A FEW MORE

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Ivan Illich made a big impact on me at University and I have therefore been 
fascinated to read this book by 2 people who knew him well - Ivan Illich 50 years 
later – situating deschooling society in his intellectual and personal journey 
Rosa Bruno-Jofre and Jon Zaldivar (2022)

The book was well received in the early 1970s. There had been other successful books critiquing schooling, in particular those written by Paul Goodman and Jonathan Kozol and the studies of social historians. However, Deschooling Society, in its apocalyptic tone, announced Illich’s view that the end of the era of scholarization had been reached. It was a time of uncertainty and crisis in which the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 had led to the realization of the dependency on oil and to economic uncertainty. In 1972, the impact of The Limits to Growth, commissioned by the Club of Rome, reporting on economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources and the limits of the system, substantiated the idea of change. We needed alternative models on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

It was a time when decolonization and its impact on life and intellectual discourses opened up new questions about education as an intervening tool. The processes of the Latin American countries had been involved in different attempts at social transformation in the 1960s and early 1970s, including looking at education in new, transformative ways. Paulo Freire’s pedagogy was an example of an epistemological rupture in the way to approach adult education and social change. Other publications of Illich’s in the 1970s attracted attention, for example, Celebration of Awareness (Anchor Books, 1971), Tools for Conviviality (Harper & Row, 1973), Energy and Equity (Marion Boyars, 1974), and Medical Némesis (Calder and Boyars, 1975). We would note, for example, that the author of Illich’s obituary published by The Lancet wrote that Medical Némesis had “something of a prophetic quality.”9 However, the successful reception of Deschooling Society did not last very long.

Illich’s ideas of the disestablishment of schooling from the state and his questioning of schooling having the monopoly of education as “The Futility of Schooling in Latin America,” Saturday Review, 20 April 1968, 57–9 and 74–5. Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1960); Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-nineteenth Century Massachusetts (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001; first published in 1968); Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (New York: Bantam Books, 1967). Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens, The Limits to Growth (New York: Potomac Associates – Universe Books, 1972). Pearce Wright, “Obituary. Ivan Illich,” The Lancet 361, no. 9352 (11 January 2003): 185.. expounded in Deschooling Society played a marginal role in the educative debate of the 1980s. Illich himself, as we indicate in chapter 4, became critical of his own approach. The political context of the 1980s was characterized by strong neoliberal policies (sponsored by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Helmut Kohl). It was a time of repression of social and cultural movements, a time of counter-revolutionary wars in Central America sponsored by the United States, and the end of the decade witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc. The shift was dramatic, and critical thinking in education had difficulties in gaining strength and reaccommodating this shift.

ABC – the Alphetization of the popular mind Ivan Illich and Barry Saunders (1988) 

How Change Happens Duncan Green (2nd ed 2024)

The first edition was 2016 and had 287 pages. This newer one has 304 and 
a new final chapter. 
Reading books is hard work. I suspect that fewer and fewer of us have the 
concentration span to read the whole thing from beginning to end, but maybe 
that’s just me – I’ve become a chronic speed reader/skimmer. 
But now you’ve got to the all-important ‘so what?’ bit. 
What do the previous chapters suggest for activists seeking to be more effective in
 their efforts to change the world?

This concluding chapter will try to strike a delicate balance between the complexity of real life and the ‘intentionality’ of those trying to make change happen. When this book came out in 2016, I was very reluctant to provide too much direction—I wanted to explore the importance of power and systems and the limits to our ability to change them, but also to show that by learning to dance with such systems, we can contribute to some of the wonderful changes going on in the world (and help defend against the dark stuff ).

But since the book was published, I have worked with inspirational civil

society organizations around the world, along with hundreds of brilliant

LSE students, researchers, and senior aid sector leaders to discuss and

refine these ideas. What they’ve taught me allows this new edition to be

a bit more propositional. Working with people from around the world trying

to bring about change in the most difficult of circumstances, I think we

have some useful ideas on how to bring about intentional change.

This (final) chapter offers a methodology for how to unpack complex problems; identify points of entry for activism; then use power analysis and stakeholder mapping to better understand the individuals and institutions you are seeking to influence. It cautions against being overly linear, arguing that, in order to flourish in complex systems, activists should cultivate curiosity, humility, self-awareness, and openness to a diversity of viewpoints. It explores the obstacles such an approach faces, in terms of conventional ways of working, thinking, and funding activism. It encourages us to nurture a genuine curiosity about the complex interwoven elements that characterize the systems we are trying to influence, without abandoning our desire to take action. I hope it’s useful, or at least interesting.

Commanding Hope Thomas - Homer-Dixon (2020)   

VALUES AND TEMPERAMENTS

A compelling vision is one that appeals to our shared values as human beings and, also, to our common personality temperaments. I see human values as coming in three main types: utilitarian, moral, and existential. What I call “utilitarian values” reflect our uncomplicated likes or dislikes— for vanilla ice cream over chocolate, for instance. Most economists use this notion of value; in their parlance, our “preference” for one thing over another thing is determined by its greater “utility” to us. But this notion of value reflects an astonishingly impoverished understanding of human beings: it’s based on the assumption that we’re nothing more than decisionmaking machines choosing among options based on how much they satisfy our hedonistic desires. It underpins economists’ common assumption that we’re insatiable consumers of material stuff and that this consumption is key to the good life. To maintain economic growth, mammoth industries of persuasion have arisen to foster mass consumption regardless of its actual importance for our well-being, and a huge apparatus of economic theory has made this consumption morally legitimate purportedly to sustain the “health” of the economy. According to this view, people are little more than walking appetites. Thus the Consumer Society.

Yet we’re obviously so much more! We also have “moral values,” which are emotionally charged rules or principles that we believe ought to govern our conduct, most often with other people, but also with other living creatures. These “oughts” can be specific injunctions, like “we shouldn’t hit each other,” or more general principles like the Golden Rule. Many people believe such “oughts” ultimately come from a higher authority, such as a deity in which they have faith. They consider these injunctions as objective, universal, and absolute, and hold, as part of their belief, that they’ll be punished if the violate them. Others think their moral values arise from their community’s history and culture, or that they simply make sense given the evidence they draw from human interactions. They generally don’t believe these values are objective and universal, and don’t have a clear idea of how or even whether they’ll be punished if they violate them.

Finally, we have what I would call “existential values” (although some might call them “spiritual values”), which help us answer the big questions about why we’re here and what our purpose is. These values concern, most deeply, how we understand our specific role in our larger story about reality— about our relationship to the cosmos, as it were. We typically don’t spend a lot of time talking about these values, and many of us turn to religion for them; but in some ways they’re the most important values of all, because they’re key to our views about what makes our lives meaningful and good.

Very roughly, as we move from the bottom to the top of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs (chapter 9), we start with utilitarian values at the base, shift to moral values in the middle, and ultimately come to existential values at the top. We derive our moral and existential values mainly from the worldviews of the groups that matter to us, and we use them to create our vision of a desirable future and the hero stories and immortality projects we construct for ourselves within that vision. They are fundamental to the meaning of our hope.

I also see three general types of temperament in the human population: exuberant, prudent, and empathetic. I’ve developed this three-part distinction— shown in the table on the next page— through my work on ideologies and worldviews, including the state-space model, and especially after reflecting on contentious public debates over environmental issues. It’s at best a rule of thumb, and it’s not wholly original; but I still find it extraordinarily useful. By temperament I mean a person’s underlying emotional and cognitive predisposition towards the world. People with an exuberant temperament are fundamentally optimistic and happy. They have a strong sense of human agency, so they’re joyous about life’s possibilities to explore, create, and flourish. And they aspire to have the opportunity to change and to grow, which means they’re deeply averse to any kind of constraint. People with a prudent temperament, in contrast, are fundamentally cautious. They have an acute sense of the dangers lurking in the world, so their main aspiration is safety. They tend to be more skeptical about human agency and more motivated by fear, and they’re apt to think recklessness and profligacy tempt fate. But their perspective isn’t necessarily bleak: because they’re sensitive to the fragility of order and to the interdependence of things around them, the world often provokes in these people feelings of awe and reverence.

Finally, those with an empathetic temperament are motivated by both compassion for people (or perhaps for living things generally) and by anger when the people (or living things) they care about aren’t treated well. They’re averse to suffering and, most fundamentally, they aspire to justice and fairness as understood within a framework of strong moral values. Three common temperaments and their key properties - Several of the state-space questions I introduced on this page highlight key differences between the three temperaments. People with an exuberant temperament will tend to see the world as safe, believe in agency, be oriented towards the future, and be inclined to encourage change and resist authority. People with a prudent temperament are more likely to see the world as dangerous and be skeptical about agency. And finally, people with an empathetic temperament will stress the basic generosity of human nature, the fundamental similarity of all human beings, and the importance of caring for others.

Most people’s personalities mix all three temperaments to different degrees. If an apex of a triangle represents the pure form of each, hardly anyone falls exactly at one apex; instead people generally fall somewhere in the space in between the three. And to the extent that most of us have a bit of each temperament available to us, we’re able to emphasize one bit or another, as our circumstances change.

But what has surprised me over the years is how readily people can be sorted into one of these three categories—how much, in other words, people tend to cluster towards the triangle’s corners. That’s partly because the temperaments sometimes don’t combine easily. It’s especially hard to mix the exuberant and prudent temperaments. Exuberant striving for opportunity and self-expression doesn’t easily fit with prudent awareness of danger and constraint, so these two temperaments can be like oil and water. It’s much easier to mix the exuberant and the empathetic or the prudent and the empathetic.

This tripartite distinction isn’t simply another way of labeling the standard left-right ideological spectrum. Sure, people who are exemplars of exuberance, such as capitalist entrepreneurs, are often conservative, but they are neighbors on the ideological right with more prudent conservatives who emphasize restraint, stability, and caution. Similarly, while many empathetic lefties strive for their version of justice, some are exuberant activists while others are cautious and careful. And of course, none of the three temperaments is good or bad in any absolute sense. As human beings, we appear to have evolved these three psychological tendencies because each, depending on context, serves a vital social purpose.

Sometimes our societies need to be warned of danger; other times, we need all the exuberant agency we can marshal to innovate or respond to a crisis; and at yet other times we need to be reminded that our members’ wellbeing is paramount. This categorization of temperaments is simple but, among other benefits, it helps us understand people’s reactions to the issue of economic growth and its possible limits. Most people who are emotionally invested in economic growth— and I’d include in this group most members of Western corporate elites and many technooptimists—have exuberant temperaments, and many of them have built their hero stories around the freedom for agency and personal flourishing that growth provides. Their reaction to the idea of limits to growth often resembles their reaction to the prospect of heavy state regulation of free markets. Both represent a kind of death—in this case, the death of the spirit of agency and opportunity. (Thus the common anti-regulation injunction: “Remove the dead hand of the state from the market!”)

Many people who are critical of economic growth, on the other hand, are environmentalists with prudent temperaments; they see growth as recklessly damaging Earth’s natural systems, and for them, it’s growth, not the absence of it, that represents death. These simple categorizations of temperaments and values can also help us make our vision of the future— and the hero stories we weave within that vision— more powerfully motivating for a broad swath of humanity. Today, our vision and stories must appeal to much more than our hedonistic, utilitarian values, for instance. They need to articulate clear moral and existential principles that position us all in a larger narrative of social purpose, while giving us guidance for what’s right and fair.

Yet today’s dominant economic worldview, which sustains a global monoculture of consumerism in all Western societies— and inspires the development of a like monoculture in new middle classes in non-Western societies as diverse as Brazil, South Africa, India, and China— appeals mainly to utilitarian values and treats us as atomized, purposeless individuals. Its vision of the good life is represented in countless advertising images of personal physical pleasure: lounging on a tropical beach, living in a luxury mansion, vacationing on a cruise liner, driving a fast car along a winding mountain road, and so on. The images signal the high social status of the people enjoying these pleasures; if you’ve “arrived,” if you’re rich enough to be living this way, the images tell us, you must be at the top of the social hierarchy.

Not only is this economic worldview now radically at odds with Earth’s deteriorating material reality, but it also doesn’t remotely meet people’s full range of psychological needs. Once our basic physical needs at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy are met, consumption of further material stuff is far down on just about everyone’s good-life list. Give us happy loved ones, supportive community, a satisfying group identity, rewarding work, moral purpose, some control over our destiny, and reasons for hope, and you’ll give most of us nine-tenths of what we really desire in a good life; at that point, looking down on everyone else from the top of the material-consumption status hierarchy becomes much less psychologically satisfying and important. Still, facing a future that looks treacherous, and without a worldview or a vision of the future built around clear moral and existential values that give our lives meaning, it’s easy to understand why we might try to assuage an amplified death anxiety through further consumption. There’s nothing to beat “shopping therapy” at certain low moments. Research shows that in a world that seems out of control, rather than hunkering down and reducing consumption, people often just buy more stuff, because it’s something they think they can control; and, at the very least, it gives them an immediate burst of utilitarian happiness. The irony is obvious: the worse that problems like climate change become and the more scared we get, the more stuff we’ll consume…another vicious circle.

Late Soviet Britain Abbey Innes (2023) 408 pp

The shattering of the British state over the last forty years was driven by the idea that markets are always more efficient than the state: the private sector morally and functionally superior to the public sector. But as this book shows, this claim was ill-founded, based as it was on the most abstract materialist utopia of the twentieth century. The neoliberal revolution in Great Britain and Northern Ireland – the United Kingdom – has failed accordingly, and we are living with the systemic consequences of that failure.