The Prophet of Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West
by todd hartch
oxford, 256 pages, $29.95
W
ho now remembers Ivan Illich? A Catholic priest, his seminars in Cuernavaca were a magnet for scholars, including John Rawls, Peter Berger, and Gustavo Gutiérrez. His early books were international bestsellers that provoked extensive debate. In Celebration of Awareness, Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Medical Nemesis, Shadow Work, and other volumes, Illich challenged, in bracing and accessible prose, the “certainties” on which modern institutions were built. He was denounced in Opus Dei’s Mexican newspaper as “that strange, devious and slippery personage,” charged by the radical Jesuit Daniel Berrigan with doing intellectual damage to “our religious left,” and interrogated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. His controversial star lit the intellectual firmament, but by the time he died in 2002, it had long since faded.
Though they were celebrated for a time by the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, Illich’s views were deeply traditional. Only by freeing our imagination from the “hold of the present,” he once observed, could we reclaim the dispositions that “seem to have been obvious and unquestioned during a thousand years of Western tradition.” These older dispositions toward learning, health, friendship, freedom, and labor have been undermined and displaced by a powerful technocratic and instrumentalizing mentality. Rather than promoting in students a “growth of an independent sense of life,” for instance, or greater creativity, or love of learning, schools often lead pupils to dependency and a deep confusion of “process and substance”—a confusion, he argued in Deschooling Society, of “teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence.”
