Nonviolence
by E. F. Schumacher
(Transcription of a lecture delivered
in Berkeley, CA, 1976)
The whole question of nonviolence
was taken by various people as being primarily a question
of revolution or change or avoidance of war, but the more
I reflect on the matter the more I see that it goes very,
very much deeper. So I will start talking
about technology because what we stand in need of is to recognize
the violence in our technology. We are always prepared
to react in a violent manner because we are very short-tempered. We
want to solve the problem immediately. We normally solve
problems by taking a sledgehammer and smashing it and then
the poor problem explodes into twelve bits, and then we take
sledgehammers to smash each of the twelve and again they explode. The
whole idea of nonviolence is to start living a nonviolent way,
and the slogan of the organization which I set up in England
twelve years ago, the Intermediate Technology Development Group,
is something like, "It's second class people who solve
problems. First
class people don't have them." It's much better not to
have them in the first place. As a highly intelligent
person once asked, "When we see the connection, if an
ancestor of long ago would visit us today what would he be
more astonished at – the number of our dentists or the
rottenness of our teeth?" We're very grateful that we
have these problem solvers, the dentists, but it would be much
cleverer not to have rotten teeth. There are whole
populations that have perfectly good teeth.
The proposal of nonviolent solutions often attracts
real hatred, real animosity. For instance, if you say
we can have a far more efficient agriculture without all these
violent chemicals, then you attract to yourself great annoyance. Particularly
from academics, which is understandable because they have spent
years and years learning about all these chemicals, the doses
and the counter-doses and the poisons and the counter-poisons
and then you come along and say we can do without all this. But
this violent technology is going to be our undoing unless we
find some ways of correcting it.
For instance, in
agriculture, chemistry is violent. Biological
processes are relatively nonviolent. Some people say
that diseases are biological processes, but we don't mean that. Nature
on the whole is very benign, very well balanced. If we
understand what she needs and that all of the scavengers also
do work, we can utilize weeds instead of killing them. We
can learn from the infestations because they are indicators
that the scavengers have come to remove something. Those
who have developed this art of the nonviolent approach to the
problem of growing enough food find that these problems don't
really arise. There was a German gardener who established
a garden on the grounds of a former brickyard. There
was no fertility whatsoever, but he built the fertility on
his own and he offered any visitor one mark for every bug he
could carry for the garden. There
just weren't any. These things can be done and have been
done and are being done. This is a nonviolent approach. To
be sure, it is not perfect, but I believe that nothing in this
world can be perfect.
I will give another example of violence,
perhaps the most horrifying. We
are prepared to get plutonium in order to get a bit of energy
so that we can go on building rooms where all sunlight is carefully
excluded and nothing can happen unless we burn energy. We
do this in order to be able to carry on with these absurdities,
which we have indulged in at a time when our oil and natural
gas was cheap and plentiful. We are now prepared to produce
plutonium and litter the world with this unbelievable ghastly
substance, which is a danger to all living creatures for all
time once it has been put into the world. The Good Lord
did not put it in the world. We make it. Then we
say that science will make sure that this will never leak out
into the biosphere. Wonderful science. They try
to make us believe that from now on there will never be any
earthquakes, no violence of any kind, no civil disturbances,
no criminals, no schizophrenics who may pull the wrong lever,
and therefore, it is quite alright to put into the world this
terrible substance, a danger to all life for 3 million years
after it has been produced by man. So, there are many,
many other examples. This
widens the concept of violence and of nonviolence beyond the
purely political. Let's try to widen it a bit more into
the philosophical, the very fabric of the modernistic way of
thinking.
You know, something happened three hundred odd years
ago in our intellectual and spiritual history associated
with the names of Francis Bacon and René Descartes. They
suddenly turned round the very principle of Western civilization. The
principle of Western civilization was formulated by Thomas
Acquinas, who actually himself was quoting Aristotle, namely
that the slenderest knowledge of the highest things is more
desirable than the most precise knowledge of the lower things.
In other words, there was a vertical scale, and René Descartes
came along and said that only such knowledge is worth having
as can be absolutely precise. The model for this was
geometry and mathematics, which automatically confines attention
only to the lower things. Only
these things can be mathematized. But these mysterious
factors like life or consciousness, or, at a human level, self-awareness,
the kind of consciousness that recoils upon itself and thereby
opens all doors, can never be mathematized. They cannot
be known with precision. They can only be known to the
extent that we can mobilize inside ourselves the quantities
necessary for knowing. So, there can be no question of
complete precision, let alone measurement. And this was
the great moment when Francis Bacon said that, in the words
of Descartes, we shall make ourselves the masters and possessors
of nature. "The
masters and possessors of nature": this is an entirely
new attitude that previously no part of mankind had ever held. Historically,
we had looked upon ourselves as, in a sense, creatures. But
that we should have even the ambition to become masters and
possessors – that
is where the real deeply-rooted violence comes from. Descartes
already, wanting to be precise, said that animals are machines. Then,
of course, it only took 100 years before the next philosopher
came along and said human beings are machines. And when
these ideas gradually take root in a civilization it doesn't
take very long before they are carried into practice. We
know we have carried the idea that, after all, animals are
only machines. We have carried this into practice with
a vengeance. They
are machines to produce eggs or machines to produce meat in
great animal factories – again, an example of the violent
spirit that comes from wrong metaphysical positions.
Hence
unhappily, because the modern age has perfected itself in
the treatment of human beings as machines. In our industrial
system, human beings are means of production and technology
is developed not from the point of view of what is the need of
the human being to develop himself or herself, but where do we
put the human being to speed up the process of production? And,
of course, if this could be mechanized, then we could do away
with the human being. All this stems from the loss of
the vertical direction and the loss of any kind of an idea
that life has any purpose but just to get through it in some
manner that is not too disagreeable. I believe as an
ecologist that we will not get any of our economics straight
unless we recover a sound metaphysical basis. There is,
I believe, in all human beings, a tremendous urge which can
be smothered that is still there to rise above, above all the
frivolities of everyday life, and that used to be symbolized
by cathedrals rising up and by all sorts of myths and legends. All
this we have been deprived of increasingly since Descartes. And
now we still have to search, to rise above, and what do we
do? Send
people to the moon. The biggest monument in Moscow is
a launching platform for space rockets. We used to have
launching platforms for souls and that doesn't use much mechanical
energy. It
conserves on natural gas for the soul to rise, but for a rocket
to rise, that takes any amount of natural resources and non-renewable
natural resources. I am not joking. These things
are interconnected items, and to talk about conservation or
ecology without making this connection is a waste of time. The
point is that there must be growth. Well, having lost
the consciousness of the vertical dimension, you say there
must be economic growth; we don't really know why or what,
but we imagine that if there is more activity, that this is
a good thing which protects us. Although, we are at the
end of an era, so that even your new president was able to
say that more is not necessarily better –a
very, very big statement. One of the biggest statements
made for 100 years. Of course, it's always been assumed
that more is better. So I wanted just to make the connection
between this idea of nonviolence, which is normally treated
as if it was just a matter of ethics, and show that it is also
a matter of technology and that technology is also a matter
of metaphysics.
The whole idea of sending people to the moon
has to be understood metaphysically. It is not good
enough to say, "Well,
we are just little boys and because we can do it, we must do
it." No, we have a need for this upward movement
and when we can't do it spiritually, then we have to do it
physically. Perhaps
this has spiritual consequences that may be beneficial. These
people have seen the earth from a distance and have suddenly
become conscious that the earth is not as scientific philosophers
have been telling us, just a cosmic accident, of no importance. They
have come back and they have said that we have seen the jewel
of the universe, a thing of genuine beauty, and a thing all
round and just as big as it is and no bigger. We have
visited other planets either in person or by photography and
all that we can see is wasteland. Horrifying wasteland. Of
course, we haven't seen many of them, but those we have seen
gave us a new view of the world. Perhaps even the silliness
of sending people to the moon may bring us back to the truth,
because an operation like shooting people up to the moon is
an operation that can only grow out of a very violent spirit. We
want to be masters and possessors also of the moon, also of
the solar system; with all the fantasies that are being discussed
about space colonies and all that, well, one has to keep one's
sense of humor. I was asked what I thought about it and
I said, "Well, you can have my list of people whom I would
nominate to send, and I would even subsidize them. But
I'm afraid it won't happen because this event is losing all
sense of reality."
The things we work with must have some
physical existence. That's
why we are on this earth. The word is indeed the beginning,
but it is not good enough to stay only with the word. The
Gospel, the fourth Gospel says, "In the beginning is the
Word," but read on, the Word has to come down, become
flesh and dwell among us. So the real question of all
of us is, how can we first hear the Word, but then bring it
down and make it flesh so that it can become a reality among
us? Therefore,
we have to do something in the material world, and one of the
biggest tasks in my group is to work toward the creation of
a nonviolent technology.
Gandhi knew all these things instinctively
with a sureness of touch, which is all the more astonishing
the more you read of what he said. How simply he said
it! He knew that
nonviolent technology must be technology on a human scale. We
see the skyscrapers – this is the outcome of a violent
attitude to everything and has a rather enormous economic consequence. I
spent two years as a young man in the United States, and for
many decades when people asked me where I was born, I used
to say I was born at the age of 21 in America. But now
I see how strange things are. How, somehow, the scheme
has gotten out of hand. On the one hand, I find enormous
skyscrapers. And
then on the other hand, enormous areas covered with one-story
buildings. That's very strange isn't it? I mean,
why can't we have 3, 4, 5-story buildings as in the European
cities? If there really isn't enough ground, why this
on the one hand – ultra-human scale vertically (physically) – and
on the other hand, again the horizontal expansion so that all
cohesion is lost? Somehow we have lost touch with one of the
fundamentals, namely, what is the proper scale of things? And
when the scale is wrong, then there is violence. And
very easily there is despair. We have to prepare ourselves
for a period, I won't say it's today, perhaps in the next 20
months but most certainly in the next 20 years, where there
is an increasing fuel crush. It won't be a matter of
exploitation but a matter of resources. There just isn't
more than the oil that there is, and at the present rate of
usage, it is not going to last more than a couple of decades. Well,
we can't afford to come to the end of it altogether, so during
thenext
two, three decades we'll have to be on a sliding scale learning
to do with less and less. Not to accept this, simply
to pretend to ourselves that science will solve these problems,
is nothing short of suicide.
Well, let's return to Gandhi. The
essence of Gandhi as a nonviolent leader and economist is
that he says, "I'm
not interested in any mechanical or other appliance which is
outside the reach of the people. Bring me machinery,
bring me the finest inventions, but they must be such that
everybody has access to them." This is a nonviolent
attitude and I wrote in my book, I think repeatedly, the very,
very deep and brilliant saying by Gandhi: the anwer is not
mass production but production by the masses. Now
this must be understood in the West more and more deeply.
What
is the difference between mass production and production
by the masses? Everybody needs to be a producer, because everybody
is necessarily a consumer, and if you are a consumer without
being a producer, you are a sponger. You are living
at the expense of others. You can't have even your self-respect. (I'm
not talking about babies or the aged or the crippled.) There are many
sorts of arrangements where not everybody can be a producer or where to be
a producer you must lower yourself to be tied to some little niche that you
might possibly fill. Then everybody becomes fearful and neurotic because
of the alternatives. I
can't be a producer because I'm unemployed. I can't find a job, or
perhaps I'm not prepared to do the kinds of nonsense that they actually expect
me to do, well, then I can't lead a decent upstanding life. It's a
terrible dilemma for me.
So Gandhi says we don't need mass production, which
is arranged by a few ultra-wealthy or powerful people and a technology
that is out of the reach of the people at large. It is
so expensive that it can only be used by people who are either
very rich or very powerful. He wanted production by the
masses – a
relatively simple technology so that everybody can be productive. And
if you just quantify this, you will decide very quickly that
the multiplier effect when really everybody can be productive
produces wealth on a scale that the mass production society
can never produce. We have indeed efficient machinery
which turns out the stuff, but the proportion of people who
are actually productively working is getting smaller and
smaller. It
is now so small that only a tiny percentage of our total
social time is time that we all of us have together as useful
for production. With
further and further mechanization and automation, that percentage
is further shrinking, so that the joy of productivity and
being creative is organized out of our society altogether. Needless
to say, all this is accompanied by theorizing that has suggested
to most of the western world that actually to have to work
is a bad thing, that the satisfaction of life can only be
had in leisure hours. Being in a situation where most
people can't enjoy their work because it is mindless and
stunting is really pretty disastrous. And this gives
rise to all sorts of wild behavior.
Now to change
the subject a little bit and make it a little bit more metaphysical. There
are three different levels: unity at the top, diversity in the middle, and
uniformity at the bottom. I'd like to associate these three words with
some others. Unity,
if you take this metaphysically, can be called the divine or heaven. Uniformity
can be associated with the idea of hell. And this is us here, this
is the world, let's call it Earth. That is to say, the situation in
our lives is one of great diversity and multiplicity, which is a very unstable
situation and we have a very urgent desire to get out of this instability. And
we have two possibilities of seeming resolve, that is, whether to go up or
to go down. Now, a mass production society is a society that is built
on the idea of uniformity. This is a movement downwards because with
uniformity and standardization you can only get at the lowest level, namely,
of lifeless, mindless matter.
Industry is
a consistent and systematic attempt to eliminate the living factor from what
we are doing. It is much easier in the textile industry to work with
man-made fibers than with natural fibers. Why? Because the man-made
fibers have total uniformity, whereas there is always an uncontrollability
about anything living because there is an element of freedom in it. So
industrialists say, "Well, surely my part is to eliminate the living
factor." The
ideal is total automation.
It's like a doctor I met in Africa who was studying
a disease that comes from snails in the water. They produce organisms
that get into the skin and into the human body, and then out
of the human body back into the snails. The way to deal
with the disease is to break the cycle somewhere. And
he says he'd come to the conclusion that it is impossible to
eliminate the snails but perhaps it could be solved if we eliminate
the human beings. Then the cycle is broken and the disease
will have gone. Industry is a little bit like that. They
say we want goods. We are interested in goods and we'd
like to eliminate the human being because automated machinery
can't go on strike, it doesn't indulge in absenteeism. You
have to organize the maintenance, but you don't have to deal
with beings who ask for higher wages and things like that. So,
this is the tendency of mass production. Industry is
forced toward uniformity, to eliminate life. So it is
a downward movement. And, of course, it kills the human
spirit. If
you ask a worker, "Do you like your work?", then
you are well-advised not to wait for the answer. This
is one of the reasons why we have worldwide inflation because
people are waking up to the fact that they are being used and
that there is no point in it except the weekly paycheck. It's
rational, then, to say if I work only to get money, I must
arrange matters so that I work less and less for more and more
money.
But it may be a return to some kind of sanity to force
management to reconsider that technology is dehumanizing. So
that work can be made more enjoyable, instead of simply saying,
as the slave-owners used to say, "Oh, no, they don't
really mind. They actually like it. They are
so moronic that the less they have to think, the happier
they are."
I
referred to Descartes. One hundred years later, we
had a man called Adam Smith, the founder of economics,
whose bicentennial has just been celebrated along with
the bicentennial of the publication of his book, The Wealth
of Nations. There,
he says that human beings are formed by the work they do, and if this work
is totally mindless, the human being will become as mindless
and stupid as it is possible for a human being to become. He
goes on to say that this is going to happen in all progressive
societies and to the great majority of the population. And
he says that without batting an eyelid. He doesn't say that this
is a great threat that will lead to total collapse of our civilization;
he simply says that this is what will happen and, of course, it would be
desirable for government to do something against it. You won't be
surprised to hear that Marx took up this remark with a certain amount of
vengeance.
Well, to return to these levels – the divine level of
unity, our level, and the level of hell or the underworld
of uniformity. But you will notice already in the words
that unity and uniformity sound very much the same and, hence,
ancient wisdom says Satan was the ape of God. You have
to look carefully to see that the difference is a total difference,
but the appearances are deceptive for those who have neglected
their own spiritual culture. Now, we can associate
this with a few other ideas. Namely, with the idea
of quality and with the idea of quantity and here, of course,
in the middle are both. That is to say, everything
that you encounter can be looked at as a quantity so much,
so heavy, this or that, or as some essential quality. We
don't know what you are all doing or going to do. I
started life as a statistician, but also I spent quite a
few years as a farm laborer. Well,
when I was a farm laborer some 40-odd years ago my task before
breakfast was to go and count the cattle, and then I would
come back and touch my hat to the bailiff, "Yes sir,
32, they are all there." "Well", he
said, "run
off and have your breakfast." One day, I arrived
there and there was an old farmer standing by the gate who
said, "What
do you do here every morning so early?" I said
I was counting the cattle. So he shook his head
and he said, "If you count them every day they won't
flourish." Well,
he didn't know that I was a statistician in disguise.
Nothing
really counts in our society unless it can be quantified. And
the things that really matter cannot be quantified. In
economics we have had a movement from economics to econometrics – great
mechanical, quantified models of how things are supposed to
intertwine. It's
a total denial of humanity to approach a human problem in that
way.
Now, I'm finally going to associate these concepts after
the commercial drug has worked. You see up here, where
it's a matter of quality, there you have nonviolence. Quantity,
pure quantity, is pure violence because there is nothing to
respect. There
is nothing to be tender with. There are just brutal facts. There
is no soul, there is no life, you are just a number. This
is the region of pure violence and, of course, on this earth,
it's a mixture of the two – nonviolence and violence. Why
is this so? Because it has been arranged that the strain
and stress force a higher level, a higher human level.
There
are two classes of problems. There are convergent problems
and there are divergent problems. Now what does that
mean? If you have a problem, namely,
how to get a speedy transport on two wheels and launch this idea with a number
of designers, they will come up with the bicycle. You will see that the
more they work on it and the more experience they gain, the more all the different
answers of different designers converge until you have the final bicycle. The
bicycle has not changed for maybe 70 years. That is a convergent problem,
and a convergent problem can be solved. And once it's solved, we are the
beneficiaries even if we haven't taken any part in the work. The problem
of how to live in a dark room where sunlight is excluded can be solved by electricity
and transmitters. And once it has been solved you only have to operate
a switch. It makes no demands on you at all. Now, if the whole world
consisted of only the convergent problems, no doubt they would all be solved
and we would have nothing more to do, and then turn into cabbages. But
this was not the idea. So the Good Lord has mixed it with a large number
of divergent problems which cannot be solved and should not be solved because
the solution, I might use the terrible word, the final solution, is only with
death.
A very typical divergent problem is education. If you
take equally intelligent people, and put to them the question, "What
is the best education?", one person is bound to say that
it is the passing on of the culture of the society through the
next generation. And this can only be done in an atmosphere
of discipline. The little beggars have to sit still and
receive it. And another person with an equally penetrating
insight says, "Now wait a minute, these little beggars are
all different and you can't force them. You have to build
a little ring fence around them and then put their roots into
the culture and they will take up what they need and grow in
accordance with their own laws and thirst and this can only be
done in freedom." Both answers are correct. But
normally in logic we learn that if discipline is a good thing,
more discipline is even better, and the most discipline is the
best. And then you get a school that is a prison house. Freedom
is a good thing and more of it would be even better, and the
most of it is the best, and again you don't get a school, you
get a loony bin. So, this is a divergent problem because
discipline and freedom are, in fact, opposites, and there is
no compromise. Either the little fellow can do what he
likes or he has to do what I tell him; there is no halfway house. In
politics we have much the same. We
have freedom and liberty and we want equality. Well, if
you leave things free, then things will be very uneven and unequal,
and if you enforce egality then your liberty goes out of the
window. There was an intelligent Frenchman connected with
the French Revolution who realized that this pair of opposites
can be reconciled at a higher level, and hence, the slogan of
the French Revolution was not simply the absurdity of having
egality and liberty at the same time. The concepts become
reconciled if there is fraternity – brotherliness.
Now,
how can I say that this is at the higher level? How
can I recognize it? Egality can be arranged; it can be
legislated. Liberty can be arranged and be legislated,
but fraternity is a quality of the human being. It cannot
be legislated and it cannot be synthetically produced. It
must come from every one of us out of our inner energy. It
is a higher thing. Therefore, you can conclude that life
has been arranged full of divergent problems. When there
are no solutions to the problems, we are continuously stimulated
to rise to a higher level. In this sense, nonviolence is
the higher level. We must not assume that we can achieve
nonviolence on this earth, but we must remember that if we don't
practice nonviolence and aspire towards it, then assuredly we
will sink down into violence.
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E.F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230 USA
(413) 528-1737
www.smallisbeautiful.org
efssociety@smallisbeautiful.org
