Gardenworld Politics Chapter 5 How did we get here? draft

  Chapter 5. How did we get here? 

History is often written as the emergence of the good, often in the form of “civilization,”  from chaos. The perspective we need now is to understand how the  possible (not yet certain) death  of the human species emerged instead. A simple picture - and there are many - is that over the centuries we got bigger, not only in population but in usable materials. Picture the shifts from 

Stone age on the ground to

Settlements in huts to

Empires with architecture to 

Colonies with trade to

Oil regime: ships planes cities

This path has a bad outcome. Did we ever have an alternative? Was there ever a time we could have said “No”? Are we so locked in that we cannot revisit crucial turning points? 

Repeatedly, and from its earliest origins, human leaders, as soon as the group was big enough to be lead, have chosen hierarchy, slavery, war, and restricted lives. Perhaps the very idea of civilization, which can be directly linked to inequality, slavery, and wr, needs to be rethought. These outcomes are not inevitable natural laws but stem from choices made by some people (not all) locking us into deep inequality.

The history from tribe to monarchy to plutocracy to parliamentary and representative democracy attempts to deal with conflict in a reasoned way, coping with the impact of rising population and the attempt by the old order to hold on to what they have gained. We are in that incomplete process — the unfinished French Revolution seeking liberty, justice and equality, or the American version of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness for Thomas Jefferson meant happenings, the number of roles one played in society, not consumer bliss. (5)

Transitions from the human past are full of clues about what happened and how people responded, such as after the collapse of feudalism, and the collapse of the Roman and Mayan empires. Arnold Toynbee described the fall of 28 empires, most of which we have never heard of. There are plenty of examples closer in our historical record to today. Take the great plague of 1348, where about half the population was lost, and again with the religious wars of the late 1600s where 1/3 of the European population didn’t make it. What did survivors do, how did they rebuild? More recently, and nearly forgotten, was the great flu of 1914 which killed perhaps 100 million. These, like climate change, were world wide events. Humanity will survive. But at what cost? We need to learn from populations in times of crisis, reflecting on their struggles, histories, and values. (6)

We have relied far too long on a mix of technology, free markets, banks, representative government, and media. We have organized society to exploit people and exploit land. We decimated the natives in the Americas, first with disease then with policy and guns, and followed up with slavery, not just in the cotton field but throughout the economy until today’s wage slavey, where people are forced to work for others in order to survive. The rich continue to feel they can buy elections, while the poor remain in materially and culturally limiting circumstances. The result is a serious failure. Can we, with common sense, technology, cooperation, and care, do better? The artist David Hockney offers, “if you see your surroundings as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, as I think I do, then you feel quite alive”. This is the ethos we need, informing the ethical climate we live in.

As a species, humans have chosen to be competitive and inventive. We could also be cooperative and inventive together. When inventiveness supports competition, the combination is suicidal because it means relentless warfare. Since we can’t alter our inherent inventiveness, how do we change our culture to be more cooperative? Could a multi-state system avoid this dynamic? Could a world system do better? What would enable this? (7)

Hunter gatherers were forced by leaders under pressure from increasing populations to domesticate — giving up ranging without conflict into the territories of others, closing off free and easy movements on land. But this was after a hundred thousand years of resistance to settlement. Life ‘inside’ was less healthy and more programmed. The early settlements broke down social relationships — songs, stories, and a spirit of sharing, and replaced them with constant war, routine, and slavery. Hunter gatherers got away from the compounds, a rejection of innovation continued by the Luddites of more recent times.

Think of it this way: if humans are hypersexial and intelligent we get increasing populations and the use of our intelligence to protect outslvers or exploit increasing populations. Is there a way out of this dynamic or are we locked in to mutually assured destruction? Add the Internet.

The path from early settlements to now is usually seen as a series of phases, where transitions were caused by new technologies: the stirrup, the bow, the horse, the catapult, explosives, and on. But to create an attractive climate crisis world that must embrace new, harsher conditions, it is more useful to see the path from past to present as one complex emergent social pattern. While technologies developed, the same elite remained in control across apparent transformations — which happened because they benefited the rich. Points along the way include the breakdown of empires and a shift to feudalism, the emergence of craft and trade, the taking of profit from new colonization and industrialization. Now we are coping with financialization and massive inequality. The result — instead of the benefits politicians promised — has led to overheating the atmosphere and worldwide despair.

We have never had a leadership that could cope with increasing population much less global issues requiring managing many systems changes. Elites exploited these trends rather than managing them for the benefit of society. Circumstances probably demanded that they do so because of the dangers of losing out in competition. This past includes the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which divided Europe into nation states which could only compete with each other. New conditions — where the obvious need for cooperation and the awareness of the earth are changing rapidly — just might make it possible to deal with climate, politics, and economy together. This is the hope of Gardenworld and its politics.

It is clear that the trendline is as much cultural as material. Habits of thought and motives to participate -what is called character - is the tue center of the dynamic.

From hunter-gatherers until now, we have been in a long incomplete arc, failing to establish a just quality of life for all. The result has led to wars, colonialism, poverty and the corruption of earth and of society. We have yet to manage our relationship to the earth, and to develop people and meaning within a democracy built on much broader participation. We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a future which we have not yet imagined and a present we cannot properly describe. (4).

Our earth, especially the critical zone, the thin skin where all life so far discovered in the universe lives, is extremely dynamic and our present human societies the result of our adaptations to it — over about 5000 generations, more than a hundred thousand years. We should remember the current phase might be short lived because we have entered into a phase we cannot control and that is finishing  off the earth as inhabitable. .

In our education we are not encouraged to ask questions such as the meaning of life, the good society, the significance of love, the place of the arts. Organizing for Garenworld requires that we think about these questions. Elites pushed education for jobs, not for participating citizens who could discuss the issues.  Languages, history, even civics were dropped. The world we are in now, a failing world, came to be as the slow evolution of the Greek, Roman and Chinese worlds, from  the feudalism that was common ground around the world, to a reformation and renaissance that was contained within the seed, from the greeks, of a mechanical rather than an organic word, We are not aware of how religious the world was  about  1800 when the earth was still considered, along with the rest of the universe, to have been created by god only 4000 or so years earlier. 

A provocative summary comes from Harari.

Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. They told a tale of progress fuelled by human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the grueling, dangerous, and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers.

That tale is a fantasy. There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Robert Skidelski is stating the problem.

“Europe was so organised socially and economically as to secure the maximum accumulation of capital. While there was some continuous improvement in the daily conditions of life of the mass of the population, society was so framed as to throw a great part of the increased income into the control of the class least likely to consume it. The new rich of the nineteenth century were not brought up to large expenditures, and preferred the power which investment gave them to the pleasures of immediate consumption. In fact, it was precisely the inequality of the distribution of wealth which made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements which distinguished that age from all others. Herein lay, in fact, the main justification of the capitalist system. If the rich had spent their new wealth on their own enjoyments, the world would long ago have found such a regime intolerable. But like bees they saved and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole community because they themselves held narrower ends in prospect.”

The usual history assumed by people trying to be strategic about the future often starts with the Renaissance, maybe the Industrial Revolution, or even post WW 2. But most of our key institutions, fire, language, kinship systems, pottery, weaving, cooking, house building (imitating the birds, insects and  animals) and social institutions of power and status  were highly developed much earlier. It is helpful to understand how the earliest humans saw the world because  they set in motion ways of living that have been passed on to the present time. Our current need to rethink our institutions and daily life will question and rely on these deep histories.

In the pursuit of an ever expanding economy we pushed aside  issues that did not contribute. Health, education, ecology were downplayed and defunded. The politics we have is not a strategic capacity but a kind of dumbshow of organized belligerence. How some citizens can exploit other citizens by making them into commodities. The Democrats, in the US, was the party of workers till the 60’s and since it has become increasingly the party of the increasing number of professionals. Neither party repented the bulk of the population which turned sullen and unrepresented. 

 Our dilemma in the West is we have gone from the powerful emperor god (Rome) to Christianity with its powerful god severed from the ground and moved to the sky,  who created an  ethical and caring world that in turn was torn apart by science, leaving us with a large number of disconnected individuals with moral intuitions but no longer subordinated to a moral universe. Civilizations lost support for acting morally. This is our modern condition. As people try to cope they take facets of the old order and try to make them universal. The result is severe fragmentation.  Economics plays a unique role here because the Greek economia meant estate management. Christianity took that model and applied to the earth, god’s domain, god’s  economy. Many historians miss this because Cicero translated economia  as distribution or dispensation. Sorry for the digression here but this is important to absorb and understand, because it needs rethinking: how do we distribute?

Understanding how we got here, our history, not only as humans but our connection with other species, that we are through evolution caring, playful and  intelligent,   helps that conversation. 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. 

The alternative story, rarely heard, is that we humans are storytellers, and the big bang is just one of those stories. The advantage of this way of seeing things is, first, it is more true, and second, it is more open to new understandings. The big bang version features material evolution, something coming from nothing. The second approach features mind and its accomplishments along with a heightened interest in mind and how it does what it does, including creating the wonderful big bang story..It also keeps open questions about the big bang origin. Where, when, how, what? Is space empty? No. it is something that is at least receptive, and at most everypoint contains all possibilities. Quantum mechanics has lots to say about the entanglements that occupy “empty” space.  Gardenworld will be helped by  an education, across generations,  about the natural and social world and the way our experiences flow with this broad education . Our experience will continue to spark awe that our current education avoids  Being more philosophical is important if we are  to understand who we are. We need to take our reflections seriously, and that requires lots of serious conversation. We don’t know how the universe started and we don’t know how it will end. We are born in between and will live out our lives bookended by the unknown. This is where we get to live. One view is that culture is an alternative reality we cling to because without some system of belief,  the universe is too anxious making. These forces will play out in Gardenworld and can be the source of art, research, conversation and friendship. Clear eyed, we can better empathize with those in the past who struggled with life and given circumstances.helps that conversation. 

The second approach features mind and its accomplishments along with a heightened interest in mind and how it does what it does, including creating the wonderful big bang story.The idea that we are storytellers also keeps open questions about the big bang origin. Where, when, how, what? Is space empty? No. it is something that is at least receptive, and at most everypoint contains all possibilities. Quantum mechanics has lots to say about the entanglements that occupy “empty” space.  Gardenworld will be helped by  an education, across generations,  about the natural and social world and the way our experiences flow with this broad education . Our experience will continue to spark awe that our current education avoids  Being more philosophical is important if we are  to understand who we are. We need to take our reflections seriously, and that requires lots of serious conversation. We don’t know how the universe started and we don’t know how it will end. We are born in between and will live out our lives bookended by the unknown. This is where we get to live. One view is that culture is an alternative reality we cling to because without some system of belief,  the universe is too anxious making. These forces will play out in Gardenworld and can be the source of art, research, conversation and friendship. Clear eyed, we can better empathize with those in the past who struggled with life and given circumstances. Gardenworld with its awareness of nature is in a good position to develop a system of belief that is felt to be substantial.  It is above all organic in contrast to the hard to empathize with structures of the cities.

How we got here is about history - what is the story of events and trends  that, after many years, arrive at us? Any moment is a combination of many parallel mostly intersecting histories. History of chess, horse racing, house construction, all open up wonderful windows on the past in ways that general history cannot. I will ignore most of these but we must always be ready for surprises. The butterfly stroke in swimming, bitcoin in currencies, the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand and the start of WW1.

Hunter gatherers to empires. 

The 100,000 year wandering from hunter gatherers to empires of agriculture was paralleled by the emergence of capitalism. This is usually mystified but it is quite simple and important for rethinking how to use capital in Gardenwrold. Capital is a way of counting the product of society. "Three new calves''. Our fingers were there as an obvious notation  medium. The word cap-italism comes from cap, head in latin  as in new head of cattle. The great middle estern empires were grain and cattle ranches.  This way of counting was made extendable beyond the five fingers when it became notches on a stick or marks on a surface. The problem with   that way of counting comes when  we treat the marks as  equivalent to the thing counted, and worse when the thing with the marks is treated as ownership of the things counted.

The history of the nomos part of “economy” is amazing in its implications and very important for Gardenworld. The key implication is that there are different ways society can be organized. Gardenworld needs this opening so we don’t fall into just trying to repeat the kind of society we have with its exploitation and misuse of land and people.

James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: a deep history of early states tells the history of the resistance for 100,000 years or more as early humans avoided settlement. Settlement meant an elite and slave labor. The wall wasn't to keep intruders out - a rare event - but to keep slaves in. Diet was reduced, health deteriorated, the easy work of hunter gatherers meandering four hours a day gave way to dawn to night labor. 

Jeremy McInerney’a The Cattle of the Sun_ Cows and Culture in the World of the Ancient Greeks shows that the ancient empires were really cattle ranches. Recall your reading of The Odyssey and the dependence of Odysseues’s crew on beef.

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Origins

So, how did we get here? Note that this way of stating the question implies a timeline from past to present. This is cultural. The Chinese culture (now partially westernized) assumes rather than thre is a here and that all past events are present. : a past emperor is as present as our children and grandparents.  But our story goes

Single cell organisms eat and reproduce and have to struggle with their environment. Just like us. We have been taught to see humans as different from animals (including primates) but this is extremely misleading and especially important when we think of how we will respond to climate and ecology issues. Who we are is much closer to animals than to computers. 

The continuity from single cell organism which take in and put out waste products and reproduce, is still who we are - - well, we have added a few touches of semi-elegance to the process but the continuity is just obvious. 

Early humans developed elaborate  tattooing to look like animals because it is obvious that animals are adapted to the environment but we humans look awkward and out of place.   Mammals developed a big heart and amazing capacities for nurturance and courage (from heart, cour, in French.) Of course they were evolving from earlier species all of whom had enough of what it takes to foster a next generation. The popularity of YouTube animal videos speaks to the depth of caring and playfulness other animals are capable of. Our strategy as humans to define ourselves by how we are different from animals was a serious mistake. That we are mammals who can care and play might be more important than that we can think with abstractions. Even for thinking, new studies keep showing how intelligent and thoughtful animals are. It is our human thinking, with symbols and systems, that tends to replace experienceable reality, fetishized concepts, oh, like “capital”. The animals show remarkable qualities of intelligence and feeling and remind us very deeply of ourselves, even our best selves. Animals save children, dogs save cats and cats save dogs and with a degree of urgency that touches us deeply - in our own humanity. 

Our mammalian ancestry Is a deep inheritance that is the basis for our value systems, our care for offspring , for children, for children not even our own. Certainly if we are to build a new culture how we are similar to animals seems to be more important knowledge than how we are different. It is obvious that humans live in houses  copied from animals. The nesting of mice in comforting holes, and birds in nests above the predators, bears out of the rain in caves, and everyone else “out there” provides examples that we have learned from in making our own enclosed spaces with comfort inside and doors and windows to the outside. We have made some advances. We invented glass windows, brought the outhouse in house, but also gunpowder, the machine gun, the tank, the war planes, nuclear bombs, and surveillance. 

But maybe most important was fire, after language and kinship systems, , 100,000 years ago? At least.cooking and keeping off predators and staying warm.. A recent site discovered in Australia shows that cooking 60,000 years ago used complex plants and animals and lots of spices. Worth a lot of thinking because of course our climate problem is because of the extension of the use of coal and then  oil.

As testimony to that range, an archaeological site in the Rift Valley dated twenty three thousand years ago gives evidence of a diet spanning four food webs (water, woodland, grassland, and arid) encompassing at least large and small animals, families of birds, and 140 kinds of fruit, nuts, seeds, and pulses, not to mention plants for medicinal and craft purposes- baskets, weaving, traps, weirs.  From Jame C. Scott, Against the Grain

A word of caution. New discoveries about ancient civilizations keep happening. It just might turn out that the past was much more developed and sophisticated than we think. Instead of the line from hunter-gatherers to the present  “progress”, we might be the backwater of lost times. 

Most  hunter gatherers that we have any record of or contact with now are the remains of large civilizations. Understanding the sociability of these groups may be crucial to our understanding how people live as we move from Industrialization through an economic and environmental crisis to GardenWorld. This is a move from the social isolation of consumer society to the renewed sociability or cooperation for survival. We tend to see the evolution toward more complex social organization, tribal chiefs and agriculture, as the result of necessity. The story is more complicated. Plantings were ceremonial, around the bodies of the dead, setting fixed places for remembrance and honoring among the daily lives of movement. Return to those fixed places starts what later became churches, and also places of story telling, awe, respect and - psychoactive plants. 

Increasing population led to more conflict and the capturing of others led to slavery. The early compounds were not to keep marauders out but to keep slaves in. Remember that hunter gatherers resisted settlement for 100,000 years. Settlement means more work, poorer diets, less sociability, less equality, subordination to the will of others and lack of freedom of movement. This whole shift needs to be seen, not as opportunism, but as a very mixed story of opportunities taken without awareness of consequences. They were storytellers, and interpreters of nature. We have lost much that is there to be regained in GardenWorld as circumstances force us to cooperation and increased sociability. 

Why anyone not impelled by hunger, danger, or coercion would willingly give up hunting and foraging or pastoralism for full-time agriculture is hard to fathom.. 

Scott. Against the Grain

 We moderns tend to look down on all those humans that lived in the past. We see them as simple minded, brutish, and mean. Yet there is no part of history more worth studying to understand our modern condition: how we deal with each other and the world around us. We might have to end up doing things they did well that society has forgotten. Hunter-Gatherers take up 99% of all human existence, and they were busy, but also more relaxed and at home. Early humans came up with fire, language, clothes, and, with language, song, stories, gods, and of all things complex kinship systems. - and accounting. And pottery. And stone edged knives. To early humans all things are alive and living their own stories. How can we see a blade of grass if it isn’t doing -{something to be seen? All early humans were bathed in mythic thinking, they lived in their stories. They worked to understand their experiences.  They paid attention to the night sky as the biggest show in town. 

One example. The constellations of the zodiac.  The “sign” is named for the constellation that carries the sun. That is, right now (April) it is Taurus and the sun , if you could see it at night , is in Taurus (if you drew a line from you through the sun to the distant stars that would be the constellation named Taurus, named for a constellation you can’t see for a number of months). The ancients, before written texts, went a step further. As a top spins fast and wobbles slow, so the earth also spins (daily) relatively fast , but, as a top will, it  wobbles slowly, with a period of about 28,000 years. 12 signs. The spring equinox is in a sign, but that sign moves to the next constellation about every 2200 plus years. Hence Moses the ram for  the old  testament, till Christ the fisherman (Pices), now and ending, and next in  Aquarius. These intelligent people  would make excellent companions for us now. . 

We still live in realistic myths. Politics begins with a good impulse but in a few generations thugs take over and the system collapses. 

We know that Neanderthals lived on big game which they killed with thrust spears. They were successful enough hunting them in the forests that they killed them all off. They had muscular stout bodies for that task - and a brain slightly larger than ours. Success then shifted to those animals, gazelle-like,  who could move fast on the open plane. Smaller heads, longer legs. Early humans made pots for storage of fluids and solid food. Do you think they had nothing to say to each other as they sat around making those pots? Look at these pre columbian, maybe 6th century, figures. 

This one is a burial piece. The triangles under the eyes are tears, reaction to death but with these  the breasts, the six toes, the posture ready for sex and the creation of the next generation (collection of the author).

Or (next photo)the craftsman making a bowl and giving a critical eye across the top. The bowl is female and the tool is male. The craftsman makes the world. The important message here is the centrality of reprodiuction and sex as central to the society. Gardenworld will carry that meaning. (collection of the author.)

 There was much to chat about with adults, with children and their children: the need to not touch the fire and don’t tease the dogs. The drama of meeting the tiger on the path to the hunt a story untold? The story of early humans is still being discovered and in ten years will probably be quite evolved from our current shifting understanding . The discovery of new artifacts and new speculations are evolving rapidly. 

Erich Voegelin has worked to understand how early civilizations, filled with people as conscious as we are, experienced their world. In that consciousness  early humans, genetically just like us,  found parallels between the cosmos (such as the constellations) and the social structure. This leap in imagination set the conditions under which we luve now, even if forgotten, 

The cosmic civilizations that emerged with increasing population  were  based on the microcosm macrocosm  parallel  insight of Paleolithic hunter gatherers.   It was conservative “Hey don't try to change society, you will mess up the cosmos”.   The word cosmos, from  pre classical   Greek  was the word used naming the pattern of silver studs on a horse collar. That pattern idea, (the mind works this way),  projected upwards seeing the patterns in the constellations, - the metaphor in quite direct - gave us “cosmos”. Since the silver studs  also make a kind of  necklace, we get “cosmetics”.  This gives lots of insight on how early humans thought and the origin of the idea of political order in the cosmos.  That cosmos and  cosmetics share a common origin is a clue to the way humans think.

Archeology also find early cave users took patterns from the constellations as structure (most of us know how to find at least Orion in the night sky) for some animal cave paintings, again making a connection between the cosmos and pragmatic lives of hunting.

Voegelin goes on to describe how   early humans found similarities in their perceptions between the cosmos and society,  but as empire became  oppressive rebellion meant   taking steps out of  the cosmos symbolism  (The state is like the cosmos) of the repressive order into more social (The state is like a family and has a history). Moses led the people out of the cosmic empire  into a new ordering principle,  for Israel, history and for the Greeks,   philosophy. These are frameworks for understanding reality that still live with us, or that we live through, as organizing principles.  Note it is people trying to understand how to live - political order - that led them to find correspondence between part of reality and social structure. Voegelin is looking for the emergence of political order in their consciousness in the world they inhabited - including the night sky and the seasons.

As Voegelin makes clear in the last volume  of Order  and History, things get murky because society is more differentiated and accumulates mistakes  while  articulating its views of Order.  

Order  for Voegelin requires five  structures in thought:  self, society, history, cosmos and the usually problematic “divine”  I would venture that what  Voegelin  means by divine or god is really the unnamable beyond what can be seen  to what cannot be seen but we all experience: that there is a beyond we can feel but can't articulate.. 

The present has continuity with the past. We are talking about slow shifts in society, its technologies and habits. This is important to understand because we are living with such shifts in our own time, and likely to be hit with changes faster than at any time in human history as our social structure and environment are both being forced to rapid changes. We are either being freed from slavery or captured into it. 

We don't know which it is. We tend to think that the lives of hunter gatherers were on the edge. But we confuse that with the few tribals left in the world who survive on the land avoided by “civilization” because it is too difficult to farm. Early humans seem to have lived well, as evidenced for example from bone structure found by archeologists. The difference between early humans and later is treated by contemporary society as huge. 

An issue for early humans was death, not just the for Egyptians.  The bodies were buried in the context of ceremonials, and these included flowers and other growing things, and took place at first in open fields but slowly in more attractive places that seemed like good homes for the dead. The first plantings were for ritual and probably involved psychedelics. The key point is, the move toward agriculture was not based on need but simple serendipity. For example, early on the people traveled to the burial sites, but as population increased, the distance back to home territory increased and people simply stayed in the necropolis. 

The egyptian experience is important. The landscape is blazingly hot days a underbright sun, and night dark a black but with stars, specs of light tha seem to be organized. The Egyptians saw that day/night and life/death were the major events . What if, they surmised, life and light turn to night and earth and whe the sun goes at night is  where the dead go 

We are just becoming aware of the Australian aboriginal people who were in complex settled communities 65,000 years ago, long before the European cave paintings and the Egyptian pyramids. Books like 1491, describing the complexities of the americas before Columbus, show a much more developed and complex world, with large populations and populated cities, and the management capacity to house large populations with fair equality, and to balance population with food supply in approximate sustainability. 

Earliest humans had a rich inheritance from earlier primates. Maternal care, social grooming, tribal coherence, defense of territory, status hierarchies, complex mating patterns all evolve before the first humans. All lifeforms even the simplest, contain aspects that are easy to connect to the human. Sexuality and eating and waste elimination for starters. We are taught that the period of hunter gatherers was a primitive time. But this might be an illusion. As smart as us, educated in the details for surviving in the complex natural world, and full of storytelling, laughter, tears and thoughtfulness. Levi Strauss proposed that the minds of amazon natives are as complex as modern minds. They have to know the plants, the animals, the poisons, the delicious, each other, stories, jokes, myths, social rules, and have a detailed mapped terrain. Modern children may not do as well in terms of complexity and interlinked pieces of knowledge. Compare the skills needed with Legos vs making toys with sticks and to float in nearby streams. Anthropology has created better narratives of how our Stone Age “neolithic” family lived. They used to be portrayed as bent over, hulked, muscular and anything but elegant. But as we see from the frozen bodies of thousands of years ago, elegance was pronounced in delicate of clothing and decoration and as we see from remaining tribal people, posture is erect and graceful. 

It is crucial to my perspective to understand  that the distance from the deep past to the present is not so complex. Stone age people  ate meat that was marinated, salted, cooked, seasoned. No need to believe they weren't curious about the impact on meat of various grasses (the word is herbs). Since we know that Hunter Gatherers did well on a few hours of work, they had time for feed, which was boiled, grilled, steamed, pounded, seasoned. Time for food preparation was available and most likely used and eaten along with. Fire Song Dance Stories The night sky. We might add fermented drinks and psychedelics. This story of the path from eating around the campfire to eating around the kitchen table or TV is not a long one. Continuity is recognizable. 

To be a species we have to eat and reproduce. Our institutions are built around the body. This will be true in the future, but we should keep eating and reproducing further to the front of our culture building for Gardenworld, and violence and defense further back. The HG period, often called the neolithic neo+ stone tools lasted from something like 50,000 years BC to 5000 BC. What emerged from their success was a capability o f breeding surplus cattle and grain, and feeding more people, leading to territorial disputes managed by increased warfare. 

As I keep saying, the past tells us a great deal about the present. What emerged from the shift, mostly driven by population, was large scale social organization of armies and farmers in walled empires. This phase lasted until, slowly, very slowly the horse and cannon culture could ride around the walls of empires, and the siege was created as a standoff zone between the inside and the outside. When we consider how important it is to have a human resources department with computers and intent, the ability to manage  these empires took a degree of complexity management was beyond what we have. 

If we look at the history of the Middle East and the eastern end of themeditarrnan we see cultures of extreme complexity. Not only Egypt and greece but  Mycenae.

Egypt In ancient Egypt with its desert and sun, the two most obvious things about the visible space were  that  first,  the rising- setting of the sun and that living things died and were gone from the earth . They suspected two were related: the place the souls went at death was the same place the sun went at night. The Catholic church, to defeat this, turned the symbolism of heaven under the earth into hell. Our own dealing with the dead is trivial - and people are not remembered, and the dying know it. The crisis leading up to  Gardenworld will have an impact on the living, many dying, and because of the new focus on the local and away from technology, the fate of the dying “right in front of us” will lead to new rituals and forms of grieving. Camile Paglia wrote that cats taught grace to the Egyptians who passed it on to civilization.

Seeing where we are in the context of paths not taken can help clarify  what is at stake for the future.

• If the French Revolution had …

• If Christianity had …

• If  slavery hadn’t …

• If native people had been appreciated …

The French Revolution was the hurried continuation of the emergence of  individual rights and concern for workers, but the revolution is threatening those who held and still hold great wealth. The revolution turned   bloody and abstract, and we got Napoleon. Christianity started the guild movement and had a sense of rights and humanity of workers, but lost the initiative by focusing on its own bureaucracy and organization. It would have been a more globalizing and  less nation based culture.  Slavery financed the industrial revolution, but leaving a huge wound, still bleeding. Native people knew how to sustain the land and grew healthy people,  till Europe brought smallpox that  killed a hundred million. 

But here we are. Most of us clothed housed and fed, but  storm clouds keep passing and we don’t ask where they came from nor whose community they will dump on. The long aftermath of the treaty of Westphalia,  which established nation states to stop wars,  but set  the conditions for new ones and is itself coming apart now.

I highly recommend reading Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital_ The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming.   And  his The Progress of this Storm. Also  Uninhabitable Earth  by David-Wallace-Wells.  By comparison, efforts underway or proposed to cope with rising temperatures and the consequences are extremely weak though the number of test projects in living and agriculture  andinventions to replace infrastructure  under way is a hopeful sign. But so far, taken together they do not yet scale to full fledged adequate solutions.   There is  an effort by a few corporations and governments to shift  to non-fossil fuel substitutes, but the numbers are huge - maybe out of reach. Think of how many solar panels would be needed to capture say fifty percent of  society’s  energy use!  Just manufacturing those panels would have intense environmental impact - mining material, heat for manufacturing, transportation  of raw and finished materials from mine to factory to installation. Some of this activity is altruistic, some profit seeking, some pernicious, but the secondary consequences are not being thought through.  Many articles that propose some kind of energy change without entering imaginatively into the lives of those doing - or being forced - to change.. We need to recall that the big oil companies knew that the use of oil would lead to an increase in warming - but they hid it, ran campaigns against it,and  paid off congress people. 

This chapter should be read as a kind of meditation on the possibilities for the future, especially the possibility of Gardenworld. Issues that populations had to face in the past are obscured by technical and urban developments.  Our task, renewal in response to climate changes, can actually be fulfilling and lead to a better life.The Struggle of humans to reach a fairly long non -ideological understanding of the world is the great hope we can participate in. 

Discussions of economics 2500 years ago in Athens meant considering all the factors of good estate management. The well managed estate produces a surplus. For what purpose, the philosophically minded Greeks asked? Following Plato and Aristotle, the surplus meant free time for philosophy and politics. China in the deep past used its surplus to ‘gift’ populations outside its borders, building relationships. Our current surplus, so badly distributed, goes to increasing population and more consumption without reflection on the consequences. We have forgotten that the ‘cap’ within capital refers to head of cattle, and we are asking the same questions around wealth today — how do I grow my herd, how do I manage my herd, how do I breed (increase) my herd. As you probably know early economic activity was about integrating land, cattle, grain and people. We continue to breed (grow) a destabilized society. How should we balance between community and individual use of an increase is a question we need to answer but aren’t asking. The greek “economy” contains ecomeaning estate (household) and nomos which, before it became a general abstract term meaning laws, in pre-classical Greek, meant equal distribution.

Laws are not created unless there is a need. In this case, “equal distribution” was probably created to counter the tendency towards unequal distribution. The state, with law, intervenes. So the struggle for equal distribution against the tendency for concentration of wealth and power — starting with land, was with us from the beginning. The idea that nomos meant equal distribution began with the division of land acquired by the polis in equal segments to provide for equal grazing of cattle, (8) The evolution of culture, driven by claiming every liveable niche and managing conflict, was from equality towards hierarchy. By the time of Plato, ‘laws’ meant collections of separate legislations, not a principle of dividing a whole into equal parts. This perspective suggests a revisiting of ancient goals hidden in the mists of time while defending what we have achieved. Each generation struggles for more equality, participation, and quality of life.

As the past collapse of empires show, there are no guarantees. Still, we should care to carve new pathways — towards better politics, a different purpose for the economy, a better life in relationships and nature, developing ourself with ourselves and seeing differences in others, through affection and understanding.

Above all to remember that a past forgotten is like a snake in the grass. Memory can be depressing but if the context is trying to do better, the past can be very helpful.

History is usually written as though we go from one phase to another. But another way of seeing history is through its continuities and the points of divergence. Population kept on increasing and the elites maintained continuity making good use of new technologies, new agriculture, organizations for war and that where we are is very recognizably like the world of hunter gatherers. We wake in the morning, rest at night, have conversations and games and stories, explore for food (now in aisles at the market), and worry about death, birth, adolescents, pets and weather. But while there are many important details, they each are dealt with in the context of the long arc of history that we are still living out.

History is not a linear arc from hunter gatherers to agriculture to city states to the present. It is a mixture of meanderings and over the cliff with constantly emerging variations, some successful and some failing. But the arc is characterized by rising population, more technology, and a struggle of the many against the few. There have been two main views of the structure of history: progress and cycles. The West is strongly committed to the perspective that history is a progression: if we can just keep going, things will continue to get better. We have accepted the idea that there is “progress”: fire, electricity, railroads, smartphones. And yet there is concern now that progress may have stalled. Most societies outside the West seem to have held on to a belief in the dominant role of cycles. That makes them more able to see repeats which the west misses because of our replacement of cycles with the flight of a single arrow. Up for ever until collapse forever. No View of rsing from the ashes.

The Covid has opened up a window on society and created working relationships across borders that might alter the odds of dealing effectively with Climate. 

Humans about 5000 years ago expanded cut forest-cuttingforest-curring s to plant edibles and in doing so released enough CO2 to prevent what was to be the next cycle of global cooling, an interglacial that led instead, because of the  increased co2,  to a long period of  moderate temperature which allowed  humanly cultivated agriculture to  flourish. This moderate stabilization was not deliberate but very helpful. 

Could humans do this well by being conscious, cooperative and thoughtful together? Humans have been affecting earth for a long time. But bacteria and animals had major effects earlier. The point is, this history is deep . This suggests that as we now move into climate change, new issues will arise and new histories will be discovered and need integrating into the human story. A key aspect of history thinking is to realize that as soon as we have a new question, a new discovery, a new trend, we need a new history.

[need to add this somewhere. Science emerged as organized pragmatic action  on  the material world. This approach was used by power and for war. The deadening mechanical approach which downgraded sart, feeling, the feminine, the myth expanded with increasing confidence until thermodynamics introduced entropy, and quantum explorations showed that predictability was not to be found everywhere, tearing apart the newtonian  model already weakened by deeper thinking about gravity and the implaibleusible action of gravity  at an infinite distance.

As the Newtonian model came apart, new ways of thinking allowed for more organic explorations  about more intriguing problems. While science was reconfigurung around quantum and spacetime the human issues were becoming more intense. The ethics of empire and colonizalization, of factory work, slavery and urbanization were not being addressed as discipled thougt was rejected as too mechanical to be useful. 

Typically historians  working to understand  current problems ignore most of that past and  start either with WW2 or the industrial revolution. Most histories of economics start with Adam Smith but in fact almost everything interesting in economics had been done before him. By his time, much of what we are now,  culturally and politically,  was already well established and its origins  are long forgotten.  This gives rise to the feeling that things have always been this way and this blocks our thinking about new ways that might be better. Our histories might be inaccurate in important ways. For example, the idea that scarcity for all  drives change rather than opportunism of a few. Water power was not running out when the shift to coal happened in England in the 1600’s - a few people saw the advantage of  coal for getting more control over workers.

The changes in scientific thinking now empower changes also in humanistic thinking, allow a blend of anthropology, philosophy and  psychology treat the problems as organic, not mechanical. Unfortunately  university based disciples hold of to mechanical methods even as the questions are more broadly considered.

Phase 1

Science is  newtonian. Mechanical, closed systems. 

Humanities rejects the mechanical in favor of the poeti

Phase 2

Science opens up: thermodynamics, spacetime, quantum

Humanities can blend the analytic with the poetic taking on a wider range of questions

Robert Artigiai is writing book n the shif from paradigm 1 to paradigm 2.  Rge argument sasy we can explore te human nd ecooogical futures wit  more discipline, appreciation amd impst than we assumed.  It turns out that netter ethics (ethos), stronger friendships, more honesty all gotogrhrt. 

From a god’s-eye-view, the best solution is world peace and no country having

an army at all. From within the system, no country can unilaterally enforce

that, so their best option is to keep on throwing their money into missiles that

lie in silos unused.

Thinking about Gardenworld as a goal should lead us to be interested in similar movements in history. The 19th century Craftsman movement for example, which can be seen as an early version of Garden world, was cut off by World War I and  the shift toward the roaring 20s and never recovered.Arts and Crafts was present enough  aroun 1900 that we can say it is part of our traftion.

  The first two historians, people who systematically explored into the causes of things, were the Greeksm Thucydides and Herodotus. Their tone, approach, and method differ from each other. History depends upon the personality of the historian. Herodotus.. They  focused on the culture that set the scene for action, Thucydides focused on who fought, who won. Is this divergence terrible? Only if we think there should be a history free from human concerns. The word history means, in Greek,  investigation, inquiry and, importantly, judgement or witness.. There are other traditions of history. The hebraic  march of generations guided by the idea that humanity has a mission,  and the Chinese spring and autumn annals. 

There are wonderful quotes about history that can orient us, or forewarn us, about our current understanding of how we got here and what to make of it.

• Those who cannot remember the past  are destined  to repeat it. 

• History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. 

• History is the menu of possibilities. 

• History blinds us to the present.

• History is a bucket of ashes. 

In the mainline histories the more human questions  lost out to a philosophy that was more interested in objects and precision than flow and experience. Myths and culture were downplayed while  technology and state histories came to dominate. We are surrounded by fragments of old cultures of values that broke apart under the power of commerce, colonialism, slavery,  and wages. 

Can we now, under the pressures of failures of climate, health, economy and politics pull these  together into a better coherent whole?  This question is vital for GardenWorld because GardenWorld is aided by a renewed interest of the purpose of life. So far it looks like many town and state governments are turning with urgency to Green as a way of creating jobs. But it can mean dysfunctional uncoordinated efforts, such as putting a solar panel complex on the best agricultural land.

Science tends to see history as  a pattern of cause and effect, the cause happening first, then the effect.  As a method it stresses before and after, A leads to B, rather than exploring the context of A and the context of B. Drawing lessons from the past requires that we consider a past broad enough to contain what might be interesting to us now, even if not to recent generations. This should be thought about over and over by each generation.

 Aristotle’s⁠1 four causes was a great perspective for understanding how things happen. I think we are weaker for not using it. The water boils. How do we understand it? Water, the material cause, fire the efficient cause, boiling the purpose cause,  the shape is the formal cause.  If we take a question like “why does the human population trash the planet?” The four causes give a comprehensive view. 

Science has emerged as the repository of solid knowledge, and this is because such knowledge helps the economy and the military. . Here is a radical thought:  science has led us to “knowledge” that the world will end as the sun goes out. What if, instead of a focus on atoms, we had had a culture that focused on the making of music or writing of poetry or perfecting our gardens? Knowing that the sun will go out - in a number of billions of years - has a powerful emotional effect reinforcing a feeling of inevitability. It isn't a question of the truth of sun vs poetry. Both are “true” but have different consequences. Gardenworld will be a world of stories and crafts, returning language and thought from “the media” to conversations among neighbors. Lots to think about. 

In the first chapter I said that who we are is the unfolding of humanity and planet in interaction. I am going to take the view that there are several major stories about how we got here. The main story that informs our culture  is that humans, inheriting from primates strong motives for status, food and sex , scrambled about the earth, started planting for ritual purposes of homoring the dead, killed off the big animals, and found ourselves using our increased population for wars, capture and slavery, settling into compounds with our domesticating animals and captured prisoners turned into slaves. 

We were primates among trees, killing off the big game and had to search out the plains as forest gave way to grasslands under pressure of drier climates, learning to walk upright and to see further ahead. Is the change we will have to go through to recover from global heating  any smaller a shift in approach to life?

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This story is about our  species and the land and how we organized to put the two together - over several hundred thousand years. And the species before that. Land means food and at first we wandered around in the landscape searching for food - which was mostly abundant - but lots of walking to find fish nuts, turtles, sprouts, rabbits…, maybe small groups scaring each other. Later the drive was to control the land, first by conflict and slowly  by some form of fencing.

There is mounting evidence that early humans shifted between summertime decentralized living when the countryside provided game, fish, birds fruits and nuts, and more centralized controlled hierarchical living when feeding off of storage was necessary because of  winter. The word vacation, from vacate, speaks to the spirit of being able to walk out of hierarchy and authority into a free space, knowing that a return is possible when needed.The way we feel about vacations is based on this possibility of periodic vacating into nature. Advertisements show how powerful this is because the setting, especially for cars, is almost always in nature, even deep nature, further than we might be able to drive. But these ads  obviously speak to us of desire held by many.

Another aspect of our early history is the major migrations forced by climate change. Freezing at the poles, deserts in the middle, followed by warming and  expanded belts of livability. It is important to understand these because our own time is characterized by forced warming and new migrations which might become major involving most of the human population. People, over several generations, walked from the Tigris Euphates . meso-p otamia - between the rivers the (hippopotamus is named hypo horse potamo river ) to China, across the aleutians to South  America - this is amazing. People like us did this!

The story is complicated. Early farmers cut trees to plant grains and this released enough CO2 5000 years ago to limit what was a phase of global cooling that was coming because of the earth's shifting orbit and rotations. This seems to have allowed a rapid expansion of farming and population. Conflict resulted and even tiny populations segmented into small groups of a dozen or so were very apprehensive of each other.

Modern historical research into the deep past  is amazing - and quite new.  It was only in Jefferson’s time that the idea that the earth is only a few thousand years old began to break down when for example Hutton in the scotland of the 1700’s watched rivulets from rain on his farm and compared them to the paths of major rivers through the countryside and made a new story around the fossils  that erosion brought to the surface. The discovery of ancient civilizations, starting with  reports from ships returning from trade and then Columbus, creating  a new industry of storytelling,  building on the large scale printing industry that was only a hundred plus years old.  The understanding of primates,  archeology, of DNA pathing through our history, comparative religions, cultural anthropology and archeology, have shifted our understanding and given us powerful new perspectives for dealing with humanity as a whole on a planet understood as a whole in a universe better understood.

How the past will be available in a post-climate crisis  future is unknown. If society remains technology based and centralized across geographies we will see the continuity with our own time, but if crises lead to localizians only,  new forms of storytelling and education generally will  emerge as the kind of knowledge we take for granted rapidly fades. .

 To get at the detail we need for thinking about Gardenworld we need more detail. A convenient view is that human history comes in four overlapping phases. 

1. Hunter gatherers 

2. Wars and empires

3 Economics

4. Cooperation.  (Yet to come.)

In slightly more detail  of a familiar kind:

1. Hunter gatherers (1m to 7000 BC). Knowledge of local conditions. Climate-forced migrations.

2. Empires and wars. Settled population and empires. 6000 BC till 400 AD

3. Economics. Trade, commerce, finance 1000-2030

4. Cooperation, peace, appreciating humans 2025-?

Each transition is marked by lots of violence and disruption, change of technology and often shift in dominant language and political systems. Can we bring the planet back as a stable platform for human life for a new millennium? The 19th century was filled with discussions of this theme.  Robert Malthus, whose thinking about human species well being led to analyzing  the flow amongst sexuality, population increase, and inevitable decline,  wrote

[Assume] all the causes of misery and vice in this island removed. War and contention cease. Unwholesome trades and manufactories do not exist. The greater part of the happy inhabitants of this terrestrial paradise live in hamlets and farm houses scattered over the face of the country. Every house is clean, airy, sufficiently roomy, and in a healthy situation. The necessary labours of agriculture are shared amicably among all. The number of persons, and the produce of the island, we suppose to be the same as at present. The spirit of benevolence, guided by impartial justice, will divide this produce among all the members of the society according to their wants. Though it would be impossible that they should all have animal food every day, yet vegetable food, with meat occasionally, would satisfy the desire of a frugal people and would be sufficient to preserve them in health, strength, and spirits. 

So When I call the present proposal GardenWorld I am aware that throughout history there has been a draw to the garden idea⁠2. GardenWorld explicitly builds on the Greek idea of economy as estate management, where the estate is now the globe and its management is the human task to which each of us is called. it is very important to see the continuity from hunter gatherers through the Greek cattle ranchers to Modern domestic life and its relation to the market - And then beyond toward Gardenworld. It is unclear whether the conditions will lead to global management or more local.  The Gardenworld idea however is that we manage the whole, global or local;, for the relationship of human life to earth and  all that is on it with the goal of enhancing human life and with it, the planet itself as a liveable place in the cosmos..

The standard view of the path from the caves and grasslands  to us in the 2020’s focuses mostly on the new technologies which forced change.  A more radical view,already mentioned,  instead of the transitions driven by technology,  is the continuity of classes and elites. Elites,  along with experts as support may be necessary for the management of society. But we can imagine a society - called democratic - where everyone is well educated and feels responsibility for the whole and is given access to participation. Not that differences among people are denied, but  that differences in temperament and talent were not rewarded with  property. As is well known, most advocates of democracy maintained that relatively equal income was a necessary condition for people to listen to each other. .  

The linear progress we were taught is not what happens. There are ups and downs, and the ups are not always bigger than the downs.We are fragile and, while robust, it is the robustness of a canoe in a bay  before the dark clouds and rising waves, what the Odyssey calls “wine-dark seas”  make it around the headlands. Not so robust then. 

We need to deeply question, mull about, and be inventive and imaginative about alternative views. The view of continuous progress has lulled us into sleep, sloth, and slithering backwards  toward a difficult future. There have been detours, many attempts to  turn back, and dead ends that just might be worth reconsidering, given that where we are is unfortunately a kind of major dead end. 

There have been about 1000 generations from hunter-gatherers  to now, and all these people, our ancestors, were busy: living fighting loving telling stories  - coping with the world.  Even earlier, half a  million years ago, some of them domesticated fire. Imagine the conversations about that.  They had conversations? At the simplest, people like us gather around, having carried off another successful hunt or forage, the stars above, the glistening alive fire in the center.  Our grunts carried meaning and soon turned into repeatable phrases, mostly  pointing or evaluating, such as the  taste of a food or weather or danger..and on into song and poetry. Any way you imagine this, it must have been early and then thousands of years during…what? Food and sex and babies and dying, night skies and changes of seasons. But resisting settlement. For those thousands of years  they must have been active in thought and emotion and shared gesture.  It is important for us, on the edge of a seriously unknown future, to see that the past was filled with lives people wanted to live.  

We miss much by not seeing how profoundly we are influenced by the Greeks, but also by being mammals, by being alive, by being on this planet. It is important to take a full spectrum approach to “how we got here” because we do not know what ahead of us will need to change. There is no single history for all issues. Each new idea requires a reanalysis of relevant  history. 

There are those who like to tell the story of the Big Bang and the slow evolution over 5 billion years to our current state. I prefer to see humans as  story tellers and that the Big Bang is one of the stories.  New discoveries about the big bang, what came before and after, and where,  might lead to a revision of the big bang story. The Big Bang, for example, implies that there was nothing, and then there was something. The universe was full of potential, not mere empty space - and space too is something with aspects, qualities.. Is that potential something or not? Many mysteries here that can affect the directions we take for the next phase of society. GardenWorld requires a well thought-out approach taking as much as we can into consideration.

Most humans are trying to make their life better. We have an amazing amount of food production, though threatened because production is so “efficient” it lacks flexibility, an amazing communication system; though threatened by authoritarian control, a tendency toward democratic governance, weakened by not paying attention to what we have been told by most of the political philosophers,  that democracy requires education and relatively equal distribution of wealth. Too much wealth without well being is not a good sign, but it is where we are..

We need to see the whole picture of things as they are, to assess our resources, and get on with the difficult - but oh so interesting - tasks ahead. Stopping fossil energy use. Reconfiguring people’s sense of a livable life.

I imagine us as a committee to take on the task of helping out.The planet has a history that is fairly well understood. The universe that contains it is less well understood.  Our cosmos, beginning with the big bang is not adequately understood, and our fate, and the fate of the universe after us, is also not well understood nor will it be. We are born in the middle and have to live it.

The humans were not just smart bipeds. Humans also are  mammals and have carried with them the emotional range that other animals live with:  complex social life, care of infants, and the emergence of kinship systems, communication through gesture, sound, song, poetry dance, rituals, stories around the evening fire.

Out of the past emerged civilizations that were a bloody mess. People were forced in to labor and military mobilizations with no say and no sense of meaning given to them. The empires have been  systems of power more than cultures. 

One way of looking at how we got here is to take seriously the split between Asian and European civilizations.  Europe has been in the slide from Christianity to a secular world. Is there a secular  frame existing in Asia,  or is the split  there softer, keeping a blend of spirit and practical wisdom, whereas we tend to split them apart? The difference might be important for survival.

Pushing further. The earth has been through climate changes and they affected the actions of people existing at each time.Those changes  drove major migrations as can be sleuthed backwards from existing patterns of DNA. The DNA of human populations on the china coast is different from the interior, and population in the Pacific, the Americas and Eurasia can be traced to these differences.. For example, the Aleutian  island, at a time of huge ice caps at the poles, had a lower sea level and much of the land, larger than present India , was inhabitable and inhabited. Same with central China. Rising waters along the shore created remaining islands, but some - we don't know how many, migrated by water to far corners of the earth.  Migrations and DNA tell a complex story of the distributions of humans. Climate change now will have similar effects, with millions, maybe billions, on the move.

The European  tends to default to the idea that history is in segments: Greece and Rome, feudalism, reformation and the industrial revolution, trade, nation states.  But these avoid lines of continuity that are more important for understanding our dilemmas now than those major shifts. One line of continuity from the past with fateful consequences now, is that, starting with small bands of hunter-gatherers, leaders emerged who had talent, physical health - and kinship connections, and they organized society for their benefit. Sound familiar? We still have this. All along the way there have been people who organized resistances and revolutions. The discovery of humanity as more than good soldiers, but made of citizens and reflective thinkers and lovers,  is a long process.

Most if not all other societies see history as cycles of repetition  just like the human life cycle.  What goes up must come down - but why? A successful society tends to be organized hierarchically and those at the top get lazy, after their parents' brilliant careers, and lose touch with reality  - nor are they still admired by those outside the hierarchy. This is a serious weakness.  and, as Spengler wrote in his Decline of the West, any sign of weakness in an empire  leads to attack from within and without, and the reaction of such hierarchical societies is to put a strong man at the top, not to lead the society, but to protect the elite  and their acquisition of things and status.

 In the earlier phases nature was the enemy and the choice appeared to be death in the jingle or alive in the village. You still hear about contemporary society “It’s a jungle out there”.  Getting an education, or comparative experience, was the set up to be successful in leaving family and home town behind, pulling  ahead of most,  and keeping up with the best.  Not just talent and brains but physical attractiveness . There are far fewer attractive woman in a small towns - because they have been extracted, even more rapidly than the brainy ones,  to play a role in the competitive urban media society. This view, treating society like a sport with winners and losers, won out because it was able to bring together greed and ambition with technology, finance and law in such a way that no other possibility could seriously emerge. Historians are tending  to see this as not the history of that success but as a kind of rolling catastrophe. A cancer. Growth out of control.

An analogy  to the complex systems alignment of the talented with centralized power is smoking. Smoking integrates the senses with ego and image of being cool. Smoking creates the rising spiral of smoke, the bitter taste of acid and coffee, the color of the world seen through the smoke, the use of lips promising kisses, the smell of sweet bitterness, the feel of the perfect round in the fingers, and the posture of the hand itself, signaling to others,  “I  am in control.” Capitalist economics is like that. I am everything that life promises because I have lots of money (my bank tells me). Both are cancerous: smoking on self and those near, and capitalism on the population and the planet.

The two are linked through the social sign of coolness: “The word property comes from  “what is proper to the man of rank to show his status in society.” What started as a proper social sign of rank slowly evolved  into a physical thing that could be sold (alienated) as property. When property - houses - became too expensive in the depression, smoking and alcohol moved to the center (Casablanca)

From primates to the moon or to Wall Street, cleverness pervades and makes terrible mistakes.  We tend to think we see the whole. -  But we really do not see very far. Look now. Perhaps ten feel or less to the wall, yet we assume a well. That we all can integrate ourselves into one world, one culture when we can only see ten feet is powerful.  Can humanity unite to control the population and have a good quality of life? It is a great drama, unfinished.   Our lives are lived “in between”, in between  birth and death, rich and poor, health and sickness, smart and stupid, lovable and unloveable, loving and hating, male and female, light and dark . There is no way out of the continuous need for discernment. The history, continuously rethought, as modern scholarship is doing, offers us clues - if we use them.

In recent years the scope of historical observation has expanded.  Arnold Toynbee extended his reach into the history of all civilizations. Many of his 28  were unknown to me. He explored how the response of a civilization to its crises determined its future, and the way the response unfolded showed important similarities and differences among the various civilizations as they failed.  Paul Vallery wrote in 1900, “We later civilizations, we too knew we were vulnerable.”  If we see that we too are one of these, it  suggests that we have much to learn from them - rapidly.

Part of what we should learn is what transitions were like. We have several major ones, each showing that the feel of reality, the basic beliefs and social organization, undergoes changes as powerful as a caterpillar to a butterfly.

The standard examples: 

1. The waning of Egypt

2. The waning of Greece

3. The waning  of Rome

4. The waning of the middle ages

5. The waning of the renaissance probably part of the waning of the Reformation. 

( I leave out Asia out of ignorance, yet it probably has similar lessons.)

And now the waning of  the West, science, exploitation, economics. Maybe we call it modernity. From the histories the waning seems so deep that it is hard to imagine any way to avoid it. 

Historians  tend to start with the industrial revolution or perhaps with the breakdown of feudalism. Those who deal with economics tend to start with Adam Smith or trade by sailing Some might go back to  Egypt, Greece and Rome, or commerce in the mediterranean, and treaty of westphalia of 1648 that established the nation state system on the ruins of feudalism and devastating wars with names like The Thirty Years War. 

The problem is,   Much that might contain significant lessons for us now is left out, especially the earlier periods when significant directions were taken with implications up  to our own time.  Hunter gatherers who developed language and kinship systems were not ignorant of  organizing their interactions with nature. Asia, which was more developed than the West until the 1800’s is left out of the standard histories.    A narrow understanding of the past  leaves out much that was started and then faded, but may  be important for our future,  leaving us  to approach  the future with a limited imagination.  A larger imagination and more facts might take us through and beyond survivability to a better life..

These common approaches to our past history  imply that culture throughout was more or less like ours,with struggles for land and competition to feed armies and maintain elite  control. There is an arc within that history of people striving against dominating leadership for  broader equality and recognition of the humanity of each person’s fuller life and the role of the community in supporting those lives,  but this has been an always failing struggle and the past is littered with 

… the prevailing picture of a motionless and static medieval society completely ignores the actual reality of the constant struggle between the laboring serfs and the nobility. The list of major revolts is long. To name just a few examples one can point to peasant revolts, such as 1323-1328 Revolt in Flanders, 1358 Jacquerie, or the Great Rising of 1381, or to first “worker’s  democracies” established by bourgeoisie revolutions in Ghent in 1335 and 1378-1382, Liege in 1378, and Florence in 1379.

From Malko, Economics and its discontents.

 Things that were opportunities: cars, tobacco, coal, oil, alcohol, which just grew, with  fateful and unseen consequences. Some of these were determined  by economic interests, such as the defeat of the early electric car and trolly systems. We need now to push  the limits of the human species  to subject ideas to careful consideration. Opportunities taken have filled up the world beyond capacity. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the lead characters, caught up in larger forces ask, “Was there ever a time we could have said ‘no’ ?”

The approach here is to look for clues in the historical arc  from when humans, following other mammals, organized in  hunter gatherer  groups made the choice between  competition over cooperation. Such clues might lead us to recovering from climate and related problems to a society more in touch with human spirations.

Human history has been a continuous damaging search for a ladder to climb up to a better future - for the successful climbers. The story is going to change, because those who climbed the highest have used policies that ruin the world for the rest of us.    The need is for on the ground cooperation. Waking up is going to be necessary. 

Long before the advent of gender-neutral terminology, the great English poet Alexander Pope averred that “The proper study of mankind is man.’’ Yet in policy making today the human sciences are typically relegated to a secondary role, and the biophysical sciences have carried the  day. The historical sciences in particular are routinely given little consideration in the making of contemporary decisions. The origins of today’s problems are usually considered to lie no more than a few years in the past. Our approaches to education and our expectation of continual technological innovation have made us averse to history…  This aversion is inimical to sustainability.In the area of global changes in climate and other environmental factors we face challenges of a kind that previous people have confronted . One might expect, then, that in a rational, problem-solving society, archaeology and history would be at the forefront of public discussion. Of course they are not, and this fact condemns us to reinvent the wheel in the face of what may be humanity’s greatest environmental crisis.

Joseph Tainter The Way the wind blows: historical archeology.

The difficulty of resurrecting  a broader historical imagination is immense because we have all swallowed a  wrong view. That view is that population increase is good, society is made of individuals more than communities, and tech will make our future better.  The reality  is that elites have always been in control and they used ideas in the emerging culture to continuously exploit the people and the land while encouraging population growth because it is good for armies, for more consumption,  and cheaper labor.  You might say that it was the wrong garden, harvesting people in evera larger numbers while failing to grow them in quality. Compare:

With

Bigger brains eventually led to agriculture – a systematic means of harnessing the sun’s energy – which in turn freed us from the constraints of nomadic existence and gave rise to permanent settlements. 

Tim Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark. “The Burning Question.” 

That picture is of conditions created by brains. Our brains were big enough to get us into trouble but not large enough to avoid trouble.  The idea that the shift to agriculture created freedom is plain wrong. Agriculture went with empires, armies, slaves. The lives of hunter gatherers were quite benign most of the time.  

Better living is possible now. 

A fuller understanding of the past is extremely supportive of an active imagination about possibilities. If we see how complex the thinking in the past was, we can more willingly undertake complex thinking now. But we should heed  the warning, Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, where  increasing complexity leads to unmanageable consequences.

Two major parts of the past have struck me as important -  and ignored. The first is the rise of cattle culture in the early empires as a development from the earlier hunter-gatherers to herders. The word capital comes from Latin for head, cap, a new head of cattle. Its culture comes right down to capitalism now, and our present can be best understood as variations on that theme.   The world we live in has clear similarity to that world of the past. We are organized for reproduction to carry on and food to power that reproduction.  We have added to this largeness, militarization, and police surveillance. The second major result of reading more history is being forced by modern anthropology to see that hunter gatherers resisted settlement for 100,000 years - and for good reasons. 

Second interesting from the past with implications for now and the future, is the word economy, Greek, which moved from meaning the managing the great cattle estates of ancient Greece the two parts of the word mean estate and management,  into the emerging Christianity. Christianity was the structure of god’s plan for humanity, with the implication of invisible hand and the economy as a coherent structure. This history is almost unknown because while the Greek word economia is common in the New Testament (written in Greek) but this is missed by historians because  it is translated into Latin, as Distribution, and that is the  version most recent historians of that period read.

Rome expanded its territory to feed its people, and overshot. We have expanded through technology to create wealth for a few, and overshot.  There may be no path to sanity  now, only severe breakdown, because the cause is in the past which we can’t change  and now we deal with consequences.  It's like a shotgun has gone off and we have the pellets whizzing around us and at us,  but we can’t undo the initial shot.My premise is that we can struggle to create Gardenworld, a world beautiful, sustaining, and modest.  Being the best we can do, if we recognize it, we will do it better.

The reason to understand the past is because society went through many transitions, and we are going through one now. We need to learn from those in the past. The transitions, say from feudalism to craft and trade, was huge and had major effects on the lives of each person living at the time. Cultures changed, wars emerged, population increased, dominant language shifted. These are suggestive of things that might be happening to us now or soon and studying the transitions  looks like a rewarding effort.

My premise is that we can work calmly and with satisfaction to create Gardenworld, a world beautiful, sustaining, and modest. The reason to understand the past is because society went through many transitions, and we are going through one now. We need to learn from those in the past. The transitions from feudalism to craft and trade, was huge and had major effects on the lives of each person living at the time. But these changes were a reaction to increasing population - and the discovery of the usable energy  worldwide wind patterns,

 The developments that led from early settlement to empire is more multi-phased opportunism than thought  through. . People were pulled into power plays and hiding out from them. Struggling with crops and seasons, births and deaths. Strong leadership and hierarchy, attitudes toward animals and family, stronger warfare in defense of or to obtain territory, slavery, the awareness of “mine”, all emerged together. In the earliest phases, say before fire, the humans functioned the way chimpanzee groups functioned, showing all these aspects. The combination of surpluses and accounting since early settlements, went along with a new sense of ownership, which starts as a primitive feeling of “I have mastery over.”. (Here we enter into one of the most important and contentious themes for Gardenworld.) What is ownership? The object exists in the field of force of a strong persons’ presence, maybe personality (or simply as a dog defends her bone). The result is “ownership” by a few and the obvious recognition that the things reflect power. 

The empires made a major difference in living conditions. Mass people were organized in labor and military squadrons. Living was tight and dirty, seen and unseen. What had been freedom to walk and socialize in fairly unstructured time became regimented and death in military service much more present. Elites had bigger houses in most empires, but life was constrained by city walls and lots of regulations as to dress, food, social occasions.  Openness was available for only a few. Great public squares broke the monotony for the more priveleged urban dwellers, not for those who lived outside, though several of the great empires made public spaces available for all. The grim colosseum in Rome, the great avenues of Teotihuacan. . Empires served the emperors, and those at court but Echos with our time own moment in history should be conscious for you as we rethink how we might organize our culture, our time, our friendships.

Hunter gatherers refused settlement for 100,000 years. The later resistance to machinery and alienation is just a continuation of that early powerful resistance to being ordered and controlled. To prevent revolt things could not be too difficult. In Rome for example the baths, public swimming pools, were visted at the end of the day by all classes where they mingled and talked.  We could learn from that. Our isolation of classes is quite extreme.  Each society to be a society had to have aspects that people identified with and  felt superior to other empires or the worker military that lived outside the city walls. 

The benefits of settlements did not persuade the hunter- gatherers. First compounds were not to keep marauders out but to keep slaves in as part of the extension of hierarchy. First slaves were captives in war and maybe humane to not kill them. Greek slaves were treated with some respect, even rights. Aristotle proposed that owners should have an agreement with slaves as to how each could earn freedom. People, cattle, women, children, slaves. All treated as stuff to control on the farm, so to speak. We need to empathize with all parties here. It was obvious that the task was to pull food for thriving out of the round. The ox, the slave the women, and self along with the children all had a part in that arduous process that came along with settlement. Remember that early humans admired animals and though they were better fitted to nature. Telling the ox what to do and telling one’s self what to do were experienced as a unified project. But that project meant harder work and a restricted diet and subordination. Not attractive. Only the loss of access to good land broke people’s spirit and got them to sign up. Better historical thinking of the kind we need for Gardenworld has come from better understanding of the earliest humans, and also better understanding of other species, not just primates like chimps, bonobos, and gorillas, but all the way along the line to the far past. 

Our word property comes from what is proper to a man of rank to show his status in society.Property is a social sign. “Are you dressed properly for the meeting?” I want you to reflect on the importance of this thought and get past thinking of property as a god given universal for all time and all societies. It is flexible, and how we handle that flexibility will be of crucial importance for our future. Macaulay speaking in Parliament in 1841 spoke, “..in thinking that property is the creature of the law, and that the law which creates property can be defended only on this ground, that it is a law

A great book, Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, has fascinating views on the lifestyles and quality of life of the early hunter gatherers and nomads. Their diet varied with season and they ate many more kinds of fruits, nuts, turtles, birds, oysters, snails, frogs than we do. It is clear that these foragers balanced work and sociability and worked about half the hours moderns do. Mann, Charles 1491.See also his second book, 1493, what happened to the Americas after columbus. 62 

The idea is that for the Greeks estate management was essential to create, first the necessities of life, and beyond that a surplus, a surplus which could support  the citizens’ participation in  the public sphere, the polis, , and to create  time for the reading thinking and talking that was the philosophical background on who we are and how to live. In this way estate management, the greek used the word  economia, (literally estate management) was understood  as both meeting necessities and creating the surplus to allow some people the leisure for politics and philosophy. 

This is clearly an intent toward the use of surplus that is very different from ours, consumer oriented status seeking. That we have two possibilities for surplus  breaks us out of the trap of thinking there is only one, and frees us to ask and debate : what can we now (with more experience, better technologies, longer lives) do with our surplus (if we still have any. Socrates said that the way to more surplus, and more leisure for philosophy,  was less consumption.)

That perspective was absorbed into early Christianity and became the well managed world, a world given by god to humanity (Jesus being part of that gift, an instruction on how to live, makes the story more complex so you need to go read it.)

The management of the world and the monastery were two sides of the early church leaders' use of economia. Remember they were Greek speakers.

Moreover the purpose was to grow that capacity in order to reach an infinite god and carry out god’s infinite plan.

In our time, we have dropped the church and the beliefs and are not growing for god’s project, but for our own. But the Athenians and the Christians had a rudder to their project, a direction, and hence an intent. We seem to lack that. Can GardenWorld become that intent?

There is a whole literature and many university departments in this discussion. Hannah Arendt for example proposed five periods to economic life: Classical, imperial, christian, liberal and neoliberal. And now what?

God created a world where humans were free. The Greek world was more a world of constancy and mechanical structures.Understanding this Christian interlude is crucial because of the influences  it  leaves on current institutions. For example, the idea that the economy is God's project for humanity and that the project had a coherent structure across the terms, God the father, the Holy Spirit and the son Jesus became the idea that the economy as a trinity was a coherent structure. Implicit was the idea that it was a monarchy and not a plurality. The three modern concepts of capital, labor, and land hold together as a single system.

the Chinese it seems never had such a coherent system in mind and saw what we call economy as an ensemble of systems that could interact but we're not necessarily coherent. There is probably great strength in the Chinese and other Asian approach. certainly the idea of elite capital as the guide Is reinforced by the Western Christian tradition and habits of thought with a single god and a single king. If garden world is to open up that's thinking it needs to consider these issues of the implicit bias of western thinking towards narrow ownership and narrow leader ship.

For the Christian perspective in the middle ages the economy was a very integrating structure that lead from purpose to practice. The experimentation in garden world should probably be a continual interaction between The goal, the purpose, and experimentation, practice and reflection which means conversation among all the participants. What works? How are we doing?

Another important perspective on the contribution of the Middle Ages and the issues they struggled with is from the literary side. An excellent book  is Ernst Curtius’s European literature and the latin middle ages. This will reinforce the idea that each old culture is in fact livable and complex. 

Christianity was certainly an all encompassing culture for Europe but it was fated. important for us now to learn the feelings of collapse.

Any look at history suggests that underneath the history you might be reading, there is a more detailed history, with many cross currents, and under that.. well, to read a minor history, like the history of tennis, or stamps, or caving is to see the world lit up in new ways.  History can also come down to individual biographies with their much richer texture but blindness to large forces such as population and climate .

Reading big histories is helpful but so are small histories, histories of details. A History of coal highlights how well we did before coal, Or Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind among the Greeks.  Or the helpful book, The American Home shows how preoccupying the making of home has been - and will be, and yet how major moves toward betterment were derailed by larger forces - the automobile for major example.

But even more focused histories. Such as a history of the interchange between english novelists and english economists in the 19th century. The whole world of London comes alive and the intelligence see Gallager, Catherine The Body Economic Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel.  There is nothing I can read that is so remote that it is not immediately useful.

The big histories that we tend to know - Greece to Rome to Renaissance to industrialization, hide very interesting and detailed histories that get much closer to the texture of real life, which is where we will need to go in dealing with the changes necessary for climate and ecology problems. We will need to rethink housing, rethink agriculture, rethink security and health. What happened on the hunt and around the evening fire are serious clues for the future. Our disdain for ancestors is extra baggage we don’t need. Their lives were filled with details, and so will our be. The point here is that the past is worth reading about because given that our future is uncertain, we need to know the range of possibilities. Of course we will fail through a variety of incomplete understanding - but something will happen- , but studying the past civilizations gives clues, inspiration and cautions. The histories of these civilizations are important and increasingly readily available. I turn to a magazine like Archeology with a kind of anticipation quite unlike opening the newspaper or my twitter account. Instead of what happened to x as she stumbled in her political career, there are headlines about a new civilization just discovered. Which one contains more news about humanity? 

All these terms point to the derivation of interest rates from the natural multiplication of livestock. If you lend someone a herd of thirty cattle for one year, you expect to be repaid with more than thirty cattle. The herd multiplies—the herder’s wealth has a natural rate of increase equal to the rate of reproduction of the livestock. If cattle were the standard currency, then loans in all comparable commoThe fuller story of ancient lives is emerging from research and field studies. William Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything, is especially strong on the 5000 year old Mesopotamian societies and their accounting systems around cattle and grain, taxes, loans, contracts. He shows that it all was more complicated than we have imagined. He shows that accounting could be done on the annual increase of the herd through breeding. What gave the ancient Sumerians the idea of charging one another interest? Linguistic evidence provides a clue. In the Sumerian language, the word for interest, mash, was also the term for calves. In ancient Greek, the word for interest, tokos, also refers to the offspring of cattle. The Latin term pecus, or flock, is the root of our word “pecuniary.” The Egyptian word for interest, like the Sumerian word, is ms, and means “to give birth.” 

dities would be expected to “give birth” as well. The idea of interest seems to be a natural one for an agricultural or pastoral society, but not so for hunter-gatherers. Ancient Sumerian 64 society—in particular, Uruk, sometimes referred to as “the city of sheepfolds”— would have been the perfect setting for the evolution of the practice of lending money at interest. 

The great empires gave support to increased population, but also to the high cultures of art, graphics, architecture and the great religions, though most craftsmen were slaves. In important ways we are the left over from that period. Some of those civilizations solved problems that we have not been capable of solving. Take for example the great Mexican civilization that built Teotihuacan or the fascinating stone city of Petra. Modern archeologists are understanding that these cities, hubs of empires,  were built on understanding of sustainability, controlling crops and population, and living with a high level of social and economic equality as seen from the common size of houses throughout the area of the cities. Imagine being a child and playing daily in Teotihuacan outside Mexico City. . This avenue was, among other things, a large market such as were built around the great churches in Europe. Colorful, musical, a feast for the eyes as well as food.  

Imagine coffee and a conversation among friends in such an atmosphere of sophistication. 

What is civilization? I find these ancient places stimulate my thinking and concerns for our species. Early humans decorated the body. The feeling was that humans looked out of place in comparison to animals. The tattooing  and painting of the body, say for dance or war, were to correct this impression. Decoration continued into feudalism and the middle ages. It still is a preoccupation of moderns. And probably will be. Another such place is Petra, in Jordan, a crossroads of commercial travelers in the first century AD.   Empire to feudalism This transition is important because it was the breakdown of a large society - Roman Empire - into smaller ones, the feudal estates. In many important ways what we are going though now, the shift of power from the states to the corporations -is repeating that process.The word feudal comes through the german word meaning cattle, showing again the origin of human society in the raising and distribution of cattle. It is engaging  to look at modern society for signs of continuity with that past. Where I am in Sonoma County we are surrounded by pastures filled with cattle and the local grocery stores sell the meat and people drive to those stores to buy it and take it home. Continuity - and modification to the ancient system - are easy to see. 

 The great empires seemed to be stalling about 500 bc. Strong religious leaders emerged surfing on the waves of despair that empire decay was causing. Confucius emerged during the warring states period, Jesus in the oppression of the Roman empire. Buddha in the shift of Indian religions (later called Hindu) toward corrupt priests and concentration of wealth, Mohammed, in the oppressed of the south eastern Roman Empire, in the desert where geography and terrain had isolated the tribes. As Rome grew its wars increased and it needed more land to feed those armies. This of course stirred up more resistance to the empire. Generals of the army were posed at some distance from Rome to manage a local part of the military establishment. But as the distances increased the postings were far enough away from Rome that periodic returns to home base became impractical. The generals, in control of their own territory, felt themselves increasingly free from Rome and because (long detailed process) local land managers, giving title to land in exchange for service in the local military. What then was huge - Rome - became an ensemble of small local estates with little interconnection. 

Land was primary. Local relationships all important. Many interesting words come from the feudal period. Troth - as in I give you my troth (faith, pledge of allegiance) became truth and moved from relationships of faith to more the truths in the world of objects. 

This Greek model moved through five centuries to the early Christian emergence, and underwent some subtle changes. The estate of the Greeks became., for the early Christians, the dominion given by god to mankind in order to provide the conditions for mankind’s evolution toward a godly life. As the population was growing, the pressure on the monasteries was increasing, and it was increasingly hard to reach the infinite God. The conclusion was that the surplus had to grow into an expansive community defined as a subset of the whole society, that subset the economy of god, managing god's household, surplus was necessary, and growth was necessary. 

 The Greeks

The richness of culture and life in classical Greece shatters our imaginations about life there. Not only did they create the words, economy, philosophy, politics and teche but gave these rich meanings. The word economy, household management, meant what it says, the management of everything about the household (households then were large farms, there was no market yet. They can be compared to Texas or Argentine cattle ranches). Plato and Aristotle among others discuss what well managed meant. It  was clear to them that if the estate was well managed, it would produce a surplus. The Greeks being inquisitive about the meanings of words asked, what is the purpose of  the surplus? We should ask the same question. Their answer was to not spend it on things but to create leisure time for the study of philosophy and participation in politics, the conversation of the community. Greek life was organized around conversation. Enough so that political offices were filled by lottery among all adult citizen males.  This meant two things: citizens were developed enough to take on the responsibility, and the responsibility was kept reasonable for ordinary people to handle. Much to learn from here. Lottery might be the true measure of a democracy.

Plato’s book  The Laws as man made, is actually preceded by  a more powerful idea. Cattle were the first kind of wealth. The new calf  (head of cattle, hence cap, “head” as in new head of cattle and thus capitalism, arising from the dynamics of cattle raising) increases the size of the herd, at first community responsibility. As the herd grew, conflicts arose about grazing rights and the focus of wealth shifted to land and how to measure it. But the culture, coming out of shared hunter gathering, wanted to maintain the culture of sharing and so looked to divide the land equally among families. But of course there is no equal land, swamp, dry rocky hillsides. The word used, nomia, meant equal distribution. This tension exists in modern and probably all law. No need for a law if there isn’t a problem to be corrected, and the early use of nomia was thus an intent to maintain the equality of hunter gatherers while underlying forces were leading to inequality.

This and other histories are important to understand because they encourage us to consider alternatives to a capital/labor divide which has been quite destructive. We need choices if we are to put together a regenerative start. Dividing work and capital between those who are part of one or the other has got to stop.  This requires some deep rethinking as we move toward a different future. 

We moderns are left with the serious question: can a society survive without an agreed upon frame of meaning,  goals and administration? Other places in the world with their own gods and stories, are finding their stories have gone missing in forgetfulness, while the intuition for moral action remains, but more vulnerable, and yet emerging at times with  strong moral force that may again tear politics apart. The challenge is how to put  these systems together into a viable and attractive frame for living.

So the Greeks arrived at  the estate as a community, and had the resulting surplus to  be used for philosophy and politics. The goal was to lead society to a fit life for humans. Plato discussed why there could be no philosopher king who could lead society in an ethical direction so we would have to rely on education and the depth of spiritual understanding by the citizens.

First,  the replacement of one generation by the next meant that no generation was fully aware of what had gone before,  nor was there clarity about the decisions about what the task was. Second, within a generation there was a great distribution of talents such that disagreements were going to happen because not all within the generation are socialized to the same understanding.

The Greek situation in Athens and surround is so rich in modern issues.  Reading and mulling over what it was about is very helpful for understanding our own predicament and deepening our understanding of what a community can be. That is true of other civilizations as well but in Athens we have the example of very detailed records that are unique in giving us access to what was thought and done.

The great empires seemed to be stalling about 500 bc. Strong religious leaders emerged  surfing on the waves of despair that empire decay was causing. Confucius emerged during the Warring States period, Jesus  in the oppression of the Roman Empire. Buddha in the shift of Indian religions (later called Hindu) toward corrupt priests and concentration of wealth, Mohammed,  in the oppressed of the south eastern Roman Empire, in the desert where geography and terrain had isolated the tribes.

As Rome grew its wars increased and it needed more land to feed those armies. This of course stirred up  more resistance to the empire. Generals of the army were posed at some distance from Rome to manage  a local part of the military establishment. As the distances increased  the postings were far enough away from Rome that periodic returns to home base became impractical. The generals, in control of their own territory,  felt themselves increasingly free from Rome and because (long detailed process) local land managers, giving title to land in exchange for service in the local military. What then was huge - Rome - became an ensemble of small local estates with little interconnection. Land was primary. Relationships as important. May interesting words come from this period. Troth - as in I give you my troth (faith, pledge of allegiance) became truth and moved from relationships of faith between people  to more the “truths”  in  the world of objects.

This Greek model moved through five centuries  to the early Christian emergence, and underwent some  The estate, insead of being one of a number of cattle ranches on the outskirts of Athens producing the basis for politics and philosophy,  became the dominion given by god to mankind in order to provide the conditions for mankind’s evolution toward a godly life.  The new monasteries have some obvious continuity with the Garden of Eden, a safe and secure and contemplative place of attractive gardening. But the monastere threatened by increasing population. so  it  was increasingly hard to reach the infinite God. The conclusion was that the surplus had to grow. 

Structures  emerged as Roman  Generals settled in local lands and the monastic structures worked in parallel with the new large  landowners  who were taking on the mythic form of leadership with “pomp and circumstance”,  in a feudal (from old German for  cattle)  until feudalism and an overly greedy church ignited  the reformation (noye the parallel with our own time). The long period of the feudal - middle ages was filled with lives. People did not wish to be elsewhere, just for a better life within the constraints of the catholic/farming culture. It is important to see how complex that life ws, with festivals, wars, and religion - and arts. 

Passing through christianity

There is a wonderfully perspective-shifting book by Dotan Leshem. Neoliberalism from Jesus to Foucault  Economics moved from the Greeks through christianity to the modern era, and the the Christian period  had a major influence, certainly unknown to me, on what economics has become. This is much more important than we are normally  because the influences are still operating, and might increase, as we try to implement  GardenWorld.The interplay of language, religious feeling, religious institutions and the organization of the psyche of the community hints at what is at stake in a community, and thus what might unfold as our current society comes apart.

Empires to feudalism

The word feudal comes through the german word meaning cattle, showing again the origin of human society in the raising and distribution of cattle. It is fun to look at modern society for signs of continuity with that past.  Where I am in Sonoma County we are surrounded by pastures filled with cattle and the local grocery stories sell the meat and people drive to those stores to buy it and take it home. Continuity -  and modification to the ancient system - are easy to see. 

Early Feudalism is often referred to as the dark ages. But the whole period was filled with pageantry, flowers, banners, fairs, games, customs. A wonderful book is Johan Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages⁠1    which describes how emotional and expressive this period was. If we assume that life past global warming will be different, we need models of what the range of differences might be - somewhere between the worlds created by  science fiction and historical pasts whose stories are constantly reinterpreted bringing to light new issues for us to think about. And the period from the breakup of Rome to the treaty of Westphalia, which established the nation states and new loyalties, is filled with interesting issues we can learn from. Certainly the nature of sociability and the place of the arts (in clothing, food, fairs, banquets) is not just interesting but fun and a bit scary to think through..

Passing through christianity

There is a wonderfully perspective-shifting book by Dotan Leshem. Neoliberalism from Jesus to Foucault  Economics moved from the Greeks through christianity to the modern era, and the Christian period  had a major influence, certainly unknown to me, on what economics has become. This is much more important than we are normally taught  because the influences are still operating, and might increase, as we try to implement  Gardenworld.The interplay of language, religious feeling, religious institutions and the organization of the psyche of the community hints at what is at stake in a community, and thus what might unfold as our current society comes apart.

Now he is decaying pitiful and weak
Old covetous and libelous
I see only fools, men and women both, the end is truly near,
Everything is going bad.

- Eustache Deschampes (about 1390)

In the confrontation of the reformation ( A reaction to  the overarching church which took too much from the local church treasuries and developed amazingly complex hierarchies) much of the modern period was formed. “Reformation” puts it starkly for us. What form do we have - democracy, capitalism, science - and what might re-forming look like?

The churchly purpose was absorbed  into a commercializing  society, but two things remained: the idea of the economic community different from society. This allowed later thinkers to  feel justified in dealing with the economy and its well being while ignoring the well being of society. The idea of the surplus also remained and was treated as the purpose of the economy. The idea of growth also remained.  So we had by the 14th century an economy as a subset of society, and that it should produce a growing surplus.  The power of this  undercurrent of ideas kept the economy as a special space for privileged participation in growth and surplus.  The religious origin of these ideas kept these ideas, in their slow evolution, basically as a belief system. With religion (the hidden hand some suggest) still at the core of economic thinking cannot be over emphasized. And provides problems and possibilities for rethinking how the economy works, a rethinking GardenWorld will encourage.

Given this, the way to the hierarchical society we have now   was to take family structure as the model chosen for organizing people, treating non-genetically linked folk as if they are members of a hierarchical family rather than as members of a conversational community that wanted to avoid hierarchy. Why the family pattern was chosen over the community by the West is a question best explored by looking at those societies that did not make such a choice. In the anthropology/archeology literature there are some examples, such as the Chinese village (“The people are in the forests and the emperor is far away”), and many now emerging in the research literature.  Scott’s Against the Grain and Graeber’s Eurozine⁠2 article point the way. 

 Breeding and nurturing has been and should be central to economy and economics. Economy is fundamentally organic,  while economics, which is academic thought about the economy, has tended toward the mechanical and formal systems, with physics as the aspirational paradigm more than biology or the humanities. The misplaced aspiration , to be included in science while supporting wealth gathering, is killing us.

What makes the cornfield smile; beneath what star
Maecenas, it is meet to turn the sod
Or marry elm with vine; how tend the steer;
What pains for cattle-keeping, or what proof
Of patient trial serves for thrifty bees;-
Such are my themes.  Vergil,  Georgics

The transition from the classical period to the Christian was a huge struggle and worth studying to understand better what we might be in for our own time.

When the explorers,  starting with Columbus,  returned  with aspecimies animal - llama, birds, and vegetable - tomato casaba, corn, potato, they were put in keeping places, walled gardens. The garden became the cultivating civilizational effort to  add usefulness and beauty alongside the places for  breeding and harvesting animals.This effort kept going through Versaillies. Paris. Central Park.  We have to remember that nearly everyone believed in the Bible stories. Bringing s[ecimens home to the royal gardens  was actually seen as recreating the Garden of Eden. Monasteries And palaces  and civic centers and then parks carried on this effort. Different cultures interpreted the garden in different ways. The collected pieces were broughtogether in an attempt to create a kind of encyclopedia of the lost garden.

1 . An earlier translation, Waning of the Middle Ages, is not as rewarding to read, thin on  detail and in language. .

2 https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/

Craft and trade, Renaissance and Reformaton. 

As the Romans retreated to feudal estates from their towns, which had been used mostly for tax collecting, they abandoned tools buildings and land. As life grew grimmer in the feudal estates, some left and went to these towns where they found ready made tools and work spaces, and set up shops, no longer making items from wood, leather and metal for the local feudal estates, but for sale. This is a long slow process of market creation. This might suggest what creating Gardenworld after civilizational collapse could be like. A major difference is that our efforts will be in the context of civilizational memories the people moving out of feudalism didn’t have. 

Remember this was a time when land could be inherited but not sold, where rank (property as a sign of rank, proper to a man of rank) was inherited and not for sale (alienated). Habits and expectations changed very slowly.

I highly recommend reading Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital_ The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming.   And  his The Progress of this Storm. Also  Uninhabitable Earth  by David-Wallace-Wells.  By comparison, efforts underway or proposed to cope with rising temperatures and the consequences are extremely weak though the number of test projects in living and agriculture  andinventions to replace infrastructure  under way is a hopeful sign. But so far, taken together they do not yet scale to full fledged adequate solutions.   There is  an effort by a few corporations and governments to shift  to non-fossil fuel substitutes, but the numbers are huge - maybe out of reach. Think of how many solar panels would be needed to capture say fifty percent of  society’s  energy use!  Just manufacturing those panels would have intense environmental impact - mining material, heat for manufacturing, transportation  of raw and finished materials from mine to factory to installation. Some of this activity is altruistic, some profit seeking, some pernicious, but the secondary consequences are not being thought through.  Many articles that propose some kind of energy change without entering imaginatively into the lives of those doing - or being forced - to change.. We need to recall that the big oil companies knew that the use of oil would lead to an increase in warming - but they hid it, ran campaigns against it, paid off congress people.

 There are many details about the path to the modern and we should keep reading new literature. An older one is from the Tocqueville

“Tocqueville and other foreign observers captured the nascent reformation of the covenant theology. “The passions that move Americans most deeply are commercial rather than political,” he observed, adding that those commercial passions were encouraged, not bridled, by evangelical clergy and moralists.”

Here is a good place to discuss the theories of Arrighi on the the way what the west calls the economy evolved from village craft to the globalization of the Atlantic empires.. The fascinating story goes like this.

In the 13-1400’s craft work created markets in places around Genoa, Florence, and Sienna in italy. The success led to an increase of  production and the beginning of a factory system, At th same time trade with other parts of the world (remember Columbus) was increasing and profits increased. The local  Italian town bankers wanted to find new investments for this money (note the investment idea is creeping in). They built  factories in towns  towns to the north but there was not enough purchasing power there, so these investments failed. At this time Holland was increasing its fleet and voyages were paying off, so the Italian bankers invested in Holland ship building. Thi worked until the fleet was saturated with new boats and voyages,but   the profit fell as competition increased. The Duch bankers, looking for a place to invest, were witnessing the rise of industrializing  England and invested heavily in London with their  Dutch Profits.  This produced good results and then excess profits and industrializing had slowed down. The London bankers wee looking for new investments and saw the rise of population and output from the North American colonies, and this continued until ww1 when England went broke with military costs (and many people lost their lives to the widespread violence)The investment in the US paid off well, and the American bankers, looking for places to put profits slowly came to China⁠1. A good new place to invest. But note, the next investment must be larger than the previous for this process to self-finance. 

After China, what? There is no bigger country, only bigger regions, and maybe not even a region is strong enough, just the whole world. Arrighi is suggesting that such is the dynamic at play. The implications for how to move toward GardenWorld? Obviously at some point the process fails to renew itself. Unless - long shot important for GardenWorld - ,  production opportunities shift from material stuff - limited - to wealth in ideas and relationships that self reinforce and do not need to return to increasing material production for wealth. Lots to discuss here for GardenWorld. Production was passed over as a path to wealth in favor of financialization, making money with money.

Renaissance and Reformation

The Renaissance and the Reformation are treated in most histories as big deals. While the Renaissance was a period of open air  markets around craft and ships. It was also a time of war, with large armies of conscripts  and mercenaries, a way of using surplus labor and using increasing cash reserves, loans from banks, and authoritarian rule. It was not a period of new social ideas. These patterns however continued down to modern times and were a continuation of what came before. The struggle continued - and continues - who owns what? 

 The arts of the period reflect the reality that science is a phase in the history of Art. Artists turned to the details of dye making, bronze casting, architecture and perspective. These were all extensions of the market and the world of material invention providing the basis for  a dynamic economy. The new thought of that time was an exuberant involvement in geometry and the separation of the mature mind from life. 

Stephen Toulmin1 has written an extraordinary book about the late phase of this period, while called called the Enlightenment; it was actually rather dark.  He says that historians and populatr opinion look on the this  as a period of developed civility and conversation, a peaceful,  inventrive and colorful  time, but, he says, it was a response to a series of crises: the thirty  years war, bad climate, high unemployment and the assassination of kings. 

The result was a number of leading thinkers turned to science as a realm free of emotion and conflict.  The Renaissance, which was complex and highly oriented toward and art and feeling,  was redirected, turned into the Enlightenment,   selecting  out  from the complex culture of the time, careful thinking that was highly rational,  abstract, anti emotional and   non-controversial.  Thinkers such as Descartes, drawn to science and mathematics,  led the way in avoiding the human aspects of belief: religion, love, arts. Toulmin reflects on the previous generation of thinkers such as Shakespeare, Erasmus and Rabelais, and their complexity of thought about human life. He says, and it is still true, that we should return to that broader agenda. Hopefully Gardenworld will support that return to a fuller life and a feeling of bein g at home in the world. Not scared all the time. 

The climate of belief - what kind of world we live in - is crucial for any civilization or human community. 

I was once walking and talking with my son in Venice and it struck me that the beautiful art, music, architecture, were just the seductions of the church. Later that evening it hit me that, while all that magnificent art was basically advertising for the church, the underlying belief system with its focus on birth, marriage, death, and solace was a much fuller view of the human life cycle than what is provided by modern advertising which has pulled us from being parents and citizens into bland consumers who all too often  don’t know how to have guests at home . 

GardenWorld needs a well developed sense of the human life cycle and how humans fit and are supported at every stage of their life and death. Economic writing, not yet called that (1600’s), was genuinely concerned with the health of society, even though the understanding of what a society was was limited to then existing concepts that privileged  the aristocracy, a pattern inherited from the great empires of the far past. Adam Smith accepted this social frame and became famous  (though those who quoted him did so very selectively. John Maynard Keyes who also thought in social terms was even more ignored. 

The parallel of the Christian word with the Greeks, looking for meaning beyond material existence,  is obvious. But then this structure ran into the reformation (and all the forces that led to that). The long period of the feudal - middle ages people did not wish to be elsewhere, just for a better life within the constraints of the catholic/farming culture. It is important to see how complex that life was becoming, with festivals, wars, and religion - and arts. Early Feudalism is often assimilated to the idea of the dark ages. But If this is the dark ages, whence cometh this light? The whole period was filled with pageantry, flowers, banners, fairs, games, costumes. 

A wonderful book is Johan Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages describing these aspects in sensuous detail. If we assume that life past global warming will be different, we need models of what the range of differences might be - somewhere between science fiction and historical pasts. Lots to think about, and the period from the breakup of Rome to the treaty of Westphalia, which established the nation states and new loyalties, is filled with interesting issues we can learn from. Certainly the nature of sociability and the place of the arts (in clothing, food, fairs, banquets) is not just interesting but fun and a bit scary to think through.. Scary because human awareness of suffering was more exposed. 

Today people cry silently and in private - not so in the middle ages where lament was common and public. “Now he is decaying, pitiful and weak, old, covetous, and libelous. I see only fools, men and women both, the end is truly near, Everything is going bad. - Eustache Deschampes (about 1390) Quoted in Huizinga

In the confrontation of the reformation ( A reaction to the over-reaching church which took too much from the local church treasuries and developed amazingly complex hierarchies) much of the colorful life was given up for the clash of bureaucracies: religious, trade, taxation. Society was becoming stripped of its human qualities. The church’s  sense of community management of the local whole was absorbed into a commercializing society, but two things remained: the idea of the economic community different from society. This allowed later thinkers to feel justified in dealing with the economy and its well being while ignoring the well being of society. The idea of the surplus also remained and was not treated as the instrument of investment. But still to create a quality of life, though this competed with militarism. 

The idea of growth also remained. So we had by the 14th century an economy treated as a subset of society, and that it should produce a growing surplus. Pickety has been straightforward in seeing that if this surplus is invested society grows but if it is not invested it increases the wealth of the already rich. 

 The power of this undercurrent of ideas kept the economy as a special space for privileged participation in growth. The religious origin of these ideas kept the ideas, in their slow evolution, basically as a belief system. With religion (the hidden hand some suggest) still at the core of economic thinking cannot be over emphasized. And provides problems and possibilities for rethinking how the economy works, a rethinking GardenWorld will encourage. Economics has become the major language for governing. The opportunity is to focus on the total productive activity of people in society on the land creating a civilization.

 The trend however was to favor analysis and concepts that supported the organization of society around elites. Economics manages the economy as though it were a part of society, not the whole. Our tendency to think of the economy as a mix of technologies , networks and finance is fairly new. Early markets were village events, occurring on, say,  Friday morning, selling locally produced food - vegetables grain and animals and a few utensils, all obviously in support of the lives of the local people. Each actual market was very unique, with its own regulations (can only sell on Friday and only here, signs can only be a certain size, remainder after sale day can not be sold to nearby towns for 3 days, and many more examples.) Early markets were in commodities, bushels of grain, head of cattle. This made quantification easy. Later things like furniture, jewels, were not commodities in the same sense yet price allowed them to be dealt with as quantities. This is a bit mysterious and worth discussion. Along the way we lost the humanistic organic basis for well-being that the villages, albeit poor by many - but not all - standards, represented.

One important way to look at this is the rise and decline of the middle class. I think it is fair to say that the middle class is basiclaly a class of people who were the oil in the machine of the economy. Especially through ww2, new industries with much more complex produces emerged leaving a capacity after the war that led the US, which has not been bombed, to thrive. That period was cut off at the knees by the rise of coordinating computer power which vigorously replaces bureaucratic managers. The endency to off load operations on to the customers took another huge slice of middle class jobs.  The result is that an economy of

• Ownerfs

• Staff

• Workers

has morphed into and economy of

• owners

• professionals

• underemployed.

The basic obvious pont that every human should face a future that is secure, rewarding and feels meaningful. Too many have no sense of being included nor of having a place to retreat to. 

“Europe was so organised socially and economically as to secure the maximum accumulation of capital. While there was some continuous improvement in the daily conditions of life of the mass of the population, society was so framed as to throw a great part of the increased income into the control of the class least likely to consume it. The new rich of the nineteenth century were not brought up to large expenditures, and preferred the power which investment gave them to the pleasures of immediate consumption. In fact, it was precisely the inequality of the distribution of wealth which made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements which distinguished that age from all others. Herein lay, in fact, the main justification of the capitalist system. If the rich had spent their new wealth on their own enjoyments, the world would long ago have found such a regime intolerable. But like bees they saved and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole community because they themselves held narrower ends in prospect.”

Excerpt From: John Maynard Keynes. “The Essential Keynes.” Apple Books. 

The emergence of the modern

Modernity is the great confusion filling inelegantly the gap left by the decline of catholicism and  leading to the “Reformation” and on to religious wars, the rise and fall of  wider cCristianity, and a lust for things more than relationships..  The period has lots of individualism and creativity but the cost in wars and slavery  and industrial slums is high. Essentially modernism  is feeling good by being surrounded by material things, mostly manufactured. The stamdr pictures from the 1880’s through the New York world’s fai in 1939 and on to captain marvel comies was a world of tallbuildings, los f glass and stel, personal helicopters, neo lights. No pets, no plants, often no children, no older people. It has been a world of consumer goods for consumers. which meant affordability, but thee pictures ofen show no production..   

Modernity is dependent on fossil fuels. The quantity  is like the distance to the stars, almost unimaginable. A trillion tons of cos2 each day. A car driven on a tank of gas adds almost a quarter ton of CO2 just by itself - one car? And we drive the freeway looking at the long stream coming toward us - and fail to imagine this weird the impactuse of energy.

But we long prepared for it, using black slaves the way we use black oil. Then facts of slavery are terrifying  to anyone who looks. Slavery was the machine of British wealth and empire. Slavery profits financed much of the industrial revolution (Dutch traders were part of that.)

An over-reliance first on  slavery, then coal, then on oil, “fueling” population increase. Populations breed till they come up against the limits of their food supply, currently dependent on oil for transportation, mechanization, and fertilizer. We have  reached some  limits. There is a way to go but it is very dependent on the  tech mix and social organizations we use (building tract homes on the best agricultural land is not smart.). Humanity on the surface of the earth did fairly well, then coal and oil were discovered under the surface, and humanity expanded to fit the limited  new resources. Coal and oil under the earth led to our increase of population on the surface. That phase (which helps me sty at my desk and type) is now perhaps nearly finished, not because we have used it up but  because what was mined and pumped was burned into the atmosphere and the whole pond of fossil fuels under the earth is now surrounding us in the air. This sets up crucial condition for social failure………………..

The great wars undid civilization but we have tried to carry on with a mix of forgetfulness and a desire to push on and hence failed to notice what was lost and what remains. The material side bombed and the human side burned. The loss is terrible and we should look at our current task, not as forgetting, but repairing and reinventing. 

We live in the modern and are formed by it.  If there is a threat of flooding the nws says “be sure to stock up”, but with the emerging crises there is no anporation, no stuff in the store and maybe no store.  We are going to be seriously off-balance. thwarted and helpeess.

Emergence to the modern is much more based on the ancient - especially Greek, Christian and medieval society and its insitions, than we are usually taught .The historical reference to Eden slowly gave way  to ideas of usefulness and beauty. Garden world efforts in the future  will be in part a throwback to those efforts while still keeping some modern elements (We don’t know which), or if we go more technocratic into the future, which garden elements - there will be many - will be resurrected and repurposed. 

The modern is fascinating but weak on human feelings. The result is a breakout of irrationality that builds on human feelings without coherence of a culture which seeks to understand them while seeing itself as rational. We replaced feelings with private spaces. Nature, life, relationships, art and spirit were pushed out of the culture.

....diverse ways of inventing “mixed species environments” might produce a more livable world. - Giovanna di Chiro

____________________

Modern has turned to post modern and beyond to trans-human. What we can learn is what happens when all thinking is technical and little is known about the humans to which the extensions of the human through tools are attached. There is little doubt that the future will keep some aspects of the modern even as the movement is away from modern  being the central image of the future. We will have appliances for water, cooling, gardening, transporting (this will be very different.), but the rest is being doubted. We have too many children who cannot draw nor feel in their hands any music making beyond button pushing.

Modern is peculiar. (Tate modern Gallery)

Swirling and interesting but cold as dry ice. To touch, the marble and the railing are cold and the feeling is one of maybe falling. Attractive, interesting, but devoid of human feeling or care.  Note few people, no place to sit.

The modern is tech without people.  We westerners  have been convinced that our superiority in science, technology and abundance were the leading edge of an ever-expanding  destiny.

From wiki

The Great Divergence is a term made popular by Kenneth Pomeranz's book by that title, (also known as the European miracle, a term coined by Eric Jones in 1981)[3] referring to the process by which the Western world (i.e. Western Europe and the parts of the New World where its people became the dominant populations) overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilization, eclipsing Medieval India, Qing China, the Islamic World, Joseon Korea, and Tokugawa Japan.

We are blind to fate and overcome with surprises. The “The Great divergence'' is now followed by The great disruption, a very serious book by Amatai Ghosh that makes the point that our dance with western modernism has been and is  trashed by ourselves.

By extension, however, it gradually became the preferred organizing principle 

Economics has become  the major language for governing. Economy.  The opportunity  is to focus on the total productive activity of people in society on the land creating a civilization.  The trend however was to favor analysis and concepts that supported the organization of society around elites. Economics manages the economy as though it were a part of society, not the whole. Our tendency to think of economy as a mix of technologies , networks and finance is fairly new. Early  markets were village events, occurring say on Friday morning, selling locally produced food - vegetables grain and animals  and a few utensils, all obviously in support of the lives of the local people. Each actual market was very unique, with its own regulations (can only sell on Friday and only here, signs can only be a certain size, remainder after sale day  can not be sold to nearby towns for 3 days, and many more examples.) The abstract noun “market”  has no referent. Along the way we lost the humanistic organic basis for well-being that the villages, albeit poor by many - but not all - standards, represented. 

There is a story - that hunter gatherers ran out of food and took up  agriculture which formed   empires which led to wars and slavery which  led to feudalism,  which population  increase and  cannons against stone walls,   broke apart into city states . Fleeing people established free towns with crafts and increasing trade.  

An alternate view is that the path, instead of a series of clear steps taken by most of humanity at the same time or following the same pattern, is more like an Escher - stairways intersecting at odd angles. Consumer culture is the result of many such intersecting stairways. 

 At any moment in history the path to the present is still obscure and debatable (because the process if not over it is still ongoing through any present moment), and the path forward looks like the Escher drawing - multiple paths with multiple destinations and multiple dead ends. These interweavings help make the glue that keeps society from changing.

This suggests that instead of a fixed past and a fixed future, all is up for creativity and  choice. The butterfly effect is always at play - that is, a tiny shift then  affects the choice we make now which has huge impacts on which future will be followed, and the path taken is really the sum of many paths across many options.  Only  in retrospect does it seem there was a clear path leading to our present.

History, much already alluded to, is very complex. Modern economists have tried to reduce that complexity to math, avoiding the need for better stories of what happened, the purpose, the decisions made along the way.

The core story is about how economics became so central to society, and how good can be made of it despite its current stupidities. What were the alternatives dropped along the way that might be worth re-engaging?

The presence of the word “economy” refers to a system  capable of management and this is crucial for GardenWorld, which is crucial for dealing with climate change. The word itself, starting with the Greeks, we still use. There has been a shift in meaning but also some powerful continuity we are mostly unaware of, thinking that economics began with Adam Smith or other simplified histories that tend to dismiss the richer stories.

.  The use of the idea of “Economy” - not till the 19th century called “economics” -    went from comprehensive approach to management - Athens (5fth century B) , - to Christian totality of the plan of god (1st to11th century AD  - to commercial emerge in the Italian Cities 12-15th Centuries -  to complex discussions -(19th century) to technocratic (20th) to nearly irrelevant in the 21st.  The crisis of the world - environment and people -  suggests resurrecting  economics as the management of the whole -  thinking through the pragmatics of managing the globe in relation to the people under the guidance of quality of life for all. Provisionally called GardenWorld.

We fail to recognize that other societies had very different and effective ways of coping with organizing life on the planet.

I first became aware of the success of such people in reading Cronon’s Changes in the Land. He creates a picture of the New England landscape at the time the first pilgrims arrived (with lust for land in their hearts). Much of the landscape was trees without underbrush. The natives had cleared it to make hunting of deer much easier.  The new arrivals saw this as fit space for conventional English gardening. Didn’t work, and, blind to what the natives were doing, many starved.

Cronon’s view points to the resources that exist for us in rethinking human civilization, or rethinking human culture. Another such writer is Pascoe and his amazing book about the natives of Australia. Again the settlers failed to understand what was in front of them - a very successful and complex civilization, and much of what they saw was after the natives suffered the same as in America, ten percent survived smallpox and what was taken as representative  natives were really the last remnants of a totally destroyed people. We redeem them if we can learn from them.

History of Corporations in the United States

A major feature of history is  the organization of a species in flocks, herds,  and societies, The popularity of murmuring videos hints at the complexity - and simplicity -  of group formation.  We tend, politically now, to talk of individual and state responsibilities. But we focus much less on the important  in-between organizations, mostly corporations.  In particular the modern corporation (the word from corpse, ody) After fighting the American Revolution with Great Britain, the founders of the United States had a healthy fear of corporations after being exploited for years by those in England.[1] As a result, they limited the role of corporations by only granting select corporate charters, mainly to those that were beneficial to society as a whole.[1] For the better part of the first one hundred years of United States history, the power of corporations was severely limited as owners could not own any stock or property, make financial donations to a political party, and legislators could dissolve a corporation at any time relatively easily.[1] Corporations did not have the same corporate veil of protection that are enjoyed today.

The shift towards corporations gaining more power and control happened as the United States progressed towards industrialization. The American Civil War wildly enriched corporations and with this new wealth came bribes to legislators and courts that allowed for increased liability protection and other corporate protections.[1] The 1886 Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad set the important legal precedent that corporations were “natural people” and as a result were protected under the 14th Amendment.[1] In the century and a half to follow, corporations have gained more control and hardly resemble what the founders of the country had intended.

It is important to note  that economics is the study of economy. Economics dominates most modern conversation beyond the family, and actually even there. Economics is the governing language of our time, replacing politics. The history of “economy” shows that the discussions started, with the Athenians around Plato,  Xenophon, and Aristotle, as a  self-conscious reflection on the purpose of the use of land to feed its population, and the emerging social organization to manage the whole. This way of thinking comes up through Adam Smith

Political economy, considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator [with the twofold objectives of providing] a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly, to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves… [and] to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue for the publick services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign.

This text of Smith’s is worth lots of reflection. It is a view of a healthy society where all participate. Our society now has a very reduced view of “enabling  the people.” A new society should make this a central concern, not to buy off the poor from violence but to include them in a sense of well-being.  Modern politics is concerned about the middle class but rarely about the marginalized.

 “Economics”, which is the word used for the description of economies, came much later, William Jevons who wanted something more scientific than “political economy”, while working for the coal owners against the mine workers.

 The Greeks of classical times, about the time of Aristotle and Plato,  were able to discuss the role of elites and the meaning of community good in the same conversation. But over time generations of later thinkers about economy reduced their thinking from being about the conditions of living, a pragmatic concern for the community,  to being a mechanical system of a few forces in quantifiable interactions. 

We could have had economy without economics. Economy is the flow of material things between and among society and nature. There should be common sense discussions, always with the criteria of sustenance for ordinary people. The word denoting a science, “Economics” may not be necessary. In fact, it became an encapsulated profession of specialized knowledge that left out common sense. Common, what we all have together.

A return to an economy as estate management, where the “estate” is our global home,  and its management the task would be a terrific advance. And this leads to the need for politics.