Martin LeFevre: Global Before Local

There is a curious juncture where conservatives and progressives agree. Both believe, to use George Bush Senior’s phrase, in the “thousand points of light” idea—that local solutions should take precedence over global approaches.

Conservatives, in the United States at least, have adopted a kill the government to save the people attitude in their political philosophy, openly following a “starve the beast” policy at the federal level.

This accounts, in large measure, for their opposition to a minimal health care bill, which looks like it will pass in the House of Representatives today. Of course their motivations, both philosophical and political, are based on their core belief that everything should be privatized.

Progressives, fearing centralized authority for a different reason, maintain that as many decisions as possible should be made at the local level. The idea, so prevalent in progressive circles that it has become a political axiom, is that everything possible should be done to empower people where they live, at the local level, and that that is the level where decisions should be made.

Where conservatives are coming from is a metaphysical issue, but it’s hard to dispute progressives’ grass roots position, because it seems intuitively correct. More often than not however, it’s the counterintuitive, not the received wisdom of the intuitive, which proves right.

Indeed, the assumption that human political problems would be largely solved if decisions were made at the local level is unfounded. It’s true that as much decision-making as possible should devolve to the lowest possible level. But that does not mean that decision-making at the local level can substitute for political philosophy and strategy at the global level.

There is a reason that the synonyms for local are limited, restricted, confined, and narrow.

Exclusively or primarily promoting local solutions at the expense of global perspectives, approaches, and strategies has had the unintended consequence of ceding the field to the hegemonic power and money centers of the political and economic world. People with their hands on the levers of power in the world sit back and laugh at those who beat the same old drum of local control.

It isn’t that those who favor grass roots decision-making are wrong; it’s that they are focusing at the local level to the point of missing the big picture. And it's in the interests of those in control to keep progressives focused on local issues, because that keeps people fragmented and unable to think and act together.

The necessity for global approaches has never been so acute, and yet the emphasis on local approaches has never been so prevalent. The parts can never make a whole.

It's surprising is how strongly people are clinging to the idea of local approaches, when evidence of the inadequacy of this approach, even locally, is overwhelming.

Specifically local approaches are proving, with few exceptions, less and less able to meet local challenges, as the forces of globalization intrude and engulf, and as localities fragment.

Why do people keep proffering local approaches? I think it's because they fear taking a global approach, believing the scale is too much for them. But it’s exactly the opposite. We are overwhelmed not by the whole, but by the parts. So the more people focus on the parts, the more overwhelmed they become, and the more they contribute to fragmentation and loss of diversity.

Most people think in terms of scale. And since the scale of the challenges facing the global society is so huge, and nobody can ‘get their head around it,’ the idea is to take a little piece of the pie and work on that.

As local diversity is effaced and erased by the torrent of globalization, it’s no surprise that the reaction of localization would arise. But scale is a horizontal measure, and we’re living in a vertical world, where the same basic issues confront people everywhere.

This entire question has particular relevance in Latin America and Africa, which have been the focus of so much colonialist and neo-colonialist coercion. Even in recent history, before the ginned up wars in Iraq, there were the ginned up invasions of Grenada and Panama.

As far as Africa, too often the image is of a hopeless basket case, worthy only of pity, missionaries, and aid. As Mary Wallace of Brown University says, “Far too often, the American public laments conflict in Africa as some hopelessly incomprehensible convergence of poverty and ethnicity, beyond the reach of reason or constructive action or even understanding.”

This stereotype has fed into the ‘local solutions for local problems’ ideology. And by refusing to see the whole, it has contributed to the exacerbation of the very problems it purports to solve.

The insights for solutions at all levels come when we first look and ask questions in terms of humanity as a whole.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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