The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government (5 page)

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Authors: Eric Liu,Nick Hanauer

Tags: #Political Science, #Political Ideologies, #Democracy, #History & Theory, #General

BOOK: The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government
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Until recently, these beliefs—we aptly call them “rationalizations”—could be backed, even if speciously, by references to science and laws of nature. But now, to anyone really paying attention, they can’t. Today, emerging from our knowledge of emergence, complexity, and innate human behavior, a different story about self-interest is taking shape, and it sounds more like this:
–What goes around comes around.
–The better you do, the better I do.
–It’s survival of the smartest—only the cooperative survive.
–Teamwork wins.
–There’s no such thing as a self-made person.
–All for one, one for all.
Let’s be clear here: we are not talking about a sudden embrace of saintly self-denial. We are talking about humans correcting their vision—as they did when they recognized that the sun didn’t orbit the earth; as they did when they acknowledged that germs, not humours, caused sickness. We are talking about humans seeing, with long-overdue clarity, and with all our millennia of self-preservation instincts intact, a simple truth:
True self-interest is mutual interest.
The best way to improve your likelihood of surviving and thriving is to make sure those around you survive and thrive. Notwithstanding American mythology about selfishness making the world go round, humans have in fact evolved—
have been selected
—to look out for others in their group and, in so doing, to look out for self. We exist today because this is how our ancestors behaved. We evolve today by ensuring that our definition of “our group” is wide enough to take advantage of diversity and narrow enough to be actionable.
This is a story, in short, about self-interest that is smart, or “self-interest properly understood,” as Tocqueville put it. It is a true story. It tells of neither altruism nor raw simple selfishness. Altruism is admirable, but not common enough to support a durable moral or political system. Raw selfishness may seem like the savvy stance, but is in fact self-defeating: tragedies of the commons are so called because they kill first the commons and then the people. True self-interest is mutual interest. This is even more urgently true in the age of global climate change, terror, drugs, pop culture, marketing, and so forth than it was in the age of hunter-gatherers.
We are aware that many have used the “newest science” to justify outlandish views and schemes, or to lend a patina of certainty to things ineffable. It would be easy to characterize our reliance on new science as similarly naïve. We are also aware, acutely, that the Machinebrain thinking we criticize is itself the direct product of science, and that our remedy may appear strangely to be a fresh dose of the illness. But while skepticism is warranted, there is an important difference: today’s science is most useful in how it demonstrates
the limits of science.
Complexity theory doesn’t give you mastery over the systems we inhabit; it simply informs us about their inherent unpredictability and instability. These new perspectives should not make us more certain of our approaches, but rather, more keenly aware of how our approaches can go wrong or become outmoded, and how necessary it is in civic life to be able to adjust to changes in fact and experience.
Where the rationalist schemes of central planners on the left and market fundamentalists on the right have led to costly hubris, public policy informed by the new science should now lead to constant
humility.
In a sense, the latest wave of scientific understanding merely confirms what we, in our bones, know to be true: that no one is an island; and that someone who thinks he can take for himself, everyone else be damned, causes a society to become too sick to sustain anyone. Indeed, he or she who defers his own immediate gain, for either the longer term or the greater good, causes a society to prosper so much as to pay back his investment of deferred gratification. True self-interest is mutual interest.
The contrast between the new and old stories of self-interest —like any paradigmatic shift in public imagination—is not just a philosophical curiosity. It plays out in how we interpret and understand—and therefore, prepare for or prevent—calamities like global financial meltdowns or catastrophic climate change or political gridlock. And it will transform the way we think about three basic elements of a democratic society: citizenship, economy, government.
What does it mean to be a citizen, to live in public, to be a contributing and effective member of a community? What is the purpose of an economy, and how, in a free society, can the market work to serve
all
people? And what is government for? As will become clear in the coming pages, we think of citizenship, the economy, and the government as living ecosystems—as gardens rather than machines, requiring a holistic sense of interconnectedness, rewarding both humility and active responsibility.
We begin, in the next chapter, with great citizenship.
III. Great Citizenship
 
Society Becomes How You Behave
 
Why “It’s not my problem” is a problem and why too many people think citizenship is for suckers—Both the market and the state have crowded out citizenship, reducing it to a cramped and crabby consumerism—The intellectual foundation of our old idea of citizenship is outmoded—A new basis for understanding healthy civic life, drawn from the science and reality of interdependence and contagion—Citizens as gardeners: five rules for great citizenship
 
 
TOO OFTEN IN AMERICA TODAY, to call someone a good citizen is to treat her like a saint who’s gone to some special length to help another—or like a sucker who forgot to look out for herself.
Either way, what’s assumed so much of the time is that being a good citizen is something either beyond or against self-interest. The very word “citizenship” has a musty, 1950s feel to it, evoking a time when people tried hard to be seen as pro-social, when scouts got badges for it. The memory of that time can stir nostalgia or disparagement. But it does often seem like that time has passed.
America has high rates of volunteerism and charity and we respond swiftly to disasters at home and abroad. But at the same time, too many Americans today live their everyday lives by an ethic of “that’s not my problem.” The “not my problem” mindset is a problem. It is both the source and the result of an ideology that exalts individual autonomy at all costs. It is also, as we will explain below, highly contagious and quickly corrosive. And thus it is part of a feedback loop in which the disavowal of problems creates the very problems being disavowed.
Our argument in this chapter is that there’s no such thing as “not my problem.” We don’t mean that all problems are equal or equally our burden, which would be paralyzing. We mean simply that great citizenship treats civic life as a garden demanding constant tending and the willingness to see all problems as interconnected.
It is an accepted axiom of corporate life that great companies create a culture where any problem the company faces is every employee’s problem. These are cultures where employees compete to identify and solve problems, rather than avoid them. In this way, problems are quickly identified and solved, or even better, headed off completely. By contrast, a corporate culture where problems are avoided or blamed on others inevitably leads to infighting, subop-timization, and failure.
So it seems obvious to us that we must create a civic culture that mirrors such high-performance organizational cultures—where every problem the society faces is everyone’s problem. As we will explain below, a culture where every problem is everyone’s problem predictably has very few problems.
The Squeeze on Citizenship
 
In too many American communities today, such a culture of civic ownership does not prevail. Robert Putnam has documented the decades-long decimation of Tocqueville’s little platoons of democracy, the voluntary associations from bowling leagues to Elks clubs that once comprised a vibrant civic ecosystem. National measures of civic health—from volunteering to neighborliness to social connectedness—have all declined substantially since the 1970s.
All around us, in less measurable ways, there has been a slow and quiet seepage of trust and responsibility. For instance, not until you stop and think about it might this seem odd: today we have a federal law requiring chief executives of public corporations to declare affirmatively in their corporate reports that they are not lying. Perhaps you find it outrageous that private security guards in a public bus tunnel in Seattle would stand by and watch a vicious beating of one teenager by another—and that the guards would justify their passivity by pointing out that the law forbade them from intervening like police officers. But then you move on. This is how it is.
The two of us don’t believe that great citizenship has been killed just yet. We do believe, however, that it has been crowded out—by the market on one side and by the state on the other. Nowadays, too many people think of their responsibilities of citizenship as limited mainly to basic compliance with the law, or perhaps jury duty or voting—and, of course, only half of us even vote.
The market is the first force that has led to the shriveling of citizenship. The classic case is the Wal-Mart effect. A town has a Main Street of small businesses and mom-and-pop shops. The shopkeepers and their customers have relationships that are not just about economic transactions but are set in a context of family, neighborhood, people, and place. Then Wal-Mart comes to town. It offers lower prices. It offers convenience. Because of its scale and might in the marketplace, it can compensate its workers stingily and drive out competition.
The presence of Wal-Mart leads the townspeople to think of themselves primarily as consumers, and to shed other aspects of their identities, like being neighbors or parishioners or friends. As consumers first, they gravitate to the place with the lowest prices. Wal-Mart thrives. The small businesses struggle and lay off workers. They cut back on their sponsorship of tee ball, their support of the food bank. As the mom-and-pops give way to the big box, and commutes become necessary, lives become more frenetic and stressful. People see each other less often. The sense of mutual obligation that townsfolk once shared starts to evaporate. Microhabits of caring and sociability fall away. In this tableau of libertarian citizenship, market forces triumph and everyone gets better deals—yet everyone is now in many senses poorer.
Two things have happened in such a scene, which, by the way, is not about Wal-Mart alone but about an ideology that treats everything—including people—like costs to be reduced. When we see ourselves as consumers above all, we start thinking of citizenship as grumpy customerhood—as suspicious, skeptical, “what’s-in-it-for-me” consumerism. Globalization and pressures on the middle class accelerate these effects. Throw in the scarcity mindset and anxieties of the Great Recession and the harm compounds. The insidious marketization of life distorts—indeed, corrupts—our politics and our civic lives.
Meanwhile, on another front, the state has encroached increasingly into arenas of civic action, reducing the space that people have to show up for one another. What used to be the sort of thing you or I might just do because it needed doing, we now see as someone else’s job. What used to be left to common sense is now prescribed by law. What used to be undertaken by self-organizing citizens is now too often delegated to the state. Elinor Ostrom’s classic
Governing the Commons
depicts these dynamics in societies around the world.

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