I read "Small is Beautiful" too as well as his next book. And also
Kirkpatrick Sales "Human Scale." I don't recall the toilet thing but
more of a thing about corporations driving things out of control and
automation taking things over. But as we can see no one worries about
machines taking over these days and corporations are all good. ;-)
On 12/14/2014 07:08 AM, seerd...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife] wrote:
Assessing civilization by it its number of toilets is a wonderful
metric and embodies all that makes the United States (and Netherlands)
the greatest countries in the world. Toilets are a grand testament to
our technological savvy in designing billion dollar systems to rid
ourselves of icky stuff. I mean its just organic crap like nitrogen,
phosphorus and potassium and all that boring like chemistry stuff Good
riddance. Far more sophisticated to use civilized chemical
fertilizers. We get to to use all those magnificent big, high tech
mining machines to transform the earth from mere dirt to huge craters.
Ah the glories western civilization. We rock. And look at countries
like india -- they produce only 10% as much CO2 per capital of the US
(15% as much as the Dutch). What losers.
Would you believe that I actually read "Small is Beautiful back the
mid 70's. I have to laugh -- back in college I was so deluded. What a
hoot. A totally looney-bin hippie manifesto. Schumaker probably hated
toilets. and would have tooted graywater and growing fresh vegetables.
As if !. I am glad men of the world like us see through such garbage.
Came across a review the other day. I think the copious amounts of
acid his mother must of taken never really left the writers brain.
" Small is Beautiful was a radical challenge to the 20th century's
intoxication with what Schumacher described as "gigantism". For
several decades, mass production methods were producing more cheap
goods than ever before; the mass media and mass culture opened up new
opportunities to a wider audience than ever. It was creating bigger
markets and bigger political entities. .. he believed such scale led
to a dehumanisation of people and the economic systems that ordered
their lives.
One of the recurrent themes through the book is how modern
organisations stripped the satisfaction out of work, making the worker
no more than an anonymous cog in a huge machine. Craft skill was no
longer important, nor was the quality of human relationship: human
beings were expected to act like adjuncts to the machines of the
production line. The economic system was similarly dehumanising,
making decisions on the basis of profitability rather than human
need... What Schumacher wanted was a people-centred economics because
that would, in his view, enable environmental and human sustainability.
It was a radical challenge which, like many of the ideas of the late
60s and early 70s (feminism is another example), were gradually
adopted and distorted by the ongoing voracious expansion of consumer
capitalism. ... a "small is beautiful" model of economic enterprise
that put relationship, craft and environment at the heart of their way
of working .. were later snaffled up by corporate giants. Small became
cool but only as part of a branding strategy which masked the ongoing
concentration of political and economic power. Gigantism has triumphed.
The power of the global multinational and the financial institutions
was beginning to become apparent in the early 70s, but it has grown
exponentially since, unaccountable to national governments. Schumacher
warned that a city's population should not rise above 500,000, but we
are now living in an era of the megapolis and several cities around
the world are heading towards 20m. Schumacher would be weeping over
his herbal tea at the fate of his big idea.
... We yearn for economic systems within our control, within our
comprehension and that once again provide space for human interaction
– and yet we are constantly overwhelmed by finding ourselves trapped
into vast global economic systems that are corrupting and corrupt.
.
