Dr. E. F. Schumacher: Author of the Book Small is Beautiful

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In a sense everyone believes in growth, and rightly so, because growth is an essential feature of life. But growth is not automatically good . . . remember the comparison of my children's physical growth versus my own.

The home-comers believe in growth, but not mindless growth for its own sake. They know that, at any given time, many things ought to be growing . . . but that many other things ought to be diminishing. They ask only that we evaluate and use some judgment. So that those things which are required, those which are healthy, and those which are good should grow . . . but those which are not required, those which are not healthy, and those which are not good should diminish.

It is the same with progress, which also can be said to be an essential feature of all life. The home-comers can see that what we now call "progress" is heavily weighed in favor of ever-greater size, ever-more complexity, ever-higher speeds, and ever-increasing violence. And they have taken stock and they have seen that this bias is destroying the very basis of our existence.

The home-comers know that man cannot live without science and technology any more than he can live without nature. But they see that our technology has taken a wrong turn and they simply ask that it be redirected. The home-comers want to go forward—they want to "progress"—just as much as anyone else. But they see that we can only go forward with, rather than against, the natural order of things.

PLOWBOY: Well you and your home-comers are asking a lot. After all, it's very easy to just join the prevailing crowd and mindlessly chant that growth is good. It's a hell of a lot more difficult, though, to decide which growth is good and which is bad and which is somewhere in the middle.

SCHUMACHER: Oh, as I've just said, the people of the forward stampede have all the catchy tunes . . . but the genuine homecomers have the most exalted text: nothing less than the Gospels. And if they'll listen to what nature and the Gospels have to say, they'll find it quite easy to make those decisions.

PLOWBOY: How so?

SCHUMACHER: There are two great teachers in life. One is nature and the other is revelation or the traditional wisdom of mankind as manifested in all the world's important religions. And the very reason that the forward stampeders are leading us in a plunge into hell is because they'll no longer listen to either one.

We have become a society of townsmen. The people who now control our destiny almost universally have a city orientation. They spend most of their time on concrete. They have little chance to study nature directly . . . and when they get the chance, their lack of experience and lack of interest make them misinterpret what they see.

These townsmen also consider it fashionable to ridicule anything of the spirit. They "don't believe" in revelation, they say. They only believe in what they can see and touch and measure.

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