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North Atlantic Diasporas
a thought experiment by
William ShepherdAny new form of internationalism will only be capable of reflecting our needs if it is responsive to citizen control. This means grappling with the problems of scale, community, power and morality. As a community increases in size and becomes a mass society, two things start to happen. Firstly the 200-year perspective of a community...from the birth of its oldest residence a hundred years ago to the death of its newest member a century hence...begins to contract until both the future and the past lose all value. Secondly the flow of power shifts direction with money instead of morality holding sway over society. Societal inversion begins to manifest itself in many different ways. This essay on human scale governance explores the idea of a new form of internationalism grounded in a bioregional vision and argues that this might provide the means to square the circle and deliver both peace and freedom to an increasing number of people on the planet.
The Ancient Greeks saw man as the measure of all things. But how do we apply the small measure of man to the vastness of our planet? And how do we bring the multitude of our earth's huddled masses into our human scale calculus? These are strange new questions for mankind. How do we approach them?When engineers are confronted by a problem of this nature they do what they call a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Normally they like to do two of them, coming at the problem from two different directions. They feel pleased with themselves when both calculations point to a similar order of magnitude. Cosmologists do this too. This is how they know there must be rather a lot of cold white dwarfs out there in the vastness of space. But we will stick with the engineers. They are smart enough to add margins of safety as sacrifices to the gods...and against their own ignorance. Wonder and mystery guide their every step.
So don't concern yourself with definitions. This is a scaling exercise. We start with the family and end up by giving them the earth.
A tribe is a collection of clans speaking a common language, worshipping the same gods...probably because they share a common ancestry...and being in some form of broad general agreement among themselves about where their ancestors dwelt and where their posterity are likely to dwell.They have much to say to outsiders about these gods of theirs and we would find them singing from very similar hymn sheets whenever we investigated their myths, their songs and their sacred places. But it is not my intention to deliver an anthropological thesis so we will leave it there.
There are twenty persons in an extended family and perhaps one hundred extended families in a clan...although directly you start to think this way you are starting down a road laid out by our bureaucrats and usurocrats. Rather than turn people into masses we will leave it like that.
Our economic atlases and our 'Economist' yearbooks tend to converge on a figure of around five thousand million as the number of this planet's masses to be clothed and caloried. We have nothing better at hand so we will make use of this figure too. Our parameters are now set.
Our task now is to find some social structures that are intermediate between the modest hundreds of the clan and the planet's teeming millions. If each of these tribes were to be a collection of clans, then a good criterion to adopt would be Aristotle's maxim for the right size of a crowd. This would ensure sufficient intermingling of clans for the purposes of marriage and procreation.
With a figure for the size of a crowd of a few hundred or so we find ourselves with a figure of between half a million and a million for our theoretical tribe. At this size clan representatives can gather together and know each other almost personally while still being able to hear what is being said from the back of the crowd without microphones or megaphones.
From the view of structural sociology, a nation is a loose-knit confederation of tribes. There are sound reasons for worrying about any nation that grows above a few million souls, so there are limits to the number of tribes that should be nationised. A dozen is good. Two dozen is slightly alarming. Any League of Real Nations would be wise to tell its applicants to breakdown their nation into its constituent tribal parts if their population is above five million or so on application.
For scaling purposes this is as far as we need to go. We have ourselves our first tribal gatherings and we have a League of Nations. We want everybody on earth represented but we are also seeking to keep our assembly within a certain human scale size range. Have we squared the circle? If you do the arithmetic you will find that we are close...but not close enough.
We have three hundred and fifty delegates within our walled garden...but there are an equal number left outside the gates. In other words, tribes plus nations into earth won't go. So we need a further scale-down factor if we are to give ourselves room for the world's expanding population.
Having completed our scaling and established the feasibility of a cascade principle for our gatherings and deliberatings based on the family, the clan, the tribe, the nation and the planetary bioregion we must promptly pay our respects to the principle of subsidiarity.This principle means that the planetary bioregional assembly will be obliged to keep out of matters that can be dealt with by the national assemblies. And that they in turn will be expected to keep their itchy fingers in their pockets and mind their own business regarding matters that can be sorted out by the higher level...higher equals closer to the people...of the tribal assemblies.
And as for family business like pensions and charity, work and play, clans ought not to be meddling in such matters but should be using their clan assemblies to make sure that the tribal assemblies keep out of their patch. That is the principle, in principle. But never underestimate the difficulty inherent in the task of applying the general principle to a particular time and place, which is why you need to do it through people and not through policies and procedures as the bureaucrats would do.
Our Elizabethan seafarers used to think in terms of the seven seas. One of them eventually turned out to be an ocean basin, which we refer to as the North Atlantic Ocean.Were a tribal gathering to be called from the North Atlantic Ocean, as one of seven tribal gatherings on the planet, our numbers would work out very nicely. So let us turn our thought experiment around, start with the idea of a Planetary Bioregional Assembly and see where this might lead us. What is the nature of this beast?
It is a confederation of nations, which are each confederations of tribes, which are confederations of clans, which are confederations of families. As a dweller in the North Atlantic Ocean Bioregion, you may act as a democratic representative for your family at your Clan Gathering; for your clan at your Tribal Gathering, for your tribe at your National Gathering, or for your nation at your Planetary Bioregional Gathering. That is the scale of things for a few decades.
Going beyond that takes us into the population question. This we address by arguing that a curb on population growth would be the consequence of a shift to human scale governance rather than a prerequisite for it because the forces generating geometric growth in population would disappear. As a result there would be no problem to solve and no need to put ourselves in the position of playing God and devising population policy. As an aside I would also add that what the people of Calais or Dover might do to keep their population within the carrying capacity of their bailiwicks would, in any event, be different to what would be decided by the crofters of Rathlin Island or the tin miners of Tintagel.
Human life has seen fit to confine itself to the shallow regions around the rim of the North Atlantic Ocean Basin. Because most of our ancestors came to where they are today by way of an extensive network of water trails, they tend to be huddled about the river estuaries.So pulling in our geographers the first thing to be done is to put them together with our model builders so that together they can build us a decent three-dimensional model of our newly discovered bioregion, suitable for laying out in the local Village Hall. That would give us our earth blood circulatory systems. River catchments and city regions is what we would have our eyes on.
Next we would turn to a list of cultural associations in North and South America. From this we would expect to get a pretty good cross-section of our ethnic mix. The Irish know a lot about the Irish diaspora, as do the one hundred and one other linguistically based cultural associations. Our many international organisations would be a great help to us here.
This would give us our family circulatory systems. Put the blood of our North Atlantic families together with the blood of the earth's circulatory system and I think we would see something emerging to which I could put the label 'North Atlantic Tribe'.
Finally we would call upon those with an entrepreneurial bent and encourage our 'League of Real Nations' to take shares in a company set up to produce maps such as the 'North Atlantic as seen from Dublin'. Within next to no time every village school would be learning geography by jigsaws. The brighter kids would be setting up software companies to model the movements of the bioregional circulations...organic models rather than mechanical ones.
We should make sure our league has shares in those companies too. After all money makes the world go round. Except now it would be our money. And the world would be turning the way we wanted it to...at its natural rate.
Meanwhile we would all be blood brothers smoking the pipes of peace together.
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e-mail: williamshepherd@cesc.net
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