[part 1]
Been busy and only going to get more so through the month of November, so this series on Schumacher is likely to be pretty spread out. Apologies.
One of Schumacher’s key insights is that the problem of the modern economic system is not simply a crisis in the distribution and use of resources, but is instead a fundamentally moral crisis. It is not a technical problem with a technical solution. The problem is our mindset, our worldview, specifically that:
modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man. If only there were more and more wealth, everything else, it is thought, would fall into place. Money is considered to be all-powerful; if it could not actually buy non-material values, such as justice, harmony, beauty or even health, it could circumvent the need for them or compensate for their loss. The development of production and the acquisition of wealth have thus become the highest goals of the modern world in relation to which all other goals, not matter how much lip-service may still be paid to them, have come to take second place.
Small is Beautiful, 313
The crisis of mindset begins with the enthronement of material ends as the highest good1 and is perpetuated by the collapse of thinking that attends such an enthronement.2
If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, his very successes become failures. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence. The Gross National Product may rise rapidly: as measured by statisticians but not as experienced by actual people, who find themselves oppressed by increasing frustration, alienation, insecurity, and so forth. After a while, even the Gross National Product refuses to rise any further, not because of scientific or technological failure, but because of a creeping paralysis of non-cooperation, as expressed in various types of escapism on the part, not only of the oppressed and exploited, but even of highly privileged groups.
Small is Beautiful, 32
Sin makes you stupid, in other words. And, as a consequence, we become more and more unable to rescue ourselves from the ever more stupefying morass into which we have fallen:
The neglect, indeed the rejection, of wisdom has gone so far that most of our intellectuals have not even the faintest idea of what the term could mean. As a result, they always tend to try and cure a disease by intensifying its causes. The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.
Small is Beautiful, 40
No technological solution can solve a problem rooted in the technological mindset itself, in the mindset that imagines nature only as something to be dominated, exploited, controlled.
We shrink back from the truth if we believe that the destructive forces of the modern world can be “brought under control” simply by mobilizing more resources–of wealth, education, and research–to fight pollution, to preserve wildlife, to discover new sources of energy, and to arrive at more effective agreements on peaceful coexistence. Needless to say, wealth, education, research, and many other things are needed for any civilization, but what is most needed today is a revision of the ends which these means are meant to serve.
Small is Beautiful, 314-5
Thus, to save the world, we must first of all affect a change in our hearts and minds, must reorient ourselves to new ends. Ultimately, Schumacher argues (to skip ahead quite a bite) this reorientation is nothing less than the reawakening of the virtues:3
Out of the whole Christian tradition, there is perhaps no body of teaching which is more relevant and appropriate to the modern predicament than the marvelously subtle and realistic doctrines of the Four Cardinal Virtues–prudentia, justitita, fortitudo, and temperantia.
Small is Beautiful, 316
Let’s continue our exploration in future posts of what this reawakening looks like in the realms of education, technology and social organization.
1. Something the students in my Introduction to World Religions courses never fail to notice is that this enthronement is condemned by every major religion on Earth. There’s probably a reason for that condemnation, maybe even a good one.
2. I must cite this stunningly evil anecdote about Keynes, Schumacher’s mentor, that Schumacher recounts to show how this mindset was consciously adopted:
In 1930, during the world-wide economic depression, [Keynes] felt moved to speculate on the “economic possibilities for our grandchildren” and concluded that the day might not be all that far off when everybody would be rich. We shall then, he said, “once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.”
“But beware!” he continued. “The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”
Small is Beautiful, 24
Doing evil so that good might result, an ever present and thoroughly wicked temptation (cf. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, ch. 3)
3. Striking how many brilliant thinkers independently arrive at this conclusion, isn’t it?
