Tending to the Garden of American Democracy is Hard and Thankless Work

In Jerzy Kosinski’s 1971 novel Being There, a simple gardener named Chance is mistaken for a political guru and quickly wows the Washington D.C. power brokers and kingmakers. It’s a marvelous study of how authority can so often be doled out to those least suited for it. I mean, look around. My father died the same November morning that we got the calamitous results of the most recent presidential election, and I can still hear his voice. In the film adaptation of Being There, co-written by Kosinski, Peter Sellers plays Chauncey Gardner, as he comes to be called, and one bit of his homespun wisdom has stayed with me these past few terrible months. I can still hear his voice too: “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.”

Two recent books have helped me make sense of how we got to this present state of affairs and how I might gather the wherewithal to respond to it. “We live in a uniquely dangerous time,” Luke Kemp writes in In Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. “Our world is scarred by a pandemic, beset by unprecedented global heating, riven by inequality, dizzied by rapid technological change, and living under the shadow of around 12,700 stockpiled nuclear warheads.”  There could also soon come a technological apocalypse brought about by sentient AI. Personally, I believe that anxiety and dread are perfectly natural responses to the times.

Kemp, a researcher and scholar of global risk, has catalogued societal collapses from the Bronze Age to the present day and offers some clues as to where we might be headed. A state, he writes, “is a set of centralized institutions that impose rules on and extract resources from a population in a territory, whether that is ancient Egypt or the US today.”  It breaks my heart to think too much about how my tax dollars are being spent in Gaza and elsewhere. As Kemp puts it, “The problem is that most of us are uncomfortable in recognizing the most common element of civilization: rule through domination.”  That sad truth becomes more obvious every day.

Instead of thinking in terms of civilizations, however, Kemp uses the word “Goliath” to describe these “systems of violence” in which a hierarchical government or bureaucracy maintains control of people and energy. He demonstrates at great length and with complete conviction that every Goliath, the US included, also contains the seeds of its own demise. That’s where the collapse eventually comes in—and that’s not always a bad thing.

“We are a species that survived the ice age by being intensely social, cooperative across groups, and equal, even during times of need and danger.”

Reached via email, I asked Kemp to expand on his thoughts about the meaning of human progress. “To me,” he told me, “progress is advances which improve the conditions of conscious life. To have progress I believe we need to eventually slay Goliath. A society based on domination will always be morally handicapped.”

I was fascinated to learn, contrary to much of what I was taught as a philosophy major, that humans didn’t always behave the way we do now. It didn’t have to be this way. “We are a species that survived the ice age by being intensely social, cooperative across groups, and equal, even during times of need and danger,” Kemp tells us early on. “That egalitarianism is what made us human.” So what went wrong?

During the Neolithic period, agriculture and the ability to domesticate animals drew more people into bigger villages—and that led to inequality. “Once you had resources that others depended on, you could leverage them for other forms of power.”  Kemp calls these new centers of power “dominance hierarchies” and they remain all too relevant today. His description is worth citing at length:

“Underlying every law in a democratic country (which very few have a direct say in creating), no matter how just or unfair, reasonable or nonsensical, recent or outdated is the threat of violence. All other ideas of life are still organized into dominance hierarchies. Most of us work nine-to-five in mini dictatorships (where one individual or a small group can hire, fire, and direct most others), pray in top-down churches and invest in markets controlled overwhelmingly by a few big firms.”

An eventual revolution in agricultural techniques led us to organize stationary settlements in places like Mesopotamia and, eventually, to form states such as Urok, where “The Epic of Gilgamesh” started to get written down. And yet, all was not well. “As signs of inequality and stratification increased, violence intensified.” Funny how that works.

In sparkling prose, Kemp carries us through thousands of years of history to demonstrate how civilizations rise and fall and rise and fall. I was transfixed by sections about the benefits of the Black Death and the ways in which the collapse of the Roman Empire led to Europe’s colonialist plunder of the globe. Today, it has become clear that nation-states are losing the relevance they once had.

It feels to me that American democracy is currently undergoing the most profound stress test in its history.

It feels to me that American democracy is currently undergoing the most profound stress test in its history and Kemp has expertly diagnosed why that is: “What we ordinarily call democracy—systems in which a subset of people (who are aggressively propagandized by political marketeers and billionaire-owned media empires) vote every four to five years for a tiny number of (usually rich) representatives who are funded and lobbied by corporations (for whom they frequently work afterwards), who then enact policies which usually better represent elite interests rather than popular opinion—is better described as an oligarchy with democratic furnishings.”

In the end, Kemp reiterates what many of us already know: that we live in a particularly perilous time. “The world is not just facing one individual challenge like climate change, thermonuclear war, autonomous armed drones, enormous volcanic eruptions, or dangerous new technologies. It is facing them all at the same time.” Isn’t that lovely? He proposes a few things we might do to make the world more equitable, starting with transitioning to a more open style of democracy. Other suggestions include “Vote Against the Apocalypse” and “Don’t be Dominated.” Also, “Don’t Be a Dick.”

In our brief email exchange, Kemp reminded me that democracy is a practice. “We don’t need any complete utopian blueprint,” he told me. “We just need to level power, democratize our institutions, and see what worlds spring forth.” He makes it sound so simple, and maybe it is.

In the meantime, I know I’m not the only one who feels overwhelmed by the daily torrent of terrible news. Every day brings another tragedy or disaster, most of them manmade. I teeter between grief and disbelief, disbelief and grief. While I can’t advocate turning our backs on all these awful events, it’s increasingly necessary for me to step outside and focus my care and attention on my surroundings. To regroup and collect the energy I’ll need to push back against this dominance hierarchy—against tyranny—when the time comes.

My advice is to get your hands dirty. That means protesting and running for office and all those noble things, sure, but I also mean it literally. Tending to a garden—or even a houseplant—and watching something grow can gird us against the rising temperature here in the frog pot. The esteemed naturalist Richard Mabey has been a longtime contributor to BBC television and radio and has published more than forty books about our relationship with nature. In The Accidental Garden, he invites us to visit his own garden in the former cannabis farm he tends with his partner Polly in south Norfolk.

“Seeing nature as a commodity whose purpose is to make us feel better seems to me to diminish it.”

Like many of us, Mabey took to gardening when stuck at home during the pandemic. And like many of us, he found that there’s more to digging in the dirt than meets the eye. “It would be glib to suggest that the immeasurably complex problems of a whole world are mirrored in the small confrontations and challenges of the garden,” Mabey writes. “But maybe the mindset needed for both is the same: the generosity to reset the power balance between ourselves and the natural world.”

Mabey seems incapable of writing a dull sentence. He lets us know from the start that his book will include “thwarted ambitions, philosophical musings, moments of delight and serendipitous accident.” Ten erudite chapters meander pleasantly from observations about his past twenty years of gardening to snippets of old poems to gentle musings about a life well lived. It’s part memoir, part treatise and part old man rightfully shaking his walking stick at the warming skies.

My favorite passages are those in which Mabey interrogates society’s—and his own—often muddled thinking about our relationship with nature. “I’m aware that my sharp, ideological contrast between the planted and the naturally sprung is simplistic, and a piece of human-centered arrogance itself.”

And: “I confess a certain weariness comes over me whenever I’m lectured on the virtues of ‘reconnecting with nature.’ I’ve never entirely understood this, given that it would be impossible for us to live dis-connected from nature.”

And: “Seeing nature as a commodity whose purpose is to make us feel better seems to me to diminish it.”  Do me a favor please and read that sentence again.

My own garden is a humble affair. I live in a Philadelphia rowhouse with my wife and a slobbery golden retriever named Oberon. (Mabey notes that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written “during an acute period of the climate upheavals of the Little Ice Age,”  a time of unusual cooling in the North Atlantic.) Our puppy moved in with us during the pandemic and quickly took to ripping out all the plants we hadn’t already removed from our small backyard for his safety. He also made quick work of the raised beds and even took to ripping low-hanging branches from the coral bark maple and pagoda dogwood we planted.

Once Oberon finally outgrew his velociraptor phase, we were able to resume with our raised beds and a series of pots on the wall we share with an overgrown and derelict community garden. One pot contains a five-foot-tall bay leaf tree, a sprig of which went in my father’s grave because he was notorious for adding it to everything he cooked. A persistent fern grows through the six tons of pea gravel we’ve put down for Oberon’s comfort. It’s one of the most beautiful plants I’ve ever seen.

The dogwood is now tall enough that the three of us can sit together on a bench in its shade. (In the spring, the blossoms attract so many bees we can hear them from inside the house. Then the purple berries bring all the catbirds to the yard.) That bench is where I do quite a bit of reading and where I scratch away at the third draft of my next novel. And it was where I read Mabey’s wise words: “The default affective state of almost all living beings is an intense attentiveness, not to the self but to the world beyond. It might not be a bad goal for us, too.”

As the United States ramps up preparations for next year’s semiquincentennial, it’s worth returning to Luke Kemp’s point that the “average lifespan of a state is 326 years.” Under the dogwood, I ask myself: has the collapse of the United States of America already begun? From where I sit, it’s difficult to know how well the roots of American democracy are thriving. Like Chauncey Gardener, however, I remain hopeful that they’re not severed, that all will be well.