Ahhhh, now we're getting somewhere. Dave Pollard has discovered Ivan Illich! De-Schooling Society has been prominent on my recommended reading list here from the beginning. Yes, Dave, I think there are several places of common agreement from which we can together leap forward toward a more unifying understanding of social cooperation and order, but we'll have to go back a bit. The decade between about 1965 and 1975 was a fertile period, and we would do look back to those years and pick up Cornuelle, Jonas Salk, Illich, Kenneth Boulding, and a handful of others grappling with the problems honestly and inventively but in ways that were largely buried by the increasing politicization of American intellectual life that ensued in the wake of Deconstruction and postmodernism.
You outline part of the challenge: "Instead of being obsessed with 'building something better' should we instead be focused on 'deconstruction tools' that liberate us from institutions and government and business and systems, and allow us to apply them to self-organized community-based networks?"
I would suggest it is really the work of building that is required.. the deconstruction will take care of itself once people have better alternatives from which to choose. But there is another problem with your vocabulary of deconstruction: the politics of difference promulgated by deconstructionists and postmodernists in the academy and embraced by many progressives today throws up strange and unnecessary barriers to the creation of the strong and weak links necessary in self-organizing networks. For an organic society to be possible, we have to believe that we can communicate with one another, and that our modes of discourse are not merely attempts at hegemony over one another.
Phil Cubeta at GiftHub doesn't like my choice of language at times--complaining that my earnest desire to explore the possibility and problems of "beneficence" is merely a front for "stinginess--and one of his commentors supposes that the religious roots of my approach to the world are merely "warmed over calvinism" that has little appeal to "adults." These are not trust-building criticisms.
If I'm speaking as truly as possible here from my heart and mind, but I'm condemned as one capable only of either false consciousness (a conservative "head fake" I believe Phil calls it) or a facile intellectual and spiritual immaturity, it really doesn't leave us much room to have a conversation about Illich or anyone else.
My faith enjoins charity and humility and provides me a robust model of communication in the Three-in-One (and through the sacrament of communion)--which holds that the signifiers we call language can and do point to deeper truths about reality than what we meagerly minded humans can make up on our own. Ultimately, it is only through my faith that I have hope that there can be trust and common ground between us, and it is in good faith that I continue to try to build bridges rather than throw up walls.
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