Against Bigness

Posted on 1.30.2013

"I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top."
--William James

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14 thoughts on “Against Bigness”

  1. By all means, let's appreciate smallness, but let's not be so small-minded as to think we can do it only at the expense of bigness. 

    Whenever I encounter "small is beautiful" (and it is!) I also think of a few practical examples of "big is beautiful." I feel awe at mountains and oceans and the vastness of space. God does not hesitate to awe us with bigness.

    And I think of how much more affordable insurance coverage is for large groups of people, and of the fact that small businesses rarely have the economies of scale needed to make it possible for workers to earn a good wage, retirement and benefits package that can support a family on a single wage. 

    Smallness is great especially because it can nestle in the big. When it tries to eat the big, it just looks silly.

  2. "And I think of how much more affordable insurance coverage is for large groups of people, and of the fact that small businesses rarely have the economies of scale needed to make it possible for workers to earn a good wage, retirement and benefits package that can support a family on a single wage. "

    I wonder if the current state of things here is also not a deliberate cause, rather than a natural effect.

  3. I'm with William James here. There is nothing necessarily inherently wrong with large organizations in their immense resources. But even within the large orgs, the most effective work to meet the needs of humans happen at the small level of the workers interacting an the little people doing many small acts of kindness.

    Seems I heard this somewhere before...oh, yeah! Gandalf...William James groks Gandalf

  6. James is talking about Big and Monolithic. Group insurance (and democracy) are different, and better thought of as collections of small, as examples of the small cooperating to create something that helps everyone.

    The starry universe, on the other hand, is a good example of Big and Monolithic. It doesn't give a fuck about us or any of the things we love. And God ... well, you can decide whether you think God is Big or small.

    Bigness is great only when it abandons its Bigness and becomes small.

  7. “The mendacity of bigness...monuments of man’s pride” –makes me think of mega churches and muscular Christianity, makes me think of Mark Driscoll acquainting me with (in my ignorance) James Macdonald’s “spiritual gift of real estate acquisition”.

  8.  I agree with your reply to Dan Heck, here.  To add to that comment, James has an excellent indictment of to "lofty" a view of God in his essay "What Pragmatism Means":

    "Affirming the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be
    the rational presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they
    may be, it remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in
    our world actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father
    them. Like the sick lion in Esop’s fable, all footprints lead into his
    den, but nulla vestigia retrorsum. You cannot redescend into
    the world of particulars by the Absolute’s aid, or deduce any necessary
    consequences of detail important for your life from your idea of his
    nature. He gives you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and
    for his eternal way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be
    finitely saved by your own temporal devices.

    "Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its
    capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of
    minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it
    doesn’t suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is
    eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic
    temper. It disdains empiricism’s needs. It substitutes a pallid outline
    for the real world’s richness. It is dapper, it is noble in the bad
    sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble
    service. In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a
    view of things is ‘noble,’ that ought to count as a presumption against
    its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of
    darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God
    of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial
    services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his
    dignity is needed in the empyrean."

  9. How well said! And, if I may shamelessly plug here, it makes me a little more contented to be a Linux using guy. :)

  11. I'm struck by the parallel between this and the exhange in the Hobbit movie between Galadriel and Gandalf. She asks him why he has chosen the eponymous Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, to join such a perilous quest. His answer is fascinating and forms one of the hinge-points of the drama. He tells her “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.”


    Doesn't make the same point, but I like the symmetry.

  12. “...and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, til history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top.”
    Thank you, thank you for posting this astounding piece of thought—I keep returning to it, and as James champions the “under-dog”, I think of Matthew: “the last will be first and the first will be last”. I hear, in this history that comes long after they are dead and puts them on top, a divine unearthing  of ‘us’—boundaryless and bone-to-bone—then a meting out of righteousness, where our ‘bigness’ like our ‘monuments’ will be humbled and we will truly know awe.

  13. It is a worthwhile question. I think economies of scale make logical sense, and are easy to observe naturally. In insurance, for example, the whole concept is to share risk. If you have 1 person in your insurance pool, you don't have insurance. If you have 2, you have a bit of insurance (essentially, the more lucky of the two of you will pay half the costs for the other one getting sick.) Still, not much insurance. But if you have 100,000 people in your insurance pool, it only costs everyone a little bit to take care of any individual lucky person. There are also economies of scale with the paperwork and administrative side; simple, centralized systems like Social Security are extremely easy to administer in cost-effective way. So I think it is quite natural, and derives directly from the core of what "insurance" means.

  14. Appropriate to reply after Trinity Sunday :) I think that is, in part, why the concept of the Trinity is important. Bigness, smallness, and a strange fiery wind that we experience simultaneously as both. Sounds like the beginning of a description of God.

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