Description
The non-Marxist left’s romance with the smallness of the local is most famously expressed by E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973). Although Schumacher observes that there is no single answer to the question of scale, he argues that ‘we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of gigantism’ and concludes that ‘it is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness’. These he identifies as a propensity to non-violence, reduction of harm and error, and a greater sense of community and stewardship. The gravitation towards the local and the small scale as respite from, even if not an adequate response to, agglomerations of power and capital has become such a commonplace of left utopian thought that it is no longer even considered worthy of comment. Yet gigantism in nature – and specifically in whales – disturbs the connotations of violent, pathological, unnatural growth that attach to gigantism in political thought. Could understanding gigantism in whales help us to appreciate the circumstances in which enormous scale makes a kind of sense, challenging the prejudice against gigantism and the suspicion of totality that pervades the post-Marxist left?
