On Bigness

A recent Orion article, The Curse of Bigness by Christopher Ketchum, illuminates the nature of largesse in our culture in a great way.  I recommend reading the whole thing if you can sit still for more than a few minutes and concentrate your waning powers of literacy.  I know that's difficult for some of us but it may be well worth the effort.  I've taken the liberty of including the conclusion here if you're the type who just likes to read the end and find out who done it. 

IT WAS E. F. SCHUMACHER WHO, in the 1950s, as the chief economist at the British National Coal Board, came to the quite reasonable—at the time unthinkable—conclusion that energy supply, the coal that England so ravenously was burning up, could not satisfy an ideology of unlimited growth. It was, Schumacher concluded, a suicide pact with Planet Earth. What Schumacher offered instead in the book that made him famous, Small Is Beautiful, is the common-sensical idea that man is small, therefore should think small—that is, think along the lines of human scale.

When in 1955 Schumacher was invited by the government of Burma as an advisor on economic development, he understood at once that the rote econometrics of the West had little to offer the Burmese. Schumacher fell in love with the country, the people, the culture, and it was Buddhism that most impressed him, Buddhism in practice in the little villages, the Buddhism of the Middle Path. The experience was transformative, inspiring him to gestate the notion of a “Buddhist economics,” an “economics as if people mattered.” Instead of demanding that his hosts modernize, he urged the Burmese to hold fast to the middle path, employing energy-light, human-scale technology—what he called “democratic or people’s technology”—to develop the economy on the organic scale of the village. Instead of industrial irrigation super-projects, there would be drip-irrigation and foot-operated treadle pumps (which have worked in Burma to this day). Instead of breakneck urbanization and huge capital investments and centralized planning, the Burmese would do better to decentralize as much as possible, he said, to keep decision-making local for the local production of food and handicrafts to be locally consumed.

Mahatma Gandhi’s development plans for India were much along the same lines. “If we feel the need of machines,” said Gandhi, “we certainly will have them. Every machine that helps every individual has a place, but there should be no place for machines [that] turn the masses into mere machine minders.” What in the intervening years has been the alternative? In China, great leaps forward have poisoned the rivers and the lakes and the fields and the coastal beds, displacing huge populations, concentrating them in the filth of cities as machine minders, impoverishing every rank of traditional society while enriching a very few, for whom tradition is nothing more than an attachment to the nonmaterial.

Of course, among the economists for whom growth was the unquestioned ideology—growth for its own sake, the ideology of the cancer cell—Schumacher was considered a crazy old man, a godforsaken crank. And to that he was said to have replied that a crank is small, safe, cheap, comprehensible, nonviolent, and efficient, a perfect tool of intermediate technology.

Let us be cranks then, though the consensus conspires against us—against the very notion that the small-scale and low-tech may hold the means to a workable future. We can start by downsizing the monster corporations. The antitrust law is there, waiting, a fist in our pockets. Let’s have a third party in politics that might dare to confront bigness—hell, let’s have a second party, given that Republicans and Democrats are at odds only in the perfumes they wear. Let’s have ten or twenty parties. Let’s encourage local production with local labor within easy commuting distances; pay a living wage; restructure land-use patterns to provide easy access to work; grow most of our food close to where it will be consumed. Let’s dream small.

Of course, bigness may still be needed to provide certain goods and services, but the most realistic future for humankind lies in a determined return to the human scale. The transformation will no doubt be costly in the short term, that is, less profitable for Big Ag and Big Oil and Big Coal and all the other bigness complexes, but it will produce vast benefits to social health in the long run. And how shall we quantify that kind of quality? Not in the usual gibberish of national product—the original definition of gross meaning “repellently fat”—or exports and imports, or capital-output ratios, or capitalization, not with the metrics of the idiot savants in the finance industry, who produce nothing one can hold in the hand, nothing of real value in a human-scale economy. Instead of depending on slave labor abroad, we can have jobs at home for the things we need, not the things we are told to want. Instead of processed food, we can have fresh food. Instead of faraway hierarchies, we can have local networks. Instead of militarism, cooperation. Instead of repression, innovation. Instead of homogenous, homegrown.

It goes against every urging in our recent history and our covetous training, and therefore it may only happen when some external force comes into play. Most likely that force will be the limits of Planet Earth, and our fitness will be determined, as it was with the dinosaurs, by our ability to adapt to the new conditions. Or not. We might do well to remember that the laws of nature are bigger than Goldman Sachs or the Big Three or the United States of America. Until then, we will continue to think of our systems as too big to fail, during which time we may end up presiding with a blithe mind over their failure—which, ultimately, will mean our failure.

This idea of size is very intimate to the thinking of Wendell. His first critical essay of agriculture published in the Whole Earth Catalog in 1970 was titled Think Little, which by the way is a great read. Even after forty years it's still a pointed attack on our current systems. We need to address this economy of scale in some manner. As of yet, I don't know what that address will look like.

My question then is this: is there a way to change our economy of scale? Can we make an economic network of our own or are we stuck in the economy we have? Will I ever not be a machine minder? What are your thoughts?