A society becomes great when men plant trees under whose shade they know they shall never sit.
Greek Proverb
In the introduction to his book Good Work, E.F. Schumacher notes the brain-rotting nature of many assembly line jobs, and the more disturbing fact that people just don’t care, or, to put it more mildly, accept it as a necessary evil. ‘Assembly line jobs' as Schumacher puts it are rather wider ranging than its name might at first suggest. Any job, in fact, that seeks in some way to pack a product or service and ready it for market can be classed as assembly line. When I taught English in a private language school in Warsaw, it was, as one of the other teachers noted, an assembly line: get them in, get their money, pump them full of English, get them out. The assembly line is everywhere, and so is the colliery. Look no further than call centres, the collieries of the modern era. Do not be fooled by disguises. Where, I wonder, is this progress we speak of? The abolition of slavery in 1833? No. The abolition of thinking? Maybe. In a world where we worry about sustainable growth, it really is sustainable thinking that we should be fundamentally concerned about.
Schumacher, a respected economist who worked briefly with John Maynard Keynes during WWII (Keynes was so impressed with the young German that he found him a post at Oxford), was Chief Economic Advisor to the National Coal Board in the UK between 1950-70. He was opposed to the tenets of neo-classical economics, declaring that single-minded concentration on output and technology was dehumanizing. He held that one's workplace should be dignified and meaningful first, and efficient second. He was a great supporter of 'Buddhist economics' that saw people as people and nature as priceless. He also held that small was beautiful, and that the embrace of simplicity as a way of living was the mark of a man who had attained wisdom.
On the subject of assembly-line jobs Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, had this to say:
That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done - these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence - because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.
Crimes against humanity begin with the betrayal of 'being', and its wholesale enslavement to the pioneers of 'doing'.
The irony is that mankind is no longer a collective of human beings, they are a fragmented diaspora of human doings. Legally-speaking, it is only with such a semantic redefinition of man that one might escape Schumacher's charge of crime against humanity.
Before Schumacher, there was Keynes...
Getting ‘out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight’ was of paramount importance to Keynes. He fervently believed that the principles upon which most of our economies are nowadays based were just plain wrong. He wrote that ‘avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemenour, and echoing the Scottish industrialist Andrew Carnegie's views on the responsibility of the rich, ‘the love of money is detestable…’. Keynes hoped that one day we should ‘once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful,’ and that we should ‘honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well.’
In his 1928 essay On the Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren he writes:
The strenuous purposeful moneymakers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.
Before Keynes there was Carnegie...
'I resolved to stop accumulating,' Carnegie writes in his essay The Gospel of Wealth in 1889, 'and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution'.
With great wealth comes great responsibility. Redistribution is (like education) all well and good, but it depends how and to whom, and for what...
If it is redistributed to fuel the current modes of greed and growth then it is counterproductive and simply a self-satisfied way of declaring oneself benevolent. If, however, it is used to raise energy and eco-literacy and to open the eyes of the next generation as to the wrongs committed by the current one then we might be making headway... Here, the creation of prizes (with equal or greater merit as the Nobel) in recognition of outstanding contributions to the cause of ecology might be what's called for; education programs that focus on slowness and being, and not career-ing out of control; fresh curricula that engender inter-religious empathy and understanding, less indoctrination, less fragmentation, less segregation. The call for subjects at a primary level that embrace a deep respect for nature as for one's self within it, that encourage cooperation for its own sake and not simply as collusion concealed beneath the grander umbrella of competition. Respect for teachers, and metaphysics!
The re-reading of Schumacher - and the move towards a Buddhist economic. The realisation of a greater existence which transcends our individual lives. The importance of being over doing. The need to plant trees under whose shade we know we shall never sit...
The Giving Pledge, formed in 2009 by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, can be seen as a continuation of Carnegie's more serious task of philanthropy. The pledge seeks 'to invite the wealthiest individuals and families in the
United States to commit to giving the majority of their wealth to
philanthropy.' The results of this show that sizeable sums have been donated; nevertheless, as of 2012, and out of the 425 billionaires in America, less than a quarter (91) have signed the pledge.
As someone who lives close to the ground, whose greatest possession is his 'nakedness' (in truth, it is 'nakedness' that possesses me) and his 15 year old bicycle, it always amazes me how much these Citizen Kanes of the world convince themselves that they need their wealth and their luxuries. Ultimately, it is an addiction of the most severe sort, which is promoted as a global ethic.
'Never ever tell me that you need anything,' an old Zen master once told his student.
And yet...
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