Renegade Priest Against Institutions
Vienna-born priest who ran a subversive Cuernavaca school for missionaries, then argued that schools, cars and hospitals pass a threshold where they disable the people they serve.
Social Critic, Historian & Theologian
Ivan Illich was a Catholic priest who ran a language school for missionaries in Mexico and used it to ask whether they should be going at all. The question that made him famous grew out of that: at what point does a service stop serving people and start manufacturing the need for itself? He answered with cases rather than slogans: a motorway that makes walking a stranger’s privilege, a diploma that stands in for knowing something, a hospital that adds diseases of its own to the list. He answered it last with his own body, living through a disfiguring cancer on terms he set rather than accept the care that, by one obituary’s account, would have ended his work. Some of his claims were challenged hard in his lifetime, and the page says where.
Ivan Illich was born in Vienna on 4 September 1926 into a Catholic household with Jewish roots on his mother’s side. His father, Ivan Peter, was a civil engineer and diplomat from a landowning Catholic family of Dalmatia, with estates on the island of Brač; his mother, Ellen Rose, came from a Sephardic Jewish family that had converted to Christianity. He was baptised in Split on 1 December 1926, spent his early years between his Dalmatian and Viennese grandfathers, and after his parents divorced in 1932 lived mostly in his maternal grandfather’s house in Vienna. In a 1982 lecture in Tokyo he gave his own version of the island: the first loudspeaker to reach Brač, he said, came over on the same boat that carried him there as a baby, and from then on silence stopped being something everyone shared. It is a story told by a man making an argument, but it shows where his later talk of “commons” began.
After the Anschluss his mother’s descent made him, under Nazi law, a half-Jew. His father’s diplomatic standing had shielded the household, and the Jewish grandfather, for a while; at fifteen or sixteen (his own archive’s biography says 1941; other accounts say 1942) he left for Italy with his mother and brothers, and he finished school in Florence. He studied natural sciences there and in Rome, crystallography and histology among them, before and alongside philosophy (1944–1947) and theology (1947–1951) at the Gregorian University. He was ordained in Rome on 24 March 1951, and took a history doctorate at Salzburg that year with a thesis on the philosophical presuppositions of Arnold Toynbee’s historiography.
His abilities pointed to the Vatican diplomatic service, which is where one of his biographers says he seemed headed. In an interview with David Cayley he said he wanted to get away from Rome and from papal bureaucracy, and that he had planned research at Princeton on Albertus Magnus. He went to New York in 1951, and a single afternoon there changed the plan.
By his account to Cayley, on his first afternoon in New York he heard from friends of his grandfather about the Puerto Ricans then arriving in the city, spent the next two days in their street market under the railway tracks near 112th Street, and went straight to Cardinal Francis Spellman’s office to ask for a Puerto Rican parish. He was given the Church of the Incarnation in Washington Heights, where, it is reported, the pastor had him preach as “John Illich” because Ivan sounded communist. In 1956 he and Spellman celebrated the feast of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s patron saint, with some thirty thousand Puerto Ricans gathered at Fordham University. That year Spellman’s favour sent him to Puerto Rico as vice-rector of the Catholic University in Ponce.
His job there was to teach North American priests Spanish and Puerto Rican culture. It was also where the education argument began. In conversations from about 1958 with the educator Everett Reimer, Illich came to see that for most people the right to learn was being restricted by the obligation to attend school. Both men were then running educational institutions, and both were examining what those institutions did.
The rupture was not with Spellman but with the island’s bishops. In the 1960 election, James McManus of Ponce and James Davis of San Juan denounced Governor Luis Muñoz Marín’s party over birth control and divorce and set up a rival Catholic party. Illich objected, and later summed up his objection as historian, politician and theologian; as a theologian, he said, the Church “never has the right to speak in favor of a specific political party” (as quoted in Francine du Plessix Gray’s Divine Disobedience, 1970). McManus then forbade priests to dine with the governor. Illich did, and McManus ordered him out of the university, calling his presence “dangerous to the Diocese of Ponce and its institutions.” Illich’s archive dates his vice-rectorship 1956–1961; Todd Hartch’s biography puts the end in 1960. The National Catholic Welfare Conference’s Paul Tanner barred him from any official role in its Latin American bureau, but the priest John J. Considine kept backing him and paid for trips to Mexico to scout a site for a missionary training centre.
The training centre Illich had begun at Fordham, the Center for Intercultural Formation, moved in 1961 to Cuernavaca, Mexico, into an abandoned hotel called the Chulavista. His Mexican biographer Braulio Hornedo reads Pope John XXIII’s call for North American dioceses to send a tenth of their priests and nuns to Latin America as a trap: the Church, he writes, was lending its missionaries to the American doctrine of “development” that the Kennedy administration would turn into the Alliance for Progress. In 1966 the centre became CIDOC, the Centro Intercultural de Documentación, with Valentina Borremans as co-founder and director; Hornedo also lists Feodora Stancioff and Gerry Morris among the founders.
Its working method was dull on paper and subversive in effect. Missionaries and volunteers got four months of intensive Spanish, five hours a day in groups of three, and were pushed to reflect on the country they were about to enter. Illich told Cayley he hoped they would write reports home that gave their superiors a truer picture of Latin America and showed up the illusion in the volunteer programmes. By his account he paid the teachers more than any university in Cuernavaca did and charged fees at American prices, which funded a research library and advanced courses, and he never took grant money. Paul Goodman, Erich Fromm, Paulo Freire and Peter Berger came through. CIDOC printed its own pamphlets in days, and several of Illich’s first Spanish-language books began as those pamphlets.
In 1968 he was invited to give the keynote to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects, a group that sent American students to work in Mexican villages in the summer. His speech, “To Hell with Good Intentions,” told them (in the Spanish text published by his archive; the translation here is ours) that the existence of organisations like theirs was “an offence to Mexico.” He said he was calling for the withdrawal of all American missionaries, Peace Corps members and volunteer groups from Latin America. In another lecture he compared the Church to the Ford Motor Company. The Jesuit Daniel Berrigan, Hornedo reports, accused him of intellectual violence.
Hornedo says the Church censured CIDOC in 1967. Illich told Cayley that in 1967 he received formal documents from the Roman Curia and learned that they had been kept as CIA reports. A 2003 obituary in the SIGNIS bulletin adds that after the death of his patron Cardinal Spellman in 1967 he fell out of favour in the Curia, although Paul VI defended him. On 18 June 1968 he was received in the Vatican by Cardinal Franjo Šeper, the head of the doctrinal congregation, and given a long written questionnaire about his theological and church-critical statements.
To be exact: this was an inquiry, not a trial. Hartch’s biography says that he was neither convicted nor punished. He did not wait for a verdict. In 1969 he stopped exercising priestly functions, while asking not to be released from celibacy or the daily breviary, and he went on calling himself a priest and saying Mass in private. Hornedo quotes his account to Cayley (in Spanish translation): he told the Church that it had made a scandal of him, that he renounced his privileges and any duty within its liturgical and clerical system, and that he would stay away. From 1960, he added, he had refused to speak as a churchman at all. The Guardian’s obituary says that by resigning active duty he sidestepped a bitter conflict with the Vatican, which by then opposed CIDOC.
We have not seen the questionnaire or the CIA material. This chapter rests on Illich’s later testimony, a sympathetic Mexican biographer and secondary reference works, and it should be read that way.
Illich wrote Deschooling Society in public. On Wednesday mornings in the spring and summer of 1970 he handed sections of the draft to participants in the CIDOC programmes in Cuernavaca, and in the preface credits ideas to Paulo Freire, Peter Berger and John Holt, among others. “Among my critics,” he writes, “Paul Goodman most radically obliged me to revise my thinking.” Robert Silvers gave editorial help on three chapters that first appeared in The New York Review of Books. The book grew from his talks with Reimer in Puerto Rico and from the CIDOC seminars Borremans ran twice a year from 1966.
The argument begins with a charge against what schools teach by their structure rather than their syllabus: “They school them to confuse process and substance.” The pupil is “schooled” to confuse “teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.” The same logic, he adds, makes medical treatment pass for health care and police protection for safety. Schooling, in his analysis, does what churches have always done: it keeps a society’s myth, institutionalises the myth’s contradictions, and runs the ritual that hides the gap between myth and reality. “School is not only the New World Religion. It is also the world’s fastest-growing labor market.”
His alternative is a set of four “learning webs” rather than a better school: reference services to educational objects, such as libraries, workshops and farms; skill exchanges, where people list what they can teach; peer-matching; and directories of educators-at-large, who could be chosen by polling their former clients. The peer-matching network reads, for 1970, like a description of an online service: “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 not a plan for abolishing schools by decree. It is also, in our reading, stronger as diagnosis than as an answer for a child whose family has neither time nor books, and that is where we would press him.
Tools for Conviviality generalises the school argument into a test for anything people use. Illich begins by saying that people need more than to be supplied with things: they need “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.” He chooses the word conviviality “to designate the opposite of industrial productivity,” meaning “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment.” His idea of a tool is deliberately wide: factories and school systems count as tools, as do hammers. In our paraphrase, a convivial tool is one a person can power, understand and steer for their own purposes. “Hand tools are those which adapt man’s metabolic energy to a specific task”: pocket knives, looms, pedal-driven sewing machines, or a whole bicycle system of pushcarts and three-wheeled rickshaws with repair stations along the road. His own gloss is that “Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.”
The bicycle makes the test plain, and the car is its opposite. In our gloss, a bicycle takes its energy from the rider, can be mended by the rider, goes where the rider chooses and leaves the street usable for everyone else; a car, in his account, rebuilds the street around itself. That is the passage to read for “radical monopoly.” Ordinary monopoly, he says, is one firm controlling a product: a thirsty man restricted to one brand of soft drink “still remains free to quench his thirst with beer or water.” Monopoly becomes radical when one type of product rules out the alternatives to it. “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. … That motor traffic curtails the right to walk, not that more people drive Chevies than Fords, constitutes radical monopoly.” It is, he adds, a different harm from burning petrol or killing people on the road: “Cars create distance.” The same structure, he says, can be seen in schooling and in medicine: “Radical monopoly exists where a major tool rules out natural competence.”
The medical case in this book is a threshold in time. About 1913, he writes, a patient first had “more than a fifty-fifty chance that a graduate of a medical school would provide him with a specifically effective treatment”; he places a second watershed about 1955, after which the profession’s harm, not its benefit, grew with each new increment of control. He also says it is “not strictly necessary to this argument to accept 1913 and 1955” as the dates, which is a fair warning that the numbers are illustrative rather than measured. What he asks for is political rather than technical: limits on tools “established and governed by political process rather than by decisions by experts.” The book’s influence on early personal-computer builders, notably Lee Felsenstein, is documented in a 1995 interview with him by Kip Crosby. The Guardian’s obituarists observe that his writing was easily caricatured on the right and disliked on the left for its attacks on the welfare state.
Energy and Equity puts figures on the car passage. In the Spanish edition published by his archive, the typical American spends more than 1,600 hours a year on his car: sitting in it, moving or stopped, and working to pay for it, the fuel, tyres, tolls, insurance, fines and the taxes for highways and car parks. That comes to four hours a day, and leaves out the hours in hospitals, courts and garages and in front of car advertisements. For those hours he covers about 10,000 kilometres, six kilometres an hour, which he says is exactly what people achieve in societies with no transport industry. The difference, Illich says, is that the non-motorised societies spend between 3 and 8 per cent of their social time on getting about, and the American a quarter of it. (The English editions work in miles; we have read the Spanish text and give its units.)
From such cases comes the threshold. In the Spanish text, wherever the speed of vehicles on daily journeys passes about 20 kilometres an hour, the scarcity of time linked to transport begins to grow. Tools for Conviviality states the same limit in a sentence: “Commuter transportation leads to negative returns when it admits, anywhere in the system, speeds much above those reached on a bicycle.” He asks, “What gains in equality, activity, health, and freedom would result from limiting all other vehicles to the speed of bicycles and sailing ships?” and then concedes, “It is of course mere fantasy to assume an egalitarian consensus sufficiently strong to accept such a proposal.” The proposal is a thought experiment as much as a policy. A fair reader will also notice that the Guardian calls Illich a “jet-age ascetic” who criss-crossed the globe in his last two decades. What lasts in the argument is the method: count the hours a vehicle costs, not only the hours it saves.
Medical Nemesis opens by granting that diseases have changed: polio, diphtheria and tuberculosis are vanishing and “one shot of an antibiotic often cures pneumonia or syphilis.” Then it makes a double claim. There is, Illich says, “no evidence of any direct relationship” between the mutation of sickness and the progress of medicine, and a growing share of the new burden of disease “is doctor-made, or iatrogenic.” He compares the damage to epidemics of the age: “Among murderous institutional torts, only modern malnutrition injures more people than iatrogenic disease in its various manifestations.” These are his 1970s claims, built on the studies he cites, and readers should treat the figures as a snapshot of that decade’s literature. Iatrogenic disease was not his invention; he notes that such side-effects “are as old as medicine itself.” What he added was a classification and an argument.
He sorts the harm into three levels. Clinical iatrogenesis covers “all clinical conditions for which remedies, physicians, or hospitals are the pathogens.” Social iatrogenesis is what he calls the expropriation of health: medically certified symptoms, he says, “exempt people from industrial work and thereby remove them from the scene of political struggle to reshape the society that has made them sick.” Cultural iatrogenesis is the deepest, “the paralysis of healthy responses to suffering, impairment, and death.” When each remedy for these harms becomes a new pathogen he calls the “self-reinforcing loop of negative institutional feedback” medical nemesis, after the Greek goddess who was, in his telling, “nature’s response to hubris.” He is not saying medicine never cures; he exempts drugs for the few in whom high blood pressure is malignant and surgery for some rare heart conditions. His target is the claim that more medicine always means more health.
On 1 April 1976, the tenth anniversary of CIDOC, Illich closed it. In 1973 he had asked the administrators to stop spending on air tickets and books and to pay everything into a fund, which at the end was divided into sixty-three equal shares. In his account to Cayley the reasons were that everything he wanted the centre to do was done by 1970, that he feared it would be institutionalised like a university, that he could not answer for his colleagues’ physical safety in the Latin America of the 1970s, and that he expected the peso to collapse. The library went to the Colegio de México, and hundreds of people from the town came to the farewell party.
After CIDOC he returned to Europe and to a life of visiting posts. His archive lists Kassel, Marburg, Oldenburg, Berkeley and Penn State; a 2015 Neue Zürcher Zeitung piece adds a place among the first fellows of Berlin’s Wissenschaftskolleg in 1981–1982. The Guardian counts seven short, non-academic books in the 1970s and early 1980s on schooling, tools, energy, medicine and work, the last two being The Right to Useful Unemployment (1978) and Shadow Work (1981). Shadow work is the unpaid labour an industrial economy needs and does not count.
Gender (1982) is the most disputed of his books. The Guardian’s summary is that the old difference between feminine and masculine domains was sacrificed to the idea of neutral work, with capitalism creating and depending on the pairing of the male wage-earner with the woman as mother who produces the next generation of workers. Illich called the older arrangement “vernacular gender.” The linguist Robin Lakoff is reported to have compared the book to Mein Kampf, in a 1983 essay titled “Illich as text”; we know it only as quoted in a 2012 law-review foreword, so treat it as a reported extreme of the hostile reception. The sociologist Barbara Duden, his collaborator on the history of the body, is among those who kept working in his tradition after his death. Our own reading is that the objection a sceptical reader should press is whether “complementary” domains felt complementary to the women who lived inside them. The shelf says to read it with critical scholarship, and that remains our advice.
The late works turn from critique to history: H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (1985), ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988), written with Barry Sanders, and In the Vineyard of the Text (1993), a commentary on the Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor, a twelfth-century Paris teacher. The Guardian reports Illich as describing the last as an attempt to understand the move from the book to the computer screen by way of changes in medieval reading practice.
The Guardian argues that this historical turn was the real foundation of his critique, which rested on an understanding of how institutions were born in the thirteenth-century Church, and that he is better read as an archaeologist of ideas than as an ideologue. Illich often cited the Latin maxim corruptio optimi pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst. In outline, the best is the Incarnation and the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the worst is what happens when that care is turned into rules and institutions without limit. From 1991 Bremen invited him as a visiting professor for seven years, and he lived frugally between Bremen, Cuernavaca and Pennsylvania, working in some ten languages and opening his doors to collaborators and drop-ins.
For the last years of his life Illich carried a growing tumour on his face. The Guardian’s obituary calls it a disfiguring cancer, puts the period at ten years and speaks of terrible suffering; another account says almost twenty, without a source. By the Guardian’s account he treated himself, against the advice of doctors who proposed a largely sedative course that would have made his work impossible. It is reported that early on he consulted a doctor about removing the tumour and was told he would probably lose his voice, and that he then lived with the disease, which he called “my mortality.” It is also reported that he smoked opium for the pain; we could not trace that to a first-hand account.
The Guardian says he acted “following the thesis of Medical Nemesis,” and other accounts say the same of his refusal. The book’s name for the harm he was avoiding is cultural iatrogenesis, “the paralysis of healthy responses to suffering, impairment, and death.” This is the thesis at its most personal. It is a record of one man’s decision, not medical advice, and the book does not claim that cancer is better left alone.
Illich died in Bremen on 2 December 2002. His last wish, to die among close collaborators in Bologna at the start of a new learning centre he had planned there, was not granted. He had finished a history of pain, which the Guardian said would be published in French the following year. He is reported to have been buried in the Oberneuland cemetery there, at his own request and with letters of support from two former mayors of Bremen.
Neil PostmanA shared inquiry into tools, schooling and institutional authority.
Christopher AlexanderConvivial tools meet participatory building and human scale.
