Small is Beautiful

Resonances from the words of Fritz Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, sounded in our Vigil Reading this morning.
Climate change and poverty are the issues Schumacher voiced so powerfully are carried forward in some striking ways.
This weekend, the Cardinal from Edinburgh is to lead a Church Delegation to the United Nations in New York. He said, 'The issue of climate is one that is too important to be sacrificed for national short-term interests."

THURSDAY 24th September Vigils Second Reading From Small is Beautiful by Fritz Schumacher In the excitement over the unfolding of their scientific and technical powers, people of today have built a system of pro­duction that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates human beings. If only there were more and more wealth, everything else, it is thought, would fall into place. Money is considered to be all-powerful; if it could not actually buy non-material values, such as justice, harmony, beauty or even health, it could circumvent the need for them or compensate for their loss. The development of production and the acquisition of wealth have thus become the highest goals of the modern world in relation to which all other goals, no matter how much lip-service may still be paid to them, have come to take second place. The highest goals require no justification; all secondary goals have finally to justify themselves in terms of the service their attainment renders to the attainment of the highest. This is the philosophy of materialism, and it is this philoso­phy - or metaphysics - which is now being challenged by events. There has never been a time, in any society in any part of the world, without its sages and teachers to challenge mate­rialism and plead for a different order of priorities. The lan­guages have differed, the symbols have varied, yet the message has always been the same: seek first the kingdom of God, and these things (the material things which you also need) shall be added unto you. They shall be added, we are told, here on earth where we need them, not simply in an after-life beyond our imagina­tion. Today, however, this message reaches us not solely from the sages and saints but from the actual course of physical events. It speaks to us in the language of terrorism, genocide, breakdown. pollution, exhaustion. We live, it seems, in a unique period of convergence. It is becoming apparent that there is not only a promise but also a threat in those astonishing words about the kingdom of God - the threat that "unless you seek first the kingdom, these other things, which you also need, will cease to be available to you." We shrink back from the truth if we believe that the destructive forces of the modern world can be "brought under control" simply by mobilizing more resources - of wealth, education, and research - to fight pollution, to preserve wildlife, to dis­cover new sources of energy, and to arrive at more effective agreements on peaceful coexistence. Needless to say, wealth, education, research, and many other things are needed for any civilization, but what is most needed today is a revision of the ends which these means are meant to serve. And this implies, above all else, the development of a life-style which accords to material things their proper, legitimate place, which is secondary and not primary.