Today we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism. It is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness.
E.F. Schumacher (1973)
“…If I zoom out, I see myself becoming a speck of dust and then finally becoming microscopic: basically non-existent and of course that is often – by people like Carl Sagan or Isaac Asimov and people like that – […] proffered as a REAL OBJECTIVE VIEW of the world; of reality. But it is the ultimate betrayal of human prejudice on a cosmic scale, it is the ultimate anthropomorphism. Because who’s to say that from God’s point of view – or from the point of view of ‘the gods’ – who’s to say that they share our evidently biologically contrived notion that ‘bigger is better’ or bigger is more important? That’s obviously something that we get from being little beings in a world with bigger animals that might eat us. It has nothing to do with value: ‘bigger is better’. Who’s to say that from the god’s perspective the smaller something is the more important it is, the more central it is?”
JF Martel (2023) – Weird Studies Audio Extra (Transcription)
Neither Schumacher nor Martel quite insist that smallness is ultimately superior to, even greater in its way than largeness. To argue as much would be to fall into the same chauvinistic dichotomising that is being critiqued. Rather I think they call for an emphasis on the small as a counterweight to an absurdly unbalanced value system – the ‘idolatry of giantism’ that generates tremendous problems from the planetary down to the personal domain. Perceiving the greatness of the small becomes a powerful corrective which can facilitate a recognition and thus a transcendence of any such distinctions – Zhuangzi’s ‘equalising assessment of things’.
Our ‘lords and masters’ the tech plutocrats spring to mind as prime examples of the tendency to fetishise and become fettered by ‘bigger = better’ thinking. Bored and restless like overstimulated children whose every impulse has been indulged, they turn their greedy attention to the stars, speculating as to how much of this ‘real estate’ they might conquer and colonise. One imagines that endless criss-crossing of the globe in a private jet must be liable to produce a shrinking, a profound perceptual diminishing of the world, serving only to exacerbate a presumably pre-existing tendency toward contempt for the earth. So what better antidote to this insanity but a corrective journey in the opposite direction, a wandering in the minute to enhance and expand the experience of the world and so to find peace and contentment in one’s always relative perspective.
