Human Scale by Kirkpatrick Sale
(Copyright 1980, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York)
An old cautionary tale has it that there once was a kingdom in which all the grain crop one exceptional year somehow became poisoned, causing anyone who ate its products to go insane. That posed 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 lives would be preserved. "But," 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. 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 this book is dedicated:
Steve Baer, Tom Bender, C. George Benello, Wendell Berry, Murray Bookchin, Ralph Borsodi, Scott Burns, Ernest Callenbach, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Collins, Richard Cornuelle, Herman E. Daly, René Dubos, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Paul Goodman, Hazel Henderson, Karl Hess, John Holt, Ivan Illich, Judson Jerome, Lee Johnson, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Leopold Kohr, Milton Kotler, Ursula LeGuin, Frances Moore Lappé, Mildred Loomis, Amory Lovins, Michael Marien, John McClaughry, Ian McHarg, Margaret Mead, Arthur Morgan, Griscom Morgan, David Morris, Lewis Mumford, Carol Pateman, Theodore Roszak, E. F. Schumacher, Neil Seldman, L. S. Stavrianos, Barry Stein, Bob Swann, Lee Swenson, Gordon Rattray Taylor, Frederick Thayer, William I. Thompson, John Todd, Nancy Todd, Peter van Dresser
PART ONE TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
Units of measure are the first condition of all. The builder takes as his measure what is easiest and most constant: his pace, his foot, his elbow, his finger. He has created a unit which regulates the whole work. . . . It is in harmony with him. That is the main point.
LE CORBUSIER
Towards a New Architecture
The proper size of a bedroom has not changed in thousands of years. Neither has the proper size of a door not the proper size of a 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 Cities, 1965
The most important balance of all the elements in space is that of the human scale.
CONSTANTINE DOXIADIS
Ekistiks, 1968 1 Parthenothanatos
For 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 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 is again reflected in the dimensions of the columns and remnant forms, and the rational, humanistic spirit that originally informed it is unmistakable still.
To architects a model, to archeologists 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 basic perceptions of the world. During the course of twenty-four centuries -- longer than any single civilization has lasted since the dawn of time -- the Parthenon has stood as the embodiment of our heritage. It has suffered much, to be sure, in the course of human warfare and human greed -- the Byzantines looted it in the fifth century, the Venetians bombed it in the nineteenth -- but it has always endured, always seemed to be possessed, as Plutarch had written, of a "a living and incorruptible breath, a spirit impervious to age."
Now the Parthenon is literally crumbling away, and it may not survive into the next century, certainly not as we know it now.
The Athens of Periclean times, a city of perhaps 50,000 people, has grown to a sprawling metropolitan area of 2.5 million. It has chosen as its primary means of transportation the automobile, its primary system of heating the oil furnace, its primary source of electricity the coal-burning power plant, and its primary engine of production the industrial factory. All of these for the last thirty years or so have been gushing out a huge slew of pollutants that have slowly eaten into the very stones of the buildings of the Acropolis, particularly the soft Doric marble of the Parthenon and its smaller neighbor, the Erechtheum; of special noxiousness is sulfur dioxide, which pours out of Athenian exhausts at some 5,000 pounds a day and which combines with droplets of water vapor in the air to become sulfuric acid, a chemical that is quite literally and methodically melting the stones of antiquity. Today the faces of the relief figures all along the Parthenon's entablature are falling away, the sculptures are being worn to indistinguishable blobs, the horseman on the west side is practically obliterated, the columnar flutes have disappeared entirely. The monument that has been the pride of centuries is now being irretrievably destroyed in the space of half a lifetime. As the UNESCO director general has put it, "After resisting the onslaughts of weather and human assailants for 2,400 years, this magnificent monument is threatened with destruction as a result of the damage which industrial civilization has increasingly inflicted on it." How wry, how ironic, that phrase "industrial civilization."
Measures have naturally been taken to try to moderate the disaster. Tourists -- more visitors in a single summer now than in all the years of ancient Athens -- have been excluded from the interior of the Parthenon and made to stay behind barriers some twenty-five feet away, lest the incessant reverberations of their feet compound the pollutants' effect; jet airplanes, too, are normally routed away from the Acropolis area to minimize the effect of their vibrations. UNESCO has begun a fundraising campaign, hoping to find at least $15 million for protection and restoration of the various buildings, though much of that money will be spent actually to undo an earlier 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 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" (as the art world's contradiction has it), its reliefs 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 upon the miracles of molded fiberglass.
Nor is 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 statutes 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 thoughout Europe are losing their statuary and decorations to the relentless chemicals: St. Sophia, St. Paul's, Salisbury, Chartres, Notre Dame, St. Peter's, St. Mark's, the churches whose very names tell much of the story of our heritage, all are decaying daily. The windows of Chartres, some of the finest stained-glass art known 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.
No one is designing this catastrophe, and surely no one wants it. Yet just as surely, as long as the priorities of industrial systems pertain, as long as private cars and fossil-fuel heating plants and chemical-based industries occupy such central parts of our societies, there can never be, however great a will we muster, and however many millions, a reversal of this process.
The onslaught on the Parthenon is not of course the worst offense of the contemporary world. But it is a symbol, for me a haunting one: as the Parthenon so fittingly embodies the heritage of Western civilization, so it displays as well the condition to which that civilization has been brought over the last few decades and the crises with which, I think one can say without hyperbole, it is now imperiled.
Its tragedy suggests at least four hard truths. That the crisis of the contemporary world is real, not some temporary aberration or media contrivance, and as palpable and perceptible as the sulfur dioxide on the Parthenon. That it cannot be solved, though it may for some time be ameliorated, by the devices of modern technology, by some combination of plastics and chemicals that will somehow emerge if enough laboratories are endowed with enough grants. That it can be dealt with only by a reordering of priorities, a rethinking of values, a reorganization of our systems and institutions so that we can begin to remove the pollutants from the economic and political environments as well as from the natural one. And that if we do not perform some such reordering and reworking we almost certainly find our cities, our cultures, our ecologies, and perhaps our very lives eroding and disintegrating just as surely and as irretrievably as the Parthenon. These are the truths that guide this book throughout.
But there is more, happily, to the Parthenon than just that, for it can also symbolize for us the direction of that reordering and reorganization. For the Parthenon is a building carefully, gracefully, designed on the human scale, measured by the human thumb and pace, celebrating the human form, created in its every detail with the principle of "man the measure."¹ It was built in a land whose society was governed by the human scale, whose economic relations were ordered by the human scale, whose government was determined by the human scale. When we 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.
1. The great French Architect Le Corbusier was once sent a set of documents giving the exact measurements of each of the marble blocks used in the building of the Parthenon -- ledges, columns, entablatures -- and from them he determined that the Athenians had used a human-scale dimension of the height of a man throughout their desgn; he calculated the height as close to his "Modular I" figure of 1.75 meters, or roughly 5 feet 9 inches, "with the help of conviction and a few inches (or millimetres) suggested by pure faith" (The Modulor, MIT Press, 1954). That in fact would be a little large of the ancient Greeks, whose stature was smaller than that of the modern European, but something closer to 5 feet 7½ inches would be very like the average male height, and therefore undoubtably the architectural measure, of the Athenians. And I have calculated that, allowing for minuscule variations in the original construction and in the settlement of the building over the years, it is in exact multiples of that measure that the major dimensions were built. The full height is 540.12 inches (5' 7½" x 8), the width 1215.3 inches (5'7½" x 18), and the length 2734.03 inches (5'7½" x 40.5); in addition, the interior columns are 202.5 inches high (5'7½" x 3), the distance between the architraves is 405 inches (5'7½" x 6), and the statue of Athena herself, the goddess to whom the city and temple were consecrated, was said to be 540 inches tall (5'7½ x 8). The multiples of the three outside dimensions when the 5'7½" measure is used match exactly the 4:9 ratio that has been regarded as the governing ratio of the Acropolis: 4:9 = 8:18 = 18:40.5.
Not that Periclean 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 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 th community, or polis, who was expected to participate in its arts, sciences, athletics, politics, discourses, and games not only for the betterment of the self but for that of the entire population.
In Athens, the daily life 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 down 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 among them) would meet to formulate the decisions of the community on the principles of open participation and individual rights, and the offices of the city 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 the year, a rotation of economic and political and even artistic function, so that each would be able to participate in all parts of urban life and none would grow to exert undue dominance. And though there would be toil for most, as likely as not with artisan and laborer and slave and free standing shoulder-to-shoulder, Athenian life was meant, and the day was organized, as much as possible for the individual's intellectual, aesthetic, sexual, social, and athletic satisfactions.
In short, Athens was, in the words of the great urban historian Lewis Mumford, a city "cut closer to the human measure."
The perils and the promise, then, coexist in the singular shrine that is the Parthenon, as fitting an exemplification of our own age as of Pericle's. Its present plight makes manifest our crises, its past glories suggest the direction of our remedies.
What follows is an extrapolation from just that duality, meant to be as definitive and judicious as I can possibly make it but, dealing as it does with much that is speculative and not widely practiced, capable of refinement and development. In this first part, I want to indicate, briefly, the nature and seriousness of our predicament, the unique challenge it offers, and the responses it is already provoking among most of the industrial nations of the West. In the second part, I try to isolate the malady that has brought us to this pass -- it is, not to try for suspense, the idea that big 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, cities, offices, factories, farms, economic networks, and societies -- are both more efficient and more humane.
In the next three parts, the heart of the book, I hope to demonstrate for the three main sectors of our lives -- our society, economy, and polity -- that smaller and more people-sized institutions and arrangements 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 takes some time to pursue all of this, and you will not have failed to notice that this, a book about the virtues of the small and human-scaled, is quite unusually large. The easy answer is that, in books as in other artifacts or systems, I am no advocate of the needlessly small, rather only of the appropriate size, kept within ecological and humanitarian limits. The more elaborate answer is that I have found that to present so many ideas running against the current thought, not only of this 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 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.
I 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.
2 Crises and Double Binds
William Sloane Coffin tells the story of a scientist from Harvard flying on an experimental mission in a private plane over the lake country of Northern Alabama, measuring with elaborate instruments the fish populations of the various lakes. Sighting two fishermen out at some remote lake he had just surveyed, the scientist figured that as a favor he would land his plane on the water nearby and tell them that his instruments had discovered there were no fish to speak of in those waters and they would have better luck if they went on to another lake. So despite the delay, he landed near the anglers and explained the bad news to them, expecting their grateful thanks. They were outraged, instantly, and told the scientist in rich Southern expletives where he could take his plane and his instruments and what he could do with them, whereupon they baited their lines once again and kept on fishing. The scientist flew off, much abashed and much puzzled. "I expected their disappointment," he said later, "but not their anger."
But of course we all react that way to unpleasant truth much of the time: it upsets our preconceptions and our comforting illusions and therefore angers us, and often as not we choose to ignore it. None of us wants to be told, even though deep down we may know it, that there are no fish.
Still, the scientist has his obligation to the truth, and there is ultimately no real point in turning a deaf ear to what he says. So, at the risk of exiting anger or producing instant deafness, I feel it is necessary for us to begin with one unpleasant truth of great importance: in the last half of the twentieth century, particularly in advanced industrial countries, we are witnessing a series of crises beyond any yet experienced in the procession of Western civilization.
Now, dire predictions of universal crisis have been common to all ages at least since the Sumerians and Egyptians first settled into urban societies 5,000 years ago. And I do not mean to seem foolishly pessimistic, a professional Chicken Little, when I speak of this series of crises, as if I thought the ingenuity of the human species had reached 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 magnitude and their scope:
An imperiled ecology, irremediable pollution of atmosphere and oceans, overpopulation, world hunger and starvation, the depletion of resources, environmental diseases, the vanishing wilderness, uncontrolled technologies, chemical toxins in water, air, and foods, and endangered species on land and sea.
A deepening suspicion of authority, distrust of established institutions, 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 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, administrative inefficiency, legislative ineptitude, judicial inequity, bribery and corruption, inadequate government regulations and enforcement, the use of repressive machinery, abuses of power, ineradicable national dept, 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 and displacement of the dollar, capital shortages, the energy crisis, absenteeism, employee sabotage and theft, corporate mismanagement, industrial espionage, business payoffs and bribes, white-collar criminality, shoddy goods, waste and inefficiency, planned obsolescence, fraudulent and incessant advertising, mounting personal debt, and maldistribution of wealth.
International instability, worldwide inflation, national and civil warfare, arms buildups, nuclear reactors, plutonium stockpiles, disputes over laws of the sea, inadequate international law, the failure of the United Nations, multinational exploitation, Third World poverty and unrepayable debt, and the end of the American imperial arrangement.
Or to put it another way:
Vietnam, Watergate, New York City bankruptcy, gas lines, Mirex, Equity Funding, ITT, riots, Medicaid fraud, redlining, CIA drug-testing, hostages, price fixing, Vesco, nursing homes, coffee prices, product recalls, assassinations, heroin, the Middle East, Rio Rancho, Kepone, skyjacking, the SLA, Hustler, Spiro Agnew, saccharin, the square tomato, Harlequin books, Los Angeles, OPEC, Wilbur Mills, power failures, My Lai, Charles Manson, PCB, the SST, Andy Warhol, Appalachia, organized crime, Three Mile Island, Valium, the Wilmington 10, REIT's, TV violence, strip mining, FBI break-ins, the Sahel, microwaves, McDonald's, Kent State, Penn Central, Attica, the Torrey Canyon, psychosurgery, mercury, Chile . . .
But that is too fast. Put that way, they come to seem as unreal as the evening news programs, where death and fires and ball scores and tomorrow's temperature all have the same hue and value. And we all 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 flame all at once but who stays on unaware until he is fried to a crisp if you start with a tiny flame and increase it only gradually. But the crises are real nonetheless, and they reflect the condition of America with shocking aptness.
Let us isolate a few at a slower tempo:
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These particular evils, just these few, should be enough, I would think, to cause us all some trepidation and to prompt a reassessment, both personal and national, of the society we have built. Can it be right to organize a nation this way? Even if we can point to some other ages or some other countries with worse performances, as no doubt we can, does that forgive our own record, these ominous and growing crises?
Suppose a Martian were to descend tomorrow and ask how efficiently the United States had gone about its business in the last twenty years or so, how effective it had been in using its obvious riches, its large universities, its mighty bureaucracies to solve the social problems of its people. What would we be able to say? That Sweden has a higher suicide rate and there appears to be about the same percentage of mental disorders in Nova Scotia? That many well-intentioned books had been written on all these subjects and many good-hearted people have given them thought? That there seemed to be other things to attend to and for some reason other priorities for institutions both public and private?
We would avert our eyes.
Of course, social disjunctions of this magnitude do not exist without their deep and pervasive effect on the populace, no matter how immune we think we may be. The evening news may not mention alcoholism, but we all know about the woman in the apartment upstairs and the broken marriage down the street; there are no banner headlines about mental disorders, but we all have friends or children or colleagues who have tortured themselves into psychic knots. Increasingly, the existence of all these crises, and the inability of any of our institutions to alleviate them, has created an awareness among the people that, as Miss Clavell puts it so well, something is not right.
Though certainly not definitive, the clearest indicators of this national spirit are the public opinion polls. Every poll and survey taken in the last decade to gauge the mood of the country indicates that 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 that the "quality of life has 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 three-quarters of the population is 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 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 that 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 elgible voters bothered to go to the polls in the 1976 presidential election, and the percentage has been decling since 1960, although the number of elgible voters has been increased by 17 percent; 41 million voted for Carter, 39 million voted for Ford, and 66 million stayed home.
"A central fact," the Harris organization concluded in our bicentennial year, "is that in our nation, our people, disaffection and disenchantment abound at every turn. That disaffection has now reached majority proportions."
Now it can be fairly objected here that every age has its crises and so far the ingenuity of the human 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, 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 potentate who offered to give one of his subjects, in return for some well-received favor, any gift he desired. The humble subject asked only for some grains of wheat on a chessboard, one grain on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on, doubling each time until all the squares were filled. Naturally the portentate was willing to comply with this modest request, and the granary managers were called forth to begin distributing. Much to everyone's amazement, there wasn't enough wheat in the entire country to supply the subject. Before they reached the thirty-third square he was owed 8,000 bushels of wheat, by the fiftieth square 1 billion bushels (which is equal to the modern annual output of the United States), and by the sixty-fourth square some 7.4 trillion bushels, or 2,000 times as much as the annual production of the entire modern world. That's exponential growth.
The Club of Rome and others in recent years have shown with sobering clarity that exponential growth will, quite literally, devastate the society that practices it. Mineral resources and fossil fuels used exponentially -- as we are now doing -- will dry up, and quite quickly, too, while pollution and population growing exponentially -- as they are now -- will overstretch the ecological limits. "Our conclusion from these extrapolations," the original Club of Rome researchers wrote, "is one that many perceptive people have already realized -- that the short doubling times of many of man's activities, combined with the immense quantities being doubled, will bring us close to the limits of growth of these activities surprisingly soon." Since then some experts have challenged their figures and their calculations, but none have seriously disputed that conclusion.
In simplest terms, this means we are now living through a time that is markedly different from that of the past. Our crises are not only different in degree, they are also, because of that, different in kind. Never before have nations grown so large, never have corporations become so powerful, never have governments swollen to such sizes, never have the instruments, the factories, the farms, the technologies been so huge -- hence, never before have the crises been so acute. It's as if humankind were living in a huge unbreakable bottle, into which is placed a small drop of exponential water that doubles in size once a day. One day we discover that the water has filled up half the bottle, and we say, well, it's taken an awful long time for it to get up to here, we probably have no reason to worry just yet, surely with our technology we'll be able to adjust to it as we have so far. The next day we drown.
The crises of the present, in other words, have now grown so large, so interlocked, so exponential, that they pose a threat unlike that ever known. It has come to the point where we cannot solve one problem, or try to, without creating some other problem, or a score of problems, usually unanticipated. Then we are suddenly faced with the task of coming up with new solutions without enough time to figure out their consequences, and when we hastily put that solution into effect, it goes on and creates another set of problems.
That is the double bind.
The double bind is the paradigmatic condition of our age. The term was invented by the psychologist Gregory Bateson some twenty years ago to describe a central dilemma he perceived in his schizophrenic patients and their families: the patient, needing love and familial reinforcement, wants to believe that his parents make sense at all times and doesn't want to disagree with them, so even when they say something wrong and he knows it to be wrong he agrees with them, thus producing the situation that when he's right he's wrong and when he's wrong he's right. Bateson amplifies this by describing a hypothetical five-person game in which each person tries to form alliances with the others for some personal gain. If A aligns with B, a correct decision, he will then be outnumbered three-to-two, which is incorrect, so he must try for an alliance also with C, a correct decision, but which may offend B and therefore forces A to ally also with D so as to prevent the counter-coalition BDE from taking shape; but that, too, is incorrect because at that point E, left alone, will try for an alliance with any of the others and each one will hope to forestall his partners so as to block a new counter-coalition, but if A thus allies with E, a correct decision, he is likely to find himself abandoned by his partners and stuck again in a minority of two, an incorrect decision, and if he does not join with E, a correct decision, he is likely to be outnumbered by majority of four, an incorrect decision. As Bateson notes:
Every move which he makes is the common-sense move in the situation as he correctly sees it at that moment, but his every move is subsequently demonstrated to have been wrong by the moves which other members of the system make in response to his "right" move. The individual is thus caught in a perpetual sequence of what we have called double bind experiences.
In other words, you can't win.
It doesn't take much reflection to realize that the series of crises that I have been describing so far has reached the double-bind point.
Let's say that America wants to alleviate the crises of domestic hunger, not simply for humanitarian reasons but because feeding 20 million underfed citizens turns them into better workers, better consumers, and better taxpayers and prevents them from turning to social unrest. But given the nature of corporate agriculture, a decision to grow more food means a far greater use of energy for farm equipment, fertilizers, pesticides, and transportation to markets, thus adding to the energy crises, driving up energy prices, and making the price of growing and distributing food even more expensive, thus ultimately putting it out of the price-range of the needy. It means increased use of pesticides, some of which in the air, soil, or food will cause additional disease and debilitation, especially among the poor, thus putting them out of work and limiting the amount of money they can spend on food. It means increased use of chemical fertilizers, the mining of which adds radioactivity to the air and can cause further sickness, and the fertilizers will eventually leach even more into the surrounding water systems to damage the marine life, curtailing the supply of fish for food. It means the expansion of the larger farms with greater capital, thus driving our small and marginal farmers who will be forced into the cities and either join the ranks of the underfed or get on the welfare rolls, adding to governmental spending and thus to inflation, driving up food prices. With increased inflation and abundant agricultural supplies, farmers will be getting less money for their crops, so either they will have to be given subsidies from the Federal treasury, increasing inflation still further, particularly for the poor, or they will have to cut back on production to force prices up, thus making less food available for the underfed.
Whichever way you look at it: double bind.
Or let's say that it is decided, as many politicians and criminologists have urged, that the country solve its problem of soaring crime rates by beefing up state and local police forces, expanding and computerizing Federal agencies, increasing the number of prosecutors and judges at all levels, building more courts and jails, and expanding budgets for prisons and rehabilitation services. This of course places an enormous extra burden on already stretched governmental budgets, particularly those of the larger cities where crime is greatest, which must then draw funds away from other services, including schools, hospitals, welfare, community development, mass transit, housing, and job-training programs, and this inevitably leads to increased unemployment, poverty, urban deterioration, addiction, and prostitution. That in turn inevitably means more crime. Double bind.
Or let's say that the crises of resource depletion and misallocation become so acute within a few years that the nation finally decides to follow the recommendations of such varied people as John Kenneth Galbraith and Herman Kahn for greater centralized planning, so that rationing and conservation can be enforced, allocation and distribution and distribution made rational, and the full range of technology brought to bear. Since only the central government can accomplish all this, that will mean an expanded bureaucracy in Washington that, whatever its other virtues, must by its very nature be cumbersome, unresponsive, time-wasting, and inefficient. Planning at this level would have to mean more reliance on high-technology and centralized systems, mechanical and human, which are inherently prone to greater error and breakdown (and are harder to fix) as they grow in size. Greater control of how resources are obtained and used would lead to greater roles for the government in extractive businesses, distribution services, the market, and even the home itself (checking, for example, on the amount of gas and oil being used), substantially increasing government interference in hitherto private areas and creating resentment and resistance among many citizens. All of that -- bureaucracy, complex systems, citizen resistance -- adds up to a high probability of overall inefficiency and waste, leading to misallocation and misuse of resources, and thus the likelihood of their earlier depletion. Double bind.
But we don't have to be quite so ethereal about it all, so futuristic. Double binds are all around us.
To build up heart muscle and ward off coronary diseases that affect people who don't exercise, people living in cities, where natural forms of exercise have been pretty much done away with, have taken to jogging and cycling. But jogging and cycling along city streets exposes the lungs to about ten times as much air pollution as normal and the activity itself leads to hyperventilation and the inhalation of even greater quantities of pollutants, many of which are known to cause heart disease. So if you do not exercise you risk coronary illness one way and if you do you risk it another way.
To ease traffic congestion on overcrowded highways, cities and states spend millions of dollars creating new multi-lane superhighways. But every time a bigger highway is built more people, even those who used mass transit before, choose to ride on it because it is faster and easier and safer, so that it very quickly becomes as overcrowded as the original road. So if a city has old highways it will have a traffic congestion problem and if it replaces them with new highways it will have a traffic congestion problem.
Double bind.
Nor is this all esoterica: the double-bind crises are the stuff of our daily headlines.
Take the energy crises. The nation has wrestled with the problem of how to power its generating stations for five years now, and each year the mess only becomes murkier. We can't use oil, of course, because it is increasingly expensive to produce domestically, it makes our economy dependent on the OPEC nations, it is a non-renewable resource that we are fast running out of, and it is polluting. Nuclear power is no alternative because conventional plants pose grave risks of accidents and air and thermal pollution, and they depend on uranium, another fast-diminishing non-renewable resource; breeder reactors might be used to make plutonium instead, but that is even more toxic and radioactive, it can easily be made into bombs, it can't be efficiently recycled, and plutonium power plants are even riskier and more expensive than conventional ones. Coal offers the advantage of a resource that won't run out for a few more centuries, if you can take comfort from that, but it has its own problems: high sulfur coal produces a deadly pollutant (that's where much of Athens's sulfuric acid is coming from), and smokestack "scrubber" devices used to lessen its sulfur content are enormously expensive, needing an investment of some $20 billion over the next decade, and produce acres and acres of sludge that nobody knows what to do with; low-sulfur coal is less polluting, but it would have to be provided by strip-mining great sections of the American West, probably turning a sizeable portion into a desert wasteland no matter how much reclamation is attempted, and it provides fewer BTU's of energy so it would be necessary to use much more of it. Solar energy, as we shall see later, is a real alternative, but because of government foot-dragging there is no technology that can turn it into electricity cheaply enough for massive power-plant use, and all the huge government projects for turning it to citywide heating use have so far been abject failures. So what's left -- candles?
Or take Tris. That is the chemical that clothing manufacturers decided to put into children's sleepwear when, after more that a decade of pressure, the Department of Commerce ordered some steps to be taken to fireproof those garments. This increased the price of sleepwear by a third, and it forced the manufacturers to use petroleum-based synthetics instead of cotton because they took the chemical better, but it was discovered that Tris is a mutagen, gets absorbed by skin cells, and is a likely source of cancer, after which it was banned from the market -- although there were 20 million garments with the stuff already in it and it was impossible to tell which polyester nightclothes were contaminated and which weren't. Then it turned out that Tris was also used in dolls, toys, car seats, and draperies, so that even the child who slept in bare skin stood a good chance of being exposed to it. And when scientists began a search for other flame-retardants to replace Tris, they discovered that all of the other chemicals suggested as flame-retardants were also -- what else? -- highly suspect carcinogens.
Or take the Aswan Dam. Egypt built that with much fanfare and vast expense in order to provide electricity for its people, increase agricultural production through controlled irrigation, increase fish production by providing a new lake, and thus improve the general standard of living. But the dam has blocked off the Nile waters so that the millions of tons of natural fertilizers end up in the lake behind it and never get either to the farmlands downstream, severely harming agricultural production, or to the marine life of the delta, severely curtailing fish production. So the government planners were forced to use much of the electricity from the dam not for home or industry but to make artificial fertilizers for the farmers and, someday they hope, artificial chemicals for the delta fishermen, thus using electricity to solve the problem created by the dam that was built to solve the problem of electricity. But since the artificial fertilizers so far have been strange to the soil and don't work as well as the natural ones, and since the delta waters, stagnant now for much of the year, have bred a variety of diseases, the overall standard of living has in fact been lowered.
Or take -- a last example -- mass transit. It is commonly agreed that the nation needs mass transit systems to save on energy use and stop traffic pollution and congestion in the big cities. But in the years between 1971 and 1977, the deficit of all the country's urban transit systems went from $300 million to $1.8 billion, a rise of 600 percent, while the number of riders went up only 3.2 percent, thus putting great strains on city budgets, creating taxpayer resentment and revolts, and putting future generations of city dwellers deep into debt, but not lessening traffic by more than an iota. Here is the pattern: a city builds a mass transit system, which is correct, but then it has a bigger municipal debt, which is incorrect, so it cuts back the frequency and quality of the service, which is correct, but then it finds itself with fewer riders, which is incorrect, so it has to charge more for the service, which is correct, but then fewer people ride and the deficit goes up more, which is incorrect. So building a mass transit system, which is correct, ends up simply enlarging city debts year after year and affecting pollution and congestion not at all, which is incorrect.
Double bind.
I hope the point is clear, though we shall have occasion to return to it again: the crises of the present are of such magnitude and synergy that they cannot be solved by any of the conventional solutions we have applied, and indeed the solutions themselves turn out to be problems more often than not. In virtually all our systems, all our conventions, all our institutions, we are caught in a double bind, and we apply our solutions, one after another, in vain, "In vain" in Latin, we might remember, is frustrere, from which, of course, we get our word "frustration."
There are no fish.
