Scaling Down

Human Scale, by Kirkpatrick Sale. Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, 558 pp., $15.95.

Try this quiz. Match the following three quotations with the authors and books listed below.

(1) “...the absence of government does not lead to bewilderment and confusion and disorder as might be imagined if all of government’s claims for itself were true, but rather to resurgence of locally based forms....”

(2) “...the state makes itself necessary by destroying the other organizations that were supplying public services to the citizenry before it came along.”

(3) “Economic and social misery increases in direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation or state.”

(A) Ed Clark, A New Beginning.

(B) Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty.

(C) Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale.

If you matched (C), Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale, to all of the statements, you answered correctly — but probably only because you know this is a book review and guessed the trick behind the quiz. If you matched Ed Clark or Murray Rothbard to any of the statements, you answered incorrectly — but plausibly enough, because either of these authors might have dropped these statements in their books. Similarly, either Clark or Rothbard might have constructed the arguments Sale offers for such propositions as the following: that slums like the South Bronx are created by government interventions in the banking and building businesses, by government welfare policies, and by rent control; that the giant corporations have been built for the most part on government largesse; that, generally speaking, the state is the cause of the problems we ask it to cure.

But this is not to say that

Sale has learned his ideas from the popularizers of modern libertarian thought. He has not. He has learned them from a list of intellectual precursors—Illich, Calhoun, the Goodman brothers, Spooner, Jefferson, Thoreau, Paine, Proudhon, and Warren—which would map neatly onto the corresponding lists of the other authors in the quiz. And no reader of The Libertarian Review could fail to recognize in his statements that unique fusion of left wing and right wing political thought that is libertarianism.

But Sale does not advertise Human Scale as a libertarian book, and to the best of my memory he uses the word “libertarianism” only once, and then merely as the opposite of “authoritarianism.” In this respect Human Scale is similar to James Dale Davidson’s The Squeeze, which also doesn’t advertise itself as liberta-left like Kirkpatrick Sale, author of SDS and Power Shift and contributor to the leftist muckraking journal Mother Jones, writes a book teeming with libertarian sentiments, he must remember that his readership’s bias associates the word libertarian with baby-selling, greedy capitalists, free-market heroin, prostitution, and gold hoarding and if he displays the word prominently his readers are likely to pass his book by. But for those LR readers who are not put off by labels, it is safe to say that Human Scale is libertarian, individualist, anti-state, communitarian, voluntarist, and dedicated to the small-is-beautiful economic philosophy.

Sale contends that it is the mistaken belief that bigger is better which has led us to today’s hell of giantism in society, economy, and polity. Like the main character in the movie, The Incredible Shrinking Man, we are being

rian. Perhaps such authors delete the word “libertarian” from their copy because their books are directed at a mass market in which libertarian ideas and principles are once again becoming mainstream.

Ironically, being in the mainstream can be either a blessing or a curse. The deeps of the mainstream flow faster and carry the message farther than do the shallows of the fringe from which libertarianism has moved in the last decade. At the same time, mainstream movements are subject to powerful scrutiny and plain bias. Let’s face it: libertarianism is becoming trendy, and we all know what can happen to trends. So when an old warrior of the new dwarfed by our architecture, but not because we are shrinking, rather, because it has grown too large to integrate the human form. We are schooled in the empire of modern education which exists to count bodies and distribute paychecks. Wholesale government intervention into the economy has resulted in still-expanding mammoth corporations that are insulated from competition via bailouts, tariffs, and subsidies, corporations which operate out of human-spirit shattering superfacto-ries of arguable efficiency. And political systems have grown so big and distant that the incredible shrinking man increasingly casts his vote of disgust by staying home on election day.

The traditional government-corporate alliance seeks to lead us away from giantism’s abyss of pollution, resource depletion, crime, and alienation by means of what Sale calls technofix. A technofix is another application of the same high-technology solutions that got us in trouble in the first place. Sale wants us to reject the cult of bigness and return to the human form itself as the measure by which we design our buildings, schools, companies, and communities. Just as the human form can grow only so large before the engineering limitations of bone and muscle turn the human giant into a cripple, Sale argues, so too is there an optimum size for everything else: communities, buildings, schools, farms. And usually that optimum size is smaller than what the government-corporate alliance has directed us to build.

The way out of the abyss lies not in more technofixes, writes Sale, but in the opposite direction:

“toward the decentralization of institu- tions and the devolution of power, with the slow dis- mantling of all the large- scale systems that one way or another have created or perpetuated the current crises, and their replacement by smaller, more controlla- ble, more efficient, people- sized units, rooted in local circumstances and guided by local citizens. In short, the human scale alter- native.”

But what is human scale? The term comes from architecture and at best is a cheater stick of average human dimensions that helps designers decide at what height to put door-knobs, how steep to build stairways, and how to shape chairs and bathtubs to satisify the majority of us. Unfortunately, the averaging that results in the designer’s human scale is strongly weighted in favor of right-handers over leftys, adults over children, and average-sized people over the Tom Thumbs and Wilt Chamber-lains of the world. Tom and Wilt are as human as we are, but they wouldn’t be comfortable in a house built for us; nor would we be comfortable in houses custom-built for them.

But if the quest for human scale proves illusory in architecture, it proves impossible in our other endeavors. How can one determine a priori what the optimum size for an institution, building, community, or economy would be? For example, what is the optimum size for an airplane? The Boeing 747 is quieter, more comfortable, and more fuel efficient than the earlier, smaller Boeing 707, but now Boeing is building a new series of aircraft, the 757 and 767, sized between the 747 and 707 which are the most quiet, comfortable, and fuel efficient aircraft ever built. There is no permanent answer to the question of optimum size for anything because technology, economy, and tastes constantly change.

E.F. Schumacher notwithstanding, small doesn’t have a stranglehold on beauty. Both small and big systems can generate both beauty and ugliness. Sale would do well to take the advice of the social planner Rufus Miles, whom he quotes as saying, “No human designers can know or comprehend all the factors that need to be taken into account, and their interrelation, sufficiently to make the current set of systems work well.” The same would apply to any future human-scale alternative.

As F.A. Hayek demonstrated long ago, it is the price system that converges all the divergent information we need to judge what economic course to take. The closest we will ever come to discovering the optimum size for airplanes will be the test of the market, and even then there will be disagreement; witness Boeing’s competitors, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, and Airbus.

On the other hand, Sale excels at documenting how the state creates troublesome gargantuans. Consolidated Edison’s New York City power blackout of 1977 is a perfect example of state-inspired giantism run amok. As Sale writes,

The lessons from this night would seem to have been obvious. You cannot design such a large system as Con Ed’s for infallibility, since that requires too great a need for technical perfection. You cannot build such a large system to work, continuously and indefinitely, without fail. You cannot operate such a large system without mistakes and the intervention of the unforeseen. You cannot protect such a large system from breakdowns and a multitude of human and mechanical errors. And you cannot repair and restart such a large system before serious damage has been done. The very size of the system magnifies all of the dangers.

This in a nutshell is Sale’s critique of Leviathan, whether it be the Leviathan of power generation, health care, education, architecture, or transportation. All of them were designed by the ultimate Leviathan, the modern nation-state. And design mandated from above results in perpetual dislocation of market forces. Sale presents convincing evidence that smaller power-generating stations such as those that existed before the state created the utility monopolies could provide cheaper and more reliable service. While I think he minimizes the problems in alternative power schemes (the manufacture of solar cells creates pollution, even small hydroelectric plants alter local ecology, and windmills are notorious for throwing blades and inducing low-frequency noise pollution) it is clear from his analysis that energy Davids could undercut the Con-Ed Goliaths, just as the education, building, and manufacturing Davids could give the Goliaths a slingful of trouble if the state no longer protected them from competition.

Sale definitely identifies giantism with the rise of the powerful nation-state in the last two hundred years. These nation-states have shattered self-sufficient, harmonious, human-scale communities all around the world in their quest for power and authority. Today, Sale sees Americans voting for the human-scale alternative with their feet by abandoning the giantism and statism of the cities for the small towns of the sunbelt states where there is less government to contend with: fewer taxes, fewer laws, less police repression, more local control over schools, less pollution, and more communitarian values. Sale doesn’t ignore the history of repressive social control associated with small towns but is confident that minorities and nonconformists can find communities in which they will thrive. He clearly wants the state out of our lives. Unlike most leftists, he promotes no new government programs and sees no social Armageddon in store if the state is rolled back. “Over time,” he writes, “as the nation-state withdraws from this or that aspect of, say, health care or transportation or housing, localities will be forced to assume that burden, thus potentially enabling them to develop their full capacities and permitting the evolution of a stronger and more variegated society.” Our potential fulfillment as human beings is actually increased by the withdrawal of the state; for our problems then become personal once again and we have a chance to control our futures.

But unlike libertarians, who are content to downsize the state and let the scale of our society be shaped by individual ambition, Sale wants to downsize everything. He’d like to see cars replaced by bicycles, energy-intensive agriculture by labor-intensive agriculture, bestsellers by small private presses, and most manufactured goods by home handcrafted goods. In short, Sale would like us to become like the Hutterites and Mennonites because it would be good for us, and besides, our fragile planet cannot endure continued industrial exploitation. But here he falls into an abyss of his own making. While he explicitly states that the way to the human-scale alternative is totally voluntary, I think, following Robert Nozick, that we can only expect 10 percent or so of any population to opt for the voluntary simplicity of kibbutzim-style living. And I am not convinced by Sale or any of the other limits-to-growth people that past exponential growth necessarily dictates future exponential growth all the way to economic breakdown. Technological advances and economic information are already flattening the exponential curves of growth into S curves in the areas of population and energy consumption. The alternative to the self-correcting free market is the steady-state economy which Sale embraces, warts and all. Doesn’t he understand that to maintain the steady-state economy he would need a police state?

Sale pays substantial lip service to human diversity, but in his utopia he would sweep away bombs, guns, moon exploration, pollution, shoddy work, crime, and government regulation with the same purging hand that would sweep away spectator sports, drugs, gambling, prostitution, advertising, costume jewelry, and greeting cards. None of these things would make it inside the pearly gates of Humanscaleland. Someday someone will have to explain to Sale that spectator sports are just as valid as the ballet, or that drug taking is just as valid as meditation, or that gambling is just as valid as mountain climbing. As of now, Sale can see no important differences among these things—they are all bad things we can do without.

Perhaps this intolerance of human diversity is the true reason why Sale does not invoke the modern libertarian movement in his search for the solution to the morass of our times. You would think a book that charts the rise of food co-ops, holistic medicine, new schools, the consumer movement, Common Cause, feminism, naturalism, alternative religions, and the Campaign for Economic Democracy as evidence that there are new anti-state, self-reliant forces shaking the temples of empire would spend at least a paragraph on the tax revolt movement or the Libertarian Party. You might think a book which shadowboxes around the subject of anarchism but never drops that word either would find F.A. Hayek’s ideas about Spontaneous Order worth mentioning. But no. In order to discuss the modern libertarian movement, Sale would have to introduce ideas about the profit-motive, the one thing he finds most symptomatic of the sickness of our society; and it is clear that outside of the psychic profit he expects his Spartan Athenians of Humanscaleland to reap, no other pursuit of profit, whether coin or capital, would be honored there.

So once again, what is human scale? Taken outside the confines of architecture and considered absolutely, the answer is that the true human scale is as boundless as our intellects. There are a multitude of ways to be human, and a successful human explores those ways that intrigue him. Sale’s utopia is not likely to be yours. Not all humans will be satisfied with the bucolic harmony and richness of Hutterite-like communities. To fulfill their humanity they will build towers that will seem to the likes of Sale to be Towers of Babel. And Towers of Babel they may be, but there is no way outside of making mistakes that we can possibly learn that we are wrong. The exploration of alternatives is the true human scale.

But as the state continues to fracture and react under the stresses of its own giantism more people will opt out of the system for the simplicity of the small town, be they new leftists like Kirkpatrick Sale or moral-majoritarian rightists like Howard Ruff. Imagine Howard Ruff’s family in its single-family home, a stash of Krugerrands and freeze-dried food in the basement. Outside, Mrs. Ruff is putting the finishing touches on a Paint-by-Number as Howard drives up in a diesel-powered Rabbit, bringing the kids home from a day in Mormon school. Just down the street of this same small town, meanwhile, imagine the family Sale in a not dissimilar home, Kirkpatrick returning from the food co-op on his bicycle with canning jars for this year’s bumper tomato crop. His kids are smoking homegrown behind the shed as Mrs. Sale finishes her daily yoga and returns to writing the Great American Community Novel.

It could happen. They could be peaceable neighbors.

John Shepherd is a freelance book reviewer, housepainter, and carpenter who has built more than a few structures to the requirements of human scale.