These ideas has been swirling in my head for some time now, but it's Peter's comments yesterday about the price of gas that have gotten me to write them down.

I've been wanting to say that this is going to be an interesting summer for me. At the same time that I've taken on My Summer Job (which entails working on a contract for the Business School, reading things from the Harvard Business School with titles like, "Creating a Marketing Plan: An Overview" and "Market Customization: Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning"), I'm also working on the abstract of an article tentatively called Sustainable Literacy. For that abstract, I'm reading a book called Tools for Conviviality written by Ivan Illich (who also wrote Deschooling Society, which I can't wait to get to) in 1973 (which makes it a wonderful timepiece, as an added bonus). I don't know that I buy Illich's arguments hook, line, and sinker for reasons I can't quite articulate yet, but in cases where it works, it really works.

Illich is talking about the nature of tools, naturally, but in making his argument he explains what he calls two evolutionary 'watersheds' that institutions or disciplines or systems or what have you can go through. The example he uses is medicine, claiming, in brief, that the first watershed came in the 20s when people began to believe that medicine could cure you; and the second came in the 50s when people first realized that medicine can also make you sick. Once the second watershed is reached, the system has reached some sort of state of self-preservation or malignant growth - something that was once conceptualized as a means becomes an end in itself, and therefore its primary interest becomes self-preservation. (Let me offer drug companies as an example of what happens then - drug research is primarly targeted towards treating disease states that are manageable, not curable, such as hypertension or high cholesterol. This situation requires that there be more and more disease states. And so on.)

One effect of this means-become-ends situation is that "the tool" (medicine or school or technology or whatever it is) throws humans out of balance with their environment, and sets them at odds with their own human needs. Illich calls that situation a "radical monopoly" - "when one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition." Illich uses the automobile as his example:

Cars can thus monopolize traffic. They can shape a city into their image - practically ruling out locomotion on foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles. They can eliminate river traffic in Thailand [he explains this example earlier]. That motor traffic curtails the right to walk, not that more people drive Chevies than Fords [!], constitutes radical monopoly. What cars do to people by virtue of this radical monopoly is quite distinct from and independent of what they do by burning gasoline that could be transformed into food for a crowded world . . . Of course cars burn gasoline that could be used to make food. Of course cars are dangerous and costly. But the radical monopoly cars establish is destructive in a special way. Cars create distance. Speedy vehicles of all kinds render space scarce. They drive wedges of highways into populated areas, and then extort tolls on the bridge over the remoteness between people that was manufactured for their sake. This monopoly over land turns space into car fodder. It destroys the environment for feet and bicycles. Even if planes and buses could run as nonpolluting, nondepleting public services, their inhuman velocities would degrade man's innate mobility and force him to spend more time for the sake of travel.

Cars create distance. I love it. I'll admit, he does get a bit out of hand there at the end of the paragraph, but nonetheless I think it's true that people do nowadays spend more time traveling than they did in the 70s, and they tolerate a greater level of travel discomfort. (As evidence, I offer you the traffic scenes in Koyaanisquatsi. Used to be, I saw those and thought, "Omigod, look at all those cars with only one person in them!" But now I think, "Hey, at least those cars are moving.")

So when I'm complaining about gas prices, it's not really the price of gas I'm complaining about. I'm bemoaning the state of being dependent on the technology of the automobile so that I can live my life. I realize that gas is relatively cheap in America. But no matter how much we pay, we're all held hostage to this technology.

Well, I don't feel that this is quite finished - there's a wider point than just cars - but I've been at it all morning and I want to let it go, so I'm posting it anyway. Much more to say about tools and the ways in which institutions use them to reproduce; I hope I get more time soon.