In defense of common sense

Plus a tiny bit of US = late Roman Empire at the end

“One way to close an age is to give it a name that sticks. I propose that we name the mid-twentieth century The Age of Disabling Professions.” ~Ivan Illich

I was poking my way again through David Cayley’s biography of Ivan Illich, and it inclined me to write a little bit in defense of common sense (and common, non-commercial life, really). Illich’s path through life exposed him to the poor (especially in Latin America), and also to the comparatively wealthy in the industrialized, managed West. And he realized that the poor lived lives that were, in some ways, more human than our own. And he didn’t want them to lose that when “development” came their way, and he wanted us to regain that.

The opening quotation mentioned “disabling professions”. How did professions disable us? Here is a sort of thing that has happened historically, in many areas of human life:

1. Once upon a time, electricity (for example) was a new thing. If you wanted electrical work done in your home, you did it yourself, and/or with help from your friends and family. Therefore many people had basic electrical skills, and work done might be relational or involve a community in some way.

2. Over time, professionals appeared. They were more capable than most homeowners. And they worked hard to convince you that you needed them to do the work for you, you shouldn’t be trying to do it yourself. So, over time, sons and daughters came to lack the skills their parents had. The relationship aspect of the work was gone too, you were just purchasing a service now.

3. Both because of the now-changed cultural situation, and because of lobbying by the professionals, the state enacted new laws that actually forbade people from doing much of their own electrical work. Therefore not only did, by now, most people lack the skills to do it themselves anyway, but now the state actually required everyone to outsource any need to a licensed specialist.

The electrical example was easy for me to write but is relatively benign. But this has happened in area after area of human life. Illich talks about burial of the dead (and the ceremony that was formerly part of a burial, all now outsourced to experts), he talks about medical care (actually he talks about “health”, to call it medical care already invokes professionals), he talks about education. No one is going to complain about the existence of all specialists, we often do need them, but to rely so overwhelmingly on them has taken something from us. It makes us into just consumers, and so diminishes our communal life and our humanity. Cayley elaborates:

…in a service society, Illich says, people suffer an even more complete alienation. Not only are they estranged from what they make [as in the Marxist critique of capitalism], they are also estranged from what they do and what they are. Whether one is dying or being born, grieving or making love, a professional is standing by ready to intervene. In a world of programmed wants and invented needs, where all risks have been calculated and every possible action has been foreseen, branded, and supplied with its own professionally supervised protocol, '“therapeutic treatment” colonizes the “mind and.. heart… even more completely” than selling away “the fruits of one’s labour”.

Yeah, you could dwell on that quotation for a while.

And this change has affected our thought lives. The idea that the common man might just go out and do something for himself is often seen as downright dangerous. I’ve commented before on this bizarre phenomenon that went into overdrive during COVID where people actually mocked you if you tried to understand something better (the threat from COVID, masks, vaccination, whatever) so you could make your own informed decision about what to do. You stupid person, don’t you know what age you live in, you’re just supposed to do whatever the experts on TV tell you to do!

Most importantly, it seems to me that such an attitude is actually contrary to what Christianity teaches us about man. God gave us rational faculties, he wants us to develop and use those rational faculties. He does not want us to be unthinking automatons who have outsourced everything we need in life, including our actual thinking, to an outside party. If common sense means the average man, reasoning his way to conclusions based on his experiences in the world, then I am inclined to say that God respects and likes common sense.

Cayley, talking about the “collapse of powers” into the person of the professional, writes:

What this means is that there is no longer a civil space in which citizens can use their common sense to arrive at a considered opinion because all available spaces are saturated by the prefabricated lingos and ready-made solutions that characterize professionalized service.

How do we get back to a more human life? Well the good news here is, it is sort of happening right now actually. Cayley writes:

Illich... imagined a convivial society as a coordinated response to some definitive crisis. What happened instead was an ad hoc response to the state of permanent, diffuse crisis that set in when no decisive action was taken to scale back the mega-machine.

That seems right to me. There has been no great collapse of the technocratic order (and I do love the phrasing of “mega-machine” to characterize it). But there is an increasing sense that it has taken something from us, that it is dangerous actually, and so there is a growing movement of people to try to opt-out of at least parts of it. You see that in homeschooling. You see that in home births and alternative medical care. Shoot, we just started buying eggs from a friend instead of buying them from the store (same price basically, but I’d rather buy them from a friend!). You see that in people realizing that they can’t just trust the credentialed talking heads, that it is important for them to try to understand the world themselves.

US = Late Roman Empire

On a different but related note to end us here - last Friday I was giving an algebra exam to our ninth graders, and therefore not especially busy, and so I wandered over to a nearby library shelf and opened Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I know I’m hardly breaking new ground here by saying “golly, sounds like the US”, but as I opened the book and just read the well-known first paragraph again, I did have the thought:

In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. The peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence; the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government.

You could parallel every sentence there with the modern United States, but my attention was especially drawn to, “the image of a free constitution was preserved” and “the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority”. The same is true in the US today. The real power lies with the administrative state and the bureaucrats that inhabit it. Our system, as it actually functions, is a very different animal than that designed by the writers of the US Constitution. Most of the rules that most affect your life will never be voted upon by a legislature, because the legislature long ago gave away most of its rulemaking power to executive agencies. The recent spectacle of the US House trying to pass a law to prevent an executive agency from banning gas stoves shows how upside down things are. The agencies really write the laws. The actual legislature is nigh powerless to do anything about it.