I still think it is worth examining how some institutions come to be
organized in such a way as to be relatively MORE coercive than others, and
the extent to which this aligns with how great the scale differences are
between the level of human interpersonal activity and the level at which
institutional formations occur which impose the coercive constraints. By
"level" here I do not mean level in an authority hierarchy, but level in
relation to material time/space/matter/energy scale of organization. In
very simple terms, I am proposing that our society has not found effective
solutions to the basic problem of large-scale social organization, that we
have taken the wrong path historically in how we mediate between
large-scale social organization and human-scale social activity. I do not
doubt that in part we have taken the paths we have because it has suited
the interests of powerful elites, but I doubt that they have a clue just
what the problem is that they have led us to such a bad solution for, nor
do any of us yet really understand where to look for alternatives.
Many people today it seems share the intuition that the scale of our
society is just too large, that there is no way people can take control of
their lives when so much of life is entangled with very large-scale
institutions and macro-social structures and constraints. It is not the
whole story that this vast weight grinding us down is just a machine to
make profits for the few. I do not think we have understood the fundamental
problems of scale in social systems. In particular, I do not think we
understand nearly well enough for our own good the problem of how meaning
and control passes from scale to scale. Our theories of authority
hierarchies entirely miss the point; they are not about scale at all, they
still talk about what people do on the normal human scale, whether they are
influential managers or oppressed peasants, but not about how regional,
national, or global scales of ecosocial processes impinge on the human
scale of activity, nor about how in principle it can be possible for
people, including managers, not to become increasingly powerless to do more
than wriggle a bit in the ever narrower channels left open to us by these
higher level constraints.
In the theory of these issues that I am trying to develop, there are
supposed to be buffers between scale levels, and there is supposed to be a
rather substantial degree of freedom for lower levels to quite differently
satisfy higher-level constraints. This is the way that ecosystems work,
that biological development works, and that some human cultural
institutions work ... but by and large it is becoming less and less the way
our dominant global views of social organization and cultural control
operate. I believe this may be extremely dangerous for the human future,
and not just because of the oppression of those at the bottom of the
authority ladder. I think it may be possible to formulate political
principles designed to restore needed freedom and flexibility and insure
the necessary buffering between levels. These principles may well forbid
some social practices which are now accepted wisdom about how society needs
to be organized, perhaps most basically the drive to large-scale uniformity
in laws, policies, and standards that has been our dominant culture's basic
response to the long and deadly era of civil wars and sectarian strife that
created modern euroculture a few centuries ago (not that it's over, or
unique to us).
In the specific arena of education, this analysis may indict standardized
curricula and perhaps even mass-market textbooks. It may seem a bit odd to
say it this way, but current trends in education seem to be heading for
exactly the same sort of ecological disaster as environmental policies, and
perhaps from exactly the same suicidal logic. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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