[Friday Musical Interlude] Glimpses of a future for human scale

Posted on | April 9, 2010 | Comments Off

One of the biggest differences between the United States and everyplace else is … well … bigness.

Certainly, when visiting Europe, it is striking that the landscape is dominated by small shops housed in small buildings lining small streets dotted with small cars. There was a lot of walking and bike riding because, evidently, nothing was all that far away from anything.

And, when you talk about the U.S. to any natives who have visited us (or, when I did), one of the things they are almost certain to remark upon (because it is what makes us the most foreign, in their eyes) is how large everything is here.

(Yeah, okay, go ahead and come to the conclusion that I’m obsessed with size. When you stop and think about it, I have to be. Comes with the territory.)

The 20th century really was the era of centralization, mass production and the democratization of possessions. Largeness was everything because with largeness came scale (better profit margins = more wealth), visibility, and many forms of power.

Wanna know why your government is so in love with very large corporations? Because partnering with giant corporations and helping those giant corporations to remain viable and keep all those people employed also gives your government easy access to you, for the purposes of everything from collecting taxes from you to making social welfare benefits available to you.

And our government finds it much easier to partner with a single company employing 5,000 people than it would to partner with 2,500 companies employing between zero and three people each.

The problem with all that is that the largeness is not natural to us humans. We do not ordinarily occupy that much space or require habitats on that scale. We can make those sorts of spaces (and institutions) only because we have opposable thumbs and reasonably advanced technology.

But we’re not entirely comfortable with all that largeness.

Similarly, we are taught to (socialized to) worship extreme wealth in this country but we are not entirely comfortable with it, either.

The result has been, over the last decade or so, a certain amount of push-back against large. Specifically, it’s push-back against things like residential centralization (policy biases in favor of urban), workplace automation (including increasing expectations for people to behave like machines), the over-regulation of human interaction (there’s a difference between a boss holding you back unless you sleep with them and the lout by the water cooler who is annoying but holds no real power over you).

This stuff is the heart and soul of the resurgence of small.

Look at the sorts of things that are becoming fashionable.

Getting away from the cities and from generally packing people into living spaces as if they were sardines.

Slow food, real food, kitchen gardens and farmers markets, food as nature intended rather than stuff processed to resemble food and packaged to be attractive (if not nutritious).

Buying local, avoiding big box retailers, buying from and working for and starting microbusinesses and nonemployer businesses (independent contractors) by the million.

We don’t like too big to fail anymore. In fact, we’re not so sure we like any form of “too big” anymore.

People seem to be yearning to get back to human scale in everything they do. We are longing to get away from the inhumane environments that are often created by the vastness of the institutions around us (political and economic).

We struggle on and on against those vast institutions “to feed this hunger burning deep inside” of us.

(Pause for musical interlude … )

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This is what I see when I look into the future. How about you?

(Credit where it’s due: props to this opinion column by David Brooks, with whom you may think I agree surprisingly often — which only goes to show how confining labels like “liberal” and “conservative” really are, especially when used to describe people who actually think.)