Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (Vintage classics)

by Ernst F. Schumacher

G. N. M. Tyrell has put forward the terms ‘divergent’ and ‘convergent’ to distinguish problems which cannot be solved by logical reasoning from those that can.

Life is being kept going by divergent problems which have to be ‘lived’ and are solved only in death.

Convergent problems on the other hand are man’s most useful invention; they do not, as such, exist in reality, but are cr...

Divergent problems, as it were, force man to strain himself to a level above himself; they demand, and thus provide the supply of, forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty, goodness, and truth into our lives.

It is only with the help of these higher forces that the opposites can be reconciled in the living situation.

The physical sciences and mathematics are concerned exclusively with...

Dealing exclusively with convergent problems does not lead into life but away from it.

The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.’

This impoverishment, so movingly described by Darwin, will overwhelm our entire civilisation if we permit the current tendencies to continue which Gibson calls ‘the extension of positive science to social facts’.

All divergent problems can be turned into convergent problems by a process of ‘reduction’. The result, however, is the loss of all higher forces to ennoble human life, and the degradation not only of the emotional part of our nature, but also, as Darwin sensed, of our intellect and moral character.

What is the Leitbild, as the Germans say, the guiding image, in accordance with which young people could try to form and educate themselves?

Who knows anything today of the Seven Deadly Sins or of the Four Cardinal Virtues? Who could even

name them? And if these venerable, old ideas are thought not to be worth bothering about, what new ideas have taken their place?

The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction.

The problems of education are merely reflections of the deepest problems of our age. They cannot be solved by organisation, administration, or the expenditure of money, even though the importance of all these is not denied.

We are suffering from a metaphysical disease, and the cure must therefore be metaphysical.

Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.

‘How did civilised man despoil this favourable environment? He did it mainly by depleting or destroying the natural resources.

‘The Proper Use of Land’ poses, not a technical nor an economic, but primarily a metaphysical problem.

What man-as-producer can afford is one thing; what man-as-consumer can afford is quite another thing.