Hooked on Speed

NOW THAT most Americans find their service stations open again at night and on weekends, public interest in the world energy situation has dwindled to self-centered nostalgia for the days of cheap energy and Sunday drives. Meanwhile, massmedia editors and anchormen have chosen to ignore an impending world famine that Notre Dame's President' Theodore Hesburgh says is going to "make the energy crisis look like a picnic." Very few Americans realize that their continued consumption of a disproportionate share of the world's energy spells starvation for millions of people in the Third World. Oil, coal and gas are essential to the production of badly-needed nitrate fertilizer. The price of crude oil alone has quadrupled in the last year and nowhere is there enough fertilizer to meet the skyrocketing demand for it. Yet 800 million people are currently subsisting on roughly 30 cents a day, the bare margin of existence.

Unfortunately, Ivan Illich's latest work has been published during such an ebb of American public interest in energy and its relation to food. But, in view of the massive famine this nation will soon witness in living color, Illich's book could not be more timely. He contends that high energy consumption in a world of limited resources necessarily decreases equity and degrades social relations on a global scale. The book is a devastating attack on the developed countries' heedless and gluttonous abuse of the world's energy supplies and a primer for undeveloped nations with similarly reckless ambitions.

ILLICH HAS a fascinating background. Austrian by birth, he studied history, philosophy and theology in Rome, Salzburg and Vienna. He served as an assistant pastor in a Puerto Rican parish in New York City for five years and then as a monsignor and vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico for another four years. He was dismissed from the latter post in 1960 after a controversy arose over his role in the island's birth control program. He then helped found the Intercultural Documentation Center in Cuernavace, Mexico, where he wrote Celebration of Awareness, Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality during the sixties. In Deschooling Society he called for an end to existing educational institutions and proposed alternative "skill exchanges" and a vast communications network that would match young and old "students" with library resources, academic experts and nearby peers who were interested in the same subject matter. Naturally these recommendations for "informal" learning caused quite a stir in what Illich called "the education industry." Energy and Equity promises to be equally provocative.

The invention of the ball bearing, Illich says, gave Western man a choice between more freedom in equity or more speed. When men selected more speed, they were not aware of the hidden costs their progeny would discover in high-energy transportation: inhuman times scarcity, massive space consumption, invidious class conflict and the consequent psychic and social frustration. He incisively explains how this "raindance of continuing acceleration" increasingly determines the schedule of daily life, the geography of social space, the correlation of speed with socio-economic rank and the very quality of human existence: "Past a certain threshold of energy consumption for the fastest passenger, a worldwide class structure of speed capitalists is created. The exchanges value of time becomes dominant, and this is reflected in language: time is spent, saved, invested, wasted and employed. As societies put price tags on time, equity and vehicular speed correlate inversely. High speed capitalizes a few people's time at an enormous rate but, paradoxically, it does this at a high cost in time for all."

The transportation industry--like the education and health industries--seeks only to expand its own power and social control over men. The industry exerts a "radical monopoly" that wastefully gorges the "overdeveloped" part of the world at the expense of the Third World, which remains "underequipped" to merely feed its own people. Illich lucidly points to the government and corporate transportation bureaucracy that creates and designs the needs which it alone can satisfy. This forced dependence on the industry's machines "denies a community just those values supposedly procured by improved transportation." One can see his argument in an action taken last week by the city of Providence, R.I. The city council increased the hitchhiking fine from $15 to $50 and made it applicable to the stopping driver as well and the hitchhiker. Even on a local level, society reinforces the values that the transportation bureaucracy has determined: every person must travel in an individually-powered unit.

ALTHOUGH WEALTHY countries like the U.S., Japan or France may not choke on their own waste, Illich predicts that their societies will collapse into a "sociocultural energy coma" and undergo cold-turkey treatment when they are forced by the rest of the world to reduce their energy consumption. Nations like China (for a short time, at least), India and Burma have not yet reached the point of no return and can still "stop short of an energy stroke." But while people in developed countries speed onward blindly addicted to ever-increasing energy consumption, he tells Third World peasants to remain sober and "to abstain from something they have yet to taste." They must stop modelling themselves after the rich nations and abandon their impassible dreams of "overdevelopment."

Illich extols the bicycle as the ideal means of transportation. "The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from where he's barred," he writes. Anyone who has ever endeavored to circumnavigate New York's Kennedy Airport on foot will immediately recognize his point. The Port Authority, in this case, has decided that even the casual visitor must ride a bus in order to merely enter the terminal next door. "The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-time and life-space," he says. "Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy." North Vietnam is an example of a nation which has placed high value on equity, autonomy and rationality, he writes. Vietnamese one bicycles were able to resist a hyperindustrial army even when American bombs deprived them of fuels, motors and roads. But he fears that Vietnamese leaders will nevertheless be unable to resist overindustrialization.

Illich proposes a society of participatory democracy and "technological maturity" where the industrial mode of production complements other more "autonomous" modes of production. He writes, "... Power must be reappropriated and submitted to the sound judgment of the common man. The reconquest of power starts with the recognition that expert knowledge blinds the secretive bureaucrat to the obvious way of dissolving the energy crisis, just as it has blinded him to recognize the obvious solution to the war in Vietnam." The rich must achieve technological maturity by pursuing "the road to liberation from affluence" and the poor must take "the road of liberation from dependence." However, he never satisfactorily explains just where men and women in 1974 can pick up these euphonious routes to earthly salvation. Nor does he come to grips with the seemingly essential problem of transporting food, medicines and other vital goods from one region to another.

Although Illich provokes his readers to see the ultimate irrationality of unlimited energy consumption in a fresh perspective, he leaves these two gaping holes in his argument. Indeed, it is not necessarily the visionary's responsibility to show a reasonable means to his end. But the American public will hardly be influenced until the right political leader appears to tell the people just what "the road to liberation from affluence" exactly means in the mid-seventies.