Human Scale 0698110137

Citation preview

-

x3lG GOVERNMENT big business, big everything crises that imperil

- how the

modern America

are the inevitable result of

giantism grown out of control

and what can be done about it.

KIRKPATRICK SALE examines a nation

in the grips of

growthmania and presents the

ways to shape a more efficient and livable society built to

the

Digitized by the Internet Archive in

2016

https://archive.org/details/humanscaleOOkirk

HUMAN SCALE

ALSO BY KIRKPATRICK SALE THE LAND AND PEOPLE OF GHANA SDS

POWER SHIFT: THE RISE OF THE SOUTHERN RIM AND ITS CHALLENGE TO THE EASTERN ESTABLISHMENT

Kirkpatrick Sale

COWARD, McCANN & GEOGHEGAN NEW YORK

Copyright

©

1980 by Kirkpatrick Sale

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,

not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.

may

Published on the same day in Canada by Academic Press Canada Limited, Toronto.

The author

gratefully

permission to acknowledges the following for granting

quote from copyrighted materials: Was Promises from New Houghton Mifflin Co. for an excerpt from “America reprinted by permission & Collected Poems, 1917-1976 by Archibald MacLeish, 1976 by Archibald MacLeish. of Houghton Mifflin Co., copyright.© “The Size of Song by John Rutgers University Press for an excerpt from by permission of Rutgers University Ciardi from Person to Person, reprinted .

Press, copyright

©1. 1964

by Rutgers, the State University.

4. 5.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING

IN

PUBLICATION DATA

Sale, Kirkpatrick.

Human

scale.

Bibliography:

p.

Includes index.

— Economic conditions— 1971 and government— 1945United States— government — United States Decentralization Environmental policy— United States Technology — Social aspects— United States United States

2. 3.

Politics in

I.

HC106.7.S24 1980

ISBN

301.5'0973

Title.

79-24205

0-698-11013-7

Designed by Helen Barrow Printed in the United States of America

An old cautionary tale has which

that there

it

once was a kingdom

in

of the grain crop one exceptional year somehow became poisoned, causing anyone who ate its products to go insane. That posed all

a terrible

dilemma

for the king

and

his advisors, for the stores of grain

from previous years were very modest, not nearly enough to feed the entire population of the land, and there was no way to procure food from without. The kingdom would face either widespread famine and starvation, if the harvest were destroyed, or widespread madness and chaos. After

much

deliberation, the king reluctantly decided to have the people go ahead and eat the grain, hoping its effects would be

temporary, that

at the

very least

human

would be preserved. he added, we must at the same time keep a few people apart and feed them on an unpoisoned diet of the grain from previous years. lives

But,

That way there

will at least

be a few

among

us

who

will

remember

that

the rest of us are insane.” It is

to those

few that

Steve Baer

* v'

John Holt

C. George Benello

v

Ivan

Wendell Berry Murray Bookchin Ralph Borsodi Scott Burns Ernest Callenbach

Herman E. Daly Rene Dubos Edgar Z. Friedenberg

v'

1/

Goodman Percival Goodman

is

dedicated:

Karl Hess v

Joseph Collins Richard Cornuelle

V

book

Tom Bender

Noam Chomsky

'S

this

Illich

v

Griscom Morgan David Morris Lewis Mumford

Judson Jerome Carol Pateman Lee Johnson v' Theodore Roszak Rosabeth Moss Kanter v E. F. Schumacher / Leopold Kohr Neil Seldman Milton Kotler L. S. Stavrianos Ursula LeGuin Barry Stein Frances Moore Lappe v Bob Swann Mildred Loomis Lee Swenson Amory Lovins Gordon Rattray Taylor Michael Marien Frederick Thayer John McClaughry William I. Thompson

Paul

McHarg Margaret Mead

John Todd

Hazel Henderson

Arthur Morgan

Peter van Dresser

Ian

Nancy Todd

CONTENTS TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE

part one: 1.

Parthenothanatos

2.

Crises and

3.

Turning Point Trend

4.

13

Double Binds

20 32 43

PART two:

THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS 62

3.

The Beanstalk Principle The Condition of Bigness But Not Always

4.

Beanstalk Violations

82

5.

Size and

97

6.

The

7.

Prytaneogenesis

8.

The Law

1.

2.

55 73

Shape

Failure of the State

of

107 116

Government

Size

129

PART three: SOCIETY

ON A HUMAN SCALE

7.

Harmony, Ecological Hubris Human-Scale Technology We Shape Our Buildings The Search for Community The Optimum City Energy: The Sun King Food: The Broken Loop

8.

Garbage: There

9.

Transportation:

1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

Ecological

Is

No Away

From Radial

to Cyclical

145

156 165

179 192

209 229 243 251

10.

Health: Heal Thyself

266

11.

Education: Big School, Small School

278

PART four:

ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE

1.

“Gloom

2.

The Myths of Bigness

307

3.

Standards of Living

319

4.

Steady-State

329

5.

Steady-State in Hiding

6.

The Logic of

336 343

Is

Spreading”

Size

295

•

7

7. 8. 9.

Workplace Democracy: Ownership Workplace Democracy: Control Workplace Democracy: Community

10. Self-Sufficiency 11.

Lucca's

Law

part

five:

POLITICS

System Incapable of Action The Three Rs

The Decentralist Tradition Society Without the State The “Necessity” of the State

The Importance of Size: Harmony The Importance of Size: Democracy Deficiencies of Community six:

365

377

392 404

ON A HUMAN SCALE

“A

PART

352

419 429 443 455

466 482 492 508

CONCLUSION 519

Parthenogenesis

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX

525

527 543

HUMAN SCALE

PART ONE

TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE Units of measure are the his

measure what

his

elbow,

his

whole work.

.

.

first

condition of

all.

The

builder takes as

and most constant: his pace, his foot, finger. He has created a unit which regulates the It is in harmony with him. That is the main point. is

easiest

.

Le Corbusier Towards a

The proper

size of a

New

Architecture 1958 ,

bedroom has not changed

years. Neither has the proper size

thousands of of a door nor the proper size of a in

community. Scale: by that we mean that buildings and their components are related harmoniously to each other and to human beings. In urban design we also mean that a city and its parts are interrelated and also related to people and their abilities to comprehend their .

.

.

surroundings.

Paul D. Spreiregen Urban Design: The Architecture of Towns and The most important balance of the

human

all

Cities,

the elements in space

scale.

Constantine Doxiadis Ekistiks, 1968

is

1965

that of

1

Parthenothanatos

F or

2,400 years the Parthenon has stood atop the Acropolis, an enduring monument to the imagination and craft of humankind and to the complex civilization that gave

it

birth. Artfully placed against the

backdrop of two dramatic mountains, on a large stone outcrop 500 feet above the Aegean's Saronic Gulf, it was purposefully built at an angle to the entrance gate so that you see it first not head on but in perspective, the columns receding in order and harmony, their delicately fluted lines etching a series of shadows in the Attic light against the bright, creamy stone. As you approach, the temple seems almost to float, massive and assertive though it is, for it rests on a slight hill and it was crafted without any true verticals whatsoever, the columns bending inward from base to capital with infinite subtlety and precision, the flutes so carefully measured that each one had to be carved individually like a jewel, the whole effect pulling the eye imperceptibly upward. Close to, the building's decorations, or what is left of them, immediately draw attention: the exterior sculptures display an extraordinary concern for the varieties of the human form, in motion and at rest, clothed and

naked, while the interior friezes of the Panathenaic procession convey the energy and centrality of the workaday civic life of the city below. Within, where the measured classical spaces, even in their ruined condition, suggest the kind of monumentality that befits a temple, the sense of the

human measure

again reflected in the dimensions of the columns and remnant forms, and the rational, humanistic spirit that

informed

is

unmistakable still. To architects a model, to archaeologists a treasure, to classicists a palimpsest, to historians a time chamber, to humanists an inspiration, the Parthenon has no equal, on any continent, from any age. “Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,” Emerson wrote, “as the best gem upon her zone." It has been the object of pilgrimages for many peoples of the world, but for the West it is even more: the seat of the civilization that has done more than any other to shape our own, our arts and our sciences, our politics and our governments, our culture and our most

originally

it is

•

13

14

TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE

-

During the course of twenty-four has lasted since the dawn o centuries longer than any single civilization embodiment of our heritage. It has time the Parthenon has stood as the of human warfare and human suffered much, to be sure, in the course looted it in the fifth century, the Venetians

basic perceptions

of the world.

—

ere ed— the Byzantines part of bombed it in the seventeenth, the British pried off

its

treasures

to be posnineteenth— but it has always endured, always seemed “a living and incorruptible breath, a sessed, as Plutarch had written, of

in the

impervious to age.” not Now the Parthenon is literally crumbling away, and it may as we know it now. survive into the next century, certainly not people, has The Athens of Periclean times, a city of perhaps 50,000 million. It has chosen grown now to a sprawling metropolitan area of 2.5 the automobile, its primary as its primary means of transportation source of electricity the system of heating the oil furnace, its primary of production the coal-burning power plant, and its primary engine thirty years or so have been industrial factory. All these for the last slowly eaten into the gushing out a huge spew of pollutants that have particularly the soft Doric very stones of the buildings of the Acropolis, Erechtheum; of marble of the Parthenon and its smaller neighbor, the pours out of Athenian special noxiousness is sulfur dioxide, which of Athenian car smokestacks at the rate of some 2,000 tons a day and out combines with droplets exhausts at some 5,000 pounds a day and which a chemical that is quite of water vapor in the air to become sulfuric acid, stones of antiquity. Today the literally and methodically melting the entablature are falling faces of the relief figures all along the Parthenon s blobs, the away, the sculptures are being worn to indistinguishable

spirit

columnar flutes horseman on the west side is practically obliterated, the the Panathenaic frieze are fading, and hands and arms and horses’ legs in the pride of have disappeared entirely. The monument that has been centuries lifetime.

is

As

now being the

irretrievably destroyed in the space of half a director general has put it, “After resisting

UNESCO

assailants for 2,400 years, this threatened with destruction as a result of the

the onslaughts of weather and

magnificent

monument

damage which

How

wry,

how

is

human

industrial civilization has increasingly inflicted ironic, that phrase “industrial civilization.

Measures have naturally been taken to

try to

moderate the

summer now than a —more ancient Athens— have been excluded from the

Tourists

visitors in

single

on

it.

disaster.

in all the years of

Parthenon lest the and made to stay behind barriers some twenty-five feet away, interior of the

effect; jet incessant reverberations of their feet compound the pollutants Acropolis area to airplanes, too, are normally routed away from the

minimize the effect of their vibrations. UNESCO has begun million for protection and raising campaign, hoping to find at least $15 that money will be restoration of the various buildings, though much of a fund-

— Parthenothanatos

spent

actually

to

undo an

earlier

15

industrial

calamity caused

when

misguided restorers bored through the center of the Parthenon columns and reinforced them with long iron bars that have now rusted and corroded. The Greek government has removed several sculptures (and plans to remove all the Acropolis figures in time), replacing them with fiberglass replicas of the originals; it even has plans to remove the smaller Erechtheum and put it into a still-to-be-built museum, simply bulldozing over the spot that for countless generations even before Pericles was a holy shrine. And lately the experts have been seriously considering a method, during the winter when the tourist flow abates, of covering the entire Acropolis in plastic.

But none of it will make a difference. The desperate attempts to patch up the ravages of huge industrial systems with money and technology always the favored solution of our contemporary age cannot restore what has been lost, cannot prevent the ongoing devastation. The Parthenon that was, the shrine that even in imperfect form excited centuries, will never—never— be the same. And even if the current fixers succeed in all their schemes, at best they can only transform the temple into a lifeless picture postcard, its sculptures no

—

more than “authentic reproductions” has

(as the art world’s contradiction

turned into machine-molded panels of drabness, its columns shaped to some restorer’s plan, its interiors barred to public experience. Pilgrimages have not been made these many centuries so that the inheritors of Greece could stand off in mid-distance and gaze it),

its

reliefs

upon the miracles of molded

Nor

is

fiberglass.

this awesome devastation confined to the Parthenon, or to the

Acropolis, or to Greece alone. The monuments of the world’s civilizations in every country are being obliterated wherever they have the

misfortune of being located in the vicinity of a large industrial city; the United Nations International Symposium on the Deterioration of Building Stones, held in September 1976, identified at least 500 important buildings suffering this destruction. The Roman statues in Italy are disintegrating, losing

noses and limbs to the pollutions of the air. The Sphinx and the Pyramids of Egypt are being eroded, the Carthaginian remains in Tunisia, the Inca temples in Mexico. Cathedrals throughout Europe are losing their statuary and decorations to the relentless chemicals: St. Sophia, St. Paul’s, Salisbury, Chartres, Dame, St. Peter’s, St. Mark’s, the churches whose very names tell

of the story of our heritage,

Chartres,

some of

all

are decaying daily.

the finest stained-glass art

known

Notre

much

The windows of

to the world,

and of

course unreproduceable, have had to be plastic-coated to preserve them from air pollution, and they now have turned yellow and lusterless and appear to be somehow fake, like paste replicas in a golden crown.

TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE

16

wants

Yet

one designing this catastrophe, and surely no as priorities of industrial systems pertain, just as surely, as long as the heating plants and chemical-based long as private cars and fossil-fuel can never be such central parts of our societies, there

No one

industries

it.

is

occupy

however great a

will

we

muster, and however

many

millions, a reversal

of this process.

offense of the Parthenon is not of course the worst symbol, for me a haunting one: as the contemporary world. But it is a heritage of Western civilization, the Parthenon so fittingly embodies the which that civilization has been so it displays as well the condition to with which, I think one brought over the last few decades and the crises can say without hyperbole, it is now imperilled. hard truths. That the crisis of the Its tragedy suggests at least four aberration or media contemporary world is real, not some temporary the sulfur dioxide on the contrivance, and as palpable and perceptible as for some time be Parthenon. That it cannot be solved, though it may by some combination ameliorated, by the devices of modern technology, emerge if enough laboratoof plastics and chemicals that will somehow That it can be dealt with only by a ries are endowed with enough grants. reorganization of our reordering of priorities, a rethinking of values, a remove the pollutants systems and institutions so that we can begin to well as from the natural the economic and political environments as

The onslaught on

from one.

And

that

if

we do

not perform

some such reordering and reworking

ecologies, and almost certainly find our cities, our cultures, our as surely and as perhaps our very lives eroding and disintegrating just that guide this book irretrievably as the Parthenon. These are the truths

we

will

throughout.

.

that, tor it But there is more, happily, to the Parthenon than just and reorgancan also symbolize for us the direction of that reordering gracefully, designed on ization. For the Parthenon is a building carefully, pace, celebrating the human scale, measured by the human thumb and principle of man the human form, created in its every detail with the governed by the the measure .” It was built in a land whose society was 1

documents giving the great French architect Le Corbusier was once sent a set of building of the Parthenon— exact measurements of each of the marble blocks used in the and from them he determined that the Athenians had use ledges, columns, entablatures their design, he calculated the a human-scale dimension of the height of a man throughout roughly 5 feet 9 inches,^ with height as close to his “Modulor I” figure of 1.75 meters, or (The suggested by pure faith the help of conviction and a few inches (or millimetres) the ancient Greeks, Modulor, MIT Press, 1954). That in fact would be a little large for something closer to 5 feet whose stature was smaller than that of the modern European, but height, and therefore undoubtedly the 71/2 inches would be very like the average male 1.

The

—

that, allowing for minuscule architectural measure, of the Athenians. And I have calculated of the building over the years, it variations in the original construction and in the settlement

Parthenothanatos

human scale,

17

whose economic relations were ordered by the human whose government was determined by the human scale. When we scale,

appreciate that,

we can

begin to see something of what we are lacking in our contemporary world, something of what it might be pertinent to be striving for.

Not

—

Athens was ideal by any means the subjugation of women and slaves would alone have made it repugnant to the modern soul nor would anyone today knowing of the numerable advantages of the present possibly advocate recreating such a remote past. Yet for all its ills, that city at that time had such an appreciation of the central role of the human within the society, of individual worth mixed with communal value, of civic participation and reward, that a contemporary American could not observe it without some sense of what has been lost that Periclean

—

in

the intervening years.

—

Unlike the peoples of the preceding empires Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Egypt the Greeks did not worship omnipotent gods, did not serve almighty kings, did not cluster themselves into faceless urban multitudes. They evolved, for the first time, philosophies and

—

organizations built on the quite remarkable notion of the free-born citizen, an individual with an inalienable equality within the community,

who was expected

or polis,

politics, discourses,

to participate in

its

arts, sciences, athletics,

and games not only for the betterment of the

self

but

for that of the entire population.

evidenced that human principle. In the agora, the public square that was at once the marketplace and the meeting place, there would be an amorphous and spontaneous movement of people and goods and ideas from dawn to sunset, a social axis on which the rest of the city’s life spun. In the ecclesia, the democratic assembly of the citizens, the free men (or at least the more purposeful In Athens, the daily

among them) would meet

life

to formulate the decisions of the

community

on the principles of open participation and individual rights, and the offices of the city would be held by various of them chosen by lot throughout the year. In the sports-grounds and parks and at the periodic games and dances, the human body would be celebrated with a pagan zeal, and at the schools and gymnasia a similar passion, at least among those who had the leisure, was devoted to the development of the human mind. For every citizen there would be a full range of activity through

is in exact multiples of that measure that the major dimensions were built. The full height is x 8), the width 1215.3 inches (57V** x 18), and the length 2734.03 540.12 inches (5'7 inches (5'lYi" x 40.5); in addition, the interior columns are 202.5 inches high (5'7 /2" x 3),

W

1

the distance

between the architraves

herself, the

goddess to

inches

tall

measure

is

405 inches (57 Vi" x

and the statue of Athena was said to be 540 (5'lYi" x 8). The multiples of the three outside dimensions when the 5'lVi" used match exactly the 4:9 ratio that has been regarded as the governing ratio of

the Acropolis: 4:9

=

whom

8:18

=

is

6),

the city and temple were consecrated,

18:40.5.

18

TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE

.

and even artistic function, the year, a rotation of economic and political all parts of urban life and so that each would be able to participate in grow to exert undue dominance. And though there would be

none would

and laborer and slave and free and the day was standing shoulder-to-shoulder, Athenian life was meant,

toil

for most, as likely as not with artisan

organized, as

much

as possible for the individual s intellectual, aesthetic,

and athletic satisfactions. urban historian In short, Athens was, in the words of the great Lewis Mumford, a city “cut closer to the human measure.”

sexual, social,

is perils and the promise, then, coexist in the singular shrine that own age as of the Parthenon, as fitting an exemplification of our its past glories Pericles’s. Its present plight makes manifest our crises,

The

suggest the direction of our remedies. What follows is an extrapolation from just that duality, meant to be dealing as it does as definitive and judicious as I can possibly make it but, of with much that is speculative and not widely practiced, capable

refinement and development. In this first part, I want to indicate, briefly, challenge it the nature and seriousness of our predicament, the unique most of the offers, and the responses it is already provoking among the industrial nations of the West. In the second part, I try to isolate malady that has brought us to this pass— it is, not to try for suspense, the idea that bigger is better and to show that this fallacy is not only

—

dangerous and absurd but flatly contradicted by the considerable evidence showing that smaller systems smaller buildings, communities, are cities, offices, factories, farms, economic networks, and societies both more efficient and more humane. In the next three parts, the heart of the book, I hope to demonstrate our society, economy, and for the three main sectors of our lives that smaller and more people-sized institutions and arrangepolity

—

—

—

ments are not simply necessary and desirable but flat-out possible, using examples from other cultures, other ages, and around our own country to show that we have the means to achieve the desirable future as soon as we can apply the will. In the final part, I touch briefly on the possibilities of such a future coming about. It

to notice

scaled,

some time to pursue all of this, and you will not have failed that this, a book about the virtues of the small and humanquite unusually large. The easy answer is that, in books as in

takes

is

other artifacts or systems, I am no advocate of the needlessly small, rather only of the appropriate size, kept within ecological and human-

The more elaborate answer is that I have found that many ideas running against the current thought, not only

itarian limits.

to

present so

of

epoch but of the past few centuries, to reassess not merely one aspect of our present difficulties but a whole range of them, and to

this

Parthenothanatos

•

19

survey the serious and workable alternatives that have been tried and proven within that range throughout history, has inevitably taken a

goodly number of pages

—

as

it

has of travels and interviews and

researches, and years.

do not ask that you agree with me as we begin. Only that you keep an open mind, and heart, and remember the sulfuric acid eating into the figures on the Panathenaic frieze. I

2 Crises

and Double Binds

the story of a scientist from Harvard in a private plane over the la e flying on an experimental mission elaborate instruments the country of northern Alabama, measuring with Sighting two fishermen out at some fish populations of the various lakes. that as a favor he remote lake he had just surveyed, the scientist figured

William Sloane

Coffin

tells

his plane on the water nearby and tell them that of in those waters instruments had discovered there were no fish to speak another lake. So and they would have better luck if they went on to explained the bad news despite the delay, he landed near the anglers and were outraged, instantly, to them, expecting their grateful thanks. They could take his scientist in rich Southern expletives where he

would land

his

and told the them, whereupon plane and his instruments and what he could do with The scientist flew they baited their lines once again and kept on fishing. expected their disappointoff, much abashed and much puzzled. “I ment,” he said later, “but not their anger.” of the But of course we all react that way to unpleasant truth much illusions and time: it upsets our preconceptions and our comforting None of us therefore angers us, and often as not we choose to ignore it. there are wants to be told, even though deep down we may know it, that

no

fish.

is the scientist has his obligation to the truth, and there So, at the ultimately no real point in turning a deaf ear to what he says. I feel it is necessary risk of exciting anger or producing instant deafness,

Still,

one unpleasant truth of great importance: in the last industrial countries half of the twentieth century particularly in advanced the we are witnessing a series of crises beyond any yet experienced in

for us to begin with

,

,

procession of Western civilization.

Now,

dire predictions of universal crisis have

ages at least since the Sumerians and Egyptians 20

•

common

to all

settled into

urban

been

first

Crises and Double Binds

5,000 years

societies

ago.

pessimistic, a professional

And

Chicken

I

•21

do not mean

Little,

seem

to

foolishly

when I speak of this series human species had reached

of

thought the ingenuity of the its limits or the cockroaches were about to inherit the earth. Nonetheless, there is enough evidence around us, and affirmations from enough different kinds of people in enough different disciplines, to prove that our current predicament is quite real and quite unique. I need only touch on the crises briefly to suggest both their

crises, as

if I

1

magnitude and

An

their scope:

imperilled ecology, irremediable pollution of atmosphere and

oceans, overpopulation, world hunger and starvation, the depletion of resources, environmental diseases, the vanishing wilderness, uncontechnologies, chemical toxins in water, endangered species on land and sea. trolled

A

deepening suspicion of authority,

and foods, and

air,

distrust of established institu-

breakdown of family ties, decline of community, erosion of religious commitment, contempt for law, disregard for tradition, ethical and moral confusion, cultural ignorance, artistic chaos, and aesthetic tions,

uncertainty.

Deteriorating cities, megalopolitan sprawls, stifling ghettoes, overcrowding, traffic congestion, untreated wastes, smog and soot, budget insolvency, inadequate schools, mounting illiteracy, declining university standards, dehumanizing welfare systems, police brutality, overcrowded hospitals, clogged court calendars,

inhuman

prisons, racial injustice, sex

discrimination, poverty, crime and vandalism, and fear.

The

growth

of

loneliness,

powerlessness,

insecurity,

anxiety,

anomie, boredom, bewilderment, alienation, rudeness, suicide, mental illness, alcoholism, drug usage, divorce, violence, and sexual dysfunction.

Political alienation

and discontent, bureaucratic

rigidification, ad-

ministrative inefficiency, legislative ineptitude, judicial inequity, bribery and corruption, inadequate government regulations and enforcement,

the use of repressive machinery, abuses of power, ineradicable national debt, collapse of the two-party system, defense overspending, nuclear proliferation, the

arms race and arms

sales,

and the threat of nuclear

annihilation.

Economic

uncertainty,

unemployment,

inflation, devaluation

displacement of the dollar, capital shortages, the energy down my

crisis,

and

absentee-

Mankind at the Turning Point, The Domesday Book, The Limits of Growth, The Coming Dark Age, The Promise of the Coming Dark 1

.

I

just glance

bookshelf:

The Twilight of Capitalism, The Environmental Crisis, The Transformation, The Biological Time-Bomb, Awakening from the American Dream, The Poverty of Power, The Stalled Society, Our Synthetic Environment, Future Shock, Blueprint for Survival, Nightmare, The Myth of the Machine, The End of the American Future, The End of the American

Age,

Era.

,

TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE

22ism,

employee sabotage and

theft,

corporate mismanagement, industrial

white-collar criminality, shoddy espionage, business payoffs and bribes, obsolescence, fraudulent and goods, waste and inefficiency, planned debt, and maldistribution of incessant advertising, mounting personal instability,

"^'international

worldwide

national

inflation,

and

civil

plutonium stockpiles, disputes warfare, arms buildups, nuclear reactors, law, the failure ot the over laws of the sea, inadequate international Third World poverty and United Nations, multinational exploitation. imperial arrangement. unrepayable debt, and the end of the American another way: lines, Mirex, Vietnam, Watergate, New York City bankruptcy, gas redlining, CIA drug-testing, Equity Funding, ITT, riots, Medicaid fraud, coffee prices, product hostages, price fixing, Vesco, nursing homes,

Or

to put

it

.

Middle East, Rio Rancho, Kepone,

recalls, assassinations, heroin, the

SLA,

skyjacking, the

Spiro

Hustler

Agnew,

saccharin,

the square

Wilbur Mills, power tomato. Harlequin books, Los Angeles, OPEC, the SST, Andy Warhol, failures, My Lai, Charles Manson, PCB, Valium, the Appalachia, organized crime. Three Mile Island,

Wilmington 10, REITs, TV violence, strip-mining, FBI Central, Attica, the Sahel, microwaves, McDonald’s, Kent State, Penn Torrey Canyon, psychosurgery, mercury, Chile as the But that is too fast. Put that way, they come to seem as unreal ball scores and evening news programs, where death and fires and we all tomorrow’s temperature all have the same hue and value. And become inured to the crises, like the frog in the laboratory experiment who jumps out of the frying pan immediately if you put him over a high break-ins, the

.

flame

all at

once but

who

stays

on unaware

until

.

.

he

is

fried to a crisp

if

crises with a tiny flame and increase it only gradually. But the of America with are real nonetheless, and they reflect the condition

you

start

shocking aptness.

Let us isolate

a few at a slower tempo:

commit In the United States today, seventy people every day frightening suicide and another thousand or so attempt it. That is a truly ultimate form of fact, for suicide, as Durkheim argued so long ago, is the alienation from society, the ultimate evidence that life is meaningless. 365,000 every year, or 15 million a thousand people every day That people if

—

in

my

—should be moved

lifetime so far

to such a statement,

even

to attract attention or revenge a slight never actually succeed, surely says something about the society we created and the life we have offered. And then to learn that the

some

of

them indeed only want

and have

suicide rate

is

increasing fastest

among

the

young

—nearly 300 percent

suicides increase for people 15 to 24 in the last twenty years, and teenage

23

Crises and Double Binds

something like a dozen a day social pathology is at work. at

A

lesser

symptom

—

is

to realize that

of desperation

is

increasing use, and the sharply increasing

some kind

alcohol, but

number of

its

of serious

prevalent and

alcoholics, suggest

symptomatic of the same maladies in the nation. Depending on who is doing the defining, there are anywhere from 11 million to 20 million full-scale alcoholics in the U.S. today, people who regularly must drink themselves to stupefaction to get through their days, and each year there are an additional 270,000 or so. Again, it is wrenching to learn that teenagers, the very people who should have the most optimistic view of life, are turning more and more to alcohol, some 1.3 million of them now that

it is

— —

regarded as out-and-out alcoholics that’s equivalent to the entire highschool population of Pennsylvania and a 1978 study by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare found that 60 percent of all 16-yearold boys, and 25 percent of all 12-year-olds, can be classified as moderate or heavy drinkers.

The number

of murders in the U.S. has increased steadily over the last twenty years, up by nearly 60 percent since 1970, with some 20,000

people a year

now

driven to this ultimate cruelty, giving the U.S. a greater murder rate than any nation on earth, perhaps greater than any nation known to history. To be sure, many of these killings are crimes of others committed in the course of another crime, and hence are not expressions of straight-out social hostility and vengeance. But the passion,

still

form of death has become so automatic in our country and so commonplace (in New York City, for example, which averages more than four homicides a day, the great majority of cases are never even reported in the newspapers) suggests a stark failure of the society to nourish among its citizens even the most basic social value, the respect fact that this

for

human

life.

The number of people with mental

disorders, a reflection of an

cope with the surrounding world, has also increased steadily every year for the past twenty. Nearly 6 million individuals in the U.S. are treated each year in mental facilities, and according to the 1978 President’s Commission on Mental Disorders approximately 32 million people received some treatment for mental disorders in 1976 in all, it estimated, 40 million Americans have “diagnosable disturbances” and are in need of professional care, and another 55 million suffer “severe emotional distress.” • In a nation that prides itself on being the richest in history (though inability to

—

in truth there are a

number

of others with greater per capita wealth), at least 30 million people live in deplorable poverty. Washington’s standards are altered every few years to cosmeticize the bitter facts, but even

using current Federal data

it is

—

some 25 million people more Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and

clear that

than the combined populations of Finland are living beneath an acceptable standard and another 15

—

24

TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE

.

Considering that the percentage of those in industrialized nations, and poverty is greater here than in most other half as much as those in other that governments here spend only about that the nation's anti-poverty countries, one might justifiably conclude unfeeling to commitment is abjectly minimal, and apparently cruel and it treats its poor, as has been boot. If a society is to be judged by the way nearly a fifth of its people languish said, then American society, in letting wanting. in destitution, surely is to "be found I would These particular evils, just these few, should be enough. to prompt a reassessment, think, to cause us all some trepidation and have built. Can it be right both personal and national, of the society we we can point to some other ages or to organize a nation this way? Even if we can, does some other countries with worse performances, as no doubt and growing crises? that forgive our own record, these ominous ask how Suppose a Martian were to descend tomorrow and about its business in the last efficiently the United States had gone its obvious riches, twenty years or so, how effective it had been in using to solve the social large universities, its mighty bureaucracies its Sweden has problems of its people. What would we be able to say? That about the same percentage of a higher suicide rate and there seems to be

million are barely above

it.

books had mental disorders in Nova Scotia? That many well-intentioned people have been written on all these subjects and many good-hearted things to attend to given them thought? That there seemed to be other public and and for some reason other priorities for institutions both private?

We

would avert our eyes.

do not exist matter how without their deep and pervasive effect on the populace, no immune we think we may be. The evening news may not mention upstairs alcoholism, but we all know about the woman in the apartment headlines and the broken marriage down the street; there are no banner

Of course, social disjunctions

of this magnitude

colleagues about mental disorders, but we all have friends or children or who have tortured themselves into psychic knots. Increasingly, the institutions to existence of all these crises, and the inability of any of our people that, as Miss alleviate them, has created an awareness among the Clavell puts it so well, something is not right.

Though

certainly

not

definitive,

the

clearest

indicators

of this

survey taken national spirit are the public opinion polls. Every poll and the country indicates that in the last decade to gauge the mood of Americans are troubled, unhappy, distrustful, disgruntled, alienated,

you name

it,

and that these attitudes are shared by more and more

people with each passing year. Some 53 percent of the citizens recently agreed that there is “something deeply wrong in America," and some 45 percent declared

Crises and Double Binds

that the “quality of

•25

had deteriorated in the last 10 years.” Well over half say every year that “most people with power only try to take advantage of you" and “what you think doesn’t count” and a consistent life

three-quarters of the population

resigned to the proposition that “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Not one of the institutions that make up the daily fabric of the country inspires the confidence of a majority: only 43 percent of Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in doctors, 30 percent in the press, 20 percent in the U.S. Congress, and 19 percent in the major corporations. As for the organs of government, public trust and allegiance have is

been eroding every year since 1958, when the pollsters first thought to ask about it, and by now every single survey shows that a clear majority is totally disillusioned, a most astonishing fact. Recent polls have counted 58 percent who are “alienated and disenchanted by the government," 72 percent who believe the government is run “on behalf of a few special interests,” and 55 percent who feel that “public officials don't care much about what people like me think.” From 1966 to 1977, the Harris polls

show

that public confidence in the presidency

dropped from 41 percent to 23 percent, in the Congress from 42 percent to 17 percent. Only 53 percent of the eligible voters bothered to go to the polls in the 1976 presidential election, and the percentage has been declining since 1960, although the number of eligible voters has been increased by percent; 41 million voted for Carter, 39 million voted for Ford, and 66 17 million stayed home.

“A

central fact," the Harris organization concluded in our bicentennial year, is that in our nation, our people, disaffection and disenchant-

ment abound

at

every turn. That disaffection has

7 p fkpobCt

proportions.

Now

it

can be

m

Cco cJUU-X s /

'j

fairly

wSl

f-h-ber

now

reached majority vrd er 'tVc -h power,

objected here that every age has

crises and so brain, often the scientific brain, has been capable of solving, or appearing to solve, them all. Here we are, after all, in a large and successful country, with lots of comforts and luxuries, far the ingenuity of the

its

human

and however numerous the problems have been in the past they obviously haven’t done us in. But that lesson from the past disguises one important fact of the present: our crises proceed, like the very growth of our systems, exponentially. “During the last two centuries,” in the words of Dr. M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist from the U.S. Geological Survey with a worldwide reputation for vision and acumen, “we have known nothing but exponential growth, and we have evolved what amounts to an exponential-growth culture, a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth.”

What

that

means

is

best expressed in the ancient fable of the

Arab

UJ