By Dan Hazen / Herald Forum
If you asked me why my politics tended toward Libertarian 20 years ago, I would have sited things like personal freedom, inefficiency of big governments and the dignity of the individual. I would still cite such things. But over the intervening years I’ve included things which simultaneously affirm and refine my established views.
One would be a collection of ideas enumerated in the 1973 economics classic, “Small is Beautiful: Study of Economics As If People Mattered,” by E.F. Schumacher. To brutally summarize the book: human endeavors which scale beyond the size and reach of individual humans will collapse under their own weight, taking the humans with them. Schumacher speaks mostly to environmental and economic concerns, but government is intimately connected with both. Small is beautiful when it comes to governance: keeping decision making at the human scale when possible.
This is one reason I watch with morbid curiosity as pro-lifers and pro-choicers stand facing one another over a pile of countless corpses and suffering women shouting about how far a person should be kept away from their own choices: “Nine black robes 3,000 miles away dictating fate for hundreds of millions, or nine black robes 250 miles away dictating fate for 7.5 million?” It’s a Morton’s Fork.
This came home to me while listening to a news story about fracking in Colorado. A rancher had become convinced that a nearby drilling operation was poisoning her well, making her cattle sick. Private testing labs found nothing wrong. She did not trust the results. County health officials found nothing wrong. Nope, the rancher did not believe it. State authorities were enlisted; still nothing, still not unconvinced. By the time the story made the news she was waiting to hear from the Environmental Protection Agency, which she was convinced would finally make things right.
As I considered her plight, I was annoyed by her refusal to just accept what the evidence revealed and instead “asked to see the manager,” three times over. At the same time, I sympathized with her need (dare I say “right”) to appeal to a higher authority. So, what should she do?
It hit me like a bolt of lightning: If the person responsible for testing the well lived next door to her, and his kids drank the same water, it’s likely that both of them could be confident in any test results, with no need to call on strangers (who have only a notional obligation to their safe water). Small is beautiful.
As I watched primary election results roll in recently and accept the reality that we will be returning the same people to the same offices, far removed from our day-to-day lives, then plead and demand that they make good decisions for us, I am reminded that they do not really govern. Like us, they are simply cogs in a machine of our own construction: a massive, all-consuming contrivance that moves under its own power and burns through cogs regardless of their perceived “importance.”
Mahatma Gandhi quipped that we “dream of a system so perfect that no one will have to be good.” He was right, and the mass of this “dream system” has been building for 500 years. It now exists on a planetary scale, and we have lost control.
So, find your beautiful, small place and stand in it.
Dan Hazen is the community pastor at Allen Creek Community Church in Marysville.
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