Our social garden

Imagine a well tended garden.  What happens to that garden when you take away the gardener? 

That will depend very much on how far the gardener's efforts had taken the garden from what would have been Nature's own efforts.  The gardener may have introduced species that were not native to the region and that unless carefully managed had the potential to overrun in a few seasons the balance established by Nature over hundreds of thousands of years. 

Other introduced species would simply perish without trace if deprived of the gardener's nurturing intervention.  This would be particularly so for those species that had evolved in very different climes and required such intense intervention as the shelter of a hot-house. 

The demise of the gardener could spell the rapid decline of the garden.   In the most extreme case, the natural unmanaged habitat may have been hostile to any species; it may have been a desert devoid of life.  There, the garden existed only because of the gardener's intervention.  It was the gardener who brought the soil and nutrients, the water, the shelter, and the seedlings to the desert.  The garden flourished in spite of Nature, and not because of it.  Nature's contribution at most would have been sunlight, and it is conceivable that in a place obscured from the benefit of the Sun's rays, even the primary source of energy and light would have been provided by the gardener. 

Clearly our desert garden could be described as "unnatural".  It would certainly require considerable ongoing effort from the gardener for it to survive and flourish.  The mere fact of it being an "unnatural" creation is not however in itself sufficient reason to warrant the dismissal and removal of the gardener, allowing the desert to return to its original barren but "natural" state. 

There is nothing intrinsically inferior in that which is "unnatural".  The ongoing intervention of the gardener to maintain the garden in its present form should not be valued in terms of what is "natural" or "unnatural" because the gardener's efforts are quite clearly "unnatural", though by virtue of that alone, not necessarily undesirable or sub-optimal. 

Rather it should be judged in terms of the purpose for which the garden was established.  What prompted the gardener to establish the garden?  What vision did the gardener have of the garden as he or she began to establish it, and how closely did the eventual reality match that original vision?  Is the effort required to establish and maintain the garden sustainable?  If the garden was established to meet particular needs, would those needs have been more readily satisfied by a less ambitious design requiring a less onerous maintenance effort? 

An ungoverned society can be likened to a natural or wild habitat.  A governed society is more like a garden with its citizens as its gardeners. 

Some would say that there is no such thing as an ungoverned society.  All societies are governed in some manner whether by explicit or implicit means; whether by design or by default. 

A society, like a garden, has its own natural, intrinsic tendencies.  If left to its own flows it will find its own level.  That level will include some order or other.  There will be rulers and ruled, and institutions, mechanisms, laws, and conventions that will maintain and sustain the "natural" order.  But that "natural" order may not be a garden that is to Our liking.  Worse, it may be a desert replete with people but devoid of humanity. 

As human beings, as citizens, as those who must dwell in the garden, it is our inalienable right to landscape and cultivate Our garden as we see fit. 

The great difficulty we have is that unlike the gardener who is an entity quite discrete from their garden, we as social gardeners are inextricably intertwined with ourselves as the plants in the garden of our society.  Because we are at one time gardeners and gardened, unless we are able to step out of ourselves and our social context^[1] and take on purely the gardener's perspective we will never really know whether our actions are part of the natural flow of human nature or part of the deliberate act of gardening.  Where does one end and the other begin? 

The distinction matters because the garden is likely to capture and subjugate the gardener^[2] unless we as gardeners are acutely aware of the demarcation and scrupulous in maintaining it.  Nature never sleeps and will relentlessly erode both the gardener and the gardener’s efforts.

The headlong rush we have experienced to democratic market economies can be likened to a wholesale dismissal of the former gardeners in favour of allowing "natural" economic habitats to establish themselves.  It is perhaps also an example of "Nature" neutralising humanity, of the garden capturing the gardener. 

True, it may well be that a region's natural habitat may be found to better satisfy the needs of the garden's dwellers than the tended garden.  In that event there is little justification for any gardening effort: allow Nature to take its course, and pick the berries as they ripen. 

But we have another difficulty.  Our present garden is one that is the result of the efforts of countless generations of gardeners over several millennia.  Our society, our civilisation, is the culmination of everything that has gone before it.  We do not exist in isolation of our History; we exist on top of it.  Our natural state lies hidden underneath layer upon layer of past intervention.  Allowing the layers of this onion to peel away may well leave us with a berry that even the ideologues of freedom will find too bitter to swallow. 

What prompted the particular efforts of past gardeners to introduce certain species, or lay certain paths in our garden may not be readily apparent to us now.  The environmental and behavioural demons^[3] to which those long gone gardeners were reacting may have never manifested themselves to us precisely because the efforts of our fore-gardeners at countering them were successful. 

It is too easy to disregard the efforts of previous generations as quaint or antiquated.  It is tempting to use our undoubted technological superiority as proof, by association, of superiority in all human endeavour.  However, there is little evidence that human nature has matched technological advance.  To the contrary, there is every reason to believe that human nature (unlike society^[4]) is not susceptible to advance, and that therefore, the thoughts and efforts of our forebears in the realms of social and economic organisation have as much or as little validity today, as they did in their own time. 

Dissatisfaction with the tended garden could be a reflection on a defective conception of the garden or on the incompetence of the gardener, rather than on the validity of seeking to establish the garden in the first place; the garden may have been quite necessary.  In that event it would be more appropriate to revisit its conception and establishment, rather than abdicating to the habitat's natural order. 

The metaphor has its limitations.  It would be misleading and simplistic to suggest that there are necessarily no gardeners in free market economies; that they are uncontrolled free-for-alls in which the "Invisible Hand" has the field to itself.  It would be much closer to the truth to categorize free market economies as gardens of a different conception and with different objectives than those that others in the past had sought to establish.  The mischief^[5] perpetrated is that the ideology of the "free" market has been passed off by those whose interests it serves as being the "natural" economic habitat with the implication that it is therefore somehow both optimal and impartial as between the members of society. 

We do not have to accept the neo-conservative free-market garden at all.  Neither are we compelled to adopt a Marxist garden or a fundamentalist religious garden.  We need not limit ourselves to the gardens now on offer.  Instead let us devise a new Garden^[6].

To devise a garden that is viable, sustainable and attractive we need to understand the plants we have to work with^[7] - ourselves - and the social environment in which those plants will coexist.  What are the default tendencies^[8] of that environment?  What will happen if we just let it run wild?  What are the seasons^[9] of our garden?    How do we want the garden to look^[10] instead, and what must we do^[11] as gardeners to achieve that?

This is the purpose of Truth in Uncertainty.