Homo viator
“It is when we come to politics,” Schumacher insisted, “that we can no longer postpone or avoid the question regarding man's ultimate aim and purpose.” If one believes in God one will pursue politics “mindful of the eternal destiny of man and of the truths of the Gospel”. However, if one believes “that there are no higher obligations”, it becomes impossible to resist the appeal of Machiavellianism - an ironic term as such because Machiavelli´s own political wiews were very near to Schumacher and distributism ...“politics as the art of gaining and maintaining power so that you and your friends can order the world as they like it”(2). Once one accepted that man was created by God with a designated purpose, politics, economics and art had value only for the end of helping man reach a higher plane of existence, which should be his goal (2).
By the end of the fifties Schumacher had reached the conclusion that man was homo viator (a pilgrim on a journey). He believed that it was the failure to recognize this fact which led to society's ills (2).
Three Culprits
For Schumacher there were three main culprits, that had all been corrosive agents in a world which had lost sight of individual responsibility and a world bound to the parameters of realism and science. These were Freud, Marx and Einstein. Freud had made perception subjective through his teaching that perception was subject to the complex interplay of the ego and the id, literally rendering it self-centered. This led inevitably to a change of attitude in human relations where self-fulfillment took precedence over the needs of others. Marx, by seeking a scapegoat in the bourgeoisie, had replaced personal responsibility with a hatred for others. His fault lay in his blaming of others for problems with society. Einstein had supposedly undermined belief in absolutes with his insistence on the relativity of everything. The application of 'relativity' in all other fields including morality, led to rejection of moral codes and responsibility (2). (Of course, Einstein's actual theory of relativity was strictly limited to physics, and its correctness has been thoroughly verified by experiment.)
Three Planes of Thought
In May 1957, in a talk he called 'The Insufficiency of Liberalism' he gave an exposition of what he termed the “three stages of development”. The first great leap, he said, was made when man moved from stage one of primitive religion to stage two of scientific realism. This is the stage most modern men tend to be in. A few move to the third stage in which one can find, in the lapses and deficiencies in science and realism, that there is something beyond fact and science. He called this stage three. The problem, he explained, was that stage one and stage three appear to be exactly the same to people stuck in stage two. Consequently, those in stage three are seen as having had some sort of a relapse into childish nonsense. Only those in stage three can understand the differences between the three stages and between stage one and stage three in particular.
Labour
In 1955 Schumacher traveled to Burma as an economic consultant. While there, he developed the principles of what he called "Buddhist economics", based on the belief that good work was essential for proper human development and that "production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life." (1)
The following four quotes from Schumacher are said to exemplify his ideas:
- “From the point of view of the employer, it [work] 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.”(2)
- “From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as 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, surrender to the forces of evil.”(2)
- The Buddhist view, “takes the function of work to be at least threefold”: “to give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.”(2)
- “to organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence”.(2)
Appropriate technology
Interwoven with his ideas of labor were Schumacher's ideas about what would later be called appropriate technology. His two basic development theories were
Intermediate Size, and
Intermediate Technology.
To impose Intermediate Size on a national economy Schumacher suggested superimposing on large-area states a cantonal structure of modest size so that vast industrial concentration (with all this entails in imbalance, ineptitude, and diseconomies of scale) becomes not only unnecessary but also impractical and inefficient. (1)
Intermediate Technology would be a byproduct of the cantonal structure. Once a development district is 'appropriately' reduced, it becomes possible to fulfill a society's material requirements by means of less expensive and simpler equipment than the costly, computerized, labor-saving machinery necessary for satisfying the massive appetite for the remedial transport and integration commodities without which a very large modern market community cannot exist. Though this means a reduction in productivity, it does not mean a reduction in even the highest humanely attainable standard of living. (1)
Putting it differently, the reduced efficiency of intermediate technology provides the same amount of goods, but at a higher cost in labor. However, since higher labor cost and longer working hours means simply that the desired level of production can be achieved only by full rather than partial employment of the available labor force, they represent socially no additional cost at all. They are, in fact, a benefit. It is unemployment, defined by Schumacher as the degrading saving of manpower through the inappropriate use of advanced machinery, which is the prohibitive cost which no society can afford to pay in the long run. Furthermore the unemployment caused by excessive technological progress will inevitably lead to the revolt of the unemployed (1).
