6 OCTOBER 1973, Page 21

Philosophy , and

fashion

Kenneth Minogue

Tools for Conviviality Ivan Illich (Calder and Boyars £2.25) Tools for what?. the reader may well ask as he picks up the new Ivan Illich. Anyone familiar With Celebration of Awareness and other Illichiana will know that it's not just a matter of bottles of beer on Saturday night. To talk of 'tools' in this way exemplifies Illich's gift for striking phrases and metaphors, a gift he employs to express his powerful sense that modern men are merely "accessories of bureaucracies and machines." Illich seeks to restore human life to a properly human scale, one in which men's own purposes determine how they live. In modern industrial societies, the 'tools' (such as jet planes, shiny cars, Cyclotrons, schools, hospitals etc.) have grown to a point where they crush the humanity out of the men who use them. The only way to avoid catastrophe is to return to tools which can mesh with human purposes: a world in Which the bicycle replaces the car, availability of books replaces compulsory schooling, and a Widespread knowledge of;elethentary hygiene takes over from the specialised ministrations of overtrained doctors.

Ivan Illich is, then, a prophet, come like all prophets to warn us of imminent doom. For all its individual flavour, resulting from Illich's Catholic background and his immersion in the Problems of undetdeveloped Latin America, his message is a familiar one. It draws upon the nineteenth century protests about the Mechanisation of man by industrial production, and its andestry is the early Marx, William Morris and (in respect of such specific things as his attack on institutionalised medicine) George Bernard Shaw. Unlike many socialists, however, Illich is not bewitched by soCial laws and the prospect of revolutionary seizure of power. He traces many of the undesirable features of the modern world to the persistence of the old idea that men are essentially the controllers of slaves. The industrial revolution held out the promise that all men could become the masters of machines; instead, the vast increase in the Power available to modern societies overwhelmed the human scale of things. As a result, men became "degraded to the status of mere consumers." Their reward is "mere Pleasure" rather than the joy that comes of creative activity. If, however, they can learn the difficult lesson that the way ahead involves the use of less rather than more control Tier energy, they will be able to achieve the autonomous and creative intercourse among vPievrsialintsyT,that Illich has chosen to call "con ln his earlier book Deschooling Society !IlIch attacked compulsory education as an Institution no longer relevant to human aspirations. He declared that it had broken loose from its legitimate tasks and set up its Own "definition'' of learning, a definition whose effect was to grade human beings into successes and failures, and to "condition" them as docile consumers of the products of industry. Tools for Conviviality also attacks educators, but broadens the attack to take in professionalisation in general, and the medical profession in particular.

Knowledge of curing, the argument seems to run, used to be widely distributed throughout the community, but professionalisation has divided us into a small highly educated group of doctors with a "radical monopoly" of how to cure, and a dependent mass of people whose very conception of what constitutes a disease is determined for them by the professionals. "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." This is one of the cases where Illich calls upon the experience of underdeveloped countries, for he is impressed by the futility of a situation in which there is a disastrous shortage of expensively trained doctors in countries where most diseases could be easily cured by lay medical workers: he cites the "barefoot doctors" of China as an example.

Modern transport systems are attacked in a similar fashion. Beyond a certain point consonant with individual human purposes, an increase in speed polarises society into those who can afford to use private cars and fast planes, and those who can no longer walk or ride bicycles because modern super-highways make no provision for slow speeds, and because speed makes slower journeys seem futile. He cites Mexican figures to show that the creation of a sophisticated modern transport system has paradoxically resulted in less, rather than more, mobility. In addition, he is concerned with the fact that bicycles and pushcarts, even when motorised are "convivial" tools in that they can be repaired by their owners, whereas modern cars and jet planes make men dependent upon trained mechanics. This is the typical case where the sophistication of the tools reduces the driver or plot to dependence upon the machinery. A strong egalitarian theme accompanies this argument: just as education grades people, so access to speed in industrial societies is a sign of worth. The message of most prophets in that the meek shall inherit the earth, and in Illich's case, it is clearly the poor who are less depersonalised by the modes of thought associated with the industrial mode of production. Nevertheless, the poor are affected by the cannibalistic way in which industrialism gobbles up natural resources and forces its criteria upon everyone.

Illich is a moralist with a well developed sense of doom. How seriously should we take him? There can be no doubt of his moral passion: in this respect, at least, he may be compared to Socrates and Rousseau. Further, he does to some extent, recognise that the future depends upon the attitudes we adopt. In other words, Illich is clearly trying to persuade us to think differently, by contrast with the more pretentious kind of radical who offers us the supposed laws of social development that are leading us inexorably towards a revolution.

Nevertheless, Illich's stock in trade is very close to the present radical mainstream. One of the odd consequences of his eccentric use of the term "conviviality" is that General Giap's North Vietnamese troops suddenly appear in the text as examples of a convivial army. He is very fond of the notion that most people have been "conditioned" to believe what industrialism requires. He cannot quite take seriously those who do not share his vision of things. Yet that vision is not only foggily described but also depends upon erecting selected features of modern society (grading in schools, specialisation in medicine, for example) into the essence of what is happening in modern society. Gadflies and prophets always tell us: "You are asleep, and I alone can wake you up." Their moral fervour should not be allowed to obscure their intellectual inadequacies.