Sometime ago I read Small is Beautiful very
quickly and was very taken by it. You probably know that we got
in touch with Schumacher in London. He came in to see us, talked
to our group and they had a fine time with him. In the last week
I had a chance to read the book with some thoroughness. The first
thing that impressed me was that the book was poorly organized.
It is obvious that the author had a set of lectures and homilies
that he quickly put together. That, however, should not bother
people like us who are trained in the methods of transrationality
which are based on the charting method. More and more I have come
to see that those who do not know the charting method have trouble
thinking transrationally. Knowing charting means that the first
thing to do after numbering the paragraphs is to run your fingers
through them, writing down one or two words that hold each paragraph
across your chart. Once you get your words for each paragraph
on the chart, then you can hold them in your head and begin to
think. Then, you begin to build the dramaturgical dynamics of
the materials you are dealing with to get hold of the transrational.
When you do that, it is very simple to reorganize a book
the way it ought to be organized or at least to put it in one
form of rational organization.
I was struck during a recent Ecclesiola that the
teacher (who did a good job) did not know any more about charting
than if she had never been in the Order. The chart put up on the
board was shocking. I am not criticizing the teacher. I am beating
myself a bit. If I had to point to the methodology upon
which we are built, it is that methodology. If you do not have
charting grounded in your deeps then you literally do not know
how to operate. That method is directly related to the
problem of how to become a gun. "The gun" has become
a matter of urgency for us. "The gun" has become life
and death, both in terms of doing Town Meeting and Social Demonstration
in mass numbers. Actually it first began to become life or death
the moment we thought about going Areal. I am still sick at heart
that we have not put our mind around the Xavier principle. The
key to the Xavier principle is the charting method. You take
whatever is yours in terms of firm delimitation and treat that
as a universe which forces transrationality, which is what the
charting method is all about. Anything that we call spirit method
or anything that we call social method is based simply
upon the charting method or the whole concept of transrationality.
So I sat there in great pain even though other aspects of the
teaching that night were very, very stimulating.
That evening we were studying the chapter on "Buddhist
Economics". Now, anyone that thinks there is such a thing
as Christian economics is wrong. Thus it follows that anybody
that talks about Buddhist Economics is also wrong. Not only that,
Mr.Schumacher himself in the last sentence of Chapter Three, just
before the one on "Buddhist Economics" tells us the
same thing. In essence he says there is not such thing as Christian
Economics, Muslim Economics, or Buddhist Economics, but now
I am going to deal with Buddhist Economics, and he includes a
chapter on it. The abstractions are a painful burden almost beyond
what anybody could endure. Now if that chapter were at
the end of the whole book and he were doing a spirit spin on Buddhism,
there would be some very exciting things in it. Where it is and
the way it is done is just sheer abstraction. You will be proud
of me when I tell you that I kept my mouth shut during the whole
study until the last five minutes. Then I moved and ripped that
chapter to pieces. One thing I said was that our job now is to
find a way to block that whole chapter, that abstraction, from
the minds of everybody in the Order who might possibly be assigned
to a social demonstration. As I sat there I felt like I was back
in 1952 where that kind of abstraction was a historical necessity.
But we are so far from that time of sitting around and thinking
about a fine idea in history, it is hard to remember that there
ever was such a time. Because we are in the time of doing, I fear
the Schumacher book.
However, what he has to say is in Part III called
"The Third World." There are four parts to the book.
When we laid out a lesson plan we should have run our group study
through Part III first, then Part II followed by Part IV
and last of all Part I which are the metaphysical reflections
including the chapter on Buddhism. Now I am dealing with transrationality
and not so much with that book. But I want to underscore that
this book is absolutely crucial. Part III needs to be taken to
pieces the same way we took The Wretched of the Earth to
pieces. We really taught that book which is one of the finest
pictures of Maoism that can be found anywhere. You know something?
I look back on that book as a terrible book. At the time I was
excited by it, as everybody was, yet we learned some fine things
out of that book. One thing that interests me from a different
perspective the perspective of human development as over
against the perspective of revolution, is that more and more I
am convinced that you have to go to the country in order to get
to the city.
The most important thing that happened in the second
consult in Majuro was that it forced us to rewrite the initial
manual in a more sophisticated form, which came out of the writing
of five or six consults. In one sense, that is the most important
thing. On the other hand, something crucial happened in that second
consult that I still do not have my mind around. Therefore, I
have not been even remotely interested, as I was earlier, in doing
a second consult any place else though I know a second consult
will have to happen in each demonstration, in time. It became
clear out there that in order to do Majuro the one really
urban center, you have to go to the outer islands. I now believe
with a passion that to do Chicago you have to go to rural Illinois.
To do Bombay, you have to go to Maliwada, and so on, around the
world. Isn't it funny how language, the greatest thing man ever
invented, has so many perversionshidden within the language
itself? There is an unlimited number of possible perversions,
especially at the level of abstract language (which I am all for
because I am an intellectual even though I try to pretend that
I am not). Anyway, we called it the Marshall Island Human Development
Project. Because of the title it became extremely difficult for
us to finally see that what we had set up was the Majuro Human
Development Project, no matter what we called it! Going to the
outer islands was replication and without replication you might
as well not do anything.
Anybody who is going to be assigned to a social demonstration
projects needs to master Part III of Schumacher's book and be
extremely cautious about the rest of it. What we do not
want out in a demonstration project is abstraction. This is so
subtle in all of us that we all can get caught in it. That is
what the chapter on Buddhist Economics was. All of us are intellectuals
in one sense or the other, and we are most vulnerable about this.
I was excited about that chapter. Even though I saw the horns
of Satan, the golden hoof and the tail creeping along in it, I
was still excited about it. What Schumacher says there is right.
The whole group at the Ecclesiola, including myself, was sucked
into it. When I made my outburst I came at it through the women.
Now what he says there about Buddhism is really not about Buddhism
but about abstraction. That kind of economy has made sheer animals
particularly out of the women in rural India. It only takes one
little trip to a village like Maliwada to see what I mean when
I say that it has made sheer animals out of the women. Now the
men, due partly, I suppose, to Indian male chauvinism, are only
half animals in those villages. But it is that economy that I
was drooling over with some excitement, in abstraction, that made
them far less than a sheer beast of burden.
One of the delights of my life was to discover in Indonesia that an honorific title was added to the word they use for "water buffalo" so that the whole thing means "our very dear friend, the buffalo." By golly, they knew what they were doing. Without "our very dear friend, the buffalo," no one would be in Indonesia today. Well, in Maliwada
our very dear friend the buffalo 1ives in a far, far better set of circumstances than the women of Maliwada. I am not sorting out India. The same is true in the realms where that kind of simplistic economy denies, for even one moment, the glory of technology. The fact that you women are not beasts of burden relative to that economy is because we are living on the other side of the technological revolution. You have had the glorious gift of technology delivered to you. In one sense that is all that demonstration is doing. All we are doing is being a viaduct to convey a moderate degree of technology to the rural people in the developing nations that enables them to get off
of four legs at least and begin to stand on two feet. Now Mr.Schumacher has this clearly spelled out in Part III of his book. We need to master that section. This is where my passion is. I think a part of it is something like this: "Lord, how in the world did you choose such an unworthy group of people to participate in this kind of significant
human service at this time in history?" That
both makes me want to shout and not utter another word the rest
of my life. It is great that we are studying that book now.
I want to mention two or three things. I felt I had
to show up at the General Conference of the Methodist Church.
Though I only stayed a very short time, others stayed on to do
the work. To be truthful, it is very important that at this moment,
in terms of the outrageous move we are making, that we comfort
and ensure the church (I picked these words carefully) that we
are radical historical churchmen. The response of the ones that
I had the chance to talk to about what we are doing is unbelievable.
They are extremely supportive. It is an obvious change. This creates
a state of pathos in you where sometimes you strike back a bit
when you encounter a sense of change. Even though they strike
back, they know that in some way or another the church was not
sent into history to build the church but to serve mankind. We
deeply know that. Even those of us who pack up two bags and run
away because we think that we are not being religious still know
that.
I saw and had breakfast with Bishop Goodwin, among
others. He is one who invited us to Selma. I first knew him in
Alabama, years and years ago. When I mentioned the fact that we
might do one of these demonstrations in a poor, rural black town
in the backwash of Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana he was extremely
interested. I think in the terms of a "Selma of the 70's".
It needs to be the most deprived rural community we could find.
He said, "Why don't you let me pick out, say five, six, seven
such villages. Then we could go together to decide which ones
you want to do." That is something for the established church!
His area recently got a whole shipload of wheat and sent it to
India.
Our colleagues in Washington D.C. have selected a
community. My guess is that it is 98% black. I saw one white family
when we visited there. It is about five minutes from the capital,
wellinsularized and in the heart of the city, so you really
have a community to work with. There are just 2000 people. I would
have preferred 5000, I believe, but that is all right.
Replication is possible. The Bishop was extremely
excited by that too. He said to my brother, "Jim, let's you
and I go immediately to Ivy City and look at it." For the
established church, I think that is something.
The Methodist Conference itself was quite disappointing
to me. They do such things as bring in 12,000 proposals and 6000
of them have to do with matters of sexuality and ordination of
specific groups. Now I am all for many of the proposals, but what
bothers me is the church's dealings being filled with its own
internal business. The Conference only meets every four years,
and the world is filled with suffering and meaning, yet they sit
out there for two weeks talking about internal affairs. No matter
how important those issues are, you are still gazing at your internal
life. That hurts me. They spent almost all their time on those
issues. Now at the same time I believe with my whole heart that
the church is beginning to care all over again and that the church
has nothing but terrible suffering ahead as it undergoes metamorphosis.
I have not had a baby, but, you know, you have to cooperate with
getting it born. The main thing is to cooperate with that birth.
The same is true with the church. You do not have to wait until
the new form comes to participate in history, you have to cooperate
with the metamorphosis. You know, in one sense, that is
our job. Maybe we ought to conceive of ourselves as midwives in
anything that we are doing. We are trying to arouse those who
care in the world, trying to get them in focus again.
But I wonder if there is anything else that can happen
to the Protestants that can wake them up to that participation
in the new birth except that the timbers fall out from under the
Roman Catholic Church itself. That is a terrible thing, but I
believe that the Protestants are depending on the security of
Rome itself. If the timbers would start to break there, and you
remember she is our Mother, it may be that we would have the hell
jarred out of us. And I believe things do not go well in Rome.
You know what happened with the Primate of England.
Pope Paul reached back and got that abbot up in Appleford in Yorkshire
land, and jumped him over all the Bishops and made him Archbishop,
the Primate of England itself. He was ordained the day after the
Isle of Dogs consult. Just last week the Pope gave him the red
cap. Isn't that something? Paul said he wanted a spiritual man
in there and he got it.
Now the next thing I believe these are the underlying
contradictions to social demonstration. One is that we need a
symbolic large funding success. Right now our hands are tied in
pushing that any further. We can not wait until you get funding
to start a demonstration. We have the consult. The very next morning
we start work on the project programs. If we waited to start until
we received the funding six or eight months later it would have
been just as well not to have the consult. How our colleagues
are "making it," I do not know. But we have to treat
them exactly the way we treated the Religious Houses when they
started. We do not send them a nickel from here. We do send them
a rupee on their last gasp going down into starvation, but not
before! Otherwise, we are going to have a subtle builtin
tyranny that Chicago is running the situation. When they accuse
us of that from the Areas they are wrong. When they think
seriously about running things out there, all they are going to
think about is "If our bellies are going to be full, we are
going to fill them. If we are going to do our program, we have
to do it." And finally, those who control the economic have
a strange kind of power that some people rush after until they
get that control. And then they wish that they didn't have
it.
The second contradiction is forces: we need adequate,
trained forces. That is why I am worried about the charting. We
particularly need people who know how to move it, move it, move
itnow, today! I am more and more intrigued with the
image we built out of Fifth City, of the twenty plates spinning
on twenty sticks, all at one time. The juggler had to keep them
all spinning. That will make a strategist out of you if nothing
else will! You have to spot the weakest one and put your whole
effort there. As you move the weakest spot, your other hand gives
the other plates a tap to keep them going. But, you have to concentrate
and you have to move it, move it, move it!
The third contradiction has to do with what I am
calling the repository. That is how we can have goods, data, expertise
and experts available to push into any needed spot at any moment.
The Social Demonstration Post is working on that now. By the way,
everybody needs to have a copy of Schumacher's article, "Intermediate
Technology" that appeared in Center Magazine from Santa Barbara.
That is a description of the kind of repository we are talking
about.
The fourth contradiction is replication. Now in the
arena of replication and in the light of those contradictions,
we had certain work to do. The most crucial one was seeing McNamara
of the World Bank. We all have the charts, now, don't we? These
are crucial and they are also good. One shows the ninetyfive
million dollars that is necessary in order to move Maharashtra.
The most affirming experience I have had for a long
time is the time we sat with McNamara. We had worked a long time
to get that appointment. To exaggerate an interior feeling, we
dared never put our foot in India again until we saw McNamara.
He is about the hardest guy to see short of the late czar of Russia
that I can think of. It would have been easier to see Ford. (I
have never gotten over my little boyishness, and I don't want
to get over it. I remember once, coming in between people to the
coat of an United States Senator. He never knew it, but I touched
his coat. Even though I didn't know anything about awe then, it
was a wonder to me. Now that boyishness is something I don't want
to get over). When I first went to see McNamara I was looking
so hard at his face and was experiencing "touching his coat,"
that I forgot to tell him who I was. Then I woke upyou know
that fraction of moment sometimes when you are not sure you know
your own name. Well, I had to think for a moment before I could
tell him my name.
McNamara is quite a man. He worked with the figures
on those charts. He has several rules of thumb as to the cost,
and we passed them. It was shocking! He divided millions by this
and the other thing and he said, "You have projected about
$300 per head. That is just about right." That was
something. He had several other kinds of criteria. Thank God for
our corporateness. You understand the way we win something like
that. I probably have got something like a peanut brain, but no
I don't! I am wired in with so many brains that you couldn't even
begin to count them. And he asked me, "Tell me concretely,
what are you going to do economically in those villages?"
So I blurted out, "Well, we intend to triple their income
in three years." "Ahh," he said, "Double would
be enough." "Well, I think we can quadruple them."
He said, "You might be able to." And certainly in Maliwada
all it would take is one little light industry to double their
income. Just one industry! To say nothing about anything else.
Again that shows how they have been neglected. And then he told
us about a situation where in eight years they were going to try
to double the income of the people. He was excited, tremendously
excited. The thing that excited him was replication. It was also
true of the president of Harvard University. Mr. Kaul of India
said one village is nothing more than a curiosity. Replication
is the crucial thing. McNamara liked our plans for replication,
though in this situation he was being asked for twentyeight
million dollars in the form of a forty year loan at no interest.
In one sense they don't even care whether they get the money back
but in another sense they do. Though we could not at that time
come out with a direct proposal he understood and was very, very
affirmative without actually committing the twenty-eight million
dollars. The next step, of course, is to have the Indian government
directly ask the bank for the twentyeight million. In this
kind of situation we are playing the chickenandthe
egg game.
If you do not have much going in India you might
as well not go to the World Bank. But you have to go to the World
Bank to get a significant project going in India. Therefore we
are doing the chickenandtheegg job. I hope that
now enough has been done that the next step that has to be done
in India is going to resolve that whole situation and that it
will move.
A week ago we saw Hubert Humphrey. He was extremely
friendly and collegial. The thing that made him collegial was
the fact that twentyfive Town Meetings have taken place
in the state that he represents in Congress. He knew about them
and pressed hard for us to give him a list of the other Town Meetings
scheduled there, and said that he needed to go to one. He is a
busy, busy man but he got on the telephone to AID and set up an
appointment with a man that we had not been able to get to see.
We saw him immediately. AID has pretty well said that they are
going to give us a grant for nine million dollars in India. Now
once again there has to be movement from India to AID to get that
money. Anyway, the McNamara thing went well.
Coolidge has been anxious for us to meet the President
of Harvard. President Bok is concerned about how Moral Philosophy
or Ethics can be taught on the undergraduate level in this time.
Coolidge knew that we had been thinking in that area, and therefore
thought we ought to go talk with Bok. Bok said that the biggest
problem in universities now is that the students are no longer
interested in the Humanities. They will study extremely hard in
medicine, law, and business, but the Humanities are gone. He contrasted
that with what was there right after World War II, and he is worried.
He is a concerned man. The Humanities in one sense are nothing
else but dealing with moral philosophy, in a deep rich sense of
that word. Every poem is on that subject. Every movie is on that
subject.
During our visit he became tremendously excited and
helped us on several levels. He spelled out to us in detail that
replication was the only thing that was needed. He likened this
moment in history to the time some years ago when anybody who
cared was doing something about the slavery situation in the United
States. He could have mentioned other examples. The issue today
is the eightyfive per cent of the people in developing nations
that have not been touched by technology. Right now, as Schumacher
said, there are two universes in each one of those nations. One
universe is the fifteen per cent who live as well as you and I
do. They many not get as many rupees as you and I do, but their
standard of living is like ours. The rest, the eightyfive
per cent, are the other universe. There is a gap between them.
And that gap is the moral issue of our time. This is another
way of saying that our concern today is with local man and local
community. Now, that was extremely crucial.
Then he got excited about replication. When we asked
him about going to Knowles, who came from that part of the country,
(a surgeon who is now head of the Ford Foundation) he said that
when we go to Knowles we have to point out replication. Last year
he went with Knowles to various nations in Africa to look at community
development projects. They discovered several fine projects but
they had stayed right in their own particular little places, getting
finer and finer and nothing was happening to the nation as a whole.
He said he thought Knowles would latch on to the replication concept.
He could not believe the formula of 25, 250 and 25,000 villages.
He also pointed out on his own that when you have done your 250
either the whole thing would have failed or the momentum would
be there to do the 2500 and the 25,000,and nobody would need to
be there priming the pump.
The last thing he suggested, and maybe the most exciting,
was that we think through a plan so Harvard students could spend
a semester in a social demonstration. We might begin with forty
students, five in Maliwada, five in Majuro, five in Jeju Do, five
in Kawangware. They would go to our social training school for
two months and then spend six months in those villages. When they
came back to Harvard, the next semester would be a course for
credit in which they corporately think through what they saw and
what happened to them. This is the answer to how you do Ethics
with the undergraduate. Do you see that? We really met with the
right guy. When he was in law school, Chester Bowles, the Ambassador
to India, made arrangements for Mr. Bok to go there for four months
and work in a village. He said, "The thing I remember most
is that I could not wait to get on that plane and get out of there.
The suffering had been too much for me to bear." You want
to know what made Bok the kind of a sensitive university president
that he is today? That experience would have to be one of the
foremost happenings.
Here is Morality: being shoved up against the raw
needs of the world without any buffer. We have just said this
is the crucial need of our time. When he got on the plane,
forces over and beyond his control had sensitized his conscience
in a new and deeply profound way. Here is morality. It does not
come out of textbooks of moral philosophy. It comes through unshielded
engagement with the underlying issues of the time in which we
live.
He said, "You get a brief description of what
this would look like on my desk immediately, and we will see what
we can do." Now I am clear why we saw Bok. It was not really
for the initial reason we needed to see him. But now we have reasons
to have gone to see him. If this happens at Harvard, we would
have a way into other universities in the Western world that could
be unbelievable. I think the hour has come when we must do that.
He was extremely excited about Town Meeting and I made one of
the mistakes of my life. At the end of my list was a note reminding
me to ask him to let us do a Town Meeting with the undergraduates
of Harvard. I forgot. Isn't that terrible? I remembered it in
car leaving the appointment. I believe he would have said, "Yes,
but let us see how we will go about setting it up." Many
of us came out of the student movement or participated in it on
campuses, and it is gone. All of us know there has to be a way
back. Wouldn't it be something if the way back was Town Meeting?
Perhaps the way is having a group of students sit down for one
day and collectively bring their brains to bear on the issues
that face our nation and their immediate situation.
The Town Meeting. I have necessarily been almost
fanatically concerned with social demonstration. But I repeat,
that is not the crucial thing we are doing now. The crucial
thing is Town Meeting. Now, Town Meeting has not developed quite
the way we intended. Nothing we have ever done has, yet there
always has to be a plan to get something started that will create
its own dynamic. Therefore the way it has developed is not surprising.
As I look back over the meetings since June of '74 when we had
those thirtynine Town Meetings, I see a rational pattern
to the development that has been unbelievable. I think that this
quarter is going to be a shootoff, but it is not going to
get the snowball coming down the mountain. And it is not going
to get going during the summer. But if we do not keep at it during
the summer and keep at it hard all summer long, it is not
going to break loose in terms of our whole life. You already sense
that we are not who we used to be and can never return to what
we have been in the past. Those major cities are going to come
off in their own way, like Washington is going to come off the
last week in June. That is going to be absolutely incredible.
We are going to find ways to get to more Adas, Ohio or more Adas,
Oklahoma or back country outback as they say in Australia.
That has to speed up. In the next few years they are going to
be a lot more important than doing Washington. Right now, doing
Washington is crucial.
Then we are going to take another shift that you
have already thought through which may occur at this time next
year. You are pioneering in it already. That shift will be to
do Town Meetings in special communities. We have to move to the
high schools and maybe the elementary schools of this nation.
We have to move to a constituency of black villages in this country.
We have to have one of these on every Indian reservation. The
fact that we have had one with the Blackfeet across the border
of Canada or with the Eskimos up north is tremendous. I can see
us doing Town Meeting within corporations, within business communities
themselves. You can figure out other special constituencies.
Secretly, as you do too, I have never surrendered
the number of 10,000 meetings and two million people which is
roughly one per cent of the people in the United States. We had
to cut down to 5000 because some of our psyches couldn't stand
ten. But deep down underneath we have to really think about ten
thousand. Built into replication of social demonstration around
the world is a Town Meeting. Six months ago the idea that we were
going to have Town Meetings in 700,000 villages in India was somewhat
of a balloon, a daytime Walter Mitty. Today, in terms of concrete
possibility, that is no longer out in the realm that the willofthewisp
lives in.
We are going to see that profound awakenment of humanity
is what a new civilization, a new social vehicle finally is all
about. And we are going to be far more clear at that time that
the Christ happening is the happening of awakenment. Or that the
happening of awakenment is the Christ happening. At General Conference
they were extremely interested in talking radically about the
new kind of evangelism. Town Meeting is at the fore of that.
Joseph W. Mathews