Extract from the transcript of a speech given at the Continental Politics Society of Auldhabn in 1990 by Dr. Minerva Stanford. Translated from the original text in Danish by Dr. Minerva Stanford at the request of the editors.
Across the North Sea the neoliberals tell us that there is no society, there are men and women and there are families. Like all claims, this claim must be interrogated. What does it mean, then, to live in a society?
I come from the United States of America, a country that possesses what most outsiders would call a strong national identity. Yet this nation that I supposedly belong to, which the great writer Dos Passos calls a “slice of a continent”, contains millions of people I will never meet, have never met, and who do not know that I exist. They, likewise, will never know the vast majority of their fellow countrymen, except for a few exceptions that are shared knowledge due to the tireless work of our media and political complexes. What nation is formed then, what community, what society? An imagined one, one of fictional friends and fictional enemies. Is it not obvious then, why vitriolic hatred of the internal enemy arises, why the political opponent is also the object of philosophical disgust, why the fellow man is segregated into either like or unlike, rather than respected as a human being in their own right? We simply cannot relate to 300 million other humans at any reasonable scale.
And this is only within one paltry nation! As our forms of communication become more rapid and more responsive, the internet will make our “society” a network of billions. Our fellow citizens in this new millennium will become not merely national but international, global, universal. There are those that predict that this will lead to unimaginable empathy and prosperity, but I cannot agree, mostly because it’s hard enough to relate to everyone on one mostly contiguous piece of physical soil. What will we do when conjoined with billions of others? Great waves of crimes of anti-empathic sentiment, no doubt, are in store for us in this century. How can we avert them?
There is something true, then, in that sentiment of Thatcher’s. But there are also clear examples that resist this sentiment: we are, in fact, capable of cooperation, of kindness to those beyond the ties of blood, of great generosity and empathy. Yet this is not always the case. Why? Our capabilities are limited, and to execute on our kinder urges requires us to know the targets of our emotions on a personal level. There are four key facts at play here:
We are only capable of a limited number of personal connections beyond immediate ties, approximately 100.
We work best when working with people we understand personally and can empathise with.
Similarly, we are most empathic and helpful within these personal bonds.
Society is improved when its members are empathic, helpful, and can work together efficiently.
Taken as a whole and reasoned to its logical conclusion, the answer is obvious: Society should be organised into units on the order of 100 to 1000 people, containing families and friends and neighbours, each of which then becomes a densely networked unit of people who know each other on an individual level, can help each other most effectively, and are less likely to harm each other. For this scheme to work they must be able to engage in self-governance through democratic means and manage their resources internally. Of course, such experiments have not been unknown to us: they can be found in small villages, local councils and governments, apartment blocks, and regional branches of parties and organisations. Yet as globalisation marches on and the forces of organisation and communication become more potent, this local effect is lessened. Local governments are underfunded, party branches are subsumed under centralised leadership, regional offices come under the control of uncaring foreign investment firms, small villages are depleted of their populations. More and more, we are told, we must be part of the wider global community, to march to a unified beat. But what if that unification is what is paradoxically causing greater division within us, when we can no longer conceive of and work with groups of human beings? The predations of market logic would surely become less vicious if applied to one’s neighbours. This new unit I propose to be called the Mesoscale Society, as a midway point between the microscale of individual families and the macroscale of millions of citizens. It may, in fact, be precisely what we need to change the world.