First things first: Reading through "Tools," I'm persuaded (enthusiastically) that highly specialized tools have replaced ends with means, and that this is categorically a bad thing. Yes. Check. That it doesn't matter where the bureaucratic / administrative machine comes from -- it's a bad thing, and we should all be riding bikes!
So that's all well and good. But I'm confused about some things. Point 1: whether it's OK to buy the argument, but disagree with the methodology? The weird thing, I guess, is that it's not an economic argument -- it's the sociological side of Marx, I guess, that's being redone here? (this is where I kind of fall apart, so bear with me). Here's a quick gloss, for instance, on medical specialization as it relates to degenerating care:
Costly prevention and costly treatment became increasingly the privilege of those individuals who through previous consumption of medical services had established a claim to it. Access to specialists, prestige hospitals, and life-machines goes preferentially to those who live in large cities, where the cost of basic disease prevention is already exceptionally high. .... The higher the per capita cost of prevention, the higher became the per capita cost of treatment. The prior consumption of costly prevention and treatment establishes a claim to ever more extraordinary care.
And, later, on the Vietnam War:
Self-defeating escalation of power becomes the core-ritual practiced in highly industrialized nations. In this context, the Vietnam War is both revealing and concealing. It makes this ritual visible for the entire world in a narrow theater of war, yet it also distracts attention from the same ritual being played out in many so-called peaceful arenas. The conduct of war proves that a convival army limited to bicycle speed is served by the opponent's escalation of anonymous power.
Overgrowth, escalation, organic development. I get this, but I'm also a little confused -- it seems essentially to be an argument about overproduction, but one that substitutes a discussion of labor and production for one of organization and administration. Which...I get? Or I think I get? But I don't actually get.
In the process of trying to get it, I discovered Wikipedia's great discussion (complete with reading group!) on Ilich, deschooling, anti-credentialism here. But without the requisite crash course in Marxism, the hard economics of this are kind of lost on me. (not lost? the irony of needing the "requisite crash course") That's OK. I'm comfortable with letting this slide for the moment.
What seems a little hyperbolic, I guess, is the idea that overproduction becomes a self-perpetuating system: it begins with efficiency (better tools for more efficient work) and moves into senseless escalation (better tools create specialized roles, which require their own managed systems). Again, I think MOST of the problem here is that the economic argument is shifting into sociology -- it'd be useful, I guess, to look at how Marx, and see how the discussion of overproduction extends from that original argument. Does it matter? I don't really know.
Where this book is awesome -- and where it really delivers -- is on two points: 1) every place where Ilich compares American corporatism with the Soviet state. The point is that when you start talking about tools, rather than labor, the ideological systems become virtually interchangeable: they both tend toward administration, and will invariably substitute technology with better technology (accelerating the "ends for means" problem, regulation, and more management). 2) How angry he is -- and how angry he gets, progressively, through the course of the essay. Page 63:
In New York people with less than twelve years of schooling are treated like cripples: they tend to be unemployable, and are controlled by social workers who decide for them how to live....Ford produces cars that can only be repaired by trained mechanics. Agriculture departments turn out high-yield crops that can be used only with the assistance of farm managers who have survived an expensive school race...
Catastrophic development tends toward frustrated dissidence. That, among other things, is how we get to where we're going.
That's my summary of Ivan Ilich. Time for bed!
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