Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)
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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
The other half, as a very conservative Catholic, conservative Catholics are neglecting our great teachers like Dorothy Day.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
As for your point itself, I don’t think “religion” is a meaningful category. It’s unclear to me Christianity and say — Shinto have some common trait that holds them together. Even Christianity and Islam have vastly different goals and ideas about what the purpose of “religion” is. So I don’t think it’s meaningful to say “religious people tend to care about intellectualism.”
Communist Russia cared a lot about intellectualism — they promoted and persecuted many intellectuals and academics, just like the Catholic Church. The common denominator between the Soviet Union and the Catholic Church is surely not that they were both religious. To assert that communism is a religion would only further prove my point above.
The Catholic Church during the counter-reformation, its most highly censorious and intolerant period, was, like the Soviet Union, a society experiencing intense paranoia and saw itself under siege by foreign and internal enemies and needing to protect itself. This was an attitude that lead to atrocities, but it’s difficult for me to see how this has anything to do with religion as such given that the same pattern happens in secular culture all the time. Politically powerful people (or those with political ambition) tend to care about these things is the real thing going on here, especially if they perceive potential threats from the intellectuals. Intellectuals are not unique targets in this respect.
Many “religions” promote having a literate class to be educated in both their scriptures and in wider philosophy because it’s necessary to socially reproduce their own teachings. In that sense they care about intellectualism but we do the same thing to reproduce American, French, British, etc. secular culture, and good luck to public school teachers who want to buck the curriculum (I don’t particularly think they should, but they’ll have issues).
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.
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.
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.
Any reputable sources for these claims? Sounds like American Cold War propaganda.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
Majid RAHNEMA wrote a book about this in french, “Quand la misère chasse la pauvreté” based on similar ideas than Illich
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.
Having said that, his criticism is completely on point. But the people who have reached the same solution are then lost on what to do after it.
True. But as Kaczynski rightly pointed out, you can't have a revolution out of thin air, and the seeds of distrust have to be sufficiently grown first before there is a critical mass of tension that can act as fuel for the fire. So the first step might just be to sow seeds of well-placed distrust against the modern tech oligarchs.
I like your username ahah.. you might be biased ;)
When I was reading it I just couldn't believe it was written in 1973. So ahead of its time.
Yet this speech could have been written today.
Intriguing.
Or take The Machine Stops from 1909.
Yet most of us (myself included) are in denial (willful or just delusional) about what AI is going to do.
My city ran its payroll on a single computer with 64KB of RAM. This would have required weeks of work from a whole team of bureaucrats.
One thing that bothers me about the ubiquitous encroachment of LLMs into most areas of human writing is that it helps us write faster, but does not necessarily help us read faster. Producing large amounts of human-looking text is instantaneous, but reading (and acting upon) still takes the same amount of time. I was e.g. called to read and review a report from an academic committee with hundreds of pages that mostly looks human but also not, with pages and pages of slop after slop. I felt like I was staring into the abyss, spending hours to read something that probably took seconds for someone to produce with AI. It felt like an absolute meaningless waste of my time.
The thing is that I think people have missed the fact that the act of reading is inherently connected to the act of writing; I take the time to read something because I know that someone took the time to write it. For those who live/work by writing it seems that the act of writing has become so detached and matter-of-fact that they think “words are words” regardless of whether they were written by a human or an AI. If it helps you write faster, then why not? Like someone who used to cut trees with axes and suddenly gets a chainsaw as a gift.
But the problem is that, inevitably, we will go down the road of “if you can’t bother to write it, I won’t bother to read it” and AI will also be used to read and interpret the writings that it itself generated. So we’ll have documents with thousands of pages that are never going to be read by humans, with AI processing in both ends, so the writing will basically be a payload, a protocol, and nothing more. As such processes become the norm, we’ll be entirely dependent on the AI to both produce text and read what it produced, and become enslaved by whatever hidden (or not?) ideological bias it has been fed by its masters.
My experience is LLMs can write very very well; we just have to care enough to ask them to do so. Those 4 pages needed a whole lot of fine-tuning. But I'm optimistic eventually people will figure it out.
Both talks center "enterprise" and communication. Thanks Claude for validating my hunch about the late-century subtweet.
> What has happened today is that there is a new hidden ground of all human enterprises, namely a world environment of electric information, and against this new environment the old ground of 19th century hardware—whether at school or factory, whether of bureaucracy or entertainment—stands out as incongruous.
...
> It is this situation that Ivan Illich addresses himself to in Deschooling Society. He is vividly aware of the irrelevance of current curricula, drills and certification. He knows that these can no longer help us relate to the new world, and he frankly appeals to the forms of preliterate, and even prenatal experience as models for the training now needed.
> As Coleridge said "If you wish to acquire a man's knowledge, first start with his ignorance." Illich is unaware—I'll repeat: Illich is ignorant of the new all-inclusive "surround" of electric information which has enveloped man, but it is his instinctive response to this new ground that in some measure validates the figure-image he suggests for the new school. For example, he says "Since most people today live outside industrial societies. Most people today do not experience childhood. In the Andes, you till the soil once you become useful: before that you watch sheep; if you are well nourished you should be useful by 11, and otherwise by 12."
> Illich relates this story: "Recently I was talking to my night-watchman, Marcos, about his 11 year old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his son was still a nino. Marcos answered with a guileless smile, 'Don Ivan, I guess you are right.' I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons." What Illich has in mind, although he does not state it, is that childhood was unknown in the Middle Ages and was a renaissance invention that came in with printing, and is ending very rapidly now in the television age...
He also seems to prompt many interesting book review comments. I have now found my mission!
> The thing is, Illich is more like Plato than Marx. Nobody ever tried to mount a Platonic revolution. [0]
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2LL7H3HL0WENO/re...
So it's really more about the medium in itself, rather than what it is or is not used for
That was made much more evident with the government restrictions/mandates during Covid.
The endgame seems to be that people will be treated as farm animals.