Let me expand this “mothballing.” Charles Taylor offers the
epistemological sea-change that he found “inspirational” in Ivan Illich as the
key to understanding the emergence of Modernity as rationalistic, objectifying,
controlling, rule based individualism and "mothballing of the aged" which pervades the Western culture in
which we all live, move and and have our being. I offer it as a machine gun killing a gnat.
Taylor writes in his foreword to
an interview with Ivan Illich:[1]
“In Latin Christendom, the attempt was made to impose on everyone a more
individually committed and Christocentric religion of devotion and action, and
to suppress or even abolish older, supposedly ‘magical’ or ‘superstitious’
forms of collective ritual practice.
“Allied
with a neo-Stoic outlook, this became the charter for a series of attempts to
establish new forms of social order. These helped to reduce violence and
disorder and to create populations of relatively pacific and productive
artisans and peasants who were more and more induced/forced into the new forms
of devotional practice and moral behavior, be this in Protestant England,
Holland, or later the American colonies, or in Counter-Reformation France, or
in the Germany of the Polizeistaat.
“This
creation of a new, civilized, ‘polite’ order succeeded beyond what its first
originators could have hoped for, and this in turn led to a new reading of what
a Christian order might be, one which was seen more and more in ‘immanent’ terms.
(The polite, civilized order is the
Christian order.) This version of Christianity was shorn of much of its
‘transcendent’ content, and was thus open to a new departure, in which the
understanding of good order – could be embraced outside of the original
theological, Providential framework, and in certain cases even against it (as
by Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, and in another way David Hume).
“The
secularization of Western culture and, indeed, widespread disbelief in God have
arisen in close symbiosis with this belief in a moral order of rights’ bearing
individuals who are destined (by God or Nature ) to act for mutual benefit.
Such an order thus rejects the earlier honor ethic which exalted the warrior,
just as the new order also tends to occlude any transcendent horizon. (We see
one good formulation of this notion of order in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, in which
he argued for a human origina of the authority to rule.) This understanding or
order has profoundly shaped the modern West’s dominant forms of social
imaginary: the market economy, the public sphere, the sovereign ‘people.’
“This,
in bare outline, is my account of secularization, one in which I think Illich
basically concurs. But he describes it as the corrupting of Christianity. To
illustrate he draws, again and again, on the familiar parable of the Good
Samaritan, Jesus’ story about an outsider who helps a wounded Jew. For Illich
this story represents the possibility of mutual belonging between two
strangers. Jesus points to a new kind of fittingness, belonging together, between
the Samaritan and the wounded man. They are fitted together in a
proportionality which comes from God, which is that of agape, and which became
possible because God became flesh. The enfleshment of God extends outward,
through such new links as the Samaritan makes with the Jew, into a network
which we call the Church. But this is a network , not a categorical grouping;
that is, it is a skein of relations which link particular, unique, enfleshed
people to each other, rather than a grouping of people together on the grounds
of their sharing some important
property. Corruption occurs when the Church begins to respond to the
failure and inadequacy of a motivation grounded in a sense of mutual belonging
by erecting a system. This system incorporates a code or set of rules, a set of
disciplines to make us internalize these rules, and a system of rationally
constructed organizations – private and public bureaucracies, universities,
schools – to make sure we carry out what the rules demand. All these become
second nature to us. We grow accustomed to decentering ourselves from our
lived, embodied experience in order to become disciplined, rational, disengaged
subjects. From within this perspective, the significance of the Good Samaritan
story appears obvious; it is a stage on the road to a universal morality of
rules.
“Modern ethics illustrates this fetishism of rules and
norms… Not just law but ethics is seen
in terms of rules - as by Immanuel
Kant, for example. The spirit of the law is important, where it is so, because
it too expresses some general principle. For Kant the principle is that we
should put regulation by reason, or humanity as rational agency, first. In
contrast, we have seen, the network of agape puts first the gut-driven response
to a particular person. This response cannot be reduced to a general rule.
Because we cannot live up to this – ‘Because of the hardness of your hearts’ –
we need rules. It is not that we could just abolish them, but modern liberal
civilization fetishizes them. We think we have to find the right system of rules, of norms, and then follow them through
unfailingly. We cannot see any more the awkward way these rules fit enfleshed
human beings, we fail to notice the dilemmas they have to sweep under the
carpet: for instance, justice versus mercy; or justice versus a renewed
relation, as we saw in South Africa with its Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, a shining attempt to get beyond the existing codes of retribution.
With this perspective, something
crucial in the Good Samaritan story gets lost. A world ordered by this system
of rules, disciplines, and organizations can only see contingency as an
obstacle, even en enemy and a threat. The ideal is to master it, to extend the
web of control so that contingency is reduced to a minimum. By contrast, contingency
is an essential feature of the story of the Good Samaritan as an answer to the
question that prompted it. Who is my neighbor? The one you happen across, stumble
across, who is wounded there in the road. Sheer accident also has a hand in
shaping the proportionate, the appropriate response. It is telling us something,
answering our deepest questions: this
is your neighbor. But in order to hear this, we have to escape from the
monomaniacal perspective in which contingency can only be an adversary
requiring control. Illich develops this theme profoundly…
“This is why Illich’s work is so
important to us today. I have found it more than useful, even inspiring,
because I have been working over many years to find a nuanced understanding of
Western modernity. This would be one which would both give a convincing account of how
modernity arose and allow for a balanced account of what is good, even great I,
in it, and of what is less good, even dangerous and destructive. Illich’s
understanding of our modern condition as a spinoff from a ‘corrupted’
Christianity captures one of the important historical vectors that brought
about the modern age and allows us to see how good and bad are closely interwoven
in it. Ours is a civilization concerned to relieve suffering and enhance human
well-being, on a universal scale unprecedented in history, and which at the
same time threatens to imprison us in forms that can turn alien and
dehumanizing. This should take us beyond the facile and noisy debate between
the boosters and knockers of modernity for the ‘Enlightenment project.’
"Illich, in his overall vision and in the penetrating historical detail of
his arguments, offers a new road map, a way of coming to understand what has
been jeopardized in our decentered, objectifying, discarnate way of remaking
ourselves, and he does so without simply falling into the clichés of anti-modernism.
"Codes, even the best codes, can
become idolatrous traps that tempt us to complicity in violence. [I immediately think of the “code”
of capitalism that (with all its good emphasis on the person, freedom,
industriousness, etc.]. Illich reminds us not to become totally invested in the
code – even the best code of peace-loving, egalitarian variety – of liberalism.
We should find the center of our spiritual lives beyond the code deeper than
the code, in networks of living concern, which are not to be sacrificed to the
code, which must even from to time subvert it. This message comes out of a
certain theology, but it should be heard by everybody. This rich book assembles
countless reminders of our humanity, which w can all hear and gain from,
regardless of our ultimate metaphysical perspective."
Charles Taylor[2]
[1]
“The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich As Told to David
Cayley,” House of Anansi Press (2005) x-xiv.
[2] Ibid.
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