In the last chapter I turned towards Illich by telling a story through his witness. In this chapter I shift the focus away from the Illich’s own story to his role as storyteller. In doing so, I explore the way in which Illich, and others, engage with the notion that “Christianity in the Western world lives and moves within a diseased social imagination” (Jennings, 2010: 6). In doing so, I weave together the voices of theologians from the conversations at Table One and the ‘other storytellers’ from Table Two (see Ch. 1) as a way of narrating the historical transformations in the West that decontextualize human dignity and the conditions for human flourishing (Soulen and Woodhead, 2006). In order to examine the missiological implications of these transformations, I explore how Illich and others at Table Two historicize ‘progress’
and ‘development’ as twin “project[s] of intervention” (Rahnema, in TPDR: 397) inside a Western “universalist mission initiated in Europe” (IMOP: 93).
To return to my guiding metaphor of journey, or itinerarium, this chapter examines modern ‘detours’1 from an original trajectory for human flourishing. More specifically, I examine the conflict between the incarnational ethos of Christian mission and another ethos, the “technological ethos” (Garrigós, TCII: 117), for the detour of the technological ethos is inextricably linked to a fundamental mis-perception, a false trajectory for “furthering humanity” (Gorringe: 2004). In the light of Illich’s analysis, one could describe this as a Promethean drive characterized by a dominant, but false, idealization of ‘independent
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1 I am using the term ‘detour’ in a sense that is fuller than the contemporary English usage of the term and closer to the original French, which means literally, a ‘change of direction’, or in the verbal form, détourner, to ‘turn away’.
individuals’ coupled with a dominant, but also false, dependence upon technological artifacts.
Illich, thereby, encourages us to discern how progress and development generate a novel social space, what he calls a technological milieu (PAF: 3), which not only eclipses and even corrupts the human self-image, but also undermines and corrupts the incarnational logic of Christian mission itself.
Framing the Detours: Human (In)dignity and the Rise of the “Technological Ethos”
In this chapter I provide a frame for tracking the rise, and detour, of the “technological ethos” by weaving together the following: 1) theological insights about the decontextualization of human dignity, from the conversations at Table One, and 2) an interpretation of Illich, especially his criticism of the technological ethos (TCII: 113-126) from Table Two. As I mingle between these two conversations, I am also doing so as a way of situating Illich. As I suggested earlier, those sat around Table Two illuminate the clarity by with Illich perceived ‘the world as it is’, especially in terms of his social criticism and perception of the world’s dis-order; those sat around Table One illuminate the fullness of Illich’s vision, of a “a world in the hands of God” (TRNOTF: Ch. 3).
(De)Contextualizing Human Dignity
The recent edited volume, God and Human Dignity (2006), represents a collective theological attempt to address some contemporary debates about the dignity of being human.
While the concept of human dignity is prominent in public discourse, the editors note a lingering problem, namely that “the pervasiveness of the discourse of human dignity in modern Western life masks the extent to which the meaning and substance of the terms has
become vague and contested” (Soulen and Woodhead, 2006: 2). They argue, however, that abandoning the term ‘human dignity’ and settling for a ‘lowest common denominator’ is not the most promising way forward. Instead, they argue for the recovery of a thicker account of the concept itself, because:
[t]he notion of human dignity is a primitive but neither self-explanatory nor self-sustaining term. Its meaningfulness is dependent on its being embedded within a broader and more comprehensive cultural, conceptual, and social framework. The contemporary crisis of human dignity results, we believe, from the fact that intersecting tendencies of modern culture and society have stripped the concept of a sustaining context, without supplying viable alternatives (2006: 2).
In other words, human dignity must be re-embedded, or recontextualized, but doing so, they believe, entails examining how the early Christian tradition contextualized human dignity and how the terms have been appropriated and decontextualized within modernity.
The early Christian tradition, Soulen and Woodhead tell us, did not coin the concept of human dignity, rather they borrowed it from its wider Greco-Roman use and shaped it for their own purposes. In antiquity, human dignitas was used to refer to either a) an individual’s position, or social status, or b) humanity’s collective, and distinctive, position within the natural order. Emphasizing this second sense, the Church Fathers reconceived humanity’s status in the light of God’s works of creation, redemption, and eschatological consummation, thereby opening up a dynamic understanding of humanity’s dignity in “the image of God”
(Gen. 1:26-28). Three points follow from this:
• Since creation is a gift from God, the creation, “being creaturely” means that our dignity is not self-ascribed, but rather “human dignity is conferred by God” (Soulen and Woodhead, 2006: 5).
• Since redemption is social and corporate and entails “an ecclesial rather than an individual horizon” (2006: 6), it follows that “human dignity is achieved in relation, not in isolation” (2006: 7).
• Since eschatological consummation perfects the union of divinity and humanity, it follows that divine and human dignity are not competitive or at odds with one another.
There is no sense in which ‘more of God’ means ‘less of humanity’. As St Irenaeus puts it: “the glory of God is a human being fully alive, and the life of humanity is the vision of God” (Irenaeus, quoted in 2006: 7).
What marks the emergence of the modern notion of human dignity, then, is precisely an attempt to decontextualize, or extricate, the concept from its prior theological matrix. The result is a novel, and fragile, conception of human dignity, one “placed on a purely internal basis (properties integral to “human nature”) rather than on an external basis (the God who creates and redeems humanity)” (2006: 10). Thus, instead of conceiving dignity as a derivative concept, grounded in God as source and giver, dignity becomes foundational, grounded self-referentially as a human property. In short, dignity ceases to be a gift; it becomes a ‘given’.
For my purpose, I want simply to highlight two significant trajectories linked to this modern notion of human dignity. One trajectory, following Kant, grounds human dignity in the faculty of human reason. Here, our dignity is the natural expression of our rational freedom. As a normative principle, the concept of dignity also corresponds to and secures
“specific rights inherent in and belonging to the human person” (Soulen and Woodhead, 2006: 10). Kant’s notion of human dignity is decidedly elevated, and yet, fragile. The second trajectory, following Nietzsche, effectively dethrones the foundational position of human reason, and, consequently, the Kantian basis for human dignity. In Nietzsche, reason is
exposed as another name for “deeper instincts, prejudices, emotions, and strategies of control”
(2006: 11). Human reason, understood in this way, is another name for will-to-power. Within this trajectory, human dignity is still embraced, not because it rests upon a rational foundation, but because it can be grounded “in the unfettered exercise of human freedom”
(2006: 12).
To recognize, then, how human dignity has been decontextualized is to recognize how it has become destabilized as a fragile, deeply contested, concept. Once extricated from the context of ‘being creaturely’ in the image of God, the anthropological enterprise becomes, in effect, a battle over ‘the human image’. When we invoke this notion of human dignity as a normative concept, we are left with the question, to whose image are we referring? I will return to this question later in this the chapter when I develop Illich’s contribution to the
“program of recontextualization” (2006: 16).
‘We’ve Got the Whole World in Our Hands’: Hubris, History and the Rise of the
“Technological Ethos”
I turn now to a voice from the ‘other storytellers’ at Table Two, a voice that adds some nuance to the theological account of the modern shift of the decontextualization of human dignity, while also providing a bridge to Illich and his array of historical investigations.
Spanish intellectual Alfons Garrigós builds this bridge not by offering a further theological reading of modernity, but through a perceptive reading of Illich, one which historicizes the shifting perception of human dignity in relation to technology, and more specifically, “the arrogance of the technological ethos” (TCII: 114).
What the ‘theologians’ describe as the modern linkage between human dignity and human self-determination, Garrigós characterizes in terms of “the logic of challenge” (TCII:
113). As Garrigós rightly observes, we tend to speak of desirable social conditions as challenges, whether that be creating more jobs, better schools, more accessible and affordable health care, or more peaceful living conditions (TCII: 113). We speak passionately about such challenges, and we even fight for them. Garrigós, however, sees a deeper problem related to the ‘challenge trap,’: namely “[a]s long as we continue proposing the main issues of our time as challenges, offenses, or crises against which we have to test our strength, we will persist in making the same mistake that gave rise to the problems in the first place” (TCII: 113). For Garrigós, “the logic of challenge” is closely linked to “an ethos of ethical norm for which every problem, if not reality itself, is a challenge” (TCII: 113). As the quintessential expression of this logic, Garrigós points to the modern turn to technology as a means of overcoming, and overreaching, any condition perceived as a limitation:
It is not difficult for technology to follow the logic of challenge. Its great efficiency in shaping reality on a grand scale is admitted by all, but this very power tends to obstruct the ability to recognize its limitations, to appreciate the point beyond which its transformations cease to promote habitable living space or truly human relations (TCII: 113).
While Garrigós’ suspicion of “the logic of challenge” rests on a subtle interpretation of the term, what he is more fundamentally suspicious of is “the arrogance of the technological ethos” itself (TCII: 114). This way of speaking has everything to do with his reading of Illich, whose work he interprets broadly as “criticism of the predominance of the technological mode in Western culture” (TCII: 114). Within the technological ethos, they both suggest, every limit represents a challenge, a limitation and a barrier “against which we must measure our strength” (TCII: 114).
Thus, within the technological ethos every limit that we encounter ceases to be an opportunity and invitation to discern appropriate action, but rather becomes a provocation to act with hubris. Indeed, by working in Illich’s shadow, Garrigós frames and synthesizes Illich’s thought as it outlines the history of the West in terms of “the evolution of what the Greeks called ‘hubris’” (TCII: 124), a disposition towards unbounded presumption similar to what the Christian tradition calls ‘pride’.
Furthermore, in suggesting that Illich’s writings “recapitulate and interpret the history of the West” (TCII: 114), Garrigós expresses these transformations in terms of three epochs or stages:
• The first stage is the “classical-medieval”, in which the cosmos, or beautiful order, provided the context, the sense of proportion and the appropriate ‘measure’ for human action, such that to transgress this cosmic order is to commit an act of hubris within Greek thought or pride within Christian thought (TCII: 115).
• The second stage, or “modernity”, arises “when the cosmos, in its ancient and medieval sense, disappears”; when humanity no longer derives reason from the cosmos or the Creator, but from itself; and therefore, the stage at which “humans become the measure of themselves and the world” (TCII: 116), leading “to a process of self-overcoming” which casts any sense of limit or constraint on human action in a negative light (TCII: 117).
• The third stage is a time characterized by a suspicion of reason’s innocence, “the rejection of any common reason”, and finally, the reduction of human freedom to
“mere automatism – through history, the libido, or language” (TCII: 117).
In his commentary on Illich, Garrigós summarizes the contours of these transformations in this way:
[W]e can say that in the West human beings found their measure first in the cosmos and then in God. In both cases, reason was ultimately subordinate to a trans-human norm indicating limitation to human action…Under such conditions all limitations of reality are perceived as challenges. Surmounting them, the human subject transcends itself until, having questioned reason as a foundation and reduced it to nothing more than a method of calculation, humans find no other end for themselves than self-transcendence per se via extravagant self-indulgence. For people who seek to surpass themselves, reality cannot be anything other than a provocation. One sees, then, that a simplified synthesis of the Western ethos results in a unitary focus, a stance I call
‘technological’ (TCII: 117).
The rise of the technological ethos, then, corresponds to seismic historical shifts in human perception. Garrigós’ reading of Illich suggests that we have quite simply misperceived our place in the world. What Garrigós calls the technological ethos is shorthand for a modus operandi which conforms to this misperception. Illich’s way of framing this shift in perception is that “a world in the hands of God” (TRNOTF: 64) becomes “a cosmos contingent on [humanity]” (IIIC: 270). In fact, the latter perception could not arise without the former. This is because the medieval Christian perception of the universe turned on the notion of contingency, the perception that the world is neither necessary nor arbitrary, but rather exists as something gratuitous, “a pure gift” (TRNOTF: 65). However, “once the universe is taken out of God’s hands, it can be placed into the hands of people, and this couldn’t have happened without nature having been put in God’s hands in the first place” (TRNOTF: 70).
Drawing Garrigós’ stages into a Christian conception of a contingent universe, it is possible to argue that once the world which was a gift became a given, an object under our gaze and control, it became a challenge. Thus, the world as a gift bound to and held within the promise
of a Giver, “a cosmos in the hand of God”, became a threat, an object which must be subdue and overcome: in short, “a cosmos in the hands of man” (IIIC: 252).
Here, our turn to Garrigós (and through him to Illich) draws us more deeply, and more attentively, into the theological debate about human dignity. In mingling among these voices at the two tables, we are in a better position to observe the overlapping storylines that run between the modern decontextualization of human dignity, at Table One, and the rise of the technological ethos at Table Two. For in the same way that we take the world out of God’s hands, so too, we take dignity out of God’s hands. In taking it into our own hands, dignity ceases to be a gift. Like the world in our hands, it has become a given, and subsequently, a challenge.
In weaving these two conversations together, I suggest that we are in a better position to see this modern notion of human dignity emerge as a particular conception of dignity, one that emerges from and in relation to other conceptions of the dignity of being human. More specifically, in the story I have been telling through and in relation to Illich, modernity only emerges á propos the “colonial wound” (Mignolo, 2005), the wound inflicted by the universalizing dominance of modern subjectivities as they emerge and exert themselves in relation to those ‘non-dominant’ others. Seen not just in terms of modernity, but in terms of modernity/colonialism, we are in a position to see more clearly how the modern notion of human dignity turns on a novel and provincial perception, a perception both recent and European, though later also reinforced by the US, and yet, one that has been effectively universalized.
Thus, by recasting the debate about human dignity within terms of modernity/colonialism, it becomes clearer that we need to attend to more than the ‘modern’
debate between the neo-Kantians and the neo-Nietzcheans. We need to attend to the way that
both of these trajectories share the same detour, the same ‘turning away’. In doing so, we need to recognize the way that this modern subject not only perceives its dignity as either a secure, foundational possession, as in Kant, or as a fragile, yet attainable condition that it confers on itself through its exercise of freedom qua self-determination, as in Nietzche. And, to discern the missiological implications of these transformations, we need to go further: we need to attend to the way this dominant subject, acting with hubris, assumes the god-like position in relation to the other: evaluation, measuring, and conferring dignity upon ‘less dignified’ human subjects by encountering them and refashioning them in the self-image of the dominant subject.
Historicizing ‘(Dis)Order and Progress’
In the first chapter I linked my experience of disintegration to a growing suspicion that much of the missionary activity happening around me, whether in seminary, sanctuary, or street, was, in fact, counterproductive. More specifically, the more I observed and became involved in projects of social inclusion which were engaged in the business of ‘meeting the needs’ of the excluded and marginalized, the more I asked the question: Into what are we and others being included?
I realized that to answer that question, I needed more insight about the social space or arena in which ‘meeting needs’ and ‘sharing the gospel’ was happening. I needed a wider narration of the Christian social imagination into which I was immersed in Brazil, in the land of ‘Order and Progress’. Those two keywords were obvious to anyone who sees the Brazilian flag, but in my case, it took an encounter with Illich to enable me to see them not just as a nineteenth-century slogan, but as a religiously performed ideal, even as a ‘gospel-in-disguise’.
Here, I examine the way that Illich’s friends expand his six-stage historiography of progress, to which I referred in Chapter 1. My concern in this section is to demonstrate how progress has counterfeited the Christian theodrama, not by rejecting it but by posing as its distorted mutation. In other words, without Christianity’s theodramatic scaffolding, there would be no faith in modern progress. ‘Faith in progress’ names the anthropological enterprise of attempting to become the author or creator of history’s end, its eschatological fulfillment. Faith in progress names the project of trying to exit Act 4 and inhabit Act 5.
The Idea of Progress
American sociologist Robert Nisbet contends that “[N]o single idea has been more important than…the Idea of Progress in Western civilization for three thousand years”
(Nisbet, in Sedlacek, 2011: 233). While ‘faith in progress’ may be recognized as a definitive mark of the period known as modernity, Nisbet’s basic argument supports Illich’s historiography: belief in progress is not so much a modern, but more precisely an ancient Western invention. In Illich’s terms, what is modern about progress is its status as a certainty (COA: 11), its power to explain, but even more, its power to persuade and direct not only the lives of intellectuals but of the masses, as well.
This raises the question: How does progress offer a comprehensive explanation of the order of things? According to Russian sociologist Teodor Shanin, in order to come to terms
This raises the question: How does progress offer a comprehensive explanation of the order of things? According to Russian sociologist Teodor Shanin, in order to come to terms