O
ccasionally in my blogroll I come across the idea of "subsidiarity". This is a principle of political organization which used to be very common, but now sounds a bit alien to us. In a system of subsidiarity, the smallest, most local authority competent to handle a particular issue is assumed to be the one that takes care of it. This would start in the family, then the local community of families, then the local magistrate, then the lord, then some higher courts, before arriving at the king (to give one example). Subsidiarity is basically a requirement of societies with limited resources and speed of communication.
In contrast, we live in a society where politically problems are increasingly assumed to be handled by large, centralized authorities with homogenous influence on their territories. The federal and state governments, large impersonal police forces, and their like are assumed to be the basic purveyors of justice. Most Americans have a pretty limited understanding of the local laws that govern their towns, but we constantly feel the pressures of nation-wide lawmaking.
Most people who talk about subsidiarity refer to it with something of a nostalgic sigh. "Local authorities for local problems", the argument goes, and I find an intuitive appeal in it myself. The idea of giant, inefficient organs of political power dispensing universalist solutions to variegated problems seems hugely ineffective. However, I always have to ask myself, why did we shift from such a "good thing" to such a "terrible thing"? Maybe oppressive powers forced the switch, but I like to entertain the notion that some good might have been followed by people in general, however mistaken in aspect.
It seems to me that the recurring problem of subsidiarity is always going to be corruption. Basically, in a pyramid-shape of networks, nodes one level up have a great deal of control over the access to higher nodes of authority. If your local magistrate is not handling a matter appropriately, you need to bring the case to some higher authority. But, you have just wasted time with the magistrate, and will now have to waste more time seeking an audience with a necessarily more busy authority above him, who presumably has a better relationship with the magistrate than he does with you. This upward friction on justice strikes me as one of the principal reasons that we rely on centralized authority today -- while centralized power has its own motives, they usually do not care one whit about one side or the other in highly local cases. Their bureaucratic necesseties make them, in ways that citizens respond to, impartial. Being married to a woman from a country with a highly corrupt and inefficient government throws into relief just what a blessing a semi-functional bureaucracy is. American systems aren't perfect by any means, but the number of times my wife has marveled that things I take for granted work at all is its own testament.