Introduction Planets & Populations Tribes & Nations One Earth & Seven Seas People &Subsidiarity Kingship & Peacecraft Culture & Divinity Diasporas & Jigsaws return to top page HUMAN SCALE GOVERNANCE 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 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.
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e-mail: peteretherden@cesc.net
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