25 years later . . . with commentaries

Published by Hartley & Marks, 1999 [ISBN: 0-88179-169-5]

The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is now being challenged by events. They speak to us in a language of terrorism, genocide, breakdown, pollution and exhaustion.

If a high-growth economy is needed to fight the battle against pollution, which itself appears to be the result of high growth, what hope is there of ever breaking out of this extraordinary circle?

. . . it does not require more than a simple act of insight to realize that infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.

There is nothing in the experience of the past 25 years to suggest that modern technology , as we know it, can really help us to alleviate world poverty, not to mention the problem of unemployment.

The idolatry of giantism is possibly one of the causes and certainly one of the effects of modern technology, particularly in matters of transport and communications. A highly developed transport and communications system has one immensely powerful effect; it makes people FOOTLOOSE.

It produces a rapidly increasing and ever more intractable problem of ‘drop-outs’, of people, who, having become footloose, cannot find a place anywhere in society. Directly connected with this, it produces an appalling problem of crime, alienation, stress, social breakdown, right down to the level of the family. In the poor countries, it produces mass migration into cities, mass unemployment, and, as vitality is drained out of rural areas, the threat of famine. And nobody knows what to do about it.

If the nature of change is such that nothing is left for the parents to teach their children, or for the children to accept from their parents, family life collapses. The life, work and happiness of all societies depend on certain ‘psychological structures’ which are infinitely precious and highly vulnerable. Social cohesion, co-operation, mutual respect, and, above all, self-respect, courage in the face of adversity, and the ability to bear hardship – all this and much more disintegrates and disappears when these psychological structures are gravely damaged. None of these awesome problems figure noticeably in the cosy theories of most of our development economists. A man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness. No amount of social growth can compensate for such losses.

. . . the human being, defined by Thomas Aquinas as a being with brains and hands, enjoys nothing more than to be creatively, usefully, productively engaged with both his hands and his brains.

Above anything else there is need for a proper philosophy of work which understands work not as that which it has indeed become, an inhuman chore as soon as possible to be abolished by automation, but as something ‘decreed by Providence for the good of man’s body and soul’. Next to the family, it is work and the relationships established by work that are the true foundations of society. If the foundations are unsound, how could society be sound?

The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science and technology. It can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.

Small scale operations, no matter how numerous, are always less likely to be harmful to the natural environment than large-scale ones, simply because their individual force is small in relation to the recuperative forces of nature. There is wisdom in smallness if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge.

Ghandi used to talk disparagingly of ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no-one will need to be good’.

If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. 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. (And they will) find themselves oppressed by increasing frustration, alienation, insecurity and so forth.

N industrial system which uses 40% of the world’s primary resources to supply less than 6% of the world’s population could be called efficient only if it obtained strikingly successful results in terms of human happiness, well-being, culture, peace and harmony. I do not need to dwell on the fact that the American system fails to do this, or that there are not the slightest prospects that it could do so IF ONLY it achieved a higher rate of growth of production, associated, as it must be, with an ever-greater call upon the world’s finite resources.

If we define the level of technology in terms of ‘equipment cost per workplace’, we can call the indigenous technology of a typical developing country – symbolically speaking – a $1 technology, while that of the developed countries could be called a $1,000 technology. The gap between these two technologies is so enormous that a transition from one to the other is simply impossible. In fact, the current attempt of the developing countries to infiltrate the $1,000 – technology into their economies inevitable kills off the $1 technology at an alarming rate, destroying traditional workplaces much faster than modern workplaces can be created, and thus leaves the poor in a more desperate and helpless position than ever before. If effective help is to be brought to those who need it most, a technology is required which would range in some intermediate position between the $1 technology and the $1,000 technology. Let us call it – again symbolically speaking – a $100 technology. A good example would be small, efficient cast iron woodstoves manufactured locally in third world towns. This would reduce forest destruction and make cooking easier and safer and healthier. A woman in India inhales the equivalent smoke of 6 packs of cigarettes per day while cooking over an open fire.

It is quite wrong to assume that poor people are generally unwilling to change; but the proposed change must stand in some organic relationship to what they are doing already and they are rightly suspicious of, and resistant to, radical changes proposed by town-based and office-bound innovators who approach them in the spirit of "You just get out of my way and I shall show you how useless you are and how splendidly the job can be done with a lot of foreign money and outlandish equipment." There is no answer to the evils of mass unemployment and mass migration to cities, unless the whole level of rural life can be raised, and this requires the development of an agro-industrial culture, so that each district, each community, can offer a colourful variety of occupations to its members.

Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.

Schumacher’s holy trinity is "health, beauty and permanence".