The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: The Perils of Quantitative Collosalism

“Our period could almost be defined as being essentially and primarily the ‘reign of quantity’.” (Rene Guenon)

Pitirim Sorokin, from The Crisis of Our Age (1941):

In the late Hellenic and Roman eras, sublime quality deteriorated. Its place was taken by ever-bigger quantity, and the greater the colossalism of the quantity, the better its regard. Temples, palaces, theaters, public buildings, monuments, sculptures, all became gigantic. The Colossus of Rhodes was 105 feet high; the Halicarnassus Mausoleum was 140 feet high. The size of sculptures and monuments like the Pergamene Frieze, the Farnese Heracles, the Arch of Titus, and the Triumphal Columns of Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, and Constantine were, comparatively, enormous. The Hellenic cities with their huge buildings and wide and long avenues were much larger than the Greek cities of the previous period. The fortunes of millionaires grew enormous. Gigantic choruses and orchestras developed, with numerous and much more complicated instruments. Theatrical plays involved hundreds of actors, animals, and accessories. Schools, colleges, learned and artistic societies, unions, and associations developed, each one larger than the last. Sciences and arts were now cultivated on a large scale. Mass education in arts and sciences, philosophy, and technology became established. A more widely spread school system was introduced. Mass preoccupation with politics became the rule. Mass growth — of unions, of men’s and women’s clubs with mass aesthetic connoisseurism; of mass amateurish philosophy; of mass theater and dramas; of mass religious revivals; of mass production of all kinds of cultural values — spread on a large scale. The size of the empire grew to pathological proportions. Quantity and show became the criteria of quality. The disease of external hugeness and of quantitative colossalism permeated the Hellenic and post-Hellenic Roman cultures.”

Quantitative colossalism was but a substitute for inability to create the great qualitative values. It was the line of least resistance accessible to any mediocrity. “Not being able to make them beautiful, they made them rich”— we can repeat what Pliny says about the huge theaters of his time. The more the creative quality deteriorated, the huger became the values produced. The less inner substance they had, the more showy they were. The more vulgar they were, the more popular they became. The bigger the temples became, the more hollow was the religion. The more generally mass education spread, the less genius appeared. The larger the empires grew, the more disorganized they turned out to be and the harder the lot of the citizens became. The larger the crowd of philosophers, the fewer great philosophers emerged. Erudition replaced creative genius; technique, inspiration; mechanical skill, creative originality.

Our sensate culture of today appears to be exactly in the same position. External glitter and quantitative colossalism already reign supreme in it. “The bigger the better” is its motto: hence our enormous skyscrapers, monuments, temples, school and college buildings, railroad stations, up to the monsters of Radio City and World’s Fairs. Quantitative colossalism tends to become the criterion of any great value. The best business firms are those which are hugest. The society leaders are those who are richest. The greatest empires are those which are most monstrous. The largest theaters become the best. The best show is that which attracts most people. So also the best preachers, teachers, orators, professors, ministers, and what not. The greatest scholar is he who is paid the highest salary or has the largest audience. The greatest university is the largest. The masterpieces of literature or art, philosophy or science, religion or politics are the best sellers bought by millions. “The biggest firm,” “the largest circulation,” “the biggest market of second-hand tires in the world”.

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Pitirim Sorokin - Wikipedia   

For more on Quantitative Collosalism: Kirkpatrick Sale’s “Human Scale” and E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”.

For more on the notions of Quantity and Quality: Rene Guenon's "The Reign of Quantity" and Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

Small is beautiful? Try telling that to the Colossus of Rhodes.

Saturday Lecture: The Disease of Civilization

Richard Heinberg (from “Was Civilization a Mistake?”):

Here we are, some of the most civilized people on the planet, discussing in the most civilized way imaginable whether civilization itself might be an error. Most of our fellow civilians would likely find our discussion, in addition to being ironic, also disturbing and pointless: after all, what person who has grown up with cars, electricity, and television would relish the idea of living without a house, and of surviving only on wild foods?

Regardless, a critique of civilization is virtually inescapable for two reasons.

The first has to do with certain deeply disturbing trends in the modern world. We are, it seems, killing the planet. Revisionist “wise use” advocates tell us there is nothing to worry about; dangers to the environment, they say, have been wildly exaggerated. To me this is the most blatant form of wishful thinking. By most estimates, the oceans are dying, the human population is expanding far beyond the long-term carrying capacity of the land, the ozone layer is dis- appearing, and the global climate is showing worrisome signs of instability. Unless drastic steps are taken, in 50 years the vast majority of the world’s population will likely be existing in conditions such that the lifestyle of virtually any undisturbed primitive tribe would be paradise by comparison.

Now, it can be argued that civilization per se is not at fault, that the problems we face have to do with unique economic and historical circumstances. But we should at least consider the possibility that our modern industrial system represents the flowering of tendencies that go back quite far. This, at any rate, is the implication of recent assessments of the ecological ruin left in the wake of the Roman, Mesopotamian, Chinese and other prior civilizations. Are we perhaps repeating their errors on a gargantuan scale?

If my first reason for criticizing civilization has to do with its effects on the environment, the second has to do with its impact on human beings. As civilized people, we are also domesticated. We are to primitive peoples as cows and sheep are to bears and eagles. On the rental property where I live in California, my landlord keeps two white domesticated ducks. These ducks have been bred to have wings so small as to prevent them from flying. This is a convenience for their keepers but, compared to wild ducks, these are pitiful creatures.

Many primal peoples tend to view us as pitiful creatures, too — though powerful and dangerous because of our technology and sheer numbers. They regard civilization as a sort of social disease. We civilized people appear to act as though we were addicted to a powerful drug — a drug that comes in the forms of money, factory-made goods, oil, and electricity. We are helpless without this drug, so we have come to see any threat to its supply as a threat to our very existence. Therefore, we are easily manipulated — by desire (for more) or fear (that what we have will be taken away) — and powerful commercial and political interests have learned to orchestrate our desires and fears in order to achieve their own purposes of profit and control. If told that the production of our drug involves slavery, stealing, and murder, or the ecological equivalents, we try to ignore the news so as not to have to face an intolerable double bind.

Since our present civilization is patently ecologically unsustainable in its present form, it follows that our descendants will be living very differently in a few decades, whether their new way of life arises by conscious choice or by default. If humankind is to choose its path deliberately, I believe that our deliberations should include a critique of civilization itself. The question implicit in such a critique is, what have we have done poorly or thoughtlessly in the past that we can do better now?

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Richard Heinberg - Wikipedia and Richard Heinberg.com

{Heinberg’s essay can be found in John Zerzan’s anthology, Against Civilization, a classic of the genre. The book, first published in 1999, includes selections from Thoreau, William Morris, Freud, Max Horkheimer, Chellis Glendinning, Edward Abbey, Kirkpatrick Sale, Ivan Illich, Theodore Roszak, Ursula Le Guin, Susan Griffin, and many more. It is, in other words, a veritable “who’s who” of cranks, eccentrics, dreamers, anarchists, and all those who rage against the machine.}  

[Photo from itsgoingdown.org]

 

Why We Can't Have Nice Things (Part the I've Lost Track)

{I am in favor of making Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” our national anthem. At the least, it should be the theme song for Fox News: “You raise up your head and you ask, 'Is this where it is?' / And somebody points to you and says, 'It's his' / And you say, 'What's mine?' and somebody else says, 'Well, what is?' / And you say, 'Oh my God, am I here all alone?' / But something is happening and you don't know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?”}

Endlessly gobsmacked (as Charlie Pierce might say) by reality, today’s conservatives haven’t a clue; unfortunately, and inexplicably, they continue to exert influence. And, just as no good deed goes unpunished, no good idea escapes being bastardized and used to further the agendas of moral cretins, e.g., Tucker Carlson (aka "the Tuckster").

Case in point: I have frequently touted the theme of “human scale,” a notion developed at length and in depth by Kirkpatrick Sale in his book of the same name. The “human scale” thesis is simple: “Smaller and more people-sized institutions and arrangements are both more efficient and more humane.” Sale referred to (and advocated for) “smaller buildings, communities, cities, offices, factories, farms, economic networks, and societies,” including almost every area of organized human existence. He used examples from nature as well as from history to argue that size matters; at a certain point, Sale claimed, bigness becomes a burden, a point he formulated as “the Beanstalk Principle,” which states that “For every animal, object, institution, or system, there is an optimal limit beyond which it ought not to grow and beyond which all other elements of the animal, object, institution, or system will be affected adversely.”

In his book, Kirkpatrick Sale urged a thoughtful, careful rethinking and redesign of our social structures, based on an understanding of his “Beanstalk Principle”. Forty years after Human Scale was first published, along comes Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson to abuse its insights and to stump for his personal brand of “Know Nothing” politics, like so:

The larger a bureaucracy becomes, the more impersonal it gets. Past a certain size, organizations of any kind lose their regard for people. As they get bigger, they get blunter, more soulless and cruel. The people in charge no longer care what you think. They don't have to worry about how their policies will affect you or your family. And that's the inevitable product of population growth. If you had five children, you would bathe them all in love and attention. If you had 5,000 children, you wouldn't know their names. So, in case you're wondering why our leaders no longer seem especially interested in your health or happiness or prosperity, that's the reason. They don't have to be interested. Our population is too big. Why should your opinion matter? You're one of many.

According to the Tuckster, America is “the victim of population growth. The Athenians invented democratic government, but at its peak, Athens only had about 8,000 voters. So, past a certain scale, democracy can't function very well.” Our democracy has its problems, and the size of the electorate (along with the mechanisms by which the electorate expresses itself and by which our political leaders are chosen) is one of them; but, while others propose rational and practical systemic reforms to address such problems, the Tuckster just wants to keep certain people out (immigrants) and to keep others (Democratic-leaning citizens) from participating in the democratic process.

Carlson’s latest tirade ends with what might at first seem to be self-parody but in fact is the Tuckster at his most authentic:

“Massive size is a threat, no matter what it is. Always. In our bones we understand this. Anything huge is inherently terrifying to us. Children run from big things!”  

Credit where credit is due: Tucker Carlson knows his audience. At heart and in their bones, today’s GOP voters are terrified children, so terrified they are willing to follow charlatan pipers like Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Donald Trump right off the cliff into an authoritarian abyss; the worst part being, they may well take the rest of us with them.

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{Thanks to Media Matters and Wonkette for the Tucker Carlson quotations.}

The Tuckster's artistic rendering of American democracy

Is Our Nation Learning?

{This is my third and final reflection on Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1980 book, Human Scale.}

Re-reading Human Scale, it can be difficult at times to remember that Kirkpatrick Sale was offering a critique of American society, including government and politics, from the political Left. His emphases on localism, on smaller and more cohesive communities, on the importance of civic institutions, and on the need for subsidiarity (the notion that issues of governance ought to be handled by the nearest, smallest, and least centralized competent authority): all of that sounds more like conservatism a la Russell Kirk than it does mainstream liberalism. That fact testifies to how far American liberalism, terrified by George McGovern’s 1972 electoral debacle and desperately trying to disassociate itself from the Sixties’ counterculture and the New Left, fled in panic from the Left and scrambled towards the center.

Here is what Sale had to say in 1980 about what Kevin Phillips called “the Balkanization of American politics”:

There may have been no time within the last century of our history when there has been such a fundamental distension of the bodies politic and social as in our present generation. Other times have seen pressure groups, of course—but today we have special-interest groups on every conceivable matter, in every conceivable enterprise and industry, most of them well organized and well financed, able to influence the course of legislation and elections.

Today there is not one social aspect of our life—birth, sex, death, education, health, environment—and not one biological aspect of our being—age, gender, race, ethnicity, physical handicap—that does not have one group, and usually two or more and often competing, around it. Today there is not a single ethnic group, however marginal, that is not organized and vocal and as often as not directly opposed to the interests or policies of at least one or two of the others.

Sale was in no way delegitimizing advocacy groups, nor was he condemning what we now call “identity politics”. He was simply noting that, given the proliferation of competing interests, the nation seemed to be coming apart:

Laying aside the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, seldom has there been the depth of hostility and fragmentation that we see today, with sectionalism infecting practically every national issue, setting a number of regions against each other and all against the Federal government…at no time since the advent of the national media has there been such a pluralism of tastes and forms and accepted practices, such an acceptance of disparate styles according to age, race, region, or status.

Kirkpatrick Sale’s remedy for this “Balkanization” was not to invoke sunnier times or some hoary myth of national unity, but to suggest that Americans acknowledge our differences and go our separate ways—amicably, of course; to paraphrase John dos Passos, "Alright then we are many nations." Sale proposed that we form regional collectives, revive our small communities, and create urban enclaves of like-minded (or at least open-minded) people; the point of all that being to allow people to design their own human-scale lives without needing permission or blueprints from Washington.

Simply put, America was too big and too diverse to be governed effectively from the center; Sale wanted power and responsibility (the two being inseparable) removed from the national government and returned to the states and localities. He was, alas, going against the tide of neo-liberalism, which promoted an alliance of centralized government with Wall Street finance and corporate globalization; and, despite his sympathy for “states’ rights,” he was also fighting the tide of conservatism, which shared his distrust of large central governments but had no interest in the rest of his Left-populist agenda, which seemed suspiciously countercultural.

According to Sale, America had entered an age that sociologist Robert Nisbet called “the twilight of authority,” marked by a loss of faith in all institutions, local as well as national, and a loss of faith in the political process itself and in the very concepts of “community” and “the collective good.” Reaganism, like Thatcherism in England, was premised on the idea that “there is no such thing as society”; and while Sale disagreed with that premise, he insisted, like Reagan and unlike the neo-liberal Democrats, that the federal government was not the solution to our civic woes.  

Sprinkling his text with ominous phrases borrowed from Nisbet—“the decline and erosion of institutions,” “a vacuum in the moral order,” “the crumbling walls of politics,” and “a gathering revolt against the whole structure of wealth, privilege, and power that the contemporary democratic state has come to represent”—Sale portrayed an American polity on the edge of rebellion. The peasants were coming, angry and armed with torches and pitchforks: Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plough.

As it turned out, that populist revolt was first disarmed by Reagan’s avuncular charm and then channeled, politically, into Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America”; that is, it was channeled into the Republican Party’s all-out assault on Washington, into its demonization of the federal government, and into its decision to treat politics as warfare by other means and to treat the Democratic Party not as the “loyal opposition” but as the enemy. Then, in 2001, 9/11 gave us another enemy to blame for our dissatisfactions and against whom to target our resentments. The Republicans, elaborating on Gingrich’s “politics as war,” now routinely conflate the enemies of America, foreign and domestic, insisting that Democrats are in league with Islamic terrorists and with criminals, anarchists, communists, Bolsheviks, cultural Marxists, “antifa,” MS 13, and so on.

The Boomers among us should remember from our youth the admonition, “Never trust anyone over thirty.” Since we quickly reached the age of “over thirty” ourselves, that admonition was amended to “Never trust anyone.” Mission accomplished, fellow Boomers: according to Kirkpatrick Sale, “The University of Michigan has measured public attitudes toward authority since 1958, at which time it found that 20% of the public expressed distrust of political authority. Every year since then the percentage has risen, and in the latest survey, in 1979, 55 percent, more than half the country, pronounced itself against the institutions of authority in America.” I have no idea what that number is today, but I guarantee it has not gotten better.

Consider this: writing in 1980, Sale noted that “Government recommendations on health and safety, even those with wide support from doctors, are increasingly rejected by the American public, suspicious and distrustful of any proclamation from Washington even when it affects their own lives. A two-to-one majority rejected the idea that saccharin was dangerous and opposed the government ban on it; government recommendations for swine-flu vaccinations were ignored almost totally by the public at large; and more than two-thirds of pre-school children are not immunized by their parents against polio, measles, rubella, mumps, or tetanus, in defiance of years of government exhortations.”

Gee, that sounds familiar. We have met the enemy, and he has been us all along.

Kirkpatrick Sale closed Human Scale by acknowledging the difficulty of reversing the momentum of modernity, with its inexorable drive towards consolidation, centralization, and giantism. The forty years since have given us no reason to think that Sale's “human scale” reforms are likely; unhappy as we are with the status quo, we seem unable to make, or even to imagine, substantive changes. It may take some natural disaster, some cataclysmic event, to force a paradigm shift upon us: a pandemic, perhaps? ¹ "I think the deck chairs would look better if we face them this way; it would give us a better view of that iceberg up ahead."

I am not optimistic. A nation that puts Donald Trump in charge of its affairs is asking for trouble. A Waylon Jennings’ lyric comes to mind: “Ain’t living long like this, can’t live at all like this, can I?” I find it increasingly difficult to see how America and its way of life can be sustained; I find it difficult to see how our republic, our democracy, can avoid collapse or implosion in the near future. In case you have not noticed, Americans increasingly hate each other, and many of them are armed to the teeth.

I fear that Human Scale was already too late forty years ago, and its considerable wisdom remains  lost on us today; Americans, by and large, do not want wisdom, they want blood. All the hate, the rancor, the bitterness, the divisions, and the resentments that have been building up in America, and that have been cynically fueled and stoked for political gain: all that hate is going to explode sooner or later. “Dirty tricks” at the ballot box this November may be the least of our worries.

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¹ Except that the pandemic teaches us, among other things, the limits of localism and the need for competent central authority and a government big enough, and smart enough, to tackle our problems. 

A Modest Proposal

Do not be misled: Lewis McCrary's "The War on Walkers" (at The American Conservative) is not a review of The Walking Dead. Instead, it is about the fact that the simple act of walking is increasingly hazardous to your health, at least if you're walking anywhere near the automotive free-for-all we have created in and around our cities. According to McCrary:

Over the last decade, it’s become safer to drive and more dangerous to walk. That’s the conclusion of a new report on pedestrian safety released earlier this week, which documents that from 2007 to 2016, “The number of pedestrian fatalities increased 27 percent … while at the same time, all other traffic deaths decreased by 14 percent. Alarmingly, this is not just a medium-term trend, reports the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). In the U.S., “pedestrians now account for a larger proportion of traffic fatalities than they have in the past 33 years.”

Since Technology giveth and Technology taketh away (praise be Technology!), can't Technology solve this problem for us? Even if It could, McCrary says, that would be missing the larger point:

A [naive] faith that new technology will magically reduce pedestrian deaths...distracts us from the real issue. Last year, Google engineers submitted patent documents that suggested coating the front of vehicles in a strong adhesive that might “prevent the pedestrian from bouncing off the vehicle after the pedestrian impacts the hood”—like a human-sized fly catcher. General Motors’ best and brightest similarly proposed airbags that would deploy outside the vehicle, perhaps gently pushing pedestrians away like a cowcatcher. Joe Cortwright of City Observatory cheekily responded that perhaps “the next frontier is to deploy this technology on people, with personal airbags” worn on our bodies—and that perhaps subsequent designs could include “small but powerful rocket packs, again connected to self-driving cars via the Internet” that “could fire and lift the pedestrian free of the oncoming vehicle.

As entertaining as those scenarios might be (at least to onlookers who could film them and post the videos to YouTube), McCrary does not believe they address "the very obvious and long-term problem—the conflict that occurs when one attempts to combine pedestrian accessibility with roads that support highway speeds. Even with smartphones locked away and all drivers drug free, there are bound to be incidents in which the operator of a two-ton object barreling down the road does incredible damage to a defenseless human being of one-tenth the weight."

We need, insists McCrary, more fundamental changes:

The only sure way to protect the vulnerable party in this situation is to slow vehicles to truly safe speeds wherever pedestrians are present. And the only way to guarantee slower speeds is to create streets—not the all-to-common suburban thoroughfares that accommodate highway speeds—that do not allow drivers to travel through neighborhoods at unsafe velocities. ¹

True sharing of the streets between all modes of mobility—including one’s own two feet—demands, as [Joe] Cortwright states so well, that walking and biking are no longer treated as a “second class form of transportation.” This transition will require recovering a rather older form of techne, a craft of building human-centered places, that does not need artificial intelligence or other “smart” devices to save us from the mechanical beasts we have allowed to dominate our streets.

But what about car culture and the manifold benefits of automotive-enabled mobility? According to McCrary, we may want to re-think all that as well:

Some might respond that in the last century, easy and cheap automobile transportation has given us freedom that is worth trading for the lives of a few errant pedestrians. Such reasoning of course ignores the needs of tens of millions of our fellow citizens who are unable to drive—particularly adolescents and disabled senior citizens—who now must be shuttled from place to place like cattle, especially when walking has been made an unsafe option. ²

The idea of true freedom as realized behind the wheel also forgets the long Anglophone tradition of liberty as the lack of an ongoing threat of bodily harm—as Thomas Hobbes famously defined in his Leviathan of 1651, freedom is most essentially the “absence of … external impediments to motion.” Over the past few centuries, this might have come to seem a quaint academic notion, but the question of pedestrian safety makes it concrete once again. If safe mobility requires purchasing a two-ton vehicle to get around, are we really as free as we imagine?

Cars have long been the leading cause of accidental death in this country, and yet, as an American icon/fetish, the car ranks second only to the gun; I for one think our society would be safer, saner, and more livable--more human, in fact--if both of those were banished from our midst.     

 

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www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/drivers-declare-war-on-walkers/

¹ Or, more radically still, we could banish cars from our neighborhoods and from as much of our shared urban space as possible.

² McCrary omits, no doubt unintentionally, those of us who simply can't afford an automobile: that is, he omits the poor, whose needs are rarely taken into account when it comes to urban design or, frankly, almost any other aspect of public policy these days.

Stop The Economy, We Want To Get Off

When not promoting the latter-day secessionist movement or contrarily insisting that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had disastrous consequences for American blacks, Kirkpatrick Sale keeps coming back to his Big Idea of "human scale" ^TM. Back in 2009, as recovery from the 2008 Crash was barely underway, Sale spotted an opening: 

Nothing could be more obvious than the need to overhaul that economy entirely-which is indeed the opportunity we have now. I don’t mean we have to scrap the capitalist system entirely, but we do have to reign it in. We have to fit it in to the limits of the real world. We have to understand that economics is a subsystem of the overall ecosystem. We have to realize that continuing to base it on the concepts of growth and consumption–and encouraging, “stimulating,” more of that–will lead to the collapse not only of the global economy but probably the industrial civilization it serves. 

Alas, for all of the good things he accomplished as President, Barack Obama did not heed Sale's counsel; instead, he followed FDR's time-tested methods for saving capitalism from itself. Sale, like many others, hoped for more—namely, a complete rethinking of the nature and purpose of the economy: 

Isn’t it obvious that the Keynesian idea of growth at all costs, particularly growth fostered by large governments that can print money, has failed? Isn’t it clear that we can’t keep on throwing money at this failed economy and that something quite different is needed? The U.S. economy has been devoted exclusively to the idea of perpetual growth since the end of World War II, and it has allowed any number of evils-environmental destruction, greenhouse gases, pollution, resource depletion, military expansion, government inefficiency and corruption, corporate political domination, unregulated financial institutions, immense inequality, a perpetual underclass, the decay of public education, and that’s just for starters-in its pursuit. Isn’t it obvious that it doesn’t work and that the current Great Recession is the proof of that? 

Sale was not offering not just a critique but a solution, and one he claimed was ready-to-hand even in 2009: 

The alternative? Nothing complicated: a non-growth economy. A human-scale economy. A steady-state economy. The idea of a steady-state economy was spelled out by John Stuart Mill in the middle of the 19th century, and has been taken up and amplified by a whole host of thinkers in recent times, including Herman Daly, Kenneth Boulding, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Leopold Kohr, Hazel Henderson, Howard Odum-oh, and myself (Human Scale, 1980). There is today an organization called the Center for the Advancement of a Steady-State Economy, and in the UK a Sustainable Development Commission has recently issued a report called “Prosperity Without Growth.” 

Economic reform, however—particularly reform as radical as Sale was proposing—would also entail substantial political reform: 

But what steady-state scholars have traditionally failed to emphasize, and what I have always held to be crucial, is scale. They have tended to picture such an economy, naturally but erroneously, on the scale of the nation-state, without realizing that it is the size and nature of the state in the first place that tends to foster growth and would be hard-pressed to do otherwise. A true steady-state economy can operate only at a scale where the people involved understand they are living within, and dependent upon, a finite ecosystem, and make their economic decisions in the mutual self-interest of humans and fellow creatures in that system. The limits and possibilities of the bioregion they live in will constrain all economic activity, which would be primarily to ensure the continued existence of the bioregion at a harmonious and productive level and would preclude destruction or pollution of the sources of economic life. 

And ultimately it would depend on community. That is, the level of a few thousand people-maybe five thousand or ten, maybe as many as twenty or thirty-who are able to deliberate and decide how their economy best fits into their ecosystem. They would grow their own food, make their own necessities, generate their own energy, create their own culture, to the maximum extent of human well-being and pleasure within the constraints of the other systems and species they live with. 

The spirit of Sale's human-scale economy is perfectly captured simply by paraphrasing Jesus: The economy was created for man, not man for the economy. 

That said, the devil is still in the details. How Kirkpatrick Sale thinks that the American economy, and the American polity, can be downsized into myriad relatively self-subsistent and relatively self-governing communities of no more than twenty or thirty thousand people apiece is best explained in his latest book HUMAN SCALE REVISITED. Unfortunately, even at book length, Sale's vision is easy to admire but hard to take seriously; with all due respect, his ideas about "human scale" can best be considered post-apocalyptic blueprints offering us a way to rebuild after the Great Collapse—not that he is rooting for such a Collapse to take place.  

Until such time, however, I suspect we are doomed to grapple, with only intermittent success, with the economic Leviathan that dominates our lives, our dreams, and our communities. Like it or not, it's the economy, stupid—at least for the foreseeable future.   

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/06/lets-get-rid-of-the-economy-of-growth/