Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)

Why is Ivan Illich so underrated ?

He predicted and theorized free software 10 years before it happened in Tools for Conviviality, made the most obvious and needed critic of education and hospitals alone against the Zeitgeist, studied step by step a lot of field of society to find patterns to simplify understanding.

He created simple concepts that everyone should know —- counter productivity, vernacular, iaotrogenic, radical monopoly, conviviality, poverty vs. misery etc.

He is much more pragmatic than all his leftists colleagues. He might not go very deep in economics but at least he’s not a basic marxist. He might not go as deep as Jacques Ellul in his critics of technology, but at least he is very understandable, anyone can be inspired by his books. I read most of Illich writings at 19 years old and it stayed with me for years

I agree with you. Is it perhaps because of his religious background (he was a Catholic priest)? For much of the last couple decades, there has been an anti-religious streak in the educational mainstream universities.

This was a whole cottage industry during the cold war, kind of like it is now that we're in another sort of cold war.

The Soviets would fund anyone applying Marxist thought to this or that. There may be some interesting ideas for those willing to sort out the chaff, but for the most part you know exactly what they're going to say if you're already familiar with the propaganda that came before.

Well, was it wrong what they said?

Yes. In general that's why you resort to propaganda and polemics rather than giving a formal argument that can be disproved.

You might enjoy a newsletter called The Convivial Society, which is heavily influenced by Illich.

I'm just starting Tools For Conviviality. I suspect that Illich's ideas are underrated because, at least today, most people want more and Illich does not offer that. He offers freedom, I think, in his definition of conviviality... but it seems to be quite clear that offered freedom or comfort, most of us today (I'm not excluding myself from this) prefer comfort.

Half agree.

The other half, as a very conservative Catholic, conservative Catholics are neglecting our great teachers like Dorothy Day.

Could that perhaps be a reaction to an anti-intellectualism streak in the mainstream religious narrative for the last couple decades?

Poverty vs Misery?

I completely agree that Marxism and its descents are bankrupt ideas, but I’m not getting the connection to Illich.

I’ve only read one of his books, Energy and Equity, but I don’t really recall any strain of Marxism or leftism, though it was a long time ago so maybe I’ve forgotten.

The fact that he's a very eclectic thinker and not very systematic, although that's one of the things that a lot of people admire about him. His religious commitments, as well, I would guess. But also he had some very odd ideas--like refusing to get a tumor removed from his face. He also was not the best at communicating his ideas.

The last couple of millennia, really. Who lynched Hypatia? Who burned the Timbuktu Manuscripts? Who burned Giordano Bruno alive? Who burned the Maya codices?

At the same time, religious institutions have always contained many intellectual traditions, perhaps most of them. When the Christians extirpated knowledge of the hieroglyphs, it was the Egyptian priests they scattered. We don't know what was in the Maya codices, but large parts of the surviving Maya inscriptions are religious in nature. European universities began as seminaries; al-Azhar University is over 1000 years old and initially taught only sharia, fiqh, and the Quran. And everyone knows how Irish monks saved civilization.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that religious people are usually the ones who care about intellectualism, whether in favor or opposed.

He's connected with liberation theology, which is what the KGB was promoting in Catholic countries to recruit for militant groups. Similar to how they promoted revolutionary Islam to people like Goddafi. I think the Soviets actually claim to have invented liberation theology, but who knows.

His deschooling and Limits to Medicine stuff were standard Soviet tropes and still are today. The obvious purposes are to get the US to weaken its education and medical systems. They ran similar strategies to get the US to weaken its nuclear system and to me it looks like they're also trying to weaken adoption of AI through similar ideas. But basically schools are bad, medicine is bad. Claims we're "pathologizing" everything. You see the same ideas in socialist spaces online today. Especially these days around psychology. Similarly with the "factory school" trope.

When Energy and Equity was written in 1974 it was a year after the 1973 oil crisis. The Soviet Union was destabilizing countries in the middle east and wanted to secure access to oil especially at the expense of the US. Their normal propaganda would be about American imperialism and how they're evil and oil producing countries should side with the Soviet Union instead. I haven't read the book, but that would be the Soviet take at the time.

I don't know whether he was supported by the Soviets. He was a public intellectual who traveled a lot especially to South America. It's very likely he was approached and attempted to be recruited by the KGB. But whether he rebuffed them or not isn't public knowledge.

One thing we're learning as more stuff gets declassified is how many household names were more actively involved in the cold war than we realized. For example, Howard Zinn being actively involved in communist organizations despite lying about it for years. Or Earnest Hemingway actively collaborating with the KGB (although in the end wasn't very successful). There are a few other examples.

yes, certainly

Interesting information. Most of what Illich says applied equally to the USSR regime though

The distinction between lack of wealth/goods/services and lack of access to services that you now mandatory need to get wealthy/goods/others services (because of how society just changed commons into privatisation). Note that I’m not anticapitalist yet I think there are interesting concepts there

Majid RAHNEMA wrote a book about this in french, “Quand la misère chasse la pauvreté” based on similar ideas than Illich

I suspect it's because he's like most of the more radical writers: if you actual dissect his writing, it really gets to the heard of a lot of what is rotten about modern industrial society. And the rectification of the problems he highlights pretty much necessitates disassembling a lot of modern technological society and getting rid of most of its institutions.

So while he makes sense, no one wants to discuss his work, because then they must also come to a lot of the same conclusions he did, which is: the global society we have today is a lost cause, and a lot of it needs to be torn down. Which of course goes against the status quo.

It's a lot different than the fluffy, weak criticism of many today that recommend making changes that don't change anything. But then at least people reading that stuff can convince themselves that they are doing something, when they are not.

Was it available in the USSR?

Huuu... he's absolutely not underrated? Quite well-known here in Europe

> He's connected with liberation theology, which is what the KGB was promoting in Catholic countries to recruit for militant groups. [...] I think the Soviets actually claim to have invented liberation theology, but who knows.

Any reputable sources for these claims? Sounds like American Cold War propaganda.

> religious people

Seems to me that the focus should be on institutions as power centers, rather than beliefs or loosely defined "religious people".

Illich himself also noted how institutionalization of an initially revolutionary idea reverses its meaning, switching, say, liberation into oppression.

Power grabbers will always attempt power grabs, and will eventually distort an initial good idea. They will pretend to Embrace it, then attempt to Extend it with their own input, to finally Extinguish the original idea.

My Shift key seems to be Jittery, apologies :)

The ideals of Illich's work are so far removed from the centralized, institutionalized Soviet socialism, I really doubt the Soviets would've been very happy if people in the USSR started talking that way. Anyone who is swayed by Illich will loathe the idea of five year plans, concerted efforts for more technological progress, and the propaganda that goes with it ("Plan is law, fulfillment is duty, over-fulfillment is honor!").

But who knows, maybe the communist spooks just saw someone geographically close to the US propounding ideas that were radically different from capitalism and didn't mind that they were also radically different from communism. The same has happened enough times in the other direction.

Usually the idea of critique was to create dissatisfaction with democracy, not to advocate for what the USSR was doing. For example, the KGB heavily promoted the US peace and anti-nuclear movements despite being strongly pro-war and pro-nuclear within the Soviet Union.

It's a bit like the fundamentalist religious people who talk a lot about how immoral everyone else is but then make excuses for the immoral things their leadership is doing. Or the congresspeople who talk about how important the family is but are serially unfaithful and don't see their kids.

It's more about having a useful way to attack people than an advocacy for a specific position or way of life.

Some of their activities are described in this interview [0]. The claims come from 2015 not from the Cold War. And they're from a communist intelligence defector, not America.

There's no shortage of interviews from former intelligence people talking about Cold War era South America and much of it is well known. The basic gist is it was before modern ICBMs, the USSR wanted nuclear missiles close to the US and they wanted military bases there. This is where the FARC, Fidel Castro, Che Guevera etc all come from. And famously it's what led to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Bay of Pigs Invasion. A lot of this can best be understood in the context of what ideas the Soviets were promoting in other parts of the world, like revolutionary Islam.

There are also many essays on the connections between Marxism and liberation theology, many (maybe most?) of them written by liberation theology proponents during the Cold War years.

Some of the claims made in the interview

> On October 26, 1959, Sakharovsky and his new boss, Nikita Khrushchev, came to Romania for what would become known as "Khrushchev's six-day vacation." He had never taken such a long vacation abroad, nor was his stay in Romania really a vacation. Khrushchev wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who had exported communism to Central and South America. Romania was the only Latin country in the Soviet bloc, and Khrushchev wanted to enroll her "Latin leaders" in his new "liberation" war.

> The movement was born in the KGB, and it had a KGB-invented name: Liberation Theology.... The birth of Liberation Theology was the intent of a 1960 super-secret "Party-State Dezinformatsiya Program" approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party's international policies. This program demanded that the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool. The WCC was the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries.

and so on.

There are lots of details you can check out and try to fact check. But it would be a research project and my guess would be hardly any of the classified information is public now. As a general rule, we get books and interviews from defectors and former intelligence officers, but they're based on first-hand recollection and contemporaneous notes backed by still-classified information.

So it's up to you to decide how much weight to give the various pieces of evidence. But certainly what he says in the interview is consistent with how the KGB operates. But we can't know things like whether he was lied to by the KGB at the time, or whether he's misremembering facts, or whether he's embellishing here or there.

[0] https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/31919/former-soviet-...

Also his criticism is very specific. Most of contemporary anti-capitalist or marxist thought that gets published is very, very abstract and hence toothless. It's easy to entertain radical ideas as long as they don't pit you against your employer.

Hypatia’s murder had very little to do with religious conflict against a free thinker and everything to do with class alexandrian class politics.

https://historyforatheists.com/2020/07/the-great-myths-9-hyp...

Bruno’s execution was of course evil and wrong but it’s also wrong to depict him as some kind of martyr for science and that the Catholics were setting back intellectual progress. Bruno was not a scientist, he was a mystic. He did not carry out experiments to try to prove his beliefs nor even believe in the ability of math to explain nature. The conflict that lead to his death was between two different religious/mystical traditions and not between “intellectualism” and religion. If he were alive today he would be more comparable with Deepak Chopra than a real scientist

Christians simply did not “extirpate” knowledge of the hieroglyphs or “scatter Egyptian priests.” Hieroglyphs were already falling into disuse since they were the writing system of a tiny elite of priests. There was no abolition or persecution of the hieroglyphic using class. The fading of hieroglyphs has its roots in the Hellenization of Egypt centuries before Christianity began. As Egyptians became Christian, the Coptic script came to be dominant for writing the Egyptian language. In the same way very few people bother to learn how to write JCL anymore, very few people were interested in retaining knowledge of hieroglyphs.

There’s an implicit idea here too that Christians were some kind of foreign interloper in Egypt instead of being themselves Egyptian — this is simply not the case. Egypt was one of the early hotbeds of Christianity and the modern-day Copts are essentially the people most closely culturally and genetically related to the ancient Egyptians.