The North Coast times-eagle., July 01, 2001, Page 5, Image 5

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NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , JULY 2001
HEATH HINEGARDNER
achieve political eminence do so only by lashing themselves to
the clichés of the institutionalized past, and repeating with the
false rhetoric of new discoveries the enthusiasms of yesterday's
innovators. The very processes of institutionalization — of
conventionalization — as they work in a mass society, assure
the loss of the fire of original inspiration. As Harold Rosenberg
put it in The Tradition of the New (Horizon, 1959):
The populizers find their natural allies in the rank and
file of each profession, to whom the latest discoveries are as
alien and disturbing as the public itself. The union of salesmen,
publicizers and distributors with the applied technicians is
enough to give them control over any new idea or work. In no
case does the founder of a method determine the use to which
it shall be put by the profession nor what the public shall be told
it means — as against the practitioner chiefs who head the
university departments and professional associations, the
influence of the actual practice of a Freud or an Einstein has
been negligible, and the same is the case, of course, with the
innovator in the arts He is doomed to isolation by the very
processes through which his work reaches society. The larger
the part played by his creation in the profession the less need
there is to understand it, and the greater grows the distance
between his idea and the influence exerted by his work. The
more widely he is known to the public the greater the misinter­
pretation and fantasy built upon his name and the greater the
distance between himself and his social existence. The famous
“alienation of the artist" is the result not of the absence of
interest of society in the artist's work but of the potential interest
of all of society in it. A work not made for but "sold" to the totality
of the public would be a work totally taken away from its creator
and totally falsified.
What is wrong with this picture? The deliberate organiz­
ation of our prejudices, weaknesses, appetites and passions into
a spuriously coherent fabric of "public opinion," which becomes
the access to the "mass market," is what is wrong with it The
moral solution for such a problem is the growth to maturity of the
people at large, resulting in their rejection of the public pander­
ing to the weaknesses they have overcome But this will take
time — a great deal of the time, it may be. Eastern philosophers
have said it will take at least seven lives or incarnations, and
growth to maturity at this rate does not seem of much value to
alienated Western thinkers who have not been brought up to
regard the evolutionary problems of mankind with patience of
this sort. But there is also another approach that has a more
immediate effect, although the philosopher, who might approve
it, would also say that moral growth is needed to give it support
This approach is the designer's solution, in contrast to the
moralist's.
The designer will say, Break up the structure of the
mass audience, the mass "market," by forming human commun­
ities of manageable dimensions -communities in which people's
problems do not grow overwhelmingly by reason of the large
numbers of those who have them If people cannot suddenly
attain maturity, they can at least cope, on this smaller scale
E. F. Schumacher, while not neglecting the moral solution,
proposed for immediate application a designer's solution He
said (in Resurgence for May-June 1975):
...let us have (social units) on a human scale, so that the
need for rules and regulations is minimized and all difficult cases
can be resolved, as it were, on the spot, face to face, without
creating precedents — for where there is no rule there cannot be
a precedent.
The problem of administration is thus reduced to a
problem of size. Small units are self-administrating in the sense
that they do not require full-time administrators of exceptional
ability; almost anybody can see to it that things are kept in
reasonable order and everything that needs to be done is done
by the right person at the right time.
I should add that, as Aristotle observed, things must
be neither too big nor too small. I have no doubt that for every
organization, as for other things, there is a "critical size" which
must be attained before the organization can have any effective­
ness at all. But this is hardly a thought that needs to be specially
emphasized, since everybody understands it instinctively. What
does need to be emphasized is that "critical size" is likely to be
very much smaller than most people in our society are inclined to
believe.
Excessive size not only produces the dilemma of admin­
istration, it also makes many problems virtually insoluble. To
illustrate what I mean, imagine an island of 2,000 inhabitants —
I have in mind an island of this size which a little while ago
demanded total sovereignty and independence. Crime in such
an island is a rarity; maybe there is one single full-time police­
man, maybe there is none. Assume, however, that some crimes
do occur, that some people are sent to jail, and that they return
from jail at the rate of one person a year. There is no difficulty in
reintegrating this one ex-prisoner into the island's society Some­
one, somewhere will find this person a room to live in and some
kind of work. No problem.
The problem of reintegrating 25,000 ex-prisoners into a
society 25,000 times as large as that of the little island is quite
a different problem, not only quantitatively but also qualitatively,
a problem the solution of which escapes the devoted efforts of
Home Office, Probation Service and countless other organiza­
tions Is it a matter of proportionately too little effort and money
being devoted to this task of reintegration and rehabilitation?
Could we solve the problem by having bigger prisoners' aid
organizations, more people and more money? Maybe we can;
maybe we cannot I personally think we cannot But the point
is that the small island does not have the problem
This is another sort of post-national thinking, obviously
sound, obviously necessary for any sort of future worth having
It introduces, of course, what may seem another problem of
large dimensions — how can we transform a mass society with
the dimensions of the United States into a federated society
of "bioregions"? It may come as a surpnse to know there are
dozens of enterprising individuals who are wjrking quite
seriously on this problem, and who have been able to introduce,
in a few areas, some modest initial changes and inquiring
attitudes of mind The first step is to begin to think in these
terms, to understand the logic of life in a bioregion, and the
vast number of problems that it wll reduce or actually eliminate
We will continue to have moral problems, to be sure, so long as
we remain human beings, but they will reduced in size so that
we are competent to deal with them Common decencies wll
no longer require that individuals become virtual heroes in order
to practice them. Life in properly sized communities wll not
necessarily produce marked changes in the moral qualities of
human beings, but it will at least stop suppressing the moral
attitudes and impulses they already possess There will no
longer be the marked contrast between social and individual
behavior, leading thoughtful writers to do books on moral man
and immoral society. Living in small communities will remove
most of the pressure put together by demagogues and "market­
ing experts" v4io make their living and attain their power through
the manipulation of the grossest impulses of human beings.
These people wll no longer have available to them the support
of vulgarized public opinion — what Max Eastman called
"organized self-interest." Their excellence and human qualities
will have opportunity to come to the surface and perhaps
predominate.
In his book, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision
(1985), Kirkpatrick Sale gives this account of the meaning of
Bioregion:
There is nothing so mysterious about the elements of
the word, after all — bio is from the Greek word for forms of life,
as in 'biology' and 'biography', and region is from the Latin
'regere', territory to be ruled — and there is nothing, after a
moment's thought, so terribly difficult in what they convey
together a life-territory, a place defined by its life forms, its
topography and its biota, rather than by human dictates; a region
governed by nature, not legislature. And if the concept initially
strikes us as strange, that may perhaps only be a measure of
how distant we have become from the wisdom it conveys —
and how badly we need that wisdom now.
This book by Sale is a good one to read for realizing
the extent to which this positive conception of post-national
consciousness is now in the air. There is an excellent biblio­
graphy of primary sources for further reading For those who
share the view of the contemporary professor that "nationality
today is almost a symptom for moral purposelessness," the
following of Sale will be of interest:
The bioregional project also takes force from the fact
that it can be begun locally, with just a few people willing to
study a little, talk a little, imagine a little, organize a little. As its
perceptions are regional, so is its canvas, and thus the energies
for its launching do not have to be very exhaustive and the
resources to keep it moving do not have to be very expensive
All too many contemporary political schemes try to take
aim at the national government — running people for Congress,
or nominating one of their own for the Presidency, or creating
caucuses in a national party, or setting up lobbies in Washington,
or organizing constituencies on a national scale The efforts
are not always useless, but they are far more often symbolic
than substantive, and they always entail a great expenditure
of money and energy for no very certain or enduring return. Or
worse: they discover that it is impossible finally to change the
entrenched Federal bureaucracy or the unresponsive Federal
administration
What makes the bioregional effort different — in any
foreseeable future, anyway — is that it asks nothing of the
Federal government and needs no national legislation, no
governmental regulation, no Presidential dispensation What
commends it especially to its age is that it does not need any
Federal presence to promote it, only a Federal obliviousness to
permit it. In that respect it is very much in tune with that basic
American spirit once described by Thoreau:
"The government never of itself furthered any enterprise,
but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way. It does not
keep the country free. It does not settle the West It does not
educate The character inherent in the American people has
done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done
somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in
its way."
To Thoreau, Kirkpatrick Sale adds:
Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care
of themselves. Take care of the communities, develop in regions,
tap the local manifestations of "the character inherent in the
American people." and the Federal structure can become quite
irrelevant
(May 14 & 21, 1986)
SONS OF LIBERTY
Two hundred and twenty-five years ago,
on July 2, 1776, a small group of terrorists betrayed
their country and vowed to commit any and all acts
of violence and treason which they claimed would be
necessary to separate from their government. Two
days later, July 4, they publicly declared their intention
of betrayal and categorically stated their reasons for
turning against their country — and they threatened to
murder or otherwise terrorize all who did not join them.
They first began their terrorist acts several years
before. They burned, looted, tortured, murdered, kidnap­
ped and held hostage representatives and supporters
of their government. They ambushed and killed soldiers
and policemen.
Numerous attempts at negotiation only increased
their demands and brutality, until finally the previous
year, in April 1775, they committed open rebellion by
attacking government forces sent to protect loyal citizens
from their terrorism.
The terrorists cloaked their atrocities and
treachery with a specious document that claimed
the support of God and the sympathy of humanity.
They named their perfidious sedition a Declaration of
Independence.
-M ichael M c C usker
*MANAS was published for 40 years, 1947 to 1987,
from Los Angeles, California It was a "journal of independent
inquiry" concerned with "intelligent idealism." Its articles were
unsigned, "to present ideas and viewpoints, not personalities."
The w>rd manas comes from a common root suggesting "man"
or "the thinker."