Chapter 3. Human Nature and design.

Notes in […]s -. are ideas to develop further (..) are to become footnotes

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.

– John Carl Warnecke.

[Exploring human nature has its dangers. Erik Ericson says mankind preres enlightenment away from itself.. wjen I arrived for my post doc at Harvard I had a dream where a house painter asks me what i do. “Study people” I replied. Oh yea, who wants to know?” Uttered with defensive hostility, fear. But lets try.] Key to good design, or most anything we humans do, is knowing who it is for. What is it like to be human and how can we design - In Gardenworld in particular - what best enhances, by their judgment, what is good for us. How can design of the space (and institutions) support our health and enthusiasm.? A design that gives us space u chose more than being forced by the design. But free speech and action in a swamp or desert is not so terrific. Our freedom requires a more complex speces.

This can be quite complex. (troubadors, creating the future with song. ) (Illich the middle ages. People lived in relationship not objectively)

When you are in the theater and the curtain opens often the stage is still empty pf people but you get a feeling from the set what kind of acgtion to expect. Kenneth Burke called this the scene/act ratio : what is to be perfoemd in implicit in the set. Let me exand a bit. In berkeley in the 60’s the free dpeech movement galvanized the campus . Iyt started when a police car was dumb enough to drive into a crowd of students who quickly “captured” the car and put a student flag out the window of he administration building. Detailss are important. as we think of how Gardenwrold can motivate it in habitants. A decade before the free speech movement a soviet stuple monolitjic staff office bukding gaerd out on a maybe half acrer of trees and the sutents caming on to camput passed under those trees in a diffuse patter, Then a new studennt Union building was built replaing the trees and narrowing down the ntrance to the campus compressing the student strean like pouring water out of a bottle. It felt as if the two building — office of the presien aand chaencellor on one side and the tudnet union on the other confronted eavh other. This set the atage for the sudnet action with the police car, aiming to stop a stiudent protest against the arrest of several students passing out pamphlets comlaigning of the politcs of Richard Nixon running for Governor of California. A ftried of Nixon’s was Senator Knowland who happened to own the Oakland Tribune and was on the Board of the Univeristy. for governor,(fact check). The interaction of history, place, cicumstances shows what human motivation is like. The simple model, A causes B, does not do justice to the multiplex causity.

So when we ask for a design of space, it is to suspport the people who move through it in their large rhumanity.

We should start with what we are now because we are the client so to speak. There are two major stories about how we became us. The more common is the 7 or 8 billion year history from the big bang - in the void - light and heat - elementary particles - atoms- molecules - distribution into galaxies and planets, cooling from the heat until water formed, one cell critters found a way, became multicellular - through history and evolution to us. — and this story continues —

The sun's light falls on our planet. A mite makes the sea roar. For whom? For what? No life to entertain. Somewhere deep inside a wave, a dance starts. It grows, It swims, It walks out onto the shore and here I am, awonder wondering.” Richard Feynamn to the AAAS at Caltech my sophomore year.)

The other version of who we are starts, not with the bang but with us humans being story tellers - we have since early human times been storytellers - what happened on the hunt, who marries whom what seems to be happening to the sky, the seasons, the changing surplus or absence of things to eat. Among the stories we have come, after a hundred thousand or so years, to tell is the big bang story (not to be confused with the big bank theory - to large to fail). Its not that the big bang led to us, it's that our story telling led to the big bang. Are we better understood as ascenecendents of molecules or story tellers? Each leads to a different kind of society.(and why do we usually speak of descendants than ascendance?)

We have built a social structure that amplifies and rewards a limited kind of intelligence, maybe IQ is an attempt to name it. But other qualities, such as caring, mothering, rhyming, helping out have been ignored. This has probably hurt our chances of survival.

EWe made a mistake as aculture by seeing humans as differfent from animals. The result is we are insufficiently aware of our mammalian makeup, care for young, playfulness, and, as youtube videos make clear, intelligent and concened. So we tend to be clever more than caring. Gardenworld will rely on caring and cleverness, but balance is critical.

What we have become is two divergent and apparently irreconcilable cultures: that of tribal people, with a stress on kinship systems, and western civilization, with its stress on abstraction and theories about objets, pushing emotional life into thecorner.

[hamlet’s mill barry cooper on early humans.

I lived in Mexico in the late 60s and remember the local church and its hourly bells and the people coming in and out. Inside were music, paintings, sculpture, carved wood, stained glass windows, semi darkness and the candles. Even the poorest person felt the right to go into that space of high culture. Nothing in contemporary life is like that.

There is lots of discussion about the meaning of individuals and the meaning of community and how they interact - on the ground and in the social mind. A shift from modern economics to Gardenworld messes with these distinctions because Gardenworld social organization will be a shift toward - not all the way - a more community based relationship centric view of how we can be, (the word community is simple: co meaning shared and mune meaning world.)

The extreme division of labor - such that those doing the parts have no view of the whole, is late, but Gardenworld will require, and lead “naturally” to cooperative efforts with far less specialization. The step from loneliness and alienation to intergenerational and sibling strife is not conflict free but seems promising as a way out of the lack of connection among people that defines our on time.

I will start at an unusual place - the nature of leisure. It was expected by Keynes and others that the evolution and maturity of the economy would lead to a surplus that would be used for leisure - time to relax, play, socialize. The dynamics of power took that supply and turned it in o portfolios for the rich, leaving all the rest of us relatively poorer and for many actually worse off then they were.

Since play is usually considered a part of leisure, it is important to understand its function n the developing mind of children, but also adults who as we now know keep learning. Play has a special role we need to understand. Piaget the swiss psychologist of childhood, wrote extensively about how play is essential for learning and epistemology. Thinking mens “treat this as a that” and that knowledge comes from treating something new (a floating leaf in a stream) by a paradigm for something already known ( a boat) - and seeing what happens. The child will now know more about leaves, water and boats. This elevates play in its role in culture and education to a much more central and powerful place. (See Huizingha, Homo Ludens: man the player) It is a good place to start thinking about human nature because it has such powerful implications across all the efforts that will go into Gardenworld.

Human nature begins with us where we are at a point in the world where we do not see th whole world, at a point in history most of which we never knew, at a certain moment in our own life course whose beginning we do not know and whose end we can only speculate about.and facing the moment with practical concerns, finish this page, make breakfast, get to work We should never forget that most discussions of human nature are abstract and do not touch us. To get us started here is the wonderful path at the edge of Munthe’s garden on Capri, A mixture of nature and civilization that lets us feel at home.

https://www.thecultureconcept.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Villa-San-Michell-Garden.jpg

For contrast to this calm, the world of Operas (Mozart, etc) is a world where normal human emotions are lifted out of the body and given extreme emotional expression, breaking them out of the locked in secret places in us where they normally hide. These have to do with love, betrayal, triangle relationships, at times exquisit and at times violent. The struggle in the story usually involves parents or the authoritarian state. This is the human as we are, but usually hidden. At any moment we are fairly flooded with feelings. We are always in a mood. Imagine if we could sing our moods, letting th chest carve the air with our feelings!

In the sixth century BCE, the philosopher Anaximenes described how “our
soul, being air, holds us together and controls us,” just like the “wind and air enclose the whole world.”30… Lent pattern

(Do pay attention to the nuances here. What we are going through has already changed much of our expectations and ways of being. We need to be prepared and attracted to thinking differently. In modern terms the meat of the body is moved by the nervous system which activates the muscles. Obviously the Greeks did not have that understanding but they did have an understanding of how motion and action required some agency in the body besides the flesh. )

“As with feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s demise will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.”

Excerpt From: Paul Mason. “PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future.” Apple Books.

No major school of psychotherapy, including the older psychoanalysis, included in its investigation of a client's mind, the way the political and issues affect the dynamics of humans, the human mind and heart. The way we are embedded in the economy and politics goes unquestioned (1) but their influences and that of depth psychology have faded from the culture. But could be the major source of what we need to be realistic about how to get through the bottleneck of unsolved problems of how we live with each other. Since almost everyone wants to live in the mixture of nature and civilization why don’t we use our intelligence and our wealth to go there? It will be important to consider the aesthetics, the landscaping and gardening, as well as the pragmatic issues of feeding and habitat for all. We can consider Gardenworld to be a serious response to meeting basic needs while realizing such environments as being not only gardens for production but similar to vacations, more like summer camps than factories.

It just may be that the fact that climate change and the destructive aspects of industrial/commercial civilization are becoming clear at the same time may be an opportunity to improve both that could not have been engaged one at a time.

Humans are not mere observers of the cosmos but active participants in the matrix of life (fn. See the suggestive book Capitalism and the Web of Life, by Jason Moore). It is crucial to be as clear as we can be about who we are, us humans. Such knowledge becomes the design guide for Gardenworld (or any other proposed future) because what we design should be support for human well being.

In the romantic period, a reaction against ugly factores, the argument was that people should see God behind the beauty and mystery of the universe, a beauty hidden by factories and pollution. Modern thinking at its best says we should pay attention to the beauty and mystery we see and reflect on our process of seeing, and see ourselves, not subordinate our ask to god. That 19th century rhetoric is part of subordinating ourselves to authority, not to reason. But the move toward reason tended to obscure the neuty , mysteries and feelings in our perceptions. Gardenworld will be a place where our feelings for nature, the universe and ourselves blend.

We tend to think we see the whole. - But we really do not see very far. We have a feeling for the whole, and imagination about it, but in practice our vision is limited. Look now. Perhaps ten feet or less to the wall, yet we assume a whole world. That we all can integrate ourselves into one world, one culture when we can only see ten feet, is powerful. That we are integrated with each other, like connected lego blocks, across the whole world contributes to that feeling that we are constantly in touch with the whole. I am typing now, my mind feels the space around my head. I know that beyond is the world I can read about in the press, discuss with friends. I have a son in Australia, and I feel sane accepting the whole world and its reasonable stability.

Each animal is perfect in its own way but man is a bundle of not integrated capacities, so we should be careful to think through what one of our capacities suggests that may conflict with the needs of other capacities.

The division of labor is driven by the ambitious, offering wages to those who have needs they are not able to find a way - a place, a role - to work to meet their own needs. as the society is. The rage to accumulate for some replaces concern for the state of being of others.

Our lives are organized around food, sex and dignity along with details that are distracting, decorative, imitated.. Putting those together is not easy, and is the work of culture, man’s “second nature”. The slow evolving set of habits that make up our character have led to a social character that is too competitive, too mean, too destructive. Gardenworld is, through the needed cooperation Gardenworld requires, the situation for growing more cooperative and less selfish people, a second nature, shared character, that is quite different in feeling and tone than a competitive society of mostly isolated individuals - who by the way are not very happy in their isolation.

Our thinking is merged at every point in our body of feeling and experience. Us humans are about a hundred and fifty pounds of dead weight that can be putcan put into motion by a well organized collection of neurons weight perhaps an ounce that ge tthemselves together to activate, mov e, the entire body. The reality principle, rooted in the body. the ability of the mind to assess the reality of the external world, and to act upon it accordingly, as opposed to acting on the pleasure principle. - freud

] do not believe that I can be happy if others are not. What we do should make a better life for all. The promise of democracy was short circuited by an economy that uses the state by some to exploit others. The happiness of all should return as a guiding template against which to measure all initiatives. By “happiness” I don’t mean frothy contentment. Jefferson (fn. See Gary Wells, Inventing America for a discussion of the origin of this idea in the Scottish Enlightenment of Fergusen and others.] , in “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness” of the Declaration means , from “to happen” , the range of roles, a person has in society, actions that nail the experience to the body and engage one’s talents.

That means looking at humans across the life cycle. We need to build environments good for children, parents and older people. Animals and insects too. Look at the environment as a whole that needs cultivation and management. It also means that we talk about philosophy: what is the nature of the world, (more than standard science), and what is human nature in it? To show how difficult and interesting this is, consider:

The struggle between democratic and rational methods.”

At first thought, how could rational and democratic be add odds? It is because rational is without feeling and democratic requires felt interests to be at play. This “struggle” will constantly arise in Gardenworld.

There are several similar issues of importance also for lots of discussion.

Starting with our biological inheritance. We are not confined to our brain. Mind can only be understood when we understand its being a blend of brain and surrounding circumstances, including other people.We are like insects - eyes, legs, reproduction, hunger, and much more. We are like mammals adding compassion and care for young, a full heart of feeling and concern. Our primate ancestors developed hands and feet and tail to swing in trees, and avoid capture for hungry others. Then down onto the plains and fast running upright. Slowly we became us.

Play and learning

John Huizingha Homo Ludens (man the player) ad Jean Piaget’s Play dreams and imitation in childhood , and Rudolph Steiner’s Human Development, all speak to who we are better than most philosophy which is dour and antiseptic.

Thee is much thinking these days about post human, the move of thinking into computers. The interest is mostly concern about computers and I ep;acing human workers, nut alo onern about our dignity as people whose thinking seems to shrink in comparison to computing. But note, when a computer “plays chess”, it has, unlike us, not experience of winning if it wins, and no pleasure in playing the game. It has no experience of playing at all.

Our brain is large, all of two pounds! Highly interconnected but capable of interaction with itself (close your eyes and imagine scenes form the past) that it tends to live in a substitute reality. This is complex.We think we are seen by others, but mostly we are dressed in clothes that have a style, reflect a culture and community choices. Very little of ourselves is actually seen by others. We have beliefs but they also cover our thoughts with ideology and so our real thoughts are hidden from others by that covering of ritualized concepts and grammars.

What is called “transcendence “ is that we are potentially bigger than we are now, more complex, more aware, more creative, more related. The fact that we can be more than we are is always with us. Society is not very good a supporting that potential, and may even be threatened by it. Our freedom gets in the way of group thinking. Garden world should support our being larger. I am convinced that we who are readers tend to discount the amazing intelligence of ordinary people able to mostly survive in a very complex world, much more complicated than the books we plow through. This will be crucial for Gardenworld challenges.

Early humans developed fire, weaving, pottery, kinship systems

, and much more, telling stores and singing (the birds as teachers). We might have stopped there, preferring to do what the group does than embrace new discoveries and patterns. But population created new anxieties and innovations, including choosing strong leaders, came to dominate.

Under these pressures the tendency of mind is to move off of major concerns - the philosophical and political - to the self serving of the little self, leaving the big self behind, what Fromm called Escape from Freedom. Our anxiety masters us and we get stupid.

Along with this tendency to avoid any controversy is our attitude towards ourselves and art. “I have no talent”. Did you ever try? “No”. If you did would the goal be to experiment and have fun or be famous? Part of Gardenworld is the continual rearrangement of the things we are using into pattens that are pleasing as well as work. Patterns that satisfy. Repurpose to better meet human needs rather than extraction from the land and from other humans.

We have developed a limited view of what a human is, citizenship and belief have given way to consumerism: the view that all a person’s needs can be met by things they can buy. climate breakdown will be a major disrupter of this pattern and it is important to see that we may come out of this better off than we are going into it. Though it will be a rough ride with many serious hurt. Part of respect for human nature is to realize that much of life has to be lived, it can’t be solved.

Sex, food and shelter: We eat in order to reproduce. This is given by the deepest circumstances from one celled organisms to our most advanced self (short or robotic replacements where the prosthesis becomes the person). It is striking how much eating leads to cuisine and gourmet experiences. Along with sex comes love and sex becomes dressed in relationshis., so much that it is hard to get cause and effect between sexual dive and relationship drive. Sex is an “it depends” activity and hence very context sensitive to being respected along with curiosity and caring . Hence love becomes involved. We need to realize how powerful it is, and that there seems to be no perfect solution between marriage and promiscuity, from randy children to randy senescence. There is also the pain of not being able to perform to the level of our imagination.

A key basis for understanding our nature is our belief system. We are organic, not mechanical. The difference is critical for the world we need to build. For mechanical systems parts maintain their integrity (static properties) even when they become part in a larger system. For organic systems parts do not maintain their integrity when they become parts of a larger system. The flow, adapt, allow for emergent properties. Designing for the organic requires a kind of respect not needed for mechanical systems

When I am talking with you, you have a model of me in you that touches all my neurons, flows with every hormone. And I am doing the same. Feel how a room changes when you are alone in it and someone else enters. Everything changes. This is much more interesting and complex than most discussions allow. This is a subject for another conversation but please take it seriously.

In fact, for all these questions, the best I can do is point you in the direction. The task here is to get you involved with Gardenworld as an intent toward future activity, not for me to be a university. You should feel an urgency to learn as much as possible about everything. Don’t be like the management consultant whom when asked if they read much said “Yes”. What? “Management books”. Gardenworld is an oppotuniay to be larger. Be a participant.

Religions and philosophy have tried to understand the human experience. In the search for security these systems seem to start with the idea that there is a solid ground on which to build thinking . What if there isn’t? The idea that there is a solid ground is the projection downward (turtles all the way down) seem to me to be projection of the idea of solid object into the unknown. Part of the hope of religions and philosophy has been to escape the body - polluted - and reside only in the soul - pure. But this strategy leads in many ways to discounting the emotional and perceptions in ways that serve existing power. The Greeks took the idea that a rational God created the universe so the universe is knowable in principle, and by us hopefully.

But the idea that the universe is created by a rational god is clearly a projection driven by a wish - to find that rock bottom solid basis for understanding. I take the view that we should accept that we are our body and thought in the midst of a relatively unknowable universe. If we are to work to design a replacement for the culture we have had, dependent on fossil fuels and borders and dominating elites - we need to know who we are so we can design for us, not for an ideology.

There has been a tendency in society from fairly early to treat the body as somehow inferior. Often to treat the body as a shit bag, not as something marvelous made by god/nature. That we eat digest and defecate is a marvelous arrangement. That we come to each other and fertilize is extraordinary. These issues say a lot about what kind of world to make, one that supports the idea of a sound mind in a sound body, not leaving the bad body to arrive at bodiless experience.

Another issue that will be played out in Gardenworld is social status. Like quick awareness of the sex when someone you don’t know enters the room, you know before you can catch the thought what their social status is. We need to accept that such tendency to ranking and placing is human and cannot be repressed. But we can move its expression away from stuff (remember “property” is what signified social rank, what is Proper”) to qualities of the person, not their belongings. A move toward a more equitable property society need not mean a leveling of sense of self and person. In such a world differences in skin color become appreciated not leveling. We might develop a better appreciation for characters and characters, personality. The range of our actual skin color is amazing, and we can learn to see each color as a complement to each other and the environment. “How beautiful this tan, mauve, copper, sienna, umber, blue of the veins through the pink the skin.”,

There is no solid ground on which to base our understanding of who we are. It requires continual rethinking, experiencing, conversation, art, experiment. Gardenworld is aimed at being a place where we grow healthy people who are interested in each other and can tolerate the anxieties of life - seeing themselves as part of the flow of nature yet aware of it all, seeing in war, with an easy smile for others. Cooperation, neighborliness, interest in helping others become, in Gardenworld, much more central to daily experiences. Circumstances of climate breakdown will force us to cooperate. At times it will be awkward and we will resist, but we need to do the hard work of being with each other for a new mode of survival. I think humans will be much happier in such a culture. Remember that as we make choices of what to build toward, what we build will in turn build us, because we are a reflection of our environment. I have further thoughts about design in Chapter 7.

Erik Erikson and the human life cycle.

I am going here into a bit more detail. Remember the task is a better society for real people. That means understanding people. Skip this section if it is getting in the way, but do come back to it.

Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst and artist, took a deep look at human development as he tried to put together his psychoanalytic experience with children and his travels in different cultures. I had the opportunity to spend time with him first in Berkeley and later at Harvard. I find his work helps to understand the way the social world and the natural world can support the development of individual human lives. Erikson’s perspective on the human life cycle can be very helpful in mapping human nature into institutions – and GardenWorld. Erikson, uniquely interested in children, was well aware that children are the core of the next generation. The path from childhood to maturity is thus a structure in time integrated with society and with surrounding generations. His simple model was self-body-society. This forces awareness integration across the key elements of a good life and a template for Gardenworld ideas - do they work across the life cycle for children, parents, the mature?

It is becoming common to talk about “cradle to cradle” (that is, the end of one life is the beginning of another) design principles for materials and buildings. We need to extend that logic to social design and the cradle to cradle life cycle perspective on human development and the interweaving of generations. Erikson worked out a roadmap, of what life is all about, how the biological interacts with the social to create the self. Most importantly, each stage is an achievement –or failure – to be integrated into the next biologically emergent capacity.

I am proposing that we use Erickson’s eight stages of life as a design template for GardenWorld. In his first work, Childhood and Society, he writes eloquently about the balance between the mind, the body and society. Any achievement or failure to achieve, by a growing person, involved all three at the same time. In that book, he presented the model of the human life cycle, the stages of life, with echoes of Shakespeare, who wrote for Jacques (I quote at length because we need to be reminded that we have a culture.)

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,

Mewling and puking* in the nurse’s arms.

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon* lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

The stages of life provide a framework for thinking about how society works and could work. We can use Erikson’s work as a design template for society –that is to see what social institutions are necessary and attractive at each stage in the human life. He saw that each stage could be characterized by an opportunity and the crisis and the resolution of the stage provided the platform for the next stage with its own unique qualities.

Writers like Erikson and Fromm are important in helping bridge between human nature, society and the planet.

His original model shows that each stage is built on all the major and minor effects of the success or failures at previous stages. The stages build upwards as a life does and each stage is characterized by the emergence of a new biological capacity that creates opportunities for success or failure and all the possibilities in between. As you read these think of the implications for a good society.

Approximate Age

Virtues

Psychosocial crisis[3]

Significant relationship

Existential question[4]

hide

Examples[4]

Infancy

Under 2 years

Hope

Trust vs. Mistrust

Mother

Can I trust the world?

Feeding, abandonment

Toddlerhood

2–4 years

Will

Autonomy vs. Shame/Doubt

Parents

Is it okay to be me?

Toilet training, clothing themselves

Early childhood

5-8 years [5]

Purpose

Initiative vs. Guilt

Family

Is it okay for me to do, move, and act?

Exploring, using tools or making art

Middle Childhood

9-12 years [6]

Competence

Industry vs. Inferiority

Neighbors, School

Can I make it in the world of people and things?

School, sports

Adolescence

13–19 years [7]

Fidelity

Identity vs. Role Confusion

Peers, Role Model

Who am I? Who can I be?

Social relationships

Early adulthood

20–39 years [8]

Love

Intimacy vs. Isolation

Friends, Partners

Can I love?

Romantic relationships

Middle Adulthood

40–59 years [9]

Care

Generativity vs. Stagnation

Household, Workmates

Can I make my life count?

Work, parenthood

Late Adulthood

60 and above [10]

Wisdom

Ego Integrity vs. Despair

Mankind, My kind

Is it okay to have been me?

Reflection on life

But we can add to the stages for the child the social conditions that are necessary to support each stage. There is a famous quote, “But who will teach the teachers?” We see that at every stage adults are necessary to help the developing child, and these adults themselves are in a specific part of their own life cycle.

That is, healthy development requires parents, schools, work, and society.

* Our society needs to provide the conditions were ordinary human beings can, in their 20’s and ’30s be good parents,

* Our society needs to provide educated and humane teachers and the settings for the education of their students.

* Our society needs to provide work which provides for dignity and creativity at work and the resources for intimacy outside it.

* Our society needs to provide an interesting milieu that allows each person to bring together the threads of their life into a meaningful and attractive pattern.

Society is a complex mosaic of interdependent generations. My local county government is arguing with needs for new jails and the fact that jails are filled with people 70% drug dependent and 20% mentally ill, but the county has not talked to the schools about a joint program and joint metrics to cope with the obvious independencies.

These life cycle and intergenerational dependencies are essential guidelines for GardenWorld. Taken together they can be used as a design template, or guidance, or reference point when looking at any policy in the GardenWorld context. If the policy does not work well in one or more phases the legislation or policy proposition should be redesigned, or at least more integrated into policies or implementations that can balance the consequences. Not only do we need conditions that support the growing person at each stage but we need people who themselves are growing to be available at each stage. The picture is of the interdependencies of generations rather than of one just replacing another.

Children are really stressed in this society. Their choice of violence, drugs, and video games puts them in control in a world that is so afraid of them getting hurt, or causing hurt. Traffic, guns, and crowding have been lethal for childhood. Children used to be able to use the woods, fields, hills, and streams to come to know themselves in the context of nature. The lack of fit between children’s needs and the modern commercial environment is a serious design flaw.

The intelligence of a community is largely the ensemble of skills and routines that are part of the life activity of the people in it. Our reservoir of skills is shifting. It is not clear how. Kids play in the interface with buttons rather cooperating through family, school, sports or work. Adults are also button pushers rather than tinkerers. Old crafts, especially in building, are gone. Newer autos and computers do not support tinkering and home repair.

Using Erikson’s stages as a design template, and looking at the consequences for the older generation that administers each stage, we see a complex interweaving of generations with specific consequences age by age, that a good society should support. Put simply any social innovation should work across the lifecycle, having a positive or at least not negate impact, at each phase. This should be one of the frameworks for analysis any social policy ought to undertake. In parallel with environmental impact statement, we could have “Lifecycle” or “generational impact” statements.

Erich Fromm

As the person is integrated into society they become representative of that society, easily recognized. This is a complex process of character building and weaving of fate. This will happen in Gardenworld. Erich Fromm is famous for his Art of Loving and Escape From Freedom but I will make most use of his The Sane Society. He takes it as obvious that a society that can kill itself off is crazy. I agree, sort of. If part of human nature is to follow popular memes without question, then yes. But calling normal human nature insane feels important but rhetorical. Let's see what use we can make of this important thought. Fromm had a number of main ideas. First is Escape From Freedom, the idea that humans have created the possibilities of freedom (active mind unencumbered by repressive politics) but, out of fear and anxiety, avoided these possibilities and resulting in our conformity, meme-dominated minds (my paraphrase), mechanization and deadening of the self and those around us.

The second major idea is what he called social character. It is obvious that people are influenced by their families schooling and communities. What is less obvious is that many people share influences and tend to become a force in society.

If you have spent your life preparing for and occupying an eight hour job, with all its routines - walking down the hall for coffee - how totally alone nd disorienting it feels to be in a garden, trimming a hedge, deadheading flowers, checking soil for dampness, This is social character; the deep shaping of the habits of a life into a mode of being. Gardenworld (or any other future alternative) will have to cope with most people feeling uprooted and unsettle and grieving for a recent past abandoned.

This is not the place to lay out Fromm’s work, but I do considered it one of they frameworks to help us undersand people’s resistance to chnage. Background to Fromm’s own thinking was his appreciation and critique of both Freud and Marx. The avoidance of both thinkers by moderns is symptomatic of denial and avoidance.The 19th century was rather closed in, “victorian.” Freud and Marx broke through to social and individual dynamics. The door was open, but we mostly , like stepping outside on a brisk day, went back inside. Sure there are dated aspects to their thinking, but social science threw out the brain with the haircut. His book, The Sane Society, draws out the implications of these two books for what our goals as a society should be, if we are to have healthy larger people. Fromm’s ideas about social character tell us a lot about how hard it is to change society - the momentum is built in to the character structure of those socialized. But He also is clear that the energy of character, which is the glue that holds society together, when thwarted, can turn into the dynamite of destructive forces.

Fromm developed a powerful theory of how character structure (For example, liking to be on time, use of anger to control others ) is shared by groups in society based on their economic role. This is not yet the place to go into the details but they are profound. Such character structures are hard to change and are a conserving part of any society.

Because we are discussing design in the context of garednworld I would like to explor as exmaple of how it might go.

The Commons.

We need a vision for a better future. Consider expanding The Commons while taming Capital.

The Commons is where parts of the earth - land, water, air, schools, roads, health, factories and fields, are shared. Thinking about the Commons and other strong options for the future of society is now urgent. The slow breakdown that was occurring has become clear through the government's inability to meet the challenges of COVID, climate change, and fairness. Now what? Something will happen.

It is possible that big data operating through large corporations, with sensors in every part of the economy and private spaces, and managed by algorithms, could work. But that same technical capacity could be used for very effective local management with sensitivity to local conditions and guided by democratic participation. Much is afoot and we should want to participate. We need a cooperative ethos. The world is still Hobbesian, all against all.

Food and habitat breakdowns will motivate local solutions.The Green Revolution proposes subsidies for green projects but no structural change in governance nor property. We must go further into causes and solutions. Imagine if food and family were the focus of social organization! As COVID fades, climate will loom, requiring us to think more structurally.

A major goal of social development should be to cut poverty to zero. That doesn't mean equality - which is a problematic concept. (Who gets to live by the ocean, who gets to marry the prom queen?). But it does mean that we lift the bottom up, not in terms of cash, but in living conditions. Each person should live a life that feels good to them and provides support for their development as family, citizen participant, and artist. I think it takes us toward what can be called Gardenworld and its politics.

Developing The Commons means cutting some of the concentration of assets at the top while vigorously creating better circumstances where most people actually try to live, but getting from cash to Commons is not going to be easy, despite its attractiveness, requiring changes in regulations and, most important, changes in culture.

To understand the future for Commons it is helpful if we have some background thinking on how all of the earth, being free for roaming, shrank to the ownership of a small percentage of the people. This has been a slow process we may need to untangle carefully.

Water and air used to be part of the Commons. Now water is in bottles and good air at expensive resorts. Land disappeared behind boundaries and titles. This started when nomads and their cattle, at first free to roam. But with increasing population, of people and cattle, grassland became scarce and conflictual until governance stepped in to divide it up. Cattle were owned but the land was just nature. The concern shifted from the cattle, the small herds, to the grazing land itself. This is a huge shift and caused reactions. The nomoi in the word eco-nomy comes from Greek nomos, law, but in pre-platonic Greek it meant equal distribution. But a law is not developed without a felt need, and that need was to maintain fairness of land division.

The first attempt at maintaining equality was to divide the land into equal portions, but not all acres of land are equal, so the process moved on to meet the needs of rising populations while maintaining nomoi - but how? In early societies, nomads and hunter gatherers, and empires , were mostly based on cattle, food was harvested and brought to the administrative center, stored in large urns, and distributed on the basis of need. The pyramids were not built by slave labor but by agricultural labor provided with feasts during off seasons.

Humans, from the earliest traces , lived communally, following the way of living of earlier primates. Human groups from bands to tribes shared food and danger. Within the group no one starved. So even today, “We are all communists in a family”. The path of history has been for private property to cut into that shared community until it only remains in the kinship family, and even at home many people in cell phones do not share dinner.