THE DANGER OF THINKING SMALL

The more global our society becomes, the more local we become. Here is the great paradox of our time. Ethnic self-determination is nothing new. It remade the map of Europe in the aftermath of World War I. It detached sub-Saharan Africa from colonial rule, perhaps a generation too early. It has spawned, first in Canada and now in the United States, a philosophy and code of multiculturalism that threatens to Balkanize us forever into hyphenated antagonists.

This is not exclusively a First World or even Second World phenomenon. In part, ethnic determination shattered the Soviet Union; the surviving republics, most notably Russia, are dealing with secessionist minorities. Throughout the First World--in Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Catalonia, the Basque country, Quebec--self-determination movements verging on secessionism are gaining strength. Scotland now has its own Parliament.

What is new, however--and fascinating, sociologically--is the rise of hyperlocalism in unified, or at least politically consolidated, venues. At first glance, the opposite might seem the case. Millions of Americans spend a significant portion of each day in cyberspace, which is to say, in no one localized region. The Internet is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Cable, satellite and combined satellite-cable-television hookups bring hundreds of channels into our homes. In terms of television, viewers, once confined to their local station, now have equal access to direct broadcasts from a host of major cities.

All this might, at first glance, suggest a scenario in which local identities blur and weaken. If we can be everywhere through the Internet and the media, why should we care where we are in our physical person? The exact opposite, however, is occurring.

In the ‘80s, futurologist John Naisbitt predicted the rise of a high-tech/high-touch society. The more technological we become, Naisbitt correctly predicted, the more synesthetic, the more localized, the more imaginative and emotionally resonant we would become. Far from enervating human community, physical contact, local identification and sensuous resonance, high technology would intensify these values by submitting them to a clear-cut dialectic in which two worlds, nature and technology, would play off and mutually reinforce each other.

For Los Angeles, this drive toward localism is especially momentous. Los Angeles, after all, rose to its current imperial status in the first three decades of the 20th century at the flood tide of modernism. In political terms, modernism favored the centralized, the controlled, the abstract. (That is why, paradoxically, modernism and fascism, as in the case of the poet Ezra Pound, have lurking sympathies for each other.) In 1898, New York City voluntarily consolidated itself by voting in the borough system. This made New York a federation of quasi-autonomous, locally governed boroughs. Los Angeles, by contrast, the model of a modernist city, expanded out from its center, annexing region after region and grafting them onto an almost abstract notion of civic identity.

Los Angeles, in other words, invented itself as a totality, while New York brought itself into being from previously existing parts. Ask a New Yorker where he or she is from, and he or she will give you the precise street, in the precise neighborhood, in the precise borough. Ask an Angeleno the same question and he or she--until recently--would merely reply Los Angeles. Ask that same question today, and the residents of this city, like their New York counterparts, also will answer with street, neighborhood and geographical section of the city.

Never before in its history has Los Angeles been in such a self-scrutinizing mood. The reasons for this are many. The scandalous collapse of the multibillion-dollar subway project, among other things, threatens to leave behind billion-dollar tunnels going nowhere, a mocking admonishment of a city that could not finish what it had begun. The secessionist movement in the San Fernando Valley threatens to deconstruct Los Angeles itself, making of it the first city in world history voluntarily to put itself out of business.

It is no surprise, then, that nearly everyone these days, including Mayor Richard Riordan and the two converging charter-reform commissions, is enamored of neighborhood councils. Such councils, among other things, would allow Los Angeles an opportunity to refederalize itself, even reboroughize itself, and thus make up for the fact that in its headlong rise to abstract identity, the City of Angels neglected local context and loyalties.

The question becomes: How much power are such councils to have? Are they to be merely advisory, as the mayor suggested in his State of the City speech, or are they to be instituted as a new decision-making level of government, with substantive authority over local land-use questions, as recommended by state Sen. Tom Hayden and others?

Here is another Los Angeles paradox. The very political strategy with which Riordan hopes to forestall secessionism in the San Fernando Valley--local councils--could fragment the city even more. Precisely because Los Angeles is such an abstract notion and such a remote entity in its centralized governance, precisely because Los Angeles never enjoyed the regional identities experienced by the boroughs of New York in the 100 years before the consolidations of 1898, the current high level of localist feelings would make such councils, whether advisory or regulatory or some combination thereof, the de facto governments of their districts.

Would this not be a form of secessionism? Certainly, the neighborhood councils of West Los Angeles, South Central Los Angeles, East Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, the South Bay could hardly be expected to come easily to agreement and action. Apparently, a secessionist group in West Los Angeles is biding its time, sitting tight until the fate of the San Fernando Valley movement becomes clear. Such neighborhood councils, in short, might not only express the fragmentation, the localization of the city, they might intensify it.

Who, in such a scenario, would be there to speak for the airport, the harbor, citywide transportation, water, sewage, and the hundreds of other functions that must be performed by the city as a whole? Would the West Los Angeles neighborhood councils have jurisdiction over the airport? Would the South-Central councils govern the Alameda Corridor? How could Los Angeles do its business, much less maintain a unified civic identity, in such a neighborhood-council system of governance in which hundreds of ambitious office seekers would be compelled to seek, first and foremost, what they perceive to be the good of their own immediate neighborhoods?

Is there not already such an entity in the present charter, the City Council? Might not the needs of growing localism be met by expanding the number of seats on the council, without establishing a new and fragmentizing level of government? Or, even better, could not the mayor learn to work better with the council and thereby promote a sense of localism in city government?

Riordan apparently is unwilling to call for an expansion of the council, lest the voters, who loathe all politicians, reject charter reform at the polls. But is not the mayor himself a politician, and is it not only through effective politics that Los Angeles has any chance whatsoever of maintaining its unity?