Another assumption common in the world today is that we in the west have the most productive and efficient economic system in the world. While “most efficient” may be technically true, the assumption that it is efficient in some good sense is not true. It is better to say that ours is more efficient than the Soviet system at producing disposable consumer products. However, both are extremely inefficient and ours, being a much bigger economy, is likely more harmful. In our system a disproportionally small number of rich consume a disproportionally large quantity of resources. This might be possibly only considered efficient if it brought with it disproportionally large amounts of happiness and well-being, which it does not seem to do, but even if it did, such an efficiency would not be equitable nor efficient in a broader sense. The assumption that ours is the most productive system only appears true because we are burning through capital as if it were income therefore our apparent productivity is mostly a mirage.
Two common biases in our economic system are that change is good and new is better. These biases play out in the assumed onus of proof required of the bystander to show how change or what is new is bad or dangerous. Schumacher argues “Anything so complicated as a planet, inhabited by more than a million and a half species of plants and animals, all of them living together in a more or less balanced equilibrium in which they continuously use and re-use the same molecules of the soil and air cannot be improved by aimless and uninformed tinkering.” Schumacher argues that the onus should be on the change agent to prove or at least show no adverse effects. The peaceful use of nuclear power is one egregious example of how the prejudice is for bigger is better and newer is safer affect political calculations.
Speaking about the “peaceful” use of nuclear power and specifically nuclear waste, “No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make ‘safe’ and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime ever perpetrated by man, the idea that a civilisation could sustain itself on the basis of such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at all.”
One problem of the modern world is the inhumanity and unnaturalness of technology. “There is measure in all natural things –in their size, speed, or violence. As a result, the system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology,… not so with man dominated by technology and specialisation. Technology recognises 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.” Schumacher refers to these signs of rejection as crises and there are three: The first, a human feeling of revulsion at the suffocation and debilitation one feels when dealing with some new piece of technology. (self-checkouts and software interface changes are two examples). The second crisis is the partial breakdown of parts of nature due to overuse or over harvesting. (For example, the collapse of the Cod fisheries). The third crisis manifests itself in, apparently random, bottlenecks and supply shocks for needed commodities. The essential point is that modern technology as we experience it in the first world does not have a hope in helping to alleviate world poverty, alienation, unemployment, and the whole host of chronic problems of the developed world.
Most would agree that the primary purpose of technology is (or ought to be) to lighten the toil and labour burden of humanity. Much technology does do this for some kinds of work. However it also often increase the work need to be done in other places. “The type of work which modern technology is most successful in reducing or even eliminating is the skillful, productive work of human hands, in touvh with real materials of one kind or another.” Machine manufacturing has taken away from people the ability to be creative in making the things they use. For Schumacher a human being “enjoys nothing more than to be creatively, usefully, productively engaged with both his hands and his brains.” Unfortunately, today the ability to make a decent living in this way is nearly impossible. Modern technology has made work easy and clean, but fragmented and therefore not really genuinely enjoyable. Consider the kind of work-play that children engage in and compare it to the actual work that adults do to see the difference. People who can engage their hands and brains in creatively, usefully productive work, like children, do not make a distinction between work and leisure.
Quoting Gandhi, Schumacher claims: “the poor of the world cannot be helped by mass production, only by production by the masses.” The problem with modern mass production is the capital and energy input requirements far exceed a sustainable supply in third world countries. In addition to the fact that we are consuming non-renewables as if they were income, we also produce huge amounts of violence on the earth and on people in the third world to maintain our living standards. Our model of production is not only unsustainable it is ethically wrong.
Schumacher and Gandhi’s solution, production by the masses, is an intermediary level of technology between the primitive preindustrial and the super high level of technology of the modern western world. It is a “self-help technology, or democratic or people’s technology—a technology to which everybody can gain admittance and which is not reserved to those already rich and powerful.” He further describes it the coming together of clever brains and skillful hands with simple technology supported with first class tools such as education. Simple technology seems to describe things like plows, scissors, knives, rope, nails etc. but made with knowledge and skill that is higher than at a medieval, that is, at an industrialized level but not generally mass produced. Schumacher is not entirely against mass production; there may be a right way to do it that fits with values of permanence and non-violence and which treats non-renewables as capital rather than as income. Mass production of this kind would likely be very rare.
How we decide to deal with the three crises or signs of rejection will determine how much of the if and how much of civilization survives. The three crises will engender two opposing attitudes. The first Schumacher calls “the people of the forward stampede,” who want to solve the crises and all economic problems with more of the same; usually more growth. They believe we are doing the right thing and we just need to do it again or do more of it to make the world a better place. They tend to believe that more or new technology will solve every problem. They often sound very good and can marshal much scientific evidence and popular bromides to support their belief and their need for their type of progress. The second group, which Schumacher calls “home-comers,” “are people in search of a new life-style, who seek to return to certain basic truths about man and his world….[they are] made up of people who are deeply convinced that technological development has taken a wrong turn and needs to be redirected.” The home-comers are the modern-day equivalent of the Gospel parable of the prodigal son. Both attitudes believe in growth, but for the home-comers “The whole point … is to give to the idea of growth a qualitative determination; for there are always many things that ought to be growing and many things that ought to be diminishing….The whole point is to determine what constitutes progress. And the home-comers believe that the direction which modern technology has taken and is continuing to pursue—towards ever-greater size, ever-higher speeds, and ever-increased violence, in defiance of all laws of natural harmony—is the opposite of progress.”
As a practical step forward, one should support the Intermediate Technology Development Group, a development charity which Schumacher founded in 1969 and which today is called Practical Action. Another charity worth supporting is The Soil Association which advocates against intensive farming and for buying locally and nutrition education.