Jerry Brown and
Jimmy Carter are both fond of quoting economist-philosopher E.
F. Schimacher, that "smaller is beautiful" and that the
citizenry should lower its expectations of government.
If it weren't for
"a total incapability of collaborating with anyone, even the
best of friends," they might instead be quoting Leopold Kohr.
Schumacher
invited Kohr, his old friend and fellow philosopher, to pool
their "independently developed but similar" ideas in a book,
Kohr said last week on his way to spend a weekend with friends
at Bohemian Grove.
Kohr declined,
and the rest is history. Schumacher's little book, "Small
is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered," because the
bible and its author guru of the small growth movement. Kohr has
remained in relative obscurity, though he says his own thoughts
on smallness date back 40 years and Schumacher's only 15.
Kohr, now 67 and
hard of hearing, despite the hearing aid he holds out like a
microphone, does not seem to mind the turn of events. In fact,
now that he is retiring from the academic world (in Aberystwyth,
Wales, where he has taught at the University of Wales for three
years), he hopes some of Schumacher's glory will reflect upon
him.
"I hope the
requests for lectures will increase with the increasing miseries
of bigness," Kohr said, smiling at the prospects.
(Kohr has two
speaking engagements this week in the Bay Area, but both are
private. The reason, a friend said, is that Kohr is unpublished
in the U.S., and if the public were to hear him and become
interested in pursuing his ideas, they would only be frustrated
in their attempts to buy his books.)
It is no accident
that Kor's work which he started as a newspaper correspondent
during the Spanish Civil War and later continued in Puerto Rico
for 30 years as a teacher, is winding up in Wales. The
separatist movement in that country to establish a Welsh
parliament epitomizes what Kohr has been preaching for years:
"That salvation
lies not in international handholding" but in small,
self-contained states that can look after themselves. "To live
in separation is infinitely simpler than in trying to maintain a
union."
Kohr said,
Bigness has "an impoverishing effect," and the big nations such
as the U.S., France, Italy and Great Britain "are floundering .
. . shaking on their foundations."
"The scandal of
our age," said Kohr, "is not war but big war, not poverty but
massive poverty, not unemployment but the scale of
unemployment."
"And since the
scale of a problem is determined by the size of the body which
it affects," he once wrote, "it follows that problems of social
existence are not diminished but aggravated with every increase
in the size of a community."
Problems would
not be eliminated in city-state sized entities, he said, but
they would be more manageable.
Kohr used the
energy crisis as an example: "At least 60 per cent of energy
consumption is commuting," he said. If we lived and worked in
smaller communities and resumed use of "our amplitude of muscle
power" (i.e. walking), "we would solve 60 per cent of the energy
problem. In Puerto Rico, I had to travel 50 or 60 mile a day to
conduct my business. in Aberystwyth, I travel one-half a mile --
30 seconds for a haircut, a minute to buy fish, two minutes to
my office by the sea."
Kohr laughingly
acknowledges that his ideas have often been classed as
eccentric. "Yes, yes, I have been considered a crank," he said
in his heavy Austrian accent. But thanks to friend Schumacher's
popularity, Kohr believes he has "graduated from crank to
romantic."
He is pleased
that the small-is-beautiful concept is catching on but also
disturbed that the politicians who advocates it don't fully
understand how it works.
"You can't say
less government is better" in a huge country the size of the
United States, he said. "You need the biggest government
possible in the biggest countries. It is a futile exercise in
folly to suggest otherwise."
"If one wants
less government," he went on, "you must first diminish the size
of the place to be governed. The answer is not, let's have
smallness. It's, let's create the frame where the problems are
diminishing the size of society."
On a visit to San
Francisco in 1967, at the invitation of the late advertising
genius Howard Gossage, Kohr suggested the creation of a
city-state here, with a duty-free port, as an antidote to
poverty -- and to a power shift to Southern California.
"The people here
feel themselves primarily citizens of San Francisco secondarily,
if at all, as Californians or even Americans," he said at the
time. "You're practically a city-state now, in feeling."
He is not quite
so outspoken today, at least on the subject of San Francisco.
Secession from the state of California "would be the prerogative
of the citizens of San Francisco," he said. "But I am an
enthusiast of any community to make the most of its limited
dimensions, whether it be San Francisco, Wales, Scotland, Sicily
or Swiss canton."
Kohr, at last, is
going to have a chance to practice what he preaches. Aside from
the hoped-for invitations to lecture, he will retire to "a
little farm in Wales" and see just how self-sufficient he can
become.
__________
Anderson,
Judith. "An Advocate of Small Who Thinks Big." San
Francisco Chronicle.
Tues, June 7, 1977, p. 21.