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.

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.

This is a combination of nonsense and non sequiturs. Why didn't you mention my non-Christian example of flagrant anti-intellectualism at all, or any of my examples of Christians promoting intellectualism? Are you trying to argue that Christians are somehow different from other religious people?

My central point, as I said, was, "Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that religious people are usually the ones who care about intellectualism, whether in favor or opposed." Are you implicitly claiming that Christians don't care about intellectualism?

My best hypothesis is that you just did some kind of keyword search and then recited a couple of marginally relevant polemical talking points you'd previously memorized, without any regard to the actual conversation you were injecting them into.