Reading David Cayley's "Ivan Illich in Conversation" these last few days has been an extraordinary experience.

I've been reading the book in between the bustle of London, on the tube heading into work. As I read I often look up at the particular reality that I inhabit, that surrounds me and permeates me. At every glance up from the page, the world looks different, somehow altered. I can feel it in my body. The ideas are strange to my head and yet my body reacts to them. I'm a little alarmed by this experience. I sit on the tube, book held limply in my hand, looking on as the world rushes by in the darkened tunnels. I understand things. Deep down in my gut I understand that I'm going through something of a profound experience. I put the book back into my rucksack, step off the train, walk up the escalators, into the sun and climb the steps up to the office in a very special daze. I sit at my desk, reply to emails, read, write, try to organise my calendar, talk to people on the phone and in person. Somewhere Illich is still speaking, still insisting, still persisting despite the distractions that I'm faced with. I don't understand, I say. I ask questions. But why? What do you mean by that? I still don't understand? Sorry I'm being slow but please say that again. From time to time I throw up my hands in exasperation. I simply don't get it. From time to time I sit back in silence, horrified at what I have just grasped. Often, we both sit back in silence and regard each other through a veil of mutual sadness. In the meantime the world churns on around me, living out the ideas that are percolating and finding a home in my head, in my heart, in parts of my body.

A month ago I found myself sitting in a mosque in Indiana. I heard the Mualana say "the truth cannot follow human desire." I sat up and thought about this. Yes, that makes sense. The truth cannot conform to our puny desires which change with the wind. I've been looking at the world with that knowledge, that idea, since that Indiana afternoon. I've been pondering how we manipulate reality to have it conform to our desires and of course, our fears. It's a dishonesty of a sort which characterises our age, our time.

What I understand is that our personal, inner state plays a large part in how we engage with and perceive reality. If we don't have the inner capacities to cope with reality, which encompasses everything from the Holocaust to Rawanda to children dying of hunger and more, then we either look right at the world and go crazy, or we figure out some way of looking at the world which aligns to our inner capacities. The modern approach to this problem is to prune reality of all the nasty things that make us inwardly sick, that make our fear real and that cause us sleepless nights. Our approach, in short, is that if we can't cope with it then it isn't real. In contrast to this approach Illich says:

"I live with the refusal not only to say certain things but also to use certain words or to permit certain feelings to creep into my heart. I cannot allow myself to meditate on the atomic bomb without going under. Reflection on certain things we take for granted is, in my opinion, acceptance of self-destruction, of burning out your heart."

Illich's refusal is to be admired because it's a conscious refusal. Illich is saying that yes, reality is a hard thing and I know that if we stare certain realities in the eye, so to speak, then our prime organ of perception, the heart, will burn out. However, I will not prune my reality to fit my organs of perception nor my capacities. I will not deny reality. I will not deny the truth. Rather I will guard my perception from certain aspects of reality that I know are harmful. I will not delude myself that certain aspects of reality do not exist. I will deal with reality as it is, not as I would like it to be.

I realise that a part of Illich's lack of popularity in what might be called the mainstream, is due to an irritation with this very trait of his, precisely because he insists of seeing reality as it is. This is intolerable because it means that Illich won't allow us to wallow in pleasure or even hope, to be lost in our comfortable delusions of reality. Instead he speaks about the truth, about difficult things, he speaks about things which we would rather turn away from and deny. He is challenging our capacities. It's a little bit like trying to sober out someone who is not only drunk but really wants to be drunk. Leave me alone damn you! All I want is to be out cold, to taste these beautiful colours in my head. Illich's voice is the annoying, maddening voice calling us back to the harshness of reality, to the harshness of a bright light, to the cold bath and the consequences of our actions, be it a hangover or kidney failure. Wake up and deal with things says Illich. No, no, go away reply those who prefer that the party keeps going as long as the booze flows. Don't spoil it man, if you don't want to join in then just go away.

This is perhaps a harsh judgment of our social condition but it's a perception that rings true for me. Western civilization is one drunken orgy of a party. We are an inebriated culture, this is an age of inebriation, of denial. On the one hand we scorn restraint, we jeer at those who would impose limits on the images and ideas that populate our public spaces. This has made things are so bad that we've invented countless tools, in the broadest sense, to pervert our senses in order to make life seem more palatable, to simply be able to bear it. We need to do this because we've neglected our organs of perception. Our inner capacities to cope with reality have atrophied at a remarkable rate, in almost direct proportion to our so called public freedoms. We cringe from the dragons that our political freedoms have unleashed, we're too proud to reign them in. Instead of taking the detox, instead of working to bring our inner capacities back to health, we're inventing new drugs – which will do little more than induce more powerful delusions that (we hope!) will make the ugliness of reality go away, at least for a little while.

In the meantime, asked how he'd like to spend his time, Illich tells Cayley that,

"…I would like to get together a certain number of people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them, to look at how tools shape our mind, how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them."

Illich is making a direct connection between our inner condition and our ability to cope with the ills of our age and cultivate social change. He's pointing out a fundamental, destructive trait of those who wish to use tools in order to create social change. He's saying that when we talk of creating change, of feeding the poor and in general of alleviating the problems of the world, all too often we're simply talking about altering our perceptions of reality. We're talking about, to put it one way, of massaging the data to give us the results we want. We're not practicing what Richard Feynman called scientific integrity. We're not really, truthfully, talking about changing reality. We're talking about changing nothing more than our perception of reality.

I sit back and ponder the depth of Illich's question. Here I am, deeply entrenched in the business of systemic change, global change, busy deploying tools left, right and centre, heck, busy advocating the creation of new tools. Illich stops me short. How are the tools we're using affecting our perception of whatever it is we want to change?

Illich stops me short because he refuses to offer prescriptions in the face of such questions. Many people dismiss Illich because he seems to be making a very serious diagnosis but offers no solution. "What! No Solution! Well what good is that?" I've been around such responses for a long time. I'm continually struck by our lack of ability to be confronted with reality. We cannot cope with reality without, in the same breath, being told that there is an answer, an antidote. It's as if our existence, joys, sufferings and fears were some sort of problem that will one day be solved. We're raised on a rationalist diet of answers. We've become a culture that doesn't care to probe too deeply into the quality of answers that are on offer. As a result we're addicted to some very bad medicine.

Towards the end of the book Illich tells Cayley of a nightmare he had, in which, "We were performing a dance to keep away the obvious, the evidence of the obvious, that, as long as you think about the world as a whole, the time for human beings is over, and has been over for a long time." My fondness for Ivan Illich continues to grow, in part, because of his clear refusal to join this dance. His life is an eloquent story of courage in honestly seeing and then refusing the madness of our age. Illlich is not a player or a counter-player, he's a non-player. His refusal to provide answers at a time where insight is little more than a commodity, a perverse addiction, is remarkable. There are many implications that flow from his refusal, that we start paying attention to our inner voices, to our inner capacities and finally that we might come to some awareness on the nature of our addictions.

I carry with me (at least!) two messages from Illich's work. The first is of radical powerlessness in the face of the future. Without embracing cynicism or forsaking sensible action, I cannot be responsible. I will not take responsibility for what has been done. I will not delude myself into thinking that I, or anyone else, can change the character of an age. As Illich pointed out to Cayley, "Unless I'm crazy, I can be responsible only for those things about which I can do something."

The second message I take from his work is that of unconditional joy. When asked by Cayley if his message is not a counsel of despair Illich responded with a vehement "No! Of Hedonism…So I say let's be alive and let's celebrate – really celebrate – enjoy consciously, ritually, openly, the permission to be alive at this moment, with all our pains and with all our miseries."

Zaid Hassan | Tuesday, April 26, 2005

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