August 25, 2022
Dear Wendell,
In the past I have enjoyed answering your hand-written letters in kind, but a bicycle misadventure yesterday has made hand-writing uncomfortable, so today I’ll have to send you a printed note. (The accident was not grave – a pickup truck that hadn’t seen me turned into my path and I had to stop so suddenly that the bike, and me with it, went down hard onto the pavement – but my arm and hand remain sore.)
Thanks for arranging the advance copy of The Need to Be Whole. I got a chance to read it last month, and, the subject matter notwithstanding, I thoroughly enjoyed the time spent in your literary company. I am admiring, and even a little amazed, at how well you have achieved what you set out to do. You said in your letter that you wished to put me under no obligation to review the book and hoped only that I would read it and discuss it with other interested friends, should I be moved to do so. I took you at your word, but, after I had finished reading, I still couldn’t help feeling that the book, and the circumstances it addresses, asked something more of me. So, I’ve written a little review essay which I include with this letter. I’ve just sent it off to the Literary Review of Canada, a journal where I’ve sometimes written. I wasn’t sure about reviewing it for an American audience, since your book is so directly addressed to your countryfolk, and I belong to one of those other Americas that are sometimes lost in the shadow of your great republic’s glory, so my thought was to speak as a Canadian in introducing it to a Canadian audience. I’ll let you know how that turns out.
Speaking more personally, the book meant a lot to me – Canada having polarized in much the same way as the U.S. Perhaps you heard something of the so-called Trucker or Freedom Convoy that descended on Ottawa in February in protest against vaccine mandates. The protesters, despite their obvious patriotism, were treated as enemies, and the Emergencies Act – a piece of legislation clearly and explicitly intended only for use only in the face of war, insurrection, or grave natural disaster – was invoked against them. The whole pandemic policy we have followed has been cut from the same cloth – the middle ground has collapsed, overt censorship has replaced free discussion, and the very principle of informed consent, on which post World War II medicine had staked its legitimacy, has been withdrawn. Jutta and I chose not to be vaccinated, not trusting a concoction so novel, so hastily assembled, and so slightly tested, and knowing that no vaccination had ever been effective against so mutable a virus as SARS CoV-2 soon showed itself to be. Consequently, we were banned from travelling by air or rail within Canada, denied entry to many places, including the homes of friends, shut out of the United States, and generally ostracized. Had I been younger I might have lost my livelihood, as many did. Old friendships have come under strain, and even, in some cases, ended. And all this has more or less carried on, even as it has been shown that these vaccines do not prevent the disease or its transmission.
This has all been pretty hard to swallow, even as I have had to recognize that it is a clear enough coming-to-fruition, or coming-out-into-the-open of exactly the kind of society Illich predicted in his later writings. This is one reason that I found your book so heartening and steadying. I have said some of this in my review, so here I only want to add a heartfelt thank you for the effort I know this must have cost you – and at an age when you could justly enough have declined to try.
I don’t know if I have told you, but I am well along with a book about the CBC – about what it has been and what it might be. It is a pretty personal book – part history, part memoir, and part exploration of what a real public broadcaster might look like – and the way you have integrated and unified the The Need to Be Whole has encouraged and inspired me. Finally, your book has helped me to see that I ought myself to try and address the mess we have gotten into in the last couple of years – under the aegis of powerful abstractions, stupefying generalizations, and, of course, Science that mighty oracle that you and I discussed for my CBC series a few years back. Sometime last year Matthew Derr, who I think you know as the former President of Sterling College, got in touch with me on behalf of a publisher called Chelsea Green, where he is now acquisitions editor, and asked if I would be willing to do a short book on the pandemic and its aftermath and implications. I was doubtful, at first, wanting above all to finish the CBC book, but reading your book, made me reevaluate and realize that I ought to throw my mite onto the scales as well. Saying this to you, and wondering if you will be thinking, what have I done?, brings up a memory of Ivan, years ago, suddenly saying to Jutta, more or less out of the blue, think of all the harm I must have done with my books. I hope you will laugh, as we did that night.