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163 C H A P T E R F I F T E E N D o n Q u i x o t e i n t h e C o n t e m p o r a r y G l o b a l Tr a g i c o m e d y Alastair Hulbert Where shall we go to search for a great thinker? Certainly not among philosophers of flesh and bone, but in a creature of fiction, of action, more real than all the philosophers: Don Quixote. —Miguel de Unamuno1 MYTHS T he church provided a good starting point for me, as for many others of my generation , from which to launch into the critique of institutions. I was fortunate to have trained for the ministry in the 1960s because in that profession, at that particular time, contradictions in the church were becoming more and more obvious. In Celebration of Awareness, Ivan Illich writes, “Institutions create certainties, and taken seriously, certainties deaden the heart and shackle the imagination.”2 During the 1950s many of the church certainties increasingly appeared to be moribund.3 Arguments to demystify the ministry, parish structure, church bureaucracy, and hierarchy were gaining ground. Where theory passed to action, as in the Student Christian Movement— for example, when the French SCM sacked its Paris conference center in 1968 or, a few years later, the British and Irish SCM (for which I worked) abandoned its valuable, traditional headquarters in London for an alternative community in the countryside—the result was not necessarily liberation. But cultural revolution was in the air. Myth and ritual had to be decoded and exposed, not just in religion and the church, but in secular institutions too. Illich set about this in a radical, learned way, tackling schooling, development , social services, transport, medicine, and industrial technology itself. “The Dawn of Epimethean Man,” an article I first read one glorious summer day in 1971 while lying on the grass in Edinburgh’s New Town Gardens, was in fact a kind of manifesto of Illich’s institutional politics in the “man-made pan-hygienic environment” of contemporary society.4 Prepared for a symposium in honor of Erich Fromm, it analyzed different stages of European civilization: primitive, classical (Apollonian ), and contemporary. His style was new—condensed and cryptic, rather than discursive —more like the political cartoonist’s than the landscape artist’s. With his astonishing references and surprising conclusions, his brilliant use of myth and symbol danced across the page of my youthful understanding of history and civilization. It was vastly romantic, yet at the same time exhilaratingly real, and verifiable from experience. Illich remythologized history in order to demythologize contemporary society. With illuminating references to a panoply of Greek myths, the essay begins the task of exposing what he calls the “Promethian fallacy,” the “reality vision of homo faber,” the “story of declining hope and rising expectations.” The mythic symbol he employs in a call for institutional revolution is Epimetheus, whose name means “hindsight,” the forgotten brother of Prometheus, “foresight.” While primitive man was surrounded by immeasurable chaos and Greek man had projected the measure of his body into the cosmos, modern man lets measuring instruments impose the same law on things and himself. Mechanics provides the stuff out of which the myths of contemporary man are made. Schooling becomes a supernational measuring stick with its grade levels and test results. Health, welfare, and social service all become measurable. (pp. 227/10)5 Illich saw the age of homo faber coming to an end. In 1970 he sensed a mood for change in the direction of a hopeful future. Inevitably, a public choice had to be made: Either to hand over control of civilization to the computer as the ultimate machine, or to use institutions and technology in another way so as to ensure the earth’s survival. The alternatives were clear. The twilight of Prometheus meant the threat of being smothered in a self-sealing box. The dawn of Epimetheus heralded an end to limitless consumption, freedom from the prescriptive nature of institutions, and a shared fullness of life. When Illich wrote “The Dawn of Epimethian Man,” the Cold War still had nearly two decades to run. The ideological struggle between communism and capitalism continued effectively to conceal the truth and divert attention from the civilizational malaise about which he wrote. The shift in geopolitics that followed the collapse of the Soviet empire lifted the veil on his...

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