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Two Mendicant Anti-professional in the Age
of the Simulacra of the Professions and the System
The monastic life is in a certain sense scandalous. The monk is precisely a man who has no specific task. He is liberated from the routines and servitudes of organized human activity in order to be free. Free for what? Free to see, free to praise, free to understand, free to love. . . . the purpose of the monastic life is to enable a man to face reality in all its naked, disconcerting, possibly drab and disappointing factuality, without excuses, without useless explanations, and without subterfuges. (Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action,(1971) p. 228) The power of the professions to measure what shall be good, right, and done warps [the]desire, willingness, and ability of the ‘common’ man to live within his measure. We do not have to pursue a flattening-out of human experience. I invite all to shift their gaze, their thoughts from health care [systems management, professionally proscribed needs] to cultivating the art of living. And today with equal importance, the art of suffering, the art of dying. (Illich, The Right to Useful Unemployment, 81; and The Cultivation of Conspiracy) It is one of the great misfortunes of our time that Thomas Merton received a letter of invitation from Ivan Illich to participate in a Conference about the Church in Latin America in Cuernavaca Mexico before Merton felt freed from a rigid adherence to his vow of monastic stability. Unfortunate, because the conversation that may have blossomed between the two never occurred. Their only existent correspondence is itself an expression of regret at not being able to meet face to face. In response to this regret, this essay attempts to suggest one of the areas a conversation between these two mendicant anti-professionals might have explored. They were both mendicant, renouncing prestige, possession and wealth and holding out a spiritual and intellectual begging bowl. They were clearly anti-professional in their actions and thinking, regarding institutional order as at best giving remedial spiritual discipline and at worst corrupting the freedom of the Holy Spirit and Grace. This essay marks the beginning of a much larger project under the working title, “The Making of a Spiritual Counter-culture: Merton, Illich and the Contemplative as Holy Rebel.” It is a work informed by the brilliant work of Robert Inchausti in Thomas Merton’s American Prophecy and Subversive Orthodoxy. Whatever can be said of the lives of these two mendicant sages, they remain deeply human voices speaking in the flesh held tongues of a spiritual counter-culture. Their fully embodied words speak to an age enraptured by the increasing volume of the disembodied electronic babble of systems and their professional managers. For whatever reasons, Merton and Illich never pursued a conversation. Illich, always focused so intensely on the somatic presence of his friends in conversation, never visited Merton at Gethsemani. Merton, the pen-pal of so many of the twentieth century’s great thinkers and writers, never pursued such a relationship with Illich. Further, it is difficult to know from their writings if either one or the other recognized the complimentarity of their lives and thinking. And yet, there is a remarkable complimentarity, a kind of filling out of areas one or the other pointed towards but did not explore. Both men began their lives marked by the migrations of a World War, Merton the First War and Illich the Second. Merton and his parents left Prades France under the cloud of the First War. Illich, born of a Jewish mother and Yugoslavian diplomatic father, was forced to leave Vienna when his parentage became questionable under the Nazi occupation at the beginning of the Second War. Both men lost parents at an early age. Both had a sense of being shaped by more than one culture and tradition, while finding home in the depths of an overarching tradition. Thereby, the narrative of their early lives was marked by tragedy and migration. Merton crossed the Atlantic to live an important part of his childhood in America and re-crossed later in childhood to France and then England. While Illich did not cross the Atlantic until his adulthood, the journey from Austria to Rome marked a crossing over a divide of history as profound and deep as Merton’s journeys from Europe to America. Perhaps their peripatetic early biographies gave an initial orientation to their iconoclastic philosophical bearing and mendicant anti-professional spirit. That they lived in the seams between cultural, religious and professional divides provides their prophetic vision and contemplative critique of modernity—its techniques, tools, institutions and professional managers—with a sharp edge. It heightened their awareness of the peculiar corruption of tradition that contemporary cultural and social patterns represents in the wide world of ethos, cultures and epochs. They could see that the “indubitable commonsensical axioms” of the age were often not only corruptions of truths and traditions but often nonsense when viewed through the lens of a shared humanity. Both share an outsider’s view of the professionally managed and engineered social systems of Euro-American societies and a high degree of suspicion about their benign nature. However, it could be said that they came at things from different starting places in the same narrative. Merton begins with auto-biography, offering a contemplative’s insight on and an apophatic theology of the “true self” and its constitution as radically at odds with contemporary mass society. Conversely, Illich begins with social analysis, offering a contemplative’s insight on and an apophatic theology in rebellion against the destructive absurdities of the contemporary situation. If anything can be said to summarize their understanding of the contemporary situation, it might be as an obsession with and a religion of the simulations and simulacra of human control and its motivation, the fear of human contingency. If anything can be said to summarize the inner experience they hoped might be recovered in this situation, it is the acceptance of human contingency as the real place of knowing and extending hospitality towards the other, human and Divine. Illich saw the contemporary situation as suffering from a disabling dependence upon the ever expanding professionalization, codifying and systemization of all aspects of human life. The global mechanisms of our age may have begun as ways of addressing real human needs and offering a social good. However, in a vicious corrupting circularity, these mechanisms manufacture needs that in turn create a growing dependence on an ever multiplying number of commodities and professional services and the expansion of the invasive power of mechanisms and systems. In the later part of his career, he argued that these contemporary global mechanisms found their origins in a corrupt form of Christianity, motivated by the fear rather than celebration of human contingency and in a desire to guarantee a good. This corrupt Christian practice gives an obsessive impulse to regulate and guarantee certain saving outcomes. In the 12th century the Latin Church established and doctrinally fixed the idea that forgiveness and salvation are products issuing from the application of certifiably correct texts, interpretations and rituals as handled and performed by an institutionally certified and juridically ordered clerisy. Illich saw this as an historical hinge point paving the way for the unique perversion of religion expressed in contemporary systems. The obsession to find and enforce rituals, techniques and structures that overcome human contingency marks the inner spiritual character of the age. Illich proceeded from this understanding of the workings and origins of the contemporary situation—the outer world—to its meaning for the inner experience. Merton proceeded in the opposite direction. He spoke of this outer world as the consequence of the workings of a false self created in the masking of the gift of the true self by the ego’s fear of human contingency. The lie of contemporary mass humanity begins, as Merton puts it, in the super-ego’s presumption of control over the ineffable and holy mystery of creation and being. This makes of the self an object. The spiritual hunger that inevitably goes unmet in such objectifying lust for certainty and control convinces the self that it must have and needs more products, techniques and systems to guarantee the salvation still unfound. Merton is not interested in a religion that gives a solution to the problems of those who seek to own and control their own salvation. This kind of religious system fixes the mask of the false self in a vacuous professionally certified smile, hiding the profound anxiety of discovering that no system can ever provide answers to the reality of human contingency. The contemplative life brings a rebellion of the true self that celebrates reality as pure gratuity in “the voice of the present moment, the present festival.” This is the inner life experienced as “a deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever [surprising] forms it may present itself.” This inner experience brings Merton to the counter-cultural stance of rejecting the “needs that society [and its managers and professional class] demands we suffer.” The freedom from these socially defined needs is an expression of a sheer gratuity where, “we lose our “usefulness” in society--the usefulness of suckers.” Counter to the utilitarian orthodoxy of the age, the goal of the contemplative is to neither stand above nor below his or her own experience exercising control as over an object. Rather the ascesis of contemplation brings one into awareness of an ineffable grace and beauty given freely at the heart of experience. Again, this is a counter-cultural move that overturns the culture of individualism and utilitarianism in a “reverence, awe and silence before the mystery that begins to take place within us.” The true self is the threshold or doorway [icon] of the Holy and the blessed community of creation. Merton sees the contemplative life as an anti-profession working against the obsessive need for professional control and institutional guarantees of the age in a celebration of awareness as a gift given by the festival that is life itself. The contemplative in this way does humanity a favour by “reminding it of its true capacity for maturity, liberty and peace.” Merton, like Illich points to an earlier time in the church when institutionalization and a professionalized priesthood did not yet exist to pervert the good news of the Logos dwelling in human flesh. Merton’s love for the Desert Fathers and his affinity with the apophatic tradition in the Eastern Church draws him into a monastic life sometimes at odds with the institutions of the Latin Church. In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, The Inner Experience and his Asia Journals, we read a Merton who has come to see both the perversions within the Latin Church and its genius. In an essay on the absurdist playwright Ionesco, Merton quotes Philoxenus of Maburg as giving wisdom to respond to contemporary dilemmas. He quotes Philoxenus’ Midrash on Christ’s words in the Gospels: “I will not make you such rich men as have need of many things but I will make you true rich men who have need of nothing. Since it is not he who has many possessions that is rich, but he who has no needs. Merton uses these words of Philoxenus to further his argument that the contemplative, like Berenger in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, runs counter to the herd. The contemplative in discovering the true self discovers that inner experience is a place no longer manipulated by systems, secular or religious. In solitude one comes to understand the “absurdity of a logically consistent individualism which, in fact, is a self-isolation by the pseudo-logic of proliferating needs and possessions.” The chosen poverty of the contemplative gives freedom for the claiming of being as a gift and a meeting place with all being, by refusing to be drawn into the economics of proliferating needs and possessions. Merton concludes: Only he who has the simplest and most natural needs can be considered to be without needs, since the only needs he has are real ones, and the real ones are not hard to fulfill if one is a free man. Merton sees the contemplative life as the freedom of the self from manufactured needs. The freedom is rooted in the gift already and forever given in human contingency, that is the gift of the true self. The nature of this gift is in its confounding all systems, religious, economic, technological or social. It is an “unknowing” in an experience of “our own interior reunion with that which is deepest in us and . . . with the transcendent and invisible power of God.” Illich and Merton share the view that the proliferation of needs imprisons the human person. Illich tried to construct a history of these needs by showing how they came about and showing how, when crossing a certain threshold, the mechanisms and professions meant to serve human needs not only imprison the person but actually act to disable and create more problems and illness then they cure. The fear of human contingency and the false religion of controlling the means to overcome contingency is ancient. However, contemporary expressions of this false religion are unique and strange in their scope and reach. The contemporary spiritual arrogance and fundamentalisms of book, doctrine, digital simulation and system has, in an unprecedented way, perverted even the best in the West and destroyed much of the diverse richness of other human cultures. In Medical Nemesis Illich showed how the attempt to alleviate pain on crossing a certain institutional threshold became corrupted into the systematic refusal to admit any organic discomfort as anything else but an unmet need for medical treatment or a technological prosthesis. In ABC and In the Vineyard of the Text he showed how the technique of silent reading on crossing a certain threshold in tool use and technical complexity has seduced the eye into a gaze that is disassociated from the real presence of the human other. In all of the writings of the later part of his career he showed how spiritual desire has become warped into a presumed need for therapies, religious systems and commodities that train us to be efficient operators of systems that we call our body and our self in order to guarantee health and salvation and to be programmed for satisfaction. As Illich would have it, there is a history of manufacturing needs unique to the West that began in the Latin Church’s attempt “to guarantee, [and] to regulate Revelation” and ends in the globalising religion of belief in a salvation based on dependence upon the shows of technical sophistication and the dominance of systematic certitudes. Illich points to a particular pronouncement of the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 as marking a watershed that once crossed had dire consequences: By 1215 we find in the pronouncements of [the] . . . Fourth Council of Lateran . . . a sentence which has, several times in my life, been important to me. It reads this way: every Christian, be they man or woman, will go once a year to their pastor and confess their sins or otherwise face the penalty of going to hell in a state of grievous sin. This codified and made normative a dramatic departure from the common practice of confession freely given in public and penance publicly lived out. This pronouncement took the freedom and grace of the gospel and made of sin a legal matter requiring the legal remedy of those charged with maintaining a holy law. Illich sees this as a hinge point that introduced the idea that the human soul has needs only a religious institution can satisfy. Merton’s “false self” is for Illich not so much an un-Christian and secular development but is rather the corruption of a uniquely Christian grace. By locating the self as a bundle of needs, various systems and professional clerisies can be shown necessary to distribute the means of salvation. Whether the system is understood as one of religion, society, economics, government, science or technology, the impact is the same. What we have is a corrupted religious force that attempts to codify, guarantee and claim ownership of the means to salvation. The self not only must find its salvation in the systems and professional managers of these systems but ultimately must treat itself as a system. Thereby, as Illich puts it in his last publications, the urge to guarantee a good through a systematic and technically driven application is a corruptio optimi quae est pessima, a corruption of the best that is the worst. Merton, as always, offers thoughts on these things as he engages in an exploration of the inner landscape of contemporary human experience. Merton did write extended essays, but his insights and thinking are more like droplets of rain falling than a continuous stream systematically carving a reasoned channel for thought. However, from the beginning to the end of his monastic life and thinking he was bent against the commodification and the reductive processes of the “mass mind” that is expressed in the greatest fiction of modernity, the isolated individual. Merton comments that the “absurdity of a logically consistent individualism . . . is a self-isolation by [a] pseudo-logic of proliferating needs and possessions.” His choice for the monastery was not an attempt to run from the world but a profound “No,” to the mechanisms of modern individualism. He saw contemporary mass society as a kind of death camp for the soul. This is precisely where Illich lays out the history and social mechanisms that have worked to isolate persons from each other and ultimately from their own capacities when a “certain threshold [in] . . . the multiplication of commodities” and services have been exceeded. The impotence experienced by people in mass society has its origins in the attempt to substitute the convivial webbing of human community and the free gifts of human capacities for the commodities and services of a church, industry, technology, market economy and finally a generic and faceless global system. Mastering and owning the works and workings of these uniquely modern mechanisms gives only the illusion of independence while in fact imprisoning the self in a never ending escalation of consumption. The global market place creates dependency on industrial products, services and systems by disabling freely given capacities and making them the scarce commodities of industrial production and professional expertise. This over dependence upon commodities, engineered processes and systems creates a “modernization of poverty” where local subsistence cultures are destroyed and persons rich and poor are imprisoned in dependence upon industrial products and processes and the professional planners and operators of these processes and products. Illich writes, . . . the modernization of poverty means that people[isolated individuals] are helpless to recognize evidence unless it has been certified by a professional . . . [it is where] organic discomfort becomes intolerably threatening unless it has been medicalized into dependence on a therapist; neighbours and friends are lost unless vehicles bridge the separating distance (created by the vehicles in the first place). In short, most of the time we find ourselves out of touch with our world, out of sight of those for whom we work, out of tune with what we feel. The more the person becomes an individual in the global economy, the more commodities and services they consume, the more they are disabled as persons who may shape their own existence in using “convivial tools” that promote friendship and human community just as they facilitate the autonomy of local cultures. Hidden in this is a spiritual reversal that is historically unprecedented. Merton and Illich have called this the work of the anti-Christ, because it is the reversal of the free and surprising gift of salvation given in the Christ. The anti-Christ is “that pseudo-Christ in which all real selves are lost and everything is enslaved to a pale, ferocious imago inhabiting the maddened group.” It is faith in the illusion of an individualized salvation that is a consumable and codified certainty that not only isolates the self but in fact consumes and codifies the self into an anonymous collective. For Illich the truly human and Divine Christ is found in the radically free act of the Samaritan that does not circumvent or deny human contingency but instead embraces it as the place for spontaneous acts of grace that can never be systematized. Merton speaks of this as being “at the same time our highest good and the highest good of others,” love for its own sake united in Christ. What the story of the Samaritan promotes is a scandalous disregard for the codified and institutionally proscribed rituals and behaviours that are deemed necessary for salvation. It introduces into human history the idea of freely choosing who one regards as a neighbour and friend. Jesus tells the story, and Illich uses it this way, to circumvent the “certain young lawyer’s” desire for a clear code and airtight definition of neighbour. Instead, Jesus gives the anti-professional response and unsystematic occasion of the Samaritan’s chance meeting and free response to the real need of a human other. In the atmosphere of the current intellectual and cultural discourse of developed western democracies, both Illich and Merton offer a deeper understanding of the present condition faced in the world. This condition has been called by some the “end of history” either in a final victory of a global system or in a religious eschaton that guarantees salvation for an elect. By others it is pronounced as a “postmodern age” where no real presence is possible and all contact with the real is suspended in an endless layering of sign upon sign. Where the first declares the imminent victory of a system and set of techniques by force over the whole human community, the second suggests there can be no real presence to which we may freely open ourselves. The second stance simply leaves the field open for the first to control, for it provides no place for the deep engagement and radical freedom of the contemplative. Illich, more than Merton, saw the new form of cultural imperialism, not in ideological or religious dominance, but in the emergence of “systems” thinking. His argument proceeds by arguing that by seeing the world, others and our own being as systems we think we know them “holistically” and thereby can find the most expedient and efficient way to “salvation.” Its underbelly has become clear in the preachers of Right wing Christian fundamentalism, primarily in the United States, and the leaders of its mirror image in Islamic fundamentalism abroad. What is needed is to see that these extreme religious groupings are not anomalies in a fundamentally secular age but in fact expose the working of its inner pseudo-logic. Whether it be a social, economic, medical, psychological or religious system, the rule of the age is the tyranny and violence of enforcing a systematic corruption of care. Whether salvation is sought in the rational workings of the free market economy, as it destroys culturally specific use values, or the universal application of certain ideological interpretations of tradition and text, the structure is the same; understanding systems provides the code, means, techniques and force required to guarantee salvation. This attempt to guarantee salvation has, as Illich claims, brought an apocalyptic reversal. The heaven promised by systems gives a disincarnate hell of dependence on faceless abstractions and the atrophying of the capacity to freely respond to the other in compassion. To the gaze of those who have faith in the religious ideologies and the unquestioned certitudes of control over salvation, economic efficiency, technological sophistication and the presumed necessary speed of the age, Merton and Illich appear as blasphemers and fools. They blasphemed the doctrines of contemporary society by questioning the systematic certitudes others merely granted as inevitable, good and necessary. Their contemplative and convivial practices seem hopelessly unsophisticated and without clear objectives. However, for those with ears to hear and eyes to see, they have been and are two still Zen like fingers pointing to the absolute gratuity of the wild seed and the salvific surprise of the unplanned for weed. Their silence is a rebellious refusal to engage in the planning for any unholy war to engineer a program of salvation. Their way was a spiritual discipline of fidelity to receive the surprise of real presence. This trappist monk and this peripatetic teacher/priest offered no new solution but rather an ancient ascesis, a holy discipline of awareness of and preparation to receive a convivial festival. They offered the priesthood of anti-professionals con-celebrating the gratuity of the holy grace of rain falling unplanned and freely upon the earth. © Dr. Daniel Bogert-O'Brien.
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