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| Ernest Schumacher |
In his famous 1973 book Small is Beautiful, Ernest Schumacher advocates a technology with a human face, because (according to him) the way modern technology has been developed dehumanizes us. Let's look at a few quotes from the chapter in his book with the same title as this post:
...the modern world has been shaped by technology. It tumbles from crisis to crisis; on all sides there are prophecies of disaster and, indeed, visible signs of breakdown.
...technology, although the product of man, tends to develop by its own laws and principles, and these are very different from those of human nature or of living nature in general. Nature always, so to speak, knows where and when to stop... Technology recognises no self-limiting principle... [T]he super-technology of the modern world, acts like a foreign body, and there are now numerous signs of rejection.
...the modern world, shaped by modern technology, finds itself involved in three crises simultaneously. First, human nature revolts against inhuman technological, organisational, and political patterns, which it experiences as suffocating and debilitating; second, the living environment which supports human life aches and groans and gives signs of partial breakdown; and, third, 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.
...a way of life that bases itself on materialism, on permanent, limitless expansionism in a finite environment, cannot last long, and its life expectation is the shorter the more successfully it pursues its expansionist objectives... Everywhere the problems seem to be growing faster than the solutions.
Then Schumacher reviews what technology has done for us. Although it has freed us from many tedious efforts, it has also practically eliminated the manual work of specialists, one of the forms of human work that provides the most satisfaction to those who perform it. According to Schumacher's calculations, of all the jobs done today, the truly productive ones occupy 3.3% of our total time. We dedicate the rest to sleeping, eating, free time, or to do non-productive jobs, which include all those in the service sector, which increasingly accounts for a greater proportion of human effort, without producing anything in return. This trend has continued in the same direction since Schumacher wrote this book.
In this, Schumacher agrees with Gandhi, who stated that the poor of the world cannot be helped by mass production, only by production by the masses.
Schumacher is not opposed to technology, but warns that our present gigantism, caused by the desire to produce more and more, inherent to a materialistic and consumerist society, is leading us to catastrophe.
Today we see these predictions much clearer: there is much talk of climate change (second crisis), of the substitution of polluting energy sources (nuclear fission, fossil fuels...) by less polluting sources, which also have risks (non-renewable energies)... As for the first crisis he warns about, political patterns, which it experiences as suffocating and debilitating, we now experience them every day, with supposedly democratic governments that in practice act like dictatorships and try to tie the votes that will keep them in power by making the entire population dependent on their subsidies.
Schumacher divides the population into two irreconcilable groups:
• Supporters of the forward stampede: those who think that the way to solve our problems is to accelerate as much as possible in the same direction that we have been following. They think that people must be forced to adapt for there is no alternative. Keynes put it in these words, which Schumacher quotes: For at least another hundred years we must pretend that fair is foul and foul is fair, for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury must be our gods for a little longer still.
• Those who think that technology has taken a wrong turn and needs to be redirected. We need a gentler, less violent technology, because small is beautiful. We must make the fair and good prevail, rather than becoming slaves of the useful. According to Schumacher, these people, who unfortunately are still a very small minority, are not enemies of progress, although they are accused of it, because the first thing we must do is define progress. An inexorable advance towards catastrophe should not be called progress.
Despite everything, Schumacher is optimistic, as proved by the last words of this chapter of his book:
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... to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for gigantism is to go for self-destruction.
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