Book proposal April  2008

GardenWorld Politics:American Values – toward the 80% solution and a new politics of inclusion

Author: Douglass Carmichael   doug@dougcarmichael.com

Contemporary issues reveal a failure of politics to deal with problems of the economy and environment. We have lost any vision of where we want to move towards with potential solutions. The modernist vision post WW2 has faded and nothing replaces it to motivate in a positive way the changes we need. The book begins with a radical idea: any politics which does not aim towards the gardening of the world and the humanization of its people is not an adequate politics. By GardenWorld we mean the intent to enhance the full spectrum of environments from inner city to wilderness with an enhanced garden aesthetic and biologically productive use of land, creating an economy that cannot be exported, and, through tough environmental regulation, drives innovation and entrepreneurial opportunities, especially at the regional and local levels.

Proposed audience: the book is for those who want to live in GardenWorld but have not articulated it to themselves. Written especially for those who have an active interest in politics, policy and the future of the human - environmental nexus. It aims to influence the dialog leading up to this next election, and policies enacted after.  It seeks a wide and intelligent audience. It brings into a coherent view the best work in the social sciences, art, and science of the last half dozen decades, and answers the question that follows from Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom, “Instead of escape, what?”.

OUTLINE

The book is a response to the current failure of most of us to have a vision of the future that is plausible, attainable, and attractive.  The core idea is that nearly everyone wants to live in a balance between civilization and nature.  Why don’t we use our wealth to go there?

The preface proposes that there exists an agenda that 80% of the people would vote for if it were offered, but it is blocked by political commitments to existing power, and that GardenWorld is an integrating vision that already exists in the minds of most people. But it needs to be named in order to be evocative, and GardenWorld is an effective name. People remember it because they already believe it. Perhaps GardenWorld is the most effective name for a hoped for future.

The book is divided into

Introduction and overview

Current politics is stuck, and why chapters 2, 3

GardenWorld evoked chapters 4,5,6

A broader historical cultural view chapter 7

The politics of GardenWorld, how to get there. chapter 8,9, 10

Epilogue chapter 11, human nature, technology and garden world

The book has five core ideas

1.      The image of the future and the promise of progress have languished, under the pressures to adapt to “modernism”, through a failure of imagination, leadership, and resources. The promise of a better life after WW2 has not been realized. Progress for all turned into privilege for ever fewer in a great game of economic musical chairs. Chapter 1 and 2.

2.      Both major political parties are stuck and governance is not responsive.  Chapters 1 through 3 analyses why we are in this jam. The merry-go-round economy, working for those who are in it, but marginalizes those who are not. Chapter 2.

3.      Much current political activity – attitude and voting -  is a way of saying “no” to the whole system, made necessary when  “no” is not one of the votable options, nor are positive policies that would deal with the obvious issues ignored by the leadership.  Chapter 3, “Is religion in politics a way of saying “no”?

4.      There exists a political agenda that 80% would agree to. Not an agenda of mere platitudes, but deals with real issues. (Preface, Chapters 1, 8, 9, 10). It requires mixing a new business climate with environmental rigor, and using health and education as enablers for fuller participation. Simply turning downward the rising curves of inequality and environmental degradation would be sufficient for a vast increase in hope and would be a good beginning. But we need to go much further to deal with the currently degrading environment and quality of life.

5.      The GardenWorld vision is necessary to make the 80% solution come alive and be evocative.  Chapters 4, 5, 6 , 11

GardenWorld, a blend of the organic and the technological, entrepreneurship, and serious environmentalism, oriented for human development across the life-cycle, is that image. Garden World is not a plan but an intent, allowing for, requiring, maximum flexibility to respond to the emerging future. It is critical of the gridlock politics, corporations, and the financial structures have on preventing needed experimentation.

The Context

The context, as I write, is that most observers agree that

1.      The economy is making the rich richer and the poor poorer in almost every country (including the Middle East, creating the conditions for chaos there), and that the legal structures of corporations, along with the computer enabled mischief by financial institutions are a major factor.

2.      The plausibility of global climate change is also now conventional wisdom. But the actionable policies have not been architected by the politicians.

3.      The idea and practice of democracy have been corrupted and nothing yet replaces them.

4.      Security in a crowded world is better achieved by diplomacy and pinpoint police professionalism than by militarism.

5.      All these problems affect the local quality of life.

The long term is described by some combination of three major scenarios (All consistent with any outcome to the disastrous war in Iraq, a war that has distracted us from the larger issues).

1.      Technocratic centralist control of the world economy as a single integrated machine, a police world with strong media control

2.      A shift toward more participation and democratic unfolding and the supporting human development in health and education, toward GardenWorld.

3.      And, of course, one must add, the possibilities of Rwanda like collapse where human needs overwhelm the social system.

The book is based on the idea that GardenWorld, the second scenario, is the viable and more attractive possibility. To get there, as I’ll describe in Chapter 9, might require some more aggressive changes, such as rethinking corporate charters, the way interest works, the way congress works, land use, and international cooperation. But I’ll emphasize that great progress can be made simply by shifting the rules enough so that increasing concentration of wealth and income cease and measureable and visible decreases in wealth concentration are sustained.

Humans are drowning in the tsunami of their own success as a species. As our population crowds in on itself, we increasingly feel that change is driven by the numbers out of control, such as population, pollution, currency manipulation and abstraction.  And change itself has been driving an expanding economy and collapsing society and makes brokers rich while most people, who assume a more “steady state” society, suffer from displacements. I believe that most people, Democrats, Republicans and Independents, progressive and conservative, actually agree with this picture. Difference emerges when standardized options, emphasized by the leaderships and the press, force polarization, which maintain existing institutions.

The Chapters

The Introduction lays out this argument as above, and the following chapters develop it.

Chapter 1. The 80% solution is about the political agenda that 80% of the population would vote for if it was offered, and begins the analysis of why we are not offered it.  I describe how we live in a time when the economy is doing well, while the people are doing badly, The national policy is to protect the rich in a time of national decline, and there is no national policy to help the country cope with meeting local needs with local jobs while acknowledging globalization.  I talk about the interviews I’ve done over the last 10 years with red state conservatives and blue state liberals.  From those interviews I concluded that the differences are far less extreme than portrayed in the press.  In fact both share common values of family, community, opportunities for children, the healthy and safe community, education and health that enables participation in the economy, and an economy that is environmentally responsive, entrepreneurial at the local and regional level, and deals fairly with security and justice.

I point out that the Right fears big government, the Left fears big business and a big military.  Each sees the other as supporting bigness which they have projected on the other.  Their critiques cancel each other out, and bigness wins.  But an alternative, a society based on what people want, is completely feasible. I give some historical analysis including a view of the politics of Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg.

Chapter 2. Why is leadership and benefit so narrowly distributed? Not only in the U.S. but in the rest of the world.  I talk about the economic machine which has room for those who can add to its production and consumption, called wealth, but not for those who would dilute it.  I call this machine the merry-go-round and show how people must choose either to align themselves with it to be included, or be marginalized. The capacity of the merry-go-round is intrinsically limited and cannot extend to the whole population. “We have a worldwide business culture that knows how to create money wealth, but not how to distribute it.”

Chapter 3.  Religious affiliation – a way of saying “No” to the current political direction when the political process does not offer the possibility of a “no” vote? Most people do not like the direction society is taking.  That direction is perceived as environmentally and economically destructive, making any quality of life increasingly out of reach for a larger number of people, trashing the environment and making jobs scare. But the real resistance is to the loss of community, hope and meaning. Under pressure, people revert to what is close at hand, and in most parts of the US that means some kind of religious orientation. Hence the rise of religion in politics is a reflection of social discontent on a large scale lacking ay  means of political action.

Chapter 4.  Toward the vision of GardenWorld - an image of a viable future, articulates the first view of GardenWorld as a way of framing the 80% solution so that it can be understood. I propose that by blending technological advances that impact the environment, education, local building and land remediation and enhancement, we can create the obvious, a world where architecture, landscape, agriculture, private gardens and public parklands - all blend into a cultivated landscape mixing growing and making with vital human lives.

I've been calling this GardenWorld, and find people take to this image, and the name. As I return to audiences where I've raised the issue, people seem to remember it, even savor it, wanting to know what's next.

GardenWorld is a balance between growing people and growing society in ways consistent with nature.  It proposes a relationship between humans and the natural world that, from a human perspective and with evidence from a healthy environment, enhances both.

GardenWorld is not a one-size-fits-all planning task like Le Corbusier’s nineteen twenties plan to replace much of Paris with a new garden city. GardenWorld should be an evolution over time, responsive to the existing buildings, the settings, the possibilities of preservation, and the emerging possibilities that people discover as GardenWorld unfolds. We seek organic growth that integrates people and nature, a mixture of ease and innovation, creativity and restful appreciation. Not narrowing of the range of activities, but supportive, from the bustle of our ambitions to significant leisure. GardenWorld, by allowing for continuity between the built and the natural gives much greater scope for design and living conditions than is typical of even the best “communities” or new towns being designed now. It is not to design bounded spaces of perfection but to create interconnected pieces of terrain.  Too many designed communities are conspicuously framed by new roads, and inside the whole development looks slightly abstract, as though it is still on the drawing board.  There is no reason why a cultivated environment cannot be kind to technology, art, animals and plants at the same time and therefore much kinder to us as well.

Chapter 5.  GardenWorld elaborated provides a more detailed look at GardenWorld.  For example: GardenWorld is not an end point, but a guide to a future that gives us a way of making decisions and initiating experiments now. Because GardenWorld is already conscious or near to consciousness in most people, it is not only an arrow toward the future but a way of reorganizing and emphasizing or deemphasizing things already in place.  It means finding what people care about and bringing those together under the imagination of GardenWorld. It does not sacrifice the present for the future, but enhances the present for the near future and creates an approach which has organic flexibility for further future experimentation, which, given energy, climate and population crises, it looks like we will need.  GardenWorld shifts the balance from engineering planning methods to organic planning attitudes.

Chapter 6.  More GardenWorld further analyses of the possibilities for GardenWorld, for example, Freeman Dyson’s recent proposal for the impact of new technologies greening the world. The aim of GardenWorld is not to make a homogeneous world of forest or pasture, but a world that has wilderness on one edge and urbanization at the other, both being included, neither excluded, with all the design and functions connecting them.  GardenWorld is a continuous experiment in blending the natural with the civilizational. We do, partially already have such an environment that does such integration and includes cities such as New York’s Central Park, and the National Parks. It is just too poorly and partially done now in too few places. We are talking about enhancing all of nature and urbanization integrated with appreciated human beings whose lives are enhanced, and includes farms, suburbs, manufacturing districts, new industrial zones, and garbage dumps in a new comprehensive participatory design process of continual experimentation. It’s a question of intent.

Chapter 7.  History is a look back at our history and builds on the several sets of scenarios presented earlier.  It looks at the promise of the West since the Renaissance and the promise of the discovery of America and the failure to realize that promise after World War II. I show how many of our key institutions have a long and deep history. For example, Gary Wills in Inventing America treats the US as an invention whose roots are clear in the desire for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the avoidance of tyranny, but recent developments suggest the founding fathers were not considering the rise of corporations nor the management of complexity. Because the US approach to governance was an experiment, it can be revisited to see how we have done.

Chapter 8.  The 80% proposal is a more detailed presentation of the proposal in Chapter 1.  It starts with a few basics.  For example: Reverse the legislation that, cumulatively, is leading to concentration of wealth and extremely unequal incomes. Because wealth is the sum of income saved over time, whereas income is only for a given year, wealth distortion is much greater than income distortion. Either is gross enough to say without equivocation, something is rotten in the republic. The solution may be as simple as reinstating the inheritance tax for estates above say 2 million, and raising the upper income tax brackets by 5 or ten percent. I believe these two changes would bring us into an era where the current increasing concentration will turn into slowly decreasing disparities.  The very fact of this shift in direction would mean that most people would have rising expectations.  The result would be increased hope and a desire to participate in politics, family life,  and the economy..

Chapter 9.  The larger platform, talks about longer term political trends and the need to question the laws of incorporation, land use, national security, and the role of governance, if GardenWorld is to be more fully realized. It recapitulates the strategy of starting with things that can easily be done, such as reversing the tax changes that led to such concentrations of wealth. And then suggests ways to go beyond these simple steps.

The chapter examines the role of technology in society, its tendency to align itself with the elites, and undercutting the potentiality for technology to move towards GardenWorld. But GardenWorld is an entrepreneurial approach to social change, using strong environmental regulation to drive technical innovation and create local jobs for retrofitting our current built environment. I continually question the current chartering process of corporations of being able to achieve the needed flexibility, since it allows them to be so self-serving, becoming instruments for reducing the complexity of their environment (complex inputs – skills, environment, and simple output; product and profit).

Chapter 10, The messy process of getting there, examines the politics of how to get to GardenWorld. I look at the history of some legislative initiatives, and the nature of resistance. For example, land ownership becomes a tremendous point of resistance to land use experiments that may be necessary under new pressures of water and energy problems, increasing population, and rising sea levels. Sea level change could be an opportunity if we used it to increase shoreline rather than decrease it, and allow inundations for aqua culture and recreation. Current shoreline owners will use their political power to defend what they have rather than let socially useful innovations occur. GardenWorld helps us cut through the resistance by making clear that there are better ways. But the process and understanding governance in its current form is not up to the task of governing complexity with compassion and fairness.

Chapter 11.  Epilogue: human nature, tech life and GardenWorld is a review of the proposal integrating human nature with the environment, and the resulting integration of economy, education, health, strong environmental protection, and due regard for population and climate change.

I discuss human nature and its relation to urban civilization and GardenWorld, and the proposal to use Eric Ericson’s eight stages of the human life cycle as a design template to measure the value of social change proposals. We humans have an inheritance from animals of instinctual energy including a warm emotional life. Human thinking is the key to civilization but it also allows us to be colonized by ideologies. Our conceptual maps are never the reality and always need reform and reflective criticism. No conceptual regime can be expected to get it all right. GardenWorld is seen as a framework that holds human nature in quality of life.

There is an analysis of the role of technology in society, its tendency to align itself with the elites, and undercutting the potentiality for technology to move towards GardenWorld. But GardenWorld is an entrepreneurial approach to social change, using strong environmental regulation to drive technical innovation and create local jobs to retrofit our current built environment. I continually question the current chartering process of corporations of being able to achieve the needed flexibility, since it allows them to be so self-serving, becoming instruments for reducing the complexity of their environment (complex inputs – skills, environment, and simple output; product and profit).

I discuss the role of belief and meaning in politics and culture. A society that does not offer believable belief misses a key ingredient in the quality of life. GardenWorld reintegrates the human and the natural in complex ways: technological urban and wild, with a special emphasis on agriculture and aesthetics. Meaning rather naturally arises in a GardenWorld world and through the compelling political process of getting there.

To Rehumanize Everything is the goal: to evaluate our future in not only economic terms for those who can afford to, and are allowed to participate, but also in the more full environmental human dimensions of the quality of life.  It renews a theme throughout the book that a recommitment to the very American values of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” without resorting to tyranny.

The appendix reviews other recent books on proposals for political change.

Author’s bio

Douglass Carmichael, psychologist, consultant, teacher

Basic info can be found at http://dougcarmichael.com/bio.html  

Currently I am Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s Media X Project, President of the privately held Shakespeare and Tao Consulting, Director, Warnecke Institute for the Future of Art and Architecture and do some private practice of philosophical psychoanalysis.

My goal is to use the education I’ve had to make a better world. Blessed with great teachers, Wilson Parkhill, David Kreps, Melba Carpenter, Linus Pauling, Richard Feynman, Alfred Stern, David Eliot, Paul Feyerabend, Karl Popper, Jonas Langer, Jean Piaget, Jerome Brunner, Giorgio De Santillana, Jerry Lettvin, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Michael Maccoby, Eric Trist, Napier Collyns. And, through books, Kenneth Burke, Ernst Cassirer, Eric Voegelin, Martha Nussbaum, Philip Mirowski, Roberto Ungar, Keith Hart… and many others, I can only feel humbled - and energized. I’ve been blessed by being able to cross institutional lines.

From physics at Caltech, where I became more interested in the personalities of scientists then the science they spoke so passionately, Oppenheimer helped me get to Berkeley where I did my doctoral dissertation in child development on Irony, related to rhetoric. My first two years were supported by a grant from Carnegie on what were then (1961) called “teaching machines”, and I wrote some programs to teach metaphor. Meeting Feyerabend gave me a grasp on the realities of science, and Erik Erikson’s visiting year gave me renewed interest in psychoanalysis. I took Kroeber’s last course, sat in on courses by Kuhn and Popper, and thoroughly enjoyed myself except for the then new Tolman Hall, one of the worst academic buildings I’ve ever been in. I was fortunate to live in a Maybeck house in Kennsington during those years, made more interesting with the Free Speech Movement and the heart moving thought of Mario Savio. I spent two years on a post doc at Brunner’s Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard, and had some influence with my Irony dissertation, and taught a seminar in the School of Architecture called “Using drama theory to understand architectural spaces.” I developed a life long abhorrence of the narrow academic approach to cognition. I turned down Jim March’s offer to head the about to open psych department at Irvine, I felt I was just too innocent. I also got to know Riesman and Erikson, and met Michael Maccoby and out of the mix came an interest and invitation to go to Mexico with Erich Fromm at his Psychoanalytic Institute at the National University. Also got married.

Working with Fromm and Maccoby gave me a sense of psychoanalysis as a means of social investigation. Living for a few years in Mexico gave me a crucial sense of cultural difference, and the rough politics of 1968.  After working on the interviews and on the research team that led to Maccoby’s The Gamesman, we were invited to start consulting.

Consulting on my own led to forays into organizations as diverse as the World Bank, the White House, Gore’s National performance Review and Reinventing Government, the State Department, Volvo, MIT, Bell Labs, The World bank, TransCanada Pipeline, and many others. Three wonderful children, Aaron, Rebecca and Seth, and now three grandchildren. Along the way, besides living in Mexico I spent long periods in Italy, France, India, Greece, and Japan, and traveled through Scandinavia and  North Africa. In stops in between I was a professor in Mexico, Santa Cruz, Catholic University in Washington (another boundary crossing), and The Washington School of Psychiatry. I was invited to join an on-line computer conversation in 1983 that was one of the earliest and most brilliant ensembles, run by the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. This led me to become a partner at Metasystems Design, where I pioneered in using computer conferencing software to support consulting projects. I learned from Harrison Owen about Open Space, and started blending those techniques. I was also integrating my drama theory thinking into understanding the drama of organizations, and working with executive teams to discover the drama they were in as a way of redesigning the plot, so to speak. I had watched the rise and fall of “Work Humanization” and the descent of “Knowledge Management” to relatively low level skill harvesting. I started spending time with Napier Collyns and GBN and learned first hand about scenarios, and integrated scenario work into my more active participatory approach to work change, especially with senior teams and overall strategy development. Married again for eight extraordinary years.

Then on a quirk, after hearing client’s anxiety about Y2K in 1998, I wrote a paper, “Who will do what and when will they do it”,  which led me to deeper strategic consulting about y2k, which led me to the back end mechanics at the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Pentagon, the Greek government and more. I wrote a newsletter called y2k week that was widely read.

All along the way I have taught when the opportunity arose, and keep my private psychoanalytic practice, which has been, along with consulting as a realm of action and reflection, getting to know society through its living lives. I keep looking for a way to create the right kind of broad-based social strategy think tank/retreat center, and am currently the Director of the Warnecke Institute for Architecture, Art and design, which integrates my past interests in a quite thorough way.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed time spent living in the large space between science and the humanities, and less intensely, in theater, classical guitar, painting, dance, swimming, tai chi, yoga, and currently live in one of the most beautiful places, where the Russian River opens out towards the sea.

But the future calls… especially my current book projects, GardenWorld Politics, about the possibility of a political agenda we would all vote for, if it were offered, and Gods, Dreams, Loves and Other Projections, and The Future of Consulting, Also a text book on Psychology for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Stanford’s Media X Project brings me back to thoughts about technology and society for which I am grateful.

Marketability for GardenWorld  Politics.

Audience: it is made to appeal to those concerned with current affairs, especially politics, social futures, economics, and, including health and education, and human welfare generally, and environment, all in the context of human development.

Platform: The book is based on my studies at Cal Tech, Berkeley, and Harvard. I went from physics to psychoanalysis to strategic consulting using scenarios and participation. The book also is based on reading and often personal relationships with Richard Rorty, Erik Erikson Martha Nussbaum, the eco-psychology movement, Paul Feyerabend, Karl Popper, David Riesman, Erich Voegelin, Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken, and many others. It is an integrative book, involving trends in modern philosophy, social thought, management theory, art and architecture. Its very being is to cross lines and be evocative of a way of living that is not sanctioned by a particular platform but does touch on the best thoughts of all of us about the future.

First, I have no other commitments other than to make the book a success and so could travel and speak as opportunities emerge.  I am a good public speaker, and have made presentations in a large variety of settings and size of audience. I think I am flexible and quick on my feet in exchanges.  As a professor at places like Santa Cruz I got very high ratings from students and warm receptions when giving talks to larger audiences.  I have been very active in the blogging world, and am fairly knowledgeable about the new media.  The book would have a very active blog.

GardenWorld Politics comes from my experience as a consultant to a very broad range of clients, businesses, governments, universities, non-profits, and politicians. The idea for the book arose from interviews I started in 1980 on attitudes toward the environment, and continued in 1999 with interviews to understand the emerging split between the apparently divergent groups in the US. During the writing of the book I have been consultant to various political organizations, starting in 1999 for one of the presidential candidates. I discovered that pressures for immediate positions prevented any deeper thinking about long-range issues.

In 1998 I started a newsletter Y2K week, on the emerging power of the y2k dilemma. It was an amazing experience. The newsletter ended with over 2000 subscribers, and was widely distributed from single copies inside organizations. It led me to things like a two and a half day seminar with the senior managers of the Washington Post, a briefing of staffs of the joint Chiefs on the social implications, a day-long meeting with most of the vice presidents of the Wall Street Journal, a trip to London to work with Tony Blair and the starting of his approach to Y2K, and close work with John Koskinen in the White House, Clinton’s y2k “Czar”

I go into this background because it is an indication of my willingness to seek out issues that resonate deeply and where a spark can have an effect. In 1977 I wrote a paper called Work at the World Bank that had a similar electrifying effect within an institution.  In both cases what I wrote was what I felt about something I deeply believed in and that mobilized my sense of urgency.

GardenWorld is a similar response to a deepfelt crisis.  The book represents the multidimensional complexity, the institutional cross cutting, and the appeal to different islands of expertise that I sense are necessary to deal with our political future.  I have followed closely the environmental discussions but have avoided active engagement because of the limited natuthinkry.com

re of the discussions I’ve found there.  In that sense my activity has not built a constituency for the book within established circles, but I believe expresses accurately what the vast majority in their wisdom sense to be the real issues and so far has gone unnamed.  During 2006 and 2007 I have been working with a small group of what I call “disaffected democratic funders” who have been distressed by the direction for the party and have shown some openness to longer term thinking.

Lately I have given small seminars, mostly in Sonoma County, coping with the future of local politics and the county planning process.  I have introduced GardenWorld and the scenarios described in the book as a framework for future thinking.  What strikes me is that people never forget the phrase and quickly accept its legitimacy.  I feel that the larger political world is ready for something that cuts deeper and mobilizes hope, blending technology and democracy with the environment, climate, and human development in a healthier mix.  GardenWorld is that vision, and GardenWorld  Politics aims at getting us there.