6 Leading Ideas All from the 19th Century

Dr Abe V Rotor
 Living with Nature School on Blog
Paaralang Bayan.sa Himpapawid (School on Air) with Ms Melly C Tenorio
738 KHz AM 8 to 9 evening class, Monday to Friday
Schumacher's book Small is Beautiful ’s six leading ideas all stemming from the 19th century, still dominate the minds of educated people.

1. Idea of Evolution that the higher forms, as a kind continually develop out of lower forms, as a kind of natural and automatic process. The last 150 years or so have seen the systemic application of this idea to all aspects without exception.

2. Idea of Competition, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, which purports to explain the natural and automatic process of evolution and development.
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Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered is a collection of essays by British economist E. F. Schumacher. The phrase "Small Is Beautiful" came from a phrase by his teacher Leopold Kohr. It is often used to champion small, appropriate technologies that are believed to empower people more, in contrast with phrases such as "bigger is better".

Twenty years after his death, the ideas of E.F. Schumacher still resonate through the environmental movement. With his deep spiritual vision and rejection of Western materialism and economic exploitation, Schumacher saw the need to give societies, communities and individuals practical tools for change.

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3. Idea that all the higher manifestations of human life – religion, philosophy, art, etc – are necessary supplements of material life process, a superstructure erected to disguise and promote economic interests, the whole human history being the class struggles.

4. Freudian interpretation which reduces them to the dark stirrings of a subconscious mind and explains them mainly as the results of unfulfilled incest-wishes during childhood and adolescence.

5. General idea of relativism denying all - absolutes, dissolving all norms and standards, leading to the total undermining of the idea of truth in pragmatism, and affecting even math, which has been defined by Bertrand Russell as “the subject in which we never what we are talking about, or whether what we say is true.”

6. The triumphant idea of positivism, that valid knowledge can be attained only through the methods of the natural sciences and hence that no knowledge is genuine unless it is based on generally observable facts. Positivism is solely interested in “know-how” at the possibility of objective knowledge about meaning and purpose of any kind.

Reference: Small is Beautiful. Economics as if People Mattered by EC Schumacher; Internet for image and update.