From a section dealing with E.F. Schumacher in Robert Inchausti's Subversive Orthodoxy:
In his 1957 talk "The Insufficiency of Liberalism," Schumacher argued that there were three stages of human development: first was primitive religiosity, and then scientific realism. The third stage, which we are now entering, is the realization that there is something beyond fact and science. The problem, he explained, is that stage one and stage three look the same to those in stage two. Consequently, those in stage three are seen as having relapsed into magical thinking when, in reality, they have actually seen through the limitations of rationalism.
Schumacher was a brilliant man (his Guide for the Perplexed was one of the most formative books of my young adult years). The observation above is novel, but I don't think he was correct to refer to stages of human development as if they were stages in societal development. Perhaps he could refer to them as developments in an individual, but as societal intellectual dispositions? I don't think so. The historical chronology seems crammed to fit his theory.
From what I can tell, he was saying that the first 6,600 years of history (5,000 BC to about 1600 AD) were sunk in primitive religiosity (magic). That strikes me as an insult to St. Thomas, Augustine, and Christ Himself. And what about spiritual eruptions prior to Christ? Was the awakening of the sixth century BC just more magic: Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Malachi, Zoroaster (c. 660-583 BC), the Mahavira, the Buddha, Lao-tze, Confucius, and Pythagoras?
And if the magical era really did last for 6,600 years, why did our culture start to emerge from scientific realism so quickly, relatively speaking? If it started in about 1600, within 200 years popularly recognized thinkers--Rousseau, Goethe, Blake--were rebelling against scientific realism and undermining it. Granted, scientific realism still the ruling sentiment 400 years later, but by Schumacher's own observation, people were already transcending it by 1960, which is a lot quicker than the 6,600 years it took to get past magic.
