Page 4 RAIN July 1980 by Ivan Illich As a historian, I am used to looking back and viewing events which •distance has put into some perspective. Personally, I most enjoy • exploring the shadow just outside the powerful searchlights of other historians who use their precision instruments to zoom in on towns and councils, markets and churches, great men and wars. I want to understand what has happened with customs and superstitions, with curses and gestures, with water, soap and bed, with begg~:r:s and women. I want to find out about the tools by which most people provided for most of their livelihood, together with the folkways within which these ~ools were used. I am less interested in kings, wars, treaties, and the prices of goqds which were always reserved for the few. This is why I collect proverbs and riddles and the rare records of the actual speech of poor people that I find embedded in the court ,testimonies given by witches and rogues..These are some of the faint traces which the past of the poor has left. But most of what the great majority of people lived and experienced has blown away, rotted with their ·bones or been buried by the powerful feats of the rich. 8 :ecause of research d~ne during the last twenty years, we can now reconstruct the ways people felt and looked at their world- ·how people in the Nevernais washed themselves and their clothes, how Welshmen cooked, how Alsatian men began to be careful when sleeping with their wives, as previously they had been only with virgins or prostitut~s. Such history alone can sharpen our eyes for the enormous variety in which subsistence flowered in Western societies before it was ruthlessly mowed down between the el}closure of pastures in England and today's total enclosure of reality on TV. By reading/' histoire des inentalitees in the Annales de Strasbourg or studying the feminist history on women's work during the confinement to the domestic sphere of the newly invented "weaker sex," we can reach insights into what has happened around the world during the last three decades. Historians reporting on the first great war on Western subsistence-:--waged by absolute monarchs and,nation states with their witch hunts, universal conscription, and construction of tenements, hospitals and jails-speak mostly oft.he progress of these institutions, while covering with a layer of-silence the competencies forgotten and the tools lost. From the second war on subsistence, now worldwide in its reach and allinclusive in its scope, in which the bulldozers and computers of development have displaced a much more variegated pattern of subsistence activities, the reports-now written by social scientistswould have us believe that subsistence has disappeared forever, ·never to be recovered. This view, I submit, is a st~pid e_rror due to a very special kind of arrogance. • 1 would like to look at ~his modern war on subsistence. But on such recent events, I cannot report ~storian. Indeed, I myself .• was stuck in such battles, up to rrty neck. I was carried along by them, and only an occasional plank allowed me to lift myself above the stream and catch a short glimpse about. I now need"to find the language .which befits my afterthoughts, as I speak out of sadness of options that we may have lost forever, and out of hope that new and more difficult options may yet be open. Rrhaps this is the time to revive an old tradition that distinguishes between research into the way things are1 and research into the ways things can be done. Let me call research into the nature of things science, and research into decisions about the use of things technology. Technology thus always implies art ethical stance, because things cannot b~ used without affecting me and all others. Further, we have learned that the same scientific insight can be applied with either of two different attitudes on the use to which , things ought to be put. Let me call the first a productivist frame- , work of technology, and the second; convivial, each at the opposite end of cil spectrum. In a productivist framework, tools enable people engaged in wage-work primarily to increase the output of goods and services. In a convivial framework, tools ertable people primarily to achieve satisfaction from what they do with them, rather than contributing to the market economy..Research which applies science to the increase of productivity is generally called R&D. Research which applies science to incr~ased.independence from the market· has been called by me and others counterfoil research. A decade ago, many of us sought tQ encourage counterfoil research. "Poor" countries could thus develop the means to avoid being saddled with the bills for the terminal paroxysms of industrialization among the "rich." We defined counterfoil research as people-based, disciplined and critical inquiry into modern alternatives ~o commodity-intensive life styles. We argued that poor coun- ·tries, where the experience of an active domestic economy is still relatively widespread, could modernize their subsistence activities and thus outwit the developed nations. We insisted that such research could equip the poorest countries with the kinds of industry and service organizations whose main purpose would be to enhance the ability of people to satisfy many of their needs and desires by modernized activities. The outcome of these activities would be free from, because outside of, the formal economic sphere. During the past dec;.ade, much of this research has been don~. A recently published guide for librarians (Guide to Convivial Tools, see RAIN April '80) provides a good survey. This work contains about 450 items that are usually missing from librarians' reference sections. Each of the items lists research and experiments that deal with modern processes and tools which are so constructed th.!).t pe~-
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