The Question of Separatism by Jane Jacobs

Author:Jane Jacobs [Jacobs, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

About half a century ago the English biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote a delightful short essay called “On Being the Right Size.” He pointed out, among other things, that sheer size has much to do with the equipment an animal must have. For instance, an insect, being so small, does not need an oxygen-carrying bloodstream. The oxygen its cells require can be absorbed by diffusion. Being larger means an animal must take on an oxygen-distributing and -pumping system to reach all the cells.

A relatively large animal, he also explained, has a relatively large mass in proportion to its surface area. The larger the animal, the greater the disproportion between the mass where the heat from oxidation is generated, and the surface area through which heat can escape. Big animals are thus inherently better equipped to withstand arctic and subarctic cold; they can more easily keep warm than small animals. But it also follows that large animals need special devices to dispose of internally generated heat before it becomes fatal: like sweat glands for cooling by evaporation, or the bizarre ears which increase the elephant’s surface, or cooling, area.

Haldane presents us with an interesting principle about animal size: big animals are not big because they are complicated; rather, they have to be complicated because they are big. This principle, it seems to me, also applies to institutions, governments, companies, organizations of all sorts. The larger they are, the more complicated they must be. They are big because they produce a huge output of telephones, say, or have a lot of welfare clients, or govern a big population. Whatever the reason for expansion, the large size creates complications. Big organizations need coordinators, liaison people, prescribed channels of communication, administrators, supervisors of supervisors, whole extra departments devoted to serving the organization itself. A small organization can get along without a bureaucracy. A big one cannot.

Bigness and the complications that go along with it have their price, but can be worth it. The human brain—with its unfathomable numbers of cells for storing, sorting, cross-referencing and retrieving words, and doing so many other things too—is so complicated that it remains incomprehensible to us. Our brains’ intricate capacities exact many prices which animals with smaller brains escape. We must use exorbitant amounts of fuel to maintain our brains and the services for them; we seem to be subjected to more mental illnesses than chickens or cows; we have to be born in an exceedingly helpless state in order to emerge before the head is too big for the birth canal; we have very extended childhoods compared with other animals, which can be hard on parents, and so on.

Just so, many jobs in this world can only be done or can best be done by large units. It is as simplistic to jump to the conclusion that something smaller is necessarily better than something bigger as it is to suppose the reverse. The point is that there is always a price to be paid for bigness. It would be too bad, or so I think, if we had only little villages or towns.

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