We can choose to create a more nurturant human scale in our lives.

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Perhaps the only escape from our current media-centrism is to learn to regard the whole issue of our “insignificance” in media terms as a kind of Chinese finger puzzle—where the harder we struggle to get out, the more tightly we’re bound in.  Perhaps the trick is simply to relax and stop struggling:  to focus instead on the ways our actions can have a higher meaning that don’t have anything to do with the media.   To learn to re-value Real Life, as we directly experience it.

It may be that the same principle can be applied to good effect in the economic realm as well.   Perhaps learning to focus more on what we can still do, whether individually or in small groups, can provide a kind of antidote to the effects of an environment that increasingly favors enterprises on a scale that dwarfs individual human beings.

Not that we can totally change this environment.  But perhaps we can mitigate it, in somewhat the same way that we’ve learned to mitigate the harshness of too much concrete and too many large buildings by planting trees on our city streets, or by setting aside urban parks wherever opportunities exist.

We may also be able to do more.  The difficulties of fostering creativity, innovation, and dynamism in large organizations are fairly well known.  Whatever areas we manage to set aside for endeavors on a more human scale are likely to be important ongoing sources of new life and vigor in the system at large.  Perhaps, then, it is not excessive to hope that areas of deliberately created or preserved human scale can, in time, rebuild our business and social structures.

If they can do this, the transformation will be one brick at a time.  Carefully replaced, rather than hurled in rage.

 

(c) COPYRIGHT 2000 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.