A friend of mine who works in the classical music field likes to quip, when someone uses the old cliché that it’s a small world, “Not really,” he’ll say, “but it is a small demographic.” This remark points to the way we interact with the world and people around us as a matter of scale. But sometimes these days we get confused about the scale at which we are engaging then world around us. The things we buy at our local grocery stores, for instance, have come to us from vast global markets.
Part of what has become difficult for us in navigating our lives is that the scale at which we are living our lives is sometimes out of whack. Remember when we used to say that all politics is local? It sure doesn’t feel that way anymore. The mechanics of the communication age in which we live (24-hour news cycles, social media, etc) have meant that many of us interact with politics most of the time at something like a national level, primarily by reading, watching, or listening about politics, rather than through a direct experience of something or someone. So much of politics comes to us on a national scale so quickly, we almost cannot avoid interacting with the world at this national scale. It feels neither like a small world nor a small demographic that we are part of.
Food brings us a similar situation. We don’t have to travel any distance at all to obtain our food - all we have to do is have it delivered. But that food has come to us as part of a vast and complicated system that did not exist a hundred years ago, when the food people ate came, of necessity, from a lot closer to home. Are we better off as a result? This may not be an easy question to answer.
What about our relationships? The ease and low cost of communication has made it possible to participate in relationships that were simply impossible prior to social media, and 5G networks. Furthermore, we can’t always be sure that there is a live human being on the other side of the conversation we are having, and AI is swiftly making it harder and harder to tell. The appeal of far-flung friendships is nothing new; I remember being inspired by the TV show Big Blue Marble to find myself a pen-pal in some far off place. But these days we communicate with people across the street from us in the exact same way that we communicate with people across the globe. Does it make any difference?
I think scale matters. A friend and I once spent four days riding on horseback from inn to inn across a small area in the northwest of Ireland. We had to consider a lot of details to cover a negligible distance: how much we could fit in our saddle bags, when the tide would be out, where the horses would spend the night, etc. We stayed in B&Bs that were people’s homes ( I feel like they were all widows, but I’m not absolutely sure that’s true), and we often talked about how the sheep were doing that year. It was exceedingly unusual to experience the world at that scale; and exceedingly joyful too. A great deal more of human history has been lived at the scale of those four days than at the scale represented by my WhatsApp contacts.
There is a danger of being fooled that you are living on a global scale, when in fact you are living in a local scale, just as there is a danger of the reverse: believing that you are confronting something local, when it comes, in fact, from a different scale altogether. In the first instance, the danger is a warped perception of reality: you fail to see that the hurricane is not actually anywhere near you. The alternative case could lead us to believe that there is something like a farm-to-table Twinkie, just to imagine a wild case.
It’s one thing to be wary of the dangers of living at the wrong scale, and quite another to see the benefits of living life at a better scale. I’m looking around for an example, and my eye rests on my tomato plants. If you read this newsletter regularly, you know that I thought that I was done with the tomatoes, and anything they might have to say to you. But last week, of course, I brought in my biggest harvest of tomatoes, and I did not need to make more tomato jam. So I made a quick tomato sauce with sausages to go with rigatoni. And it was delicious - so much more scrumptious than sauce from a jar. Gardeners, I guess, know something about living life on a local scale.
One of the blessings of church life is that it can keep you grounded in life on a local scale. Church is a place to gather, where you encounter people face-to-face. Maybe at church you will volunteer and work with people shoulder-to-shoulder. In a church in a city, you will come across people who are in need, and you will have to decide what to do about it; you may learn their names. And even in the smallest churches you will be invited to have an encounter with the living God, and to learn about how it is that God deals with his people sometimes on the most personal and intimate scale. Most churches (not all) are training grounds for living life at a local scale, what I think of as the scale of craftsmanship, where you can see the handprints in the dough, and the chisel marks on the stones, and know whose work it is; you can hear the voices of the singers, and know whose voice it is. Churches are places where life is lived on a fairly local scale. It’s not a small world, but the church is a relatively small demographic.
I long ago discovered a book called “The Not So Big House” that argued that many houses these days are too big, and leave people feeling unhappy because living in such a building seems too require life lived on a different, not-so-homey scale. I have long suspected there is truth to this insight. And the reason to bring up the matter of scale is because when we get caught up in living life on the wrong scale, it leaves us feeling unhappy.
I’m not sure I know a useful test for discerning when you are experiencing the world at too large a scale. I don’t think you have to source all your food from a hundred-mile radius from your home, for instance (though if you want to, go right ahead!). And of course you don’t need to source your news or your friends that way either. There are some real benefits we derive from being able to live on a global scale, sometimes. I feel like I want to reach for the concept of subsidiarity, which Wikipedia defines as “a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.” But that’s not quite the answer, either. I have a pair of riding boots that were made by hand, and I know the woman who made them for me, but I also know that any rule about proximity to the maker is neither practical nor very affordable these days. I suspect the best I can offer is counsel about awareness: that we should be aware of the scale at which our relationships, purchases, news, etc are being carried out when we encounter them.
And, when possible, seek out some appropriately small demographics to interact with: some gardeners to trade seeds with, some voices to sing with, some soup-makers to feed the hungry with, some pilgrims to go to church with, some local tomatoes to cook with. I would say that you should take a few days to ride across a small area of Ireland on horseback, but the barn that provided that possibility is no longer in existence. I think the more of these appropriately small demographics we have in our lives the happier we will be on many levels, but in some ways they are becoming harder to find, because it is not a small world that we live in. It is a big world in which you can easily get lost without even knowing it, without even leaving home. Which is why it is so important to find the small demographics that give you relationships, experiences, and foods that only exist on that smaller scale; do not lose sight of the fact that most of our lives is lived on a small scale, even if our food and our news comes to us from global markets. Neither all of politics nor all of life is local anymore, but in many ways, the parts of life that we get to live on a small scale, are the best parts, if you ask me.
So appreciate the insights shared Sean, always.
Well written Sean..........and yes, if one is creative there are small corners of one's world that one can create for the 'human' element to reside..........they are 'findable'