E. F. SCHUMACHER
E.F. Schumacher is best known as the Author of Small Is Beautiful, however he is best known to me as the Author of A Guide For The Perplexed.
Today I finished A Guide for the Perplexed, by E.F. Schumacher. Wow!
The last chapter, Two Types of Problems, was a series of crescendos and descendings and I despaired for I wanted to end my reading on a high note. No less than five peaks I had to endure, or to be more correct, it was the five valleys I had to endure that I could revel in the heights.
What is that saying: It is not what gives you breath; it is what takes your breath away?
The message of this book is the exact message needed by myself, and I am suspecting others, especially who hold to conspiracy history rather than accidental history, i.e. (Schumacher made several references to Dante’s Inferno), “Today, people who acknowledge the Inferno of things as they really are in the modern world are regularly denounced as “doomwatchers,” pessimists, and the like. Dorothy Sayers, one of the finest commentators on Dante as well as on modern society, has this to say”:
That the Inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, everybody will readily agree. And since we today fairly well convinced that society is in a bad way and not necessarily evolving in the direction of perfectibility, we find it easy enough to recognise the various stages by which the deep of corruption is reached. Futility; lack of a living faith; the drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled bad temper; a self-opinionated and obstinate individualism; violence, sterility, and lack of reverence for life and property including one’s own; the exploitation of sex, the debasing of language by advertisement and propaganda, the commercializing of religion, the pandering to superstition and the conditioning of people’s minds by mass-hysteria and “spell-binding” of all kinds, venality and string-pulling in public affairs, hypocrisy, dishonesty in material things, intellectual dishonesty, the fomenting of discord (class against class, nation against nation) for what one can get out of it, the falsification and destruction of all the means of communication; the exploitation of the lowest and stupidest mass-emotions; treachery even to the fundamentals of kinship, country, the chosen friend, and the sworn allegiance: these are the all-too-recognisable stages that lead to the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all civilized relations.
These are the valleys we live in. But here are the mountain peaks that our understanding tells us we can strive for:
“life is bigger than logic”
Schumacher distinguishes existing problems as being one of two kinds: convergent, where solutions are more easily and readily found because the answer “complies with the laws of the Universe – laws at the level of inanimate nature” which he explains can be manipulated (his example was the wheel); and divergent, where solutions are not so obvious, even to the point that as they become more numerous they also become more opposed to one another, offering contradictions that do not “yield to ordinary , ‘straight-line’ logic” (his example was education with divergent solutions of ‘discipline & obedience’ vs ‘freedom,’ or ‘freedom vs equality’).
Convergent problems relate to the dead aspect of the Universe, where manipulation can proceed without let or hindrance and where man can make himself ‘master and possessor,’ because the subtle, higher forces – which we have labeled life [plant], consciousness [animal], and self-awareness [human] - are not present to complicate matters.
The moment we deal with problems involving the higher Levels of Being, we must expect divergence, for there enters, to however modest a degree, the element of freedom and inner experience. In them we can see the most universal pair of opposites, the very hallmark of Life: growth and decay.
Growth thrives on freedom (I mean healthy growth; pathological growth is really a form of decay), while the forces of decay and dissolution can be contained only through some kind of order.
Growth versus Decay and Freedom versus Order are encountered wherever there is life, consciousness, self-awareness.
“to solve a problem is to kill it”
There is nothing wrong with ‘killing’ a convergent problem. . .But can – or should – divergent problems be killed? (The words ‘final solution’ still have a terrible ring in the ears of my generation.)
Divergent problems cannot be killed; they cannot be solved in the sense of establishing a ‘correct formula’; they can, however be transcended. A pair of opposites – like freedom and order – are opposites at the level of ordinary life, but they cease to be opposites at the higher level, the really human level, where self-awareness plays it proper role. It is then that such higher forces as love and compassion, understanding and empathy, become available, not simply as occasional impulses (which they are at the lower level) but as a regular and reliable resource.
Divergent problems – opposites – ‘are not logical but existential questions. . .The main concern of existentialism. . .is that experience has to be admitted as evidence. . .without experience there is no evidence.
Our logical mind does not like [divergent problems]: it generally operates on the either/or or yes/no principle, like a computer. . .this exclusiveness inevitably leads to an ever more obvious loss of realism and truth. . .Divergent problems offend the logical mind. . .A refusal to accept the divergency of divergent problems causes these higher faculties to remain dormant and to wither away, and when this happens, the ‘clever animal’ is more likely than not to destroy itself.
‘[a]ll great works of art are ‘about God’
If art aims primarily to affect our feelings, we may call it entertainment; if it aims primarily to affect our will, we may call it propaganda. . .a pair of opposites. . .
No great artist has ever turned his back on either entertainment or propaganda, nor was he ever satisfied with just these two. Invariably he strove to communicate truth, the power of truth, by appealing to man’s higher intellectual faculties. . .Entertainment and propaganda by themselves do not give us power but exert power over us. When they are transcended by, and made subservient to, the communication of Truth, art helps us to develop our higher faculties, and this is what matters. . .the purpose of the whole is to remove those living in this life from a state of misery, and lead them into a state of felicity.
“the real problems of life have to be grappled with”
While the logical mind abhors divergent problems and tries to run away from them, the higher faculties of man accept the challenges of life as they are offered, without complaint, knowing that when things are most contradictory, absurd, difficult, and frustrating, then, just then, life really makes sense: as a higher Level of Being.
Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something much better: that we can become oak trees.
“the true progress of a human being”
1. One’s first task is to learn from society and ‘tradition’ and to find one’s temporary happiness in receiving directions from outside.
2. One’s second task is to interiorize the knowledge one has gained, sift it, sort it out, keeping the good and jettisoning the bad; this process may be called ‘individuation,’ becoming self-directed.
3. One’s third task cannot be tackled until one has accomplished the first two, and is one for which one needs the very best help that can possibly be found: It is ‘dying to oneself,’ to one’s likes and dislikes, to all one’s egocentric preoccupations. To the extent that one succeeds in this, one ceases to be directed from outside, and also ceases to be self-directed. One has gained freedom or, one might say, one is then God-directed.
Now, let’s go be oak trees!
No comments:
Post a Comment