Town & Country Planning, April 2011
I have been in south of France for a few weeks, not in those parts of Languedoc that are usually frequented by tourists, but in the forgotten region of Hérault, in the tiny half-forgotten village of Avène.
In fact, I wonder whether Avène would be here at all if it were not that, just down the road, there is the famous spa which cures eczema, and a cosmetics company, medical research centre, hotel and everything that goes with it.
It is a visit which has made me think a little differently about localism because even here – in one of the depressed regions of rural France, where Jean-Marie Le Pen managed one of his highest votes – everything is so new.
There is not a road bridge, not a roadside wall, not a footpath, not a village centre, that is anything less than freshly and expensively repaired. Even the broken old water mill, which looked so romantic on previous visits, has been restored to the point of non-existence.
It is easy to be cynical about this. These improvements are possible because of vast regional funding, and are presumably one of the reasons why French national debt now stands at 80 per cent of annual GDP (the UK’s stands at 59 per cent).
Yet, despite all our Anglo-Saxon disdain for the way the French have managed to protect the crucial aspects of family and community life, they do at least make things work. Back in England, where the debt is not inconsiderable, our national obsession with a narrow kind of efficiency seems to make sure than most things are broken.
But this is about more than public spending. There are parts of the UK where money has been sprayed around without restraint which still lack the attention to detail that you find here in the Cevennes.
I think that is the difference. The little medieval church at the top of the hill in Avène only has mass once a month now. Yet the church clock tells the correct time and sings out the correct hours across the valley of the River Orb.
It is an attention to detail that is made possible by very small units of government. Our lowest executive tier has an average of 120,000 people; in France the comparative figure is 1,500.
Ah yes, we say in the UK – but what about the needs of the whole? And this is where the localism debate would benefit from broadening itself a little. Both in management and military theory, academics are debating precisely these same issues, but apparently without sharing their insights.
In fact, the debate since 9/11 has split the Pentagon into rival factions on either side of this same debate. The US Navy and Air Force remain committed to the idea of what they call ‘RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs), a highly centralised command structure and high-tech solutions.
The US Army and Marines now have their doubts. None of that high tech equipment warned them about Osama Bin Laden’s plans in 2001. What they actually lacked was human beings on the ground, with freedom to manoeuvre.
That is why both the American and British armies increasingly try to delegate as far down the line of command as possible, as the Royal Navy always has done, because it makes them more flexible. It means they can take effective decisions faster than the other side.
Yet I have just heard an eminent military historian speak about this trend approvingly, and complain about the lack of strategic thinking in either political or military life – not because of local decision-making but because the central system doesn’t allow it either.
So here is the dilemma. We dare not decentralise too enthusiastically for fear of losing the overall strategic picture, but we don’t have the right skills or leadership for strategy either.
We have a decision-making machine that can see the outputs but not grasp the outcomes. We have technical rules that allow us to see the little picture but not the big one. We have the worst of both worlds – neither the big picture nor the small picture.
We have no strategy because we don’t have a political system that encourages it. Yet we can’t provide the kind of attention to detail that they have in Avène either.
How do we make sense of this? Well, it just so happens that I can recommend an excellent book by the philosopher and psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist called The Master and his Emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world.
McGilchrist argues that this same dilemma is hard-wired into our culture by our failure to balance left brain skills (good at dealing with the particular) and right brain skills (dealing with the whole picture).
Western culture is based on developing left brain skills, confining the right brain skills to the domestic household where they are used for multi-tasking. Hence the mess we are all in. We have left-brain planning, but without daring to do it properly.
What do we do about it? Well, a week or two in a French village in Le Midi, in the spring sunshine, might just help.