Tuesday, October 05, 2010

lllich Diction: She/Her

Ivan llich symbols, diction, attitudes ...

pk has preached deschooling since 1970, devoted, sacrificed, his life to it, been martyred by the Nazis of schooling (that is, of coercion, of interferring with other people's business). My home page, published to the internet since the early mid-1990s, gathered relevent materials: first in Knatz.com's FLEX section, than at InfoAll.org, a domain dedicated to the purpose, then additionally at this InfoAll blog, and now at a Knatz.com being resurrected first on my hard drive, in hope of getting back into cyberspace (cyberspace, an invention largely of Ivan Illich and Paul Knatz, the anti-centralization cyberneticists stolen by the conventional US thieving politicians (and bureautcrats) in a section renamed DeDeDe: for DeRegulate, DeProfessionalize, DeSchool: a trinity of aspects of deschooling. I took to Illich like a fish to water because he embodied many of my own ideas and attitudes, but also added fresh perspectives and analyses and alternatives that I'd never thought of. His being a Roman Catholic priest, a monseignor, threw me for a loop, but then again the Church had already defrocked him before I ever heard of him: thus his Imitation-of-Jesus crown of thorns, his stigmata, were already in place for any Christian to see and marvel at. (If the kleptocratis is chauffeured in a chariot, you know almost for sure that it isn't Jesus, isn't a disciple of Jesus; if he's hanging upside down while everyone else is dripping gravy on their tie, then it might be Jesus, or a Jesus disciple. Anyway, here's the first a a series of presentations of Illich images:

Church as
SheversusHer

Illich distinguished between the Church (that he loved) as She and the Church (that he hated) as Her. The Church as She was the bride of Christ; the Church as Her was the Whore of Babylon.

The Church as She served God: that is, Truth, evolution, progress ... grace; the Church as Her servied the fat, ignorant, lazy, stupid, vain, selfish, gluttonous ... priests. (Ivan isn't around to ratify or to disavow some of my diction: "evolution" there may represent pk more than Illich.) (I can't wholly represent Illich's will anymore than he (or I) could wholly represent Jesus' values.) (The Bible changes a word, a letter, a comma; next thing you know the Bible is grossly misrepresenting what it purports to serve.) (That's life, that's scholarship, that's service.) (Don't worry, the truth will still sort out: just with nobody having been right all the time: no human.)

Think it out from there yourself. Think of other institutions that can be so divided: the school as genuinely interested in learning, in skill, in mutual service ... vs. the school as authority-bound, ignorant, vain, serving hubris ...

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