ALTHOUGH CRITICISM abounds concerning the rapid concentration of
governmental power, world trade, domestic commerce and police authority
- just to name a few - there is a stunning lack of alternatives proposed
or even mentioned by media, politicians or intellectuals. Even among
those who despise these trends there seems an almost tacit acceptance of
their inevitability. A few examples:
- One of the greatest assaults on the Tenth Amendment's protection of
state powers - No Child Left Behind - is broadly supported by both
Republicans and Democrats. The Tenth Amendment, in fact, has almost
become the Forgotten Law.
- America's right to determine the values and politics of the rest of
the world, even to the point of invasion, has wide acceptance among
Democrats and Republicans, limited only by the caveat that it may not be
as big a disaster as is Iraq.
- The gross conglomeration of the American media - the broadcast media
in particular - has raised few objections saved from those hardy groups
that still believe in a free press.
- Many corporations use America mainly as a mailing address as they seek
to do to the world what Starbucks has done to many urban neighborhoods.
- The cultural values of Americans is increasingly based on the idea
that bigger is better. We have been taught to worship grandiosity and
ridicule the modest.
Obviously, these are not universally held values although one might
easily think so. In fact, underneath the surface of mainstream
megalomania are numerous examples of groups and people still acting in,
or striving for, human scale. They are, in fact, about some of the most
important business of a human: reversing the gigantism that has not only
hurt our lives but is threatening the whole planet.
Collectively these alternatives can be called examples of devolution or
subsidiarity, the dispersal of authority to the lowest practical level,
an increasing proximity of people to power, the return of commerce,
politics and policing to human scale.
Nothing could be more important and no idea is more in need of a
movement.
You didn't have to explain this in the 1960s and 70s when community
power and control were well up on the left's agenda only to be wiped
from memory by a generation of accumulators, self-aggrandizers and
monopolizers preaching the human heresies of Thatcher, Friedman and
Reagan like so many hustling evangelicals.
This journal has joined innumerable fights on this matter over the
years. It argued for urban neighborhood government, it published a
series of articles on devolution in other countries (including a
prediction of the break-up of the Soviet Union) by Thomas Martin, and we
have raised the flag for more urban states.
The best way to think about devolution is to remember that it refers to
what Martin has called "the ideology of scale." This ideology functions
in a three-dimensional fashion with traditional ideologies. For example,
one can be a progressive decentralist or a conservative who believes in
centralized authority. Thus conservatives and progressives may agree
that much power needs to be returned to a local level, but might
disagree violently on how it should be handled once it gets there.
What works so well in the manufacture of a Ford Taurus -- efficiency of
scale and mass production -- fails to work in social policy because,
unlike a Taurus, humans think, cry, love, get distracted, criticize,
worry or don't give a shit. Yet we keep acting as though such traits
don't exist or don't matter. We have come to accept the notion that the
enormous institutions of government, media, industry and academia are
natural to the human condition and then wonder why they don't work
better than they do. In fact, as ecological planner Ernest Callenbach
pointed out, "we are medium-sized animals who naturally live in small
groups -- perhaps 20 or so -- as opposed to bees or antelopes who live
in very large groups. When managers or generals or architects force us
into large groups, we speedily try to break them down into sub-units of
comfortable size."
Today, if you want to tell it to the boss, you may have to travel a
couple of thousand miles just to get to the receptionist. All of our
systems appear to be on steroids. And like the drugged athlete, nature
eventually pulls the plug. The institutions that have imposed a tyranny
of size upon us not only fail to accomplish what they set out to do but
are themselves disintegrating. The troubles of such huge institutions is
a primary characteristic of our times. Consider the Soviet Union, Sears,
General Motors and, yes, the United States itself.
We see it and yet we don't. Our loyalty to our assumptions and
ideologies as well as our natural difficulty in accepting mortality even
in non-human systems lead us to underrate such changes, to keep trying
to do things the old way one more time.
Over the coming weeks, the Review will be presenting examples of
devolution that works and some that doesn't. We invite further examples
and will post a field guide to these matters on a separate web page.
For openers, and to add a little respectability to a topic that may seem
a trifle odd to some, we offer the example of the Catholic church under
Pope Leo XIII
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH & SUBSIDIARITY
WIKIPEDIA - The principle of subsidiarity holds that government should
undertake only those initiatives which exceed the capacity of
individuals or private groups acting independently. The principle is
based upon the autonomy and dignity of the human individual, and holds
that all other forms of society, from the family to the state and the
international order, should be in the service of the human person.
Subsidiarity assumes that these human persons are by their nature social
beings, and emphasizes the importance of small and intermediate-sized
communities or institutions, like the family, the church, and voluntary
associations, as mediating structures which empower individual action
and link the individual to society as a whole. "Positive subsidiarity,"
which is the ethical imperative for communal, institutional or
governmental action to create the social conditions necessary to the
full development of the individual, such as the right to work, decent
housing, health care, etc., is another important aspect of the
subsidiarity principle.
The principle of subsidiarity was developed in the encyclical Rerum
Novarum of 1891 by Pope Leo XIII, as an attempt to articulate a middle
course between the perceived excesses of laissez-faire capitalism on the
one hand and the various forms of totalitarianism, which subordinate the
individual to the state, on the other. The principle was further
developed in Pope Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, and
Economic Justice for All by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
FIELD GUIDE TO DEVOLUTION
http://prorev.com/devolution.htm
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
CROSS-OVER POLITICS AND THE IDEOLOGY OF SCALE
Sam Smith
[Part of a continuing series on devolution - the opposite of
governmental centralization, commercial monopoly and cultural
domination. Devolution is the art of conducting public affairs at a
practical level closest to the human spirit and human communities]
In an age of conglomeration and domination, the cross-political nature
of devolution - or the ideology of scale - attracts little attention.
One can go through a whole political campaign and never consider it. But
that doesn't mean the issue is not there.
Consider two current examples: the assault on local control of public
schools and the smart growth movement. Both are driven by a curious
alliance of liberal, conservative and corporate interests. And both
attempt to replace the decentralization of decision-making with
centralized, bureaucratic choices.
For example, only Vilsack among the Democratic candidate for president
has challenged the No Child law despite it being based on absurdly
inadequate justifications, proposed by the least qualified president
ever to hold office and pushed by a bunch of child profiteers who will
probably be the only clear winners under the legislation.
Similarly, the smart growth movement is being increasingly driven by a
dubious alliance between "we know what's good for you" liberal planners
and developers who initially resisted the idea until they realized how
many new high-rises might result.
Liberals and conservatives who favor America's two centuries of local
school control, or wish to resist the transformation of successful
communities into high-rise factory farms for globalized serfs, find
themselves ignored, ridiculed as NIMBYs or considered behind the times.
One developer's Power Point even declared that "fear and loathing of
density is. . .ironic, dangerous, counter-productive." In other words,
preferring the lifestyle predominant in 99.9% of human history is now
dangerous and counter-productive. Further, in the tradition of the new
managerial mullahs, anyone who doesn't like what they're up to is
suffering from fear and loathing of positive change.
No Child Left Unregimented
The assault on community controlled public education is not only a
result of Bush's No Child law. Bill Kauffman once noted in Chronicles
that it was liberal Harvard president President James Conant who
produced a series of postwar reports calling for the "elimination of the
small high school" in order to compete with the Soviets and deal with
the nuclear era. Says Kauffman, "Conant the barbarian triumphed: the
number of school districts plummeted from 83,718 in 1950 to 17,995 in
1970."
Writing in Principal Magazine, Kathleen Cushman pointed out that the
small school movement was driven by "the steady rise in school size that
has seen the average school population increase five-fold since the end
of World War II. A push to consolidate schools has reduced the number of
districts by 70 percent in the same period. Ironically, this trend
toward big schools coincides with research that repeatedly has found
small schools - commonly defined as no more than 400 students for
elementary schools - to be demonstrably better for students of all
ability levels, in all kinds of settings. Academic achievement rises, as
indicated by grades, test scores, honor roll membership, subject-area
achievement, and assessment of higher-order thinking skills. For both
elementary and secondary students, researchers also find small schools
equal or superior to large ones on most student behavior measures. Rates
of truancy, classroom disruption, vandalism, theft, substance abuse, and
gang participation all are reduced in small schools, according to a
synthesis of 103 studies."
Education is one of those human activities clearly centered on two
people (teacher and student). As the system surrounding this experience
becomes larger, more complex and more bureaucratic, the key players
become pawns in a new and unrelated bureaucratic game. The role of the
principal also dramatically shifts - from being an educational
administrator to being a cross between a corporate executive and a
warden. It is such a transformation that helps to bring us things like
what happened at Columbine.
Consider, for a moment, that not a single private school has merged with
five or ten other academies in the name of efficiency and improved
learning. No one has suggested a
Andover-Exeter-Groton-Milton-Choate-Kent School Administrative District.
If conglomeration of schools really helped, why would such places not
give it a try? I once asked the head of one of the top private girl's
schools in the country what he considered the maximum size of a school
he'd like to run. His reply: 500 students. . ."Remember, that means
1,000 parents."
Yet not only do we find George Bush, with lots of Democratic support,
actively destroying local control over public schools, mayors and
governors rushing to join the attack.
For example, inspired by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who has
yet to produce convincing results for his corporatization of public
education, DC's 36-year old new mayor Adrian Fenty is following suit. He
wants to abolish the elected school and put the system under his control
despite his impressive inexperience in education. But Fenty, like many
in politics and business, is absolutely convinced that certainty is an
adequate substitute for competence.
How little he really understands was well described by Colbert King in
the Washington Post:
"If governance and lack of accountability are the main problems, why do
students attending Lafayette and Murch elementary schools, which are
west of Rock Creek Park, exceed proficiency targets in reading and math
by wide margins while students at Ketchum and Stanton elementary
schools, east of the Anacostia River, fall far short of the mark? The
four schools are in the same governance structure. Their principals
report to the same superintendent and are guided by the same school
board policies. True, Lafayette and Murch, located in middle-income
neighborhoods, have more white students. But before going off on a
racial tangent, consider this: Black students attending Lafayette and
Murch, in contrast to their counterparts in Southeast, also excel in
reading and math." King asked Fenty why his takeover would help matters:
"His bottom line: he has the energy, determination, and sense of urgency
that he feels are missing among school leaders to make those things
happen." In other words, he thinks what the schools really need most is
himself.
Perhaps even more bizarre is what is happening in Maine. The plan itself
is familiar: the pursuit of the false god of educational efficiency
through the concentration of school districts as ordered by the
governor. 290 school districts would be merged into 26 regional
administrative units.
What makes it stranger is that Maine is one of a handful of New England
states where one can still find the remnants of American democracy
functioning at human scale thanks to such institutions as town meetings
and lots of small villages that do what they want without excessive
interference from above. This tradition has produced in recent years
more independent governors (although not the present one) than just
about any state and a culture of honest independence in politics and
governance that would best be emulated rather than reorganized.
And who suggested the course that the governor is following? None other
than representatives of that citadel of Washington anti-democratic
elitism, that hospice of prematurely aging MBAs and political science
majors: the Brookings Institution. This is like Arianna Huffington
coaching the Chicago Bears.
To add to the oddity, it is all being done in the name of "smart
growth."
To give a sense of how alien this is to traditional Maine culture,
consider a town meeting I attended a few years back in Freeport. I got
there a little late and the respectables had taken all the chairs, so I
stood in the hall outside with the baseball cap and pencil in the ear
set, all intensely interested and exchanging play by play among
themselves. It was a heated discussion that eventually produced the
resignation of a couple of council members but I tired of standing and
so returned to my quarters to watch it on TV. At 11 pm, when I thought
the citizen input was almost over, two people showed up to testify
explaining they had become so perturbed, they had gotten out of bed,
dressed and braved the ice and cold to join the fray at town hall.
Now that's the way democracy is meant to work, but it's damn seldom that
you see it any more. And when you do, the sensible reaction should be:
don't mess with it.
Although the Maine media has seemed to give implied blessing to the
school reorganization scheme, there is life in the state yet as public
comment illustrates.
One Brunswick school board member called Governor Balducci's plan
"totalitarian." Said another, "To lose our local control, I think it
would be devastating." Asked one citizen: "Tell me folks, right here in
Brewer, do you want somebody from Alton, Bradley or Bangor telling you
how we should run our school system?"
A school superintendent, according to the Brunswick Times Record,
"warned the plan could mean a higher per-student cost for Brunswick,
possible budget cuts that would affect teaching staff, and a potential
clash of educational philosophies between Brunswick, Freeport and the
towns of School Administrative District 75 that would share one
administrative office and one school board under the proposed plan. [The
superintendent] also criticized the governor and Education Commissioner
Susan Gendron for producing a plan that glossed over the loss of more
than 600 teachers, hundreds of jobs for administrative office staff and
the educational impact of superintendents.
Other comment, as reported by local press:
Roger Shaw, superintendent of the Mars Hills schools: "All small schools
are struggling for survival and all small schools are in danger. Whether
by chance or design, we are in the crosshairs of state policy."
Harvey Shue, a junior at Hampden Academy called it an "extreme act" to
merge his 2,200-student school district into a 16,000-student district
based miles away.
Richard Farrell of Monhegan "said it would be unworkable to relocate the
management of its seven-pupil elementary school to the mainland. He said
parents would be hard-pressed to attend meetings and that the island's
overall cost would be bound to increase."
Andrew Geranis of York "asked lawmakers to reject any proposal that
would change the way schools are now governed. 'Local control is the
heart of our life in Maine,' he said.
Angela Iancelli of Monhegan Island "said she feared that district
consolidation would lead to the closing of the island's small school,
which she said manages to operate efficiently while turning out students
who perform well on state achievement tests."
This is not a left-right struggle but one that may far more important
for our future: a struggle between communities and bureaucracies and
between humans and systems. At present, the communities and humans are
not winning.
Smart Growth
The tie-in with smart growth is quite revealing. The smart growth
movement started as a largely well-intentioned movement led by planners
and environmentalists. Many of their proposals made sense but it had
some serious problems, beginning with the insulting manner it treated
suburban communities in which many Americans lived, had improved their
lives and educated their children. As is traditionally the case with
planners, these citizens were expected to adapt to a purportedly ideal
physical model - even at the cost of having to move or being evicted -
instead of having the emphasis placed on improving - for them as well as
the environment - the communities in which they currently lived.
This is not a new problem with planners. In 1910, G. K. Chesterton
described two characters, Hudge and Gudge, whose thinking evolved in
such a disparate manner that the one came to favor the building of large
public tenements for the poor while the other believed that these public
projects were so awful that the slums from whence they came were in fact
preferable. Wrote Chesterton:
"Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely
introduced as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding
which is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of a
rookery, men are put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy
human soul loathes them both. A man's first desire is to get away as far
as possible from the rookery, even should his mad course lead him to a
model dwelling. His second desire is, naturally, to get away from the
model dwelling, even if it should lead a man back to the rookery.
"Neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for an instant what sort of
house a man might probably like for himself. In short, they did not
begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not practical politicians."
Much of American politics and planning follows the Hudge-¬Gudge model,
producing failure for both conservatives and liberals -- the former
offering us an army of the homeless and the latter presenting us finally
with drug-infested housing projects.
In the case of smart growth, the Hudge-Gudge conflict could have been
avoided by considering not just a community's ecological liabilities but
its assets, and then figuring out how to lessen the former without
harming the latter. This might lead not to large scale redevelopment but
towards ways of making it less necessary for people to move around so
much in order to fulfill a day's tasks, permitting accessory apartments
in single-family neighborhoods and easing zoning restrictions on
community-serving small businesses. In many suburbs wastefully designed
shopping strips can provide more than enough room for high-rise density
without imposing them on communities that don't want them.
It is helpful also to bear in mind that next to economists, no
profession has been so consistently wrong and harmful to the human
spirit as urban planning.
There was, for example, zoning that destroyed the mixed use city in the
name of cleanliness and health and that laid the groundwork for the
sprawl of which planners now complain.
There were decades of racist federal housing lending policies that
created ghettoes in cities as the money fed the expansion of the
suburbs.
There was the destruction of magnificent streetcar systems on behalf of
the automobile.
There was urban renewal that destroyed communities instead of rebuilding
them.
There was anti-human public housing.
There were - and continues to be - grandiose "economic development"
programs that overwhelmingly favored the upper class and a small coterie
of developers but which left less wealthy urban residents increasingly
victims of neglect and of gentrification.
Each of these schemes were based on physical solutions to human, social
and economic problems - conceived by planners and politicians stunningly
indifferent to their affect on actual people.
The human, the community, the small were repeatedly considered archaic,
insignificant and regressive.
From the progressive movement of the early 20th century on, well-meaning
but excessively self-assured members of the elite have controlled the
debate, the money and the plans, with barely restrained contempt for the
reservations, concerns and resistance of the less powerful. And so it is
with smart growth.
Listen to Grow Smart Maine:
"Many of Maine's smaller cities and towns are experiencing unplanned
growth but lack the resources and experience to manage that change in
ways that protect the character of their community. . . The Model Town
Community Project will work with a selected town during 2006 and 2007 to
provide tools and advice that will help the town shape its future. The
project will mobilize local, state and regional resources, enable the
town to explore new growth strategies and fully engage local residents
by combining the best elements of New England town meetings with ground
breaking new technologies."
In other words, we'll come in and show you how to run a town meeting our
way, just like we learned at business school.
But if smart growth is meant to be about environmentally sound planning,
how come we have to consolidate our school districts and our town
offices?
Because once you put your faith in the sort of expertise that a
planning-managerial elite offers, once you turn to MBAs like others turn
to Jesus, then you don't really need democracy, town meetings or small
schools. What you need is efficiency and managerial skill and you have
been promised that, so why worry?
Further, even over smart growth's short life, a disturbing alliance has
developed between some liberals and developers thanks to the latter
discovering that the environmentalists didn't really want to stop them
from building, they just want them to build somewhere else and most
likely in a place where they could get more per square foot.
Washington, DC offers a good example and, once again, the Brookings
mafia is hard at work. In fact, it even wants to eliminate something
that make Washington one of the most appealing cities in the world: its
building height limit.
Reports the Washington Post: "Christopher B. Leinberger, a land-use
expert at the Brookings Institution, last week brought up the prospect
of raising the height limit on buildings in the District. He didn't
specify a height but encouraged community leaders, planners and
developers to at least entertain the idea. 'Things have changed,' he
told a standing-room-only crowd . . . 'We have an office market that
needs to go someplace,' he said. 'Density is critical. We're running out
of land. We need to build up.'"
In some neighborhoods, citizens are even being called NIMBYs because
they don't want high-rises shoved into their pleasant communities and
the name-callers include not just the developers but enabling liberals
who think they're saving the planet. Never mind that in their own city,
in Greenwich Village or in Europe there are plenty of examples of
density without high-rise factory farms.
Fortunately, not everyone is taken in.
One in attendance at the density meeting wrote online afterwards: "The
biggest hole in the program, in my humble opinion, was the fact that
none of the presenters acknowledged that DC is not Bethesda or Atlanta
or Portland. It is our nation's capital, not a strip mall out in Fairfax
waiting to be retooled."
It is this remarkable notion of our nation's capital and other cities -
that they are just strip malls waiting to be retooled - that is driving
much of urban planning and politics these days.
In both the school consolidation and the smart growth debates the issue
of human scale - and not some liberal-conservative conflict - is at the
core. But we have been taught - by intellectuals, by the media, by
politicians, - to revere a promise of efficiency and technological
advance over the empirical advantages of living the way humans have
traditionally lived, including valuing the small places that host,
nurture and define their lives. We have been trained not to even notice
when our very humanity is being destroyed in the name of mere physical
change.
We should notice, though, because in the end, if we lose the fight for
staying human, whether we were liberal or conservative won't have
mattered a bit.
A FIELD GUIDE TO DEVOLUTION
http://prorev.com/devolution.htm
--^----------------------------------------------------------------
governmental power, world trade, domestic commerce and police authority
- just to name a few - there is a stunning lack of alternatives proposed
or even mentioned by media, politicians or intellectuals. Even among
those who despise these trends there seems an almost tacit acceptance of
their inevitability. A few examples:
- One of the greatest assaults on the Tenth Amendment's protection of
state powers - No Child Left Behind - is broadly supported by both
Republicans and Democrats. The Tenth Amendment, in fact, has almost
become the Forgotten Law.
- America's right to determine the values and politics of the rest of
the world, even to the point of invasion, has wide acceptance among
Democrats and Republicans, limited only by the caveat that it may not be
as big a disaster as is Iraq.
- The gross conglomeration of the American media - the broadcast media
in particular - has raised few objections saved from those hardy groups
that still believe in a free press.
- Many corporations use America mainly as a mailing address as they seek
to do to the world what Starbucks has done to many urban neighborhoods.
- The cultural values of Americans is increasingly based on the idea
that bigger is better. We have been taught to worship grandiosity and
ridicule the modest.
Obviously, these are not universally held values although one might
easily think so. In fact, underneath the surface of mainstream
megalomania are numerous examples of groups and people still acting in,
or striving for, human scale. They are, in fact, about some of the most
important business of a human: reversing the gigantism that has not only
hurt our lives but is threatening the whole planet.
Collectively these alternatives can be called examples of devolution or
subsidiarity, the dispersal of authority to the lowest practical level,
an increasing proximity of people to power, the return of commerce,
politics and policing to human scale.
Nothing could be more important and no idea is more in need of a
movement.
You didn't have to explain this in the 1960s and 70s when community
power and control were well up on the left's agenda only to be wiped
from memory by a generation of accumulators, self-aggrandizers and
monopolizers preaching the human heresies of Thatcher, Friedman and
Reagan like so many hustling evangelicals.
This journal has joined innumerable fights on this matter over the
years. It argued for urban neighborhood government, it published a
series of articles on devolution in other countries (including a
prediction of the break-up of the Soviet Union) by Thomas Martin, and we
have raised the flag for more urban states.
The best way to think about devolution is to remember that it refers to
what Martin has called "the ideology of scale." This ideology functions
in a three-dimensional fashion with traditional ideologies. For example,
one can be a progressive decentralist or a conservative who believes in
centralized authority. Thus conservatives and progressives may agree
that much power needs to be returned to a local level, but might
disagree violently on how it should be handled once it gets there.
What works so well in the manufacture of a Ford Taurus -- efficiency of
scale and mass production -- fails to work in social policy because,
unlike a Taurus, humans think, cry, love, get distracted, criticize,
worry or don't give a shit. Yet we keep acting as though such traits
don't exist or don't matter. We have come to accept the notion that the
enormous institutions of government, media, industry and academia are
natural to the human condition and then wonder why they don't work
better than they do. In fact, as ecological planner Ernest Callenbach
pointed out, "we are medium-sized animals who naturally live in small
groups -- perhaps 20 or so -- as opposed to bees or antelopes who live
in very large groups. When managers or generals or architects force us
into large groups, we speedily try to break them down into sub-units of
comfortable size."
Today, if you want to tell it to the boss, you may have to travel a
couple of thousand miles just to get to the receptionist. All of our
systems appear to be on steroids. And like the drugged athlete, nature
eventually pulls the plug. The institutions that have imposed a tyranny
of size upon us not only fail to accomplish what they set out to do but
are themselves disintegrating. The troubles of such huge institutions is
a primary characteristic of our times. Consider the Soviet Union, Sears,
General Motors and, yes, the United States itself.
We see it and yet we don't. Our loyalty to our assumptions and
ideologies as well as our natural difficulty in accepting mortality even
in non-human systems lead us to underrate such changes, to keep trying
to do things the old way one more time.
Over the coming weeks, the Review will be presenting examples of
devolution that works and some that doesn't. We invite further examples
and will post a field guide to these matters on a separate web page.
For openers, and to add a little respectability to a topic that may seem
a trifle odd to some, we offer the example of the Catholic church under
Pope Leo XIII
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH & SUBSIDIARITY
WIKIPEDIA - The principle of subsidiarity holds that government should
undertake only those initiatives which exceed the capacity of
individuals or private groups acting independently. The principle is
based upon the autonomy and dignity of the human individual, and holds
that all other forms of society, from the family to the state and the
international order, should be in the service of the human person.
Subsidiarity assumes that these human persons are by their nature social
beings, and emphasizes the importance of small and intermediate-sized
communities or institutions, like the family, the church, and voluntary
associations, as mediating structures which empower individual action
and link the individual to society as a whole. "Positive subsidiarity,"
which is the ethical imperative for communal, institutional or
governmental action to create the social conditions necessary to the
full development of the individual, such as the right to work, decent
housing, health care, etc., is another important aspect of the
subsidiarity principle.
The principle of subsidiarity was developed in the encyclical Rerum
Novarum of 1891 by Pope Leo XIII, as an attempt to articulate a middle
course between the perceived excesses of laissez-faire capitalism on the
one hand and the various forms of totalitarianism, which subordinate the
individual to the state, on the other. The principle was further
developed in Pope Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, and
Economic Justice for All by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
FIELD GUIDE TO DEVOLUTION
http://prorev.com/devolution.htm
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
CROSS-OVER POLITICS AND THE IDEOLOGY OF SCALE
Sam Smith
[Part of a continuing series on devolution - the opposite of
governmental centralization, commercial monopoly and cultural
domination. Devolution is the art of conducting public affairs at a
practical level closest to the human spirit and human communities]
In an age of conglomeration and domination, the cross-political nature
of devolution - or the ideology of scale - attracts little attention.
One can go through a whole political campaign and never consider it. But
that doesn't mean the issue is not there.
Consider two current examples: the assault on local control of public
schools and the smart growth movement. Both are driven by a curious
alliance of liberal, conservative and corporate interests. And both
attempt to replace the decentralization of decision-making with
centralized, bureaucratic choices.
For example, only Vilsack among the Democratic candidate for president
has challenged the No Child law despite it being based on absurdly
inadequate justifications, proposed by the least qualified president
ever to hold office and pushed by a bunch of child profiteers who will
probably be the only clear winners under the legislation.
Similarly, the smart growth movement is being increasingly driven by a
dubious alliance between "we know what's good for you" liberal planners
and developers who initially resisted the idea until they realized how
many new high-rises might result.
Liberals and conservatives who favor America's two centuries of local
school control, or wish to resist the transformation of successful
communities into high-rise factory farms for globalized serfs, find
themselves ignored, ridiculed as NIMBYs or considered behind the times.
One developer's Power Point even declared that "fear and loathing of
density is. . .ironic, dangerous, counter-productive." In other words,
preferring the lifestyle predominant in 99.9% of human history is now
dangerous and counter-productive. Further, in the tradition of the new
managerial mullahs, anyone who doesn't like what they're up to is
suffering from fear and loathing of positive change.
No Child Left Unregimented
The assault on community controlled public education is not only a
result of Bush's No Child law. Bill Kauffman once noted in Chronicles
that it was liberal Harvard president President James Conant who
produced a series of postwar reports calling for the "elimination of the
small high school" in order to compete with the Soviets and deal with
the nuclear era. Says Kauffman, "Conant the barbarian triumphed: the
number of school districts plummeted from 83,718 in 1950 to 17,995 in
1970."
Writing in Principal Magazine, Kathleen Cushman pointed out that the
small school movement was driven by "the steady rise in school size that
has seen the average school population increase five-fold since the end
of World War II. A push to consolidate schools has reduced the number of
districts by 70 percent in the same period. Ironically, this trend
toward big schools coincides with research that repeatedly has found
small schools - commonly defined as no more than 400 students for
elementary schools - to be demonstrably better for students of all
ability levels, in all kinds of settings. Academic achievement rises, as
indicated by grades, test scores, honor roll membership, subject-area
achievement, and assessment of higher-order thinking skills. For both
elementary and secondary students, researchers also find small schools
equal or superior to large ones on most student behavior measures. Rates
of truancy, classroom disruption, vandalism, theft, substance abuse, and
gang participation all are reduced in small schools, according to a
synthesis of 103 studies."
Education is one of those human activities clearly centered on two
people (teacher and student). As the system surrounding this experience
becomes larger, more complex and more bureaucratic, the key players
become pawns in a new and unrelated bureaucratic game. The role of the
principal also dramatically shifts - from being an educational
administrator to being a cross between a corporate executive and a
warden. It is such a transformation that helps to bring us things like
what happened at Columbine.
Consider, for a moment, that not a single private school has merged with
five or ten other academies in the name of efficiency and improved
learning. No one has suggested a
Andover-Exeter-Groton-Milton-Choate-Kent School Administrative District.
If conglomeration of schools really helped, why would such places not
give it a try? I once asked the head of one of the top private girl's
schools in the country what he considered the maximum size of a school
he'd like to run. His reply: 500 students. . ."Remember, that means
1,000 parents."
Yet not only do we find George Bush, with lots of Democratic support,
actively destroying local control over public schools, mayors and
governors rushing to join the attack.
For example, inspired by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who has
yet to produce convincing results for his corporatization of public
education, DC's 36-year old new mayor Adrian Fenty is following suit. He
wants to abolish the elected school and put the system under his control
despite his impressive inexperience in education. But Fenty, like many
in politics and business, is absolutely convinced that certainty is an
adequate substitute for competence.
How little he really understands was well described by Colbert King in
the Washington Post:
"If governance and lack of accountability are the main problems, why do
students attending Lafayette and Murch elementary schools, which are
west of Rock Creek Park, exceed proficiency targets in reading and math
by wide margins while students at Ketchum and Stanton elementary
schools, east of the Anacostia River, fall far short of the mark? The
four schools are in the same governance structure. Their principals
report to the same superintendent and are guided by the same school
board policies. True, Lafayette and Murch, located in middle-income
neighborhoods, have more white students. But before going off on a
racial tangent, consider this: Black students attending Lafayette and
Murch, in contrast to their counterparts in Southeast, also excel in
reading and math." King asked Fenty why his takeover would help matters:
"His bottom line: he has the energy, determination, and sense of urgency
that he feels are missing among school leaders to make those things
happen." In other words, he thinks what the schools really need most is
himself.
Perhaps even more bizarre is what is happening in Maine. The plan itself
is familiar: the pursuit of the false god of educational efficiency
through the concentration of school districts as ordered by the
governor. 290 school districts would be merged into 26 regional
administrative units.
What makes it stranger is that Maine is one of a handful of New England
states where one can still find the remnants of American democracy
functioning at human scale thanks to such institutions as town meetings
and lots of small villages that do what they want without excessive
interference from above. This tradition has produced in recent years
more independent governors (although not the present one) than just
about any state and a culture of honest independence in politics and
governance that would best be emulated rather than reorganized.
And who suggested the course that the governor is following? None other
than representatives of that citadel of Washington anti-democratic
elitism, that hospice of prematurely aging MBAs and political science
majors: the Brookings Institution. This is like Arianna Huffington
coaching the Chicago Bears.
To add to the oddity, it is all being done in the name of "smart
growth."
To give a sense of how alien this is to traditional Maine culture,
consider a town meeting I attended a few years back in Freeport. I got
there a little late and the respectables had taken all the chairs, so I
stood in the hall outside with the baseball cap and pencil in the ear
set, all intensely interested and exchanging play by play among
themselves. It was a heated discussion that eventually produced the
resignation of a couple of council members but I tired of standing and
so returned to my quarters to watch it on TV. At 11 pm, when I thought
the citizen input was almost over, two people showed up to testify
explaining they had become so perturbed, they had gotten out of bed,
dressed and braved the ice and cold to join the fray at town hall.
Now that's the way democracy is meant to work, but it's damn seldom that
you see it any more. And when you do, the sensible reaction should be:
don't mess with it.
Although the Maine media has seemed to give implied blessing to the
school reorganization scheme, there is life in the state yet as public
comment illustrates.
One Brunswick school board member called Governor Balducci's plan
"totalitarian." Said another, "To lose our local control, I think it
would be devastating." Asked one citizen: "Tell me folks, right here in
Brewer, do you want somebody from Alton, Bradley or Bangor telling you
how we should run our school system?"
A school superintendent, according to the Brunswick Times Record,
"warned the plan could mean a higher per-student cost for Brunswick,
possible budget cuts that would affect teaching staff, and a potential
clash of educational philosophies between Brunswick, Freeport and the
towns of School Administrative District 75 that would share one
administrative office and one school board under the proposed plan. [The
superintendent] also criticized the governor and Education Commissioner
Susan Gendron for producing a plan that glossed over the loss of more
than 600 teachers, hundreds of jobs for administrative office staff and
the educational impact of superintendents.
Other comment, as reported by local press:
Roger Shaw, superintendent of the Mars Hills schools: "All small schools
are struggling for survival and all small schools are in danger. Whether
by chance or design, we are in the crosshairs of state policy."
Harvey Shue, a junior at Hampden Academy called it an "extreme act" to
merge his 2,200-student school district into a 16,000-student district
based miles away.
Richard Farrell of Monhegan "said it would be unworkable to relocate the
management of its seven-pupil elementary school to the mainland. He said
parents would be hard-pressed to attend meetings and that the island's
overall cost would be bound to increase."
Andrew Geranis of York "asked lawmakers to reject any proposal that
would change the way schools are now governed. 'Local control is the
heart of our life in Maine,' he said.
Angela Iancelli of Monhegan Island "said she feared that district
consolidation would lead to the closing of the island's small school,
which she said manages to operate efficiently while turning out students
who perform well on state achievement tests."
This is not a left-right struggle but one that may far more important
for our future: a struggle between communities and bureaucracies and
between humans and systems. At present, the communities and humans are
not winning.
Smart Growth
The tie-in with smart growth is quite revealing. The smart growth
movement started as a largely well-intentioned movement led by planners
and environmentalists. Many of their proposals made sense but it had
some serious problems, beginning with the insulting manner it treated
suburban communities in which many Americans lived, had improved their
lives and educated their children. As is traditionally the case with
planners, these citizens were expected to adapt to a purportedly ideal
physical model - even at the cost of having to move or being evicted -
instead of having the emphasis placed on improving - for them as well as
the environment - the communities in which they currently lived.
This is not a new problem with planners. In 1910, G. K. Chesterton
described two characters, Hudge and Gudge, whose thinking evolved in
such a disparate manner that the one came to favor the building of large
public tenements for the poor while the other believed that these public
projects were so awful that the slums from whence they came were in fact
preferable. Wrote Chesterton:
"Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely
introduced as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding
which is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of a
rookery, men are put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy
human soul loathes them both. A man's first desire is to get away as far
as possible from the rookery, even should his mad course lead him to a
model dwelling. His second desire is, naturally, to get away from the
model dwelling, even if it should lead a man back to the rookery.
"Neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for an instant what sort of
house a man might probably like for himself. In short, they did not
begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not practical politicians."
Much of American politics and planning follows the Hudge-¬Gudge model,
producing failure for both conservatives and liberals -- the former
offering us an army of the homeless and the latter presenting us finally
with drug-infested housing projects.
In the case of smart growth, the Hudge-Gudge conflict could have been
avoided by considering not just a community's ecological liabilities but
its assets, and then figuring out how to lessen the former without
harming the latter. This might lead not to large scale redevelopment but
towards ways of making it less necessary for people to move around so
much in order to fulfill a day's tasks, permitting accessory apartments
in single-family neighborhoods and easing zoning restrictions on
community-serving small businesses. In many suburbs wastefully designed
shopping strips can provide more than enough room for high-rise density
without imposing them on communities that don't want them.
It is helpful also to bear in mind that next to economists, no
profession has been so consistently wrong and harmful to the human
spirit as urban planning.
There was, for example, zoning that destroyed the mixed use city in the
name of cleanliness and health and that laid the groundwork for the
sprawl of which planners now complain.
There were decades of racist federal housing lending policies that
created ghettoes in cities as the money fed the expansion of the
suburbs.
There was the destruction of magnificent streetcar systems on behalf of
the automobile.
There was urban renewal that destroyed communities instead of rebuilding
them.
There was anti-human public housing.
There were - and continues to be - grandiose "economic development"
programs that overwhelmingly favored the upper class and a small coterie
of developers but which left less wealthy urban residents increasingly
victims of neglect and of gentrification.
Each of these schemes were based on physical solutions to human, social
and economic problems - conceived by planners and politicians stunningly
indifferent to their affect on actual people.
The human, the community, the small were repeatedly considered archaic,
insignificant and regressive.
From the progressive movement of the early 20th century on, well-meaning
but excessively self-assured members of the elite have controlled the
debate, the money and the plans, with barely restrained contempt for the
reservations, concerns and resistance of the less powerful. And so it is
with smart growth.
Listen to Grow Smart Maine:
"Many of Maine's smaller cities and towns are experiencing unplanned
growth but lack the resources and experience to manage that change in
ways that protect the character of their community. . . The Model Town
Community Project will work with a selected town during 2006 and 2007 to
provide tools and advice that will help the town shape its future. The
project will mobilize local, state and regional resources, enable the
town to explore new growth strategies and fully engage local residents
by combining the best elements of New England town meetings with ground
breaking new technologies."
In other words, we'll come in and show you how to run a town meeting our
way, just like we learned at business school.
But if smart growth is meant to be about environmentally sound planning,
how come we have to consolidate our school districts and our town
offices?
Because once you put your faith in the sort of expertise that a
planning-managerial elite offers, once you turn to MBAs like others turn
to Jesus, then you don't really need democracy, town meetings or small
schools. What you need is efficiency and managerial skill and you have
been promised that, so why worry?
Further, even over smart growth's short life, a disturbing alliance has
developed between some liberals and developers thanks to the latter
discovering that the environmentalists didn't really want to stop them
from building, they just want them to build somewhere else and most
likely in a place where they could get more per square foot.
Washington, DC offers a good example and, once again, the Brookings
mafia is hard at work. In fact, it even wants to eliminate something
that make Washington one of the most appealing cities in the world: its
building height limit.
Reports the Washington Post: "Christopher B. Leinberger, a land-use
expert at the Brookings Institution, last week brought up the prospect
of raising the height limit on buildings in the District. He didn't
specify a height but encouraged community leaders, planners and
developers to at least entertain the idea. 'Things have changed,' he
told a standing-room-only crowd . . . 'We have an office market that
needs to go someplace,' he said. 'Density is critical. We're running out
of land. We need to build up.'"
In some neighborhoods, citizens are even being called NIMBYs because
they don't want high-rises shoved into their pleasant communities and
the name-callers include not just the developers but enabling liberals
who think they're saving the planet. Never mind that in their own city,
in Greenwich Village or in Europe there are plenty of examples of
density without high-rise factory farms.
Fortunately, not everyone is taken in.
One in attendance at the density meeting wrote online afterwards: "The
biggest hole in the program, in my humble opinion, was the fact that
none of the presenters acknowledged that DC is not Bethesda or Atlanta
or Portland. It is our nation's capital, not a strip mall out in Fairfax
waiting to be retooled."
It is this remarkable notion of our nation's capital and other cities -
that they are just strip malls waiting to be retooled - that is driving
much of urban planning and politics these days.
In both the school consolidation and the smart growth debates the issue
of human scale - and not some liberal-conservative conflict - is at the
core. But we have been taught - by intellectuals, by the media, by
politicians, - to revere a promise of efficiency and technological
advance over the empirical advantages of living the way humans have
traditionally lived, including valuing the small places that host,
nurture and define their lives. We have been trained not to even notice
when our very humanity is being destroyed in the name of mere physical
change.
We should notice, though, because in the end, if we lose the fight for
staying human, whether we were liberal or conservative won't have
mattered a bit.
A FIELD GUIDE TO DEVOLUTION
http://prorev.com/devolution.htm
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