Small Is Beautiful, and So Is Rome: Surprising Faith of E.F. Schumacher by Charles Fager Mr. Fager is a free-lance writer who lives in Palo Alto, California. This article appeared in the Christian Century April 6, 1977 p. 325. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock. What does it mean that E. F. Schumacher’s
book Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (Harper &
Row, 1973), has caught on so strongly, especially among people who are
exploring “alternatives” of various sorts -- economic, political, spiritual?
Originally published in England, the volume has now sold more than a million
copies worldwide. Is its best-selling status another sign of decay in the old
establishment world view, and further evidence of growing efforts to transcend
that world view through a new consciousness, replace it with a new life style,
and outlive it in a New Age? Well, maybe. Those who think so include
people who have compiled records of intelligent and dedicated radicalism going
back a decade or more. But then again, other people have seen the book as
representing something very different. One of them is E. F. Schumacher himself.
As he puts it with unusual bluntness, “All this lyrical stuff about entering
the Aquarian Age and reaching a new level of consciousness and taking the next
step in evolution is nonsense. Much of it is a sort of delusion of grandeur,
the kind of thing you hear from people in the loony bin. What I’m struggling to
do is to help recapture something our ancestors had. If we can just regain the
consciousness the West had before the Cartesian Revolution, which I call the
Second Fall of Man, then we’ll be getting somewhere.” Putting the ‘Inner
House’ in Order I talked with Schumacher recently when he
passed through the San Francisco Bay area on a nationwide tour. While in the
area he dropped in on one of his biggest local fans, California Governor Edmund
G. Brown, Jr. for a private dinner, then for two days sat in on a big
conference on Small Is Beautiful held by the extension department
of the University of California at Davis. Reporters thronged his press conferences,
underlining his underground superstar status. During his U.S. visit he was
hosted by five governors and a lieutenant governor, a passel of universities
and social-change groups, and -- with fine ecumenical sense -- the heads of
several large corporations. My conversation with him came in bits and pieces
between lectures, local tours, speech preparations and fugitive efforts to
catch a little sleep. Most of his talks and the bulk of the
questions he fielded had to do with the unorthodox economic proposals set forth
in his book and his other writings: the idea, above all, of an “intermediate
technology” appropriate in scale and cost to the needs and conditions of the
people using it -- neither too large nor too small. But most of his specific
suggestions seemed secondary to what came through as the primary message of Small
Is Beautiful -- a message so skillfully delivered that it has been
absorbed by his audiences apparently without being noticed. What is the message?
Nothing less than a passionate plea for the rediscovery of old-time Western
religion -- Roman Catholic religion, to be precise. That’s right: E. F. Schumacher is really
an apologetical preacher, one of the rare breed whose experience has made it
possible for him to employ effectively the language and concepts of economics
as a medium for communicating what is essentially a sermon, a call for readers
to repent, believe the gospel and reorder their lives accordingly. Schumacher himself insists that it is this
“metaeconomic” foundation of his argument that is most important, rather than
the specifics of, say, his attacks on nuclear power or the use of chemicals in
agriculture. “Everywhere people ask,” he writes in the book’s final paragraph,
“What can I actually do?” The answer is as simple as it is
disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order.” The key word here is “inner.” Skim over
it, and one can easily imagine that, like some Earth Day orator, he’s only
saying, “Ecology begins at home,” with recycling your bottles and flattening
tin cans. He recommends these things, to be sure, but they aren’t the point. The Anti-Christian
Trauma This “inner” part was what I wanted to
talk to him about. He readily owned up to being a Catholic, a certified convert
as of five years ago. This item is not mentioned in his book; in fact, one of
the most frequently cited chapters, “Buddhist Economics,” almost made it appear
as if he were deeply involved in Eastern religions. But wasn’t this chapter, I
inquired, really more informed by the Catholic writings and thinkers he
mentioned so frequently elsewhere in the book -- the papal encyclicals, Newman,
Gilson and, above all, Thomas Aquinas? Schumacher grinned. “Of course. But if I
had called the chapter ‘Christian Economics,’ nobody would have paid any
attention!” This is not to say that the reference to
Buddhism was a sham; he is firmly convinced that the basic elements of a common
religious outlook are to be found in all the world’s major religions. But it
was done artfully, to help get his message across. “You see, most people in the
West are suffering from what I call an anti-Christian trauma,” he explained,
“and I don’t blame them. I went through that for 20 years myself.” Paradoxically, it was Buddhism that
opened the door to Schumacher’s return to Western religion, so his use of
Buddhist concepts, besides being shrewd, is authentically based in his
experience. “I was raised in Germany in the atmosphere of scientific
materialism,” he explained, “though with a veneer of Christianity --
Lutheranism. But after I went to the university, I reacted very strongly, like
many young people, against veneers of religion and culture, and that was the
beginning of my own version of the anti-Christian trauma. There’s much truth to
that reaction too, of course, because the churches have become associated with
so much that’s wrong about our culture.” But this scientific materialism was
hardly a satisfactory alternative world view for a sensitive soul. “These
attitudes,” said Schumacher, “all left the taste of ashes in my mouth,” and it
wasn’t long before he was searching for some better view of life. Overcoming Egocentricity Then about 1950, he said, he stumbled
across a book about Buddhism. “My eyes had been firmly closed to truth,” he
said, “but Buddhism opened them. As I read the book I kept saying, ‘This is
what I’ve been looking for!’ And I wanted to learn all I could about it. As
part of this study I became an economic adviser to the government of Burma, a
Buddhist country.” Schumacher was then chiefly occupied as the head economist
for the British National Coal Board, one of the largest industrial enterprises
in Europe. Another part of his exploration of
Eastern religion included reading Gandhi. He was impressed by the Mahatma’s
reported advice to his Christian friends from the West. As far as religion was
concerned, Gandhi insisted, “Stay at home! Stay at home!” These words echoed in Schumacher’s mind.
“One thing I realized was that I was no different from anyone else in my
society, really. And in my own view it is a very important part of a person s
spiritual development to overcome his own egocentricity, his pride. And if I
were to go around England passing myself off as a Buddhist, then I would also
be thinking that everyone else around me was stupid, because they’d all got the
wrong religion. They’re all unenlightened, while I’m the one who has the truth.
And there are many people in the West these days going around acting like
quasi-Orientals, with dreadful results. “Of course, there are exceptions to this
rule; I know Western people who are quite humbly and genuinely Buddhist. But in
my case Gandhi was right; such an attitude would only signify a slipping back
into my own egocentricity. And besides, I was quite sure that the Lord would
not have left all the Christians without any truth in their tradition. This was
all part of the process of overcoming my own anti-Christian trauma. At Home in Catholicism Once over this hump, Schumacher began exploring
the styles and beliefs of the churches around him. “I found that in England
almost any old nonsense was being written and passed off as Christianity, even
by bishops. And so I finally decided that the Catholic tradition was the one
where I felt most at home, and where the essentials of Christianity were best
preserved.” But why join a church at all, I wondered.
If the central elements of various religions have so much in common, if they
form what Schumacher calls the philosophia perennis, why did he feel
obliged to settle for a single, necessarily limited institutional expression of
it? Schumacher leaned back in his chair,
allowed that it was a good question, and took his time before answering. “All I
can say,” he admitted finally, “is that I did it out of deep consciousness of
my own weakness, my unreliability, my need for ‘crutches,’ for a framework. In
these circumstances, to go it alone was simply not a good idea for me. “In this way too, I heard echoes of what
Gandhi said: ‘Stay at home! If everybody else around who is a Christian has a
need for a church, am I really so different and better that I don’t? No. And in
fact I get a great deal out of the church. The ritual, for instance, is
extremely intelligent, in the fullest sense, so it is a great help. And
finally, I am a family man [Schumacher at 66 has eight children, the
youngest a son two years old], and even if I could sustain a free-floating
spirituality, which I can’t, the children surely couldn’t, and it’s important
to me that religion be a family affair. The church enables me to have that.” The Catholic tradition provided
Schumacher with more than a personal spiritual haven, however. It also gave him
the building blocks for his own economics of human scale and appropriate
technology. “Schumacher is a contemporary voice of
what I call social Catholicism,” commented John Coleman, who shared a panel
with the Englishman at the Davis Extension Conference. Dr. Coleman is professor
of religion and society at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, and he
had delivered a paper discussing some of the ethical implications of the
approach. “By this I mean the stream of Catholic thought that built on
Thomistic principles, as particularly reapplied in the work of Jacques
Maritain. Its adherents stressed that human institutions ought to be manageable
in size, respectful of the human scale, and sanely run so that they did not
damage the people involved in them.” “These writers,” said Coleman, “also
asserted that there were institutions in society outside the government which
stood between the individual and the state, and which did not derive their
right to exist from the state. In other words, they stood alongside and, if
necessary, over against the state. The two institutions usually cited as being
of this character were the family and the church itself. Schumacher extends
this approach to technology. “The problem with social Catholicism,”
Coleman continued, “is that it has been mainly enunciated rather than acted
upon. But in Europe, for instance, most of the Christian Democratic parties
have endorsed the idea of workers’ councils as part of management in
corporations -- a policy which Schumacher proposed in his book. And in England
earlier in this century there was a group of Catholic distributists, headed by
G. K. Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc and Eric Gill, who talked of decentralizing
industry along lines that in spirit were very much like what you find in Small
Is Beautiful.” Coleman added: “Maritain was very much
opposed to the bourgeois capitalism of his time; yet he also could not accept
totalitarian socialism. So his work represents among other things an effort to
find a ‘middle way’ for Christians. In his work as well as Schumacher’s you
find a tension, an almost paradoxical character: they’re ‘conservative
revolutionaries’ or ‘reactionary radicals,’ mixing the old and the new with all
the risks that involves.” Schumacher agreed with this catalogue of
thinkers as sources for his own outlook. In keeping with their thought, he
frequently repeated, in his talks at the Davis Extension Conference, his
conviction that the first task of the people in the audience who agreed with
him is “to sort out our values and our views of reality, to clear our minds.” But as he urged them then to get down to
more concrete work in support of various efforts of appropriate technology
research and development, their comments and questions kept skimming past this
first priority to the practical pros and cons, the alleged sins of the oil
companies, his attitude toward women’s liberation, the possibility and
desirability of violent revolution. The First Task Schumacher did not harangue them on the
point. But he confirmed for me his strong sense of the priority of what he
calls “metaphysical reconstruction.” “That is the first task,” he said,
“because without it all these various technological fixes will only add to the
confusion. But nowadays, to talk openly about such issues is hardly permitted
in polite society.” This comment reminded me of something
else he had said often during the question periods following his lectures: “I’m
not a scholar, or even a writer. I’m a practical man: I run things and get them
going.” It is, I suspect, part of this practicality that leads him to approach
the abstract side of economics -- its metaphysical and religious
underpinnings -- through more
“practical” (that is, saleable) concepts like Intermediate Technology and
Buddhist Economics. Some Catholic apologists have likened this approach to a
“slippery slope,” a line of thinking which, once embarked on at any point,
would slide the inquirer, imperceptibly but most certainly, down into the
expansive lap of Holy Mother Church. Schumacher had to leave to catch a plane
before I could ask him whether that’s what he expected to happen to many of his
devoted readers. But it’s a good bet that he does; after all, as he said, he’s
no different from the rest of us -- and that’s what happened to him. |