Ivan Illich -- obituary

The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 12/05/2002

[dighton]

Ivan Illich, the sociologist and former priest who died on Monday aged 76, was a resolute opponent of institutionalisation; his controversial views on education, society, the law, medicine, and over-consumption brought him into conflict with the Roman Catholic Church and “experts” in almost every discipline.

Experts were, in fact, precisely the target of Illich’s wrath, especially in his two most influential books, Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesis (1975). The hideously-titled Celebration of Awareness took a dim view of progress.

Gender (1982) pointed out that drains were not an unqualified benefit to the Third World’s women. “Tap water put an end to her carrying the jugs to and fro, but also to her meeting friends at the well.” Addressing the Royal Academy of Persia on the subject of ablutions, he questioned the wisdom of giving every citizen a flush lavatory.

Illich argued that schools undermined the genuine purpose of education, that the legal system heightened, rather than resolved, people’s grievances, that doctors and scientists had set themselves up as a new, secular priesthood, and that the Church had become enmeshed in bureaucracy.

Statements such as “All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on society” and “The medical establishment has become a major threat to health” were typical examples of his provocative stance.

But while other figures who shared many of Illich’s preoccupations, such as the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, gained support for their views by promulgating them through political channels, Illich resolutely refused to appear on television, and seldom spoke to journalists. Although he continued to publish, his work had less and less influence after the mid-1970s.

Nor did his approach always seem balanced - those who shared his suspicion of bureaucracy and of claims to expertise were often less impressed by his arguments for the basis of community, accusations of “Western political bias” and enthusiasm for “intercultural sensitivity”. Others supported Illich’s distrust of Western paternalism and authority, but ridiculed the warnings against modern education and medicine.

Though he anticipated many of the concerns of the ecological movement, his religious radicalism made him an uncomfortable ally. He opposed travel above bicycle speed (the motor car was a bete noir), yet spent much of his life jet-setting from conference to conference.

Ivan Illich (whose name was sometimes spelled Ilic) was born on September 4 1926 in Vienna, the son of a Catholic Croatian landowner and civil engineer and a mother from a Sephardic Jewish family which had originated in Spain but long since settled around Heidelberg. His maternal grandmother was a Texan.

Young Ivan was a promising student at the Piaristengymnasium in the city, and spent his summers on the Dalmatian coast or travelling around Europe until 1941, when his mother’s Jewish background led to the family’s expulsion from Austria. He completed his secondary education in Florence, at the Liceo Scientifico Leonardo da Vinci, before attending the University of Florence, where he studied Histology and Crystallography.

He also read widely in Psychology, becoming particularly interested in the theories of Rudolf Steiner and Ludwig Klages, and developed a fascination with primitive art. These early mentors, he later wrote, “had a much deeper mark on my intellectual orientation than formal university study or degree work”.

But by this stage, Illich had also decided to study for the priesthood, and in 1943 travelled to Rome, where he enrolled in the Gregorian University. He began by studying Philosophy, and was much influenced by the writings of the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, as well as falling under the spell of Dostoyevsky, whom he saw as a forerunner of existentialism.

After graduating in 1946, he embarked on a licentiate in Theology, which concentrated on the basis of religious motivation in the work of Romano Guardini. Simultaneously, he took a doctorate from the University of Salzburg on Arnold Toynbee and the difficulty of historical knowledge.

After ordination in 1951, Illich seemed set for a career as a nuncio or canon lawyer, but instead requested a move to the Archdiocese of New York, where he worked at Washington Heights, in a parish serving the large Puerto Rican population then arriving in Manhattan. With a judgment characteristic of his later work, Illich said that what these migrants needed most was “not more help but less categorisation according to previous schemes”.

His enthusiasm for the souls in his care led Illich to accept a job as Vice-Rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico in 1956. He spent four years at Ponce, travelling widely through Latin America and studying immigration; and alienating many of the local clergy by complaining of their readiness to impose American values on their congregations.

After he fell out with the Bishop of Ponce, the Most Rev James McManus, over the gubernatorial election of 1960, Illich quit the island and returned to New York. He became a research assistant to the president of Fordham University, and set up the Center of Intercultural Formation, which soon became the Centro Intercultural de Documentacion (CIDOC), based in Mexico.

This mixture of language school, think tank, publishing house and informal seminary attracted many young priests, especially after a papal call for 10 per cent of North America’s religious to serve in the southern part of the continent. Many did not impress Illich - a cantankerous figure - who sent half home as unfit for missionary work.

After he criticised the Church in the Jesuit-run journal America, Illich’s funding was withdrawn, and in 1968, he severed CIDOC’s ties with the Church. In January the next year, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith prohibited priests from visiting the centre, and in March 1969, Illich abandoned his titles and benefits (though not his vow of celibacy or obligation to say his office).

Illich continued to lecture at Fordham, in the department of Political Science, and took on many other scholarly posts. He was a visiting professor of Medieval History at the University of Kassel from 1979-1981, at the University of California at Berkeley the following year and then at the Universities of Marburg and Oldenburg, Germany.

He became Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University in 1986, and ran its doctoral programme in Architecture from 1990 until 1995. From 1991, he lectured in Sociology at Bremen University.

Illich, a man of 6 ft 3 in, could appear a stern, forbidding character, which he put down to “growing up in five languages, but without a mother tongue”. He took notes in Latin and read several books each night, acquiring several more languages. He learned Greek in a week when attending a conference in Cyprus, but when asked why he used complicated expressions in English, replied: “Brain incompetence.”

Illich’s other publications included Tools for Conviviality; Energy and Equity (both 1973); The Right to Useful Employment; Towards a History of Needs (both 1979); Shadow-Work (1981); ABC: The Alphabetisation of the Popular Mind (1988); and In the Vineyard of the Text (1993).

Asked once in Paris: “Do you come here often?” he replied, “I find it difficult to make a general statement about the way I lead my life”. Despite his many targets, he maintained until the end the same evasive position about the kind of society of which he would actively approve. “I am not concerned with prescriptions.” He avoided doctors.

[nickcarraway]

One of Leo Tolstoy's most famous novella's is about his death.

[struwwelpeter]

He sounds like a kindred spirit.

[nicmarlo]

That's where I heard the name.....I couldn't figure out why it sounded so familiar.....

[dighton]

Ouch!

[cornelis]

Brain incompetence

A-P is this you?

[Shermy]

“I am not concerned with prescriptions.” He avoided doctors."

Another blue medal for the Telegraph obit writer.

[cornelis]

He learned Greek in a week when attending a conference

[dighton]

Blue-ribbon obituarist bump.

[BlackVeil]

That's where I heard the name..... That is exactly what I was wondering about. He sounds a real character, doesn't he? Love that casual bit about making notes in Latin, and learning a language here, a language there ...

[TopQuark]

on the subject of ablutions, he questioned the wisdom of giving every citizen a flush lavatory.

Yep, it's usually the ones who have plush, warm, and tiled bathrooms that feel sorry for the passing of the ways of the "aborigines."

[yooper]

"Addressing the Royal Academy of Persia on the subject of ablutions, he questioned the wisdom of giving every citizen a flush lavatory."

What an idiot. It's a well known fact among my profession (civil engineering) that the advent of flush toilets and other improvements in waste disposal was generally responsible for the great increase in life expectancy seen after the turn of the 20th century (in "modern" societies).

Sounds like the world is better off without this pseudo-intellectual......

[aculeus]

His maternal grandmother was a Texan.

Hmmmm.

[TopQuark]

He appears to have had a great deal of hubris: with an undergraduate in crystallography and graduate studies in religion, he has lectured in sociology (?), political science (?), medieval history (?), and run a doctorate program in... architecture.

I am certain that modesty was not the cause of his death.

May he rest in peace.

[Shermy]

His maternal grandmother was a Texan.

Hmmmm.

Albino Squirrel Becomes (North Texas) Campus Good Luck Charm - (Texas Students Believe) Spotting Creature Assures Passing Grades

[cornelis]

I am surrounded for the first time in my life with people above 25 who were born in the year, or shortly after the year, during which I had one experience of what they call medically in America depression of two weeks. I called it melancholia. I called it acedia.

Brown: Acedia being one of the seven deadly sins.

Illich: Which is the inactivity which results from a man seeing how enormously difficult it is for a man to do the right thing.

Brown: Also called sloth in some translations.

Illich: In good English. Sloth.

-1996 .

[ArcLight]

Another marvelous obit...thanks.

[pinz-n-needlez]

ping