Ambition is Dead: Long Live Art

That’s gonna be part of my new philosophy. So stay tuned.

from Pickersgill Reef's photostream, flickr

But first, some Buddhist Economics, courtesy of E.F. Schumacher, whose book, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, was excerpted by one my favorite reads, Chapel Hill, NC’s magazine “The Sun,” which says:

German-born E.F. Schumacher was a British economist best known for his critique of unfettered capitalism in the West. An early hero of the environmental movement, Schumacher urged the development of local, self-reliant economies and more restrained, conservative use of nonrenewable resources.  Buddhism, which he encountered while working as an economic advisor in Burma, played a central role in the evolution of his vision.

They go on to quote his book, above, at length. Here is a tiny bit:

While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is the “middle way” and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and nonviolence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. he is used to measuring the “standard of living” by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is “better off” than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. Thus, if the purpose of clothing is a certain amount of temperature comfort and an attractive appearance, the task is to attain this purpose with the smallest possible effort—that is, with the smallest annual destruction of cloth and with the help of designs that involve the smallest possible input of toil. The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity.

Emphasis mine.