Based on a lecture given in London, August 1968, and first published in Resurgence, Journal of the Fourth World, Vol. II, No. 3, September/October 1968.
I was brought up on an interpretation of history which suggested that in
the beginning was the family; then families got together and formed tribes;
then a number of tribes formed a nation; then a number of nations formed a
'Union' or 'United States' of this or that; and that finally, we could look
forward to a single World Government. Ever since I heard this plausible story I
have taken a special interest in the process, but could not help noticing that
the opposite seemed to be happening: a proliferation of nation states, The
United Nations Organisation started some twenty-five years ago with some sixty
members; now there are more than twice as many, and the number is still
growing. In my youth, this process of proliferation was called 'Balkanisation'
and was thought to be a very bad thing. Although everybody said it was bad, it
has now been going on merrily for over fifty years, in most parts of the world.
Large units tend to break up into smaller units. This phenomenon, so mockingly
the opposite of what I had been taught, whether we approve of it or not, should
at least not pass unnoticed,
Second, I was brought up on the theory that in order to be prosperous a
country had to be big -- the bigger the better. This also seemed quite
plausible. Look at what Churchill called 'the pumpernickel principalities' of
Germany before Bismarck; and then look at the Bismarckian Reich. Is it not true
that the great prosperity of Germany became possible only through this
unification? All the same, the German-speaking Swiss and the German-speaking
Austrians, who did not join, did just as well economically, and if we make a
list of all the most prosperous countries in the world, we find that most of
them are very small: whereas a list of all the biggest countries in the world
shows most of them to be very poor indeed. Here again, there is food for
thought,
And third. I was brought up on the theory of the 'economies of scale' --
that with industries and firms, just as with nations, there is an irresistible
trend. dictated by modern technology, for units to become ever bigger. Now, it
is quite true that today there are more large organisations and probably also
bigger organisations than ever before in history; but the number of small units
is also growing and certainly not declining in countries like Britain and the
United States, and many of these small units are highly prosperous and provide
society with most of the really fruitful new developments. Again, it is not
altogether easy to reconcile theory and practice, and the situation as regards
this whole issue of size is certainly puzzling to anyone brought up on these
three concurrent theories.
Even today, we are generally told that gigantic organisations are
inescapably necessary; but when we look closely we can notice that as soon as
great size has been created there is often a strenuous attempt to attain
smallness within bigness. The great achievement of Mr Sloan of General Motors
was to structure this gigantic firm in such a manner that it became, in fact, a
federation of fairly reasonably sized firms. In the British National Coal Board
one of the biggest firms of Western Europe, something very similar was
attempted under the Chairmanship of Lord Robens; strenuous efforts were made to
evolve a structure which would maintain the unity of one big organisation and
at the same time create the 'climate' or feeling of there being a federation of
numerous 'quasi-firms'. The monolith was transformed into a well-co-ordinated
assembly of lively, semi-autonomous units, each with its own drive and sense of
achievement. While many theoreticians -- who may not be too closely in touch
with real life -- are still engaging in the idolatry of large size, with
practical people in the actual world there is a tremendous longing and striving
to profit, a at all possible, from the convenience, humanity, and manageability
of smallness. This, also, is a tendency which anyone can easily observe for
himself.
Let us now approach our subject from another angle and ask what is
actually needed. In the affairs of men, there always appears to be a need for
at least two things simultaneously, which, on the face of it, seem to be
incompatible and to exclude one another. We always need both freedom and order.
We need the freedom of lots and lots of small, autonomous units, and, at the
same time, the orderliness of large-scale, possibly global, unity and
co-ordination. When it comes to action. we obviously need small units, because
action is a highly personal affair, and one cannot be in touch with more than a
very limited number of persons at any one time. But when it comes to the world
of ideas, to principles or to ethics, to the indivisibility of peace and also
of ecology, we need to recognise the unity of mankind and base our actions upon
this recognition. Or to put it differently, it is true that all men are
brothers, but it is also true that in our active personal relationships we can,
in fact, be brothers to only a few of them, and we are called upon to show more
brotherliness to them than we could possibly show to the whole of mankind. We
all know people who freely talk about the brotherhood of man while treating
their neighbours as enemies, just as we also know people who have, in fact,
excellent relations with all their neighbours while harbouring, at the same
time, appalling prejudices about all human groups outside their particular
circle.
What I wish to emphasise is the duality of the human requirement when it
comes to the question of size: them is no single answer. For his different
purposes man needs many different structures, both small ones and large ones,
some exclusive and some comprehensive. Yet people find it most difficult to
keep two Seemingly opposite necessities of truth in their minds at the same
time. They always tend to clamour for a final solution, as if in actual life there
could ever be a final solution other than death. For constructive work, the
principal task is always the restoration of some kind of balance. Today. we
suffer from an almost universal idolatry of gigantism. It is therefore
necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness -- where this applies. (If
there were a prevailing idolatry of smallness, irrespective of subject or
purpose, one would have to try and exercise influence in the opposite
direction.)
The question of scale might be put in another way: what is needed in all
these matters is to discriminate, to get things sorted out. For every activity
there is a certain appropriate scale, and the more active and intimate the
activity, the smaller the number of People that can take part, the greater is the
number of such relationship arrangements that need to be established. Take
teaching: one listens to all sorts of extraordinary debates about the
superiority of the teaching machine over some other forms of teaching. Well,
let us discriminate: what are we trying to teach? It then becomes immediately
apparent that certain things can only be taught in a very intimate circle,
whereas other things can obviously be taught en masse, via the air, via
television, via teaching machines, and so on.
What scale is appropriate? It depends on what we are trying to do. The
question of scale is extremely crucial today, in political, social and economic
affairs just as in almost everything else. What, for instance, is the
appropriate size of a city? And also, one might ask, what is the appropriate
size of a country? Now these are serious and difficult questions. It is not
possible to programme a computer and get the answer. The really serious matters
of life cannot be calculated; We cannot directly calculate what is right: but
we jolly well know what is wrong! We can recognise right and wrong at the
extremes, although we cannot normally judge them finely enough to say: 'This
ought to be five per cent more; or that ought to be five per cent less.'
Take the question of size of a city. While one cannot judge these things
with precision, I think it is fairly safe to say that the upper limit of what
is desirable for the size of a city is probably some thing of the order of half
a million inhabitants. It is quite clear that above such a size nothing is
added to the virtue of the city. In places like London, or Tokyo or New York,
the millions do not add to the city's real value but merely create enormous
problems and produce human degradation. So probably the order of magnitude of 500.000
inhabitants could be looked upon as the upper limit. The question of the lower
limit of a real city is much more difficult to judge. The finest cities in
history have been very small by twentieth-century standards. The instruments
and institutions of city culture depend, no doubt, on a certain accumulation of
wealth. But how much wealth has to be accumulated depends on the type of
culture pursued. Philosophy, the arts and religion cost very, very little
money. Other types of what claims to be 'high culture' -- space research or
ultra-modern physics -- cost a lot of money, but are somewhat remote from the
real needs of men.
I raise the question of the proper size of cities both for its own sake
but also because it is, to my mind, the most relevant point when we come to
consider the size of nations.
The idolatry of gigantism that I have talked about is possibly one of
the causes and certainly one of the effects of modern technology, particularly
in matters of transport and communications. A highly developed transport and
communications system has one immensely powerful effect: it makes people
footloose.
Millions of people start moving about, deserting the rural areas and the
smaller towns to follow the city lights, to go to the big city, causing a pathological
growth. Take the country in which all this is perhaps most exemplified -- the
United States. Sociologists are studying the problem of 'megalopolis'. The word
'metropolis' is no longer big enough; hence 'megalopolis'. They freely talk
about the polarisation of the population of the United States into three
immense megalopolitan areas: one extending from Boston to Washington, a
continuous built-up area, with sixty million people; one around Chicago,
another sixty million: and one on the West Coast from San Francisco to San
Diego, again a continuous built- up area with sixty million people; the rest of
the country being left practically empty; deserted provincial towns, and the
land cultivated with vast tractors, combine harvesters, and immense amounts of
chemicals.
If this is somebody's conception of the future of the United States, it
is hardly a future worth having. But whether we like it or not, this is the
result of people having become footloose; it is the result of that marvellous
mobility of labour which economists treasure above all else.
Everything in this world has to have a structure, otherwise it is chaos.
Before the advent of mass transport and mass communications, the structure was
simply there, because people were relatively immobile. People who wanted to
move did so; witness the hood of saints from Ireland moving all over Europe.
There were communications, there was mobility, but no footlooseness. Now, a
great deal of structure has collapsed, and a country is like a big cargo ship
in which the load is in no way secured. It tilts, and all the load slips over,
and the ship founders.
One of the chief elements of structure for the whole of mankind is of
course the stale. And one of the chief elements or instruments of
structuralisation (if I may use that term), is frontiers, national
frontiers. Now previously, before this technological intervention. the
relevance of frontiers was almost exclusively political and dynastic: frontiers
were delimitations of political powers determining how many people you could
raise for war. Economists fought against such frontiers becoming economic
barriers -hence the ideology of free trade. But, then, people and things were
not footloose; transport was expensive enough so that movements, both of people
and of goods, were never more than marginal. Trade in the pre-industrial era
was not a trade in essentials, but a trade in precious stones, precious metals,
luxury goods, spices and -- unhappily -- slaves. The basic requirements of life
had of course to be indigenously produced. And the movement of populations
except in periods of disaster, was confined to persons who had a very special
reason to move, such as the Irish saints or the scholars of the University of
Paris.
But now everything and everybody has become mobile. All structures are
threatened, and all structures are vulnerable to an extent that they have never
been before.
Economics, which Lord Keynes had hoped would settle down as a modest
occupation similar to dentistry, suddenly becomes the most important subject of
all. Economic policies absorb almost the entire attention of government, and at
the same time become ever more impotent. The simplest things, which only fifty
years ago one could do without difficulty, cannot get done any more. The richer
a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without
immediate pay-off. Economics has become such a thraldom that it absorbs almost
the whole of foreign policy. People say, 'Ah yes, we don't like to go with
these people, but we depend on them economically so we must humour them.' It
tends to absorb the whole of ethics and to take precedence over all other human
considerations. Now, quite clearly, this is a pathological development, which
has, of course, many roots, but one of its clearly visible roots lies in the
great achievements of modern technology in terms of transport and
communications.
While people. with an easy-going kind of logic, believe that fast
transport and instantaneous communications open up a new dimension of freedom
(which they do in some rather trivial respects), they overlook the fact that
these achievements also tend to destroy "freedom, by making everything
extremely vulnerable and extremely insecure, unless conscious policies are
developed and conscious action is taken, to mitigate the destructive
effects of these technological developments.
Now, these destructive effects are obviously most severe in large
countries, because, as we have seen, frontiers produce 'structure', and it is a
much bigger decision for someone to cross a frontier, to uproot himself from
his native land and try and put down roots in another land, than to move within
the frontiers of his country. The factor of footlooseness is, therefore, the
more serious, the bigger the country. Its destructive effects can be traced
both in the rich and in the poor countries. In the rich countries such as the
United States of America, it produces, as already mentioned, 'megalopolis'. It
also produces a rapidly increasing and ever more intractable problem of 'drop-outs',
of people, who, having become footloose, cannot find a place anywhere in
society. Directly connected with this, it produces an appalling problem of
crime, alienation, stress, social breakdown, right down to the level of the
family. In the poor countries, again most severely in the largest ones, it
produces mass migration into cities, mass unemployment, and, as vitality is
drained out of the rural areas, the threat of famine. The result is a 'dual
society' without any inner cohesion, subject to a maximum of political
instability.
As an illustration, let me take the case of Peru. The capital city,
Lima, situated on the Pacific coast, had a population of 175.000 in the early
1920s, just fifty years ago. Its population is now approaching three million.
The once beautiful Spanish city is now infested by slums, surrounded by
misery-belts that are crawling up the Andes. But this is not all. People are
arriving from the rural areas at the rate of a thousand a day -- and nobody
knows what to do with them. The social or psychological structure of life in
the hinterland has collapsed; people have become footloose and arrive in the
capital city at the rate of a thousand a day to squat on some empty land,
against the police who come to beat them out, to build their mud hovels and
look for a job. And nobody knows what to do about them. Nobody knows how to
stop the drift,
Imagine that in 1864 Bismarck had annexed the whole of Denmark instead
of only a small part of it, and that nothing had happened since. The Danes
would be an ethnic minority in Germany, perhaps struggling to maintain their
language by becoming bilingual, the official language of course being German.
Only by thoroughly Germanising themselves could they avoid becoming
second-class citizens. There would be an irresistible drift of the most
ambitious and enterprising Danes, thoroughly Germanised, to the mainland in the
south, and what then would be the status of Copenhagen? That of a remote
provincial city. Or imagine Belgium as part of France. What would be the status
of Brussels? Again, that of an unimportant provincial city. I don't have to
enlarge on it. Imagine now that Denmark a part of Germany, and Belgium a part
of France, suddenly turned what is now charmingly called 'nats' wanting
independence. There would be endless, heated arguments that these
'non-countries' could not be economically viable, that their desire for
independence was, to quote a famous political commentator, 'adolescent
emotionalism, political naivety, phoney economics, and sheer bare-faced
opportunism'.
How can one talk about the economics of small independent countries? How
can one discuss a problem that is a non-problem? There is no such thing as the
viability of states or of nations, there is only a problem of viability of
people: people, actual persons like you and me, are viable when they can stand
on their own feet and earn their keep. You do not make non-viable people viable
by putting large numbers of them into one huge community, and you do not make
viable people non-viable by splitting a large community into a number of
smaller, more intimate, more coherent and more manageable groups. All this is
perfectly obvious and there is absolutely nothing to argue about. Some people
ask: 'What happens when a country, composed of one rich province and several
poor ones, falls apart because the rich province secedes?' Most probably the
answer is: 'Nothing very much happens.' The rich will continue to be rich and
the poor will continue to be poor. 'But if, before secession, the rich province
had subsidised the poor, what happens then?' Well then, of course, the subsidy
might stop. But the rich rarely subsidise the poor; more often they exploit
them. They may not do so directly so much as through the terms of trade. They
may obscure the situation a little by a certain redistribution of tax revenue
or small-scale charity, but the last thing they want to do is secede from the
poor.
The normal case is quite different, namely that the poor provinces wish
to separate from the rich, and that the rich want to hold on because they know
that exploitation of the poor within one's own frontiers in infinitely easier
than exploitation of the poor beyond them. Now if a poor province wishes to
secede at the risk of losing some subsidies, what attitude should one take? Not
that we have to decide this, but what should we think about it? Is it not a
wish to be applauded and respected? Do we not want people to stand on their own
feet, as free and self-reliant men? So again this is a 'non-problem'. I would
assert therefore that there is no problem of viability, as all experience
shows. If a country wishes to export all over the world, and import from all
over the world, it has never been held that it had to annex the whole world in
order to do so.
What about the absolute necessity of having a large internal market?
This again is an optical illusion if the meaning of 'large' is conceived in
terms of political boundaries. Needless to say, a prosperous market is better
than a poor one, but whether that market is outside the political boundaries or
inside, makes on the whole very little difference. r am not aware, for
instance, that Germany, in order to export a large number of Volkswagens to the
United States, a very prosperous market could only do so after annexing the
United States, But it does make a lot of difference if a poor community or
province finds itself politically tied to or ruled by a rich community or
province. Why? Because, in a mobile, footloose society the law of
disequilibrium is infinitely stronger than the so-called law of equilibrium.
Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing stagnates like stagnation. The
successful province drains the life out of the unsuccessful. and without
protection against the strong, the weak have no chance: either they remain weak
or they must migrate and join the strong, they cannot effectively help
themselves.
A most important problem in the second half of the twentieth century is
the geographical distribution of population, the question of 'regionalism'. But
regionalism, not in the sense of combining a lot of states into free-trade
systems, but in the opposite sense of developing all the regions within each
country. This, in fact, is the most important subject on the agenda of all the
larger countries today. And a lot of the nationalism of small nations today,
and the desire for self-government and so-called independence, is simply a
logical and rational response to the need for regional development. In the poor
countries in particular there is no hope for the poor unless there is successful
regional development, a development effort outside the capital city covering
all the rural areas wherever people happen to be.
If this effort is not brought forth, their only choice is either to
remain in their miserable condition where they are, or to migrate into the big
city where their condition will be even more miserable. It is a strange
phenomenon indeed that the conventional wisdom of present-day economics can do
nothing to help the poor.
Invariably it proves that only such policies are viable as have in fact
the result of making those already rich and powerful, richer and more powerful.
It proves that industrial development only pays if it is as near as possible to
the capital city or another very large town, and not in the rural areas. It
proves that large projects are invariably more economic than small ones, and it
proves that capital-intensive projects are invariably to be preferred as
against labour-intensive ones. The economic calculus, as applied by present-day
economics, forces the industrialist to eliminate the human factor because
machines do not make mistakes which people do. Hence the enormous effort at
automation and the drive for ever-larger units. This means that those who have
nothing to sell but their labour remain in the weakest possible bargaining
position. The conventional wisdom of what is now taught as economics by-passes
the poor, the very people for whom development is really needed. The economics
of gigantism and automation is a left-over of nineteenth-century conditions and
nineteenth-century thinking and it is totally incapable of solving any of the
real problems of today. An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system
based on attention to people, and not primarily attention t~ goods -- (the
goods will look after themselves!). It could be summed up in the phrase,
'production by the masses, rather than mass production'. What was impossible,
however, in the nineteenth century, is possible now. And what was in fact -- if
not necessarily at least understandably -- neglected in the nineteenth century
is unbelievably urgent now. That is, the conscious utilisation of our enormous
technological and scientific potential for the fight against misery and human
degradation -- a fight in intimate contact with actual people, with individuals,
families, small groups, rather than states and other anonymous abstractions.
And this presupposes a political and organisational structure that can provide
this intimacy.
What is the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity. standard of
living, self-realisation, fulfilment? Is it a matter of goods, or of people? Of
course it is a matter of people. But people can be themselves only in small
comprehensible groups. Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an
articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units,
If economic thinking cannot grasp this it is useless. If it cannot get beyond
its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output
ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital accumulation; if it
cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of
poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress,
congestion, ugliness. and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and
start afresh.
Are there not indeed enough 'signs of the times' to indicate that a new
start is needed?
