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COMMENTARY
December 23, 2009
Redeeming
Let me begin today's column by quoting the last line of my Sunday column: "It is against this background of unknowable numbers, that I recommend we halt this season -- at the still, knowable, solsticial point -- to consider a world in which Christ had not been born."This has puzzled a number of my readers and distressed several. Of course, several others just glibly replied, "What a wonderful world that would be!" (One wonders at the facility with which they please themselves.) I imagine that my task as a newspaper columnist goes beyond that of giving my opinion on events of the day, an opinion which often deviates from those prevailing in the media at large. I imagine that it extends to challenging readers to think, for themselves, about the things that concern us. Hence my frequent and peculiar habit of ending columns on a discussion point, or an actual question, rather than beginning them that way. Let me continue spelling this out, for the large amount of mail I seem to generate, not arguing with me, but demanding I be silenced, seems to miss this point. One of my favourite writers and thinkers from my father's generation was Ivan Illich (1926-2002). Those who recognize his name may easily associate him with the other, "leftist" end of the political spectrum, and note that, even as a Catholic priest, he was at the other, "liberationist" end of the Church -- from where I live. Certainly he moved in "progressive" circles and made free use of jargon from the social sciences. It is impossible to place Illich's ideas and positions on any conventional chart, however. He was anarchist rather than socialist, for starters. His best-known books -- Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, and Limits to Medicine, all of them published in the 1970s -- attacked the whole idea of what I call bureaucracy and bureaucratization. But he found this evil -- man serving machine, rather than machine serving man -- wherever he looked. He did not distinguish the bureaucracy of the state from the bureaucracy of big business or even the bureaucracy of organized religion. (But then, neither do I.) This marked him as a radical, in the best, original sense: someone who goes "to the root," who examines fundamentals, who isn't distracted by "epiphenomena." It also marked him as the opposite of a system-builder -- the opposite of anything like a Marxist or other ideologue. For even when Illich was proposing solutions -- new and very different ways of doing things -- he wasn't insisting on them, only playing with them. He was, radically, examining the collective in light of the individual, instead of the individual in light of the collective, as almost all political writers do. He was, in fact, a very radical Christian, deeply and practically concerned with the question of salvation. Illich's greatest book, in my opinion, if in no one else's, was published in 1993. It was, In the Vineyard of the Text, and was framed as a commentary on the 12th-century Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor. Illich returns to the dawn of scholasticism in an attempt to understand how the invention of the book-as-thing -- as "text," as optical rather than aural in nature, as fixed and "literal" in some new and revolutionary sense -- transformed the world. He is doing this as prolegomena to an understanding of a similar transformation happening in our times. The book can be read as a celebration of literacy. or as an attack on it; really it is both. It can also be read as a long meditation on "the idea of the footnote," and in several other ways. It probably fails as an introduction to Hugh of Saint Victor, but even on that level it is informative and enlightening. In fact, I disagree with the whole book. It seems to me that Illich is playing into the hands of the computer nerds who deify the Internet. He has seen the virtue of "precision" in the old scholastic habit of citing chapter and verse exactly -- of getting beyond paraphrase. But, to my mind, he has failed to see as clearly the supporting virtue of "chastity," that gives this precision a purpose, and makes it into a good thing. Without that chaste intellectual spirit, in which we look at things apart from ourselves, and appreciate them in themselves, and not only for what use they can be, precision is just a hunting skill. But it doesn't matter that I disagree. Illich made me think about this issue. Returning now to the point with which I began, about a world without Christ: I actually meant my reader to think about that, and not glibly. On the eve of the Eve of Christmas, we should consider what this world would be like without the possibility of redemptive grace. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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