CHAPTER 11.

HUMAN NATURE AND GARDENWORLD

I quoted in the Introduction Warnecke’s lines:

Vitruvius, in his Ten Books of Architecture, arranged building designs
around the human body and its actions, and he did not leave out the
implications for surrounding room sizes and the size and proportions of the
various parts of the body. As we move through the 21st century, we need to
struggle to bring the human, as the design criteria, back into the center of
design and policy. –

Not only did Vitruvius, setting the patterns for Greek and Roman revivals in
architectural style and substance for twenty centuries, deal with the body and the
building. He sensitively situated that body in the climate and local environment,
and made the building cohere around the body’s needs in that setting. There is
much we don’t know about the flourishing of human nature, that are either threats,
or opportunities. We humans are the glue that holds society together, and the
explosive force which can break it apart. We are not used to thinking about the
qualities of human beings. Our tendency is to reduce us to little points within the
large forces of economics and politics. The immensity of the human being is
almost lost to us. Being clearer about what a human being is helps ground
GardenWorld and helps motivate us to want it.
Our existing institutions are an integration of various aspects of our human
tendencies. For example our drive for status, inherited from primates, leads the
strong to try to dominate the weak and yet to organize them. This drive for power
by the strong leads the weaker to fear being left out, and their violent reactions
over time have led to a rule of law. Our sexual drives get organized into families,
and our choice of mate is strongly influenced by the status drives. Our search for
understanding of the big issues, life and death, time and nature, get organized in
belief systems, which combined with status and power and our desire for alignment
with success. We call these religion, “re”, again, and “ligare”, to bind. (an
alternative origin comes from to “re-read” carefully and thoughtfully). That is, to
renew our understanding and meaning of the universe by seeing what ties it all
together. In this sense science too is a religion. It is a belief system among other
belief systems that attempts to tie everything together. The preference for one
system over another is not just an empirical question in the laboratory sense but an
empirical question of the larger sense of what framework works for what kind of
society. Our beliefs are an affirmation of the social system and our beliefs give us
a world, but with blind spots.
You might remember the story of the horse, ‘Clever Hans” who had a reputation
for being able to do simple arithmetic. A researcher discovered that the horse was
responding to subtle cues from his trainer, and was not in fact adding or subtracting
nor understanding numbers. The result was – hoax. End of story. But the real story
went unexplored – Hans’s sensitivity to the trainers usually unconscious postural
cues. The real capacity of Hans went unnoticed, and we are doing the same thing to
ourselves. Getting into greater intimacy with our humanity is fairly easy. Desiring
it is uncommon. Peer pressure as part of the felt need to align with the
opportunities around us narrows our vision. The bright eyes of children dim as
puberty and identity choices are made.
I once taught the psychology of creativity to senior honors students at the
Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C. I set the students’ task for the semester
to come up with a theory of creativity they could live with and that would support
their artistic lives. The view we came to was that humans are born out of the earth,
with all our instinctual and spiritual desires, but that as we live vertically, we are
cut through with the horizontal winds of accumulated symbols – images, words,
sounds, of the culture. The place where the winds of symbols meet the rising
energy of instinct we feel this intersection at the core of our experience, and we
feel that the images fit or do not fit that experience. The artist is the one who works
in the place where the symbols do not fit what we experience. The artists worry
this space, mull it, can’t leave it alone. But all humans face these feelings of a
mismatch between the world presented to us and our inner judgment. Most just
shut up. As we contemplate a better future where we not only survive, but thrive,
we are up against some fundamental aspects of our own nature. We need to get out
of our ruts where our symbols do not match our experience and think things
through. There are five (somewhat arbitrarily chosen) aspects of our nature we
need to understand and express well.
1. First, we are, so far, a very successful species. We all know the curve of
population increase.
The result? Civilization. But many people competing for status and land. Warfare
balances populations. Freud called the two Thanatos and Eros. War is a reaction to
successful reproduction. We defend our births better than any other species.
GardenWorld should more or less “normalize” these conflicting tendencies,
bringing humans into a more resourceful relationship with nature leading to a
better balance of reproduction and resources and less need to fight. A civilization
of concrete, steel, and bits is enhanced when plants, gardens, parks, and walkway
to the wild are part of daily living. Our dark side, driven by reproductive conflict,
will not go away, but we can embed it in a healthier environment. Anthropology
also suggests that there are alternatives to hierarchical systems, namely kinship
systems that are typical of some North American Indians and much of sub Sahara
Africa. Our own kinship system, the nuclear family and exogenous careers, is
currently being modified by actual family experimentation driven by economics
and education that take each person away from any nuclear ties.
2. Second is our desire for status. This is complex and rooted in the need for the
individual and the group to be aligned with strategies of survival. Primate studies,
and anthropology, suggest that status sensitivities are built in to our nature, leading
to hierarchies for reproduction (opportunity’s to socialize with potentially good
mates) and defense of ego, institutions, and territory. Increasing the population but
reducing the resources available for each, in the context of crowding, has
supported a great increase in the centralization and hierarchization of society.
Status is how one fits into globalization and its structures. An over-hierarchization
and a withdrawal of resources and opportunities from too much of the population
and geographic localities weakens us all by making nations brittle and local
governments drained of resources. The result is the merry-go-round of only
including some, those who can contribute to the mainstream effort, in the
dynamics of society. That society is limited in its capacity to include everyone.
GardenWorld would renormalize this tendency, bringing focus back to regional
and local – even backyard – developmental opportunities. As Jefferson wanted
people to express their talents through having many roles in society, happenings,
making up “happiness” so we need more opportunities for roles and status in
important and interesting local culture. People need to be known where they live
and work, and their children can see their parents’ involvements. GardenWorld,
with its long tradition of garden imagery, from Eden to the contemporary yearning
for a rural connection and local parks and walkways, should help bring these
aspects of human life closer to the viable center of our activity, policy, and daily
life. Remember, GardenWorld is not a plan, but an intent.
We are in a delta of possibilities, as the narrow stream of industrialization spreads
out and weakens under the IT revolution. Social evolution has to some degree
taken over from biological evolution, Yet echnical evolution, part of that shift,
combined with old corporations and power relations, threatens (with its benefits)
us, taking us in narrow unsupportable directions. Evolutionary theory in its
mainstream form supports a passivity towards ends but a vigor towards winning.
As you know there is a lot of use, and misuse, arguments for and against, the
simple evolutionary model. I think it is plausible to say that humans can chose,
ethically, to not take the evolutionary path. Evolution pushed for “mere” success.
But humans can chose to act as if “all men are created equal”, which we can treat
as ethically real but not “real” in the normal materialist sense. Perhaps the real
ethical turn is at this level. It may be important to comprehend that the major
religions began as reactions against the trends of power. Buddha responded to the
increasing financial power of the Hindu priests as society grew more complex and
wealthy. Moses reacted against the deadening hand of Egyptian belief which
stressed the importance of maintaining the state as opposed to the welfare of the
people. Jesus reacted against the growing power of the Roman Empire. Moses
reacted to the marginalization that again came from Rome after it made
Christianity the official religion. Confucius reacted against the costs of the warring
kingdoms, replacing war with ritual and respect. Lao Tzu felt that civilization was
taking us away from our natural inclinations. In this interchange mind can be used
for freedom, and love, or as the tool of our being colonized by belief. GardenWorld
is dealing with these issues, which takes us to:
3, Third, the human mind, expressing the kind of intelligence that worked at the
transitions into or out of an ice age, is a mind that likes abstractions, serving
hierarchies. “Rational” mind meaning for the Greeks, the use of thought in the
service of life, has become, become, in the modern period so rationalized it is
irrational. We have to ask the question: rational for whom? Rational for cars is not
rational for people. Rational for owners is not rational for non-owners. So mind
tends to align with power and the dominant self-serving ideological mood. Today
that mean the general ethos of fear and militarization. But the mind is also
naturally inclined to justice, fairness, creativity, friends, loves, and contemplation.
Replacing the word “soul” with mind was a product of the very materialistic 19th
century and does not serve well as the name of what soul-mind is all about.
GardenWorld should help create the scene for a better integration of mindfulness
with our earth and sky rootedness, with many interesting local thing to do and
stories to tell.
4. Fourth, belief. Our daily activities are woven together with systems of belief that
justify what we do, and lead us to what to do next. Belief ranges from practical
activities to transcendent mediation and awe. What we “believe” is a result of
repetition. All ritual is aimed at belief. So be careful of what you do – and don’t do.
Belief to work must touch on the deep issues of living: being together, resentment,
love, meaning seeking, desiring justice and seeking advantage. Belief also ties
together practical activities in that larger context. One pitfall (nice metaphor) is
that we all tend to fall into a certain fundamentalism: that is, to treat a few things as
rock solid, “The way things really are.” A better view might be that whatever is, we
only have our thoughts about them, tested for sure, but never yielding certainty. We
live floating so to speak, in our collective symbolic realms, tied to reality through
practicality, but not knowing fully what it is. Desire for truth helps, but too often
truth (from the same root as troth or trust) we find is a tool of power, or converted
into such a tool, rather than into awe, respect, love or awareness.
5. Fifth, Justice. We need to honor the autonomy of the person to be alone with
themselves, but not tolerate too much the ability of persons to act against the
autonomy of others or against group needs. Sticky problem, In Dostoyevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov, the two opposing lawyers give speeches that are so
compelling that Demtri looks to the reader first guilty and then innocent. The
message is that society cannot know the true mind of the individual. A court system
dealing with an unruly viable teenager cannot know if this is a psychiatric problem,
a reaction from damage that is irreparable, or an outburst of protest against a
system that is not working. The aim must be to prevent the encounter between
person and court by dealing earlier with the causes of disruptive actions, and this
means thinking upstream to families and education, and economy that supports
those parents in such a way that they can support without exhaustion the family
they create. The interplay between justice and economy is obvious to most. Simply
arguing that it is personal choice when there are huge trends – such as fewer well
paying jobs and an increasing population – is like trying to control a skid by
turning up the volume on the car stereo. With two and a half million in jail and
many more having been there, with poor chances of returning to normal life, it is
clear we do not have a system of justice but, as with school, of warehousing
unemployed and votes.
These five aspects of our nature – not an exhaustive list – frame our understanding
of the future and support GW as a vision of the livable lives and society.
A book such as Colin Turnbull’s The Human Life Cycle shows that there are ways
of raising children that are outside our imagination. For example, in a village,
somewhere in Africa, when a child is about to be born, the mother goes into the
forest and introduces it to the trees, returns to the village and adults gather around
her. As soon as he child is born, it is passed from adult to adult, making everyone
part of this child’s future. When it is time for solid food, the villagers again gather,
and the men chew food which they put on their nipples, and the child is passed
from male to male. We have so much to learn about ourselves and how to
societalize..
The human is the measure[i]. How easily we forget. Our society tries to convince us
that the dollar is the measure. Schumacher in Buddhist Economics writes,
For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He us used to
measuring the "standard of living" by the amount of annual consumption, assuming
all the time that a man who consumes more is "better off" than a man who
consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively
irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim
should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.
I was at a meeting of the California State Economic Development Council and one
of the members said “The purpose of an economy is to have good families.” An
amazing thought to be heard in such a place, where usually the emphasis is just on
the economy itself. “The good of families” is full of implicit psychology, requiring
us to know how an economy can work in a way that enhances human development
in the concrete lives of all the people. Thinking through what we know about
humans, how they have been, are, and might be, helps understand politics and
governance, and the limits and possibilities. GardenWorld’s possibilities are
dependent on our view of human nature. The danger is that the Merry-go-round
described earlier with its narrow focus and less than full participation, is taken as
the measure of the human. Obviously a vital economy is important but it is
reasonable to balance it with costs to other aspects of life. GardenWorld is that
balance in the making.
Results from history, anthropology and primate studies are new resources, much of
this research scarcely fifty years old, for rethinking who we are. Discoveries in
history that there were other civilizations, from anthropology that other cultures are
both reassuringly similar and distressing different from our own, research with
primates show how similar we are in ways we did not anticipate: parental feeling,
fears, sexuality, deep concern for status – all help frame what we have to work with
when we think civilizational, or work from an evocative image of a good future,
such as GardenWorld.
The integration of historical anthropological and ethological knowledge into our
Inventing America 2.0 has really just begun. New work in the social sciences,
about emergent phenomena, in the space between rigidity and chaos is based on the
nature of complexity: phase and state change, emergent phenomena, tipping point,
self regulation, complex adaptation, the nature of reare (black swan) events, and
other dynamics show that we are in a non-linear flux impossible to predict well,
but where predictions are themselves causative factors in what happens to us. One
of the concepts to “emerge” from this work is “strange attractor”. This is the un-
seeable center around which large phenomena organize themselves. An example is
the way the whirlpool forms in the draining sink. Robert Artigiani has written on
the U.S. Constitution as such a strange attractor. I would like to believe that
GardenWorld is also a strange attractor and that our actions create the vector that
draws us towards it. Thus the path to GardenWorld is a path of
explorations. Garden world or no, such explorations will happen. The new work
gives us an understanding of what can happen in complex nonlinear systems.
There was a promise after WW2, of abundance for everyone. Remember the talk of
leisure? What happened? The fruits of technology and productivity turned out to be
narrowly owned, and new inventions, instead of for wide human benefit, benefited
owners and the small circle that could afford their products. All this is
understandable. The power of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, of science
and technology, of new political forms of participation, printing and wide spread
education in at least the basics, destabilized and re-stabilized the continuous surge
of the ocean of change into the tide pools of real lives. But we no longer have a
public image of where we are trying to go. GardenWorld is a response by
articulating a vision of the future that is doable and close to our existing desires.
Humans’ unique capabilities, individual and collective, personality and culture, are
at the center of what society, education, politics, civilization, love, and art are
about. We are embedded in a nature we do not fully understand, in a universe
whose beyond is beyond us. Yet the basics of life cohere: a viable society must
work to produce parents and children, feed them and protect them, deal with status
and power, the use of the land, and the accretion of memories and habits. But how
little we know! What are the most mature attainments of humans? How do we
integrate a newborn into the world of people? (And as parents know, they have to
integrate themselves into the world of their newborn.) How to deal with
population, and how to educate, and for what?
We clearly come out of nature, Religious stories and the scientific story agree. The
Garden of Eden and creation myths in all known societies have us humans
emerging in a world of nature, night and day, stars and sun, – rocks, water, land,
plants, animals - and how we became civilized, often at high cost and loss of
original (relative and limited) purity.[ii]
Human nature is in large part a struggle between breeding and war, love and
territory, sex and violence, population increase and population loss, affirmation of
love, and affirmation of offensive and defensive militarization. GardenWorld
probably lets us bring these into balance more gracefully than the cult of progress
which has led to urban civilization and centralized hierarchies that lead to large
scale conflicts. The wonderful achievements of urban living have had very high
costs, through impoverishing rural life – and impoverishing aspects of urban life.
This has been the result of economic decisions bypassing aesthetic and health
concerns, and where the quality of the deal trumps the quality of life. We have built
an economy for those whose central life purpose is financed power - a world that
hardly works for everyone.
In Chapter 4, I outlined the work of Erik Erikson and the stages of the human life
cycle, and I proposed that we take his framework as a “design Template” for social
innovation. It integrates what people need as they grow, and also what we need
from adults with skills and maturity to provide it – parents – education- work –
social meaning. The point is that our political, economic and environmental
initiatives should fit what we are learning about human nature. The general culture
seems to be approaching a more compassionate and complex view of what the
human is, yet we have been through a period where simple human happiness has
been replaced by an amazing commitment to speed and urgency as the game of
musical chairs, the merry-go-round, heats up, more entropically than coherently. I
quoted Mill when discussing the history of economics. He also wrote in 1848:
There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increase
of population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase.
But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density
of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the
advantages both of cooperation and social intercourse has in all most populous
countries been obtained. A population may be too crowded, though all be amply
supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all
times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude these extirpated
is a very poorer ideal. Solitude in the sense of being often alone is essential to any
depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty
and grandeur is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for
the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much
satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous
activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is
capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture
ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use
exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out,
and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being
eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture.[iii]
The question he is asking is, what is the proper ideal? He opposes nature to the
urban industrial, but I see the blending of city and country as where the real
creativity of technology and life styles is emerging.
We need to understand how we as a species have taken the inheritance that comes
to us, a cosmos that allows people like us to exist, with our capacity for serious
thinking and awesome search for meaning, living in tension and
harmony. GardenWorld is based on a more mature and organic integration of our
pasts than that characterizing the trends so obvious in contemporary society. We
cannot deny and hence must use happily:
· The reptilian locomotion towards food and away from threat,
· The mammals with their emotional attachments to their young,
· The primates with social complexities of status and tribe forming,
· The humans, with imagination, projections, and thought,
While Erikson worked out the social architectural implications of the life cycle,
another teacher of mine, Erich Fromm worked on the dynamical interaction
between human and social energy, making clear that the energy of any particular
society was the integration of the particular qualities of those people who lived
it. Fromm saw that a crucial step was to understand that the dynamics of the person
through the organization of their character, and the dynamics of a society, were two
ways of looking at the same thing. Freud saw this interaction but did not explore
the implications for different ways of structuring society. He took his own society,
in his work before WW1, as given, much as most people do today with a different
society – our own. Civilization and its Discontents, written by Freud in 1929,
raised very good questions (we ignore Freud and Marx to our peril. They made
solid contributions worth continual revisiting and reworking.) A few suggestive
quotes:
"So far, we can quite well imagine a cultural community consisting of double
individuals... who, libidinally satisfied in themselves, are connected with one
another through the bonds of common work and common interests. If this were so,
civilization would not have to withdraw any energy from sexuality. But this
desirable state of things does not, and never did, exist. Reality shows that
civilization is not content with the ties we have so far allowed it. It aims at binding
the members of the community together in a libidinal way as well and employs
every means to that end. It favors every path by which strong identifications can be
established between the members of the community, and it summons up aim-
inhibited libido on the largest scale to strengthen the communal bond.... (pp.108-9)
"If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the
development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be
justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some
civilizations, or some epochs of civilization -- possibly the whole of mankind --
have become 'neurotic'? (p.144)
"The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what
extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance to their
communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. Men have
gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they
would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know
this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and
their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two
'Heavenly Powers'... eternal Eros, will make an effort to reassert himself in the
struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what
success and with what result?" (p.145)
The idea of GardenWorld is carried in the word “Eros”, the love of life and the
need for a less conflict engendering civilizational setting, a world where we
actually like each other, find each other interesting, and care for each other.
Garry Wills wrote a fascinating book I mentioned in the preface, Inventing
America. He shows how the Founding Fathers, educated by the Scottish version of
the Enlightenment (a period when awareness of other regions of the globe, and
understanding nature, were opened like a curtain in the theater, revealing a larger
world), sought to put together a country that worked, in contrast to the wars and
poverty they experienced, or read about, in Europe. Because America was an
“Invention” to meet some specific criteria, taking a look now to see if those criteria
were met, might be a good idea. If the criteria were not met, we can tweak the
invention to get closer to the goals, which were, in shorthand, “life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness” without tyranny.[iv]
We have created civilizations with great gains and high costs. “We”, speaking from
the point of view of our long history as a species, in Rome chained slaves to their
oars, where they lived and died without ever leaving their benches, in the service
of empire. In the midst of early empires arose the great religions which say, “Pay
attention and take compassion seriously and act on it”, be aware of the good, and
avoid the bad.
Yet the religions as organizations also served empire and fomented hatred of and
by others. In our success as a species we have put creativity into both the ugly with
the beautiful. Creating civilizations – and messes, dreaming and nightmaring,
governance and intentional withdrawal to contemplation – these are the fruits of
being human that tell us much about what being human is.
Looking at religion with its deep sources in human nature, and the difficulty of
understanding it, and the benefits and tragedies that follow from it, help clarify
what a human is. The major way of knowing what a thing is, is to look at what it
can do. You would not try to understand a violin by merely weighing it, cutting out
a piece and doing a laboratory analysis, or thwacking it with a hammer, but by
playing it. People are better understood by looking at how they might play than by
a restricted view of their place within the economy. Humans are roughly known to
us as creators of gods, dreams, loves, civilizations, music, art, and the delights of
daily life - and, at the core, families, economies, and governance. The social
sciences, and especially psychology, tend to avoid those issues of what we can call
high or aspirational civilization, and focus on more repetitive and often mindless
behavior. Mindlessness accompanies the momentum of society, even when
thoughtfulness might do better. If we are to work toward a realizable ideal of
civilization, we need to understand how powerful these key aspects of human life
are, despite their weak place in the social sciences. They are the source of
mindfulness, working against the momentum of routine.
There was the wonderful New Yorker carton of lots of lemmings rushing to the
cliff over the sea, and one says to his neighbor in the stampede, “anyone think of
going to the mountains this year?”
Schumaker writes of Buddhism (there are similar thoughts in all religions).[v]
Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in a multiplication of wants but in the
purification of human character. …If the nature of the work is properly appreciated
and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to
the physical body. It nourishes and enlivens the higher man and urges him to
produce the best he is capable of. It directs his free will along the proper course
and disciplines the animal in him into progressive channels. It furnishes an
excellent background for man to display his scale of values and develop his
personality.
Yet habit is the enormous flywheel of society, said William James. (A flywheel is a
very heavy metal wheel attached to an engine that, because of its momentum,
smoothes out the roughness of the engine) . Here's an extract from The Principles
of Psychology, volume 1 (1890):
Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It
alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of
fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and
most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread
therein. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or
our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is
no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different
social strata from mixing. Already at the age of 25 you see the professional
mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveler, on the young doctor,
on the young minister. You see the ways of the "shop," from which the man can by
and by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of
folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in
most of us, by the age of 30, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften
again.[vi]
This is realistic, and the ability of humans to become settled is necessary for the
stability of a society. Society to be governable at all requires a real sacrifice of their
creativity by the many. But Democracy is a commitment to expand the
participation of the many, risk their independence of thought, and keep some
stability – enough to prevent anarchy. Yet we have not achieved settledness. The
pressures of modern life, scrambling for a foothold, scrambling to maintain one,
constantly threaten to undo our chosen place, our attempt at finding an adaptive
role. Modern circumstances do not do well at meeting us halfway in terms of what
we need for stimulation and nurturance. The level of depression in our society and
the obvious problems of children being either hyperactive or hypoactive (showing
the narrowing range of activities safe to children in the conditions of modern
living), are both related to the lack of integrating experience that comes from a
thriving and attractive environment, and not just an environment to look at, but to
learn and work and play in. Current society is full of unrewarding work and narrow
are the forms of leisure, opportunities for reflection, experimental vacations, or
expanding sociability.
Our development is hindered by current society with its return to hierarchy, lack of
social mobility, and lack of ways of acting on compassion for the less fortunate.
Democracy is more than a political strategy for getting acquiescence to the rule of
the elite. It is a genuine attempt to involve more people, and to make their
development a central part of society.
The Democracy Project.
Democracy in so far as it is based on the idea of the core identity of persons as
being equal, is not in keeping with evolution. It may be that humans have the
capacity, through democracy and the idea that “all people are created equal”, to opt
out of evolution for more human purpose than conflict. We need not accept
propelling us towards another species, one that may be better or worse. Better from
its point of view, but less from ours.. Evolution as we know, leads to the death and
replacement of species. Maybe we don’t want to go there.
The idea that we chose equality indicates how powerful our assumptions are.
Compassion plus logic lets us see that we are all facing similar existential
dilemmas. It is a very different way of thinking that ranking people based on IQ,
race, income, and years of schooling. The tendency toward ranking is powerful, as
can be seen in our friends the other primates, chimpanzees, gorillas, and on down
the complexity chain. But human capacity for symbolization along with empathy
(animals feel for the threats to their own kind) is strong enough to overcome the
the simple demoralizing split between “us” and “them”. Instead of being
threatened by the achievements of others, we begin to see the advantage to us of
their well being.
The Democracy Project, by which I mean the full development of everyone’s
capability for participating in the conversation of governance, is a major (but not
only) trend in civilizational history. Tribal chiefs began as the strong man, in mind
and body. As tribes got larger and leadership more exhausting, a council was
added. These evolved into kings and their courts, and the ministers began to see
themselves as personally coequal to the king in wisdom and experience. As
societies continue to get more complex more people have this experience, sensing
in their own power and talent possibilities equal to that of the chief. Complexity
leads to human development. Power, of necessity, devolves or is extended outward
to more people. The next phase in the struggle was the rise of parliaments which
has been followed by the struggle for authority between kings and parliaments.
Much of European history from the 13th to the 20th century was taken up with this
issue. Thus competence and self identity as a full person spread out from the
center. These councils turned into parliaments, giving three layers in government,
and the parliament members saw themselves as developed adults. The next move
was to extend franchise out to the population at large, with the parliament being
"representatives." As this competence and participation moved outward to more
and more people, the language and theory of politics and governance did not keep
pace. Today we do not know how to do a democracy of six billion people, and
national democracies are still tied to nationalism, elites, technocracy, and bribery.
Tragically education for democracy (and the full development of the person) was
diverted to education for the economy, substituting a part for the whole. In short,
our capacity for democracy at the moment is weak. Classical theory, which had
such an impact on the American constitution, proposed a three part "constitution"
of the polity: the one, the few and the many, and claimed that leaving any one out
would lead the ignored party to use their power in round about ways and destroy
the system. Our current political vocabulary (“political” from the Greek polis, for
small and self contained city) has hardly evolved since the Renaissance. Erich
Voegelin, a major and not well known, somewhat curmudgeonly figure from the
50’s, wrote a very powerful history of political ideas. I do not agree with some of
his thinking, but he, ore than anyone raises the right issues, and shows how hard a
deep understanding is.[vii] I return to his books over and over.
If our commitment is to the full development of everyone, then the democracy
project still has virtue, but theory and practice in governing a crowded world of
eight billion people are lacking. We add to this the problem of the media which
works for the kleptocracy, and the rise of the mega corporation controlled market
as an alternative system of preference setting (one dollar one vote), which
increasingly is more real to people than the political system. We must realize how
much work we have to do. Whether a hugely complex society can be managed
without violence or injustice by such devolution of poweris untested. For those of
us who really care about the democratization project, the project of developing
everybody, we need to question whether small groups can actually carry the
democratic project, or whether they revert to chief-led enclaves. If democratization
requires complexity, as its history seems to show, then fragmentation should
concern us.
My sense of emergence tells me that an effective next stage of governance will rely
more on peer interactions among empowered distributed centers than on central
management. Models like the chaordic organization, a mix of order and chaos, put
together to organize VISA by Dee Hock, come to mind. Though my own view is
that one can't run a world with seven billion people with only dispersed and
chaordic organizations.
"The university, like any institution, reflects a routinized accommodation among
interests, and the institution will be reinvented through a fresh engagement of the
many social groups that have a stake in it." (Phil Agre). This suggests that old
structures, with their careers and relationships, will attempt to hold on against
forces of radical decentralization. Or, indeed, against any restructuring or other
change that threatens. That's ordinary self-preservation, and would be expected
unless restructuring comes to be seen as a way to preserve certain values in the
face of threats to others. But the attempt to hold on will be much with us as an
obstacle in the coming governance transition, whatever direction that may take.
What is felt to be at stake is the dignity and complexity that traditional roles confer
on their owners. Perhaps the democratization project requires forms of governance
and a kind of politics that is different from chaos and local self-organization. Self-
organization out of chaos is no more a credible proposal than frozen
fundamentalism. Once we accept self-organization as an explanatory framework,
then all organizations only exist because they are adaptive self organizing systems.
Else, taking the framework of taking self organization seriously, they couldn't
exist. Large corporations are as much the result of self-organization as New
England Town meetings. Self-organization alone cannot be seen as the answer to
large hierarchical systems. Self-organization is based on the emergence that
follows from having very large numbers of similar agents interacting with shared
rules. Democracy is the commitment to bring people into the conversation. It
broadens the conversation but does not replace it. It requires the participants to
more deeply discipline themselves and this requires those currently in the
conversation to open themselves to new participants.
The problem of governance.
Humans are tribal, says anthropology. Humans are political say Plato and Aristotle.
Humans can be historically minded says the western tradition. Primate studies
suggest that group cohesion is something that we inherit. The well-known studies
of the last 20 years of chimpanzees and their look alike but slightly smaller cousins
the bonobos, show the small differences in genetics can make a big difference in
behavior. In short bonobos are less aggressive and more sexual. Their stomachs
will digest a slightly larger spectrum of jungle fruits. The result is gentler group
behavior.
Organizing the group has been with us long before humans appeared, and the
solution is a mix of power and charisma mixed with status seeking and fear,
throughout human history. There will always be the smarter, the better educated,
the more fortunate, but we do not need to overdo creating systems which
concentrate the rewards to the detriment of everyone – including a myopic
leadership that dies when societies fail.
We like to think that the post WWII period is different from all that came before.
But more realistically the problems of how to organize and govern wealth,
technology and status led to the nation state and on to communism and fascism as
two attempts to govern that problem. Both attempts failed, and both created major
wars, WW I and II. The problem is still with us. State capitalism in the modern US
form is another attempt to solve the problem of integrating wealth technology,
status, and careers. I quoted an Indian economist earlier who said, “We have a
world wide business culture that knows how to create wealth, but not how to
distribute it.” That is our problem. Concentration in hierarchies has proven
destructive, and the destruction of the countryside and its cultures, driving billions
to the cities, is a measure of over-concentration. GardenWorld seeks a better
balance, not a hostile move against the cities, but to create a spectrum from wild to
countryside to urban centers that are better interconnected, and whose values –
green from the countryside – education from the urban centers – are more widely
available and acted on.
Progressives ask for holistic solutions. The problem is that this total approach
blends uncomfortably with the “totalitarian problem” of the 20th century whose
dynamics have not been left behind, nor transcended. And a warning: technology
appeals to those who want to solve problems. The seduction is incredibly strong.
The biologist of Gaia fame, James Lovelock, just wrote an article , “Nuclear power
is the only green solution”, saying “We have no time to experiment with visionary
energy sources; civilization is in imminent danger.” But, nuclear power requires a
centralized and security minded culture. There are those who are willing to be
totalitarian in order to do good.
This problem can be summarized as – how to integrate, or not, power, capitol,
status, and technology to govern a society that remains meaningfully democratic,
humane and decently decentralized?
What is the relation of the leaders to the led? We have king theory, that the top has
a vision of the good for the whole, and the rest have to fall in place. Then we have
democratic theory, that the leaders represent the led and their interests, as if they
have no interests of their own but to serve. But the “interests” fail to add up to a
whole and lack vision.
Any realizable governance is probably in between. That means a bit of hierarchy
and a bit of democracy, a bit of control and a bit of chaos. Democracy may have
been a phase in political structure that fit the middle class and middle manager that
arose so prominently along with industrialization. The ideas of a free press and
accurate information – never fully realized – might also be phase specific. As a
more rough and tumble struggle for power and wealth returns, that phase may be
over and with it the institutions we have come to love. My own view is that
democracy is something we should hold onto and strive for. It is not just because
democracy in itself is good.
What I am call the Democracy Project, is a strong commitment to human
development. The real payoff of democracy has two aspects. It prevents leadership
with myopia, and it requires, but does not always achieve, the rich development of
all the citizens. Citizens? We have come to realize that this word itself can gain and
then lose meaning.
Indeed one of the things that we have had to face since WW II is that the
ambivalent nature of change. Change always helps some, and always hurts others.
A well known economist, Brad DeLong has just published a paper on how
economic elites accepted the view that globalization would trickle down, lift all
bots, leave – ultimately – no child behind. What he describes is how the reality is
that when local third world elites gain cash, they do not invest it locally, but in the
US!. The result is to leave much of their country behind, undeveloped and
brutalized by higher prices and property stealing.[viii] The modern stress on
change is, I believe, part of the global business culture. That culture, from creative
destruction and built in product obsolescence, hypes change, because that is how it
makes its profit. You could say that modern governance has been change
management. This is a world that benefits those who broker change. Every buying
and selling creates middle men. Not too bad if distribution of the quality of life is
achieved. But when the real profits come from buying and selling financial
instruments which themselves are merely taking advantage of differentials in
market conditions, then we find ourselves in a strange world. In the US 20% of all
economic activity is “financial services” but 40% of all profit accrues within the
financial serice world of banks, hedge funds, and brokers. These numbers are way
too big.
When the Asian financial crisis hit in 1997 the IMF did a report saying that the
decline in growth in Asia from 4 to 2 % was a disaster. Why, I thought? If most of
us earn this year what we did last year, we would be ok. Why is this not true for
countries? Ah. In each country here is a small but powerful group who identify
with the economy, and that means growth. Because their profit only starts when the
economy is growing. These are the fund managers and assorted brokers who make
out well when assets are growing and they can strip off a percentage from grateful
owners who are getting their value increased. In this context “change” is the key
product that has to be sold. When economist talk about the health of the economy it
is growth they have in mind, not meeting human needs. Change is not the enemy of
the human, but it can be distorted into a mechanism of wealth transfer, not wealth
creation and sharing. Science has been co-opted into the change process, serving
profit more than creating understanding.
Darwin can say that competition continually re-balances the existing species,
which includes advancing or suppressing new mutants. But Darwinian thinking can
not tell us which species will emerge nor which species will survive These are
questions of form, not dynamics. And evolutionary theory lacks a theory of form. It
lacks a theory of potential. This may be behind some of the energy for “intelligent
design.” What is clear is that current evolutionary “theory” is not compete, and in
fact is rather limited. When we come to the level of social life the form question
becomes more important - what will people be willing to believe and to do? - and
the dynamic issue, which at the social level is more based on contagion of learning
and pretty efficient – is less important.
Evolutionary psychology, one of the newer trends trying to make maximum use of
Darwin, with the logic that nothing exists that has not survived evolutionary
conflict, has made interesting claims, but also have tried to limit speculation, which
means that other paths to explore the origins of human behavior are blocked. The
simple idea that evolution in fact gave us our mind may be true, but once we have
it we no longer needed to follow evolution but could choose a path of our own
invention. For example evolution might benefit by our fighting with each other so
that skills of war and strength would lead to a species that are capable of dealing
with the world. But we might at that point choose peace and creativity, love and are
and a certain softness of life are more important to us and we choose them even at
some evolutionary risk. The world’s major religions arose at the point of increasing
complexity and the domination of the priests and their specific societies, Chinese,
Indian, and the Middle East. [redundant? Check]
To see how far this problem can go in the modern context we can take for example
Freeman Dyson who writes:
We agree that the technology of reprogenetics will ultimately split humanity into
many species, and that the division will not be only between rich and poor. The
division will be between different ways of living….When we have mastered the
technology of reprogenetics, we shall be creating our own genetic barriers, not in
opposition to nature, but enabling the natural processes of human evolution to
continue. In the end we must travel the high road into space, to find new worlds to
match our new capabilities. To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and
body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough. [ix]
I personally believe that the division of humanity into those who leave and those
who stayed behind would create a hell for both, but who knows, and in the
meantime I think GardenWorld is what we ought to be doing. Dyson, who seems to
me to be a technological optimistic humanist does not pay sufficient attention to
the intertwining of science and and power. He can also write beautiful things that
do seem to give a deeper recognition to humane considerations, like the paragraph
that closes the book:
The networks are driving us into a world of cutthroat competition that many of us
find destructive. The networks impose cultural and economic constraints that we
feel powerless to resist:. The networks mostly serve the rich and are inaccessible to
the poor and uneducated, thereby increasing the barriers and inequalities between
rich and poor. To this injury add insult, threatening to reduce humans to the status
of cells in a multi cellular organism that is indifferent to our needs and desires. But
we have the power as individuals to make our needs and desires heard. As creators
of the machines and protocols by which the networks live, we have the power to
understand them and to influence their functioning. We have the responsibility for
making the networks serve the interests of social justice and human freedom. The
game of evolution, like the game of chess, will in future be played by humans and
machines working together. The landscape of cyberspace offers us as much scope
for artistic creation as the landscape of a chessboard.[x]
There is much that could be critiqued in this paragraph with this tendency to
overemphasize the head. The chessboard with its artificial rules is actually not like
the life whose rules are messy, complex and always slightly emergent. Those
whose desires are not heard are not the ones his desires can be heard. The ones
with unmet needs are not the ones who are the creators of the machines and the
protocols. Dyson who is also the one who suggests that the future can be green.
My book The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (1999) describes a vision of green
technology enriching villages all over the world and halting the migration from
villages to megacities. The three components of the vision are all essential: the sun
to provide energy where it is needed, the genome to provide plants that can convert
sunlight into chemical fuels cheaply and efficiently, the Internet to end the
intellectual and economic isolation of rural populations. With all three components
in place, every village in Africa could enjoy its fair share of the blessings of
civilization. People who prefer to live in cities would still be free to move from
villages to cities, but they would not be compelled to move by economic necessity
Ultimately, what counts here is to recognize the powerful role of the human desire
for freedom, and its opposite, an escape from freedom. As Karl Marx said the
freedom of today becomes the chains of tomorrow. As humans roamed the world in
response to the radical climate changes of ice ages and drought, so now they roam
their minds and their circumstances looking both for peace and adventure. Politics
should meet both of these needs and because there is no stable point of solution
politics must handle the oscillations in the context of always new climatic,
technological, and historical circumstances.
The image of the Garden of Eden, the hanging gardens of Babylon, Central Park
and the garden temples of Kyoto all hint at the power GardenWorld has on and for
us. The proliferation of garden books, practical and cultural, and the magazines
and the flourishing of garden centers speak volumes more.
Science and GardenWorld.
Science is one of the great explorations and one of the humanities. Right now,
biotech and nanotech are likely to reorganize much human economic activity. This
pair is full of promise, and compromises. GardenWorld is dependent on our
knowledge of plants, seasons, growth, propagation, care and use. For example, the
dependence of plants on millions of other, usually invisible, species. This directly
implicates science. What does science tell us about the way GardenWorld works?
There are two realms we need to understand. One is the nature of growing stuff,
the green and flowering. On the other side is what science is telling us that is
relevant about what a human being is and how we thrive.
What has official science contributed to our understanding of what a human being,
or a garden, is? Science tends to create a world that is about things and their
interactions and not about people and their relationships. This has a complex
history. Science has evolved – always in the context of a particular society to
which it is adapted. The focus of contemporary science is a reflection of the
society, paying more attention to energy and the structure of material than say the
structure of singing. A word like “truth”, same as “troth” as in the standard
marriage phrase, “I pledge thee my troth”, described a relationship of faith and
trust between people, especially in a feudal context. The word then got applied to a
craftsman and his tools, and then the relation of things to each other, as if the
human world did not exist. The curious thing is, science is one of the great
humanities, a piece of culture that shows much about who we are – questioning,
curious, pragmatic, and opportunistic. But the interplay between science and the
commercial world is obvious. Science is part of the merry-go-round described in
Chapter 2. Science at its best is really organized curiosity about what is
awesome. Science can be seen as a phase in the history of art. As artists understood
paints and pigments and the complexities of bronze casting, their curiosity led
them into materials. Science today is more of an instrument of power than
curiosity, but this was also true for Galileo and his imprisonment and DaVinci and
his military commissions. My guess is we all mostly agree with this analysis and
concur with the following.:
In scientific research fields the mainstream pathways are the networks of
researchers who control the major departments that reproduce the field by editing
the journals, producing the graduate students, winning the most grants and awards,
and running the academic societies. Of course the networks are very porous, and it
is not always possible to characterize research fields in this way, but it is a helpful
way of thinking about science, .. In industrial fields the mainstream pathways are
the technologies and products put on the market by the leading corporations in
each field.[xi]
Paul Hawken writes in his new book,
Observation: goods seem to have become more important, and are treated better,
than people. What would a world look like if that emphasis were reversed?²
And he says that by the middle of the century, resources per person on the globe
will drop by half. In a review of the book,
Hawken, studiously avoiding the language of religion, ends up groping for a faith-
free yet faith-based terminology to describe what connects people who put aside
their own immediate material needs, if just for a second. ³
Carl Woese a leading mainstream biologist, writes;
The emerging mainstream scientific view of human nature, full of interest and
discoveries, has limits, limits of assumptions, and of goals. Face it, much of what
we are learning about humans is research driven by agendas of artificial
intelligence, data mining, drug specificities, and a general view that man is a
machine. The alternative view, probably more useful to those concerned with
history, belief, governance, taste, and education is the view that machines are
reductions of human nature, effective and cheap substitutes for specific purposes,
and often not our purposes.
This is to say that our political culture and future depend on a view of humans
different from that emerging from megamachine science. It follows that the agenda
of science is not driven by scientific curiosity, but by much larger institutional
forces. Where they conflict, curiosity gives way, as in Kuhn’s “normal science”, to
what most scientists do between major mind-altering discoveries, focused, for
survival, on career and grants.[xii] As Brecht has Galileo say “as a scientist I set a
bad example. Now the best we can hope for is a race of inventive dwarfs for hire
by anybody.” Yet most scientists are in part romantic, and we let them down.
I recently attended a required course for physicians on pain management. Pain has
not been considered a diagnostic category, but only the result of external events or
a by-product of a medical procedure. What struck me at the conference was the
relief the physicians had in talking about how their clients felt, and their
responsibility for it. It seemed to be an affirmation of the legitimizing of caring that
had attracted them to medicine. This has not been the mainstream of science, nor,
pathetically, medicine.
What we want, for understanding how to achieve human happiness, is a view of
human nature that is adequate to the problem, and a view of society that opens up
our thinking to a greater range of alternatives. Like any “new” science, this
exploration of human nature is lacking funds and dependent upon few and
scattered and poorly understood observations. Our lack of ready to hand examples
of how we could be different hobbles our imagination. As an example, a recent
series of talks by Keith Hart, an anthropologist who looks at economics and history
in Africa, writes,
A body of Marxist and feminist scholarship in the 1960s and 70s extended this
analysis to the conflict between African males of different age, with polygamous
elders commanding young men's labour through control of access to marriageable
women and the latter condemned to doing most of the work without effective
political representation. Gender and generation differences accordingly take on
huge salience in African societies.
This suggests that there are aspects of kinship systems, which can be opposed
generally to hierarchical state structures, that are attractive and that we need to
understand better if we are to deal with needed *cultural* change. These quotes
can be retrieved from the archive: http://www.nettime.org
More from the same source
In the decades leading up to the First World War, fifty million Europeans left home
for temperate lands of new settlement; the same number of Indians and Chinese
('coolies') were shipped to the colonies as indentured labourers. These two streams
of migrants had to be kept apart since, although their work and skill-level was
often similar, whites were paid on average nine shillings a day, while Asians
received one shilling a day. In those areas where Asian workers were allowed to
settle, the price of local wage-labour was driven down to their level. Western
imperialism's division of the world at this time into countries of dear and cheap
labour had profound consequences for their subsequent economic development.
Demand in high-wage economies is stronger than in their low-wage counterparts.
World trade has been organized ever since in the interests of the better-paid, with
tax-rich states subsidizing their farmers to dump cheap food overseas at the
expense of local agricultural development, while preventing the poorer countries'
manufactures from undermining the wages of industrial workers at home. South
Africa and the United States each encouraged heavy immigration of working-class
Europeans while seeking to retain a reserve of poorly-paid black and Asian labour.
The resulting dualism is inscribed on their shared history of racist urbanization.
Our social arrangements appear to have been, and are being, quite repeatedly
destructive. But we should not forget that each generation, focusing on itself, has to
cope with a rising new generation, larger and unknown with a great dynamic of its
own, that needs things to do.
There is little point in measuring “happiness” in purely economic terms when it is
clear that happiness depends on broader considerations. While the corporations
would like to commodify everything, we humans resist the fully commercialized
world taking over sexuality, private time, spiritual feeling, and our thinking. But it
is a struggle because the advertisers and commodifiers want every minute of our
attention, “happy”, reducing our role to buying and earning the income to buy, and
getting the education to earn the income to buy. Gary Wills. in Inventing America,
mentioned earlier in the chapter, shows that for Jefferson, in writing of “life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness” was using a tradition seeing “happiness” as a very
complex process, based on happenings. The more roles one had in daily life of the
community, the happier, because more human talent is engaged in things actually
going on in a person’s life. The way of quantification is not just the tool of
economics. Economics measures happiness by access to goods, but Jefferson
measured “happiness”, following thinkers contemporary with Adam Smith, by the
number of happenings one played in life: the roles – coach of the softball team,
carrying the plate at the church, volunteering to manage the voting booth of the
town, and so on. Consumption of the economists can be contrasted with the actions
of Jefferson. Both are measures, but with a very different view of life. It is not hard
to see that each of these views supports differing sets of interests. Your being coach
at the softball team does not aid consumption, but your interest in buying a
computer game does.
The recent work of Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of
American community, tells the sad story of the decline of multiple role
participation and the lack of the “third great place”, the pubs and town squares in
modern life. For many of those we have “busy” roles but not places where we sit or
play or work with others in repeated conversational interactions. This was brought
home to me recently when we were invited for lunch to a neighbor’s house. I set
aside an hour and a half to two hours, but lunch wasn’t even served until the two
hours had passed, while we sipped wine and ate cheese and nibbled on some
tomatoes and feta. The “hanging out” time I had lost touch of and it took me the
few hours to readjust and settle in and it became a memorable afternoon of getting
to know the lives and inclinations of some loveable neighbors.
For many people I know, their life is a commute between a good home and a good
job. Only a trip to the grocery store connects them to the presence of others more
intimately than through the windshield of their car, or that amazing look alike, the
TV screen. They never see the less advantaged closer at hand, but distanced by
zoning, in their own community, and never enter those other communities beside
the freeway, in the ex-suburbs of abandoned or overcrowded houses.
The brain bias.
The mechanical model of the brain is always using the latest technology as the key
metaphor. But the history shows how this happened. God made the universe. The
universe is a machine. God's mind is a machine making mind. Knowing how the
machine works can lead us to understand how god's mind works. God made the
universe and us. Since we are the investigators our mind must be similar. This is
not the place to go into the full arguments but I want to raise your awareness that
the usually implicit framing of the larger questions has consequences for human
nature and hence for politics. The brain is always part of a larger system, the body,
its surroundings, and memory, which is of external events mixed with internal
capacities. I’d argue that the very distinction between internal and external is weak,
because we have first our experience, which is a mix, and second since the brain is
just part of a larger system it may be false to assume that memories, ideas or
thinking are “in the brain.” They are in the system taken as a whole. The idea of
the brain as a standalone is a parallel with the idea of the machine and the
computer as a standalone computing device.
IQ, and many other psychological measurements, have their origins in a culture of
agricultural and industrial production and people wanted simple measurements of
power and speed. Much of our statistical methods, comes from agricultural
management where the task was to find significant differences in genetic
manipulation and in the measurement of yields. It is important to remain vigilant
about the assumptions carried by our current thinking, assumptions that emerged in
the needs of a different era than our own.
The contemporary search for the gene that goes with intelligence shows that we
have bought into the idea that intelligence as a single trait rather than a highly
integrate complex emergent capacity based on many genes and the extended
apparatus needed for expression. Under the pressure of new studies, multi-
determinate models are appearing. The current mainstream theory tends to put
together the two metaphors of evolution and computers. It is probably important to
distinguish between research strategies and ideology. The strategy should open up
questions whereas ideologies tend to close them. Clearly the idea that mathematics
is more important than poetry is a reflection of the power structures of our culture
and not survivability. Survivability might depend much more on poetic and
political intuitions. For example shared songs, which are well developed aspects of
culture prominent among the early hunter-gatherers in their quest for survival,
provide social structuring of actions.
Part of our problem with education and intelligence is the idea that many believe
that the brain can be loaded up with applicable skills and that is all education is.
What we know from the study of creativity or citizenship is that the emerging in
the history and culture and being conscious are crucial to development. Even
participation is very limited in the absence of this kind of knowledge. The
experimental schools of Waldorf and Montessori , and the integration with work
such as Piaget's, are defended against by the normal schools. Mostly because
reglar schools need to teach with teachers who are not really interested, but are
willing to follow routine.
The deep work of the Waldorf and Montessori schools, both of which stress the
need for the development of eye and hand coordination before reading, goes
against the ambitious mainstream view that reading should be stressed (even if
stressing) as early as possible. Waldorf keeps the children closer to math and art.
Montessori keeps the children closer to toys of increasing complexity. Both
understand that the child’s mind grows through engagement that is action oriented
and first and conceptual second. Concepts must attach to actions, or they float
disembodied. Our current mental fetish, driven by desire for the success of our
children, is to stress intellectual content being poured into minds that have no
internal structures and cannot absorb it. This strategy plays up abstraction and
downplays the real world. This allows people to write sentences like “The great
advantage of globalization is that it gives new people opportunities for wealth and
advancement.” This standard idea is so ingrained that it is more like an incantation
than the result of thought. People will say it without imagining the concrete world
to which it refers, a world where most people are not included in “people” and
where standard of living is equated with dollar income, no longer able to imagine
that a lifelong low income in an attractive rural community has a higher “standard
of living” then a $600k house to in a polluted suburb of far eastern Los Angeles
County. The current awareness that the rich eat more, and there are more rich,
means less food and higher prices for the increasing number of poor and truly
marginalized.
Despite the power of the mainstream with its mechanical tendencies research with
a different orientation indicates that not all people all the time are willing to give
up their intuitions about what a human being is. For example the wonderful review
by MacNeil in the New York Review of Books on the origins and significance of
cave paintings, those marvelously fluid and “realistic” images from 20,000 BC .
[photo]
youngsters were responsible for much more of preserved Paleolithic art than
scholars have assumed.... I am not concluding...that all Paleolithic art is children's
art, only that works by young people constitute both a disproportionate and largely
unrecognized fraction of preserved Paleolithic art.…The most definite proof he
offers comes from his measurement of hand images left in some, but not all,
decorated caves, wherever someone sprayed a mouthful of ochre paint against an
outspread hand held close against the wall. Human hands change shape and
proportion with age and differ between the sexes, so by careful measurement of
nine different widths and lengths compared with the same hand measurements of
adults and schoolchildren in Alaska, Guthrie found that “handprints of adolescents
are the most numerous among the Paleolithic sample.... The second important
observation is that the vast majority of these individuals were males. From the total
sample of 201 Paleolithic hands, discriminate analysis classified at least 162 as
male and the other 39 as either female or young male.” Other observers also found
that "virtually all...of the foot tracks in Paleolithic art caves are those of
children."…..However that may be, it seems clear to me that the two books under
review would benefit greatly if Guthrie and Curtis could agree that cave art derives
both from the natural world of flesh, blood, and brain that once existed on the
Mammoth Steppe, and from an imaginary world of invisible spirits, embodied and
disembodied, who, the artists' believed, controlled, directed, and inspired animal
and human behavior both above and below ground. Only by positing such an
imaginary world can we begin to understand the paradoxical mix of serene and
accurate masterworks with the multitude of free and spontaneous scribbles that
together comprise the art of the caves.
Our social science has not even begun to bring into a single field of vision and
inquiry the real range of the humanly possible, and possibly desirable. Social
science does not have a solid sense of what the classicists, such as Plato and
Aristotle achieved, that here is a cycle from monarchy to democracy to tyranny.
Are we possibly in such a cycle, and if so where are we in it? Part of the mystery
of knowledge and social action is that very few descriptions of society characterize
the whole. The very fact that the top can be going in one direction forces others to
react to that and go in a different direction. The result is the levels are not moving
in parallel in a common frame but in frames that are opposed to each other, like
tectonic plates one moving under the other, going in opposite directions but with
lots of activity at the sliding surfaces, and must be described in incompatible
language. This layering moves from the top through different social groupings to
the individual. You know well that the way you think is not a reflection of the way
the country’s leadership thinks, but a reaction to it and a development beyond what
they are thinking. In the same way, to be fair, what they are thinking is also not
what they appear to be thinking but complex reaction to the circumstances they are
in.
Some new paradigms are afoot in the social sciences. The promise of chaos theory,
which gained public awareness in the chaotic time of the 60’s (science is attracted
by social conditions), was to recognize that much of what happens is
understandable but not calculable. If you take a glass and threw it on the ground,
the physics is completely understood, but the actual distribution of the pieces is not
calculable. The result of this for human understanding is to undermine the atomic –
discrete building block – approach to understanding. If everything is flow and
interdependence, then that an idea or a sensation of a perception as a ‘thing” falls
apart. As we all know, the metaphors for mind tends to follow technology: from
hydraulics (Descartes) to telephone switchboards to computers to software, and a
Facebook neurology is already here. At the core of the modern atomistic approach,
no longer so physical, is the idea of information. People, including scientists, talk
about information as if it were a specific thing: the “information revolution”, the
amount of information in the daily newspaper, or in a DNA molecule.
But if we are to be rigorous and avoid sloppy thinking, we have to realize these
uses of “information” are not quantifiable. Information is defined as the number of
yes no decisions that need to be made to uniquely select for example the letter b
from the other letters. Since there are 24 letters, the first division says ‘is it in the
first half or second half of the alphabet? Since it takes 6 such decisions to come to
“b” it is called a six bit system. What is necessary for information is to be able to
specify how many choices there are and their probabilities of occurring. This sets
the environment within which the piece of information will operate. But in real
life, this rarely can be done. The way the DNA molecule acts depends on the
environment within which it operates, and hence the amount of information in it
cannot be specified by itself. While the information in the DNA that uniquely
selects its own sequence can be calculated, the amount of information in the DNA
operating in a natural environment cannot. As soon as, say through mutation, or
expressions surrounding it in the organism, change, the ability of the molecule to
interact changes, and hence the amount of “information” in it.
Calling it all “information” implies a concreteness and specificity that does not
exist. For example, the oft cited idea that “there is more information in one issue of
the New York Times than existed in the tenth century.“ Even if we narrowed it
down to “all publications in the tenth century”, it would be false. “Information”
during the 10th century consisted of complex agricultural processes, knowledge of
the seasons, metallurgy, stone work and the handling of horses and many other
aspects of daily life.
Take for example simple questions. Is there more information in two copies of
hamlet than in one? Is there more or less information ij Hamlet than in a book of
the same length with just apparently random letter sequences? From an information
point of view the answer to the first is –silly question then why do you tell me we
have an information explosion? The answer to the second is – depends…..
Depends on what happens to the text. From an informational point of view at the
level of say telephony, the normal hamlet has less because it is so redundant – that
is, given the text up to some point the next letter is fairly well determined. If the
text is say presented in a theater, it ‘selects” states of meaning from within the
listener. The information theory view maintains that in principle this process is no
different from any other informational process – it is the selection from a fixed
number of (specifiable in principle ) states into the assembled “meaning” that the
hearer-observer is conscious of.
There are two reasons why this is important. First, we tend to gloat on having so
much information. But the reality is our current information is in many ways a vast
reduction from the complexities of agricultural society. Second reference to
information tends to make the speaker appear to have a precision which in fact is
totally lacking.
As I’ll suggest in a moment, this split between thing and person, of which
“information” is just one aspect, is deep in our culture and supports a thing
oriented economy where wealth is measured in the ersatz form of dollars. The real
issue is the measure of wealth. Wealth has a long history. In agricultural societies it
began with food and population: the purpose of the economy was to grow people.
Capitalism by the way starts with breeding cattle, “cap” being the old Latin for
head, so we have the phrase “how many head of cattle..” Capitalism was the
increase through breeding.. As population increased, military needs increased and
people production became subordinate to military capacity, and that was the chief
measure of wealth. With the rise of more trade and manufacturing, currency
became more central as a measure of wealth. The question is, clearly dollar
measure is now so abstract, and remote from what we feel wealth is – in the sense
of quality of life- is there a better emerging measure? People have talked loosely
about how the cash world, the information world, and the energy world all being
mutually fiduciary in some sense – that is, transformable one to the other in a
fundamental way. The future of society may depend on a better measure of wealth.
Certainly we are now in the situation where the GDP may be positive but the draw
down of resources – land, water, oil and air – may mean that the real total of
generated wealth is negative..GardenWorld will look more promising and
important the more we get measures of wealth that move towards the real quality
of life of all people, and that means nature too, which is the sustainer and enabler.
In this context I think there is a general new interest in what humans really are, and
what makes for health – not just in calories or exercise quota, or the medical charts
sense, but in the quality of lived experience, hope, and the ability to feel good
about the direction of one’s own life and that of society, the species, the planet, the
universe. No Illusion: we know that each of these probably has a life course. It is
the way things are, and quite livable.
The mathematics and quantification problem
Quantification drives the economy, technology, and governance. Fixation on math
and quantity is a tendency in our mental inheritance. Looking at history we see that
early art, in pottery, tends to geometric patterns before representations (though
cave painting may indicate that the aesthetic of living natural forms is as
powerful). The major societies, China, Greece, Middle East, Latin America, and
India, show this mathematizing tendency in its early art. In more complex social
times, we see in the belief that the good is geometric, and that the world can be
understood as mathematical forms. Motivating Plato, and in much Greek thought,
is a strong desire to be invulnerable in the world, to find comfort with the eternal,
and to avoid emotional confusions. So in Augustine, we see a strong tendency to
admire the part of the human that can be in a relationship with god, but to leave out
the rest as unworthy, such as our love for each other in our uniqueness. By the time
of regarded as secondary, math is treated explicitly as real and everything else is
secondary, and the experience of color, sound, emotions, unworthy of science.
Another aspect of quantification - money - gives the illusion that so many apples
equal a motorcycle, or that the value of a life is its potential earned income. This
can be seen as being an obsessive symptom. At the social level, money gives the
illusion that everything can be brought into the money system, that all things are
interchangeable. The result is a tendency to reduce the world from a variety of
incommensurables into a system of control, exchange and ownership. What counts
is what can be counted.
The result is to enhance political and economic power through a focus on things
and money and downplay the person and the significance of social relationships.
The usual sociological or economic view is that people are points in a large force
field, pushed around by economics or politics or cultural values. But people are
much more complex than the social field. GardenWorld is a full spectrum world
where quantification – along with cities, corporations and advanced technologies,
will be used, but not totalized.
I think we can make progress in understanding why math is important, and at the
same time why it is limited. The psychological investigations by Piaget of the
developing mind of the child shows clearly that the child’s activities with its own
body and the world lead to ensembles of actions that have some special properties
that are typical of mathematics. A sentence backwards does not mean the reverse of
the sentence said or written normally. But if you push your hand out in front of
you, you can reverse the process and bring it back. This property of reversibility is
crucial to math, and not at all representative of human drama and story. To show
you how complex this is, read the following and then try it.
Touch your right index fingertip to some stable physical object nearby. Close your
eyes. Move your hand away from the object and make some complex movements
in space with your hand and tip. Stop. Now in a straight line, keeping eyes closed,
bring your finger back to where it started. Open your eyes and see how close you
came.
The path you took back is one you had never taken before. Yet you were able to
arrange the motions you made such that you could find, construct, and take the
path back. This is highly “mathematical”. We don’t yet know quite how this works
(neurologists, looking for atoms of action, are not looking at this complex
operation as core, which would actually simplify the computer recognition of
object, because the computer could start with the assumption that an input is
reflective of the existence of a solid something),
What we learn first is that the body’s activity (enhanced and organized by the
complexities of mind) maps into the physical world. In fact that mapping may be
what we mean by the physical world. It is the world of Cartesian space full of
motion but devoid of feeling and significance without an interpreter. Second, the
very idea of what we mean by object – that it is solid - is the attribution of this
group of movements to perceived objects. For the computer simulation of object it
would probably be better to have the computer assume that an ensemble of photons
coming at it through say a camera have group properties and then attribute solidity
to the ensemble. Then only a few points of light are needed to “round out, fill out,
the object. The mind does not build up the object from atoms of perception, but
starts with the hypothesis of solidity. That is, it remains invariant under rotation
and displacement.
If we pick up a kitten we will experience that to some degree it is a solid object,
but in some ways it is not. We will attribute to it an aliveness and state of feeling
and movements that corresponds – expresses -, those feelings, say of discomfort at
being held at a height and this keeps us from treating the kitten as a mere thing. It
is still cohent as an objet, but also alive.
Piaget shows that as the child builds up the motor capacity and its use –
coordination of body with itself and with things, then begins slowly to attach
symbols, speech at first, to those operations. When fully symbolized with symbols
differentiated and integrated into a system, they become mathematics and can be
moved around in the mind, in imagination, and on paper. As we all know, when we
close our eyes, we can move around in what we remember of the world. Piaget is
clear, for example in his extraordinary book, Play, Dreams and Imitation in
Childhhood, that language can also be attached to these actions.. The work of
Piaget is deeply profound, but most researchers reflect their reading of summaries
by people who never fully engage the theory. For example, Piaget is interested in
the origins of intelligence. One of the things he looks at is the interaction of the
child with both its own body and the external world. In Play, Dreams, and
Imitation, he shows that one part of the external world, speech by others, becomes
very early assimilated to the emerging structures the child is building its own mind.
But later researchers, not aware of that more difficult book stick with summaries
and can say things such as Jerome a Brunner wrote, with good intent, " the lone
child struggles single handed to strike some equilibrium between assimilating the
world to itself or himself to the world." The Russians psychologist Vygotsky wrote
a wonderful work, after a careful reading of Piaget, focusing on the social side of
thinking. Later psychologists often opposed Vygotsky to Piaget, and miss that
deeper integrity of both dealing with a phenomenon of a mind that can be seen as
both internal and external, personal and social. In this way science itself is a social
phenomenon and is as much a collection of careers and received opinion as well as
a (hopefully)full inquiry into the unknown.
So, math is deeply a part of human nature, but only a part. The importance of that
part is somewhat dependent on whether the culture uses or ignores that part of our
capacity. In no case will we drop the capacity of muscles to move in space and
attribute solidity to objects, but articulating this in a form of symbols, as math
does, is a cultural choice that affects individual minds.
So here’s the problem when we think of human nature. The math is only a mapping
on one part of the body. We also have gut and hormones and exquisite sensitivities
to beauty, threat, love, anger… And the mapping of these from the body into the
environment is more like stories and less like mathematics. Stories are about
objects, and hence use the motoric projections of anticipated solidity, but stories
also have emotions, and so are using other parts of the body. Biological systems
tend to work together, not in isolation, so all human achievements are messy and
complex, using multiple systems. But math alone is not a good mapping of these
complexities. The recalcitrant will here revert back to assumptions of atoms, bits,
programs and machines.
A full development of our multiple capacities I think is why people are attracted to
natural scenes, gardens, and art. GardenWorld provides that support. Two recent
books help clarify what is at stake in the interaction of mathematics, quantification,
and society. Both these books are extraordinary in scope, quality of writing, depth
of new thinking. Mary Poovey’s The Making of the Modern Fact , shows how
social science originated in the needs of states to manage commerce and
demographics. This tradition began with the use of double-entry bookkeeping as
rhetoric – the confidence that come from “it all adds up” to justify business
practice to ministers of state, and to extend business practice to social thinking. She
is showing how numbers served the rhetorical governing purposes of a ruling elite,
and in the process legitimated the use of generalizations and the downgrading of
individual cases. Her critique is a devastating analysis of the rise of abstraction at
the expense of real lives.
Mirowski’s Machine Dreams: How Economics Became a Cyborg Science, argues
that fragments of science, such as thermodynamics and entropy theory, systems
analysis, game theory, automaton studies, mostly created in the 1930’s, were all
brought together in research efforts to create control systems for the WWII
military, and that this agenda became the official social science (economics
especially) fundable research agenda after the war. The human-machine interface
problem was defined as a relation between a machine and a human who thinks,
thought is rational, thought can be modeled by logic, logic by math, and math can
be simulated by computers - ergo the man-machine interface problem is really a
machine- machine interface problem. Mirowski’s conclusion is that economics has
opportunistically followed science: classical economics following Newton and
then thermodynamics and then computability. This is a world oriented around
things and not around people.The implications of Mirowski’s reasoning, well
spelled out by him, is that economic theory by reducing the human to the machine,
creates a system where all parts recognize each other, and this leads to integrating
the whole world economy into a single machine. The implications for competition
and governance are obvious – the only game in town is who owns it, who controls
it, who is needed, and paid for it, and who is not, and is marginalized.
Math does map well with things (it started as accounting, architecture and
navigation), and much less with drama and poetry. Music is an interesting balance
between math like structures and emotions. Economics has been evolving as a
math based science where only rational actors and monetized behaviors are
allowed. We watch helplessly as water, copyright, seed genetics, move from the
world of human artifacts or natural givens into market relationships, and wealth
moves to those who rationalize the market (If not Wal-Mart some corporation
would have to be the by definition the largest mass importer from China. That is
there cannot not e a largest importer from China) or deal in derivatives. The pun is
intentional. Futures – expectations of change – on higher order derivatives can be
bundled and sold and called “derivatives”, coming from “derived from”.
This “rationalizing”, rooted in human nature and the needs of power, seems, at the
early part of the 21st century, inexorable. Richard Wright wrote a book that says
"complexity wins". But what if system collapses because human can stand the
consequences of so much complexity? Joseph Tainter’s collapse of complex
societies which I will discuss more in a few paragraphs is one version of this
dynamic as society grows more complex and drowns in its own problems.
We don't yet know if an information based society is more complex and wins over
a different kind of literary and humane culture. The loss of variety is not
necessarily a gain of complexity. The Greeks and Romans lost out to a Christianity
that had a more complex form of governance and social bonding. Christianity lost
out to the Renaissance world of commerce and absolute authoritarian secular
orders, and that world shifted rapidly to the world of commercial society marrying
new technology with economic power. But in the globalizing world of massified
standardized products, and the elimination of local differences , and standardized
global media may mean that total “information” may be in decline. We see this in
standardization of genes in narrowing the gene pool for livestock, grain and
vegetables.
Indeed, corporations are simplification machines. Complex inputs of skill, raw
materials, local culture, and the output is standard product and cash. There is a vast
reduction going on there. Homogenization is simplification pure and direct. In the
same way farming replaces a complex biospace with monocultures. Again, a vast
reduction in complexity. Technology is also a simplification process. A wing is
vastly simpler on a plane than on a bird. We have never “invented” anything as
complicated as a flower, or even a blade of grass. The robot is an example of a few
functions machined, technologized, into a thing that has vastly reduced complexity
compared to the human who had done some version of the same tasks. In this way
corporations and technology together provide very attractive alternatives to nature
and people: the cost is less. An urbanized valley has far less DNA variety than the
natural landscape it replaced. The environment in which people live is reduced in
its complexity. Imagine two scenes: the Gardner and the office worker.
GardenWorld is a vision that leads to local regional, microregional and individual
perspectives for action and creates the social and environmental conditions for a
healthier integration of mathematics into our thinking without the costs that come
from the hyper-rationalization and its obsessive tendencies. GardenWorld is not
anti-science. “Rational” for the Greeks meant the use of mind in the service of life.
In its current form it means stringing together a series of techniques in a way that
meets engineering criteria but can lead to a result of that is anti life. War, and the
use of sophisticated financial derivates, for example.
Part of the inheritance of the old split between matter and sprit was what can be
called the strategy of atomization. There exists, so this strategy (also no sound as
belief) implies, a level of substance that is real and uncontroversial, and that this
constitutes the real stuff. But what science has shown us is that at every level what
appears to be substantial (the word means what is standing underneath) is actually
a complex balance of forces and possibilities. The preference for an atomistic
approach is so powerful because it leads to the expectation that if we master the
parts then we are on solid ground. (Sub-stantial). Then it’s just a question of
putting them together, like bricks. The idea was articulated early, for example in
the work of John Locke, that all in the mind was the result of sensation, and
sensation was atoms of … unspecified. But as we know what is seen or heard is
patterns with mutual inhibitions and amplifications that swamp the input of any
individual velocity of an atom or photon.
This kind of neurological reductionism seems to be fading at the leading edge of
research, but will take a long time to be dampened in commercial research, which
is depending on the payoff from this approach. I am hopeful that GardenWorld
imagery will help shift the balance toward a more organic and less mechanical
approach to the life sciences. Certainly the new openings in genetic research show
that the “expression” of a gene is much more dependent on the complex
environment in which the gene functions than on what it can determine on its own.
Nigel Golderifeld1 and Carl Woese writes of Biology’s next revolution
Create a biology that embraces collective phenomena and supersedes the molecular
reductionism of the twentieth century. …it is not a good approximation (except
perhaps within the sterile laboratory) to regard microbes as organisms that are
dominated by individual characteristics [5]
That microbial behavior must be understood as predominantly cooperative.
Equally exciting is the growing realization that the virosphere plays an absolutely
fundamental role in the biosphere on both immediate arid long-term evolutionary
senses[15, 16]. Recent work, including our own unpublished work, suggests that
viruses may play an important role as a repository and memory of a community’s
genetic information, contributing to the evolutionary dynamics?, 18] and the
stability of the system
If the interactions are collective effects dominant, then an organism cannot even be
considered in isolation. Indeed, we would go so far as to suggest, that, a defining
characteristic of life is the strong dependency on flux from the environment, be it
energy-giving, chemical-giving, metabolism giving, or genetically-giving. This
inherently biocornplex perspective renders academic such debates as “is a virus
dead or alive.
And
A society that permits biology to become an engineering discipline, that allows that
science to slip into the role without trying to understand it, is a danger to itself.
Modern society knows that it desperately needs to learn how to live in harmony
with the biosphere. Today more than ever we are in need of a science of biology :
that helps us to do this, shows the way. An engineering biology is needed that will
still show us how to get there; it just doesn’t know where ‘there” is. [xiii]
Take for example the strong drive within neurology to want to have “atoms”, small
units of stable properties that can be integrated to higher levels of complexity.
Neurons seem to fit the bill and they do have spikes of discharge. But the
atomization view falls apart when one sees the complexity of the cell and its
embededness in context. That context is among other things, fluids filled with ions
that change the probability of a discharge, and hormones and nutrients, in an
incalculable maze of fluid flows. The 0 (no fire) or 1 (fire) view of the neuron is an
abstraction. The reason this is important is because it affects political thinking. Is
there a solid foundation for understanding humans, society, history and the
possibilities of “policy”? If rather we are all immersed in complex flows, then what
we can do is a mixture of traditions and our imaginative reactions. But this means
there is a story, a narrative that can map fairly well into the whole, but there is not
a possibility of reducing the flow to elemental particles of sure and absolute facts.
We need to realize that there is no fact without theory and no theory without
making use of tradition, and tradition has roots in the utterly obscure recesses of
the time before history. The reductionist approach supports the technologiezed
landscape and undermines GardenWorld by implying that the organic can be
replaced by the mechanical, yielding benefits without costs. We are moving
towards a reduced world with one kind of chicken, several kinds of fish, a few
grains each with identical gene structures throughout the agricultural world.
But if we approach human nature the way I suggested we approach understanding
a violin – by playing it more than by weighing it –we would start with the major
things humans do. Math for one, and science, but also art, in all its forms, loves,
gods, dreams, governments, wars, and economies, and quality private time in
contemplation.
To understand why this mathematizing takes place, her are a few suggestions
1. The place of power is based on mastery of things
2. Mechines and corporations are both simplification machines
3. The system of mathematics maps well into reality for some of its aspects
(time and space and mass and their changes) but
4. Math maps inward to only part of the body, that of our motion in space,
feeling for time, and effort. This is basically the musculature and its controlling
cerebellum, and its representations such thatw e can close our eyes and imagine a
cube rotating.
5.
To understand all these human creations and expressions, drama theory for
example may be more important than math. Appreciating them more leads to the
need for GardenWorld as a setting for active human lives.
So, who are we? Our actions and consciousness are embedded in a context of rich
experience and a complex body. We, our complex aware self, live in the in-
between of body and society, life and death, happiness and sadness, wellbeing and
collapse, love and loneliness. Our capacity for thinking merged with animal
instincts is a dangerous combination, but a thrilling combination, and it sets the
stage for us humans, between animals and gods. Our greatest thinkers, who have
created a civilization aware of individual and social interdependence, and the
possibility of a more democratic world, have worked for centuries in the wriggle
room between destruction and creation. Unfortunately too often the destruction has
been imposed on the many and on the environment, and creation co-opted for high
civilization and status in the life circumstances of a narrow elite. Too often we
have been told that is “rational”.
Since the human is expressed though science, religion, myth, loves, and much else
high and low in daily experience, we need to understand the history of these as best
we can if we are to see the human as best we can at the beginning of this century
(already 8% gone). We tend to take the nation state and secular society as givens,
having a history that is merely the emergence of reason from the dark of earlier
times (earlier is earlier or later, depending on one’s education.). Recent historical
research indicates that things we take for granted should not be. Our social
arrangements, perspectives on the meaning of the world and human nature, of
dealing with our personal self and close relations, all have a history coming out of
previous (say Middle Ages) arrangements, and have changed because of the need
to adapt to changing circumstances. The tree bends but does not break,
Understanding the constants in causing us to be who we are, and understanding the
variations that make us different, require serious intellectual, humanistic and
scientific work. Our current culture of cool reason and suspicion of deeper
feelings, down into the gut or up into spiritual awareness, are discounted. Science
has been for 400 years in harmony with the desire coming out of the devastating
Thirty Years War and the solution of the Treaty of Westphalia for stability and
hierarchy. Social stability and a scientific approach (hyper rationalism and
mathematical “certainty”) supported and reinforced each other. This period is at an
end. The result is we are more interested and open to the anthropological and
studies of animal complexity. We have lived through a time when numbers
counted, words should be unmetaphorical, and economics and technology trumped
actual social outcomes. The result is climate and wealth problems that have arrived
as the consequences of a narrow use of rationality.
And more important for the social sciences is the realization that social
arrangements are complex balancing assemblages of many constituent parts that
are not intrinsically, but only at times, hierarchical and precise. We realize that
emergence of new levels of complexity, each with its own structure and needed
description, means that the social science world is wide open, and social reality
with it.
There is an issue: how to govern a world with 7 billion. Is flexibility more
important than stability? We do not know, but I think the decision is in that
flexibility, tolerance, curiosity – what is called diversity – is in – and old style
“with us or against us” is gone, and the travails of the Bush administration (and us
dragged along for the ride) are part of the period of transition.
GardenWorld is in the spirit of finding the good in that new openness and
experimentation that is less hierarchical, less dogmatic, more democratic, scientific
yet humane and not so dogmatic, as reflected in the “science vs. religion” dialog.
We recognize that science too is a way of tying things together, one way among
others – narrative and novels for example – and we need all approaches. Religion
cannot go away because reach towards tying things together in a way helps us
understand human lives, and in that sense, science too is a religion, a way of tying
things together.
The Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment all, in their cumulative impact
helping to define the “West”, led to a mode of thinking which saw reason as
opposed to, or remote from, the body and feeling. This shift in the conscious of a
mainstream view of human nature fits the emerging economy of rapidly increasing
trade and industrialization, a period when the movement of things in trade was
experienced as more important and the relationships among people. That period is
coming to an end, but with a lot of resistance from established professions –
including science. A greater awareness of other cultures, primates, the emotional
complexity of children, and the play of emotion in persuasion, have created a great
opportunity to rethink the good life and the good society, and the role of science in
its achievement. In all fields, the return of the desire for the fuller human seems to
be part of our increasing awareness of ourselves as emotionally charged, gut
grounded, and heartfelt compassionate, and that we have gone too far in
suppressing these qualities. Civilization is not made by suppressing our animal side
which, after all, is the source of our compassion, our affections, our pleasure in our
daily life and our needs to feed and house ourselves in hopefully attractive
ways. Bad behavior is the result of poor or unfortunate nurturance and education.
DNA is important but not alone determinate. It is better to lead fourth than to beat
down. Conservatives want good education for their children, even excellent
education, but too often fail to see the advantages of extending it to
others. Progressives see the advantages in avoiding violence but too often missed
that the benefits of discipline, skills and socialization, would advantage, in the best
sense, nearly everyone.
And we like people who are alive:
If one of them appears in company, he’s a grain of yeast which ferments and gives
back to everyone some part of his natural individuality. He shakes things up. He
agitates us. He makes us praise or blame. He makes the truth come out, revealing
who has value. He unmasks the scoundrels. So that’s the time a man with sense
pays attention and sorts his world out .[xiv]
Personality can be seen as the major achievement of a civilization. Our view of
human nature is not just scientific. It is cultural, involving religions, arts and
sciences, and requiring personal experience. The basic ideas of human nature, such
as person, individual, family action, memory, have long cultural histories. That we
are organized by families from the earliest prehistoric times is just so obvious we
often forget it. That we are born young and die before we achieve our dreams is
part of what all of us think about more than we’d let on. We are disquieted by what
we see but persevere. I just was in Costa Rica and saw a country that is lush and
with friendly people who have a sense of dignity, not humiliation as say in the
more feudalistic hacienda culture of Mexico. And I just read a book on the
economics of the country. What is striking is the complete dominance of that
model of development where “development” is health, electricity roads and trade.
These do not add up to development. Bt they are things the World bank, for
example, can deliver. The implicit theory is that people will benefit by these and
then - then - build a real life on this new base. But what goes un-asked and under-
analyzed is the way the actual lived lives develop. Shifting from forest and plain to
paved roads and electrical hookups is ambiguous at best. For example, it leaves out
the shifting ownership of property and the resulting impact on the quality of life of
much of the population.

This leads us to the next chapter, the problems of technology.