Let’s start with a pair of the largest unknowns:
1. Will we solve the major problems? Environment, population, war, education, families
2. Will we do this with large globalizing institutions, or with smaller, regional and local ones?
This generates four different outcomes, if we move towards the paired extremes.
First is that we will solve the problems (or at least keep them managed) with large organizations. This, Market Globalization, is a kind of official future describing the way Europe, the United States and Asia seem to be moving.
Second, that we will solve the problems, but with smaller, local and regionally focused efforts. We can call this the Jeffersonian scenario.
The other two, which I call Fascism and Mafia centered, you can work out.
The major result from these is to notice that the managers and owners that are propelling us toward the Official Future, Market Globalization, really prefer the Jeffersonian. They want semi-rural lives, even if just for weekends and vacations, and they would like their children to live in a detached house surrounded by trees, and even “acreage”, with a school they can walk to and a dog that can roam with them.
This suggests that polarizing between the Official Future and more regional and local development (that is, betwen Globalization adn Jeffersonian democracy)is not smart. That a policy of blending the two with mixed strategies, social policies that support some degree of globalization, but with renewed focus on local and regional development, would pull most people together. If they find themselves in conflict, the result will be to increase policing and isolation, and to shift the emotional climate towards the fascist/mafia outcomes.
The scenarios can be summarized in a diagram.
The way to achieve this complex mixed strategy is to realize that regional and local development requires a more equitable distribution of resources, and the education at local levels to make sense with those resources.
This approach, blending globalization and local developments, in order to bend rather than break, requires that we all learn to deal with complexity and compassion – capacities we are not good at.
For political dialog, with its need for simplification, memorability, contrast with other views, and attractiveness to the ear and mind, this alternative needs a name. Major political symbols are evocative of deep meanings. Democracy, Socialism, Freedom, Rule of Law, Nation, Community all have complex resonances, sometimes positive and sometimes negative. Evocative symbols are necessary for the dialog.
For many reasons, Garden World is what I favor. It cuts to the core. It has high contrast with alternatives. The Japanese countryside gives us a hint at what a well treated environment can look like. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon could even help integrate our friends in the Middle East, helping to revive this great tradition. Fredrick Law Olmstead in creating Central set an American Model for city-rural integration that is design based and organic. The environment, through agriculture, is probably the key infrastructure for our population, much more important than energy. A Garden World is attractive, healthy believable and possible. It uses the technical, but in the service of the humane and organic. It offers quality of life for rich and poor.
Garden World is the real contrast to the Buck Rogers sci-fi techno-dominant world that is our current official direction. Garden world allows the humanists, the religious, and the scientific to have a shared goal of a realizable better world. Without such a goal, we will see increased refusnik terrorism, where each new freedom fighter embraces a last and self annihilating action in a social field of utter despair. A person only becomes a suicide bomber when they feel that to not be also destroys them and their loved ones.
We are dealing with meanings, which the progressive professional technocratic class forgot to cultivate beyond a scientism that was serving masters they didn't care to recognize they worked for. There are great traditions of science, art, governance, and yes religious thought, and only by integrating them in a new and tolerant way can we avoid factionalism and what the founding fathers feared, "Interests."
Leo Marx, while professor of history at MIT, wrote The Machine in the Garden, showing how deep is the American desire or the garden world, and how reality of economic interests and perceived benefits kept collapsing us towards the machine world. He shows that “in between” the urban and the wilderness, the garden, is what the real reformers had in mind. My own view is that we are no longer viewing two futures, but looking at the machine reality for its already realized problems, the garden world alternative is worth a new look, with deeper appreciation. People are ready, with the ugliness in front of them, rather than just anticipated.
Bend to the Garden World rather than following the current path of axis of finance, or break. Give the religiously inclined a way to participate in a better future rather than using their own religious beliefs as a way, out of deeply felt frustration, of saying “no”. Provide the technically and scientifically inclined a real possibility that their creativity will build a better world. Besides, Garden World is a beautiful vision, and worth all our talent to work for.
