Large Fierce Mammal

“Its a tragedy of the first magnitude that millions of people have ceased to use their hands as hands. Nature has bestowed upon us this great gift which is our hands. If the craze for machinery methods continues, it is highly likely that a time will come when we shall be so incapacitated and weak that we shall begin to curse ourselves for having forgotten the use of the living machines given to us by God. Millions cannot keep fit by games and athletics and why should they exchange the useful productive hardy occupations for the useless, unproductive and expensive sports and games.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Satish Kumar is the Editor of Resurgence magazine as well as running the Schumacher Society, the Schumacher Lecture Series, and Schumacher College. He heads up Green Books, described on the company’s website as, “… an independent environmental publishing company producing books on a wide range of ecological and cultural issues.”

Man is a social animal, and a fundamental departure from the Way of the Wild as it is meant to express itself in Man occurs when the value of individual contribution becomes subjugated to serving the role of cog in the machine. Treated as a mere tool, quick and cheap to create and all too easily thrown away when broken or worn out, the Spirit of Man languishes in miserable solitude even in the midst of a throng of his kind, ever immersed in the message that the value of each human is measured by his or her ability to consume.

In his splendid article, Gandhi’s Swadeshi – The Economics of Permanence, Mr. Kumar reveals lessons of incalculable and timeless value from the philosophy of a man who once grappled with restoring economic potency and independence to a population that had long languished in servitude to greater powers – Mahatma Gandhi. In his words you’ll hear echos of the battle cry that right now stirs the building realization of the threat to the Earth that is represented by big government in the service of big money, and moves a growing percentage of the population toward a smaller focus –  support of local Craftsmen as a first choice, buying meat and produce directly from Farms or Farmer’s markets, and seafood directly from Fishermen. Toward self-sufficiency on a community level by taking steps toward eliminating the intrinsic vulnerability that comes of absolute dependence on a centralized source of essential supplies, with its own agendas and priorities. Consider his description of what Gandhi called “swadeshi”:

In India, people have lived for thousands of years in a relative harmony with their surroundings: living in their homesteads, weaving homespun clothes, eating homegrown food, using homemade goods; caring for their animals, forests, and lands; celebrating the fertility of the soil with feasts; performing the stories of great epics, and building temples. Every region of India has developed its own distinctive culture, to which travelling storytellers, wandering ‘saddhus’, and constantly flowing streams of pilgrims have traditionally made their contribution.

According to the principle of swadeshi, whatever is made or produced in the village must be used first and foremost by the members of the village. Trading among villages and between villages and towns should be minimal, like icing on the cake. Goods and services that cannot be generated within the community can be bought from elsewhere.

Swadeshi avoids economic dependence on external market forces that could make the village community vulnerable. It also avoids unnecessary, unhealthy, wasteful, and therefore environmentally destructive transportation. The village must build a strong economic base to satisfy most of its needs, and all members of the village community should give priority to local goods and services ….

The British believed in centralized, industrialized, and mechanized modes of production. Gandhi turned this principle on its head and envisioned a decentralized, homegrown, hand-crafted mode of production. In his words, “Not mass production, but production by the masses.”

By adopting the principle of production by the masses, village communities would be able to restore dignity to the work done by human hands. There is an intrinsic value in anything we do with our hands, and in handing over work to machines we lose not only the material benefits but also the spiritual benefits, for work by hand brings with it a meditative mind and self-fulfilment.

I invite you to consider this and comment. We’ll expand on the concept in next week’s WWW, and look at one writer’s call for an “archaic revival“.