On Two Watersheds

Illich describes an impending crisis caused by the scale of industrial production that he feels urgently needs to be addressed. He describes the arc of the problem as two watershed moments in the industrial development of any institution.

At first, new knowledge is applied to the solution of a clearly stated problem and scientific measuring sticks are applied to account for the new efficiency. But at a second point, the progress demonstrated in a previous achievement is used as a rationale for the exploitation of society as a whole in service of a value which is determined and constantly revised by an element of society, by one of its self-certifying elites. (p.7)

As an institution approaches the first watershed, the benefits of its development are clear and desirable. For example, medicine in the early 20th century provided clean water, cured diseases, eased pain, and fostered our understanding of the relationship between our health and our actions and environment. 

However, at some point, the industrial development of the institution approaches a second watershed where the means are mistaken for the ends and any benefit is overwhelmed by the destructive consequences of the scale and self-sustaining operation of the institution. Beyond this point, the enterprise “first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself.” (pp.x-xi)

For example, Illich contends that healthcare has developed into a harmful institution that is built around prolonging unhealth rather than providing care, imposes a narrative of measured “progress” on health that generates more issues than it cures, and propagates and protects itself with a barrier of professional over-specialization. He sees the same pattern occurring across all institutions, including education (on which he wrote a separate book), transportation, civil engineering, social work, etc.

Illich goes into detail on the potential destructive consequences of our institutions reaching the second watershed. I’ll only repeat his summary here:

(1) Overgrowth threatens the right to the fundamental physical structure of the environment with which man has evolved. (2) Industrialization threatens the right to convivial work. (3) The overprogramming of man for the new environment deadens his creative imagination. (4) New levels of productivity threaten the right to participatory politics. (5) Enforced obsolescence threatens the right to tradition: the recourse to precedent in language, myth, morals, and judgement. (pp.47-48)

It’s good to note that Illich is not advocating any kind of return to the past. Rather, the book advocates for a change in focus, turning towards individual agency and dignity.

Our vision of the possible and the feasible is so restrained by industrial expectations that any alternative to more mass production sounds like a return to past oppression or like a Utopian design for noble savages. In fact, however, the vision of new possibilities requires only the recognition that scientific discoveries can be used in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power and turns people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The second enlarges the range of each person's competence, control, and initiative, limited only by other individual's claims to an equal range of power and freedom. (pp.xi-xii)

Illich’s argument is a radical one that attacks foundational systems. The issue is not about who owns an institution or whether we are supporting the institution sufficiently. For him, the very premise of an industrial institution is a problem.

This dogged stance makes it difficult for me to side with some of the conclusions he reaches in the book, for example his seemingly blanket distrust of institutional science and his dismissal of the strategy of minority or gender equality movements (arguing that they are attacking symptoms rather than root issues, reinforcing existing institutions by demanding equal consumption rather than working to create new systems of equal input).

However, Illich’s message is provocative for designers when we ask how we are contributing to society’s development. As shapers of the tools and contexts available to others, to what degree are we supporting systems that are ultimately unhealthy for culture and environment? I think the idea of the two watersheds could be a useful frame to evaluate the contexts of our design and consider where along that progression we are contributing (or whether we should be offering alternatives).