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.

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

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.