The Human Scale

Some thoughts on what scale a human tries to live in, and what scale extracts the best out of a human (or provides the best for one).

There's a book called Scale by Geoffrey West (2018, ISBN 13: 9781780225593) which had some very interesting views of the world based on how things scale and the effects of scaling up aspects of our modern lives (e.g. small villages to cities, shope to international businesses...). Aspects of life and how they change such as the pace of life increasing with city size might be a good example. However, I found the book to be a) primarily interested in the economics and to an extent mathematical, quantitative effects of scaling things up with a rather positive attitude to it. My memory is admittedly dwindling on the book's detail, but I came away only partially fulfilled by its suggestions. It seemd like the "trust" of emergent properties of large organisations and social structures to always be good and make economies of scale missed one massive element: humans. My opinion however, is that companies may scale, but humans do not. Cities may get bigger, but humans stay as they are. In fact, our fight to patch the injuries caused by marrying the scaling up of our societies and their institutions/structures with non-scalable humans is proof of this. Cities could not grow as large as they are without internet technologies, so in a way our technological advances can be seen as both the driver of this scaling up as well as the cushion allowing it to take hold. Performing complex tax revenues of a country with half a billion people using typewriters and postal service? Impossible. Using a website? Now it's doable.

So, where am I going with this?

Humans exist on a specific scale, but our brains are very malleable (Kurt Vonnegut in his book Galapagos might say too much so). We can press a button, but our brains don't mind whether we learn to push the button to nuke our neighbouring country, press a keyboard or check if a piece of fruit is ripe. This does not mean, however, that we don't perform at our best when we create societies that operate at our scale rather than trying to operate at the scale of our societies. Let's use another example: the book 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People' by Stephen Covey (ISBN 13: 9781471195204) explains in one section the idea of understanding your spheres of control, influence and concern. The first section are aspects of your life you can control (self-explanatory, but as an existentialist might suggest, very limited). The second are those you can have an effect on but not control completely (e.g. the happiness of a colleague) and the third are those that matter to you (they probably affect you in some way) but you do not have control. People are understandably in the best position when the majority of their sphere is taken up by things they can control, or at least influence. Having a large number of things out of control or influence, yet which can seriously affect you and your wellbeing is clearly not an ideal position and a recipe for stress.