PEACE THROUGH SOCIAL EMPOWERMENT 4. PRIMARY CAUSES
return to top pageIn posing the question we are of course pointing to the need to grasp the real nature of the causes of the global crisis. What then are those causes? We are concerned to locate here but one.
Every former age can show how power has been abused to one degree or another, what is singular about the modern era is the sheer scale of that abuse; it is a scale which, armed with a vast panoply of chemical and mechanical invention, is able to dominate citizen life right down to the minutest particulars as never before.
The power implied here, as indicated above, is on so enormous a scale as to be out of control, it is running amok and creating crisis situations in almost every sphere of human experience and endeavour.
One of the major defects of so many organisations seeking to arrest the ensuing effects of the abuses of power is just that. So often they are seeking to restore a status quo ante, a status that produced the problem in the first place.
We need to see that the massive abuses of power now dominating human affairs have their origins in the destruction of genuine peoples' power, power at the smallest level of society, in the village, the neighbourhood, the community or whatever name we choose to give it; power which was frequently expressed in work, in localised trading, in relationships and in a wide range of social usages, common understandings and adherence to a common code of moral principle.
Our prospects of countering the evil forces promoting the global crisis and of making any significant progress are bleak indeed if we do not grasp that if people have no real power to enable their moral judgements to be reflected in the general life processes of their own communities, if they do not themselves control their social structures, their schools, post office, bank, police, hospital, transport and their welfare services; if they have no local power to determine these matters, if they do not have their own locally elected representatives to sit, with others similarly elected, on boards which govern matters of wider import, including public utilities such as water, gas, electricity and not least, governing the content of radio and television, they have no effective power at all.
The very structures disempower them and it is a mere abuse of language to describe any such process as democratic. Democracy, we should never cease to hold, does not mean government of the people, nor government for the people, both are essentially totalitarian concepts, it means government by the people. All else is claptrap and delusion.
Once the power of people to make decisions at community level is nullified by shunting that power to ever larger centres of administration and control, then what becomes determinative is not the will of the people but factors attendant on the pursuit of power, whether in terms of place, profit or prestige, as an end in itself. .
Supposing then our reform movements changed tack? Supposing they tackled the problem of giantism and of excessive size in order to restore control of affairs back in citizen hands? And suppose all these reform and protest organisations joined hands to do so?
What then would be involved?
They would be agents of the most thoroughgoing and peaceful revolution the world has ever seen. A revolution not to capture power but to dissolve it. To dissolve it into people's hands where it rightly belongs in the manifold neighbourhoods, villages, parishes and human scale political structures throughout the world.
They would be putting paid to the absurd notion that the citizen can have a meaningful voice or influence in political parties or in governments so enormous as to make it inevitable that power will be in the hands of those who are controlling things at the centre, a control which ensures that they control the party conferences, agendas, policies, candidate lists and so on.
So persuasive is the power of established practice, and the powerful propaganda that accompanies it in asserting the natural and inevitable validity of our current institutions, that it requires a real effort of mind to recognise that far from being natural or inevitable they are neither. They are based in fact on quite unsustainable assumptions and not least of these assumptions relates to current scheming and plotting (it really is nothing less) to unite Europe under one Brussels-dominated Government.
Foremost, with the horrific tragedy of two world wars uppermost in mind, there is the assumption that a united 'Europe' will achieve peace. Will it? Can it? The mere supposition that it can and will ignores the lessons of all the other giant federations already in existence. Have any one of them achieved peace?
The USA, the most powerful of them all, has been involved in every major war of the 20th century. Is it likely that it will prove any more peaceful in the 21st?
India, to take another example, despite its crippling poverty, since the transfer of colonial power from Westminster to Delhi, has had a military confrontation with every one of its neighbours.
China, to take another, despite numerically being the largest state on earth yet sees fit to invade and subjugate the ancient peoples of Tibet.
Russia, like all other monster states, is armed to the eyebrows with nuclear weapons and is even now waging a genocidal war against the people of the independent state of Chechnya;
Brazil, to take yet another monster, is busy destroying the priceless human heritage of its rain forests, its government operates in a morass of drug-related and other forms of corruption and if it has yet to be a threat to peace beyond its borders it is only because it currently lacks the means to mount one.
Is there anyone sanguine enough to suppose a united 'Europe' will behave differently? Its government is already a byword for corruption on a scale even the USA finds difficult to rival, and already its leading voices are urging the need for an 'European' army.
None of this should surprise any intelligent observer; the birth of 'Europe' has been accomplished, insofar as it has yet succeeded, by a team of midwives difficult to distinguish from a bunch of crooks.
But, we are assured, 'Europe' is the path to prosperity. It will be noted that the assurance is based on the supposition that a continuance of current policies of economic growth have any vestige of moral validity, or that to achieve globally the material consumption standards of an average U.S household would not require the resources of several more planets.
But if uniting Europe will achieve prosperity where is the evidence? Are there any lessons to be learned here from the world's existing giant federations?
The USA is undoubtedly, in terms of per capita gross national product, the wealthiest nation the world has ever seen, but is it a form of riches, given the environmental holocaust it has engendered to achieve it, one which others ought to pursue? We may also ignore that two million of its citizens are in prison, but can we ignore its millions who live below the poverty line and that their numbers are growing?
For that matter, are the other giants shining examples of economic prosperity, even assuming the forms of prosperity on offer are worthy moral objectives? Against the fact that both China and India, in per capita G.D.P. terms, are both at the bottom of the global league table, we have to ask, why it is that of the top forty of the richest states on earth thirty have populations of less than ten million?
Small may not always be beautiful, sometimes indeed it can be quite horrible, but the evidence suggests it is far more likely to be prosperous, whilst big is showing itself to be increasingly mad.
This does not mean that in a world of small nations, themselves devolving power to village or urban ward level, all problems will be solved and that we shall have ushered in an era of perpetual peace, progress and happiness. Human beings are not perfect and any system of government however well contrived, will always reflect some of those imperfections.
What it does mean is that if power to decide is restored to the citizen then the citizen's moral and aesthetic judgements will then become influential, and even perhaps determinative, in the shaping of events. Not lease, small-scale government will ensure that any abuses will tend to be of limited impact.
There is often a disposition to swallow wholesale the notion that the ordinary citizen does not have the knowledge or the capacity to make decisions on complex issues and that such matters are best left to experts, and that anyway administration on a large scale is cheaper and more efficient.
Against this the citizen needs to ask what empowered and largely self-governing human scale community would allow nuclear bombs or nuclear energy to be produced on its territory? Or allow genetic engineering to proceed? Or car production and motorways to have precedence over public transport? Or allow its local shops to be driven out of business by giant 'super' markets (it is the profits which are 'super')? Or permit the closure of its local hospital or post office? Or allow its schools to be run by people who are not members of the community? Or permit chemical farming and factory type rearing of animals under cruelly intensive conditions?
Our society abounds with abuses of power in every direction, so that the list of these questions could be extended indefinitely; the people who take up the cudgels to oppose these and other evil developments are to be applauded, but what the wide range of the questions they themselves have raised suggests is a conclusion which may often be beyond their horizons.
It is simply this; that our primary problem is not war, or the environment, or population pressures, nor the squandering of the planet's finite resources, nor the alienation from life of many millions of people; THE PRIMARY PROBLEM IS THAT OF SIZE, size developed on such a scale as to disempower people and which makes their moral judgements irrelevant to the passage of events.
If we ignore that and simply focus our energies on particular abuses then, however commendable our objectives and our efforts, we are dealing with the effects of the abuses of power and ignoring their causes. It was Einstein who remarked 'You cannot solve a problem with the mindframe that has created it'. In saying as much he was pointing to the core of our problem; a 19th century mindframe which accepts, without question or challenge, giant centralised states and economic entrepreneurship global in its scope, which together have created a doomsday scenario for the human race.
No body can be healthier than the cells of which it is comprised. If the cells of small-scale community life are debilitated or non-existent in the body politic then what we are confronted with is a form of social and political leukaemia, a destroyed immune system which cannot prevent multitudinous forms of life-threatening malignancy, such as monster global wars, from flourishing.
We are not going to solve the problems of the 21st century with the mind-frame of the 19th. Social empowerment, involving the deliberate creation of an organic, multi-cellular structure and process of our political and economic institutions, is today the only realistic path to enduring peace and to any genuine social progress.
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