A Voice for Conviviality
(Page 2 of 2)
March / April 2003
Jerry Brown Utne magazine
Given Illich?s frontal assault on the status quo, it is not
surprising that America?s newspaper of record would so interpret
his life and work. One can?t attack, as he cheerfully did,
schooling, medicine, even the ?pursuit of health,? transportation,
and economic development and still earn approbation. Like the
prophets before him, Illich is not easily accepted.
In the 1970s, facing sharp criticism from the Vatican, Illich
withdrew from the active ministry and refrained from speaking ever
again as a Catholic theologian. Instead, he focused on the
pervasive institutions of modern society. Here he found not the
triumph of progress, but the servitude of addiction and envy.
Instead of welfare economics and environmental management, Illich
emphasized the virtues of friendship and self-limitation.
At first, Illich offered trenchant social criticism,
particularly in Tools for Conviviality (1973) and
Medical Nemesis (1976). In later years, he turned his
attention inward and to what one of his friends called a new way of
doing theology. In an essay titled ?The Cultivation of Conspiracy,?
Illich wrote: ?I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot
thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a
commitment to friendship.?
In the last 20 years of his life, Ivan Illich suffered
increasingly from a persistent growth on the side of his face,
which he never treated, nor had diagnosed. In explaining why he
voluntarily suffered, he said simply, quoting Saint Jerome: ?Nudus
Christum nudum sequere??naked I follow the naked Christ.
In what was his most provocative and perhaps final comment on
the ?pursuit of health,? Illich wrote: ?Yes, we suffer pain, we
become ill, we die. But we also hope, laugh, celebrate; we know the
joy of caring for one another; often we are healed and we recover
by many means. We do not have to pursue the flattening-out of human
experience. I invite all to shift their gaze, their thoughts, from
worrying about health care to cultivating the art of living. And,
today with equal importance, the art of suffering, the art of
dying.?
Jerry Brown is former governor of California and current
mayor of Oakland. He can be reached at www.wtp.org and
jb@jerrybrown.org.
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