The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government (2 page)

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Authors: Eric Liu,Nick Hanauer

Tags: #Political Science, #Political Ideologies, #Democracy, #History & Theory, #General

BOOK: The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government
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The question today is, can we still adapt? Will our experiment get another cycle? Or has our society’s capacity to evolve run its course?
The failure of American politics to address and solve the great challenges of our time—climate change, debt and deficits, worsening schools, rising health care costs, the shriveling of the middle class—is not just a failure of will or nerve. It is equally a failure of ideas and understanding. And the failure to address these challenges isn’t just a matter of politics, but of survival.
To begin with, we labor today under a painfully confining choice between outmoded ideologies on both the left and the right. On the left, too many remain wedded to paradigms first formed during the decades between the Progressive Era and the New Deal. They are top-down, prescriptive, bureaucratic notions about how to address social challenges. These state-centric approaches made sense in a centralizing, industrializing America. They make much less sense in the networked economy and polity of today.
On the right, we hear ideas even more historically irrelevant : laissez-faire economics and a “don’t tread on me” idea of citizenship that might have been tolerable in 1775 when the country had 3 million largely agrarian inhabitants, only some of whom could vote, but is at best naïve and at worst destructive in a diverse, interdependent, largely urban nation of over 300 million.
Our politics has become an over-rehearsed, over-ritualized piece of stage combat between these two old ideologies. False choice after polarizing false choice emanates from Washington. Both ideologies—indeed, the surrender of American politics to ideology itself, and the abandonment of pragmatism as a guiding political philosophy— make it harder by the day for America to adapt.
We wrote this short book to offer a new way. We aim to reach not “moderates” or “centrists” who split the difference between left and right. We aim to reach those who think independently. That might mean those who claim no party affiliation, though it also includes many loyal Democrats and Republicans. It definitely means those who are uncomfortable being confined by narrow choices, old paradigms, and zero-sum outcomes.
If you can hold these paired thoughts in your head, we wrote this book for you:
–The federal government spends too much money. The wealthy should pay much more in taxes.
–Every American should have access to high-quality health care. We spend far too much on health care in the United States already.
–We need to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels. We need to ensure our economy continues to grow.
–Unions are a crucially important part of our economy and society. Unions have become overly protectionist and are in need of enormous amounts of reform.
–We need strong government. We need strong citizens.
Contemporary American political discourse sees these pairings as
either-or.
Independent-thinking Americans see them as
both-and.
Our goal in these pages is to push past the one-dimensional, left-right choices of contemporary politics—between more government or less, selfishness and altruism, suffocating collectivism and market fundamentalism—and find
orthogonal
approaches to our challenges. The great challenge of this age—and the point of this book—is to rethink how we as citizens create change, how the economy truly works, and what government fundamentally is
for.
The great challenge of this age is to change how we
see
, and by so doing, improve our ability to adapt.
At every stage in history, people operate within a constructed frame of ideas, metaphors, and narratives—and this story frame defines how people think of themselves, what they think is possible in life, and how they think the world works. To put it more pointedly, there is not now and has never been some abstracted social reality “out there”; at every moment in each epoch, in ways influenced by culture, science, and technology, people
construct
a social reality that validates some truths and distorts others. These frames define what we think of as good for us—how we pursue our individual and collective self-interest. It defines what a society thinks is possible.
But these frames are not fixed. Every so often, the idea set shifts radically, and with it our notion of what is good for us. We are in the midst of such a shift right now. A set of quiet scientific revolutions now demands that we see in terms of systems—and enables us to make sense of them. What kinds of
systems
make up our economy, our society, and the ecologies that sustain us? How are the elements in these systems
connected
? And finally, how do the agents (people) within these systems
behave
?
These are the kinds of questions we are far better able to answer today than we were half a century ago. Science—which we mean broadly to include physical discoveries, insights into behavior, awareness of patterns of experience—tells us today that the world is a
complex adaptive system
, not a linear equilibrium system; that the elements within it are
networked
, not atomized; that humans operate in that system as
emotional reciprocal approximators
, not rational self-regarding calculators.
Taken together, these insights (which we describe in more depth below) suggest a new narrative about how strong societies emerge, adapt, and thrive.
Why does this matter? Why should anyone besides students of science or intellectual history care? Because in every age, those who define the metaphors define the terms of politics. In its time, Darwin’s theory of evolution was corrupted into a powerful ideology of Social Darwinism, which treated the weak and marginalized as presumptively unfit for survival (and government aid). Later, Taylorism and “scientific management” led government leaders to believe they could engineer their way to desired social outcomes. In our own time, the belief that markets follow the equilibrium dynamics of physics has had its own awful results. Consider that policymakers did not foresee or forestall the crash of 2008 because their dominant economic model had, as Alan Greenspan later admitted, “a flaw”—namely, that it didn’t contemplate human irrationality.
This is not just about economics or politics; it’s about
imagination
and our ability to conceive of new ways of conceiving of things. It is about our ability to adapt and evolve in the face of changing circumstances and the consequences of our actions. History shows that civilizations tend eventually to get stuck in the patterns that had brought them success. They can either stay stuck and decay, or get unstuck and thrive.
We posit in these pages that this country has for too long been stuck in a mode of seeing and thinking called Machinebrain. We argue that the time has come for a new mode of public imagination that we call Gardenbrain.
Machinebrain sees the world and democracy as a series of mechanisms—clocks and gears, perpetual motion machines, balances and counterbalances. Machinebrain requires you to conceive of the economy as perfectly efficient and automatically self-correcting. Machinebrain presupposes stability and predictability, and only grudgingly admits the need for correction. Even the word commonly used for such correction—“regulation”—is mechanical in origin and regrettable in connotation.
Gardenbrain sees the world and democracy as an entwined set of ecosystems—sinks and sources of trust and social capital, webs of economic growth, networks of behavioral contagion. Gardenbrain forces you to conceive of the economy as man-made and effective only if well constructed and well cared-for. Gardenbrain presupposes instability and unpredictability, and thus expects a continuous need for seeding, feeding, and weeding ever-changing systems. To be a gardener is not to let nature take its course; it is to
tend.
It is to accept responsibility for nurturing the good growth and killing the bad.
Tending
and
regulating
thus signify the same work, but tending frames the work as presumptively necessary and beneficial rather than as something to be suffered.
Machinebrain treats people as cogs: votes to be collected by political machines; consumers to be manipulated by marketing machines; employees to be plugged into industrial machines. It is a static mindset of control and fixity, and is the basis of most of our inherited institutions, from schools to corporations to prisons.
Gardenbrain sees people as interdependent creators of a dynamic world: our emotions affect each other; our personal choices cascade into public patterns, which can be shaped but rarely controlled. It is a dynamic mindset of influence and evolution, of direction without control, and is the basis of our future.
Machinebrain allows you to rationalize atomized selfishness and a neglect of larger problems. It accepts social ills like poverty, environmental degradation, and ignorance as the inevitable outcome of an efficient marketplace. It is fatalistic and reductionist, treating change as an unnecessary and risky deviation from the norm.
Gardenbrain recognizes such social ills and the shape of our society as the byproduct of man-made arrangements. It is evolutionary and holistic, treating change as the norm, essential and full of opportunity. It leads you to acknowledge that human societies thrive only through active gardening.
Gardenbrain changes everything.
New understandings about how the world works—and the development of tools to represent such understandings—now undermine the ideologies of hyperindividual-ism on the right and reflexive statism on the left. Science is coming ever closer to depicting what each of us already understands intuitively about how the world works. Most of us know in our gut—contrary to the political ethos of raw self-seeking—that our family, friends, neighbors, and customers are bound by something other than raw calculation of interest. We know in our gut—contrary to the axioms of market fundamentalism—that businesses and economies are not self-regulating machines. We know in our gut as well—contrary to the promises of expert-led government—that a society that relies on top-down problem-solving ends up being too slow and too non-adaptive to thrive.
 
 
 
MACHINEBRAIN VS. GARDENBRAIN: Gardenbrain changes everything
 
 
So now for the plan of this book.
We will begin by summarizing the revolutions in human understanding that have fundamentally altered our macrocosmic understanding of societies. We will explore in detail how these new ideas—ideas about people and the systems in which they operate—transform how we think about our self-interest and the public interest. Our claim here is that new ways of understanding the world translate into profoundly new ways of thinking about how to advance our shared interests—and that our politics must change to reflect that.
In our first book,
The True Patriot
, we argued that putting self above community and country was morally wrong. In this book, we argue that it is stupid. We aim to show that in theory and in practice, self-seeking is now a counterproductive instinct and that we need a bigger idea of what freedom means in order for our country to remain great.
Next we unpack how these ideas and metaphors impact what we think of as the three “gardens of democracy,” the interlocking organic realms that comprise public life: citizenship, economy, and government.
We will argue that understanding the world in these new ways raises the standard for citizenship, by making clearer the ways in which our individual behavior inescapably creates feedback loops that contagiously shape society. Our new understanding of citizenship forces us to acknowledge that we are individually both more powerful within, and more responsible to, the communities and networks that surround us.
Then we will explore how understanding the economy as a complex adaptive system fundamentally challenges and changes our notions of what wealth is, how it is generated, and why fairness and fierce competition are allies. Powerful new metaphors with explanatory power will lead us to new and surprising conclusions about how we should organize our economy. We’ll make an argument for a “true capitalism” both more competitive and more fair than what we now call capitalism.
Finally, we will explore the question of what government is for and how it should be constructed, given our new understanding of social systems and the world around us. Our aim is to pose the deepest questions about the role of government in modern democratic society and go all the way back to first principles in constructing its proper role. Government is not, as both today’s liberals and conservatives seem to think, a thing “over there” to be lionized or reviled. In this section, we aim to reboot a conversation on the actual civic meaning of self-government, beyond acting out or opting out, beyond spectator sport or simple cynicism. How does a diverse, networked, interdependent, largely urban and technological society govern itself?

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