SCHUMACHER AND SURVIVAL ECONOMICS

by Kirkpatrick Sale

The author has written nine books, including Human Scale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution and The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy. He can be reached at: kirksale@counterpunch.org

FRITZ SCHUMACHER was, we tend to forget, a truly radical man. He was so charming and warm in person, and so smooth and straightforward in his writing, that most people did not realise how far-reaching was the crux of his policies and programmes.

His was a vision going far beyond just conservation and intermediate technology and worker ownership – in fact the most important part of it saw an economics that was truly liberatory and communitarian, what he called at one point a Buddhist economics.

He didn’t think much of traditional economists. In fact he used to tell this story. An architect, an astronomer and an economist were sitting around one day arguing about which of them had the oldest profession. The architect said his was the oldest because it was an architect who must have planned and built the Garden of Eden, humankind’s first home. No, said the astronomer, before the Garden there was the creation of heaven and earth, and there must have been an astronomer to study that heaven. Well, said the economist, yes you’re right, but God made heaven and earth out of chaos – and, he said, who do you think created that?

Well, economists have indeed made a chaos, and called it modern industrial capitalism. So chaotic that in one sense, it is not working – it is not providing adequate food, shelter, water, health, longevity for fully a third, perhaps a half, of the world’s people, not providing security, harmony, purpose, meaning, justice, or peace for any of the rest but a small minority in the richest nations.

And in one sense it is working, working with great speed and power to use up the world’s resources – that is, you understand, its fundamental purpose, the fuel of its engine – and in the process exterminate its species, deplete its topsoils, pollute its waters, alter its atmosphere, remove its forests, distort its climate, exhaust its fisheries, and enlarge its deserts. Chaos, indeed.

Schumacher knew the chaos economy very well – he was, after all, chief economist for the British Coal Board for 20 years. He knew how wrongheaded and dangerous it was, and that is why, after a sojourn in Burma in the 1960s, he worked out the themes of a right-headed economics based on the Buddha’s ‘noble eight-fold path’, a set of personal goals that includes ‘right livelihood’ – how does a person make a living in the best way – but also ‘right understanding’, ‘right conduct,’ ‘right effort’ and ‘right purpose’.

Schumacher himself once summed it up when he said ‘economics without Buddhism’ – that is, without spiritual and ecological values – ‘is like sex without love’. Schumacher nowhere lays out a complete eight-fold economic path – he concentrates on ‘right livelihood’ in his core essay on Buddhist economics – but I have constructed from Schumacher’s range of writings, mixed with various economic ideas expressed by the Buddha, something of what an economic eight-fold path would be like.

1. All production of goods or services would be based primarily on a reverence for life, a biocentric understanding that life means more than humans – it means animals, birds, insects, plants, trees – above all trees, in Buddha’s eyes – it means the living ecosystems, streams and rivers, forests and wetlands, hills and mountains, clouds and rains, and it means fundamentally the living earth – Gaia – herself, understood as the only living, self-regulating planet in the galaxy and one which will not take human abuse indefinitely without striking back.

2. All systems have limits and they must be learned and adhered to in every economic act, and overuse of a resource or species or their depletion and exhaustion would be seen as a criminal act of violence, and overproduction of a resource or a species, such as the human, would be seen as a criminal act of avarice and greed, not to mention stupidity.

3. The primary unit of production would be the community, within a self-regarding bioregion, which would strive to produce all its needs, shunning long-distance trade except for non-essential objects of beauty, and political and economic decisions would be taken democratically at that level.

4. Consumption would be limited, for it is not a rightful end in itself but merely a means to human well-being, for which only a little is necessary to satisfy vital human needs: the goal of economic life is not the multiplication of wants but the satisfaction of basic needs.

5. Everything produced and the means of its production would embody the four cardinal principles of smaller, simpler, cheaper, safer – that is to say, technology on a human scale, comprehensible, affordable for all, and non-violent.

6. The only jobs would be those that enhance the worker, contribute to the immediate community, and produce nothing but needed goods – and that means goods, not bads.

7. All people who wish to do so would work, for the purpose of work is not to produce things to satisfy wants but rather primarily to nourish and develop the individual soul, aiming at fulfilling the highest nature of the human character.

8. All economic decisions would be made in accordance with the Buddhist principle: ‘Cease to do evil; try to do good’, and the definition of good would be that which preserves and enhances the integrity, stability, diversity, continuity and beauty of living species and systems; that which does the contrary is evil.

There is the noble eight-fold path of Buddhist economics. But I ask you, does anyone think that this has the slightest chance of coming about in the world as we know it?

Many people have been saying for many years that something of this sort is necessary, that we must rethink the global economy before it is too late. I do not see that we have had any significant success in planting that rethinking in the minds of the people who run the world’s economies or convincing them that a radical change is needed. We must be very careful about this idea of ‘change’.

Let me put it bluntly: we must not have the illusion that it is possible to reform the institutions and systems of advanced industrial capitalism. We must not waste intellectual power or time in dreaming of ways of making these institutions perform better – we must not delude ourselves with the limited vision , for example, of the Porto Alegre anti-global activists, or those liberal economists who think that governments will enact ‘green taxes’, or those academics who think that the United Nations would have the will and the power to make wholesale alterations in major systems – governing the distribution of water, for example – or the activists who believe that the World Bank and the IMF can be reformed into eco-friendly institutions.

We cannot reform this economic system. The problem, you see, is not in what these governments, institutions and systems do, but in what they are – not in what they do but what they are. They are the instruments of chaos economics and that’s all they can be. That’s why they exist in the first place. They will not – they cannot – be turned into instruments of Buddhist economics, or indeed anything approaching the kind of economics of a noble path. They cannot be expected to have moral, spiritual, environmental values, no matter how many fancy speeches and articles and books implore them to. Chaos economics is clearly incapable of reform.

I don’t mean to be Cassandra-ish here, but I think it best that we understand the truth about this system and its inevitable future. It is certain to collapse, perhaps in the next two decades, certainly by the middle of the century, because it will go on doing essentially what it does now.

The causes will be multiple and synergistic: environmental degradation, depletion of fresh water and fertile topsoils, climate change, ozone radiation, rising sea levels, deforestation and desertification, over– population, exhaustion of oil and mineral resources, resurgent diseases, warfare and rebellion, unabated terrorism and crime, disintegration of nation-states, worldwide depression and the meltdown of major currencies, biological and robotic technologies out of control – and that’s just for starters.

Lest you think me an alarmist, let me cite two other sources.

The first is the Statement of more than 100 Nobel laureates and 1,600 members of national academies of science around the globe that said that the present rates of environmental assault and population increase cannot continue without ‘vast human misery’ and a planet so ‘irretrievably mutilated’ that ‘it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know’. And that warning was issued in…1992, more than a decade ago, and the fact is that not only has our assault on the planet not halted or slowed, it has markedly increased since then. Scientists, who study these things closely, may tell us that we are destroying the planet, but politicians of all stripes, and the corporate and financial interests they serve, have no intention of listening, indeed have no way of listening.

The second source is the United Nations’ World Water report, issued to thundering silence this past March. In it UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura says bluntly that ‘of all the social and natural crises we humans face, the water crisis is the one that lies at the heart of our survival and that of our planet Earth’. And yet, the report says, ‘despite widely available evidence of the crisis, political commitment to reverse these trends has been lacking… Over the past 25 years…several targets have been set to improve water management but hardly any have been met’ – and ‘hardly any’ is UN-speak for ‘none’. The report adds: ‘Attitude and behaviour problems lie at the heart of the crisis, inertia at leadership level, and a world population not fully aware of the scale of the problem means we fail to take the needed timely corrective actions’. On this most crucial issue, ‘we fail’.

Instead, chaos economics goes full-bore ahead with the privatisation, the obscene commercialisation, of public water supplies because that, and not the health of the planet, is in the interest of corporate and financial powers. And that, I remind you, is the fate of just one of the earth’s resources. If we do not pay attention to the loss of potable water, why should we pay attention to any of the other crises? Obviously we will not, or not until it’s too late, because they are irrelevant to chaos economics.

Still, I don’t think it is advisable to take to our beds and pull the covers over our heads. I firmly believe it would be a good idea and worthwhile enterprise to work now to fashion a Buddhist economics, or devise the mechanics of one, before it’s too late, if only to have something to put in place of chaos economics when the opportunity arises.

I am not optimistic, of course, that this can be done. But if it were to happen it would be only if there were an immediate cessation of all reformist programs and policies that keep capitalist institutions in place, and the rededication of all those well-meaning reformist activists and academics to a massive effort to alter the fundamental value systems of the world’s populations so as to grow new ones to put in their place.

Those values that lie at the heart of Buddhist economics – a precious regard (or perhaps I should say ‘love’) for the living earth, a fundamentally moral approach to work and production, a rejection of materialism and embrace of spirituality, a vision of a society ordered at a human and communitarian scale – these are the precepts that somehow must be taken into the hearts and minds of our fellow humans everywhere.

We cannot change the world until we change its values. I am not, as I say, optimistic that the values of Buddhist economics will prevail. But I do know that it is in their refinement, development, and propagation that all good work – right livelihood – lies.

And to that end I suggest we may each of us dedicate our lives to exactly those tasks, guided by Schumacher himself, who wrote: ‘I can’t myself raise the winds that might blow us into a better world. But I can at least put up the sail, so that when the wind comes I can catch it.’

This article was first published in Fourth World Review Number 125 in January 2004 with the following editorial comment: ‘In this timely essay our regular feature writer pinpoints the major crisis factors confronting Western civilisation, and indeed the destiny of all humanity. In doing so he draws a vital analytical distinction between those numerous. well-intentioned campaigners who seek to reform our dominant institutions and those who grasp the need to transform, and even supersede, the institutions themselves. In doing so he confronts reformers everywhere with an imperative obligation to reconsider the validity of their reforming assumptions.