers of other people’s time, and accelerating vehicles become the means for effecting a net transfer of life-time. The degree of transfer is measured in quanta of speed. This time-grab despoils those who are left behind, and since they are the majority, it raises ethical issues of a more general nature than kidney dialysis or organ transplants. - -Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto. - -Man’s speed remained unchanged from the Age of Cyrus to the Age of Steam. News could not travel more than a hundred miles per day, no matter how the message was carried. Neither the Inca’s runners nor the Venetian galley, the Persian horseman or the mail coach under Louis XIV, could break the barrier. Soldiers, explorers, merchants and pilgrims moved at twenty miles per day. In Valéry’s words, Napoleon still had to move at Caesar’s slowness: _Napoléon va à la même lenteur que César._ The Emperor knew that ‘public prosperity is measured by the income of the coaches’: _On_ _mésure_ _la_ _prospérité_ _publique_ _aux_ _comptes_ _des_ _diligences_ , __ but he could barely speed them up. Paris-Toulouse had required about 200 hours in Roman times, and the scheduled stagecoach still took 158 hours in 1782. Only the nineteenth century accelerated man. By 1830, the trip had been reduced to 110 hours, but at a new cost. In the same year, 4,150 stagecoaches overturned in France, causing more than a thousand deaths. Then the railroad brought a sudden change. By 1855, Napoleon III claimed to have travelled an average of 96 kilometres per hour on the train between Paris and Marseilles. Within one generation, the average distance travelled each year per Frenchman increased one hundred and thirty times, and Britain’s railroad network reached its greatest expansion. Passenger trains attained their optimum cost calculated in terms of time spent for their maintenance and use. - -With further acceleration, transportation began to dominate traffic, and speed began to erect a hierarchy of destinations. By now, each set of destinations corresponds to a specific level of speed and defines a certain passenger class. Each circuit of terminal points degrades those pegged at a lower number of miles per hour. Those who must get around on their own power have been redefined as underdeveloped outsiders. Tell me how fast you go and I’ll tell you who you are. If you can corner the taxes which fuel the Concorde, you are certainly at the top. - -Over the last two generations, the vehicle has become the sign of career achievement, just as the school has become the sign of starting advantage. At each new level, the concentration of power must produce its own kind of rationale. So, for example, the reason that is usually given for spending public money to make a man travel more miles in less time each year is the still greater investment that was made to keep him more years in school. His putative value as a capital-intensive production tool sets the rate at which he is being shipped. Other ideological labels besides ‘a good education’ are just as useful for opening the cabin door to luxuries paid for by others. If the Thought of Chairman Mao must now be rushed around China by jet, this can only mean that two classes are needed to fuel what his revolution has become, one of them living in the geography of the masses and the other in the geography of the cadres. The suppression of intermediary levels of speed in Popular China has certainly made the concentration of power more efficient and rational, but it also underscores the new difference in value between the time of the bullock driver and the time of the jet-driven. Accelerating speed inevitably concentrates horsepower under the seats of a few and compounds the increasing time-lack of most commuters with the further sense that they are lagging behind. - -The need for unequal privilege in an industrial society is generally advocated by means of an argument with two sides. The hypocrisy of this argument is clearly betrayed by acceleration. Privilege is accepted as the necessary pre-condition to improve the lot of a growing total population, or it is advertised as the instrument for raising the standards of a deprived minority. In the long run, accelerating transportation does neither. It only creates a universal demand for motorized conveyance, and puts previously unimaginable distances between the various layers of privilege. Beyond a certain point, more energy means less equity. - -## The ineffectiveness of acceleration - -It should not be overlooked that top speeds for a few exact a different price than high speeds for all. Social classification by levels of speed enforces a net transfer of power: the poor work and pay to get left behind. But if the middle classes of a speed society may be tempted to ignore discrimination, they should not neglect the rising marginal disutilities of transportation and their own loss of leisure. High speeds for all mean that everybody has less time for himself as the whole society spends a growing slice of its time budget on moving people. Vehicles running over the critical speed not only tend to impose inequality, they also inevitably establish a self-serving industry that hides an inefficient system of locomotion under apparent technological sophistication. I will argue that a speed limit is necessary not only to safeguard equity; it is equally a condition for increasing the total distance travelled within a society, while decreasing the total time that travel takes. - -There is little research available on the impact of vehicles on the twenty-four-hour time budget of individuals and societies. From transportation studies, we get statistics on the cost of time per mile, on the value of time measured in dollars or in length of trips. But these statistics tell us nothing about the hidden costs of transportation: about how traffic nibbles away at life-time, about how vehicles devour space, about the multiplication of trips made necessary by the existence of vehicles, or about the time spent directly and indirectly preparing for locomotion. Further, there is no available measure of the even more deeply buried costs of transport, such as higher rent to live in areas convenient to the flow of traffic, or the cost of protecting these areas from the noise, pollution and danger to life and limb that vehicles create. The lack of an account of expenditures from the social time budget should not lead us to believe, however, that such an accounting is impossible, nor should it prevent our drawing conclusions from the little that we do know. - -From our limited information it appears that everywhere in the world, after some vehicle broke the speed barrier of 15 mph, time scarcity related to traffic began to grow. After industry had reached this threshold of per capita output, transport made of man a new kind of waif: a being constantly absent from a destination he cannot reach on his own but must reach within the day. By now, people work a substantial part of every day to earn the money without which they could not even get to work. The time a society spends on transportation grows in proportion to the speed of its fastest public conveyance. Japan now leads the United States in both areas. Life-time gets cluttered up with activities generated by traffic as soon as vehicles crash through the barrier that guards people from dislocation and space from distortion. - -Whether the vehicle that speeds along the public freeway is owned by the state or by an individual has little to do with the time scarcity and over-programming that rise with every increment in speed. Buses use one-third of the fuel which cars burn to carry one man over a given distance. Commuter trains are up to ten times more efficient than cars. Both could become even more efficient and less polluting. If publicly owned and rationally managed, they could be so scheduled and routed that the privileges they presently provide under private ownership and incompetent organization would be considerably cut. But as long as any system of vehicles imposes itself on the public by its unlimited top speed, the public is left to choose between spending more time to pay for more people to be carried from station to station, and paying less taxes so that even fewer people can travel in much less time much further than others. The order of magnitude of the top speed which is permitted within a transportation system determines the slice of its time budget that an entire society spends on traffic. - -## The radical monopoly of industry - -A desirable ceiling on the velocity of movement cannot be usefully discussed without returning to the distinction between self-powered _transit_ and motorized _transport_ , __ and comparing the contribution each component makes relative to the total locomotion of people, which I have called _traffic._ - -Transport stands for the capital-intensive mode of traffic and transit indicates the labour-intensive mode. Transport is the product of an industry whose clients are passengers. It is an industrial commodity and therefore scarce by definition. Improvement of transport always takes place under conditions of scarcity that become more severe as the speed--and with it the cost--of the service increases. Conflict about insufficient transport tends to take the form of a zero-sum game where one wins only if another loses. At best, such a conflict allows for the solution of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: by cooperating with their jailer, both prisoners get off with less time in the cell. - -Transit is not the product of an industry, but the independent enterprise of transients. It has use value by definition but need not have any exchange value. The ability to engage in transit is native to man and more or less equally distributed among healthy people of the same age. The exercise of this ability can be restricted by depriving some class of people of the right to take a straight route, or because a population lacks shoes or pavements. Conflict about unsatisfactory transit conditions tends to take, therefore, the form of a non-zero-sum game in which everyone comes out ahead--not only the people who get the right to walk through a formerly walled property, but also the owner who now gets a road. - -Total traffic is the result of two profoundly distinct modes of production. These can reinforce each other harmoniously only as long as the autonomous outputs are protected against the encroachment of the industrial product. - -The harm done by contemporary traffic is due to the monopoly of transport. The allure of speed has deceived the passenger into accepting the promises made by an industry that produces capital-intensive traffic. He is convinced that high-speed vehicles have allowed him to progress beyond the limited autonomy he enjoyed when moving under his own power. He has allowed planned transport to predominate over the alternative of labour-intensive transit. Destruction of the physical environment is the least noxious effect of this concession. The far more bitter results are the multiplication of psychic frustration, the growing disutilities of continued production, and subjection to an inequitable transfer of power--all of which are manifestations of a distorted relationship between life-time and life-space. The passenger who agrees to live in a world monopolized by transport becomes a harassed, overburdened consumer of distances whose shape and length he can no longer control. - -Every society that imposes compulsory speed submerges transit to the profit of transport. Where-ever not only privilege but also elementary necessities are denied to those who do not use high-speed conveyances, an involuntary acceleration of personal rhythms is imposed. Industry dominates traffic as soon as daily life comes to depend on motorized trips. - -This profound control of the transportation industry over natural mobility constitutes a monopoly much more pervasive than either the commercial monopoly Ford might win over the automobile market, or the political monopoly car manufacturers might wield against the development of trains and buses. Because of its hidden, entrenched and structuring nature, I call this a _radical_ _monopoly._ Any industry exercises this kind of deep-seated monopoly when it becomes the dominant means of satisfying needs that formerly occasioned a personal response. The compulsory consumption of a high-powered commodity (motorized transport) restricts the conditions for enjoying an abundant use value (the innate capacity for transit). Traffic serves here as the paradigm of a general economic law: _Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need_. Beyond some point, compulsory schooling destroys the environment for learning, medical delivery systems dry up the non-therapeutic sources of health, and transportation smothers traffic. - -Radical monopoly is first established by a rearrangement of society for the benefit of those who have access to the larger quanta, then it is enforced by compelling all to consume the minimum quantum in which the output is currently produced. Compulsory consumption will take on a different appearance in industrial branches where information dominates, such as education or medicine, than it will in those branches where quanta can be measured in British thermal units, such as housing, clothing or transport. The industrial packaging of values will reach critical intensity at different points with different products but, for each major class of outputs, the threshold occurs within an order of magnitude that is theoretically identifiable. The fact that it is possible theoretically to determine the range of speed within which transportation develops a radical monopoly over traffic does not mean that it is possible theoretically to determine just how much of such a monopoly any given society will tolerate. The fact that it is possible to identify a level of compulsory instruction at which learning by seeing and doing declines does not enable the theorist to identify the specific pedagogical limits to the division of labour that a culture will tolerate. Only recourse to juridical and, above all, to political process can lead to the specific, though provisional, measures by which speed or compulsory education will actually be limited in a given society. The magnitude of voluntary limits is a matter of politics; the encroachment of radical monopoly can be pinpointed by social analysis. - -A branch of industry does not impose a radical monopoly on a whole society by the simple fact that it produces scarce products, or because it drives competing industries off the market, but rather by virtue of its acquired ability to create and shape the need which it alone can satisfy. - -Shoes are scarce all over Latin America and many people never wear them. They walk on the bare soles of their feet, or wear the world’s widest variety of excellent sandals, supplied by a range of artisans. Their transit is in no way restricted by their lack of shoes. But in some countries of South America people are compelled to be shod ever since access to schools, jobs and public services was denied to the barefoot. Teachers or party officials define the lack of shoes as a sign of indifference toward ‘progress’. Without any intentional conspiracy between the promoters of national development and the shoe industry, the barefoot in these countries are now barred from any office. - -Schools, like shoes, were scarce at all times. But it was never the small number of privileged pupils that turned the school into an obstacle for learning. Only when laws were enacted to make schools both compulsory and free did the educator assume the power to deny learning opportunities on the job to the underconsumer of educational therapies. Only when school attendance had become obligatory did it become feasible to impose on all a progressively more complex artificial environment into which the unschooled and unprogrammed do not fit. - -The potential of a radical monopoly is unmistakeable in the case of traffic. Imagine what would happen if the transportation industry could somehow distribute its output more adequately: a traffic Utopia of free _rapid_ transportation for all would inevitably lead to a further expansion of traffic’s domain over human life. What could such a Utopia look like? Traffic would be organized exclusively around public transportation systems. It would be financed by a progressive tax calculated on income and on the proximity of one’s residence to the next terminal and to the job. It would be designed so that everybody could occupy any seat on a first-come, first-served basis: the doctor, the vacationer and the President would not be assigned any priority of person. In this fool’s paradise, all passengers would be equal, but they would be just as equally captive consumers of transport. Each citizen of a motorized Utopia would be deprived of the use of his feet and drafted into the servitude of proliferating networks of transportation. - -Certain would-be miracle makers disguised as architects offer a specious escape from the paradox of speed. By their standards, acceleration imposes inequities, time loss and controlled schedules only because people do not yet live in those patterns and orbits into which vehicles can best place them. These futuristic architects would house and occupy people in self-sufficient units of towers interconnected by tracks for high-speed capsules. Soleri, Doxiadis or Fuller would solve the problem created by high-speed transport by identifying the entire human habitat with the problem. Rather than asking how the earth’s surface can be preserved for people, they ask how reservations for necessary people can be established on an earth that has been reshaped for the sake of industrial outputs. - -## The elusive threshold - -Any traffic-optimal speed for transport seems capricious or fanatical to the confirmed passenger, whereas it looks like the flight of the bird to the donkey driver. Four or six times the speed of a man on foot constitutes a threshold too low to be deemed worthy of consideration by the habitual passenger and too high to convey the sense of a _limit_ to the three-quarters of humanity who still get around on their own power. - -All those who plan other people’s housing, transportation or education belong to the passenger class. Their claim to power is derived from the value their employers place on acceleration. Social scientists can build a computer model of traffic in Calcutta or Santiago, and engineers can design monorail webs according to abstract notions of traffic flow. Since these planners are true believers in problem solving by industry, the real solution for traffic congestion is beyond their grasp. Their belief in the effectiveness of power blinds them to the disproportionately greater effectiveness of abstaining from its use. Traffic engineers have yet to combine in one simulation model the mobility of people with that of vehicles. The engineer cannot conceive the possibility of renouncing speed and slowing down for the sake of permitting optimal traffic flow. He would never entertain the thought of programming his computer on the stipulation that no motorized vehicle within any city should ever overtake the speed of a velocipede. The development expert who looks down compassionately from his Land-Rover on the Indian peasant driving his pigs to market refuses to acknowledge the relative advantage of feet. The expert tends to forget that this man has dispensed ten others in his village from spending time on the road, whereas the engineer and every member of his family separately devote a major part of every day to being in traffic. For a man who believes that human mobility must be conceived in terms of indefinite progress, there can be no optimal level of traffic but only passing consensus on a given level of technical development. - -Most Mexicans, not to speak of Indians and Chinese, are in a position inverse to that of the confirmed passenger. The critical threshold is entirely beyond what all but a few of them know or expect. They still belong to the class of the self-powered. Some of them have a lingering memory of a motorized adventure, but most of them have no personal experience of travelling at or above the critical speed. In the two typical Mexican states of Guerrero and Chiapas, less than one per cent of the population moved even once over ten miles in less than one hour during 1970. The vehicles into which people in these areas are sometimes crowded render traffic indeed more convenient, but barely faster than the speed of a bicycle. The third class bus does not separate the farmer from his pig, and it takes them both to market without inflicting any loss of weight, but this acquaintance with motorized ‘comfort’ does not amount to dependence on destructive speed. - -The order of magnitude in which the critical threshold of speed can be found is too low to be taken seriously by the passenger, and too high to concern the peasant. It is so obvious it cannot be easily seen. The proposal of a limit to speed within this order of magnitude engenders stubborn opposition. It exposes the addiction of industrialized men to consuming ever higher doses of energy, while it asks those who are still sober to abstain from something they have yet to taste. - -To propose counterfoil research is not only a scandal, it is also a threat. Simplicity threatens the expert, who supposedly understands just why the commuter train runs at 8:15 and 8:41 and why it must be better to use fuel with certain additives. That a political process could identify a natural magnitude, both inescapable and limited, is an idea that lies outside the passenger’s world of verities. He has let respect for specialists he doesn’t even know turn into unthinking submission. If a political resolution could be found for problems created by experts in the field of traffic, then perhaps the same remedy could be applied to problems of education, medicine or urbanization. If the order of magnitude of traffic optimal vehicular velocities could be determined by laymen actively participating in an ongoing political process, then the foundation on which the framework of every industrial society is built would be shattered. To propose such research is politically subversive. It puts in question the overarching consensus on the need for more transportation which now allows the proponents of public ownership to define themselves as political adversaries of the proponents of private enterprise. - -## Degrees of self powered mobility - -A century ago the ball bearing was invented it reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand by applying a well calibrated ball-bearing between two neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel--probably the last of the great neolithic inventions--finally to become useful for self-powered mobility. - -Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometre in ten minutes by expending 0·75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than five per cent and nomads less than eight per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment. - -Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometre of flat road at an expense of only 0·15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines, but all other animals as well. - -The invention of the ball-bearing, the tangent-spoked wheel and the pneumatic tyre taken together can be compared to only three other events in the history of transportation. The invention of the wheel at the dawn of civilization took the load off man’s back and put it onto the barrow. The invention and simultaneous application, during the European Middle Ages, of stirrup, shoulder harness and horseshoe increased the thermodynamic efficiency of the horse by a factor of up to five, and changed the economy of medieval Europe: it made frequent ploughing possible and thus introduced rotation agriculture; it brought more distant fields into the reach of the peasant, and thus permitted landowners to move from six-family hamlets into 100-family villages, where they could live around the church, the square, the jail and--later--the school; it allowed the cultivation of northern soils and shifted the centre of power into cold climates. The building of the first ocean-going vessels by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, under the aegis of developing European capitalism, laid the solid foundations for a globe-spanning culture and market. - -The invention of the ball-bearing signalled a fourth revolution. It created an option between more freedom in equity and more speed. The bearing is an equally fundamental ingredient of two new types of locomotion, respectively symbolized by the bicycle and the car. The bicycle lifted man’s automobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible. In contrast, the accelerating individual capsule enabled societies to engage in a ritual of progressively paralysing speed. - -The monopoly of a ritual application over a potentially useful device is nothing new. Thousands of years ago, the wheel took the load off the carrier-slave, but it did so only on the Eurasian landmass. In Mexico, the wheel was well-known, but never applied to transport. It served exclusively for the construction of carriages for toy gods. The taboo on wheelbarrows in America before Cortés is no more puzzling than the taboo on bicycles in modern traffic. - -It is by no means necessary that the invention of the ball-bearing continue to serve the increase of energy use, and thereby produce time scarcity, space consumption and class privilege. If the new order of self-powered mobility offered by the bicycle were protected against devaluation, paralysis and risk to the limbs of the rider, it would be possible to guarantee optimal shared mobility to all people and put an end to the imposition of maximum privilege and exploitation. It would be possible to control the patterns of urbanization if the organization of space were constrained by the power man has to move through it. - -Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man’s radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike he can usually push it. - -The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes two lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using modern trains, four to move them on buses, 12 to move them in their cars, and only one lane for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred. - -Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim. - -A grizzly contest between bicycles and motors has just come to an end. In Vietnam, a hyperindustrialized army tried to conquer, but could not overcome, a people organized around bicycle speed. The lesson should be clear. High energy armies can annihilate people--both those they defend and those against whom they are launched, but they are of very limited use to a people which defends itself. It remains to be seen if the Vietnamese will apply what they learned in war to an economy of peace, if they will be willing to protect the values that made their victory possible. The dismal likelihood is that the victors, for the sake of industrial progress and increased energy consumption, will tend to defeat themselves by destroying that structure of equity, rationality and autonomy into which American bombers had forced them by depriving them of fuels, motors and roads. - -## Dominant v subsidiary motors - -Men are born almost equally mobile their natural ability speaks for the personal liberty of each one to go wherever he or she wants to go Citizens of a society founded on the notion of equity will demand the protection of this right against any abridgement. It should be irrelevant to them by what means the exercise of personal mobility is denied, whether by imprisonment, bondage to an estate, revocation of a passport, or enclosure within an environment that encroaches on a person’s native ability to move in order to make him a consumer of transport. This inalienable right of free movement does not lapse just because most of our contemporaries have strapped themselves into ideological seat belts. Man’s natural capacity for transit emerges as the only yardstick by which to measure the contribution transport can make to traffic: there is only so much transport that traffic can bear. It remains to be outlined how we can distinguish those forms of transport that cripple the power to move from those that enhance it. - -Transportation can abridge traffic in three ways: by breaking its flow, by creating isolated sets of destinations, and by increasing the loss of time due to traffic. I have already argued that the key to the relation between transport and traffic is the speed of vehicles. I have described how, past a certain threshold of speed, transport has gone on to obstruct traffic in these three ways. It blocks mobility by cluttering up the environment with vehicles and roads. It transforms geography into a pyramid of circuits sealed off from one another according to levels of acceleration. It expropriates life-time at the behest of speed. - -If beyond a certain threshold transport obstructs traffic, the inverse is also true: below some level of speed, motorized vehicles can complement or improve traffic by permitting people to do things they could not do on foot or on bicycle. Motors can be used to transport the sick, the lame, the old and the just plain lazy. Motorpulleys can lift people over hills, but they can do so peacefully only if they do not push the climber off the path. Trains can extend the range of travel, but only if they give people equal opportunity to come closer to each other. A well-developed transportation system running at top speeds of 25 mph would have allowed Fix to chase Phileas Fogg around the world in less than half of 80 days. The time engaged in travel must be, as much as possible, the traveller’s own: only insofar as motorized transport remains limited to speeds which leave it subsidiary to autonomous transit can a traffic-optimal transportation system be developed. - -A limit on the power and therefore on the speed of motors does not by itself insure those who are weaker against exploitation by the rich and powerful, who can still devise means to live and work at better located addresses, travel with retinue in plush carriages, and reserve a special lane for doctors and members of the central committee. But at a sufficiently limited maximum speed, this is an unfairness which can be reduced or even corrected by a combination of taxes and technological devices. At unlimited top speed neither public ownership of the means of transportation nor technical improvements in their control can ever eliminate growing and unequal exploitation. A transportation industry is the key to optimal production of traffic, but only if it does not exercise its radical monopoly over personal productivity. - -## Underequipment overdevelopment and mature technology - -The combination of transportation and transit that constitutes traffic has provided us with an example of socially optimal per capita wattage and of the need for politically chosen limits on it. Traffic is also a model for the convergence of worldwide development goals, and a criterion by which to distinguish those countries which are lamely underequipped from those that are destructively overindustrialized. - -A country can be classified as underequipped if it cannot outfit each citizen with a bicycle or provide a five-speed transmission for anyone who wants to pedal others around. It is underequipped if it cannot provide good roads for the cycle, or free public motorized transportation for those who want to travel for more than a few hours in succession. No technical, economic or ecological reason exists why such backwardness should be tolerated anywhere in 1975. It would be a scandal if the natural mobility of a people were forced to stagnate on a pre-bicycle level against its will. - -A country can be classified as overindustrialized when its social life is dominated by the transportation industry, which has come to determine its class privileges, to accentuate its time scarcity, and to tie its people more tightly to the tracks it has laid out for them. - -Beyond underequipment and overindustrialization, there is a place for the world of post-industrial effectiveness, where the industrial mode of production complements other autonomous forms of production. There is a place, in other words, for a world of technological maturity. In terms of traffic, it is the world of those who have tripled the extent of their daily horizon by lifting themselves onto their bicycles. It is just as much the world marked by a variety of subsidiary motors available for the occasions when a bicycle is not enough and when an extra push will limit neither equity nor freedom. And it is, too, the world of the long voyage: a world where every place is open to every person, at his own pleasure and speed, without haste or fear, by means of vehicles that cross distances without breaking with the earth which man walked for hundreds of thousands of years on his own two feet. - -Underequipment keeps people enslaved to primordial nature and limits their freedom. Overindustrialization does not admit of differences in production and political style. It imposes its technical characteristics on social relations. The world of technological maturity permits a variety of political choices and cultures. The variety diminishes, of course, as a community allows industry to grow at the cost of autonomous production. Reasoning alone can offer no precise measure for the level of post-industrial effectiveness and technological maturity appropriate to a concrete society. It can only indicate in dimensional terms the range into which these technological characteristics must fit. It must be left to a historical community engaged in its own political process to decide when programming, space distortion, time scarcity and inequality cease to be worth its while. Reasoning can identify speed as the critical factor in traffic. It cannot set politically feasible limits. - -Only when top speeds on personal carriage reflect the enlightened self-interest of a political community can they become operative. This interest cannot be expressed in a society where one class monopolizes not only transportation, but communication, medicine, education and weapons as well. It does not matter if this power is held by legal owners or by entrenched managers of an industry that is legally owned by the workers. This power must be reappropriated and submitted to the sound judgment of the common man. The reconquest of power starts with the recognition that expert knowledge blinds the secretive bureaucrat to the obvious way of dissolving the energy crisis, just as it has blinded him to recognize the obvious solution to the war in Vietnam. - -There are two roads from where we are to technological maturity: one is the road of liberation from affluence; the other is the road of liberation from dependence. Both roads have the same destination: the social restructuring of space that offers to each person the constantly renewed experience that the centre of the world is where he stands, walks and lives. - -Liberation from affluence begins on the traffic islands where the rich run into one another. The well-sped are tossed from one island to the next and are offered but the company of fellow passengers en route to somewhere else. This solitude of plenty breaks down as the traffic islands gradually expand and people begin to recover their native power to move around the place where they live. Thus, the impoverished environment of the traffic island can embody the beginnings of social reconstruction, and the people who now call themselves rich will break with bondage to overefficient transport on the day they come to treasure the horizon of their traffic islands, now fully grown, and to dread frequent shipments from their homes. - -Liberation from dependence starts at the other end. It breaks the constriction of village and valley and leaves behind the boredom of narrow horizons and the stifling oppression of a world closed in on itself. To expand life beyond the radius of tradition without scattering it to the winds of acceleration is a goal that any poor country could achieve within a few years, but it is a goal that will be reached only by those who reject the offer of unchecked industrial development made in the name of an ideology of indefinite energy consumption. - -Liberation from the radical monopoly of industry is possible only where people engage in a political process founded on the protection of optimal traffic. This protection, in turn, demands a recognition of those energy quanta upon whose neglect industrial society has been built. These energy quanta can carry those who consume that much, but no more, into a post-industrial age that is technologically mature. - -Liberation which comes cheap to the poor will cost the rich dear, but they will pay its price once the acceleration of their transportation systems grinds traffic to a halt. A concrete analysis of traffic betrays the truth underlying the energy crisis: the impact of industrially packaged quanta of energy on the social environment tends to be degrading, exhausting and enslaving, and these effects come into play even before those which threaten the pollution of the physical environment and the extinction of the race. The crucial point at which these effects can be reversed is not, however, a matter of deduction, but of decision. - -## Bibliography - -_Seminars on ‘Alternatives to Acceleration in the Improvement of Traffic’ and on ‘The History of Thermodynamics Applied to Personal Transportation’ are meeting at CIDOC in Cuernavaca during 1974 and 1975. The following list has been culled from the seminar library. Only those titles have been quoted which, besides having proved useful in past sessions of the seminar, could easily be overlooked by those who might wish to pursue the line of inquiry followed in this essay_. - -ALBION, R. G., _Naval_ _and_ _Maritime_ _History_ , _An_ _Annotated_ _Bibliography_. Mystic, The Marine Hist. Assn. Conn. 1972. - -ANDERSON, Romola and Roger, _The_ _Sailing_ _Ship:_ _Six_ _Thousand_ _Years_ _of_ _History_. London, Harrap, 1926. - -BANKS, Arthur S., _Cross-Polity_ _Times_ _Series_ _Data_. Cambridge, Mass.; MIT, 1971. - -BARKIN, David, ‘El consumo y la vía chilena al socialismo; reflexiones en torno a la decisión automotriz’. Versión Preliminar. _Centro_ _de_ _Estudios_ _Socio-Económicos_ , Santiago de Chile, 1972. (Available from CIDOC Library.) - -BERNSTEIN, M. T., _Steamboats_ _on_ _the_ _Ganges_. Bombay, Orient Longmans, 1960. - -BIVAR, A. D. H., ‘The Stirrup and Its Origins’. _Oriental_ _Art_ , vol. I, 1955, pp. 61-65\. - -BLAISDEL, R. et al., _Sources_ _of_ _Information_ _in_ _Transportation_. Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University Press (The Transportation Center), 1964. - -BOWDEN, Frank Philip, Art. on ‘Friction’ in the _Encyclopaedia_ _Britannica_ , vol. 9, pp. 840A-841\. - -BRANCH, Melville C., _Comprehensive_ _Urban_ _Planning:_ _A_ _Selected_ _Anno_ _tated_ _Bibliography_ _with_ _Related_ _Materials_. Sage Publications, 1973. For material on transportation, cf. pp. 251-272\. - -BRAUDEL, Fernand, ‘La Lenteur des Transports’ in _Civilisation_ _Materielle_ _et_ _Capitalisme_ , _XV-XVIII_ _Siècle_ , pp. 314-329\. Paris, Armand Colin, 1967. - -----. ‘Vicissitudes des Routes’ in _La_ _Méditerranée_ _et_ _le_ _Monde_ _Medi_ _terranéen_ , pp. 242-259\. Paris, Armand Colin, 1949. - -BRUNOT, Ferdinand, _Histoire_ _de_ _la_ _Langue_ _Française_ _des_ _Origines_ _a_ _nos_ _Jours_. For references to ‘transport’, cf. esp. tome VI, pp. 357-360 and tome VII, pp. 201-231\. - -BUCHANAN, C. D., _Mixed_ _Blessing:_ _The_ _Motor_ _Car_ _in_ _Britain_. London, 1958. - -BUFFET, B., _L’Eau_ _Potable_ _à_ _travers_ _les_ _Ages_. Liege, 1950. - -CAUNTER, C. F., _The_ _History_ _and_ _Development_ _of_ _the_ _Cycles_ , _As_ _Illustrated_ _by_ _the_ _Collection_ _of_ _Cycles_ _in_ _the_ _Science_ _Museum_. London, 1955. - -CAVAILLES, Henri, _La_ _Route_ _Française_ , _son_ _Histoire_. Paris, 1946. - -CHERMAYEFF, Serge, and TZONIS, Alexander, _Shape_ _of_ _Community_. Penguin, 1971. - -CLAXTON, E. C., ‘The Future of the Bicycle in a Modern Society’. _Journal_ _of_ _the_ _Royal_ _Society_ _of_ _Arts_ , January, 1968, pp. 114-135\. - -COOK, Walter L., _Bike_ _Trails_ _and_ _Facilities_ _:_ _A_ _Guide_ _to_ _Their_ _Design_ , _Construction_ _and_ _Operation_. Wheeling, W.Va., American Institute of Park Executives, 1965. - -COPELAND, John, _Roads_ _and_ _Their_ _Traffic_ , _1750 -1858_. Newton Abbot, 1968. - -DAVENAS, Paul, _Les_ _Messageries_ _Royales_. Paris, 1937. - -DEFFONTAINES, P., ‘Sur la Reparticion Géographique des Voitures à Deux Roues et à Quatre Roues’. _Traveaux_ _du_ _Premier_ _Congrès_ _Internacional_ _de_ _Folklore_ , _Paris_ _1937_ , p. 117 ff. Arbault, Tours, 1938. - -DEISCHEL, Erwin, _Umweltbeanspruchung_ _und_ _Umweltschaeden_ _durch_ _den_ _Verkehr_ _in_ _der_ _BDR_ , Munich, 1971. - -DOLLFUS, C., _Historie_ _de_ _la_ _Locomotion_ _Terrestre_. Paris, 1935-36\. - -EKHOLM, Gordon F., ‘Wheeled Toys in Mexico’. _American_ _Antiquity_ , vol. 2, 1946, pp. 222-228\. - -FARVAR, M. Taghi and MILTON, John, _The_ _Careless_ _Technology:_ _Ecology_ _and_ _International_ _Development_. Garden City, N.Y., The Natural History Press, 1972. - -FORBES, R. J., ‘Land Transport and Road Building, 1000-1900’. _Janus_ , vol. 46, 1957, p. 100. - -----. _Notes_ _on_ _the_ _History_ _of_ _Ancient_ _Roads_ _and_ _Their_ _Construction_. Second Edition. Amsterdam, 1964. - -FOSTER, George M., _Culture_ _and_ _Conquest:_ _America’s_ _Spanish_ _Heritage_. Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1960. - -FROMM, Gary, ed., _Transport_ _Investment_ _and_ _Economic_ _Development_. Washington, D.C., The Brookings Institution Transport Research Program, 1969. - -FULLER, R. Buckminster, _World_ _Resource_ _Inventory_. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. Cf. esp. vol. 4, part 4. - -FULLER, Dudley D., _Theory_ _and_ _Practice_ _of_ _Lubrication_ _for_ _Engineers_ , N.Y., Wiley, 1956. - -GIEDION, Siegfried, _Mechanization_ _Takes_ _Command_. New York, Norton, 1969. - -GINSBURG, Norton, _Atlas_ _of_ _Economic_ _Development_. University of Chicago Press, 1961. Cf. esp. pp. 100-101 and pp. 60-77\. - -GOETZ, Wilhelm, _Verkehrswege_ _im_ _Dienste_ _des_ _Welthandels:_ _Eine_ _Historisch-Geographische_ _Untersuchung_. Stuttgart, 1888. - -HALDANE, J. B. S., ‘On Being the Right Size’ in James R. Newman, ed., _The_ _World_ _of_ _Mathematics_ , vol. II. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1956. - -HALL, Edward T., _Hidden_ _Dimension_. New York, Doubleday, 1969. - -HANNEN, Bruce, ‘Options for Energy Conservation’. Unpublished manuscript, Feb., 1973. CIDOC Library. - -HASEBRÖK, Johannes, _Griechische_ _Wirtschaftgeschichte_ _und_ _Gesell_ _schaftgeschichte_ _bis_ _zur_ _Perserzeit_. Tübingen, 1931. - -HAUDRICOURT, André G., ‘Contribution a la Géographie et a l’Ethnologie de la Voiture’. _Revue_ _de_ _Géographie_ _Humaine_ _et_ _Ethnologie_ , 1948. pp. 54-64\. - -HEICHELHEIM, Fritz M., _An_ _Ancient_ _Economic_ _History_ , _From_ _the_ _Paleo_ _lithic_ _Age_ _to_ _the_ _Migrations_ _of_ _the_ _Germanic_ , _Slavic_ _and_ _Arabic_ _Nations_. 3 Volumes, Leiden, 1938. - -HERENDEEN, R., Use of Input/Output Analysis to Determine the Energy Cost of Goods and Services. Mimeograph, 22 pp. Urbana, University of Illinois (Center for Advanced Computer Studies), Feb. 20, 1973. - -HIRST, E., _Energy_ _Efficiency_ _for_ _Passenger_ _Transportation_ _and_ _for_ _Freight_ _Transportation_. Oak Ridge National Laboratories, 1971. - -HORNELL, J., _Water_ _Transport:_ _Origins_ _and_ _Early_ _Evolution_. Cambridge University Press, 1946. - -HOSKINS, Halford, _British_ _Routes_ _to_ _India_. New York, 1928. - -HUNTER, Holland, _Soviet_ _Transport_ _Experience_ , _Its_ _Lessons_ _for_ _Other_ _Countries_. Washington, D.C., The Brookings Institution Transport Research Program, 1968. - -JOPE, E. M., ‘Vehicles and Harness’ in Singer, _A_ _History_ _of_ _Technology_ , vol. 2, p. 537. Oxford University Press, 1956. - -KALMUS, Ludwig, _Weltgeschichte_ _der_ _Post_ _mit_ _besonderer_ _Berücksichtigung_ _des_ _deutschen_ _Sprachgebietes_. Vienna, 1937. - -KIRKLAND, Edward, _Men_ , _Cities_ _and_ _Transportation_ _:_ _A_ _Study_ _of_ _New_ _England_ _History_ , _1820 -1900_. Two volumes. Cambridge, Mass., 1948. - -KOHL, Johann Georg, _Der_ _Verkehr_ _und_ _die_ _Ansiedlungen_ _der_ _Menschen_ _in_ _ihrer_ _Abhaengigkeit_ _von_ _der_ _Gestaltung_ _der_ _Erdoberflaeche_. Leipzig, 1841. - -LANSING, John B.; MARANS, Robert W., et. al., _Car_ _Ownership_ , _Annual_ _Mileage_ , _and_ _the_ _Journey_ _to_ _Work_. Ann Arbor, Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan, 1970. Cf. esp. pp. 137-151\. - -LAPIN, Howard, _Structuring_ _the_ _Journey_ _to_ _Work_. Philadelphia University Press, 1964. - -LARTILLEUX, H., _Geografía_ _de_ _los_ _Ferrocarriles_ _Españoles_. M. Rivadaneyra, 1954. - -LEFEBVRE des NOETTES, R., _L’Attelage_ _et_ _le_ _Cheval_ _de_ _Selle_ _à_ _travers_ _les_ _Ages;_ _Contribution_ _à_ _l’Histoire_ _de_ _l_ ’ _Esclavage_. Paris, Picard, 1931. - -----. _De_ _la_ _Marine_ _Antique_ _à_ _la_ _Marine_ _Moderne:_ _La_ _Revolution_ _du_ _Gouvernail_. Paris, 1935. - -LEWIS, Richard S. and SPINRAD, Bernard I., _The_ _Energy_ _Crisis_. Chicago, Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, 1972. - -LIEPMANN, Kate K., _The_ _Journey_ _to_ _Work_ , _Its_ _Significance_ _for_ _Industrial_ _and_ _Community_ _Life_. London, 1944. - -LINDER, Staffan Burestam, _The_ _Harried_ _Leisure_ _Class_. New York, Columbia University Press, 1971. - -LISCO, Thomas E., ‘The Future of Urban Transportation; Mass Transportation: Cinderella in Our Cities’. _The_ _Public_ _Interest_. 1970. - -LOPEZ, R. S. and RAYMOND, J. W., eds., _Medieval_ _Trade_ _in_ _the_ _Mediter_ _ranean_ _World_ : _Illustrative_ _Documents_. New York, Columbia University Press, 1955. - -MANHEIM, Marvin L., ‘Principles of Transport Systems Analysis’. _Proceedings_ _of_ _the_ _Seventh_ _Annual_ _Meeting_ _of_ _the_ _Transportation_ _Research_ _Forum_ , 1966, pp. 9-21\. - -MARSH, George Perkins, _The_ _Earth_ _As_ _Modified_ _by_ _Human_ _Action_. Third Edition. New York, 1888. - -MEYER, Balthasar H., ed., _History_ _of_ _Transportation_ _in_ _the_ _United_ _States_ _before_ _1860_. Washington, D.C., 1917. - -MEYER, John R., Art. on ‘Transportation: Economic Aspects’ in the _Encyclopedia_ _of_ _Social_ _Sciences_ , vol. 16, pp. 134-140\. - -MOTT, George Fox, ‘Transportation in Contemporary Civilization’ in _Transportation_ _Renaissance_ , vol. 345 of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, pp. 1-5, Philadelphia, 1963. - -MACKAYE, Benton, ‘Townless Highways for the Motorist’. _Harper’s_ _Magazine_ , Aug., 1931. - -MCMURRAY, David F. E., _Aspects_ _of_ _Time_ _and_ _the_ _Study_ _of_ _Activity_ _Routines_. Thesis for the M.S. in city planning. Cambridge, Mass., MIT, 1968. - -NEEDHAM, Joseph, ‘Vehicles for Land Transport’ in _Science_ _and_ _Civilization_ _in_ _China_ , vol. 4 (Physics and Physical Technology), part II (Mechanical Engineering), pp. 243-281\. Cambridge University Press, 1965. - -----. ‘Power Sources and Their Employment, (1) Animal Traction’ in _ibid_., pp. 303-328\. - -OLSSON, Gunnar, _Distance_ _and_ _Human_ _Interaction_ _:_ _A_ _Review_ _Bibliography_. Philadelphia (Regional Science Research Institute, bibl. sec. 2), 1965. - -OSTWALD, W., _Energetische_ _Grundlagen_ _der_ _Kulturwissenschaft_. (Philosophisch-Soziologische Bücherei Bd. 16) Leipzig, 1909. - -OTTLEY, George, _A_ _Bibliography_ _of_ _British_ _Railway_ _History_. London, Allen and Unwin, 1965. - -OWEN, Wolford, _Strategy_ _for_ _Mobility_. Washington, D.G., Brookings Institution, 1964. - -PERRATON, Jean K., ‘Planning for the Cyclist in Urban Areas’. _The_ _Town_ _Planning_ _Review_ , vol. 39, no. 2, July, 1968, pp. 149-162\. - -PLATT, John, ‘Hierarchical Restructuring’. _Bulletin_ _of_ _Atomic_ _Scientists_ , Nov., 1970. - -POLANYI, Karl, ed., _Trade_ _and_ _Market_ _in_ _Early_ _Empires_. Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1957. - -ROBBINS, Michael, _The_ _Railway_ _Age_. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Penguin, 1964. - -RUSSEAU, Pierre, _Histoire_ _des_ _Transports_. Paris, Artheme Fayard, 1961. - -SAUER, Carl O., _Agricultural_ _Origins_ _and_ _Dispersal_. Bowman Memorial Lectures, Series Two. New York, 1952. - -SAUVY, Alfred, _Les_ _Quatre_ _Roues_ _de_ _la_ _Fortune_ _:_ _Essai_ _sur_ _l_ ’ _Automobile_ , Paris, 1968. - -SCHNORE, Leo F., Art. on ‘Transportation, Commutation’ in the _Encyclopedia_ _of_ _Social_ _Sciences_ , vol. 16, pp. 140-144\. - -SHERRINGTON, Charles E. R., _A_ _Hundred_ _Years_ _of_ _Inland_ _Transportation_ , _1830 -1933_. London, 1934. Kelly reprint, 1969. - -SMERK, George M., _Readings_ _in_ _Urban_ _Transportation_. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1968. - -SMITH, Joel. Art. on ‘Transportation: Social Aspects’ in the _Encyclo_ _pedia_ _of_ _Social_ _Sciences_ , vol. 16, pp. 129-134\. - -SMITH, William, _The_ _History_ _of_ _the_ _Post_ _Office_ _in_ _British_ _North_ _America_ , _1639 -1870_. Cambridge University Press, 1920. - -SPENGLER, Joseph, ‘On the Progress of Quantification in Economics’ in Harry Woolf, ed., _A_ _History_ _of_ _the_ _Meaning_ _of_ _Measurement_ _in_ _the_ _Natural_ _and_ _Social_ _Sciences_ , pp. 128-146\. New York, Bobbs Merrill, 1961. - -STONE, Tabor R., _Beyond_ _the_ _Automobile:_ _Reshaping_ _the_ _Transportation_ _Environment_. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall, 1971. - -STRUBE ERDMANN, Leon, _Vialidad_ _Imperial_ _de_ _los_ _Incas_. Universidad de Córdoba, Argentina, 1963. - -SUNDQUIST, James L., ‘A Policy for Urban Growth: Where Shall They Live?’ _The_ _Public_ _Interest_. No. 18, Winter 1970. - -STUTZ, Frederick P., _Research_ _on_ _Intra-Urban_ _Social_ _Travel:_ _Introduction_ _and_ _Bibliography_ _;_ _Exchange_ _Bibliography_ _No_. _173_. Monticello, Mich., Council of Planning Librarians, Feb., 1971. - -TAYLOR, George, _The_ _Transportation_ _Revolution_. New York, Harper & Row, 1951. - -TERRAZAS DE LA PEÑA, Eduardo, ‘Necesidad de un Incremento en la Intensidad del Uso del Espacio’. Paper presented at a regional meeting on urban development policies, Mexico City, July, 1972. CIDOC Library. - -_Transportation_ _Renaissance_ , Vol. 345 of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Philadelphia, 1963. - -TURNER, John F. C., ‘Housing for People or Housing by People’? Mimeograph, 10 pp. Cambridge, Mass., MIT, 1970. - -WESTERGAARD, John, ‘Journey to Work in London Region’. _TPR_ , April, 1957. - -WHEELER, James O., _Research_ _on_ _the_ _Journey_ _to_ _Work:_ _Introduction_ _and_ _Bibliography;_ _Exchange_ _Bibliography_ _No_. _65_. Monticello, Mich., Council of Planning Librarians, January, 1969. - -WHITE, Lynn, ‘Tibet, India and Malaya as Sources of Western Medieval Technology’. _American_ _Historical_ _Review_ , vol. 65, 1960, pp. 515-526\. - -----. ‘The Agricultural Revolution of the Early Middle Ages’ in _Medieval_ _Technology_ _and_ _Social_ _Change_. Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 39-78\. - -WHITE, Leslie, _The_ _Science_ _of_ _Culture_ _:_ _Energy_ _and_ _the_ _Evolution_ _of_ _Culture_. New York, Grove Press, 1949. cf. esp. pp. 363-393\. - -WILSON, S. S., ‘Bicycle Technology’. _Scientific_ _American_ , March, 1973, pp. 81-91\. - -WILSON, George W., et. al., _The_ _Impact_ _of_ _Highway_ _Investment_ _on_ _Development_. Washington, D.C., The Brookings Institution Transport Research Program, 1966. - -YURICK, Sol, ‘The Political Economy of Junk’. _Monthly_ _Review_ , vol. 22, no. 7, Dec, 1970, pp. 22-37\. diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/energy/es.txt b/data/pages/en/book/energy/es.txt deleted file mode 100644 index e448072..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/energy/es.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,456 +0,0 @@ -# Energía y equidad - -## La importación de una crisis - -Mientras mas rico el país, más de buen gusto es mostrarse preocupado por la llamada “crisis de energía”. El tema saltó a primer plano entre aquellos que _Le Monde_ y el _New York Times_ trataron inmediatamente después de que Kissinger anunció la suspensión de bombardeos en Vietnam. El nuevo problema --chispa para los grandes programas de televisión-- está en la agenda del _jet-set_ científico internacional, meollo en la reorganización de las relaciones comerciales entre rusos y norteamericanos. Ya en 1970, este mismo tema llegó a tener preeminencia en las revistas de las élites científicas; en parte porque cómodamente amalgama varias ramas “distinguidas” de la investigación reciente, ampliamente popularizadas durante la década de los sesenta: el estudio psicosociológico de los conflictos, de la ecología y de la contaminación ambiental, el de las mutaciones previsibles en la tecnología futurista. Ahora, en 1973, vemos los primeros signos de que la importación de la “crisis energética” empieza a tener éxito en América Latina. Se multiplica la reproducción de traducciones sobre el tema. En la prensa periódica, destinada a las clases escolarizadas, las vitrinas de las librerías exhiben títulos al respecto; los programas de televisión, promovidos por las fundaciones extranjeras, conectan el tema a la necesidad de limitar la población, de aumentar los niveles tecnológicos para usar la energía escasa en forma más económica y de llegar a acuerdos internacionales de naturaleza no política. Me parece de suma importancia fijar nuestra atención en la realidad que subyace en esta “crisis” y encontrar una manera que habilite a las masas populares para participar en el análisis, sin que por ello baje el nivel lógico y técnico de la discusión. El presente documento es una contribución para orientar esta discusión en uno de los sentidos posibles. - -Hay que desenmascarar la así llamada “crisis de energía”. Se trata de un eufemismo que encubre una contradicción, indica una frustración, consagra una ilusión. Encubre la contradicción inherente al hecho de querer alcanzar, al mismo tiempo, un estado social basado en la noción de EQUIDAD y un nivel cada vez más elevado de crecimiento industrial. Indica cuál es el grado de frustración actual, provocado por el desarrollo industrial. Finalmente, consagra la ilusión de que se puede sustituir indefinidamente la potencia de la máquina por la energía metabólica del hombre, ilusión que lleva, en este momento, a los países ricos a la parálisis y fatalmente desorienta la planificación del desarrollo en los países pobres. Al difundir el pánico de una inminente e inevitable “crisis de energía”, los ricos perjudican aún más a los pobres que al venderles los productos de su industria. Construir las propias centrales nucleares en los Andes incorpora a un país al Club de los Exploradores, mientras que la importación de coches o aviones solamente acentúa su dependencia. Al difundir en el mundo de los pobres el temor por la insuficiencia de energía para el “progreso” hacia tales metas, los pobres aceptan la explicación que presentan los ricos sobre la crisis en el progreso y se ponen al mismo tiempo un _handicap_ en la carrera del crecimiento a la cual se obligan. Optan por una pobreza modernizada, en vez de elegir, con el uso racional de las técnicas modernas, el acceso a un modo de producción que refleje madurez política y científica. En mi opinión es de la mayor importancia enfrentarse a la realidad que oculta ese llamado concepto de “crisis”. Hay que reconocer que la incorporación de algo más que un cierto quántum de energía por unidad de un producto industrial inevitablemente tiene efectos destructores, tanto en el ambiente sociopolítico como en el ambiente biofísico. - -## El abuso político de la contaminación - -A la presente “crisis” energética la precedió una análoga “crisis” ecológica: se abusa de ambas con fines de explotación política. Hay que entender que la segunda no encuentra su solución aun cuando se encontraran formas de producir energía abundante y limpia, es decir, sin efecto destructor sobre el medio ambiente. - -Los métodos que hoy se utilizan para producir energía, en su creciente mayoría agotan los recursos y contaminan el ambiente. Al ritmo actual de su utilización, el carbón, el petróleo, el gas natural y el uranio se consumirán dentro del horizonte temporal de tres generaciones, y en el entretiempo habrán cambiado tanto al ser humano como su atmósfera de forma definitiva. Para transportar a un solo hombre en un Volkswagen, sobre una distancia de 500 km, se queman los mismos 175 kg de oxígeno que un individuo respira en todo un año. Las plantas y las algas reproducen suficiente oxígeno para los 3 000 millones de hombres que existen. Pero no puede reproducirlo para un mundo automovilizado, cuyos vehículos queman cada uno por lo menos 14 veces más oxígeno del que quema un individuo. Los métodos usados para producir energía no sólo son caros --y por tanto son recursos escasos--, sino igualmente destructores, al punto de engendrar su propia escasez. Los esfuerzos de los últimos decenios se han orientado a producir más petróleo, a refinarlo mejor y a controlar su distribución. El énfasis ahora se va trasladando hacia la investigación para encontrar fuentes de energía abundante y _limpia_ y motores comparables en potencia a los presentes, que sean más rentables y menos venenosos. Se olvida que automóviles que no envenenen el ambiente, ni en su manufactura ni en su marcha, costarían un múltiplo de los que ahora tenemos. La promoción de la técnica limpia casi siempre constituye la promoción de un médico de lujo para producir bienes de primera necesidad. - -En su forma más trágica y amenazante, la quimera energética se manifiesta en la llamada “Revolución verde”. Los granos milagrosos introducidos en la India hace pocos años, hacen sobrevivir y multiplicarse a los hambrientos que se multiplicaron por el crecimiento industrial. Estas nuevas simientes se cargan de energía en forma de agua de bombeo, abonos químicos e insecticidas. Su precio se paga no tanto en dólares sino más bien en trastornos sociales y en destrucción ecológica. De esta forma, los cuatro quintos menos industrializados de la especie humana, quienes llegan a depender más de la agricultura “milagrosa”, empiezan a rivalizar con la minoría privilegiada en materia de destrucción ambiental. Hace sólo 10 años se podía decir que la capacidad de un recién nacido norteamericano de envenenar el mundo con sus excrementos tecnológicos era 100 veces mayor que la de su coetáneo en Bengala. Gracias a que el bengalí depende de la agricultura “científica”, su capacidad de destruir el ambiente en forma irreversible se ha multiplicado por un factor de cinco a 10, mientras que la capacidad del norteamericano para reducir la contaminación que causa ha disminuido un poco. Los ricos, como grupo, ya van en vías de perder el primer puesto en la contaminación del planeta. Los ricos tienden a acusar a los pobres por usar poca energía en forma ineficiente y dañina y los pobres acusan a los ricos de producir más excrementos porque devoran sin digerir mucho más que ellos. Los utópicos prometen soluciones milagrosas a los dos, tales como la posibilidad de realizar pronto un decrecimiento demográfico o la desalinización de las aguas del mar por energía de fusión. Los pobres se ven obligados a fundar sus esperanzas de sobrevivir en su derecho a un ambiente reglamentado que les “ofrece” la generosidad de los ricos. La doble crisis de abastecimiento y de contaminación ya manifiesta los límites implícitos en el crecimiento industrial. Pero la contradicción decisiva de esta expansión más allá de ciertos límites reside en un nivel más hondo, en lo político. - -## La ilusión fundamental - -Creer en la posibilidad de altos niveles de energía _limpia_ como solución a todos los males, representa un error de juicio político. Es imaginar que la equidad en la participación del poder y el consumo de energía pueden crecer juntos. Víctimas de esta ilusión, los hombres industrializados no ponen el menor límite al crecimiento en el consumo de energía, y este crecimiento continúa con el único fin de proveer cada vez a más gente de más productos de una industria controlada cada vez por menos gente. Prevalece la ilusión de que una revolución política, al suprimir los errores técnicos de las industrias presentes, crearía la posibilidad de distribuir equitativamente el disfrute del bien producido, a la par que el poder de control sobre lo que se produce. Es mi tarea analizar esta ilusión. Mi tesis sostiene que no es posible alcanzar un estado social basado en la noción de equidad y simultáneamente aumentar la energía mecánica disponible, a no ser bajo la condición de que el consumo de energía por cabeza se mantenga dentro de límites. En otras palabras: sin electrificación no puede haber socialismo, pero inevitablemente esta electrificación se transforma en justificación para la demagogia cuando los vatios per cápita exceden cierta cifra. El socialismo exige para la realización de sus ideales un cierto nivel en el uso de la energía: no puede venir a pie, ni puede venir en coche, sino solamente a velocidad de bicicleta. - -## Mi tesis - -En mi análisis del sistema escolar he señalado que en una sociedad industrial el costo del control social aumenta más rápidamente que el nivel del consumo de energía. Este control lo ejercen en primera línea los educadores y médicos, los cuerpos asistenciales y políticos, sin contar la policía, el ejército y los psiquiatras. El subsistema social destinado al control social crece a un ritmo canceroso convirtiéndose en la razón de la existencia para la sociedad misma. He demostrado que solamente imponiendo límites a la despersonalización e industrialización de los valores se puede mantener un proceso de participación política. - -En el presente ensayo mi argumento procederá analógicamente. Señalaré que en el desarrollo de una sociedad moderna existe un momento en el que el uso de energía ambiental excede por un determinado múltiplo el total de la energía metabólica humana disponible. Una vez rebasada esta cuota de alerta, inevitablemente los individuos y los grupos de base tienen que abdicar progresivamente del control sobre su futuro y someterse siempre más a una tecnocracia regida por la lógica de sus instrumentos. - -Los ecólogos tienen razón al afirmar que toda energía no metabólica es contaminante: es necesario ahora que los políticos reconozcan que la energía física, pasado cierto límite, se hace inevitablemente corrupta del ambiente social. Aun si se lograra producir una energía no contaminante y producirla en cantidad, el uso masivo de energía siempre tendrá sobre el cuerpo social el mismo efecto que la intoxicación por una droga físicamente inofensiva, pero psíquicamente esclavizante. Un pueblo puede elegir entre una droga sustitutiva tal como el metadone y una desintoxicación realizada a voluntad en el aislamiento; pero no puede aspirar simultáneamente a la evolución de su libertad y convivencialidad por un lado, y a una tecnología de alta energía por el otro. - -## El marco latinoamericano - -La llamada crisis de la energía es un concepto políticamente ambiguo. En la manera como se usa en el presente, sirve a los intereses imperialistas tanto en Rusia como en Estados Unidos. Sirve de explicación para limitar privilegios a quienes más directamente cooperan en el desarrollo de éstos. En América Latina la difusión del pánico serviría para integrar el continente más perfectamente como periferia de un mundo cuyo centro está donde más energía per cápita se utiliza. No hay movimiento de verdadera liberación que no reconozca la necesidad de adoptar una tecnología de bajo consumo energético. - -Discutir la crisis de energía equivale a colocarse en el cruce de dos caminos. A mano izquierda se abre la posibilidad de transición a una economía posindustrial, que pone el énfasis en el desarrollo de formas más eficientes de trabajo manual y en la realización concreta de la equidad. Nos conduciría a un mundo de satisfacción austera de todas las aspiraciones realistas. A mano derecha se ofrece la opción de acometer la escalada de un crecimiento que pondría el énfasis en la capitalización y el control social necesarios para evitar niveles intolerables de contaminación. Nos conduciría a transformar los países latinoamericanos en participantes de tercer orden en el apocalipsis industrial, hacia el cual marchan los países ricos. Estados Unidos, Japón o Alemania ya están a punto de perpetrar el autoaniquilamiento social en una parálisis causada por el superconsumo de energía. Insistiendo en el sueño de hacer trabajar las máquinas en lugar del hombre, se desintegran políticamente, aun antes de verse sofocados en sus propios desechos. Hay ciertos países, como la India, Birmania, y espero que aún por cierto tiempo también China, que son todavía bastante operantes en el uso de sus músculos, previniendo así el aumento del desarrollo energético. Pueden aún limitar el uso de energía al nivel actual, tratando de usar sus vatios para fines cualitativamente cada vez más altos y cada vez en forma de mejor distribución. - -Posiblemente den el ejemplo de una economía al mismo tiempo posindustrial y socialista, para lo cual deberán mantener una tecnología con un bajo consumo de energía y decidir, desde ahora, vivir más acá del nivel de consumo por cabeza de energía mecánica que deberán recuperar los países ricos para poder sobrevivir. - -América Latina se encuentra dentro de una tercera situación. Sus industrias están subcapitalizadas y sus subproductos, física y socialmente destructores, son menos visibles que en los países ricos, haciendo excepción particular del Distrito Federal en México y de São Paulo en Brasil. El menor número de gente es consciente de sufrir precisamente a causa del aumento de la potencia de la máquina industrial y, por tanto, menos es la gente dispuesta a tomar en serio la necesidad de limitar el desarrollo ulterior de tal potencia. Por otro lado, todos los países de América Latina ya tienen una infraestructura física que _a priori_ impide al no escolarizado, al no motorizado, al no electrificado, al no industrializado participar humanamente en el proceso de producción. Aquí, la idea de una alternativa al desarrollo de la industria pesada ya implica la renuncia a lo que se está haciendo o se cree poder hacer mañana: una renuncia al coche, a la nevera, al ascensor y, en muchos casos, hasta al cemento armado que ya están en el pueblo o en la casa del vecino. En Latinoamérica hay menos conciencia que en los países ricos de la necesidad de un modelo alternativo de tecnología y tampoco se vislumbra una renuncia al modelo de los ricos, cosas que pudieran permitirse los chinos, si así lo quisieran. - -## El poderío de alto voltaje - -Tanto los pobres como los ricos deberán superar la ilusión de que MÁS energía es MEJOR. Con este fin es necesario, ante todo, determinar el límite de energía más allá del cual se ejerce el efecto corruptor del poder mecánico. Este efecto corruptor puede ser controlado en dos niveles característicos. Una sociedad puede sacrificar su propia supervivencia, como comunidad política, al ídolo del poder material. Puede optar conscientemente, o por falta de iniciativa contraria, por identificar el bienestar con el más alto consumo de energía, estableciendo el sistema de planificación que lo hace posible. La maximización del sistema industrial bajo un techo energético más allá del cual cesa la viabilidad del sistema, requiere la transformación de nuevos poderes a un Leviatán tecnofascista. - -Una sociedad que dé preferencia al pleno desarrollo de sus industrias sobre la plena participación de sus miembros en el proceso, no puede evitar un nuevo nivel de tecnocracia. Es de poca importancia real el modo concreto como llegue esta tecnocracia al poder: por imposición extranjera, por revolución dentro o fuera de la legalidad o a través de un nuevo contrato social. Tecnocracia es la orientación que siguen los países ricos y la misma que quieren imponer a los países pobres. - -Hay un segundo nivel característico, y más bajo, al cual se puede limitar la energía utilizada dentro de un sistema social: es el nivel en el que un pueblo cree tener mejor participación en el dominio de la máquina al combinar mejor y simultáneamente el desarrollo de sus valores tradicionales con la realización de sus ideales sociales. Para ello hay que limitar el uso de la energía, recuperando el nivel tope, pasado el cual éste reduce la autonomía de los individuos y de los grupos de base. - -La hipótesis es evidentemente verdadera: más allá de cierto nivel de uso per cápita de energía física, el ambiente de una sociedad cesa de funcionar como nicho de su población. En esta afirmación no hay nada novedoso pero yo pretendo decir más que esto en mi hipótesis. - -## Mi hipótesis - -El hombre es el ser consciente de su espacio vital y de su limitación temporal. Integra a los dos por medio de su acción, de la aplicación de su energía a sus circunstancias concretas en las cuales se encuentra. Para tal fin utiliza instrumentos de varios tipos, algunos de ellos dan mayor efecto a las energías metabólicas de las que dispone, y otros le permiten hallar fuentes energéticas que son exteriores a su propio cuerpo. - -La energía, transformada en trabajo físico le permite integrar su espacio y su tiempo. Privado de energía suficiente se ve condenado a ser un simple espectador inmóvil en un espacio que lo oprime. Al usar sus manos y pies transforma el espacio, simple territorio para el animal, en casa y patria. Al aumentar la eficiencia en la aplicación de su propia energía, lo embellece. Al aprender a usar nuevas fuentes de energía, lo expande y lo pone en peligro. Más allá de cierto punto, el uso de energía motorizada inevitablemente empieza a oprimirlo. - -Mi hipótesis es que no puede existir una sociedad que merezca el calificativo de “socialista” si la energía mecánica que utiliza aplasta al hombre; inevitablemente, pasado cierto punto, la energía mecánica tiene tal efecto. Existe una constante K. Ésta indica la cantidad por la que hay que multiplicar la energía mecánica utilizada para todos los fines en la sociedad. No puede existir una sociedad “socialista”, en tanto K no quede entre los límites. La sociedad debe considerarse subequipada para una forma de producción participativa y eficaz, mientras K no alcanza el valor del límite inferior. Cuando K se vuelve mayor que el valor del límite superior, termina la posibilidad de mantener una distribución equitativa del control sobre el poder mecánico en la sociedad. Espero elaborar un modelo teórico que ilustre esta hipótesis. Si ésta es correcta, existe en cada sociedad concreta un “nivel de energía de rendimiento mecánico” dentro del cual puede funcionar de manera óptima un sistema político participativo. El orden de magnitud en que se da este nivel de energía es independiente del instrumental tecnológico o de la eficiencia en la transformación de la energía misma. - -Simultáneamente propongo se verifique esta misma hipótesis en algunos campos concretos que consumen un porcentaje importante de la energía mecánica en nuestras sociedades. Tales campos serían: la habitación, los aspectos mecanizados de la agricultura y del transporte. Yo me he decidido a formular mi argumento partiendo de un análisis de este último. - -## El paradigma de la circulación - -Para tales fines presento a consideración el campo de la circulación de personas. Me limitaré al análisis de la circulación de la gente y de su equipaje personal, porque la circulación de bienes en cantidades superiores exigiría otro planteamiento. En la circulación distinguiré dos medios de locomoción: _el tránsito_ de las personas que usan su propia fuerza para trasladarse de un punto a otro y _el transporte_ motorizado. Incluyo en la circulación total dos grandes clases estadísticas de locomoción bien distintas: _el viaje_ , que al empezar conlleva la intención de dormir en otro lugar, por lo menos durante una noche, y _el desplazamiento_ , o trayecto de ida y vuelta, que termina durante el mismo día en su lugar de origen. El viaje y el desplazamiento pueden tener como fin el trabajo, el paseo, el mercado o la participación en actividades sociales. - -En el ejemplo de la circulación creo poder aclarar por qué la “crisis de energía” es un eufemismo detrás del cual se esconde la ilusión de que el uso de la energía y la equidad puedan crecer al mismo paso indefinidamente. La circulación ofrece una oportunidad para exponer la urgencia del análisis que propongo, al mismo tiempo que permite llamar la atención sobre la ceguera ante la evidencia de esta urgencia. Finalmente, me permito presentar mi argumento en forma tal que pueda entenderse y verificarse en discusiones públicas con gente de cualquier grado de instrucción formal. - -## La industria del transporte - -En el momento en que una sociedad se hace tributaria del transporte, no sólo para los viajes ocasionales sino por sus desplazamientos cotidianos, se pone de manifiesto la contradicción entre justicia social y energía motorizada, libertad de la persona y mecanización de la ruta. La dependencia, en relación con el motor, niega a una colectividad precisamente aquellos valores que se considerarían implícitos en el mejoramiento de la circulación. - -Lo siguiente es evidente para campesinos sensatos y se hace dudoso para una persona que sube por la escalera de la escolaridad: la máquina es una contribución positiva cuando su empleo conduce a expander el radio de circulación para todos, multiplicando los destinos terminales sin que por esto aumente la parte del tiempo social que se dedica a la circulación. Hoy en día, ningún sistema motorizado de locomoción llega a aumentar el radio de circulación y simultáneamente a salvaguardar la equidad en la distribución de costos y en la accesibilidad a los puntos de destino escogidos. Frente a esta evidencia el campesino y el peón fácilmente llegan a entender la trampa de la aceleración que roba su tiempo a la mayoría, mientras que los universitarios justifican los privilegios con que esta velocidad les provee, mediante argumentos extraños al debate; insisten en que los países latinoamericanos tienen derecho a competir con la tecnología rica; muestran que el transporte genera un aumento importante en el PNB y que sin una política de movilización mecánica de las masas no es posible desarrollar aquella forma de control social que para ellos se esconde detrás del ideal nacionalista. - -En mi análisis del transporte no me interesa identificar los beneficios económicos que éste genera, sino la contribución que presta a la circulación. Lo quiero analizar como medio de circulación y no como medio de inflación. Es fácil constatar que dondequiera que las máquinas destinan una tasa elevada de energía mecánica a la propulsión de un pasajero, el desarrollo de los transportes como industria reduce la igualdad entre los hombres, limita la movilidad personal dentro de un sistema de rutas trazadas al servicio de las industrias, las burocracias y los militares y, además, aumenta la escasez de tiempo dentro de la sociedad. En otras palabras, cuando la velocidad de sus vehículos rebasa cierto margen, la gente se convierte en prisionera del vehículo que la lleva cada día de la casa al trabajo. La extensión del radio de desplazamiento diario de los trabajadores tiene como contrapartida la disminución en la elección de puntos de destino. Quien va a pie al trabajo llega a crearse un ambiente a lo largo de su ruta; quien recorre el camino en vehículo está privado de una multiplicidad de opciones: paradas, accesos, contactos. Pero, el mismo transporte que para la mayoría crea nuevas distancias físicas y sociales, crea islotes de privilegios al precio de una esclavitud general. Mientras que unos pocos viajan en alfombra mágica entre puntos distantes, y por medio de su presencia prestigiosa los hacen no sólo raros sino seductores, los otros, que son la mayoría, se tienen que desplazar con más y más rapidez por los mismos trayectos monótonos y deben consagrar cada vez más tiempo a estos desplazamientos. - -En Estados Unidos de América cuatro quintos del tiempo consumido en la circulación concierne a las personas que se mueven entre su casa, el sitio de su trabajo y el supermercado. Y cuatro quintos de kilometraje destinado a congresos, a viajes de vacaciones y de negocios son para el 1.5% de la población. La gente que se encuentra en los aeropuertos siempre es la misma. También ellos se dividen en dos clases: los que se ven obligados a viajar y quienes lo hacen por propia decisión, que forman la minoría. Un tercio de la población adulta debe hacer 40 kilómetros por día entre la casa, la escuela, el trabajo y el supermercado para que 0.5% pueda elegir viajar en avión más de una vez al año. Todos aumentan su kilometraje personal obligatorio para que algunos puedan franquear incalculables distancias en el transcurso de algunos años. - -Los medios de transporte acentúan la división de clases en las sociedades ricas, y siendo su lugar de destino las capitales del mundo pobre, extienden la estratificación en un plano global. - -El esclavo del desplazamiento cotidiano y el viajero impenitente se ven igualmente sometidos al transporte. Ocasionales puntos altos de velocidad dan al usuario corriente la ilusión de pertenecer al mundo protegido de los altos consumidores de energía. La oportunidad ocasional que tiene el trabajador negro en Miami de pasar dos semanas de vacaciones en Copacabana, le hace olvidar que para el viaje por avión de seis horas de ida y seis de vuelta tuvo que trabajar tres veces más días de lo que hubiera tomado el viaje por barco. El pobre del mundo moderno, capaz de acelerar de vez en cuando, refuerza él mismo la ilusión de la que es víctima premeditada y se hace cómplice de la destrucción del cuadro social del espacio. No sólo quien usa el avión, sino también quien defiende su uso coopera a destruir la relación multimilenaria que existe entre el hombre y su geografía. - -El hombre americano típico consagra más de 1 600 horas por año a su automóvil: sentado dentro de él, en marcha o parado, trabajando para pagarlo, para pagar la gasolina, las llantas, los peajes, el seguro, las infracciones y los impuestos para las carreteras federales y los estacionamientos comunales. Le consagra cuatro horas al día en las que se sirve de él, se ocupa de él o trabaja para él. Aquí no se han tomado en cuenta todas sus actividades orientadas por el transporte: el tiempo que consume en el hospital, en el tribunal y en el taller mecánico; el tiempo pasado ante la televisión viendo publicidad automovilística, el tiempo invertido en ganar dinero para viajar en avión o en tren. Sin duda, con estas actividades hace marchar la economía, procura trabajo a sus compañeros, ingresos a los jeques de Arabia y justificación a Nixon por su guerra en Asia. Pero si nos preguntamos de qué manera estas 1600 horas, que son una estimación mínima, contribuyen a su circulación, la situación se ve diferente. Estas 1 600 horas le sirven para hacer unos 10 000 kilómetros de camino, o sea seis kilómetros en una hora. Es exactamente lo mismo que alcanzan los hombres en los países que no tienen industria del transporte. Pero, mientras el norteamericano consagra a la circulación una cuarta parte del tiempo social disponible, en las sociedades no motorizadas se destina a este fin entre 3 y 8% del tiempo social. Lo que diferencia la circulación en un país rico y en un país pobre no es una mayor eficacia, sino la obligación de consumir en dosis altas las energías condicionadas por la industria del transporte. - -## El estupor inducido por la velocidad - -Al rebasar determinado límite en el consumo de energía, la industria del transporte dicta la configuración del espacio social. Las autopistas hacen retroceder los campos fuera del alcance del campesino que quisiera caminar, los viaductos y aeropuertos cortan el acceso de un lado del barrio a otro, las ambulancias empujan las clínicas más allá de la corta distancia que se puede cubrir llevando a un niño enfermo. El coche o la moto permiten al médico y a la partera vivir lejos del ambiente en el que ejercen, y mientras más costosos los transportes, más se vuelve privilegio de ricos o de jerarcas la visita a domicilio. Cuando los camiones pesados llegan a un poblado de los Andes, lo primero que desaparece es parte del mercado local. Luego, cuando llega la ruta asfaltada y un grupo de maestros de secundaria se establece en el poblado, cada vez más gente joven se va hacia la ciudad, hasta que no queda una sola familia que no espere reunirse con alguien allá, a cientos de kilómetros. - -Frecuentemente nos olvidamos de que la aceleración de los viajes es un hecho muy nuevo. Valéry tenía razón cuando afirmaba que Napoleón aún se movía a la lentitud de César. Desde los tiempos de Ciro el Grande, rey de los persas, los imperios contaban con la posibilidad de enviar las cartas a una velocidad hasta de 160 kilómetros por día, los mensajes de toda la historia circulaban a un promedio de 100 kilómetros diarios, ya fuesen transportados en galeras de Constantinopla a Venecia o llevados por los corredores de los Fugger, por jinetes del califa o por las rutas del inca. El primer camino para diligencia entre París y Marsella o Tolouse, que regularmente hacía más de 100 kilómetros por día precedió por sólo 70 años al primer tren que hacía 100 kilómetros por hora en 1853. Pero una vez creada la vía férrea el hombre se vio clavado a ella. En Francia, entre 1850 y 1900, el kilometraje por pasajero se multiplicó por un factor de 53. - -Por su impacto geográfico, en definitiva, la industria del transporte moldea una nueva especie de hombres: los usuarios. El usuario vive en un mundo ajeno al de las personas dotadas de la autonomía de sus miembros. El usuario es consciente de la exasperante penuria del tiempo que provoca recurrir cotidianamente al tren, al automóvil, al metro, al ascensor, que lo trasladan diariamente a través de los mismos canales y túneles sobre un radio de 10 a 25 kilómetros. Conoce los atajos que encuentran los privilegiados para escapar a la exasperación engendrada por la circulación y los conducen adonde ellos quieren llegar, mientras él, el usuario, tiene que conducir su propio vehículo de un lugar, donde preferiría no vivir, a un empleo que preferiría evitar. El usuario se sabe limitado por los horarios de tren y autobús, en las horas que su esposa lo priva del coche, pero ve a los ejecutivos desplazarse y viajar por el mundo cuando y como a ellos les place. Paga su automóvil de su propio bolsillo, en un mundo donde los privilegios van para el personal dirigente de las grandes firmas, universidades, sindicatos y partidos. Los pobres se atan a su coche, y los ricos usan el coche de servicio, o alquilan el coche de Hertz. El usuario se exaspera por la desigualdad creciente, la penuria de tiempo y su propia impotencia, pero insensatamente pone su única esperanza en _más_ de la misma cosa: más circulación por medio de más transporte. Espera el alivio por cambios de orden técnico que han de afectar la concepción de los vehículos, de las rutas o de la reglamentación de la circulación. O bien espera una revolución que transfiera la propiedad de los vehículos a la colectividad y que, por descuento a los salarios, mantenga una red de transportes gratuitos, cuyas secciones más veloces y costosas serán otra vez accesibles sólo a quienes la sociedad considere más importantes. Casi todos los proyectos de reforma de los transportes que se suponen radicales padecen de este prejuicio: se olvidan del costo en tiempo humano resultante de sustituir el sistema presente por otro, más “público”, si este último ha de ser tan rápido como el otro. - -Por las noches el usuario sueña con lo que los ingenieros le sugieren durante el día a través de la televisión y de las columnas seudocientíficas de los diarios. Sueña con redes estratificadas de vehículos de diferente velocidad que convergen en intersecciones donde la gente puede encontrarse en los espacios que le conceden las máquinas. Sueña con los servicios especiales de la “Red de Transporte” que se harán cargo de él definitivamente. - -El usuario no puede captar la demencia inherente al sistema de circulación que se basa principalmente en el transporte. Su percepción de la relación del espacio con el tiempo ha sido objeto de una distorsión industrial. Ha perdido el poder de concebirse como otra cosa que no sea un usuario. Intoxicado por el transporte, ha perdido conciencia de los poderes físicos, sociales y psíquicos de que dispone el hombre, gracias a sus pies. Olvida que el territorio lo crea el hombre con su cuerpo, y toma por territorio lo que no es más que un paisaje visto a través de una ventanilla por un hombre amarrado a su butaca. Ya no sabe marcar el ámbito de sus dominios con la huella de sus pasos, ni encontrarse con los vecinos, caminando en la plaza. Ya no encuentra al otro sin chocar, ni llega sin que un motor lo arrastre. Su órbita puntual y diaria lo enajena de todo territorio libre. - -Atravesándolo a pie el hombre transforma el espacio geográfico en morada dominada por él. Dentro de ciertos límites que aplica al movimiento determina su movilidad y su poder de dominio. La relación con el espacio del usuario de transportes se determina por una potencia física ajena a su ser biológico. El motor mediatiza su relación con el medio ambiente y pronto lo enajena de tal manera que depende del motor para definir su poder político. El usuario está condicionado a creer que el motor aumenta la capacidad de los miembros de una sociedad de participar en el proceso político. Perdió la fe en el poder político de caminar. - -En sus demandas políticas el usuario no busca más caminos abiertos sino más vehículos que lo transporten; quiere más de lo mismo que ahora lo frustra, en vez de pedir garantía de que, en todo sentido, la precedencia la tenga siempre el peatón. La liberación del usuario consiste en su comprensión de la realidad: mientras exija más energía para propulsar con más aceleración a algunos individuos de la sociedad, precipita la corrupción irreversible de la equidad, del tiempo libre y de la autonomía personal. El progreso con el que sueña no es más que la destrucción mejor lograda. - -## Los chupatiempo - -En toda sociedad que hace pagar, el tiempo, la equidad y la velocidad en la locomoción tienden a variar en proporción inversa una de la otra. Los ricos son aquellos que pueden moverse más, ir donde les plazca, detenerse donde deseen y obtener estos servicios a cambio de una fracción muy pequeña de su tiempo vital. Los pobres son los que usan mucho tiempo para que el sistema del transporte funcione para los ricos del país. - -La razón de ello es que la velocidad resulta demasiado cara para ser realmente compartida: todo aumento en la velocidad de un vehículo ocasiona un aumento correspondiente en el consumo de energía necesaria para propulsarlo. - -No sólo el funcionamiento mismo consume energía: mientras mayor la velocidad, más energía se invierte en la construcción del vehículo mismo, en el mantenimiento de su pista y en los servicios adicionales sin los cuales no puede funcionar. - -No sólo energía consume un vehículo veloz; más importante aún es que consume espacio. Cada aumento en la velocidad hace al vehículo más voraz de metros cuadrados o cúbicos. - -Alemania Federal consumió su tierra a razón de 0.2% por año durante la década de los cincuenta. En los sesenta ya había logrado cubrir permanentemente con asfalto 0.4% de su territorio. Los norteamericanos requieren, para sus propios movimientos y para los de sus mercancías, una suma de energía superior a la totalidad de lo disponible, en todos los efectos, para la mitad de la humanidad entera, reunida entre China, India y el sudeste asiático. Ineluctablemente la aceleración chupa tiempo, espacio y energía. - -Ahora bien, cuando la energía requerida por el usuario rebasa cierta barrera, el tiempo de unos cuantos adquiere un valor muy alto, en tanto se desprecia el de la mayoría de los demás. En Bombay bastan algunos pocos automóviles para perturbar la circulación de miles de bicicletas y carretillas de tracción humana. Desplazándolos reducen gravemente su flujo y crean tapones. Pero uno de estos escasos automovilistas puede trasladarse en una mañana a la capital de provincia, trayecto que, dos generaciones antes, hubiera llevado una semana entera. En Tailandia los transportes tradicionales eran tan excelentes y flexibles que los reyes nunca pudieron imponer contribuciones sobre los movimientos del arroz: tan múltiples eran las vías por las cuales se podía escapar de la vigilancia del recaudador en unos botecitos elegantes y rápidos, usando una vasta red de canales. Para poder introducir el automóvil todo este sistema perfectamente democrático fue paralizado, cubriendo algunos de los _klongs_ (canales) con asfalto. Algunos poquísimos individuos pueden moverse con rapidez y la mayoría se hizo dependiente y debe adquirir “transporte”. - -Lo que es válido en la India, donde el ingreso anual por cabeza alcanza 70 dólares, lo es también en Boston, donde la circulación se ha hecho más lenta que en la época de los carruajes de caballos. El tiempo usado en actividades relacionadas con el transporte lógicamente crece con los gastos hechos para acelerarlo. Una minoría de bostonianos puede permitirse el lujo de vivir en rascacielos, cerca de su trabajo, usar el puente aéreo para dar una vuelta y almorzar en Nueva York. Para la mayoría aumenta la porción de dos horas de vigilia pasadas para crear “transporte”. - -En cualquier lugar, la demanda de circulación crece con la aceleración de los vehículos y con mayor premura que la posibilidad de satisfacerla. Pasado cierto límite, la industria del transporte cuesta a la sociedad más tiempo del que ahorra. Con aumentos ulteriores en la velocidad de ciertos vehículos, decrece el kilometraje total viajado por los pasajeros, pero no el tiempo que les cuesta mantener el sistema de transportes. La utilidad marginal en el aumento de la velocidad, accesible sólo a un pequeño número de gente, al rebasar un límite conlleva para la mayoría un aumento en la desutilidad total del transporte. La mayoría no sólo paga más, sino que sufre más daños irreparables. - -Pasada la barrera crítica de la velocidad en un vehículo, nadie puede ganar tiempo sin que, obligadamente, lo haga perder a otro. Aquel que exige una plaza en un avión, proclama que su tiempo vale más que el del prójimo. En una sociedad en donde el tiempo para consumir o usar se ha convertido en un bien precioso, servirse de un vehículo, cuya velocidad exceda esta barrera crítica, equivale a poner una inyección suplementaria del tiempo vital de otros al usuario privilegiado de vehículos. - -La velocidad sirve para medir la dosis de la inyección que transforma en ganancia de tiempo para unos pocos la gran pérdida de tiempo de muchos. Inevitablemente esta carrera contra el tiempo y contra la muerte de los ricos deja heridos tras de sí. Presenta problemas éticos de orden más universal que la diálisis renal o los injertos de vísceras, que a tantos sublevan. - -Al rebasar cierto límite de velocidad, los vehículos motorizados crean distancias que sólo ellos pueden reducir. Crean distancias a costa de todos, luego las reducen únicamente en beneficio de algunos. Una carretera abierta en el desierto pone la ciudad al alcance de la vista del campesino hambriento, pero ciertamente no al alcance de su mano. La nueva ruta _express_ extiende a Chicago, absorbiendo a los motorizados hacia los nuevos suburbios y dejando que el centro de la ciudad degenere en arrabales de asfalto para los otros. - -El desplazamiento en masa no es cosa nueva; nuevo es el desplazamiento diario de masas de gente sobre distancias que no pueden cubrirse a pie; nueva es la dependencia de los vehículos para hacer el trayecto diario de ida y vuelta. El uso diario de la silla de posta, el _rickshaw_ y el _fiacre_ , sirvió en su tiempo para comodidad de una ínfima minoría, que no quería ensuciarse los pies ni fatigarse, pero no para aventajar el paso del caminante. El tránsito diario de masas aparece solamente con el ferrocarril. En Francia, entre 1900 y 1950, aumentó casi 100 veces el kilometraje por pasajero. La existencia del ferrocarril hizo posible la expansión de las fábricas, creando, desde un principio, una nueva forma de discriminación. Hizo posible que el director empleara en la fábrica gente que se resistía a una distancia mayor de la que se puede cubrir a pie, creando con esto un “mercado de compra” para la mano de obra. Los ferrocarriles con su capacidad enorme de transporte comenzaron luego a transformar el espacio, permitiendo el crecimiento de la urbe, del arrabal y de la fábrica, que se hizo más gigantesca. - -El impacto directo de los primeros ferrocarriles recayó sobre la estructura del espacio: en sus primeros años el tren pudo acentuar los privilegios establecidos, creando la primera clase, que los ricos usaban en vacaciones y para sus negocios, mientras que los pobres se vieron obligados a usar la tercera todos los días. Pero la velocidad aún no determinaba las distinciones. Fue a finales de siglo cuando las cosas cambiaron. La velocidad se convirtió en factor de discriminación. El tren expreso ya corría tres veces más rápido que el tren lechero y era más costoso. Pasados otros 20 años, con el uso común del automóvil, el hombre de la calle comenzó a ser su propio chofer. Los beneficios de la velocidad, logrados por todas partes, llegaron a constituir la base para los privilegios reservados a las nuevas élites. - -El porcentaje de gente que emplea hoy chofer es más o menos el mismo que lo empleaba hace dos generaciones; sólo que hoy el salario que éste gana lo pagan las empresas, los ministerios y los sindicatos. Pero además de usar chofer, esta gente es la misma que usa aviones y helicópteros, vive cerca de las arterias de transporte y trabaja en lugares próximos al restaurante, al barbero y a las tiendas. Mucho más de lo que pudo hacerlo el tren, los nuevos niveles de velocidad agrupan las zonas burocráticas favorecidas, los espacios residenciales más atractivos y las estaciones turísticas de lujo, dentro de una órbita cerrada, a la que el acceso que tienen las masas es, primordialmente, a través de la televisión. En los países de Europa oriental donde el número de lugares privilegiados para quienes disponen de coches es menor, su importancia relativa es, quizás, mayor. - -Hoy vemos la formación de una jerarquía de diferentes circuitos de transporte, los cuales determinan el acceso a sus servicios de acuerdo con la velocidad que desarrollan y, por tanto, cada uno define su propia clase de usuarios. Cada uno de estos circuitos, si es de velocidad superior, reduce el acceso a menor número de personas, conecta puntos más distantes entre sí y devalúa los circuitos de menor velocidad. - -Dime a qué velocidad te mueves y te diré quién eres. Si no puedes contar más que con tus propios pies para desplazarte, eres un marginado, porque, desde medio siglo atrás, el vehículo se ha convertido en signo de selección social y en condición para la participación en la vida nacional. Dondequiera que la industria del transporte ha hecho franquear a sus pasajeros una barrera crítica de velocidad, inevitablemente establece nuevos privilegios para la minoría y agobia a la mayoría. - -A todos los niveles, para que la acumulación de poder pueda ser factible, tiene que crear su propia justificación. Así es como un hombre queda justificado al consumir fondos públicos para aumentar la cantidad anual de sus viajes, sumándolos a los fondos públicos ya consumidos anteriormente y al extender la duración de sus estudios. Allí donde se cree que el saber puede capitalizarse y se puede medir el valor productivo por los años de escolaridad de un individuo, inevitablemente se llega a justificar que éste capitalice su vida utilizándola más intensivamente al usar transportes más veloces. - -En los países ricos, quienes ganan mucho tienen el mejor transporte y mayor probabilidad de tener éxito en los estudios que justifican los demás privilegios. Pero no es necesario usar el salario o el título académico como pasaporte que permita la entrada a un avión. Hay factores de orden ideológico que pueden igualmente abrir o cerrar la puerta de la cabina. Si bien es cierto que la LÍNEA JUSTA de Mao, para extenderse en China, necesita actualmente de aviones a reacción, esto no puede significar sino la emergencia de un espacio/tiempo propio de los cuadros del partido y diferente al espacio/tiempo en el que viven las masas. En la China Popular la supresión de los niveles intermedios ha hecho más eficaz y más racional la concentración del poder, pero simultáneamente ha recalcado también cómo el tiempo del hombre que guía su búfalo vale mucho menos que el tiempo del hombre que trae ideas y se hace transportar en jet. La velocidad vehicular concentra la potencia energética y el poder en las posaderas de unos cuantos: es estructuralmente demagógica y elitista, independientemente de las intenciones que tenga quien se hace propulsar velozmente. Es un hecho: los caballos de fuerza no pueden sino pisotear la equidad. Además, hacen perder tiempo. - -## La aceleración dimensión técnica que expropia el tiempo - -La velocidad reduce el tiempo en un doble sentido: disminuyendo el que necesita el pasajero para cubrir 1 000 kilómetros y reduciendo el que podría emplear en otra cosa que no fuera el desplazamiento. La velocidad superior de ciertos vehículos favorece a algunas personas, pero la dependencia general de los vehículos veloces consume el tiempo de todos. Cuando la velocidad rebasa cierta barrera empieza a aumentar el tiempo total devuelto por la sociedad a la circulación. - -El efecto que tienen los vehículos superpotentes sobre el presupuesto cotidiano del tiempo disponible de individuos y de sociedades se conoce mal. Lo que las estadísticas nos muestran es el precio en dólares por kilómetro o la duración en horas por desplazamiento. Muy poca es la información sobre los presupuestos de tiempo en el transporte. Hay pocos datos estadísticos de cómo la circulación carcome el tiempo, de cómo el automóvil devora espacio, de cómo se multiplican los recorridos necesarios, de cómo se alejan terminales codiciadas y de cómo al hombre motorizado le cuesta adaptarse al transporte y reponerse de él. - -Ningún estudio señala los costos indirectos del transporte, por ejemplo, el precio que se paga por residir en un sector con circulación de fácil acceso, los gastos implicados en protegerse del ruido, de la contaminación y de los peligros de la circulación. - -Sin embargo, la inexistencia de una contabilidad nacional del tiempo social no debe hacernos creer que es imposible establecerla, ni debe impedirnos utilizar lo poco que ya sabemos al respecto. - -Lo que sí sabemos con seguridad es que en todas partes del mundo, en cuanto la velocidad de los vehículos que cubren los desplazamientos diarios rebasa un punto de alrededor de los 20 kilómetros por hora, la escasez del tiempo relacionada con el desarrollo del transporte general comienza a aumentar. Una vez que la industria alcanza este punto crítico de concentración de vatios por cabeza, el transporte hace del hombre el fantasma que sabemos, un desatinado que constantemente se ve obligado a alcanzar dentro de las próximas 12 horas una meta que por sus propios medios físicos no puede alcanzar. En la actualidad, la gente se ve obligada a trabajar buena parte del día para pagar los desplazamientos necesarios para dirigirse al trabajo. Dentro de una sociedad, el tiempo devuelto al transporte crece en función del máximo de la velocidad de los transportes públicos. Por tener medios de transporte público más modernos, Japón ya precede a Norteamérica en velocidad y en el tiempo perdido en gozarla. - -El tiempo carcomido por la circulación; el hombre privado de su movilidad y sometido a depender de las ruedas; la arquitectura al servicio del vehículo; todo esto es consecuencia de la reorganización del mundo sujeta a la aceleración prepotente. No cambia mucho el asunto si la máquina es pública o privada. Inevitablemente con el aumento de la velocidad crece la escasez de tiempo: pasando del coche al tren, que le da el mismo servicio, el usuario trabaja dos o tres horas al día para pagar más impuestos en lugar de trabajar para pagar su Ford. Inevitablemente aumenta la programación: en vez de tener que añadir dos horas de trabajo como chofer de su propio coche al trabajo diario en la fábrica o en la oficina, ahora tiene que adaptar su día a los horarios de los diferentes medios de transporte público. Así como los vehículos ocupan el espacio y reducen los lugares donde la gente pueda parar o vivir, así igualmente ocupan más horas cada año, además imponen su ritmo al proyecto de cada día. - -## El monopolio radical del transporte - -Como indiqué anteriormente, para poder entender la disfunción que analizamos hay que distinguir entre la circulación, el tránsito y el transporte. Por _circulación_ designo todo desplazamiento de personas. Llamo _tránsito_ a los movimientos que se hacen con energía muscular del hombre y _transporte_ a aquellos que recurren a motores mecánicos para trasladar hombres y bultos. Sin duda, desde tiempos inmemoriales el animal ha compartido el hambre del ser humano y fue su dócil vehículo. Es cosa del pasado: el aumento de los hombres cada vez lo excluye más de un mundo superpoblado y ahora los motores mecánicos generan la forma inhumana de los movimientos. - -Dentro de esta perspectiva, se diferencian dos formas de producción de la circulación. El transporte, que es la forma basada en la utilización intensiva del capital; el tránsito, la forma basada en el trabajo intensivo del cuerpo humano. El transporte es prevalentemente un producto de la industria, el tránsito no lo es, ni puede serlo. Quien transita en el acto es eminentemente su propio dueño, quien usa transporte es pasajero o usuario, inevitablemente cliente de una industria. El transporte que usa es un bien con valor de cambio, sujeto a la escasez. Se somete al juego del mercado, organizado como un “juego con suma cero”, de tal manera que si unos ganan los otros pierden. El tránsito, por definición, tiene un valor de uso, que normalmente es del transeúnte. No se ve necesariamente afectado por algún valor de cambio. El niño puede visitar a su abuela sin pagar a nadie, pero puede, si quiere, llevar un bulto para el vecino de la señora, cobrando por la molestia de llevarlo. Hay penuria de tránsito únicamente al negar a los individuos la posibilidad de utilizar su capacidad innata de moverse; no se les puede privar del medio de locomoción que usan. Por esto el tránsito en sí no es fácil de organizar como un “juego con suma cero”. Por su naturaleza, al mejorar el tránsito de un miembro de la colectividad, mejora la suerte del conjunto. Todo esfuerzo por perfeccionar el tránsito toma la forma de una operación en la que finalmente todo el mundo sale ganando. En cambio, de toda lucha por acelerar el transporte (por encima de cierta barrera), inevitablemente resulta en un aumento de la injusticia. El transporte más rápido para algunos inevitablemente empeora la situación de los demás. - -Las paradojas, contradicciones y frustraciones de la circulación contemporánea se deben al monopolio ejercido por la industria de los transportes sobre la circulación de las personas. La circulación mecánica no solamente tiene un efecto destructor sobre el ambiente físico, ahonda las disfunciones económicas y carcome el tiempo y el espacio. Además de todo esto, inhibe a la gente de servirse de sus pies, incapacitando a todos por igual. En Los Ángeles no hay destino para el pie: el coche dictó su forma a la ciudad. - -El dominio del sistema industrial de circulación sobre el sistema personal se establece cuando, y sólo entonces, los medios de transporte circulan a velocidad prepotente. La velocidad, al volverse obligatoria, arruina el tránsito en favor del transporte motorizado. Dondequiera que el ejercicio de privilegios y la satisfacción de las necesidades más elementales va unida al uso del vehículo prepotente, se impone una aceleración de los ritmos personales. La industria tiene el monopolio de la circulación cuando la vida cotidiana llega a depender del desplazamiento motorizado. - -Este poderoso control que ejerce la industria del transporte sobre la capacidad innata que tiene todo hombre para moverse, crea una situación de monopolio más agobiante que el monopolio comercial de Ford sobre el mercado de automóviles o el monopolio político que ejerce la industria automovilística en detrimento de los medios de transporte colectivos. Por su carácter disimulado, su atrincheramiento, su poder para estructurar la sociedad, este monopolio es radical: obliga a satisfacer de manera industrial una necesidad elemental hasta ahora satisfecha de forma personal. El consumo obligatorio de un bien de cambio, el transporte motorizado, restringe las condiciones para poder gozar de un valor de uso superabundante, la capacidad innata de tránsito. La reorganización del espacio en favor del motor vacía de poder y de sentido la capacidad innata de moverse. - -La circulación nos sirve aquí de ejemplo para formular una ley económica y política general: cuando un producto excede cierto límite en el consumo de energía por cabeza, ejerce el _monopolio radical_ sobre la satisfacción de una necesidad. Este monopolio se instituye cuando la sociedad se adapta a los fines de aquellos que consumen el total mayor de quanta de energía, y se arraiga irreversiblemente cuando se empieza a imponer a todos la obligación de consumir el quántum mínimo sin el cual la máquina no puede funcionar. El monopolio radical que ejerce una industria sobre toda una sociedad no es efecto de la escasez de bienes reservados a una minoría de clientes; es más bien la capacidad que tiene esta industria de convertir a todos en usuarios. - -En toda América Latina los zapatos son escasos. Mucha gente no los usa jamás. Caminan descalzos o con sandalias, huaraches o caites que ellos mismos se fabrican; sin embargo, nunca la falta de zapatos ha limitado su tránsito. Pero, unas dos generaciones atrás, se convirtió en ideal de los nacionalistas calzar al pueblo. Se empezó a obligar a la gente a calzarse, prohibiéndoles comulgar, graduarse o hacer gestiones públicas ante burócratas, presentándose descalzos. El poder del burócrata para definir lo que es bueno para el pueblo inevitablemente le da el poder de establecer nuevas jerarquías. - -Como el calzado, las escuelas han sido siempre un bien escaso. Pero el solo hecho de admitir una minoría privilegiada no ha logrado que la escuela sea un obstáculo para la adquisición de saber por parte de la mayoría. Ha sido necesario establecer la escuela gratuita y obligatoria para que el educador, convertido en tamiz entre el saber y las masas, pudiera definir al subconsumidor de sus tratamientos como despreciable autodidacta. - -La industria de la construcción podría servirnos de tercer ejemplo de lo que es un monopolio radical. La mayoría de nuestra gente sabe aun crearse un ambiente físico y construir su casita. No es la casa del rico o el palacio de gobierno lo que impide que lo haga hoy, sino la ley que presenta la casa profesionalmente construida como modelo la que impide la autoconstrucción moderna a la mayoría. - -Los elementos que constituyen a una industria gran consumidora de energía en monopolio radical, se ponen de manifiesto si tratamos de realizar los ideales que hoy rigen la circulación. Imaginemos que se organiza un sistema de transportes para uso diario, que realmente sea _rápido, gratuito, igualmente accesible a todos_. En un mundo hipermoderno, dotado de un sistema semejante, todos los transportes serían pagados con fondos públicos, es decir, con fondos recaudados por medio de impuestos. La imposición, a su vez, no sería solamente mayor para quienes ganan más, sino paraquienes viven o tienen negocios más cercanos a las terminales. Además, en este sistema, quien llegara primero sería también primero en ocupar su plaza, sin prioridad reconocida ni al médico, ni a quien va de fiesta, ni al directivo. Un mundo utópico semejante bien pronto se manifestaría como una pesadilla, en la que todos serían igualmente prisioneros del transporte. Cada uno privado del uso de sus pies, incapaz de competir con los vehículos, se convertiría en agente de la proliferación ulterior de la red de transportes. La única alternativa que le quedaría se impone por sí sola: insistir en que la velocidad de los vehículos disponibles se reduzca a un nivel que permita al hombre competir con ella por sus propias fuerzas. - -## El límite inasequible - -Hay que preguntarse por qué la investigación insistentemente continúa orientada hacia el desarrollo de los transportes cada vez más dañinos, en vez de determinar las condiciones óptimas de la circulación. En mi opinión, hay una razón obvia. No se pueden identificar las condiciones para una circulación óptima sin decidir de antemano que la circulación en cuestión debe ser la locomoción de las personas y no de los vehículos. Ahora bien, para poder asentar las metas de un sistema de transportes en tal premisa, hay que tomar en consideración que las personas tienen una capacidad innata de moverse sin que para ello necesiten de la ayuda de políticos e ingenieros. Aunque pueda parecer extraño al hombre común, es precisamente a esta movilidad natural del ser humano a la que no dan significación formal los grandes equipos de profesionales, quienes prepararon la mayoría de los grandes estudios sobre la reorganización de la circulación necesaria durante los próximos 10 años. - -Asentada la premisa de que el hombre nace con alta movilidad, característica de su ser y tradicionalmente satisfactoria, se impone el problema de cómo salvaguardar esta movilidad natural, a pesar de las medidas que se tomen para “mejorarla”. Una de las formas que garanticen el disfrute de la movilidad natural consiste en imponer un límite a la industria del transporte, límite que, a cierto nivel, tome la forma de restricción de la velocidad. El obstáculo mayor para la discusión racional del tema es el orden de magnitud de la velocidad en el que se encuentra este límite. - -El usuario comprende que algunas velocidades deben excluirse, comprende que la generalización del avión supersónico le impediría el descanso y el sueño y, con mucha probabilidad, a sus nietos les quitaría el oxígeno necesario para vivir. Sin dificultad comprende que existen velocidades máximas, pero no ha meditado en la posibilidad de velocidades óptimas. Las discusiones sobre velocidades que lleven a una circulación óptima le parecen arbitrarias o autoritarias. Del otro lado, al ciclista o al mulatero la discusión le parece carente de sentido. Para ambos, lo que podrían llegar a identificar como velocidad óptima en la circulación, es distinto a lo que ellos conocen por experiencia. Una velocidad cuatro o seis veces mayor a la de un peatón representa un margen demasiado bajo para que el usuario del sistema de transportes lo considere y es demasiado elevado para tres cuartas partes de la humanidad que todavía se mueve por sus propias fuerzas. Es aquí donde está el obstáculo para la politización del asunto. - -La gente que planifica el alojamiento, el transporte o la educación de los demás pertenece toda a la clase de los usuarios. La competencia que reivindica se basa en el valor reconocido al producto de sus agencias: los “milagros médicos”, la velocidad o los certificados escolares. Sociólogos o ingenieros pueden dar cuenta del embotellamiento en Calcuta o en Caracas, en términos informativos. Hasta saben trazar planos para la sustitución de coches por autobuses, metros o aerotrén. Pero inevitablemente son gente que cree poder aportar algo que los demás no tienen: un vehículo, un plan o un sistema. Son personajes profesionalmente adictos a la solución industrial de problemas creados por una industria. Su fe en la potencia, en la fuerza de concentración de la energía, les impide tomar conciencia de la potencia, superior en mucho, inherente a la renuncia. El ingeniero es incapaz de concebir la renuncia a la velocidad, el retardo general de la circulación, como medio de abolir el espasmo energético que ahora entorpece los transportes. No quiere elaborar sus programas sobre el postulado de prohibir en la ciudad todo vehículo motorizado que aventaje la marcha de una bicicleta. - -Desde su Land Rover, el consejero para el desarrollo se compadece del peruano que lleva sus marranos al mercado. Se rehúsa a reconocer las ventajas que le da el hecho de ir a pie: se olvida de que si bien este hombre pasará en el camino tres días enteros del mes, la mayoría de sus familiares no tienen que salir del pueblo. En contraste, cada uno de los miembros de la familia del norteamericano, en Saint Louis Missouri, está obligado a pasar cuatro horas diarias en el servicio de los transportes. No sorprende, pues, que como benefactor de la humanidad subdesarrollada ponga empeño en proveer a los indios de la sierra de “privilegio” semejante. Para el ingeniero del desarrollo no existe nada que sea sencillamente _bueno_ , sueña con lo mejor, lo más rápido, lo más costoso y, por tanto, acrecentando el medio aleja el fin. - -La mayoría de los peruanos y mexicanos, para no hablar de los chinos, se encuentran en la actitud opuesta. El límite crítico de la velocidad se coloca para ellos muy por delante de lo que conocen por experiencia propia. Sí, hay unos cuantos que guardan de por vida el recuerdo de alguna escapada motorizada; recuerdan el día en que, en el camión del ejército, los transportaron a una manifestación en el zócalo o en Pekín; recuerdan la visita del cacique en su coche. Pero aun estas raras ocasiones, en las que se movieron sobre la pista a una velocidad de 50 kilómetros, en una hora no recorrieron más de 30 kilómetros. No asimilan la experiencia de haber recorrido tal distancia en tan poco tiempo. En Guerrero y en Chiapas, dos estados mexicanos característicos, en 1970 menos de 1% de la población jamás había recorrido 15 kilómetros en menos de una hora. Los caminos de tercera sin duda hacen más cómodo el desplazamiento, hacen posible los recorridos más largos, pero no los _aceleran_ , pasando el límite. Permiten a todos moverse juntos, llevan al campesino al mercado sin separarlo de su marrano y sin ocasionarle al puerco pérdida de peso, pero no los hacen llegar más que seis veces más pronto que si hubiesen ido a pie. - -El orden de magnitud donde se coloca el punto límite crítico de la velocidad es muy bajo para que el usuario lo tome en serio y muy alto para afectar al campesino. De esta manera se sitúa para ambos en el punto ciego de su campo visual. Al campesino le parecería volar como un pájaro si pudiera trasladarse de su casa a un campo a 25 kilómetros de distancia en una hora o menos, mientras que el usuario olvida que la enorme mayoría de los habitantes de Londres, París, Nueva York y Tokio emplean más de una hora por cada 10 kilómetros que se desplazan. El hecho de que la velocidad crítica para la circulación esté situada en un punto ciego común al campo visual del usuario y del campesino, es lo que hace tan difícil presentar el asunto a la discusión pública. El usuario está intoxicado por el consumo de altas dosis de energía industrial y se le toca un nervio vivo al mencionar el punto, mientras que el campesino no ve la razón de defenderse de algo que no conoce. - -A esta dificultad general para politizar el asunto de las velocidades se añade otro obstáculo aún más palmario. El usuario de transportes no es cliente de las carreteras únicamente. Es casi siempre un hombre moderno, lo que quiere decir que igualmente es cliente encadenado a otros sistemas públicos, tales como la escuela, el hospital y el sindicato. Está condicionado a creer que sólo los especialistas pueden comprender el porqué de las “características técnicas” según las cuales funcionan los sistemas: sólo el médico puede identificar y curar su calentura, y sólo el maestro titulado debe enseñarle a leer a su hijo. Igualmente está acostumbrado a confiar en los expertos, y a que sólo ellos comprendan _por qué_ el tren suburbano parte a las 8:15 y a las 8:41 o por qué los coches se tienen que hacer cada vez más complejos y costosos sin que para él mejore la circulación. La idea de que por un proceso político se podría encontrar una característica técnica tan elemental como la “velocidad crítica”, aquí bajo estudio, le parece fruto de la imaginación ingenua de un abuelo, de un inculto, de un _luddita_[^n01] o de un demagogo irresponsable. Su respeto al especialista, a quien no conoce, se ha transformado en ciega sumisión a las condiciones que éste ha establecido. La mistificación propia y típica del hombre-cliente es el segundo obstáculo para el control popular de la circulación. - -Hay un tercer obstáculo a la construcción de la circulación: tal reconstrucción por iniciativa mayoritaria es potencialmente un explosivo social. Si en un solo campo mayor las masas llegaran a entender hasta qué punto han sido fantoches de una ilusión tecnológica, la misma mutación de conciencia podría fácilmente extenderse a otros campos. Si fuese posible identificar públicamente un valor natural máximo para las velocidades vehiculares, como condición para el tránsito óptimo, análogas intervenciones públicas en la tecnoestructura serían entonces mucho más fáciles. La estructura institucional total está tan integrada, tan tensa y frágil, que desde cualquier punto crítico se puede producir un derrumbe. Si el problema del tránsito se pudiera resolver por la intervención popular, y sin referencia a los expertos en el campo del transporte, entonces se podría aplicar el mismo tratamiento a las cuestiones de la educación, de la salud, del urbanismo y hasta de las Iglesias y de los partidos. Si, para todos los efectos y sin ayuda de expertos, los límites críticos de velocidad los determinaran las asambleas representativas del pueblo, entonces se cuartearían las bases mismas del sistema político. Así, la investigación que propongo es fundamentalmente política y subversiva. - -## Sobre los grados del moverse - -El hombre se mueve con eficacia sin ayuda de ningún implemento. Caminando hace su sendero. La locomoción de cada gramo de su propio cuerpo o de su carga, sobre cada kilómetro recorrido en 10 minutos, le consume 0.75 calorías. Comparándolo con una máquina termodinámica, el hombre es más rentable que cualquier vehículo motorizado, que consume por lo menos cuatro veces más calorías en el mismo trayecto. Además es más eficiente que todos los animales de un peso comparable. El tiburón o el perro le ganan, pero sólo en poco. Con este índice de eficiencia de menos de una caloría por gramo, históricamente organizó su sistema de circulación, prevalentemente basado en el tránsito. Exploró el mundo, creó culturas, sostuvo comercios y, por cuanto podamos saber, no gastó más que 3.5% del tiempo social en moverse fuera de su hogar o de su campamento. Sólo algunos pueblos, en raros momentos de su historia, probablemente consagraron más de este porcentaje del tiempo común en moverse o en ocuparse con sus vehículos y motores animales, por ejemplo, los mongoles en sus guerras. - -Hace un siglo el hombre inventó una máquina que lo dotó de eficiencia aún mayor: la bicicleta. Se trataba de una invención novedosa, a base de materiales nuevos combinados en una tecnología ingeniosa, e impensados en tiempos del joven Marx. - -El uso de la bicicleta hace posible que el movimiento del cuerpo humano franquee una última barrera. Le permite aprovechar la energía metabólica disponible y acelerar la locomoción a su límite teórico. En terreno plano, el ciclista es tres o cuatro veces más veloz que el peatón, gastando en total cinco veces menos calorías por kilómetro que éste. El transporte de un gramo de su cuerpo sobre esta distancia no le consume más que 0.15 calorías. Con la bicicleta, el hombre rebasa el rendimiento posible de cualquier máquina y de cualquier animal evolucionado. - -Además, la bicicleta no ocupa mucho espacio. Para que 40 000 personas puedan cruzar un puente en una hora moviéndose a 25 kilómetros por hora, se necesita que éste tenga 138 metros de anchura si viajan en coche, 38 metros si viajan en autobús y 20 metros si van a pie; en cambio, si van en bicicleta, el puente no necesita más de 10 metros de anchura. Únicamente un sistema hipermoderno de trenes rápidos, a 100 kilómetros por hora y sucediéndose a intervalos de 30 segundos podría pasar esta cantidad de gente por un puente semejante en el mismo tiempo. - -No sólo en movimiento, también estacionado hay una diferencia enorme entre el espacio que ocupa el vehículo potencialmente rápido y la bicicleta. Donde se estaciona un coche caben 18 bicicletas. Para salir del estacionamiento de un estadio, 10 000 personas en bicicleta necesitan una tercera parte del tiempo que necesita el mismo número que abordan autobuses. - -Dotado de bicicleta, el hombre puede cubrir una distancia anual superior, dedicándole en total menos tiempo y exigiendo menos espacio para hacerlo y muy poca inversión de energía física que no es parte de su propio ciclo vital. - -Además, las bicicletas cuestan poco. Con una fracción de las horas de trabajo que exige al norteamericano la compra de su coche, el chino, ganando un salario mucho menor, compra su bicicleta, que le dura toda la vida, mientras que el coche, cuanto más barato, más pronto hay que reponerlo. Eso mismo puede decirse respecto a las carreteras. Para que un mayor número de ciudadanos pueda llegar hasta su casa en coche, se corroe más el territorio nacional. Inevitablemente el coche está ligado a la carretera, no así la bicicleta. Donde no puede ir montado en ella, el ciclista la empuja. El radio diario de trayectos aumenta para todos por igual sin que por esto disminuya para el ciclista la intensidad de acceso. El hombre con bicicleta se convierte en dueño de sus propios movimientos, sin estorbar al vecino. Si hay quien pretenda que en materia de circulación es posible lograr algo mejor, es ahora cuando debe probarlo. - -La bicicleta es invento de la misma generación que creó el vehículo de motor, pero las dos invenciones son símbolos de adelantos hechos en direcciones opuestas por el hombre moderno. La bicicleta permite a cada uno controlar el empleo de su propia energía; el vehículo de motor inevitablemente hace de los usuarios rivales entre sí por la energía, el espacio y el tiempo. En Vietnam, un ejército hiperindustrializado no ha podido derrotar a un pueblo que se desplaza a la velocidad de la bicicleta. Esto debería hacernos meditar: tal vez la segunda forma del empleo de la técnica sea superior a la primera. Naturalmente, queda por ver si los vietnamitas del norte están dispuestos a permanecer dentro de esos límites de velocidad que son los únicos susceptibles de respetar los valores mismos que hicieron posible su victoria. Hasta el momento presente los bombarderos americanos les han privado de gasolina, de motores, de carreteras y los han obligado a emplear una técnica también moderna, mucho más eficaz, equitativa y autónoma que la que Marx hubiese podido imaginar. Queda por ver si ahora, en nombre de Marx, no se lanzan a una industrialización, cuantitativamente tan superior a lo que Marx pudo prever, que sea imposible la aplicación de los ideales que él formuló. - -## Motores dominantes contra motores auxiliares - -Los hombres nacieron dotados de movilidad más o menos igual. Esta capacidad innata de movimiento aboga en favor de una libertad igual en la elección de su destino. La noción de equidad puede servir de base para defender este derecho fundamental contra toda limitación. Dentro de esta perspectiva, poco importa cuál sea la amenaza al libre ejercicio del derecho de moverse y elegir su propio destino: la prisión, la prohibición de cruzar fronteras, la reclusión dentro de un ambiente urbano que impida la movilidad innata de la persona con la sola finalidad de transformarlo en usuario. El hecho de que nuestros contemporáneos, en su mayoría, estén atados a su butaca por su cinturón de seguridad ideológica, no basta para que el derecho fundamental a la libertad de movimientos se vuelva obsoleto. La movilidad humana es el único patrón válido para medir la contribución que cualquier sistema de transporte haga a la circulación. Si por el transporte el tránsito se ve restringido, el transporte hace declinar la circulación. - -Para distinguir el transporte que mutila el derecho del movimiento de aquel que lo ensancha, hay que reconocer que el vehículo puede entorpecer la circulación triplemente: rompiendo su flujo, aislando categorías jerarquizadas de destinación y aumentando la pérdida de tiempo vinculada con la circulación. Se ha visto que la clave de las relaciones entre el transporte y la calidad de la circulación es la velocidad del vehículo. También se ha visto que, pasado cierto límite de velocidad, el transporte afecta la circulación de tres maneras: la entorpece al saturar de vías y coches un ambiente físico; transforma el territorio en una trama de circuitos cerrados y estancos, y sustrae al individuo del tiempo y el espacio de existir, convirtiéndolo en presa de la velocidad. - -Lo contrario es cierto también: bajo determinado nivel de velocidad, los vehículos motorizados pueden complementar o mejorar el tráfico, permitiendo a las personas hacer cosas que no podrían hacer a pie o en bicicleta. Los motores pueden usarse para transportar al enfermo, al lisiado, al viejo o al simplemente perezoso. - -Las motocicletas pueden transportar personas pasando sobre montículos, pero lo pueden hacer en forma sosegada solamente si no aventajan a una mayoría que tiene que subir a pie. Los trenes pueden extender el radio de vivencia para una mayoría, pero pueden hacerlo sólo si con ello ofrecen igual oportunidad a todas las personas de estar más cercanas entre sí. Un sistema de transporte bien desarrollado, a velocidades tope de 25 kilómetros por hora, hubiera permitido al policía Fix perseguir a Phileas Fogg alrededor del mundo no en 80 días, sino en 40. Pero en un sistema así, el tiempo empleado para viajar pertenece en forma dominante al viajero: más baja la velocidad, menor es la expropiación del tiempo ajeno que practica el viajero. - -La coexistencia de vehículos movidos sólo a fuerza de energía metabólica humana y de otros auxiliados por motores, será ponderada únicamente si se concede preferencia absoluta a la autonomía de movimiento del hombre y si se protege la geografía humana contra aquellas velocidades que la distorsionan en geografía vehicular. - -Se puede desarrollar un sistema de transportes con características óptimas para el tráfico siempre que el transporte motorizado se mantenga limitado a velocidades subsidiarias del tránsito autónomo. El límite a la potencia, y por tanto a la velocidad de los motores, en sí mismo no protege a los más débiles contra la explotación de los ricos y poderosos. Éstos siempre podrán idear medios para vivir y trabajar en mejores localidades, viajar en gran lujo y hacerse transportar sobre los hombros de sus esclavos. Pero al fijar velocidades máximas dentro de ciertos límites es posible reducir, y hasta corregir disparidades, combinando medios políticos con recursos tecnológicos. Una revolución política puede eliminar la institución de la esclavitud; sin limitar la velocidad no puede eliminar la nueva explotación que el sistema de transporte impone. Si no hay velocidades máximas determinadas, no pueden superarse las disparidades, ni siendo propiedad del Estado los medios de transporte, ni aplicando mejores técnicas para su control. Una industria del transporte sirve para la producción del tráfico total únicamente si no ejerce un monopolio radical sobre la productividad personal que la tecnología moderna ha elevado a un nuevo orden. - -## Equipo insuficiente superdesarrollo y tecnología madura - -La combinación de transportes y tránsito que constituye la circulación nos indica cuál es la potencia en vatios per cápita socialmente óptima y señala la necesidad de someterla a límites elegidos políticamente. Asimismo nos ofrece un ejemplo de la convergencia de metas en el desarrollo socioeconómico y un criterio para distinguir a los países que están insuficientemente equipados de los que están destructivamente superindustrializados. - -Un país se puede clasificar de _subequipado_ cuando no puede dotar a cada ciudadano de una bicicleta o proveer una transmisión de cinco velocidades a cualquiera que desee pedalear llevando a otros. Está subequipado si no puede proveer buenos caminos para la bicicleta o transportes públicos gratuitos para aquellos que quieren viajar horas seguidas. No existe una razón técnica, económica o ecológica para que por el año de 1975 se tolere semejante retraso, consecuencia de un equipo insuficiente. Sería un escándalo si la movilidad natural de los hombres se viera, contra su voluntad, forzada al estancamiento a un nivel prebicicleta. - -Un país puede clasificarse como _superindustrializado_ cuando su vida social está dominada por la industria del transporte que ha llegado a determinar sus privilegios de clase, a acentuar la escasez de tiempo y a mantener a los hombres más firmemente en los carriles trazados para ellos. - -Más allá del subequipado y del superindustrializado está el sitio del mundo de la _eficacia posindustrial_ , en donde la modalidad industrial de producción complementa la producción social sin monopolizarla. En otras palabras, hay un sitio para un mundo de madurez tecnológica. En términos de circulación, éste es el mundo de aquellos que han ensanchado su horizonte cotidiano a 13 kilómetros, montados en su bicicleta. Al mismo tiempo es el mundo marcado por una variedad de motores subsidiarios disponibles para cuando la bicicleta no basta y cuando un aumento en el empuje no obstaculice ni la equidad ni la libertad. También es el mundo del viaje largo, un mundo donde cualquier lugar está abierto a cualquier persona, a su albedrío y a su velocidad, sin prisa o temor, por medio de vehículos que cruzan las distancias sin roturar la tierra sobre la que el hombre ha caminado con sus pies por cientos de miles de años. - -El mundo superindustrializado no admite diferencias en el estilo de la producción y de la política. Impone sus características técnicas a las relaciones sociales. El mundo de la madurez industrial permite una variedad de elecciones políticas y culturales. Esta variedad, por supuesto, disminuye en la medida en que una comunidad permite a la industria crecer a costa de la producción autónoma. El razonamiento solo no puede ofrecer la medida para fijar el nivel de eficacia posindustrial y la madurez tecnológica que se ajuste a una sociedad concreta. Únicamente puede indicar, en término dimensional, el radio dentro del cual deben ajustarse estas características tecnológicas. Solamente un proceso político, dentro de una comunidad histórica, puede decidir cuándo dejan de valer la pena la programación, la distorsión del espacio, la escasez del tiempo y la desigualdad. El razonamiento puede _identificar_ la velocidad como un factor crítico en el transporte, pero no puede _fijar_ límites políticos factibles. - -Las velocidades tope en el transporte de personas se hacen operantes sólo si reflejan con claridad el interés propio de una comunidad política. La expresión común de este interés no es posible en una sociedad en la que una clase monopoliza no sólo los transportes, sino igualmente las comunicaciones, la medicina, la educación o el armamento. No tiene importancia que este poder lo ejerzan los propietarios legales o los gerentes atrincherados en la industria o si ésta es legalmente propiedad de los trabajadores. Este poder debe incautarse y someterse al sano juicio del hombre común. Su reconquista comienza al reconocer que el conocimiento experto ciega a los burócratas reservados frente a la forma evidente de disolver la crisis de la energía, así como los cegó para reconocer la solución evidente para resolver la guerra en Vietnam. - -De donde nos encontramos ahora parten dos caminos hacia la madurez tecnológica. Uno es el camino de la liberación de la abundancia, el otro el de la liberación de la dependencia. Ambos tienen el mismo destino: la reestructuración del espacio que ofrece a cada persona la experiencia, constantemente renovada, de saber que el centro del mundo es donde ella vive. - -Los hombres que tienen los pies en la tierra, que dominan su morada, que ejercen su poder innato de moverse, saben dónde está el centro de la Tierra. Saben vivir en una vecindad, conocer a sus vecinos, detenerse a hablar con el hombre que encuentran en la esquina, pasear y sentarse en una banca de la acera. - -El tráfico de la abundancia atropella y zarandea a los ricos. La _liberación_ de esta _abundancia_ empieza con el dominio sobre la aceleración destructora del tiempo ajeno. Los veloces son empujados de un lado a otro, son lanzados de una vía rápida a otra y sólo tropiezan con otros usuarios propulsados hacia rumbos diferentes. Ven las caras anónimas de los demás en el cruce de dos circuitos. Es éste un mundo de órbitas sin centro. - -La soledad de la abundancia se quebrantará cuando los usuarios rompan la servidumbre al transporte supereficiente. La liberación de la abundancia se hará cuando rompan los circuitos veloces que extienden el territorio y tomen de nuevo posesión de la tierra con sus pies. - -_La liberación de la dependencia_ comienza en el otro extremo. Rompe con la opresión de la población y del valle, deja detrás el tedio de los horizontes estrechos y sofocantes y el agobio de un mundo encerrado en sí. Expander la vida más allá del radio de la tradición, sin inseminarla por los vientos de la aceleración, es una meta que cualquier país pobre podría alcanzar en pocos años. Sin embargo, es una meta que podrán alcanzar sólo aquellos que rechazan la oferta del desarrollo de un monopolio industrial, sobre la producción hecha en nombre de una ideología de consumo indefinido de energía. - -Lo que ahora amenaza tanto a los países ricos como a los países pobres es precisamente lo contrario. Más que los jeques árabes y más que las compañías petroleras internacionales, la crisis energética recientemente “descubierta” aventaja a las clases gobernantes y a sus lacayos profesionales. En lugar de identificar el mínimo de carburante necesario para la mayor movilidad personal, ellos tratan de obligarnos a consumir el máximo de medios de transporte que puede hacerse funcionar con el carburante disponible. Los ingenieros de tráfico imponen límites de 80 kilómetros por hora en la ruta, porque a tal velocidad la eficiencia de los motores es máxima, y límites de 40 en los puntos congestionados, porque así el número máximo de vehículos cabe en cada kilómetro de asfalto. Aumentan los reglamentos y los horarios, y los privilegios para doctores, policías y potentados. El límite tecnocrático en favor del transporte está así en oposición diametral al límite político que se debería escoger en protección del tránsito humano. Así, empero, también se hace más evidente la contradicción entre la racionalización del transporte veloz y la calidad de la circulación. Entre más duros, vejatorios y evidentes se hacen los sacrificios impuestos a la mayoría por los veladores del modo de producción industrial, más probable se hace la emergencia de una conciencia mayoritaria en favor de la limitación de toda circulación a una velocidad del orden de 25 kilómetros por hora, lo que para la gran mayoría implicaría más equidad, libertad y acceso mutuo. - -La protección de la movilidad personal autónoma y sin clases contra el monopolio radical de la industria es posible únicamente donde la gente se empeñe en un proceso político, basado en la protección del tráfico óptimo. Esta protección, a su vez, exige reconocer aquellos quanta de energía que la sociedad industrial ha desatendido y sobre los cuales basa su propio desarrollo. El consumo estricto de estos quanta puede conducir a quienes lo respeten a una era posindustrial tecnológicamente madura. - -La liberación que para los países pobres será barata, costará a los ricos, y éstos no pagarán el precio sino hasta que la aceleración de su sistema de transporte triture el tráfico hasta paralizarlo. Un análisis concreto del tráfico traiciona la verdad que subyace en _la crisis de la energía_ : el impacto sobre el ambiente social de quanta de energía industrialmente empaquetado es degradante, agotador y esclavizante. Estos efectos se hacen sentir antes que la amenaza de la contaminación del ambiente físico y de la extinción de la raza humana. El punto crucial en el que estos efectos son reversibles no es, sin embargo, cuestión de deducción sino de decisión política, posiblemente sólo donde la voz de la mayoría puede limitar el poder y la velocidad de sus gobernantes. - -## Bibliografía - -Durante 1974 y 1975 se llevaron a cabo seminarios sobre “Las alternativas a la aceleración y la mejora del tráfico” en el Cidoc, en Cuernavaca. La lista que sigue es el resultado de los trabajos previos de este seminario. Sólo se reseñan aquellos títulos que, además de haberse mostrado útiles en pasadas sesiones de estudio, pueden ser más fácilmente localizados por aquellos que deseen proseguir la línea de investigación presentada en este ensayo. - -Albion, R. G., _Naval and Maritime History, Annotated Bibliography,_ Mystic, Conn., 1972. - -Anderson, Romola, y Roger Anderson, _The Sailing Ship: Six Thousand Years of History_ , Harrap, Londres, 1926. - -Banks, A., _Cross-Polity Time Series Data_ , MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 1971. - -Barkin, David, “El consumo y la vía chilena al socialismo; reflexiones en torno a la decisión automotriz”, versión preliminar, _Centro de Estudios Socio-Económicos,_ Santiago de Chile, 1972. - -Bernstein, M. T., _Steamboats on the Ganges,_ Orient Longmans, Bombay, 1960. - -Bivar, A. D. H., “The Stirrup and Its Origins”, _Oriental Art_ , vol. I, 1955, pp. 62-65. - -Blaisdel, R., y cols., _Sources of Information in Transportation_ , Northwestern University Press (The Transportation Center), Evanston, Ill., 1964. - -Bowden, Frank Philip, “Friction”, en _Encyclopedia Britannica_ , vol. 9, pp. 840A-841. - -Branch, Melville C., _Comprehensive Urban Planning: A Selected Annotated Bibliography with Related Materials_ , Sage Publication, 1973. Para material de transporte, _cf_. pp. 251-272. - -Braudel, Fernand, “La Lenteur des Transports”, en _Civilisation Materielle et Capitalisme_ , XV-XVIII Siècle, Armand Colin, París, 1967, pp. 314-329. - -------, “Vicissitudes des Routes”, en _La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen_ , Armand Colin, París, 1949, pp. 242-259. - -Brunot, Ferdinand, _Histoire de la Langue Française des Origines à nos Jours_. Para referencias al transporte, _cf_. esp. tomo VI, pp. 357-360, y tomo VII, pp. 201-231. - -Buchanan, C. D., _Mixed Blessing: The Motor Car in Britain_ , Londres, 1958. - -Buffet, B., _L’Eau Potable à travers les Âges_ , Lieja, 1950. - -Cavailles, Henri, _La Route Française, son Histoire_ , París, 1950. - -Chermayeff, Serge, y Alexander Tzonis, _Shape of Community_ , Penguin, 1971. - -Claxton, E. C., “The Future of the Bicycle in a Modern Society”, _Journal of the Royal Society of Arts_ , enero de 1968, pp. 114-135. - -Cook, Walter L., _Bike Trails and Facilities, A Guide to Their Design, Construction and Operation_ , American Institute of Park Executives, Wheeling, W. Va., 1965. - -Copeland, John, _Roads and Theri Traffic_ , _1750-1858_ , Newton Abbot, 1968. - -Counter, C. F., _The History and Development of the Cycles, As Illustrated by the Collection of cycles in the Science Museum_ , Londres, 1955. - -Davenas, Paul, _Les Messageries Royales_ , París, 1937. - -Deffontaines, P., “Sur la Répartition Géographique des Voitures à Deux Roues et à quatre Roues”, _Travaux du Premier Congrès International de Folklore_ , París, 1937, Tours, Arbault, 1938, p. 117. - -Deischel, Erwin, _Umweltbeanspruchung und Umweltschaeden dur den Verkehr in der BDR_ , Munich, 1971. - -Dollfus, C., _Histoire de la Locomotion Terrestre_ , París, 1935-1936. - -Ekholm, Gordon F., “Wheeled Toys in Mexico”, _American Antiquity_ , vol. 2, 1946, pp. 222-228. - -Farvar, M. Taghi, y John Milton, _The Careless Technology; Ecology and International Development_ , The Natural History Press, Garden City, N. Y., 1972. - -Forbes, R. J., “Land Transport and Road Building, 1000-1900”, _Janus_ , vol. 46, 1957, p. 100. - ---------, _Notes on the History of Ancient Roads and Their Construction,_ Amsterdam, 1964 (segunda edición). - -Foster, George M., _Culture and Conquest; America’s Spanish Heritage_ , Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1960. - -Fromm, Gary (ed.), _Transport Investment and Economic Development_ , The Brookings Institution Transport Research Program, Washington, 1969. - -Fuller, Buckminster, _World Resource Inventory_ , Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1965. _Cf_. esp. vol. 4, parte 4. - -Fuller, Dudley, “Bearing, Antifriction”, en _Encyclopedia of Science and Technology_ , vol. 2, McGraw Hill, Nueva York, 1971, pp. 124-131. - -Giedion, Siegfried, _Mechanization Takes Command_ , Norton, Nueva York, 1969. - -Ginsburg, Norton, _Atlas of Economic Development_ , University of Chicago Press, 1961. _Cf_. esp. pp. 100-101 y 60-77. - -Goetz, Wilhelm, _Verkehrswege im Dienste des Welthandels: Eine Historich-Geographische Untersuchung,_ Stuttgart, 1888. - -Haldane, J. B. S., “On Being the Right Size”, en James R. Newman (ed.), _The World of Mathematics,_ vol. II, Simon and Schuster, Nueva York, 1956. - -Hall, Edward T., _The Hidden Dimension,_ Doubleday, Nueva York, 1969. - -Hannen, Bruce, “Options for Energy Conservation”, inédito, febrero de 1973, Biblioteca Cidoc. - -Hasebrok, Johannes, _Griechische Wirtschaftgeschichte und Gesellschaftgeschichte bis zur Perserzeit,_ Tubinga, 1931. - -Haudricourt, André G., “Contribution à la Géographie et à l’Èthnologie de la Voiture”, _Revue de Géographie Humaine et Ethnologie,_ 1948, pp. 54-64. - -Heichelheim, Fritz M., _An Ancient Economic History, from the Paleolithic Age to the Migration of the Germanic, Slavic and Arabic Nations,_ tres volúmenes, Leiden, 1938. - -Herendeen, R., _Use of Input/Output. Analysis to Determine the Energy Cost of Goods and Services,_ mimeografiado, 22 pp., University of Illinois (Center for Advanced Computer Studies), Urbana, 20 de febrero de 1973. - -Hirst, E., _Energy Efficiency for Passenger Transportation and for Freight Transportation,_ Oak Ridge National Laboratories, 1971. - -Hornell, J., _Water Transport: Origins and Early Evolution_ , Cambridge University Press, 1946. - -Hoskins, Halford, _British Routes to India,_ Nueva York, 1928. - -Hunter, Holland, _Soviet Transport Experience, Its Lessons for Other Countries,_ The Brookings Institution Transports Research Program, Washington, 1968. - -Jope, E. M., “Vehicles and Harness”, en Singer, _A History of Technology,_ vol. 2, Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 537. - -Kalmus, Ludwig, _Weltgeschichte des Post mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des deutschen Sprachgebietes,_ Viena, 1937. - -Kirkland, Edward, “Men, cities and Transportation”, en _A Study of New England History 1820-1900,_ dos volúmenes, Cambridge, Mass., 1948. - -Kohl, Johann Georg, _Der Verkehr und die Ansiedlungen der Menschen in Ihrer Abhaengigkeit von der Gestaltung der Erdoberflaeche,_ Leipzig, 1841. - -Lansing, John B., Robert Marans, y cols., _Car Ownership, Annual Mileage, and the Journey to Work,_ Ann Arbor, Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan, 1970. _Cf_. esp. pp. 137-151. - -Lapin, Howard, _Structuring the Journey to Work,_ Philadelphia University Press, 1964. - -Lefebvre des Noettes, R., _L’Attelage et le Cheval de Selle à travers les Âges; Contribution l’Histoire de l’Esclavage,_ Picard, París, 1931. - ---------, _De la Marine Antique a la Marine Moderne: La Revolution du Governail,_ París, 1935. - -Lewis, Richard S., y Bernard I. Spinrad, _The Energy Crisis,_ Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Chicago, 1972. - -Liepmann, Kate K., _The Journey to Work, Its Significance for Industrial and Community Life,_ Londres, 1944. - -Linder, Staffan Burestam, _The Harried Leisure Class,_ Columbia University Press, Nueva York, 1971. - -Lisco, Thomas E., “The Future of Urban Transportation; Mass Transportation, Cinderella in Our Cities”, _The Public Interest,_ 1970. - -López, R. S., y J. W. Raymond, _Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World: Illustrative Documents,_ Columbia University Press, Nueva York, 1955. - -Mackaye, Benton, “Townless Highways for the Motorist”, _Harper’s Magazine,_ agosto de 1931. - -Macmurray, David F. E., _Aspects of Time and the Study of Activity Routines,_ Thesis for the M.S. in city planning, MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 1968. - -Manheim, Marvin L., “Principles of Transport System Analysis”, _Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Forum,_ 1966, pp. 9-21. - -Marsh, George Perkins, _The Earth As Modified by Human Action,_ 3a. ed., Nueva York, 1888. - -Meyer, Balthasar H. (ed.), _History of Transportation in the United States before 1860,_ Washington, 1917. - -Meyer, John R., “Transportation, Economic Aspects”, en _Encyclopedia of Social Sciences,_ vol. 16, pp. 134-140. - -Mott, George Fox, “Transportation in Contemporary Civilization”, en _Transportation Renaissance, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science_ , vol. 345, Filadelfia, 1963, pp. 1-5. - -Mott, G. F., “Vehicles for Land Transport”, en _Science and Civilization in China,_ vol. 4 (Physics and Physical Technology), parte II (Mechanical Engineering), Cambridge University Press, 1965, pp. 243-281. - -Needham, Joseph, “Power Sources and Their Employment, (1) Animal Traction”, en _ibid_., pp. 303-328. - -Olsson, Gunnar, “Distance and Human Interaction”, _A review Bibliography,_ Science Research Institute, Filadelfia, 1965. - -Ostwald, W., _Energetische Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaft,_ Leipzig, 1960. - -Ottley, George, _A bibliography of British Railway History_ , Allen and Unwin, Londres, 1965. - -Owen, Wilfred, _Strategy for Mobility,_ Brookings Institution, Washington, 1964. - -Perraton, Jean, “Planning for the Cyclist in Urban Areas”, _The Town Planning Review,_ vol. 39, núm. 2, julio de 1968, pp. 149-162. - -Platt, John, “Hierarchical Restructuring”, _Bulletin of Anatomic Scientists,_ noviembre de 1970. - -Polanyi, Karl (ed.), _Trade and Market in Early Empires,_ The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1957. - -Robbins, Michael, _The Railway Age,_ Routledge and Kegan Paul, Penguin, Londres, 1964. - -Russeau, Pierre, _Histoire des Transports, Arthème Fayard,_ París, 1961. - -Sauer, Carl O., _Agricultural Origins and Dispersal,_ Bowman Memorial Lectures, Series Two, Nueva York, 1952. - -Sauvy, Alfred, _Les Quatre Roues de la Fortune; Essai sur L’Automobile,_ París, 1968. - -Schnore, Leo F., “Transportation, Comutation”, en _Encyclopedia of Social Sciences,_ vol. 16, pp. 140-144. - -Sherrington, Charles E. R., _A Hundred Years of Inland Transportation, 1830-1933_ , Londres, 1934; reimpresión Kelly, 1969. - -Smerk, George M., _Readings in Urban Transportation,_ Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1968. - -Smith, William, _The History of the Post Office in British North America, 1639-1870_ , Cambridge University Press, 1920. - -Spengler, Joseph, “On the Progress of Quantification in Economics”, en Harry Woolf (ed.), _A History of the Meaning of Measurement in the Natural and Social Sciences,_ Bobbs Merrill, Nueva York, 1961, pp. 128-146. - -Stone, Tabor R., _Beyond the Automobile; Reshaping the Transportation Environment,_ Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1971. - -Strube Erdmann, Leon, _Vialidad imperial de los incas,_ Universidad de Córdoba, Argentina, 1963. - -Stutz, Frederick P., _Research on Intra-Urban Social Travel: Introduction and Bibliography, Exchange Bibliography,_ núm. 173, Council of Planning Librarians, Monticello, Mich., febrero de 1971. - -Sundquist, James L., “A Policy for Urban Growth: Where Sall They Live?”, _The Public Interest,_ 1970. - -Taylor, George, _The Transportation Revolution,_ Nueva York, 1951. - -Terrazas de la Peña, Eduardo, “Necesidad de un incremento en la intensidad del uso del espacio”, texto presentado en el Congreso regional sobre política de desarrollo urbano, México, julio de 1972, Cidoc. - -“Transportation Renaissance”, _The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science_ , vol. 345, Filadelfia, 1963. - -Turner, John F. C., “Housing for People or Housing by People”, mimeografiado, 10 pp., MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 1970. - -Westergaard, John, “Journey to work in London Region”, TPR, abril de 1957. - -Wheeler, James O., _Research on the Journey to Work: Introduction and Bibliography, Exchange Bibliography,_ núm. 65, Council of Planning Librarians, Monticello, Mich., enero de 1969. - -White, Leslie, _The Science of Culture; Energy and the Evolution of Culture,_ Grove Press, Nueva York, 1949. _Cf_. esp. pp. 363-393. - -White, Lynn, “The Agricultural Revolution of the Early Middle Age’s”, en _Medieval Technology and social Change,_ Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 39-78. - -Wilson, George W., y cols., _The Impact of Highway Investment of Development,_ The Brookings Institution Transport Research Program, Washington, 1966. - -Wilson, S. S., “Bicycle Technology”, _Scientific American,_ marzo de 1973, pp. 81-91. - -Yurick, Sol, “The Political Economy of Junk”, _Monthly Review,_ vol. 22, núm. 7, diciembre de 1970, pp. 22-37. - - -[^n01:] En 1811, en el Condado de Nottingham, en Inglaterra, bandas de artesanos que habían sido desplazados por las máquinas empezaron a irrumpir en las fábricas de telas y a destruir los telares mecánicos. Se llamaban a sí mismos _Ludds_ o “ludditas”, según el nombre de un personaje legendario, John Ludd, supuestamente oriundo de Leicester y que, alrededor de 1780, en un acto de coraje, destruyó uno de los primeros telares mecánicos.] diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/energy/index.txt b/data/pages/en/book/energy/index.txt deleted file mode 100644 index f7a7c81..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/energy/index.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8 +0,0 @@ -# Energy and equity - -* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:en|Online]] -* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Énergie et équité_ -* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1974 -* **#@LANG_comments@#:** was first written in French and published in Le Monde in May 1973 in three instalments. Developed and rewritten, with the help of Luce Giard and Vincent Bardet, it was the subject of a first edition in French in 1975, under the Éditions du Seuil. A longer and more detailed English version was established on this complete and enriched plot of works conducted at the CIDOC of Cuernavaca. - -~~NOTOC~~ diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/gender/index.md b/data/pages/en/book/gender/index.md deleted file mode 100644 index d41e4a7..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/gender/index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,14 +0,0 @@ - ---- -title: "Gender" -author: "Ivan Illich" -abstract: "https://illich.test/en:book:gender:index?rev=1621567599" -date: "**1982" -lang: "ex" -titlepage: true -titlepage-color: "FFFFFF" -titlepage-text-color: "000000" -titlepage-rule-color: "CCCCCC" -titlepage-rule-height: 4 ---- - diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/gender/index.txt b/data/pages/en/book/gender/index.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 55c3e09..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/gender/index.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ -# Gender - -* ** #@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:en|Online]] -* ** #@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1982 -* ** #@LANG_comments@#:** ... -* ** #@LANG_authors@#**: Ivan Illich - - - -~~NOTOC~~ diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/index.txt b/data/pages/en/book/index.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..9345bdb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/book/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../contents/book/index.en.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/en.epub b/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/en.epub Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 481befb..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/en.epub +++ /dev/null diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/en.pdf b/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/en.pdf Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index bdce430..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/en.pdf +++ /dev/null diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/en.txt b/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/en.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 41ba134..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/en.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,274 +0,0 @@ -# The Right To Useful Unemployment And Its Professional Enemies - -## Foreword - -In the last decade or so I have prepared and published a number of essays[^n01] on the industrial mode of production. During this period, I have focused on the processes through which growing dependence on mass-produced goods and services gradually erodes the conditions necessary for a convivial life. Examining distinct areas of economic growth, each essay demonstrates a general rule: use-values are inevitably destroyed when the industrial mode of production achieves the predominance that I have termed "radical monopoly". This and my previous essays describe how industrial growth produces the modernization of poverty. - -Modernized poverty appears when the intensity of market dependence reaches a certain threshold. Subjectively, it is the experience of frustrating affluence that occurs in persons mutilated by their reliance on the riches of industrial productivity. It deprives those affected by it of their freedom and power to act autonomously, to live creatively; it confines them to survival through being plugged into market relations. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is with difficulty expressed. For example, we are the witnesses of a barely perceptible transformation in ordinary language: verbs which formerly expressed satisfying actions have been replaced by nouns which name packages designed for passive consumption only – "to learn" becomes "to accumulate credits". A profound change in individual and social self-images is here reflected. And the layman is not the only one who has difficulty in accurately expressing what he experiences. The professional economist is unable to recognize the poverty that his conventional instruments fail to uncover. Nevertheless, the new mutant of impoverishment continues to spread. The peculiarly modern inability to use personal endowments, community wealth, and environmental resources in an autonomous way infects every aspect of life where a professionally engineered commodity has succeeded in replacing a culturally shaped use-value. The opportunity to experience personal and social satisfaction outside the market is thus destroyed. I am poor, for example, when the use-value of my feet is lost because I live in Los Angeles or work on the thirty-fifth floor of a sky-scraper. - -This new impotence-producing poverty must not be confused with the widening gap between the consumption of rich and poor in a world where basic needs are increasingly shaped by industrial commodities. This gap is the form traditional poverty assumes in an industrial society, and the conventional terms of class struggle appropriately reveal and reduce it. I further distinguish modernized poverty from the burdensome price exacted by the externalities which increased levels of production spew into the environment. It is clear that these kinds of pollution, stress, and taxation are unequally imposed. Correspondingly, defences against such depredations are unequally distributed. But like the new gaps in access, such inequities in social costs are aspects of industrialized poverty for which economic indicators and objective verification can be found. Such is not true for the industrialized impotence that affects both rich and poor. Where this kind of poverty reigns, life without addictive access to commodities is rendered impossible or criminal – or both. Making do without consumption becomes impossible, not just for the average consumer, but even for the poor. All forms of welfare, from affirmitive action to job training, are of no help. The liberty to design and craft one’s own distinctive dwelling is abolished in favour of the bureaucratic provision of standardized housing in the United States, Cuba or Sweden. The organization of employment, skills, building resources, of rules and credit favour shelter as a commodity rather than as an activity. Whether the product is provided by an entrepreneur or an apparatchik, the effective result is the same: citizen impotence, our specifically modern experience of poverty. - -Wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or engaged in consumption: the attempt to build a house or set a bone outside the control of certified specialists appears as anarchic conceit. We lose sight of our resources, lose control over the environmental conditions which make these resources applicable, lose taste for self-reliant coping with challenges from without and anxiety from within. Take childbirth in Mexico today. Delivery without professional care has become unthinkable for those women whose husbands hold regular employment and, therefore, access to social services, no matter how marginal or tenuous, is denied. They move in circles where the production of babies faithfully reflects the patterns of industrial outputs. Yet their sisters who live in the slums of the poor or the villages of the isolated still feel quite competent to give birth on their own mats; they are still unaware that they face a modern indictment of criminal neglect toward their child. But as professionally engineered delivery models reach these independent women, the desire, competence, and conditions for autononmous behaviour are being destroyed. - -For advanced industrial society, the modernization of poverty means that people are helpless to recognize evidence unless it has been certified by a professional – be he a television weather commentator or an educator; organic discomfort becomes intolerably threatening unless it has been medicalized into dependence on a therapist; neighbours and friends are lost unless vehicles bridge the separating distance (created by the vehicles in the first place). In short, most of the time we find ourselves out of touch with our world, out of sight of those for whom we work, out of tune with what we feel. - -This essay is a postscript to my book, Tools for Conviviality, published in 1973. It reflects the changes which have occurred during the past decade, both in economic reality and in my own perceptions of it. It assumes a rather large increase in the non-technical, ritual, and symbolic powers of our major technological and bureaucratic systems, and a corresponding decrease in their scientific, technical, and instrumental credibility. In 1968, for example, it was still quite easy to dismiss organized lay resistance to professional dominance as nothing more than a throwback to romantic, obscurantist or élitist fantasies. The grass roots, common sense assessment of technological systems which I then outlined, seemed childish or retrograde to the political leaders of citizen activism, and to the "radical" professionals who laid claim to the tutorship of the poor by means of their special knowledge. The reorganization of late industrial society around professionally defined needs, problems, and solutions was still the commonly accepted value implicit in ideological, political, and juridical systems otherwise clearly and sometimes violently opposed to one another. - -Now the picture has changed. A hallmark of advanced and enlightened technical competence is a self-confident community, neighbourhood or group of citizens engaged in the systematic analysis and consequent ridicule of the "needs", "problems", and " solutions " defined for them by the agents of professional establishments. In the sixties, lay opposition to legislation based on expert opinion still sounded like anti-scientific bigotry. Today, lay confidence in public policies based upon the expert’s opinion is tenuous indeed. Now thousands reach their own judgments and, at great cost, engage in citzien action without any professional tutorship; through personal, independent effort, they gain the scientific information they need. Sometimes risking limb, freedom, and respectability, they bear witness to a newly mature scientific attitude. They know, for example, that the quality and amount of technical evidence sufficiently conclusive to oppose atomic power plants, the multiplication of intensive care units, compulsory education, foetal monitoring, psycho-surgery, electro-shock treatment, or genetic engineering is also simple and clear enough for the layman to grasp and utilize. - -Ten years ago, compulsory schooling was still protected by powerful taboos. Today, its defenders are almost exclusively either teachers whose jobs depend upon it or Marxist ideologues who defend professional knowledge-holders in a shadow battle against the hip-bourgeoisie. Ten years ago, the myths about the effectiveness of modern medical institutions were still unquestioned. For example, most textbooks accepted the beliefs that adult life expectancy was increasing, that treatment for cancer postponed death, that the availability of doctors produced greater infant survival rates. Since then people have "discovered" what vital statistics have always shown – adult life expectancy has not changed in any socially significant way over the last few generations, is lower in most rich countries today than in our grandparents" time, and lower than in many poor nations. Ten years ago, universal access to post-secondary schooling, to adult education, to preventative medicine, to highways, to a wired global village were still prestigious goals. Today, the great myth-making rituals organized around education, transportation, health care, urbanization have indeed been partly demystified; they have however not yet been disestablished. - -Shadow prices and increased consumption gaps are important aspects of the new poverty. But my principal interest is directed towards a different concomitant of modernization – the process through which autonomy is undermined, satisfaction is dulled, experience is flattened out, needs are frustrated for nearly everyone. For example, I have examined the society-wide obstacles to mutual presence which are necessary side effects of energy-intensive transportation. I have wanted to define the power limits of motors equitably used to increase access to one another. I recognize, of course, that high speeds inevitably impose a skewed distribution of harriedness, noise, pollution, and enjoyment of privilege. But my emphasis is other. My arguments are focused on the negative internalities of modernity – such as time-consuming acceleration, sick-making health care, stupefying education. The unequal distribution of these ersatz benefits, or the unequal imposition of their negative externalities, are corollaries to my basic argument. I am interested in the direct and specific effects of modernized poverty, in human tolerance for such effects and in the possibility of escaping the new misery. I share with others a deep desire to see greater justice. I am absolutely opposed to the unjust distribution of what can be genuinely shared with pleasure. But I have found it necessary, these last few years, to examine carefully the objects of any and every redistribution proposal. Today I see my task even more clearly than when I first started talking and writing about the counterproductive mythmaking that is latent in all late industrial enterprises. My aim has been to detect and denounce the false affluence which is always unjust because it can only frustrate. Through this kind of analysis one can begin to develop the theory which would inspire the social regeneration possible for twentieth-century man. - -During these last years I have found it necessary to examine, again and again, the correlation between the nature of tools and the meaning of justice that prevails in the society that uses them. I could not help but observe the decline of freedom in societies in which rights are shaped by expertise. I had to weigh the trade-offs between new tools that enhance the production of commodities and those equally modern ones that permit the generation of values in use; between rights to mass-produced commodities and the level of liberties that permit satisfying and creative personal expression; between paid employment and useful unemployment. And in each dimension of the trade-off between heteronomous management and autonomous action I found that the language that would permit us to insist on the latter has to be recovered with pains. I am, of course, like those whom I seek as my readers, so clearly committed to a radically equitable distribution of goods, rights and jobs that I find it almost unnecessary to insist on our struggle for this side of justice. I find it much more important and difficult to deal with its complement: the Politics of Conviviality. I use this term in the technical sense that I have given to it in Tools for Conviviality. There the term designates the struggle for an equitable distribution of the liberty to generate use-values and for the instrumentation of this liberty by the assignment of an absolute priority to the production of those industrial and professional commodities that confer on the least advantaged the greatest power to generate values in use. - -Convivial Politics are based on the insight that in a modern society both wealth and jobs can be equitably shared and enjoyed in liberty only when both are limited by a political process. Excessive forms of wealth and prolonged formal employment, no matter how well distributed, destroy the social, cultural, and environmental conditions for equal productive freedom. Bits and watts (which stand for units of information and of energy respectively) when packaged into any mass-produced commodity in amounts that pass a threshold, inevitably constitute impoverishing wealth. Such impoverishing wealth is either too rare to be shared, or it is destructive of the freedom and liberty of the weakest. With each of my essays I have attempted to make a contribution to the political process by which the socially critical thresholds of enrichment are recognized by citizens and translated into society-wide ceilings or limits. - - -### Introduction - -Fifty years ago, most of the words heard by an American were personally spoken to him as an individual, or to somebody standing nearby. Only occasionally did words reach him as the undifferentiated member of a crowd – in the classroom or church, at a rally or a circus. Words were mostly like handwritten, sealed letters, and not like the junk that now pollutes our mail. Today, words that are directed to one person’s attention have become rare. Engineered staples of images, ideas, feelings and opinions, packaged and delivered through the media, assault our sensibilities with round-the-clock regularity. Two points now become evident: 1) what is occurring with language fits the pattern of an increasingly wide range of need-satisfaction relationships; 2) this replacement of convivial means by manipulative industrial ware is truly universal, and is relentlessly making the New York teacher, the Chinese commune member, the Bantu schoolboy, and the Brazilian sergeant alike. In this postscript to my essay Tools for Conviviality I shall do three things: 1) describe the character of a commodity/market-intensive society in which the very abundance of commodities paralyzes the autonomous creation of use-values; 2) insist on the hidden role that professions play in such a society by shaping its needs; 3) expose some illusions and propose some strategies to break the professional power that perpetuates market dependence. - -### Disabling Market Intensity - -Crisis has come to mean that moment when doctors, diplomats, bankers and assorted social engineers take over and liberties are suspended. Like patients, nations go on the critical list. Crisis, the Greek term that has designated "choice" or "turning point" in all modern languages now means "driver, step on the gas". Crisis now evokes an ominous but tractable threat against which money, manpower and management can be rallied. Intensive care for the dying, bureaucratic tutelage for the victim of discrimination, fission for the energy glutton, are typical responses. Crisis, understood in this way, is always good for executives and commissars, especially those scavengers who live on the side effects of yesterday’s growth: educators who live on society’s alienation, doctors who prosper on the work and leisure that have destroyed health, politicians who thrive on the distribution of welfare which, in the first instance, was financed by those assisted. Crisis understood as a call for acceleration not only puts more power under the control of the driver, while squeezing the passengers more tightly into their safety belts; it also justifies the depredation of space, time and resources for the sake of motorized wheels and it does so to the detriment of people who want to use their feet. - -But crisis need not have this meaning. It need not imply a headlong rush for the escalation of management. Instead, it can mean the instant of choice, that marvellous moment when people suddenly become aware of their self-imposed cages, and of the possibility of a different life. And this is the crisis, that, as a choice, confronts both the United States and the world today. - -#### A world-wide choice - -In only a few decades, the world has become an amalgam. Human responses to everyday occurrences have been standardized. Though languages and gods still appear to be different, people daily join the stupendous majority who march to the beat of the very same mega-machine. The light switch by the door has replaced the dozens of ways in which fires, candles and lanterns were formerly kindled. In ten years, the number of switch-users in the world has tripled: flush and paper have become essential conditions for the relief of the bowels. Light that does not flow from high-voltage networks and hygiene without tissue paper spell poverty for ever more people. Expectations grow, while hopeful trust in one’s own competence and the concern for others rapidly decline. - -The now soporific, now raucous intrusion of the media reaches deeply into the commune, the village, the corporation, the school. The sounds made by the editors and announcers of programmed texts daily pervert the words of a spoken language into the building blocks for packaged messages. Today, one must either be isolated and cut off, or a carefully guarded, affluent drop-out, to allow one’s children to play in an environment where they listen to people rather than to stars, speakers, or instructors. All over the world, one can see the rapid encroachment of the disciplined acquiescence that characterizes the audience, the client, the customer. The standardization of human action grows apace. - -It now becomes clear that most of the world’s communities are facing exactly the same critical issue: people must either remain ciphers in the conditioned crowd that surges towards greater dependence (thus necessitating savage battles for a share of the drugs to feed their habit), or they must find the courage that alone saves in a panic: to stand still and look around for another way out than the obvious marked exit. But many, when told that Bolivians, Canadians and Hungarians all face the same fundamental choice, are not simply annoyed, but deeply offended. The idea appears not only foolish but shocking. They fail to detect the sameness in the new bitter degradation that underlies the hunger of the Indian in the Altiplano, the neurosis of the worker in Amsterdam, and the cynical corruption of the bureaucrat in Warsaw. - -#### Towards a culture for staples - -Development has had the same effect in all societies: everyone has been enmeshed in a new web of dependence on commodities that flow out of the same kind of machines, factories, clinics, television studios, think tanks. To satisfy this dependence, more of the same must be produced: standardized, engineered goods, designed for the future consumers who will be trained by the engineer’s agent to need what he or she is offered. These products – be they tangible goods or intangible services – constitute the industrial staple. Their imputed monetary value as a commodity is determined by state and market in varying proportions. Thus different cultures become insipid residues of traditional styles of action, washed up in one world-wide wasteland: an arid terrain devastated by the machinery needed to produce and consume. On the banks of the Seine and those of the Niger, people have unlearned how to milk, because the white stuff now comes from the grocer. (Thanks to more richly endowed consumer protection, it is less poisonous in France than in Mali.) True, more babies get cow’s milk, but the breasts of both rich and poor dry up. The addicted consumer is born when the baby cries for the bottle: when the organism is trained to reach for milk from the grocer and to turn away from the breast that thus defaults. Autonomous and creative human action, required to make man’s universe bloom, atrophies. Roofs of shingle or thatch, tile or slate, are displaced by concrete for the few and corrugated plastic for the many. Neither jungle marshes nor ideological biases have prevented the poor and the socialist from rushing onto the highways of the rich, the roads leading them into the world where economists replace priests. The mint stamps out all local treasures and idols. Money devalues what it cannot measure. The crisis, then, is the same for all: the choice of more or less dependence upon industrial commodities. More dependence means the rapid and complete destruction of cultures which determine the criteria for satisfying subsistence activities. Less means the variegated flowering of use-values in modern cultures of intense activity. Although hard to imagine for those already accustomed to living inside the supermarket, a structure different only in name from a ward for idiots, the choice is essentially the same for both rich and poor. - -Present-day industrial society organizes life around commodities. Our market-intensive societies measure material progress by the increase in the volume and variety of commodities produced. And taking our cue from this sector, we measure social progress by the distribution of access to these commodities. Economics has been developed as propaganda for the takeover by large-scale commodity producers. Socialism has been debased to a struggle against handicapped distribution, and welfare economics has identified the public good with opulence – the humiliating opulence of the poor in the schools, hospitals, jails and asylums of the United States and other western countries. - -By disregarding all trade-offs to which no price tag is attached, industrial society has created an urban landscape that is unfit for people unless they devour each day their own weight in metals and fuels, a world in which the constant need for protection against the unwanted results of more things and more commands has generated new depths of discrimination, impotence and frustration. The establishment-orientated ecological movement so far has further strengthened this trend: it has concentrated attention on faulty industrial technology, and, at best, on exploitation of industrial production by private owners. It has questioned the depletion of natural resources, the inconvenience of pollution, and net transfers of power. But even when price tags are attached to reflect the environmental impact, the disvalue of nuisance, or the cost of polarization, we still do not see clearly that the division of labour, the multiplication of commodities and dependence on them have forcibly substituted standardized packages for almost everything people formerly did or made on their own. - -For two decades now, about fifty languages have died each year; half of all those still spoken in 1950 survive only as subjects for doctoral theses. And what distinct languages do remain to witness the incomparably different ways of seeing, using, and enjoying the world, now sound more and more alike. Consciousness is colonized everywhere by imported labels. Yet, even those who do worry about the loss of cultural and genetic variety, or about the multiplication of long-impact isotopes, do not advert to the irreversible depletion of skills, stories, and senses of form. And this progressive substitution of industrial goods and services for useful but non-marketable values has been the shared goal of political factions and regimes otherwise violently opposed to one another. - -In this way, ever larger pieces of our lives are so transformed that life itself comes to depend almost exclusively on the consumption of commodities sold on the world market. The United States corrupts its farmers to provide grain to a regime which increasingly stakes its legitimacy on the ability to deliver ever more grain. Of course, the two regimes allocate resources by different methods: here, by the wisdom of pricing; there, by the wisdom of planners. But the political opposition between proponents of alternate methods of allocation only masks the similar ruthless disregard of personal dignity and freedom by all factions and parties. - -Energy policy is a good example for the profound identity in the world-views of the self-styled socialist and the so-called capitalist supporters of the industrial system. Possibly excluding such places as Cambodia, about which I am uninformed, no governing élite nor any socialist opposition can conceive of a desirable future that would be based on per capita energy consumption of a magnitude inferior to that which now prevails in Europe. All existing political parties stress the need for energy-intensive production – albeit with Chinese discipline – while failing to comprehend that the corresponding society will further deny people the free use of their limbs. Here sedans and there buses push bicycles off the road. All governments stress an employment-intensive force of production, but are unwilling to recognize that jobs can also destroy the use-value of free time. They all stress a more objective and complete professional definition of people’s needs, but are insensitive to the consequent expropriation of life. - -In the late Middle Ages the stupefying simplicity of the heliocentric model was used as an argument to discredit the new astronomy. Its elegance was interpreted as naivete. In our days, use-value centred theories that analyze the social costs generated by established economics are certainly not rare. Such theories are being proposed by dozens of outsiders, who often identify them with radical technology, ecology, community life-styles, smallness, or beauty. As an excuse to avoid looking at these theories, the frequent failure of their proponents" experiments in personal living are held against them and magnified. Just as the legendary inquisitor refused to look through Galileo’s telescope, so most modern economists refuse to look at an analysis that might displace the conventional centre of their economic system. The new analytical systems would force us to recognize the obvious: that the generation of non-marketable use-values must inevitably occupy the centre of any culture that provides a programme for satisfactory life to a majority of its members. Cultures are programmes for activities, not for firms. Industrial society destroys this centre by polluting it with the measured output of corporations, public or private, degrading what people do or make on their own. As a consequence, societies have been transformed into huge zero-sum games, monolithic delivery systems in which every gain for one turns into a loss or burden for another, while true satisfaction is denied to both. - -On the way, innumerable sets of infrastructures in which people coped, played, ate, made friends, and loved have been destroyed. A couple of so-called development decades have sufficed to dismantle traditional patterns of culture from Manchuria to Montenegro. Prior to these years, such patterns permitted people to satisfy most of their needs in a subsistence mode. After these years, plastic had replaced pottery, carbonated beverages replaced water, Valium replaced camomile tea, and records replaced guitars. All through history, the best measure for bad times was the percentage of food eaten that had to be purchased. In good times, most families got most of their nutrition from what they grew or acquired in a network of gift relationships. Until late in the eighteenth century, more than 99 per cent of the world’s food was produced inside the horizon that the consumer could see from the church steeple or minaret. Laws that tried to control the number of chickens and pigs within the city walls suggest that, except for a few large urban areas, more than half of all food eaten was also cultivated within the city. Before World War II, less than 4 per cent of all food eaten was transported into the region from abroad, and these imports were largely confined to the eleven cities which then contained more than two million inhabitants. Today, 40 per cent of all people survive only because they have access to inter-regional markets. A future in which the world market of capital and goods would be severely reduced is as much a taboo today as a modern world in which active people would use modern convivial tools to create an abundance of use-values that liberated them from consumption. One can see in this pattern a reflection of the belief that useful activities by which people both express and satisfy their needs can be replaced indefinitely by standardized goods or services. - -#### The modernization of poverty - -Beyond a certain threshold, the multiplication of commodities induces impotence, the incapacity to grow food, to sing, or to build. The toil and pleasure of the human condition become a faddish privilege restricted to some of the rich. When Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress, Acatzingo, like most Mexican villages of its size, had four groups of musicians who played for a drink and served the population of eight hundred. Today, records and radios, hooked up to loudspeakers, drown out local talent. Occasionally, in an act of nostalgia, a collection is taken up to bring a band of drop-outs from the university for some special holiday to sing the old songs. On the day Venezuela legislated the right of each citizen to "housing", conceived of as a commodity, three-quarters of all families found that their self-built dwellings were thereby degraded to the status of hovels. Furthermore – and this is the rub – self-building was now prejudiced. No house could be legally started without the submission of an approved architect’s plan. The useful refuse and junk of Caracas, up until then re-employed as excellent building materials, now created a problem of solid-waste disposal. The man who produces his own "housing" is looked down upon as a deviant who refuses to cooperate with the local pressure group for the delivery of mass-produced housing units. Also, innumerable regulations have appeared which brand his ingenuity as illegal, or even criminal. This example illustrates how the poor are the first to suffer when a new kind of commodity castrates one of the traditional subsistence crafts. The useful unemployment of the jobless poor is sacrificed to the expansion of the labour market. "Housing" as a self-chosen activity, just like any other freedom for useful unemployment of time off the job, becomes the privilege of some deviant, often the idle rich. - -An addiction to paralyzing affluence, once it becomes engrained in a culture, generates " modernized poverty". This is a form of disvalue necessarily associated with the proliferation of commodities. This rising disutility of industrial mass products has escaped the attention of economists, because it is not accessible to their measurements, and of social servicers, because it cannot be "operationalized". Economists have no effective means of including in their calculations the society-wide loss of a kind of satisfaction that has no market equivalent. Thus, one could today define economists as the members of a fraternity which only accepts people who, in the pursuit of their professional work, can practice a trained social blindness towards the most fundamental trade-off in contemporary systems, both East and West: the decline in the individual-personal ability to do or to make, which is the price of every additional degree of commodity affluence. - -The existence and nature of modernized poverty remained hidden, even in ordinary conversation, as long as it primarily affected the poor. As development, or modernization, reached the poor – those who until then had been able to survive in spite of being excluded from the market economy – they were systematically compelled to survive through buying into a purchasing system which, for them, always and necessarily meant getting the dregs of the market. Indians in Oaxaca who formerly had no access to schools are now drafted into school to "earn" certificates that measure precisely their inferiority relative to the urban population. Furthermore – and this is again the rub – without this piece of paper they can no longer enter even the building trades. Modernization of "needs" always adds new discrimination to poverty. - -Modernized poverty has now become the common experience of all except those who are so rich that they can drop out in luxury. As one facet of life after another becomes dependent on engineered supplies, few of us escape the recurrent experience of impotence. The average United States consumer is bombarded by a hundred advertisements per day, and reacts to many of them – more often than not – in a negative way. Even well-heeled shoppers acquire, with each new commodity, a fresh experience of disutility. They suspect they have purchased something of doubtful value, perhaps soon useless, or even dangerous, and something that calls for an array of even more expensive complements. Affluent shoppers organize: they usually begin with demands for quality control, and not infrequently generate consumer resistance. Across the tracks, slum neighbourhoods "unplug" themselves from service and "care", from social work in South Chicago and from textbooks in Kentucky. Rich and poor are almost ready to recognize clearly a new form of frustrating wealth in the further expansions of a market-intensive culture. Also, the affluent come to sense their own plight as it is mirrored in the poor, though for the moment this intimation has not developed beyond a kind of romanticism. - -The ideology that identifies progress with affluence is not restricted to the rich countries. The same ideology degrades non-marketable activities even in areas where, until recently, most needs were still met through a subsistence mode of life. For example, under Mao the Chinese – drawing inspiration from their own tradition – seemed willing and able to redefine technical progress and to opt for the bicycle over the jet plane. They stressed local self-determination as a goal of inventive people, rather than as a means for national defence. But by 1977, their propaganda was glorying in China’s industrial capacity to deliver more health care, education, housing, and general welfare – at a lower cost. Merely tactical functions are provisionally assigned to the herbs in the bag of the barefoot doctor and to labour-intensive production methods. Here, as in other areas of the world, heteronomous – that is, other-directed – production of goods, standardized for categories of anonymous consumers, fosters unrealistic and ultimately frustrating expectations. Furthermore, the process inevitably corrupts the trust of people in their own and their neighbours" ever-surprising autonomous competences. China simply represents the latest example of the particular western version of modernization through intensive market dependence seizing a traditional society as no cargo cult did at its most irrational extreme. - -#### The history of needs - -In both traditional and modern societies, an important change has occurred in a very short period: the means for satisfaction of needs have been radically altered. The motor has sapped the muscle; instruction has deadened self-confident curiosity. As a consequence, both needs and wants have acquired a character for which there is no historical precedent. For the first time, needs have become almost exclusively coterminous with commodities. As long as most people walked wherever they wanted to go, they felt restrained mainly when their freedom was restricted. Now that they depend on transportation in order to move, they claim not a freedom but a right to passenger miles. And as ever more vehicles provide ever more people with such "rights", the freedom to walk is degraded and eclipsed by the provision of these rights. For most people, wants follow suit. They cannot even imagine liberation from universal passengerhood, that is the liberty of modern man in a modern world to move on his own. - -This situation, by now a rigid interdependence of needs and market, is legitimated through appeal to the expertise of an élite whose knowledge, by its very nature, cannot be shared. Economists of rightist as well as leftist persuasion vouch to the public that an increase in jobs depends on more energy; educators persuade the public that law, order, and productivity depend on more instruction; gynaecologists claim that the quality of infant life depends on their involvement in childbirth. Therefore, the near-universal extension of market intensity in the world’s economies cannot be effectively questioned as long as the immunity of the élites which legitimize the nexus between commodity and satisfaction has not been destroyed. The point is well illustrated by a woman who told me about the birth of her third child. Having borne two children, she felt both competent and experienced. She was in hospital and sensed the child coming. She called the nurse, who, instead of helping, rushed for a sterile towel to press the baby’s head back into the womb and ordered the mother to stop pushing because, "Dr. Levy has not yet arrived". - -But this is the moment for public decision, for political action instead of professional management. Modern societies, rich or poor, can move in either of two opposite directions: they can produce a new bill of goods — albeit safer, less wasteful, more easily shared — and thereby further intensify their dependence on consumer staples. Or, they can take a totally new approach to the inter-relationship between needs and satisfactions. In other words, societies can either retain their market-intensive economies, changing only the design of the output, or they can reduce their dependence on commodities. The latter entails the adventure of imagining and constructing new frameworks in which individuals and communities can develop a new kind of modern toolkit. This would be organized so as to permit people to shape and satisfy an expanding proportion of their needs directly and personally. - -The first direction represents a continuing identification of technical progress with the multiplication of commodities. The bureaucratic managers of egalitarian persuasion and the technocrats of welfare would converge in a call for austerity: to shift from goods, such as jets, that obviously cannot be shared, to so-called "social" equipment, like buses; to distribute more equitably the decreasing hours of employment available and ruthlessly limit the typical work week to about twenty hours on the job; to draft the new resource of unemployed life-time into retraining or voluntary service on the model of Mao, Castro, or Kennedy. This new stage of industrial society – though socialist, effective, and rational – would simply usher in a new state of the culture that downgraded the satisfaction of wants into repetitive relief of imputed needs through engineered staples. At its best, this alternative would produce goods and services in smaller quantities, distribute them more equitably, and foster less envy. The symbolic participation of people in deciding what ought to be made might be transferred from a buck in the market to a gawk in the political assembly. The environmental impact of production could be softened. Among commodities, services, especially the various forms of social control, would certainly grow much faster than the manufacture of goods. Huge sums are already being spent on the oracle industry so that government prophets can spew out "alternative" scenarios designed to shore up this first choice. Interestingly, many of them have already reached the conclusion that the cost of the social controls necessary to enforce austerity in an ecologically feasible, but still industry-centred society would be intolerable. - -The second choice would bring down the curtain on absolute market dominance, and foster an ethic of austerity for the sake of widespread satisfying action. If in the first alternative austerity would mean the individual’s acceptance of managerial ukazes for the sake of increased institutional productivity, austerity in the second alternative would mean that social virtue by which people recognize and decide limits on the maximum amount of instrumented power that anyone may claim, both for his own satisfaction and in the service of others. This convivial austerity inspires a society to protect personal use-value against disabling enrichment. Under such protection against disabling affluence many distinct cultures would arise, each modern and each emphasizing the dispersed use of modern tools. Convivial austerity so limits the use of any tool that tool ownership would lose much of its present power. If bicycles are owned here by the commune, there by the rider, nothing is changed about the essentially convivial nature of the bicycle as a tool. Such commodities would still be produced in large measure by industrial methods, but they would be seen and evaluated differently. Now, commodities are viewed mostly as staples that directly feed the needs shaped by their designers. In the second option, they would be valued either as raw materials or as tools that permitted people to generate use-values in maintaining the subsistence of their respective communities. But this choice depends, of course, on a Copernican revolution in our perception of values. At present, we see consumer goods and professional services at the centre of our economic system, and specialists relate our needs exclusively to this centre. In contrast, the social inversion contemplated here would assign use-values created and personally valued by people themselves to the centre. It is true that people have recently lost the confidence to shape their own desires. The world-wide discrimination against the autodidact has vitiated many people’s confidence in determining their own goals and needs. But the same discrimination has also resulted in a multiplicity of growing minorities who are infuriated by this insidious dispossession. - -### Disabling professions - -These minorities already see that they – and all autochthonous cultural life – are threatened by mega-tools which systematically expropriate the environmental conditions that foster individual and group autonomy. And so they quietly determine to fight for the usefulness of their bodies, memories, and skills. Because the rapidly increasing multiplication of imputed needs generates ever new kinds of dependence and ever new categories of modernized poverty, present-day industrial societies take on the character of interdependent conglomerates of bureaucratically stigmatized majorities. Among this great mass of citizens who are crippled by transport, rendered sleepless by schedules, poisoned by hormone therapy, silenced by loudspeakers, sickened by food, a few form minorities of organized and active citizens. Now these are barely beginning to grow and coalesce for public dissidence. Subjectively, these groups are ready to end an age. But to be dispatched, an age needs a name that sticks. I propose to call the mid-twentieth century the Age of Disabling Professions. I choose this designation because it commits those who use it. It exposes the anti-social functions performed by the least challenged providers: educators, physicians, social workers, and scientists. Simultaneously, it indicts the complacency of citizens who have submitted themselves to multi-faceted bondage as clients. To speak about the power of disabling professions shames their victims into recognizing the conspiracy of the life-long student, gynaecological case, or consumer, each with his or her manager. By describing the sixties as an apogee of the problem-solver, one immediately exposes both the inflated conceit of our academic élites and the greedy gullibility of their victims. - -But this focus on the makers of the social imagination and the cultural values does more than expose and denounce; by designating the last twenty-five years as the Age of Dominant Professions, one also proposes a strategy. One sees the necessity of going beyond the expert redistribution of wasteful, irrational, and paralyzing commodities, the hallmark of Radical Professionalism, the conventional wisdom of today’s good guys. The strategy demands nothing less than the unmasking of the professional ethos. The credibility of the professional expert, be he scientist, therapist, or executive, is the Achilles" heel of the industrial system. Therefore, only those citizen initiatives and radical technologies that directly challenge the insinuating dominance of disabling professions open the way to freedom for non-hierarchical, community-based competence. The waning of the current professional ethos is a necessary condition for the emergence of a new relationship between needs, contemporary tools, and personal satisfaction. The first step toward this emergence is a sceptical and non-deferential posture of the citizen towards the professional expert. Social reconstruction begins with a doubt raised among citizens. - -When I propose the analysis of professional power as the key to social reconstruction, I am usually told that it is a dangerous error to select this phenomenon as the crux for recovery from the industrial system. Is not the shape of the educational, medical, and planning establishments actually the reflection of the distribution of power and privilege of a capitalist élite? Is it not irresponsible to undermine the trust of the man in the street in his scientifically-trained teacher, physician, or economist precisely at the moment when the poor need these trained protectors to gain access to classroom, clinic, and expert? Ought not the industrial system’s indictment expose the income of stockholders in drug firms or the perquisites of power-brokers that belong to the new élites? Why spoil the mutual dependence of clients and professional providers, especially when increasingly – as in Cuba or the United States – both tend to come from the same social class? Is it not perverse to denigrate the very people who have painfully acquired the knowledge to recognize and service our needs for welfare? In fact, should not the radically socialist professional leaders be singled out as the most apt leaders in the ongoing task of society of defining and meeting people’s "real" needs in an egalitarian society? - -The arguments implicit in these questions are frequently advanced to disrupt and discredit public analysis of the disabling effects of industrial welfare systems which focus on services. Such effects are essentially identical and clearly inevitable, no matter what the political flag under which they are imposed. They incapacitate people’s autonomy through forcing them – via legal, environmental, and social changes – to become consumers of care. These rhetorical questions represent a frantic defence of privilege on the part of those élites who might lose income, but would certainly gain status and power if, in a new form of a market-intensive economy, dependence on their services were rendered more equitable. - -A further objection to the critique of professional power drives out the devil with Beelzebub. This objection singles out, as the key target for analysis, the defence conglomerates seemingly at the centre of each bureaucratic-industrial society. The developed argument then posits the security forces as the motor behind the contemporary universal regimentation into market-dependent discipline. It identifies as the principal need-makers the armed bureaucracies that have come into being since, under Louis XIV, Richelieu established the first professional police: that is, the professional agencies that are now in charge of weaponry, intelligence, and propaganda. Since Hiroshima, these so-called services appear to be the determinants for research, design production, and employment. They rest upon civilian foundations, such as schooling for discipline, consumer training for the enjoyment of waste, habituation to violent speeds, medical engineering for life in a world-wide shelter, and standardized dependence on issues dispensed by benevolent quartermasters. This line of thought sees state security as the generator of a society’s production patterns, and views the civilian economy as, to a large extent, either the military’s spin-off or its prerequisite. - -If an argument constructed around these notions were valid, how could such a society forego atomic power, no matter how poisonous, oppressive or counter-productive a further energy glut might be? How could a defence-ridden state be expected to tolerate the organization of disaffected citizen groups who unplug their neighbourhoods from consumption to claim the liberty to small-scale use-value-intensive production that happens in an atmosphere of satisfying and joyful austerity? Would not a militarized society soon have to move against need-deserters, brand them as traitors, and, if possible, expose them not just to scorn but to ridicule? Would not a defence-driven society have to stamp out those examples that would lead to non-violent modernity, just at the time when public policy calls for a decentralization of commodity production reminiscent of Mao, and for more rational, equitable, and professionally supervised consumption? - -This argument pays undue credit to the military as the source of violence in an industrial state. The assumption that military requirements are to blame for the aggressiveness and destructiveness of advanced industrial society must be exposed as an illusion. No doubt, if it were true that the military had somehow usurped the industrial system, if it had wrenched the various spheres of social endeavour and action away from civilian control, then the present state of militarized politics would have reached a point of no return; at least of no potential for civilian reform. This is in fact the argument made by the brightest of Brazil’s military leaders, who see the armed forces as the only legitimate tutor of peaceful industrial pursuit during the rest of this century. - -But this is simply not so. The modern industrial state is not a product of the army. Rather, its army is one of the symptoms of its total and consistent orientation. True, the present industrial mode of organization can be traced to military antecedents in Napoleonic times. True, the compulsory education for peasant boys in the 1830s, the universal health care for the industrial proletariat in the 1850s, the growing communications networks of the 1860s, as well as most forms of industrial standardization, are all strategies first introduced into modern societies as military requirements, and only later understood as dignified forms of peaceful, civilian progress. But the fact that systems of health, education, and welfare needed a military rationale to be enacted into law, does not mean that they were not thoroughly consistent with the basic thrust of industrial development which, in fact, was never non-violent, peaceful, or respectful of people. - -Today, this insight is easier to gain. First, because since Polaris it is no longer possible to distinguish between wartime and peacetime armies and second, because since the War on Poverty, peace is on the war-path. Today, industrial societies are constantly and totally mobilized; they are organized for constant public emergencies; they are shot through with variegated strategies in all sectors; the battlefields of health, education, welfare, and affimative equality are strewn with victims and covered with ruins; citizens" liberties are continually suspended for campaigns against ever newly discovered evils; each year new frontier-dwellers are discovered who must be protected against or cured of some new disease, some previously unknown ignorance. The basic needs that are shaped and imputed by all professional agencies are needs for defence against evils. - -Today’s professors and social scientists who seek to blame the military for the destructiveness of commodity -intensive societies are people who, in a very clumsy way, are attempting to arrest the erosion of their own legitimacy. They claim that the military pushes the industrial system into its frustrating and destructive state, thereby distracting attention from the profoundly destructive nature of a market-intensive society which drives its citizens into today’s wars. Both those who seek to protect professional autonomy against citizen maturity, and those who wish to portray the professional as victim of the militarized state, will be answered by a choice: the direction free citizens wish to go in order to supersede the world-wide crisis. - -#### The waning of the professional age - -The illusions that permitted the installation of professions as arbiters of needs are now increasingly visible to common sense. Procedures in the service sector are often understood for what they are – Linus Blankets, or rituals that hide from the provider- consumer-caboodle the disparity and antipathy between the ideal for the sake of which the service is rendered, and the reality that the service creates. Schools that promise equal enlightenment generate unequally degrading meritocracy and life-long dependence on further tutorship; vehicles compel everyone to a flight forward. But the public has not yet clarified the choices. Projects under professional leadership could result in compulsory political creeds (with their accompanying versions of a new fascism), or experiences of citizens could dismiss our hubris as yet another historical collection of neo-Promethean but essentially ephemeral follies. Informed choice requires that we examine the specific role of the professions in determining who in this age got what from whom and why. - -To see the present clearly, let us imagine the children who will soon play in the ruins of high-schools, Hiltons – and hospitals. In these professional castles turned cathedrals, built to protect us against ignorance, discomfort, pain, and death, the children of tomorrow will re-enact in their play the delusions of our Age of Professions, as from ancient castles and cathedrals we reconstruct the crusades of knights against sin and the Turk in the Age of Faith. Children in their games will mingle the uniquack which now pollutes our language with archaisms inherited from robber barons and cowboys. I see them addressing each other as chairman and secretary rather than as chief and lord. Hopefully adults will blush when they slip into managerial pidgin with terms such as policy-making, social planning, and problem-solving. - -The Age of Professions will be remembered as the time when politics withered, when voters guided by professors entrusted to technocrats the power to legislate needs, the authority to decide who needs what and a monopoly over the means by which these needs shall be met. It will be remembered as the Age of Schooling, when people for one-third of their lives were trained how to accumulate needs on prescription and for the other two-thirds were clients of prestigious pushers who managed their habits. It will be remembered as the age when recreational travel meant a packaged gawk at strangers, and intimacy meant training by Masters and Johnson; when formed opinion was a replay of last night’s talk-show, and voting an endorsement to a salesman for more of the same. - -Future students will be as much confused by the supposed differences between capitalist and socialist school, health-care, prison or transportation systems as today’s students are by the claimed differences between justification by works as opposed to justification by faith in the late Reformation Christian sects. They will also discover that the professional librarians, surgeons, or supermarket designers in poor or socialist countries towards the end of each decade came to keep the same records, use the same tools, and build the same spaces that their colleagues in rich countries had pioneered at the decade’s beginning. Archeologists will periodize our life-span not by potsherds but by professional fashions, reflected in the mod-trends of United Nations publications. - -It would be pretentious to predict whether this age, when needs were shaped by professional design, will be remembered with a smile or a curse. I hope, of course, that it will be remembered as the night when father went on a binge, dissipated the family fortune, and obligated his children to start anew. Sadly, it will more probably be remembered as the time when a whole generation’s frenzied pursuit of impoverishing wealth rendered all freedoms alienable and, after first turning politics into the organized gripes of welfare recipients, extinguished it in expert totalitarianism. - -#### Professional dominance - -Let us first face the fact that the bodies of specialists that now dominate the creation, adjudication, and satisfaction of needs are a new kind of cartel. And this must be recognized to outflank their developing defences. For we already see the new biocrat hiding behind the benevolent mask of the physician of old; the paedocrat’s behavioural aggression is shrugged off as perhaps silly, overzealous care of the concerned teacher; the personnel manager equipped with a psychological arsenal presents himself in the guise of an old-time foreman. The new specialists, who are usually servicers of human needs that their speciality has defined, tend to wear the mask of and to provide some form of care. They are more deeply entrenched than a Byzantine bureaucracy, more international than a world church, more stable than any labour union, endowed with wider competencies than any shaman, and equipped with a tighter hold over those they claim than any mafia. - -The new organized specialists must, first, be carefully distinguished from racketeers. Educators, for instance, now tell society what must be learned and can write off as useless what has been learned outside of school. By this kind of monopoly, which enables tyrannical professions to prevent you from shopping elsewhere and from making your own booze, they at first seem to fit the dictionary definition of gangsters. But gangsters, for their own profit, corner a basic necessity by controlling supplies. Educators and doctors and social workers today – as priests and lawyers formerly – gain legal power to create the need that, by law, they alone will be allowed to serve. They turn the modern state into a holding corporation of enterprises that facilitate the operation of their self-certified competencies. - -Legalized control over work has taken many different forms: soldiers of fortune refused to fight until they got the licence to plunder; Lysistrata organized female chattels to enforce peace by refusing sex; doctors in Kos conspired by oath to pass trade secrets only to their offspring; guilds set the curricula, prayers, tests, pilgrimages and hazings through which Hans Sachs had to pass before he was permitted to shoe his fellow burghers. In capitalist countries, unions attempt to control who shall work what hours for what pay. All these trade associations are attempts by specialists to determine how their kind of work shall be done, and by whom. But none of these specialists are professionals in the sense that doctors, for instance, are today. Today’s domineering professionals, of whom physicians provide the most striking and painful example, go further: they decide what shall be made, for whom, and how it shall be administered. They claim special, incommunicable knowledge, not just about the way things are and are to be made, but also about the reasons why their services ought to be needed. Merchants sell you the goods they stock. Guildsmen guarantee quality. Some craftspeople tailor their product to your measure or fancy. Professionals however, tell you what you need. They claim the power to prescribe. They not only advertise what is good, but ordain what is right. Neither income, long training, delicate tasks, nor social standing is the mark of the professional. Their income can be low or taxed away, their training compressed into weeks instead of years; their status can approach that of the oldest profession. Rather, what counts is the professional’s authority to define a person as client, to determine that person’s need, and to hand that person a prescription which defines this new social role. Unlike the hookers of old, the modern professional is not one who sells what others give for free, but rather one who decides what ought to be sold and must not be given for free. - -There is a further distinction between professional power and that of other occupations: professional power springs from a different source. A guild, a union, or a gang forces respect for its interest and rights by a strike, blackmail, or overt violence. In contrast, a profession, like a priesthood, holds power by concession from an élite whose interests it props up. As a priesthood offers the way to salvation in the train of an anointed king, so a profession interprets, protects, and supplies a special this-worldly interest to the constituency of modern rulers. Professional power is a specialized form of the privilege to prescribe what is right for others and what they therefore need. It is the source of prestige and control within the industrial state. This kind of professional power could, of course, come into existence only in societies where élite membership itself is legitimated, if not acquired, by professional status: a society where governing élites are attributed a unique kind of objectivity in defining the moral status of a lack. It fits like a glove the age in which even access to parliament, the house of commons, is overwhelmingly limited to those who have acquired the title of master by accumulating knowledge stock in some college. Professional autonomy and licence, in defining the needs of society are the logical forms that oligarchy takes in a political culture that has replaced the means-test by knowledge-stock certificates issued by schools. The professions" power over the work their members do is thus distinct in both scope and origin. - -#### Towards professional tyranny - -Professional power has also, recently, so changed in degree that two animals of entirely different colours now go by the same name. For instance, the practicing and experimenting health scientist consistently evades critical analysis by dressing up in the clothes of yesterday’s family doctor. The wandering physician became the medical doctor when he left commerce in drugs to the pharmacist and kept for himself the power to prescribe them. At that moment, he acquired a new kind of authority by uniting three roles in one person: the sapiential authority to advise, instruct, and direct; the moral authority that makes its acceptance not just useful but obligatory; and the charismatic authority that allows the physician to appeal to some supreme interest of his clients that not only outranks conscience but sometimes even the raison d’état. This kind of doctor, of course, still exists, but within a modern medical system he is a figure out of the past. A new kind of health scientist is now much more common. He increasingly deals more with cases than with persons; he deals with the breakdowns that he can perceive in the case, rather than with the complaint of the individual; he protects society’s interest rather than the person’s. The authorities that, during the liberal age, had coalesced in the individual practitioner in his treatment of a patient are now claimed by the professional corporation in the service of the state. This entity now carves out for itself a social mission. - -Only during the last twenty-five years has medicine turned from a liberal into a dominant profession by obtaining the power to indicate what constitutes a health need for people in general. Health specialists as a corporation have acquired the authority to determine what health care must be provided to society at large. It is no longer the individual professional who imputes a "need" to the individual client, but a corporate agency that imputes a need to entire classes of people, and then claims the mandate to test the complete population in order to identify all who belong to the group of potential patients. And what happens in health care is thoroughly consistent with other domains. New pundits jump on the bandwagon of the therapeutic care-provider: educators, social workers, the military, town-planners, judges, policemen, and their ilk have obviously made it. They enjoy wide autonomy in creating the diagnostic tools by which they then catch their clients for treatment. Dozens of other need-creators try: international bankers "diagnose" the ills of an African country and then induce it to swallow the prescribed treatment, even though the "patient" might die; security specialists evaluate the loyalty risk in a citizen and then extinguish his private sphere; dog-catchers sell themselves to the public as pest controllers, and claim a monopoly over the lives of stray dogs. The only way to prevent the escalation of needs is a fundamental, political exposure of those illusions that legitimize dominating professions. - -Many professions are so well established that they not only exercise tutelage over the citizen-become-client, but also determine the shape of his world- become-ward. The language in which he perceives himself, his perception of rights and freedoms, and his awareness of needs all derive from professional hegemony. - -The difference between craftsman, liberal professional, and the new technocrat can be clarified by comparing the typical reaction of people who neglect their respective advice. If you did not take the craftsman’s advice, you were a fool. If you did not take liberal counsel, society blamed you. Now the profession or the government may be blamed when you escape from the care that your lawyer, teacher, surgeon, or shrink has decided upon for you. Under the pretense of meeting needs better and on a more equitable basis, the service-professional has mutated into a crusading philanthropist. The nutritionist prescribes the "right" formula for the infant, and the psychiatrist the "right" anti-depressant, and the schoolmaster – now acting with the fuller power of "educator" – feels entitled to push his method between you and anything you want to learn. Each new speciality in service production thrives only when the public has accepted and the law has endorsed a new perception of what ought not to exist. Schools expanded in a moralizing crusade against illiteracy, once illiteracy had been defined as an evil. Maternity wards mushroomed to do away with home births. - -Professionals claim a monopoly over the definition of deviance and the remedies needed. For example, lawyers assert that they alone have the competence and the legal right to provide assistance in divorce. If you devise a kit for do-it-yourself divorce, you find yourself in a double bind: if you are not a lawyer, you are liable of practice without a license; if you are a member of the bar, you can be expelled for unprofessional behaviour. Professionals also claim secret knowledge about human nature and its weaknesses, knowledge they are also mandated to apply. Gravediggers, for example, did not become members of a profession by calling themselves morticians, by obtaining college credentials, by raising their incomes, or by getting rid of the odour attached to their trade by electing one of themselves president of the Lion’s Club. Morticians formed a profession, a dominant and disabling one, when they acquired the muscle to have the police stop your burial if you are not embalmed and boxed by them. In any area where a human need can be imagined, these new disabling professions claim that they are the exclusive experts of the public good. - -#### Professions as a new clergy - -The transformation of a liberal profession into a dominant one is equivalent to the legal establishment of a church. Physicians transmogrified into biocrats, teachers into gnosocrats, morticians into thanatocrats, are much closer to state-supported clergies than to trade associations. The professional as teacher of the current brand of scientific orthodoxy acts as theologian. As moral entrepreneur, he acts the role of priest: he creates the need for his mediation. As crusading helper, he acts the part of the missionary and hunts down the underprivileged. As inquisitor, he outlaws the unorthodox – he imposes his solutions on the recalcitrants who refuse to recognize that they are a problem. This multi-faceted investiture with the task of relieving a specific inconvenience of man’s estate turns each profession into the analogue of an established cult. The public acceptance of domineering professions is thus essentially a political event. The new profession creates a new hierarchy, new clients and outcasts, and a new strain on the budget. But, also, each new establishment of professional legitimacy means that the political tasks of lawmaking, judicial review, and executive power lose more of their proper character and independence. Public affairs pass from the layperson’s elected peers into the hands of a self-accrediting élite. - -When medicine recently outgrew its liberal restraints, it invaded legislation by establishing public norms. Physicians had always determined what constitutes disease; dominant medicine now determines what diseases society shall not tolerate. Medicine has invaded the courts. Physicians had always diagnosed who is sick; dominant medicine, however, brands those who must be treated. Liberal practitioners prescribed a cure: dominant medicine has public powers of correction; it decides what shall be done with or to the sick. In a democracy, the power to make laws, execute them, and achieve public justice must derive from the citizens themselves. This citizen control over the key powers has been restricted, weakened, and sometimes abolished by the rise of church-like professions. Government by a congress that bases its decisions on expert opinions of such professions might be government for, but never by, the people. This is not the place to investigate the intent with which political rule has thus been weakened ; it is sufficient to indicate the professional disqualification of lay opinion as a necessary condition for this subversion. - -Citizen liberties are grounded in the rule that excludes hearsay from testimony on which public decisions are based. What people can see for themselves and interpret is the common ground for binding rules. Opinions, beliefs, inferences, or persuasions ought not to stand when in conflict with the eyewitness – ever. Expert élites could become dominant professions only by a piecemeal erosion and final reversal of this rule. In the legislature and courts, the rule against hearsay evidence is now, de facto, suspended in favour of the opinions profferred by the members of these self-accredited élites. - -But let us not confuse the public use of expert factual knowledge with a profession’s corporate exercise of normative judgment. When a craftsman, such as a gunmaker, was called into court as an expert to reveal to the jury the secrets of his trade, he apprenticed the jury to his craft on the spot. He demonstrated visibly from which barrel the bullet had come. Today, most experts play a different role. The dominant professional provides jury or legislature with his fellow-initiate’s opinion, rather than with factual evidence and a skill. He calls for a suspension of the hearsay rule and inevitably undermines the rule of law. Thus, democratic power is ineluctably abridged. - -#### The hegemony of imputed needs - -Professions could not have become dominant and disabling unless people were ready to experience as a lack that which the expert imputed to them as a need. Their mutual dependence as tutor and charge has become resistant to analysis because it has been obscured by corrupted language. Good old words have been made into branding irons that claim wardship for experts over home, shop, store, and the space or ether between them. Language, the most fundamental of commons, is thus polluted by twisted strands of jargon, each under the control of another profession. The disseizin of words, the depletion of ordinary language and its degradation into bureaucratic terminology, parallel in a more intimately debasing manner that particular form of environmental degradation that dispossesses people of their usefulness unless they are gainfully employed. Possible changes in design, attitudes, and laws that would retrench professional dominance cannot be proposed unless we become more sensitive to the misnomers behind which this dominance hides. - -When I learned to speak, "problems" existed only in mathematics or chess; "solutions" were saline or legal, and "need" was mainly used as a verb. The expressions, "I have a problem", or, "I have a need", both sounded silly. As I grew into my teens and Hitler worked at solutions, the "social problem" also spread. "Problem" children of ever newer shades were discovered among the poor as social workers learned to brand their prey and to standardize their "needs". "Need", used as a noun, became the fodder on which professions fattened into dominance. Poverty was modernized. Management translated poverty from an experience into a measure. The poor became the needy. - -During the second half of my life, to be "needy" became respectable. Computable and imputable needs moved up the social ladder. It ceased to be a sign of poverty to have needs. Income opened new registers of need. Spock, Comfort, and the vulgarizers of Nader trained laymen to shop for solutions to problems they learned to cook up according to professional recipes. Education qualified graduates to climb ever more rarefied heights and implant and cultivate there ever newer strains of hybridized needs. Prescriptions increased and competences shrank. For example, in medicine, ever more pharmacologically active drugs went on prescription, and people lost their will and ability to cope with indisposition or even with discomfort. In American supermarkets, where it is estimated that about 1500 new products appear each year, less than 20 per cent survive more than one year on the shelves, the remainder, having proved unsellable, fadish, risky, unprofitable, or obsolete competitors to new models. Therefore, consumers are forced to seek guidance from professional consumer protectors. - -Furthermore, the rapid turnover of products renders wants shallow and plastic. Paradoxically, then, high aggregate consumption resulting from engineered needs fosters growing consumer indifference to specific, potentially felt wants. Increasingly, needs are created by the advertising slogan and by purchases made by order from registrar, beautician, gynaecologist, and dozens of other prescribing diagnosticians. The need to be formally taught how to need, be this by advertising, prescription, or guided discussion in the collective or in the commune, appears in any culture where decisions and actions are no longer the result of personal experience in satisfaction, and the adaptive consumer cannot but substitute learned for felt needs. As people become apt pupils in learning how to need, the ability to shape wants from experienced satisfaction becomes a rare competence of the very rich or the seriously under-supplied. As needs are broken down into ever smaller component parts, each managed by an appropriate specialist, the consumer experiences difficulty in integrating the separate offerings of his various tutors into a meaningful whole that could be desired with commitment and possessed with pleasure. The income managers, life-style counsellors, consciousness raisers, academic advisers, food-fad experts, sensitivity developers, and others like them clearly perceive the new possibilities for management and move in to match packaged commodities to the splintered needs. - -Used as a noun, "need" is the individual offspring of a professional pattern; it is a plastic-foam replica of the mould in which professionals cast their staple; it is the advertised shape of the brood cells out of which consumers are produced. To be ignorant or unconvinced of one’s own needs has become the unforgivable anti-social act. The good citizen is one who imputes standardized needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for alternatives, much less the renunciation of need. - -When I was born, before Stalin and Hitler and Roosevelt came to power, only the rich, hypochondriacs, and members of élite unions spoke of their need for medical care when their temperatures rose. Doctors then, in response, could not do much more than grandmothers had done. In medicine the first mutation of needs came with sulfa drugs and antibiotics. As the control of infections became a simple and effective routine, drugs went more and more on prescription. Assignment of the sick-role became a medical monopoly. The person who felt ill had to go to the clinic to be labelled with a disease-name and be legitimately declared a member of the minority of the so-called sick: people were excused from work, entitled to help, put under doctor’s orders, and were enjoined to heal in order to become useful again. Paradoxically, as pharmacological technique – tests and drugs – became so predictable and cheap that one could have dispensed with the physician, society enacted laws and police regulations to restrict the free use of those procedures that science had simplified, and placed them on the prescription list. - -The second mutation of medical needs happened when the sick ceased to be a minority. Today, few people eschew doctors" orders for any length of time. In Italy, the United States, France, or Belgium, one out of every two citizens is being watched simultaneously by several health professionals who treat, advise, or at least observe him or her. The object of such specialized care is, more often than not, a condition of teeth, womb, emotions, blood pressure, or hormone levels that the patient himself does not feel. Patients are no more in the minority. Now, the minority are those deviants who somehow escape from any and all patient-roles. This minority is made up of the poor, the peasants, the recent immigrants, and sundry others who, sometimes of their own volition, have gone medically AWOL. Just twenty years ago, it was a sign of normal health – which was assumed to be good – to get along without a doctor. The same status of non-patient is now indicative of poverty or dissidence. Even the status of the hypochondriac has changed. For the doctor in the forties, this was the label applied to the gate-crashers in his office – the designation reserved for the imaginary sick. Now, doctors refer to the minority who flee them by the same name: hypochondriacs are the imaginary healthy. To be plugged into a professional system as a life-long client is no longer a stigma that sets apart the disabled person from citizens at large. We now live in a society organized for deviant majorities and their keepers. To be an active client of several professionals provides you with a well-defined place within the realm of consumers for the sake of whom our society functions. Thus, the transformation of medicine from a liberal consulting profession into a dominant, disabling profession has immeasurably increased the number of the needy. - -At this critical moment, imputed needs move into a third mutation. They coalesce into what the experts call a multi-disciplinary problem necessitating, therefore, a multi-professional solution. First, the proliferation of commodities, each tending to turn into a requirement, has effectively trained the consumer to need on command. Next, the progressive fragmentation of needs into even smaller and unconnected parts made the client dependent on professional judgment for the blending of his needs into a meaningful whole. The auto industry provides a good example. By the end of the sixties, the advertised optional equipment needed to make a basic Ford desirable had been multiplied immensely. But contrary to the customer’s expectations, this "optional" flim-flam is in fact installed on the assembly line of the Detroit factory, and the shopper in Plains is left with a choice between a few packaged samples that are shipped at random: he can either buy the convertible that he wants but with the green seats he hates, or he can humour his girlfriend with leopardskin seats – at the cost of buying an unwanted paisley hard top. - -Finally, the client is trained to need a team approach to receive what his guardians consider "satisfactory treatment". Personal services that improve the consumer illustrate the point. Therapeutic affluence has exhausted the available life-time of many whom service professionals diagnose as standing in need of more. The intensity of the service economy has made the time needed for the consumption of pedagogical, medical and social treatments increasingly scarce. Time scarcity may soon turn into the major obstacle for the consumption of prescribed, and often publicly financed, services. Signs of such scarcity become evident from one’s early years. Already in kindergarten, the child is subjected to management by a team made up of such specialists as the allergist, speech pathologist, paediatrician, child psychologist, social worker, physical education instructor and teacher. By forming such a paedocratic team, many different professionals attempt to share the time that has become the major limiting factor to the imputation of further needs. For the adult, it is not the school but the work-place where the packaging of services focuses. The personnel manager, labour educator, in-service trainer, insurance planner, consciousness raiser find it more profitable to share the worker’s time than compete for it. A need-less citizen would be highly suspicious. People are told that they need their jobs, not so much for the money as for the services they get. The commons are extinguished and replaced by a new placenta built of funnels that deliver professional services. Life is paralyzed in permanent intensive care. - -### Enabling distinctions - -The disabling of the citizen through professional dominance is completed through the power of illusion. Hopes of religious salvation are displaced by expectations that centre on the state as supreme manager of professional services. Each of many special priesthoods claims competence to define public issues in terms of specific serviceable problems. The acceptance of this claim legitimates the docile recognition of imputed lacks on the part of the layman, whose world turns into an echo-chamber of engineered and managed needs. This dominance, the satisfaction of self-defined preference, is sacrificed to the fulfilment of educated needs and is reflected in the skyline of the city. Professional buildings look down on the crowds that shuttle between them in a continual pilgrimage to the new cathedrals of health, education, and welfare. Healthy homes are transformed into hygienic apartments where one cannot be born, cannot be sick, and cannot die decently. Not only are helpful neighbours a vanishing species, but also liberal doctors who make house calls. Work places fit for apprenticeship turn into opaque mazes of corridors that permit access only to functionaries equipped with "identities" in mica holders pinned to their lapels. A world designed for service deliveries is the utopia of citizens turned into welfare recipients. - -The prevailing addiction to imputable needs on the part of the rich, and the paralyzing fascination with needs on the part of the poor, would indeed be irreversible if people actually fitted the calculus of needs. But this is not so. Beyond a certain level of intensity, medicine engenders helplessness and disease ; education turns into the major generator of a disabling division of labour; fast transportation systems turn urbanized people for about one-sixth of their waking hours into passengers, and for an equal amount of time into members of the road gang that works to pay Ford, Esso, and the highway department. The threshold at which medicine, education, and transportation turn into counterproductive tools has been reached in all the countries of the world with per capita incomes comparable at least to those prevalent in Cuba. In all countries examined, and contrary to the illusions propagated by the orthodoxies of both East and West, this specific counter-productivity bears no relation to the kind of school, vehicle, or health organization now used. It sets in when the capital-intensity of the production process passes a critical threshold. - -Our major institutions have acquired the uncanny power to subvert the very purposes for which they were originally engineered and financed. Under the rule of our most prestigious professions, our institutional tools have as their principal product paradoxical counterproductivity – the systematic disabling of the citizenry. A city built around wheels becomes inappropriate for feet, and no increase of wheels can overcome the engineered immobility of such cripples. Autonomous action is paralyzed by a surfeit of commodities and treatments. But this does not represent simply a net loss of satisfactions that do not happen to fit into the industrial age. The impotence to produce use-values ultimately renders counterpurposive the very commodities meant to replace them. The car, the doctor, the school, and the manager are then commodities that have turned into destructive nuisances for the consumer, and retain net value only for the provider of services. - -Why are there no rebellions against the coalescence of late industrial society into one huge disabling service delivery system? The chief explanation must be sought in the illusion-generating power that these same systems possess. Besides doing technical things to body and mind, professionally attended institutions function also as powerful rituals which generate credence in the things their managers promise. Besides teaching Johnny to read, schools also teach him that learning from teachers is "better", and that, without compulsory schools, fewer books would be read by the poor. Besides providing locomotion, the bus, just as much as the sedan, reshapes the environment and puts walking out of step. Besides providing help in avoiding taxes, lawyers also convey the notion that laws solve problems. An ever growing part of our major institutions" functions is the cultivation and maintenance of three sets of illusions which turn the citizen into a client to be saved by experts. - -#### Congestion versus paralysis - -The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services. This illusion is due to an educated blindness to the worth of use-values in the total economy. In none of the economic models serving as national guidelines is there a variable to account for non-marketable use-values any more than there is a variable for nature’s perennial contribution. Yet there is no economy that would not collapse immediately if use-value production contracted beyond a point; for example, if homemaking were done only for wages, or intercourse engaged in only at a fee. What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe. - -The illusion that economic models can ignore use-values springs from the assumption that those activities which we designate by intransitive verbs can be indefinitely replaced by institutionally defined staples referred to as nouns: "education" substituted for "I learn’; "health care" for "I heal’; transportation for "I move’; "television" for "I play". - -The confusion of personal and standardized values has spread throughout most domains. Under professional leadership, use-values are dissolved, rendered obsolete, and finally deprived of their distinctive nature. Love and institutional care become coterminous. Ten years of running a farm can be thrown into a pedagogical mixer and made equivalent to a high school degree. Things picked up at random and hatched in the freedom of the street are added as "educational experience" to things funneled into pupils" heads. The knowledge accountants seem unaware that the two activities, like oil and water, mix only as long as they are osterized by an educator’s perception. Gangs of crusading need-catchers could not continue to tax us, nor could they spend our resources on their tests, networks, and other nostrums if we did not remain paralyzed by this kind of greedy belief. - -The usefulness of staples, or packaged commodities, is intrinsically limited by two boundaries that must not be confused. First, queues will sooner or later stop the operation of any system that produces needs faster than the corresponding commodity and, second, dependence on commodities will sooner or later so determine needs that the autonomous production of a functional analogue will be paralyzed. The usefulness of commodities is limited by congestion and paralysis. Congestion and paralysis are both results of escalation in any sector of production, albeit results of a very different kind. Congestion, which is a measure of the degree to which staples get in their own way, explains why mass transportation by private car in Manhattan would be useless; it does not explain why people work hard to buy and insure cars that cannot move them. Even less does congestion alone explain why people become so dependent on vehicles that they are paralyzed and just cannot take to their feet. - -People become prisoners to time-consuming acceleration, stupefying education and sick-making medicine because beyond a certain threshold of intensity, dependence on a bill of industrial and professional goods destroys human potential, and does so in a specific way. Only up to a point can commodities replace what people make or do on their own. Only within limits can exchange-values satisfactorily replace use-values. Beyond this point, further production serves the interests of the professional producer – who has imputed the need to the consumer – and leaves the consumer befuddled and giddy, albeit richer. Needs satisfied rather than merely fed must be determined to a significant degree by the pleasure that is derived from the remembrance of personal autonomous action. There are boundaries beyond which commodities cannot be multiplied without disabling their consumer for this self-affirmation in action. - -Packages alone inevitably frustrate the consumer when their delivery paralyzes him or her. The measure of well-being in a society is thus never an equation in which these two modes of production are matched; it is always a balance that results when use-values and commodities fruitfully mesh in synergy. Only up to a point can heteronomous production of a commodity enhance and complement the autonomous production of the corresponding personal purpose. Beyond this point, the synergy between the two modes of production paradoxically turns against the purpose for which both use-value and commodity were intended. Occasionally, this is not clearly seen because the mainstream ecology movement tends to obscure the point. For example, atomic energy reactors have been widely criticized because their radiation is a threat, or because they foster technocratic controls. So far, however, only very few have dared to criticize them because they add to the energy glut. The paralysis of human action by socially destructive energy quanta has not yet been accepted as an argument for reducing the call for energy. Similarly, the inexorable limits to growth that are built into any service agency are still widely ignored. And yet it ought to be evident that the institutionalization of health care tends to make people into unhealthy marionettes, and that life long education fosters a culture of programmed people. Ecology will provide guidelines for a feasible form of modernity only when it is recognized that a man-made environment designed for commodities reduces personal aliveness to the point where the commodities themselves lose their value as means for personal satisfaction. Without this insight, industrial technology that was cleaner and less aggressive would be used for now-impossible levels of frustrating enrichment. - -It would be a mistake to attribute counterproductivity essentially to the negative externalities of economic growth, to exhaustion, pollution and various forms of congestion. This mistake would lead to confusing the congestion by which things get into his way, with the paralysis of the person who can no more exercise his autonomy in an environment designed for things. - -The fundamental reason why market intensity leads to counterproductivity must be sought in the relationship between the monopoly of commodities and human needs. This monopoly extends beyond its usual meaning. A commercial monopoly merely corners the market for one brand of whisky or car. An industry-wide cartel can restrict freedom further: it can corner all mass transportation in favour of internal combustion engines, as General Motors did when it purchased the Los Angeles trolleys. You can escape the first by sticking to rum and the second by purchasing a bicycle. I use the term "radical monopoly " to designate something else: the substitution of an industrial product or a professional service for a useful activity in which people engage or would like to engage. A radical monopoly paralyzes autonomous action in favour of professional deliveries. The more completely vehicles dislocate people, the more traffic managers will be needed and the more powerless people will be to walk home. This radical monopoly would accompany high-speed traffic even if motors were powered by sunshine and vehicles were spun of air. The longer each person is in the grip of education, the less time and inclination he has for browsing and exploration. At some point in every domain, the amount of goods delivered so degrades the environment for personal action that the possible synergy between use-values and commodities turns negative. Paradoxical, or specific, counterproductivity sets in. I will use this term whenever the impotence resulting from the substitution of a commodity for a value in use turns this commodity into a dis-value in the pursuit of the satisfaction it was meant to provide. - -#### Industrial versus convivial tools - -Man ceases to be recognizable as one of his kind when he can no longer shape his own needs by the more or less competent use of those tools that his culture provides. Throughout history, most tools were labour-intensive means that could be used to satisfy the user of the tool, and were used in domestic production. Only marginally were shovels or hammers used to produce pyramids or a surplus for gift-exchange, and even more rarely to produce things for the market. Occasions for the extraction of profits were limited. Most work was done to create use-values not destined for exchange. But technological progress has been consistently applied to develop a very different kind of tool: it has pressed the tool primarily into the production of marketable staples. At first, during the industrial revolution, the new technology reduced the worker on the job to a Charlie Chaplin of Modern Times. At this early stage, however, the industrial mode of production did not yet paralyze people when they were off the job. Now women or men, who have come to depend almost entirely on deliveries of standardized fragments produced by tools operated by anonymous others, have ceased to find the same direct satisfaction in the use of tools that stimulated the evolution of man and his cultures. Although their needs and their consumption have multiplied many times, their satisfaction in handling tools has become rare, and they have ceased to live a life for which the organism acquired its form. At best, they barely survive, even though they do so surrounded by glitter. Their life-span has become a chain of needs that have been met for the sake of ulterior striving for satisfaction. Ultimately man-the-passive-consumer loses even the ability to discriminate between living and survival. The gamble on insurance and the gleeful expectation of rations and therapies take the place of enjoyment. In such company, it becomes easy to forget that satisfaction and joy can result only as long as personal aliveness and engineered provisions are kept in balance while a goal is pursued. - -The delusion that tools in the service of market-orientated institutions can with impunity destroy the conditions for convivial and personally manageable means permits the extinction of "aliveness" by conceiving of technological progress as a kind of engineering product that licences more professional domination. This delusion says that tools, in order to become more efficient in the pursuit of a specific purpose, inevitably become more complex and inscrutable: one thinks of cockpits and cranes. Therefore, it seems that modern tools necessarily require special operators who are highly trained and who alone can be securely trusted. Actually, just the opposite is usually true, and ought to be so. As techniques multiply and become more specific, their use often requires less complex judgments. They no longer require that trust on the part of the client on which the autonomy of the liberal professional, and even that of the craftsman, was built. However far medicine has advanced, only a tiny fraction of the total volume of demonstrably useful medical services requires advanced training in an intelligent person. From a social point of view, we ought to reserve the designation "technical progress" to instances in which new tools expand the capacity and the effectiveness of a wider range of people, especially when new tools permit more autonomous production of use-values. - -There is nothing inevitable about the expanding professional monopoly over new technology. The great inventions of the last hundred years, such as new metals, ball-bearings, some building materials, electronics, some tests and remedies, are capable of increasing the power of both the heteronomous and the autonomous modes of production. In fact, however, most new technology has not been incorporated into convivial equipment, but into institutional packages and complexes. The professionals rather consistently have used industrial production to establish a radical monopoly by means of technology’s obvious power to serve its manager. Counterproductivity due to the paralysis of use-value production is fostered by this notion of technological progress. - -There is no simple "technological imperative" which requires that ball-bearings be used in motorized vehicles or that electronics be used to control the brain. The institutions of high-speed traffic and of mental health are not the necessary result of ball-bearings or electronics. Their functions are determined by the needs they are supposed to serve – needs that are overwhelmingly imputed and reinforced by disabling professions. This is a point that the young Turks in the professions seem to overlook when they justify their institutional allegiance by presenting themselves as the publicly appointed ministers of technological progress that must be domesticated. - -The same subservience to the idea of progress conceives of engineering principally as a contribution to institutional effectiveness. Scientific research is highly financed, but only if it can be applied for military use or for further professional domination. Alloys which make bicycles both stronger and lighter are a fall-out of research designed to make jets faster and weapons deadlier. But the results of most research go solely into industrial tools, thus making already huge machines even more complex and inscrutable. Because of this bias on the part of scientists and engineers, a major trend is strengthened: needs for autonomous action are precluded, while those for the acquisition of commodities are multiplied. Convivial tools which facilitate the individual’s enjoyment of use-values – without or with only minimal supervision by policemen, physicians, or inspectors – are polarized at two extremes: poor Asian workers and rich students and professors are the two kinds of people who ride bicycles. Perhaps without being conscious of their good fortune, both enjoy being free from this second illusion. - -Recently, some groups of professionals, government agencies, and international organizations have begun to explore, develop, and advocate small-scale, intermediate technology. These efforts might be interpreted as an attempt to avoid the more obvious vulgarities of a technological imperative. But most of the new technology designed for self-help in health care, education, or home building is only an alternative model of high-intensity dependence commodities. For example, experts are asked to design new medicine cabinets that allow people to follow the doctor’s orders over the telephone. Women are taught to determine themselves how ripe their breasts are for useless amputation by the surgeon. Cubans are given paid leaves from work to erect their pre-fabricated houses. The enticing prestige of professional products as they become cheaper ends by making rich and poor more alike. Both Bolivians and Swedes feel equally backward, underprivileged, and exploited to the degree that they learn without the supervision of certified teachers, keep healthy without the check-ups of a physician, and move about without a motorized crutch. - -#### Liberties versus rights - -The third disabling illusion looks to experts for limits to growth. Entire populations socialized to need on command are assumed ready to be told what they do not need. The same multinational agents that for a generation imposed an international standard of bookkeeping, deodorants, and energy consumption on rich and poor alike now sponsor the Club of Rome. Obediently, UNESCO gets into the act and trains experts in the regionalization of imputed needs. For their own imputed good, the rich are thereby programmed to pay for more costly professional dominance at home and to provide the poor with assigned needs of a cheaper and tighter brand. The brightest of the new professionals see clearly that growing scarcity pushes controls over needs ever upward. The central planning of output-optimal decentralization has become the most prestigious job of the late seventies. But what is not yet recognized is that this new illusory salvation by professionally decreed limits confuses liberties and rights. - -In each of the seven United Nations-defined world regions a new clergy is being trained to preach the appropriate style of austerity drafted by the new need-designers. Consciousness raisers roam through local communities inciting people to meet the decentralized production goals that have been assigned to them. Milking the family goat was a liberty until more ruthless planning made it a duty to contribute the yield to the GNP. - -The synergy of autonomous and heteronomous production is reflected in society’s balance of liberties and rights. Liberties protect use-values as rights protect the access to commodities. And just as commodities can extinguish the possibility of producing use-values and turn into impoverishing wealth, so the professional definition of rights can extinguish liberties and establish a tyranny that smothers people underneath their rights. - -The confusion is revealed with special clarity when one considers the experts on health. Health encompasses two aspects: liberties and rights. It designates the area of autonomy within which a person exercises control over his own biological states and over the conditions of his immediate environment. Simply stated, health is identical with the degree of lived freedom. Therefore, those concerned with the public good should work to guarantee the equitable distribution of health as freedom which, in turn, depends on environmental conditions that only organized political efforts can achieve. Beyond a certain level of intensity, professional health care, however equitably distributed, will smother health-as-freedom. In this fundamental sense, the care of health is a matter of well-protected liberty. - -As is evident, such a notion of health implies a principled commitment to inalienable freedoms. To understand this, one must distinguish clearly between civil liberty and civil rights. The liberty to act without restraint from government has a wider scope than the civil rights the state may enact to guarantee that people will have equal powers to obtain certain goods and services. - -Civil liberties ordinarily do not force others to act in accord with one’s own wishes. I have the freedom to speak and publish my opinion, but no specific newspaper is obliged to print it, nor are fellow citizens required to read it. I am free to paint as I see beauty, but no museum has to buy my canvas. At the same time, however, the state as guarantor of liberty can and does enact laws that protect the equal rights without which its members would not enjoy their freedoms. Such rights give meaning and reality to equality, while liberties give possibility and shape to freedom. One certain way to extinguish the freedoms to speak, to learn, to heal, or to care is to delimit them by transmogrifying civil rights into civic duties. The precise character of this third illusion is to believe that the publicly sponsored pursuit of rights leads inevitably to the protection of liberties. In reality, as society gives professionals the legitimacy to define rights, citizen freedoms evaporate. - -### Equity in useful unemployment - -At present, every new need that is professionally certified translates sooner or later into a right. The political pressure for the enactment of each right generates new jobs and commodities. Each new commodity degrades an activity by which people so far have been able to cope on their own; each new job takes away legitimacy from work so far done by the unemployed. The power of professions to measure what shall be good, right, and done warps the desire, willingness, and ability of the "common" man to live within his measure - -As soon as all law students currently registered at United States law schools are graduated, the number of United States lawyers will increase by about 50 per cent. Judicare will complement Medicare, as legal insurance increasingly turns into the kind of necessity that medical insurance is now. When the right of the citizen to a lawyer has been established, settling the dispute in the pub will be branded unenlightened or anti-social, as home births are now. Already the right of each citizen of Detroit to live in a home that has been professionally wired turns the auto-electrician who installs his own plugs into a lawbreaker. The loss of one liberty after another to be useful when out of a job or outside professional control is the unnamed, but also the most resented experience that comes with modernized poverty. By now the most significant privilege of high social status might well be some vestige of freedom for useful unemployment that is increasingly denied to the great majority. The insistence on the right to be taken care of and supplied has almost turned into the right of industries and professions to conquer clients, to supply them with their product, and by their deliveries to obliterate the environmental conditions that make unemployed activities useful. Thus, for the time being, the struggle for an equitable distribution of the time and the power to be useful to self and others outside employment or the draft has been effectively paralyzed. Work done off the paid job is looked down upon if not ignored. Autonomous activity threatens the employment level, generates deviance, and detracts from the GNP: therefore it is only improperly called "work". Labour no longer means effort or toil but the mysterious mate wedded to productive investments in plant. Work no longer means the creation of a value perceived by the worker but mainly a job, which is a social relationship. Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one’s neighbour. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who "works", no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be. Activity, effort, achievement, or service outside a hierarchical relationship and unmeasured by professional standards, threatens a commodity-intensive society. The generation of use-values that escape effective measurement limits not only the need for more commodities but also the jobs that create them and the paycheques needed to buy them. - -What counts in a market-intensive society is not the effort to please or the pleasure that flows from that effort but the coupling of the labour force with capital. What counts is not the achievement of satisfaction that flows from action but the status of the social relationship that commands production – that is, the job, situation, post, or appointment. In the Middle Ages there was no salvation outside the Church, and the theologians had a hard time explaining what God did with those pagans who were visibly virtuous or saintly. Similarly, in contemporary society effort is not productive unless it is done at the behest of a boss, and economists have a hard time dealing with the obvious usefulness of people when they are outside the corporate control of a corporation, volunteer agency, or labour camp. Work is productive, respectable, worthy of the citizen only when the work process is planned, monitored, and controlled by a professional agent, who insures that the work meets a certified need in a standardized fashion. In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is so arranged that only the job gives access to the tools of production, and this monopoly of commodity production over the generation of use-values turns even more stringent as the state takes over. Only with a license may you teach a child; only at a clinic may you set a broken bone. Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents. In 1945, for each American Social Security recipient there were still 35 workers on the job. In 1977, 3.2 employed workers have to support one such retiree, who is himself dependent on many more services than his retired grandfather could have imagined. - -Henceforth the quality of a society and of its culture will depend on the status of its unemployed: will they be the most representative productive citizens, or will they be dependants? The choice or crisis again seems clear: advanced industrial society can degenerate into a holding operation harking back to the dream of the sixties; into a well-rationed distribution system that doles out decreasing commodities and jobs and trains its citizens for more standardized consumption and more powerless work. This is the attitude reflected in the policy proposals of most governments at present, from Germany to China, albeit a fundamental difference in degree: the richer the country, the more urgent it seems to ration access to jobs and to impede useful unemployment that would threaten the volume of the labour market. The inverse, of course, is equally possible: a modern society in which frustrated workers organize to protect the freedom of people to be useful outside the activities that result in the production of commodities. But again, this social alternative depends on a new, rational, and cynical competence of the common man when faced with the professional imputation of needs. - -### Outflanking the new professional - -Today, professional power is clearly threatened by increasing evidence of the counterproductivity of its output. People are beginning to see that such hegemony deprives them of their right to politics. The symbolic power of experts which, while defining needs, eviscerates personal competence is now seen to be more perilous than their technical capability, which is confined to servicing the needs they create. Simultaneously, one hears the repeated call for the enactment of legislation that might lead us beyond an age dominated by the professional ethos: the demand that professional and bureaucratic licensing be replaced by the investiture of elected citizens, rather than altered by the inclusion of consumer representatives on licensing boards; the demand that prescription rules in pharmacies, curricula, and other pretentious supermarkets be relaxed; the demand for the protection of productive liberties; the demand for the right to practice without a license; the demand for public utilities that facilitate client evaluation of all practitioners who work for money. In response to these threats, the major professional establishments, each in its own way, use three fundamental strategies to shore up the erosion of their legitimacy and power. - -#### The self-critical hooker - -The first approach is represented by the Club of Rome. Fiat, Volkswagen, and Ford pay economists, ecologists, and experts in social control to identify the products industries ought not to produce, in order to strengthen the industrial system. Also, doctors in the Club of Kos now recommend that surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy be abandoned in the treatment of most cancers, since these treatments usually prolong and intensify suffering without adding to the life of the treated. Lawyers and dentists promise to police, as never before, the competence, decency, and rates of their fellow professionals. - -A variant of this approach is seen in some individuals or their organizations, who challenge the American Bar Association, British Medical Association, and other power brokers of the establishment. These claim to be radical because, 1) they advise consumers against the interests of the majority of their peers; 2) they tutor laymen on how to behave on hospital, university, or police governing boards; and 3) they occasionally testify to legislative committees on the uselessness of procedures proposed by the professions and demanded by the public. For example, in a province of Western Canada doctors prepared a report on some two dozen medical procedures for which the legislature was considering a budget increase. All the procedures were costly, and the doctors pointed out that they were also very painful, and many were dangerous, and that none could be proven effective. For the time being the legislators refused to act on such medical advice, a failure that, provisionally, tends to reinforce the belief in the necessity of professional protection against professional hubris. - -Professional self-policing is useful principally in catching the grossly incompetent – the butcher or the outright charlatan. But as has been shown again and again, it only protects the inept and cements the dependence of the public on their services. The "critical" doctor, the "radical" lawyer, or the "advocacy" architect seduces clients away from his colleagues, who are less aware than he of the vagaries of fashion. First liberal professions sell the public on the need for their services by promising to watch over the poorer layman’s schooling, ethics or inservice training. Then dominant professions insist on their rightful duty to guide and further disable the public by organizing into clubs that brandish the high consciousness of ecological, economic, and social constraints. Such action inhibits the further extension of the professional sector but strengthens public dependence within that sector. The idea that professionals have a right to serve the public is thus of very recent origin. Their struggle to establish and legitimate this corporate right becomes one of our most oppressive social threats. - -#### The alliance of hawkers - -The second strategy seeks to organize and coordinate professional response in a manner that purportedly is more faithful to the multifaceted character of human problems. Also, this approach seeks to utilize ideas borrowed from systems analysis and operations research in order to provide more national and all-encompassing solutions. An example of what this means in practice can be taken from Canada. Some years ago, the Minister of Health launched a campaign to convince the public that spending more money on physicians would not change the country’s patterns of disease and death. He pointed out that premature loss of life-time was due overwhelmingly to three factors: accidents, mostly in motor vehicles; heart disease and lung cancer, which doctors are notoriously powerless to heal; and suicide combined with murder, phenomena that are outside medical control. The minister called for new approaches to health and for the retrenchment of medicine. The task of protecting, restoring, or consoling those made sick by the destructive life-style and environment typical of contemporary Canada was taken up by a great variety of new and old professions. Architects discovered that they had a mission to improve Canadians" health; dog-control was found to be an inter- departmental problem calling for new specialists. A new corporate biocracy intensified control over the organisms of Canadians with a thoroughness the old iatrocracy could hardly have imagined. The slogan "better spend money in order to stay healthy than on doctors when you get sick" can now be recognized as the hawking of new hookers who want the money spent on them. - -The practice of medicine in the United States illustrates a similar dynamic. There, a coordinated approach to the health of Americans has become enormously expensive without being especially effective. In 1950, the typical wage-earner transferred less than two weeks pay per year to professional health care. In 1976, the proportion was up to around five to seven weeks pay per year: buying a new Ford, one now pays more for worker hygiene than for the metal the car contains. Yet with all this effort and expense, the life expectancy of the adult male population has not sensibly changed in the last one hundred years. It is lower than in many poor countries, and has been declining slowly but steadily for the last twenty years. - -Where disease patterns have changed for the better, it has been due principally to the adoption of a healthier life-style, especially in diet. To a small degree, inoculations and the routine administration of such simple interventions as antibiotics, contraceptives, or Carman tubes have contributed to the decline of certain diseases. But such procedures do not postulate the need for professional services. People cannot become healthier by being more firmly wedded to a medical profession, yet many "radical" doctors call for just such an increased biocracy. They seem to be unaware that a more rational " problem-solving " approach is simply another version, though perhaps more sophisticated, of affirmative action. - -#### The professionalization of the client - -The third strategy to make dominant professions survive is this year’s radical chic. As the prophets of the sixties drooled about development on the door-steps of affluence these myth makers mouth about the self-help of professionalized clients. - -In the United States alone since 1965, about 2700 books have appeared that teach you how to be your own patient, so that you need see the doctor only when it is worthwhile for him. Some books recommend that only after due training and examination should graduates in self-medication be empowered to buy aspirin and dispense it to their children. Others suggest that professionalized patients should receive preferential rates in hospitals and that they should benefit from lower insurance premiums. Only women with a license to practice home birth should have their children outside hospitals since such professional mothers can, if necessary, be sued for malpractice. I have seen a "radical" proposal that such a license to birth be obtained under feminist rather than medical auspices. - -The professional dream of rooting each hierarchy of needs in the grassroots goes under the banner of self-help. At present it is promoted by the new tribe of experts in self-help who have replaced the experts in development of the sixties. The universal professionalization of clients is their aim. American building experts who last autumn invaded Mexico serve as an example of the new Crusade. About two years ago a Boston professor of architecture came to Mexico for a vacation. A Mexican friend of mine took him beyond the airport where, during the last twelve years, a new city had grown up. From a few huts, it had mushroomed into a community three times the size of Cambridge, Massachusetts. My friend, also an architect, wanted to show him the thousands of examples of peasant ingenuity with patterns, structures, and uses of refuse not in and therefore not derivable from textbooks. He should not have been surprised that his colleague took several hundred rolls of pictures of these brilliant amateur inventions that make the two-million-person slum work. The pictures were analyzed in Cambridge; and by the end of the year, new-baked United States specialists in community architecture were busy teaching the people of Ciudad Netzahualcoyotl their problems, needs, and solutions. - -### The post-professional ethos - -The inverse of professionally certified lack, need, and poverty is modern subsistence. The term "subsistence economy" is now generally used only to designate group survival which is marginal to market- dependence and in which people make what they use by means of traditional tools and within an inherited, often unexamined, social organization. I propose to recover the term by speaking about modern subsistence. Let us call modern subsistence the style of life that prevails in a post-industrial economy in which people have succeeded in reducing their market dependence, and have done so by protecting – by political means – a social infrastructure in which techniques and tools are used primarily to generate use-values that are unmeasured and unmeasurable by professional need-makers. I have developed a theory of such tools elsewhere ( Tools for Conviviality, Calder & Boyars, 1973), proposed the technical term "convivial tool" for use-value-orientated engineered artefacts. I have shown that the inverse of progressive modernized poverty is politically generated convivial austerity that protects freedom and equity in the use of such tools. - -A retooling of contemporary society with convivial rather than industrial tools implies a shift of emphasis in our struggle for social justice; it implies a new kind of subordination of distributive to participatory justice. In an industrial society, individuals are trained for extreme specialization. They are rendered impotent to shape or to satisfy their own needs. They depend on commodities and on the managers who sign the prescriptions for them. The right to diagnosis of need, prescription of therapy, and – in general – distribution of goods predominates in ethics, politics, and law. This emphasis on the right to imputed necessities shrinks the liberty to learn or to heal or to move on one’s own to fragile luxuries. In a convivial society, the opposite would be true. The protection of equity in the exercise of personal liberties would be the predominant concern of a society based on radical technology: science and technique at the service of a more effective use-value generation. Obviously, such equitably distributed liberty would be meaningless if it were not grounded in the right of equal access to raw materials, tools, and utilities. Food, fuel, fresh air, or living space can no more be equitably distributed than wrenches or jobs unless they are rationed without regard to imputed need, that is, in equal maximum amounts to young and old, cripple and president. A society dedicated to the protection of equally distributed, modern and effective tools for the exercise of productive liberties cannot come into existence unless the commodities and resources on which the exercise of these liberties is based are equally distributed to all. - -[^n01:]"Deschooling Society" (1971); "Tools for Conviviality" (1973); "Energy & Equity" (1974); "Medical Nemesis – The Expropriation of Health" (1976); "Disabling Professions" (1977)] diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/es.txt b/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/es.txt deleted file mode 120000 index 104cc11..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/es.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -../../../es/book/unemployment/es.txt
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/index.txt b/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/index.txt deleted file mode 100644 index dada828..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/book/unemployment/index.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8 +0,0 @@ -# The Right to Useful Unemployment - -* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:en|Online]] -* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _The Right To Useful Unemployment And Its Professional Enemies_ -* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1978 -* **#@LANG_comments@#:** ... - -~~NOTOC~~ diff --git a/data/pages/en/index.txt b/data/pages/en/index.txt index fe8c59a..acadbb4 100644 --- a/data/pages/en/index.txt +++ b/data/pages/en/index.txt @@ -1,14 +1,12 @@ # English +## Books -## Original books series +* [[en:book:toynbee:index|1951 - Die philosophischen Grundlagen der Geschichtsschreibung bei Arnold Joseph +Toynbee]] _(The Philosophical Foundations of Historiography in Arnold Joseph Toynbee's Work)_ - -* 1951 - Die philosophischen Grundlagen der Geschichtsschreibung bei Arnold Joseph -Toynbee _(The Philosophical Foundations of Historiography in Arnold Joseph Toynbee's Work)_ - -* [[en:book:awareness:index|1970 - Celebration Of Awareness]] +* [[en:book:awareness:index|1970 - Celebration of Awareness]] * [[en:book:deschooling:index|1970 - Deschooling Society]] @@ -16,11 +14,13 @@ Toynbee _(The Philosophical Foundations of Historiography in Arnold Joseph Toynb * [[en:book:conviviality:index|1973 - Tools for Conviviality]] -* [[en:book:energy:index|1973 - Energy And Equity]] +* [[en:book:energy:index|1973 - Energy and Equity]] -* [[en:book:medical:index|1975 - Medical Nemesis-The Expropriation Of Health]] +* [[en:book:medicine:index|1976 - Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, The Expropriation of Health]] -* [[en:book:unemployment:index|1978 - The Right To Useful Unemployment And Its Professional Enemies]] +* [[en:book:needs:index|1977 - Toward a History of Needs]] + +* [[en:book:unemployment:index|1978 - The Right to Useful Unemployment and its Professional Enemies]] * [[en:book:shadow:index|1981 - Shadow Work]] @@ -28,567 +28,38 @@ Toynbee _(The Philosophical Foundations of Historiography in Arnold Joseph Toynb * [[en:book:school:index|1984 - School into Museum]] -* [[en:book:h20:index|1985 - H2O And The Waters Of Forgetfulness]] - -* [[en:book:abc:index|1988 - ABC-The Alphabetization Of The Popular Mind]] - -* [[en:book:mirror:index|1992 - In The Mirror Of The Past-Lectures And Addresses, 1978-1990]] - -* [[en:book:vineyard:index|1993 - In The Vineyard Of The Text-A Commentary To Hugh's Didascalicon]] - -### Compilations +* [[en:book:h20:index|1985 - H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness]] +* [[en:book:abc:index|1988 - ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind]] -* [[en:1977:index|1977 - Toward A History Of Needs]] ((includes "Energy And Equity" and "The Right To Useful Unemployment And Its Professional Enemies")) +* [[en:book:mirror:index|1992 - In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses, 1978-1990]] -* [[en:1977b:index|1977 - Disabling professions]] ((includes only on text of Illich and from other authors)) +* [[en:book:vineyard:index|1993 - In the Vineyard of the text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon]] ## Articles -### 1950's - -* 1953 - Basic Policies for Courses of Missionary Formation - * Requested at: https://findingaids.library.uic.edu/sc/MSICUI89.xml - -* [[en:article:1955-the_american_parish:index|1955 - The American Parish]] - -* 1955 - Can a Catholic Get a Divorce? - * in Integrity, vol. 9, n. 7, aprile 1955, pp. 7-10; - * in Obras Completas Italianas 1 - -* 1955 - Sacred Virginity - -* 1956 - Puerto Ricans in New York - * En Celebration - * Otro titulo: Puerto Ricans in New York - -* 1956 - Rehearsal for Death - -* 1958 - The End of Human Life - -1958 - The Pastoral Care of Puerto Rican Migrants in New York - * in Social Compass, vol. 5, nn. 5-6, marzo 1958, pp. 256-260. - * in Obras Completas Italianas 1 - -### 1960's - -* 1960 - Missionary Silence - -* [[en:article:1961-bootcamp_for_urbanites:index|1961 - Boot Camp for Urbanites]] - -* 1961 - Brazil - * in Data for DECISION in Latin America, novembre 1961, - * in Obras Completas Italianas 1 - -* 1961 - Spiritual Poverty and the Missionary Character - -* 1962 - The Lay Missionary in Latin America - -* 1962 - Education and Economic Development - * in Data for DECISION in Latin America, maggio/giugno/luglio 1962, - * in Obras Completas Italianas 1 - -* 1963 - The Predicament of the Church and the Task of the Religious Orders - -* 1964 - Religion and the Universities: An Invitation to Discussion - * in CIF Reports, vol. 2, febbraio 1964, poi in «CIDOC Cuaderno No. 37», 1969, pp. 16-18, - * in Obras Completas Italianas 1 - -* 1964 - A Note from the Publisher - * in CIF Reports, vol. 2, n. 10, marzo 1964, pp. 3-4; poi in «CIDOC Cuaderno No. 37», 1969, pp. 10/3-4. I - * in Obras Completas Italianas 1 - -* 1964 - The Education of Submarginal People - * in Joseph P. Fitzpatrick (a c. di), Educational Planning and Socio-Economic Development in Latin America, «Sondeos No. 9», 1966, pp. 159-161. - * in Obras Completas Italianas 1 - -* 1965 - Dear Father Kevane - -* 1966 - Concerning Aesthetic and Religious Experience - -* [[en:article:1968-the_redistribution_of_educational_tasks:index|1968 - The Redistribution of Educational Tasks between Schools and Other Organs of Society]] - -* 1967 - Dear Mary: Letter to an American Volunteer - -* 1967 - Yankee, Go Home: The American Do-Gooder in South America - -* 1967 - The Church, Change and Development - -* 1967 - The Seamy Side of Charity - * the powerless church - * Las sombras de la caridad - -* 1967 - The Vanishing Clergyman - * the powerless church - * la metamorfosis del clero - -* 1967 - To be perfectly frank - -* 1967 - The Secular City and the Structure of Religious Life: A Discussion Outline - * Cuernavaca 1967, in CIDOC Informa, gennaio-giugno 1968, «CIDOC Cuaderno No. 20», vol. 6, 1968, pp. 51a/1-9. - * in Obras Completas Italianas 1 - -* 1968 - Violence: A Mirror for Americans - -* 1968 - La escuela, esa vieja y gorda vaca sagrada - * 1969 - Commencement at the University of Puerto Rico - * 1968 - To Hell with Good Intentions - -* 1969 - Between Jail and Campus: The Chaplain’s Halfway House - -* 1969 - The need for counterfoil research. Address to the Canadian Institute of Public Affairs at Couchiching - * En CIDOC DOC - - -### 1970's - -* 1970 - Mission and Midwifery, Part I: Missionary Formation Based on Missiology - -* 1970 - Mission and Midwifery, Part II: Selection and Formation of the Missionary - -* 1970 - Missionary Poverty - -* 1970 - Missionary Silence - - -* 1970 - Beecher Lectures - * Cuadernos CIDOC ; No.1002 - -* 1970 - Ivan Illich Writes Pope Paul - -* 1970 - A Call to Celebration - -* 1973 - Abolishing schools 1 - * In New York Times, May 3, 1971. page 37. - -* 1971 - Draft for an address to the American Educational Research Association meeting in New York - * February 6, 1971. CIDOC, Doc. A/E 71/282. - -* 1971 - The Powerless Church - -* 1971 - De-schooling the Teaching Orders - -* 1971 - Por qué debemos abolir la trata escolar - * Cuaderno 66 - -* 1971 - Contra la religión de la escuela - * Cuaderno 66 - -* 1971 - The Alternative to Schooling - * In: "Saturday Review". 19 June 1971 - -* 1971 - The Breakdown of Schools: A Problem or a Symptom? - -* 1971 - Society and Imagination - -* **1971 - The Evolution of the School** - -* **1971 - The Roots of Human Liberation** - -* **1971 - This Book Is About Schools** - -* 1971 - The institutionalization of truth - * En Tradition and revolution, Lionel Rubinoff (solicitado a Harvard) - -* 1972 - How Will We Pass on Christianity? - -* 1972 - Foreword to Letters from the desert - -* **1972 - Education: Knowledge Capitalism** - * CIDOC. No. 39, - -* 1972 - A Center Conference: Toward a Society without Schools - * CIDOC DOCUMENTA Alternatives in Education V. 2, - -* 1972 - Identity and the nature of revolution - * In Latin America: The Dynamics of Social Change: https://hollis.harvard.edu/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=01HVD_ALMA211929995010003941&context=L&vid=HVD2&lang=en_US&search_scope=everything&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=everything&query=any,contains,Latin%20America:%20The%20Dynamics%20of%20Social%20Change&offset=0 - -* **1972 - Hacía una sociedad convivencial** - * In: CIDOC CUADERNO. No. 1021 - -* 1972 - Institutional Inversion - * In: CIDOC CUADERNO. No. 1017 - -* 1972 - Mr Chief Justice Burger and the disestablishment of schooling - * in CIDOC CUADERNO. No. 76 - -* 1972 - Anglo American Law and a convivial society - * In: CIDOC CUADERNO. No. 82 - -* 1972 - Gradual change or violent revolution in Latin America? - -* 1973 - After Deschooling, What? - * Un Mundo sin escuelas - -* **1973 - An Expansion of the Concept of Alienation** - -* 1973 - La necesidad de un techno común; el control social de latecnología. - -* 1973 0 Maintaining a Wattage Threshold. - * In: "The New York Times".; p. 33 - -* 1973 - Limits of Therapy - * Preparatory Documents for 1974 CIDOC - -* 1973 - Herramientas para la convivencia - * In: CIDOC CUADERNO. No. 1027 - -* 1973 - La escuela y la represion de nuestros hijos - -* 1973 - National Health Insurance and the People's - * In: CIDOC CUADERNO. No. 84 - -* 1973 - On the Political Uses of Natural Death - * In: CIDOC CUADERNO. No. 84 - -* 1973 - Para reencontrar la vida - * In: CIDOC CUADERNO. No. 84 - -* 1973 - Recycling the World - * In: CIDOC CUADERNO. No. 84 - -* 1973 - The illusion of unlimited Health Insurance - * In: CIDOC Documenta I/V, Julio 1971 - Agosto 1972. In: CIDOC CUADERNO. No. 82 - -* 1974 - Discurso en el Colegio de Abogados de San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 15 de abril de 1974 - * In: CIDOC DOCUMENTA I/V - -* 1974 - Lima Discourse - -* 1974 - The Annual Encyclopaedia Brittanica Lecture, Edinburgh - -* 1975 - Crisis en la didáctica, 2a parte. - -* 1975 - Introduction - * In: CIDOC CUADERNO. No. 90 - -* 1975 - La educación autocrítica - * and Paulo Freire - -* 1975 - Pilgrims of the Obvious: A Conversation with Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire - * In: "Risk" - -* 1975 - The industrialization of medicine - * In: "Ciba Found Symp" - -* 1975 - The medicalization of life - * In: "Journal of Medical Ethics. The Journal of the Society for the Study of Medical Ethics" - -* 1975 - The Recovery of Health - * In: "Cross Currents" - -* 1976 - Political Inversion - * Included in "Imprisoned in the Global Classroom" - -* 1976 - Medicine Is a Major Threat to Health - * [Co-author: Keen, Sam.] In: "Psychology Today" - -* 1976 - The age of professional dominance - * [A draft.] In: "TECNO-POLITICA". Doc. Cuernavaca, (México) - -* 1977 - Factors in Contemporary Medicine - -* 1978 - Alternativas de la educacion - * In: Coleccion Afluente. Ed. Apex: Buenos Aires; 116 - -* 1978 - In Lieu of Education - * In: Illich, Ivan: Toward a history of needs - -* 1978 - Tantalizing Needs - * In: Illich, Ivan: Toward a history of needs - -* 1978 - Introduction - * In: Doctors on trial. - -* 1978 - Taught Mother Tongue - * In Mirror - * Other name: Taught mother language and vernacular tongue - * In the book "Multilingualism and mother-tongue education" with Debi Prasanna Pattanayak - -* 1978 - Introduction to "The Inverse of Managed Health" - * [Co-author: Illich, Ivan.] In: "Social Alternatives". with Borremans, Valentina - -* [[en:article:1978-the_message_of_bapus_hut:index|1978 - The Message of Bapu’s Hut]] - -* 1979 - Preface - * In: Borremanns,Valentina: Guide to convivial tools - -* 1979 - The New Frontier for Arrogance: Colonization of the Informal Sector - -* 1979 - Vernacular Values and Education - -* 1979 - The Educational Sphere - * In Mirror - -### 1980's - -* 1980 - Alternativas del desarrollo. In: "El Viejo Topo". - -* 1980 - Los profesionales de la impotencia. - * In: "Construcción, Arquitectura y Urbanismo". 61, Col. Of. de Arquitectos Téc. y Aparejadores de Cataluña: Barcelona; - -* 1980 - Hugh - or, Science by People - -* 1980 - The De-linking of Peace and Development - * In Mirror - -* 1981 - Multilingualism and mother-tongue education (with Pattanayak, Debi Prasanna) - -* 1981 - On Education - * In: "New Education". - -* 1981 - La guerra contra la subsistencia: antología. - * In: Coleccion "Esta America". - * Otro titulo: La represión del ámbito vernáculo. - -* 1982 - Medicalization and primary care - * In: "The Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners". - -* 1982 - Silence is a Commons. - * In mirror - * Otro titulo: La sociedad gestionada mediante computadoras - -* Draft for a lecture in Berlin - -* 1983 - I Too Have Decided to Keep Silent - * In Mirror - -* 1984 - Dwelling - * In Mirror - -* 1984 - Eco Paedagogics and the Commons - * In: "Education". no. 2, 6, p. 29-34 - -* 1985 - In the vineyard of text - * (primero en aleman?) - -* 1985 - Twelve Years after Medical Nemesis: A Plea for Body History - * Escribir la historia del cuerpo doce años después de Nemesis médica. In: "Archipiélago: cuadernos de crítica de la cultura". No 15, Archipiélago: Barcelona; p - -* 1986 - Education as a problem of scarcity of means - -* 1986 - A plea for body history - -* 1986 - A Plea for Research on Lay Literacy - * In Mirror - -* [[en:article:1986-disvalue:index|1986 - Disvalue]] - -* 1987 - El género del espacio. El hogar vernáculo - * In: "Av. Arquitectura y vivienda". 12, Soc.Estatal de Gestión para la Rehabilitación y Construcción de la Vivienda: Madrid - -* 1987 - Hospitality and Pain. - -* 1987 - Computer Literacy and the Cybernetic Dream. - * In Mirror - -* 1987 - Medical Ethics: A Call to De-bunk Bio-ethics. - * In Mirror - -* 1988 - Needs - -* 1988 - The Educational Enterprise in the Light of the Gospel - -* 1988 - Alternatives to Economics: Toward a History of Waste - * In Mirror - -* 1989 - Posthumous Longevity. An open letter to a cloistered community of Benedictine nuns, 1989. - -* 1989 - The Institutional Construction of a New Fetish: Human Life - * In Mirror - -* 1989 - The Shadow that the Future Throws - -* 1989 - Commentary on Robert J. Fox - -### 1990's - -* 1990 - A-mortality - -* 1990 - Introduction to A-mortality - -* 1990 - Drugs - -* 1990 - Declaration On Soil - -* 1990 - Health as One's Own Responsibility - No, Thank You! - -* 1990 - Mnemosyne: The Mold of Memory. 'The Object of Objects: An Elegy for the Anchored Text' - -* 1990 - The Loudspeaker on the Tower - -* 1990 - The Sad Loss of Gender - -* 1991 - Comment: The Last Modern Century - -* 1991 - Preface In: Arney, William Ray: Experts in the Age of Systems - -* 1991 - Mente letrada versus mente informática - * In: "Archipiélago: cuadernos de crítica de la cultura". No 7 - -* 1991 - Text and University - on the idea and history of a unique institution - -* 1991 - The Earthy Virtue of Place - -* 1992 - Autostop - -* 1992 - The loss of world and flesh - -* 1993 - Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show. - -* 1993 - Lectio divina. - -* 1993 - To Honor Jaques Ellul. - -* 1994 - An Address to "Master Jacques" - -* **1994 - Blasphemy: A Radical Critique of Technological Culture** - -* 1994 - Coping with sickness - -* 1994 - Brave New Biocracy: Health Care From Womb to Tomb - -* 1994 - La ilusión fundamental - * In: "Archipiélago: cuadernos de crítica de la cultura". No 18-19, Archipiélago: - -* 1994 - Pathogenesis, Immunity and the Quality of Health Care. - -* 1994 - The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr - -* 1994 - Unhappy paradoxes of medicine - -* 1995 - Death Undefeated: From Medicine to Medicalisation to Systematisation - -* 1995 - Statements by Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich - * In: "Technology in Society". no. 2, 1995, volume 17, p. 231-235 - -* 1995 - The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze. A plea for the historical study of ocular perception - -* [[en:article:1995-foreword_deschooling_our_lives:index|1995 - Foreword to "Deschooling Our Lives"]] - -* 1996 - Education in the Perspective of the Dropout - * In: "Bulletin of Science, Technology andSociety". - -* 1996 - Health - * In: "Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society". no. 5/6, 1996, v - -* 1996 - Living Off the Waste of Development. - * In: "New Perspectives Quarterly" no. 3, June 1996, 13, p. 10-11 - -* 1996 - Philosophy... Artifacts... Friendship - and the History of the Gaze - -* 1996 - Speed? What Speed? - * Same: "From Fast to Quick" - -* 1997 - The Image of Objectivity - -* 1997 - To Hell with Life - -* 1997 - Beauty in Proportion - * In: "Resurgence: an international forum for ecological and spiritual thinking". Issue 185, - -* 1997 - Homo educandus lost. Education and Technology: Asking the Right Questions - -* 1997 - Slow Is Beautiful. In: "New Perspectives Quarterly" - * Gardels, Nathan ed.; issue 1, volume 14 - -* 1997 - The Immorality of Bioethics - -* [[en:article:1998-conspiracy:index|1998 - The Cultivation of Conspiracy]] - -* 1998 - La reindinvicación de la casa - * In: "Archipiélago: cuadernos de crítica de la cultura". No 34-35, Archipiélago - -* 1998 - And do not lead us into diagnosis, but deliver us of the pursuit of health - -* 1999 - The Conditional Human - - -## Other resources - - -* [[en:videos:index|Videos]] - -* 1969 - A conversation with Ivan Illich. Illich, Ivan, 1926-2002; WCNY-TV (Television station) Syracuse, N.Y. Interviewer: Carl Illenberg. - -* 1970 - The Institutionalization of Truth - * This is a videotape of a lecture (about 55 minutes) delivered in the spring of 1970 at York University in Toronto, Canada. - -### Audios - -#### Available - - -* 1968 - "Yesterday I Could Not Sleep Because Yesterday I Wrote My Name..." Sept. 30, 1968. Tape No. AS7915-7916/R7. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Collection. Duration: 00:42:00 - -* 1968 - Education in Developing Countries, Sept. 30, 1968. Tape AS17029/R7. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Collection. Duration: 1:30:00. - -* 1969 - A Privileged Place. Apr. 25, 1969. - Tape No. AS8075/R7. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Collection. Duration: 21:09 - -* 1973 - Retooling Society, Feb. 26, 1973. Tape No. A20644/R7. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Collection. Duration: 2:34:43 - -* 1976 - Reflections on Medical Nemesis, Apr. 20, 1976. Tape No. AS20944/R7. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Collection. Duration: 2:05:53 - -* 1976 - Lecture: "The Art of Dying (Ars Moriendi)," Apr. 21, 1976. Tape No. A5838/R7. 1:34:40 - -* 1981 - In Conversation with Ivan Illich (2 tapes), Apr. 23-24, 1981. Tape No. AS21511-21512/R7. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Collection. Duration: 2:48:19 (Tape 1) and 2:22:32 (Tape 2). - -* 1989 - Cayley, David (1989): Part Moon Part Travelling Salesman: Conversations with Ivan Illich. - -* 2002 - Cayley, David; (Illich, Ivan) (2000/2002): The corruption of christianity. Ivan Illich on Gospel, -Church and Society. - - -#### Requested - -* 1971 - John Wilkinson - Discussions with Ivan Illich in Mexico [?], (4 tapes), 1971. Tape No. AS10964-10967/R7. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Collection. Duration: ? - -* 1971 - Telephone Conversation with Ivan Illich - * Requested to [[http://www.johnohliger.org/contact.html|Chris Wagner]] from John Ohliger Institue on 26/1/2022. - * Audio-tape of an amplified long distance telephone conversation with Illich made on April 16, 1971. For about 35 minutes students and faculty at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio questioned Illich in Cuernavaca, Mexico about his ideas on deschooling. (For information on availability write to John Ohliger at the address on the last page of this bibliography.) - -#### Missing - -* 1970 - Alternatives in Education - * Available here: https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/permalink/01UTORONTO_INST/14bjeso/alma991106571535506196 - * Audiotape. About two hours. (Order at 775.00 from Reg Herman, Managing Editor, Conucenas, P.O. Box 250, Station F, Toronto 5, Ontario, Canada: This is a tape of a lecture delivered by Illich at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education on December 2, 1970. The chairman of the meeting announced that he hnd been informed by Illich that this was the last time he would talk on education and that he now hone: to move on to other things and leave the problems of education to other people or people he had managed to convert. Approximately the last half of the tare is devoted to a question and answer session with the audience. The tape is seven inch, 3 3/b i.p.s. half-track. - -* 1971 - Disestablishing education. Los Angeles, Calif. : Pacifica Tape Library. 2 cassettes (101 min.) - * Available at: https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/permalink/01UTORONTO_INST/14bjeso/alma991106673061806196 - -* 1971 - Ivan Illich on educational alternatives. CBC. - * Available at: https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/permalink/01UTORONTO_INST/14bjeso/alma991106005915006196 - -* 1975 - What Education Expresses. Pacifica Tape Library: Los Angeles; Audiocassette (Other/3553) - -* 1986 - On Literacy. Teach'em: Chicago; Audiocassette (Other/3549) - -* 1989 - The STS Curriculum. Infotainment Inc.: Ottawa, ON; Videocassette (Other/3550) - -* Illich, Ivan (19??): Askese des Blicks. In: Reihe Autobahn Universität. Vortrag auf Cassette. Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag: Heidelberg; (Other/2504) - -* 1971 - Goodman, Paul; Illich, Ivan (19??): Authenticity and Change. Living Library Corporation: New York;Audiocassette (Other/3539) - * Available here: https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/permalink/01UTORONTO_INST/14bjeso/alma991106590271806196 - - - -### Interviews (in text) +{{page>.:article:index}} -* 1972 - Barry Schwartz: Deschooling, an interview with Ivan Illich. In: "Affirmative Education" -* 1976 - De Santana, Hubert (1976): Interview with Ivan Illich. In: "Maclean's". p. 8-9 +## Interviews -* 1977 - Illich, Ivan (1977): Revolting Development: An Exchange with Ivan Illich. In: "International Development -Review". no. 4, 19, p. 303-315 +{{page>.:interview:index}} -* 1987 - Interview with Douglas Lummis +<html> +<style> -* 1996 - Land of Found Friends: Conversation among Ivan Illich, Jerry Brown, and Carl Mitcham. +li.level1 { + margin-bottom: 20px; +} +li.level2 { + font-size: 75%; +} -* 1997 - Twenty-Six Years Later: Majid Rahnema in conversation with Ivan Illich. (D/4042/135-0) +img.icon { + vertical-align: baseline; +} -* 1989 - Cayley, David (1989): Part Moon Part Travelling Salesman: Conversations with Ivan Illich. -* 2002 - Cayley, David; (Illich, Ivan) (2000/2002): The corruption of christianity. Ivan Illich on Gospel, -Church and Society. +</style> +</html> diff --git a/data/pages/en/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto/index.bib b/data/pages/en/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto/index.bib new file mode 120000 index 0000000..77c9f4d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto/index.bib @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto/en.bib
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto/index.txt b/data/pages/en/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto/index.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..45f65d9 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto/index.txt @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +# Q & A Session in OISE of Toronto in December 1970 + +* **#@LANG_textfull@#:** [[.:text|Online]] +* **#@LANG_titleorig@#:** _Q & A Session in OISE of Toronto in December 1970_ +* **#@LANG_langorig@#:** #@LANG_lang_en@# +* **#@LANG_authors@#:** Ivan Illich; Ontario Institute for Studies in Education +* **#@LANG_publicationdate@#:** 1970-12-02 +* **#@LANG_versions@#:** +* **#@LANG_comments@#:** + * This session took place following Illich's talk to a meeting at the +Ontario Institute for Studies in Education on December 2, 1970. The +session won't make much sense without first listening to the talk on the tape. The title of the address was "Alternatives in Education". + +``` +@ARTICLE{Illich-1970-qa_session_toronto-en, + author = {Ivan Illich and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education}, + title = {Q & A Session in OISE of Toronto in December 1970}, + year = {1970}, + date = {1970-12-02}, + origdate = {1970-12-02}, + language = {en}, + translator = {}, + url = {https://illich.acerv.uz/en/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto:index} +} +``` +~~NOTOC~~ +{{tag>available}} diff --git a/data/pages/en/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto/notes.txt b/data/pages/en/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto/notes.txt new file mode 120000 index 0000000..2e3c076 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/pages/en/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto/notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../../../contents/interview/1970-qa_session_toronto/en.notes
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/pages/en/videos/index.txt b/data/pages/en/videos/index.txt deleted file mode 100644 index b0d75ee..0000000 --- a/data/pages/en/videos/index.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,11 +0,0 @@ -# Videos - -## Available - -* [[.:1972:index|1972 - Un Certain Regard]] -* [[.:1976:index|1976 - In the name of Progress: no respect for holy cows]] - -## Not available yet - -* 1970 - The Institutionalization of Truth - * This is a videotape of a lecture (about 55 minutes) delivered in the spring of 1970 at York University in Toronto, O.Inada. Tt is on 1/2 inch Shibaden tape. (For information on availability write to rr. Beg Herman, L"anaging Editor, Convergence, P.O. Box 250, Station F, 'Toronto 5, Ontario, Canada. This lecture places Illich's thoughts about schools within the context of his opposition to t'cle worldwide drive toward economic development.
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