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