lbc

Cosmopolites for an LBC

By John Taylor; 2007 August 01

Last autumn we underwent what for us was a very long drive on a dark evening, home from a conference in Silver Lake, in Upper New York State. I was the driver and was getting more bored the further we got. There was nothing but pap on the radio. The wife and kids mostly were asleep, or quietly amusing themselves drawing. As soon as we crossed the border from Buffalo into Fort Erie the receiver suddenly tuned in my favorite channel, CBC Radio One. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, at last! What a tremendous relief to hear some half-way intelligent discussion and conversation. I felt a surge of patriotic fervor; how good to live where the mind is not parched, where your feelings are not fodder always to be exploited by advertisers. And, mostly, how central the CBC is to being a Canadian! There could not be a better border sign announcing: you are now Chez Nous.

Lately, for one reason or another, I have been driving often to Hamilton and Welland. On the trip home, as I approach our little town of Dunnville I keep thinking: would it not be nice to have the same "at last I am home" feeling when I drive into Dunnville that I did when I crossed the American border into Canada! What we need, in every town, hamlet and county, is an LBC, a Local Broadcasting Corporation. We require a local identity far more than a national one. We need local contact, more, I daresay, than a world identity.

A local broadcaster should be built into of the infrastructure of the local fact, it should be considered every bit as important as roads, sewers, electric wires and telephone and broadband cables. It should cut across all media, radio, television, the internet, even covering live events, presentation and other productions in parks and theaters. We need a local broadcaster not only for sharing mundane information of purely local interest, but a broad spectrum of local expression. We need all this not only for practical reason but on a deeper level to put a stamp on our home and our psyche, a sure sign saying,

"This is where I come from. I am not from a dead lump of earth but a living, vital, developing organism. The cultural seed that germinates and grows here will feed all humanity."

 We are missing out on an entire dimension of human culture, the amateur. The amateur level can only thrive at the local, neighborhood level. We have ample amateur sports, we make sure to involve young people at all ages in participatory sporting events (but, sadly, not older people as much), but when it comes to the avocations and professions that interface with the public, well, you are either a professional or you are nothing, you are either big time or a no time wannabe. The local, amateur level is sparse, struggling, and unsupported, in spite of the fact that Hollywood and big media broadcasters bleed billions of dollars, and all the talent, away from the local level.

 It is obvious to all those likely to be reading this that the reason local governance and culture are being choked out is the same reason that world governance and culture –- known as cosmopolitanism -- are stifled: rampant nationalism. Nationalism is a two edged sword that cuts both ways, locally and continentally. I came across the following two fancy terms for these two directions in the Wiki encyclopedia article on Cosmopolitanism,

 "Nested structures of governance balancing the principles of irreducibility (i.e., the notion that certain problems can only be addressed at the global level, such as Global Warming) and subsidiarity (i.e., the notion that decisions should be made at as local a level possible) would thus form the basis for a cosmopolitan political order."

 Thus subsidiarity, a fundamental, universal principle of governance, is what will make it necessary to form an LBC as the agent for culture in every neighborhood. The Baha’i equivalent is the Feast, the only institution in the Order of Baha’u’llah that is totally local, and involves all believers all the time, or at least on a continual basis. The Wiki Cosmopolitan article says,

“Other authors imagine a cosmopolitan world moving beyond today's conception of nation-states. These scholars argue that a truly cosmopolitan identity of Global Citizen will take hold, diminishing the importance of national identities. The formation of a global citizen's movement would lead to the establishment of democratic global institutions, creating the space for global political discourse and decisions, would in turn reinforce the notion of citizenship at a global level.”

The formation of an LBC has got to be the first step in any future “global citizen’s movement.”

I had written the above and could not think of anything more to say, so I decided to research the Web a little more about local broadcasting. I found a study finding that local broadcasting has declined markedly in the US over past years. No surprise there. Then to my surprise I found out that there already is an LBC and what is more it is a Canadian institution; The LBC was founded in the early 1990’s and it stands not for Local Broadcasting Corporation but Local Broadcasting Centers, and it seems mostly oriented around the blind, and providing for them spoken local news broadcasts and webcasts. LBC’s have been set up in localities throughout Canada, and even more surprising, even in Dunnville. Shows how out of touch I am from the local level! Their site URL is:

http://www.voiceprintcanada.com/content/view/42/72/

I like the first words of their mission statement on this site: “Active citizenship begins with being aware of, and linked to, the world immediately around you -- your local community. It then extends to the wider context – your region. And finally it extends further to what is happening in other places – the nation and the world.” Yes, cosmopolitanism. I guess you could say that you cannot be a cosmopolite without first being a complete local communitarian. Nice as this initiative is, it is only a start, and it is only in Canada, and largely for the blind. It should be everywhere, it should be fully financed, multimedia, it should involve every amateur in every discipline and be designed into the very structure of the neighborhood. But this too, the fact that such a small start on this began in Canada, arouses one’s patriotic feeling, in spite of the fact that nationalism the big bad guy that we cosmopolites are struggling against. I am reminded of the opening words a recently released animated feature film, which I paraphrase: “Once, in a magical, enchanted land far away everybody was happy. It was perfect … yes, I know, it has a stupid name but `Canada’ is already taken...”