When a childhood psychologist recently wrote against children having best friends in school, she received a concentrated dose of mockery. As much as she deserved it, I think that was unfortunate. In the first place, those bad ideas don’t go away after mocking; they go underground where they are re-branded and implemented behind closed doors. Understanding and rebutting her error Is the proper way to fight those pernicious ideas. First seek understanding.
The childhood psychologist seems to believe that human beings can have friendship without exclusivity. The relationship doesn’t work that way. A friendship without emotional involvement of some sort doesn’t deserve its name. The relationship cannot be scaled up; human beings seem to be able to have three or four close friends, including spouse; beyond that we are overwhelmed. A person who claims fifty close friends probably doesn’t have any.
Problems of Scale
Trying to ‘scale up’ social institutions often ends in disaster. For profit companies run into trouble when the number of employees and relationships between employees becomes too large for the owners to understand properly. Several European cultures share a saying; ‘the eye of the master fattens the horse’. But when the master tries to fattens several hundred horses his eye falters. When companies grow, there comes an inflection point where the owners must use professional management techniques, or else employ outside managers. Growing beyond certain size guarantees the need for bureaucracy.
Religious congregations also suffer from the problem of size. A priest cannot possibly understand the needs of the two thousand people or so who belongs to my local church. Churches that big or bigger need to build closer units of faith, or else church-going becomes ritualistic and empty. A big church may be magnificent, but it is the relationships between people that make a congregation.
Scaling up schools, I believe, is largely responsible for the sorry spectacle of the youth culture. Building mega-schools has made it impossible for educators to supervise students. That has ceded the leadership of school to charismatic students of both sexes, who become the real rulers of schools. That development, when mixed with other social developments such as mass media, awful educational practices, and the general breaking of social bonds, has given us youth culture in all its glory.
But when it comes to social disasters helped along by wrong-sizing institutions, mega-prisons dwarfs most other bad ideas. In a prison that holds several thousand inmates, ethnic gangs rule. The old problem applies—no one can understand the relationships between inmates, and thus it becomes impossible to supervise them. In that situation, the worse inmates prey on the relatively peaceful ones, and ethnic gangs thrive. The criminal justice system(s) in the United States suffer from many problems that lie beyond the scope of this post. But I’m certain that the mega-prison phenomenon has made those problems worse.
Right-Sizing Institutions
Over the past month, I’ve been arguing about human social capacity, and its implications for society. Overall, most of us instinctively understand the proper size of institutions. You cannot have more than a few close friends; a city block or building with about forty families is about the right size; a school or small company ought to be the same size. Mega-churches tend to be cold. The biggest problem has come from utopian reformers like the woman at the beginning of the post who wants to end close friendships. Neuter the power of utopian reformers, and we would go a long way to bettering our social institutions.
