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 they intend. 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 people 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.”
L.M. Sacasas, writing in The Convivial
Society, 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 come along with “a perspective on the world.” The
devices subtly encourage their users to adopt an individualistic attitude, he
continues.
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’s positive advice to the
seminarians and to us is a “silence of deep interest.” At prayer each evening,
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, notebooks,
handouts and bandages can be appropriate. But the genuine helper is skilled in
the art of active listening. Lo and behold, the helper who listens can discover
something about herself. So too, each true exchange between people is an
encounter with God, our God who is Unified Community, a Blessed Trinity.
Droel edits a free, printed newsletter,
INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629)
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