THE silly season, we are led to believe, is the consequence of a dearth of news during the summer months. Judging from the obsession with sport and other trivia in our media at the moment, this annual happenstance of non-happening is now in full swing.
Why? Are there fewer people in the world today than there were two months ago. Not as far as we know. Are these people less alive, less talkative, less in need or pain, less engaged with the world than at other times of the year? There is little evidence of it. Do the things that happen to people in their everyday lives cease to happen because it is summer? No.
What, then, is the silly season? Why do our newspapers become thinner in both tone and content at this time of the year? Why does our national radio station go to pot? Why are TV news bulletins reduced to half their normal length?
The answer is simple and obvious: because the system has closed down. Although our media would like us to believe what they are covering and depicting is "reality", in reality they are engaged for the most part in providing an information service for the institutions which comprise the established system.
When the parliament, courts and other institutions close down, the media become all but paralysed by their inability to describe what is happening within the society. Of course, it is partly the pretence that they are in some way separate from the system that prevents the media themselves from closing up shop for the summer months.
To do this would be to admit that they are driven by the same ideological agenda as the institutions they report on. They must, above all, deny that they are an intrinsic element of the system, pumping out the logic which allows it to stay in place, while confining anything that would threaten to remove, replace or even radically improve it to the margins of the society's consciousness.
I found it ironic, therefore, that Richard Douthwaite's book, Short Circuit (Lilliput Press; £15), should be published at the height of the silly season. For here is a work that gives a sense of much of what our media should be and are not. It is a book of almost 400 pages, teeming with information and ideas. It provides a map of a reality which is at least as real as the one depicted in the news columns and business pages, but is never acknowledged other than in a tokenistic and condescending way.
In the foreword, written by Helena Norberg-Hodge of the International Society and Culture and Ed Mayo of the New Economics Foundation,
Short Circuit is described as "one of those rare volumes that will change the spirit of our age".
I believe there may be a good deal of truth in this apparent hyperbole. Richard Douthwaite has already published one classic, The Growth illusion, a masterly indictment of the modern macroeconomic system's senseless appetite for expansion. If that book provided a denunciation of the present state of affairs, Short Circuit moves on to the annunciation of a viable alternative.
RICHARD Douthwaite is a rarity among economists, firstly in that he likes to think. For several years he has been attempting to draw our attention to the way in which the existing macroeconomic system, driven by greed, individualism, competition and speculation, has been spinning out of control.
He is an oddity, too, in that he speaks not from a position of pseudo-detachment, but as a member of the human race. He has been trying to show us how, as it becomes increasingly unstable, the world economy conspires to exclude more and more people and places from worthwhile participation. He has detailed, too, how - its absurdities and frailties concealed by a rolling frontier and the covering fire of cockeyed economic thinking - the system has been able to limp along from one close shave to the next near-miss.
Like the great works of Keynes and Galbraith, Short Circuit is a profoundly moral book. Richard Douthwaite details how, for the globalising process to succeed, its proponents had to undermine some of the most primal values in the culture of mankind.
The erosion of belief in God led in turn to an erosion in the metaphysical relationship between mankind and land, earth and nature, resulting in the collapse of a moral perspective which was quintessentially rural. The ideology of free trade became our only guiding light.
The annunciation of Short Circuit resides in its blueprint for remedial action. Douthwaite argues that, no longer able to depend on the world economy, people in their communities must build small, integrated economies to exist independently of the world system. He hopes that communities will "find ways of resisting being destroyed by the industrial system and that, out of their struggle for survival, a modern version of peasant culture might be born".
Short Circuit combines brilliant analysis with straight reporting of the experience of people in areas almost invariably dismissed as "alternative". This is a book crammed with stories. There are stories of how people, working within their own communities, have created alternative financial systems, "parallel financial micro-climates", within which local resources are appropriated, applied and exchanged.
THERE are stories of how people have tapped and exploited alternative sources of energy to meet local needs and reduce dependency on external sources of how people have developed alternative systems of agricultural production to enable their communities to become more self-reliant; of how people have created new trading structures - or adapted old ones - to achieve a better balance between personal and community interest.
There are stories about renewable energy in Bandon, subscription farming in Ayrshire and land trusts in Scotland. All the stories are about people - not stockbrokers, shareholders, consumers or clients. They present, as Douthwaite underlines, a new and striking reality, no longer "some sort of cranky optional extra", but the only realistic way to ensure economic security at all.
These are stories which for the most part are ignored by our media, not because they are unimportant, but because they question the sanity of the present system. In what sense can it objectively be justified that the activities of, for example, Budget Travel should receive saturation coverage in our media, while the work of, say, the Westport LETS system is never mentioned?
This can only happen because of an ideological agenda which exists to serve a complex web of vested interests and has little or no relationship to any objective reality.
Richard Douthwaite, of course, could equally be said to be driven by an ideological agenda. Among the qualities distinguishing him from most others who purport to report reality is that he does not seek to deny it.