Good afternoon. It is a great privilege to be here with you today to share some reflections about my father, Fritz Schumacher. It is quite a challenge for me to be addressing a society that bears my father’s name. You have been developing and implementing some of his ideas for many years and you know much more about how they work out in practice than I do. It is inspiring to be with people who have been carrying the torch that he lit, giving hope that it is possible to make a better world. My father gave hope because at the root of his message was that every one of us has a part to play and nothing is too insignificant to make a difference. And you are showing that small steps in the right direction can become something beautiful.
The last time I saw my father was in late August 1977. It was my eldest brother’s birthday. After my father had enjoyed a glass or two of whisky, he suddenly called us to order and gave an emotional speech about the importance of marriage. He told us how much we should all cherish and care for our spouses, and how we must keep going when there are difficulties. At the end of the evening, he came to me and handed me a parcel. As he gave it to me, he said: “This is what my life has been leading up to.” In the parcel was a copy of his second book, A Guide for the Perplexed, which had just been sent to him hot off the press.
A week later he was dead.
“Marriage is for keeps” and “this is what my life has been leading up to.” These last words are burned into my mind. The talk about marriage was his last request to all of us children. But his words about his book were addressed to me alone. He was saying that with this book he had completed his life’s work. I felt he was also saying that it held the key to understanding him as well as his life’s work.
Some months later I began working on his biography. With his last words to me ringing in my ears like a challenge, my first objective was to discover why he had considered this second book to be the fulfilment of his life’s work. I had to find out why this book contained the essence of who he had become and how it related to what motivated and inspired him.
His first book, Small is Beautiful, was already a world-wide best seller. It has never been out of print, and has been translated into countless languages. Many people have said that Small is Beautiful expressed things that they were feeling but were unable to articulate. They would say, “Schumacher put into words what I sensed was true but did not understand why” and “Schumacher gave me hope that I can make a difference.” Even today, 50 years after it was published, it is still being read because it is still as relevant now as it was 50 years ago.
My father has become hailed as wise man and even a prophet. He was someone who could read the signs of the times and could see where the world was heading. This was because he was concerned about truth. He tried to call people back to truth and right living. Like a prophet, he warned what would happen if we didn’t change our ways, and, like a true prophet, he offered hope by reminding those who would listen that there is always a way back if we recognize where we have gone wrong and turn around to follow the right path. Those who have ears to hear recognize the truth in what he was saying.
I thought that writing such an influential book was the crowning glory of his life. But no, that was not his view. He thought that his second book was more important. He told me that he knew that Small is Beautiful would be a best seller and he hoped this would encourage people to read A Guide for the Perplexed. Unfortunately, this has not happened, and this second book remains largely unknown.
I have to confess that I had never read Small is Beautiful before he died, because, to be honest, I felt I already knew what it contained. I had grown up with my father talking at us about his latest ideas at practically every meal time. I sometimes wonder if he was using us to work out how to convey his views to a wider audience; if his children could follow what he was talking about then his adult audiences would have no trouble in understanding!
As long as I can remember he talked about the importance of energy. His job was Economic Advisor to the National Coal Board in London and that meant keeping track of world-wide energy production, current consumption, and the estimates of future needs. He loved numbers and said that if he ran his finger down a list of numbers he could see immediately if one didn’t fit. He didn’t really trust computers and rather used a slide rule or worked things out on the back of an envelope. In the 1960’s when oil began to flow in from the Middle East, and the government wanted to close the coal mines, he fought long and hard to keep the mines open. He knew from his calculations that there would not be enough coal and oil and gas in the ground to satisfy our increasing needs. He deplored the willingness to depend on oil from the Middle East because it was such an unstable part of the world. I remember him saying in his usual direct and non-politically correct way that “They won’t want to give up their newfound wealth and return to sand and camels when their oil begins to run out.” I became so anxious about the prospect of the lights going out that I began to hoard a huge supply of candles just in case! My husband Don and I are still burning them to bring some romance into our meals!
There was a tension between his day job as an economist at the Coal Board and his alternative life where he was drawing attention to the adverse effects of economic growth on the environment, and on human health and wellbeing. When I was a student at Bristol University, he gave a lecture to the economics students with the title “The double life of the post-modern economist” in which he explained this dilemma. My fellow students found his talk deeply disturbing because, within a few minutes, he had undermined all the assumptions we had been taught about economic theory. Human beings do not always act rationally or predictably, and economists don’t always factor that into their plans.
In the early days, when he was developing the ideas contained in Small is Beautiful, he was considered very controversial and encountered a lot of opposition. I remember the day after he had given his lecture to the Clean Air Society in London on the dangers of nuclear energy. It is reproduced in Small is Beautiful. He came home in a state of shock because he had been denounced in Parliament as being irresponsible for attacking nuclear energy. Another time after he had given a lecture to fellow economists about intermediate technology, arguing that this was the way to help poor countries develop, he was attacked by his fellow economists who all still believed that the answer was to transfer the highly sophisticated technology of the West. A prophet is never accepted by his own people.
Everything he shared around the kitchen table became part of the way I understood the world and thought about the world. His ideas became self-evident truth for me.
It was different though with A Guide for the Perplexed. He did not talk so much about the things he wrote about in this book, either to us or in his many talks and lectures, and when I began to read it, I was surprised at how different it was from Small is Beautiful. But gradually it became clear to me that A Guide for the Perplexed was in fact putting forward a world view and way of thinking that is the foundation to Small is Beautiful. A Guide for the Perplexed is a guide to discovering the truth about who we are as human beings and the truth about the world, and without such truth we cannot understand the challenges of living.
In one sense there is nothing new in A Guide for the Perplexed. It contains a view of the world that is as old as the earliest civilizations and is part of every authentic religion and spiritual path, but it is articulated in a way that my father hoped would perhaps be more acceptable to modern ears. It is also a warning that, when we lose sight of truth, specifically the truth that is contained in the wisdom of the ancients, our civilization will surely collapse.
A Guide for the Perplexed is concerned with the inner work we need to do so that we can clearly understand what it means to be human. It sets out why this matters so we can know how to conduct our lives so that all living beings can flourish. It makes explicit the thinking which lies behind the sub-title of Small is Beautiful which is “A Study of Economics as If People Mattered.” Small is Beautiful is the fruit of such inner work and is itself a guide to show us how to act when we have understood the truth of why people matter, and how this knowledge affects the way we think about the purpose of our economic activity.
A Guide for the Perplexed is quite a short book with a clear structure of four main sections. Its whole purpose is to get across the message that to live properly we have to recognize that there are different orders of knowledge to be had about ourselves and the world; a higher knowledge and a lower knowledge. Scientific knowledge, observable provable facts, can give us certainty. We can know they are true. But this kind of knowledge is not the only truth, nor the most important truth for living. There is a higher, more important kind of knowledge which is invisible and cannot be proved by scientific methods. This is knowledge about the inner life of things, particularly of human beings. It is harder to obtain but is essential to understand the truth about who we are and how we can address the many challenges that we face in our lives. The theme that runs all through A Guide for the Perplexed is summed up by the words of St Thomas Aquinas that “the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.”
There can be confusion here about what is meant by higher and lower knowledge, particularly as the first section of the book looks at what is called the Levels of Being, namely the difference between minerals, plant life, animal life, and human life. In evolutionary terms higher means more complex and more intelligent forms of life. But this is not what is meant by knowledge of the highest things. St Thomas Aquinas is talking about inner knowledge, knowledge of the inner life of human beings, knowledge of what is good and evil, knowledge of the divine. This is where the truth lies. Truth that we need to live a meaningful life. But it is hard to obtain this kind of truth, particularly since modern science tells us that the only truth we can be sure of is scientific truth. And further, tells us that because the world is the product of a process of mindless evolution, life, including human life, has no meaning or purpose, because it all occurred by chance. From this it follows that the only difference between human beings and animals is that we humans have a higher intelligence. Otherwise, we are just naked apes.
Such a world view is not compatible with the search for a way of life that is based on the belief that people matter. People matter because we are qualitatively different from everything that has gone before us. It may be true that we have evolved from lower forms of life and therefore share some of their attributes. But we are much more than animals. We have self-awareness. Human beings are different from animals because we are able to be aware of our inner life, our hopes and fears and aspirations. We can love and we can act generously and selflessly, even to sacrificing ourselves for others. We are capable of empathy and compassion. We can understand the difference between what is just and unjust, what is good and right and what is wrong and harmful. We can have flashes of insight and inspiration and creativity that are different from mere intelligence. And we are able to recognize these abilities and attributes within ourselves, and able to work to develop those that lead to the good and try to overcome those that cause us to live in a way that is less than human. To be human is to be a creature with unlimited potential which it is our task in life to unlock. We are defined by our greatest achievements, and not by our average behaviour or our faults.
My father believed that without a proper understanding of the qualitative concepts of higher and lower types of knowledge – in other words recognizing that inner spiritual knowledge is more important than factual scientific knowledge and is therefore a higher form of knowledge – it is impossible to find meaningful guidelines about how to live in a manner that is more than merely utilitarian and selfish, focused on our animal instincts. In his words, I quote:
Traditional wisdom has a reassuringly plain answer [to where happiness lies]. Man’s happiness is to move higher, to develop his highest faculties, to gain knowledge of the higher and highest things and, if possible to ‘see God’. If he moves lower, develops only his lower faculties which he shares with the animals, then he makes himself deeply unhappy, even to the point of despair.
My father suggested that what he called Evolutionism was largely responsible for debasing the uniqueness of human life. He used to joke that it would be useful to get people to identify themselves on their visiting cards – such as John Smith, naked ape, or John Brown, made in the image of God. Then we would know who we were dealing with! Defining people as naked apes was to him as nonsensical as calling a dog a barking plant or a running cabbage! But his point was deadly serious. When we no longer understand that we are more than animals, then we are in danger of losing these inner qualities that make us human: inner life is dismissed and outer material needs and desires become the sole focus. It has often struck me that we excuse our failings by saying “Well we are only human.” The truth is that when we behave badly we are being less than what we are meant to be.
A Guide for the Perplexed insists that a proper understanding of what it means to be human is essential for knowing how to live and how to relate to others. Today there is even greater confusion in our understanding of who we are as human beings with the advent of what is mistakenly called artificial intelligence. Robots are not intelligent. They are machines that have been programmed by intelligent human beings to assess data. Machines do not have an inner life. Machines do not understand the concepts of justice and mercy and forgiveness and love. Machines do not have intuition or the ability to make leaps of the imagination, nor do they have feelings. Yet there is a growing sense that these machines are not merely equal to human life but even superior to it.
To confuse human life with the existence of robots or to see ourselves and others as merely more intelligent animals, has huge implications for the way we conduct our lives and the way we treat others, because it fails to factor in the meaning of life. The theory of evolution is an explanation about how different life forms are related and change over a period of time. But it cannot explain why or for what purpose life came into being. Yet rather than admit that meaning is beyond the competence of science, we have been led to believe that, because meaning cannot be identified and proved scientifically, there must therefore be no meaning and purpose to human life.
Small is Beautiful is based on the belief that human life has meaning and that the purpose of human life is to become fully human. Our purpose is to develop our inner invisible life as well as to have concern for our outer visible life and the life of others. When we become open to the necessity for inner work, for a reaching out beyond ourselves and our human limitations towards a life that is higher than our own, something that every civilization in the past has recognized as a reaching out to the divine, then we can begin to see the world as it really is and what it means to live a full life. When we recognize that our purpose here is not merely to fill our bellies and become rich while we can, but to grow inwardly, then it makes sense that work has a purpose beyond merely earning our living, as is described in the chapter on Buddhist Economics. When we acknowledge that we have been put on earth to develop and use our creative gifts, then the purpose of technology changes and it makes sense to seek technology that serves rather than dominates those who use it, as it is called in Small is Beautiful, technology with a human face. When we accept that our inner life is what connects us to the lives of others in our relationships, then we are motivated to build sustainable communities of a size where we care for each other so all can flourish, and where we treat each other as we would like others to treat us.
When a scientific theory about how the wonderful variety of life has come to be is applied to areas in which it has no business and has nothing to say, namely its application to philosophical and spiritual understanding, the result is an erosion of a proper understanding of why people matter. Such understanding needs a spiritual perspective because developing our higher faculties means reaching upwards beyond ourselves. It means searching for truth, striving to put our lower animal cravings in their proper place and developing our higher nature. It means becoming aware of what we are created to be, and also what we actually are, what motivates us, our priorities, what makes us happy and unhappy. It means going inwards, become more attentive and concentrated on the things that really matter, rather than drifting through life in a kind of half sleep, unaware of who we are ourselves, and unaware of what the humanity of others means.
This journey inwards is not easy. In fact, A Guide for the Perplexed suggests that not everyone is able to do this. Because to undertake such an inward journey means being prepared to take a leap of faith that such higher realities actually exist. To quote A Guide for the Perplexed:
I have faith so as to be able to understand. If I lack faith…no degree of ‘objectivity’ will ever save me from missing the point of the whole thing, and I rob myself of the very possibility of understanding. I shall then be one of those of whom it has been said: ‘They, seeing, see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
The faith that is meant here is not first and foremost a religious faith but an openness to the possibility that there is more to life than meets the eye, which must therefore be investigated. In my father’s case it led to a search for spiritual truth that he believed could be found in every great world religion.
For it is impossible for any civilisation to survive without a faith in meanings and values transcending the utilitarianism of comfort and survival – in other words without a religious faith.
Every religion and spiritual path teaches that to know the truth we have to go on an inward journey. As the Oracle said, “Know yourself.” My father was convinced that it was this journey inward, this journey of faith to discover and recognize truth, that enabled him to read the signs of the times. Such a journey is demanding. It requires a deep level of attentiveness and self-awareness. It requires an openness to become clearsighted enough to recognize that there are particular perspectives through which we see and understand the world. These can give us a distorted view of the true state of affairs. A considerable amount of A Guide for the Perplexed is devoted to arguing that the true meaning of human life has been distorted by seeing it through the lens of evolutionism. In fact, in some ways Small is Beautiful goes further, particularly in Chapter 6, which is called “Education: The Greatest Resource.” There, ideas such as relativism and positivism, the Freudian idea that our behaviour is determined by unconscious sexual urges, and the Marxist assertion that all religion is merely a means of control of the working class, are marked out as other ideas besides evolutionism that have also seeped into our subconscious way of understanding the world. Chapter 6 is, to my mind, one of the most important in Small is Beautiful. It is not, as some people believe, anything to do with the size of schools or the method of education. In a sense it is kind of preview of A Guide for the Perplexed because it too calls for a re-education and return to the truths of traditional wisdom.
It is only when we become aware of the ideas that inform our understanding of the world, and of ourselves, that we can begin a systematic search for truth. A Guide for the Perplexed has a lengthy section called the “Four Fields of Knowledge” which describes how to distinguish those things we can know for certain from the things which we can only glimpse in part but never know completely, and what is necessary to gain this knowledge. We can know ourselves with inner work and we can obtain certain knowledge of things around us by observation and measurement, by the use of our senses of sight and taste and touch and so on. But we cannot observe and measure the inner workings of others, nor can we see ourselves as others see us. Such knowledge requires a different approach altogether.
We need both kinds of knowledge. Without both the inward journey and the knowledge we obtain by observation, we cannot discover the truth that leads to right action. All these four types of knowledge are necessary to understand ourselves and others. Together both types of knowledge enable us to make the decisions that lead to action. While inner growth is more important than outward achievement, it is not enough to be, as the saying goes, “so heavenly minded that one is no earthly good.”
I called this talk “Schumacher Revisited: Challenge, Courage, and Change” because when I began to research my father’s life, I was surprised to discover that he had not always held the views that he expressed in A Guide for the Perplexed or Small is Beautiful. What is contained in these two books was the result of a painful and challenging journey of courage and change. As a young man he had been a convinced atheist. He had rejected anything that he considered to be, in his words, mumbo jumbo. He was a scientific materialist and as an economist he was a conventional Keynesian. He admired large scale organizations and was sceptical of the value of small enterprises because he thought they were inefficient. He was particularly convinced of the importance of international trade. In a letter to a friend at the time he summed up what he believed as follows: I quote:
Since everything has a cause, the realm of science is everything…. I further hold that it is unworthy of thinking men to succumb to their horror vacui in the field of knowledge and understanding and to give answers to unsolved problems ‘by act of faith’ merely because they should like to have an answer. The smallest item of observational knowledge appeals more to my aesthetic, yes, also to my moral sense than the most glorious superstructure built by statements unsupported by or in contradiction with facts.
As a young man, he was supremely arrogant in his self-belief. One friend commented at the time “I don’t believe that man was born, I think he came out of a bottle.” He admitted later that he had thought that anyone who had views that included a sense of the spiritual was intellectually underdeveloped or senile. It embarrassed him to look back on those early views and made him reticent about talking about his later religious convictions.
What caused the change? My father’s whole way of thinking was challenged by the horror of what he encountered when he went back to Germany after World War II. He was a German by birth and he could not understand how such a cultured nation, that had given the world the music of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven, the writings of great authors like Goethe, and the great German philosophers and thinkers, could have fallen for the evil of Hitler and Nazism. This is when he realized that his credo, the scientific method, could not give him the answers he sought. He had to admit to the possibility that there existed a whole world of knowledge that he had not merely ignored but had not even been prepared to consider actually existed. As he began his search, he said that his whole way of thinking had come into motion and wrote to his parents that I quote:
New possibilities of knowledge (and experience) have been opened to me of whose existence I had no inkling. I feel as men during the Renaissance must have felt. All the conclusions I had come to have to be thought through again.
Such a turn-around required the courage to admit that he had been wrong. It took courage to change the way he thought about and understood what was true and real, and courage to start all over again and rethink everything he had believed and proclaimed with such conviction. It takes courage for us today to recognize and discard our own erroneous ways of thinking, to search for truth, to challenge the lies that have become common currency in so much of public life, and stand up for what is true and right.
By the time I was born my father had already embarked on his journey to find the truth and I experienced the way he gradually changed. He became softer and more human. I remember as a small child finding him quite distant and unapproachable, but as he became more inward—or as he put it—moved the center of his understanding from his mind and intellect to his heart, he became a more warm and more rounded person. More fully human.
What he wrote in both Small is Beautiful and A Guide for the Perplexed were not words from an ivory tower theoretician but came out of his own experience. His embarrassment at his former views when he was antagonistic towards anything that was based in faith, also made him acutely aware that to talk too overtly in terms of religious faith put people off, particularly if Christian language was used. He tended to speak about traditional wisdom rather than use the language of religious faith so that his words would be accessible to everyone regardless of their religion or none. He said once that he could have called Buddhist Economics ‘Christian Economics,’ but then nobody would have read it!
My father’s spiritual journey took many twists and turns. Once he had opened his mind to the possibility that there was another kind of knowledge beyond factual scientific knowledge, he delved into every different kind of belief system that he came across. He examined Eastern religions, in particular Buddhism. He explored Subud and Sufism, and then gradually approached Christianity from various different directions. By the time I had left home he was reading a great number of Christian writers, in particular St Thomas Aquinas, and a few years before he died came to rest in the Roman Catholic Church, saying that becoming a Catholic was making “legal a long-standing illicit love affair.”
He claimed that the real breakthrough came when someone recommended that he should try to spend 15 minutes a day emptying his mind and learning to become fully present and conscious—a practice he later wrote about in A Guide for the Perplexed. He said it enabled him to glimpse those invisible realities whose existence he had so vehemently denied as mumbo jumbo. Words of Scripture that had been meaningless to him, or even unacceptable and perverse, suddenly revealed their truth. This became especially clear on his trip to Burma in 1955 when he spent a weekend in a monastery learning to meditate. There he had some sort of spiritual experience which he described as an encounter with something beyond himself. At the time he called it X. Later he saw this as God. I found a scrap of paper amongst his letters on which he had written after this experience: “I came to Burma a thirsty wanderer and there I found living water.”
A Guide for the Perplexed makes clear that this practice of emptying the mind is essential to learning to listen with the heart because it is only the heart that is able to recognize truth, not the mind. The mind—our intellect and intelligence—enables us to observe the exterior of things. It is what is needed for scientific observation and testing, but it is the heart that enables us to understand a deeper truth. As my father was fond of saying, “We are now far too clever to be able to survive without wisdom.” The mind is clever but the heart is wise and enables us to reach the higher things.
It was not an easy task for someone whose mind was as active as my father’s and who had so prized his own intellectual superiority, to stop and still his mind. He thought he had the ability to focus with laser precision, but he discovered that it was very difficult to be still and control his thoughts. His restless inquiring mind proved to be a constant hinderance.
I remember him explaining this to me with the following story of the father who offered his son ten shillings if he could say the Lord’s Prayer without becoming distracted. The little boy was delighted at the chance to make such easy money and immediately began: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…Dad, did you say you would give me five shillings or ten shillings?” I know from my own experience that this story is an accurate description of what happens during the prayer of silence.
This process of going inward, that he experienced so vividly in Burma, also changed his understanding of economics. He recognized that economics was only the means to an end and not an end in itself. He said that the end purpose of economics was “derived from a view of the meaning and purpose of life—whether the economist knows this or not.” He tried to express this in his final report to the Burmese government—a report which was the basis of Buddhist Economics—where he urged the government to put the development of the whole person at the center of their economic policies. It was not well received but it was the point where my father’s spiritual search and his economic thinking became intertwined and interdependent.
Specific religious belief or disbelief was not the prime issue for him. He believed that Traditional Wisdom was common to every religion. He first found the truth he was looking for in Buddhism, but he said that as he lived in the West, he looked for the same truth in Western religion. What he wanted to get across was that every religion through the ages had had a similar understanding of the world. All recognize that the world has a vertical dimension and that the purpose of human life is to reach upwards toward the divine.
Despite his criticism of the claim that scientific truth is the only certain truth, he never denied that we need the knowledge science gives us in order to understand the physical world around us. But without the guiding understanding of the heart to give meaning, and the ability to recognize goodness and beauty, and the true value of things, science tends toward manipulating and exploiting the world. Science on its own makes everything into an object and is unable to recognize the value a thing has in itself. Of course, the environmental crisis is a consequence of this failure to recognize that nature is not there merely to satisfy our animal cravings but that it has value in itself and so needs to be cared for.
The year before he died my father wrote movingly about the fruits of this process of moving inwards to the heart.
This inner organ with its indwelling spirit of Truth is really the most wonderful thing. It tells me whether something is Truth—the truth that shall make us free—sometimes long before my reason is able to understand how it could be such. I then may have to work hard until I can see the rationality of such a Truth. Conversely, it often greets the most plausible and seemingly most compelling arguments which my reason produces, with cold indifference, and, again I may have to work hard until I discover the flaws in my reason’s arguments.
Both Small is Beautiful and A Guide for the Perplexed are about truth. Without truth we cannot begin to solve the challenges that we face in the world today. My father’s story is inspiring because he had the courage to change and do the work necessary to discover a deeper truth when he recognized that what he had thought was truth was actually false and misleading. It is also inspiring because he then worked to put what he discovered into practice. He changed as a person, he changed the way he lived, he changed the way he thought, and he applied that new thinking to showing others how to change the world.
This is why his two books belong together. Both challenge us to think again about who we are and how we should live in our fragile and wonderful world, and both challenge us to act on that new way of thinking.
Small is Beautiful ends like this:
Everywhere people ask: ‘What can I actually do?’ The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.
And so we move on to A Guide for the Perplexed to learn what that wisdom is. But A Guide for the Perplexed ends on an unexpectedly practical note and takes us back to Small is Beautiful. I quote:
There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been. But there is a moral problem…and moral problems have to be understood and transcended. Can we rely on it that a “turning around” will be accomplished by enough people quickly enough to save the modern world? The question is often asked, but whatever answer is given it will mislead. The answer “yes” would lead to complacency; the answer “no” to despair. It is desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work.
