The choice of Buddhism for this purpose is purely incidental; the teachings of Christianity, Islam, or Judaism could have been used just as well as those of any other of the great Eastern traditions…
— E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Chapter 3.
When Schumacher was an economist working for the British government, he was sent to Burma to advise the people and their government on how to develop economically using technologic, scientific, advanced techniques of ‘progress.’ After a few months he realized that the Burmese did not need this Western style of development and technological agriculture. They had their own perfectly good economic system, which he called =‘Buddhist economics.’ When he returned to Great Britain, he wrote the essay, ‘Buddhist Economics,’ and gave it to his fellow economists in the government. They said: ‘Mr Schumacher, economics is all very well, but what does Buddhism have to do with it?’ Schumacher replied: ‘Economics without Buddhism, i.e. without spiritual, human, and ecological values, is like sex without love.
— Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence magazine (from the 25th anniversary edition, Hartley & Marks, 1999).
In some ways, this chapter on Buddhist economics is the very heart of the book. It starts with the somewhat ’shocking’ idea that Buddhism has an economic policy – though, in fact, all the great world religions do, once you strip away the stuff about sheep and goats.
What is more, they are all remarkably similar.
What the chapter says.
At the heart of the chapter is the issue about work – and how modern economists assume that work – or ‘labor’ – is ‘a necessary evil’:
“From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a ‘disutility’; to work is to make a sacrifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. Hence the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment…”
Neither of these work effectively, of course. In fact – simply because modern economics regards work as drudgery – then that is precisely what it tends to become, often in the name of ‘efficiency’ or ‘modernization’…
“Here, it is not a matter of ordinary specialization, which mankind has practised from time immemorial, but of dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts, so that the final product can be produced at great speed without anyone having had to contribute more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases, unskilled movement of his limbs...”
On the other hand, Buddhism suggests that there are three vital functions of work:
- To give people the chance to use and develop their faculties.
- To enable them to overcome their egocentred-ness by joining with other people in a common task.
- To make the goods and services happen “which are needed for a becoming existence”.
Next, Schumacher quotes the artist and writer Ananda Coomaraswamy, who was a craftsman in the tradition of John Ruskin and William Morris, as well as someone who was trying to translate the art world of India and his native Ceylon to the English art world, and vice versa. He was married four times and his first wife was the great Distributist weaver and designer Ethel Mairet, a pioneer of natural dyes. He drew what he called a “a delicate distinction between the machine and the tool”: “The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsmen’s fingers; but the power loom is a machine, and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work.”
Schumacher contrasts this with John Kenneth Galbraith’s book The Affluent Society, whether it might be more ‘economic’ to run an economy at less than full employment so as to ensure a greater mobility of labor, and better stability of wages: “His fundamental criterion of success is simply the total quantity of goods produced during a given period…”
From a Buddhist point of view, he says, this is getting things upside down – as if goods were “more important than people and consumption […] more important than creative activity”.
“It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, a surrender to the forces of evil. The very start of Buddhist economic planning would be a planning for full employment, and the primary purpose of this would in fact be employment for everyone who needs an ‘outside’ job: it would not be the maximization of employment nor the maximization of production…”
Next, he inveighs against the problem of built-in obsolescence:
“It would be the height of folly to make material so that it should wear out quickly and the height of barbarity to make anything ugly, shabby or mean. What has just been said about clothing applies equally to all other human requirements…”
Buddhism is about liberation, says Schumacher: “Buddhism is ‘The Middle Way’ and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern – amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results….”
The problem for Schumacher is that the world is now hopelessly materialistic:
“When we examine all of the foreseeable difficulties which threaten the survival of industrial civilization, it is difficult to see how the achievement of stability and the maintenance of individual liberty can be made compatible. Even if this were dismissed as a long-term view there is the immediate question of whether ‘modernization’, as currently practised without regard to religious and spiritual values, is actually producing agreeable results. As far as the masses are concerned. the results appear to be disastrous – a collapse of the rural economy, a rising tide of unemployment in town and country, and the growth of a city proletariat without nourishment for either body or soul…”
What happened next?
Women, on the whole, said Schumacher in his chapter, “do not need an ‘outside’ job, and the large-scale employment of women in offices or factories would be considered a sign of serious economic failure. In particular, to let mothers of young children work in factories while the children run wild would be as uneconomic in the eyes of a Buddhist economist as the employment of a skilled worker as a soldier in the eyes of a modern economist…”
So the first task is to look more closely at new economics and it’s attitude to women. In 1999, Hazel Henderson took him to task on this:
“One issue about which Fritz and I agreed to disagree was the role of women in society. Schumacher was a product of his European culture and era. I was just emerging into my own feminist awareness. We both admired the loving, caring, sharing role that women had so faithfully played through most of human history. However, Schumacher, like many of our male colleagues at that time, still believed that only women could nurture children and the local community. These beliefs, of course, are no longer tenable today – especially as we learn that gender-equity is essential if we are to redirect our societies in more peaceful, sustainable paths. Yet Fritz encouraged my determination to account for the ‘Love Economy’ – 50 percent of all useful products and services in even industrial societies which are unpaid and largely produced by women. They include volunteering, caring for the young, old and sick, household management, do-it-yourself housing, food-growing, and community service. Traditional economics scorns such loving work as ‘uneconomic,’ while only self-interesting if maximizing of one’s own advantage is recognized as economically rational. Such theories are based on fear of scarcity and survival, which is the economics of reptilian brains. Today we learn from the United Nations Human Development Index that this unpaid work is estimated at $16 trillion, which is missing from the gross domestic product of all countries…” (from the 25th anniversary edition, Hartley & Marks, 1999).
But Hazel writes as if this was just a peculiar idea of Schumacher’s. I’m less sure it is a coincidence.
There is definitely a danger here that any new economics that tries to go forward towards radical departure from the present based on traditional values – as Small is Beautiful does – will have a blind spot about the role of women.
It may be that Schumacher managed to avoid this mainly by talking about Buddhism, rather than, say, Catholicism, which he had recently become attracted to.
There has been a suggestion that the chapter was originally to be called ‘Chestertonian Economics’, after G. K. Chesterton, the famous poet, writer and distributist, who died in 1936.
Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, the Catholic apologist and historian, began as Liberals but by 1912, they had begun to formulate a different ideology based on the distribution of land and small-scale household industry, borrowing a Liberal Party slogan from the 1880s, ‘three acres and a cow’ – which was enough, or so it was said, for every family to provide for themselves.
The Distributist League never fought elections, and it had petered out in anti-semitism by the 1950s, but in its heyday it was an extraordinary example of a practical ‘small is beautiful’ creed.
It also drew broadly from Catholic social doctrine. Belloc and Chesterton shared with Schumacher dismay at the failure to divide work effectively between men and women. They even opposed the franchise for women – on the grounds that Westminster politics was too corrupt and pointless for men already (Morris had famously imagined the Houses of Parliament as a compost heap in News from Nowhere (1890)) – and they wanted them to dominate home life instead.
This is the tradition that Schumacher fits into – it stretches back to people like Thomas Jefferson, William Cobbett, and other advocates of going back-to-the-land. It includes Ruskin and Morris. And Ruskin is supposed to have inspired Cardinal Manning to draft the original tenets of Catholic social doctrine for Leo XIII (1893).
In fact, by the 20th century, many of the stars of this tradition were women, people like Dorothy Day in the USA, or Wangari Maathai in Kenya, or indeed Ethel Mairet, the first wife of Ananda Coomaraswamy.
She wrote that “every piece of craft work should be an adventure… It may be objected that life is not long enough [to dye all your own cloth]; but the handicrafts are out to create more life, not out to produce quantity nor to save time.”
That was also what Schumacher was saying in this chapter. What made his contribution new and fresh was that he has none of the melancholia of the distributists. This is Chesterton in 1926, the year the Distributist League was launched:
“Do anything, however small. Save one out of a hundred shops. Save one croft out of a hundred crofts. Keep one door open out of a hundred doors; for so long as one door is open, we are not in prison…”
The great thing about Small is Beautiful is that it looks excitedly towards a smaller scale, more humane future. It embraces life.
Questions for discussion…
- Can we forgive Schumacher for his failure to understand about labour-saving technology and women’s lives?
- How does he manage to keep so joyful and optimistic, when the situation in 1973 was far worse than it was when Chesterton was writing 50 years before?
- Coomarawamy was a ‘Perennialist’ which meant that – like Aldous Huxley – he believed that the great world religions were just aspects of the same fundamental truth. Was Schumacher one too? Does this matter?
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