Generally, those in education, health care, ministry, civil service and more want to do good through their daily work. However, the outcome of their efforts often produces the opposite of what is intended. Schools produce too many uncultured young adults. Frustration among patients and health professionals is a major side-effect of health care delivery. Churches reinforce individualistic attitudes. The civil service system, top to bottom, often delivers dependency and/or corruption.
The bad side-effects come from the nature of our bureaucratic system in which transactions supersede personal attention. Students relate to teachers by way of grade sheets. Patients relate to doctors and nurses through charts and test results. A business simply counts an employee as a debit on the expense sheet, rather than as a unique individual.
Some time ago, Msgr. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) gave a talk to seminarians, titled “To Hell With Good Intentions.” These North American seminarians were about to spend a summer helping people in Mexico. Illich told them to discard their unacknowledged pretention that You will be better because I know better. Those who desire to help, said Illich, have “enormous good will [but] an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy.” (www.studocu.com)
L.M. Sacasas, writing in The Convivial Society (https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com; 12/24), summarizes Illich’s challenge and gives it current application, including to those involved with artificial intelligence. How deeply do computer engineers reflect on the harm that their programs cause, Sacasas asks? All our tools and devices have “a perspective on the world they subtly encourage their users to adopt,” he continues. In today’s economy that perspective is consumerism and individualism.
If You Want To Help, Go Home
Too often unexamined helping behavior results in “a loss of personal potency,” says Sacasas. The more that nice people apply their notion of helpfulness and forsake “critical self-awareness,” the more that patients, students, parishioners, employees and citizens lose agency.
In this talk to seminarians and in his other writing, Illich delivers a stern warning. The warning does not, however, support the neoconservative position that all government assistance (Medicare, food stamps, disaster relief, etc.) should end. Illich advised the seminarians and suggests to us “the silence of deep interest.” At prayer each evening we can consider the question: Whom did I really help today?
Pope Francis preaches the same when he urges Christians to develop a “culture of encounter.” Go to the peripheries and look squarely at others. Listen to them with an unbiased heart. Programs and notebooks and handouts and bandages can be appropriate. But the genuine helper is skilled in the art of active listening. Lo and behold, the helper will discover something about herself and maybe something about our God, who from all eternity is revealed in encounters.
(Obtain On Social Friendship by Pope Francis from National Center for the Laity, PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629; $7)
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