We talked about many things; I hadn't seen her since Nora and I went to our friends Neoma's and Ben's wedding in August 2010. [Neoma is now two weeks away from having their first baby, who will almost certainly be born with a passport in hand.] One thing she told me was that she and her husband have just decided that they're going to homeschool their son, who's 8 years old. There are a lot of reasons, as there always are, but one of the things that it drove home for me (again) was the problem of scale.
When your work is with a handful of people, or with a piece of material right in front of you, you can be attentive to its details. You can see the way that each person receives and works with ideas, you can watch the grain of the wood take shape, you can see patterns emerge before your eyes. But hardly any of the ways we make our living any more have that kind of attentiveness, because they almost all happen at a massive scale. A restaurant that serves fifty diners an evening is a different kind of restaurant than one that serves fifty diners every ten minutes. A clothier who makes a thousand shirts an hour is a different kind of business than a clothier who makes a shirt a day. And a school that serves a thousand students is a different kind of school than one that serves eighty.
Our friend Dave is a wood turner, and I think his bowls are completely gorgeous. Not merely because of the wood he uses — lots of people use good northern hardwoods. And not just because he has a good sense of line and proportion — lots of people have design sense. Dave's bowls are remarkable because I look at each one of them and see him paying attention. Each bowl is different in thickness, different in curvature, different in its base and decoration. He's letting the wood itself help him make decisions. He could hire a team of workers and make a hundred bowls a day, but they wouldn't be nearly as interesting.
In 1973, the British economist E. F. Schumacher published a remarkable little book called Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. Schumacher was what you might call a reverse colonialist; he worked for huge national economics boards and helped with German reconstruction after the war, but his primary gift was to look at village-scale economies (mainly in his travels to Burma, Zambia and India) and to say not that they needed to be "modernized," but rather that modern economies needed to understand more fully the successes of the small. Work, according to Schumacher, is not a mindless tool to facilitate consumption. Rather, work is an expression of one's own abilities and a gift to those who receive it, and can only be done well in that spirit of meaning and relationship.
The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his facilities; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining him with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence... To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.Can anything worth doing be done at a massive scale? Is it possible to serve 125 billion hamburgers or 14 million college students or 2.3 million prison inmates and do it with any degree of craft? Is it possible to design a curriculum through which all students pass together in pace, trajectory, sequence and outcome, and have any sense of what it means uniquely to any of them?
Instead of division of labor, we need integration of labor. Instead of economies of scale, we need economies of attention. Instead of a rush to growth, we need an understanding of enough.
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