In the Mirror of the Past

by Ivan Illich

  The Institutional Construction of

  a New Fetish: Human Life

  * * *

  Presented as a ‘Planning Event’ of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Chicago, 29th March, 1989

  Ladies and Gentlemen. On 1st January 1988, so you informed me, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America came into existence. It is the result of a merger of three antecedent Churches. With 5.6 million members, it is the fourth largest Christian Church in the US. This Church and its Bishop have convoked a conference which you have labelled as a ‘planning event.’ I am one of half a dozen outsiders who have been invited to comment on the context in which the new Church’s mission must respond.

  I was asked to address something called ‘resources and institutions.’ I take up this challenge by making you reflect on a characteristic of twentieth-century institutions: their ability to generate entities that can be defined as basic needs and which, in turn, define resources that are perceived as being scarce. To illustrate my point I suggest that you look at the institutional relationship of the Church to a new kind of entity called ‘life,’ a notion variously referred to as ‘a life,’ ‘American lives,’ ‘human life on earth’ and by some as ‘gaya, the life of the biosphere.’ These words are now frequently used in public discussion and refer to a new kind of social construct: an entity no one dares to think away. Analyzing this discourse I am led to the conclusion that entitative life, the subject of this new discourse, is spoken about as something precious, endangered, scarce. It is further spoken about as something amenable to institutional management, something which calls for the training of ever-new specialists from lab scientists to therapists and professional caretakers. Several Christian Churches claim an eminent responsibility as guardians of ‘life,’ or as specialists in its definition. On the other hand, ‘life on Earth’ plays the crucial role in the new mythology and philosophy of eco-sciences and is discussed as the ultimate resource to be protected. Life is an eminent example of an assumption that is convenient for the expansion of institutional control over resources which, by going unexamined, has taken on the features of a certainty.

  I will present five historical observations to support my thesis. I will give to each of these the form of a mini-syllabus. This organization of my material in the form of conceptual units that could serve as outlines for a lecture or seminar makes it easier for you to conduct the discussion for which you have invited me. It also suggests the lines for a historical and theological research project. The Lutheran Church to which we owe the leadership in the field of Biblical studies might take the lead in exploring the relationship between life in the Bible and what the term is used to mean now.

  Philip Hefner asked me for a forceful presentation to generate theological response and issue-oriented discussion of concrete subjects. So I begin by stating a thesis:

  ‘Human life’ is a recent social construct, something which we now take so much for granted that we dare not seriously question it. I propose that the Church exorcize references to the new substantive life from its own discourse.

  Life constitutes an essential referent in current ecological, medical, legal, political and ethical discourse. Consistently those who use it forget that the notion has a history; it is a Western notion, ultimately the result of a perversion of the Christian message. And it is also a highly contemporary notion, with confusing connotations that obliterate the power of the word to denote anything precise. Thinking in terms of ‘a life’ and ‘human life’ vaguely connotes something of extreme importance and tends to abolish all limits that decency and common sense have so far imposed on the exercise of professional tutelage.

  As currently used, the English words ‘life’ and ‘a life’ feed the most powerful idol which the Church has had to face in the course of her history. More than the ideology of empire or feudal order, more than nationalism or progress, more than gnosticism or enlightenment, the acceptance of substantive life as a God-given reality lends itself to a new corruption of the Christian faith. What I fear is this: that the Churches, due to a lack of firm rooting in Biblical language, engage the myth-making power which they possess as late twentieth century institutions to foster, consecrate and sanctify the abstract secular notion of ‘life.’ Carrying out this profoundly ‘religious’ and equally non-Christian enterprise, they thereby make it possible that this spectral entity progressively replace the notion of ‘person’ in which the humanism of Western individualism is anchored. ‘A Life’ is amenable to management, to improvement and to evaluation in terms of available resources in a way which is unthinkable when we speak of ‘a person.’

  Paralysis of language in a managed world

  I am turning the idea of management into a key problem of the encounter between Church and World. I do so because it is through management that those certainties are shaped and confirmed for the sake of which our late twentieth century society is organized. I want to call your attention to the dangers rather than to the opportunities of the Church co-sponsoring these realities in collaboration with other institutions.

  The difficulty of addressing you on this particular subject appears in every sentence of the mail about this conference which I have been sent during the last seven months. Let me illustrate by caricature. In the first paragraph of the first letter you speak about a Church which ‘came into existence’ not on Pentecost, but on January 1st. You inform us that this Church resulted not from the will of God but from a merger of three antecedent institutions. This Church has a bishop, but one surrounded by an executive staff, a team which organizes itself for planning. With touching innocence the Vatican-like agencies of the eighties present themselves in managerial terms. Now, I am not challenging the necessity of competent accounting, banking, window cleaning and fund raising. I am not even questioning public relations, statistics and lobbying. And I welcome calling a spade what it is. But the innocence with which Church people apply to their community metaphors taken from corporations deserves some attention. Let me tell you a story.

  One of my great teachers was Jacques Maritain, philosopher, neo-thomist, mystical poet and, at the time of the story, a colleague of Einstein at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. It was 1957, the second year after my transfer from a slum parish in New York to educational administration in Puerto Rico. I had become deeply involved in the newly established manpower qualification planning board of the island’s Government. I was deeply upset by the philosophical ambiguities into which planning, not of the Church, but of something called qualified manpower was leading me. Dictionaries did not help me: ‘planning’ does not appear in the pre-war supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary though it was launched within the same couple of years by Hitler, Stalin and Roosevelt. So on my next visit to the mainland I went to see Professor Maritain, who had earlier guided my studies on the history of the practice and theory of virtue in the Christian West. How could I fit ‘planning’ into the traditional system of responsible habits within which I had learned to think? I had great difficulty in explaining to the old man the meaning of the term that I was using: planning was not accounting, nor was it legislation, nor a kind of scheduling of trains. We took tea on his veranda. It was to be my last visit with him. I was delighted to look at his beautiful face, close to death, transparent, like one of the patriarchs in a Gothic stained glass window. The cup in his hand was shaking. Then, finally, he put it down, looking disturbed, and said: ‘Is not planning, which you talk about, a sin, a new species within the vices which grow out of presumption?’ He made me understand that in thinking about humans as resources that can be managed, a new certitude about human nature would be brought into existence surreptitiously.

  Today it would seem silly to examine the notion of planning within the context of Christian virtues. Planning long ago acquired the public status of an accepted and well-tested technique. Today, it has become quite unthinkable to question the epistemic status of notions like ‘management,’ ‘control,’ ‘communication,’ ‘profe
ssionalism’ and other related ideas. With the semblance of understanding, speakers recklessly apply these concepts to almost anything in any way the speaker chooses. For instance, once ‘manpower’ has become the object of research, planning, development, investment and improvement, the ghost of manpower takes on the features of a compact reality. Even children learn to think in terms of human resources. Their popular games inculcate policies, programs, decision-making. Throughout life the concept of scarce resources in need of management acquires the guise of a-historical certainty. The ominous power of modern institutions consists in their ability to create and to name the social reality which the institutions’ experts need as the substance they manage.

  The power of management to name norms of health, education, psychic balance, development and other modern idols is no less important than its power to actually create the social context within which a default in regard to these ‘values’ is experienced as a need which in turn translates into an entitlement. This point is of particular importance within the tradition of the Lutheran Church, with its intense awareness of the Church’s duty to announce the Word of God. The evangelical critique of the universe of bureaucratic terminology which penetrates and colors everyday conversation and consciousness seems to me a God-given task implied in one’s witness to the Word of God.

  Epistemic sentimentality

  The day-by-day experience of a managed existence leads us all to take a world of fictitious substances for granted. It leads us to speak about these managed phantoms with new words like ‘progress’ in health care, universal education, global consciousness, social development; with words that suggest something ‘better,’ ‘scientific,’ ‘modern,’ ‘advanced,’ ‘beneficial to the poor.’ The verbal amoebas by which we designate the management-bred phantoms thus connote self-important enlightenment, social concern and rationality without however denoting anything which we could ourselves taste, smell or experience. In this semantic desert full of muddled echoes we need a Linus blanket, some prestigious fetish that we can drag around to feel like decent defenders of sacred values. Social justice at home, development overseas and world peace appear in retrospect as such fetishes; the new fetish is Life. There is something apocalyptic to search for life under a microscope (Mt.24,26).

  There are people who are pro-life: some oppose abortion, others vivisection, capital punishment or war. Their opponents want the choice to interrupt pregnancy or life-saving treatment. As Will Campbell said to me three years ago: ‘life is tearing the Church apart.’ And yet, no one dares to oppose the use of this verbal amoeba in public controversy. Least of all churchmen. Some burn incense to life. Others have become specialists in peddling pseudo-biblical pieties about the ‘value’ of life. While Medicine manages life from sperm to worm, Churches have acquired a new social standing by framing these medical activities within the semblance of an ethical discourse. Bio-ethics provides a new and prestigious job market which gives preference to unemployed clerics with university degrees. I am therefore fully aware of the difficulty I face when I choose life as my exemplary instance of a notion which takes on spectral but unquestioned existence through an institutional commitment to new domains of management. And I am also aware of an added hazard: I present this example to a Church which resulted from a merger last January 1st, and whose executives are anxious to know what the world expects from their institution.

  I can tell you: the Christian West has given birth to a radically different kind of human condition, unlike anything that has ever existed or that could have come into existence without the Church’s millennial midwifery. Only within the matrix which Jacques Ellul calls the ‘technological system’ has this new type of human condition come to full fruition. A new role opens for mythmaking, moralizing, legitimizing institutions, a role which cannot quite be understood in terms of old religions, but which some churches rush in to fill.

  The new technological society is singularly incapable of generating myths to which people can form deep and rich attachments. Yet, for its rudimentary maintenance it needs agencies which create legitimate fetishes to which epistemic sentimentality can attach itself. At no previous time was there a similar demand for agencies capable of rendering such a service. And the major Christian Churches — traditionally legitimate, intellectually prestigious, well managed, independently financed — appear as apt centers to be entrusted with this task. The Gorbachev epoch is not one in which the Church faces Jacobins. Rather, a new kind of conspiracy threatens: not with the triumphalism of a Constantinian empire, but with powers that promote welfare, development and justice as the means of maintaining order and peace.

  The Gospel of Life

  I was not taught to believe that the Church finds its vocation by listening to the world. The Lutheran Church is not only populous and rich; not only one of the important agencies defining moral issues in public life and speaking out for ethical responsibility in American politics; not only one of the key institutions providing social coherence, along with orchestras, democratic clubs, alumni associations and the Daughters of the American Revolution. I cannot but believe that it is also and, above all, one of the major vessels to which a distinctive theological tradition has been entrusted. All American Christians are in some way dependent on the Lutheran Church safeguarding Gospel words in a world full of pop-science junk terms. The clear discrimination between the Life and a life is today an essential and paradigmatic part of this task. But, how can we demand that the Church anathematize an idol at the very moment when she has lost her ability to define the terms she uses to announce her own message? How to demand that the Church sail against the very current into which she steered the West?

  The comparison between the Church and an ocean-going sailing vessel goes back to patristic times. It antedates the invention of the central rudder and the ominous connotations of control which this image suggests. The unwieldy vessel now sails through utterly strange waters, those which medieval maps show at the edge of the world, where the oceans burn, and heavens rain sulphur. I can think of no better picture to evoke for you what it means to be the crew of a Church in the 1990s, when the elements through which generations have sailed have almost disappeared: ozone and climate, genetic variety and hereditary immunities, forests and whales — that is, more importantly, the cedars that give the Salomonic Temple its sensual quality, the monster in whose belly Jonas, like Christ, spent three days.

  It is in these regions of dissimilitude that you find yourselves huddled together for a week of prayerful reflection, carrying on board the Good News which the Lord announces to Martha when he says to her ‘I am Life.’ He does not say, ‘I am a life.’ He says, ‘I am Life,’ tout court. Hypostatic life has its historical roots in the revelation that one human person, Jesus, is also God. This one Life is the substance of Martha’s faith, and of ours. We hope to receive this Life as a gift, and we hope to share it. We know that this Life was given to us on the Cross, and that we cannot seek it except on the via crucis. To be merely alive does not yet mean having this Life. This Life is gratuitous, beyond and above having been born and living. But, as Augustine and Luther constantly stress, it is a gift without which being alive would be as dust.

  This Life is personal to the point of being one person, both revealed and promised in John 19. This life is something profoundly other than the life which appears as a substantive in the headlines of US newspapers. And at first sight, the two have nothing in common. On one side, the word says: Emmanuel, God-man, Incarnation. On the other, the term is used to impute substance to a process for which the physician assumes responsibility, which technologies prolong and atomic armaments protect; which has standing in court, can be wrongfully given; a process about whose destruction, without due procedure or beyond the needs of national defense or industrial growth, so-called pro-life organizations are incensed.

  However, on closer inspection, life as a property, as a value, a national resource, a right, is a Western notion which shares its Christian ancestry with oth
er key verities defining secular society. The notion of an entitative human life which can be professionally and legally protected has been tortuously construed through a legal-medical-religious-scientific discourse whose roots go far back into theology. The emotional and conceptual connotations of life in the Hindu, Buddhist or Islamic traditions are utterly distinct from those evident in the current discourse on this subject in Western democracies. This is a primary reason why the demystification of life is a service in which theologically-trained historians ought to engage.

  Politically, pro-life movements are sponsored mainly by Christian denominations. And these organizations have played a major role in the social construction of the idol of which I speak. This is a second reason why I look to the Church to clarify the notion. The Christian Churches now face an ugly temptation: to cooperate in the social creation of a fetish which, in a theological perspective, is the perversion of revealed Life into an idol.

  Five observations on the history of life

  Christian theology starts where iconoclasm has done its job. If as an institution you put your resources into an interpretation of the Gospel that tries to shun epistemic sentimentality, the ‘history of life’ belongs on your agenda. And those who engage in this history might well keep five points in mind.

  First, life, as a substantive notion, makes its appearance around 1801.