Chapter 14

CHAPTER 14. PURPOSE: TO REHUMANIZE EVERYTHING.

Urgent to wait As we wait Dark shadows of fate Occlude the sun Our serious purpose And our fun.

We live, at times enough, or not Under the bare breasted belly exuberance Of our mother universe With her own thoughts And maybe Unfathomable wisdom.

OVERTURE

We humans probably owe our origins to our response to rapid climate change to which we coped by adding a reflective quick mind to our existing mammalian compassion. Our problem is that by attempting civilizations, we live with the divergence of those two inheritances of the feeling mind and the reflective mind. Mind becomes technocratic, and culture slowly weakens compassion. Meaning dissolves and we are left coping with the flux of daily life. What then is our "purpose?" The origin of “purpose” suggests it is part of rhetoric: "to propose". Proposing, and purpose, imply deliberations, collegiality and community, not

blind acceptance. It is above all an invitation. We do not propose by our self, but to another, or others. Purpose cries out for integration in the name of life, love, our reflective capacity, our yearning for understanding the world and ourselves, our pleasure in life and with others, and reasonable security and contentment with ourselves. A look at other societies indicate that, even given male dominance, warfare, and starvation, they built cultures that are attractive and integrated - think of Eastern European peasant costumes, dances and song, think of the Southwest traditions of adobe, weaving, pottery and food - these cohere and make life attractive much of the time. But modern life has neither freedom from violence nor a sufficient capacity for integrated beauty and community life. We are fragmented. There is no built-in elegant solution guiding us humans about how to live. Animals come with instinctual energies and the instinctive patterns for living. Because humans have the instinctual energy of animals but lack instinctive solutions, culture must provide us a second nature – and purpose. But culture, borrowing from the patterns of our fellow apes, the chimps and gorillas, bonobos and orangutans, is continually co-opted by our leader/elites and treated as their own. So what the modern world has proposed is not to good purpose. In building a world that works for elites, and their struggles with the leaderships of other groups, and against internal revolt. They take technology and wealth and have built a culture which in some narrow ways serves ambition and speed, but is not so good for much of the population: the children who can't play outside, the women who cannot be enthusiastically mothers, artists who can't buck the commercial designers, older people who may not be so swift in automobiles, people whose color or national origins are markers for poverty and for the rest of us to say, in so many ways, "no" to, and to those whose IQ may not embrace calculus and programming. Erik Erikson, the psychoanalyst of culture and childhood, explored the implications of body, mind, and society as being co-equal for the child, unfolding in eight stages of life, which we can use as a design framework for society - and we can see that our current trends do not work well in most of the stages (if any).

In Venice a few summers ago I found myself inside a church, looking at the architecture and the paintings, the light, the induced quiet in those who entered, and thought, "This was just advertising for the church." But I found myself saying "Wait. The image of life in that culture is a richer view of human life than is available in the mainstream modern market and mall." What if we take this achievement of the past and use it as a rough guide to what we propose people live by? The church had color and art, light and dark, flowers and stained glass, tiles and carved wood, and the images dealt with life, birth, death, marriage, welcoming the infant, saying goodbye to the deceased, and supporting the sensuality of marriage (with sex screened by complex cultural forms of reflection and ritual). Candles burned, the organ sat quietly waiting knowing hands and an expressive heart. But the machine (and its technocratic and economic support systems) has usually trumped the accompanying search for the humane, from Greek architecture to Olmsted, William Morris, and Chris Alexander. Technology, war and elites win out. The rationalized society is the expression of our tendency to mathematize the world in the context of the needs of power and status, violence and commerce, as a single system with origins in the power and property needs of an agriculture based society. COMPLEX SOCIETIES We live in a society of economy and politics leading to a game of personal gain, or the gain of a small cohort. But elites are self-defeating because their remoteness from the events in ordinary lives filters feedback. Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies shows, from archeological and historical evidence that societies overspend on infrastructure such as roads, irrigation, security and bureaucracy. These costs outpace population and the production of surplus value. We can give in to this dynamic, or educate our way out of it, but it requires purpose. Those responsible for large systems such as a society’s largest businesses take a short term view even when their own horizon of failure is close. An

example would be the lack of responses of business toward the sinister decline of the American brand in the world today. As we see in our failure in Iraq, social purpose among our leaders requires dialog, education, world experience, and interagency conversations. The totalitarian problem. I have constructed a small graphic (shown earlier in discussing religion) to represent potential future directions for the world’s societies. , and what they might suggest in terms of social purpose and strategy. This is a simple way to generate some scenarios. Let me recall the scenarios. Two major unknowns of our future are · ·

Firat, Can we solve our major problems? Second, Will we do so primarily with large organizations, or small organizations (local and regional economic and governance)

Making axes of these gives us four future possibilities.

In the upper right we have corporate dominated market globalization. This is the “official scenario”, especially in the United States. Below on the right are small organizations working to solve major problems. This we can call Jeffersonian. Those owners, managers and staff helping us move into the top right have the values of those in the Jeffersonian, to live in homes in the country near the village and have their children walk to school, but the tendency is for the Jeffersonians to fight. This tension leads to increased security concerns and moves the whole society to the left hand side (“left” not in the usual sense.), fascism, if big systems dominate, and local mafias if things fall apart.

Thus we should avoid polarizing, and foster purposes - strategies, policies that move in between the two, inter-weaving the Jeffersonians and corporatists together in projects that hold them together despite some differences. But is there really an alternative to technocratic centralization? Let me be blunt. Markets without constraints on corporations lead to monopolies, democracies without constraints lead to tyrannies. The two tend to engage the same people near the top, and that is, as state-corporate partner ships really is fascism. This tendency is exceedingly strong. But that helps define a purpose - to work hard to find an alternative viable direction for humanity, one that subordinates economics and politics to social good, not to a kind of personal gain that in practice enriches a few while impoverishing many. This has of course been a perennial issue, from Aristotle to the struggles of the 20th century, over how to manage capital, status and technology. If we understand why we get this technocratic trend, we can have a more informed purpose. a major aspect of why we end up technocratic is become of several aspect of human nature. REHUMANIZE EVERYTHING Shockingly I’d say the purpose is to rehumanize everything, as much as we can, all out. GardenWorld is the proposed frame, but creating healthy humans and good human experience is the real goal. Rehumanization is not a vague concept. It develops a larger conception of the human than the reduction of social being to economics, or the mind to machine mimicable activity. We know from the world of literature, poetry, drama and history, that there is an approach to the world that feels fundamentally different from that of the technocratic, that teaches something about how others have lived, and hence how one could live. Rehumanization has several aspects. As a rough cut :

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Living in experience The cultivation of the educated emotional life

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Pleasure and awe in transcendence Living a rich social life Contemplating the universe And again: Living in Experience

The idea that things are experienced within experience is hard to grasp. The modern view is that there is a world of things: people are things, magnetic fields are things, bits and bytes are things. End of story. But humans cannot experience the presence of a thing without attributing, at the same time, the presence of a universe in which the thing is. This really is astounding. And the core to rehumanization is revalidating experience as something intrinsically real and extremely important, first for the person who has the experience, and second for the ways society is organized at the level of symbols, stories, and – yes – purposes. Experience is not reducible to an ensemble of things. Reaffirming the value of experience should be part of our purpose.

The cultivation of the educated emotional life

A few years ago I was invited to teach a course on the psychology of creativity at one of our major art schools. I thought it would be worthwhile to develop with the students a theory of creativity that they believed in and hold for their productive lives. As we worked through suggestive texts , we developed a view that human nature, exemplified by our bodies, arose out of the broader nature around us, and that this natural body was buffeted by the crosswinds of culture and symbols. There is a place, we concluded, in the human experience where our human nature and the world of symbols meet. The match is rarely perfect, and the artist is the one who worries the difference until a better match can be found. That course deeply influenced my approach to this book and GardenWorld.

Daniel. Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, deals with the danger of not understanding emotions, but his early writing does not affirm the emotional life as intrinsically valuable. His second book made the case that mangers had to understand emotions so that emotional people would not ruin the corporate management plan. Love, security, joy in cooperation, or the Eros of groups, are not discussed. But even those in public life or our institutions who are against the emotional life in business or politics thrive on emotions: righteous indignation, or smug self congratulation at avoiding them. A social thinker such as Martha Nussbuam , as in her elegant book Love’s Knowledge, has gone a long way towards showing that literary understanding is necessary for philosophy, and for justice in the court, or economics. She is explicitly recommending the reflective emotional life as the life worth living. Some others who are working in this direction are Theodore Zeldin, whose Intimate History of Humanity, shows through interviews how the small issues in lives are immediately related to huge social issues that constrain and pervert these lives. Also John Ralston Saul has worked an agenda from looking at the roots of hyper-rationalization in Voltaire’s Bastards, and his suggestive book on how to live a life of experience, Equilibrium. So far we have talked about experience and the positive achievement of the rich emotional life. The place of art in its broadest – architecture, dance, music, all the graphics and writings – help, and are their own reward. And we have pushed it aside. Bringing it back should be part of our purpose. Being emotionally educated should be part of our purpose. GardenWorld helps create the conditions.

Pleasure and awe in transcendence

We all have the experience, though rarely cultivated, when our self and the world feel clear and one. This human capacity is probably as strong as sexuality. It is implicated in dreams, gods, loves and other engagements with the world. Just as

society is highly motivated to use our sexual reproductive energy channeled to its own ends through repression, marriage and market, so transcendental capabilities, which could also take us outside of society, are channeled by a society through education, church, and science. For each person any moment is potentially a transcendent moment. However, social “reformers” have taken that sense out of the vertical of the here and now and laid it out horizontally towards some place in future time, so that we work hard to get there rather than be here. Deepening respect and understanding for our human capacity for the transcendent should be part of our purpose.

Living a rich social life

We all know about the article Bowling Alone in America. For way too many, life is reduced to work, the supermarket, and going home to TV. No love, no friends, no community involvement. Jefferson, when he wrote “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. With the phrase “pusuit of happiness” Jefferson was not just adding California icing. It was the idea that the life of a person could be measured by the number of happenings, the roles the person played in society: the baseball coach, husband, father, volunteer fire department, choir, city council, carpenter, farmer… and that this was a measure, of how fulfilling a life was. We have lost such a sense. Society does not support it. Read poetry, read out loud, between kisses, before and after voting. Draw, even if badly. Learn an instrument and play with a friend. Cross generational lines. Travel and avoid five star hotels where you are guaranteed nothing will happen. Love this world. Our literature is one long essay on educating us to social life and ethics. Enriching our social life should be part of our purpose.

Exploring the universe.

What is beyond the stars, what happened before happening began, where are we in space, and where is that space? All children look sparkly. Curiosity is alive. The crushing weight of sex and work bear down quickly on children, and they lose

that spark. Perhaps society cannot tolerate so many creative people. But then we need to work towards a more tolerant and inclusive society. If we could reframe science as part of the humanities and stop talking about “matter” and “physical”, it would actually be more interesting. There is clearly pattern at every level we go down, and there clearly is stuff at every level we go up. Admit the complexity and beauty of it! Bringing together the curiosity of the child, and adult, with the world, should be part of our purpose. GardenWorld is the enabeling context.

SO

Our purpose is to rehumanize everything, because the current trend is deadening and violence-based. To function in a humane way, markets and democracy must be informed by a well educated optimistic community of interconnected people. The mechanization of mind and the decline of humane understanding arise from our own embedded lower level opportunistic mental nature. We are up against ourselves, and avoiding our own self-imposed fate based on an over reliance on our awesome intellect is the task. Socrates asked, “What is the fit life for a human being?” The purpose: to rehumanize everything. The reason, to avoid the deadening and killing mechanization of the world and the belittling of humans and nature. The reason: to bring everyone into the realm of expression and experience. The reason: to enhance our dance with nature. The reason: to give transcendence and art a real place. The reason: democracy requires such people. The reason: out of love for everyone. The main tendency of our time, under pressure of population and the surge this energy gives to authoritarian leadership is the rise of a technocratic world prison system for all, except some have better offices and cells. A democratic, humanly educated and developed world blending organic, photonic, electrical and mechanical technologies is possible. GardenWorld is the best way I’ve seen to frame current decisions for practical and emergent politics, that mixes hope with the requisite solutions needed to meet the severe challenges

of environment, population and wealth that we face now, and the solutions we will live with..