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Planets & Populations |
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| One Earth & Seven Seas | Full Text |
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HUMAN SCALE GOVERNANCE
Radical Consultation in Swindon, Wiltshire, England
and included in the Radical Hansard
Introduction
Any form of political or economic power, which is not controlled by those affected by it, is a threat to peace, or to freedom, or to both. The questions that need to be asked centres on control: who appoints whom; who decides policy; who settles the budgets; who checks the books; who controls those who make the decisions?
Very few people have any real control over their own national (or even local) government, and such lack of control tends to surface in every kind of political abuse, from exploitation and corruption to mass misery and war.
Most theories of government seek to address the problem of power. Alexis de Touqueville believed the principle of the division of powers had solved the problem in North America in the 18th century. Others like Thoreau and Kropotkin, arguing in the anarchist tradition, believed that only the absence of government could square this particular vicious circle.
However John Papworth's first and second law of political dynamics suggest that no solution to the problem of power is possible without an understanding of the impact of scale. His first law makes the relationship explicit by stating that as a political unit increases in numbers, the capacity of the individual citizen to control its workings declines.
His second law defines the limits to growth in terms of morality and community by defining a community as a political unit of such modest dimensions that the personal relationships of the members, and how those relationships become expressed in terms of morals and values, can take precedence over every other force.
Any 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 residents 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.
Planets & Populations
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.
Tribes & Nations
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.
One Earth & Seven Seas
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.
People & Subsidiarity
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.
Kingship & Peacecraft
But what are tribes and nations for? There are four main fields of human activity: kingship, peaceship, culture and divinity. These require different forms of administration and no society has existed or endured without them. Kingship and peaceship are the traditional administrative domains of princes while culture and divinity have always been the concern of poets, bards and troubadours in societies where the princes, allied with the little people in their communities, have out-manoeuvred the priests and the lawyers. Subsidiarity is the principle of course but applied to what? It is time to start defining some of our terms.
Kingship is the temporal function of collecting, creating and distributing goods, including slaves, within the society. First of all food, then tools, then luxury goods and finally services, each with its own economics. One of our modern heresies is to seek to apply one set of economic premises to these four different economic systems. Another is to confuse kingship with peacecraft and to exaggerate their administrative importance relative to culture and divinity.
Peacecraft is concerned with the relationship of the society with other neighbouring societies. Depending on circumstances, such as physical proximity, shared ideas of conduct or the personalities of the governors; these will vary from mutual hospitality and friendship to open war. The peacecraft function is where warriors, diplomats and several species of international traders will be found. Diplomacy is war by other means. Foreign trade invariably involves war and diplomacy as complementary means often with different enemies. Modern war societies adopt such euphemisms as defence, commerce and foreign affairs for peacecraft.
Culture & Divinity
Culture concerns itself with the relationship of the collective to the individual, many aspects of both being intertwined with the individual unconscious and the society's collective unconscious. The collective will is traditionally reinforced through instilling a conscious awareness of a shared past handed down in folk tales, poems and history. Invariably this is given actuality by the establishing of rules and codes of conduct and enshrining these in manners, custom and law.
The poet and the legislator often find themselves seeking similar ends but approaching them with two opposing views on the nature of man. The poet appeals to the highest virtues and to the divine in man. The lawyer seeks to circumscribe man's 'baser nature' by prohibiting and punishing his deadlier sins. In mass societies, the media constitutes an independent third party, in conflict with poets and legislators on both means and ends, while indifferent to the fate of both the individual and the society.
When custom is no longer created or modulated by philosopher-poets, who 'put it all together', custom no longer touches the hearts of the individuals in society, as manifested by conscience, sensibilities and common sense. Then living customs decay into dead traditions, the society becomes brittle and shatters at the slightest of adverse blows. When law comes to predominate over custom we have a society in which the rule of law rapidly deteriorates into a rule of lawyers. In such societies, poets have no apparent power, but are always the well-spring of society's revitalisation, a process which often begins with the disgrace, and on occasions the destruction, of the legislative class.
Divinity concerns itself with the relationship between the individual as an individual and as a member of his social unit, and the natural, supernatural, sacred and divine. In these realms, the individual and the collective will are 'subject to fate'. Man is not free. This function has many parallels to the culture administrative function. Often the poet, instead of finding himself at odds with the legislator will find himself disputing with a professional caste seeking to control access to knowledge of the mysterious and the occult, while seeking to persuade the uninitiated that their particular priesthood is in possession of a bag of tricks able to propitiate or intervene or improve the odds. Priest-ridden societies follow much the same trajectory as law-ridden societies. And just as the poet-philosopher is the saviour of the lawyer-ridden society, so the poet-mystic is the best hope for societies bled white by a professional priestly caste.
Diasporas & Jigsaws
We have our politics of persons and our politics of place. But what is a North Atlantic tribe? The response of a pragmatist would be to hang out a 'League of Real Nations' banner and invite the nations of the North Atlantic to apply to join the club. The argument would be that this process would provide the answer a few hundred applications hence. And that is not a frivolous proposal. But there is another approach.
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 Fourth World 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.
P.O.Box 36, Rye, Sussex, TN31 7ZE England
e-mail: peteretherden@cesc.net
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