We are poor, not demigods.
We have plenty to be sorrowful about, and are not emerging into a golden age.
We need a gentle approach, a non-violent spirit, and small is beautiful.
We must concern ourselves with justice and see right prevail.
And all this, only this, can enable us to become peace-makers.— E . F. Schumacher’s version of the Beatitudes, adapted from the original in the Gospel of St. Matthew Chapter 5, v3-12 (the Sermon on the Mount), in this chapter
Schumacher would certainly have supported the Gaia hypothesis, the view that planet earth is a self-regulating system. But there is nothing self-regulating about technology, which is still driven by notions of limitless growth, labor-saving, and expansion of consumption.
— George McRobie, author of Small is Possible, from the 25th anniversary book (1999)
We are creating so many unnecessary technologies for the home environment that we have made housing unaffordable for most… When we go to the roots of technologies in housing, we recognize that what we had before was adequate – people were sheltered sufficiently from the elements. In our drive to create technologies that protect us and save our time and energy, we are losing energy by producing gadgets that are not necessary to begin with.
— Avi Friedman, Canadian architect and professor and co-founder of the Affordable Homes Program at the McGill University School of Architecture, from the 25th anniversary book (1999).
This is the last of Schumacher’s core chapters covering policy areas where he had developed bees in his bonnet. So he delves into the question of whether – if it hadn’t been for Small is Beautiful – this issue might have provided his main claim for a legacy.
The chapter is based on his lecture given at the Sixth Annual Conference of the Teilhard Centre for the Future of Man, London in October 1971.
What the chapter says…
If the modern world is shaped by its faulty metaphysics, that is bound to affect its education, its food and its tech, says Schumacher:
“If that which has been shaped by technology, and continues to be so shaped, looks sick, it might be wise to have a look at technology itself. If technology is felt to be becoming more and more inhuman, we might do well to consider whether it is possible to have something better – a technology with a human face.”
The natural world which we are part of tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing, says Schumacher:
“Not so with technology, or perhaps I should say: not so with man dominated by technology and specialization. Technology recognizes no self-limiting principle — in terms, for instance, of size, speed, or violence. It therefore does not possess the virtues of being self-balancing, self-adjusting, and self-cleansing. In the subtle system of nature, technology, and in particular the super-technology of the modern world, acts like a foreign body, and there are now numerous signs of rejection.”
He then looks at three simultaneous crises:
1, Human nature revolts against inhuman technological, organizational, and political patterns, which it experiences as suffocating and debilitating.
2, The living environment which supports human life aches and groans and gives signs of partial breakdown; and
3, It is “clear to anyone fully knowledgeable in the subject matter that the inroads being made into the world’s non-renewable resources, particularly those of fossil fuels, are such that serious bottlenecks and virtual exhaustion loom ahead in the quite foreseeable future…” (see Chapter 8).
“Everywhere the problems seem to be growing faster than the solutions. This seems to apply to the rich countries just as much as to the poor. There is nothing in the experience of the last twenty-five years to suggest that modem technology, as we know it, can really help us to alleviate world poverty, not to mention the problem of unemployment which already reaches levels like thirty per cent in many so-called developing countries, and now threatens to become endemic also in many of the rich countries. In any case, the apparent yet illusory successes of the last twenty-five years cannot be repeated: the threefold crisis of which I have spoken will see to that. So we had better face the question of technology – what does it do and what should it do? Can we develop a technology which really helps us to solve our problems – a technology with a human face?”
At this point, Schumacher gets suddenly playful and suggests that, when he was first travelling around the world, it struck him that it might be a good idea to re-formulate the first law of economics like this: ”The amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs.*
This is a kind of lampoon of Parkinson’s first law – that the work tends to expand to fill the time available – at least according to the English historian-turned-business guru, Cyril Northcote Parkinson, which made him very famous around the world after it was first published in 1958 (following an article in The Economist, three years before). His second law is even more like Schumacher’s ‘economics law’ – that the amount of time and effort a committee takes to discuss an agenda item is in inverse proportion to its importance (this was also known as Parkinson’s Law of Triviality).
This makes me wonder whether there was ever a time when Schumacher considered copying Parkinson in his approach to economics. But you can see why he didn’t – because Parkinson had no economics background at all, to make his opinions about how bureaucracies tend to grow in their ambition and numbers of staff in inverse proportion to the work that anyone actually needs. Whereas Schumacher had worked with some of the most famous economists in the world. He had no need to pass himself off as a humorist – though it would be fascinating to see what other ‘laws’ he would have been able to formulate his ideas as if he had gone further with this.
He justifies his labour-saving law by comparing Burma and the UK:
“As there is so much less labour-saving machinery to help them, they ‘accomplish’ much less than we do; but that is a different point. The fact remains that the burden of living rests much more lightly on their shoulders than on ours … The question of what technology actually does for us is therefore worthy of investigation. It obviously greatly reduces some kinds of work while it increases other kinds. The type of work which modern technology is most successful in reducing or even eliminating is skilful, productive work of human hands. in touch with real materials of one kind or another. In an advanced industrial society, such work has become exceedingly rare, and to make a decent living by doing such work has become virtually impossible. A great part of the modern neurosis may be due to this...”
Only about one sixth of the workforce actually produces, makes or grows things anyway, he says.
“When you look at industrial society in this way, you cannot be surprised to find that prestige is carried by those who help fill the other 96 per cent of total social time. primarily the entertainers but also the executors of Parkinson’s Law. In fact, one might put the following proposition to students of sociology: ‘The prestige carried by people in modern industrial society varies in inverse proportion to their closeness to actual production’… There is a further reason for this. The process of confining productive time to 31 per cent of total social time has had the inevitable effect of taking all normal human pleasure and satisfaction out of the time spent on this work. Virtually all real production has been turned into an inhuman chore which does not enrich a man but empties him. ‘From the factory,’ it has been said, ‘dead matter goes out improved, whereas men there are corrupted and degraded.’
Now you might say that this sounds awfully like a whiff of Marxism, but Schumacher is aware of this.
“Karl Marx appears to have foreseen much of this when he wrote: ‘They want production to be limited to useful things, but they forget that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.’ to which we might add: particularly when the processes of production are joyless and boring. All this confirms our suspicion that modern technology, the way it has developed, is developing, and promises further to develop, is showing an increasingly inhuman face, and that we might do well to take stock and reconsider our goals.”
As a possible solution, he suggests a test of reversing the labour-saving figures. so that instead of only spending, on average, 3 per cent of our time in productive work that we all spent 20 per cent.
“An incredible thought! Even children would be allowed to make themselves useful, even old people. At one-sixth of present-day productivity, we should be producing as much as at present. There would be six times as much time for any piece of work we chose to undertake — enough to make a really good job of it, to enjoy oneself, to produce real quality, even to make things beautiful. Think of the therapeutic value of real work: think of its educational value. No-one would then want to raise the school-leaving age or to lower the retirement age, so as to keep people off the labour market. Everybody would be welcome to lend a hand. Everybody would be admitted to what is now the rarest privilege, the opportunity of working usefully, creatively, with his own hands and brains, in his own time, at his own pace — and with excellent tools.”
He was quite right – there could definitely be a great deal less illness if people had to do something genuinely productive for that much of their weeks (we now know that loneliness can impact people’s bodies as much as smoking 15 packets of cigarettes a day.
This is the ‘technology of production by the masses’, he says – quoting Gandhi – who famously said that we don’t need mass production: we need “production by the masses.”
He explain that his new kind of ‘IT’ is “designed to serve the human person instead of making him the servant of machines. I have named it intermediate technology to signify that it is vastly superior to the primitive technology of bygone ages but at the same time much simpler, cheaper, and freer than the super-technology of the rich. One can also call it self-help technology, or democratic or people’s technology – a technology to which everybody can gain admittance…”
Then it is back to making an example of Dr Sicco Mansholt of the European Commission (see Chapter 7) as an example of the wrong direction to go in.
“ ‘More, further, quicker, richer,’ he says, ‘are the watchwords of present-day society.’ And he thinks we must help people to adapt ‘for there is no alternative’. This is the authentic voice of the forward stampede, which talks in much the same tone as Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: ‘Why have you come to hinder us?’ They point to the population explosion and to the possibilities of world hunger. Surely, we must take our flight forward and not be fainthearted. If people start protesting and revolting, we shall have to have more police and have them better equipped. If there is trouble with the environment, we shall need more stringent laws against pollution, and faster economic growth to pay for anti-pollution measures. If there are problems about natural resources, we shall turn to synthetics; if there are problems about fossil fuels, we shall move from slow reactors to fast breeders and from fission to fusion. There are no insoluble problems. The slogans of the people of the forward stampede burst into the newspaper headlines every day with the message, a breakthrough a day keeps the crisis at bay’.”
Then he describes people like himself. And remember that his term ‘Homecoming was originally going to be the title for the whole book:
“And what about the other side? This is made up of people who are deeply convinced that technological development has taken a wrong turn and needs to be redirected. The term ‘home-comer’ has, of course, a religious connotation. For it takes a good deal of courage to say ‘no’ to the fashions and fascinations of the age and to question the presuppositions of a civilization which appears destined to conquer the whole world; the requisite strength can be derived only from deep convictions. If it were derived from nothing more than fear of the future, it would be likely to disappear at the decisive moment. The genuine ‘homeroom does not have the best tunes, but he has the most exalted text, nothing less than the Gospels. For him, there could not be a more concise statement of his situation, of our situation, than the parable of the prodigal son. Strange to say, the Sermon on the Mount gives pretty precise instructions on how to construct an outlook that could lead to an Economics of Survival.”
At this point, we get Schumacher’s own re-writing – or perhaps re-interpretation might be a better phrase – of the Beatitudes, from the Sermon on the Mount (see the top of this chapter):
“It may seem daring to connect these beatitudes with matters of technology and economics. But may it not be that we are in trouble precisely because we have failed for so long to make this connection? It is not difficult to discern what these beatitudes may mean for us today:
– We are poor, not demigods…” (and so on).
Schumacher predicts a long struggle – a kind of ‘culture war’ between these homecomers and those committed to what the ‘forward stampede call ‘progress’:.
“In one way or another everybody will have to take sides in this great conflict. To ‘leave it to the experts’ means to side with the people of the forward stampede. It is widely accepted that politics is too important a matter to be left to experts. Today, the main content of politics is economics, and the main content of economics is technology. If politics cannot be left to the experts, neither can economics and technology… The case for hope rests on the fact that ordinary people are often able to take a wider view, and a more ‘humanistic’ view, than is normally being taken by experts. The power of ordinary people, who today tend to feel utterly powerless, does not lie in starting new-lines of action, but in placing their sympathy and support with minority groups which have already started.”
He is referring here to the two biggest organizations in the UK which were inspired by Schumacher’s vision – the Soil Association in Bristol and the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) – known since 2005 as Practical Action – in Rugby. He ends the section like this:
“I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for gigantism is to go for self-destruction. And what is the cost of a reorientation? We might remind ourselves that to calculate the cost of survival is perverse. No doubt, a price has to be paid for anything worth while: to redirect technology so that it serves man instead of destroying him requires primarily an effort of the imagination and an abandonment of fear.”
What happened next?
This really is essential Schumacher, especially in the way he plays with ideas – suggesting that those two modern professions (sociologists and economists) are stick-to-itiveness. Not to mention his version of the Beatitudes – his attitude to religion in this chapter is reminiscent of the great British Distributist Hilaire Belloc (see Chapter 4), who famously said that all political issues are at root theological. Schumacher would have agreed.
He would also have agreed with the Distributists that the economic solution for the UK was for everyone to be allocated ‘three acres and a cow’, which they could control. The equivalent slogan in the USA demonstrates the difference between the two countries: ‘Forty acres and a mule’.
The Soil Association had been founded, largely by ultra-conservatives, at the end of World War II, and Schumacher was the chair in the 1960s. But ITDG had been set up – as so many ginger groups were in the 1960s – after an article in the Observer, in 1965. It was by Schumacher and it was called ‘How to help them help themselves’. There was enough interest and excitement from academics, politicians and the wider development community that Schumacher was able to launch a new organization, which he then chaired.
ITDG began with an advisory service in 1966, but soon expanded with a technical consulting service in 1969, alongside an independent publishing arm in 1973. Their ’development approach’ focused on helping communities facing poverty to help themselves, rather than prescribing hardware-based solutions that may not be viable or appropriate.
These days, it is a key member of the Schumacher Circle organization, of which the New Economics Foundation and the Schumacher Center are also part. Practical Action (formerly ITDG) is still committed to rolling out intermediate technology solutions in developing countries. Take, for example, their ‘Emptier to Entrepreneur’ model:
“While almost everyone in Bangladesh has access to a basic toilet, human waste isn’t always safely managed and can cause huge problems, especially for the workers who risk their health and dignity to clean it up. Waste disposal systems managed by local authorities don’t cater for poor, urban ‘slum’ dwellings. Instead informal waste workers have to step up to carry out this vital service.”
The pay and job security are both uncertain for these waste workers, who often work in dangerous conditions where they have to empty the contents of pit latrines and septic tanks by hand, facing toxic substances without protective clothing. They are also often “excluded from society and discriminated against because of the work they do. Because there is no established system for emptying waste and treating it safely, it’s often dumped in local rivers and nearby wasteland, causing serious health and environmental hazards.”
Practical Action takes a “systems approach, working across sectors to facilitate bold collaborations between waste workers, communities, the private sector and local government. Informal workers are supported to form co-operatives. By joining together in a formal business, workers are able to develop improved operating practices and obtain the licenses needed for the safe emptying, transport, and disposal of waste. Employment conditions are improved and workers get access to personal protective equipment. New, innovative technology is leased to the co-operatives from the municipality, waste workers swap emptying latrines by hand for ‘Vacuity suction technology which is quicker, cleaner and much safer…”
The main issue seems to be about why people are not shifting in their understanding. And here we come across a separate debate – about the proportion of the population who are at least potential homecomers.
It seems like an impossible question to answer, but actually there is some evidence that it’s about half of us in the UK. That’s the proportion of the British population categorized as ‘inner-directed’ – people whose prime motivation is no longer conspicuous consumption or keeping up with their neighbors, but autonomy, self-expression, health and independence.
These are people who are suspicious of mass production, who want things customized or tailor-made, who may or may not be excited by information technology and computers – but who are definitely part of the world of self-actualization, and maybe self-employment, tracked by modern prophets like Charles Handy.
‘Inner directness isn’t a new discovery. The idea goes back to a book called The Lonely Crowd, published in 1950 by the radical sociologist David Annmarie. It was a revolutionary way of categorizing the public, when most sociologists were used to categorizing people according to their class rather than their attitudes.
Instead, he divided consumers into three. There was sustenance-driven: people motivated primarily by getting by, or where the next meal would come from. Then there were the directorates, the vast majority of the population, who were in control of their insecurity about the next meal, but who were busily consuming conspicuously – the marketing dream. Inner -Disconnectedness were then a small, barely visible third group, in control of their insecurity about what the neighbors might think, and moving on to something else.
It was thought that their interest in independence made many of them Thatcher voters in the 1980s, though they are probably more natural Liberal Democrats or Greens. These are the people who leave the cities for the countryside – or who want to – who downshift, who experiment with new ideas and sometimes new technology. They are deeply suspicious of marketing and serious enthusiasts about health and education.
By the end of the 1980s, about 37 per cent of British people were classified as inner-directed – only the Netherlands had a higher proportion – and there was speculation about what would happen if they suddenly became the majority. Would those directorates, so busily keeping up with the Joneses around them, suddenly start copying them?
So the British, Dutch and Scandinavians now lead the world in disconnectedness, where anything up to half the population are inner-directed, and that has indeed been something of a shock to the system.
In the USA, the idea of ‘Cultural Creatives’ identified by Paul Ray, of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, who he believes make up a quarter of the American population – no coincidence that the inner-directed category makes up a similar quarter of all Americans. His figures put what he calls Modernists, those primarily motivated by material wealth, at 47 per cent of the US population. Cultural Creatives, at 24 per cent, are those he sees as reinventing culture, interested in health and spirituality, and searching for integrity, quality and authenticity in what they buy.
Many Cultural Creatives think they’re alone in their beliefs, says Ray – maybe just them and their ten best friends. It’s a strange phenomenon: because the kind of challenge made by Schumacher isn’t really reflected in the media, they don’t feel they are part of anything widespread or new.
. In other words, we are talking about potential homecomers here – not necessarily fully-signed up, card-carrying ones. but even so, a potential electorate of 25 percent can certainly achieve great things, as long as they don’t do what Schumacher warned against – when he says that we shouldn’t constantly reinvent the wheel: “The power of ordinary people, who today tend to feel utterly powerless, does not lie in starting new lines of action, but in placing their sympathy and support with minority groups which have already started.”
Questions for discussion…
- What do we feel about Schumacher’s re-statement of the Beatitudes as a warning, rather than as a blessing?
- Is Schumacher right about his refusal to accept new lines of action – surely sometimes, we just need to start afresh?
- Might going ‘back to the land’ mean that women’s roles will get sidelined again?
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